Quotulatiousness

January 2, 2022

The Schmeisser MP41: A Hybrid Submachine Gun

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Sep 2017

Most people think that the MP41 is simply an MP40 in a wooden stock, but this is actually not the case — and unlike the MP40, the MP41 can be accurately called a Schmeisser — because it was Hugo Schmeisser who designed it.

The MP41 is actually a combination of the upper assembly of an MP40 with the lower assembly of an MP28 — the gun which was Schmeisser’s improved version of the MP18 from World War One. Where the MP40 fires only in fully automatic mode, the MP41 has a push-through selector switch located above the trigger which allows either semi-auto or full auto function.

For the typical user, however, this mechanical distinction is not particularly important, as the MP41 handles very much like the MP40. It has the same relatively low 500 rpm rate of fire, and weighs about 8.2 pounds (3.7kg). It uses the same magazines as the MP40, although the magazines made and sold with the MP41 were marked “MP41”. As with many other SMG designs, the MP41 was never formally adopted by the German military. In this case, the majority of MP41 production (26,000 guns in 1941 and another 1,800 or so in 1944) went to Romanian troops.

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January 1, 2022

Merry Olde England

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

Sebastian Milbank on the often disparaged nostalgic view of “the good times of old England”:

Gin Lane, from Beer Street and Gin Lane. A scene of urban desolation with gin-crazed Londoners, notably a woman who lets her child fall to its death and an emaciated ballad-seller; in the background is the tower of St George’s Bloomsbury.
The accompanying poem, printed on the bottom, reads:

Gin, cursed Fiend, with Fury fraught,
Makes human Race a Prey.
It enters by a deadly Draught
And steals our Life away.
Virtue and Truth, driv’n to Despair
Its Rage compells to fly,
But cherishes with hellish Care
Theft, Murder, Perjury.
Damned Cup! that on the Vitals preys
That liquid Fire contains,
Which Madness to the heart conveys,
And rolls it thro’ the Veins.

Wikimedia Commons.

The decadence and excess of the city is of a piece with puritanical restraint

William Wordsworth wrote:

They called Thee Merry England, in old time;
A happy people won for thee that name
With envy heard in many a distant clime;
And, spite of change, for me thou keep’st the same
Endearing title, a responsive chime
To the heart’s fond belief; though some there are
Whose sterner judgments deem that word a snare
For inattentive Fancy, like the lime
Which foolish birds are caught with. Can, I ask,
This face of rural beauty be a mask
For discontent, and poverty, and crime;
These spreading towns a cloak for lawless will?
Forbid it, Heaven! and Merry England still
Shall be thy rightful name, in prose and rhyme!

Merry England is an easily mocked concept in today’s society, but in my view it carries a perennial insight: that the decadence and excess of the city is of a piece with puritanical restraint. Both apparently opposite features reflect an urban sophistication and the ruling imperative of commerce. The moneymaking frenzy of cities like London gave rise to excessive consumption and the relaxing of prior moral and social norms. Yet the 17th century Puritans were in large part cityfolk, alienated from rural tradition and well represented amongst bankers, merchants and urban middle class trades and professions.

William Hogarth’s most famous engraving is Gin Lane, which shows a street filled with people immiserated by the gin craze, a child toppling out of its mother’s arms, emaciated figures dying in the open, madmen dancing with corpses, a pawn-shop with the grandeur of a bank eagerly sucking in objects of domestic industry and converting them into gin money. Less well known is the image that accompanied it, the engraving Beer Street. In this latter engraving, plump and prosperous individuals pause from their labour to receive huge foaming mugs of ale, buxom housemaids flirt with cheerful tipplers, bright inn signs are painted, buildings are going up, and the pawn-shop is going out of business.

Merry England is an image of a society centred on human life and happiness rather than the demands of commerce. Here labour and rest both have their place: noble objects like a fine building and a bounteous meal are provided by hard work, but once completed, time is devoted to appreciating and relishing the finished product. Decoration and adornment are the outward sign of this; they are by their nature a form of abundance. The finite object of labour and production thus gives rise to an infinite realm of feast, celebration, adornment and signification. This enchanted public sphere, shaped to the human person, is limitless within its limits, and points beyond itself to the truly limitless and eternal world of the transcendent.

