Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s postbattle interview following the 20th Maine’s successful defense of Little Round Top at the extreme left of the Union line during the Battle of Gettysburg in the 1863 Civil War season.
Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan explain how a farmer growing wheat on his own land to feed his own cattle somehow transmogrified into an interstate commerce activity that could be regulated by the federal government:
Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011. Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.
… who ended up being tasked with deciding what Article One, Section Eight actually meant? Herein lies the wrinkle that enables all manner of constitutional mischief in the United States. The institution that ended up deciding what the federal government is empowered to do is itself a branch of the federal government. And it should come as no surprise that when push comes to shove, the Supreme Court routinely finds in favor of empowering the federal government.
This sort of mischief flowered fully in the decade following ratification of the 21st Amendment. In 1942, the Supreme Court decided a case, Wickard v. Filburn, in which farmer Roscoe Filburn ran afoul of a federal law that limited how much wheat he was allowed to grow.
A careful reader might, and should, ask where the federal government’s right to legislate the wheat market is to be found — because the word “wheat” is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Be that as it may, the federal government’s aim was clear enough. It was to keep the price of wheat high enough for farmers to remain profitable. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 put an upper limit on how much wheat farmers were allowed to grow, which would serve to keep prices high by limiting supply.
Roscoe Filburn had grown 12 more acres of wheat than the law allowed. But not only did he not sell the excess wheat outside of his home state, but he also didn’t sell it at all. He used the wheat from those 12 acres to feed his cattle. Filburn was very clearly not engaging in commerce, let alone interstate commerce, yet the Supreme Court found (unanimously) that because Congress had the authority to regulate interstate commerce, Congress also had the authority to prohibit Filburn from growing those 12 acres of wheat for his own use. The Supreme Court’s “reasoning”?
Had Filburn not fed his cattle that excess wheat, he would have been forced to purchase wheat on the open market. And even if he purchased wheat that was grown within his home state, doing so would have made less wheat available within his home state for other wheat buyers. Consequently, some wheat buyers within his home state would then have had to buy wheat from outside the state. Therefore, Filburn’s non-commercial activity was, according to the Supreme Court, interstate commerce.
The mental gymnastics that went into this ruling made just about any activity interstate commerce by definition. Since Wickard, any time Congress has wanted to exercise power not authorized by the Constitution, lawmakers have simply had to make an argument that links whatever they want to accomplish to interstate commerce. Why? Because they know they can get away with it.
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The Pritchard bayonet for the Webley revolver is one of the more photogenic and less truly practical weapons to come out of the Great War. Designed by one Captain Pritchard after he spent a year in France in 1915-1916 with the Royal Berkshire Regiment, the idea was to use the front 8 inches or so of a sword on a cast gunmetal hilt to create a bayonet mounted on a British service revolver. He first presented the idea to the Wilkinson Sword Company, but they were too busy making sabers and rifle bayonets, and suggested that having to sacrifice usable sword blades for production would make it quite the expensive endeavor.
Pritchard next took his idea to W.W. Greener, where he found a more receptive audience. Greener had a large supply of surplus French Gras bayonets, which were cheap and served as excellent donors for the Pritchard bayonets. Something like 200 were made in total — not formally adopted by the British but available for commercial sale to officers who might want them. While some may have seen service, no hard evidence has been found to prove any combat action with them.
Over the decades, a great many fake and reproduction Pritchard bayonets have been made — many times more than there are originals. As far as I can determine, this one is a legitimate original (although it may have a replacement locking lever). A few things to look for in authenticating a Pritchard are engraved patent and manufacturer marks (most reproductions have no manufacturer logo and a stamped patent number) and a quality casting. When you hold the blade and tap the handle with a hard object, it should ring bright and bell-like (which this one does).
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I’ve been thinking for some time now that the smartphone has achieved a kind of singularity, becoming a black hole that sucks all portable electronics into itself. PDAs – absorbed. Music players – consumed. Handset GPSes – eaten. Travel-alarm clocks, not to mention ordinary watches – subsumed. Calculators – history. E-readers under serious pressure, and surviving only because e-paper displays have lower battery drain and are a bit larger. Compasses – munched. Pocket flashlights – crunched. Fobs for keyless locks – being scarfed down as we speak, though not gone yet.
