Quotulatiousness

July 29, 2020

What was TEKOI?

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

CGP Grey
Published 28 Jul 2020

## Related Videos

Exploring Tekoi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABMV4…

Defeated by Tumbleweeds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeXP…

## Special Thanks

Gregory Waltz

## Crowdfunders

Steven Snow, Bob Kunz, John Buchan, Nevin Spoljaric, Donal Botkin, BN-12 , Chris Chapin, Richard Jenkins, Phil Gardner, Martin, Steven Grimm, سليمان العقل, Elliot Lepley, Colin Millions, David F Watson, Saki Comandao, Ben Schwab, Jason Lewandowski, Bobby, rictic, Marco Arment, Shallon Brown, Shantanu Raj, emptymachine, George Lin, Jeffrey Podis, Ben Delo, Henry Ng, Thunda Plum, Awoo, David Tyler, Fuesu, iulus, Jordan Earls, Joshua Jamison, Nick Fish, Nick Gibson, Tyler Bryant, Zach Whittle, Oliver Steele, Kermit Norlund, Derek Bonner, Derek Jackson, Mikko, Orbit_Junkie, Ron Bowes, Tómas Árni Jónasson, Andrew Bereza, Rebecca Wortham, Bryan McLemore, Bear, chrysilis, David Palomares, Emil, Erik Parasiuk, Esteban Santana Santana, Freddi Hørlyck, John Rogers, ken mcfarlane, Leon, Maarten van der Blij, Peter Lomax, Rhys Parry, ShiroiYami, Tristan Watts-Willis, Veronica Peshterianu, Dag Viggo Lokøen, Essa omar, Ryan Richards, Alex Simonides, Felix Weis, John Lee, Maxime Zielony, Melvin Sowah, Elizabeth Keathley, Christopher Mutchler, Giulio Bontadini, Paul Alom, Ryan Tripicchio, Scot Melville, Kyle Wayman, Julien Dubois

## Music

David Rees: http://www.davidreesmusic.com

Update: CGP Grey posted a corrected version of this video here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCeMCwxayp0
He also posted the Director’s Commentary video (originally intended only for his Patrons) here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufsYK3Eecw4
There is also a video explaining how the whole process worked and how the error was missed, if you’re interested.

The Equity, Inclusivity, and Diversity Industrial Complex

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden comments on a Ross Douthat column on the “antiracist” demands of our modern protestariat (the hordes of un- or under-employed university-educated young liberals and socialists):

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

… the most interesting aspect of this lockdown-induced outpouring of collective rage hasn’t been the protests, or the cancellations, but the woke job creation that is going on. The ideology behind things like “white fragility” is increasingly being transformed into what can be described as an equity-inclusivity-diversity (EID) industrial complex that might end up being the most significant long term structural change that emerges out of the protests.

One of the most common responses in elite institutions as they promise to address systemic racism has been the creation of new jobs and positions that will supposedly help to do so. For instance, the Washington Post created a set of new positions that will be focusing on racial issues. This included hiring a “Managing Editor for Diversity and Inclusion.” At Princeton, the administration announced, like many other elite universities, new courses (which means new teaching opportunities) focused on racial injustice, as well as new projects and funding for research to explore and address racial issues. Stanford has created a new Centre for Racial Justice at its law school.

This direct job creation is just the tip of the iceberg. The real EID industrial complex is in the creation of a vast number of new jobs dedicated to the promotion and advancement of the basic tenets of this ascendant ideology through the expansion of human resource departments to deal with these issues, the creation of new EID bureaucrats and administrators in universities, corporations, government departments, the rise of EID consulting and mandatory courses and workshops for employees, new jobs and potential litigation for lawyers, as well as courses and modules in law schools to teach aspiring lawyers about these things.

