Military History Visualized
Published 11 Jan 2016Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/mhv
Alexander the Great is well known for his tactics on the battlefield. Some aspect that is often forgotten is that victory on the battlefield requires well supplied troops. This is especially true, because Alexander’s conquest covered a vast area.
See the YouTube description for a lengthy sources list.
At UnHerd, Douglas Murray discusses membership in the (extended) royal family as a “predicament”:
The royal family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour 2010, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.
There is a line in Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III which is so good that the makers of The Crown lifted it — without attribution — in their most recent season. The heir to the throne, waiting for Parliament to declare him regent, says that to be Prince of Wales is not a position: “It is a predicament.”
Whether or not that is the case for the current Prince of Wales, it is certainly true for the Sussexes, who have just announced that they are going to step back from public duties in order to become “financially independent”.
Even the most devout republican will recognise that there is something worse than the now-defunct Civil List; something undisguisably worse than members of the Royal Family receiving public subsidy. It is the predicament of Royal privilege.
Such is the cruelty of public life, that people born into a position of undeniable privilege are rewarded — or revenged — by being placed into an impossible situation. If a prince or princess is carrying out public duties, but also having the occasional moment of private enjoyment, they will be lambasted by the press for freeloading and gallivanting on the public’s dime. If they decide to relieve the strains on the public coffers by accepting the largesse of some wealthy individuals, then the same press will attack said royal for freeloading on someone else’s dime, and being caught up with sleazy or shallow celebrity characters.
There is a way out, of course, one demonstrated by Her Majesty the Queen throughout her public life, which has been to doggedly and dutifully carry out an unceasing round of obligations for so many years that in her tenth decade of service, no reasonable person could begrudge her the occasional day off.
But the head of the family is at an advantage. That role is well defined. It is the other royals — especially the “minor royals” — who find themselves in the worst situation. True, there are people — almost everybody else on earth if it comes to that — who are in a materially worse position. But in terms of being born into a difficult role, being born a non-monarch in the royal family must count as among the most impossible to carry out.
In the 1990s, when the Civil List was whittled down, we were given an inkling of how the Sussex situation might play out. Members of the Royal Family, such as the Michaels of Kent, were suddenly expected to strike out on their own; forced to sell their home while the press enjoyed ogling at their embarrassment. When the Michaels had an attic sale, they were attacked for cheapening themselves and the Royal Family by auctioning their possessions. They then attempted to make money through various forms of consultancy and authorship, but every way they turned they were accused of using their position to “cash in”. What else were they to do, though? What other commodity — other than royalty — did they have?
Paul Sellers
Published 9 Jan 2020The card scraper is the least complex of all woodworking tools in that it comprises a single piece of plate steel with a highly refined cutting edge.
Throughout history, this tool has refined even the very wildest grain to the ultimate pinnacle of refinement levels. In this video, Paul demonstrates how to sharpen this incredibly versatile tool.
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In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes looks at Britain’s volatile financial scene in the 1720s:
William Hogarth – The South Sea Scheme, 1721. In the bottom left corner are Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish figures gambling, while in the middle there is a huge machine, like a merry-go-round, which people are boarding. At the top is a goat, written below which is “Who’l Ride”. The people are scattered around the picture with a sense of disorder, while the progress of the well-dressed people towards the ride in the middle represents the foolishness of the crowd in buying stock in the South Sea Company, which spent more time issuing stock than anything else.
Scanned from The genius of William Hogarth or Hogarth’s Graphical Works via Wikimedia Commons.
Over in France, a Scottish banker named John Law had in the late 1710s overseen an ambitious scheme to reorganise the government’s finances. He ran the Mississippi Company, one of the many companies with monopolies on France’s international trade. His scheme was for the company to acquire all of the other similar monopolies, so that it could have a monopoly on all of the country’s intercontinental trade routes. By 1719, the Mississippi Company had swelled into a Company of the Indies, which in turn had purchased the right to collect French taxes, from which it took took its own cut. In exchange for acquiring these monopolies, Law’s new super-monopoly would buy up the French government’s accumulated war debts, allowing repayment on more generous terms. By allowing the state to borrow more cheaply, the scheme was to be a key plank in improving French military might.
Meanwhile, in Britain, a very similar project was afoot. Following the War of the Spanish Succession, one of the things Britain won from France was the asiento – the monopoly on supplying African slaves to Spain’s colonies in America. The asiento was given to the South Sea Company, which had the monopoly on British trade with South America, and which in 1720 began to follow a scheme similar to Law’s. Given developments in France, it would not do for the British state to be left behind in terms of its capacity to take on more debt for war. Thus, with political support, the South Sea Company began to buy up the government’s debt, persuading its creditors to exchange that debt for increasingly valuable company shares.
In 1720, both schemes came crashing down. In the case of Law’s scheme, he had printed paper currency with which people could buy his company’s shares, but in 1720 discovered he had printed too much. When he prudently tried to devalue the company’s shares to match the quantity of paper notes, the devaluation spun out of control. In the case of the South Sea Company, the causes of the crash were a little more mysterious, perhaps even verging on the mundane. One explanation is that too many wealthy investors simply tried to sell their shares so that they would have ready cash to spend on holidaying in Europe, precipitating a minor fall in the share price which then led to a more widespread panic. Regardless, it did not end well. The company itself continued for many years thereafter — it even got involved with whaling off the coast of Greenland — but the collapse of its share price ended its chance to restructure the government’s debts.
Feature History
Published 25 Jan 2017Hello and welcome to a Feature History special; featuring the Emu Wars, the incompetence of my own country, and my miserable attempt at doing the accent I should have.
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The credit for this video goes to Feature History’s employee of the month, me, for the art, animation, script, voice-over.
Music
Kevin MacLeod – “Drankin’ Song”
Kevin MacLeod – “Bama Country”
As all right-thinking people know, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a right-wing atrocity against gays, hatched in the pernicious seventy-two degree corners of the doubleplusungood and evilwickedbadnaughty Pentagon, fought against nearly to the death by progressives …
That’s not remotely what happened. Rather, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as enacted by Congress, has long deemed Sodomy, which covered more than just homosexual conduct, as a criminal offense potentially carrying severe penalties. Moreover, the procedure for entering into service demanded that prospective recruits deny or admit to homosexual leanings, in writing, which admissions would usually bar the man or woman from service. Of course, back when the shame of being publicly homosexual was very great, people who wanted to join the armed forces simply lied about it and then, as a general rule, hid it while in service.
Liberal Democratic President Bill Clinton, acting in his capacity as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, simply ordered that prospective recruits were not to be asked if they were gay or had homosexual leanings, and were not to volunteer the information. That, young Millennial, is where DADT came from; it came from a liberal, liberally motivated, and pandering to his liberal base.
Did you know that? No? Well, then; ask yourself, WHY didn’t you know?
What the loss of history does to you, dear Millennial, is that it robs you of the ability to reason your way to cause and effect. Never mind the crappy to the point of idiotic decisions and programs this might lead you to support, consider what it does to you as a person. What, after all, is the effect of shielding people from contrary opinions by designating and maintaining, under color of law or regulation, “safe spaces” for this or that minority? Does it make them stronger? Better able to deal with a harsh world? Does it change that objective world to something less harsh? No and no and no; it does none of that. Do you gain grit in a safe space? Ha. Do you learn endurance in a safe space? Oh, please.
Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.
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