Sunday, July 20, 2014

The electric motorcycle acquires a big name. The Harley Davidson Livewire

I've met some people who are fanatically opposed to the concept of electric vehicles.  I don't really know why, other than that they just don't like things changing much and have an attachment to vehicles as they are.  However, even a casual observation would confirm that electric vehicles are starting to come on strong.

Now, as if anyone needs any further proof, Harley-Davidson, a company with over a century in motorcycle making experiencing, is making an electric motorcycle, the Livewire.

They aren't offering it to the public, it's a concept bike they're touring around with now. But the fact that they've done means that the heavy duty electric motorcycle can't be fare behind.

 1922 Harley Davidson with sidecar.

UW law professor receives grant for persuasive writing - Laramie Boomerang Online

UW law professor receives grant for persuasive writing - Laramie Boomerang Online

Not only did he receive a grant, he made the fairly amazing statement in his interview that if something went to trial, that indicated a failure.

Well, in looking him up I noted that his actual years in private practice were exceedingly small, one of the problems I tend to have with academic lawyers.  Perhaps he's done a lot of representation while a university professor, which quite a few university professors do, but still that comment is just flat out off the mark.

The Casper Star Tribune Colunist Dan Molyneax

As I've criticized the Casper Star Tribune from time to time, I have to give it credit where credit is due. While I don't always agree with him (I think, for example, he's wrong on Putin), he writes well, clearly, and isn't afraid of stating opinions that most people hold to themselves out of fear of holding them, if they do.  That columnist would be Dan Molyneaux.

Molyneax has guts.  In the short time he's been writing he came out with an article sympathetic to the aims of Vladamir Putin, with a clear explanation of why he feels that way, he's criticized the common idolizing of John Wayne as a hero, and on a recent Sunday he declared that Islam is not a religion of peace. All pretty bold comments really from a print columnist in a local newspaper.  Just taking on the odd memory people have of John Wayne as an American hero took guts I thought, and actually discussing the tenants of Islam at their written face value is very bold in the west. Having bold opinions is one thing, but actually stating them in the compressed amount of space a columnist has is quite another.  Molyneaux actually manages that.  And he doesn't do it in a superficial manner, in which some inflammatory national columnist do. Agree with him or disagree with him, he actually states a point and why he thinks what he does.

Again, I don't always agree with him, but I hope they keep him around.  As I thought would be the case, one recent column will met with a lot of opposition, probably about 70% of it vitriolic and not bothering to actually address his points in their disagreement..  That's the risk of being a columnist in the age of the instant anonymous comment.  I wouldn't read the comments if I were him, and I hope the Tribune doesn't regard them as a reason to set him aside. 

Of interest, Molyneaux fits into the category of clergymen correspondents, something we tend not to see a great deal of now, but which were at one time quite common.  In his case, he's an ordained Lutheran minister, which the Tribune used to note in its short note on his column, but no longer does.  Anyhow, it's nice to see the Tribune have an articulate serious columnist, no matter what a person might think about any one of his particular columns.

Monday, July 20, 1914. The Kriegsmarine mobilizes.

Germany mobilized the Imperial German Navy and ordered shipping companies to withdraw from foreign ports and return to German ports.


Mobilizing navies is a difficult project, and was all the more difficult in the coal fired engine days.  Coal had to be ordered, boilers for heavy ships, starated, ammunition properly stored and the mechanics of steel vessels fully readied.

Marcus Garvey, age 28, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association with Amy Ashwood, who would later become his first wife.  The organization still exists.

The trial of Henriette Caillaux began in Paris, with the accused reportedly being kept in the same cell that had held the murdered Marie Antoinette.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 18, 1914. The sort of birth of the Air Force.

Friday, July 18, 2014

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Wyoming's First Tribal People

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Wyoming's First Tribal People

The Big Speech: Henry Fairlie's The Idiocy of Urban Life or The Cow's Revenge

The late Henry Fairlie was a British born essayist who wrote in the New Republic. A man of biting wit, he wrote the following essay, which is one of my favorites:

The Idiocy of Urban Life Or The Cow's Revenge.

Interesting reading, and a lot of interesting commentary in the article.

Saturday, July 18, 1914. The sort of birth of the Air Force.

 


Congress created the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, effectively creating what would become the Air Force.

Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić stated that he would not accept any measures that compromised Serbian sovereignty in reaction to rumors about an Austro Hungarian ultimatum.

King George inspected the fleet at Spithead.

Joe Hill, labor activist memorialized in a famous folk song, was sentenced o death under questionable circumstances in Utah.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 15, 1914. Huerta resigns.

