#blowback operation

[historyofguns]

The article, written by Tom Laemlein for The Armory Life, discusses Japan's development and deployment of the Type 100 submachine gun during World War II. Initially, the Japanese military showed little interest in submachine guns in the 1930s, but began development late into the war. Influenced by European models like the Thompson submachine gun and the German MP 18, Japan's early experimentation led to the creation of the Type 100 by Nambu Arms, which was adopted by the military in 1942. Despite its practical design aimed at increased firepower in urban battles, the production was limited and delayed, resulting in only about 10,000 units by the end of the war and failing to significantly impact the Japanese military's capabilities. The Type 100 had notable variants including a folding stock model for paratroopers. However, with the lack of a powerful cartridge and production challenges, the Type 100 was ultimately considered inferior to other contemporary SMGs in terms of effectiveness and production ease. Despite this, it had a unique design and served a specialized role during its limited use in the war.

[alanshemper]

learned about a new CIA covert operation today

[vacuouslyfalse]

Anyway. I've said this before but while I am generally critical of communism and the USSR, anticommunism is a far more bleak and disturbing ideology. There is an oft-repeated lie that the Cold War was a conflict between democratic capitalism and authoritarian communism, but you really don't have to look that hard to see how that narrative falls apart - the people the US supported as bulwarks against communism were consistently antidemocratic.

The cognitive dissonance induced by anticommunism was staggering - you have all these US government officials talking about the loathed enemy, unable to really articulate what they were fighting and why, and why they thought the people they were supporting were better, besides their shared opposition to communism.

A particularly stark example of this comes up in this season of Blowback when the CIA director was flirting with a plan to try and get Soviet soldiers to defect. To shoot down the plan, other CIA operatives showed him evidence of Mujaheddin sexual violence against Soviet prisoners, which elicited a response along the lines of "I see your point, there's no way any of the Soviets would ever ally with those subhuman monsters." But those were the same people the CIA were funding, training, and arming!

Even some concept of pro-US campism (support people who are pro-US!) or shared interest in capitalist profits (support people who make the US money!) doesn't hold up - the Islamic fundamentalists were completely uninterested in what the US was selling, except that it furthered their immediate aims!

[frogblast-the-ventcore]

From clockwise right, we have:

Hellreigel 9mm submachine gun (text via IMFDB: "As of current knowledge, there was only ever one example of the Hellriegel and it did not survive the war. Its caliber, capacity, operating method, and whether or not it was even a functional weapon are conjecture based on analysis of the photographs and historical context. It is assumed to have been blowback operated with the projections at the rear being a pair of recoil springs, and the large structure over the barrel is thought to have been a leather-wrapped water or oil jacket for cooling. From what little could be known about the weapon from the three images, it appears that the Hellriegel is a large-capacity submachine gun, firing what seems to be a 9mm cartridge. It would make the Hellriegel one of the first submachine guns made in the world by definition of a submachine gun. It wouldn't be referred as a submachine gun at the time, as the term "submachine gun" was first coined in 1921 to advertise the Thompson Submachine Gun; the Hellriegel was referred to as a machine gun (Maschinengewehr) on the image caption. It could feed from straight box magazines, or from a large drum magazine which was not actually connected to the weapon and instead fed the cartridges through a flexible chute. The unusual appearance of this drum magazine led to some assumptions that it was belt fed, however this is not the case with the rounds being unconnected from one another and are propelled along the drum and feed chute by a spring in a similar manner to the Trommelmagazin snail drum used by the Luger pistol. The drum magazine is believed to be able to hold up to 160 rounds while the box mag is limited to 20 or so. It seems to be crew-served, as one image depicts an ammo bearer with a backpack for drum magazines, and its seeming intention to be used as a stationary weapon given its weighted base for the drum and its machine gun name (making it a "heavy" submachine gun of sorts). The provision for a drum but not a bipod however, means it is unclear what exactly the weapon was intended to be used for. All three pictures were taken from the right side of the gun, so what the left side looked like is a complete mystery."

