The Benefits of Extremism

In these modern times, there is a grave misunderstanding circulating among reasonable people: the quaint belief that moderation, compromise, and balanced thought hold intrinsic value.  We are far past the time when we should have dispensed with such outdated notions.  Extremism in political beliefs, I propose, is not merely advantageous—it is the pinnacle of human intellectual and social evolution.

Never let logic, reason, common sense, or even reasonable doubt come between you and your cherished core beliefs—particularly those positions that you were born into such as religion or political party.   Take pride in the fact that you have always voted for the same political party, secure in the knowledge that despite the constant shifting of political party platforms or that politicians from both parties have been sentenced to jail, never once was the opposing candidate the correct choice.  Your tribe/clan/gang’s party has always been better than the other political party, chiefly because it has you as a member.  Ignore the troublesome fact that when a political party no longer has to earn your vote, you no longer have a vote. 

First, let's discuss simplicity.  Life is inherently complex and stressful.  Holding moderate, balanced beliefs necessitates tedious contemplation, constant reading, exhausting discussions, and—worst of all—the willingness to admit you might be wrong.  Conversely, adopting an extreme political belief system instantly removes these cumbersome burdens. Why grapple with nuance and complexity when you can, instead, rely on unshakable certainty?  Indeed, life is much simpler when your worldview consists entirely of absolutes.

Imagine the hours saved at social gatherings.  Without the needless clutter of nuance, you can effortlessly categorize all of your friends and closest family members as either staunch allies or irredeemable enemies.  Conversations become quicker, gatherings become shorter, and your social circle becomes refreshingly predictable.  Who wants relationships complicated by empathy and understanding when you can be safely ensconced in a political echo chamber? Certainly not the busy extremist!

Next, there's the benefit of clarity. Holding extreme beliefs provides unparalleled clarity of purpose.  There's never a moment of indecision, as your path forward is always crystal clear:  whatever your chosen ideological doctrine mandates.  When confronted with an unfamiliar or uncomfortable situation, there's no need for analysis or deliberation.  Simply consult your ideological handbook (real or imagined) and move confidently forward, armed with moral superiority and absolute assurance.

Economically, extremism offers surprising financial benefits.  Consider the cost savings associated with adopting one-dimensional (Or, these days, monochromatic: Red or Blue…or, maybe…Green?) ideologies.  No longer do you need to subscribe to multiple news outlets or waste money on diverse educational resources.  Your consumption of information can comfortably shrink to just one consistently reliable source that endlessly echoes your existing beliefs perfectly.  Think of the reduced expenses on books, magazines, and subscribing to multiple television channels.  One pamphlet or perhaps a single, trusted Facebook group, is all you need to stay blissfully informed.

Let's not forget the physical and psychological health advantages of extremist thinking.  Moderation and open-mindedness lead to incessant stress and anxiety—and trust me, stress leads to a heart attack.   The moderates endlessly worry about fairness, moral consistency, and the feelings of others—such exhausting burdens. By embracing extreme views, you can free yourself from the anxiety of moral ambiguity, releasing a torrent of delightful endorphins as you confidently judge the entirety of humanity from your lofty ideological perch.  Nothing is as intensely satisfying as virtue signaling for the one true cause.

Extremism also enhances community cohesion.  Shared hatred or disdain for those who hold opposing views provides a powerful bonding experience.  Social interactions become effortlessly streamlined as you quickly identify those who share your inflexible viewpoints, fostering friendships bound by mutual intolerance.  The stronger your shared opposition to "the other," the closer your bonds become.  After all, nothing builds camaraderie quite like collective disdain.  Depending on your choice of the one real truth, you automatically have a favorite television news show, a preselected set of enemies, and already decided-upon candidates to vote for in all future elections.  You even have a pre-approved set of epithets to call those with different opinions.  Fascist, looney lefty, Nazi, Socialist—these are just a few of the ample stock of ready-to-use insults for every occasion.  Remember, every policy of your opponent is wrong and must be resisted, even if it seems to be working.

Moreover, adopting extreme political beliefs vastly simplifies your digital life.  Algorithms across all social media platforms are explicitly designed to reward extreme positions with increased visibility.  Moderates languish unseen, while you, the extremist, will find your digital profile skyrocketing, earning you likes, shares, and retweets from an ever-growing circle of similarly morally gifted individuals.  Why toil in online obscurity when you could be a viral sensation, heroically leading the charge against nuance and reason?

