Brandon F.
Published on 15 Dec 2018Before the days of the Raj, British India was ruled by a private corporation: The Honourable East India Company. The Company, which began in India as a purely mercantile institution, eventually came to control vast territories across the subcontinent. These wild frontiers and busy cities required garrisons to defend them, and the expansion of Company interests demanded the ability to wage war. To do this, the Company commanded a massive private army. Made up of both European and Indian soldiers, and working in close — if not always frictionless — tandem with H.M.’s regiments, it was a fascinating institution that only came to an end with the massive Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and the dissolution of Company rule.
In this video, I discuss the organization of this army, and the way in which it related to government forces.
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January 7, 2019
The Private Army of the British East India Company
QotD: The lifecycle of the pop music industry
… the music industry, the people involved in the business end of things, is about half the size it was at its peak. A couple of years ago I did a post on the state of music. Per capita music sales have collapsed from their peak 15 years ago. That peak was largely a bubble created by the advent of the compact disc. Everyone went out and repurchased their music collection in the new digital format. A lot of old stuff was remastered for the new format and that boosted sales too.
We are now in a time when selling songs is no longer very profitable. Often, bands will put their new releases on YouTube free of charge. The song itself is a form of marketing for their live shows. In my youth, the opposite was the case. Bands went on tour to promote their latest album. The tickets to the show were often cheaper than the album. Now, anything you want is on-line so trying to monetize the songs has become a lost cause. As a result, the focus is on making money from the live shows.
In many respects, pop music is back to where it was before the great wars of the 20th century. In the 19th century, sheet music was the item of value in the music business. Many of our intellectual property laws, in fact, come from efforts to protect the owners of sheet music. The main source of income for musicians, however, was the live act. They went around performing for customers. It is where the expression “sing for your supper” started. Often musicians were paid, in part, with a meal.
The Z Man, “The Cycle of Life”, The Z Blog, 2017-03-01.
January 6, 2019
The Finns Strike Again and Japan Strikes Back – WW2 – 019 – January 5 1940
World War Two
Published on 5 Jan 2019In Finland the invading Red Army suffers catastrophic casualties, while in China the Nationalists are divided as Japan uses diplomacy to strike back.
Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations by: Eastory
Community Manager: Joram AppelColorizations by Spartacus Olsson and Norman Stewart.
Photos of the Winter War are mostly from the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive (SA-Kuva).
Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.comA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
The demands to re-nationalize British passenger railways
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall points out the mutually exclusive claims about the state of British passenger rail services and the counter-productive demand to shuffle it all back into the state’s tender mercies:
Wikimedia caption – “This is the Bring Back British Rail, a reverse image of the old BR logo, (now used by the TOC’s) to show we are heading the wrong way with Rail in the UK”
A standard whinge in Britain today is that rail privatisation has failed – just look, the trains are so crowded! The thought that people flocking to use something proves failure being a most odd one of course. That more people use the train sets to travel longer distances more often should be seen as a triumph of privatisation, not a proof of its failure. And we should note that the last few decades of British Rail did show – population adjusted – falling ridership.
There’s also a certain puzzlement at the next cry of outrage – that ticket prices are too high. If people are flocking to use something etc then it’s difficult to insist that prices are too high. […] Popularity both proves that the basic system is wrong and also that prices are too high. Tough this economics stuff, isn’t it?
As to the congestion part, well, on those popular lines and routes the route itself is running at capacity. It’s just not possible to squeeze more trains onto the tracks without them running into each other. Ah, but goes the cry, government should do something! But the tracks are already run by government, that we’re not getting more track capacity is government’s fault. Giving us a good guide to how it would be if government ran it all – as history tells it was like when government did.
As to the prices, well, that overcrowding shows us that prices are too low. We need some method of rationing that access to something being over-used. Price is always the best method of rationing. Thus prices should be higher to relieve that over-crowding – while we wait a few decades for government to pull thumb out and provide more track capacity.
Thameslink Class 700 Desiro City at London Blackfriars in 2016.
Photo by Alex Nevin-Tylee via Wikimedia Commons.
“Carding” is an infringement of rights that does nothing to reduce crime
Chris Selley wonders why the blatantly unconstitutional practice of “carding” people without even a hint of suspicion that they’ve done anything wrong was instituted in the first place:
… it’s far easier to make a case that carding has no effect at all on serious crime than that it has a huge one. But even if previous carding practice had “worked,” even if the new regulation had stopped it from working, it barely even amounts to a defence. As [Justice Michael] Tulloch notes, “the regulation simply gives effect to the existing law that people do not have to provide their identification when there are no reasonable grounds to believe the person has committed an offence.”