Tsar tank (absolutely bonkers Russian experimental wheeled tank):

Hand-dropped bomb runs (commonplace during the war until bomb racks were invented for small aircraft):

German cavalry with pikes (note the horse gas masks).

Also this happened:

[greatworldwar2]

• M50 Reising Submachine Gun

The .45 Reising submachine gun was manufactured by Harrington & Richardson (H&R) Arms Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, and was designed and patented by Eugene Reising in 1940. The three versions of the weapon were the Model 50, the folding stock Model 55, and the semiautomatic Model 60 rifle. Over 100,000 Reisings were ordered during World War II, and were initially used by the United States, though some were shipped to Canadian, Soviet, and other allied forces.

Reising was an assistant to firearm inventor John M. Browning. In this role, Reising contributed to the final design of the US .45 ACP M1911 pistol. Reising then designed a number of commercial rifles and pistols on his own, when in 1938, he turned his attention to designing a submachine gun as threats of war rapidly grew in Europe. Two years later he submitted his completed design to the Harrington & Richardson Arms Company (H&R) in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was accepted, and in March 1941, H&R started manufacturing the Model 50 submachine gun. H&R promoted the submachine guns for police and military use, and the Model 60 for security guards. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the US was suddenly in desperate need of thousands of modern automatic weapons. Reising's only competitor was the .45 ACP Thompson submachine gun. The US Army first tested the Reising in November 1941 at Fort Benning, Georgia. During this test, several parts failed due to poor construction. Once this was corrected, a second test was made in 1942 at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. In that test, 3,500 rounds were fired, resulting in two malfunctions: one from the ammunition, the other from a bolt malfunction. As a result, the Army didn't adopt the Reising, but the Navy and Marines did, due to insufficient supply of Thompsons.

The Reising submachine gun was innovative for its time. In comparison to its main rival, the famous Thompson, it possessed similar firepower, better accuracy, excellent balance, a lighter weight, a much lower cost, and greater ease of manufacture. Despite these achievements, the poor combat performance of the Reising contrasted with favorable combat and law enforcement use of the Thompson mired the weapon in controversy. The Reising was far less costly ($62) compared to the Thompson ($200). It was much lighter (seven vs. eleven pounds). The Model 55 was also more compact (about twenty-two vs. thirty-three inches in length). The M50 Reising's delayed blowback operation, often classified as hesitation lock, works as follows: as the cartridge is chambered, the rear end of the bolt is pushed up into a recess, in a manner similar to tilting-bolt locked breech guns; but whereas such weapons rely on an additional mechanism to unlock them, in the case of the Reising the end of the bolt that pushes against the back wall of this recess, is subtly rounded, while the wall is correspondingly curved. On firing, the extreme pressure from the propellant gases is thereby able to force the bolt-end down, back to the horizontal. From here the bolt can move to the rear removing the cartridge from the chamber; but the combination of mechanical disadvantage and friction the force of the gases must overcome to push the end of the bolt down has achieved a delay of a fraction of a second, allowing pressure in the barrel to drop to a level sufficiently low for safe and efficient cartridge extraction. The Reising was made in selective fire versions that could be switched between semi-automatic or full-automatic fire as needed and in semi-auto only versions to be used for marksmanship training and police and guard use. The Reising had a designed full-auto cyclic rate of 450–600 rounds per minute but it was reported that the true full-auto rate was closer to 750–850 rounds per minute.