In the bestselling Ibram X. Kendi book How To Be An Antiracist, one of Kendi’s central solutions is to pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution and permanently establish and fund a Department of Anti-racism. This department:

    would be comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

The radical tendencies of the bourgeois bolsheviks in the streets might make them seem like true revolutionaries, but what this movement seems to actually want to create, with remarkable success, is new employment opportunities for true believers in the new anti-racist creeds. Racism won’t so much be solved by tearing society down, but by massively expanding new professional and managerial jobs that can guarantee full employment for the credentialed class of true believers.

O’Boyle’s thesis is that the revolutions that swept across European cities in 1848 were because a large surplus of resentful and overeducated men felt society was denying to them what they were rightfully owed. O’Boyle looks at Germany, where university education was cheap, and was “emphasized as an avenue to wealth and power.” This ending up producing an excess of ambitious, but resentful and frustrated men who felt society was not allotting them the status and comfort they deserved. The same was true in France. But in Britain, the opportunities produced by industrialization that had yet to fully materialize on the continent kept this excess surplus of overeducated men much smaller, and helped insulate Britain from revolution.

What if the EID industrial complex actually helps to reduce the scarcity of opportunities in elite fields and institutions that will put a lid on the unrest that overproduction breeds? The EID industry is worth billions of dollars, and in a way it might be the solution liberalism offers to both the radical progressivism of this ideology, and to the challenge posed by elite overproduction.

QotD: Grog in the Royal Navy

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

More generally, though, do we have any historical evidence of groups whose alcohol consumption was documented with any confidence, to see how they fared?

Actually, we do, at least as a floor: we know the quantity of the Royal Navy’s spirit ration, which until 1823 was based on half a pint of rum (284 millilitres in foreign) per man per day. We also know its minimum strength, since it was tested by trying to ignite gunpowder soaked in it: it had to be over 57% alcohol by volume (“proof strength”) to pass. That’s sixteen units of alcohol – not per week, but per day – or north of a hundred units a week, just for the issued ration before sailors bought any extra from the purser. (No wonder Jack Tar was jolly back in those days!)

But clearly, we would expect a body of men consuming such suicidally destructive quantities of booze to be physical wrecks, raddled by cirrhosis and disease? As Dr James Lind (he of the discovery that citrus fruits were a sovereign remedy for scurvy) put it,

    It is an observation, I think, worthy of record that fourteen thousand persons, pent up in ships, should continue, for six or seven months, to enjoy a better state of health upon the watery element, than it can well be imagined so great a number of people would enjoy, on the most healthful spot of ground in the world.

(For context, around this point the Navy won the battle of Quiberon Bay, with twenty ships – who had less than one man sick per ship).

The ration was halved in 1823, and again in 1850, but for a hundred and twenty years until Black Tot Day in 1970, the Navy still issued nearly thirty units of alcohol a week to everyone on the lower deck (junior rates got theirs diluted, seniors got neat rum). Either folk were hardier back then, or Britannia managed to rule the waves and keep her sailors reasonably healthy despite being a pack of hopelessly addicted alcoholics.

Jason Lynch, “How Much Is ‘Too Much’?”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-08.

July 28, 2020

Roman kit: featuring armour, swords, spears, artillery, rations, deckchairs, and of course shoes

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

Lindybeige
Published 27 Jul 2020

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A video of re-enactors and their Roman kit. Sorry about the wind noise.

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Tank Chats #76 Tetrarch Tank | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 31 May 2019

Tetrarch tanks were flown over on D-Day, 6th June, 1944, for the invasion of France during WW2. Find out more with David Fletcher.

Originally adopted by the British Army as a light tank it became the first British airborne tank.
Many thanks to Vitaly Kuzmin for providing the image of the Tetrarch at Kubinka https://www.vitalykuzmin.net

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July 27, 2020

The Bronze Age Collapse (approximately 1200 B.C.E.)

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Greece, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historia Civilis
Published 25 Jul 2020

Just casually thinkin bout the end of the world. No, no reason, why?