[…]
But in an entertaining inversion, one device of the future actually works on smartphones now. Because I thought it would be funny, I searched for “tricorder” in the Android market. For those of you who have been living in a hole since 1965, a tricorder is a fictional gadget from the Star Trek universe, an all-purpose sensor package carried by planetary survey parties. I expected a geek joke, a fancy mock-up with mildly impressive visuals and no actual function. I was utterly gobsmacked to discover instead that I had an arguably real tricorder in my hand.
Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don’t have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.
And these sensors are already completely stock on smartphones because sensor electronics is like any other kind; amortized over a large enough production run, their incremental cost approaches epsilon because most of their content is actually design information (cue the shade of Bucky Fuller talking about ephemeralization). Which in turn points at the fundamental reason the smartphone is Eater-of-Gadgets; because, as the tricorder app deftly illustrates, the sum of a computer and a bunch of sensors costing epsilon is so synergistically powerful that it can emulate not just real single-purpose gadgets but gadgets that previously existed only as science fiction!
[…]
I specified “personal” radios because radios have something in common with personal computers; their main design constraints are actually constraints on a peripheral stage. For a computer you’ll be using for hours at a time you really want a full-sized hard keyboard and a display bigger than a smartphone’s; for a really good radio, the kind you supply sound for a party with, you need speakers with resonant cavities that won’t fit in a smartphone enclosure.
Digital cameras are another diagnostic case. The low-end camera with small lenses is already looking like a goner; the survivors will be DSLRs and more generally those with precision optics too large and too expensive to fit in a phone case.
These two examples suggest Raymond’s Rule of Smartphone Subsumption: if neither the physics nor the ergonomics of a gadget’s function require peripherals larger than will fit in a smartphone case, the smartphone will eat it!
It’s a bold move, says Jon Miltimore, let’s see if it pays off:
While Florida, which on Tuesday passed a $15 an hour minimum wage referendum, was the only state to have the minimum wage on the ballot in 2020, some localities also voted on the issue.
One of those cities was Portland, the largest city in Maine. The referendum sought to increase the minimum wage from $12 an hour to $15 by 2024. The measure also mandated that workers receive time and a half during a civil emergency (like, say, a pandemic).
Despite opposition from the city’s mayor, seven members of the city council, and dozens of Portland businesses, the measure passed with 60 percent of the vote. That means as early as next month the minimum wage will be $18 an hour, since Maine has declared a civil emergency. (The time-and-a-half will kick in on the $12 minimum wage.)
Businesses already ravaged by stay-at-home orders from the coronavirus have expressed worry about how they will manage to stay in the black.
“In the last 7 months business has dropped from 30 to 50 percent and food costs have skyrocketed. This added increase on a business already depressed due to the pandemic is tough,” one Portland business owner who declined to speak on camera told WCSH, an NBC-affiliate. “We may have to either cut employee hours or cut back on business hours.”
Cutting employee hours is just one of the ways employers negatively respond to laws that artificially raise the price of labor. Other responses include cutting other forms of compensation, such as health care or 401k benefits, replacing workers with robots, and simply assigning employees to do more work.
These are hardly the only unintended consequences. For example, economists David Neumark and William Wascher found that higher minimum wages decrease the number of teens enrolled in high school because they encourage high-skilled teens to drop out; this in turn displaces low-skilled workers.
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For TANKFEST 2019, The Tank Museum was extremely lucky to be able to display the Leopard PRTL courtesy of The Historic Collection of the Royal Netherlands Army, in cooperation with the National Military Museum of the Netherlands.
David Willey explores how the self-propelled anti-aircraft system, based on a Leopard 1 tank, works and operates, alongside some footage of the PRTL in action.
To western eyes, contemporary Japan has a kind of earnest childlike wackiness, all karaoke machines and manga cartoons and nuttily sadistic game shows. But, to us demography bores, it’s a sad place that seems to be turning into a theme park of P.D. James’ great dystopian novel The Children Of Men. Baroness James’ tale is set in Britain in the near future, in a world that is infertile: The last newborn babe emerged from the womb in 1995, and since then nothing. It was an unusual subject for the queen of the police procedural, and, indeed, she is the first baroness to write a book about barrenness. The Hollywood director Alfonso Cuarón took the broad theme and made a rather ordinary little film out of it. But the Japanese seem determined to live up to the book’s every telling detail.
