Let us be clear about three facts. First, all battles and all wars are won in the end by the infantryman. Secondly, the infantryman always bears the brunt. His casualties are heavier, he suffers greater extremes of discomfort and fatigue than the other arms. Thirdly, the art of the infantryman is less stereotyped and far harder to acquire in modern war than that of any other arm. The role of the average artilleryman, for instance, is largely routine; the setting of a fuse, the loading of a gun, even the laying of it are processes which, once learnt, are mechanical. The infantryman has to use initiative and intelligence in almost every step he moves, every action he takes on the battlefield. We ought therefore to put our men of best intelligence and endurance into the Infantry.
Field Marshal Earl Wavell, “In praise of infantry”, The Times, 1945-04-19.
February 26, 2019
QotD: The infantryman
February 25, 2019
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [is] doing for America what Jeremy Corbyn has done for Britain”
Alex Noble sings the praises of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she does the heavy lifting to bring awareness of socialism to the American people:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking at the Reardon Convention Center in Kansas City, on 20 July 2018.
Photo by Mark Dillman via Wikimedia Commons.
Good old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – she’s doing for America what Jeremy Corbyn has done for Britain. Much to the dismay of the secret socialists now entrenched in the Democrat Party, she is stripping away the protective layer of bullshit that socialism normally has to rely upon to keep people from understanding its inherent failings, and is thus laying it bare before the world.
Because she is too ignorant to understand them – she actually believes in socialism, and thinks that if only it is adequately explained to the rest of us, we will love it as she does.
She doesn’t know enough history to know that everyone over the age of forty has seen socialism tried a dozen times in their lifetimes. Her sales pitch is wasted on us – we’ve seen the results before.
So when she told Amazon that their particular brand of crony capitalism was not welcome in New York, she genuinely thought people would admire her.
Instead, even the crony capitalists on the Democrat side of the aisle (i.e those who understand how the game is really played) are very upset with her – she has driven away 25,000 jobs and all the
voteseconomic benefits that would have flowed from them.All because she thinks Amazon should pay more corporation tax.
Project Lightening Episode 04: Field Strip
C&Rsenal
Published on 21 Feb 2019Project Lightening is the first collaborative project between C&Rsenal and Forgotten Weapons. It features SEVEN World War One light machine guns put head to head to see which is the best!
We’re releasing two episodes a week but you can get them all at once over at C&Rsenal AND support both shows at the same time!
http://candrsenal.com/product/lightening
Episode 01: https://youtu.be/TVgkwQTo2n4
Episode 02: https://youtu.be/-hSZbo8Hvn4
Episode 03: https://youtu.be/A9ryJaj3mPw
Modern parenting – too many helicopters yield lots of snowflakes
It’s a commonplace assertion that children today have less unscheduled, unsupervised opportunities for play and exploration, and parents have been indoctrinated into the belief that the world has become a much more dangerous place and their kids need 24/7 protection from those myriad dangers. “Helicopter” parenting is a rational response to this indoctrination, but it comes with costs to the growth and maturity of the next generation. More than a decade ago, I posted this graphic showing how each generation has been more protective of their own children than their parents had been for them:
The problem has been getting worse over time, as Rob Creasy and Fiona Corby describe:
Children growing up in the UK are said to be some of the unhappiest in the industrialised world. The UK now has the highest rates of self harm in Europe. And the NSPCC’s ChildLine Annual Review lists it as one of the top reasons why children contact the charity.
Children’s mental health has becomes one of British society’s most pressing issues. A recent report from the Prince’s Trust highlights how increasing numbers of children and young people are unhappy with their lives, sometimes with tragic consequences.
This is a generation of young people that has been labelled as “snowflakes” – unable to handle stress and more prone to taking offence. They are also said to have less psychological resilience than previous generations. And are thought to be too emotionally vulnerable to cope with views that challenge their own.
[…]
Children’s lives are being stifled. No longer are children able to spend time with friends unsupervised, explore their community or hang around in groups without being viewed with suspicion. Very little unsupervised play and activity occurs for children in public spaces or even in homes – and a children’s spare time is often eaten up by homework or organised activity.
This is further impacted by the way children are taught in schools and how pressure to succeed has led to a taming of education. But if children are never challenged, if they don’t ever experience adversity, or face risks then it is not surprising they will lack resilience.
HMCS Bonaventure of the Royal Canadian Navy
Sneaky Loon
Published on 9 Apr 2017The Bonaventure was purchased from the Royal Navy to replace HMCS Magnificent because the Bonaventure could operate fighter jets to conduct anti-submarine activities.