In the commercially determined sphere of modernity, it is instead work and consumption that are rendered limitless. The objects have become entirely ones of consumption — there is no limit to the consumption of gin, which stands in for all consumer objects. Hogarth shows us the humane objects of household industry — the good cooking pots, the tongs, the saw and the kettle — replaced with money. Liquidity is everywhere, capital has broken down the social order, removing all distinctions of sex, age and class. Now all persons and all things are joined together by a single seamless system of predation.

The alternative that many advocated to this situation was embodied in the Temperance movement: a Puritan-dominated enterprise which saw drinking as a threat to industry as well as the spiritual and moral health of the nation. This is a deep tendency in the British character: the impulse to look upon poverty and distress as a culpable disease and to preach individual self-restraint as the cure. Puritans were often well-to-do, literate townspeople, whose collective refusal to participate in dancing, drama, drinking, gambling, racing and boxing not only set them apart from the boisterous lower orders, but also from the quaffing, hunting, hawking and whoring nobility.

A 4000 Year Old Recipe for the Babylonian New Year

Filed under: Food, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Dec 2020

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DISH NAME
ORIGINAL c.1740BC RECIPE (From The Yale Babylonian Tablets)
Tuh’u sirum saqum izzaz me tukan lipia tanaddi tusammat tabatum sikara susikillum egegerum kisibirrum smidu kamunum alutum tukammas-ma karsum hazannum teterri kisibirrum ina muhhi sipki tusappah suhutinnu kisibirrum isarutu tanaddi.

Tuh’u. Lamb leg meat is used. Prepare water. Add fat. Sear. Add in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro, samidu, cumin, and beets. Put the ingredients in the cooking vessel and add crushed leek and garlic. Sprinkle the cooked mixture with coriander on top. Add suhutinnu and fresh cilantro.

MODERN RECIPE
INGREDIENTS
– 1lb (450g) Leg of Lamb Chopped into bite size pieces.
– 3-4 Tablespoon Oil or Rendered Fat
– 1 ½ teaspoons Salt
– 2 Cups (475ml) Water
– 12 oz (350ml) Beer – (A sour beer and German Weissbier are recommended, but any non-hoppy beer will suffice)
– 1 Large Onion Chopped
– 2 Cups Arugula Chopped
– 3/4 Cup Cilantro Chopped
– 2 Teaspoons Cumin Seeds crushed
– 2 Large Beets (approx. 4 cups) Chopped
– 1 Large Leek Minced
– 3 cloves Garlic,
– 1 Tablespoon Dry Coriander Seeds
– Additional Chopped Cilantro for garnish
– Samidu* (Something akin to 1 Persian Shallot)
– Suhutinnu* (Something akin to Egyptian Leek for garnish)
*These ingredients have no definite translation; the shallot and leek are the best guesses of scholars at Yale and Harvard Universities)

METHOD
1. Add the oil/fat to a large pot and set over high heat. Sear the lamb for several minutes in the oil until lightly browned.
2. Add the onions and let cook for 5 minutes, then add the beets and let cook for 5 minutes. Then add the salt, beer, arugula, cilantro, samidu (shallot) and cumin and bring to a boil. Mash the garlic into a paste and mix with the leek, then add to the pot.
3. Lower heat to medium and let simmer for approximately 1 hour, or until the beets and meat are cooked to your liking.
4. Once cooked, dish it into a bowl and sprinkle with coriander seeds. Garnish with fresh cilantro and suhutinnu (leek)

PHOTO CREDITS
Crocus: By Safa.daneshvar – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, http://bit.ly/3hfNN7F
Statue of Nabu: By Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, http://bit.ly/2KodVkV
Temple of Nabu at Borsippa: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons
Ishtar Gate: Joyofmuseums, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons
King Marduk-zakir-shumi: By Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg)Throne Dais of Shalmaneser III at the Iraq Museum.jpg, CC BY 4.0, http://bit.ly/3nMw22j

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QotD: Heinlein’s “Crazy Years”, Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, and modern times

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

While Heinlein (as far as I know) supplied no rationale for the advent and the recession of the craziness in the Crazy Years, A.E. van Vogt was freer with his speculations: insanity, either of individuals or of peoples, in van Vogt’s stories (and perhaps in the theories of Alfred Korzybski, who discovered or invented General Semantics) is caused by a fracture or disjunction between symbol and object. When your thoughts, and the thing about which you think, do not match up on a cognitive level, that is a falsehood, a false belief. When the emotions associated with the thought do not match to the thing about which you think, that is a false-to-facts association, which can range from merely a mistake to neurosis to psychosis, depending on the severity of the disjunction. You are crazy. If you hate your sister because she reminds you of your mother who beat you, that association is false-to-facts, neurotic. If you hate your sister because you have hallucinated that you are Cinderella, that association is falser-to-facts, more removed from reality, possibly psychotic.

