It’s often called the “Hundred Days”, but even for people who stayed awake in their high school history classes, that’s often taken to refer to the last hurrah of Napoleon between his escape from Elba and his ultimate defeat at Waterloo. The WW1’s Hundred Days began with the Allied victory at the battle of Amiens and ended with the Armistice on 11 November, 1918. On Twitter, Engaging Strategy shared a series of tweets about this campaign and how little is generally remembered about it:
August 3, 2018
The obscure, almost-forgotten campaign that ended the First World War
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August 1, 2018
British Labour Party continues to sideline pro-Brexit MPs
Fraser Myers on the most recent pro-Brexit Labour MP deselected by local party activists:
Labour Party activists have passed votes of no confidence in two of Labour’s Brexit-backing MPs, and called for their deselection. Frank Field and Kate Hoey were censured by their local parties for voting with the government against an amendment that would have kept the UK in a customs union with the EU after Brexit. If passed, it would have killed off any prospect of Britain having an independent trade policy after Brexit, and would have kept us under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Recognising this as a betrayal of the Leave vote, Labour Brexiteers had no other choice but to vote with the government to defeat the amendment. Now, for defending the democratic choice of 17.4million voters, Field and Hoey stand accused of ‘betraying’ the Labour movement and ‘siding with the reactionary Tory establishment’.
This sends a disastrous message to voters and pits Labour against the Leave vote, the largest democratic mandate in British history. Labour’s better-than-expected result at the 2017 General Election depended on retaining Brexit-voting seats. Two thirds of Labour MPs represent Leave-backing constituencies, with some of the largest Leave votes in Labour-held seats. Labour needs to win 64 seats at the next election to form a majority government, 42 of which are dotted around blue-collar, Leave-voting England. To attack the few Labour MPs who are on the side of the Leave majority is an astonishing act of self-harm for a party that claims to represent ordinary people.
While some Blairite MPs have long feared the prospect of deselection campaigns launched by the Corbyn-backing Momentum, the no-confidence motion against Kate Hoey was initiated by members of the Blairite pressure group, Progress. And rather than stand up for Hoey, a defender of Corbyn’s leadership, Momentum sided with its erstwhile rivals against the Brexiteer MP. As Owen Jones revealingly writes in the Guardian: ‘Self-professed Blairites, soft lefties and Corbynites were united in this vote.’ While the Blairite and Corbynite wings of the party claim to agree on very little, they appear to be united in their contempt for the electorate and for democracy.
These activists seem to forget that Labour has a long history of Euroscepticism. Labour’s much-celebrated postwar prime minister, Clement Attlee, and the architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan, were against Britain joining the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community (EEC). When the left-winger Michael Foot led Labour into the 1983 General Election, the party’s manifesto pledged to withdraw Britain from the EEC. Tony Benn – Corbyn’s hero – opposed the anti-democratic tendencies of the EU all his life. Would Benn, Foot and Bevan face a similar fate to Hoey and Field in Labour today?
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July 31, 2018
The anti-Brexit propaganda machine of “Project Fear”
Brendan O’Neill on the never-ending whinge by the Remoaners emphasizing the potential negatives of Brexit:
I can’t remember a time when the elitist politics of fear has been as cynically wielded as it has been over the past week. It wasn’t even this bad when schoolkids of my generation were made to watch The Day After, a nuclear-disaster movie in which a wholesome American family slowly die from radiation after the Soviets go mental and bomb the US. Also, at least that dread-laden propaganda was only designed to make us fear the Ruskies – the even more unhinged Project Fear of elitist Remoaners is an attempt to make us fear ourselves and our friends and family and our collective electoral stupidity that has allegedly propelled Britain to the brink of ‘self-immolation’, in the words of the increasingly bizarre figure of David Lammy, the Member of Parliament for Brussels.
Every day the fearful propaganda intensifies. One wakes wondering what unearthly horror our vote against the EU 25 months ago might now have unleashed. Gonorrhoea is the latest. If we leave the EU with No Deal, Britain will apparently become a 15th-century-style hotbed of such sexual malaise. ‘Brexit could lead to spread of infectious diseases such as super-gonorrhoea’, says a headline in the London Evening Standard, which was once a newspaper but is now a score-settling sheet for its current editor: arch Remainer and former chancellor George Osborne, who we turfed out of office with our vote for Brexit. Medical officials fear that a shortage of medicine in the event of No Deal will mean we won’t be able to treat knob rot. It’s almost Biblical. ‘Defy me and your genitals shall wither.’ Up next: plagues of locusts? Floods?