QotD: Defining mineral reserves
The European chemists organisation – EuChemS – has just added to the torrent of environmental drivel with their new periodic table. They’re trying to tell us which elements are going to run out when and thus tell us all that we’ve got to recycle. The entire process is bunkum because they’ve not understood the first thing about the supply of minerals. They simply do not know the meaning of mineral reserve that is.
Just for the edification of anyone who does drool when contemplating their own nasal effluvia – you know, a member of Greenpeace, that sort of person – a mineral reserve is something we’ve proven, yes proven, that we can extract from using today’s technology, at today’s prices, and make a profit. It costs a lot of money to prove these facts. Thus we only prove for what we’re likely to use in the next few decades. Mineral reserves are, to a reasonable level of accuracy, just the working stock of current mines.
There is no relationship, no relationship at all, between our mineral reserves and how much of that element or mineral is available to us to use. Really do grasp this point. It’s not that the amount is larger. It’s not that the multiple is high. It’s that there is no relationship at all. There are, for example, absolutely no mineral reserves of hafnium anywhere on the planet. Nothing, absolutely nada. At current rates of usage we might run out some few billion years after the Sun goes Red Giant. The European Chemical Society tries to tell us that there’s a serious risk of running short of Hafnium in the next 100 years. This is so gibberingly stupid that it would get a laugh from German geologists – I know because I told some this once and they giggled. Seriously, German – German – geologists, giggling.
Tim Worstall, “More Environmental Drivel With New Periodic Table – We’re Going To Run Out Of Helium”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-01-23.
February 24, 2019
Manstein Makes a Plan and Hitler has a Man Crush – WW2 – 026 – February 23 1940
World War Two
Published on 23 Feb 2019German General Erich von Manstein has a cunning plan. And as it happens, it’s just how Hitler likes it. This week, the German war plans change quite drastically. In the meantime, the Soviet Red Army continues it push through the Finnish Mannerheim line, except for a stubborn Finnish pocket of resistance at Taipale.
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Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: EastoryPortrait colorizations by Norman Stewart.
Photos of the Winter War are mostly from the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive (SA-Kuva).
Photo of Sartre by Government Press Office Israel, https://www.flickr.com/people/6906147….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.
From the comments:
World War Two
2 days ago (edited)
While the Winter War seems to be coming to an end, new plans are being crafted in Germany to invade most of their neighbours. And before someone asks: the Swastika in the thumbnail is NOT used as a political statement of some sort. Just like in all of our earlier episodes, we use relevant symbols from the different armies and powers to illustrate the topic of the thumbnail. And yes, we are aware of regulation in Germany and Austria regarding the use of Nazi symbols, but as long as they are used in an historical context for educational purposes, which it clearly is, showing this symbol is allowed.And before I forget: the release of this episode marks exactly half a year since we have started doing World War Two on 1 September 2018/1939. A lot has changed in these months, and there are still many exciting new things on the horizon. The series is about to enter a very eventful time, we are going to start with some new projects which you’ll hear about soon and there are more specials coming – which we hope to be able to bring to you on a regular basis as soon as possible. We hope you enjoy the episode!
Cheers, Joram
Another review of Curl’s Making Dystopia
Having read a few reviews of James Stevens Curl’s recent Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, I’m likely to add it to my booklist (when I have a budget for new books again, that is). Here, Michael Mehaffy shares his comments on the book:
Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, voted as Britain’s most hated building in a Channel 4 poll.
Photo by Ed Webster via Wikimedia Commons.
For most reform-minded urbanists today, the complicity of architectural Modernism in the urban fiascoes of the last century is not in dispute. A representative (and seminal) criticism was Jane Jacobs’ withering 1961 attack, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she described Le Corbusier’s “wonderful mechanical toy” that “said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement” — but as to how a city actually works, it told “nothing but lies.” Jacobs’s work was of course a major inspiration in forming the Congress for the New Urbanism, along with the work of other reformists like Leon Krier, Christopher Alexander and Vincent Scully.
In fact, the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism almost precisely inverts Le Corbusier’s 1933 Athens Charter: in place of the Modernists’ functional segregation, we would have mixed use; in place of their dominance of fast-moving vehicles (especially cars), we would have walkability and multi-modal streets; in place of wholesale demolition of historic districts and prohibition of historic styles, we would have preservation and renewal, and buildings that “grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.”
Yet in the last few decades, architectural Modernism has enjoyed a resurgence among some New Urbanists, as it has in the wider profession of architecture. For them, it’s reasonable to separate the urban mistakes of Modernism from its alleged architectural genius, which, as they see it, continues to offer inspiring building design ideas that can take their place happily within great new cities.
