Forces TV
Published on 10 Oct 2018Lord Of the Rings director Peter Jackson has seen footage of a mine explosion that his own grandfather was only a hundred yards away from on the Western Front at the time. He saw the footage while making his new film They Shall Not Grow Old.
November 11, 2018
How Peter Jackson ‘Brought To Life’ WW1 Footage In His New Film | RATED
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QotD: “Chateau” generals and the modern Canadian Army
… the great British strategist, one of the “fathers” of modern armoured-mechanized-mobile warfare, Major General JFC “Boney” Fuller, wrote in the mid 1930s called Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure: A Study of the Personal Factor in Command. In it Fuller was harshly critical of what he saw as an old, fat (quite literally) and out of touch military command structure that was intent on fighting the last war, or even the one before that, and was unable to innovate or accept change. Too many generals, he suggested, were physically and mentally unfit for the stresses of modern war, they could not “rough it” with soldiers and actually needed to be in nice warm chateaux behind the lines while soldiers and colonels fought in the mud. This is related to something that the brilliant British soldier-scholar Field Marshal Lord Wavell said in his comments on “generalship:” commanders need to be “robust … able to withstand the shocks of war.” Fuller, especially, went to great lengths, and back two thousand plus years in history, to say that wars and military leadership require physical and mental vigour and that young people, often very young people can master both war and leadership. I suspect that both Fuller and Wavell would look at our modern Canadian Army, especially at our seasoned, experienced and relatively old sergeant section and tank commanders and so, “No, no, no! You’re wasting all that good training and experience at too low a level. Section commanders need only half that much training; those sergeants should be doing more and more important things.”
I believe that we, the Canadian public, need and deserve a more efficient and cost effective Army, and one way to make it so is to lower the ranks of junior leaders: tank and rifle section and tank troop and rifle platoon commanders. It should be harder but quicker for young soldiers to achieve the ranks of lance corporal, corporal and master corporal and command a tank or a rifle section ~ but the corporals and master corporals should be paid more. Junior officers should spend longer in the ranks of second lieutenant and lieutenant, and be paid more, while they are given the opportunities to master the basics of their profession. If you have first rate platoon commanders you’ll get good generals without too much trouble … if you don’t have a plentiful supply of really good tank troop and rifle platoon commanders then good generals will only appear now and again, by happy accident.
Ted Campbell, “The foundation (2)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-02-21.
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November 10, 2018
Hitler’s Beer Hall Disaster I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1923 Part 1 of 2
TimeGhost History
Published on 10 Nov 2018When Germany spirals into hyperinflation and the French occupy the Ruhr, Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff make a grab for power.
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written and directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Writing and Research Contributed by: Rune V. Hartvig
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus OlssonArchive by Screenocean/Reuter https://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
And from the comments:
We jump ahead briefly to 1923 as this week is the anniversary of the Hitlerputsch and the Georg Elser Bomb in 1939. We will return to part 4 of 1920 in shortly. Many thanks to Rune V. Hartvig for contributing to the writing of this episode.
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Don’t expect the “Internet-of-Things” to get better security without Uncle Sam’s pressure
Bruce Schneier believes it will take government action (or as The Register phrased it, “Uncle Sam … putting boots to asses”) to get any significant improvement in Internet-of-Shit device security:
Any sort of lasting security standard in IoT devices may only happen if governments start doling out stiff penalties.
So said author and computer security guru Bruce Schneier, who argued during a panel discussion at the Aspen Cyber Summit this week that without regulation, there is little hope the companies hooking their products up to the internet will implement proper security protections.
“Looking at every other industry, we don’t get security unless it is done by the government,” Schneier said.
“I challenge you to find an industry in the last 100 years that has improved security without being told [to do so] by the government.”
Schneier went on to point out that, as it stands, companies have little reason to implement safeguards into their products, while consumers aren’t interested in reading up about appliance vendors’ security policies.
“I don’t think it is going to be the market,” Schneier argued. “I don’t think people are going to say I’m going to choose my refrigerator based on the number of unwanted features that are in the device.”
Schneier is not alone in his assessment either. Fellow panellist Johnson & Johnson CISO Marene Allison noted that manufacturers have nothing akin to a bill of materials for their IP stacks, so even if customers want to know how their products and data are secured, they’re left in the dark.
