Offline

Am offline for a while, but had a moment to post, with this question:

Who out here is good at identifying Soviet armored vehicles? I swear to God I was standing next to a ZSU23-4.

Update: Here are two frames.



Looks like mounts for 4 23mm cannon, with case ejection chutes and coolant lines, on the front of the rectangular turret.






Six roadwheels, evenly spaced except for the frontmost, no return rollers. Two reloading hatches on the side of the hull. See again the rectangular turret.

Yup. A ZSU23-4. Compare with photos and (French language) description here.

Quote for the day

For most of us, America wasn't our first choice as much as it was

our last chance.

Varifrank. HT to James Rummel.

Red-headed stepson of RMBR

For your enjoyment, a sampler of some of the best weblogging the Front Range has to offer. Please pardon any typos I failed to catch: I'm typing with 8-month-old Toad in my lap.



As to be expected, election season figures prominently among the submissions by Rocky Mountain bloggers in this Roundup:

• White Dog draws our attention to Bill Whittle's two-part essay on the value of rhetorical skill vice the message, with respect to the Presidential election. Shall one vote for style, or for substance, given that between the two major-party candidates one cannot have both? Choose well.
  
  
  
  
• Dave disputes Josh Claybourn, arguing that the Republic is healthier when more people vote, rather than fewer, more-informed people vote.
  
  
  
  
• RMBR founder Walter In Denver argues from experience that the validity of our elections is at greater risk from inaccuracy than from fraud.
  
  
  
  
• BigSkyDave challenges the good Senator Kerry on who constitutes a threat to US security. Or world peace. Whatever.

Elsewhere:

• The Speculist offers a meta-roundup, headquartered in the Front Range but collecting contributions from faraway corners of the Republic. Raptors, privately-operated space flight, wickedfast computers, improved popcorn, and cancer-sniffing dogs.
  
  
  
  
• Jed at FreedomSight reminisces about the quintessential banned-able book. I got my copy. I don't need it---I have it merely to remind myself that I can have it.
  
  
  
  
• Publicola fisks an essay defending the Empire, even if it did make the trains run on time, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
  
  
  
  
• Your host offers his proposal to deploy high-speed internet service everywhere. We'll have to destroy the internet to save it. Always a downside.

Stop the Presses! A late entrant petitions to be included. We are fair and evenhanded to a fault.

• Bob at We The Free waxes Lettermanlike with Top Ten debating points. Though I dispute Bob's use of the term liberal . . .
  
   

I really don't deserve her

My wife lets me spend most of the day converting antelope into sausage or corned antelope, with the enthusiastic assistance of The Cabinet Man (thanks, TCM).



She and I discuss What Not To Wear as it would apply to her, in the abstract. She really is the kind of woman to whom I could say, "that makes you look fat," and live to not regret it.



Then I discover that she's a closet Farscape fan. I ask her to watch the library for Babylon 5 DVDs. She says "OK."



I am not worthy of her. I'll keep her just the same.

For the Children!

Little Green Footballs asks: Were there plans in the works for a Beslan-like massacre in San Diego?



It doesn't matter whether plans actually existed, or whether a threat was truly posed---they didn't, as the article to which LGF links clearly states. It does not matter. The mere discovery of materials discussing public school security, in the abstract, in the possession of a person engaged in armed conflict against Coalition forces in the Middle East, is enough to contemplate for the moment. It crossed their minds.



Incidentally, a few weeks ago I posted a prediction on this sort of thing happening at StrategyPage's prediction market, though I thought Europe a more likely place for it to occur.



I'm not a particularly bright or well-spoken or uniquely malicious person, and it crossed my mind.



Now take a deep breath and one looong step backward to see the bigger picture.



Public schools are not the only vulnerable public spaces in America. They represent a tiny fraction of them all. Add day care centers, nursing homes, and churches. Then add shopping malls. Then keep on adding.



We can't put armed guards and concertina wire around them all. We can't put automatically locked doors and ID card swipers at all the entrances to them.



My day job is on a military base. I know what it's like to work in facilities that protect themselves like that, 24/7. It is incredibly expensive, incredibly slow, and it brings out the worst in people who think they are smarter than you. I can work like that but I will not live like that, and I won't ask my neighbors or teach my kids to live like that either. Our economy cannot survive it and our national character will not tolerate it.



Still, the threat exists to my neighbors and my kids, even though the most evidence for that threat is a CD-ROM found in Iraq, burnt with a pdf pulled from an open web page. What measures we take to counter that threat must be consistent with the national character we have chosen for ourselves, and otherwise be within our reach.



My Googling skills are failing me in seeking one politician's exhortations that we must not change the way we live, but to change the way the other bastards live. We are indeed doing the latter, at great expense and sacrifice, but it will not be enough. In some way we will have to change how we live, but it will not be in the direction of C-wire and ID badges. These measures simply wrap defensive layers around what remains a vulnerability.



I would rather deny any adversary his ultimate goal, by erasing that vulnerability and giving up some or all of the layers of defense surrounding it. This will have to be a change in attitudes first, then laws second, but little or no money need be spent publicly to bring it about.



