Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature.

Why Arabs Lose Wars

This quote is from J. Kb’s post and made me laugh because I saw exactly the same thing in Venezuela although not with the military but with professional audio.

Before I ended up with my business partner and fellow engineer, I worked in a couple of studios in Caracas. Being a young man, trained in a good school in the U.S of A made it easy to get a job. I worked in two places and both had the same approach to information: Don’t share. Back in the age of analog tape, you needed to know certain setting of you tape machine and what was its  maintenance record as it would help you detect possible problems before they happened. The same applied to the console and some of the rack-mounted effects. The more you know, the less crap you have to deal during a session.

I could not get a straight answer ever.

In fact, I could not get the manuals for the equipment! I requested them over and over and I was always told a good engineer did not need them to operate an specific model of gear. Imagine my shock coming from a culture where the frigging operating manuals for every piece of gear in the school were right there in the Control Room ready to be used at a moment’s notice.

One of my “specialties” as engineer was doing maintenance to the tape machines and it was a bit of a challenge to do so without the manuals. Also other necessary gear to perform maintenance was considered by the owners as unnecessary or too expensive and was ordered to do without. Finally I told my last employer that this was a stupid way to run a studio and why they did things like that. The answer is one some of you probably heard before: “We have been doing it for 20 years and never had a problem.” I may have responded to my last boss that indeed they had a problem: their recordings sounded like shit. I believe he did was not sorry to see me go.

I was told that another Venezuelan “gringo” like me was building a studio and I went see him. We hit it off fast and the conversation eventually landed on the gear he had for the studio. The tape machine was a Tascam 85-16B and my next question was if the manual was available. He said nothing but went into a file cabinet and produced this thick 3 ring binder.

I was home.

Once the studio was up and running, we prided ourselves of being sharers of information. I don’t think a month went by that another studio called us with a problem and we were happy about sharing possible fixes. People thought we were some sort of Audio genius that knew anything and everything, but the reality was we were collectors of information. Our repair room also held the audio library with a competent collection of audio recording books and about a decade of Pro Audio magazines we were subscribed to and read religiously. At least 2 young audio entrepreneurs decide to get into the recording studio business and they came to us asking for the How-To.  It was a proud moment when they called us to say they had their first paid session and thanked us for the help.

Were we hated because we shared info? Oh shit yes. How dare we rock the boat?! They gossiped crap about us, dropped a dime about we dealing drugs from the Studio (We had long hair and wore flipflops, then again we had NRA and gun stuff all over my side of the office and a poster of an electric chair in the break room indicating our mood if you were to violate the studio rules which included ZERO DRUGS) and even a couple of daring souls came in trying to sabotage our equipment. Keyword: Tried. Let’s say we developed a “Do not fuck with” reputation after that.

To summarize a long post: The other studios were fearful that by sharing knowledge, other people would benefit and they would lose market share. They never understood that the clients want quality and delivery speed and are willing to pay for it. Once our reputation was established, we never stopped having clients, even when we shared info that lead to the creation of two other studios.

And it was never about the information but what you could do with it to give the client the best recording possible. It is not that I had the manual for the console or the tape machine or the reverb, it is that the manual provided me with not only the operations instructions but how to keep the machine properly maintained for a recording with exquisite sound.

It goes to a saying we have heard in the gun culture: “It is not the arrow but the Injun.”

This is/was a show that started with a nice premise (Top criminal manages to bamboozle the FBI into do stuff for him) but let’s face it, the script quality the last three seasons has been less than good. The only reason I was watching it is because James Spader continues to do an amazing acting job as Red Reddington, the cultural concierge of crime with zero morals.

Last year, actress Megan Boone had to do her bit for Wokness after the Parkland shooting and swore her character (FBI agent Elizbeth Keen) would never be seen using an AR 15. Since I really don’t remember her using one in the series, I did not give a damn about her posturing as she was one of many Hollywood Dancing Monkeys doing the Official Gun Control PR thing at the time.

But on this week’s episode, the series decided to go full woke sharknado. The premise was that certain important men (you are not told all the details till halfway the show) are being kidnaped, kept for a couple of months and then suddenly released.   The victims do not cooperate with the authorities so there is a mystery behind it. Midway through the show you discover what’s the commonality among the victims: They are conservative pro-life males who were kidnaped and somehow, by doing surgery in some basement somewhere by apparently an IT guy and a pissed off mom, they were inserted with  fetuses that they would have to carry to full term because the laws of the State would prohibit them to have an abortion and that would teach them a lesson on interfering with women’s body rights.

