Guest Contributor – War Pig – 19MAR2023 – Human Diversity

Having been around the world a few times, courtesy of Uncle Sugar, I can say all humans are UNequal. Therein lies one of our greatest strengths. I would stand no chance against LeBron on the court, but he would be little more than a bullet magnet on the battlefield. I’m not going to trade punches with Mike Tysoj, but give us each a rifle and let us enter a forest at opposite ends and I’ll hang his scalp on my wigwam. I am not a military hero like Chesty Puller but i am a sneaky, conniving bastard who can knife you in the back to prevent you attacking my nation.

Our inequalities have allowed us as a species to thrive. The Pygmies can exploit their environment in the ways the Tutsi cannot, while the Tutsi’s altitude advantage allows them to see lions a long way off and protect their livestock. The native tribes of the Amazon would quickly expire in the Himalayas while Himalayans would melt and choke in the dense, super humid air of the Amazonian basin. We are the one adaptable species that can either find a way or make one. So thank God he did not create us all equal.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 19DEC2022 – Natural Rights

War Pig

It’s true, we have no natural rights. A right cannot be taken from you. We have given ourselves rights under our Constitution but they are constructs of human minds. People say you have a right to life. Try walking through South Chicago almost any balmy night, or else try living in Kiev under Russian missile attacks targeting hospitals and civilian housing areas. I am sure the so-called grizzly man protested to the bear as it was attacking and eating him.

Your right to liberty can be curtailed by government quite easily. Think of anything you would call a right and somewhere on this earth it is being violated by governments, gangs, individuals and the cosmos itself if an asteroid lands on your county. Tornados and hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires will not listen to your protests. Other humans have proven to be just as indifferent. The holocaust, the Rwandan genocides, what Russia is doing in Ukraine, what the British did when they invented the concentration camp, slavery of all sorts for millennia.

No, the only “rights” we possess is what we as individuals or groups can defend. Which is why our Second Amendment is so important. It protects all the other rights we have claimed for ourselves here in the USA. It protects them from strangers, gangs, other groups and governments; including our own.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 17DEC2022 – Exotic Alloys

My dad worked for North American Aviaton/ Rockwell/rRocketdyne in the 50s and 60s. He worked on the X15, A5, XB70 and the space program until it went kablooey after Appllo. He also worked on ICBMs. They had some exotic alloys, naturally, as well as some surprising non metal shields, nose cones and the like. ICBM warheads have to endure extreme temperatures and pressures on reentry

Rocketdyne made all the head men and their wives simple, shiny alloy rings. The metal, whatever it was, had to be sized at the plant. Only a diamond can cut it and darned slowly at that. Engraving their names on the ring took a week per ring and costs one diamond bit per ring. Mom and Dad both were buried with them

Dad once said it was a tungsten-carballoy-titanium-beryllium alloy with some other exotic metals added in. It had been through a launch, orbit and reentry cycle which really toughened it. Before launch it had been cryo-treated, too. I wish I still had them but they were buried with my parents. They never had a scratch and looked like polished silver or stainless steel. They were also amazingly light.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – War, Up Close & Personal

A lot of real action with elite units is up close and personal. You have to be able to look them in the eye and kill them. You can smell and almosr taste their adrenaline, their fear, their natural body odor. You have to become almost animalistic in your fury. Killing up close is killing well when done correctly. They gift you with their lives and you can almost see the other side in their eyes but they glaze over too soon. One thing, if you ever kill up close as with a knife, you, yourself will never fear death again and that is the greatest gift.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – Memorial Day

My Memorial Day weekend will be spent visiting various cemeteries. I have veteran relatives to honor, such as mom, dad and several uncles and cousins. I will also remember conrades who died in action or later after retirement. My Vietnam generation is fast aging. Most of us who were privates then are in our 70s now, and those who were officers and NCOs are even older. Many of us served well into the War on Terror and against Iraq and even Afghanistan, as well as many places that never made it in the news.

For me and many others Memorial Day is bittersweet and rather melancholy. Families with a strong military tradition likely feel the same. Since the Civil War there have been men and women in our family who have served and fought in each war and “police action”. So I will stand and salute as the Anthem or Taps is played or the colors pass at various cemeteries and Memorial services, and I will shed the odd tear in memory of those braver than I who went before.

 

Guest Contributor – War Pig – Ulfberht Steel

And we still don’t know who by or where the Ulfberht swords were made. The steel was centuries ahead of its time.

Ulfberht steel was crucible steel. It was remarkably fine grained and had very few inpuruties. Likely imported from south Asia. Europe did not work out crucible steel for centuries after the Ulfberht swords were made. You can learn a great deal in the NOVA special on PBS.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ciave

Also MAN AT ATMS REFORGED did a short on making an Ulfberht sword from scratch. They made their own steel from ore and all.

The flexibility and strength in sword steels today we rather take for granted. Ulfberht steel would have seemed to be magic to the smiths if the age. An Ulfberht sword would be equal in value to a small castle back then. Of course, where there is quality there were counterfeits. Humans haven’t changed much in the last thousand years or so that way. The NOVA special references fakes. Just like fake Rolex qatches today, there were fake Ulfberht swords.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 03MAR2022 – On War

(In reply to comments on the review of the 1965 movie “The Battle of the Bulge”) – photog

I’ve never heard what Eisenhower had to say about it. I get my lean on it from my uncle, an enlisted man. Battles are seen quite differently if you’re one of the dogfaces in the ranks than by staff generals and politicians and people who write about it later.

