Free capital is the key to war making on any large scale, what Cicero called “the sinews of war,” without which an army cannot muster, be fed, or fight. Capital is the wellspring of technological innovation, which is inextricably tied to freedom, often the expression of individualism, and thus critical to military success throughout the ages. That capitalism was born in the West, expanded through Europe, survived the alternate Western-inspired paradigms of socialism and communism, and found itself inextricably tied with personal freedom and democracy in its latest global manifestation explains in no small part Western military dominance from the age of Salamis to the Gulf War.
Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 2001.
December 9, 2018
QotD: The western way of war
Comments Off on QotD: The western way of war
December 8, 2018
The Iliad – what is it really about?
Lindybeige
Published on 4 Mar 2016The Iliad – Homer’s epic poem of Achilles and the Trojan War. It was the Bible of its day, but what is it really about? Spoilers!
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
Here I summarise the plot of the Iliad, which may surprise and disappoint those who thought that it was the story of the Trojan War, and then describe and illustrate one of its main themes: the glory and tragedy of war; and then go on to point out the crucial scene of the poem, in which Priam begs for the return of the body of his son, and argue that this is actually the scene that gives meaning to the piece.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
▼ Follow me…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
website: www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
Comments Off on The Iliad – what is it really about?
Will the West want in again this time?
The last time Albertan sensibilities were being regularly assaulted by federal politicians, the response was the Reform Party with their slogan “The West Wants In”. This time, Lawrence Solomon suggests, the Albertan response might not be so congenial:
Canadians don’t value our fossil fuel economy, which explains why so many are OK to trash pipelines and see Alberta tank. Only 19 per cent think it more important to pursue oil and gas development than to go green and regulate oil, according to EKOS polling. That 19 per cent figure shrinks to eight per cent for Canadians who consider themselves Liberals, six per cent for NDPers and two per cent for those who vote Green, meaning that politicians of most stripes have no interest in alienating their supporters to help Alberta’s energy economy recover.
Those figures also explain why Alberta’s sense of alienation is on the rise. According to Ipsos, fully 62 per cent believe Alberta “does not get its fair share from Confederation” (up from 45 per cent two decades ago), 46 per cent feel more attached to their province than to their country (up from 39 per cent) and 34 per cent “feel less committed to Canada than I did a few years ago” (up from 22 per cent). Just 18 per cent of Albertans believe “the views of western Canadians are adequately represented in Ottawa.”
One-quarter of Albertans now believe Alberta “would be better off if it separated from Canada,” a number that may well rise if the provincial economy founders, and would certainly rise if Albertans realized that they need Canada a lot less than Canada needs them. Without Alberta’s wealth and foreign-exchange earnings, the living standard of Canadians outside Alberta would drop and the Canadian dollar would plummet, likely leading to inflation as the cost of imports rose. Albertans, in contrast, would see their affluence rise and, because oil sales are denominated in U.S. dollars, Alberta would be largely insulated from the inflation to its east and west.
Those pooh-poohing independence claim Alberta, being land-locked, would be held hostage if it were an independent state. Those scoffers have it backwards. Alberta is today held hostage, its pipelines east and west kiboshed by its fellow Canadians. If Alberta were independent, its newfound bargaining power would certainly cause the Rest of Canada to capitulate, and speed to completion any and all pipelines Alberta needed to either ocean.
An independent Alberta would control access to its land mass as well as the skies above it, requiring Canada’s federal government to negotiate rights for, say, Vancouver-to-Toronto flights over Alberta airspace. Canada would also need Alberta’s agreement to have trains and trucks cross its now-international borders. Threats of tolls and tariffs could abound as needed to chasten those perceived to be wronging Alberta, whether Quebec, which exports dairy to B.C., grain interests that now commandeer rail to the detriment of Alberta’s oil shippers, or the B.C. ports that depend on commodities going to and from points east. Anyone thinking that Alberta would be unable to police its borders needs to be reminded that, for the past 70 years, Alberta’s patrols have made it the continent’s only rat-free jurisdiction.
Comments Off on Will the West want in again this time?
