The Ides of September, 2002

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 15 Sep 2002 12:00:00 GMT
I loaded up some 444 Marlin cartridges last night. Thirteen 310 grain silver alloy, fourteen 240 grain jacketed, five 240 grain silver alloy. All with H322 powder, minimum loads. It's raining today (Yay!), so I probably won't try them until Wednesday or Friday. Loading 444 Marlin cartridges takes four dies, not just the two or three I'm accustomed to with my bottle-necked cartridges. With those you resize the cases, prime, fill with powder, seat bullets, and optionally crimp. With straight cases you have to expand the neck before bullet seating, and with a tube magazine crimping isn't optional. My daughter helped with case lubrication and resizing. I did the rest after everyone else had gone to bed. H322 is a new powder for me.

samizdata.net - blog glossary - additions and corrections requested.

Jerry Pournelle - There Will Be War - some analysis of the U.S. choices. Will move here next week. [pournelle]

Whatever happens, there is all that oil. The good and competent Imperial way would be to use the Kurdish client state to help us, given them northern Iraq, and we occupy the rest under a puppet regime. We are not yet much in favor of kings (else we would have restored the monarchy in Afghanistan with the current president as Prime Minister) so we are unlikely to make the current Hashemite pretender the puppet ruler. Monarchies have the capability of uniting disparate peoples through loyalty to the throne when there is no nation. In Iraq the disparities are such that we may have to dismember the place and have multiple puppets, possibly in a loose federation. Whatever we do, the Imperial way would be to pump hell out of the oil, get the price of crude on the world market down to $20 or lower, and watch the Dow Jones head for 12,000 and north.

...

As to what a republic would do about the situation in the Middle East, I have said it before: make certain that every ruler over there knows that participation in attacks on the United States will result in a change of regime, and we don't care if the result is anarchy; meanwhile we develop our own resources and work to energy independence; build solar power satellites and nuclear power plants, and space defenses; and mind our own business. But we won't do that. If we did, what would the unionized federal passenger harassment bureaucracy do? That "service" is here to stay, you know.

But since that's irritating, we can have national identity cards and allow true loyalists exemption to the subject harassment system at airport...

Sue Clough at The Telegraph - Man guilty of manslaughter after tackling career burglar - defend yourself and your family from a burgler who broke into your house and is attacking you, go to jail, in Great Britain. Samizdata comments (Perry de Havilland) here. [samizdata]

John Askill at The Sun - Farce as heroes nick thug - Catch a teenager who threw a brick through your window and take him to the police station, be charged with kidnapping, in Great Britain. Fortunately, these guys got off, but they should have been congratulated, not charged with kidnapping. The kid was let off scot free.

The Attacks of 11 September: Who Profits from the Crime? - Daddy Bush, that's who. Analysis from Emmanuel Ratier's Letter of Confidential Information Faits & Documents and 911 The Big Lie by Thierry Meyssan. [grabbe]

Ratier notes with astonishment that there exist no video recordings or photographs of the Pentagon crash, although the Pentagon is visited every day by thousands of tourists, cameras and video-recorders slung across their shoulders. The FBI seized the video films from a hotel and a service station, both situated right next to the Pentagon, whose cameras may have contained images of the plane landing (or on the contrary shown that no plane ever did land...)

Not one of the eight black boxes (two per plane) are of any use, it would appear, although they are designed to withstand crashes and fires: "We do not know what was said in the cockpits either by the crew members or by the hijackers." (the FBI spokesman to CNN) What is known, on the other hand, is that the four planes all followed routes very different from their flight plans. According to the procedures of the FAA (Federal Aviation Agency), as soon as a plane deviates from the corridor assigned it, the agency immediately attempts to make contact with the pilots. Should this not succeed, the alarm is sounded and the entire regional airspace is placed under surveillance. It appears that the transponders were turned off. Yet another reason to activate the emergency procedures. For the plane does not disappear from the radar screens; these continue to follow its trajectory, and the alarm is raised. Now, on 11 September, the fighter planes remained grounded.

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