In Lady James’ speculative fiction, pets are doted on as child-substitutes, and churches hold christening ceremonies for cats. In contemporary Japanese reality, Tokyo has some 40 “cat cafés” where lonely solitary citizens can while away an afternoon by renting a feline to touch and pet for a couple of companiable hours.
In Lady James’ speculative fiction, all the unneeded toys are burned, except for the dolls, which childless women seize on as the nearest thing to a baby and wheel through the streets. In contemporary Japanese reality, toy makers, their children’s market dwindling, have instead developed dolls for seniors to be the grandchildren they’ll never have: You can dress them up, and put them in a baby carriage, and the computer chip in the back has several dozen phrases of the kind a real grandchild might use to enable them to engage in rudimentary social pleasantries.
P.D. James’ most audacious fancy is that in a barren land sex itself becomes a bit of a chore. The authorities frantically sponsor state porn emporia promoting ever more recherché forms of erotic activity in an effort to reverse the populace’s flagging sexual desire just in case man’s seed should recover its potency. Alas, to no avail. As Lady James writes, “Women complain increasingly of what they describe as painful orgasms: the spasm achieved but not the pleasure. Pages are devoted to this common phenomenon in the women’s magazines.”
As I said, a bold conceit, at least to those who believe that shorn of all those boring procreation hang-ups we can finally be free to indulge our sexual appetites to the full. But it seems the Japanese have embraced the no-sex-please-we’re-dystopian-Brits plot angle, too. In October, Abigail Haworth of The Observer in London filed a story headlined “Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?” Not all young people but a whopping percentage: A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged 16–24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.” For women, it was 45 per cent.
Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, 2014.
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Don’t miss the special announcement of our new exciting collaboration at the end of this episode!
Register for free at World of Warships here: https://wo.ws/PearlHarbor and receive a special in-game package worth €25, including the ships USS St. Louis, Japanese Cruise Tenryū – and more bonuses.
In this episode:
There is a lull now on the Eastern Front, and Adolf Hitler uses the time to plan another drive on Moscow and points beyond, but he’ll be facing a larger Red Army, as reinforcements and recruits hope to nearly double its size in a matter of weeks. The British are counting down the days to their upcoming North African offensive, and the Japanese are sending out orders that will change the world dramatically in a single morning.
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: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)
Sources:
Bundesarchiv
Arkiv i Nordland
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
IWM C 4748, E 6661, WPN 298, E 6724, MH 9292, E 3469E, E 7008, E 759C
Picture of Alfred Godwin-Austin, courtesy of Berserker276 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
from the Noun Project: company soldiers by Andrei Yushchenko, Bell by wahyakup
Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Bonnie Grace – “The Dominion”
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Hakan Eriksson – “Epic Adventure Theme 3”
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
merdiolu81
22 hours ago (edited)
Meanwhile, on 30 October, Stalin had raised a casual question. “How are we going to do the military parade?” That was the great, traditional 7 November Red Square parade, the celebration of the 1917 “October” Revolution, which had taken place on 24-5 October, Old Style — 6-7 November, New Style. General Pavel Artem’ev, who had been commander of the Moscow Military District and had taken command of the Moscow defence zone as the critical phase began, on 12 October, said it could not happen. Yes, it would, said Stalin. If there was a German air raid, the dead and wounded should be removed quickly, he added. It would happen. The risk was considerable. The potential political response was devastatingly positive, and worth the risk. The “Boss” had his faults (aside being a brutal tyrant) , but this was the decision of a leader. The parade would take place, and the troops, guns and armoured vehicles would then proceed straight to the front. It was a stroke of genius. The military effect would be compounded by the media and political effect. As always, everything was kept secret until the last moment. The officers involved did not receive their final briefing until 02.00. Stalin liked surprises, as most dictators do.