The great and dire events of the early Twentieth Century no doubt confirmed Korzybski in the rightness of this theory. Nothing prevents a race of people from contracting and fomenting a false-to-facts belief: the fantasies of the Nazi Germans, pseudo-biology and pseudo-economics combined with the romance of neo-paganism, stirred the psyche of the German people for quite understandable reasons. From the point of view of General Semantics, the Germans had divorced their symbols from reality, they mistook metaphors for truth, and their emotions adapted to and reinforced the prevailing narrative. They told themselves stories about Wotan and the Blood, about being betrayed during the Great War, about needing room to live, about the wickedness of Jewish bankers and shopkeepers, about the origin of the wealth of nations — and they went crazy.

The Russians, earlier, and for equally psychological and psychopathic reasons told themselves a more coherent but more unreal story about history and destiny, taken from a Millenarian cultist named Marx, and they were, on an emotional level even if not on a cognitive level, convinced that shedding the blood of millions would bring about wealth as if from nowhere. And, because they used the word “scientific” to describe their brand of socialism, they actually thought their play-pretend neurotic story was a scientific theory that had been discovered by rigorous ratiocination — and they went crazy.

Berlin was bombed into submission during the Second World War, and the Berlin Wall collapsed along with the Soviet Empire at the end of the Cold War. But the modern methods of erecting false-to-facts dramas appealing to mass psychology, once discovered, did not fall when their practitioners fell: scientific socialism, naziism, fascism, communism, all have in common the subordination of word-association to political will. All these doctrines have a common ancestor, which is the social engineering theory of language: if you change the connotation of word, so the theory runs, you change the connotations of thoughts. General Semantics says that if an individual, or whole people en mass, adopt deliberately false beliefs, supported by deliberately manipulative word-uses, he or they will have increasingly unrealistic and maladaptive behaviors. Introduce Political Correctness, ignore factual correctness, and the people will go crazy.

The main sign of when madness has possessed a crowd, or a civilization, is when the people are fearful of imaginary or trivial dangers but nonchalant about real and deep dangers. When that happens, there is gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions — the Crazy Years have arrived.

John C. Wright, “The Crazy Years and their Empty Moral Vocabulary”, John C. Wright, 2019-02-18.

December 31, 2021

German Artillery Shells Paris Into Submission I GLORY & DEFEAT

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Real Time History
Published 30 Dec 2021

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The new year 1871 is about to bring upon a new German Empire. German leadership, especially Bismarck, is exceedingly frustrated with the dragged out Franco-Prussian War that the Germans have all but won for months now. The decision is finally made to bombard Paris into submission and the German guns surrounding Paris open fire.

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» OUR PODCAST
https://realtimehistory.net/podcast – interviews with historians and background info for the show.

» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018

Bourguinat, Nicolas and Gilles Vogt: La guerre franco-allemande de 1870. Une histoire globale. Paris 2020

Gouttman, Alain: La grande défaite. 1870-1871. Paris 2015

https://www.volksbund.de/nachrichten/… (zuletzt besucht am 21.11.2021)

» SOURCES
Allorant, Salomé u.a. (Hrsg.): La République au défi de la guerre. Lettres et carnet de lAnnée terrible (1870-1871). Amiens 2015

Goncourt, Edmond de: Journal des Goncourts. II.1. 1870-1871. Paris 1890

Hérisson, Maurice d’: Journal d’un officier d’ordonnance. Paris 1885

Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.): Kaiser Friedrich III. Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926

N. N. (Htrsg.): Bismarcks Briefe an seine Gattin aus dem Kriege 1870-71. Stuttgart, Berlin 1903

Pflugk-Hartung; Julius von: Krieg und Sieg 1870-71. Bd. I. Kulturgeschichte. Berlin 1896

