Tab Clearing...

• Is your brain just making magenta up?


• "Epistemic Crisis": From my hotel room hobby of alternating nights watching Fox News and MSNBC, I agree that it is obvious that Americans don't agree on basic facts any more. It's like watching news reporting from alternate timelines. That's troubling.


• The original DOS version of Accolade's game Test Drive is playable in your browser. That's a lot cheaper than this vintage, unopened copy on eBay, and you don't even need a 5.25" floppy drive to play it!


• Buying guns in London with Bitcoin via Snapchat...


• This is the article on Jane Jacobs that made me want to read her book Dark Age Ahead.

Information Illiteracy is a Real Problem

Someone makes a post that's a funny pop culture inside joke, but the real punchline is that they put "Share if you want to honor his heroism" so they can snicker behind their hands when Boomers unfamiliar with Die Hard share the post unironically.

So Snopes and Facebook's "fake news" algorithm debunk it, and people I know are mad at the internet about it.

Why? It's literally doing its job, trying to keep your grandma from being fooled by every troll meme the anons throw at her. "Haha, this one's obviously a joke!" Not to her, it ain't. She's the normie-est normie that ever normie-ed. If a website has non-potato photos and the word "news" anywhere in its URL, it might as well be the straight-up Reuters news feed, as far as she's concerned.

Maybe if they'd had this feature a few years ago, West Point cadets wouldn't be in danger of having their careers aborted in the third trimester for playing the circle game.

The problem under discussion here is the tendency for informationally-illiterate people to believe that a well laid out page with non-potato photos and the word “news” somewhere in its URL is telling them the gospel truth, simply because what it’s saying fits their biases.

Then when CNN or the BBC or whoever comes along and points out that it’s made-up bullshit from a click-farm in Macedonia, they get assmad and yell about the biased MSM and its "fake news".

Google before you share. Google the URL of the originating site, too, if it's not one you're familiar with. If just reading a headline is so bias-confirming that you get a little shot of dopamine when you click "share" because you're excited about how it's going to Own The Libs/Show Trump's A Moron, think about why you're clicking "share".
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"Good Gun Owners"

One interesting feature of op eds or stumping political candidates these days when they bring up the idea of AWB v2.0 is that they all cite some "Good Gun Owner" who had an epiphany after a mass shooting and decided that they didn't need an EEBIL AR47 to hunt ducks or defend themselves from burglars, and voluntarily renounced the "assault weapon" lifestyle and turned the bad guns in.

Which, in light of actual compliance rates in recent ban states, is purely whistling past the graveyard.
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Andrea Mitchell needs to shut up and sit down.

Yes, you most certainly do need to aim a #shotgun. Here are the actual facts: https://t.co/glUz08Gxrx#stayinyourlane pic.twitter.com/TFpzquxMYB

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 29, 2018

Vague terms of service, capriciously enforced...

Brownells’ YouTube channel has been terminated w/oout warning or notice.
If you’re opposed to the attacks on our communitys 1st & 2nd Amendment rights, please contact GOOGLE : 650-253-0000 OPTION 5 FOR YOUTUBE, MESSAGE YT & GOOGLE:https://t.co/csetulvAckhttps://t.co/9oLz6TGWZx pic.twitter.com/T85z9Py2l0

— Brownells, Inc. (@BrownellsInc) June 9, 2018

In the Tank

The morning news, both local and national, was full of coverage of the planned Children's Crusade tomorrow.

Reporters were interviewing children, apparently exempt from school on a weekday, boarding planes for the flight to DC. No doubt they had purchased their airline tickets with their newspaper route and babysitting earnings.

Earlier this year these same fawning reporters had been making fun of these same wide-eyed naifs for eating laundry detergent.

I won't be able to watch the festivities on the tube tomorrow because I'm going to out on the range, apparently in the snow, learning how to run a pistol better from John Murphy of FPF Training.

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Cards on the Table

MSNBC had not been shy about having a leftward editorial slant in the past, implicitly since '07 and explicitly since the "Lean Forward" campaign of 2010. It was their schtick to pass CNN and go after FOX News, by basically setting themselves up as the "AntiFOX".

