InRangeTV
Published on 21 Jan 2018What does a week’s worth of food for two people in World War Two London look like? We bought the whole week’s groceries and we will explain what the rations entailed and what we have to work with (this episode was actually filmed the day before the experiment began).
Of course, the typical British family during the war did not have a refrigerator, and the wife would have been shopping for groceries on a daily basis.
Day 2 Menu:
Breakfast: Whole Grain Pancakes, tea
Lunch: Split Pea Soup, bread
Tea: Pumpkin Spice Cookies, tea
Dinner: Spam, Vegetable Mash, aleInRange is entirely viewer supported:
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April 19, 2019
British Ration Week Episode 2: Food for the Week
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QotD: The revolution will be YouTubed, which might snuff it out before it gets underway
I think that a number of factors will ultimately tamp it down [campus protests/riots]. The ability of people to record videos of police has been a tremendous spur to calls for reform. But police are not the only people who can be filmed in public; so can protesters. I suspect that as people discover what can happen when future employers google up videos of you shouting “[expletive deleted] the police” or screaming at professors and speakers, the costs of this sort of protest will rise, and there will be less of it. Moreover, I suspect that both alumni and state funding for schools where this sort of thing happens a lot will often decline, putting pressure on administrators to curb it.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
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April 18, 2019
Chiang Kai-shek Plays it Like Stalin | Between 2 Wars | 1926 Part 3 of 3
TimeGhost History
Published on 17 Apr 2019In 1926 Chiang Kai-shek manages to turn the Kuomintang into his own private army, and the events are befuddling…
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson supported by Gabriel MatsakisColorized Pictures by Olga Shirnina
https://klimbim2014.wordpress.comVideo Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
15 hours ago (edited)
First of all, many thanks to Gabriel Matsakis for helping out with the research for this episode! While writing about China and Chiang Kai-shek, Spartacus realised that he needed to make more than one script to explain The Northern Expedition (crucial to the developments that eventually lead to the World War in China), so we threw in another episode in 1926 to explain Chiang Kai-shek’s rise to power. In the next episode (1927 part 1) we will return to the United States and look at the economic boom and the Roaring Twenties. We will also return to China and the actual Northern Expedition in a 1927 episode after that. Enjoy the confusion that is China in the 1920s!?!
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Holiday Tales: Easter!
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 30 Mar 2018Happy Good Friday, everyone! Easter’s in two days, so let’s take a hot minute to see if we can figure out what exactly we’re celebrating when we pull out our egg baskets and chocolate bunnies, and why exactly we do it the way we do. Will we be able to unravel the mysteries of Easter before Jesus’s death timer hits zero? (Spoiler: no!)
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Shakespeare’s work is merely used to highlight the brilliance and originality of modern theatrical directors
Anthony Daniels reports for Quadrant Online of how he recently attended a performance of a play by some unimportant dead English white guy:
The precise date of the discovery by theatre directors that they are greater than Shakespeare cannot be specified: the discovery was more a process than an event. But by the time I saw a production of Richard II at the Almeida Theatre a few weeks ago, the superior genius of any director over that of Shakespeare was an established principle and indisputable fact.
[…]
But if I had an elevated conception of Shakespeare, how naive and mistaken I was! I knew nothing of Richard II — the play, that is, not the king — until I saw the production by Joe Hill-Gibbins. How narrow had been my previous conception of it! I discovered, among other things, that Richard was a short, fat fifty-eight-year-old in a black T-shirt, with a crown of the kind that is awarded to the person who finds the fève in the galette des rois that the French eat on the sixth of January, that the Duke of Norfolk was a woman dressed like a cleaning lady, and that all the action of the play takes place in what looks like a large biscuit tin, without exit or entrance. All this, of course, means something far deeper than anything that a mere Shakespeare could convey, being deeply symbolic, and therefore required real inventive genius on the part of the director to bring forth.
While the same actress took the parts of the Duke of Norfolk, Bushy and Green (all of them looking like cleaning ladies and each indistinguishable from the other because they could not leave the stage even to change costume), and the parts of both the Earl of Northumberland and the Bishop of Carlisle by other actresses, actual women’s roles such as that of Richard’s Queen were expunged entirely from the text. Between them, three actresses played five male parts and only one female. There is a profound lesson in this somewhere, no doubt in enlightened gender fluidity.