The U.S. Marines adopted the Reising in 1941 with 4,200 authorized per division with approximately 500 authorized per each infantry regiment. Most Reisings were originally issued to Marine officers and NCOs in lieu of a compact and light carbine, since the newly introduced M1 carbine was not yet being issued to the Marines. Although the Thompson submachine gun was available, this weapon frequently proved too heavy and bulky for jungle patrols, and initially it, too, was in short supply. During World War II, the Reising first saw action on August 7th, 1942, exactly eight months to the day after Pearl Harbor, when 11,000 men from the 1st Marine Division stormed the beaches of Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. The same date of Guadalcanal's invasion, the Model 50 and 55 saw action with the 1st Marine Raiders on the small outlying islands of Tulagi and Tanambogo to the north. Serious shortcomings in both guns were becoming apparent. The reality was that the Reising was designed as a civilian police weapon and was not suited to the stresses of harsh battle conditions encountered in the Solomon Islands—namely, sand, saltwater that easily rusted the commercial blued finish, and the difficulty in keeping the weapon clean enough to function properly. Tests at Aberdeen Proving Ground and at Fort Benning, Georgia, had found difficulties in blindfold reassembly of the Reising, indicating the design was complicated and difficult to maintain. The producer, H&R, had not yet mastered mass-production technologies in 1940-1941, and many of the parts were hand fitted at the factory just like the company did with their commercial firearms. While more accurate than the Thompson, particularly in semi-automatic mode, the Reising had a tendency to jam. The Reising earned a dismal reputation for reliability in the combat conditions of Guadalcanal. The M1 carbine eventually became available and was often chosen over both the Reising and the Thompson in the wet tropical conditions.

In late 1943 following numerous complaints, the Reising was withdrawn from Fleet Marine Force (FMF) units and assigned to Stateside guard detachments and ship detachments. After the Marines proved reluctant to accept more Reisings, and with the increased issue of the .30-caliber M1 carbine, the U.S. government passed some Reising submachine guns to the OSS and to various foreign governments (as Lend-Lease aid). Both the Soviets and Canada purchased some Model 50 SMGs, others were given to various anti-Axis resistance forces operating around the world. Many Reisings (particularly the semiautomatic M60 rifle) were issued to State Guards for guarding war plants, bridges, and other strategic resources. After the war, thousands of Reising Model 50 submachine guns were acquired by state, county, and local U.S. law enforcement agencies. The weapon proved much more successful in this role, in contrast to its wartime reputation. Production of the Model 50 and 55 submachine guns ceased in 1945 at the end of World War II. Nearly 120,000 submachine guns were made of which two-thirds went to the Marines. H&R continued production of the Model 60 semiautomatic rifle in hopes of domestic sales, but with little demand, production of the Model 60 stopped in 1949 with over 3,000 manufactured. H&R sold their remaining inventory of submachine guns to police and correctional agencies across America. Decades later, in 1986, H&R closed their doors and Numrich Arms (aka Gun Parts Corporation) purchased their entire inventory.

[inkandguns]

Val Kilmer’s pistol from Heat

$369!

[pattern-recognition]

the 124cc motorcycle engine, the blowback-operated submachine gun, the zippo lighter, the floatplane, the d-shaped carabiner; just a selection of god’s favored objects

[eveledoze]

which md character do you like to draw the most?

the Uzi ( /ˈuːzi/ ⓘ; Hebrew: עוזי, romanized: Ūzi; officially cased as UZI) is a family of Israeli open-bolt, blowback-operated submachine guns and machine pistols first designed by Major Uziel "Uzi" Gal in the late 1940s, shortly after the establishment of the State of Israel. It is one of the first weapons to incorporate a telescoping bolt design, which allows the magazine to be housed in the pistol grip for a shorter weapon.

[ladyloveandjustice]

Speaking of MAWS, I think it would be extremely funny of the show if Alex the intern is Lex and he just consistently keeps showing up as the intern or second-in-command to rich super tech criminals who are goddamn idiots, the voice of reason that is never listened to (and probably long term planning to depose them and take over their operation), only to always be caught in the blowback when Superman, Lois and Jimmy foil him. I also want Lois to have to punch him out every single time.

Every time, the grudge grows deeper, not just against Superman, but Lois and Jimmy (and Clark). (He hates them in the comics since they foil his plans there too ofc and because of their connection to Superman, but it's never AS big as the hateboner for Superman. In this version, I want him to hate them JUST AS MUCH if not MORE.)

