The caveman is all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers … a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.
H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918.
September 5, 2021
QotD: Cavemen
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September 4, 2021
Battle of Sedan – German Victory and Fall of the French Empire (Franco-Prussian War)
realtimehistory
Published 2 Sep 2021The Battle of Sedan was one of the pivotal moments in the 19th century. The French 2nd Empire’s defeat at Sedan (and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III) unleashed social tensions in Paris and a new French republic was proclaimed. And while the victory of the German Armies was resounding, the cost at places like Bazeilles was also high.
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https://realtimehistory.net/podcast – interviews with historians and background info for the show.» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018Barry, Quintin: The Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871. Vol 1: the Campaign of Sedan. Solihull 2006
Bourguinat, Nicolas/Vogt, Gilles: La guerre franco-allemande de 1870. Une histoire globale. Paris 2020
Gouttman, Alain: La grande défaite de 1870-1871. Paris 2015
Howard, Michael: The Franco-Prussian War. London 1961
Herre, Franz: Eugénie. Kaiserin der Franzosen. Stuttgart, München 2000
Milza, Pierre: L’année terrible. Paris 2009
» SOURCES
Chuquet, Arthur. La Guerre 1870-71. Paris 1895Fontane, Theodor: Der Krieg gegen Frankreich. Bd. Berlin 1874
Kühnhauser, Florian: Kriegs-Erinnerungen eines Soldaten des königlich bayerischen Infanterie-Leib-Regiments. Patenkirchen 1898
N.N. (Hrsg.): Bismarcks Briefe an seine Gattin aus dem Kriege 1870-71. Stuttgart, Berlin 1903
Sheridan, Philip H.: Von Gravelotte nach Paris. Erinnerungen aus dem deutsch-französischen Kriege. Leipzig 1889
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Recreating the original India Pale Ale
In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys discusses the rebirth of the original IPA:
From an early age Jamie Allsopp had wanted to bring back the beer that made his family name. It was his ancestor Samuel Allsopp who made the very first Burton IPA, and created a style that is now a global phenomenon. Hell, there are even brewers in Germany making IPA these days.
Though IPA is most associated with Burton-on-Trent, it was originally brewed in London by Hodgson’s, the nearest brewery to East India Dock. Here East India Company servants would buy beer to sell at a vast profit in India. The beer of choice was a strong, heavily-hopped ale designed to last through the winter months. On the six-month voyage through the tropics, it was found to have matured splendidly, rather like wine from Madeira did. Shipped in the early-nineteenth century, this was the first India Pale Ale, though it wasn’t known as such.
Frederick Hodgson then got greedy and tried to cut out the East India Company by shipping directly. So, Campbell Majoribanks, a director at the Company, approached Burton brewer Samuel Allsopp to make a rival beer. Allsopp brewed a sample in a teapot which met with approval and the beer was shipped to India from 1823.
Burton-on-Trent had an advantage over London in that the water contained gypsum, calcium sulphate, which made the beer brighter and clearer with a pronounced acidic bite. It suited a pale crisp beer, made possible by the recent invention of pale malt, very different to the heavy dark porter that London was famed for.
Other Burton brewers such as Bass & Ratcliff got in on the act. This new beer wasn’t just a hit in India; it became all the rage back in Britain. Railways meant that Burton beer could be sent to London cheaply, and the porter that had dominated the capital began to die out, displaced by this new refreshing beer. Some time in the 1830s the name IPA began to be used.
It was the drink of the aspirant middle class. It would have sold for twice as much as ordinary beer. So popular were Burton beers that by 1877 the Bass brewery was the largest in the world. Bass had the red triangle trademark whereas Allsopp’s symbol was the red hand.
The Allsopp family, like many of the great brewing families, moved into politics. Samuel’s son Henry was elevated to the peerage as 1st Baron Hindlip. In fact, so great was the political influence of brewing families that they were known as “the beerage”. Gladstone attributed the liberal defeat in the 1874 election to this powerful faction: “We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer”, he wrote.
