Polish or German families sent their young men ahead of the family to establish themselves and make the family’s arrival more comfortable. Italians who found the immigrant life too difficult returned to their home country in large numbers.
But Jews behaved differently. Once they decided to leave, they sold everything, boarded ships and arrived on America’s shores as whole families. They knew they would not be returning.
During the Panic of 1907, 300,000 Italian immigrants returned home to Italy.
[..]
European immigrants returned to their home countries in huge numbers between 1908 and 1925: 57% of Italians, 40% of Poles, 64% of Hungarians, 67% of Romanians and 55% of Russians.
Among Jews, the figure was just 5%.
[…]
In 1910, when the US had already absorbed some two million East European Jews, New York Immigration Commissioner William Williams ended his annual report with a warning: “The time has come when it is necessary to put aside false sentimentality in dealing with a question of immigration, and to give more consideration to its racial and economic aspects and in deciding what additional immigrants we shall receive, to remember that our first duty is to our country.”
[…]
In 1921, the US Congress decided to act. It passed the Emergency Quota Act and then the 1924 Quota Act, severely reducing Jewish immigration from over 120,000 per year to under 3,000 a decade later.
All inquiries either outright declined or ignored altogether.
I scanned the websites of some of these bookstores. They are hosting events for authors with 2,000 Twitter/X followers and, in several cases, little to no online or cultural footprint beyond a perch at one of the many dying legacy media outlets.
[…]
I have 136,000 followers on Twitter/X. I have nearly 50,000 subscribers on this Substack. My writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Psychology Today, and many other mainstream outlets. I broke myself in half to enlist in the military and then study at Yale and Cambridge.
[…]
If you grow up poor and aren’t willing to pledge fealty to the right causes, these places don’t want you. If you grew up poor, remake your fortunes, and then speak truthfully about the factors that fuel success (hard work, determination, sacrifice) rather than the factors elites speak about (luck, systemic forces, privilege), then these places don’t want you.
[…]
The kinds of people who work in these spaces claim to be open-minded. They claim they want to elevate and center voices from marginalized communities.
That’s what they claim.
Let me repeat a stat that doesn’t get shared enough:
Three percent of kids in the foster system graduate from college.
[…]
One of us somehow manages to join that minuscule group. And build a large enough platform to communicate about his experiences. And write a book about the obstacles so many young people face. A book that has been warmly endorsed by people across the political spectrum. A book that has received positive early reviews from professional reviewers. One of us manages to miraculously reach a position to communicate the difficulties of sidelined and struggling kids across the country.
But the people who run bookstores aren’t interested in hosting a conversation about it. Apparently, the people who run bookstores are more afraid of confronting my past than I am.
By 2001, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), the Predator had, in the words of the Air Force, “become the commander’s real-time eye in the sky, providing real-time streaming video back to the command post”:
The imagery appeared to be highly addictive, leading to it being called “Predator crack” because it seemed that commanders right up to the White House could never get enough of it.
[…]
On the other hand, intelligence analysts were accustomed to imagery in the form of black-and-white still photographs, not color video. Initially their approach was to take stills from the video feed and print them out.
[…]
The plane can be broken down and stored in a shipping container known as a “coffin” and flown around the world on a transport aircraft. In theatre, it needs a five-thousand foot runway and a dedicated ground support team. Once it is rolled onto the runway, the drone is piloted by a local crew who get it into the air and on its way. Then it is handed over via satellite link–it has its own special twenty-foot dish and dedicated satellite systems–to a remote team. From then on the Predator is flown from Creech Air Force Base, forty minutes outside Las Vegas.
Unmanned aircraft like Predator have major support requirements, but each flight provides twenty-four hours of continuous surveillance on station with cameras, infrared, and radar sensors. By using the drones in relays, the Air Force can maintain a permanent presence over an area, known as a “combat air patrol,” “CAP” or “orbit.” Each CAP requires at least three drones. In 2010 there were fifty Predator/Reaper CAPs; by 2013 the number was up to sixty-five, with plans to replace all the Predators with Reapers by 2016.
[…]
The plane may keep going for twenty-four hours, but that requires several shifts of pilots, with replacements for those that are sick or otherwise not available.
[…]
One study suggested that ten pilots were needed for each predator CAP to keep operations going 24/7. These days less than half of drone pilots qualified on other aircraft first. Pure drone pilots may have some advantages; reports suggests that pilots have to unlearn some of their skills before they can fly the Predator effectively, as they may have become reliant on feeling the tilt of the aircraft or the change in note of the engine to tell how it was flying.