When he eventually does turn supervillain, I want him to have confrontations and plans targeting Lois and Jimmy too- not to get to Superman, no, but because he considers them equal threats and is also extremely petty. And whenever he rants about how they ruined his life, it will never occur to him that he could have stopped interning for stupid criminals at any point. If it's ever pointed out he'll be like "well. anyway."

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth Mandel

As we consider the nature of the astonishing events both in Gaza and in Lebanon over the past month, we should recognize this one clear fact: Israel spent the last year not only fighting a two-front war in real time but learning from its every step and every move how to win the war that had been thrust upon it. And now it is.

I don’t need to rehearse it all for you, but I will, because it’s just so…exhilarating. The elimination of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah since 1992, brought to a climax a period of daring Israeli actions that included, but are not limited to:

—the assassination in the spring of leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran’s most elite military unit, in a building in Syria.

—Israel’s use of some kind of science-fictional weapon we normies still don’t have a bead on against an Iranian site after the ineffectual missile attack Iran launched in response to the Syria killing—a clear message to the mullahs that Israel possesses terrifying capabilities Tehran cannot predict and that therefore Iran would be wise not to try and find out. And it hasn’t.

—the assassination inside Tehran in an apartment complex owned and run by the mullahs of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh—a plan so daring and melodramatically implausible it seemed to have been lifted from the pages of one of Daniel Silva’s glorious Gabriel Allon novels.

—the trapping of senior Hamas leadership in a corner of the city of Rafah following a months-long halt outside this southernmost point in Gaza—a pause largely due to the historically embarrassing pressure exerted by an increasingly pusillanimous and morally impotent Biden administration and its fear of an electoral blowback in one state out of 50 in a country generally extremely supportive of Israel’s efforts.

—the relentless grinding down of Hamas to the point that in the past week Israel is now openly declaring that Hamas no longer functions as a military but has been downgraded into some kind of counterinsurgency at best.

—Operation Grim Beeper, in which Israel wounded or took off the fighting map literally thousands of Hezbollah operatives in a single second, followed a day later by the same attack on the secondary communications devices Hezbollah resorted to with their pagers blown up.

—Operation Northern Arrows, a series of Israeli strikes that did more damage to Hezbollah’s colossal missile stash in six hours than it had done in the 34 days Israel had fought Hezbollah in a conventional war in 2006. In a day’s time, the Israeli airforce hit 1,600 sites in Southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley.

—The picking-off of Hezbollah leaders systematically wherever and whenever they have been accessible for such elimination, beginning with military commander Fuad Shukr and reaching its apex on Friday with 83 tons dropped directly on the head of Hamas’s command-and-control superbunker—killing Hassan Nasrallah, the world’s most destructive terrorist over the past 32 years, thus decapitating Hezbollah, an enemy of Israel, the United States, and the Jewish people worldwide for four decades.

—the continuing elimination of Hezbollah leaders following Nasrallah’s death, three so far, demonstrating that the decapitation of Hezbollah is not going to be followed any time soon with any kind of regeneration.

And after I finish writing this and before you begin reading it, more will have happened to boost Israel’s side of the war-fighting ledger. And if you had told me just a month ago at the end of August that I would be writing these words at the end of September, I would have thought you mad.

Just one month ago, Israel had plunged into a despair deeper than it had experienced at any time after October 7 when the nation learned that six hostages, including the Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been murdered just minutes before they might have been rescued. Throughout Israel and the Jewish world, even some hawks found themselves all but ready to give up the fight because the continued plight of the hostages had just become too great to bear. A ceasefire was needed. Bring them home now.

