What does the soul of a people sound like? With the Germans, you have adequate proof; Wagner spoke for them, for better or worse — grandeur and myth that elevated the soul as easily as it rotted to the soundtrack for a meglomaniacal death cult. Italian music — well, no one ever marched off to war to Respighi’s ode to a peacock. Music for life, lived without lasting consequence. (They did their part in the Roman times; they’ve earned a nap.) French music is best expressed by the gauzy wash of Debussy and his comrades, music that doesn’t confront the ear but gently appeases it. America: cheerful tootling Souza marches or great broad optimistic Copeland yawps. Or jazz. Or rock and roll. Or country twangs. (It’s not that we have no sound — we have many, and each is as much a part of us as the other. Few cultures can pull that off.) Russian music has that delicious third-drink moodiness. Canadian music — no such thing, really, which is telling. Unless you define it as American style music recorded in a Canadian studio to satisfy a government requirement.
James Lileks, Screedblog, 2005-07-08.
January 9, 2020
QotD: National music
January 8, 2020
Victor Davis Hanson – World War II Leadership
Anang
Published 6 May 2012If you want to read more about WW2 leadership, read Andrew Roberts Masters & Commanders.
Victor Hanson, a professor emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, lectured to a history class on Masters and Commanders at Hillsdale College. In this fall seminar in classical and military history Professor Hanson examined how leaders, both civilian officials and generals on the battlefield, conducted themselves in wartime. That day’s class focused on Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and how those very different American and British leaders learned to work together to defeat Nazi Germany.
Original link: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/29…
Chauchat: Shooting, History, and Tactics
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 14 Sep 2015http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Hammer price: $13,500The M1915 CSRG, commonly called the Chauchat after its primary designer, has a reputation as the worst gun ever put into military service. That reputation, however, is not deserved. It was not a great weapon, but it was a very serviceable gun for its day. The French needed a light automatic rifle *right now*, and needed it in large numbers. The Chauchat answered that call, and was used to great effect by many French soldiers.
The Chauchat’s poor reputation comes from a couple places, some justified and some not. First off, many US troops trained on M1918 Chauchats built in .30-06, which were poorly made and pretty darn bad guns. They were replaced by 8mm Lebel guns before going into combat, but the bad experiences of training stuck with many Americans. The biggest mechanical flaw in the Chauchat was its magazine. All automatic weapons are heavily dependent on good magazines, and the Chauchat used a magazine that was made of thin metal, easily damaged, and open on the sides for dirt and mud to enter. If the magazines were not treated well, the gun would become hopelessly useless.
In addition, many of the Chauchat guns in the United States today were deactivated at one time, and often badly reactivated. This has nothing to do with their original reliability, but it does a lot to perpetuate their reputation. This particular example is an original gun that does not appear to have ever been deactivated, and it ran flawlessly for me. It will be an excellent example for someone who can appreciate it!
January 7, 2020
“HS2 will make the country worse off and should be stopped as soon as possible”
The British government recently reviewed the ever-escalating sums for the proposed HS2 high speed passenger rail connection that began at some £30 billion, then climbed to £50 billion, then £80 billion, and the latest estimate is up to £110 billion. Even by other countries’ high speed rail boondoggles, that is a breathtaking cost escalation. If, as it should, the government cancels the HS2 project, what happens to the money that was budgeted for the fiasco?
The figures used to justify HS2 were “fiddled” and that the project is most unlikely to deliver value for money — that’s the verdict of Lord Berkeley, the deputy chairman of the recent review into the project. He’s right of course and not solely because he’s repeating what I argued more than a year ago.
HS2 will make the country worse off and should be stopped as soon as possible. The government can mourn the money wasted and go off and do something else. Some suggest the HS2 money should be taken and spent on northern railways. Or as Lord Berkeley himself would prefer, on commuter lines in the Midlands.
But those offering these suggestions are making a very fundamental mistake: the real question is not which project most deserves this slab of funding, but whether the state should be spending this money at all.
This is not to say government should not be involved in funding any big infrastructure — everyone except the most hardcore anarchists accepts that state involvement in the economy is sometimes appropriate. But when it does intervene, it ought to be because there is an ironcast case for the betterment of the general population. That’s equally true whether we are talking about taxing to spend money now, or borrowing on the assumption that future benefits will pay back the debt incurred.
So, where does this leave the HS2 money? At some point it was decided that spending £30 billion, £50 billion, £80 billion or now as much as £110 billion on some nice choo-choos was an idea that justified taxing the public. Now it’s clear and obvious that it isn’t. Deciding afterwards that the government must spend all those billions on something else transport-related is missing the point entirely.
