A Fourth of July cruise on the Saigon River

 

I'm reading a book about DARPA, the defense agency responsible for so many military (and ultimately civilian) innovations, including the internet that makes it possible for me to post these pages and you to read them. The book prompted me to suss out the remarkable little machine gun that I encountered on a Fourth of July cruise down the Saigon River in 1964. The holiday was organized by three US Navy officers who liked to get out and about, so they commandeered a Junk Fleet riverboat and who invited me to come along. Another straphanger also turned up, a US Army one-star general who was in-country to test out some innovative field rations and a light assault machine gun that I now realize was a Stoner 63. It didn't work awfully well -- it kept jamming, apparently because the cartridges were too dry -- but the Junk Fleet sailors loved it. Here the Trung Si (sergeant) fires the weapon from a kneeling position, though dang if I can see where his right leg has got to!

Eugene Stoner came up with the weapon after the ArmaLight company sold his AR-15 design to Colt's. The model 63 variant was chambered for the same 5.56 mm cartridge as the AR-15. It was manufactured by Cadillac Gage in Costa Mesa, California, from February 1963 to September 1964, to a total of 234 examples. DARPA bought 25 of that batch, with wooden stocks, and this may well have been one of them, though about 2,000 more Stoner 63s were manufactured in the next few years. I confess I don't remember whether the weapon we fired along the Saigon River had a wooden stock or a plastic one. The Marines were more interested than the Army, but in the end the Stoner 63 was deemed to be "unacceptable for service use."

For more, go to www.warbirdforum.com -- Dan Ford

Light dawns over Times Square

By golly, the New York Times is catching on! In his Political Times column, Matt Bai ruminates on the larger meaning of America's roiling anger about body scanners, pat-downs, and bullying bureaucrats in general:

...the “Don’t touch my junk” fiasco raises, yet again, what has become the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work. From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled — blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry.

Good grief! This could have been a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Mr. Bai goes on to speculate that perhaps the Democrats were misled by their electoral triumphs in 2006 and 2008. (You think?) He holds up the Cash for Clunkers boondoggle as just such an over-reaching, though I suspect it was mostly forgotten by November 2: ObamaCare was the clunker on most of our minds by that time.

White House aides expressed shock this week at how controversial the T.S.A. has now become. They seem to regard this latest argument as a distraction from the security issues that matter more.... But this is just the latest iteration of a larger debate that surrounds much of what Mr. Obama does. And, just as with the health care protests and the reaction to the BP oil spill, the administration’s surprise seems to indicate that it still doesn’t quite get what that debate is really about.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

That was the old fine!

The obese ladies and gentlemen of the Transportation Security Administration have created a new American folk hero in John Tyner. Rather like President Obama and Nancy Pelosi, who'd like to fire the American electorate for not appreciating them sufficiently, the TSA is really upset with the "traveling public" and its reaction to full body scanners and the deliberately intimate pat-down given to those who opt out of it. To make their point, they have opened an investigation into Mr. Tyner and threatened him with an $11,000 fine.

It seems that Mr. Tyner warned an agent, "Touch my junk and I'll have you arrested," when the TSA began to explore his "crotchal area," as one agent felicitously called it. He was forcibly ejected from the airport, with a warning that he could be fined $10,000 for lèse majesté. Though the Federal Reserve Board assures us that the consumer price index these days is flat, the TSA evidently hasn't gotten the word: $10,000, explained a representative, was the old fine for injuring the pride of its employees; Mr. Tyner may now have to come up with eleven big ones.

A conservative famously is a liberal who's been mugged. Just so, a libertarian is a conservative who's been groped by TSA. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Eichmann, the takeaway

Some memorable moments from Eichmann in Jerusalem:

For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everyone's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. (p. 233)

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and repent. (p. 251)

For the truth of the matter was that by the end of the Second World War everybody knew that technical developments in the instruments of violence had made the adoption of "criminal" warfare inevitable.... Hence, it was felt that under these new conditions war crimes were only those outside all military necessities, where a deliberate inhuman purpose could be demonstrated. (p. 256)

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied ... that this new type of criminal ... commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. (p. 276)

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Bye bye, Mr. Soviet Pie!

Though he still  hangs on in Russia, the country he brutalized for thirty years, Josef Stalin got the boot this week in his home town in Georgia--formerly a Soviet republic, now a more or less independent nation. (I say "more or less" because officials removed Uncle Joe in the dead of night, to avoid protests by those who still regard him fondly--and not just in Hollywood.) Stalin will be replaced by a statue commemorating Georgia's resistance to a Russian invasion two years ago, provided Moscow doesn't finish the job in the near future.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On kicking through the door

I came across the phrase in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, and it sounded so over the top that I immediately Googled it. Every reference went to a right-wing blog or newspaper (mostly the Washington Examiner), but I finally found the source, which is no less than the Washington Post and its left-wing blogger, Ezra Klein. According to Mr. Klein, this is what the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said on Monday about the pending health-insurance legislation:

"My biggest fight has been between those who wanted to do something incremental and those who wanted to do something comprehensive. We won that fight, and once we kick through this door, there'll be more legislation to follow."

In order words, if she and Harry Reid manage to ram ObamaCare through the Congress by a ploy that is highly unusual and perhaps unconstitutional, then the “public option” (i.e. government health care on the British model) is sure to follow. And who knows what else?

Mr. Klein says that Ms. Pelosi made her prediction “to reporters.” So where was the media on this astonishing story? Why wasn’t it on the front page of the WaPo, the NYT, or indeed the WSJ on Tuesday morning? This really shakes me up. If a Speaker of the House declares that we are about to nationalize health care, and there is no blogosphere to pick up on it, did it really happen? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

All hail to Kim Jong-un!

The always-interesting John McCreary has put together a couple of reports from North Korea, one noting that the Dear Leader and Forever President has stashed $4 billion in secret European bank accounts as an emergency fund, in case the people ever wake up and run him out of the country. $4 billion is real money, even in Barack Obama’s America; in North Korea, it represents a tenth of the country’s total annual output of goods and services.

In other news from Pyongyang, the dictator’s third son is about to have his official portrait released. To Pyongyang-watchers, this means that Kim Jong-un has been anointed as the heir apparent. For further proof, they point to the fact that the personal name Jong-un is now reserved for him alone. You can’t name your kid Jong-un any more, and if that happens to be your own name, you’ve got to change it. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

You are being watched

You probably won't want to watch the whole of this Dubai television program--it's nearly half an hour--but it's a fascinating glimpse of how closely we are being watched as we go through life. I trust the United States is not as advanced in this activity as is Dubai--or Britain, for that matter. But I find it positively creepy that even a government television station can put together such a detailed video of the assassins from the moment they arrive at the airport, and through their various taxi rides, hotel rooms, and disguises. (I particularly liked the videos of the guy who enters his hotel room bald and leaves it with a fine head of hair.) Is there any place in Dubai without a surveillance camera? In London? In Washington? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford