Quotulatiousness

August 2, 2019

Polish-Ukrainian War 1919 – The Battle for Lemberg I The Great War July 1919

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 1 Aug 2019

Lviv or Lwów are two names for the same city that was known as Lemberg until 1919. The Poles considered it as one of their most important cultural and political centers, the Ukrainians too. And so, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the question of who would control this city led to conflict: The Polish-Ukrainian War.

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» SOURCES
Smele, Jonathan. The “Russian” Civil Wars 1916-1926 (London: Hurst, 2015).

Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War (New York: Pegasus Books, 2005).

Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018).

Macmillan, Margaret. The Peacemakers: Six Months That Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2001)

Dudko, Oksana: “Polish-Ukrainian Conflict over Eastern Galicia”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08 https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Kutschabsky, W. Die Westukraine im Kampfe mit Polen und dem Bolschewismus in den Jahren 1918–1923 (Berlin, 1934)

Davies, Norman. White Eagle Red Star (Random House, 2003 (1972))

Sharp, Alan. The Versailles Settlement. Peacemaking and the First World War, 1919-1923 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

Judson, Pieter. The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Belknap Press, 2016)

Böhler, Jochen. Civil War in Central Europe, 1918-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Timothy Snyder. The Reconstruction of Nations. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)

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“Screaming Eagles” – Battle of the Bulge – Sabaton History 026 [Official]

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published on 1 Aug 2019

When the Germans launched their last western offensive through the Belgian Ardennes in the winter of 1944, it was up to the American 101st Airborne Division to defend the key city of Bastogne. Surrounded by camouflaged German soldiers and endless artillery bombardments, the 101st, a.k.a the Screaming Eagles, endured.

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Doug Ford’s sudden onset “Winegate” scandal

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ontario premier Doug Ford is now taking flak for promoting an Ontario winery after his party accepted what some Toronto media reports characterized as a “generous” donation from the winery’s owner. How generous? Are we talking millions? Tens of millions? A thousand dollars. Toronto media considers $1,000 to be enough money to sway the provincial government and at least one local media outlet encouraged its readers to boycott the winery. But that turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg from a media investigation point of view: Ford’s ultra-cheesy “Ontario News Now” party propaganda channel had given Ford’s endorsement to at least four other mega-corporations whose political contributions may have gone as eye-wateringly high as $2,000! Torontonians may never have heard of these corporate puppet-masters who clearly now control Premier Ford’s every waking moment, but as Canadians have never seen corruption on this scale before — nearly ten thousand dollars in political contributions!! — they’re demanding all the usual things that media-ginned-up protests tend to demand.

At the National Post, Chris Selley wonders why the Ontario Progressive Conservatives are acting just as badly as the Liberals they replaced:

When it comes to Canadian politicians and money, it might be difficult to explain to a foreign visitor exactly what’s kosher and what’s not. Ontario Premier Doug Ford got some bad press this week for having promoted the Pelee Island Winery in one of his impossibly cheesy “Ontario News Now” propaganda videos, just weeks after the winery’s owner, Walter Schmoranz, donated $1,000 to Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. In isolation, it didn’t look great. If it’s a coincidence, as the premier claims, then it’s the sort of coincidence a government wishing to claim moral rectitude should endeavour to avoid.

Viewed in the broad landscape of Canadian politics, however, it all seems rather overblown. Politicians regularly stump for certain products and businesses, after all, implicitly at the expense of others. More to the point they routinely give businesses free money without asking us, and not out of the goodness of their hearts.

According to David Akin’s indispensable @ottawaspends Twitter feed, the federal government doled out $723,000 to wineries and winery associations this year and last. The Nova Scotia Winery Association hoovered up $522,000 of the total, plus another $175,000 back in 2012. Perhaps it would be cynical to observe that the riding of West Nova, home to the Annapolis Valley wineries, is notorious for changing hands between the Liberals and Conservatives. Whoops — too late.