Schikorsky, Isa (Hrsg.): “Wenn doch dies Elend ein Ende hätte”. Ein Briefwechsel aus dem Deutsch-Französischen Krieg 1870/71. Köln, Weimar, Wien 1999

Zeitz, Karl: Kriegserinnerungen eines Feldzugsfreiwilligen aus den Jahren 1870 und 1871. Altenburg 1905

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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand, Jesse Alexander
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Editing: Toni Steller
Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
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Maps: Battlefield Design
Research by: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand
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Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2021

Let the Hunger Games Begin – WAH 049 – December 1942, Pt. 2

Filed under: China, Europe, Germany, History, India, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 30 Dec 2021

The world learns more details of the War Against Humanity in Occupied Poland, while in China and India starvation looms.
(more…)

Hogmanay Shortbread from 1779

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 28 Dec 2021

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Subtitles: Jose Mendoza | IG @ worldagainstjose

PHOTO CREDITS
Shortbread fingers: Dave Souza – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
Black Bun: IMBJR, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons

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“Achaidh Cheide – Celtic” by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…
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December 30, 2021

The Cursus Honorum of the late Roman Republic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Founding Questions, Severian notes that the Cursus Honorum — the formal “career path” for ambitious men in the late Roman Republic was a remarkably effective process … that ended up being a victim of its own success:

Ahhh, God bless the autists at Wiki, they’ve got it down to a chart:

This is from Caesar’s time, and since one of this blog’s main themes is the confusion between process and outcome, let’s put it right up front: This system, the cursus honorum, was designed to produce men like Julius Caesar …

… and you can take that in either sense.

Caesar is one of the most mulled-over men in history, but nobody seriously doubts that he was at least competent at pretty much everything. Maybe he didn’t make the big list of “Greatest Pontifices Maximi” (or however the Latin goes), but he wasn’t a disgrace to the toga, either. If it was a public function in the Late Roman Republic, Caesar was at least decent at it.

And that’s what the cursus honorum was designed to do. It was a three-fer: It gave you competent public officials, but it also gave young ruling class men some seasoning. Most importantly, it was a way of nurturing talent that also hedged against the Peter Principle. If you want to argue that that makes it a four-fer, go nuts, but the point is, it was a pretty good system … up to a point, and if you’re a regular reader, you know what that point is: The Dunbar Number, at which point relationships become too complex to be managed personally, and bureaucratic structures replace them.

One wishes later governments had something like this — if a guy starts out as a quaestor and discovers he can’t handle it, he’ll bring that knowledge with him to the Senate. (Of course, if he can’t even manage to get elected to that, he’ll know full well his level of talent, and he’ll sit down and shut up on the Senate’s back benches). Note too that the bottom rung is military service — since at that time legionaries were all militia, the voters got a good look at you where it really matters, right from the beginning.

By the time a man reaches the top, then, he has intimate experience of ALL the public offices. Not only that, but he’s well known to everyone who matters, since in between the various offices he’s in the Senate, making connections (or out in the provinces, making other — but no less valuable — connections). A consul, then, is pretty much by definition omnicompetent. He did a good enough job in all the previous public offices that he didn’t disqualify himself for the top slot. Also, he’s been thoroughly vetted — everyone who matters, at pretty much every level of society, has had a good look at him (or, at worst, has a good friend who has had a good look at him).

Obviously it wasn’t a perfect system. Rome had her share of inept consuls, because people are people and sometimes “promotion to your level of incompetence” means “promotion to the very top job”. But for the most part it worked well, and even if a guy turned out to be a dud as consul, well, what can you do? Everyone had at least a reasonable expectation that he’d be able to handle it, which is pretty much the best one can consistently achieve in human affairs. Not only that, but because of the candidate’s long experience and careful vetting, you had a much better than average chance of getting a real winner …

… a man like Caesar, who is at minimum competent at everything, and outstanding at lots of things.

The Story Of Sir Arthur Currie: From Gunner To General | The Great War With Norm Christie | Timeline

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Timeline – World History Documentaries
Published 28 Dec 2021

Military historian Norm Christie presents a four-part series examining the First World War from a Canadian perspective. As he begins his journey through the historic battlefields of France and Belgium, Christie focuses on the career of General Sir Arthur Currie, a soldier who rose through the ranks from humble gunner in 1897 to lead the Canadian Corps to several victories during the conflict which began in 1914.

