Happy Fun Pundit makes the case that planes should be stocked with defensive items to help the passengers foil a hijacking.

Long armored gloves, wire-mesh vests, and a nightstick are excellent tools for subduing someone with a knife, even in the hands of the untrained, and yet they pose no risk to the aircraft because they are not offensive weapons.

How about the stuff that's already there and dispersed? Reaction time is critical in a situation like this, the hijackers are at their most vulnerable in the first few seconds of the hijack.

Use the seat cushions as armor. They will stop a short knife or a box cutter, and reduce the penetrating ability of a larger knife.

Blankets can be used to entangle a knife-wielding opponent. The Roman gladiators frequently used fishing nets as defensive tools.

The in-seat phones can be yanked out and thrown at a hijacker. It's not likely to put him out of commission, but solid hit will hurt like hell, and its one heck of a distraction while blanket- and cushion-wielding passengers are counterattacking up the aisles, especially since there are a lot of those phones available as weapons.

Smaller items of carry-on luggage can be thrown. A solid underarm toss of a fully-loaded hardshell suitcase is gonna hurt like hell when it hits, and also clog up the aisle making it more difficult for the hijacker to move. This could be handy for helping to contain the hijackers in the rear of the plane while the passengers in the front reclaim the cockpit.

(LILEKS) James : the Screed

Lileks takes on this amusing shallow and clueless article from the Guardian.

Great reading, and hilarious as well.

Happy Fun Pundit "reinterprets" the Constitution ala Gary Wills

To which I would add the following obvious interpretations of the third amendment:

III) No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

(1) I'm not sure that this isn't intended to prohibit the ancient practice (well known to the founders) of "drawing and quartering", in this case of a soldier, inside someone's home, except in the circumstances prescribed by law, i.e. after a proper conviction. Clearly because they didn't want a sensitive populace to be exposed to the goriness of this particular punishment.

(2) The "manner to be proscribed by law" seems to be the most important phrase, since its position at the end of the sentence clearly modifies the rest of the sentence. Thus modified, this amendment means that the quality of the conditions in which troops are quartered in a person's home must match the quality of the conditions specified by congress for troops in government barracks, i.e. that the homeowner's aren't allowed to treat the troops being quartered there inferiorly re the other troops. Number of meals, beer, availability of prostitutes, size and thickness of bed, personal hygiene facilities etc should all meet or exceed the government-specified standards.

A LOOK AT THE ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGES AND "GLOBAL WARMING"

Interesting (although slightly technical) look at the polar ice caps, the recent spate of icebergs, and global warming.

It's a lot more complicated that the environmentalists would like you to believe. It's also a lot more cyclical than they would like you to believe.

Anyway, read the article, it's got lots of graphs and pretty thermal-imaging satellite pictures.

It Doesn't Add Up to Much

I feared as much from what I saw in the "Sum of All Fears" trailer when I went to see "Star Wars". Jonathan Last confirms it:

"The Sum of All Fears" is, objectively speaking, one of the worst-made big studio films in recent memory. The editing is ham-handed and often incoherent. The direction is suspect. And the production decisions are both mystifying and instructive.

Lots of other good stuff in there about Hollywood's Political-Correctness-run-wild.

Victor Davis Hanson on war on National Review Online

Hanson thinks that the US's status as sole superpower means that it can can be pickey about its friends. He makes a very good point.

For some reason I've had this long-running fascination with large-bore rifles. As in bigger than 50-cal. 45-70 just doesn't quite cut it. Unfortunately, all the really-big-caliber cartridges are designed either for elephants or for WWI tanks.

The British had an interesting-looking cartridge back in the mid-80's called the .577 Snyder, but it was a black-powder cartridge chambered only for the weak hinged-block Snyder action (similar to the US 45-70 trapdoor), and was quickly dumped in favor of the smokeless .45-577 which was itself only chambered in the falling-block Martini-Henry action. From what I've read, the Snyder cartridge mostly replicated their old rifle-musket load in a cartridge form with a different, slightly lighter bullet.