History Summarized: Alcibiades
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 11 Jan 2016The oracle at delphi simply tells him, “congratulations”. The standard of nudity was his idea. Narcissus gets shy around him. Patroclus was his boyfriend first. He is … the most interesting man in Ancient Greece.
Extra special thanks to Blue’s professor, Mr. Samons, who taught him about Greek history and the comedic potential of marshmallows and triremes.
Isaac Asimov at 100 … ish
It’s probably the centenary year for the late Isaac Asimov, but the date is only approximately correct:
Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1944.
US government photo via Wikimedia Commons.
In actual fact the centenary is a bit of a fudge because Asimov never knew his actual birthday and picked January 2 as a likely date, and one that allowed for an extra holiday after the Christmas festivities. He was born around the turn of the year in 1920, three years after the Russian revolution, in the Soviet town of Petrovichi, although he emigrated to the US at the age of three.
Like many Russian Jews the family moved to Brooklyn in New York, and Asimov’s father ended up running a confectionery store and newsagent. Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five and taught his sister too, and consumed the pulp science fiction magazine stocked in his father’s shop.
At the age of 15 he applied to Columbia but was rejected, ostensibly on age grounds but, as he wrote in his autobiography I, Asimov, he recounted that the university had filled its quota of Jews for the year. After multiple rejections he eventually earned his Master of Arts degree in chemistry in 1941 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry in 1948, serving as a civilian in the US Army in the Second World War.
An academic career beckoned and in 1949 he joined the Boston University School of Medicine as a biochemistry teacher. But by then he had already been getting science fiction short stories published for nearly ten years. In 1950 he wrote his first book and largely abandoned his teaching career, finding writing more lucrative and enjoyable.
[…]
Some thought Asimov had peaked as a science fiction writer by the mid 1960s, as he spent the next few years writing a lot of popular science books, non-fiction and school textbooks. He was even asked by Paul McCartney to write a science fiction musical for his then-band Wings, although the idea was eventually dropped.
But in the 1970s he came back into the SF fold with a series of books and short stories, winning two Hugo and two Nebula awards in the decade. He was also involved in some television and film work, having acted as a consultant on Star Trek in the 1960s.
In 1981 he was approached by a publisher to return to the Foundation series and add more to the canon. Foundation’s Edge was published the next year year, to wide acclaim. This was followed by Foundation and Earth in 1986, Prelude to Foundation in 1988, and finally Forward the Foundation, which was published in 1993, one year after Asimov’s death.
Wars of the Roses | 3 Minute History
Jabzy
Published 23 Jan 2015Of course there’s a lot I left out.
And when I say “Lancaster”, it sounds out of place because I had to just record over me continuously saying “Lancashire”.
QotD: The cult of Le Corbusier
A dangerous cult may be defined as a kind of false religion, adoption of a system of belief based on mere assertions with no factual foundations, or as excessive, almost idolatrous, admiration for a person, persons, an idea, or even a fad. The adulation accorded to Le Corbusier, accorded almost the status of a deity in architectural circles, is just one example. It has certain characteristics which may be summarized as follows: it is destructive; it isolates its believers; it claims superior knowledge and morality; it demands subservience, conformity, and obedience; it is adept at brainwashing; it imposes its own assertions as dogma, and will not countenance any dissent; it is self-referential; and it invents its own arcane language, incomprehensible to outsiders.
Anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration has not read much Le Corbusier. (His writing is as bad as his architecture, and bears out precisely what Curl says.) Nor is it difficult to find in the architectural press examples of cultish writing that is impenetrable and arcane, devoid of denotation but with plenty of connotation. Here, for example, is Owen Hatherley, writing about an exhibition of Le Corbusier’s work at London’s Barbican Centre (itself a fine example of architectural barbarism). According to Hatherley, Le Corbusier was:
the architect who transformed buildings for communal life from mere filing cabinets into structures of raw, practically sexual physicality, then forced these bulging, anthropomorphic forms into rigid, disciplined grids. This might be the work of the “Swiss psychotic” at his fiercest, but the exhibition’s setting, the Barbican — with its bristly concrete columns and bullhorn profiles, its walkways and units — proves that even its derivatives can become places rich with perversity and intrigue, without a pissed-in lift [elevator] or a loitering youth in sight. … [T]hese collisions of collectivity and carnality have no obvious successors today.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Crimes in Concrete”, First Things, 2019-06.
