Abortion in Wyoming and the Law of Unintended Consequences.

 This is what happens when a dumb, paranoid,  amendment to the Constitution is made.

The amendment that brought down the state's abortion laws was passed due to right wing paranoia that the AHCA would create "death panels". That fear was frankly stupid, but it was adopted by far right Republicans who really believed it.  The prime architect of the amendment has gone on record that he'd feel awful if the amendment caused the abortion laws to fail, and in fact he should feel awful.

Abortion remains legal in Wyoming after state high court strikes down bans

Abortion remains legal in Wyoming after state high court strikes down bans: Wyoming Supreme Court rules two bans passed by state lawmakers are unconstitutional.

Abortion-rights advocates cheer Wyoming Supreme Court ruling; opponents plan constitutional amendment

Abortion-rights advocates cheer Wyoming Supreme Court ruling; opponents plan constitutional amendment: Governor calls for a rehearing and urges lawmakers to draft a constitutional amendment to let Wyoming voters settle the matter.

The 2026 Election, 3rd Edition: The Self Inflicted Wound Edition.

And can they recover?

A major turn occured in the Wyoming election when all three of Wyoming's congressional delegation members supported Mike Lee's Deseret Dream to swipe Federal lands for land raping purposes.  The move was hugely, overwhelmingly, unpopular in Wyoming, but the delegation in part assessed the voters dim, and in part, trusted on them to forget.

Right now, it doesn't look like they will.

And the candidate are beginning to line up.  We have, so far:

Governor:

GOP.

Eric Barlow. Barlow is a state senator from the 23rd district and announced earlier this week. So far, he's receiving a lot of accolades from the none Freedom Caucus Republicans and condemnations from the populist Freedom Caucus, which frankly makes him the front runner.  

Brent Bien.  Bien is retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel and another member of the recent Wyoming crowd who declares "after sucking on the government tit my whole life I hate the government and know best for people who haven't had such secure jobs as me".  He's on the far right.

Joseph Kibler.  Kibler is a web designer and might as well drop out right now.

Reid Ranser.  Far right gadfly who doomed his chances, which were non existent anyway, by filing a lawsuit which states that he's a homosexual and was slandered by certain GOP figures.  The slander aside, branding yourself as a homosexual is a bad political move in this atmosphere.  He's highly likely not to be the only homosexual running for a statewide office or perhaps in office, but Wyomingites tend not to draw attention to themselves in that manner during an era such as the one we currently live in.

Waiting in the wings are Chuck Gray, who is already campaigning for something on the far right wing of the far right, save when it comes to nuclear power, were the populist are flower children, so he is too.  Holding Gray up is Harriet Hageman, who seems likely to try to run, but whose position in opposition to the Federal lands is likely to sink any campaign of hers, or at least seriously damage it.

Also waiting in the wings is Mark Gordon, who has clearly not wanted Gray to replace him.  With Barlow throwing his broad brim in the ring, he likely won't run now.

August 15, 2025

This is interesting:

Wyoming crowd boos Hageman retort that protections against greenhouse gases based on ‘false science’

Wyoming crowd boos Hageman retort that protections against greenhouse gases based on ‘false science’: U.S. Rep. Hageman's comment didn't go over well in Pinedale, where residents struggled for years to clean up health-threatening pollution from oil and gas drilling.

Pinedale calls itself the "Icebox of the Nation" and the introduction of oil and gas operations near it are relatively new.  Given both of those, it clearly didn't drink the GOP Koolaide on global warming being a fib.

Hageman has so far received rough crewed treatment in Pinedale, Rock Springs, and Laramie. I suspect she would in Casper as well.  I also suspect she might want to start thinking about selling her house in D.C. and looking to move back to her brother's ranch, as she may be out of work next year. 

Labels: 2020s, 2025, 2026, 2026 Election, Climate Change, Harriet Hageman, Petroleum, Wyoming (Pinedale), Wyoming (Sublette County)

Wyoming has been a prime example of "if I make money from it, it must be perfectly okay".  If we could grow big fields of opium here, we'd be loudly in favor of heroin.

Given that, and given that a lot of Wyomingites are imports from warmer regions of the country, people here are huge climate change deniers, even though if you've lived here your whole life its extremely obvious that its going on.  

And Hageman comes from the agricultural which is bizarrely resistant to accepting the reality of climate change, even though if nothing is done, it'll destroy their livelihoods.

So she no doubt thought stepping in front of a Sublette  County audience would mean that the "climate change is a fib" line would be well received.  It wasn't.

Something is finally really starting to change here.  Part of it is that people are waking up to reality, and part of it is that Hageman took a stand for something Wyomingites detest, transfering the Federal lands, and then basically asserted we were dumb for not supporting it ourselves.  She's so all in on these positions, she really can't change them, and stepping in front of audiences makes her situation worse.