Consider, too, the wonderful world of fashion that extremism unlocks.  No longer will you be subjected to the agony of deciding between shades of gray.  Your attire can now boldly proclaim your ideological allegiance with unambiguous clarity.  T-shirts, hats, badges, and banners emblazoned with catchy slogans replace bland, politically neutral attire.  Such decisive fashion statements allow you to effortlessly signal your moral and intellectual superiority in public spaces.  (After all, anyone with a belief system too long to fit on a bumper sticker is obviously a degenerate.)

Finally, let us acknowledge the existential reassurance extremism provides.  Doubt is a draining and often painful experience.  Why grapple with existential dread when an extreme ideology promises clear, unequivocal answers to all of life's deepest questions?  Certainty is bliss, and extremism offers ample supplies.  Indeed, there's profound comfort in knowing exactly whom to blame for all societal ills.  Whether your chosen scapegoat is an opposing political party, a social group, or perhaps even an abstract concept like globalization, extremism provides the simple solace of having an easily identifiable villain.

In conclusion, the benefits of extreme political beliefs are manifold.  They liberate you from burdensome thought, simplify your social and digital interactions, provide economic efficiencies, enhance your personal sense of identity, and create unbreakable bonds based on mutual disdain.  Truly, moderation is an overrated, exhausting, and ultimately futile pursuit.  Embrace extremism and enjoy the blissful simplicity it provides—you'll never have to think critically again.

Most importantly, you already know that everything above is true since I was obviously talking about the nuts in the other political party.  So, embrace the farthest reaches of the political spectrum.  Remember, the only thing found in the middle of the road is roadkill. 

A Wogdon Affair

Britbox is rerunning the old Lovejoy series, and I’m hooked.  If you have never watched the show—and I recommend that you do—the series is about an antiques dealer in England who possesses a special gift, he is a “divvy” a person who somehow just knows when he is standing next to a fake work of art.  I admit to being addicted to the series, despite its being more than thirty years old.

After eight seasons, the show went off the air—primarily because the public wanted grittier mystery shows, tougher protagonists, and stories with more violence and edgier dialogue.  There was no place left on the air for a show where an intelligent light-hearted hero broke the fourth wall to discuss art history.

Good movies and good television shows frequently get their start from good books and Lovejoy is no exception.  The Lovejoy series, penned by Jonathan Gash (the pseudonym of John Grant), is comprised of 24 novels, published between 1977 and 2008.  In real life Grant was a British Army doctor, who opened a private practice after he retired from the military.  Perhaps the real mystery is not a story told in one of the author’s books, but where he learned so much about antiques.

I recently tracked down a hardback copy of the first book in the series, the Judas Pair, which is about a matched pair of dueling pistols made by Durs Egg.  (No, that’s not a typo:  his name really was Durs Egg and he was arguably the finest gunsmith of his time.)  For a brief period, dueling pistols were the highest form of art in the realm of gunsmithing.  Finely crafted pairs of pistols were carefully fitted into wooden cases, along with screwdrivers, powder horns, bullet molds, and ramrods.

You didn’t have to use only dueling pistols to fight duels—there are lots of records of duels using an astonishing variety of bizarre weapons.  In 1808, two Frenchmen armed with blunderbusses fought in the sky over Paris until one combatant successfully shot down his opponent’s hot air balloon.  Otto von Bismarck suggested that duelists fight with sausages, one of which was to be laden with poison.  There are recorded duels with every imaginable edged weapon and one rather gruesome one conducted with sledgehammers.  

A friend and I once conducted a duel with roman candles at 20 feet. Although neither of us can remember quite why we fought, we did learn two valuable lessons:  The first is always to drink mescal in moderation and the second is that you really shouldn’t wear a nylon shirt while engaging in such a duel.

Another unconventional duel, equally fueled with alcohol, was Jim Bowie’s bizarre knife fight in the dark in what became known as the “Sandbar Fight.”  Bowie and his opponent were observing a duel with pistols, and when both participants fired and missed their opponents, the spectators joined in with whatever weapons were at hand.  Bowie was shot and repeatedly stabbed in the chest but still managed to kill Major Norris Wright with his knife. (Remember, Bowie survived to die at the Alamo.)

