A piece of Russian history

I received today an unusual acquisition, a Mosin Nagant 1891/30 rifle, released at some point from a Russian arms cache and sold to the Americans. It was $99.95 at a local sporting goods store, cheap for a relatively accurate, high caliber weapon.

I won't bore you with the history of this model, but I will tell you that it was built by the Izhevsk Arsenal in 1942. For those of you who do not know, let me tell you where, and when, this rifle came from.

In 1942, the Soviets were fighting a losing battle against the invading German Wehrmacht. The Germans attacked in June 1941, and throughout 1941 and 1942, the Soviets were in a dire fight for existence. The Germans crushed the Soviet defensive lines and captured enormous numbers of prisoners. Only two things seemed to bode well for the Soviets: The endless Russian Steppe, and the brutal Russian winter. In fact, if Russia were the size of France, it would have been over with in 1941. If it were the size of the United States, it would have been decided in 1942, in the German's favor. But Russia goes on forever. Napoleon knew this, and Hitler was about to learn it. Even after the Germans had penetrated their furthest into Russian territory in 1943, within site of the three primary Russian cities, they had only conquered about 1/4th of Soviet territory.

The Russian defense, such as it could be called, comprised two basic commodities: Russian soldiers and space. When they had the former, they fought for the latter. Otherwise, they gave it up and fell back to another position. A seemingly unending supply of both kept the Soviets in the war, year after year. They created and committed infantry forces as quickly as they could. When the Germans threatened a base of production, they dismantled the factories and moved them further into the Russian interior, and built more weapons and formed more divisions. Many were captured. Some survived. The Germans advanced, and always, always, more Russian infantrymen, and further to go.

"With amazement and disappointment, we discovered in late October and early November that the beaten Russians seemed quite unaware that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist."
Günther Blumentritt, Chief of Operations to German General Gerd von Rundstedt, Army Group South

The primary weapon of the Soviet infantryman at this time was the Mosin Nagant 1891/30 rifle, an example of which I now possess. It is a bolt action rifle chambering the 7.62mm x 54mm round, basic in design and function, easy to manufacture, use and clean. And manufacture they did. Price is decided by supply and demand. My price, $99.95, was decided primarily by a huge supply of rifles coming from some 37 million that were manufactured by the Soviets and their clients during World War I, the interwar years, World War II, and after.

The Russians are famous for building dependable, reliable, simple weapons - and burying them. Who knows how many of these guns were locked away by the Soviets, waiting for the Cold War to turn hot. It never did. Now, apparently recognizing that the Americans are not going to invade, they have emptied their warehouses and are selling the obsolete firearms by the gross. The ammo, too. Surplus ammunition for this rifle from the Eastern Bloc and Russia goes for about 18 cents a round, versus about a dollar a round for new US ammo. I have 440 rounds of it on order now, made in the 1980's, maybe under the order of Andropov.

Sitting around for 30 years... waiting for the war with the capitalists. And this is a rifle that was obsolete even then. This round does not fit in the AK-47 or the AK-74.

I disassembled and cleaned the weapon. It seems to be in fine shape. Everywhere are the signs of corners cut and minor blemishes dismissed. The stock is a little rough, the metal work is not up to American standards, either now or then. But the rifle cocks, fires, and I suspect, does so accurately enough to kill a German soldier at 100 yards. In 1942, that was perfect.

I want to whisper to this gun: "You are in the United States now, and not in the hands of a defender of the Motherland. I bought you for ninety nine American dollars, because communism lost, and I have bought you as the cheapest spoils of victory."

I want to say that. I can't.

I can't sully the victory of the men who carried this rifle from Moscow to Berlin.I can't demean the sacrifice made by men who are no worse than I am. Whether their cause is just or not, it doesn't matter. They died. Their lives stopped in 1942 or '43 or '44. They put everything on the line to defend against tyranny, and some of them, in the end, lost everything. And in the end, won everything. They won it all.

I will never insult their name or their sacrifice. They are better men than me.

So I clean and learn this gun, like the young men who put their lives on the line for their homeland, and when I do...

The rifle speaks to me.

What are the chances that it did not see service? Very low. Made in 1942, it would have had to sit around unused while newer weapons were issued. Not likely.

This weapon was on the back of an infantryman in 1942. I know it. Did the soldier who carried it kill any Germans with it? The possibility is distinct. It was in service for three years of war and survived. It almost certainly fired upon the enemy. It was at the Pripyet marshes, in a column of Russian soldiers, perhaps. It was in Poland, or Lithuania or Kiev... it was held by an 18-year old farmer as he ran in the dust behind a T-34 at Kursk in 1943.

It was held by a boy, a Russian boy, who leveled it against the invading Fascists and died, before he could fire. It was at Karkhov, fighting the soldiers of Hoth, Kempf, Manstein! It defended the motherland in the service of Malinovski, Matutin, or even the great Zhukov himself. Perhaps his guard carried this gun.

