Dire Straits
Published 28 Apr 2023Dire Straits performing ‘Tunnel Of Love’ at Rockpop in Concert on December 19th 1980.
Footage licensed from ZDF Enterprises. All rights reserved.
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August 1, 2023
Dire Straits – Tunnel Of Love (Rockpop In Concert, 19th Dec 1980)
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July 31, 2023
The grim plight of the UK as global BOILING advances
Alexander McKibbin reports on the UK’s latest set of climate-related warnings from the Met Office:
No one who has read and digested this authoritative and comprehensive report can fail to be apprehensive about the future. Harnessing the technological power of its powerful computer modelling system, the Met Office can produce a highly accurate forecast of how the changing climate will affect the UK. It is a truly dystopian projection and one which should ring alarm bells in the top echelons of Whitehall.
Below is a selection of areas highlighted as being at risk if we do not achieve Net Zero by 2030.
Berwick-upon-Tweed
This charming border town with castle ruins and cobbled streets will disappear in the next five years, according to the Met Office. The picturesque Royal Border, Berwick and Union Suspension bridges will all be drowned by an unstoppable and ever-rising River Tweed. Displaced residents will need to find alternative accommodation and it is likely that looting and scavenging will become commonplace.
Kent
Known for centuries as “The Garden of England”, this delightful county currently plays host to gentle hills, fertile farmland and fruit-filled orchards. Country estates such as Penshurst Place, Sissinghurst Castle and Hall Place Gardens are all well known for the scenic views they offer.
Sadly, this will all shortly vanish under burning heat exceeding 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The rivers Stour, Medway, Darent and Dour will slow to a trickle and finally dry up completely. Dust storms and dust bowls will be part and parcel of daily living, as will camels and occasional prickly pear cacti dotted across a barren and arid wasteland. Dartford, the Met Office confidently asserts, will be a never-ending vista of shape changing sand dunes.
Yorkshire
Known to inhabitants as “God’s Own County”, no one can deny the many charms of England’s largest county with a population twice the size of Wales.
Horse-racing is a major attraction and with nine courses to choose from including Thirsk, Wetherby, Redcar and Catterick, no wonder Yorkshire is a popular tourist destination. What a pity that all of these temples to equestrian prowess will be lost to an all-consuming glacier that will blanket the land. The report is not sure whether at 104ft high the scenic Ribblehead Viaduct will avoid being trapped in this icy embrace. It is suggested that refugees should make their way south to seek food and shelter.
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RSC 1917: France’s WW1 Semiauto Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Nov 2015Did you know that the French Army issued more than 80,000 semiautomatic rifles during WWI? They had been experimenting with a great many semiauto designs before the war, and in 1916 finalized a design for a rotating bolt, long stroke gas piston rifle (with more than few similarities to the M1 Garand, actually) which would see field service beginning in 1917. An improved version was put into production in 1918, but too late to see any significant combat use.
The RSC 1917 was not a perfect design, but it was good enough and the only true semiauto infantry rifle fielded by anyone in significant numbers during the war.
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July 30, 2023
“Give me Andrea Dworkin’s anti-fella fury over this matrician tripe any day of the week”
Brendan O’Neill clearly doesn’t think Caitlin Moran’s new book What About Men? is worth reading:
Men, I have bad news: Caitlin Moran is coming for us. She comes not to man-bash, not to holler: “All men are rapists!” It’s worse than that. She feels sorry for us. “I’m violently opposed to the branches of feminism that are permanently angry with men”, she writes at the very start of her very bad book. Instead she pities us. She frets over our toxic stoicism, our inability to be vulnerable, our unwillingness to be open about our fat bodies and small cocks. She wants to save us from all the “rules” about “what a man should be”. From all that “swagger” and “the stiff upper lip”. By the end I found myself pining for some good ol’ angry feminism. Give me Andrea Dworkin’s anti-fella fury over this matrician tripe any day of the week.
What About Men? is, I’m going to be blunt, rubbish. I knew it would be from the very first page where Moran says that “when it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz”. Imagine using the word bantz unironically in 2023. What she means is that she’s done all the vagina stuff. She’s completed feminism. She’s known as “the Woman Woman”, she says, in an arrogant timbre that puts to shame those cocksure blokes who stalk her nightmares. She wrote the bestselling pop-feminist tome, How To Be a Woman (2011), which contained such gems of wisdom as “don’t shave your vagina” because it’s better to have a “big, hairy minge”, a “lovely furry moof”, “a marmoset sitting in [your] lap”, than a bald cooch. (Emmeline Pankhurst, I’m so sorry.) So now, naturally, she’s turning her attention to men. She’s discovered there is “a lot to say” about “men in the 21st-century”. Lucky us.