It was because of just such drunken brawls that a group of Irish aristocrats created the Code Duello in 1777.  Duels were to be serious affairs that settled matters of honor, not wild brawls in which spectators joined in the fighting.  First, there were “seconds,” (representatives of each duelist) to mediate disputes before dueling took place and whose job it was to arrange the place and time of the duel (usually in a secluded location to eliminate unwanted participants).  The challenged duelist was given the choice of weapons, and the seconds were charged with insuring that both weapons were strictly equal in all respects.

The favorite weapons were usually pistols, but this was not always the case.  In 1842, James Shields felt humiliated by a humorous letter Abraham Lincoln had written for the local newspaper.  Following the Code Duello, Shield’s second demanded satisfaction from Lincoln.  As the challenged, Lincoln chose broadswords.  The two combatants met on an island in the Mississippi River where Lincoln, nine inches taller than Shields, warmed up by cutting twigs from tree branches that no other man present could reach.   Not surprisingly, both seconds were able to settle the matter with apologies, thus eliminating the need for the duel.

This gave rise to the dueling pistols set: finely crafted weapons that were utterly reliable, and as nearly identical as possible.  These pistols were usually a smaller caliber than were normally used in warfare, since the object was to prove honor—not necessarily to kill.  Nor were the barrels to be rifled, because that would make the guns more accurate and, thus, more likely to kill.  (Some dueling pistols were smooth bore for the last two inches but rifled further down the barrel where it was difficult for the seconds to inspect.  This illegal rifling was referred to as “French rifling” in England.)

Duelists were to face each other after walking apart ten paces each, and at a given signal raise their pistols, aim, and fire at will.  If a pistol misfired or failed to fire because the hammer was not properly cocked, that was considered that opponents shot and he was not allowed to reload.  If either opponent deloped, deliberately firing his weapon into the ground or air, the other duelist was free to either delope or fire at his opponent.  This was assumed to have settled the affair, but if both parties still felt aggrieved, they were free to reload and fire.

The finest dueling pistols were made in England by such notable gunsmiths as Joseph Manton, Durs Egg, and Robert Wogdon.  The latter made so many sets that in England a duel was referred to as a “Wogdon Affair.”   The pistols at right were made by Egg for the Prince of Wales, later King George IV.  Today, they are on exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dueling in England was against the law, but rarely resulted in criminal trials.  When it was, juries rarely brought back a guilty verdict.  The last duel in England—at least the last one that was public—was fought between Lieutenant James Seton and Captain Hawkey in 1845 after Hawkey objected to Seton’s unwanted attention to Mrs. Hawkey.  In the first round of shots, Seton missed while Hawkey’s gun was only half-cocked and failed to fire.  The duel could have ended there, but Hawkey insisted on a second round of fire.  Seton missed again but Hawkey shot Seton in the abdomen—a fatal wound.  Hawkey was charged and tried, but the jury never left the jury box, taking only nine seconds to acquit the Captain.

Dueling lingered longer on the continent, and though the practice eventually died out, the idea of dueling never completely left.  At the Athens Olympics in 1908, two different dueling contests were exhibited.  In the first contest, athletes shot (unarmed) mannequins, while the second featured combatants actually shooting at each other but with wax bullets.  While modified dueling never became an Olympic event, the sport did become briefly popular.  The last public contest in the United States was held in Carnegie Hall.  

Reading the news, I sometimes wonder if we got rid of dueling too soon.  Perhaps we should bring it back, but limit participation to lawyers, gang members, and politicians.

Space Age Easter Eggs

Unfortunately, Hogwarts is not real.  But, if you look carefully, there are a few places where real magic has occurred regularly.  Menlo Park, Bell Labs, Cern, Cavendish Labs, The Skunkworks, and one of my favorites, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, regularly produce very real magic.

As the author Arthur C. Clarke famously said, Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. 

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has an interesting past, dating back to a handful of nerdy students and a friendly professor at Caltech back in the 1930’s, who were known as “the Suicide Squad” for their habit of small explosions (and the occasional fire in their dorm rooms).  These eccentric geniuses were obsessed with rocketry, which was then considered junk science.