Of course, many critics would not agree — including many of the profession’s most prominent insiders. For them, the building-scale and urban-scale failures of Modernism have been of a piece, borne of a totalizing but defective theory of habitat, and even a dubious theory of architectural form itself. As the Post-Modernist Rem Koolhaas observed (in his 1995 book S,M,L,XL), “Modernism’s alchemistic promise, to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition, has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn’t work.” Nor was Koolhaas the first to attack the ideological foundations of Modernism. Similar criticisms came from earlier insiders like Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, wife of Bauhaus pioneer Lazslo, whose stinging 1968 essay on the Bauhaus labeled it “Hitler’s Revenge.” Its built works in the US carried, for her, “the browbeating symbolism of a negative ideology that was already bankrupt when the dying German Republic unloaded it on America.”
Yet for a movement that has been so frequently discredited, Modernism still has a curious grip on the profession even today. That’s because from the beginning, according to historian James Stevens Curl, the movement has been populated by “architectural bullies” who would stop at nothing to seize power, extinguish its competitors, re-write history, forbid all other styles (especially those with any ornament), and otherwise enforce a radical agenda — one that only seemed to offer all things alluring, progressive and historically inevitable. Beneath that marketable cover story, he says, the real agenda was an exhilarating quest for power and dominance, and especially later, for the wealth generated by a profitable industrialization of the human environment. Modernism sold, and no matter if it also sold out—cities, people, history, the future. For Curl, that approach was (and is) nothing less than “architectural barbarism.”
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Warners (Part 3/2)
Lindsay Ellis
Published on 20 Apr 2018Nothing is pure.
From the comments:
Special Agent Washing Tub
2 months agoMe; * watching this and feeling my childhood shatter*
“Why does it hurt so much?”
Lindsay: “BECAUSE IT WAS REAL.”
QotD: Wine books
There are three categories of wine book. The first are guides, like those of Robert Parker, which seek to offer practical help in the purchase and consumption of wines – though their effects are often contrary, adding feverishness to the acquisition (‘I’ve landed a 95-pointer!’) and self-consciousness to the drinking (‘Did you get black truffles on the nose?’). The second category consists of historical surveys and château profiles, the latter often little more than disguised puffery, since the author will have been given privileged access to the archives, and will have been vetted, if not actually chosen, by the château, will have been wined and dined until he – or, occasionally, she – is practically wearing the château’s label as a blazer badge. Famous wine houses are nowadays international businesses, and no less good at promoting themselves than Nike and Benetton. Thirdly, there are books of almost no practical value but which appeal to the nostalgic, fetishistic or cork-sniffing side of oenophilia: celebrations, anthologies, reminiscences of the wine country and its colourful characters, evocations of people and vintages often long since dead. The wine buff will often buy such useless treasures second-hand and will employ them to induce harmless reverie, rather like leafing through an old Sears Roebuck catalogue.
Julian Barnes, “Did You Get Black Truffles on the Nose?”, Literary Review, 1994-10.
February 23, 2019
How a statistical error became the key argument in the “everyone must turn vegan” movement
At The Conversation, Frank M. Mitloehner explains how a flawed statistic — comparing numbers derived from non-parallel bases — evolved into one of the most widely quoted arguments for governments forcing people to give up meat in their diet:
As the scale and impacts of climate change become increasingly alarming, meat is a popular target for action. Advocates urge the public to eat less meat to save the environment. Some activists have called for taxing meat to reduce consumption of it.
A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change.
[…]
Global livestock production by region (milk and eggs expressed in protein terms).
Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.Setting the record straight on meat and greenhouse gases
A healthy portion of meat’s bad rap centers on the assertion that livestock is the largest source of greenhouse gases worldwide. For example, a 2009 analysis published by the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute asserted that 51 percent of global GHG emissions come from rearing and processing livestock.According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the largest sources of U.S. GHG emissions in 2016 were electricity production (28 percent of total emissions), transportation (28 percent) and industry (22 percent). All of agriculture accounted for a total of 9 percent. All of animal agriculture contributes less than half of this amount, representing 3.9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s very different from claiming livestock represents as much or more than transportation.
Why the misconception? In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a study titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which received widespread international attention. It stated that livestock produced a staggering 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agency drew a startling conclusion: Livestock was doing more to harm the climate than all modes of transportation combined.
This latter claim was wrong, and has since been corrected by Henning Steinfeld, the report’s senior author. The problem was that FAO analysts used a comprehensive life-cycle assessment to study the climate impact of livestock, but a different method when they analyzed transportation.
For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat. This included emissions from fertilizer production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.
However, when they looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, they ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes. As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted.
“Panzerkampf” – The Battle of Kursk – Sabaton History 003
Sabaton History
Published on 21 Feb 2019In “Panzerkampf” on The Art of War album, Sabaton sings about the German offensive on the Kursk salient in the summer of 1943. We dive into the details of the Battle of Kursk and one of the biggest tank battles in world history, the Battle of Prokhorovka.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek KaminskiEastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.
