Quotulatiousness

October 11, 2020

An Open Road to Moscow! – WW2- 111- October 10, 1941

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

World War Two
Published 10 Oct 2020

The road to Moscow does indeed lay open before the Germans, but for how long? And can they exploit such an opportunity — since the panzers are busy encircling hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers near Vyazema? Georgy Zhukov arrives in Moscow to take charge of the Soviet defenses and try to shut the door.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Monika Worona
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Carlos Ortega Pereira
Mikołaj Uchman
Julius Jääskeläinen
Daniel Weiss

Sources:
Archive.org
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Mil
Bundesarchiv

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

“Doctrinaire cuisine is dangerous”

Filed under: Food — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is not a fan of printed recipes, for they quash the creative, adventurous spirit he feels is required for proper cooking:

“The Joy of Cookbooks” by shoutabyss is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I believe in freedom and one of the reasons for my hatred of recipes is their peremptory, commanding tone, as if the writer knew the only way to fashion the dish. Variants from the inflexibly regimented columns of most cookbooks are made to seem like heresies.

Recipes are typically officious and pettifogging, treating readers as idiots, who don’t know how to suit their own taste or adjust traditions.

Many read like nursery-school arithmetic: add x amount of flour and y of milk to z of butter to produce a predictable outcome. Creativity and adventure get no badge. By specifying quantities, the teacher robs cooking of its status as art and turns it into drearily certified schoolkid-science.

Doctrinaire cuisine is dangerous. Friendships founder and marriages crash over differences about whether — for instance — to put onions in Spanish omelette or chillies in curry, or disputes over whether eggs are better scrambled in a deep or shallow dish. I’m happy to leave chacun à son goût in almost everything.

If you want to marmalade your kippers or make mayonnaise with sunflower oil, I’ll despise your mind and denounce your taste, but I’ll defend your right, as thoroughly as if you wanted to vote Republican or learn line-dancing. I’ll tolerate tinned tomatoes in ratatouille, as long as I don’t have to eat it, or rose veal in Wiener schnitzel, or even honey instead of molasses in baked beans.

But there are some abominations that are destructive of happiness, because they deprive eaters of opportunities of enjoyment, or turn wonderful ingredients to waste. Most of them occur in recipes exposed to the internet, where nannies write for nincompoops.

Winchester Lever Action Development: Model 1876

Filed under: History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Jun 2017

While the Model 1873 was a very popular rifle, its pistol caliber cartridge did leave a segment of the market unaddressed. Winchester wanted a rifle that could chamber the larger and more powerful cartridges popular with long range hunters, and the Model 1876 would be that rifle.

Early attempts to enlarge the 1873 action to use the .45-70 Government cartridge were unsuccessful, for two reasons. First, the cartridge in its 45-70-500 infantry configuration was simply too powerful for the toggle lock design that had been the core of all Winchester’s rifles back to the 1860 Henry. In addition, the elevator mechanism used to feed the rifle had to be sized to a specific (and fairly precise) overall cartridge length. The variety of different bullet weights used in the .45-70 did not affect use in single shot weapons, but did cause problems for Winchester’s repeater.

The solution was for Winchester to design a new round for its scaled-up Model 1876. This was the .45-75, and it used a relatively light bullet and a bottlenecked case similar to the general design of the .44 WCF from the Model 1873. This bottleneck improved obturation, preventing powder fouling from leaking around the cartridge case and into the working parts of the rifle. This was not strictly necessary though, as new chambering of the 1876 would be quickly added, including the .45-60; a straight-wall shortened version of the .45-70 Government round.

While it did not blow the doors off the factory like the 1873 had, the Model 1876 was a popular rifle with its intended audience, with tens of thousands of rifles sold to men including Theodore Roosevelt.

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QotD: Britain’s National Health Service cult

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The NHS has not served the nation well, if international comparison is the criterion by which it should be judged. For example, when the NHS was founded (when British healthcare was among the best rather than the worst in Europe) the population of France had a life expectancy six years lower than that of Britain; it is now two years higher. The health of the population in Spain improved more under Franco than that of the British under the NHS in the same years. Of course, there are determinants of life expectancy other than healthcare systems, but at the very least the comparisons do not suggest any particular virtue to the NHS.

Survival from many serious illnesses such as cancer, heart attacks and strokes is lower in Britain than in most European countries. Publicity is sometimes given to these statistics but they are not immediately apparent to patients or their relatives, and in any case the NHS is immune to criticism because its deficiencies are assumed to be departures from its essential goodness or the result of inadequate funding.

No number of scandals, such as that of Mid Staffs in which hundreds of patients were neglected to a degree that often defied belief, all in plain sight of a large bureaucracy supposedly devoted to ensuring the quality of patient care, can dent faith in the NHS. Staff committed, and management connived at, acts of cruelty that would have made Mrs Gamp blush. Mr Cameron’s government, anxious not to seem an enemy of the NHS, which would have been politically damaging, swept the scandal under the carpet.

A system whose justification for its nationalisation of healthcare was egalitarianism has failed even in the matter of equality. If anything, the difference between the health of the richest and poorest sections of the population has increased rather than decreased under the NHS.

The gap between the life expectancy of unskilled workers and that of the upper echelons, which had been stable for decades before the foundation of the NHS, began to widen afterwards and is now far wider than it ever was. Again, there are reasons for inequality in health other than the deficiencies of healthcare, the prevalence of smoking and obesity, for example; but if systems are to be judged by their effects, the NHS has failed in its initial goal.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.

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