But the Allsopp’s brewing heyday did not last long. According to Jamie Allsopp, in 1897, the family “built a big lager brewery and nobody wanted lager and it finished the company”. They were pushed out in 1911 when the firm went into receivership. It soldiered on before merging with another Burton brewer, Ind Coope, in 1934. Following waves of mergers and acquisitions, the name and the famous red hand disappeared in 1959.
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The Mauser Train: High Adventure in the Last Days of WWII
Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 May 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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Only days ahead of the French Army in April 1945, Ott-Helmuth von Lossnitzer and about 250 Mauser engineers and technicians fled Oberndorf with the core of Mauser’s new projects. They had the drawings, components, and gages for guns like the new StG-45 assault rifle, MK214 aircraft cannon, and Volkspistol and they were headed for an impregnable series of tunnels in the Austrian Alps to carry on the war. In a story that is absolutely worthy of film adaptation they scrounged a series of locomotives, dodged P47 Thunderbolt attacks, and went careening through the Alps with about 2 dozen boxcars of the most important prototype guns in the German arsenal.
Of course, the idea of continued resistance was a complete fantasy. When it did finally arrive in Ötztal, the Mauser refugees found all the tunnels already occupied by other groups with the very same idea. So they basically made camp and waited for American forces to arrive. The train was found by a British-American CIOS (Combined Intelligence Objective Subcommittee) party, the engineers were all questioned, and the train contents packed up for shipment to the UK and US. Ott-Helmuth von Lossnitzer himself emigrated to the US as part of Operation Paperclip, where he worked for Springfield Arsenal for many years until retiring in 1968 and then living in Wisconsin until his passing in 1989.
For anyone interested in this story, I highly recommend Lossnitzer’s oral recollections compiled into book form by Leslie Field and Bas Martens – ISBN 9789081737807. It is out of print now, but you may be able to find it on the secondary market.
Much more accessible is the reprinting of the original CIOS report on Mauser published by Peter Dallhammer (whom you may recall from his Textbook of Pistol Technology and Design). This is a 360-page treasure trove of details on Mauser’s ongoing R&D in 1945, and it is available on Amazon:
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QotD: Modern childhood
So much for the roving pack of kids each block boasted during Mintz’s childhood, and my own. “The empty lot has disappeared,” he quips. “And we are so concerned with legal liability that if kids do find one, you’d better be sure you’ll get a call from the police.”
Beth Hawkins, “Safe Child Syndrome: Protecting kids to death”, City Pages, Volume 26 – Issue 1267 (posted to the old blog, 2005-03-31).
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September 3, 2021
Why Don’t the French Resist? – WAH 041 – August 1942, pt. 2
World War Two
Published 2 Sep 2021Citizens in Stalingrad face German bombs as Soviet officials refuse to evacuate. The German counter-insurgency effort increases, but people continue to resist against all odds. The Treblinka camp breaks down under the ambitions of its commandant, Irmfried Eberl.
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“Watching our feminist prime minister uncomfortably defend and explain away decidedly unfeminist behaviour has become an evergreen moment for our nation”
The NP Platformed newsletter is in the hands of Kathryn Marshall while Colby Cosh is on vacation, and she offers yet another golden moment of hypocrisy on the part of Justin Trudeau:
Standing in the fenced-in corner of a backyard during a press conference this Tuesday, Justin Trudeau was cornered in more ways than one.
Faced with questions from the media as to why he was allowing an incumbent Liberal candidate who had been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment to run for his party, an exasperated Trudeau was once again faced with his hypocrisy when it comes to his feminist credentials.
Only the day before, Trudeau was touting the Liberals “zero-tolerance” policy for sexual harassment. Of course, that was in the context of a Conservative candidate who had been accused of sexual misconduct. Notably, that candidate was very swiftly given the boot by leader Erin O’Toole, which was the correct response.
Now Trudeau finds himself in the exact same position that the Conservative leader was in. Following a CBC report, it has come to light that one of the Liberal candidates, two-term MP Raj Saini, has been the subject of numerous sexual harassment allegations from a number of staff going all the way back to 2015. I have no idea if these allegations are true, but they are deeply disturbing and should be taken seriously. As reported by the CBC, there are seven different sources who “described four different cases where Saini allegedly made unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate comments.” One of the allegations involves a former staff member who filed a human rights complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and tried to end her own life.