[…]
One of the biggest differences from other aircraft is the time lag of a few seconds (latency) due to the satellite communications.
[…]
The real business end of the Predator is a “sensor ball” eighteen inches in diameter. This is the AN/ AAS-52 Multi-Spectral Targeting System (3), which has a stabilized gimbal mount with two axes of rotation, keeping the cameras pointed in exactly the same direction regardless of the motion of the drone. It has normal visible-light cameras for daytime use and image-intensified night cameras, as well as infrared imaging, along with software that combines the inputs from different cameras into a single image. It features various levels of zoom, from a forty-five degree wide-angle view down to an ultra-narrow 0.2-degree view. This is equal to a x200 zoom range. On a standard 35mm camera, the equivalent lenses at the extreme ends would be a 50mm wide-angle lens and a 12,000mm telephoto.
[…]
The sensor ball also contains a laser illuminator, like an invisible searchlight indicating targets for friendly forces, a laser designator for the Hellfire missile, and a laser rangefinder to determine the exact location of the target.
Even in pitch darkness–or in the rain, which was a problem previously–the Predator can pick out objects on the ground with great accuracy. This is thanks to a radar system called Lynx developed in 1998 by Sandia National Laboratories (4) to overcome the limitations of cameras. Existing radar was too large for the Predator at some four hundred pounds. In a major feat of miniaturization, the necessary electronics were crammed into a package weighing just a hundred and twenty pounds which generates an image resembling a black and white video with an impressive level of detail.
From fifteen miles away, Lynx produces images in which features four inches across can be distinguished. It also has some other clever tricks. A process called coherent change detection shows the difference between the current scene and one recorded previously. This is accurate enough to pick up the disturbance left by a bomb buried under the road surface.
[…]
The Predator can also carry various electronic warfare packages that allow it to detect, locate, and intercept radio signals. The simplest of these was a radio receiver bought from Radio Shack; the most advanced are highly classified and cost millions. These could, for example, pick up walkie-talkie or cell phone transmissions and pinpoint the users. Predators can reportedly track individual cell phones when they are on by their SIM cards.
A DIME weapon consists of a carbon fiber casing filled with a mixture of explosive and very dense microshrapnel, consisting of very small particles (1–2 mm) or powder of a heavy metal. To date, tungsten alloy (heavy metal tungsten alloy, or HMTA) composed of tungsten and other metals such as cobalt and nickel or iron has been the preferred material for the dense microshrapnel or powder.
[…’
The HMTA powder acts like micro-shrapnel which is very lethal at close range (about 4 m or 13 ft), but loses momentum very quickly due to air resistance, coming to a halt within approximately 40 times the diameter of the charge. This increases the probability of killing people within a few meters of the explosion while reducing the probability of causing death and injuries or damage farther away. Survivors close to the lethal zone may still have their limbs amputated by the HMTA microshrapnel, which can slice through soft tissue and bone.
[…]
In July and August 2006, doctors in the Gaza Strip reported unusual wounds caused by Israel Defense Forces attacks against Palestinians, claiming that they were from previously unknown weapons. A lab analysis of the metals found in the victims’ bodies was reportedly “compatible with the hypothesis” that DIME weapons were involved. Israel denied possessing or using such weapons, and an Israeli military expert said that the wounds were consistent with ordinary explosives.
Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, reported on their use against Hamas a few years ago:
There’ve been reports out of Gaza that when the Israelis blast one of these Hamas guys outside a coffee house or his home, there’ve been weird injuries to the people standing next to the target — their arms and legs get sheared off clean, as if God himself lowered a big rotary saw over him and lifted him up into the sky like a core sample from an oil rig, along with the odd arm or leg of other people who happened to be inside the magic 4 meters. The wounds have supposedly stopped clean at that point, cauterized by the blast.
Naturally, such precise munitions are considered a crime against humanity — because tungsten powder can cause cancer.
In the early days of PayPal, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), Musk and Michael Moritz went to New York to see if they could recruit Rudy Giuliani to be a “political fixer” for becoming a bank:
But as soon as they walked into his office, they knew it would not work. “It was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says. “He was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets.” They asked for 10 percent of the company, and that was the end of the meeting. “This guy occupies a different planet,” Musk told Moritz.