If carding “worked,” in other words, it relied on citizens not knowing or caring about their already-existing right to be left alone whilst minding their own business, or being too intimidated to exercise that right — as well they might be. Politely refusing an armed man or woman’s request to identify yourself is no small thing, all the more so if you have “nothing to hide.”
The problems inherent in such a situation are myriad. There are quantifiable harms: People were denied jobs and security clearances, and in at least one case menaced by child services, thanks to information stored in police databases that implicated them in nothing other than being included in a police database. And there are more existential harms. Imagine growing up with a squeaky-clean nose yet constantly feeling like a person of police interest. It’s profoundly alienating, especially when targets quite logically conclude, based on well-documented statistics if not their own intuition, that they’re being harassed because of their race, skin colour or some other innate characteristic. It’s no less insidious if the bias is unconscious; it might even be more so.
Nothing good can come from it, and plenty bad. It hinders police in solving crimes, for one thing: “When a segment of society believes that it has been unfairly targeted by the police,” Tulloch writes, “it will delegitimize the police in their eyes.” All those desperate calls for witnesses to come forward will be met more skeptically. Tulloch cites research showing “inappropriate interaction with police” can even “desensitize young people from guilt regarding potential acts of crime.”
WW2 Ball Turret with twin .50 cals at the Big Sandy Shoot
Gunscom
Published on 7 Dec 2018One of the highlights at this fall’s Big Sandy Shoot was a vintage WW2 ball turret with twin .50 cals that spectators could shoot.
Although it’s not uncommon to see unique and rare guns and military vehicles at the event, the fully functioning ball turret garnered a lot of attention.
Taigh Ramey, president of Vintage Aircraft, towed the Sperry A2 ball turret all the way from Stockton, California to the shoot, which takes place every April and October just outside of the town of Wikieup, Arizona.
Sperry A2 ball turrets were commonly mounted underneath either a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress or the Consolidated B-24 Liberator. They were used to defend the bomber against aircraft attacking from below.
Ramey found the turret in a surplus shop many years ago. It took him 15 years to convince the owner to sell it, and he’s sure glad he did. Ramey fixes up and maintains vintage aircraft for the Stockton Field Aviation Museum. The ball turret has proven to be very popular with visitors.
The turret was new ‘old stock’ from the 1940’s, so it never saw service. Despite having sat on a storage skid for half a century, Ramey says he brought it back to his shop, put hydraulic fluid, fired it up, and the turret ran like a charm.
Rumored to have inspired the inside of the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars films, the Sperry turret was operated by the gunner inside using two hand controls that operated two Vickers hydraulic units. It could rotate 360 degrees and tilt up up and down. Atop two control handles were fire buttons that engaged two .50 caliber light-barrel Browning AN/M2 machine guns. The guns fired 850 rounds per minute, and each gun was fed by a 500 round box of ammunition. The guns could not be reloaded in flight, so gunners had to be careful.
Contrary to popular myth, ball turrets were not always manned by tiny people. People up to six foot could fit inside comfortably. Gunners sat in a fetal-type position, and aimed the guns using a Reflector sight in front of a small circular window between their legs.
Statistically, the ball turret was one of the safest crew positions during WWII as ball turret gunners had the lowest loss rate.
Ramey was at the Big Sandy Shoot not only to live fire the turret, something he’d never done before, but also to promote Bomber Camp. It is a two-day event held on May 29 and 30 of every year at the Stockton Metropolitan Airport in California. Participants get a chance to step back in time to train for a bombing mission, and then to fly it for real.
Participants learn how to use original bomber sights and compensate for height, distance and wind. Gunnery classes familiarize them with the ball turret and other aircraft mounted guns, all of which can be fired in flight using airsoft propane ‘blanks’.
The grande finale is a flying mission in which dummy cement bombs are dropped from high altitudes on targets from a B-24 or B17 aircraft. Bomber Camp offers a once in a lifetime experience to gain a greater appreciation for the men and women of the “greatest generation”. Enrollment is tax deductible.
QotD: English racism
The old-style contemptuous attitude towards ‘natives’ has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasising the superiority of the white race have been abandoned. Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
January 5, 2019
Leave the Strand Alone! Iconic Bookstore Owner Pleads With NYC: Don’t Landmark My Property
ReasonTV
Published on 4 Jan 2019Leave the Strand Alone! Iconic Bookstore Owner Pleads With NYC: Don’t Landmark My Property
More from the article at Reason:
If New York City moves ahead with a proposal to landmark the home of the Strand Book Store, it would be putting a “bureaucratic noose” around the business, says owner Nancy Bass Wyden. “The Strand survived through my dad and grandfather’s very hard work,” Wyden says, and now the city wants to “take a piece of it.”