First, my jaw broke a floor tile so hard it dropped. The human body is not a collection of Lego blocks you can remove and re-insert at you pleasure.  The amount of physiological and medical contradictions in the episode’s premise just made the show extra stupid. Second, what kind of idiot producer said, “You know what? Let’s do a Woke Pro-Choice show and shove it to the Male Supremacy.  because principles!” Dear dude or dudette or duddeX: I watch a show like yours to entertain me, not to be told by morons who failed Biology and Health classes and have the morality of Dr Mengele, what is politically and morally right. This last is ironic since the producers and writers had every character in the series abandon their moral compass and FBI oath before the end of the second season.

So dear The Blacklist producers, go FWoke Yourselves.

There are several version of this song, but I went with Foreigners because it happens in a recording studio and that gets me in the feels. Nominated for the List of Church Music.

PS: This was supposed to be for next Sunday with a Hat tip for Jay, but I clicked the wrong button. Enjoy anyway.

First, AOC:

I want to be the party of the New Deal again.

The party of the Civil Rights Act,
the one that electrified this nation and fights for all people.

For that, many would call us radical.
But we aren’t “pushing the party left,”
we are bringing the party home.pic.twitter.com/wLeDaxCHkZ

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 17, 2019

Next, Bernie Sanders [mis]quoting/paraphrasing her:

“It’s time that we become the party of FDR again.

It’s time for us to become the party of the Civil Rights Act again.

It’s time for us to become the party that fights for queer liberation again, the anti-war party, a party that establishes peace and prosperity.” –@AOC pic.twitter.com/8APqzdFiNV

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 16, 2019

So when AOC and Bernie say they want to be the party of FDR, what do they mean?

Do they want to inter the Japanese again?

Do they want to resist the desegregation of the military during a time of war?

Do they want to create federal housing programs that made segregation in the north possible through Redlining?

Do they want to send Jewish refugees from the Holocaust back to Germany to die in concentration camps?

Do they want to round up Jewish Holocaust survivors and ship them back Madagascar?

Maybe they just want to worsen the next economic downturn into another Great Depression with excessive economic meddling?

It amazes me just how little the Democrats know about how awful FDR was.  By every other Progressive standard, FDR should be canceled and banished to the dustbin of history for being a vile racist and bigot.

I guess they want to overlook/erase that because he got closer to making the US a socialist nation than any other person in American history.

I saw this at Scientific American:

Climate Change May Be Blowing Up Arms Depots
More intense heat waves can destabilize the components of munitions, particularly where explosives are not properly stored

Oh for fuck’s sake.

The author of this piece is Peter Schwartzstein.  According to his bio:

I’m a British-American journalist, consultant, and think-tanker based in Cairo, but am usually on the road elsewhere in the Middle East and North and East Africa.

I write about regional environment and geo-political issues, with a focus on trans-boundary water disputes, the conflict-climate nexus, food security and refugee movements. Though in an effort to cling to my last tatters of sanity, I also contribute occasional history and science stories to Smithsonian Magazine.

He is why I hate science writers.  Science writers are not scientists or engineers, they are journalists or English majors who write about technical topics.  But having little technical knowledge, they do a shit job writing about it.  Furthermore, coming from fields like journalism, which is heavily politically biased, they infuse their technical work with that bias.

Case in point, this article.

It was a little before 4 A.M., on an airless morning in June 2018, when the arms depot in Baharka, Iraqi Kurdistan, blew up. Brightening the dawn sky for kilometers around, the blast sent rockets, bullets and artillery rounds hurtling in every direction. Officials say no one was killed. But were it not for the early hour and reduced garrison, the death toll might well have been horrendous.

A year later, another arsenal exploded just to the southwest of Baharka, reportedly destroying millions of dollars’ worth of ammunition amassed during the fight against ISIS. Two similar blasts around Baghdad followed a few weeks after that, killing and wounding dozens of people between them. Before the end of this past summer, at least six munitions sites had gone up in flames in Iraq alone, according to Iraqi security sources.

While details of the blasts were scarce, investigators agreed that most incidents shared a common theme: hot weather. Each explosion came in the midst of a long, scorching Iraqi summer, when temperatures routinely topped 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). And they all struck just as powerful heat waves ramped up. Explosives experts say such intense heat can weaken munitions’ structural integrity, cause the thermal expansion of explosive chemicals and damage protective shields.