The problem wasn’t an Israeli unwillingness to achieve a ceasefire. The Netanyahu government and its negotiators  accepted general ceasefire terms at multiple moments over the summer. Rather it was Hamas that would not proffer any kind of hostage return that even the United States, which wanted the ceasefire desperately, could view as minimally acceptable. But Israelis and Jews around the world had, without even knowing it really, been surviving on a kind of desperate optimism that things were really going to work out in a movie-ending sort of way. The loss of that optimism was soul-crushing and once again threatened to turn Israel inside out against itself even as the war was not won.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah was firing rockets, killing Druze children, and keeping the North depopulated. Israeli military leaders and Israelis have long known they would not be spared from directly engaging in this war on the northern border. But a country in mourning and a Jewish people worldwide overwhelmed by a degree of open hostility toward us most of us had never known could hardly bear the thought of that second front. Not to mention Yemen. Not to mention Iran.

Which is why September 2024 may go down in the annals of Jewish history as the time our people looked despair in the face and refused to submit to it. Israel said, through the proper democratic vehicle of the Jewish state’s duly elected government, that it would no longer hold itself back in hopes of a deal that would not emerge or tie an arm behind its back to manage a relationship with the United States when the U.S.’s position in all these matters had become all but inexplicable in its inconstancy.

The Netanyahu government acted, and with a kind of determination and confidence that has breathed new strength and a new sense of resolve into the Jewish people. Whatever the divisions and concerns and cautions inside the corridors of power about the astonishing onslaught of Israel against the Iran Axis of Evil, the fact is Israel stared into the abyss and said, “Not today. Not this week. Not this month. Not ever.”

[sketching-shark]

🔥 on Sun Wukong

Well @cryzyimp at the risk of sounding like a grimdark edgelord, they should let him be more evil.*

*AS IN & AS PER MY PREVIOUS RANTS, one of the things that really launched the Monkey King into being one of my favorite characters of all time is that while an important part of his whole thing is being a violent little shit, for me the thing that really stands out is that he's a self-aware and brutally honest violent little shit.

He casually talks about having killed more people that he can remember, wields his power to steal whatever he wants for himself and for his monkey family, and we KNOW he ruled as something akin to a warlord for ~20 years. And even after everything that goes down in the Havoc in Heaven and his entrapment under the Five Elements Mountain, he isn't sorry about any of it at all! But it's exactly this which is one of the elements that makes JTTW so interesting! As we go through the book every other figure in authority, from the Tang Emperor to other yaoguai walords, make it pretty clear that they're operating on a very similar wavelength to the Monkey King himself, i.e. they're willing to kill countless people if it helps them establish their rule and/or protect their loved ones. Hell, I'd argue that their free admissions of all kinds of atrocities is to the point where it compels a reader to ask if the Monkey King received the punishment he did less because of the ethics involved and more because he had the power to keep escalating his challenges until he faced someone he couldn't match!

So in this context, for me, the most interesting potential of SWK's arc isn't about having to learn that what he did was bad because he was just that naive; it's all about how he knew exactly what he did and the journey is about showing why he should recontextualize his actions, see how the violence he inflicted on others eventually came back to bite him and his loved ones in their collective ass, and thus learn why he should have compassion for others outside of his very select circle.

So yea big pet peeve that JTTW itself highlights him being impulsive and thus opened up the door for the endless "stupid idiot monkey a-hole" interpretations of the Monkey King, when at least for me it's far more interesting to go with the embedded interpretation that SWK was evil in the sense that he freely wielded violence in full understanding of the consequences for others and did it anyway, sincerely believing that his power could keep any blowback from hitting him or his loved ones until the Buddha himself proved the monkey wrong.

[warsofasoiaf]

On ceasefire negotiations related to how Israel-Hamas is operating. Israel demanded to know how many hostages remain and who is alive, and apparently Hamas is refusing to provide the names and count. Is this a normal thing to argue over and is it normal for a country to sacrifice military campaigns for a comparatively small number of civilians? For example would the United States act similarly if it were in Israel's situation? Would another Western country?

This is actually something I can talk a great deal about, because it deals with negotiations, game theory, and applying economic concepts to non-economic subjects. This will be pretty clinically heartless, so I'm going to throw a cut down.