Friday Farming: Harvesting potatoes.


Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Wednesday, July 15, 1914. Huerta resigns.

Victoriano Huerta resigned as president of Mexico and left for Vera Cruz and exile.  Francisco S. Carvajal became interim president.

Carvajal

Carvajal was a lawyer and government official whose position was merely transitional.  After completing it, which took a month, he left for the United States where he married.  He returned to Mexico in 1922, resuming his prior occupation of lawyer, and died in 1932 at age 61.

Rasputin was declared out of danger.  He had, as readers will be recalled, been stabbed by a female assailant earlier in 1914.

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 14, 1914. Bastille Day.

Monday, July 14, 2014

The Four Chaplains – “Interfaith in Action”

The Four Chaplains – “Interfaith in Action”

Seriously, Stop Refrigerating These Foods - Reviewed.com Refrigerators

Seriously, Stop Refrigerating These Foods - Reviewed.com Refrigerators



Okay, well off our typical subjects. . .



Or maybe not.  There are a fair number of things that need not be refrigerated, but people do anyway, reflecting a change in habits over time.  Interesting how refrigeration has affected our diets, and habits.

Tuesday, July 14, 1914. Bastille Day.

The Government of Ireland Bill passed the House of Lord, allowing Ulster counties to vote on whether they wished to participate in Home Rule from Dublin.

Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza, who had opposed going to war with Serbia, changed his view out of fear that if Austro Hungaria did not do so it would result in a breach of the alliance with Germany. 

It was Bastille Day.


Last edition:

Monday, July 13, 1914. Austrians conclude no Serbian involvement.

The Big Picture: Labor Party Convention, November 22, 1919


First national Labor Party convention, November 22, 1919. This photos is illustrative of the rise of socialist parties in the United States in the early 20th Century.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Monday, July 13, 1914. Austrians conclude no Serbian involvement.



An Austrian investigation into the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand concluded that there was little evidence to support Serbian government involvement in his murder.

Captain Robert Bartlett departed from Alaska on the Bear for Wrangle Island to rescue the Canadian Arctic Expedition.  Only fourteen survivors then existed.

Kent State Normal School, summer session, 1914.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 12, 1914. Mehmedbašić arrested.


Saturday, July 12, 2014

Sunday, July 12, 1914. Mehmedbašić arrested.

Muhamed Mehmedbašić, whom is generally forgotten, was apprehended for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  He was one of the principal planner of the killing plot.  A Muslim, he lived a complicated life supporting Serbian independence. 

Mehmedbašić in 1943.

He escaped from prison two days later in circumstances that remain suspicious, remained involved, perhaps, in various movements, and was killed by the Ustaše in 1943, showing perhaps that he remained a significant figure in some ways.

Albanian rebels captured Berat.

Shots were fired at the homes of striking miners in Hartford, Arkansas, causing them to riot thereafter.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 11, 1914. Babe Ruth premiers, as does the USS Nevada.

Friday, July 11, 2014

Friday, July 11, 1914. Babe Ruth premiers, as does the USS Nevada.

Babe Ruth made his major league debut with the Boston Red Sox.

July 11, 1914: Babe Ruth makes his major-league debut with Red Sox

The German foreign office sent a letter to King Peter of Serbia congratulating him on his birthday.

The USS Nevada was launched.

It was classified as a "super dreadnaught", which would really place it in the brief category of "battleship", in a period of rapid naval evolution. The launch was attended by Governor Oddie, Governor David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.

She'd serve in World War One.

She was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sunk and refloated in 1942.  She served thereafter in Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, as well  as the landings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. She was sunk as a target in 1948.

On the same day, 5,000 people attended an Anti Militarist League rally to commemorate the anarchist killed in the July 4, Lexington Avenue Explosion.

Last edition:

Friday, July 10, 1914. Loyalties.

Friday Farming: Potato Digger


Thursday, July 10, 2014

Friday, July 10, 1914. Loyalties.

The Provisional Government of Ulster met for the first time in the Ulster Hall.  It pledged to keep Ulster in trust for the King and British constitution.

Georgian born Nicholas Hartwig, the unlikely named Russian Minister to Serbia, died of a massive heart attack while visiting Austro Hungarian minister Baron Wladimir Giesl von Gieslingen in Belgrade.  He was an ardent pan Slav, who was said to be more Serbian than the Serbs.

Mountain Lake, Virginia.  July 10, 1914.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 9, 1914. Huerta defeated.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Mid Week At Work: Striking women, 1910


Thursday, July 9, 1914. Huerta defeated.

Obregón took Guadalajara.

It was the effective end of Victoriano Huerta's regime.

Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph was advised his council was working on an ultimatum containing demands that were designed to be rejected by Serbia.

As the recent posts have demonstrated, the "war guilt" clauses imposed on the Central Powers after World War One were not without merit.

Miss Norma Phillips.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 8, 1914. Rebels and Emperors.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Painted Bricks: The end of the NCHS swimming pool

Painted Bricks: The end of the NCHS swimming pool

Wednesday, July 8, 1914. Rebels and Emperors.

Mexican rebels under Álvaro Obregón defeated a Federal force numbering 6,000 sent out from Guadalajara to arrest his advance.


Exiled Chinese revolutionary figure Sun Yat-sen reorganized the Kuomintang party under the new name Chinese Revolutionary Party after Yuan Shikai, self-proclaimed emperor of China, outlawed the political party.

The Austro Hungarian Council of Ministers gave its recommendations to the Emperor, with the first bieng a surprise attack on Serbia being the preferred option, and the second place one being to  place demands on Serbia before mobilization to provide a proper "juridical basis for a declaration of war".

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 7, 1914. Pondering war.

Monday, July 7, 2014

Everything Old is New Again. Yeoman's laws of History and Behavior and the U.S. Military Sidearm.

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Yeoman's Second Law of History.  Everything last occurred more recently than you suppose.
Here too, it doesn't matter what the topic is, it happened much more recently than you think it did.  Almost everything and every behavior is really durable, if it had any purpose in the first place.

For example, last bayonet charge?  Are you thinking World War One?  Nope, the British did one in Iraq.  Small unit, but none the less they did it.  And in the Second Gulf War.  Last cavalry charge?  Civil War?  No again, they've happened as recently as the current war in Afghanistan.  Last use of horse mounted troops?  Well. . . we aren't there.  It's still going on.  We're never as far from what we think is the distant past as we imagine.
From Yeoman's Laws of History.

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 Soldiers training with M1911 .45 ACP pistols during World War Two.

This past week, the U.S. Army announced that it is giving up on an effort to replace the M9 pistol it adopted in 1985 (basically because Congress forced it to) with another 9mm pistol.  It wants a pistol that shoots a larger cartridge.  Something in the .40 to .45 range.

The pistol that never really left.  A Greek soldier coaches a Polish soldier in the shooting of the M1911 handgun.  How exactly a scene like this comes about, I don't know, but the M1911 kept on keeping on in the hands of soldiers who really needed an effective handgun.

Instruction on the M9, the Army's current (well, one of the current) handguns, taking place in Afghanistan.

People who follow such things will recall that the U.S. Army had been using the .45 ACP cartridge and the M1911 pistol since 1911.  The Army never saw any reason to replace either, but Congress did and ultimately the Army was forced into adopting the 9mm cartridge, which was the NATO pistol standard.  The Army ended up adopting a Beretta pattern of pistol as the M9, and has been using it ever since, sort of.

Truth be known, just as with the 5.56 cartridge and the M16, there were those in the Army who were never very happy with the change, and ongoing criticism went on for a long time.  There were always efforts to paint a happy picture on the pistol situation, in spite of persistent rumors of the cartridge being inadequate and the M9 having problems, but they were basically officially denied.  Then wars happened.

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Yeoman's Thirteenth Law of Human Behavior:  The measure of the utility of something is how well it accomplishes a task, not how new it is.  Nonetheless, people tend to go with the new, even if less useful.

People tend to believe that they adopt new technology or implements because they are better or more efficient than what came before them.  Very often they are. But they aren't always.  Nonetheless, the new tends to supplant the old, simply because its new.

There are plenty of examples of this.  Some old tools and old methods accomplish any one job better than things that came after them, and some things remain particularly useful within certain condition or niches.  Nonetheless, it takes educating a person to that to keep those older things in use, because they are, well. . . older.
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For reasons that are a bit of a historical oddity, the U.S. Army has always been pistol heavy compared to other armies, and so unlike many other armies, the Army's pistol actually ends up being used in combat.  Given that, the .45 ACP began to creep back into use for special troops in the service, followed by the M1911.  Recently, the Marine Corps simply gave up on the 9mm M9 and readopted a new version of the M1911 for combat troops. The Army now appears set to do so, and in fact has been issuing variants of the M1911 to special troops for some time.  The Navy too has been issuing a .45 ACP pistol, although it's not a M1911, when conditions require it.  This follows the interesting story of the service's 7.62 NATO M14 rifle creeping back into use after decades of denying it was more effective than the 5.56 M16, although there's no indication that the M14 will replace the M4/M16, and I am sure it will not. The M1911 .45 ACP pistol may very well end up replacing the M9 and the 9mm completely. At least some big cartridge pistol will.  This basically proves the critics of the M9 and the 9mm to have been right all along.