“Most of the stuff out there, even as a security professional, I have to ask myself, what do they mean?” Allison said.
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Remy: I Love L.A. (Parody)
ReasonTV
Published on 9 Nov 2018Remy updates the iconic Randy Newman anthem for 2018.
Parody written and performed by Remy
Camera and editing by Austin Bragg
Music tracks, background vocals, and mastering by Ben KarlstromReason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
—-
LYRICSNice fall day
In L.A. County
Sitting watching all the leaves change
Temperature dipping into the low 70’s
I dress accordinglyRoll down the window
Put down the top
You know what
Maybe roll it up on second thought
That guy was higher
Than the pension of a state employeeCan’t use straws here
No fois gras here
You can’t park here
Lots of laws hereEvery toilet
Barely flushing
But the sun is shining all the time
Looks like another bill to payI love L.A.
We Love it“Definitely recommend this crystal here.
Oh and this one is our number one seller.”
“What’s that for? Anxiety?”
“No. Typhus.”
“Ah”Public school graduates
Can barely read
And when they try to park
Well this is what they seeSweet regulations
Ain’t nothing like em nowhereBeachside
We love itMountainside
We love itRiverside
We…eh….Fixed streets
We love em
We love L.A.“Unfortunately I’ll have to fail your restaurant.
I found a rat in the kitchen.”
“That wasn’t a rat that was my, uh,
emotional support rodent.”
“Well why didn’t you say so!”“And this right here is a great hemorrhoidal crystal.
Uranus is in retrograde.”I love L.A.
We love it
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Emperor Karl’s last attempt for peace, 1917
Part of a post at Essays in Idleness from last month by David Warren:
As we approach the centenary of the Great Armistice, I see the plastic poppies circulating from the little boxes in the liquor stores. My thoughts turn to war qua war. Though sometimes necessary, it is not a good thing (“bad for children and animals” as the peaceniks say); and given the ambiance of our high-tech weaponry, little heroism is left to raise the tone. Contemporary battles are not confined to the soldiers, as once they could be. The devastation of cities and towns, the routine destruction of infrastructure, the civilian suffering that follows from that, must match or quite exceed ancient incidents of rapine.
While I’ve never thought war should be avoided at all costs, I recognize that the cost is very high. Opportunities for peace should not be overlooked, even while the carnage is in progress.
When, for instance, the newly-enthroned Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary — “fanatic” Catholic Christian — discreetly proposed a separate peace to the allies in the spring of 1917, his agents were rebuffed, outed, and mocked. The Americans were coming to tilt our fortunes, the Germans were distracted overrunning the Russians, and while the Western Front was in catastrophic stasis, our nationalist politicians could now hope to utterly crush the foe. They would demand unconditional surrender.
The incident haunts my historical imagination. This was a serious opportunity to restore something close to the status quo ante, while resolving casus belli (very much plural) from Belgium and Alsace to Serbia and Constantinople on the principle of sweet reason. Drowned in the gunfire was this Blessed Karl’s expressly Christian plea. In an instant the decision was made, in the West, to persist till millions more were slain, and the conditions were assembled for international violence and totalitarianism through the next seventy years.
The gentlemen I call “the three stooges of the apocalypse” — Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau — were all modern politicians, whose nationalist ideals were now buttressed by the vast democratic constituencies of countries at war, goaded on by the screaming headlines of a paper mass media. They wanted a New Europe, a New World Order, in which antiquated empires and all the sleepy old aristocratic polities would be smashed and replaced — with modern, ethically homogenous, democratic States. The consequences were unforeseeable to them, wrapped in their flags and the rhetoric of liberté, égalité, fraternité.
It was a war to end all wars! … Both the malice and the naivety were astounding.
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War Graves: Honouring the Fallen of the First World War | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 2 Nov 2018On a visit to the Cambrai Memorial to the Missing at Louverval, Curator David Willey took the opportunity to explore the Allied First World War graves. In this video he explains how they were set up by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission during WW1 and why they look the way they do.