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Sources:
The Medinet Habu Inscription | https://bit.ly/2Ba2Lvf
David O’Connor & Stephen Quirke, Mysterious Lands | https://amzn.to/3jdQOWu
—
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed | https://amzn.to/2ClWgpO
Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. | https://amzn.to/2CkJ7NC
Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization | https://amzn.to/2Wra8G4
Oliver Dickinson, The Aegean From Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries B.C. | https://amzn.to/3h8ar0r

Music:
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“Heliograph,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Deluge,” by Cellophane Sam

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From the comments:

ka v
1 day ago
I got Sea People Return in the December slot of my 2020 Apocalypse bingo card.

Food in Ancient Rome – Garum, Puls, Bread, and Moretum

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

SandRhoman History
Published 7 Jul 2019

Food in ancient Rome – the cuisine of ancient Rome is probably not everybody’s cup of tea. Food in ancient Rome was consumed at the mensa, the dining table of the ancient Romans. A usual ancient Roman meal for the upper classes could look like this: puls, one of the main ancient Roman meals. This was essentially a form of porridge, along with that they might have eaten bread, refined with olives and figs. Bread was often eaten with moretum, a spread, made of sheep cheese, a lot of garlic and herbs. Most Roman meals would have been spiced with garum, a fermented fish sauce, to go along with such a meal, the Romans drank water or wine. Beer, called cervisia, in contrast would have been considered barbaric. The wine was usually diluted with water and sometimes spiced with herbs and vinegar. Water with vinegar was called posca, another variant was mulsum, wine spiced with honey.

Ancient Roman food had even more variety, but for now we just made the recipes below. We might make some more ancient Roman food in the future though.

Ancient Roman recipes:

First off: Put garum into everything. That’s actually what the Romans used, usually instead of salt and/or other condiments. [Consider it the ketchup of the ancient world.]

Garum recipe
– 1000 g small fish (sardines, anchovies or similar, fresh or frozen but uncooked)
– 500 g sea salt
– 2 1∕2 tbsp. dried oregano
– 1 tbsp. dried mint
– 1,5 litres water
– 5 tbsp. honey
Put everything in a pot and cook it until the fish falls apart (ca. 15 minutes). Pestle it with a spoon or similar and reduce this broth for at least 20 minutes. Then strain it, let it cool and strain it again. Additionally, you can pour it through a filter cone to refine the garum even further. Keep the garum in the fridge and throw it away if it gets dreggy.

Moretum recipe
– 300 g of ricotta
– 100 g pecorino (or similar hard sheep cheese)
– 3 tbsp. white wine vinegar
– 3 tbsp. sea salt
– 3 cloves of garlic
– a bunch of thyme
– a bunch of rosemary
– a bunch of estragon [tarragon]
– a bunch of coriander
– garum
Press the garlic, grind the pecorino and stir all the ingredients until you get a consistent mass. Done!
Pro tip: You might want to be careful with the amount of salt and especially garlic you add. Three cloves make it very intense.

Puls recipe
– 500 g rolled oats
– 1.5 litres of water
– 1 tbsp. olive oil
– 100 g pecorino (or similar hard sheep cheese)
– 1 onion
– 2 carrots
– 150 g mushrooms
– 100 g streaked pork
– garum
Chop all the vegetables and cut the pork into strips. Then roast it gently in a bit of olive oil and put it aside. Cook the rolled oats with some water and add continuously as it disperses until you get a porridge-like consistency. Then add the prepared vegetables and meat and fold in the ground pecorino.
If you want to stay somewhat authentic to the Roman recipe use white, violet or yellow carrots: orange ones weren’t known in the occident until the Middle Ages.

Panis militaris castrensis (Roman bread) recipe
Ingredients for one loaf (4 – 6P):
– 500 g spelt flour (whole grain)
– ½ tsp. of salt
– olives
– figs
– 3 tbsp. olive oil
– 1 tsp. honey
– 3 dl water (hand-hot)
– 15 g yeast (or one package of dry yeast)

Mix everything up and knead it for at least 15 minutes. Then let it rise for an hour in a bowl covered with a towel (preferably in a warm spot). Form a loaf, cut six pieces (halfway through) and bake it for 35 minutes at 180°C.