Opened by her grandfather, Benjamin Bass, in 1927, the Strand is New York City’s last great bookstore — a four-story literary emporium crammed with 18 miles of merchandise stuffed into towering bookcases arranged along narrow passageways. It’s the last survivor of the world-famous Booksellers Row, a commercial district comprised of about 40 secondhand dealers along Fourth Avenue below Union Square.
On December 4, 2018, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on a proposal to designate the building that’s home to the Strand as a historic site. If the structure is landmarked, Wyden would need to get permission from the city before renovating the interior or altering the facade.
“It would be very difficult to be commercially nimble if we’re landmarked,” Wyden tells Reason. “We’d have to get approvals through a whole committee and bureaucracy that do not know how to run a bookstore.”
Wyden’s outrage derives in part from her family’s decades of struggle to keep the business alive.
The Strand survived, she says, because of “my grandfather and my dad’s very hard work and their passion … Both worked most of their lives six days a week” and they “hardly took vacations.”
We may already have passed the peak of High Speed Railways
Hans Bader looks at the mass transit mess, including a brief glance at the state of high speed passenger rail:
So-called bullet trains generally turn out to be white elephants. South Korea is abolishing its celebrated high-speed rail line from its capital, Seoul, to a nearby major city because it can’t cover even the marginal costs of keeping the trains running. Most people who ride trains don’t need maximum possible speed, and most of those who do will still take the plane to reach distant destinations.
Despite Japan’s much-vaunted bullet trains, most Japanese don’t take the bullet train either; they take buses because the bullet train is too expensive. Bullet trains do interfere with freight lines, so Japanese freight lines carry much less cargo than in the United States, where railroads—rather than trucks—carry most freight, thereby reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
California’s so-called bullet train is vastly behind schedule and over budget, and will likely never come close to covering its operating costs once it is built. As Reason magazine noted, transportation officials have warned that California’s misnamed “bullet train” is a disaster in the making. California is drastically understating the costs of its high-speed rail project. Just the first leg of this $77 billion project will cost billions more than budgeted. And the project is already at least 11 years behind schedule.
Irish Punjabi Party (New Way Forward) – The Snake Charmer ft. Raoul Kerr
TheSnakeCharmer
Published on 10 Dec 2018Bringing together a blend of cultures yet again in this fun and dancy tune popularly heard in Titanic called “Irish Party in third class”. Giving it The Snake Charmer effect we remade this song into something fun and pass a message of how some things like art, culture and ideas are better when brought and shared together. In this case blending a traditional Irish folk tune into electronic dubstep music with bhangra and punjabi beats. Today you can watch me because of the internet and i feel that using the internet to create a shared global culture is the way forward.
Music stays undivided 🙂Support me on:
Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/thesnakecharmer
iTunes – https://apple.co/2QLYaFn
Google Play – http://tiny.cc/2xam1y
Spotify – http://tiny.cc/xyam1yArchy J (The Snake Charmer) – Bagpipes
Raoul Kerr (Rapper)
Dhol – Sarthak Pahwa
Irish Dancers – Laura Whistler and her dancers
NCEA CCF Band (UK)Original Song is a Irish folk song called “Blarneys Pilgrim”
QotD: Nasser’s anti-American success, funded by the USA
If you’re familiar with the history of the region, you already know that Nasser aligned Egypt with the Soviet Union anyway and whipped up the Arab world into an anti-American frenzy. Ike’s gamble failed. Nasser’s heart was with Moscow all along. He cleverly used Eisenhower as a tool for his own ambitions and planned to stab the United States in the front from the very beginning.
One of Nasser’s deceptions should be familiar to anyone who has followed the painful ins and outs of botched Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Over and over again, Nasser used a strategy Doran calls “dangle and delay.” He repeatedly dangled the tantalizing idea of peace between Egypt and Israel in front of Eisenhower’s eyes, only to delay moving forward for one bogus reason after another. He never planned to make peace with Israel or even to engage in serious talks.
Nasser did, however, participate in theatrical arms negotiations with Washington that he knew would never go anywhere.