Despite the disdain of the rest of the scientists, the Suicide Squad kept trying to perfect a liquid propellant for their rockets, (many of those fuels spontaneously combusted when mixed).  Though no one was seriously hurt, Caltech banished such experiments on campus but provided three remote acres in a place call Arroyo Seco.  Since there was nothing in that dry gully, the Suicide Squad was free to conduct its& research.  Finally free to do whatever they wanted, they thrived.  Eventually, they stopped blowing up the gully—mostly—and the rockets flew—mostly.

When World War II started, the Suicide Boys worked for the US Army, developing Jet-Assisted Takeoff (JATO) and they became a government installation run by Caltech.  When the war ended, they were the scientists who worked with Von Braun to launch V-2 rockets here in New Mexico.  (If you ever get a chance, there is a great museum at the  White Sands Missile Range post, where you can see one of the remaining V-2 rockets.)

After the Russians launched Sputnik, JPL became part of NASA and has been incredibly active ever since.  These are the people who design the rovers that have successfully landed on the moon (and lately, Mars), who built the Voyager spacecraft, and who also built the helicopter that flew on Mars.

Less well-known, JPL’s population is also the people with a sense of humor that put Easter Eggs on their spacecraft.  Let me give you an example:

When the Perseverance rover was landing on Mars, it landed with a multicolor parachute.  A camera on the top of the rover sent back a magnificent photo, but few realized that the pattern in the parachute was actually binary code that spelled out, "DarJPL's motto from a speech by President Theodore Roosevelt, a long with the GPS coordinates of JPL's headquarters in Pasadena, California.  Also aboard the rover was a tiny sliver of a piece of Martian meteorite that had landed on Earth.  The JPL decided that it should be the first object to make a roundtrip journey back to Mars.

Then there was the calibration target on the 2018 Insider rover.  A calibration target helps the rover’s camera adjust for color and adjust for distortion.  JPL followed NASA’s instructions, and carefully hid in the border the Braille code for “JPL.”  A few years later on a different rover, they glued a 1909 Lincoln Penny onto the calibration target.  This was JPL’s way of referencing the habit of geologists placing a coin next to rocks before taking photographs of their samples.

My favorite JPL Easter Egg has to be the wheels of the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars.  On previous rovers, JPL had noticed that it was difficult to determine just how far a rover had moved as it traveled because the rover’s wheels sometimes slipped on the loose dusty surface of Mars.  The instruments could accurately measure how many revolutions the wheels had turned, but not how far the rover had actually traveled.

JPL quickly came up with a solution.  The metal wheels of Curiosity would have the letters ”JPL” stamped on them so on each revolution of the wheels, the letters would be stamped into the Martian dust.  Then the camera could take a photo of the tracks, in a sense creating a visual odometer.  Scientists on earth could compare the travel distance recorded on the instruments to the travel distance shown in the tracks.

NASA loved the low-tech solution for coming up with accurate travel measurements, but was a little wary of all the photos from Mars advertising JPL.  Those photos were going to be seen by the whole world.  Reading the correspondence between the two agencies concerning this, you get the idea that if the wheels had spelled out “NASA”, there wouldn’t have been a problem. 

In the end, JPL agreed to just put a distinctive pattern of squares and rectangles on the tires, something that would show up well on the photos.  NASA agreed.

Shortly before launch, NASA finally realized that the “square and rectangle holes” were actually dots and dashes that in Morse code spelled out “JPL.”  By then it was too late to change the tires.  As I write this, the Curiosity rover is still working, years after its projected lifespan, and is still leaving its secret message on the surface of Mars.

The Siege of Sidney Street

Let’s start with Houndsditch, the where everything started:  Houndsditch, as the name literally indicates, started as a combination drainage and defensive ditch dug just outside the walls of Londinium.  The ditch was first built by the Romans, filled in, and then dug a second time by the Danes.  There are two competing theories of the origin of the name.  The first says that the ditch was used as a garbage dump and depository for dead dogs.

The competing theory is more interesting:  King Cnut (more commonly known as King Canute), had the English traitor Eadric Streona executed as part of the Christmas festivities of 1017.  The exact details are a little sketchy, but Streona apparently was strangled on Christmas morning, his body was dragged through the streets of London by his heels, then it was burnt, beheaded, and tossed into Houndsditch.  The story says that not even the hungry wild dogs living outside the city wall would eat the remains.  Apparently, the wild dogs weren’t fond of traitor tartare.