August 20, 2025

Congressman Elsie Stephanik was booked off of a New York stage two days ago.

Stephanik likely sacrificed her career for Trump.

Elsie of course crawled into bed with Trump.  She originally was opposed to him.  Harriet Hageman, on the other hand, was never openly opposed to Trump and took the seat of her former friend Liz Cheney opportunistically.

Hageman has had a lot of simple adoring fans since that time, but the bloom is really off the rose.  She was booed in deeply Republican Sublette County last week, and received a hostile crowd in Casper on Monday night.  Indeed, the Casper event was notably not only for the outright hostility to Hageman, but to extent to which a lot of Republicans flatly did not show up leaving a lot of room in the auditorium.

Hageman had her sights set on the Governor's mansion and still might.  If nothing else, she's doubling down on her position on everything.  But that ship has likely sailed, and she stands a good chance, right now, of having to vacate her Congressional seat.

August 29, 2025

And yet. . . 

Joseph Kibler running for governor on promise of ‘being something different

being yet another carpetbagger coming in and complaining of too much bureaucracy, particularly in a state you just moved to, isn't actually different.

September 30, 2025

Sec. Gray has flagged over 2,000 Wyoming voters for County Clerks to investigate s voters who may no longer reside in Wyoming.

This entire topic has been a fictional bee in Gray's bonnet.

Progressive Palestinian American Palestinian State Rep. Ruwa Romman has entered the Georgia Governor's race.

October 22, 2025

The Barlow Effect: Candidates can’t officially join the race till next year, but an unmistakably powerful ingredient has entered the mix, writes columnist Rod Miller.

November 18, 2025

A Federal Court in Texas has blocked the state from using its recently redrawn Congressional District map.

Oops.

This will be appealed, but if the decision is upheld it would mean that the five GOP (probably) seats that the state added won't be, while California, in a recent election, added five.

Oops.

Additionally, early indicators are that Texas Hispanics are following the national tread and are becoming disenchanted with the GOP, so some Texas districts may swing Democratic on their own.

Oops.

All of this could mean that the 2026 election could see the House not only swing Democratic, but perhaps massively so, and that some of the Returning Republicans are no longer big fans of Trump, to which those survivors will be reassessing their loyalty to Trump.

On the last item, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in a flat out war with Trump, and Trump is losing.  Greene has gone from one of Trump's most loyal adherents to an outright anti Trump insurgent.

There's a year to go, of course, but Trump is already acting like unstable and clearly under pressure.  Having pulled out all the stops to prevent the release of the Epstein files, he now is claiming to once again support the release, putting the Senate in the hot seat.  If Trump is acting behind the scenes at the Senate, it puts Senators in a terrible spot at the same time that they have the example of Massie and Greene, who aren't being hurt by opposing Trump.

Locally, it'll be interesting to see if Lummis and Hageman remain lashed to the deck of Trump.  I bet Lummis won't.

December 11, 2025

From the New York Times.

Indiana Lawmakers Reject Trump’s New Political Map

Republicans hold an overwhelming majority in the Indiana Senate, but more than a dozen of them defied the president’s wishes, voting against a map aimed at adding Republicans in Congress.

December 19, 2025

Cynthia Lummis will not run for her Senate seat next year.  We can bet that Hageman will run for it and probably already is.  It'd be interesting to see if Gordon runs for the seat.

This means Gray, whose political hopes were dead, will now run for Congress, although I doubt he will get Hageman's seat.  It'll be interesting to see if Stubson runs.

Elise Stefanik is dropping out of the New York Governor's race and will not run for Congress next year.

December 20, 2025

Lots of speculation up in the air following Lummis' surprise announcement that she's giving it up after a single term as Senator, including why she's doing that.

Included in speculative candidates are, as already noted, Gray, Hageman and Gordon.  Degenfelder has also been mentioned, whom I didn't think of.  Degenfelder would have a good chance against any of these three, although I'd prefer Gordon.

Reid Rasner has been mentioned , and I'd guess that he will run. . . and lose in the primary.

Matt Mead has been mentioned as well.

Of course, this shuffling will also bring out the hard right "I worked for the government my entire life but now that I'm retired and on a Federal pension let me run from the far right" candidates. Brent Bien is running for Governor now, but he might take a run at this as it seems Barlow is in such good shape.

With oil declining, the weather being rather weird, and a large percentage of Wyomingites about to lose their healthcare, this election will also present opportunities for moderate Republicans we haven't thought of yet, as well as with conservative Democrats, if any can be found.  I don't think that Karlee Provenza will want to give up her seat in the state legislature, but if Hageman runs for the Senate, which I think she will, and Chuck Gray for the House, which I think he will, Provenza would be an interesting dark horse candidate who might win against Chuck.  Indeed, it's not impossible to imagine Gordon and Provenza in, which would move Wyoming's Congressional delegation overall to the center, as Barrasso will do what he needs to do to keep his job, assuming he'll run again.