I assert this without apology. We will remain vulnerable as long as it is not commonplace for people in public to be armed, able to protect themselves and the innocent among them.



As I have argued in other spaces, the present conflict will not be over until our servicemen begin to bring home Persian wives. That represents the "change how the other bastards live" aspect of the solution.



But it is only half of the solution. The other half will be signaled by, for instance:

• being able to buy targets at Target, and a brick of .22LR while you're at it;
  
  
• turning on TLC to see Paige Davis or Bob Vila advise a young couple on renovating a rifle on This Old Mauser;
  
  
• the high school yearbook photos show a larger trap shooting team than basketball team;
  
  
• an adult showing anxiety around firearms will earn the same contempt we express today for a man who beats his wife, or the same pity we express to one who lacks the capacity to wipe one's own bottom.
  
  

Deny our philosophical enemies their ultimate goal by encouraging their victims to fight back. Celebrate the armed virtue.



The objection will be raised that we would be changing how we live. I concede that. But we would be changing toward a lifestyle of fewer fences and alarms and locked doors, fewer face-commparing cameras and identity badges, more economic prosperity, more confidence in oneself. We would be transferring our uncertainties to those who have taken advantage of our uncertainty.



Those who view human life through the lens of class should welcome the erasure of boundaries between the protected, protecting, and unprotected classes. Increasingly, this is the only stratification that matters, if we are to regard one another as equals before the law.



I do not present this as a complete solution, for no solution can be complete. It does not speak to concerns that jihadis will obtain a nuclear explosive, or smallpox, for example. But those contingencies are best addressed by military force over the course of weeks, months, and years.



The seizure of a school or a church by jihadis, on our own soil, which surely has been contemplated by our enemies, can be thwarted only in seconds, by the spontaneous and violent reaction of the people who were in that school or church at the moment it occurs.

Roundup!

Walter has graciously agreed to let me host the latest Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup.



Please send me a link to your best recent post---sorry, only one post per blogger---with a brief description of it and yourself. Deadline forthcoming.



Deadline 1700 hours Mountain, 10 October for publication on Columbus Day.

Quote for the day

The U.S. military---particularly at the level of NCOs, who are the guardians of its culture and traditions---is a world of beer, cigarettes, instant coffee, and chewing tobacco. It is composed of people who hunt, drive pickups, use profanity as an element of ordinary speech and yet have a simple, sure, demonstrative belief in the Almighty.




Robert Kaplan in Atlantic Monthly. Hat Tip to Lexington Green at ChicagoBoyz.

New stuff at Ditchweed

A new Wise Turkey story, with an opossum this time.

Time to overhaul all of it, then

United Airlines has told the bankruptcy court that the "likely result" will be a decision to terminate all of its pension plans. ... That would precipitate the biggest pension default in history ... The move is expected to

destabilize the already struggling airline industry, prompting other old-line carriers like Delta to eventually follow suit ... It would also put additional pressure on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC,) the federal agency that insures traditional pensions in case companies go belly

up.

Why not allow all pension plans to convert to defined-contribution plans? Then dissolve the PBGC.

I gots ambition

If I learn enough Linux to be dangerous, I'll make my mark, and secure my retirement, by selling an intelligible, hotlinked replacement for the MAN pages.

The New Orleans of the Atlantic

The Real Sam Johnson Show reminds me: Savannah, Georgia impresses me as the New Orleans of the Atlantic. And how the Atlantic needs one.



I'll be going there again soon.

The Fusilier Pundit Plan to Deploy Ubiquitous High-Speed Internet Bandwidth

Executive Summary: outlaw the Internet.

Abstract: the fastest way to ensure that high-speed wireless Internet connectivity is deployed to every possible inhabited place in the United States is to chase it into the shadows through the power of US law. The author draws parallels between the the War on Drugs, the War on Guns, and alcohol Prohibition on the one hand, and the availability of high-speed wireless Internet connections on the other.

Making alcohol, abuse drugs, and certain types of firearms illegal encouraged criminal entrepreneurs to ramp up supply to meet suppressed demand. In fact, milieus presumably under total control by government, such as prisons, are incapable of eradicating such "contraband."

A comparable approach, resulting from heavy lobbying by industries who perceive threats to their business model from digital reproducibility of their content, would incentivize a cottage industry of hackers and geeks to circumvent these legal controls, thereby making bandwidth more available, more reliable, more anonymous, and more resilient to malicious code attacks.

The fundamental problem facing developers an underground ubiquitous IP infrastructure are political and economic, not technical. To date there has been no incentive to develop or deploy such an infrastructure because there has been no pressure to do so.

However, if the entertainment industry succeeds in enacting laws that will mandate the inclusion of digital rights management in the existing IP network, for example, there will be ample incentive for industries or activities to move their IP-dependent applications to a network that does not obey those laws. The technology exists, or the precursors to that technology exist, and only await the incentive to be assembled and applied. The demand, today legitimate and above board, will be forced underground. An active community of politicized engineers and technologists already exists to serve them.

The greatest technological obstacle would be replacement of the long-haul high-speed connections provided by such carriers as Level3, Qwest, and Worldcom.

For more, beg and plead for it in Comments.