Quotulatiousness

July 31, 2018

The anti-Brexit propaganda machine of “Project Fear”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill on the never-ending whinge by the Remoaners emphasizing the potential negatives of Brexit:

I can’t remember a time when the elitist politics of fear has been as cynically wielded as it has been over the past week. It wasn’t even this bad when schoolkids of my generation were made to watch The Day After, a nuclear-disaster movie in which a wholesome American family slowly die from radiation after the Soviets go mental and bomb the US. Also, at least that dread-laden propaganda was only designed to make us fear the Ruskies – the even more unhinged Project Fear of elitist Remoaners is an attempt to make us fear ourselves and our friends and family and our collective electoral stupidity that has allegedly propelled Britain to the brink of ‘self-immolation’, in the words of the increasingly bizarre figure of David Lammy, the Member of Parliament for Brussels.

Every day the fearful propaganda intensifies. One wakes wondering what unearthly horror our vote against the EU 25 months ago might now have unleashed. Gonorrhoea is the latest. If we leave the EU with No Deal, Britain will apparently become a 15th-century-style hotbed of such sexual malaise. ‘Brexit could lead to spread of infectious diseases such as super-gonorrhoea’, says a headline in the London Evening Standard, which was once a newspaper but is now a score-settling sheet for its current editor: arch Remainer and former chancellor George Osborne, who we turfed out of office with our vote for Brexit. Medical officials fear that a shortage of medicine in the event of No Deal will mean we won’t be able to treat knob rot. It’s almost Biblical. ‘Defy me and your genitals shall wither.’ Up next: plagues of locusts? Floods?

Yes, floods. Brexit could ‘water down [the UK’s] environment laws’, says a piece in the Guardian, complete with a photo of a flooded English village. We could see more ‘severe flash floods’ if we leave the EU without boosting eco-laws. Perhaps we should build arks, get some animals on board? If you don’t drown, you might be poisoned. If there’s No Deal, Britain will become a ‘dumping ground for chemicals’, claim green groups. There won’t be much food, either. Remoaners are stoking up fears of food shortages if we change our trade arrangements with the EU. Because we will struggle to import ingredients and therefore won’t be able to make bread and other essentials. Why won’t be able to do this? They never say. They just know starvation is on the cards.

In the words of chief Remoaner Alastair Campbell, ‘No deal Brexit means no food Brexit and no medicines Brexit…’. Imagine being Alastair Campbell. Imagine giving the green light to the destruction of a foreign country and the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the name of delivering democracy, only to decide 15 years later that you don’t believe in democracy after all and so you devote your entire life to overthrowing the largest democratic vote in British history. Scientists should study Mr Campbell to discover how such a human being manages to sleep at night. Also, no one is saying there will be ‘no food’ after Brexit. Campbell is lying now as surely as he was when he said Saddam could bomb Britain in 45 minutes.

German Asia Corps In The Ottoman Empire During WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Middle East, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 30 Jul 2018

German-Ottoman military cooperation predated World War 1 by a few decades. But their alliance during the First World War meant that German (and Austrian) troops would actually fight in and with the Ottoman Empire.

A gruesome experiment in determining the actual need for social housing

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall discusses an aspect of the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in London that I hadn’t considered:

The fire at Grenfell Tower in London, 14 June 2017.
Photo by Natalie Oxford via Wikimedia Commons

That the Grenfell Tower fire was a tragedy is obvious. That lessons need to be learned is equally so. At which point, OK, which lessons would we like to learn? One that would be useful is to work out how much of social housing in London – for that’s what the evidence allows us to estimate – is illegally sublet. Or, as we might also put it, how much social housing in London is not actually needed as social housing?

For sublets are, by their nature, at something close to market rents, the difference between those and the social rents being pocketed by those doing the renting out.

No, we don’t know and that might be just because we’ve not been paying the detailed attention required. But it’s also something we tend to think will have been glossed over in investigations into the events. Something that perhaps should not have been glossed over – if indeed it has.

[…] The thought that a place, in the centre of London, where we could house – safely perhaps this time – several hundred people not be used to house several hundred people? We have a housing shortage or not?

However, it’s the insight into that larger question that interests. We know that some amount of social (and or council) housing in London is illegally sublet. The very fact that it is shows that it’s not needed. Those who are paying the landlord a reduced rent clearly don’t need the property as they’re not living in it. Those paying the near market rents don’t need social housing as they’re paying near market rents. Thus subletting shows that the entire structure of – at least in that instance – the social rent isn’t necessary.

So, how prevalent is it? We know that some of it occurred at Grenfell. We’ve all admitted it, clearly, for we’ve not insisted that only those on the tenants’ listing are those who should be granted aid for having had their home burned down. So, we know there’s some. So, how much?