January 6, 2020
Macedonian Battle Tactics
Historia Civilis
Published 5 Jul 2017Patreon | http://patreon.com/HistoriaCivilis
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comSources:
Parallel Lives, by Plutarch: http://amzn.to/2sOfr4O
Alexander of Macedon, by Peter Green: http://amzn.to/2rMJqpn
Alexander the Great, by Robin Lane Fox: http://amzn.to/2sOKqh3
Ghost on the Throne, by James Romm: http://amzn.to/2tpuNxqWe are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Music:
“Seeing the Future,” by Dexter Britain
“Infados,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Drums of the Deep,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Hallon,” by Christian Bjoerklund
The Nazis, The British Accent, and BBC News
Today I Found Out
Published 29 Apr 2016In this video:
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is an institution known and respected the world over for its relative impartiality and objectivity compared to many other news sources, with numerous surveys showing that the BBC is one of the most trusted sources of news in both the UK and the US. But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about dinner jackets, Received Pronunciation, the Nazis, and what all of this has to do with the BBC News.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
Sources:
http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sou…
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=B…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice…
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/aboutbbcnews/sp…
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=c…
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/ap…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Re…
Gerontophobia – “the most acceptable, widespread prejudice in society today”
In Spiked, Ella Whelan discusses one form of prejudice that is not only common, it’s practically proselytizing for new members:
Have you found yourself grimacing at Zimmer frames on the bus? Do you revel in checking the latest census data to see the average age of the nation? Do you retweet sarky comments about “youthquakes” shaking out the old fuddy-duddies? If so, you might be suffering from gerontophobia – the fear and loathing of old people – which is the most acceptable, widespread prejudice in society today.
Ageism is the one “ism” that is given a free pass. Hating on granny is all the rage. Recently, former US president Barack Obama made headlines by talking about “old people … not getting out of the way”.
The 58-year-old is not the only older politician to turn against his age group. Since the Brexit vote, 76-year-old Vince Cable has been railing against older Leave voters. On a panel with me at the How the Light Gets In festival last year, he drew laughs from a Hampstead crowd for mocking Brexit as a “Zimmer-frame revolution”. The author Ian McEwan also denounced his fellow septuagenarians when he delightedly predicted that by 2019, “1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves” could swing public opinion towards remaining in the EU.
The phrase “OK Boomer” went viral last year after a young person posted a clip of herself reacting to a “baby boomer” complaining about “snowflakes” and overgrown teenagers. This derisory response of “OK Boomer”, used to shut down the so-called Baby Boomer generation, was also used by Netflix in one of its social-media posts. It was even used earnestly in the New Zealand parliament by Green politician Chlöe Swarbrick in response to an older colleague.
The instant popularity of the phrase signalled how normalised generational divides have become. There have always been tensions between younger and older generations, but never before has there been so much celebration of youngsters deriding their parents. Rather than rebelling against the old and changing the world, the OK Boomer phenomenon shows how little young people want to interact with older generations, instead preferring petulant put-downs.
Perhaps the most pronounced and sinister ageism came from the wave of interest in Extinction Rebellion (XR), Greta Thunberg and the climate-emergency panic. From Thunberg being named Time person of the year after blaming older generations for stealing “my dreams and my childhood” to XR Youth proclaiming that “adults need to be accountable to the young people”, climate activism isn’t very oldie friendly. Instead of asking questions about what political changes might be made to help the planet, and, more importantly, the people living on it, environmentalism has veered towards a cultish celebration of youth. Fawning adults have handed over all moral authority to schoolchildren.
Greta Thunberg at the EU Parliament, 16 April, 2019.
European Parliament photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Lee Metford MkI*: Britain’s First Repeating Rifle (Almost)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Feb 2018Sold for $4,025.
The first repeating rifle adopted by the British military was the Lee-Metford MkI, or as it was later redesigned, the Magazine Rifle MkI. This design combined the cock-on-closing action and detachable box magazine of James Paris Lee with the rounded-land Metford rifling pattern. Formally adopted in 1888, about 350,000 Lee-Metford rifles would be produced in total, among the LSA, BSA, Sparbrook, and Enfield factories.
It would not be long until the design began to be modified, however. The Lee-Metford we have here today was made in 1891 as a MkI pattern, but updated to the MkI* variant in 1892. This modification involved removing the manual safety, changing from Lewis pattern sights to traditional barleycorns, and modifying the upper hand guard for easier removal. Other changes would follow, with the MkII pattern adopted in 1893 with a 10-round magazine, Enfield pattern rifling adopted in 1895, and ultimately charger loading adopted in 1907.
Despite the fairly large number of Lee Metford rifles made, they are very scarce to find in original condition like this one. Typically the British military would update any older pattern rifle to meet new specifications, or convert them in to rimfire training rifles if such a conversion was not possible. Few left the military in the early configurations.
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January 5, 2020
It’s 1941 – A World at War – WW2 – 071 – January 4 1941
World War Two
Published 4 Jan 20201941 begins with action in North-Africa and China, but Indy also takes a moment to assess the current stakes and stakeholders in the East-Asian theatre. What is sure, is that 1941 will be an eventful year!
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Join our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/D6D2aYN.