Pro tip: take big olives and lots of them because the whole grain flour will be so dense that they kind of disappear.

Those recipes are taken from a cookbook which has been written about 2,000 years ago. Taking this into account you should be rather careful applying these cooking techniques. We are not to be held responsible for any damage resulting, neither for smelly apartments, nor for health issues.

#food #ancientrome #history #ancienthistory #rome

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sandrhoman

July 26, 2020

French War In Syria – British War Against The Iraqi Revolution I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 25 Jul 2020

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The French and British colonial powers had their own plans on how to rule the Middle East after the costly campaigns of World War 1. National self-determination for the different groups in Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Arabia were not part of these plans. And so in the summer of 1920 the situation in Iraq and Syria escalated and the French-Syrian War and the Iraqi Revolt broke out.

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Kadhim, Abbas. Reclaiming Iraq: the 1920 revolution and the founding of the modern state (U of Texas Press, 2012).
Allawi, Ali. Faisal I of Iraq (Yale University Press, 2014).
Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace (Macmillan, 2009 [1989]).
Naaman, Abdullah. Le Liban: histoire d’une nation inachevée.
Karsh, Efraim & Karsh, Inari. Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923, (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1999)

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Hagia Sophia

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lars Brownworth (author of the excellent Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization) on the building of the Hagia Sophia by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian in Constantinople:

Illustration of the Hagia Sophia from European History: An outline of its development by George Burton Adams, 1899.
Wikimedia Commons

The Hagia Sophia was the brainchild of a unique figure in history. At birth, Justinian was a nobody among nobodies in a grindingly poor part of what is today North Macedonia. By his mid-40s, he was a Byzantine emperor. His appetites were large, his dreams larger. The man who knew what it was like to have nothing gave new meaning to the idea of luxury. For one memorable celebration, he spent almost two tons of gold on decorations.

Justinian had no time for small things. By the second year of his reign, he had decided to codify all of Roman law, founded several new cities, and had started construction on at least eight new churches.

The money for all these projects inevitably came from the public. And by the fifth year of his reign, his subjects had had enough. Already upset by rampant corruption, an inefficient bureaucracy, and crushing taxes, they hit the boiling point when Justinian severely restricted public games. A mob tore through the streets, overwhelming the unprepared police forces. Several stores were set on fire, and the wind quickly spread the flames to a nearby hospital, which burned down with its patients inside. An inferno raged. For five long days, Constantinople burned.

By the time Justinian reasserted control, more than 30,000 citizens were dead, and perhaps a third of the city was a blackened shell. It looked as if some barbarian horde had sacked the capital. The fact that its own people had inflicted such a wound hovered like a black cloud over the streets.

Characteristically, Justinian saw a perfect opportunity within the ashes. This was a blank canvas on which to create a new city in his image. The transformation would begin with the cathedral. The original building, known simply as the Magna Ecclesia — the Great Church — had been built by a son of Constantine the Great in the fourth century, but had burned down a few decades later. Since it was a standard Roman basilica — a large hall with square walls and angled wooden roof — it had been fairly easy to rebuild along the same lines.

But of course, Justinian had no intention of following the tired plans of an earlier age. This was a chance to remake the cathedral on a new scale, something worthy of the ages. It was to be nothing short of a revolution, equal parts art and architecture, the enduring grandeur of the emperor himself frozen in physical form.

Everything about this project was audacious, including his selection of architects. Instead of choosing a traditional builder, he picked two teachers who — like himself — had more vision than practical experience. This was a lifelong pattern with Justinian. He had a habit of plucking genius out of the common crush; his wife was a reformed prostitute, and his greatest generals were an elderly eunuch and a former bodyguard.

