Quotulatiousness

November 26, 2019

Invasion of Poland 1939 – Fall Weiß – Case White

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Military History Visualized
Published 30 Aug 2016

The German Invasion of Poland in 1939 started the Second World War in Europe. The German name of operation was “Fall Weiß” meaning “Case White”. In this video I will take a look at the major German troop movements, the Soviet invasion of Poland, the losses and a final assessment.

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» SOURCES & LINKS «

Maier, Klaus; Rohde, Horst; Stegemann, Bernd; Umbreit, Hans: Die Errichtung der Hegemonie auf dem europäischen Kontient. Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (DR2WK), Band 2.

Müller, Rolf-Dieter: Hitler’s Wehrmacht, 1935-1945

Zaloga, Steven J.: Poland 1939 – The Birth of Blitzkrieg

Wettstein, Adrian: Wehrmacht im Stadtkampf

http://www.cgsc.edu/CARL/nafziger/939…

http://www.cgsc.edu/CARL/nafziger/939…

http://niehorster.org/029_poland/1939…

http://www.westpoint.edu/history/Site…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_…

» CREDITS & SPECIAL THX «
Song: Ethan Meixsell – “Demilitarized Zone”

The Counter-Design is heavily inspired by Black ICE Mod for the game Hearts of Iron 3 by Paradox Interactive
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/…

» DISCLAIMER «
Amazon Associates Program: “Bernhard Kast is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.”

Communal farming nearly killed off the Plymouth Colony

Filed under: Britain, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

What saved them was abandoning the “common property” communalism and adopting private ownership of the farms:

The Plymouth Colony 1620-1691.
Map by Hoodinski via Wikimedia Commons.

The first few years of the settlement were fraught with hardship and hunger. Four centuries later, they also provide us with one of history’s most decisive verdicts on the critical importance of private property. We should never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan but saved itself when it embraced something very different.

In the diary of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford, we can read about the settlers’ initial arrangement: Land was held in common. Crops were brought to a common storehouse and distributed equally. For two years, every person had to work for everybody else (the community), not for themselves as individuals or families. Did they live happily ever after in this socialist utopia?

Hardly. The “common property” approach killed off about half the settlers. Governor Bradford recorded in his diary that everybody was happy to claim their equal share of production, but production only shrank. Slackers showed up late for work in the fields, and the hard workers resented it. It’s called “human nature.”

The disincentives of the socialist scheme bred impoverishment and conflict until, facing starvation and extinction, Bradford altered the system. He divided common property into private plots, and the new owners could produce what they wanted and then keep or trade it freely.

Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous. The “people over profits” mentality produced fewer people until profit — earned as a result of one’s care for his own property and his desire for improvement — saved the people.

Over the centuries, socialism has crash-landed into lamentable bits and pieces too many times to keep count — no matter what shade of it you pick: central planning, welfare statism, or government ownership of the means of production. Then some measure of free markets and private property turned the wreckage into progress. I know of no instance in history when the reverse was true — that is, when free markets and private property produced a disaster that was cured by socialism. None.

A few of the many examples that echo the Pilgrims’ experience include Germany after World War II, Hong Kong after Japanese occupation, New Zealand in the 1980s, Scandinavia in recent decades, and even Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

The Avro Arrow

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 25 Nov 2019

In the 1950s, Canada had one of the world’s most advanced aerospace industries. But the cancellation of the Avro CF-105 “Arrow” changed everything. The History Guy remembers the Avro Arrow and forgotten aviation history. It deserves to be remembered.
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“Women’s sports are dying, and very quickly”

Filed under: Australia, History, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn outlines the rise and sudden fall of women’s sports:

Rachel McKinnon on the podium after winning the Union Cycliste Internationale Masters Track Cycling World Championship, October 2018.

When the Olympic Games was revived in 1896, it was assumed by all that, as in the ancient games of Greece, the competitors would be men. The inclusion of women, said Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympiad, would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect”.

By “uninteresting”, he meant that the innate differences between the male and female bodies ensured that women’s participation would require one to feign interest in races that were slower and jumps that were shorter. In a competitive celebration of excellence, what’s the point? So the first female Olympians were women who could hold their own with men and compete in the chaps’ events — such as Hélène de Pourtalès, who won a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics as part of the Swiss sailing crew. A week later Mesdames Guerra and Moulin competed, unsuccessfully, in the hacks and hunter rounds of the equestrian events. In the croquet competition, seven men and three women participated, with the men taking all the medals.

And then came the tennis, for which they introduced a ladies’ singles event, at which Miss Charlotte Cooper (a five-times Wimbledon champ) prevailed.

These were the two models for female sportsmen, if you’ll forgive the expression: Compete in mixed events and spend most of your life losing to blokes, or compete only against other women where the lesser achievements are, as M le Baron saw it, “uninteresting”. In the case of certain activities, male sports felt obliged to spin off more genteel and (in Coubertin terms) even less interesting female variants — softball and netball, rather than baseball and basketball.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the latter model — female-only sports — prevailed, as part of what was understood by the general trend of “women’s rights”, loosely defined, and indeed more explicitly so by things like America’s Title Nine legislation.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Charlotte Cooper model is collapsing, very fast. Women are back to losing to rivals who, whatever their lipstick, skirts or breast implants, are biologically male with all the inherent advantages. Miss Hannah Mouncey, for example, is six-foot-two and 220 pounds, which is rather heavier than me and an inch taller. The average Australian woman is five-foot-four-and-a-quarter and just under 157 pounds. If you have to catch a ball, standing six inches above anybody else on court comes in helpful:

Did Miss Mouncey procure her advantages over her sisters through a rigorous workout regime? No. She gained them by being born male. She played for Oz’s national men’s handball team until 2016, when she revealed she was transitioning and thus would henceforth play for the women’s team. She also announced she was taking up Aussie football, again for the ladies.

Tank Chats #55 Churchill Crocodile | The Funnies | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 18 Aug 2018

Another episode in the Tank Chats Funnies Specials, with David Fletcher looking at the weird and wonderful vehicles of 79th Armoured Division led by Major General Percy Hobart, known as “Hobart’s Funnies”.

The Churchill Crocodile was a British flamethrower tank and a variant of the Churchill Mark VII tank. The Crocodile was developed in time for the D-Day landings and used during the Allied invasion of North-West Europe.

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QotD: The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688

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

William of Orange masterminds a coup d’état known here as the “Glorious Revolution” (1688), and installs himself as King of England. My teachers made it sound as if the English elite suddenly decided one day that they wanted a different king, found William of Orange in a mail order catalogue, liked the look of him and had him delivered the next day, in a state of great amazement and gratitude. In fact, William bossed the entire operation, albeit with plenty of English support. It is worth noting that William achieved a successful cross-Channel invasion of England, so all that stuff about England not having been invaded since 1066 is quite wrong.

Brian Micklethwait, “Navigating individuals”, Samizdata, 2004-10-04.

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