Here in Ontario, meanwhile, between 2013 and 2018, the province and feds collectively gave away at least $1.1 million to wineries and $1.5 million to breweries, plus $140-odd million more to an endless queue of cap-in-hand distillers, mushroom farmers, meat processers, goat dairies, sugarmakers and bakeries. Pelee Island Winery isn’t on that list, incidentally, which might put the premier’s non-financial contribution — quid pro quo or not — in perspective.

All that taxpayer dough got handed out under a program called Growing Forward 2, which was an “initiative that encouraged innovation, competitiveness and market development, adaptability and industry sustainability in Canada’s agri-food and agri products sector.” That’s a fancy way of saying “corporate welfare,” which can be unpopular in Canada when it comes to bailing Bombardier out of its latest fiasco or buying the Weston clan new freezers, but which is entirely uncontroversial when it comes to smaller, less obviously villainous businesses — especially if they happen to be farms.

PM63 Rak: An Interesting Polish SMG/PDW Hybrid

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 7 Jun 2019

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The PM-63 Rak is a pretty interesting Polish Cold War machine pistol or personal defense weapon. It fires from an open bolt, but uses a slide like a pistol rather than a bolt in an enclosed receiver like a typical SMG. There are several other interesting elements to the design, so let’s take a closer look…

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QotD: What we mean by “civilization”

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I floated that there might have been “civilizations” between the emergence of anatomically modern humans, and ya’ll objected because no signs of dentistry, no extensive mining operations and even the crab bucket, I thought “Well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It wasn’t till yesterday morning that I stopped and went “waitaminut, Czar Nicholas’ skeleton showed signs of prolonged and horrific abscesses. We only found out how extensive the Roman mining operation in the village was when it rained for a month and roads collapsed under cars. And even with the crab bucket and no Judeo-Christian ethic, ancient Asia had a lot of very advanced, flourishing civilizations.”

Which is when the dime dropped and I realized you guys immediately translated civilization to “as good as we have or better.” Which, of course, made me giggle. Because I’d have liked you to tell a Roman, with their world-bestriding empire that they weren’t civilized. Or, before that a classical Greek.

Understand I am not imagining others before us had the internal combustion engine, or steam, or trains, or … Sure, they might have, but that’s a heck of a coincidence, since those things usually come about by an individual stroke of genius, and even when they do they often aren’t used the way we did (Romans and their mechanical toys.)

To imagine other civilizations of which we’ve forgotten every trace followed exactly the same route we did to the same place we’re at requires believing that inventing steam and the internal combustion engine and harnessing electricity is as natural to humans as dams to beavers.

Now, maybe that’s true. It would certainly make for a very good science fiction story. (Short story, I think. Too much of a punchline thing for a novel.) BUT the odds defy rationality.

I was imagining, you know “builds houses of wood or stone. Domesticated SOME animals. Has villages and cities. Might have trade over long routes. MIGHT have had wheeled vehicles.” (The last, as we know, one can have quite sophisticated civilizations without.)

Look, it’s not your fault. Since the seventies, we’ve been bombarded by crazy BS about superior aliens or superior lost civilizations. (And before that, there was a trickle of it, too, going back I think to the eighteenth century, just couched in different terms.) You’ll get stuff about how the pyramids were built of stones that floated at the sound of a certain note. (A C note, or the equivalent, I bet. “Listen, Mac, you take this stone to the top of the pyramid, I give you a C Note. A hundred Amontheps in your pocket, bucko. Buys a lot of fish and falafel.”)

Part of this, and part of the reason it intensified since the seventies were the “unilateral disarmament people.” You know, those jokers who wanted us to get rid of our own nukes and stand disarmed in front of the USSR, who would then realize we were peaceful, and not attack, and everyone would live in peace and harmony with rainbows and farting unicorns. Yes, it was a stupid and crazy idea since the continued survival of the USSR depended on plunder and conquest. But I’ll remind you our last president still believes that bag of moonshine. All of it, including the unicorn farts.

Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.

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