By 2014 it was costing them viewership, as they'd pushed too far past the center-Left, and they were losing viewers in the crucial "Crackers in their prime spending years" demographic. They officially tried to steer a course back towards hard news back in 2015, but it's obvious that there's still an agenda, as is witnessed by the lavish promo spots for the Children's Crusade:



So, yeah, basically a straight-up commercial for gun control. Such evenhanded, very journalism, wow.

Of course, if you are a journalist working the Acela corridor, gun control is a very Centrist idea! Everyone knows that the NRA is funded by giant shadowy arms companies and nobody is actually opposed to "Assault Weapons Bans" and "Universal Background Checks" except a handful of camo-wearing kooks in Idaho. All our polling data tells us that!

Please let the Democrats make November 2018 a referendum on Gun Control rather than on Donald Trump.
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Dirty Laundry

Notice how this lady is holding the mic herself, with no on-the-scene reporter standing next to her? This is a straight up setup. Find a grieving parent, hand her the mic, and stand aside to let 'er rip and edit the raw footage later so it begins and end at the right spots.

This was probably edited with one hand on the console and the other down their trousers, with visions of a News & Documentary Emmy dancing in their head.

And that's the only reference you'll see to this here.
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Topsy Turvy World

The Right's speech is violence, but the Left's violence is speech. That's the Current Narrative.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 13, 2017

The Two Minutes Hate stops for nothing.

Well, you certainly can't accuse the media of being distracted by the big sportsball game yesterday, at least not CNN...

"But what happens when politics IS bread and circuses?"

Of downballots and coattails...

"Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has concluded that at least two traditionally Republican states, Georgia and Arizona, are realistic targets for her campaign to win over. And Republican polling has found that Mr. Trump is at dire risk of losing Georgia, according to people briefed on the polls, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mrs. Clinton now holds such a strong upper hand that Priorities USA, a “super PAC” backing her campaign, may direct some of its war chest into Senate races, two people said, and may begin broadcasting ads for those contests as soon as next week. Congressional Democrats also hope to persuade Mrs. Clinton to continue pouring money and campaign resources into states like Virginia and Colorado, where they believe her victory is assured, in order to lift other Democratic candidates."

I'll say it again: if Donald Trump had been hired by the Clinton Foundation as a Trojan Horse to torpedo the GOP and leave the party a sinking wreck, what would look different?

To restate an earlier post:

Raise your right hand if you remember the basic plot outline of The Producers.

This whole thing is side-splittingly hilarious, except the part where, you know, it's actually frickin' happening.
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What Media Bias?

So, late in the East Coast day yesterday, and TOTALLY COINCIDENTALLY just in time for the six o'clock news in places like, say, LA and San Francisco, NBC announced Hillary Clinton as the prospective Democratic Party nominee.

I'm sure whoever wrote the headline woke up this morning and was all like "Oh, shit! I totally forgot that the California primary was today! I hope nobody thinks we were trying to put our thumb on the scales!"
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Two Americas...

"What Really Goes On At A Gun Show" reads the panting headline at CNN Money.

To me, the article sounds about as exotic as "What Really Goes On At A Flea Market" or "What Really Goes On At The Comic Book Show", but apparently to the writer and his soft, cud-chewing co-workers it's as titillating and exotic as "What Really Goes On In The Slave Bazaars On The Dark Side Of The Moon".

And the funny thing is, in the opening paragraphs, they acknowledge that gun shows are common, that they occur in droves every weekend from coast to coast, and that people throng to them. Then they go on to explain what happens at a gun show without stopping to think that, you know, a sizable minority, maybe a third, of the people reading your breathless little hit piece have been to a gun show and you might as well be explaining what goes on inside of a supermarket to them.

Speciation is well underway.
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"Politicize All The Things!"

WTH, Daily Beast — politicize all the things! Also, is Montana really that red a state? pic.twitter.com/qwqOphhxuS

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 7, 2015

"All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war." -Billy Beck

The important thing here is not that there was a crime committed, but that we find out whose team the criminal was on!
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And Now A Word From Our Sponsors...