The emperor’s instructions to Isidore of Miletus, a physics teacher, and Anthemius of Tralles, a mathematician, should have terrified them. They merely had to design and successfully build a church unlike anything else the world had seen. Sheer scale wasn’t enough — the empire was full of grand monuments and immense sculpture. This had to be something different, something fitting for the new golden age that was dawning. Expense wasn’t an issue, but speed was. Justinian was already in his 50s, and he didn’t intend to have some successor apply the final coat of paint and claim the project as his own.

Hagia Sophia in the Faith district of Istanbul, 18 November 2004.
Photo by Robert Raderschatt via Wikimedia Commons.

The Wehrmacht – an Army on Horseback – WW2 – 100 – July 25 1941

Filed under: China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Jul 2020

Although we may picture panzers when we think of the German Army in WW2, it was very much an army that relied on horses — especially in the east — for a large part of its supplies and logistics, and the horse situation on the Eastern Front has grown dire. Japan’s economic situation has also grown dire and they are now looking south for new sources of raw materials.

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– Imperial War Museum: Art.IWM PST 16102, C 2228
– Archives municipales de Brest

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J.K. Rowling receives an apology

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his first Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan reports on the retraction and apology by The Day to J.K. Rowling:

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been pivotal for many Millennials in encouraging them to move away from traditional religious beliefs.

We’re used to public apologies by now, but this one is a little different. It comes from a magazine for schoolchildren in England, called The Day. It reads:

    We accept that our article implied that … JK Rowling … had attacked and harmed trans people. The article was critical of JK Rowling personally and suggested that our readers should boycott her work and shame her into changing her behaviour … We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted. We accept that our comparisons of JK Rowling to people such as Picasso, who celebrated sexual violence, and Wagner, who was praised by the Nazis for his antisemitic and racist views, were clumsy, offensive and wrong … We unreservedly apologise to JK Rowling for the offence caused, and are happy to retract these false allegations and to set the record straight.

The Day had been referring to JK Rowling’s open letter on trans issues, which you can read in its entirety here and judge for yourself.

I have to say it’s good to see this apology in print. It remains simply amazing to me that the author of the Harry Potter books, a bone fide liberal, a passionate feminist and a strong supporter of gay equality can be casually described, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp did yesterday, as “one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture.” It is, in fact, bonkers. Rowling has absolutely no issue with the existence, dignity and equality of transgender people. Her now infamous letter is elegant, calm, reasonable and open-hearted. Among other things, Rowling wrote: “I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection.”

She became interested in the question after a consultant, Maya Forsteter, lost a contract in the UK for believing and saying that sex is a biological reality. When Forsteter took her case to an employment tribunal, the judge ruled against her, arguing that such a view was a form of bigotry, in so far as it seemed to deny the gender of trans people (which, of course, it doesn’t). Rowling was perturbed by this. And I can see why: in order either to defend or oppose transgender rights, you need to be able to discuss what being transgender means. That will necessarily require an understanding of the human mind and body, the architectonic role of biology in the creation of two sexes, and the nature of the small minority whose genital and biological sex differs from the sex of their brain.

This is not an easy question. It requires some thinking through. And in a liberal democracy, we should be able to debate the subject freely and openly. I’ve done my best to do that in this column, and have come to many of the conclusions Rowling has. She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous.

[…]

It pains me to see where this debate has gone. There’s so much common ground. And I do not doubt that taking into account the lived experiences of trans people is important. But if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, we have all but abandoned any pretense of liberal democracy. And if a woman as sophisticated and eloquent and humane as JK Rowling is now deemed a foul bigot for having a different opinion, then the word bigotry has ceased to have any meaning at all.

Gewehr 98: The German WWI Standard Rifle

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Jun 2016

Sold at auction for $1,840 (w/ 5 other rifles).

The Gewehr 1898 was the product of a decade of bolt action repeating rifle improvements by the Mauser company, and would be the standard German infantry rifle through both World Wars. Today we are looking at a pre-WWI example (1905 production) that shows all the features of what a German soldier would have taken to war in 1914.

July 25, 2020

Did Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont invent the steam engine a century before Newcomen?