What she says about us is almost too daft for words. You realise by about page 22 that she’s never met a bloke from outside the media-luvvie, ageing rock-chick, “Glasto”-loving circle she famously inhabits. (I almost died of second-hand embarrassment when she said in How To Be a Woman that she lives an edgy existence, “like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash”. Maam, you write a celebrity column for hundreds of thousands of pounds for The Times.)
Even her cultural references in What About Men? are off, as befits a woman who is essentially a square person’s idea of a cool person. She laments that young men are in “the grip of a fad” for super-skinny jeans. Jeans so tight they look “sprayed-on”. Jeans so tight that the poor lad’s balls end up “crushed against the crotch seam, in vivid detail”. Really? It’s not 2006. Bloc Party aren’t in the charts. I’m no follower of fashion but even I know most young men haven’t been wearing bollock-squashing jeans for a few years now. My nephews wear baggy jeans, à la Madchester. Pretty much the only time you see unyielding denim these days is on the portly thigh of a mid-life-crisis middle-class dad. The kind of men, dare I say it, that Ms Moran mixes with.
Her commentary on t-shirts is a dead giveaway, too. The only fashion flare the tragic male sex is allowed to enjoy is the tee, she says. Especially past the age of 40. You’ll see fortysomething fellas in “band t-shirts, slogan t-shirts, t-shirts with swearing on”, she says. Will you? Where? Again, only in the knowingly dishevelled privileged set Moran exists in. Every man in his forties I know always manages to put a shirt on. So desperate are emotionally repressed men to express themselves, says Moran, that some even buy t-shirts “from the back pages of Viz” that say things like “Breast Inspector” or “Fart Loading: Please Wait”. Not once in my life have I seen a man in a Viz tee. The problem here isn’t men – it’s Moran’s man-friends. She could have saved herself the trouble of this entire book by befriending some normal blokes.
That Moran’s pool of men is shallow is clear from the fact that all the men she talks to for the book seem to be as steeped as she is in chattering-class orthodoxy. She includes a transcript of long chats with male acquaintances and, honestly, reading it feels like being stuck in a lift with craft-beer wankers who do IT for the Guardian. At one point she informs her readers that her male friends are mostly “middle-aged, middle-class dads who know about wine, recycle, have views on thoughtful novels” and would probably “cry if they saw a dog struggling with a slight limp”. Writing a book about men from the perspective of men like that is like writing a book about women from the perspective of Princess Anne.
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Bradley Unleashes His Cobra – WW2 – Week 257 – July 29, 1944
World War Two
Published 29 Jul 2023Operation Cobra is the drop that finally opens the floodgates and the Allies make a breakthrough in Normandy; up in the Baltics the Soviets take Shaulyai, Dvinsk, and finally Narva, though their big prize this week is Lvov further south. This happens during the Poles’ Lvov Uprising, which ends badly for the Poles. Things also go badly for the Japanese on Guam, though, as their assault this week devastates their own troops.
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The Grave of the Man Who Never Was: Operation Mincemeat
Tom Scott
Published 7 Nov 2016In a cemetery in Huelva, in Spain, is the grave of Major William Martin, of the British Royal Marines. Or rather, it’s the grave of a man called Glyndwr Michael, who served his country during World War 2 in a very unexpected way … after his death.
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QotD: Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan
… I’m not trying to cast Thomas Hobbes, of all people, as some kind of proto-Libertarian. The point is, for Hobbes, physical security was the overriding, indeed obsessive, concern. Indeed, Hobbes went so far as to make his peace with Oliver Cromwell, for two reasons: First, his own physical safety was threatened in his Parisian exile (a religious thing, irrelevant). Second, and most importantly, Cromwell was the Leviathan. The Civil Wars didn’t turn out quite like Hobbes thought they would, but regardless, Cromwell’s was the actually existing government. It really did have the power, and when you boil it down, whether the actually existing ruler is a Prince or a Leviathan or something else, might makes right.
One last point before we close: As we’ve noted here probably ad nauseam, modern English is far less Latinate than the idiom of Hobbes’s day. Hobbes translated Leviathan into Latin himself, and while I’m not going to cite it (not least because I myself don’t read Latin), it’s crucial to note that, for the speakers of Hobbes’s brand of English, “right” is a direction – the opposite of left.
I’m oversimplifying for clarity, because it’s crucial that we get this – when the Barons at Runnymede, Thomas Hobbes, hell, even Thomas Jefferson talked about “rights”, they might’ve used the English word, but they were thinking in Latin. They meant ius – as in, ius gentium (the right of peoples, “international law”), ius civile (“civil law”, originally the laws of the City of Rome itself), etc. Thus, if Hobbes had said “might makes right” – which he actually did say, or damn close, Leviathan, passim – he would’ve meant something like “might makes ius“. Might legitimates, in other words – the actually existing power is legitimate, because it exists.
