World War Two
Published 10 Jul 2021Adolf Hitler is not happy, and yet phase one of Fall Blau has accomplished all of its goals and done so ahead of the timetable. However, the Soviet Army in 1942 is not the same as that in 1941, and is not waiting around this time to be captured by the hundreds of thousands, and if things continue then the Axis might just be wasting a ton of gas to take a ton of empty space.
(more…)
July 11, 2021
Fall Blau – A Victim of Its Own Success? – 150 – WW2 – July 10, 1942
Comments Off on Fall Blau – A Victim of Its Own Success? – 150 – WW2 – July 10, 1942
QotD: William and Mary
Williamanmary for some reason was known as The Orange in their own country of Holland, and were popular as King of England because the people naturally believed it was descended from Nell Glyn. It was on the whole a good King and one of their first Acts was the Toleration Act, which said they would tolerate anything, though afterwards it went back on this and decided that they could not tolerate the Scots.
A Darien Scheme
The Scots were now in a skirling uproar because James II was the last of the Scottish Kings and England was under the rule of the Dutch Orange; it was therefore decided to put them in charge of a very fat man called Cortez and transport them to a Peak in Darien, where it was hoped they would be more silent.
Massacre of Glascoe
The Scots, however, continued to squirl and hoot at the Orange, and a rebellion was raised by the memorable Viscount Slaughterhouse (the Bonnie Dundee) and his Gallivanting Army. Finally Slaughterhouse was defeated at the Pass of Ghilliekrankie and the Scots were all massacred at Glascoe, near Edinburgh (in Scotland, where the Scots were living at that time); after which they were forbidden to curl or hoot or even to wear the Kilt. (This was a Good Thing, as the Kilt was one of the causes of their being so uproarious and Scotch.)
Blood-Orangemen
Meanwhile the Orange increased its popularity and showed themselves to be a very strong King by its ingenious answer to the Irish Question; this consisted in the Battle of the Boyne and a very strong treaty which followed it, stating (a) that all the Irish Roman Catholics who liked could be transported to France, (b) that all the rest who liked could be put to the sword, (c) that Northern Ireland should be planted with Blood Orangemen.
These Blood-Orangemen are still there; they are, of course, all descendants of Nell Glyn and are extremely fierce and industrial and so loyal that they are always ready to start a loyal rebellion to the Glory of God and the Orange. All of which shows that the Orange was a Good Thing, as well as being a good King. After the Treaty the Irish who remained were made to go and live in a bog and think of a New Question.
The Bank of England
It was Williamanmary who first discovered the National Debt and had the memorable idea of building the Bank of England to put it in. The National Debt is a very Good Thing and it would be dangerous to pay it off, for fear of Political Economy.
Finally the Orange was killed by a mole while out riding and was succeeded by the memorable dead queen, Anne.
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.
Comments Off on QotD: William and Mary
July 10, 2021
History-Makers: Aristophanes
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 9 Jul 2021He told the Athenians they were a disaster and they gave him a prize. Aristophanes wrote in the new Theatrical genre of Comedy during the golden age of Athens, and used his plays to viciously satirize Athenian society. They create a fabulously clear portrait of ancient Athenian life, and they have the corollary benefit of being funny as hell.
SOURCES & Further Reading: The 11 plays of Aristophanes, with particular focus on Clouds and Women at the Thesmophoria, Britannica’s “Aristophanes”, Crash Course Theater #2 & 4.
Partial Tracklist: “Sneaky Snitch”, “Marty Gots A Plan” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp
MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/osp
OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/
From the comments:
Overly Sarcastic Productions
2 hours ago
While we’re here, one subject I cut for time is the relationship between “The Clouds” and the trial of Socrates.It’s commonly assumed that Aristophanes’ satire played a part in Athens’ decision to charge and ultimately kill Socrates, but that interpretation doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.
The Clouds was performed over 20 years before Socrates’ trial. If the play had that strong an effect on Athens, we can assume Socrates would have been charged far sooner. And Plato’s own writings paint Aristophanes rather favorably — if Plato blamed Aristophanes for the trial, he does not make that obvious.
There IS one snide line in Socrates’ Apology that seems to a modern reader like it’s referring to The Clouds, but really we can’t be sure. Aristophanes was not the only comic playwright in Athens, and certainly not the only person who disliked Socrates. Did The Clouds contribute to a negative public perception of Socrates? Sure, in part, at least when it was performed in 423. But it’s faaar more likely that Socrates’ trial and death in 399 owe more to his persistent habit of being a Colossal Pain In The Ass to whomever he was speaking with.
Reading The Apology makes it clear that nobody had the power to make Athens hate Socrates more than Socrates.
