Quotulatiousness

February 12, 2020

Guderian – Myth & Reality

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

Military History Visualized
Published 24 Apr 2018

Heinz Guderian, the father of the German Panzerwaffe, is one of the best known German generals from the Second World War. He is also known for his opposition to the Battle of Kursk (Operation Zitadelle) and the early deployment of the Panzerkampfwagen V Panther, yet some historians noted recently that many of Heinz Guderian’s claims are not backed up by archives. Well, time to take a closer look.

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Pöhlmann, Markus: Der Panzer und die Mechanisierung des Krieges: Eine deutsche Geschichte 1890 bis 1945 (Zeitalter der Weltkriege)

Corum, James S.: The Roots of Blitzkrieg. Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform

Macksey, Kenneth: “Generaloberst Heinz Guderian”; in: Ueberschär (Hrsg.) Gerd R.: Hitlers militärische Elite – 68 Lebensläufe (3. Auflage), S. 351-358

Guderian, Heinz: Panzer Leader (English Version of Erinnerungen eines Soldaten)

Guderian, Heinz: Erinnerungen eines Soldaten

Munzel, Oskar: Die deutschen gepanzerten Truppen bis 1945

Schacter, Daniel L.: The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers

Citino, Robert M.: The German Way of War. From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich

Citino, Robert M.: The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943

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#ww2 #panzergeneral #Guderian

Rebecca Black, nine years after the release of “Friday”

Filed under: Education, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CNN‘s Scottie Andrew talked to Rebecca Black about her experiences and the reactions to her debut video:

Partyin’, partyin’, YEAH! “Friday,” the accidental anthem of 2011 and an ode to the best day of the week, is officially nine years old.

It became something of a national joke when it debuted. But to a then-13-year-old Rebecca Black, the single’s star, the jokes made at her expense were immensely damaging.

Black, now 22 but still a pop singer, is remarkably well-adjusted for someone whose life was upended by a music video. She marked the 9th anniversary of the song that started it all with a note to her younger self — and advice for her followers to love themselves a little better.

[…]

Black was only in middle school when she filmed the infamous video. She paid a company called Ark Music Factory to write her a song and film a music video for it, starring her and her friends.

It’s not an artistic achievement, but it’s fitting for the young star at its center. In it, Black sways and sings her way through a Friday — she wakes up, she eats cereal, she can’t decide which seat in a convertible to take. Typical teen stuff.

The negative comments rolled in almost immediately, and nearly all of them lambasted Black.

At the time, I linked to a couple of deconstructions of the video that amused me. One was from The Awl:

She offers the camera a hostage’s smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

“Look and listen deeply,” she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: “I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.”

***

Ms. Black first appears as her own computer-generated outline: wobbly, marginal, a dislocated erasure. The days of the week flip by accompanied by dull obligations — “essay due” — and tired clichés — “Just another manic Monday …” Her non-being threatens to be consumed by this virtual litany of nothing at all until, at long last — Friday.

[…]

Yet here the discerning viewer notes that something is wrong. Because it is a simple matter of fact that in this car all the good seats have already been taken. For Rebecca Black (her name here would seem to evoke Rosa Parks, a mirroring that will only gain in significance) there is no actual choice, only the illusion of choice.

The viewer knows that she’ll take the only seat that’s offered to her, a position so very undesirable as to be known by a derisive — the “Bitch” seat.

She might well have been better off on the school bus, among the have-nots. But Rebecca Black’s world is so advanced in the craft of evisceration that this was never a consideration. John Hughes died while out jogging, these are the progeny of his great materialist teen-villain, James Spader, a name that would come to be synonymous with desperate sex and high-speed collision. And as she gets in the car Ms. Black’s joy is as patently empty as her liberation.

“Partying, Partying,” she sings, in hollow mantra.

“Yeah!” an unseen mass replies, a Pavlovian affirmation.

The other was from Jeffrey Tucker in the Christian Science Monitor:

Far more significant is the underlying celebration of liberation that the day Friday represents. The kids featured in the video are of junior-high age, a time when adulthood is beginning to dawn and, with it, the realization of the captive state that the public school represents.

From the time that children are first institutionalized in these tax-funded cement structures, they are told the rules. Show up, obey the rules, accept the grades you are given, and never even think of escaping until you hear the bell. If you do escape, even peacefully of your own choice, you will be declared “truant,” which is the intentional and unauthorized absence from compulsory school.

This prison-like environment runs from Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to late afternoon, for at least ten years of every child’s life. It’s been called the “twelve-year sentence” for good reason. At some point, every kid in public school gains consciousness of the strange reality. You can acquiesce as the civic order demands, or you can protest and be declared a bum and a loser by society.

“Friday” beautifully illustrates the sheer banality of a life spent in this prison-like system, and the prospect of liberation that the weekend means. Partying, in this case, is just another word for freedom from state authority.