There was a romance novel from the 1930s, where the reader decides which suitor the protagonist marries with dozens of possible endings. Several high-concept stories arrived by the 50s and 60s, like Raymond Queneau’s surreal Story As You Like It or Robert Coover’s explicit and unsettling The Babysitter. Celebrated for their uniqueness, none of these caught on beyond their novelty, and were purely adult fare. It wasn’t until a lawyer teamed up with a young writer to find a way to bring this idea to bookshelves across the country.
Edward Packard came from a family deep in the legal business, but practicing law was never something he truly cared about. While his passion was writing, Ed’s children’s books were never picked up by publishers. His fate changed one evening in 1969 while making up a bedtime story for his two daughters about a character named Pete. Struck by writer’s block, Packard couldn’t figure out how to progress the tale and asked his kids what should happen next. When both girls answered differently, he realized Pete was never the protagonist – it was his kids living those adventures firsthand in their imaginations. Immediately, Packard knew he was onto something.
Ray Montgomery had just started Vermont Crossroads Press in 1970, after cutting his teeth writing roleplaying scenarios for Clark Abt, a pioneer in educational games. The Yale and NYU grad had aspirations larger than his employer and ventured out to make a name for himself in publishing. When Packard walked into his office with a draft of Sugarcane Island in 1976, Montgomery saw great potential that perfectly aligned with his interests. “I Xeroxed 50 copies of Ed’s manuscript and took it to a reading teacher in Stowe,” Montgomery said in an interview from 1981. “His kids — third grade through junior high — couldn’t get enough of it.”
Sugarcane Island became the best-selling book of the upstart publisher, moving over five thousand copies, but they were still an unknown entity in a crowded landscape.
It was this point where things started to get messy for Packard and Montgomery. Both writers saw a a potential for larger success beyond the small Vermont publishing house, and the two pursued greener pastures, independent from each others ventures. Packard published two CYOA-style books in 1978 under Harper imprint, Lippincott. Meanwhile, Montgomery’s agent managed to obtain a six-book deal from Bantam in 1979, with the caveat that Packard must be involved. Cooler heads prevailed, and the duo came together to split the deal and workload.
Similar to the origin story of Sugarcane Island, Packard turned to his kids for story ideas. His daughter, Andrea, told him about her summer escapades spelunking, and her desire to wander solo to explore more. She imagined a tunnel that could transport her to another time or place, and her dad loved it! Andrea scribbled more notes, and ultimately ideated the first published CYOA book, “The Cave of Time.”
[…]
A fortuitous mistake resulted in Bantam overprinting this inaugural entry, and the publisher remedied its overstock by donating 100,000 books to schools and libraries throughout America. This charitable act guaranteed their target audience would have no problem discovering the book, transforming CYOA into a household name practically overnight.
[…]
Sales dwindled until the company flew the white flag in 1998, ending with book #184, Mayday, which Packard co-wrote with the person responsible for the very first title in the franchise, his daughter Andrea.
Roadrunner is a modular, twin-jet powered autonomous air vehicle with extraordinary performance at low cost. Vertical takeoff and landing capability gives Roadrunner the flexibility to rapidly launch from and return to any location, pairing high subsonic speed with exceptional agility and stability.
[…]
Similar to traditional approaches to deter and defeat incoming aerial threats like scrambling expensive and airfield-dependent jets, Roadrunner-M can take off, follow, and intercept distant targets at the first hint of danger, giving operators more information and time to assess the target and rules of engagement. If there is no need to destroy the target, Roadrunner-M can simply return to base and land at a pre-designated location for immediate refueling and reuse. If the target does need to be destroyed, Roadrunner-M will swiftly do so. Unlike legacy missile systems, you can reuse all craft that are launched but not consumed. This radical shift in thinking allows for large-scale defensive launches at extraordinarily low cost, increasing redundancy for higher probability of lethality and enhancing the ability to simultaneously engage many targets.
[…]
A single operator can launch and supervise multiple Roadrunner or Roadrunner-M squadrons. Roadrunner-M can be controlled by Lattice, Anduril’s AI-powered software suite for command and control, or be fully integrated into existing air defense radars, sensors, and architectures to provide immediately deployable capability.
A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop. No other demographic group has seen such a precipitous decline, though there have been ups and downs from year to year.