I didn't pay much attention to the Robert Scales Atlantic hit piece on the M4 initially. "OMG, teh AR sux!" is kind of the cosmic background radiation of the gunternet and you have to filter it out if you want to pick up any meaningful signals. It wasn't 'til I saw it referenced (favorably, I might add) here that I went and read it.

This led to Facebook discussion about it, and then to one of my 'net friends doing a bit of Googling of Scales' history of editorializing on military topics, and that led to... Well, here, without further ado, let me present the first and maybe only ever guest post at VFTP, because it needs to be read. Take it away, Terence Nelan:

"In the final days of 2014, The Atlantic magazine published an article by Major General Robert H. Scales (retired) which called the U.S. Army's main infantry weapon, the M-4 carbine, "badly flawed."

General Scales begins with President Lincoln and his famous test of the 7-shot Spencer repeater, hoping to show that the right rifle can bring decisive advantage on the battlefield. Skipping a few hundred years, he then blames the finicky M-16 -- the precursor to today's M-4 -- for the death of three of his men in a night attack on his artillery positions at Firebase Berchtesgaden in 1969. This was part of the famous battle for Hamburger Hill.

With his bona-fides thus established, Scales -- sorry, General Scales -- pauses to invoke the troubled F-35 program as an example of military mismanagement, then proceeds to recycle nearly every boneheaded piece of gun-store drivel there is in his attempted indictment of the M-4.

Far more qualified writers than I have taken General Scales' critique of the M-4 apart. Our hostess Tamara Keel delivered an excellent primer and also linked to WeaponsMan's 2-part evisceration of General Scales here and here.  The guys at Firearm Blog got in on the action too. 

If you need more, you can mine the comments on those articles or wander over to Ballistic Radio's torture test in which an (admittedly expensive) AR-15 fired 20,000 round without cleanings or malfunctions. It shot nice groups, too.

After all that, there's nothing fiskable left of the General's original Atlantic article, but there's still a big question still outstanding:  why? Why did he take every rusted-out half truth, lie, and cliché he could find on the M-4,  and package them as journalism and himself as a Noble Reformer? As Tam herself pointed out, the Atlantic piece results in calls to the Diane Rehm show by well-intentioned listeners wondering  "why our soldiers weren't being given the best guns?"

You can't really blame the editors of The Atlantic, who couldn't tell an M-4 from an harquebus. After all, their chosen illustration for the article was a civilian AR-15, tricked out with a Slidefire stock, which is about as useful on a select-fire rifle as a screen door on the space shuttle.  That leaves General Scales himself. He hasn't commented anywhere that I can find on the substance of his work or his motivation for writing it, but a review of his other recent work provides some clues.

On December 6, 2013, he wrote a rebuttal of Dana Milbank's opinion piece in the WaPo that called for the reinstatement of the draft.  The article is mostly tepid, prosaic stuff, but includes a rather astonishing claim.

"Thus, it should surprise no one that better trained and acculturated German soldiers had a field day killing Americans with great skill in the hedgerows of Normandy."

Setting aside for the moment that the Wehrmacht was also a draftee army, the US actually won the battle of Normandy, and drove the Germans out of the bocage. In fact, it was the Allied  drive deep into France that  pushed desperate German generals into the failed plot to kill Hitler.  It's true that the Allies took heavy casualties, but any army attacking into prepared defenses in the Normandy hedgerows would have been bloodied.

We now start to wonder, will General Scales say anything at all to make his point?

Another article, dated October 8, 2013, is pegged to the Medal of Honor award ceremony for Captain William Swenson, who was ambushed by the Taliban in Kunar Province on Sept 8, 2009 . Scales tells us that he broke down in tears during the ceremony. He believes the ambush and the subsequent US casualties could have been avoided  if "some soldier-saving technologies" had been in the field with Swenson and his unit.

He begins with the cell phone. First he scornfully points out the bulky radio shown in Capt. Swenson's helmet cam video, and asks "Why can’t our fighting men and women have cell phones in combat?"

At this point, it is important to note that General Scales bills himself as an intellectual, a thinker, technologist and a 'military futurist.'

It's astonishing then, that he considers cell phone communications a valid choice for military communications, as they are fragile,  insecure, and utterly unreliable. Does General Scales imagine that the US would set up cell towers all over Afghanistan, and that the Taliban would leave them alone?