As Londinium grew, the area outside of the walls was incorporated and the area of the filled-in ditch became a street in the East End of London.  By the start of the 20th century, though, there were a few prominent buildings on Houndsditch.  The area was relatively poor and was a center for Eastern European immigrants, particularly Russian emigres forced to leave their homes due to Tsarist pogroms.  

Part of the population was an organized group of exiled Latvian anarchists.  If your brain did not immediately start screaming “OXYMORON,” you need to read that sentence again.  Not only is the whole idea of anarchists setting up a hierarchical organization ludicrous, but once they are chased out of their home country, they immigrate to a country kind enough to accept them as refugees, only to repay that kindness by fomenting a violent revolution.  These are the type of jackasses that will slip a snake into your pocket and then ask to borrow a match.

Touching off a revolution is expensive, so the Latvian anarchists—not believing in capitalism—financed their activities with theft.  At 119 Houndsditch there was a jewelry shop that, rumor said, kept between £30,000 and £20,000 worth of jewelry in its safe.  The anarchists rented a pair of shops behind the jewelry store and used pneumatic power tools to batter down the common wall between the shops to gain entry into the jewelry store.  

On the night of December 16, 1910, a neighbor thought the loud noises were unusual and alerted a policeman.  When three officers armed only with truncheons knocked on the door of the shop where the noise was coming from, the would-be thieves shot and killed the officers and fled.  George Gardstein—the reputed leader—was wounded during the struggle and later died of his wounds.  While Gardstein was wrestling with a police officer, one of the gang members had attempted to shoot the policeman but had hit Gardstein.  

The brutal killing of three unarmed policemen became known as the Houndsditch Murders and outraged the public and galvanized the police.  A morgue photo of Goldstein (right) was published in the local papers along with a plea to the public to help locate the remainder of the gang.  Within weeks, most of the Latvian gang had been arrested by the investigating officers, who had now been temporarily issued revolvers.

In early January 1911, an informant tipped off the police that the last two gang members, including Gardstein, were hiding at 100 Sidney Street, about a mile and a half distant from the jewelry store.  The police carefully removed the neighbors from the building.  The standing orders for the police were that they could not open fire until they were fired upon, so the police threw stones through the window of the apartment to wake up the two mean, Svaars and Sokoloff.  The two men appeared at the broken window and immediately began firing at the police assembled below.

It was immediately apparent that the two men were much better armed than the police.  The anarchists had the latest automatic Mausers, while the police were armed with revolvers that were only effective at short range.  Scotland Yard phoned the Home Secretary and formally asked for military assistance, an act that required the approval of the Home Secretary.

Within an hour, twenty-one volunteers from the Scots Guard departed from the Tower of London and took position at each end of the street and in the buildings across the street.  Firing continued with neither side actually hitting anybody.  (According to the historian and author Andrew Wareham, the Scots Guard were not noted for accurate firepower at the time, but were famed for their magnificent uniforms.  They were truly impressive at the funeral of Edward VII, just five months later.)

Two hours later, just shortly before noon, the Home Secretary arrived, Winston Churchill.  There is still a great debate about whether he took direct command or just observed.  It should be noted that about an hour later, both a Maxim machine gun and horse artillery arrived, something that would also have required the approval of Churchill.  Before the more powerful weapons could be used, however, the standoff ended.

An hour after Churchill arrived, smoke was seen coming from the building.  For over an hour, the building burned but the two men inside never came out.  When it was apparent that the two anarchists were dead, the fire brigade was finally allowed to extinguish the flames and extract the two bodies.  In the aftermath, all of the captured anarchists were acquitted for lack of evidence and Winston Churchill was widely criticized for seeking publicity and posing for cameras during the standoff.

Do your remember Peter the Painter?  His real name was never discovered, nor was he ever captured.  A century later, two towers of apartment buildings were built on the site of the siege.  One of the towers is named “Peter House” and the other is called “Painter House”, despite the strenuous objections of the Metropolitan Police Federation.

Zimmerit

Shortly before the launch of the USS New Mexico, a modern fast attack, nuclear submarine, the Captain and First Officer made a goodwill tour of New Mexico.  As part of the tour, they came to my class on the History of Naval Warfare at Enema U.  It was a great talk and, in hindsight, I realize that I probably did not thank the US Navy enough.