An interesting thing to note is that it's quite clear that Liz Cheney was going to run for Enzi's Senate seat when he died, but Lummis took her spot  It seemed pretty clear that there was animosity between the two because of that.  In spite of all the MAGA hatred of Cheney now, she was a very popular Congressman up until she failed to bow to Trump and took him on.  Had she won that seat, she'd still be in the Senate today.

The spectacular fall of Elise Stefanik is quite notable, and should serve as a warning to the flag of convenience politicians. Stefanik hitched her wagon to Trump and failed to get what she wanted.  Now she's dropping out of politics, for awhile.

Stefanik made an incredibly bad set of calculations and more or less sold her soul, Marco Rubio style, for power, except she lost power, rather than gain it.  She'll reemerge, I'm pretty sure, after Trump is out of office, banking on Americans having short political memory.  My prediction on her is that she, like Rubio, will declare they never really loved Trump.

Cont:

And we are in fact off. There are two filed candidates.

One is the predictable Reid Rasner.  Rasner took a pounding in the last election trying to run to the right of John Barrasso, and he'll go down in flames again here.

The other is Jimmy Skovgard.  I checked his website and have no idea what he stands for. He has a blog, with poor production values, and perhaps if I'd waded through all of it I'd know more, but I didn't.

I suspect his campaign will likewise go nowhere.

December 23, 2025

Lummis not running again changes 2026 political strategies: From Miss Frontier to the U.S. Senate, columnist Kerry Drake writes, Lummis has had remarkable success in state and federal offices.

With this entry, we close out this edition. 

Last edition:

The 2026 Election, 2nd Edition: The early season.

Labels: 2026 Election, Carpetbaggers, Chuck Gray, Cynthia Lummis, Elon Musk, Errare humanum est perseverare diabolicum, Harriet Hageman, homosexuality, Hypocrisy, Lies, Politics, Populism, Republican Party, Sex, The Big Ugly, Wyoming

Blog Mirror and Pondering: Cassie Craven: Welfare Was Supposed To Be Our Job

Let me start off by noting that as a rule, I can't stand Cassie' Craven's op eds.  They tend to be in your face unthinking populist, and I also resent (I'm not kidding) the co-opting of a cowboy hat that obviously doesn't fit.

And frankly I don't much like people spouting off about protecting Wyoming or what Wyoming is or was, when they aren't from here. She's from Nebraska, so that's not far off, but Nebraska is not Wyoming.  

Well, like some other populist things, or NatCon things, I'll confess that as a real conservative, and for htat matter a distributist agrarian, I find myself occasionally disturbed by a one of their members saying something that taps into something I've said myself.  This article by Craven does that:

Cassie Craven: Welfare Was Supposed To Be Our Job

As much as I hate to admit it, and I do hate to admit it, she has a point, although in the typical populist manner, she starts off by saying something cruel to get to the point.  Indeed, it basically takes her 40% of her article to quit being an asshole before she gets to the point that 's worth considering, with this paragraph:

Welfare, in the 14^th century meant one’s good fortune, health and exemption from evil. This changed in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries as public assistance became a role the government took over from the private charities, which had historically helped to ensure that people fared well. Welfare was holistic, community-driven and just as much emotional and spiritual as it was physical.

The shift of society away from the church-based and community associations and toward the government was no good for our fellow man. Adding fuel to the fire were the rapid technological advances that made us distant, isolated, and serotonin-addicted.

This has addled people’s ability to engage in real conversation or romance.

Well, she's correct, sort of .

Craven seems to edge up on the point, actually and then wonder off again, being slightly mean spirited once again.  She never gets to the bigger point which is that a welfare system that creates semi permanent benefits, run by a bureaucracy, creates dependency, and corrupts.  Indeed, that was the huge difference, other than an inability to cover all who really needed help, from modern welfare and pre Great Depression charity.

Support form charitable organizations, and churches, and the like, was always very temporary.  And it tended to come with some requirements.  State funded welfare tends not to, although the GOP has attempted to insert some.  There are work requirements, of course, but it is difficult to tell how much they're winked at as the principles of subsidiarity have not been applied, so there's no real control.  In contrast, I know of a situation in which a Church collects directly for the poor and distributes directly to the poor.  In doing so, they do ask "are you working?"

And there are more uncomfortable truths as well.  Welfare has, ironically, been a major driver in the decline of Western morality, and more particularly, and arguably much more pronounced, American morality.

