Thursday, July 20, 2017

Fascinating



6 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Great story, and a fascinating theory. One little nitpick: Malcolm Gladwell compares the "ballistics" and "stopping power" of David's slung stone with "a 45 millimeter handgun". There is no "45 millimeter" handgun; you probably couldn't even lift one. There is, of course, the .45 caliber handgun, of legendary stopping power; the cartridge was developed to use on rampaging Moros in the Philippines (America's first modern war against suicidal Jihadists), who were hopped up on drugs and on whom .38 caliber rounds (I'm not sure if that was the .38 Special, or its predecessor, the .38 Long Colt) proved ineffective. .45 caliber is equivalent to 11.25 millimeters.

BTW, for students of military history [Skoonj?], Gen. "Black Jack" Pershing had some interesting ways of dealing with the Philippine Moslems...

JimB said...

Stu,
I believe you're talking about the .45 Long Colt not the .45 APC. A few years too early for the 1911.

Unknown said...

JimB: Of course it was "too early for the 1911"! Did I say anything about the .45 ACP or the Model 1911? I was talking about .45 caliber, although I did err in stating that "the cartridge was developed to use on rampaging Moros", since that caliber existed in several configurations long before that conflict in The Philippines (which ended in about 1902, if I recall correctly). However, based on the U.S. experience in The Philippines, Col. John T. Thompson in 1904 declared that any new sidearm adopted by the army should be "of not less than .45 caliber".

Skoonj said...

Stu, you are right about Pershing's various ways of dealing with Muslims. Since I first of dipping bullets in bacon grease there was some "research" saying it was only scare mongering, and didn't really happen. Since then, though, additional sources say that yes he did dip bullets in bacon grease, and also used bacon grease and pork fat on the corpses of dead Muslim enemies when they were buried.

I am now pretty sure that yes, Pershing and his men used pork against the enemy, and it did help. This from a discussion forum on the matter: It happened in the Philippines about 1911, when Gen. John J. Pershing was in command of the garrison. There had been numerous Islamic terrorist attacks, so "Black Jack" told his boys to catch the perps and teach them a lesson.

Forced to dig their own graves, the terrorists were all tied to posts, execution style. The US soldiers then brought in pigs and slaughtered them, rubbing their bullets in the blood and fat. Thus, the terrorists were terrorized; they saw that they would be contaminated with hogs' blood. This would mean that they could not enter Heaven, even if they died as terrorist martyrs.

All but one was shot, their bodies dumped into the grave, and the hog guts dumped atop the bodies. The lone survivor was allowed to escape back to the terrorist camp and tell his brethren what happened to the others. This brought a stop to terrorism in the Philippines for the next 50 years.

Rodger the Real King of France said...

Whoa ...that's a lot of comedy for a serious subject.

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