It’s unlikely that we’ve as much information on this concerning any other building in the country. Thus this is an excellent place to actually conduct such research.

The Utah Navy: Clearfield Navy Supply Depot, updated

Filed under: History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: Five Minutes of History
Published on 5 Aug 2017

The History Guy examines the unique role of Utah and the Clearfield Navy Supply Depot in the war in the Pacific. Episode one of History Guy: Five Minutes of History is now available in HD.

QotD: Hostility to international trade

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Much suspicion of, and hostility to, international trade is akin to atavistic superstitions that raised in some peoples suspicions of, and hostility to, mating with individuals outside of those people’s ethnic or racial or religious groups. “Only We are worthy of your seed or your womb – They are not!” “Corruption of the purity of Our race is the inevitable result of your conjugal mixing with Them!”

Or only slightly differently: protectionism is much like in-breeding. Like in-breeding, protectionism weakens the economy that practices it. Like in-breeding, protectionism causes the group that practices it to become ever-more stupid, uncreative, fragile, and vulnerable – a population of pathetic misfits destined to be weaker and poorer than are their more-cosmopolitan and open neighbors.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-14.

July 30, 2018

Pour Le Merite – Persia – Polish Legions I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Middle East, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 28 Jul 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time!

Auditor General to look at the RCAF’s “capability gap” claim

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell reports on the news that the Auditor General will investigate the Trudeau government’s claim that the RCAF would be unable to meet its obligations due to a newly discovered lack of airframes:

I see in a Canadian Press report published in the Globe and Mail that “Canada’s auditor general has started to dig into one of the Trudeau government’s most contentious claims, upon which rests the fate of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars: that the country is facing an urgent shortage of fighter jets … [and] … The claim was first made in November, 2016, when the Liberals announced that Canada didn’t have enough fighter jets to defend North America and simultaneously meet the country’s NATO commitments, and that a stopgap was urgently needed until the entire CF-18 fleet could be replaced.“

You’ll remember, I hope, that back in 1997 Canada’s government (Jean Chrétien was our Liberal prime minister) decided to join the US (but soon multi-national) F-35 Lightening II programme with the implicit intention of buying the aircraft and the explicit goal of sharing in the work, profits and jobs that the project might create. In 2010 the Government of Canada (Stephen Harper was the Conservative prime minister) committed to buying the aircraft for the Royal Canadian Air Force. There ensued an almighty public row over costs ~ partially because some generals and some DND officials tried to ‘low ball‘ the actual costs, partially because almost no one in government can agree on how to define ‘life cycle costs,‘ partially because most Canadian journalists are nearly innumerate and partially because the Liberal ‘war room‘ launched a disinformation campaign ~ and that rocked the Harper government back on its heels and made it a campaign issue. In 2015 the Liberal Party promised that Canada would not buy the F-35 but would, instead, hold “an open and transparent competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft.”

Then, when in power the Liberal “government originally planned to buy 18 interim Super Hornets from Boeing for $6.4-billion before the deal was scuttled late last year in favour of buying 25 used jets from Australia for $500-million … [but] … critics, including opposition parties and former air force commanders, accuse the government of fabricating an urgent “capability gap” – as the shortfall is known – by changing the military’s requirements to avoid having to buy the F-35 stealth fighter.” The rumour ~ and that’s all it ever amounted to, as far as i know ~ floating around Ottawa was that the Liberals saw the Boeing Super Hornet fighter as a “cheap and dirty,” readily available solution and they felt confident that they could, easily back away from the promise to hold a competition, thus avoiding the dilemma of having an “open and transparent competition” while already having decided that the F-35 could not win.

Forgotten History: World’s Biggest Black Powder Cannon – a 100-Ton Gun

Filed under: Britain, History, Italy, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 10 Jul 2018

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

The largest muzzleloading black powder cannons ever built were the Armstrong 100-ton guns which saw service with the Italian Navy and with British coastal fortifications on Malta and Gibraltar. They were purchased by the Italians first, to outfit a pair of new super battleships, each vessel having two turrets with two of these guns in each. To avoid being outclassed, the British ordered two guns for installation to protect the Grand Harbor of Malta and two more to protect Gibraltar. Today one survives at each location, and we are visiting the Rinella Battery in Malta, which was built to house one of the Maltese guns.

These guns had a maximum range of 8 miles, and was capable of piercing 15 inches of iron armor at 3 miles. It had a 17.7 inch (45cm) bore fired a 2000 pound (900 kg) shell with a 450 pound (200kg) charge of black powder. The gun itself weighed approximately 102 tons, and with its cradle and a shell the whole assembly came in at 150 tons.