Prior to the current welfare regime, children were very much the responsibility of both parents, in every fashion.  We've discussed this in the context of the Playboy Philosophy and what not, but what was the case, even into the early 1980s, was that people that had children were normally married, and to a large degree, women who became pregnant out of wedlock either married the father or gave the child up for adoption (or after 1973, aborted).  Moral decay brought on by the Sexual Revolution, aided by pharmaceuticals, started to erode the two parent family however and in our current age that's pretty pronounced.  An African American commentator got in trouble a year or two ago by claiming that some women "married the government", but there's more than a little truth to that.  Kids raised in this environment are more subject to abuse by subsequent "boyfriends" of their mother, and are more likely to  be raised in poverty and declining morality.  It's simply the truth.

That in turn kicks back to society at large.  The American lower middle class tends to wade at least knee deep in a sort of moral sewer even while being horrified by those swimming in it.  This wasn't the case thirty year or more ago.  The trend line isn't good.

So, Cravens has a point.

But how do you end this? She doesn't opine on that, which is the cowardly way out.  Indeed nobody, except perhaps for those deep in the Heritage Society, is doing so.  What Project 2025 did, apparently, is to suggest an increase in work requirements, which was attempted sort of sub silentio earlier this year.  But then, the entire NatCon group in the government right isn't really willing, in general, to admit trying to bring into play any of their policies. They do them all silently while sometimes denying they're doing them at all.

Which is one of the things I really detest about the Trump Administration.  It's dishonest.  They should simply admit, if they think it, that "welfare is contributing to moral decay and we have to do something about it."

Of course, the problem here is that most Americans really don't want to do anything about the things they claim they do.  Bloated Americans who spend Sundays watching the NFL and who are living with their second or third wives or girlfriends might think about going to the megachurch once a month where the pastor is not going to equate their lifestyle with adulterous mortal sin, or preach about the dangers of wealth to their souls, and might bitch about homosexuals and the like even while being just as morally adrift, but they don't really want the responsibility of responsibility.

Of course, save for some, which explains a movement towards cultural conservatism in the young, thereby being proactive in the culture, even if not attempting to be cultural revolutionaries.

They were careless people.

 

Donald Trump at Mar A Logo's Halloween 1920s themed party.  Seated to Trump's left was an unhappy looking Marco Rubio with Jeanine Pirro looking back.  The event featured scantily clad dancing women, complete with the timeless barely clad woman in a giant champagne glass.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Donald Trump ought to read a little.  History would be a good start, but also Fitzgerald's great novel.

Monday, October 20, 1975. Grain, Cubans, Primates, and AIDS.

The US and USSR entered into a five year grain sale agreement by which the US agreed to sell 6,000,000 tons of grain to the USSR each year, as its collective agricultural system tanked, and by which the US accidentally screwed Canadian farmers.

The Cuban Navy's El Vietnam Heroico, El Coral Island and La Plata brought the first Cuban soldiers to Angola to support the MPLA..

Presumably the El Vietnam Heroico didn't celebrate the numerous South Vietnamese who gave their lives in order to attempt to hold the Communist back South East Asia.

Cuban military support to Angola would lead to the introduction of AIDS into Cuba, that region of Africa having been ground zero for the disease.  Myths about the origin of the horrific disease, and a supposed ground zero in New York City, have abounded for years, but in reality SIVcpz, the strain in chimpanzees, was transmitted to humans via contact with infected blood, most likely during the process of hunting and butchering chimpanzees for meat.  It was a "crossover disease."  It spread undetected for some time in Central Africa, notably by hetrosexual sex, and into the Cuban population by that means of transmission.  In much of the Western World, of course, it spread through homosexual sex at first, and then by infected needle transmissions. 

FWIW, eating primates is a really bad idea. They're too closely related to us, giving rise to things like this.

It's an interesting example of how war brings plagues of all types.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 14, 1975. Operation Savannah.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Angola, Columbus Day, Namibia, Native Americans, Operation Savannah, South Africa, South African Army, Washington (Seattle)

A bankrupt policy. Trump shafts American consumers and does so again for 大豆

I had a draft post at the time of the last election I never published why farmers and ranchers routinely vote to have themselves shafted by voting for the GOP.  Democrats typically have farm policies that actually benefit farmers, including preserving the lands.  Republicans tend to be in favor of land rape to benefit the wealthy.

I really have no good explanation for it.

Well, no surprise, soybean farmers are getting pounded by Trump's tariff polich. D'uh.

Trump's trade battle with China puts US soybean farmers in peril

I love this quote from one soybean farmer:

“Overwhelmingly, farmers have been in President Trump’s corner,” said Ragland, the president of the soybean association. “And I think the message that our soybean farmers as a whole want to deliver is: ‘President Trump, we’ve had your back. We need you to have ours now.’”

Well, I'm a type of farmer, a livestock farmer, and frankly Ragland, screw you and the John Deere you rode in on.  You are getting just what you deserve.

