Quotulatiousness

February 28, 2020

“The Future of Warfare” – British Tanks of the Great War – Sabaton History 056 [Official]

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Media, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 27 Feb 2020

Tanks! What a terrible and frightening sight they must have been for the Germans, the first time they had appeared on the battlefield at the Somme in 1916. The tanks were the product of many different ideas and prototypes, that all sought to overcome the perils of the modern battlefield — the machine gun, the bombed out ground and the barbed wire. The British Mark I tank would crush those obstacles through its sheer weight and begin a new age of mechanized warfare!

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to “The Future of Warfare” on the album The Great War:
CD: http://nblast.de/SabatonTheGreatWar
Spotify: https://sabat.one/TheGreatWarSpotify
Apple Music: https://sabat.one/TheGreatWarAppleMusic
iTunes: https://sabat.one/TheGreatWarItunes
Amazon: https://sabat.one/TheGreatWarAmazon
Google Play: https://sabat.one/TheGreatWarGooglePlay

Watch the official lyric video of “The Future of Warfare” here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8qJi…

Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory

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

Sources:
– Bundesarchiv
– Bibliothèque nationale de France
– Library and Archives Canada
– National Library of Scotland
– Australian War Museum
– National Army Museum
– IWM: Q 53204, Q 115391, Q 1419, Q 78121, Q 72864, HU 55578, Q 14496, Q 14495, Q 2487, Q 2486, Q 5574, Q 52, Q 43463, Q 3565, Q 3542, Q 5578, Q 80026, Q 68975
– IWM ART: REPRO 000684 7
– Sound of tracktor engine by viertelnachvier, tank sound by nicstage, from freesound.org

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

The Robin Hood complex – Social banditry theory and myth making

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 15 Dec 2016

There’s one historical theory that people keep deluding themselves with, and it’s about time I pointed it out. Social banditry, or the “Robin Hood theory” is problematic at best and cultural misanthropy at worst.

Social bandit or social crime is a term invented by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels, a study of popular forms of resistance that also incorporate behavior characterized by law as illegal. He further expanded the field in the 1969 study Bandits. Social banditry is a widespread phenomenon that has occurred in many societies throughout recorded history, and forms of social banditry still exist, as evidenced by piracy and organized crime syndicates. Later social scientists have also discussed the term’s applicability to more modern forms of crime, like street gangs and the economy associated with the trade in illegal drugs.
————————————————————
References:
Boessenecker, John. “California Bandidos.” Southern California Quarterly 80, i4 (Dec. 1, 1998), 419-434.

Hall-Patton, Joseph. Pacifying Paradise: Violence and Vigilantism in San Luis Obispo. San Luis Obispo: California Polytechnic – San Luis Obispo thesis, 2016. http://www.digitalcommons.calpoly.edu…

Hobsbawm, Eric. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1965. https://amzn.to/2L6TDY0

Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. Rev. ed. New York: The New Press, 2000. https://amzn.to/2L4RagK

Rediker, Marcus. Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailor, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2014. https://amzn.to/2OasYf4

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2000. https://amzn.to/2JKq8tN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancho_…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquin…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_B…
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Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/CynicalHistorian

LET’S CONNECT:
https://twitter.com/Cynical_History
—————————————–
Hashtags: #History #SocialBanditry #PrimitiveRebellion #RobinHood #BillyTheKid

February 27, 2020

Appeasement – How the West Helped Hitler Start WW2 | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 1 of 4

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 26 Feb 2020

With the increasing aggression of Italy, Japan, and Germany in the 1930s, the League of Nations is becoming increasingly ineffective in regulating international disputes. Britain and France adopt a diplomatic strategy of appeasement to hold off all-out war and buy some crucial time. But will it work, and can Adolf Hitler’s territorial ambitions be contained?

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Tom Meaden, Izzy Wilson, and Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Sources:
Bundesarchiv_Bild:
102-08806, 102-08810, 102-09042,
119-5243, 146-1970-052-24, 146-1985-108-27A,
183-1987-0922-500, 183-R03618,
Photo from color by klimbim.