Most of the lines were delivered as if they were a religious incantation in a dead language that both the celebrants and the congregation desired to get over with as quickly as possible, clear diction being one of the many tools by which class hegemony is so unjustly exercised. The actor who took the part of Richard, it is true, was comprehensible, but made the acting of Sir Henry Irving appear taciturn by comparison. If emphasis is good, overemphasis must be better: no more stiff upper lip, we are all hysterics now, and can understand nothing that is not accompanied by gesticulation.
The director fortunately realised that Shakespeare got the order of his play wrong: Richard’s great speech in Act V scene 5 (“I have been studying how I may compare / This prison unto the world …”) was actually a prologue. The director is not the interpreter of Shakespeare, but rather Shakespeare is, and ought to be, the occasion, the opportunity, for the director to place his own immortal (and highly original) genius before the world.
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British Ration Week Episode 1: Introduction
InRangeTV
Published on 20 Jan 2018Did you know that under World War II rationing, the health of the British public improved by virtually every objective measure? Caloric intake increased, lifespan increased, and infant mortality decreased. Despite being an island nation under severe submarine blockade, the United Kingdom managed to not just provide food for its millions of inhabitants, but actually build and maintain the public trust in government rationing. How did this happen? We will explore the question all week, while Ian eats a diet of only what a typical British family would have eaten during the dark days of the Blitz.
Day 1 Menu:
Breakfast: Oatmeal Porridge, tea
Lunch: Leek & Potato Soup, bread & margarine, water
Tea: Vanilla Depression Cake, tea
Dinner: Cottage Pie, aleFor the recipes for today’s dishes – and lots of other details about the experiment – please see our data page at InRange.tv:
http://www.inrange.tv/british-rationi…
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QotD: Roadblocks to deregulating the US healthcare market
One problem America has is simply that our government administration isn’t very good. That’s not true across the board — our government statistics are, IMHO, the finest in the world. But there’s stuff that other countries can do that we can’t, either because our government is more decentralized, or because our civil service just isn’t as prestigious (and therefore as full of competent, motivated people) as those in other countries. And our regulatory approach — rules rather than principles based, and highly adversarial — is also suboptimal, and hard to change.
Given how much the government now interferes in health care, that’s a big problem. Given our lack of administrative competency, our first step should be pulling back where we can — trying to push more ordinary expenses onto consumers, for example, who can manage those the same way they manage their aspirin and antacid purchases now. And eliminating the tax deduction for employer sponsored health care would be major. But I fear, politically impossible.
Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.
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April 17, 2019
Game of Thrones Goblet | Turning Tuesday #13
Matt Estlea
Published on 16 Apr 2019The new season of Game of Thrones is FINALLY here. So I thought I would make myself a wooden goblet to drink from while watching each episode and become one step closer to becoming Jon Snow.
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_________________________________________________________________My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 23 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***.
I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre with a further 1 year working as an Artist in Residence at the Sylva Foundation. I now teach City and Guilds Furniture Making at Rycotewood as of September 2018.
I also had 5 years of experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I helped customers with purchasing tools, demonstrated in stores and events, and gained extensive knowledge about a variety of tools and brands.
During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best.
I like to have a laugh and my videos are quite fast paced BUT you will learn a lot, I assure you.
Lets go make a mess.
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Some good news in the aftermath of the Notre-Dame de Paris fire
Mark Steyn, who is not normally noted for his habit of bringing good news, actually has some good news to share as the authorities in Paris evaluate the damage to the cathedral after the fire of April 15th:
The north rose window of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, in a photo from 22 August, 2010. This and the other two rose windows are reported to have survived the fire of 15 April, 2019.
Photo by Julie Anne Workman. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Twenty-four hours after Notre Dame de Paris began to burn, there is better news than we might have expected: More of the cathedral than appeared likely to has, in fact, survived intact – including the famous rose windows, among the most beautiful human creations I’ve ever seen. The “new” Notre Dame will be mostly high up and out of sight, which is just as well given that modern man prides himself on having no smidgeonette of empathy with his flawed forebears and thus the chances of historic recreation of the animating spirit of 1160 are near zero.
There is an architectural debate to be had, I suppose, about whether a reconstructed twelfth-century cathedral requires nineteeth-century appurtenances such as its spire. But the minute that starts you risk some insecure dweeb like Macron, on whose watch the thing went up in smoke, getting fanciful ideas about bequeathing to posterity some I M Pei pyramid on the top of the roof. France’s revolution, unlike America’s, was aggressively secular, and it ultimately found expression in the 1905 law on the separation of churches and the state. Since then the French state has owned the cathedral, and thus it will be Macron who ultimately decides what arises in its place.