A hostage negotiation is, at its core, taking prisoners to extract some form of compensation for their safe return. The hostage taker wants something, and trades in human lives to get it. This can be money (ransom), an exchange of prisoners (a prisoner swap), or to exert pressure to enact political change (terrorism). The negotiation is largely an argument over price - how much is it worth to return the hostages safely. We'll get back to this in a bit.

It is typically standard practice to declare the name, number, and status of hostages for a few reasons. One is verification, to prove that the organization has the hostages in question. The second is to establish good faith that the negotiations can be conducted, that the hostages won't be immediately executed. If there is no good faith, the other side does not negotiate and instead attempts rescue (or in Russia's case, just mows them down indiscriminately). That's the same reason why hostage takers can release hostages as a show of good faith that further negotiations are fruitful.

At the end of the day, a hostage negotiation is an argument over the price of the hostages' lives. In any negotiation, information asymmetry is the name of the day, and the more advantages you have in that category, the better price you can command. Hamas is incentivized not to declare the name and status of the hostages for both benign (relatively) and malign reasons. By refusing to name the number and status of the hostages, it forces uncertainty into the Israeli negotiations. If Israel doesn't know how many hostages it's "buying" then it's liable to offer more than Hamas is willing to settle for, which makes Hamas come out ahead in the exchange. If Israel offers too low an amount, Hamas can simply demand more - there are no downsides unless Israel refuses to negotiate.

Of course, the malign reason is that the hostages are not in the best shape - they're either the victims of torture or are already dead. In this case, Hamas is disguising the status to up the price of the negotiations. Typically, negotiators don't pay for dead hostages, so in the event you have dead hostages, it's advantageous to disguise that status to extract something for them (typically money because once you have it in your hand, it's tough to go backsies). It's not good business in the long run, because no one does business with you again, but Hamas likely doesn't believe it's going to be in a position to negotiate again so that threat is less prescient. Similarly, Hamas likely believes it's insulated from the inevitable blowback that it would bring. Support for Hamas, either from their Iranian backers or Western groups, doesn't typically go down even in response to perfidy, torture, or other crimes. So in that sense, being a habitual bad-faith actor doesn't hold the same animus - they're still going to enjoy support from their backers regardless of what they do, which are prime conditions for reinforcing bad behavior. It's similar in Israel, where the Netanyahu government largely doesn't care about foreign political pressure - their reaction typically to international condemnation is to close ranks and accuse their critics of wanting them dead, or at least not caring whether they live or die.

Typically, governments don't like to negotiate ransoms for hostage taking for the all-too-logical reason, it incentivizes other hostage taking attempts. Private citizens often pay ransoms because for them, it is a singular iteration of game theory - there typically isn't a second instance of hostage taking unless the individual is quite unlucky. Governments however, frequently interact with terror groups and are thus less likely to negotiate directly save in the event that the hostage in question is extremely important.

In that sense, hostage taking is usually an attempt to force private citizens to enact domestic pressure on a government, not to pressure the government directly. In the sense of the United States or any other Western countries, this is more effective than in autocracies such as Russia or China, which both are relatively resistant to domestic criticism and are more willing to accept civilian casualties. So to answer your question of what would the United States or another Western nation do, the answer is "it depends on the willingness of the public to place domestic pressure on the government to free the hostages versus their desire to punish the perpetrators."

Thanks for the question, Cle-Guy.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Oliver Willis at Oliver Willis Explains:

The media industry, in particular, thrived during Trump’s time. Instead of sleep-inducing policy wonkery as they had to contend with during President Barack Obama’s two-terms, Trump lurched from drama to drama and crisis to crisis. When he wasn’t feuding with celebrities or Saturday Night Live, he was pissing off NATO allies, mismanaging a pandemic, or bowing to North Korea’s dictatorial regime. And of course there was the steady stream of racism and misogyny.