Aside from the massive scale of the piece, the most interesting part of its design is actually the loading machinery. Because of the titanic size of the gun and ammunition, Armstrong designed a fascinating hydraulic reloading facility which makes up the body of the fortress in which the gun is set. A pair of steam engines drove a pair of hydraulic accumulators, which provided hydraulic pressure to move the gun on its carriage, to douse the barrel after firing, to hoist ammunition into position for loading and power a 60-foot (18m) ramrod to mechanically ram the charge and shell into place. Two mirror-image reloading galleries under the fortification operated in turn, giving the gun a sustained rate of fire of 1 round every 6 minutes – at least until its 120-round barrel life was exhausted.

I am grateful for the Malta Tourism Authority’s assistance in helping to make this visit and video possible, and would also like to give special thanks to Simon, our awesome reenactor guide!

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

QotD: Buying books but not reading them

Filed under: Books, Japan, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Nick Carraway slinks away from Jay Gatsby’s party. In the library he comes across a drunken, bespectacled fat cat who starts going off about the books lining the walls. “They’re real,” he slurs, pointing to them. “What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?” Uncut pages! If you know how books used to be manufactured, this means one thing and one thing only: Gatsby wasn’t much of a reader. After all, until they’re cut, book pages can’t be turned.

Collecting books and not reading them is, shall we say, textbook behavior. At least for some of you, and you know who you are. Suffering from the condition of racking up book purchases of $100, $200 or $1,000 without ever bending a spine? There’s a Japanese word for you.

Prognosis: terminal. Stats reveal that e-reading doesn’t hold a candle to the joy of reading a physical book. Although e-book sales jumped 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, 2.71 billion physical books were sold in the U.S. alone in 2015, according to Statista. That’s compared with the 1.32 billion movie tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada. As if every American were reading an average of more than eight books annually.

Certainly, it’s unlikely you’re going to hear the word tsundoku on the subway. But in a language where there are words for canceling an appointment at the last minute and the culture-specific condition of adult male shut-in syndrome, how can you be surprised? Other, similar words like tsūdoku (read through) and jukudoku (reading deeply) are in praise of sitting down with a book (doku means “to read”). But we think tsundoku is particularly special: Oku means to do something and leave it for a while, says Sahoko Ichikawa, a senior lecturer at Cornell University, and tsunde means to stack things.

Libby Coleman, “There’s a Word for Buying Books and Not Reading Them”, OZY, 2016-10-03.

July 29, 2018

Carving up the Middle East and Preempting Rommel I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1920 Part 3 of 4

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 27 Jul 2018

In 1920 the colonial powers of the British Empire and France reverse course on their commitment to grant independence to the peoples of the Middle East. In a game to grab the oil fields of Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia, and to control the Suez Canal they tighten their grip on the region, with far ranging consequences that will shape the world well into the 21st century.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written and directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Research Contributed by: Jonas Yazo Srouji
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

A poor tank, a useless tank, and the worst tank in the world

Filed under: Australia, Britain, History, Japan, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published on 10 Jul 2018

Tigers? Why talk about Tigers when one can talk about tanks that were even worse? More tank banter with The Chieftain.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige

A low-tech tank with fragile armour, a tank that never saw the enemy, and the tank used to teach how not to build tanks. Thanks to Nicholas Moran (AKA The Chieftain) and Matt Sampson, the cameraman at Bovington Tank Museum.

The third of these three segments was shot with my new camera, and it really shows.

Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.

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QotD: The third Great Awakening

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We are now — in the Me Decade — seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD and other psychedelics, orgy, dancing (the New Sufi and the Hare Krishna), meditation, and psychic frenzy (the marathon encounter). This third wave has built up from more diverse and exotic sources than the first two, from therapeutic movements as well as overtly religious movements, from hippies and students of “psi phenomena” and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?

The historian Perry Miller credited the First Great Awakening with helping to pave the way for the American Revolution through its assault on the colonies’ religious establishment and, thereby, on British colonial authority generally. The sociologist Thomas O’Dea credited the Second Great Awakening with creating the atmosphere of Christian asceticism (known as “bleak” on the East Coast) that swept through the Midwest and the West during the nineteenth century and helped make it possible to build communities in the face of great hardship. And the Third Great Awakening? Journalists (historians have not yet tackled the subject) have shown a morbid tendency to regard the various movements in this wave as “fascist.” The hippie movement was often attacked as “fascist” in the late 1960s. Over the past several years a barrage of articles has attacked Scientology, the est movement, and “the Moonies” (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) along the same lines.

Frankly, this tells us nothing except that journalists bring the same conventional Grim Slide concepts to every subject. The word fascism derives from the old Roman symbol of power and authority, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together by thongs (with an ax head protruding from one end). One by one the sticks would be easy to break. Bound together they are invincible Fascist ideology called for binding all classes, all levels, all elements of an entire nation together into a single organization with a single will.