-B
Comments Off on History-Makers: Aristophanes
A History of Caricature: the Art of Exaggeration
J.J. McCullough
Published 27 Mar 2021Let’s look at the history of caricature, the art of drawing exaggerated cartoon pictures of famous people like celebrities, politicians, and movie stars. We’ll look at the style of great artists like Al Hirschfeld, Gerald Scarfe, and Robert Risko among others.
Voice cameo by Alec: https://www.youtube.com/user/bostwiki
FOLLOW ME:
🇨🇦Support me on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/jjmccullough
🤖Join my Discord! https://discord.gg/3X64ww7
🇺🇸Follow me on Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/jjmccullough/
🇨🇦Read my latest Washington Post columns: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people…
🇨🇦Visit my Canada Website http://thecanadaguide.comHASHTAGS: #caricature #art #history
Comments Off on A History of Caricature: the Art of Exaggeration
July 9, 2021
The Western Warlords of Asian Armies – WW2 Gallery 004
World War Two
Published 8 Jul 2021From the Battle of Shanghai to the Burma Campaign and beyond, Western military advisors have played a big role in the actions of East Asian armies in the Pacific Theatre. Watch the videos to learn the stories of Joseph Stilwell, Claire Lee Chennault, the Flying Tigers, the Chindits, and more.
(more…)
Comments Off on The Western Warlords of Asian Armies – WW2 Gallery 004
Alexander Larman on George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels
I happened upon a copy of the first Flashman in my teens and was totally taken in by the assertion that the book was about “a real historical figure involved in most of the Victorian era’s most notorious episodes and that his papers were discovered during a sale of household furniture at Ashby, Leicestershire in 1965.” I’d watched the TV adaptation of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, so I had some awareness about the character Flashman, which only helped keep the cover story going for me. I absolutely loved the book and while it eventually became clear that it was fiction, I haunted the bookshops for years afterwards searching for more from Fraser. In The Critic, Alexander Larman looks at the author and his works — which almost certainly could never have been published in this neo-Victorian age:
When Flashy first entered the scene in bestselling form in 1969, there was confusion as to whether the tales were fanciful fiction or eyebrow-raising fact. This was due to MacDonald Fraser’s straight-faced claim that his protagonist was a real historical figure involved in most of the Victorian era’s most notorious episodes and that his papers were discovered during a sale of household furniture at Ashby, Leicestershire in 1965.
MacDonald Fraser presented himself as an impartial editor. He wrote, “I have no reason to doubt that it is a completely truthful account; where Flashman touches on historical fact he is almost invariably accurate, and readers can judge whether he is to be believed or not on more personal matters.”
The subterfuge succeeded. A third of the initial reviews treated it as a serious work of non-fiction, rather than a brilliantly conceived and superbly written counter-factual piece.
Not bad for the continued exploits of a minor character in the sanctimonious Victorian novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, whose major achievement is to bully the protagonist and his friend Harry “Scud” East, before being expelled for drunkenness. It set its creator on a hugely lucrative path, and established him as one of the great comic novelists of his day.
MacDonald Fraser was a contradictory figure. A patriotic right-winger who had a deep respect for other cultures and peoples; one of Hollywood’s most in-demand screenwriters who happily lived on the Isle of Man in a self-conscious recreation of “the good old days”; a fully paid-up reactionary who wished to reintroduce corporal and capital punishment, but who loathed British incursions abroad.
Above all, he despised cant and hypocrisy. He described Tony Blair as “not just the worst prime minister we’ve ever had, but by far the worst prime minister we’ve ever had” and angrily added, “it makes my blood boil to think of the British soldiers who’ve died for that little liar.”
Christopher Hitchens, who may not have agreed with his views on foreign expeditions, but knew a thing or two about the value of being able to hold one’s drink, was a friend of MacDonald Fraser’s. When Hitchens telephoned him on his eightieth birthday to offer his regards, he was stoutly informed that he shared the company of “Charlemagne, Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen and Kenneth Tynan” on that date.
Their politics may have differed — Christopher acknowledged MacDonald Fraser’s “robust Toryism” — but Hitchens respected the older writer’s enduring affection for his Zulu, Sikh and Afghan characters, as well as the dutiful admiration he showed towards both American culture and its presidents.
Comments Off on Alexander Larman on George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels
Evolution of the Sturmgewehr: MP43/1, MP43, MP44, and StG44
Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Oct 2017Today we are going to look at the evolution of the Sturmgewehr — from the MP43/I and MP43 to the MP44 and StG44, what actually changed and why?