Photo of Bill Belichick: https://www.flickr.com/photos/2700360…
No matter which “global crisis” they cry up, their answer is always “more government”
Alex Noble on the remarkable consistency of the proffered solution to any and all “global” problems:
Climatechangers are really just watermelons – green on the outside but red on the inside. You’ll notice that none of their ideas about how to prevent climate change involve anything other than bigger government.
For them, climate change is just a pretext – an irrefutable argument (“if you disagree that we need to save the planet you must want people to die!”) that enables them to demand more taxes and more power for them and their friends so they can set the world to rights.
And out here in the real world, they have their army of useful innocents – voters fearful of tackling the real world on their own without help from a cosseting State, all too ready to swallow any argument for bigger government.
Climate change largely consists of menacing them with stories about rising water and melting ice and starving polar bears, so they will allow our civil rights to be ridden over to keep us all safe. They demand it, in fact.
As H.L Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
The Hobbit: Battle of Five Studios (Part 2/2)
Lindsay Ellis
Published on 3 Apr 2018So we’ve looked into what the problems were with these movies, the question now is … why? What happened, Peter Jackson? WHAT HAPPENED?
From the comments:
app
5 months agoThat interview clip with John Callen near the end broke my heart. I also grew up with the hobbit and was bored to tears by the movies. But I never thought about the actors of the Dwarves and how important it was that they got pushed aside. The hobbit could have been amazing if it was this band of actors, dressed like dwarves, trying to reclaim their culture and finding out what that really means. It’s a pure idea, and ironically it was corrupted by greed… you reminded me what I loved about the book! :'(
QotD: “Toxic masculinity”
And then we have toxic masculinity. Is there toxic masculinity? Of course there is. Well, there is toxic and it can have a masculine expression. Because of obvious biological differences, the most toxic of women will have issues beating up people or raping them. It can be done, but it won’t be common.
Is masculinity toxic? Not more than femininity. The latest insistence on doing everything the feminine way has got us “feminine business” and “feminine politics” where everything is run on image, innuendo and gossip: the female version of toxicity. You’re either with the group or out, and if you’re out we’ll demonize you.
So blaming everything on men is bad-crazy.
I have a friend who has been trying to defend the Gillette ad as in “But they’re giving to causes that help raise boys who are fatherless” etc. I love her to death, but no. While that might be laudable, the fact is that that add is another brick in the wall of “If you’re a woman and your life isn’t perfect it’s a man’s fault.”
This bad crazy not only destroys marriages, it destroys GIRLS. You see that thing above “to succeed you must sacrifice?” If you infect females with the idea that they’re owed success and if they don’t get it, it’s men’s fault, you’re both undermining them and turning them into rage-filled screeching monkeys, who are exactly zero use to society. (Oh, but they vote for Marxists, so I guess there’s that.)
Worse, this bad crazy is riding on other bad crazy. Which like most bad crazy since the twentieth century has its origins on the insane crazy of Marx.
The question is, WHY was this ad made at all? It certainly doesn’t sell razors. So, why?
Because for decades we’ve taught our children their most important role in life is the crazy cakes “change the world” or “make a difference” and the difference they’re supposed to make is in the class-war (or race war, or sex war now) sense of bringing about the Marxist paradise. We tell them they’re supposed to speak for the voiceless, then tell them the voiceless are the “designated victim classes” (whom frankly we can’t get to SHUT UP.) We tell them this is what gives meaning to life. We tell them through school, through entertainment, through news narratives, through the people who are being lionized.
And this is bad crazy. Really bad crazy. By itself it is a wrench that will take society apart. We have publishers, writers, journalists, and probably taxi drivers, policemen, engineers and who knows what, increasingly convinced their highest calling is not doing their job, but “educating” or “improving” or “raising the consciousness of” other people.
Even for a credo that worked with humanity — say Christianity — when a society becomes convinced pushing the idea is more important than doing their job, the wheels come off. BUT when the credo is neo-Marxism, or actually “increasingly elaborate excuses as for the only thing Marxism brings about is death” it’s exponentially worse.
It’s also the explanation for why the wheels come off every field that gets taken over by the left: because the people in those fields stop understanding what their actual job is.
And it’s everywhere. At such a deep level that most people — even those mad at Gillette — didn’t see that the actual problem is that no one involved in the damn ad understood it had NOTHING to do with SELLING the product.
It’s bad crazy. There’s a lot of bad crazy running in the world. And we must stop it — and build under, build over, build around — or it will kill society.
Sarah Hoyt, “Bad Crazy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-01-20.