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss
– Norman Stewart
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Split Decision” – Rannar Sillard
– “Death And Glory 1” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian Andersen
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “Death And Glory 3” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to look back at Anglo-French foreign policy in the 1930s and be shocked at how many mistakes politicians like Neville Chamberlain could make. This video will probably only add to that judgement, it more or less charts all the times Hitler could have been stopped but wasn’t. But put yourself in the context of the time. Memories of the Great War are only twenty years ago old, and the public has no appetite for another massive conflict. The global economy is only just showing signs of recovery after the Great Depression, and Britain and France barely have the industrial capacity to fight a modern war. So, imagine you’re Chamberlain (or any other politician of the time), are you really going to commit your country to war over a territorial disagreement between Germany and Czechoslovakia? The invasion of Poland in September 1939 shows that appeasement was a mistake. But maybe it was an understandable one? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Cheers,
Francis.

Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU)

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill explains why Toby Young’s FSU is so important right now:

The beautiful thing about the mad reaction to Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU) is that it proves why the union is so necessary. No sooner had Young unveiled his censorship-busting union than the illiberal liberals were out in force to mock it and ridicule it and to insist that, actually, there is no free-speech crisis in the UK. It’s a right-wing myth, they claim. There is no widespread censorship. People aren’t being shipped off to gulags for expressing an opinion. Apparently, the free-speech “grift” – God, I hate the word “grift” – is just a bunch of pale, male and stale blokes pissed off that they can no longer say the N-word or talk openly about women’s boobs. Freedom of speech is not under threat, the Young-bashers claim, and anyone who says it is is probably just an Islamophobe, transphobe or some other breed of phobe itching to spout bile with “no consequences”.

This rank denialism, this blinkered insistence that free speech is not in danger in 21st-century Britain, is exactly why we need the FSU and as broad a discussion as possible about the importance of the liberty to express oneself. Because the fact that so many inhabitants of the chattering-class bubble can’t even see that free speech is dying right now confirms how naturalised and uncontroversial the new censorship has become. They don’t even see it as censorship. They see it as perfectly normal, and good, in fact, that certain views cannot be expressed in public life or on social media. That’s how cavalier the new war on heretical opinion has become. At least in the past, from Torquemada to the McCarthyites, authoritarians were honest about being censors. Today’s self-elected moral guardians of correct opinion are so hubristic, so taken with their own mortal rectitude, that they don’t even see themselves as enemies of freedom, but rather as decent, unimpeachable maintainers of a natural intellectual order.

Things have come to such a pass that these people will literally seek to censor you in one breath and then express alarm at being called censors in the next breath. Hence the Guardian could publish a piece last week claiming that the idea that there is a culture of censorship in British universities is a “right-wing myth” while simultaneously defending censorship on campus. In an act of extraordinary moral contortionism, Evan Smith mocked the “idea that there is a free-speech crisis at British universities” and then, without missing a beat, he defended the policy of No Platform and the creation of safe spaces because “the university cannot be a place where racism and fascism – as well as sexism, homophobia and transphobia – are allowed to be expressed”. The Orwellianism is staggering. “There is no censorship on campus. Except the censorship I approve of. Which is not really censorship.” That is what is being said here. The intellectual dishonesty is almost impressive.

This Orwellian denialism of the existence of censorship by people who actually support and enact censorship cuts to the heart of the free-speech crisis in the UK. The reason the illiberal liberals and woke McCarthyites and Twittermobs don’t consider themselves to be censors – even as they gleefully agitate for the censorship of feminists, secularists worried about Islamist extremism, and right-wing people opposed to mass immigration – is because they have convinced themselves that certain forms of speech are not free speech. That certain beliefs should not be afforded the liberty of expression. You hear it in their telling, baleful mantra that “Hate speech is not free speech”. And if “hate speech” is not free speech, but rather some kind of toxin, a pox on public life, then crushing it is not censorship. It is more like an act of public health: cleansing the public realm of diseased thoughts that are liable to harm certain groups. These people see themselves not as censors, but as public-health activists delousing the community of germs spread by evil men and women.

A French Civil War in 1937? – WW2 feat. Hearts of Iron IV [sponsored]

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2020

This video is sponsored by Paradox Interactive. Indy shares his thoughts on what he thinks would have happened if the French would have decided to meddle in the Spanish Civil War – triggering a Civil War.

Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance is now available! You can play Hearts of Iron IV for free until next Sunday, the 1st of March! Discover it here: https://pdxint.at/39Re5ld

Watch our first collab video with HoI4 about the Spanish Civil War here: https://youtu.be/7QE1hvH8ZVU
Watch our Between Two Wars episode on the Spanish Civil War here: https://youtu.be/ncUkPavahCU
Watch our Between Two Wars episode on the French February Revolution in 1934 here: https://youtu.be/tLm1gWnlcYw

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Directed by: Wieke Kapteijns
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Guido Becker
Gameplay scenes: Sietse Kenter

Colorizations by:
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…
Daniel Weiss

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Winston Churchill Biography: In the Darkest Hour

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Biographics
Published 13 Feb 2018

We imagine Winston Churchill with his signature cane, drinking scotch whiskey, and puffing on a Cuban cigar. His mouth is downturned, and his voice is gruff and his words pointed. This is the image Hollywood portrays but it is a mere caricature of the flesh and blood version. Who was Winston Churchill? In Britain’s “darkest hour,” Churchill led his country from the brink of Nazi conquest by forging an alliance with the U.S. and Russia. He had many critics, and made mistakes on a grand scale. Yet, above it all, possessed an unwavering belief in his own power. To his beloved country he offered his “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Visit our companion website for more: http://biographics.org

Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Crystal Sullivan
Producer – Samuel Avila
Executive Producer – Shell Harris

Business inquiries to biographics.email@gmail.com

Biographies by the book, get Winston Churchill’s biography from Amazon: http://amzn.to/2EAfh7b

February 26, 2020

The Home Office – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From Stephen Pollard, one gets the sense that no rational politician would ever want to be Home Secretary in a British government:

Official portrait of the Right Honourable Priti Patel, MP.
Photo by Richard Townshend.

Here’s a trick question: which Home Secretary has been subject to hostile briefings from within the department that they are too Right-wing, too populist, too lazy, too stupid and a bully?

It’s a trick because the answer is: almost all of them. You can pretty much take your choice from any of those who have arrived at the Home Office with a definable agenda, and one that differs from the received Home Office wisdom.

The briefings currently being meted out against Priti Patel are certainly severe. She has been accused of creating an “atmosphere of fear” by officials, an allegation strongly denied by ministers. But in the sweep of recent political history, they are entirely normal. The Home Office has always played dirty when a minister attempts to overturn its shibboleths. The moment its mandarins sniff trouble, stories start appearing in the press about how the new minister is out of his or her depth, unthinking, posturing and — always the same — a variation on stupid.

[…]

The list of the Home Office’s responsibilities is ludicrously large, including: illegal drug use; alcohol strategy, policy and licensing conditions; terrorism; crime; public safety; border control; immigration; applications to enter and stay in the UK; issuing passports and visas; policing; fire prevention; fire rescue. In addition it is responsible for more than 30 agencies and public bodies.

John Reid infamously described its immigration department as “not fit for purpose”, and that quote has often been — understandably — misapplied to the Home Office as a whole.

The likes of Michael Howard and David Blunkett, who became Home Secretary in 2001, were political heavyweights with enough nous to get a grip of the hostile department. In preparing my biography of Blunkett, I spent months in and out of the Home Office when he was running the department, observing and speaking to officials — some who were supportive of their boss but others who clearly regarded him as an irritant.

One adviser to Blunkett recalls that the feeling was mutual. Blunkett wanted to replace the senior civil servants from top to bottom, and he and his aides were shocked at just how chaotic and inefficient the department was. “Nothing had prepared us for it,” recalled one adviser. “It was worse than any of us had imagined possible. God alone knows what Jack [Straw] did for four years. I am simply unable to comprehend how he could have left it as it was. At least Howard had the alibi that he was attempting a wholesale culture shift. In the Home Office, doing nothing means going backwards. It was a mess. A giant mess.”

February 25, 2020

“… and men like you will teach the kids. Not poems and rubbish; SCIENCE! So we can get everything working!”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, Greece — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apparently “the Artilleryman” from Jeff Wayne’s musical interpretation of War of the Worlds has taken over some important post at Oxford:

The Classics Faculty at the University of Oxford is considering whether to remove from its undergraduate courses the compulsory study in their original languages of Homer and Vergil. The reasons given are that students from independent schools, where some classical teaching is kept up, tend at the moment to do better in examinations than students from state schools, and that men do better than women. I regard this as the most important news of the week. I do so partly because I make some of my living from these languages, and so have a financial interest in their survival. I do so mainly because I see the proposal as a further enemy advance in the Culture War through which we have been living for at least the past two generations.