At the end of his talk, the boat’s Captain asked if there were any questions.  My class was a little shy, so I primed the pump by asking what the top speed of the sub was expected to be.  The Captain smiled and said, “A little under 35 knots.”

I expected that answer since, according to the US Navy, every large ship currently commissioned goes “A little under 35 knots.”  Supposedly, even modern American destroyers are slower than their counterparts in World War II.  The true top speeds of American warships are absolutely classified and only the US Navy and every one of our enemies know the truth.   

I smiled back and asked the question that I was really curious about.  “Will the USS New Mexico be covered with anything special?”

Once again, the boat’s Captain smiled and replied, “Just anti-fouling paint.”

We both knew he couldn’t say more.  I have no idea exactly what subs are really covered with, but it is a hell of a lot more than anti-fouling paint.  There are some kind of noise deadening rubber tiles that make the sub harder to detect by both radar and sonar, but exactly what they are made of is classified.  

Classified coatings for military use are not exactly new.  In 1917, during World War I, the British Royal Navy introduced “dazzle” camouflage, using complex, high-contrast patterns to confuse enemy targeting.  Since there was no real evidence that it worked, it was tried briefly by both Great Britain and the United States in World War II.  To this day, there is no clear consensus on whether the strange paint job really worked, though there is some anecdotal testimony that torpedoes missed the dazzle ships because submarine captains couldn’t stop laughing.  (I wonder if it has been tried on cars to confuse traffic cops?)

In the 1970’s the US started covering military vehicles with something called CARC (Chemical Agent Resistant Coating) that supposedly made vehicles exposed to chemical agents easier to clean.  And we all have heard about the modern coatings that make aircraft harder to see on radar.  There is, however, an earlier special coating for tanks that you have probably never heard of: Zimmerit.

During World War II, Germany was concerned that the Allies might target their armored vehicles with magnetic bombs.  Remember the scene in Saving Private Ryan when Tom Hanks destroys a Tiger tank with a “sticky bomb”?  (Well, technically the tank was a Russian T-34 with wood and paper mâché added to make it look like a Tiger tank, but let’s not be picky!)

According to the movie, a sticky bomb was a plain GI sock crammed full of explosives with a simple fuse, with the sock then covered in axle grease.  An incredibly brave soldier would light the fuse, run up to the enemy tank, slap the improvised mine against the steel side of the vehicle, then run away before the bomb blew up.  There was, of course, no such bomb used in World War II.  The British had developed a No. 74 Sticky Bomb, but it was nitroglycerine in a glass container that could adhere to the side of an enemy vehicle with adhesives.  The weapon was ineffective and far better results could be achieved with other anti-tank weapons like the American bazooka or the British PIAT.

There was a magnetic mine used during World War II, the Hafthohlladung (or as it was more commonly called, the Panzerknacker or “Tank Breaker”).  Developed in 1942, this was a shaped charge that was attached to three strong horseshoe magnets.  A soldier could place one against the side of an enemy tank, pull the firing pin, then run like hell before the 4.5 second fuse detonated the bomb.  Needless to say, this was a difficult getaway to accomplish.

Pondering this led to the Germans worrying about magnetic explosives being placed against the sides of their tanks.  Their response was the development of zimmerit—a thick plastic-like foam mixed with sawdust that was applied in inch-thick ridges to the sides of their tanks, hardened with a blowtorch and left to dry.  The foam material was mixed with a yellowish-brown ochre, making the tanks look like they had been covered with thick cooked waffles.

The idea was that the thick zimmerit coating would prevent the magnetic bombs to be close enough to the tank for the magnets to work, so they would simply fall off the side of the vehicle.  The process of applying the zimmerit at the factory took several days, and despite the desperate need of more tanks at the front line, Germany continued to apply the protective foam on its armored vehicles from December 1943 to September 1944.

You would think that the reason that the Germans stopped using zimmerit was because they finally noticed that Germany was the only country using magnetic mines against tanks.  Or maybe it was that Germany realized that, since the Allies had developed projectile anti-tank weapons, the likelihood of someone attempting to physically place a mine onto a tank (outside of Hollywood) was highly unlikely.  Those are both good possible explanations, but neither is the reason the Germans stopped using zimmerit.

Germany was afraid that the new Allied projectile weapons (like the American bazooka) might set fire to the zimmerit…So, they stopped using it.

British tests after the war discovered that it was all but impossible to ignite zimmerit!