Police departments, fire departments, military units, hell, even power companies all use radios because they deliver superior range, security and reliability. Although anyone who has seen Lone Survivor knows that even the radios can fail.

The shopping list that follows is even more bizarre.

Although Captain Swenson did have a helmet cam, General Scales wonders why he didn't have a helmet cam capable of sending live video back to the screens in the operations center. Surely that would have convinced the command authority that Swenson's pleas for supporting artillery were valid?

Maybe General Scales -- although he says he was present at the award ceremony -- didn't hear President Obama say "as he returns fire, Will calls for air support. But his initial requests are denied – Will and his team are too close to the village."

Let's assume for a moment there was no village. What sort of infrastructure does General Scales (military futurist!) imagine is required to wirelessly transmit live video streams from the battlefields of Kunar province to the operations center? How much might that equipment weigh? He does not share this with us, as he's too eager to report that one can buy helmet cams at Walmart. This prompts the question "would you go to war and depend on a helmet cam you bought at Walmart -- even if it could broadcast a video stream?"  We are not favored with an answer.

General Scales goes on to complain that Captain Swenson's unit didn't have any drone coverage. He speculates that "had a drone been overhead the Taliban would never have dared to open fire." Drones are slow, lightly armored, and not particularly maneuverable. That's why they fly so high that they are almost invisible and inaudible to people on the ground. Even if there had been one, the Taliban would never have known it, which is of course, the whole point.

General Scales further suggests that the army should have seen fit to equip Captain Swenson with a "sensor that detected movement or the metabolic presence of humans nearby." The military should have this, because such devices have "been in use by civilian security companies for years." Maybe there's a difference between locking down a warehouse in Passaic, NJ and walking a trail up a mountain in Afghanistan. Maybe this is the sort of distinction that falls away when one becomes a military futurist.

The last of General Scales' articles is a long and passionate argument for the creation of special instruction and curriculum focused on strategy and strategic leadership at the new Army University. AU is an Army initiative intended to "build an education enterprise that brings all schools from basic training to the staff college under single management."

This is the sort of thing that a former head of the Army War College might really groove on. Scales gets right down into the weeds in this lengthy article and puts a big emphasis on the creation of distance learning and the creation of new standardized testing, which he compares to the GRE.  He says that a " key assessment would be a 'GRE'- like test of verbal and writing skills provided perhaps by a civilian testing service like ETS in Princeton."

This sounds pretty innocuous. Scales is recommending a technology solution here, but unlike his blithe suggestion that the Army magically transmit live video across Afghanistan, distance learning in offices is a Real Thing that People Do.

So why make an issue out of it?

Because General Scales was made president and CEO of Walden University  -- a private, for profit institution -- in the year 2000, and  promoted to Senior Vice President of Sylvan Learning Systems in December of 2002.  (Source: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Robert_H._Scales,_Jr.) This is not mentioned in the article.

Suddenly, his enthusiasm for distance learning and civilian testing services seems less selfless. Does he also consult for any other companies that make, say, cell phones, or helmet cams, or rifles?

What else has General Scales been up to?

Back in 2008, he was the president of a consulting company named Colgen, which described itself somewhat immodestly as "America's Premier Landpower Advocate."   The Colgen.net site is no longer available, unless you go dig for it at web.archive.org (Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20120622230733/http://www.colgen.net/products.html).

On the site back in 2008, Colgen's business was to assist "landpower Services in creating future warfighting doctrine and operational concepts" and it "translates these concepts into useful strategies and actions for industry, the media, and the congressional and executive branches of government."
 Colgen's "products targeted to these marketing elements including: media commentary, congressional testimony, advice to the executive branch, published works, seminars and conferences."  [emphasis mine] Colgen's "growing list of satisfied clients" includes defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin.

Note that Colgen clearly states that published works are a marketing product.

If that weren't enough, General Scales played a minor role in a controversial Pentagon program where former military consultants were given preferential access and briefings with the likely expectation that they'd carry water for the Pentagon during their media appearances. How you feel about that program -- described in great detail here -- probably depends on how you feel about the war.