On 7 November, at 08.00 hours, just after dawn, under a steely, overcast Russian sky, with rimy air on the brink of freezing and snow beginning to fall, the troops marched south-east down the “square”, towards St Basil’s Cathedral and the Moskva river, beyond. Red Square, which owes its name to the old Slavic word for “beautiful”, and not to communism at all, is not really a square, either. It is a wide cobbled boulevard, running past the north-east wall of the red-brick, triangular Renaissance fortress. St Basil’s Cathedral is the onion-domed fantasy built for Ivan the Terrible. He was so delighted with it that he had the architect’s eyes put out, so that he could not build for anybody else anything so whimsically fantastic and beautiful. Stalin admired Ivan. The Germans were coming from the north-north-west, so, once the troops, guns and armoured vehicles had passed Lenin’s Mausoleum and reached St Basil’s, they would turn smartly about and head in the opposite direction, up Gor’kiy Street, and then north-west, to face the Germans.
The stars of the show were the new T-34 and KV tanks. But one of the heavy KV tanks screeched to a halt and then turned the wrong way. Another followed. The tanks were all armed, ready for battle, and if anybody wanted to take out the Politburo standing on Lenin’s Mausoleum, that would have been an ideal opportunity. Given the paranoia which prevailed in Moscow at the time, overreaction might have been the order of the day. Artem’ev demanded to know what had happened. The first tank, it turned out, had suffered a mechanical problem, and its commander did not want to cause any embarrassment on the big parade, so he got out of the way. Following the standard operating procedures the newly trained crews had been taught, the second tank went to its aid. This was starting to look like a professional army. The boss classes gathered on the Mausoleum found it amusing, and no one was reprimanded. The big parade was an iconic image of the war, and a stroke of public-relations genius. And, that night, earlier than usual, the Russian winter snow really began to fall.
Absolute War, Soviet Russia in the Second World War – Chris Bellamy
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Barbara Kay is not in favour of clearly misogynistic sports policies:
2016 high school boys compared to 2016 Olympic Women’s Finalists. Source: http://boysvswomen.com/#/
No hormone treatment is required, says the EWG, because being male or female is not dependent on biology but on one’s feelings: “(It) is recognized that transfemales are not males who become females. Rather these are people who have always been psychologically female.” Furthermore, these individuals must be allowed to participate in “the gender with which they feel most comfortable and safe, which may not be the same in each sport or consistent in subsequent seasons.” Your eyes do not deceive you. First they justified trans women competing with women because they had “always” felt they were female. Then they say the “always” female trans athlete might “be” male for certain sports or at different times.
It gets worse.
They say that although “participants in men’s sport, on average, out-perform participants in women’s sports, current science is unable to isolate why this is the case.” This is nonsense on two counts. First, there is no “on average” about it. Virtually all high-performance male athletes out-perform all high-performance female athletes. And second, even in 2014, abundant scientific data “to isolate why this is the case” was readily, even effortlessly (#Google!) available.
Data or no data, a statement in the document itself makes clear that the ideological fix was in from the get-go: “The Expert Working Group held strongly to the principle that the inclusion of all athletes, based on the fundamental human right of gender self-determination overrides any consideration of potential competitive advantage.”
Needless to say, but it must be said anyway: Male athletes have nothing whatsoever to fear in competing with trans male athletes. This is a problem for female athletes only, which seems not to trouble the CCES at all. I’m not a feminist, but I know a misogynistic sport policy when I see it. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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Our historical documentary series on the history of the Cold War continues with a video on the famous Cambridge Five and Donald Maclean in particular – a real Cold War-era spy story
… it was a problem of permitting, by and large. Portugal isn’t as bad, mind, nowhere near but in the seventies a lot of places were designated “green belts” everywhere, so that to build on them (and you had to build on them, or you were stymied in growth) you had to know who to bribe, and of course have the money to do it. This isn’t the only reason why favelas end up housing even the middle class. There’s a ton of other reasons, including but not limited to land ownership and property rights, and a shit-ton of stuff. But permitting is part of it.
This is because people don’t view their public posts as something they do to make society better/serve society or even do a job, but as a way to enrich themselves/benefit their friends/make it easier to make money in the future.