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
– Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/Sources:
– IWM: MH 2718, C 1850, E2294, E 18542, E 378, E 443, E 3721E, E 1573
– Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-783-0104-09 / Moosmüller / CC-BY-SA 3.0
– Prison by FORMGUT. from the Noun Project
– Artillery by Creative Mania from the Noun ProjectSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Magnificent March 3” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “March Of The Brave 10” – Rannar Sillard
– “March Of The Brave 9” – Rannar Sillard
– “Deviation In Time” – Johannes Bornlof
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian Andersen
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien TellArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
2 days ago (edited)
Happy New Year to you all!! We hope you all had a great turn of the decade. We certainly have! Here’s a casual, spoiler-free statement: 1941 will be an interesting year. We are all very grateful for those who found us at the very start with the Invasion of Poland, during the Phoney War, the early fighting Northern and Western Europe and the more recent conflicts in Greece and North-Africa. Those of you who joined the TimeGhost Army and support us financially on patreon.com/timeghosthistory or Timeghost.tv deserve extra praise – as we would not have made 1941 without you! And we have BIG plans for the coming year, so please consider supporting us as well! Make history with us and join the TimeGhost Army!!Here’s to a great 2020 and ‘interesting’ 1941.
Cheers, Joram
January 4, 2020
Blue’s Dumb History Tales #2
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 3 Jan 2020Happy new year, have some memes.
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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Looking back at the ’20s … the 1620s
In the latest installment of Anton Howes’ Age of Invention, he takes us back to what he calls the “transformative 20s” of the seventeenth century:
St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden (built 1631-8) by Inigo Jones.
Photo by Steve Cadman via Wikimedia Commons.
The 1620s saw an upsurge in major projects to transform Britain’s landscape. Engineers from the Dutch Republic like Cornelius Vermuyden came to straighten its rivers, build canals, and even drain its marshes, converting them into pasturage and farmland — in the decades that followed, they would even begin to drain the Great Fens. The cityscapes changed too. The former theatre designer and architect Inigo Jones — by 1615 the Surveyor-General of the King’s Works — introduced classical architecture from the continent, drawing upon the rules of beauty and proportion that had been set down by Vitruvius in the first century BCE and resuscitated in Renaissance Italy by Andrea Palladio. Jones’s influence transformed England’s palaces, churches, cathedrals, and even Covent Garden square, to reflect his ancient Roman ideal.
But the environment, built or natural, would be most transformed by the experiments of a few individuals with fossil fuels. Dud Dudley, an illegitimate child of the 5th Baron Dudley, in the 1620s experimented with smelting iron with peat and coal. Dudley was not the first to do so — the patent on using coal instead of charcoal to work iron had been sold on from person to person since at least 1589 — but his experiments were among the most influential. The famous Abraham Darby, who achieved commercial success in applying coal to smelting metals in the early eighteenth century, was Dud Dudley’s great-great-nephew.
Sir Robert Mansell (1570/71–1652), by an unknown artist.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.The decade also saw major new attempts to use coal as a fuel in other processes, such as glass-making. Although the patent on using coal to make glass had been around since at least 1610, by the 1620s Sir Robert Mansell had bought out the partners who owned it and was pouring a fortune into setting up glassworks at Newcastle. In this case, the transformation was institutional. Mansell’s political connections allowed him to widen the terms of his patent, such that he even tried to ban all other kinds of glass in England, regardless of whether they were made using other fuels, or even imported. Usually, patents of invention were for things entirely new, and were not supposed to interfere with existing English industries. But over the course of the 1610s, various abuses like Mansell’s came to light. King James I, eager for cash, had sold monopolies on ancient trades, as well as the new — one crony was even awarded a patent for inns and alehouses. Mansell’s patent, along with the others, was attacked in Parliament in the 1620s, and even revoked. The outcry ultimately led to the Statute of Monopolies of 1624 — the earliest patent legislation in England, which sought to regulate the royal practice of granting them. (Ironically, Mansell was so well-connected that he managed to get his controversial glass-making patent renewed and then exempted from the new Act.) The Statute of Monopolies was the only English patent legislation in force during the Industrial Revolution — there was no more patent legislation until 1852.
Finally, the ’20s saw a transformation of science. It was the decade in which Francis Bacon published some of his most significant works, on how to collect, refine, and systematise human knowledge for the good of humankind. He set out a comprehensive programme for the organisation of science and invention, with his utopian work New Atlantis setting out his ideal R&D lab – “Salomon’s House”. (Despite these high-minded aims, Bacon was also Mansell’s brother-in-law, and as attorney-general had helped draft the controversial glass-making patent. In 1621 he was convicted, fined, and even briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London for his role in the corrupt early patent system, though he appears to have been a scapegoat.)