In 2018, 56.4% of new recruits were categorized as white. In 2023, that number had fallen to 44%. During that same five-year period, Black recruits have gone from 20% to 24% of the pool, and Hispanic recruits have risen from 17% to 24%, with both groups seeing largely flat recruiting totals but increasing as a percentage of incoming soldiers as white recruiting has fallen.
Users will have the option to pay $3 a month to remove the ads, but as the executive quips: “Almost no one will do that, are you kidding me?”
[…]
Amazon, run by Andy Jassy, has always been coy about just how many Prime subscribers it has (the last official number, in 2021, was “more than 200 million”), but no one disputes that its reach is almost unrivaled. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that there are about 168 million Prime subs in the U.S. alone, as of 2023.
If just half those subs watch Prime Video content, it would be comparable to Netflix’s penetration in the U.S. (77 million) and significantly more subs than the likes of Hulu, Peacock or Paramount+.
Data from Nielsen reinforces that: While Netflix and YouTube take up the lion’s share of viewing time, Prime Video is extremely competitive. The latest Nielsen Gauge reported that 3.4 percent of TV viewing in November was Prime Video, compared to 2.7 percent for Hulu, 7.4 percent for Netflix and 9 percent for YouTube.
The Gauge certainly suggests that if Hulu has just shy of 50 million subscribers, as Disney has reported, then Amazon is at least in the same ballpark in terms of Prime subs that watch video content.
Most Netflix users, however, are not subscribing to the ad tier (the company said in November it had only 15 million “active users” of the tier), while some Hulu subcribers also opt out of ads.
That scale, in both subscriber reach and real viewership, has analysts thinking that Amazon will be able to quickly scoop up billions of ad dollars. Bank of America’s Justin Post estimated in a Jan. 3 note that the company will ultimately generate $3 billion in new ad revenue from the switch, and nearly $5 billion when accounting for users who opt to pay not to see ads. LightShed’s Rich Greenfield estimates that the company will hit $2 billion in ad revenue this year. Both analysts assume that the overwhelming majority of users will opt not to pay extra to remove the ads.
Kevin Krim, CEO of the ad measurement firm EDO, estimates that Amazon could see a CPM (the cost per thousand consumers who see an ad) of about $50, below what Netflix sought when it got into advertising a little over a year ago, but still “a big premium to linear TV.”
Early Predator losses were high, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), but acceptable:
By 2001, twenty of the sixty Predators had been lost to a mixture of pilot error, bad weather, accidents, and enemy fire. “Situational awareness” in unmanned aircraft is notoriously poor because of the limited view and the lack of feedback from other senses. You cannot hear the engine or feel vibration. The extreme case occurred when a pilot crashed during landing because she did not realize that her Predator had been flipped over and was flying upside down. Lesser mishaps are common. The accident rate peaked at one crash per 2,500 hours flown, far higher than any manned aircraft–but not unusual for a drone.
[…]
At less than $3 million an airframe, compared to over $200 million for some manned jets, and with no pilot casualties to worry about, the Predator was expendable. Improvements in training and additional safety features brought the accident rate down to one per 20,000 hours in 2010. By 2013, large drones had a lower accident rate than many manned aircraft.
“The results of field tests showed that the target detection radar of the Tor air defense system provides detection of small UAVs at ranges of only 3-4 km,” writes Makarenko.
This explains why drones are able to get so close and take video of these systems: the Russians are unable to spot a drone unless it is practically on top of them. When the drones are spotted, Makarenko says Tor has trouble shooting them down.
“The practical experience of experimental firing at small targets [with Tor] … indicates the low efficiency of their destruction. The main reasons for this are the imperfection of the SAM warhead detonation control system, as well as large errors in target tracking and SAM guidance on small-sized UAVs.“
This has been borne out in Ukraine, for example by this video of a Tor missile hurtling past a Ukrainian quadcopter without exploding. This is exactly what Makarenko means by a failure of detonation control.
Roychand and his team partially replaced sand with biochar — a material similar to charcoal — derived from coffee waste; they obtained their best result when they replaced 15% of the sand and baked the grounds at 350 degrees Celsius (662 degrees Fahrenheit). The resulting concrete was 30% stronger than regular concrete by compressive strength — the ability of the material to withstand a load.
In regular concrete, water, its second-largest ingredient by volume, is absorbed by the cement over time, reducing the amount of moisture that’s still inside the concrete, Roychand says. This drying effect, known as desiccation, causes shrinkage and cracking at a microscale, weakening the concrete.