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

In his latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes investigates Spanish claims that Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont beat Newcomen by a hundred years in the quest to harness steam power:

Screenshot from “Savery’s Miners Friend – 1698”, a YouTube video by Guy Janssen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5VvrEIj8w)

The Spanish claimant in question is one Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont, a late-sixteenth-century aristocrat and military engineer from Navarre, who from 1597 served as the administrator of the royal mines, and who invented a whole host of devices, from diving equipment and mine ventilation systems, to various improvements to mills, pumps, and furnaces. Thanks to the work of historian and engineer Nicolás García Tapia, whose biography of Ayanz came out in 2010, we now know quite a bit about this interesting inventor. The work was published in Spanish, and quite understandably was widely covered in the Spanish press. So although Ayanz has not quite become a household name in Spain just yet, he does now seem to be fairly well-known by the local “well actually” brigade (a shadowy international movement of which I am, to most people’s annoyance, a long-serving member). “Thomas Newcomen/Thomas Savery invented the steam engine you say? Well actually, I think you’ll find it was Ayanz a century earlier” — I had a quick google and discovered there were hundreds of comments to this effect.

But, actually, the story is a bit more complicated than that. The devil, as always, is in the detail, and unfortunately the press claims about the technology have become widely and erroneously repeated, apparently ignoring Tapia’s careful historical work. I even spotted a recently-published encyclopaedia of inventions that repeated the errors.

So what, exactly, did Ayanz invent? The key fact is that in 1606 he obtained a 20-year monopoly from the king of Spain for the use of over fifty different inventions, including two steam-related devices. One of these was related to getting rid of deadly mine gases, which had killed one of his friends and collaborators, and had almost killed Ayanz too. His solution was a steam injector — essentially, a steam boiler with a narrowing pipe sticking out of it, which would inject the steam into a larger air pipe. The pressurised steam, upon flowing up into the air pipe, created a powerful sucking effect behind it, thus rapidly drawing deadly gases out of the mine. (A bit like at the start of this video).

It was the second steam-powered device, however, that has become famous as Ayanz’s steam engine. Just like the inventions of Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen about a century later, it was designed to pump the water out of mines. Ayanz formed a partnership in 1608-11 to reopen the silver mines of Guadalcanal in Spain, which had been abandoned due to flooding, and seems to have tried to implement the engine there: he obtained rights to cut down nearby trees for firewood, for example, and exploited nearby copper, which would have been essential for making boilers and pipes. As for whether he actually got it to work, we don’t know for sure. Sadly, he died only a few years after starting the project.

But the devilish detail is in how his engine worked. Specifically, all the multiplying errors seem to have arisen from a misinterpretation, by the press, of Tapia’s statement that the engine was “very similar” to that of Thomas Savery. There are, certainly, some important similarities. Both engines, for example, exploited the expansionary force of steam. In both, steam from a boiler was piped into a water tank, forcing that water up a narrow pipe — what we might call a pushing effect. And both engines used two tanks, which alternated so that the engine would pump continuously. While one tank and was being refilled with mine water, the other would be have the steam pushing the water out, and then vice versa. So far so good. Indeed, due to the two water tanks, drawings of Ayanz’s and Savery’s devices look very similar side by side.

“The Ballad of Bull” Pt.2 – Combat Medics – Sabaton History 077 [Official]

Filed under: Australia, Germany, History, Japan, Media, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 24 Jul 2020

Sometimes war is killing, sometimes war is saving lives.

In the first episode we have seen Leslie “Bull” Allen become a hero, not through the death of his enemies, but by saving his comrades’ lives. And there were others like him. Soldiers and medics, whose first duty it was to preserve lives during war, even when it meant endangering their own safety. Here are three short stories of men and women, who served as medics at the front line of the Second World War, and became heroes to their country.