The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … “Let’s talk about Me.” They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize — but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It’s exhilarating! — to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.

Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff’s slogan — “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” — seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope (antanaclasis) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name — they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality.

Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, New York Magazine, 1976-08-23.

July 28, 2018

“[S]ocialism is the leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence”

Filed under: Economics, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Harsanyi isn’t cool with people trying to make socialism cool again:

On the same day that Venezuela’s “democratically” elected socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, whose once-wealthy nation now has citizens foraging for food, announced he was lopping five zeros off the country’s currency to create a “stable financial and monetary system,” Meghan McCain of The View was the target of internet-wide condemnation for having stated some obvious truths about collectivism.

During the same week we learned that the democratic socialist president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, is accused of massacring hundreds of protesters whose economic futures have been decimated by his economic policies, Soledad O’Brien and writers at outlets ranging from GQ, to BuzzFeed, to the Daily Beast were telling McCain to cool her jets.

In truth, McCain was being far too calm. After all, socialism is the leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence. Whether implemented by a mob or a single strongman, collectivism is a poverty generator, an attack on human dignity and a destroyer of individual rights.

It’s true that not all socialism ends in the tyranny of Leninism or Stalinism or Maoism or Castroism or Ba’athism or Chavezism or the Khmer Rouge — only most of it does. And no, New York primary winner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t intend to set up gulags in Alaska. Most so-called democratic socialists — the qualifier affixed to denote that they live in a democratic system and have no choice but to ask for votes — aren’t consciously or explicitly endorsing violence or tyranny. But when they adopt the term “socialism” and the ideas associated with it, they deserve to be treated with the kind of contempt and derision that all those adopting authoritarian philosophies deserve.

But look: Norway!

Socialism is perhaps the only ideology that Americans are asked to judge solely based on its piddling “successes.” Don’t you dare mention Albania or Algeria or Angola or Burma or Congo or Cuba or Ethiopia or Laos or Somalia or Vietnam or Yemen or, well, any other of the dozens of other inconvenient places socialism has been tried. Not when there are a handful of Scandinavian countries operating generous welfare-state programs propped up by underlying vibrant capitalism and natural resources.

Of course, socialism exists on a spectrum, and even if we accept that the Nordic social-program experiments are the most benign iteration of collectivism, they are certainly not the only version. Pretending otherwise would be like saying, “The police state of Singapore is more successful than Denmark. Let’s give it a spin.”

Pellagra – A Medical Mystery – Extra History

Filed under: Food, Health, History, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 26 Jul 2018

Pellagra can cause depression, dementia, and diarrhea, eventually leading to death. Dr. Joseph Goldberger was put on the case to crack it.

Historical vandalism at Stonehenge

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jocelyn Sears on the barbaric “souvenir” habits of 18th century English “tourists”:

A photograph of Stonehenge taken in July 1877 by Philip Rupert Acott
Via Wikimedia Commons

In 1860, a concerned tourist wrote to the London Times decrying the “foolish, vulgar and ruthless practice of the majority of visitors” to Stonehenge “of breaking off portions of it as keepsakes.” Today, taking a hammer and chisel to a Neolithic monument seems like obvious vandalism, but during the Victorian era, such behavior was not only common but expected.

English antiquarian tourists, who were mostly upper class, had developed the habit of taking makeshift relics from the historical sites they visited during the 18th century. By 1830, the practice was so widespread that the English painter Benjamin Robert Haydon dubbed it “the English disease,” writing, “On every English chimney piece, you will see a bit of the real Pyramids, a bit of Stonehenge! […] You can’t admit the English into your gardens but they will strip your trees, cut their names on your statues, eat your fruit, & stuff their pockets with bits for their musaeums.”

For centuries, both locals and visitors had taken pieces of Stonehenge for use in folk remedies. As early as the 12th century, rumors of the stones’ healing properties appear in the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in 1707, Reverend James Brome wrote that their scrapings were still thought to “heal any green Wound, or old Sore.” In the 1660s, the English antiquarian John Aubrey reported a local superstition that “pieces or powder of these stones, putt into their wells, doe drive away the Toades.”

Eventually, tourists were not just taking from Stonehenge, but also leaving their mark, too. By the middle of the 17th century, tourist graffiti was appearing on the stones. The name of Johannes Ludovicus de Ferre — abbreviated “IOH : LVD : DEFERRE” — is etched, and so is the engraving “I WREN,” which may refer to Christopher Wren, the famed architect who designed St. Paul’s Cathedral.

As early as 1740, the archaeologist William Stukeley was decrying “the unaccountable folly of mankind in breaking pieces off [the stones] with great hammers,” and by the end of the 19th century, according an 1886 commenter, “Almost every day takes some fragment from the ruins, or adds something to the network of scrawling with which the surface of the stone is defaced.”

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