I could make this essay into another attack on the cultural leftists. I will come to these, as they are among the villains. They are not, however, the main villains. These are people who sometimes regard themselves, and are generally regarded by others, as conservatives. They once looked to Margaret Thatcher as their political champion, and then to Tony Blair. They were some of the most committed advocates of our departure from the European Union. They now look to the Johnson Government for the final triumph of their agenda. For these people, a nation is barely more than a giant economic enterprise – Great Britain plc. For them, the main, or perhaps the sole, purpose of education is to provide sets of skills that have measurable value in a corporatised market.

These people have been around for a long time. They were satirised by Charles Dickens in Hard Times, where Thomas Gradgrind explains his philosophy of education:

    Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which to bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

[…]

I agree that state education had become a joke where almost nothing of any kind was taught. As continued by Tony Blair, the Thatcher reforms did eventually drive up standards of literacy and numeracy. But this has been at a terrible cost. Any modern school that wants to be thought desirable must focus on its place in the league tables. This involves working the children like slaves – stuffing them in class with facts that can be regurgitated in tests and therefore graded, then handing out reams of homework that leaves no time for personal development.

The universities continue this conveyor belt approach. Around half of school leavers are pressured into “higher” education. Those who go into the “STEM” subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics – follow a narrow and specialised curriculum that leaves them ignorant of nearly everything outside their own subject. The rest sign up for largely worthless subjects – anything with the words “business” or “studies” in the name. There, they are kept busy with three-hour lectures. I know the value of these, as I used to give them. I fell asleep in one of them, and the students were happy when my voice finally trailed off. Progress in these subjects is measured by coursework that is increasingly plagiarised or ghost-written, or through examinations where the grades are fiddled. At the end of this, graduates – and everyone does graduate – are qualified for nothing better than employment in one of those bureaucracies of management or control that fasten on the actually productive like mistletoe on a tree. The universities look at rising numbers and the fact that graduates do find paid employment, and call this a great success. No one thinks it a disgrace if students never take up a book not on their worthless reading list, or that, having graduated, they never open another book.

Or school leavers at the bottom end are herded into courses in plumbing or hairdressing. I was once invited to teach a module in a Parking Studies degree – this for the certification of traffic wardens. I suppose people are needed to keep the roads clear, and I suppose they should be given some idea of their legal rights and duties. I am not at all sure if they need to have degrees. I am sure that skilled trades of undoubted value are best taught, as they always used to be, through private apprenticeships or informally on the job.

The Prototype .280 FAL from 1950s NATO Trials

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Feb 2020

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

After World War Two, the new NATO defense alliance held a series of trials to adopt a standard cartridge and infantry rifle. This would eventually devolve and the goal of a standardized rifle would be abandoned, but during the early trials there were three main contenders: the British EM-2, the American T-25, and the Belgian FAL. The Fusil Automatique Leger was designed by Dieudonne Saive and originally presented to the British government in 8mm Kurz, before being scaled up to accommodate the British request to use the .280 cartridge. A small number of these prototype FAL rifles in .280 were delivered by FN, and used in the 1950 NATO rifle trials.

Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film and disassemble this very scarce trials rifle! The NFC collection there — perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe — is available by appointment to researchers:

https://royalarmouries.org/research/n…

You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:

https://royalarmouries.org/collection/

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

February 24, 2020

The British Lee tank (that is not a Grant)

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lindybeige
Published 23 Feb 2020

Visit https://www.audible.com/lindybeige or text ‘Lindybeige‘ to 500 500 to find out more about the free trial offer.

The Lee tank was an American hastily-made tank that saw action in the north African desert, and the Grant was a British version of the same vehicle. But there were also Lee tanks that were more like Grants. I try to explain the confusion.