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
Comments Off on Evolution of the Sturmgewehr: MP43/1, MP43, MP44, and StG44
July 8, 2021
The initial findings of our months-long dietary natural experiment
As we’ve all been told many, many times by the food nannies, access to fast food restaurants makes us fat. The food is too greasy, too salty, too tasty for our feeble wills to fight so we just engorge ourselves on those bad calories. We eat too much fast food and we get fat. Case closed. Well, that’s what we’ve been told. Our recent fast food deprivation diets say something else again:
“Camden Fast Food” by It’s No Game is licensed under CC BY 2.0
OK, well, we’ve just had a grand experiment, haven’t we? Peeps haven’t been able to queue at Maccy D’s to get their greaseburger. People have had to – and have had time to – buy actual food and then prepare it for themselves at home.
Which is something that does rather kill the case about those burgers. Because what has been happening is that we’ve been – in the absence of greaseburgers – been eating more.
Using data on millions of food and non-alcoholic drink purchases from shops, takeaways and restaurants, the study found that the pandemic led to calories from restaurant meals falling to zero during the UK’s first national lockdown. That increased somewhat over the summer and declined again as restrictions in the hospitality sector were reintroduced in the autumn.
However, this was more than offset by a large increase in calories from takeaways, which peaked at more than double the usual levels in the UK’s second national lockdown in November 2020.
Overall, people increased their calories from raw ingredients by more than those from ready-to-eat meals and snacks and treats, with the pandemic leading to a shift in the balance of calories towards foods that required home preparation.
It’s that last paragraph that’s important. More home food preparation was being done from raw ingredients. And yet calorie consumption rose.
The report said the most plausible explanation for the sustained increase over the pandemic was higher consumption rather than changes in household composition, food waste or stocking up.
The study is specific to Britain, but it’s highly likely that the same results will be observed in Canada, the United States, Australia, and many other places. But I wouldn’t expect it will be given much coverage, like so much these days that contravenes the messaging that our dying media all seem to prefer to spread.
Comments Off on The initial findings of our months-long dietary natural experiment
July 7, 2021
Poland’s Forgotten Spy War against the Nazis – WW2 – Spies & Ties 05
World War Two
Published 6 Jul 2021The Polish played a big part in cracking the Enigma codes. From there, the Polish spy and intelligence operation became even bigger.
(more…)
Comments Off on Poland’s Forgotten Spy War against the Nazis – WW2 – Spies & Ties 05
Tank Chats #114 | Luchs | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 1 Jan 2021In his latest Tank Chat, The Tank Museum’s Curator David Willey looks at the Luchs, a Second World War German reconnaissance vehicle from the Panzer II family. The Tank Museum’s example is one of only two survivors in the world.
(more…)
Comments Off on Tank Chats #114 | Luchs | The Tank Museum
QotD: Bad language from Down Under
Naive he surely was — and while over his nine-year career at the Eye he might increasingly turn the tables on the Brits, that innocence never wholly disappeared — in one respect he was omnipotent. His slang-laden, all-Australian language burst into the Eye reader’s consciousness fully-formed and quite astounding. By 1968 Bazza was offering freckle puncher, smell like an Abo’s armpit, bang like a shithouse door, dry as a nun’s nasty, point Percy at the porcelain, siphon the python and perhaps the most celebrated, the Technicolour yawn (aka the liquid laugh or the big spit).
[…]
It was also resolutely carnal: in its concentration on defecation and urination, drinking (and the seemingly inevitable vomiting it induced) and copulation (even if Bazza remains the eternal virgin), Humphries either created or collated a vocabulary that would not be rivalled until Viz magazine’s “swearing dictionary” Roger’s Profanisaurus began appearing in 1997.
Rooted, from Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University and chief editor of the Australian National Dictionary, focuses on this side of the Australian vocabulary. Rooted comes from root, a euphemism for fuck, both literally, in the context of sex, and figuratively, as in harm, destroy, and so on. It falls into what Laugesen is happy to term “bad language”, even if one might suspect that with her formidable knowledge it is a term she knows perfectly well is a construct of tabloid moralising and empty religiosity. (Perhaps I am hardened by proximity, but I find it sad she feels the need to warn readers they will encounter the language that is the subject of her work.)
Jonathon Green, “Fair dinkum dictionary”, The Critic, 2021-04-08.
Comments Off on QotD: Bad language from Down Under
July 6, 2021
Conspiracies within conspiracies within conspiracies
In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb considers the evolving nature of Wuhan Coronavirus conspiracy theories:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
We have, for the past eighteen months, lived through a fantasy pandemic. If unpleasant, the Virus is not particularly deadly. The number of cases is a product of testing, the number of deaths a statistical fraud. We have had much worse infections in living memory. We never responded to those by locking down whole populations and making hysterical fear an object of state policy. What is happening?