Trump bets the soybean farm on tariffs | Wall Street Journal

But, have no fear, socialized farming through the GOP will come to the rescue.  Trump is going to take $10B from the national sales tax, i.e., tariffs, to bail out farmers.

So, the American consumer is getting taxed, as in the end it's us who pays the tariffs, to bail out soybean farmers.  

Good old free enterprise at work there.

Farmers are getting stiffed by Trump's taxes, and will continue to get stiffed by them, and he hopes to balance the table by handing over money the American public handed over via tariffs. 

A better plan would just be to let soybean farmers go bankrupt.  

That's way harsh, of course, but there is a certain element of justice to it.  People voted for it.  If they voted for it, you get what get and you don't have a fit.

Locally there's some of this going on, oddly enough, with nuclear energy.  I support nuclear energy, and apparently the Trump administration does as well, and of course Wyoming has uranium and once had a nuclear mining industry.

People are having a fit, including a lot of people who are diehard right wing populists.

I guess that's their right, but farmers  have no right to have the implications of a policy that Trump was very clear about implementing relieved from them.  Trump always was in favor of tariffs and made no secret about it. What did they think was going to happen?

Moreover, the "we supported you" argument is only a good one if its something unexpected.  This amounts more to political payola.

Saturday, August 11, 1945. The US rejects the Japanese attempt at surrender and the Soviets invade South Sakhalin. And stuff that doesn't neatly fit into accepted history.

U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes rejected the Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration as it contained the proviso that the Imperial Household would not be disturbed.

The war, therefore, was still on.

Having said that, the US was now engaging in semantics, with there now being room for the preservation of the Imperial throne, if the Japanese people wished it.  This took a step towards a democratic resolution the question, very much in the spirt of Franklin Roosevelt, even if the administration knew right form the onset that the Japanese people, who contrary to the widespread mythin did not regard the Emperor as a god, would wish to keep a monarchical sovereign.

The latter was also now clearly influencing the US view.

And the Soviets were advancing.

By Kaidor - Own work based on [1] and [2], CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24319997

The Red Army commenced the invasion of South Sakhalin, a direct assault on territory long contested between Japan, China, and Russia.   The southern half of the large island had been held by Japan since the Russo Japanese War.  This is still a matter of contention between Japan and Russia, showing how much certain old claims survive, in this case, through two successive Russian regimes and on into a third, and through two Japanese regimes.

Of note, the wikipedia entry on this regards the conflict between the Soviet Union and Japan as a "minor" part of the World War Two. The Japanese didn't regard it that way. The entry of the USSR into the war was ripping into their imperial holdings at lightning speed. The Soviet entry into the war mattered a lot more than the US has traditionally been willing to admit.  With the Soviets entering the war, Japan had lost Manchuria and any hope it had of hanging on to anything on the Asian mainland were gone.  Moreover, not only was a looming American invasion of the Japanese home islands now inevitable, the specter of a Russian invasion of part o fit was as well. There can be, frankly, little doubt that Japan had to be worried that the USSR would take Honshu.¹

This, then, creates an interesting topic of "revisionism".  The Soviet declaration of war on Japan mattered a lot more than Americans are willing to credit it with, while the Red Army's effort in Europe was helped much more, indeed on a level of magnitude hardly appreciated, by the West, than they're willing to admit to. The Red Army was, at the end of the day, an armed mob, which would have never achieved what it did, and may have well lost the war, with out the US and UK's support.  And the Western Allied effort in Europe was much more significant winning the war than the USSR could have ever conceded, even if it knew it.

Indeed, at the end of day, it was the UK and British Dominions that won the war.

Mopping up operations on Mindanao were completed.

On the Philippines, General MacArthur stated that the atomic bomb was unnecessary since the Japanese would have surrendered anyway.

He was correct, and also thereby added  his voice to the growing number of military figures, now forgotten in their views, that criticized the U.S. war crime.

The Kraków pogrom, the first anti Jewish pogrom in post war Poland, took place. 56-year-old Auschwitz survivor Róża Berger, shot while standing behind closed doors.  The event was based on the absurd rumors of blood libel but was heavily influenced by the return of Jewish survivors of World War Two to the city.  The participation in locals in the Holocaust, even when they were under heavy repression themselves, is something Eastern Europeans have never been willing to really admit or deal with.² 

"3 elephants are being used by the 30th Div., 1st Army, on their march south thru the village of Pa-Tu on the road to Nanning. 11 August, 1945. The elephants are used for emergency work such as pulling out bogged down trucks and other heavy labor which can not be done by mechanical power or other livestock. Photographer: T/3 Raczkowski."