Beyond that are the larger questions: When the iconic house of worship at the heart of French Christianity decides to mark Holy Week by going up in flames, it’s too obviously symbolic of something … but of what exactly? Two thousand churches have been vandalized in the last two years: Valérie Boyer, who represents Bouches-du-Rhône in the National Assembly, said earlier this month that “every day at least two churches are profaned” – by which she means arson, smashed statutes of Jesus and Mary, and protestors who leave human fecal matter in the shape of a cross. This is a fact of life in modern France.
As it is, there is no shortage of excitable young Mohammedans gleefully celebrating on social media. In 2017 some inept hammer-wielding nutter yelling “Allahu Akbar!” had a crack at Notre Dame, and a couple of years before that the historian Dominique Venner blew his brains out on the altar to protest same-sex marriage. I love France but, in recent years, it’s hard not to pick up on the sense that it’s coming apart – and that, when the center cannot hold, the things at that center, the obsolete embodiments of a once cohesive society, are a natural target.
In addition, the authorities’ eagerness to assure us that it was an accident at a time when such a conclusion could not possibly be known – and when their own response to the emergency was, to put it politely, somewhat dilatory – was itself enough to invite suspicion: “Sure, it might be an accident. But, even if it weren’t, they’d still tell us it was…”
So, precisely because Paris is full of people who would love to burn down Notre Dame four days before Good Friday, it seems bizarrely improbable that it should happen by accident: that a highly desirable target should be taken out by some slapdash workman leaving a cigarette butt near his combustible foam take-out box – the lunchpack of Notre Dame – and letting the dried-out twelfth-century timbers do the rest.
The Rose Window was spared! pic.twitter.com/D5NjepKzh3
— The French History Podcast (@FrenchHist) April 16, 2019
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Lee Carbine: Gunmaking is not for the Faint of Heart
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 16 Apr 2019This rifle is lot #13868 at Morphy’s April 2019 auction:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/lee-…James Paris Lee is known today as the inventor of the detachable box magazine, and the “Lee” in the “Lee Enfield” rifle system – a very significant contributor to firearms development. His first foray into the business of gun design and manufacture, however, was a rather ignominious failure.
Lee patented a single shot swinging barrel system in 1862, and hoped to win an Army contract for it. In February of 1864 he submitted a rifle version to the Army, and was promptly rejected – the Army was not interested in breechloading rifles. Lee came right back in April 1864 with a carbine pattern, and this was accepted for testing – the Army was indeed looking for breechloading cavalry carbines. It took a full year, but in April 1865 the Army came back and gave Lee a contract for 1,000 carbines at $18 each. Lee rounded up investors and capital, and created the Lee Fire Arms Company in Milwaukee to produce the guns. His first two samples were delivered in January 1866 – in .42 rimfire caliber.
At this point, there is some disagreement. Lee claims that his sample guns in .42 caliber were accepted, and thus his followup delivery of .42 caliber carbines should have been accepted. The government said that the contract specified .44 rimfire caliber, and his delivery of .42 caliber guns was unacceptable, and thus rejected. A court case would ensue, but with the rejection of the first 250 guns and the cancellation of their contract, the company had to look hard and fast for a backup plan. In March 1867 newspaper ads were placed in Milwaukee for sporting rifles and carbines from the Lee company. The parts planned for military production were used instead for civilian guns in a variety of configurations – carbines, light rifles, and heavy rifles in several barrel lengths and several calibers. By 1868 all production had ceased, and the Lee Fire Arms Company dissolved.
James Lee returned to his former profession of watchmaking, but this experience with gun manufacturing would not keep him deterred for long. By 1872 he was back working with Remington, and would go on the produce the designs that we know him for today. The lessons of this rifle? Firearms manufacturing is a risky business, not for the faint of heart. And also, sometimes you can learn from a difficult experience to do better the second time.
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Theresa May has been brilliantly successful in achieving her (true) aims
Theodore Dalrymple admits having misjudged Mrs. May as a failure, when in fact her plans have been coming brilliantly to fruition:
Like almost everyone else, I regarded [Theresa May] as a pygmy in courage and a giant in incompetence, but it is time for a re-assessment, especially with regard to her efforts to Britain’s exit from the European Union. After the Union granted a further delay to Britain’s departure, the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, said that it was his secret dream to prevent Britain from leaving. It is pleasing to know that Mr Tusk’s secret dreams so entirely coincide with those of the British political class, including (I surmise) those of Mrs May. At last we have a basis for full and final agreement.