Yes, floods. Brexit could ‘water down [the UK’s] environment laws’, says a piece in the Guardian, complete with a photo of a flooded English village. We could see more ‘severe flash floods’ if we leave the EU without boosting eco-laws. Perhaps we should build arks, get some animals on board? If you don’t drown, you might be poisoned. If there’s No Deal, Britain will become a ‘dumping ground for chemicals’, claim green groups. There won’t be much food, either. Remoaners are stoking up fears of food shortages if we change our trade arrangements with the EU. Because we will struggle to import ingredients and therefore won’t be able to make bread and other essentials. Why won’t be able to do this? They never say. They just know starvation is on the cards.
In the words of chief Remoaner Alastair Campbell, ‘No deal Brexit means no food Brexit and no medicines Brexit…’. Imagine being Alastair Campbell. Imagine giving the green light to the destruction of a foreign country and the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the name of delivering democracy, only to decide 15 years later that you don’t believe in democracy after all and so you devote your entire life to overthrowing the largest democratic vote in British history. Scientists should study Mr Campbell to discover how such a human being manages to sleep at night. Also, no one is saying there will be ‘no food’ after Brexit. Campbell is lying now as surely as he was when he said Saddam could bomb Britain in 45 minutes.
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A gruesome experiment in determining the actual need for social housing
Tim Worstall discusses an aspect of the terrible Grenfell Tower fire in London that I hadn’t considered:
The fire at Grenfell Tower in London, 14 June 2017.
Photo by Natalie Oxford via Wikimedia Commons
That the Grenfell Tower fire was a tragedy is obvious. That lessons need to be learned is equally so. At which point, OK, which lessons would we like to learn? One that would be useful is to work out how much of social housing in London – for that’s what the evidence allows us to estimate – is illegally sublet. Or, as we might also put it, how much social housing in London is not actually needed as social housing?
For sublets are, by their nature, at something close to market rents, the difference between those and the social rents being pocketed by those doing the renting out.
No, we don’t know and that might be just because we’ve not been paying the detailed attention required. But it’s also something we tend to think will have been glossed over in investigations into the events. Something that perhaps should not have been glossed over – if indeed it has.
[…] The thought that a place, in the centre of London, where we could house – safely perhaps this time – several hundred people not be used to house several hundred people? We have a housing shortage or not?
However, it’s the insight into that larger question that interests. We know that some amount of social (and or council) housing in London is illegally sublet. The very fact that it is shows that it’s not needed. Those who are paying the landlord a reduced rent clearly don’t need the property as they’re not living in it. Those paying the near market rents don’t need social housing as they’re paying near market rents. Thus subletting shows that the entire structure of – at least in that instance – the social rent isn’t necessary.
So, how prevalent is it? We know that some of it occurred at Grenfell. We’ve all admitted it, clearly, for we’ve not insisted that only those on the tenants’ listing are those who should be granted aid for having had their home burned down. So, we know there’s some. So, how much?
It’s unlikely that we’ve as much information on this concerning any other building in the country. Thus this is an excellent place to actually conduct such research.
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July 30, 2018
Forgotten History: World’s Biggest Black Powder Cannon – a 100-Ton Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 10 Jul 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The largest muzzleloading black powder cannons ever built were the Armstrong 100-ton guns which saw service with the Italian Navy and with British coastal fortifications on Malta and Gibraltar. They were purchased by the Italians first, to outfit a pair of new super battleships, each vessel having two turrets with two of these guns in each. To avoid being outclassed, the British ordered two guns for installation to protect the Grand Harbor of Malta and two more to protect Gibraltar. Today one survives at each location, and we are visiting the Rinella Battery in Malta, which was built to house one of the Maltese guns.
These guns had a maximum range of 8 miles, and was capable of piercing 15 inches of iron armor at 3 miles. It had a 17.7 inch (45cm) bore fired a 2000 pound (900 kg) shell with a 450 pound (200kg) charge of black powder. The gun itself weighed approximately 102 tons, and with its cradle and a shell the whole assembly came in at 150 tons.
Aside from the massive scale of the piece, the most interesting part of its design is actually the loading machinery. Because of the titanic size of the gun and ammunition, Armstrong designed a fascinating hydraulic reloading facility which makes up the body of the fortress in which the gun is set. A pair of steam engines drove a pair of hydraulic accumulators, which provided hydraulic pressure to move the gun on its carriage, to douse the barrel after firing, to hoist ammunition into position for loading and power a 60-foot (18m) ramrod to mechanically ram the charge and shell into place. Two mirror-image reloading galleries under the fortification operated in turn, giving the gun a sustained rate of fire of 1 round every 6 minutes – at least until its 120-round barrel life was exhausted.