How to break down plywood. A guide to cutting, moving and hauling plywood by yourself
Steve Ramsey – Woodworking for Mere Mortals
Published on 16 Nov 2018Set up shop for under $1000. Download my FREE GUIDE ►► http://mytoollist.com/
One of the most challenging woodworking tasks is dealing with plywood and other large sheet goods. They are unwieldy and a challenge to move by yourself and transport. In this video, I show you ways to make lugging it around and cutting it.
……………………………
Tools and plans in this video:
Free plans for my plywood lifting cleat: http://bit.ly/WWMMplywood
Peachtree Edge Guide► https://amzn.to/2Q3wOdq
Kreg Accu-Cut Track Guide► https://amzn.to/2KagEda……………………………
AD-FREE versions of my videos ►► https://www.patreon.com/wwmm
—————-
MAILING ADDRESS:WWMM
448 Ignacio Blvd. #237
Novato CA 94949
Comments Off on How to break down plywood. A guide to cutting, moving and hauling plywood by yourself
QotD: The nationalist obsession
As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named. Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e.g. ‘Patriots’ for Franco-supporters, or ‘Loyalists’ for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of the which the two rival factions could have agreed to use. All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this struggle reappears in subtler forms as a struggle between dialects. Anglophobe-Americans will refuse to use a slang phrase if they know it to be of British origin, and the conflict between Latinizers and Germanizers often has nationalists motives behind it. Scottish nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots, and socialists whose nationalism takes the form of class hatred tirade against the B.B.C. accent and even the often gives the impression of being tinged by belief in sympathetic magic — a belief which probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
Comments Off on QotD: The nationalist obsession
December 7, 2018
The Anti-Authoritarian Politics of Harry Potter
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 6 Dec 2018JK Rowling’s wizarding world isn’t all wands, charms, and transfigurations. The magical universe inhabited by characters like Harry Potter and Newt Scamander is rife with the dangerous incompetence of adults, unchecked corruption, and appalling abuses of power, and not just by Voldemort or Grindelwald.
_____________
Written & Produced by Sean W. Malone
Edited by Arash Ayrom & Sean W. Malone
Comments Off on The Anti-Authoritarian Politics of Harry Potter
“A date that will live in infamy” – Speech
FootageArchive – Videos From The Past
Published on 19 Mar 2015Welcome to FootageArchive! On this channel you’ll find historic and educational videos from the 1900s. Watch, learn, and take a trip back in time as we gain insight into a previous time. Subscribe for more.
Note: this video contains archived public domain / licensed footage. This footage serves documentary purposes on world history and is to be viewed as educational.
Comments Off on “A date that will live in infamy” – Speech
QotD: Why did our grandparents adopt “mass market” foods?
If those authentic old foods were so great, how come our ancestors were so eager to switch to processed foods? The culprit most often identified is the power-mad food scientists of yesteryear, who convinced the housewives of previous generations to give up the good stuff in favor of tasteless packaged foods. The people who write these theories have apparently not spent much time observing today’s food scientists in their tireless quest to get people to stop eating the junk they like to eat now. If they had, they might have asked why yesterday’s food scientists had so much more power to alter dietary habits. And after they asked that question, they might have come to the conclusion that our ancestors switched because they liked the new foods better than whatever they were eating before.
That’s because so much of what we eat now as “authentic” is mostly some combination of peasant special-occasion dishes and the rich-people food of yesteryear, fused with modern technology and a global food-supply chain to become something quite different from what our ancestors ate, or the ancestors of people half a world away ate. And that’s OK. The baguette is delicious, and so is that pricey “peasant” loaf. But they are no better for having been invented decades ago than something that was invented last week, nor would they be better still if Caesar’s legions had been carrying them across Europe.
Megan McArdle, “‘Authentic’ Food Is Not What You Think It Is”, Bloomberg View, 2017-02-24.
Comments Off on QotD: Why did our grandparents adopt “mass market” foods?