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From the comments:

Sabaton History
2 days ago
The medical staff in war — combat medics, field surgeons and nurses, ambulance drivers and medevac crews — are often the unsung heroes of war, literally and figuratively.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve to be remembered and their sacrifices honored. There are undoubtedly many instances of exceptional bravery among the medical staff of wars throughout history — for which they rightly should be praised. But they should also be remembered for their everyday work in trenches or field hospitals, in jungles and deserts, at sea or in mid-air. Treating a seemingly endless stream of incoming wounded, trying to give relief to those in pain, comfort to those in agony, and hope to to those who have lost theirs — day in and day out, for as long as the war will last.

If you missed part one of “The Ballad of Bull” you can see it right here.

Walter Duranty, Stalin’s tame “journalist”

Filed under: History, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Francis X. Maier makes the case that the Holodomor — the Soviet Union’s deliberate starvation of millions of its own people in Ukraine and surrounding regions — killed even more than the better-known Nazi Holocaust, then identifies one of the key apologists who lied serially and deliberately to hide the genocide:

A page from the Chicago Herald and Examiner from 3 March, 1935.
Wikimedia Commons.

[S.J.] Taylor’s 1990 article was timed to the release of Stalin’s Apologist, her withering biography of journalist Walter Duranty. A Pulitzer Prize winner, celebrated political analyst, and Moscow correspondent for the New York Times during the 1930s, Duranty interviewed Stalin twice. He also played a significant role in securing American diplomatic recognition for the Soviet regime. Less publicly, he was a prodigious womanizer, longtime opium buddy of Satanist Aleister Crowley, compulsive exploiter of friends, a spendthrift, occasional drunk, and an inventive, always-reliable flack for the Soviet regime.

One of Duranty’s lifelong memories involved his religious grandmother who, after catching the adolescent Duranty in a lie, had warned him that “liars go to hell.” He never forgot or forgave the correction. As an adult, he simply erased all family ties and falsely claimed in his autobiography that he’d been orphaned at age ten. Massaging the truth became one of his core skills. Brilliant, engaging, and widely respected at the time, he was, in the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, who also reported from Moscow and saw Duranty in action, “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.”

Committed to protecting his own influence and to a future “greater good” promised by the Soviet regime, Duranty at first dismissed rumors of the Ukrainian Famine. Then he downplayed them. Then he claimed that Ukraine’s “food shortages” were the result of local mismanagement and the work of “wreckers” and “spoilers” intent on undermining Soviet progress. He repeatedly denied the mass starvation in his reporting. But he did suggest that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” … especially when the omelet is the task of modernization, and the cooks are tough-minded Bolsheviks intent on a better tomorrow.

As Taylor notes in her book, Western powers struggling with the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler in Germany had little interest in rumors from Ukraine that might antagonize Stalin as a potential ally. Muggeridge had arrived in Russia in 1932 to string for the Manchester Guardian. A convinced socialist at the time, he intended to stay in Russia and renounce his British passport for Soviet citizenship. Reality interfered. By March 1933, he was reporting on Ukraine’s famine as “one of the most monstrous crimes in history,” and his disillusionment with the Soviet paradise was complete. But back in England, thanks in part to Duranty’s counter-reporting and Soviet propaganda, Muggeridge’s work was dismissed as “a hysterical tirade.” Muggeridge himself was slandered, vilified, and unable to find employment. And that might have buried the Holodomor story successfully, except for one man.

Welshman Gareth Jones was a young Russian Studies graduate of Cambridge and a former secretary to British Prime Minister Lloyd George. Stringing for the same Manchester Guardian as Muggeridge, he eluded Soviet press controls and spent three weeks on his own, walking through the hellish conditions of a starvation-ravaged Ukraine. Then he wrote about it in the spring of 1933, confirming and compounding the impact of Muggeridge’s recent work. Walter Duranty led the ferocious, Soviet-prodded attack on Jones’s credibility. He also bullied most other Moscow-based Western journalists — to their enduring disgrace — into doing the same, lest they lose their visas. Jones, however, had a spine. He did not back off. He continued writing and speaking about the famine in Ukraine with lasting effect, until his death under suspicious circumstances two years later.

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