 
U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.  All of the firearms that can be seen in this photograph are M16A1 rifles, a rifle that came into service due to being first adopted by the USAF for service (as the M16) in Vietnam.  The rifle supplanted the M14 over the objection of Springfield Armory, which ended up ceasing to exist in the process.  In spite of repeated efforts to fix various problems associated with it, which has resulted in the rifle remaining in service to this day, there have always been grumblings about it.



U.S. soldier of the 1st Infantry Division in Afghanistan, with an updated version of the M14 rifle.  Like the M1911, the M14 never really left the services, as it carried on in the hands of special troops before coming roaring back into service due to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's sort of an interesting story in context of the lessons of history.  The Army has played out this story before.

The U.S. Army went big into sidearms during the frontier era, when effective revolvers first became available.  Revolvers ended up being issued to every single cavalryman by the mid 19th Century, which was not the case for most armies, which relied much more on sabers and perhaps a long arm of some sort.  American cavalrymen, by the post Civil War frontier era, were all provided with a carbine, a saber and a sidearm.  In the field, sabers were often omitted.  Because of this, sidearms were regarded as a serious combat arm by the American military, and in spite of efforts to change that over the years, this remains the case.  American troops carry sidearms to an unusual degree.

In the mid 19th Century, cap and ball service revolvers were generally .36 or .44, with .44s being the more common issue arm in the U.S. Army (and also in the Confederate army).  .36s were used, but they were not used as much as .44s.  The .44 "Dragoon" revolver had come in the prior two decades, and it remained the standard up until 1873, at which point the Army adopted the M1873 Colt revolver in a .45 cartridge.  Why the change from .44 to .45 I don't know, as there was already a big .44 cartridge available, but that brought in the .45.  

Civil War Union Cavalryman with Colt 1860 model revolver.  This cap and ball revolver was the last of the series of successful cap and ball Colts.

The .45 as the service caliber remained in use for decades but in the late 19th Century an effort was made to replace it with a .38 cartridge and a new, double action, revolver was adopted.  It was used, along with old stocks of .45 revolvers, in the Spanish American War, but it was a failure in the Philippine Insurrection and .45 revolvers were reissued and a new one adopted.

 The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry on the San Juan Heights. Theodore Roosevelt carried, and used, a .38 Colt revolver that had been recovered from the USS Maine in the action.

Sound sort of familiar?

Finally, a brand new .45 cartridge and a new automatic pistol were adopted in 1911. That pistol and cartridge carried right on until 1985, and it appears set to come back on it.  History repeating itself.

  
American soldiers in France with captured German 9mm P08s. The 9mm cartridge is actually a little older than the .45 ACP.

This is an interesting story, to followers of things of this type, as it shows the "history repeating itself maxim, and it's a story the US has actually lived through more than one.  The US military had a .45 sidearm and started to replace it with a lighter .38, but that failed, and the US went back to the .45.  Later in the 1980s, the US again replaced the .45 with a lighter cartridge, this time the 9mm. Granted, politics and pressure were involved with it, and an aspect of it was the adjustment of the service to increased numbers of women combined with the erroneous belief that women couldn't handle the bigger handgun.  It's not really a simple story. Yet here again, the 9mm is set to be replaced, apparently, with a .45 again.

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Yeoman's First Law of History.  Everything first happened longer ago than you suspect.
It doesn't matter what the topic is, but the first occurrence of anything is always further back in time than originally thought.  This is why certain distant dates are continually pushed back, and will continue to be. So, take whatever you like, say the first use of the horse, or the first appearance of humans in North America, and you'll find the "first" date gets more and more distant in time.  Things that were thought to happen, say, 5,000 years ago, turn out to have happened 50,000 years ago, or 500,000 years ago, as we gain better data.
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We've done that with rifles too, actually.  At the turn of the century, when smokeless powder weapons were coming in, the .45-70 single shot "Trapdoor" Springfield was replaced by the .30-40 Krag in the Army.  In the Navy and Marine Corps, however, the .45-70 was replaced by the 6mm Navy Lee, which proved too light and was soon thereafter replaced itself.  

U.S. Marines on board the USS Wyoming, equipped with Navy Lees.

Ultimately, the .30 became universal in the US military until the 5.56 came in, but then the .30 started coming back in again, with the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The point?  I suppose there really isn't one, other than that this provides an interesting way to explore the operation of some of the prime Yeoman's Laws of History and Yeoman's Law of Human Behavior.