Quotulatiousness

December 27, 2018

The 1914 Christmas Truce

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

Mark Felton Productions
Published on 25 Dec 2018

As we celebrate Christmas today, perhaps its worth recalling the Christmas Truce of 1914, when, for a few days 104 years ago, the terrible slaughter of World War I stopped and the ordinary officers and men of both sides met in No Man’s Land to sing carols, exchange gifts and play soccer.

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Shooting the FG42: The Hype is Real

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 3 Dec 2018

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

The hype? Yeah, it’s real. The FG42 is the nicest full-auto full-power rifle I have yet fired. This is a recut of a previous video that YouTube decided to squash.

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QotD: The deep state

The deep state is no myth but a sodden, intertwined mass of bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy that constitutes the real power in Washington and that stubbornly outlasts every administration. As government programs have incrementally multiplied, so has their regulatory apparatus, with its intrusive byzantine minutiae. Recently tagged as a source of anti-Trump conspiracy among embedded Democrats, the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans and apolitical functionaries of Bartleby the Scrivener blandness. Its spreading sclerotic mass is wasteful, redundant, and ultimately tyrannical.

I have been trying for decades to get my fellow Democrats to realize how unchecked bureaucracy, in government or academe, is inherently authoritarian and illiberal. A persistent characteristic of civilizations in decline throughout history has been their self-strangling by slow, swollen, and stupid bureaucracies. The current atrocity of crippling student debt in the US is a direct product of an unholy alliance between college administrations and federal bureaucrats — a scandal that ballooned over two decades with barely a word of protest from our putative academic leftists, lost in their post-structuralist fantasies. Political correctness was not created by administrators, but it is ever-expanding campus bureaucracies that have constructed and currently enforce the oppressively rule-ridden regime of college life.

In the modern world, so wondrously but perilously interconnected, a principle of periodic reduction of bureaucracy should be built into every social organism. Freedom cannot survive otherwise.

Camille Paglia, “Hillary wants Trump to win again”, Spectator USA, 2018-12-04.

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