We Postmoderns, who speak only English, get confused by the many contradictory senses of “right”. The phrase “might makes right” horrifies us (at least, when a Republican is president) because we take it to mean “might makes correct” – that any action of the government at all is legally, ethically, morally ok, simply because the government did it. Even Machiavelli, who truly did believe that might makes ius, would laugh at this – or, I should say, especially Machiavelli, as he explicitly urges his Prince, who by definition has ius, to horribly immoral, unethical, “illegal” (in the “law of nations” sense) behavior.
So let’s clarify: Might legitimates. That doesn’t roll off the tongue like the other phrase, but it avoids a lot of confusion.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
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July 29, 2023
The brief – but vastly profitable – heyday of Parys Mountain
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes discusses the engine behind the meteoric rise of Britain’s “Copper King”, Thomas Williams:
Parys Mine Shaft. View down a shaft at Parys Mine.
Photo by Stephen Elwyn Roddick – CC BY-SA 2.0
At the time More visited, Thomas Williams had only just begun his rapid rise to power. He was already a major industrialist and grown stupendously wealthy. When More asked about his stables, Williams apparently could not even estimate how many he possessed to the nearest ten. But Williams not yet even master of the mountain.
Nonetheless, the mining was well underway. The closest port, Amlwch, was already connected to the mountain by a new road that had been built for the Parys Mine Company’s sole use. Having not long ago been a village of just six houses, Amlwch had turned into a bustling port.
The mine itself was a source of fascination. “This differs from any mine I had ever seen or perhaps is anywhere else to be found, for the ore here instead of being met with in veins is collected into one great mass, so that it is dug in quarries and brought out in carts without any shafts being sunk”. Instead, the miners hollowed out the mountain itself, forming vast caverns that they supported by simply leaving vast columns of the ore untouched. He noted at least four or five of these caverns with ceilings forty feet high, with columns of yellow ore: “the whole seemed like the ruins of some magnificent building whose pillars had been of massy brass.”
It’s a fascinating insight into what Parys would have very briefly looked like, because today there is so little of the mountain left. Indeed, some of the caverns More got to see were already collapsing, with the rubble then needing to be sorted. He describes how one such piece of rubble — a two-ton chunk of ore — had to be bored, the cavity rammed with gunpowder and sealed with stones, and then exploded. “They are continually blowing up parts of the mine”, he noted, and was informed that the part of the mine he was visiting alone got through 10-12 tons of gunpowder per year. The mountain was disintegrating, punctuated by the occasional boom.
And as though that were not dramatic enough, the whole place smelled like hell. When More visited there were some seventy vast kilns upon the mountain for calcining the ore, burning off its sulphur. Each kiln held some 2,000 tons of ore, and when ignited with a little dried vegetation or coal it was so sulphurous that it took four months of furious burning for the ore to be sufficiently calcined. He noted that one had to keep to the windward side of the kilns, as “the fumes arising from them are very disagreeable and destroy all vegetables for a considerable distance around them.”
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French 75mm of 1897
vbbsmyt
Published 30 Dec 2021The French 75 is widely regarded as the first modern artillery piece. It was the first field gun to include a hydro-pneumatic recoil mechanism, which kept the gun’s trail and wheels perfectly still during the firing sequence. Since it did not need to be re-aimed after each shot, the crew could reload and fire as soon as the barrel returned to its resting position. In typical use the French 75 could deliver fifteen rounds per minute on its target, either shrapnel or high-explosive, up to about 8,500 m (5.3 mi) away. Its firing rate could even reach close to 30 rounds per minute, albeit only for a very short time and with a highly experienced crew. [wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_d…]
The concept for the gun anticipated future conflict being a war of manoeuver — with massed infantry and cavalry attacks — based on the experience of the wars of 1870-1872. Consequently the gun was designed to be able to be moved easily, set up quickly and fire antipersonnel shells (shrapnel) rapidly, and without the need to reset the carriage after each shot. Two critical components were the cased ammunition (shell and cartridge as a single unit) and a recoil system that completely absorbed the recoil forces and returned the gun to its original position without disturbing the gun’s position.
This animation shows the actions necessary to prepare the gun from its “travelling” state to operational state. The carriage has to be “locked” into a fixed position and levelled. The operation of shrapnel shells depends upon setting a time fuse to explode the shell just in front of an attacking force, to shower them with balls, and demonstrates the French Débouchoir mechanical fuse setter that allowed time fuses to be set rapidly and accurately. The liquid (oil) and air (pneumatic) recoil mechanism used a “floating piston” — on one side hydraulic oil and on the other compressed air. The design must keep these two separated while allowing the free piston to move rapidly. The French design laid great emphasis on seals made of silver – being soft enough to conform to the sleeve housing, but as reported by the US when they started manufacturing the 75mm, the key element was highly precise machining of the sleeve housing the free piston.