December 6, 2018
Izanami and Izanagi – Underworld Blues – Extra Mythology
Extra Credits
Published on 3 Dec 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
When Izanami died giving birth to Kagu-Tsuchi, the incarnation of fire, Izanagi visited the underworld to try to get her back, not realizing the dreadful terrors he would face. But from that bitter journey, sprung the life of new Japanese gods…
Watch the Overly Sarcastic Productions crossover episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clJ0F…
Comments Off on Izanami and Izanagi – Underworld Blues – Extra Mythology
“Marx was right”
An interesting little bit of history and philosophy over at Rotten Chestnuts:
Marx was right: Society really is shaped by relations between the means of production.
The Middle Ages, for instance, organized itself around defense from marauding barbarian hordes. Fast, heavy cavalry were the apex of military technology at the time; the so-called “feudal” system were the cavalry’s support. The system was field tested in the later Roman empire — medieval titles like “duke” came from the ranks of the Roman posse comitatus — and perfected in the Dark Ages.
When the barbarians had been pacified sufficiently that Europeans had leisure time to think about this stuff, they took the feudal system — at that point a cumbersome relic — as their model for society. Hobbes, Locke, et al saw it as the origin of the Social Contract; Marx saw it as finely tuned oppression. But here’s the fun part:
Hobbes ends his Leviathan with the most absolute monarch that could ever be. He starts* with… wait for it… the equality of man. Marx, on the other hand, ends with the equality of man. He starts with a frank, indeed brutal, acknowledgment of man’s inequality. As much as I love Hobbes (and consider Leviathan the only political philosophy book worth reading), he’s wrong — fundamentally wrong — and Marx is right. Marx went wrong somewhere down the line; Hobbes jumped the track from page one.
Marx only went wrong when he started dabbling in metaphysics. Marxism isn’t the original underpants gnome philosophy, but it’s certainly the best — not least because Marx’s followers were so successful at hiding the deus ex machina that was supposed to bring Communism about. Marx didn’t just say “The Revolution will happen because that’s the way all the trend lines are pointing.” He said “the trend lines are pointing that way, and oh yeah, the animating Spirit of History demands that the Revolution shall happen.” This is so obviously sub-Hegelian junk that his followers dropped it as fast as they could, but to Marx himself it was the key to his philosophy. For all its formidable technobabble, Marxism is just another chiliastic mystery cult.
[…] Enlightenment-wise, Hobbes was the start, Marx the end of political philosophy, and both are flawed beyond redemption. Hobbes sure sounds like a viable alternative to Marx, because Hobbes’s reasoning seems sound, and based on an irrefutable premise: That in the State of Nature, life is nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. But that’s not Hobbes’s premise — the fundamental equality of man in the State of Nature is. Life in the State of Nature is brutal because all men are equal.
* If you’ve read Leviathan, of course, you know he starts the book itself with a long discourse on contemporary physics. Hobbes was an innovator there, too — he’s the first person to put forth his humanistic ideas as the coldly logical deductions of physical science. It’d be fun to taunt the “I fucking love science” crowd with that, except they think Hobbes is a cuddly cartoon tiger and “Leviathan” one of the lesser houses at Hogwarts.
Comments Off on “Marx was right”
FAL Paratrooper 50.63
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 16 Nov 2018https://www.forgottenweapons.com/fal-…
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
FN introduced the paratrooper folding-stock version of the FAL rifle in the early 1960s, and it became a very popular addition to their rifle line. Since the recoil spring on the standard pattern FAL runs down the length of the buttstock, fitting a side folding stock required a redesign to the internal parts, moving the recoil spring in front go the bolt, inside the top cover. For this reason, standard and paratrooper lower receivers, top covers, springs, and bolt carriers are not interchangeable. In addition to those changes, FN developed the folding charging handle for these rifles and shortened their barrels to approximately 17 3/8 inches. The standard muzzle brake was used, and the standard handguards and folding bipod also fitted. The rear sight was fixed, with just a single 250m aperture.
A batch of 1,375 of semiauto Para FAL rifles was imported into the US before the various bans on military style rifles were instituted, and this is one of them – an all-original FN made Para!
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
Comments Off on FAL Paratrooper 50.63
QotD: The best “industrial policy” is not to have one at all
Which brings us to nub of the matter: how do we increase trade and productivity, given that productivity is the thing they claim the whole schemozzle is about. There is one simple and single policy which will do both. One policy which will increase British productivity simply by allowing more trade.