Everything, from truly shoddy workmanship to rushed, corner/cutting work, to outright corruption comes from viewing a job not as something you take pride in and work to do your best at, but from viewing a job as an opportunity to enrich yourself and your family while doing as little work as humanly possible. In fact in some societies, this is viewed as a duty. As someone in comments cited there are places in Africa where locals can’t run a shop, because all their relatives near and distant will expect to be given merchandise for free … or even money out of the till.
A lot of this is because the idea of the individual as independent of the tribe and the family is a very new thing in most of the world. We kind of have a head start on it because we are/are descended from those who left family and tribe behind.
[…]
Also in most of the world working for money is vaguely shameful. Particularly so if you’re working for someone else. […] And even here not only does that attitude persist, but it’s trying to make itself normal. Particularly in politics.
So, take pride in what you do, and do the best job you can. It’s not just important for you, it’s a building block of society. Do the best you can, and control as much as you can, so maybe you will have just reward which is an incentive to do better.
This way is civilization built. This way do things actually improve.
It seems to happen almost as regularly as Old Faithful, as someone blows a virtual gasket over the reserves of this or that mineral “running out” in x number of years. Tim Worstall explains why this is a silly misunderstanding of what the term “mineral reserves” actually means:
“Aerial view of a small mine near Mt Isa Queensland.” by denisbin is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
It’s not exactly unusual to see some environmental type running around screaming because mineral reserves are about to run out. The Club of Rome report, the EU’s “circular economy” ideas, Blueprint for Survival, they’re all based upon the idea that said reserves are going to run out.
They look at the usual listing (USGS, here) and note that at the current rate of usage reserves will run out in 30 to 50 years. Entirely correct they are too. It’s the next step which is such drivelling idiocy. For the claim then becomes that we will run out of those metals, those minerals, when the reserves do. This being idiot bollocks.
For a mineral reserve is, as best colloquial language can put it, the stuff we’ve prepared for use in the next few decades. Like, say, 30 to 50 years. That we’re going to run out of what we’ve got prepared isn’t a problem. For we’ve an entire industry, mining, whose job to to go prepare some more for us to use.
[…] A mineral reserve is something created by the mining company. Created by measuring, testing, test extracting and proving that the mineral can be processed, using current technology, at current prices, and produce a profit. Proving that this is not just dirt but is in fact ore.
Mineral reserves are things we humans make, not things that exist.
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Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 6 Nove 2020
Wale, Wale, Wale(s), what have we here? I’ll tell you! A look at the oft-forgotten history of Britain’s secret third country Wales, where the population is about 50% bards just by sheer cultural osmosis.
SOURCES & Further Reading: A Concise History of Wales by Jenkins, A History of Wales by Davies
In The Line, Kaveh Shahrooz looks at the accusations among the ultra-woke that members of ethnic minorities in the United States who voted for Trump can no longer be considered ethnic minorities and are guilty of variant forms of white supremacy:
Did self-hating racist Hispanic and Black people help Donald Trump? Did sexist women stop the promised Democratic blue wave?
Those may seem like bizarre questions, but according to the woke left, the answer is: yes.
A new narrative began to emerge on election night, after it became clear that Miami-Dade County — a heavily populated area in southern Florida — would go to Trump, thus preventing an early Joe Biden blowout. To the woke left’s chagrin, it was Trump’s significant support among Miami-Dade’s Hispanic voters, namely those in the Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American communities, that kept the state in the Republican column.
In a direct challenge to the widely held belief that Trump’s presidency is the result of a simple racist white patriarchal backlash, the incumbent president actually increased his support among Latinos, black males, Muslims, and Native Americans on election night. He also appears to have maintained much of his support among women.
To compensate for this cognitive dissonance, standard bearers of the woke left explained this phenomenon by implying that these ethnic minorities were enacting a form of white mimicry, or “white adjacency.” First out of the gate was the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, fresh off the controversy surrounding her 1619 Project, who tweeted that “white Cubans” should not be lumped in with “Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans.”
Insofar as ethnic communities should not be assumed to share political interests simply because they speak the same language and come from roughly the same broad geographic region, it is hard to disagree with her. But her point was not anything nearly so straightforward. As she made clear in subsequent tweets, she believes that the Miami Cubans should more accurately be viewed as white because they sit atop “racial hierarchies based on whiteness.”
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