Four years into President Joe Biden’s time in office, it is clear to anyone with open eyes that the mainstream press desperately wants to go back to the good old days. They want easy stories and a torrent of clicks to their websites and eyeballs on their broadcasts. They want to be able to churn out a series of bestsellers, compiling information they should have been reporting in newspapers and broadcasts, packaged as buzzworthy scoops to juice book sales. Like Zaslav, the mainstream media - the New York Times, CNN, Associated Press, the networks and the rest — tipped their hands as they took part in the post-debate media orgy. Biden’s performance was putrid, as he has admitted, but the coverage went above and beyond with the press beating the drumbeat for Biden to drop out of the race louder than a Taylor Swift concert extravaganza. The press misses Donald, their meal ticket, their path to riches and an easy day at the office. He makes a big show of speaking negatively about his coverage, but like a wrestler working a gimmick to get the audience out of their seats, everyone in this pantomime is playing a role.

[...] The press does not like criticism from the left. The left is supposed to just suck it up and take it and bow before them. Simply because the left side of the aisle does not share Trump’s position that the free press is the “enemy of the people,” that is supposed to be carte blanche for lies, unfair coverage, and agenda-based reporting against Democrats. Nonsense. Biden was well within bounds to push back on the media’s reprehensible behavior and in fact he should have been more forceful. Because in this election — as in past elections — the Republican Party isn’t his only opposition.

The people who continually carry water for specious and debunked right-wing attacks, like the Swift Boat lies of 2004 or the Willie Horton smears of 1988 or the email faux scandal of 2016 are all the same people: The media. The Republican Party and conservatives have a steadfast ally in the mainstream press that amplifies their bad faith attacks without context, who abdicate their roles as journalists or fact checkers to operate as stenographers for whatever dumb thing Republicans come up with. When George W. Bush and his team wanted to sell lies about weapons of mass destruction, they didn’t go to Fox News. The went to the New York Times. Of course the press should investigate and press back on claims from Democrats, and when Democrats lie or massage the facts, the news media should take them to the rhetorical woodshed. That is their job. But for too long they have operated with two sets of standards for the two parties. What is merely a faux pas by Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump is seized upon as a major crisis and scandal if the perpetrator is Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden (along with Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton). This cannot continue to stand, not without some blowback.

Oliver Willis wrote a solid piece on why Joe Biden was right to call out the bothsiderist MSM in a Monday interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.

[gunzlotzofgunz]

FAMAE SAF

FAMAE SAF is blowback-operated; firing from a closed bolt. It is based on the Swiss SIG SG 540 rifle which is produced under license by FAMAE.The SAF has a bolt hold-open catch that engages after the final shot.

Caliber: 9mm Effective Range: 150m Method of Operation: Blowback Length with Stock Extended: 640mm Length with Stock Folded: 410mm Barrel Length: 200mm Weight, Empty: 2970g

[unbossed]

"Blowback is the unintended consequences and unwanted side-effects of a covert operation. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as "random" acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name the intelligence agency acted—are unaware of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them."

[mariacallous]

Much has been written about the risks to the rest of the world if former U.S. President Donald Trump wins the election on Nov. 5. Less has been discussed of the risks associated with his defeat.

In the event that Vice President Kamala Harris wins in the electoral college, team Trump is highly likely to contest the result—and we know how that played out in 2020. The violence and instability caused by Trump’s Big Lie was mostly contained to the United States, in no small part because much of the world was under lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2024, the world is in a very different place. Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have set up clear divides between the U.S.-led democratic West and the new axis of autocracies: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. In this context, the political stability of the most powerful country on Earth is extremely important and any question over the outcome of its presidential election could have global consequences.

Brian Klaas, an associate professor of global politics at University College London, said the prospect of a Trump-contested election creates two major risks for the rest of the world—one short-term and one long-term.

“In the immediate aftermath, Trump refusing to concede would suck up the attention of every politician and news organization on Earth, leaving little bandwidth to deal with anything else,” Klaas said. “That immediately creates space for opportunist bad actors to do things with limited blowback.”