"One of the elephants that are being used by the 30th Div, 1st Army on their march south thru the village of Pa-Tu on the road to Nanning. The elephants are used for emergency work such as pulling out bogged down trucks and other heavy labor which can not be done by mechanical power or other livestock. 11 August, 1945. Photographer: T/3 Raczkowski."

Footnotes:

1. While not exactly on point, but related, I was accused of revisionism elsewhere the other day for suggesting that the atomic bombing of Japan was unnecessary. Well, revisionist or not, it was.

I'm open to the same charge here, I'm sure.  The Soviet declaration of war is typically treated as opportunistic, even though the US very much encouraged it.  Missed in this, the Japanese decision to take the "southern route" and to attack the US, and UK, in 1941 was a calculated decision to use the Japanese Navy rather than Army, which the considered "northern route", an attack on the Soviet Union, would have required. The Japanese Army had already tasted battle with the Red Army in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 and were well aware that they were not up to fighting the Red Army.  Believing they had no alternative between the two, they took on the US and UK, which they thought a better bet.

Figuring into this, the Japanese government was very anti Communist and there was likely some belief that no matter how horrific, from their prospective, an American occupation would be, it wouldn't be as bad as a Soviet one. On that, they were correct, and post war history demonstrates that the Japanese in fact very rapidly accommodated themselves to occupation, even to the extent of cooperating with the US during the Korean War.

All of which is really uncomfortable with the majority American view of "we had to nuke them".

2. All of this raises an entire host of uncomfortable issues concerning Eastern Europe.  I'm not going to try to go into them all. You'd be better off reading Blood Lands.

What I will note, however, is that violent antisemitism had been a feature of Eastern European culture for a very long time.  Eastern Europe's Jewish population had been the target of violence nearly everywhere for eons.  This really only changed, in terms of violence, after World War Two, although anti semitic prejudice runs through the entire region and into Western Europe to the present.

The Polish example is an interesting one in that no nation suffered more in World War Two than the Poles.  The Germans were murderous towards the Poles since day one, and a huge percentage of the Polish population died during the war.  The Catholic Church in Poland was massively attacked, with simply being a Polish priest meaning that such a person had a high likelihood of being murdered.  None the less, Poles participated in the German barbarities directed at the Jews, as did Ukrainians, the later of which also directed murderous prejudice at the Poles.

Last edition:

Friday, August 10, 1945. Ending one war and resuming another.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Chinese Civil War, fishing, Japan, Japan {Honshu), Manchuria, Monarchy, Potsdam Conference, Red Army, Royal Navy, The Press, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy

The SIG M17/M18 Controversy.

A Soldier fires an M17 handgun at targets during the Victory Week Pistol Competition, or Regional Combat Pistol Championship, June 4. The top 10% of firers at the event earned a bronze Excellence in Competition marksmanship badge. (Photo Credit: Nathan Clinebelle)

The M17 and M18 pistols, manufactured by SIG, which are versions of their P320 handgun, are really taking the heat.

They have been for awhile, but this local incident really ramped things up:

Air Force Division Grounds M18 Handguns After Airman Dies On Wyoming Base

Let's first say, anyway you look at this, this is a terrible tragedy (but see below).

But is anything really wrong with the pistol.  SIG says there isn't.

Sig Sauer pushes back on criticisms over safety of M17 and M18 pistols

Let's start with something first.  

SIG, or expanded Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, is one of the premier firearms manufacturers in the world.  In this context its party of a trade union with the German firm of J. P. Sauer und Sohn GmbH in order to work around Swiss laws that would largely prohibit the export of military weapons.  SIG did export some prior to the industrial union, with the excellent Stg 57 in export variants, being a prime example, but in recent years SIG has seriously moved into the export arms market in a way that it had not before, following the well blazed trail of Mauser and Fabrique Nationale, both of which at one time occupied the stage of supplier of small arms to the world at different points.

The US was never part of that market until Robert Strange McNamara vandalized Springfield Armory and foisted the AR15 upon the military against its will.  That had the impact of making the US a commercial small arms purchaser in a way that it had not been since the American Revolution, and we've paid for it every since.  It's completely true that the US had purchased commercial arms prior to that, with it notably going to commercial sidearms after Colt's perfection of cap and ball revolvers, and it interestingly relied upon commercial firms for machineguns, but when Springfield Armory was around, it always had an excellent in house backup.  After that, the US became entirely reliant upon civilian suppliers.

A lesson there, interestingly enough, is that to some degree being a commercial supplier of small arms to the US military has been historically a really bad deal for commercial firms.  Being the manufacturer of the M1917 rifle during World War One nearly killed Remington right after the war, and relying on sales of AR15 models to the service has actually been sort of a bad economic bet for Colt.  The lesson probably is that really relying on military sales to the US is risky.

The old model that Colt used, which was basically "here's what we have, it's really good, buy if you want it" is probably the best one.