The most likely answer is stupidity. The quality of the people who rule Britain and America has dropped through the floor since about 1990, and it was not that high then. Sadly, though, the rest of the world still believes Britain and America are the pinnacle of civilisation, and so, whatever madness is decided in London and Washington is copied without question almost everywhere else. Take stupidity, add short-term advantage to the usual suspects in politics and business, and we have the Coronavirus Panic.
But arguments from stupidity are boring. They are the equivalent of denying the existence of ghosts and second sight — worthy and true, but unentertaining. Much better is to begin from the assumption that the idiots in charge are not really in charge, but are only front men for the supremely intelligent and supremely effective and supremely wicked Ones-on-High. Do this, and explaining the panic becomes an argument over which conspiracy theory best fits the observed facts.
Until a few weeks ago, my favourite was that the Virus was a bioweapon that had somehow leaked from a Chinese laboratory. It was spotted by the main governments, because they were all working in secret on something similar. This would explain the initial panic. As for the piffling number of deaths, bioweapons are still at the experimental stage, and no one realised until it was too late that modified viruses lose their potency almost at once in the wild. This was my favourite conspiracy theory for over a year. I only went off it when the authorities stopped denouncing it and punishing anyone important who said it was true, and instead announced on television that it might be true. Since the hacks in the mainstream media are just bright enough not to tell the truth even by accident, it was half a minute to give up on a year of enjoyable speculation.
There are other conspiracy theories. Regrettably, most of these border on the respectable. For example, the panic is a cover for clawing back some of the manufacturing outsourced to China since the 1990s. Or it is an excuse for ending the unwise monetary policies of the past decade and inflating away the resulting national debts. These all have an appearance of the probable, and are therefore dull before the first paragraph is read. But, looming over all the others, is the merger of scepticism about vaccines and the Agenda 21 conspiracy.
For those unaware of it, Agenda 21 is boring drivel from the United Nations about not cutting down trees. Behind this, though, is an alleged conspiracy to reduce the human population from seven billion to half a billion. Doing this, apparently, will end all the fanciful scares about global warming, and leave the lucky survivors free to use all the electricity they want without feeling guilty.
The latest version of this theory is that the Virus is a fraud, but justifies injecting people with a vaccine that will make most of them fall down dead, or in some degree sterilise them. There are passionate advocates of the revised theory, all of them begging us to keep away from any of the vaccines on offer. I have so far kept away from the vaccines.
Comments Off on Conspiracies within conspiracies within conspiracies
July 5, 2021
QotD: Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister
Most historians rate Walpole as one of our more successful prime ministers: he stabilised the nation’s finances, saw off Jacobite sedition, and kept the country out of foreign wars, proudly boasting: “There are 50,000 slain in Europe this year and not one Englishman.” But inevitably, there was a downside to Walpole: he was charged by his enemies with corruption.
In fact, considering the spectacular eighteenth-century standards of sleaze, Walpole was — to borrow a phrase coined by Tony Blair — “a pretty straight kind of guy”. True, he spent six months in the Tower of London accused by his political foes of all sorts of malpractice; but he was eventually cleared. True, too, that he built a magnificent mansion, Houghton Hall, in his native Norfolk — but he had legitimately made a fortune in the South Sea Bubble financial crash that ruined so many others (by buying shares when they were low and selling them when they were high). Nevertheless, Walpole was not above sailing close to the wind of propriety, cynically remarking: “Every man has his price.”
Nigel Jones, “Scandal, corruption and collusion: 300 years of British prime ministers”, The Critic, 2021-04-03.
Comments Off on QotD: Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister
July 4, 2021
Fall Blau Begins, Stalin Caught off Guard Again – 149 – WW2 – July 3, 1942
World War Two
Published 3 Jul 2021It’s that time of the year again — the time when the Axis Powers drive deep into the Soviet Union. Fall Blau is the name of this year’s huge offensive, and it begins this week, making great gains from the very beginning, but the Axis Powers are also making big gains this week in North Africa, taking Mersa Matruh and pushing to within 100 km of Alexandria. Can nothing stop them?
(more…)
Comments Off on Fall Blau Begins, Stalin Caught off Guard Again – 149 – WW2 – July 3, 1942
QotD: It’s not your money … it’s the GOVERNMENT’S money
The left seems to be going off the same book when they say things like “How will you pay for the tax cuts?” as if the government is OF COURSE entitled to all your money, and if you’re getting some back, that part must be compensated for.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Tragedy of the Squid Farms on Mars”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-12-05.
Comments Off on QotD: It’s not your money … it’s the GOVERNMENT’S money