Biochar from coffee waste can reduce this natural process. When the biochar is mixed with concrete, Roychand says, its particles act like tiny water reservoirs, distributed throughout the concrete. As the concrete sets and begins to harden, the biochar slowly releases the water, essentially rehydrating the surrounding material and reducing the impact of shrinkage and cracking.
Steamboat Willie was the third of Mickey’s films to be produced, but it was the first to be distributed, because Disney, having seen The Jazz Singer, had committed himself to produce one of the first fully synchronized sound cartoons.
The Jazz Singer is famous for being the first “talkie,” or, technically, “the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music and lip-synchronous singing and speech.” I don’t remember seeing it or any references to it growing up — except for some cartoon spoofs that didn’t make any sense to me at the time:
The film depicts the fictional story of Jakie Rabinowitz, a young man who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. After singing popular tunes in a beer garden, he is punished by his father, a hazzan (cantor), prompting Jakie to run away from home. Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer, performing in blackface. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer, but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage.
Even the non-blackface numbers feel quite dated:
Steamboat Willie could have entered the public domain in four different years:
first in 1955, at which point it was renewed to 1986, then extended to 2003 by the Copyright Act of 1976, and finally to 2023 by the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (also known pejoratively as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”).
Like The Jazz Singer, Steamboat Willy features a song associated with the old minstrel shows:
”Turkey in the Straw” is an American folk song that first gained popularity in the 19th century. Early versions of the song were titled “Zip Coon”, which were first published around 1834 and performed in minstrel shows, with different people claiming authorship of the song.
[…]
The title of “Zip Coon” or “Old Zip Coon” was used to signify a dandified free Black man in northern United States. “Zip” was a diminutive of “Scipio”, a name commonly used for slaves. According to Stuart Flexner, “coon” was short for “raccoon” and by 1832 meant a frontier rustic and by 1840 also a Whig who had adopted coonskin cap as a symbol of white rural people. Although the song “Zip Coon” was published c.1830, at that time, “coon” was typically used to refer to someone white, it was only in 1848 when a clear use of the word “coon” to refer to a Black person in a derogative sense appeared. It is possible that the negative racial connotation of the word evolved from “Zip Coon” and the common use of the word “coon” in minstrel shows.
Although Steamboat Willy just fell out of copyright, Walt Disney posted it to YouTube 14 years ago:
The Swedish language edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit from the 1960s was illustrated by famed Moomins creator Tove Jansson (and edited by noted children’s author Astrid Lindgren). It turns out that Gollum’s appearance had never included any description of his size, so Tove produced this:
Tolkien went on to amend the text, adding a description of Gollum as “a small, slimy creature.”
Our Slovenian guest knows that I’ve been interested in camouflage, both orthodox and unorthodox, for some time, and pointed me to this history of camouflage by Severian, one of Z Man’s commenters.
Severian notes that primitive hunters probably didn’t use anything resembling modern camouflage, because animals don’t spot predators the way we spot enemies. They primarily spot movement and rely on their other senses. He wonders if prey animals like deer can even see color — which they can, but not like humans. This is why a tiger’s bright orange coat is excellent camouflage: orange and green are the same color, if you have red-green colorblindness. Mammal predators can’t produce green pigment, but they can produce orange, and their mammal prey can’t typically see the difference.
Anyway, Severian notes that military camouflage would’ve been useless in most of the conflicts in human history:
There’s simply no point in dressing a Roman legionary, a medieval knight, or a member of the Army of Northern Virginia in camouflage, because for those guys, movement is the entire point. Concealing the individual soldier would be counterproductive, because individual soldiers were pretty much worthless — big, mass movements were the only way to concentrate sufficient firepower (sword-power, lance-power, whatever) to win battles.
[I’m leaving aside guerrillas and whatnot, for the obvious reason that guerillas don’t win wars].
I can’t help but mention that Robin Hood and his Merry Men wore Lincoln green, if not modern camouflage.
There might even be a real advantage to gaudy uniforms in the black-powder era:
There’s smoke obscuring everything, command-and-control (such as it was) would be easier if you’re wearing something really bright and distinctive that can be seen through the haze.
It’s only when you get to a) static warfare, with b) long-range weapons that also c) have a high rate of fire that personal, sartorial camouflage starts to make sense.