Having been in a couple or so battles myself I can say the troops fight a battle intimately, not cooly and detached like they do at headquarters. You fight what is in front of you and you do not fight for king or country. You fight for the dogfaces to your right and left, your brothers. Your own world in battle is quite small, really. Your brothers on your right and left, and what you can see to your front. Usually about 400 yards or so. Modern thermal sights changes that for tank xrews and the like, and better optics on rifles extends that range a little bit but the soldier with the rifle in the ranks can only worry about what he sees and what can see him.

I generally don’t watch war movies that involve ground action. They are so fake overall. I’ll watch Battle of Brirain or In Harms Way about planes and ships, but I usually don’t watch ground war movies. I saw Bulge before I went to Vietnam. After that I gave up on ground war movies. I especially never watch movies about conflicts or operations in which I took part. They remind me of things I’d rather not remember and they are so wrong I get angry.

 

Guest Contributor – War Pig – The Battle of the Bulge

My uncle, who fought under Patton, told me of how the battle shaped up for him and his tank crew. It was snowy and icy and muddy all at the same time. The Germans did blow up trees to block roads and used mines and panzerfausts with skill and daring. They shelled trees to make splinters to wound the infantry. Pattons forces did have to fight without air cover. I don’t know if it was the prayer Patton uttered or just a warm front moving in but when the skies cleared, P47s, B25s/26s and British Typhoons feasted upon the Germans. The brave men of the 101st Airborne were heroic in their stand which brought down the entire offensive. Both the last stand of the 101st and Patton’s charge are excellent examples of American military exceptionalism.

The Quadratic Franchise

Many, many years ago I read an essay by the science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein about civics.  He was making the case that democracy was the proposition that a million men were smarter than one man or a few men.  And he batted that idea around.  His point was that the average man might not be the right decision maker for society.  And then he thought of how we could rig things to make democracy better.  Now, being an engineer, his first idea was based on the type of tests that would appeal to a technical mind.  He imagined the voting booth being equipped with a visual display of some sort that communicated a problem to the voter to solve before being allowed to vote.  Heinlein favored solving a quadratic equation as the qualifying test.  I can’t remember if it was a multiple-choice question or not but at the time, I saw the sense of it.  Pick some minimally difficult standard of intelligence and make it a condition for voting.

But intelligence is not the only criterion for citizenship.  Moral fitness may be even more important.  You may be smart enough to know something is a bad idea for society but if you think that you’ll personally benefit from it then you might go along with it.  So, another way to rig the franchise is disqualify people who have chosen to live antisocially.  Currently, most states disqualify felons from voting.  That seems a reasonable measure.  But I think there are other larger voting blocks that should be looked at.  Perhaps civil servants should not be allowed to vote.  After all, teachers and prison guards have controlled politics in California and other states like Illinois and New Jersey for decades based on their habit of voting in Democrats to keep their pensions and salaries robust.  Maybe anyone on welfare should be taken off the voters’ roll because they’ll vote for the liberal who will keep their gravy train flowing.

Or maybe we should go the other way around.  Maybe people’s votes should be weighted according to how much taxes they pay.  So, Elon Musk pays on average ten million dollars in taxes a year and I pay fifty thousand so his vote should count for two hundred of mine.  And the guy who pays no taxes has no vote or maybe some minimal fraction of a vote.

But of course, the absurdity of this whole discussion is that none of this matters because as Dementia Joe recently pointed out, it’s not who votes but who counts the votes, that counts.  Even when unheard of numbers of Americans came out to vote in 2020 the people who rig elections in Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Madison and Phoenix simply ran the photocopy machines ten times as long and manufactured the votes needed to fake the election result they wanted.

We can talk about who the least responsible voters are.  My favorite is women because they vote with their emotions and because they’re gullible and easily flattered into thinking their self-interest is equal to the good of the country.  But even they will recognize grim reality when it comes in the likeness of a BLM mob.  So ultimately trying to fix representative government means absolutely nothing when the ballot box is being stuffed.

I think the attempts to fix this situation and the simultaneous attempt to codify fraud by the Democrats is the biggest struggle going on right now in our country.  I don’t want to overblow the criticality of the result because the bad guys never run out of ways to degrade our country.  Literally they never quit.  But I think the attempt to fix this problem is a fair test of whether there is enough strength left in our system and in our will to turn the country around.  If after what happened in 2020, we don’t solve this problem then we’re not going to have the strength to survive the diseases that afflict our country.  They will overwhelm the system like a parasitic disease that saps its host’s strength and eventually leads to death.

Heinlein thought about civics and ways that we could improve citizenship.  But he also predicted the decay of our society under the influence of progressivism.  I think he would have recognized the symptoms we are currently suffering from but he still might have been sad to see it happen to the country he loved.

War Pig’s Feedback

I prefer the government of “Starship Troopers”. I also like the idea he postulated in “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” – that any law passed can be nullified by I believe a 1/3 vote of the People. After all if a law is so poorly written or unnecessary that a full third of your citizens despises it, it is a bad law.

I do NOT trust the form of voting in Sam Clemen’s “The Curious Republic of Gondour”, since we have seen what craziness is professed in western colleges and universities. What was it William F Buckley Jr said;- “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

 

(Good to hear from you War Pig.  All the best.

photog)