Yes, the Communists lie, and sometimes those lies are what is needed, sometimes there is beauty in a lie. Sometimes the lie descends through the ages, in a cheap propaganda poster or a story in Pravda. In the end, victory is the first prerogative. The lie becomes merely a simplistic truth.

It was the son of a desperate and patriotic father from Peryaslav, terrified, and yet after seeing his village burn, wanted nothing but to kill the Nazi oppressor. Maybe it wasn't even a man. A woman held this rifle and fired on the advancing Germans in a trench surrounding Moscow, in the rubble of a building in Stalingrad, cold and sparse and meager, scratching for existence, the gray monotone of sacrifice to the Motherland.

Perhaps.

How the Media Creates the News

It has taken me a long time to realize this, even though my degree is in journalism, and I was a journalist for a time, both in college and afterwards. But there's something everyone should understand about the media in this country: They do not report the news. They make the news.

What you think about anyone famous is largely decided by how the media creates the story. They admit to following the "arc" of a story, or the "running commentary", like that arc is naturally existing and they're just following it. That's not true at all. The media follows the arc that it creates.

Let's try something: Let's come up with names for the story arcs that the media has chosen for the candidates.

We would like to believe that these "stories," the ongoing streams of news about one or a series of events, are merely reflections of reality. We think, for example, that the arc of one story, let's name it "McCain's Terrible Campaign", is merely the reflection of a terrible campaign. And to some degree it is the reflection of McCain's mistakes. But the media gets to decide how it is going to portray any story, and eventually, any story arc. Both candidacies can have difficulties and successes. The media gets to decide whether, and how, and how often, and how long, to cover every success and every failure. This is how this running commentary is created.

Let me be clear that this is not some conspiracy. It's just the result of who reporters are, the kind of people who decide to take a low pay, relatively influential position. They tend to be democrats. That reporters and editors are heavily democrat is beyond debate. When people of a certain outlook report things, they decide what to report and how to report it, and their bias creeps in. Sometimes it is well suppressed, sometimes it is obvious. Someone like Brit Hume or Brian Williams conceals his bias well. Someone like Keith Olbermann, not well at all.

But the trend is clear. A story arc called "McCain's Terrible Campaign" is much more likely to develop than a story arc called "Obama's Terrible Campaign," even if both have the same campaigns, because the former is the one that the reporter finds compelling, and therefore is the one that he is most likely to pursue. Looking closely at his preferred candidates mistakes is uncomfortable. Looking at his opponent's is exhilarating. It's fun to cover the opponent's mistakes, and tempting to find more. It's uncomfortable and unpleasant to cover your candidate's mistakes, and you do not actively pursue them.

To hear the media tell it today, Palin's choice as VP was a catastrophe. Biden's was... well, it was just a choice. Biden literally says ten times as many embarrassing things as Palin. But Palin's story arc is "Totally Unqualified Ditz", and Biden's is "Experienced Statesman who Creates Harmless Gaffes." Palin refuses to answer what newspaper she reads and is portrayed as stupid, uneducated and uninterested in the world. Obama refuses to answer questions about William Ayers and he is not portrayed as secretive, hiding something, untrustworthy - the media simply stops asking the question and ignores it. Palin stumbles through an answer and it gets wide coverage. Biden makes a bizarre claim about an attack on America if Obama is elected, and the running commentary is that it is harmless little screw-up, just another "Bidenism".

Biden is just a harmless klutz. Obama is a great speaker, but private. McCain is "erratic" and "maybe a little senile". Palin is dangerously unqualified. These are the running commentaries.

Note that "unqualified" is not the story arc that Obama got. His story arc could be named "Historic Candidacy." He's as unqualified as Palin, arguably, and he's pursuing a much more important office. But his story arc was never going to be "Dangerously Unqualified" with a friendly media. It has been "Historic Candidacy" from day one.

The Mortgage Meltdown as I See It

OK. This is how I understand it. Sorry I don't sound more pissed off, I wrote it for a non-pissed off venue. I'll throw a few fucks into the mix to spice it up.

There are two issues regarding these bad loans that are causing such trouble to our economy. The question, to me, is twofold: Why were so many loans written that were going to go bad? Don't banks know how to loan money? Secondly, why are companies like Lehman Brothers going under because of bad loans they didn't even make?

There is a secondary market that buys the loans, but it doesn't guarantee them. This secondary market buys loans or parts of loans as securities - basically like stocks. If I'm Fannie Mae, I take 1,000 subprime loans and bundle them together into a set of securities worth, in total, say, 10 million dollars. The securities, let's say there are 10,000 of them, are sold for $1,100 each - $1,000 for the loan, $100 to cover expenses and a profit. You buy one share, and now you own .01 percent of 10 million dollars worth of loans. This is called Securitization.