Like the great majority of the British political class, Mrs May was always in favour of remaining in the Union. This class was so confident of its ability to persuade the population that it was right that it agreed with practically no demur to a referendum which would pronounce the winner as the side which obtained 50 per cent plus one of the votes cast. Thus the matter of British membership, it thought, would be settled once and for all.
The problem for the political class was now to find a method of overriding the result of the referendum without doing so in too blatant a fashion. And here, in Mrs May, it found a perfect leader.
Needless to say, Mrs May, having been selected as Prime Minister, could not just put forward her conviction that Britain should remain in the Union and say outright that she had no intention of carrying out the will of the majority. At that stage, such a disavowal of the result would have been politically impossible and might even have caused unrest. Instead, she went through a brilliantly elaborate charade of negotiating withdrawal, in such a way that the result would not be accepted by Parliament. Her agreement would be withdrawal without withdrawal, the worst of all possible outcomes, all complication and difficulty, and no benefit.
She knew perfectly well that the European Union, having drafted this agreement unacceptable to Parliament, would not renegotiate it. Why should it, since it knew that Parliament had no intention of demanding a real and total withdrawal, since it did not want to withdraw at all? She also knew that Parliament would never agree to a withdrawal without an agreement with the Union, as Parliament has repeatedly made clear.
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Tank Chats #46 Ram Kangaroo | The Funnies | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 16 Feb 2018As part of the Funnies mini-series, David Fletcher takes a look at the troop-carrying Ram Kangaroo.
Towards the end of World War Two, Canadian Ram tanks were converted into Armoured Personnel Carriers called Kangaroos.
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QotD: “[E]valuating food by its calorie count is like evaluating literature by the number of pages in a book”
… calorie-counting is an ineffective approach to eating. Calories are a crude metric that takes into account nothing about the properties of foods other than the total energy they contain. The value of activities can’t be reduced to a number, and nor can foods. Still calories are listed everywhere, enumerated in enormous fonts on food packaging and across menus and ads for packaged products with nothing to recommend them but a lack of calories.
A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. The “calories” we talk about in food are the amount of energy released when that food is burned. Of course the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, so if you take in less energy than you use, it’s impossible to store that energy (as body fat). But the factors that go into energy balance are many. The body burns and stores energy from different foods in different forms at different times in different people in different ways.
That crudity leads to mistakes, like the idea that 200 calories of Skittles are in any way equivalent to 200 calories of salad. In that way, calories have been weaponized by marketers to claim their ingestible products are innocuous. As Coca-Cola has advertised, for one, drinking soda is fine as long as you exercise enough to burn off those calories. That’s reasonable if it weren’t also true that constant exposure to high-sugar foods changes the way our bodies store energy. It’s like saying it’s fine to insult someone as long as you follow it with a compliment.
Worse still are the loudly advertised “100-calorie” packs of sugar-based edible products. They cause insulin levels to surge, affecting nutrient absorption and subsequent hunger in ways fundamentally different from eating 100 calories of almonds or spinach. That’s so much spinach. It would fill your stomach and please the microbes of your bowel.
James Hamblin, “It’s True, Hot Baths Burn Calories: Why calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading”, The Atlantic, 2017-04-13.
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April 16, 2019
The fire at Notre-Dame de Paris
The central Paris landmark has been severely damaged by a fire that broke out beneath the roof of the cathedral early in the evening of April 15th. Here are a few images from the Wikimedia Commons page on the fire:
Officials were quick to announce that the fire was not the result of terrorist action … while the fire was still raging (that is, before anyone could have made any scientific determination on the cause), which only made those inclined to suspect terrorist activity even more suspicious. Conspiracy theorists gotta theorize, after all. Robert Harris discusses this aspect of the story at the New English Review:
Ruling out any cause other than accidental fire, at such an early stage, did seem to be an assumption made with [undue] rapidity, not least because it occurred within a week of Easter when such a religious landmark would be a prime target within a city and a nation that has suffered more than its share of acts of Islamist terrorism, and especially at a time when numerous French churches have been targeted.
The international media was similarly unanimous in describing the cause of the blaze, with some carrying critical coverage of Youtube’s automated topical descriptors linking the event with 9/11. Even Fox News’ Shepard Smith was rather more than simply unwilling to entertain the speculations of one French interviewee that tried to note some of the above surrounding circumstances.
Prima facie, it might have also been thought that it was peculiar that such a serious fire became so advanced during a time of day when the cathedral would have been in use by public visitors. There have been numerous serious fires during periods of restoration, as the mainstream media rightly noted, but less mentioned was the likely fact that such work would have ceased some hours before smoke became visible.