Advertisement for Colt double action revolver.

And that's particularly the case as there hasn't been a single US handgun the US military has purchased since the M1873 was replaced by the M1892 which hasn't drawn criticism.

The M1892 is a nice double action revolver, but its .38 cartridge, ideal for police use, was anemic for combat, something that the Philippine Insurrection rapidly demonstrated.  M1873s were brought back into service (more on that in a minute) and .45 Colt New Army's were purchased as M1982s were pulled.  That was a stopgap measure until the Army could adopt an "automatic" pistol, which it did after leisurely testing in the form of the M1911.

The M1911 is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time, so its surprising that at first there were plenty of Army officers who hated it.  They regarded it outright dangers as it was too easy to fire and it was found that excited cavalrymen would accidentally shoot their horses in the head during charges.  Criticism of its short trigger pull lead to a new version of the pistol, the M1911A1, coming out during hit 1920s, simply to make it a bit harder to shoot, but as late as World War Two old cavalrymen were clinging to double action revolvers, which had no safeties at all, but which featured a long heavy trigger pull.

By that time the M1911 was beloved and for good reason.

The M1911 took the services all the way into the late 80s.  In 1985, the Baretta M9 was chosen to replace it, when it really didn't need to be replaced.  Indeed, the Army had to be forced to make a decision, which it was resisting, by Congress threatening to turn the project over to the Air Force, which had been responsible for the adoption of the AR 15.  That caught Colt flat footed as even t hough they'd been the supplier of most military handguns to the military for over a century, they weren't really expecting the Army to move forward with the entire project.

There were three reasons in reality to find a new handgun.  One was that no new M1911s had been purchased since the Second World War, so they were all getting internally rebuilt.  New pistols needed to be ordered. The second one was tha ti was felt that the .45 ACP round was too stout for women, who now were in roles where they needed handguns. That was moronic, as women can shoot any handgun a man can.  The third was that the US was foisting the 5.56 on our NATO allies and by adopting a 9mm pistol, we were throwing htem a bone, as every other NATO member save for NOrway used a 9mm pistol.

Which is something we shoudl have paused to think about right there.

The US, until after World War Two, had never been a supplier of small arms to other nations in any signficiant degree. Even after World War Two we were't a supplier of new arms, but our suprlus arms.  IT wasn't until after teh Vietnam War that this changed.  The big suppliers of military arms to the Western World were Germany and Belgium.  The Browning designed Belgian handgun, the High Power, was to some degree the handgun of the free world.  It had a proven track record.

The Baretta was a reengineerd P-38.  The P-38, like the High Power, and the M1911, is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time.  Given that, the M9 is a very good handgun.

US troops at first hated it.

Marines with M9s.

They hated it because they didn't want it, and soon attention was focused on breakages in the slides of the early Italian manufactured pistols.  Baretta stated there was nothing wrong with the gun, and in fact, there wasn't.

It never really fully replaced the M1911, as if you really need a pistol, the M1911 wins hands down every time.  But as 9mms go, it was a really good one.

Well, then came the Glock.

Glocks are frankly nothing special and a lot of real pistol aficionados do not like them.  But they used a striker instead of an external hammer.  There are some advantages to that, but for the most part, the advantages are more theoretical than real.  Frankly, anyone carrying a striker pistol would be just as well off with a hammer fired one and never notice the difference if they actually had to use it.

Anyhow, the service determined that it needed a striker fired pistol because everyone else was getting one.  Not too surprisingly, some in the service dithered on the project as it wasn't really needed, but them some senior officers who didn't know what the crap they were talking about threatened to directly procure Glocks, which would have been a horrible idea.

Tests were held and the P320 chosen.

Disclaimer here, I have one.

I have one, oddly enough, due to a Ducks Unlimited event.  I didn't go out and look for one.  

Having said that, it shoots extremely nicely.  I can see why people like/liked them.  In a heads up contest between the M9 and the M17/18, I think the SIG wins every time.

And now we have this issue.

Is it one?

I don't really know.  I hope that its figured out.  SIG, which also won the Army contest for new rifle (M7) and machine gun (M250), is taking piles of ill informed heat right now.

Let's take a look at the problem, some potential causes, and some fixes.

First, let's start with this.

Is there really a problem?

Sounds fantastical to even ask that, but the chatter about the SIG fits into a long US service tradition of claiming that the prior firearm was perfect and the new one plagued with flaws.  Sometimes its even true, or perhaps a little true. Sometimes, it's bunk.

The history of Army handguns certain fits that, however.  The Army was really long in replacing the M1873 and soldiers came to immediately hate its replacement. Was the M1892 bad?  Well, not as a design, it was far more advanced than the M1873, but the cartridge really was a bad choice.  The criticism was warranted.