The French 75mm of 1897 was of less use with the introduction of trench warfare, where howitzers and mortars being the primary artillery, but the 75mm retained some value, one use being firing shrapnel shells at aircraft. A longer time fuse had to be developed to reach the altitude that some aircraft flew at.
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QotD: How pre-modern cities shaped the surrounding landscape
Every town or city, of course, will be different. For agricultural societies especially, local terrain sharply constrains possible land uses. Some land is simply too wet or dry or rough or rocky or infertile for this or that purpose. In a modern city, apartments or factories or offices can be built almost anywhere; the sort of land suitable for intensive farming is more limited. This is even more true for pre-modern societies working without modern fertilizer, without electric-powered irrigation and without the industrial technology to massively reshape terrain (draining swamps, filling ravines, flattening hills, irrigating the desert, etc – some of these can be done with hand tools, but not to the extent we can today).
Still, we want to begin thinking about how cities impact the land around them without all of these difficult and confusing variables. We want to image a city, isolated and alone in the middle of an endless, flat and featureless plain. This is exactly what J. H. von Thünen did in The Isolated State (Der isolierte Staat). This kind of exercise can give us a baseline of what the landscape around a decent sized city might look like, which we can then modify to respond to different terrain, technology and social organization.
(Note: I would be remiss if I didn’t note that my discussion of these ideas owes heavily to Neville Morley’s Metropolis and Hinterland (1996), where he applied this very method to the city of Rome and its hinterland (and also first introduced me to von Thünen’s ideas). That book and also his Trade in Classical Antiquity are both great books to give a read if you want to begin building a sense of how pre-modern economies work).
The key factor von Thünen looks at is transportation costs. For a society without trains or trucks, moving bulk materials of any kind over long distances is extraordinarily expensive. Moving grain overland, for instance, would cause its cost to double after 100 miles. Thus land close to our theoretical city is extremely valuable for production, while land far away is substantially less valuable (because the end goal is transporting the agricultural production of that land to the city). As a result, transit costs – and thus distance – dominates how cities influence land-use patterns (along with population, which determines the intensity of the city’s influence).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.
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July 28, 2023
Ideology and Mediocrity: Inside the 12th SS Division Leadership
OTD Military History
Published 27 Jul 2023Historian Dr. Philip W. Blood discusses how the leadership of the 12th SS (Hitler Youth) Panzer Division were a clique of ideological motivated Nazis and most were promoted into their positions because of their loyalty to Hitler and Nazism and not because they were good soldiers.
Check out my full conversation with Philip Blood at the link below.
Waffen-SS Fantasies and the Commodification of War Crimes
https://youtube.com/live/vdZf_2tooSM
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July 27, 2023
History Summarized: The Cities of Ancient Sparta
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Apr 2023Is. This. Sparta???
SOURCES & Further Reading:
– “The Spartans” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
– “The Greek Polis – Sparta” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble
– “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland
– “Being a Greek Slave” from The Other Side of History by Robert Garland.
– The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton
– The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline.
– AskHistorians posts by u/Iphikrates “Is the Military Worship of the Spartans Really Justified?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
– “This. Isn’t. Sparta.” by historian Bret Devereaux argues that Sparta was a horrible place to live, had poorly educated citizens, was militarily mediocre, culturally stagnant, and was ruled by elites who were pretty crappy too. Anything inaccurate in that assessment?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
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QotD: The causes of crime in Britain
Theodore Dalrymple, “Pray for Rain”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-07-08.
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July 26, 2023
Bombing France into Freedom – War Against Humanity 105
World War Two
Published 25 Jul 2023The destruction of German cities has shown how difficult it is for the heavy bombers of the RAF and USAAF to hit small targets with precision. Things will be no different when these big beasts go into action to support the D-Day landings. Thousands of French civilians will pay the price for the flawed logic of Allied bombing.
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July 25, 2023
WWI Footage: Narrow Gauge Train Lines in France
Charlie Dean Archives
Published 14 Aug 2013American forces constructing railways throughout France to help move men and supplies during World War One. We see US Army personnel laying the sleepers and track for the extensive network of two foot (60cm) narrow gauge lines, ballasting work, loading and laying of pre-built trackwork. We also see scenes of the railway in action as the little trains trundle along country lanes and through the town streets. The film ends with scenes of the train taking soldiers towards the front lines.
After the war the lines were abandoned and most of the locomotives and rollingstock simply left where they were last used, with many being salvaged by the locals to help with logging activities.
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
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