I am grateful for the Malta Tourism Authority’s assistance in helping to make this visit and video possible, and would also like to give special thanks to Simon, our awesome reenactor guide!
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
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July 29, 2018
Carving up the Middle East and Preempting Rommel I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1920 Part 3 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published on 27 Jul 2018In 1920 the colonial powers of the British Empire and France reverse course on their commitment to grant independence to the peoples of the Middle East. In a game to grab the oil fields of Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia, and to control the Suez Canal they tighten their grip on the region, with far ranging consequences that will shape the world well into the 21st century.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written and directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Research Contributed by: Jonas Yazo Srouji
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus OlssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
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A poor tank, a useless tank, and the worst tank in the world
Lindybeige
Published on 10 Jul 2018Tigers? Why talk about Tigers when one can talk about tanks that were even worse? More tank banter with The Chieftain.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeA low-tech tank with fragile armour, a tank that never saw the enemy, and the tank used to teach how not to build tanks. Thanks to Nicholas Moran (AKA The Chieftain) and Matt Sampson, the cameraman at Bovington Tank Museum.
The third of these three segments was shot with my new camera, and it really shows.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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July 28, 2018
Historical vandalism at Stonehenge
Jocelyn Sears on the barbaric “souvenir” habits of 18th century English “tourists”:
A photograph of Stonehenge taken in July 1877 by Philip Rupert Acott
Via Wikimedia Commons
In 1860, a concerned tourist wrote to the London Times decrying the “foolish, vulgar and ruthless practice of the majority of visitors” to Stonehenge “of breaking off portions of it as keepsakes.” Today, taking a hammer and chisel to a Neolithic monument seems like obvious vandalism, but during the Victorian era, such behavior was not only common but expected.
English antiquarian tourists, who were mostly upper class, had developed the habit of taking makeshift relics from the historical sites they visited during the 18th century. By 1830, the practice was so widespread that the English painter Benjamin Robert Haydon dubbed it “the English disease,” writing, “On every English chimney piece, you will see a bit of the real Pyramids, a bit of Stonehenge! […] You can’t admit the English into your gardens but they will strip your trees, cut their names on your statues, eat your fruit, & stuff their pockets with bits for their musaeums.”
For centuries, both locals and visitors had taken pieces of Stonehenge for use in folk remedies. As early as the 12th century, rumors of the stones’ healing properties appear in the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in 1707, Reverend James Brome wrote that their scrapings were still thought to “heal any green Wound, or old Sore.” In the 1660s, the English antiquarian John Aubrey reported a local superstition that “pieces or powder of these stones, putt into their wells, doe drive away the Toades.”
Eventually, tourists were not just taking from Stonehenge, but also leaving their mark, too. By the middle of the 17th century, tourist graffiti was appearing on the stones. The name of Johannes Ludovicus de Ferre — abbreviated “IOH : LVD : DEFERRE” — is etched, and so is the engraving “I WREN,” which may refer to Christopher Wren, the famed architect who designed St. Paul’s Cathedral.
As early as 1740, the archaeologist William Stukeley was decrying “the unaccountable folly of mankind in breaking pieces off [the stones] with great hammers,” and by the end of the 19th century, according an 1886 commenter, “Almost every day takes some fragment from the ruins, or adds something to the network of scrawling with which the surface of the stone is defaced.”
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July 27, 2018
QotD: All pizza is local
When it comes to pizza, you like what you like; and the weird regionalized nature of pizza suggests that we are most likely to like what we know. Real travellers are aware that it is almost impossible to anticipate what you might get ordering pizza outside its twin cultural homes of Italy and North America. Try it in the U.K.: any sort of two-dimensional horror might materialize. Is that yogurt? Endive? Are those eggs? To the depraved British, it makes sense, like Marmite.
Colby Cosh, “The Edmonton pizza hypothesis”, National Post, 2016-10-03.
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July 26, 2018
The life and strange death of Godfrey Elfwick
Poor old Godfrey has been taken from us by the Grim Twit-Reaper, felled in his Xirs prime in the midst of Twitter’s most recent mass-banning. At Spiked, Andrew Doyle pays tribute to the late Arch-Ubertroll of social media:
In November 2016, the Guardian published a comment piece in which the anonymous writer described how he was radicalised into the ‘alt-right’. It started when he watched a few ostensibly harmless videos by the American liberal Sam Harris. From there, he graduated to material of an anti-SJW (Social Justice Warrior) and anti-feminist disposition, before eventually becoming a fan of the dreaded Milo Yiannopoulos. As the writer dramatically put it: ‘The indoctrination was complete.’