[…]
It’s a conceptual reorientation: Pattern-disruption, not motion-disruption. Thanks to rapid-fire weapons, movement goes from an army’s biggest advantage to one of its biggest disadvantages. One needs to be still in no man’s land… but even if one is very still, the very regularity of one’s uniform is now a dead giveaway, because the human eye is unsurpassed at detecting patterns.
[…]
Throw in naked-eye gunnery and especially aerial photography and all of a sudden people start thinking about visual patterns as an abstract concept. The uniform goes from being “a mark of distinction” to “a means of unit identification” to “a part of combat in its own right.” German gray works pretty good, as does British khaki. I imagine that even the classic, distinctive French “horizon blue” worked well on occasion.
[…]
Indeed, as I understand it, camo was never issued to US regular troops in Vietnam. The standard combat uniform was GI green, official designation OG-107. Only Special Forces guys got camo, and it looked pretty cool.
World War I
By WW1, camouflage uniform were far from standard, but some troops were outfitted with camouflage akin to modern-day ghillie suits. If the terrain was particularly rocky, the early camo suits would resemble the rock surfaces that soldiers would inevitably find themselves hiding behind or lying atop of rocks. For greener environments, the outfits would be covered in materials resembling the elements of the environment such as moss and leaves.
World War II
In World War II, the camouflage uniform truly started to emerge. Certain army units were assigned the HBT camouflage. This was short lived though due to the uniforms looking too much like the German Waffen-SS uniforms and friendly fire becoming a major problem.
In fact, by 1943, U.S. Marines in the Solomon Islands began wearing reversible beach/jungle coveralls with totally new green-and-brown “frog” patterns, later known as “frog suits”. This type of camouflage pattern included speckled and disruptive coloration, similar to a frog’s skin. The Marine Corps soon adopted a two-piece uniform made of the same camouflage material and used that same material for a helmet cover during the Korean War.
1950′s
Camouflage uniforms in a leaf-and-twig pattern (with a four-color combination) were created by the Army’s Engineer Research and Development Laboratory and introduced. These had limited usage and underwhelming reviews, and they were quickly phased out.
In 1954, The Army Green Uniform came about as a result of a uniform improvement program and became the basis of the Army uniform and, at that time, was expected to remain until at least 2014.
1960′s
By 1965, Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and other Special Forces in Vietnam started wearing unofficial camouflage uniforms. These locally produced uniforms were made with a camo pattern we know today as “Tigerstripe”.
This pattern was called “Tigerstripe” due to the resemblance the pattern bore to the stripes on actual tigers. The pattern consisted of narrow strips of green and brown which look like brush strokes from a painter’s brush as well as broader brush strokes in black painted over a lighter shade of olive or khaki.
These brushstroke stripes interlock rather than overlap.
Eventually, the Tigerstripe pattern was replaced by the official ERDL (leaf pattern) pattern in American recon units. With that said, The Civilian Irregular Defense Group (advised by the Special Forces) continued to wear Tigerstripe uniforms from 1963 until it was disbanded in 1971.
1970’s
The OG-107 was the standard uniform throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The OG-107 was one of the longest issued uniforms by the US Military. The use of this uniform began in 1952 and a poly-cotton blend (OG-507) was introduced in 1975. The name of this uniform came from the US Army’s “Olive Green 107″ and “Olive Green 507″. Both of these were shades of a darker green (OG-107 made with cotton and OG-507 made with poly-cotton). The two shades are nearly identical, but differentiated by the material. The Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) replaced the OG-107 and OG-507 throughout the 1980s. These uniforms were also used by other countries, including countries the United States gave military aid.
1980’s
In 1981, a new pattern came about known originally as the Six-Color Desert Pattern, but getting the name “Chocolate-Chip Camouflage” and “Cookie Dough Camouflage” because of the close resemblance to chocolate chip cookie dough. The base pattern is light tan with broad strokes of pale green and two different bands of brown. There are clumps of black and white spots laid over that to help blend in with pebbles and shadows.
The M81 Woodland Camouflage Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) was introduced for the entire military. The colors included brown, green, black, and sand, and uniforms in this pattern were utilized by certain units well into the 2000s. The Woodland design was utilized during Vietnam but went through certain changes to more appropriately represent the longer-range environments that the troops would be encountering in the new era.
Isegoria: It doesn’t appear to come from either Dracula or The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
Isegoria: I suppose I should have linked to my fourth Critical Chain post, which addresses multi-tasking.