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Norman Conquest of England | 3 Minute History

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jabzy
Published 15 Jan 2015

Norman Conquest

February 23, 2020

The British Will Walk 500 Miles, and They Will Walk 500 more – WW2 – 078 – February 22, 1941

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 22 Feb 2020

As the British make spectacular advances in East-Africa, with even more spectacular advances on the horizon, South-Eastern Europe is getting increasingly tense.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Join our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/D6D2aYN.
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/

Sources:
– Bundesarchiv
– Library of Congress
– IWM: E 6661
– National Library of Australia
– National Portrait Gallery
– Letter by Mochammad Kafi, post icon by Bonegolemfrom, from the Noun Project
– Photot of Goethe Medal by Mondfreund from Wikimedia Commons
– Eirik Sundvor, The Municipal Archives of Trondheim

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

February 22, 2020

The FAL for British Troop Trials in 1954: X8E1 & X8E2

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Feb 2020

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

The NATO rifle trials of the early 1950s eventually chose the 7.62mm x 51mm cartridge, and the British and Belgians agreed on the FAL rifle to shoot it (and they thought the US would as well, but that’s another story). The British government formally accepted the FAL for troop trials, and in 1954 an order for 4,000 X8E1 rifles (with iron sights) and 1,000 X8E2 rifles (with SUIT 1x optical sights) was placed. These rifles were mechanically the same as what would be finalized as the L1A1 rifle, but they include a number of differing features. Both models had 3-position selector switches allowing automatic fire, and they also had manual forward assists on the bolt handles. The iron sights had top covers with integrated stripper clip guides, as there was concern that troops would have to manually reload their magazines, and stripper clips would speed this process up.

Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film these very scarce trials rifles! The NFC collection there — perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe — is available by appointment to researchers:

https://royalarmouries.org/research/n…

You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:

https://royalarmouries.org/collection/
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

February 21, 2020

British wages to be further impacted by Brexit

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As we were told for years, if Brexit happened there were going to be dire consequences to the British economy, and here’s the latest one:

Employers are complaining that without badly paid immigrant labour they’ll just not be able to get the staff. The answer to which is that they’d better start paying higher wages then, eh?

[…]

The analysis here stems from something Marx got right. It’s competition among capitalists for scarce labour which pushes wages up. If there’s a vast reserve army of the unemployed then anyone needing more straining backs just tosses a crust to those in that army and gets as many limbs and torsos to exploit as desired. But if all are already employed then any desire for extra labour requires tempting it away from current employer and occupation to the new. That means a better job offer. Some mixture of conditions, enjoyment of the job, cash and so on that makes up a more attractive package.

The combination of cheap flights and free movement of labour has meant that the reserve army lives in Wroclaw and Debrecen. It’s also been near unlimited – compared to the size of the UK economy – these past couple of decades.

The absence of free movement – what is being complained about here – will mean that to gain the desired labour those employers are going to have to offer higher wages, higher compensation rather, to those not ordinarily resident or stemming from central Europe.

[…]

But back to the basic complaint here. These employers are complaining that Brexit will mean they’ve got to raise the wages they pay. To which the correct response is “Ah, Diddums”.

“Back in Control” – The Falklands War – Sabaton History 055 [Official]

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 20 Feb 2020

1982, on a group of islands far, far away from Great Britain. After the military junta of Argentinian Army General Leopoldo Galtieri had publicly declared that the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) were rightfully part of Argentinian territory, an invasion force succeeded in wrestling control away from their British owners. However Great Britain would not simply stand by and give the Falklands up. Instead a British task-force would make its way down to the Falklands, in an attempt to take back control of the islands by force. What followed was an undeclared war of 10 weeks, where British carriers and commandos fought against the entrenched Argentinian ground-forces for the ownership of the islands.

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Listen to “Back in Control” on the album Attero Dominatus:
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Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album ‘The Great War’ right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

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

Sources:
– Casa Rosada (Argentina Presidency of the Nation)
– Gobierno de Argentina (Government of Argentina) – Argentina.gob.ar
– Ken Griffiths from Wikimedia Commons
– Armada Argentina on Flickr
– HMS Invincible in 1980, HMS Hermes in 1977, credit: Hugh Llewelyn on Flickr
– IWM: FKD 186, FKD 357, FKD 677, IWM FKD 138, FKD 185, FKD 2743, FKD 168, FKD 435, FKD 182, FKD 319, FKD 2744, FKD 71, FKD 217, FKD 107, FKD 321, FKD 349, FKD 345, FKD 2755, FKD 108, FKD 2028, FKD 2750, FKD 2051, FKD 2040, FKD 176, FKD 314, FKD 427
– IWM ART: 15530 33, 15530 56, 15530 10, 15530 10
– National Army Museum: 164752, 107649

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