More alarming is the impact that Trump’s rejection of a second election could have on U.S. democracy’s standing around the world—a cloud that could hang over Harris’s entire presidency if she wins.

“America’s ability to curb the actions of autocrats comes from threats to remove foreign aid or other support if leaders incite violence or flagrantly disregard democracy,” Klaas said. “How can America lecture the world about democracy when things like Jan. 6 happen? Nobody sees America as an aspirational model for democracy during the Trump era.”

The first and most obvious risk comes in Ukraine, where European security officials and sources inside the country believe Kyiv is grinding toward a slow, bloody defeat.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s requests for more weapons and his “victory plan” come at a critical time in the war. Ukraine is in the paradoxical position of needing to prove to allies that it can win the war in order to get the weapons it needs to win the war. Trump has made his hostility to Kyiv and favoring of Moscow extremely clear. But even if Trump loses, Ukraine could be in trouble.

“We know Russia is stockpiling weapons sent to them by Iran,” said Jade McGlynn, a researcher in the department of war studies at King’s College London who is currently in eastern Ukraine. “The expectation here is that they will bombard Ukraine over the winter. This would be a disaster for areas that have already had most of their energy infrastructure taken out by Russia. It could force people to flee, making it easier in the long run for Russia to launch new, successful assaults.”

NATO officials are concerned that instability after the U.S. election makes this more likely. Some have noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin has used the window of a transition period to carry out horrific acts of war before, pointing to the 2016 operation in Aleppo, Syria. Samantha Power, then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called Russia’s actions at the time a “modern evil.”

The multipronged conflicts in the Middle East are also becoming more dangerous by the day. Unlike the war in Ukraine, few Western officials believe that instability in the United States would provoke further escalation by Israel, Iran, Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon. As it stands, the United States and all of its allies have, thus far, failed to prevent the conflict snowballing into the most dangerous situation the region has seen in decades.

NATO sources, speaking on deep background, said that the West’s near irrelevance in the region is the product of more than a decade’s disengagement there. The political, diplomatic, cultural, and intellectual withdrawal from the Middle East has reduced U.S.-led influence. Why would any regional party act on U.S. demands if they ultimately know no NATO troops are coming and policy toward Israel is unlikely to change?

While instability in the United States isn’t likely to be seized upon in the same way as it could in Ukraine, there are question marks about what the Western response would be if Iran and Israel’s tit-for-tat exchanges get out of control.

“If Israel decides to target civilian and economic infrastructure inside Iran, Tehran’s retaliation would be key,” said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations and a senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment. “That is the point—that a full-scale war between the two nations might become an active question, which could bring in the United States on the side of Israel.”

That is where a contested election could become an issue. While the Biden administration would still be in power during the transition period, the chaos of uncertainty about the next administration would complicate all foreign-policy decisions, especially in the Middle East.

While overseas wars are the most obvious areas of concern, uncertainty about the outcome of the election would also play into the hands of those who seek to run down and discredit the United States as an example to the world.

“America’s main international rivals are Russia and China, which relish any opportunity to paint Western democracy as a failure,” said Nic Cheeseman, a professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham.

Running down their democratic opponents has been a norm for communist states since the early days of the Soviet Union, and China is no exception. But although the propaganda is constant, it gets a big credibility boost if it has a real basis. If there is violence on the streets of the United States or people claiming the election was rigged, then is democracy really so great? If open society cannot keep people safe or the country stable, then maybe a communist dictatorship is better than liberal democracy and human rights?

U.S. diplomacy has already been affected by internal politics, with the tortuous Capitol Hill arguments over Ukraine funding being the most obvious and recent example. What might that look like if Republicans drag their heels on the confirmation hearings of officials or diplomats that Harris, as president, might want to appoint?

Instability in U.S. politics has the potential to cause global uncertainty. Of course, it’s natural that U.S. voters will be primarily concerned with the domestic implications of their own election. But a vacuum in Washington creates opportunities for people who want to diminish the United States and its values to step in and redefine the international order in their own autocratic image.