[…]
The prospect of a terrorist act rears but there is perhaps some reason to assume a non-terrorist motive because there doesn’t seem to have been any claims of responsibility. It may be thought that any Islamist organisation linked with the blaze of such a major Christian/Western landmark would be very keen to boast about the deed on social media when the story hit the international news. Alternatively, the inferno could have been caused by a lone-wolf terrorist attack but such individuals commonly swear allegiance to a particular group and/or make some sort of public statement before a given attack.
If religiously motivated terrorism can be deemed to be unlikely at this stage, obvious alternatives still remain, such as an act of criminal arson or non-religious terrorism in which the perpetrators might be less keen to voice their involvement with the crime. For example, the blaze could have been an act of secular quasi-terrorism/arson/vandalism by the left-wing ‘Black-Bloc’, which has been responsible for much of the recent violence within the ‘Yellow Vest’ protest movement. It may therefore be suggested that the French authorities came to an unduly prompt reaction, given the surrounding circumstances.
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Modern ASW corvettes are not the answer for the Royal Navy
A few years, back someone floated the idea of a cheaper class of warship for the Royal Navy to address a perceived weakness in anti-submarine capabilities. I heard it mentioned as the “cheap and cheerful” frigate proposal. The idea must still be popular with the fantasy fleet set, as Sir Humphrey takes some time to explain why the Royal Navy isn’t likely to order up a big batch of the 21st century’s answer to the Flower class of corvettes any time soon:
At its heart is the difficult question about whether the Royal Navy is best placed to meet the many global operational challenges it faces by investing in a small but highly capable force of escort ships, able to operate in every threat environment against peer competitors, or whether it invests more in a larger force of less capable platforms which increase its presence around the world.
Underpinning this argument is a sense by many commentators that what the Navy needs is more ships, and that the only way to get this is to invest in buying lots of smaller ships now to improve overall levels of capability.
This argument was recently made in an article by respected defence commentator Nicholas Drummond, who argued that what was required was a force of cheaper corvette style vessels. Perhaps up to 20 would be a highly effective way of providing basic ASW defence and also increasing hulls for operations around the world. Drawing his inspiration from the WW2 ‘FLOWER’ class, he notes that the RN was able to quickly build ships that provided a basic level of defence in an all out general war.
It is tempting to see this as a strong argument for the Royal Navy – build lots of little ships, individually cheap, but which when brought together provide a level of coherent defensive capability against threats that would potentially deter a submarine captain.
RCN Flower-class corvette HMCS Regina, pennant number K234 circa 1942-43.
Photo from the Canadian Navy Heritage site, negative number CT-252 via Wikimedia Commons.
The parallels break down because the Flower class were very cheap to build — they were built by commercial shipyards that normally worked on fishing vessels and small- to medium-sized cargo ships — they were not as heavily built as “real” warships and would have been almost helpless in surface combat with anything larger than a surfaced U-boat or light patrol craft. The enemy they were designed to fight was effectively a torpedo boat with limited underwater capabilities. WW2-era anti-submarine combat is no longer a useful guide to modern warfare.
The reality is that modern ASW is not something that can be done cheaply or via a simple platform. A credible and effective ASW frigate requires two three key assets, firstly the sonar processing power to identify, track and prosecute an attack against an extremely quiet target that does not want to be found. Secondly, it needs the means to deliver this attack as far away from the escort ship as possible – which calls for a platform capable of operating a long range helicopter capable of prosecuting an attack. Finally to prevent detection and attack, the frigate is required to be as quiet as possible to avoid notifying submarines of its presence – this requires extensive silencing and mounting of machinery to prevent it giving away a ships presence.
In turn these three characteristics raise the cost of the platform. Modern sonar equipment is incredibly expensive – particularly if you want to opt for things like Towed Array Sonars. If you want it to be able to work effectively against a highly capable target, you need to be prepared to spend a lot of money on it. There may be plenty of ‘cheap’ ASW frigate designs out there, but they almost certainly skimp on the complex underpinning sonar and software architecture required to be effective – and they are not intended to go up against peer threats like the latest Russian SSNs.
In the same vein while some of the designs on the market may have a flight deck or hangar for a small aircraft, what they are not cleared for is operating large Merlin scale helicopters. These are an essential part of the ASW battle – intended to travel quickly to successfully prosecute any contacts, the Merlin is at the heart of the modern Royal Navy frigates ASW weaponry.
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