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QotD: Protectionism helps domestic producers but hurts domestic consumers
Protectionists always speak of tariffs and other import restrictions as impositions the burdens of which fall exclusively on foreign producers (usually, as in the case of antidumping cases, on foreign producers who have the audacity to sell their wares to us at prices that are especially low). And while domestic protectionist measures do indeed harm foreign producers, every protectionist measure is also – indeed, chiefly – a restriction on the freedom of domestic consumers to spend their money as they choose. Tariffs, antidumping duties, and all protectionist impositions make domestic citizens less free (by closing off areas of voluntary exchange that they would otherwise choose to engage in) and less prosperous (by diminishing the volume of goods and services available in the domestic market for people to consume).
Protectionism is rank economic idiocy and an unquestionable assault on liberty. And it becomes no smarter or prettier just because it is costumed in moralistic language (such as “fair trade” or “leveling the playing field”) or is pushed by your preferred political party rather than by some other political party.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-12-06.
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November 9, 2018
Revolution in Germany – Armistice in Austria I THE GREAT WAR Week 224
The Great War
Published on 8 Nov 2018Unrest within the German Empire is spreading, resentment against the war, the hunger and the elites is turning into revolutionary action and with a mutiny in Kiel the wheels begin to turn quickly. Austria signs an armistice, the Macedonian Front collapses, Romania might enter the war again and the new German political leaders send a delegation through the lines in France. Their goal: An Armistice.
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Sniffing out the heretics in academia
There’s apparently an easy way to figure out who the secret conservatives are in the academic world:
In Evan Maloney’s fun little campus-bashing documentary Indoctrinate U, there’s a psychology prof who’s been outed as a conservative (and, of course, harassed out of employment and blackballed from academia, because Liberals are all about the dissenting viewpoints and how dare you suggest otherwise!!!). Maloney then interviews several of her former students:
“Oh yeah,” they say, “we all knew.” He asks them just how they knew, and they all reply with a version of “because she was the only professor we had who didn’t go off on political rants all the time in class.”
Which is how all but the deepest-cover shitlords get blown. Unhinged political rants are so common in academia, in every class from the loopiest Angry Studies seminar to the hardest of STEM labs, that simply not acting like an SJW lunatic during class time is unusual enough to get you noticed. It’s like being the first guy to stop clapping for Dear Leader at a North Korean politburo meeting.*
*It’s a mark of Orwell’s genius that he even thought this through. I always wondered why the put a time limit on the Two Minutes’ Hate… until I realized that, Stalinists being Stalinists, no work would get done otherwise; they’d keep ranting until they dropped from exhaustion (and the first guy to pass out would probably still get shot).
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Tank Chats #37 Daimler Armoured Car | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 12 May 2017Historian David Fletcher MBE, in the 37th Tank Chat discussing the Daimler Armoured Car.
The Daimler Armoured Car proved to be a versatile and successful vehicle, serving with the British Army in all theatres of war from 1941 and remaining in service for some years after the Second World War.
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QotD: Puritanism
Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
Bertrand Russell, “Recrudescence of Puritanism”, 1928.
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November 8, 2018
What do you do with decommissioned Royal Navy nuclear submarines?
Apparently, based on current MoD practice, you leave them sitting around for decades, until you have more decommissioned boats in storage than the RN has in commission:
Decommissioned Royal Navy nuclear submarines at Devonport.
Screen capture from Google Maps.
There are currently 20 former Royal Navy nuclear submarines awaiting disposal in Rosyth and Devonport. They do not represent a great hazard but maintaining them safely while they await dismantling is a growing drain on the defence budget. Nuclear submarines are arguably Britain’s most important defence assets but the failure to promptly deal with their legacy has been a national scandal. Although there has been discussion and consultation going back years, only recently has there been action to actually start the disposal process.
Status of Royal Navy submarine disposal in early 2018.
OSD – Out of Service Date. Hull age – years since hull laid down.
Plans for the safe and timely disposal of nuclear submarines should have been drawn up as far back as the 1970s but successive governments have avoided difficult decisions and handed the problem on to their successors. RN submarines were designed so the Reactor Pressure Vessel could be removed from the hull. Other nations cut the entire reactor compartment out of the submarine and transport it to land storage facilities. The US has successfully disposed of over 130 nuclear ships and submarines since the 1980s. The Russians have disposed of over 190 Soviet-era boats (with some international assistance) since the 1990s while France has already disposed of 3 boats from their much smaller numbers.The first Royal Navy nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought decommissioned in 1980, has now been tied up in Rosyth awaiting disposal longer than she was in active service.