What about the criticism of the M1911, which actually lead to it being redesigned a bit?  Not hardly.  The M1911 was a great pistol from day one and its defects, so to speak, were ones of perception on the part of those who were used to old heavy trigger double actions.

And the M9. Well, I'll admit that I was one of its critics.  But the M9 is a really good handgun.  The frame cracking was a freakish event and not something that proved to be an overall problem.  The eral problem is that its a 9mm, but that doesn't have anything to do with the design itself.

And, if we expand out and look at the history of US rifles we'll find the same thing.  When the M1 Garand was adopted there were some legitimate problems wtih its gas system, which lead to that being rapidly resdesigned.  Still, that didn't keep pleny of critics of faulting the rifle as inferior to the M1903 and soldiers actually were very conscerned that stoppages they experienced in stateside training, which apparently were due to the ammunition being used for a time, meant the rifle was defective.  Combat would rapidly prove that to be false, but it received that criticm at first.

The M14 received criticism for having some supposed problem with its bolt and action, which critics of the rifle will reference even today.  One civilian produced variant supposedly featured reengingeering to address the prblem, whatever it is.  It's difficult to find out hwat hte supposed problem was, and in actual use, ti seems to have been completely unnoticed.  Some M14s, for that matter, featured M1 Garand lock bar rear sights which drives some competitive rifleman absolutely nuts. Anyhow, the rifle didn't have faults, but it received criticism for having them.

The M16 of course, did have real faults, and still does, all of which are attributable to its direct impingment gas system.  However, the Army made the faults worse by suggesting the rifle never needed to be cleaned, wich was absurd, and by using fouling powder in early cartridge production.  AR15 fans and the military seem to have gotten largely over this, but at first the rifle was really hated, and I'll admit that I didn't like it.

The point is that there might not be anything wrong with the M17 at all.  What we could be seeing is an element of operator error.

Or, in some cases, worse:

Airman arrested for death that prompted Air Force-wide safety review of Sig M18

I have a thread on the M18 story, but I've been waiting for this:

Airman arrested for death that prompted Air Force-wide safety review of Sig M18

Something about the entire "it discharged all on its owned from its holster" story sounded like a fable.

I started this post before the news above broke, but I kept expecting something like this.  Frankly, murder or manslaughter wasn't what I was expecting, but some sort of operator error, or I'll confess suicide.  

But here's the deal, once something gets a bit of a bad wrap in American society, particularly litigious American society, it's hard to unring the bell on the story.  

And the story here, dare we say it, involves a lot of service users. . . . 

Now ,why would that be significant?

Well, frankly, because service users are amongst those who are the least likely to be paying attention to what they're doing and screw up.  Being in the Armed Forces or a police department doesn't make you a gun fan.  It doesn't even really make you all that knowledgeable on weapons, quite frankly.

SIG might be right. There might be no problem here at all.

And if there is one, it might be an introduced one.  That is, users messing with their sidearm accidentally or intentionally.  Some police forces actually issue sidearms just to keep their policemen from doing that with firearms they own.

But let's assume there is a problem. What would it be?

The M17 features a really complicated striker design and the pistol was designed not to have a safety. Those two things alone may mean that the design has been somewhat compromised by complication and the addition of a safety it wasn't designed to have.  That might, somehow, be defeated the need for a trigger "command".  It's important to note that if the pistols are firing on their own, they're defeating the safety, but then the safety only prevents the trigger from being pulled.

That is, I'd note, a much less effective safety design than that on the M1911, but we'll get back to that.

Anyhow, the safety isn't going to stop block the striker.  It doesn't work, say, like the safety on a M1903 or G98, which does.  It just keeps the trigger from being accidentally pulled.

Another possibility is that something about the holsters is playing a weird role  It seems unlikely, but its not completely impossible.

If I were a SIG engineer, and I'm not an engineer at all, I'd look at trying to develop a safety that hold the striker, if possible, and it might not be.

Okay, let's assume that it's all just hopeless, there's something wrong with the SIG and it can't be fixed.  I'm not saying that's the case, but what if there is.  Clearly a different handgun is in order.

Some have suggested just going back to the M9, and that's not a bad idea. The problem might be that after decades of use most of the M9s are in rough shape.  I doubt that, but it's possible.  

Well, so what.  Just sort through the ones in the inventory and weed out those in bad shape.  Issue the ones that aren't, and adopt the newest variant of the M9, which is nearly universally regarded as a very fine weapon.

The only reason not to do that is it has a hammer.

M'eh.

The other possibility. . . oh my. . .dare we say it. . . is to bring back the M1911.

Marine Corps MEU-SOC, the M1911 that proceeded the M45.

There's no reason not to, and in fact the Marine Corps did for awhile.  There's nothing the M17/18 and M9 can do that the M1911 doesn't do better.