The largest segment of the video then deals with what this window of liberty, the weekend, means in the life of someone otherwise ensnared in a thicket of statism. Keep in mind here that the celebration of Friday in this context means more than it would for a worker in a factory, for example: for the worker is free to come and go, to apply for a job or quit, to negotiate terms of a contract, or whatever. All of this is denied to the kid in public school.

Jeeves & Windsor (Prince Andrew Edition) – Will Franken

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Comedy Unleashed
Published 8 Feb 2020

An imagined Prince Andrew receives advice from Jeeves about Jeffrey Epstein.

Live at London’s little home of free-thinking comedy.
Gigs every month https://comedyunleashed.co.uk/whatson

H/T to Hector Drummond for the link.

“… perhaps the biggest Internet cash grab in the OECD with mandated payments and levies on thousands of Internet services with Canadian users”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist refutes the claim that the recent Broadcast and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel report does not recommend a “Netflix tax”:

The reference to a Netflix tax in the overview is the only such reference in the 235 page report. It was likely included in the overview in the hope that media coverage would jump on the claim and seek to re-assure Canadians that there was no Netflix tax or higher prices likely for consumers as a result of the report’s recommendations.

Yet the reality for anyone that reads beyond the overview is that the panel’s report not only recommends what would widely be considered a Netflix tax but proposes perhaps the biggest Internet cash grab in the OECD with mandated payments and levies on thousands of Internet services with Canadian users. This includes online streaming services, social media companies, news aggregators, and online communications services such as Skype, WhatApp, and Viber. In the view of the panel, any service or site with Canadian users is part of the “Canadian system” and should be expected to contribute to the development of Canadian content, Canadian news organizations, or building broadband connectivity. Note that all of this is above and beyond sales taxes, which the panel also recommends should be implemented with respect to foreign services.

Some of the panel’s plans are admittedly somewhat confusing. For example, the panel states:

Media curation undertakings brought under the regime – including Netflix and other online streaming services – would be required to devote a portion of their program budgets to Canadian programs.

That statement, along with chair Janet Yale’s comment at the opening press conference that there was no need for Netflix to spend additional money on Cancon but rather merely divert existing on foreign location and service production spending in Canada, has been interpreted by some to mean that Netflix would not have to increase its Canadian programming budget. But that is apparently not what the panel means. I spoke with Yale who confirmed that the panel expects the CRTC to establish a minimum Cancon spend requirement on Netflix based on its Canadian revenues. In other words, the requirement has nothing to do with its existing spending on production in Canada. For Netflix, that could certainly represent an increase in spending costs in Canada with those costs likely passed along to consumers.

Yet the panel’s plan extends far beyond just online streaming services such as Netflix. It also envisions mandatory levies against social media services and news aggregators that would be used to fund Canadian news services. It similarly targets a myriad of communications services that would pay into funds to support broadband development.

The Animated History of Italy | Part 1

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Suibhne
Published 19 Mar 2018

Signup for your FREE trial to The Great Courses Plus here: http://ow.ly/tsMf30iqEeT

The exciting first video in the History of Italy series. Find out how the Italian peninsula was perfectly positioned at the heart of the Mediterranean to both dominate trade, and then rise to defeat its rivals, becoming the most powerful empire Europe, and perhaps the world has ever known

QotD: Experienced political operators after an unexpected paradigm shift

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I think this is causing some confusion, blindness and otherwise inexplicably stupid behavior in people who never seemed stupid before. This is what I call The Years the Masks Fell off.

Look, take a just-now thing: the DNC says that all precincts in Iowa WERE counted. The app recorded every vote, they say. They just need to tally them.

Turns out that’s probably not precisely true.

As a friend noticed, that’s not precisely a lie, that’s just “making sh*t up.”

We’re seeing that a lot from the other side of the aisle suddenly. Unbelievably stupid behavior like the sham wow impeachment.

They keep telling us “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” and being shocked and appalled when we choose our lying eyes.

[…]

And then they’re shocked, nay astonished, when these tactics don’t work. While we who are standing outside this look at them and go “Who would think that would work? Some two year old?”

I mean half of the bizarre behavior of our government and its agencies falls under that heading too. “Who could think that would work/wouldn’t be found out/made any sense?”

But the thing you have to understand is that you’re not dealing with stupid people. Not by half. You’re dealing with people who were very competent and comfortable in — for lack of a better term — the previous paradigm of politics, or publishing or whatever.

The more comfortable they were; the easier it was for them, the harder it is to accept that it’s gone and it’s not coming back

For instance, the dems could trust the media would cover for them absolutely and completely, and that their pettiness, idiocy or outright corruption would never be revealed.

They got used to it, they got comfortable. They got to believing it was their natural right. It was just the way things were. They were the good people. Their hearts were pure. No one would ever look into their behavior outside the limelight.

If some psychological tests are correct, they grew to believe they were entitled to corruption and unethical behavior for all the “good” they did, such as Clinton thinking he was entitled to all the women he wanted for “fighting for women’s rights” (Which for men like him always mean abortion, but never mind.)

They can’t adapt. They can’t believe things have changed.

Sarah Hoyt, “How Things Have Always Been”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2020-02-09.

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