The program was called "psyops" by its detractors, and after it garnered too much attention, it was quietly closed down. The NYT coverage of the program stated that "most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. "

The NYT coverage included an email exchange from 2008 which the Times claimed was an implicit trade of good access for favorable coverage. "Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006. 'Recall the stuff I did after my last visit," he wrote. 'I will do the same this time.'"

Scales says his email was taken out of context and it just meant he'd continue to do a good job as an analyst and consultant.

Was General Scales caught red-handed trading access for positive spin? He claims he never "drank the Koolaid" and he pointed out that he didn't always agree with the administration, or the other analysts.

Maybe so, but when there's money involved, he seems to agree just often enough."

(We were not the only ones to wonder about advertorials, either.)
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#billNBC

It's almost a pop culture proverb that if someone is accused of something sensational, say, kiddie-diddlin', the accusations will be trumpeted on the front page, and if those accusations turn out to be false, the retraction is below the fold on pg. 23 with the dry-cleaning coupons and right before the obits.

Similarly when you see this and this, understand that it's because the media raced each other to the six o'clock news to report the most fabulous version of events as provided by biased witnesses. I'd be willing to bet that a majority of the people in those photos are protesting a teenager getting shot in the back, a narrative not remotely supported by the facts, but trumpeted by the news enough that it has become fact for the people in question.

In a world where a 300lb man wrestling for a cop's gun is consistently referred to as an "unarmed teenager" while a man with a pen knife that never left his pocket is always referred to as an "armed man", it's hard not to believe there's more than a little bit of truth to claims of a "narrative". If some Ferguson business owner were to sue the big news organizations for the damages... well, I'd love to be on that jury.
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None of those are the biggest surprise.

The other day, CNN ran a piece on the "five biggest surprises" of our not-really-a-war,-honest in Syria. (This is kinda like a war, only our president has promised we won't stick our military in too far.)

Oddly, not one of their five line items was about how suddenly cool bombing hadjis is with mainstream Democrats when it's Barry's idea. No giant papier-mâché Obama heads on the local campuses or picket signs with caricatures of the president as a warmongering Pan troglodyte (you can only do that when the prez is a cracker, otherwise it's disrespectful of the office and racist... which have been pretty much the same thing since January of '09, come to think of it.) Instead it's just more "Kumbayah", only with a chorus about drone strikes.

I found this image at Random Nuclear Strikes

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The Religion of "Workplace Violence"

@iowahawkblog If that lede were buried any further, it'd show up in @cnnbrk's mailbox next week with a Chinese postmark.
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 26, 2014

You... you... patriot, you!

So, as background emerges on Mickey and Mallory Knox, New Vegas Edition, the crowd at HuffPo has practically popped a chubby over their wookie-suiter roots. To read commentary around the net, these mopes may have held the guns, but Wayne LaPierre lined up the sights and Rand Paul pulled the trigger.

Of course this miserably fails the ideological Turing test, which is much easier for me to pass than it is for my opponents on gun issues or even general politics. They may actually skim the occasional article in American Rifleman or on PJ Media to bone up for a hit piece, but I can't help but swim in their stuff; it's so ubiquitous that you have to deliberately avoid it if you don't want to get it all over you.

I know their side of the story because I hear it all the time on NPR and NBC, in the editorial commentary disguised as neutral journalism. They, on the other hand, only know that "Those Gun People" come from "The Right", which is some kind of amorphous blob, an undifferentiated mix of Nazis and National Review, Ron Paul and Ronald Reagan, Jonah Goldberg and compound-dwelling Jew-haters, the Klan and Palin and Vanderboegh.

If you want to really get your civil war on, you gotta Other the opposition, and Team Open-Minded Non-Judgmental seems to be keepin' up with the Bob Joneses here.
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While we're pig-piling on Hillz...

...I'm not averse to the occasional late hit in these circumstances:

“She referred to recent high-profile incidents of minor disputes in movie theaters or parking lots that escalated into lethal shootings, saying, “That’s what happens in the countries I’ve visited that have no rule of law."”

You mean like those countries you visited where you had to duck sniper fire getting off the plane? Those countries?

'Course, that little lie was a long time ago. After all this time, what difference does it make?

(H/T to Unc.)
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