Still, that's the sort of thing I'm looking for. 50-75 cal, smokeless, throwing a 500+grain solid lead slug at 1300fps. Basically a lead baseball. Preferably in a bolt-action, lever-action, or semiauto, although single-shot might work too if it came to that.

At one time an outfit called Tromix made a replacement upper for the AR-15 that chambered the 50AE cartridge, which was a 50-cal pistol round. Close to what I want, very close, although the AR-15 is awfully lightweight for a cartridge like that.

That still may be my best option, though I'd prefer something a little larger, and capable of shooting big lead slugs.

Oh well, a man can wish, can't he?

Just finished Herodotus. I'm not so sure about that "Father of History" thing -- "Rambling Grandmother of History", maybe. There were certainly a lot of wild stories, some of which seem to have been true (circumnavigation of Africa, some remarkable ancient construction projects), but he had absolutely no sense of proportion, spending more time talking about X's affair with Y's wife resulting in Y being skinned alive so X could tire of Y's wife and then work his way down Y's daughters, than he did discussing Marathon, or Plataea, or Salamis, or any of the other historically significant events. Disappointing, especially compared with his partial-contemporary Thucydides and the slightly later Xenophon, both of whom stayed much more on-topic, and who seem infinitely more modern in tone and style.

I was about to comment that Herodotus feels medieval in comparison Thucydides and Xenophon (which he does) but to some extent he also feels slightly Victorian-travelogue-ish, although I'm told that Xenophon is much more so in his Anabasis (or "The March Up-Country", which describes the famous march of the Ten Thousand) once he starts describing the trip back home.

At which point I should mention that I just started reading Anabasis last night, so far I've gotten through Book II. It's been very absorbing so far, much less dense than Thucydides, and more focused and direct Herodotus. No "It is said that ..." or "I heard that ..." except where this impacts the story directly, as in "We heard that Artaxerxes was encamped in the next village ..." or "We heard that Cyrus had been killed...", etc.

The weakness of the Persian empire was as apparent to Xenophon as it is to us in retrospect, and is really staggering when compared to the tremendous might it displayed during the invasions of Greece many years earlier. While it was defeated, it took the combined might of all the polis to do it, whereas now a small band (Xenophon claims 10,000, other contemporaries claim even less) repeatedly smashed through the much larger Persian army at Cunaxa only to discover that their patron Cyrus had been killed in a foolish charge at his brother, the King of Persia. Even after the battle (it took a day or so for the Greeks to discover that despite winning the battle they had lost the war), Artaxerxes and his army of several hundred thousand carefully avoided further battle with the tremendously smaller Greek army.

There are many ironies in this book, but one that was most important to the Persians is that the failure of Artaxerxes to destroy this little Greek band helped inspire Alexander a few years later to lead a slightly larger and more aggressive army into Persia, leading to the sudden and utter destruction of the Achemaenid empire.

FOXNews.com

We went through with this during Ann Richard's reign, when in order to spare the feelings of the hispanic texas population, she ordered the San Jacinto reenactors to abort the reenactment before the part where Texas wins and the Mexican army runs. It's sad to see this absurdity-of-political-correctness making a comeback.

Never mind the fact that a huge part of the Texas army were hispanic themselves. Nope, can't risk offending the illegal immigrants.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Richard Sennett: Caught in the trap of self-sufficiency

The Guardian is on a roll today. How about this headline: "Politicians who deny the dignity of dependence are out of touch". The poster child for this "dignified dependence" is an elderly retiree who has been denied her pension. The editorial goes on to equate the retirees pension with welfare payments. It goes further when it also claims equivalence with the dependence of a child on its parents.

Which would be fine if the cases were at all related. But they serve the author's purpose of bringing in sympathetic cases to illustrate his point. That they are in no wise related seems to be immaterial.

Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | Freedom to hate, freedom to harm Found this little gem in the Guardian, in an editorial (mostly) about the cross-burning case currently before the Supreme Court:

The US constitution is a uniquely powerful document, but whether it has really done anything for the cause of freedom is open to debate. ... Nowadays it is being used as a vehicle for the proliferation of guns...