Gaikokumaniakku: “The trail I walked lacked the geometric and artificial precision of the grand boulevards of the Städte I would later come to know so well. Here Nature did not bend to Man with such frequency or slavishness, but rather the two seemed to bend around one another at regular intervals, a grant of mutual dignity prevailing between the two. Here the paths wound around and through the hills, according to how the land pulled a man’s steps hither or thither. It was by this road, made by Man but...
Gaikokumaniakku: I’m a simple man. I see Goldratt, I feel compelled to wade into the comments section, even if I have little to add that the author has not already said. Overproductive workers who produce subassemblies are an example of physical constraints of part storage. Real-world factories don’t have infinite buffer space to store subassemblies. Overproduction is a problem for many reasons, but if we had some kind of Star-Trek-tier space warp for infinite storage, overproduction would be...
W2: Do two people looking at the same place see the same sprite?
Bob Sykes: This is US/UK/EU propaganda. Prior to the coup of 2014 that removed Ukraine’s democratically elected and legitmate president, Yanukovich, and that replaced him with the current paleo-Nazi junta, over 90 of Crrimeans were ethnic Russians, and they voted to join Russia. The vote was unauthorized, but there is no doubt it was accurate. The Russian military did not invade Crimea. They were already there by treaty. And Crimea (and all of Ukraine) had been sovereign Russian territory for over 300...
McChuck: Predators seek out dark, secluded spaces. Normal people avoid dark, secluded spaces. It really is that simple. There’s a reason parking garage stairwells are now built with top to bottom windows. Public spaces are designed with clear sight lines, no obstructions above two feet or below six feet. Remove the places predators can wait in ambush, and crime drops substantially.
Phileas Frogg: Makes sense, ease of access and utilization is improved for everyone by lots of those changes, not just the young, old and disabled. Reminds me of this excerpt: “The trail I walked lacked the geometric and artificial precision of the grand boulevards of the Städte I would later come to know so well. Here Nature did not bend to Man with such frequency or slavishness, but rather the two seemed to bend around one another at regular intervals, a grant of mutual dignity prevailing between...
Isegoria: This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History, by T. R. Fehrenbach, makes the short list.
Gaikokumaniakku: Marginally relevant, but likely to be of interest to readers who may actually have seen it already: The Marine Corps Commandant’s 2026 Reading List.
Isegoria: I think The Dracula Tape is moving up in the queue.
Bruce: “Medicine in the 19th century was in a Hell of a state.” — Dracula in Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, where Dracula says Lucy was killed by van Helsing’s bungled blood transfusions.
Isegoria: I felt the same way about Dumas: Reading The Count of Monte Cristo in 11th grade clarified just how derivative most of the entertainment we consume really is — everything has been done better by Dumas, and he did it over a century ago — and it got me wondering why we don’t regularly enjoy the pop classics.
Isegoria: Apparently Saberhagen’s Dracula Series goes on for nine books!
Bruce: The Dracula Tape and The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen are extremely good, and Saberhagen knew the source material very well.
Benjamin I. Espen: Dracula is like the still center around which a whole constellation of pop culture orbits. You can see a lot of things that were clearly derived from it, yet returning to the original is a shocking and even a refreshing experience. None of the derivatives have its power and gravity.
Isegoria: When I read Frankenstein years ago, I immediately realized how little resemblance it bore to the version of the story I’d osmotically absorbed through the culture.
Phileas Frogg: I’ve returned to Dracula many times throughout the years, and I’m always amazed that each time I pick it up I become more and more aware of the genuine horror of the story. My most recent re-read a few months ago elicited the willies on several occasions, a phenomenon that I really only experienced a handful of times while reading. Excellent novel, and far superior to, Frankenstein, despite the fact that they are paired together so often, and the latter seems to be preferred...
Gaikokumaniakku: I got up this morning planning on having a productive and diligent day, but now that I have seen a single mention of skeleton, I suppose I will spend the next sixteen hours watching Alessia Crippa videos. Che ci vuoi fare? Così è la vita.
Gaikokumaniakku: 1961: The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. 1971: Federal funding becomes normal. 1981: Defense funding becomes foundational. 1991: Dependence survives the Cold War. 2001: No civil rights for “enemy combatants” or “terrorists.” ; 2011: Grant-seeking becomes institutionalized. 2021: Government influence over entire economy is semi-concealed...