That can happen and this is a real concern for munitions.

Most munitions are designed to withstand severe heat but only in the relatively short term.  If exposed to extreme temperatures and humidity for long enough, a munition can become unstable and may even more or less strip itself apart.  The wood in antipersonnel stake mines rots; rubber and plastic in plastic mines can shatter in the unrelenting sun. Without regular monitoring, heated explosive materials within munitions can force their way through seals and filler plugs, a shell casing’s weakest points. Nitroglycerin becomes so sensitive when it absorbs moisture that even a slight shake can set it off.

Also true.

“The physical effect of abnormally high temperatures is that a high level of stress occurs between components because of the different expansion rates of the individual materials,” says John Montgomery, chief technical adviser for explosive ordnance disposal at the Halo Trust, a land-mine-clearance nonprofit organization.

This can happen.

Higher temperatures also raise the risk of handling errors by fatigued armorers. From chaotic conflict zones to the best-equipped NATO-standard storage facilities, soldiers say summer is when explosive accidents peak because of a combination of foggy decision-making and more sensitive munitions, both caused by extreme heat. “In the military, everything is more difficult when it’s summer,” says an Iraqi artillery officer who gives his name as Ali. “And now summer never ends.”

This is a logistics and training issue.  Use more people on shorter duty rotations to combat fatigue.

But for all those improvements to happen, there is going to have to be a sea change in attitudes, arms experts say. Many militaries do not make stored munitions much of a priority, and they—and environmentalists—are not thrilled at the prospect of having to go through the expensive and sometimes polluting process of destroying and refreshing their stockpiles more frequently. “It can be difficult to get any government to focus on ammunition unless something bad happens, because it’s just not a sexy topic,” says Robin Mossinkoff, head of the support section at the Forum for Security Co-operation at the intergovernmental Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. “But if you can afford to spend $300 million on new weapons, you can afford to do this.

Nothing he said is technically wrong.  My problem is that it is biased by a Brit-Yankee based in Cairo who has clearly gone native.

There is a fantastic article published in Middle East Quarterly 20 years ago that is just as accurate and relevant as ever.  I was first introduced to it in ROTC and it should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the Middle East.

Why Arabs Lose Wars
by Norvell B. De Atkine

I’m not going to go into the whole thing, but there are two parts that are necessary to understand.

Information as power:
In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature.

And

Indifference to Safety:
In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could have been prevented by minimal efforts. To the (perhaps overly) safety-conscious Americans, Arab societies appear indifferent to casualties and show a seemingly lackadaisical approach to training safety.

So a large portion of what Schwartzstein is blaming on climate change is actually the result of the terrible culture of Arab armies.  They don’t know how to build proper munitions storage facilities, they don’t handle the munitions safely, and they wouldn’t care about the safety of the depot workers or surrounding civilians if they did.

Notice how the explosions he cites are in Iraq.

But it is his last paragraph that is most annoying.

As the materials scientists for a military contractor, I have personally done environmental testing on munitions.  I’ve frozen it, baked, blasted it with UV radiation, it and sprayed it will all sorts of corrosive or caustic chemicals.

I can’t tell you what our munitions can handle, but I can tell you that MIL-SPEC requires a minimum of 140 degF and -40 degF stability for both long term and cyclic exposure.  That testing is governed by both MIL-SPEC and ASTM standards and that testing facilities are ISO certified.

Global warming isn’t going to cause US military munitions to accidentally go off any time soon.

I don’t know if all NATO countries use exactly the same standards and tests that we do, but I have a feeling they are very close.

So if a bunch of Arab armies and terrorist cells using old Soviet surplus weapons, or Iranian or Egyptian knockoffs, blow themselves to hell with improper storage and handling of munitions that weren’t properly made and tested to begin with… I have no fucks to give about that.

Just make sure our soldiers stay clear of those depots and enjoy the fireworks.

I need to make a list of songs from back then that could perfectly fit fo a Sunday Church service.  This is one of them.

Finally got the announcement of parole from Twitter. In a sense it was funny that I got sacked for saying former Bolivian president Evo Morales needed a time out in front of a firing squad and 2 days later he renounced escaped the country afraid he was going to get his ass shot.

And thank you to each and every one who helped publishing the posts while incarcerated.