Soon after, a well-known Twitter troll called Godfrey Elfwick claimed to be the author. It made complete sense, even though it wasn’t true. Elfwick was a brilliant caricature of the excesses of the liberal-left. He, or rather xe, identified as a ‘genderqueer Muslim atheist’ who was ‘born white in the #WrongSkin’. His ‘transblack’ status began as a satire of Rachel Dolezal, the US civil-rights activist who was born to white parents but identifies as black. ‘I have light skin’, he tweeted, ‘yet I know in my heart I am black and act accordingly’. Elfwick’s #WrongSkin hashtag soon began to trend worldwide on Twitter, fooling many in the process. Even the Mirror and the BBC published articles which did not rule out the possibility that the campaign might be authentic.
Similarly, Elfwick’s claim to have penned the Guardian comment piece was effective precisely because it was so feasible. The satire was double-edged. On the one hand, Elfwick had accentuated the inherent absurdities of the article in question, exposing the self-parodic nature of the Guardian. On the other, he had successfully duped public figures such as Sam Harris, Maajid Nawaz, and leading Gamergater Ethan Ralph, all of whom had been so quick to take his tweets at face value. The hoax claim was in itself a hoax.
Elfwick’s brand of satire depended on this kind of ambiguity. Those who took his posts seriously were inadvertently enhancing the impact of the joke, especially when they expressed such boiling outrage. It is no coincidence that objections to Elfwick tend to come from po-faced peddlers of identity politics who are unhappy about being ridiculed. The same goes for the ideologues of Twitter, who have an established record of deleting accounts for political reasons and have now permanently banned Elfwick from their platform.
A few gems from the Trolling Hall of Fame:
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July 25, 2018
Britain, refugees, and migrants
Alex Noble explains why Britain needs migrants, but not all migrants:
Nurses, doctors, engineers, scientists, computer programmers – our society is very advanced and a big chunk of our economic strength is based on advanced services that need skilled people like these. And there aren’t enough native Brits skilled in these areas – our demand outpaces our supply of people. We need lots of computer programmers and only relatively few native Brits are qualifying in computer sciences. And the shortage of young Brits taking STEM subjects is worsening.
So far so good – we need a supply of skilled migrants for the foreseeable future. Hopefully we can all agree on that.
Do we need unskilled migrants?
Because when people with no skills come to the UK, we suffer and so do they. They are either forced into crime, fall into modern slavery, or find themselves exploited working on the black market.
When they are forced into crime, we see more stabbings and rapes and burglaries and murders.
When they fall into modern slavery we see more people-trafficking, more forced prostitution.
When they are exploited, they are forced to work below minimum wage, and the jobs that young British teenagers might have taken are taken by those willing to work for a pittance just to stay alive. When they find themselves working in the black market, they pay no tax and have no protections.
Modern Britain does not need or desire these things – young people enslaved and forced to work for low pay, exploited, or forced into crime. These are profoundly negative developments for our society, and a grotesque abuse of people who were mislead into coming here for what they thought would be a new life.
Modern Britain does not need unskilled migrants, and should not enrich their slavers.
And that brings us to refugees.
Are there genuine refugees? Yes of course.
But we know what refugees look like – men, women and children staggering over the border into the nearest safe nation with the clothes on their backs and often not much else. Poverty-stricken and unable to return to the homelands, they throw themselves on the mercy of their neighbours. Refugees don’t abandon their families in war zones and travel thousands of miles alone. They do not have thousands of dollars to give to slave traders for a seat on their rickety barges.
What we see on the boats are not refugees.
They are mostly young men coming for a better life. And while we cannot begrudge them those intentions, we have already discussed why unskilled migrants cannot be welcomed here in large numbers. And unskilled migrants they mostly are, because skilled migrants come armed with work permits and speak the language. At the very least they have documentation to prove who they are, because being able to prove you are an Iranian heart surgeon is important. Being able to prove you are a penniless and unskilled Eritrean, who doesn’t speak English……………that’s not an identity worth retaining at a border check.
And so the Mediterranean sea floor is littered with their travel documents.
Genuine refuges stagger over the nearest safe border – we must help them if we can.
The unskilled migrants travel here in boats, trafficked by modern-day slavers into the underworlds of our nations. They may have hope in their hearts, but they are bringing misery into a society that cannot absorb them.
