A marked increase in the number of rude, rotten, and outright dangerous drivers is a local thing that my daughter and I, and a scattering of friends have noticed over the last several months. It has been, as my daughter noted, an increased number of Third World drivers, on our local roads. A lot of near-misses, carelessness in lane-changing, ignorance of use of the turn indicators, and a fair amount of road rage… including a shooting on a stretch of the IH-35 on the South Side of the city. While the South Side is largely and traditionally Hispanic, and has neighborhoods in it which have a reputation for being violent, especially after dark, I used to drive clear across town on my daily commute, from the largely Anglo, or white north-east side of town, to the Southside, and I often noticed that the drivers on the South side were a hell of a lot more courteous about allowing merges and lane changes on the IH-35.
Personal Narrative
Around the Next Corner
What lurks in hiding for us there? Nothing good, and that is the general feeling one gets from the ripples and small currents in the wide ocean of the blogosphere. I’ve been paddling in that ocean since … 2002, when I gave up on Slate as an original aggregator news site shortly after 9-11, because the communities which gathered in the various comments sections just got too angry and irrational for words. Something let me to Instapundit, and through his links to the original incarnation of Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief. I became a contributor when the original Stryker appealed for other contributors and have been paddling away at the margins of the digital information ocean ever since. Back in the pre-internet day, I had subscriptions to all kinds of magazines. As a military public relations professional, I reasoned that I should know when and from which direction the next political-military-social sh*t-storm would arrive. Tracking blogs and digital media serves the same purpose for me that print media once did.
Seth Barrett Tillman: “What I Learned About the United States After Ten Years in Ireland”
This is an anniversary, of sorts, for me. I have now lived in Ireland for ten years. They were ten good years. During that time, I made some friends and worked with colleagues, who later became friends, and befriended some students, who later befriended me. During this time, I made one good decision, and one bad mis-judgment—and the two were related.
Worth reading in full.
Happy Birthday to US
I was patiently waiting for one of the other authors here to put up some sort of post today to celebrate the birthday of these most excellent United States. Seeing nothing, I provide a short story before I wish you a most happy Fourth of July.
Last night I went to a local neighborhood party. It was one of those where the local dads pooled (a lot of) money to purchase various illegally obtained incendiary devices, both terrestrial and aerial. Many treats were served (dish to pass required for admission), and the theme of the party was all stars and stripes. Everyone had stars and stripes attire, the food was all stars and stripes, and the colors of the day were most certainly red, white and blue, down to the host houses hand towels in the bathroom.
Before the municipal sized devices were detonated, much conversation was had. Even though the people were across the political spectrum, all agreed that the idiotic and dunderheaded reaction to covid over the last year was hated by all, and many jokes were made about the higher ups making said terrible decisions. It was refreshing and a great time, without a mask in sight.
The American spirit, at least here in flyover country, is still strong. The national anthem was played before the fireworks, and during the explosions John Philip Sousa music was playing. We have a lot of problems in this country, but at least for one night, it was good to be a proud American. Most media will try to play it down and make all seem terrible. If they want to live in misery, so be it.
Happy Fourth to you all and God Bless America.
Dilèm Aksyon Kolektif nan Matisan
Generatim discite cultus
(Learn the culture proper to each after its kind)
— Virgil, Georgics II
Stephen Biddle, Nonstate Warfare: the Military Methods of Guerrillas, Warlords, and Militias (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)
By way of making this more than a merely armchair review, I will be discussing the developing situation of state failure in Haiti, which is providing a personally harrowing example of the phenomena theorized and studied in this book. NB: additional situation reports like the one I quote from below will appear at this OCHA webpage.
I. Increasingly Scale-Free Military Activity in the 21st Century
In this follow-up to 2004’s Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (also from Princeton), Stephen Biddle continues to elucidate the many ramifications of the one-to-many relationship which came to dominate the battlefield between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. Over that century and in the decades that followed, individual-service weapons increased in rate of fire from a (very) few rounds per minute to ~10 rounds per second, in effective range from ~100 to >300 meters, and in accuracy from (optimistically) 10 to 1.5 milliradians. Say 2 ½ orders of magnitude improvement in RoF, half an order of magnitude in range, and one order of magnitude in accuracy; multiplying these together to create a sort of index of effectiveness, I get an overall change of 4 orders of magnitude, with stark implications for battlefield environments.