It should be a ludicrously easy call for Trudeau. The Liberal party has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, right? Obviously, Saini needs to go and an individual who is facing allegations of this nature is in no position to be running for public office, period.
Except for one small hiccup. The allegations have come to public light after the candidate cut-off date for the election, which was Monday. So if Trudeau gets rid of Saini, it means they can’t replace him with someone else, and the result is no Liberal candidate on the ballot in a safe Liberal seat. Call me cynical, but if I had to guess, I would say this likely has something to do with the fact that overnight, the Liberal’s “zero-tolerance” policy appears to have evaporated into thin air.
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Anti-Slavery Patrols – The West Africa Squadron
Drachinifel
Published 1 Dec 2018Title says it all really, we look at something that was definitely worth doing, which really should have been done much sooner.
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QotD: Drama critics
It’s a second-rate job, folks. Being a drama critic on Broadway wouldn’t keep a decent mind occupied 10% of the time. So you don’t even get second-raters. You get the dregs, the stage-struck but untalented neurotic who eventually drifts into criticism as a means of clinging peripherally to the arts. And most of your cruel critics come this way: they are getting their own back.
William Goldman, The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, 1969.
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September 2, 2021
Road to WWII: A Basic Causal Analysis
Thersites the Historian
Published 19 Nov 2019This video is a primer for undergraduates in broad history survey courses that will hopefully help make sense of the interwar years between World War I and World War II.
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Charles Stross predicts that Elon Musk will become a multi-trillionaire
Charles Stross isn’t exactly a fan of Musk’s, but he outlines why he thinks Musk is on a potentially multi-trillion dollar path:
Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.
So, I’m going to talk about Elon Musk again, everybody’s least favourite eccentric billionaire asshole and poster child for the Thomas Edison effect — get out in front of a bunch of faceless, hard-working engineers and wave that orchestra conductor’s baton, while providing direction. Because I think he may be on course to become a multi-trillionaire — and it has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, NFTs, or colonizing Mars.
This we know: Musk has goals (some of them risible, some of them much more pragmatic), and within the limits of his world-view — I’m pretty sure he grew up reading the same right-wing near-future American SF yarns as me — he’s fairly predictable. Reportedly he sat down some time around 2000 and made a list of the challenges facing humanity within his anticipated lifetime: roll out solar power, get cars off gasoline, colonize Mars, it’s all there. Emperor of Mars is merely his most-publicized, most outrageous end goal. Everything then feeds into achieving the means to get there. But there are lots of sunk costs to pay for: getting to Mars ain’t cheap, and he can’t count on a government paying his bills (well, not every time). So each step needs to cover its costs.
What will pay for Starship, the mammoth actually-getting-ready-to-fly vehicle that was originally called the “Mars Colony Transporter”?
Starship is gargantuan. Fully fuelled on the pad it will weigh 5000 tons. In fully reusable mode it can put 100-150 tons of cargo into orbit — significantly more than a Saturn V or an Energiya, previously the largest launchers ever built. In expendable mode it can lift 250 tons, more than half the mass of the ISS, which was assembled over 20 years from a seemingly endless series of launches of 10-20 ton modules.
Seemingly even crazier, the Starship system is designed for one hour flight turnaround times, comparable to a refueling stop for a long-haul airliner. The mechazilla tower designed to catch descending stages in the last moments of flight and re-stack them on the pad is quite without precedent in the space sector, and yet they’re prototyping the thing. Why would you even do that? Well, it makes no sense if you’re still thinking of this in traditional space launch terms, so let’s stop doing that. Instead it seems to me that SpaceX are trying to achieve something unprecedented with Starship. If it works …
There are no commercial payloads that require a launcher in the 100 ton class, and precious few science missions. Currently the only clear-cut mission is Starship HLS, which NASA are drooling for — a derivative of Starship optimized for transporting cargo and crew to the Moon. (It loses the aerodynamic fins and the heat shield, because it’s not coming back to Earth: it gets other modifications to turn it into a Moon truck with a payload in the 100-200 ton range, which is what you need if you’re serious about running a Moon base on the scale of McMurdo station.)