Normally a bank doesn't write high risk loans unless it can charge a lot of interest for them, to cover expenses as some of the loans fail at a higher than normal rate. This also results in fewer loans being written overall, because most poor people can't afford the higher interest rates that are normally charged. But Fannie Mae will buy these loans from you as a bank, because it has been instructed to do so by Bill Clinton. Clinton does this because he wants poor people to own houses too. This is not sound business, but it is government, that explains why it is not sound business. Fannie Mae is guaranteed as a company (implicitly) by the government precisely because the government makes them buy these loans that otherwise sane companies would never buy.

I'm not aware of anyone who guarantees these loans other than Fannie/Freddie, and as far as I know, they don't even guarantee the loans, they are simply guaranteed as companies. Maybe other companies guarantee these loans, but I don't know of any.

The central problem here as I see it is that loans were written outside of generally accepted good loan writing procedures. Banks don't write loans that are too risky to make a profit on, because their motivation is profit, unless they can find someone to buy it. And nobody will buy it at a profitable rate unless it can be guaranteed somehow. Enter the implicit guarantee of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (fuck, added for spice)

Guarantee: why the loans exist in the first place. Without the guarantee, people won't write them at the low rates that poor people need to buy a home with. Ergo, less bad loans when everything goes to hell.

Securitization: why the loans are owned by investment companies when they go bad, instead of Countrywide and Wachovia. (fuck, gratuitously included for no reason. Ok, I'm done with the fucks.)

So, the scenario is this:

Clinton says "write bad loans for good rates." F/F (Fannie and Freddie) do so because they operate by different rules, as dictated by the government. The upside is that these "alternate rules" create an implicit guarantee of F/F.

Loan gets made. Poor Guys #1 through #1,000,000 buy houses. Loans get sold to F/F because F/F is buying them because Clinton told them to, and implicitly guaranteed that the company would be covered. It would be Poor Guys #1 through #100,000 buying houses, but these cheap loans are being sold to poorer credit risks, so more people get them. This causes the housing market to grow into a bubble, because a lot more homes are being sold, and builders can't keep up with all this new demand. This creates the illusion that you can buy a house that you can't afford and flip it later on, and come out clean. So a lot of people, not just poor people, buy houses they can't afford as investment vehicles.

Fannie creates a security (basically shares of stock) on a group of loans that it bought. It sells these securities. These are bought by Lehman Brothers, because they have a good rating, because the government guarantees the company that wrote them.

This goes great as long as prices are going up. Even if you can't afford it, you can sell it for a profit, so you're fine. When housing prices go down though, poor people as well as investors get stuck holding houses that are worth less than they owe on them. So the loans start failing in large numbers.

Poor Guys #1 through #600,000 pay their loans OK. Poor Guys #600,001 through #1,000,000 default on their loans. This causes the value of the security to tank, because the government is guaranteeing F/F, not the loan itself (as far as I know). The value tanks so much that F/F go bankrupt, and anyone holding these "toxic loans" suddenly has a lot less money than they thought they were going to have. This causes failures outside of F/F: Companies that own the stock (Lehman, many banks) and companies that insure those companies (AIG). Suddenly companies can't pay the credit that they owe, so the creditors all freak out and raise their credit rates, or issue less credit. Less credit is less economic activity, and other people can't borrow money to pay their bills. Recession ensues.

This is how Bill Clinton's desire for poor people and minorities to own homes resulted in a worldwide market meltdown.

This meltdown has so far cost trillions of dollars in value, and will cost trillions more in inflation due to all the money being pumped into banks to keep them from failing.

At least that's how I understand it.

I'm about to twist off

OK, I created this blog because I'm pissed off and I'm getting more pissed off.

This is my question, first: Does the world need to know that a fucking plumber in Ohio owes back taxes?

That's what our democrat-controlled leftist media assholes have done. See, if you ask The One a question, you'd better be damned sure he answers it right. Because if you manage to stump The One, what do you think is going to happen?

Well, let's put it this way: What if you stumped God? What if you asked God a question, and God is like "...shit, you got me, man." What would happen to you? That's right. God would vaporize your sorry ass in about two seconds for making him look stupid, because God is powerful. He can do that. You'd be turned into a pink mist if you did that to God.

Obama, The One, he is all knowing, and as gentle as the lamb. But he is not a spiteful god, no. He does not kill people for making him look stupid. He is far more cruel. He sics his vicious attack dogs, the American Mainstream Media on you, and ruins your life.

So that's where we are. The MSM has revealed what might be the most important information of the entire election: That a fucking moron plumber in Ohio owes back taxes. Why do we know this? Because the moron plumber has to be destroyed. Never mind talking about why Obama would say what he did -- the media does not question The One. The media simply does as it is told.

You know what's going to make me piss my pants in glee? When the mainstream media digs into Obama's past half as hard as they dig into the past of a fucking plumber in Ohio.