As any householder knows, It is sensible practice to dispose of your worn out items before you replace them with new ones.
The capacity to store more boats at Devonport is limited, every further delay adds to cost that will have to come from a defence budget that is much smaller in real terms than when the boats were conceived at the height of the Cold War. Apart from the attraction of deferring costs in the short-term, a major cause of delay has been the selection of a land storage site for the radioactive waste. It has also taken time to develop a method and ready the facilities needed to undertake the dismantling project.
Afloat storage
While awaiting dismantling, decommissioned submarines are stored afloat in a non-tidal basin in the dockyard [as seen in the image at the top of this post]. Classified equipment, stores and flammable materials are removed together with rudders, hydroplanes and propellers while the hull is given treatments to help preserve its life. The 7 submarines in Rosyth have all had their nuclear fuel rods removed but of the 13 in Devonport, 9 are still fuelled. This is because in 2003 the facilities for de-fuelling were deemed no longer safe enough to meet modern regulation standards and the process was halted. Submarines that have not had their fuel rods removed have the reactor primary circuit chemically treated to guarantee it remains inert and additional radiation monitoring equipment is fitted.
More than £16m was spent between 2010-15 just to maintain these old hulks alongside, and costs are rising. Apart from regular monitoring, the hulks need to be hauled out of the basin for occasional dry docking for inspection and repainting to protect the hull from corrosion. All this effort and expense is a drain on precious resources for no direct gain. Responsible care of the growing number of hulls means they pose little risk to the local population, but a tiny risk does remain. This makes some people living nearby uneasy and provides another grievance for those ideologically opposed to nuclear submarines and Trident.
Perseus – Plans of Bismarckian Proportion – Extra Mythology – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 5 Nov 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
Perseus was the undesirable grandchild of the king Acrisius, who wanted him dead — but accidentally just left him alive to float to a new beach. THEN he became the undesirable ADOPTED grandchild of the island’s despot, Polydectes, who sent him on a quest to obtain the head of a gorgon…
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80 years on from Kristallnacht
Jerrold Sobel reminds us that 80 years ago today, the Nazis got their desired pretext to launch a domestic terror campaign against the Jews:
Destroyed shopfront of a Jewish business in Magdeburg, November 9, 1938.
Photo Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1979-046-19, via Wikimedia Commons.
Hitler came into power in 1933 with a plan to expand Germany’s rule and to completely annihilate world Jewry. During this time between his ascension and 1938, progressively strident anti-Semitic laws known as the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in which governmental policies regulated every aspect of Jewish life.
As conditions increasingly worsened for Jews, a Polish Jewish student, Herschel Grynszpan, whose family was being deported after a lifetime living in Germany, acted out against the Nazis and assassinated a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, on November 7, 1938. Hitler could not have been happier: it was the pretext he had been seeking to up the ante of anti-Semitism from “law-based” to mob violence.
By November 9, rioting was already in full swing in all quarters of the Reich, which by this time included Austria. Minister of propaganda Josef Goebbels encouraged Hitler to allow further punishment of the Jews through more “spontaneous demonstrations” of violence. According to Goebbels’s diary, Hitler responded: “[D]emonstrations should be allowed to continue. The police should not be withdrawn. For once the Jews should get the feel of popular anger.”
And did they ever. On the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, unspeakable assaults upon Jewish women and men took place in Germany and Austria. When the majority of the mayhem finally ended on November 11, 30,000 Jewish men had been arrested and taken to concentration camps. Although figures vary, at least 100 fatalities were initially reported, the number growing into the hundreds due to subsequent mistreatment of those arrested.
Over 1,400 synagogues were burnt to the ground, and more than 7,500 businesses were likewise looted and torched. Jewish hospitals, homes, and schools fared no better. Those two nights of havoc would ignominiously become known as Kristallnacht: the night of the broken glass.
Soon, the world came to know the depredations wrought upon the Jewish people those nights. It was just the beginning, a precursor to the greatest ethnic mass murder of a people in the history of the world: the Holocaust.
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