Musk has trailed using early Starship flights to lift Starlink clusters — upgrading from the 60 satellites a Falcon 9 can deliver to something over 200 in one shot. But that’s a very limited market
As they say, read the whole thing.
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Tank Chats #122 | Sherman 105 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 9 Apr 2021The Tank Museum’s Historian David Fletcher presents a Tank Chat on the only M4 variant of Sherman in The Tank Museum’s collection. This particular example is armed with the 105mm millimetre howitzer, designed for firing High Explosive in a close support role. Join David to find out more.
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QotD: The Boer War
The War was not a very successful one at first, and was quite unfair because the Boers could shoot much further than the English, and also because they were rather despicable in wearing veldt hats and using PomPom bullets.
Numerous battles were fought against the Bore leaders (such as Bother, Kopje, and Stellenbosch) at Nek’s Creek, Creek’s Nek, Knock’s Knee, etc., and much assistance was given to the British cause by Strathcoma’s memorable horse (patriotically lent by Lord Strathcoma for the occasion) and by the C.I.D., who fought very bravely and were awarded a tremendous welcome on their return to London after the war.
Finally, the people at home took upon themselves the direction of the War and won it in a single night in London by a new and bracing method of warfare known as Mafeking. Thus the English were once more victorious. Memorable Results The Barwar was obviously a Good Thing in the end because it was the cause of Boy Scouts and of their memorable Chief Scout, General Baden Powell (known affectionately as ‘the B.O.P.’), and also because it gave rise to a number of very manly books, such as 40 Years Beating About The Bush, 50 Years Before The Mast, 60 Years Behind The Times, etc.
Death of Queen Victoria
Meanwhile Queen Victoria had celebrated another Jamboree, called the Diamond Jamboree (on account of the discovery of Diamond mines at Camberley during the Borewore) and after dying of a surfeit of Jamborees, Jokes, Gladstone, etc., had been succeeded by her son, Edward VII.
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.
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September 1, 2021
Larry Elder’s campaign for governor hit with accusations of “white supremacism”
In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald looks at the recent hysterical attacks on gubernatorial hopeful Larry Elder based on the notion that he is somehow a kind of stalking horse for white supremacists:
Larry Elder at Camp Pendleton for the ceremony presenting the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to his father, Staff Sergeant Randolph Elder, U.S.M.C., 16 August, 2013.
US Government photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.
The media have focused particularly on Elder’s views about crime and policing. The self-described “Sage from South-Central” maintains that criminals, not the police, are the biggest threat in the black community. According to Elder, the false narrative about lethal police racism has only led to more black homicide deaths. “When you reduce the possibility of a bad guy getting caught, getting convicted and getting incarcerated, guess what? Crime goes up,” he said recently at a campaign event in Orange County.
Elder also rejects the charge that white civilians are gunning down blacks, as LeBron James maintained in a tweet during the George Floyd riots: “We are literally hunted everyday, every time we step outside the comfort of our homes.” Elder has a different take. If a “young black man is eight times more likely to be killed by another young black man than [by] a young white man,” Elder told the Orange County Republicans, then “systemic racism is not the problem.”
Such statements are anathema to the establishment Left, deeply invested as it is in the idea that blacks have little agency in the face of ubiquitous white racism. Few subjects are more taboo in elite discourse than the elevated rate of crime among blacks, as it suggests cultural pathologies that — at the very least — complicate the victim narrative. To the Left, black crime is little more than a racist fiction. Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero claims that the crime statistics Elder has cited “over the decades to support his views and policy proposals are misleading, if not outright false, casting Black people as unusually crime-prone.” Black people are not “more inclined toward violent crimes,” nor do blacks “disproportionately victimize whites,” Guerrero wrote, citing Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan and other criminal experts. (Fagan was the plaintiff’s expert in a trilogy of lawsuits against the New York Police Department in the 2010s.) Fellow Times columnist Erika Smith sneered that Elder “keeps trotting out statistics that purport to show that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another.”
Unfortunately for Elder’s critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the Left’s favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks aged 10–34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots — an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.
Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence. These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times‘s other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are “more inclined toward violent crimes” is indisputable.
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