This policy is so simple that even the Treasury (yes, that’s our Treasury, the one in London) was able to get right, even when being run by George Osborne. As they set out in their analysis of Brexit repercussions:
“The benefits of trade in terms of increasing productivity are well understood… greater openness to trade creates a larger market which the most productive firms expand to serve. Openness also increases competition between firms, enhancing the incentives for domestic firms to innovate or adopt new technology… It increases returns on investment, and encourages UK firms to make greater use of new technologies, either by improving the quality of inputs, or through the more effective adoption of technological innovations. Greater openness to trade also increases consumer choice and reduces prices. Lower trade costs give consumers access to cheaper imported goods and competition reduces the price of domestically-produced goods.”
In plain English, it is the competition from imports which forces British firms to buck up their act and become more productive. So here is how we improve British productivity: we move to unilateral free trade. No barriers to imports, no tariffs, just the same regulation as domestically produced items.
British industry, facing the stiffest competition from the best in the world, would be forced to meet global standards of productivity. So the best industrial policy would be to stop trying to have an industrial policy about what we can and can’t buy from beyond Britain’s borders – and the rest should take care of itself.
Tim Worstall, “The best industrial strategy for Britain is not to have one”, CapX, 2017-01-23.
Comments Off on QotD: The best “industrial policy” is not to have one at all
December 5, 2018
The Alberta government must be getting a heck of a deal on those tank cars and locomotives
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley grabbed headlines recently with her pledge to buy additional railway locomotives and tank cars to help move some of Alberta’s excess crude oil to market. Brian Zinchuk says those numbers don’t make sense, given the amount of money the province is to pay:
On Nov. 28, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley announced her province is going to be acquiring unit trains to get her province’s landlocked oil moving. Not only has she committed money to Trans Mountain Expansion, but now rail, too. This premier is serious.
However, there’s a big problem with her numbers. She spoke of $350 million to purchase up to 7,000 rail cars and 80 locomotives. That $350 million doesn’t come even close. It might be enough to lease those units for a few years. Her stated intention was this was a short-term solution, and the life expectancy of a locomotive and tanker cars is easily into three or four decades.
However, she said, “Alberta will buy rail cars ourselves in our fight to get top dollar for the resources that belong to every Albertan.”
I never saw “lease” mentioned once.
Notley spoke of 120,000 barrels per day (bpd) of capacity. Her initial statements weren’t very clear, as someone with little knowledge of the business might think she just meant two sets of 100 or 120 car trains. That wasn’t at all what she meant.
She meant enough trains to keep 120,000 barrels per day in motion, each and every day. That’s a lot of rail cars, and a lot of locomotives.
[…]
There’s a problem with her numbers, however. The current standard locomotives used by Canadian railways cost US$3 million each as of December 2017, when CN bought 200 locomotives for US$600 million. That’s $3.859 million Canadian, each, at the exchange rate at that time. Notley spoke of 80 locomotives – that’s $308.7 million. That only leaves $41.3 million for 7,000 rail cars, or $5,897 each. That’s obviously way too low. So either there’s some leasing considerations involved here, perhaps on the locomotives, or the $350 million is way too low. Remember they were asking the feds for half? Even if the feds coughed up an additional $350 million, that still leaves only $55,900 per car.
My math shows, on the low end, a price tag of $945 million for new rail cars alone. Coupled with ~$309 million for locomotives, and you come in at $1.254 billion. At the high end, it would be $1.484 billion for cars, totalling $1.793 billion including locomotives. Either way, it’s a heck of a lot more than the $350 million announced. Unless she’s leasing, Notley’s $350 million is only one-third to one-fifth of the money required to buy all these new trains, and no consideration has been given to staffing or operational costs.
H/T to Small Dead Animals for the link.
Comments Off on The Alberta government must be getting a heck of a deal on those tank cars and locomotives
The Spanish Flu I THE GREAT WAR Epilogue 2
The Great War
Published on 3 Dec 2018The Spanish flu has quickly spread all over the world since the spring of 1918 and will become the disease that killed more people in a shorter period of time than any other disease in human history.
Comments Off on The Spanish Flu I THE GREAT WAR Epilogue 2