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July 23, 2018
Jeremy Clarkson is a maniac
Ove Bakken
Published on 19 Oct 2017
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July 19, 2018
Mucking around with Stonehenge
Many people are still under the impression that Stonehenge was built by the Druids (debunked in this video by Siobhan Thompson). At least as many people think that the modern day stone circle is an undisturbed historical relic, and that the stones are standing today as and where they have for thousands of years. All the way back in 2001, Emma Young did a quick debunking of that theory in New Scientist:
An early photograph of Stonehenge taken in July 1877 by Philip Rupert Acott
Via Wikimedia Commons
Photo from a similar angle in 2008 showing the extent of reconstruction.
Via Wikimedia Commons
Most of the one million visitors who visit Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain every year believe they are looking at untouched 4,000-year-old remains. But virtually every stone was re-erected, straightened or embedded in concrete between 1901 and 1964, says a British doctoral student.
“What we have been looking at is a 20th-century landscape, reminiscent of what Stonehenge might have looked like thousands of years ago,” says Brian Edwards, a student at the University of the West of England in Bristol.
Stonehenge isn’t the only ancient site to have been transformed in recent years, he says. “Even many of the local people in Avebury weren’t aware that a lot of the stones were put up in the 1930s,” he told New Scientist.
[…]
English Heritage says it is now considering covering the Stonehenge alteration programme in detail in the next edition of its official guidebook to the site. A decision not to include the work in official guides was taken in the 1960s, says Dave Batchelor, English Heritage’s senior archaeologist.
The first restoration project took place in 1901. A leaning stone was straightened and set in concrete, to prevent it falling.
More drastic renovations were carried out in the 1920s. Under the direction of Colonel William Hawley, a member of the Stonehenge Society, six stones were moved and re-erected.
Cranes were used to reposition three more stones in 1958. One giant fallen lintel, or cross stone, was replaced. Then in 1964, four stones were repositioned to prevent them falling.
The 1920s ‘restoration’ was the most “vigorous”, says Christopher Chippindale of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. “The work in the 1920s under Colonel William Crawley is a sad story,” he says.
As I commented on a post back in 2010:
I imagine, given how many times Stonehenge has been mucked about with by earlier enthusiasts, there must be much misleading data has to be sifted and re-sifted before any definite discoveries can be announced. Stonehenge has been fascinating people for centuries and there are probably lots of amateur investigations that may well have made the situation more confusing (think of a sixteenth century equivalent of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft with a nose for treasure).
Atlas Obscura recently had a set of photos of Stonehenge taken in 1867 likely featuring the family of Colonel Sir Henry James, of the Ordnance Survey. There’s also a watercolour by John Constable from around 1835 showing a very different, more ruin-y monument:
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July 17, 2018
Australian General John Monash I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1
The Great War
Published on 16 Jul 2018John Monash was one of the most capable commanders of World War 1 but his rise to fame didn’t come unopposed.
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Women to be eligible to join British army Gurkha units in 2020
The BBC reports on a recently announced change in Gurkha recruiting:
Screencap of the Royal Gurkha Rifles page at the British Army website
The Gurkhas will recruit women for the first time from 2020, and the selection process will be the same as for men.
Women hoping to join will have to pass gruelling physical tests – including racing 3.1 miles (5km) uphill carrying 55lb (25kg) of sand in a wicker basket.
Gurkhas, who are Nepalese, have been part of the Army for more than 200 years.
Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said it was “right” women were given the chance to serve in “this elite group”.
The change in direction comes three years after Nepal – traditionally a male-dominated society – elected its first female president, Bidhya Devi Bhandari.
To be considered for the selection process, applicants must weigh more than 50kg (7.9 stone), be taller than 158cm (5ft 1in) and “be able to complete eight underarm heaves”, the Army website says.
The recruitment process takes place in Pokhara, central Nepal. Successful applicants are then flown to Catterick, North Yorkshire, for a 10-week training programme.
[…]
At its peak, during World War Two, 112,000 men were in the Gurkhas. More than 230,000 fought across both world wars, but their numbers have fallen dramatically since.
Currently, there are about 3,000 Gurkhas – most are in the infantry but some are engineers, logisticians or signals specialists.
The regiment, whose motto is “Better to die than be a coward,” still carry into battle their traditional weapon – an 18-inch (46cm) long curved knife known as a kukri.
A Kukri (Top) with the traditional Karda (middle) and Chakmak (bottom). The Karda and Chakmak are used as a utility knife and a sharpening tool respectively
Via Wikimedia Commons.
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