Eisenhower wanted to equip the Egyptian army. Nasser wasn’t stupid, though. He knew that Ike would attach strings to the deal. Egypt’s soldiers would need to be trained by Americans, and they’d be reliant on Americans for spare and replacement parts. Nasser really wanted to be armed by and tied to the Soviet Union, but had to pretend otherwise lest Eisenhower side with Britain, France, and Israel. So Nasser slowly sabotaged talks with the United States in such a way that made Washington seem unreasonable. That way, when he turned to the Soviet Union for weapons, he could half-plausibly say he had no choice.
Nasser did such a good job pretending to be pro-American that he convinced the United States to give him a world-class broadcasting network that allowed him to speak to the entire Arab world over the radio. Washington expected him to use his radio addresses to rally the Arab world behind America against the Russians. Instead, he used it to blast the United States with virulently anti-American propaganda and to undermine the West’s Arab allies. “Nasser,” Doran writes, “was the first revolutionary leader in the postwar Middle East to exploit the technology in order to call over the heads of the monarchs to the man on the street. Suddenly the Hashemite monarchy [in Iraq and Jordan] found itself sitting atop volcanoes.”
Nasser strode the Arab world like a colossus after his American-made victory in the Suez Crisis, and he became more brazenly anti-American as he gathered strength. Conning Ike was no longer possible, but Nasser didn’t need the United States anymore anyway.
Michael J. Totten, “We Are Still Living With Eisenhower’s Biggest Mistake”, The Tower Magazine, 2017-02.
January 4, 2019
The US Turns Away from the World to Prohibition and Crime I Between 2 Wars I 1921 Part 1 of 2
TimeGhost History
Published on 3 Jan 2019After an unpopular war and facing unrest at home, the US returns to isolationism after half a century of gradually opening up to the world. On the home front, prohibition gives rise to more problems of the very kinds it meant to solve; crime and debauchery, and one the biggest crooks is in the White House.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Rune Væver Hartvig
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Edited by Wieke KapteijnsThumbnail depicts US President Warren G. Harding as in his official presidential portrait.
Video Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
From the comments:
Now… before all you modern liberals and modern conservatives get your panties in a bunch; listen carefully to what Indy says in this video this is not about right or left wing politics in the modern sense, and this video is not about 2018 any parallels you infer to today will by force be way, way off the mark, the world of the 1920s was a very different place. If you have the desire to draw parallels to today we can’t stop you (we disagree on principle, but hey), in any case we’re not telling this part of American history for that reason, this is just the way it happened and we have to cover these events and movements to understand yet another little piece of the puzzle that was laid as the foundation for World War Two.
SplashData’s Top 100 Worst Passwords of 2018
QotD: The modern C.V.
Take that ghastly soul-destroying document, the curriculum vitae. It is as inherently inflationary as clipping the coinage or fiat money. A friend of mine, whom I knew to be competent and conscientious, consistently failed to be appointed to positions for which he was eminently qualified. My wife, who knew the ways of modern appointment committees, asked to see the curriculum vitae he was supplying with his applications for the jobs.
She was horrified: He would never get a job with such a curriculum, it was far too old-fashioned. It gave merely his formal qualifications and the positions he had previously held, with references. No, no, said my wife to him, what you need is to boast. You have to make out that your piddling research might be chosen very soon for a Nobel Prize, that your occasional good deeds were as at great a personal sacrifice as those of Mother Teresa, and that you are a person whose outside interests are carried out at levels equal to the professional; in other words that you are multitalented, multivalent, and quite out of the ordinary. Moreover, your ambition must be to save the world, to be a pioneer and a path-breaker, not merely to do your best in the circumstances. You must be grandiose, not modest.
Of course, every other applicant would be similarly boastful, and so, like star architects trying to outdo each other in the outlandish nature of their buildings, my friend’s boasts had to be preposterous, quite out of keeping with his admirable character. But once he had swallowed the bitter pill of realism, he was appointed at once. We all have to be Barons Munchausen now.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Merits of Nepotism and Boasting”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-12-08.
January 3, 2019
The “Full English Breakfast”
My friend Liam emailed me to ask whether I had strong opinions on this serious debate despite having been raised in Canada. This was my response:
Yes, of course. I have a pulse, you know.
A proper Full English Breakfast is actually composed of eggs, bacon (English bacon, not side, back, or peameal), beans, and black pudding. Sausage is for wimps who can’t handle black pudding. Optional, but completely acceptable additions include fried mushrooms, fried onions, fried tomatoes, potato fry-up, and toast.
Anything else is an Abomination in the sight of the Lord. ESPECIALLY chips.
As to the positioning on the plate … these must also be people who colour-code their sock drawers and have secret notebooks filled with locomotive spotting numbers. You know, “anoraks”.
Bloody wankers.