It is revealing, though hardly surprising, that the Guardian finds the US Constitution a downright hindrance to it's concepts of "freedom". It is also hardly surprising that it believes the private ownership of firearms incompatible with its concept of "freedom".

The Guardian's concept of "freedom" is essentially this: Sit Down And Shut Up While We Enlightened Leftists Run Your Life, And You Will Like It Or Else.

FOXNews.com

FOX squawks about the Great Jewish Lobbyist Conspiracy.

Apparently, the members of congress are paying an undue amount of attention to the Jewish lobby, instead of listening to the american press. Never mind that the american people tend to be pro-Israeli (or at least anti-palestinian) themselves. Nope, it's that gotta be that darned Jewish conspiracy.

Carnegie Endowment - Power and Weakness

Robert Kagan has an excellent article on the emerging gulf between European and American viewpoints.

Spent the weekend reading several of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and Victor Hanson's The Wars of the Ancient Greeks and their Invention of Western Military Culture. Prachett is wonderfully funny, nice light fluffy stuff that goes down easy while sitting on the porch with a glass of lemonade. Plus you get to learn nifty and useful things like the name of Death's horse is "Binky". And all about the fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse (he left before they became famous). And the true power of chocolate.

I generally like Hanson's stuff as well, but one problem that really jumped out at me in this book was his failure to establish how the Roman army and tactics developed out of the Greek military tradition. Yes, they used massed groups of citizen-soldiers, but he establishes no historical relationship between Greece and Latium to explain this, nor does he attempt to explain how the pretty major differences between legionary tactics and post-alexandrian greek tactics came about. Which strikes me as a pretty major lapse, since a persistent thesis of his works has been the continuous cultural and more specifically the military heritage that the western world has inherited from the greeks. Since our heritage is directly and obviously traceable to the Roman era, it seems imperative to establish the connection between Greek and Roman heritage, at the very least the military heritage. Certainly the broader cultural connection was made post-conquest, when Rome imported large numbers of educated greek slaves as teachers, philosophers, chef, etc to enrich the fairly impoverished roman culture (Rome, like England, seems to be another case of "conquering the world in the hopes of finding some decent cuisine :-)

But at the time of the Roman conquest of Greece, which was nearly as lopsided as the earlier Greek conquest of Persia that Hanson uses as evidence of the innate superiority of the "Western way of War", the period of Greek influence on the wider Roman culture had not yet happened. Hanson waves off the problem of causality with the claim that the Roman legion represents the new, improved Western Way that the post-Alexandrian Greeks had forgotten.

"Western" it undoubtly was. But his failure to provide details on how the Greek phalanx turned into the markedly different and even more markedly superior legion strikes me as a critical and glaring flaw.

Digression:One thing that I've always wondered about is why the ancient world never discovered the combination of infantry and massed archery that the English used to such good effect in the late middle ages. In fact, until the English, archery seems to have been pretty universally disdained as ineffectual against cavalry and infantry.

TCS: Enviro-Sci - Tigers and Rhinos and Pandas, Oh My!

Iain Murray exposes the UN's claims that 1/4 of the mammalian species will be extinct within 25 yrs as pure hokum.

USS Clueless - Euro Defense Spending

Den Beste has a great article on the increasing military disparity between the US and the rest of NATO. Not size, but fundamental capabilities -- the improvements in the US military weapons and support systems in the last decade or so have begun to change our tactics to the point where it would be difficult to fight a major war side-by-side with our NATO allies, even assuming they could manage to show up for it, and finishes up with this little gem directed at Europe:

[You're] faced with a stark choice: massively upgrade your military capability to bring the quality up to our standards, or accept that your military is second rate and no longer capable of operating with ours even with the best of intentions by all involved. At the rate things are going, in fifteen years European forces would be about as able to operate on a battlefield with us as Greek hoplites.

If Europe want's the US to take it seriously as a partner, it should pay attention. It's in danger of becoming irrelevant militarily as well as culturally.