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Note: The original YouTube title said “from Gunman to General”. Perhaps in British usage, “gunman” is a variant of “gunner” (an artilleryman), but in Canadian usage the word “gunman” almost invariably means armed criminal or terrorist, and while Sir Arthur’s career had its difficulties, he was never a criminal.

The Army’s Labor Union: Winchester 94s for the Loyal Legion of Loggers & Lumbermen

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Aug 2021

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Today we have a rifle from a really neat forgotten corner of American military history. During World War One, the Pacific Northwest was the source of prime lumber, in particular Sitka Spruce that was ideal for aircraft production. The US military wanted that spruce for its own aircraft, and there was also massive demand from France and the UK for their production as well. As part of the American war effort, the Signal Corps (which oversaw military aviation) set about increasing spruce production severalfold.

The Corps sent a Colonel to investigate what would be necessary to do this, and he found that logging work was being significantly disrupted by labor union organizing, ranging from strikes to active sabotage. In response, the Army essentially created its own labor union, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen which both provided some of the labor reforms sought by groups like the IWW and also succeeded in massively increasing timber output for the war. The LLLL is a mostly-forgotten organization, and most of the documentation on it is from very left-wing organizations that paint it as a government attempt to quash labor rights. The reality appears to be far more nuanced, with several very legitimate reforms instituted in good faith. Unfortunately, the best reference on this period is completely out of print, Soldiers and Spruce: Origins of the Loyal Legions of Loggers & Lumberman by Harold Hyman (https://amzn.to/3lErrRC).

At any rate, part of the effort included the creation of the Spruce Production Division — 25,000 soldiers (mostly with backgrounds in logging and lumber) to Vancouver. They were seconded to private logging companies with Army-subsidized wages, but retained a military structure and officer corps. The Signal Corps purchased about 1,800 Winchester Model 1894 rifles in .30-30 caliber to arm a segment of the Division for security and military police type duties. Winchester 94s were in production and readily accessible, and the Division’s mission did not justify giving them Enfield or Springfield rifles needed by troops in Europe. These Winchesters were marked with a “US” property stamp and flaming bomb, and had serial numbers between 835,000 and 853,000 (specific numbers are not known because Winchester’s records form this period were destroyed). When the war ended, the guns (along with the Division’s other equipment) were sold as surplus, and they are found to this day in the Northwest. Many are in poor condition from decades of hard use, and they can be difficult to identify (and are also faked …) but they are a really neat artifact of a long-forgotten part of World War One history.

Contact:
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December 29, 2021

War in Numbers 1942 – WW2 Special

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

World War Two
Published 28 Dec 2021

Quantity had a quality of its own. 1942 was the year in which the dimensions of the Second World War became truly apparent. The US and its unmatched economic power began to outproduce any other warring nation, manufacturing a fleet of ships and aircraft in record time. In the east Soviet industry began recovering itself, producing tens of thousands of tanks despite tremendous losses. All the while the German logistic system got overwhelmed by the vastness of the occupied territory.
(more…)

A history of and my first go at MEDIEVAL TENNIS

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published 28 Sep 2021

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Tennis is a very old sport, going back at least to the 1200s. Here I try my hand at it for the very first (but not last) time, and talk about the history of it a bit.

Many thanks to Jesmond Dene Real Tennis Club (https://www.jdrtc.co.uk) where this was shot.

Editing this took a LONG time. We had three cameras recording at the same time, and synching the footage up took an age. The sound consisted mainly of echoing footsteps and ball bounces, and the fact that the main microphone kept glitching did not help (you will notice some of the patches to the sound using other mics, but most I made fairly smooth).

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December 28, 2021

The Bubblegum History … of Chewing Gum

Filed under: Business, Europe, Food, Greece, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 27 Dec 2021

Ancient Finns, angry Ottomans, a one-legged Mexican general, and scouring soap — that’s the story of modern chewing gum in a nutshell!

Hosted by: Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Sources:
– Birch Bark photo courtesy of Jerzy Opioła https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
– Mastic tears photo courtesy of פארוק https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastic_…
– Mexican Cession map courtesy of Kballen https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
– Peter Gabriel, Chateau Neuf, Oslo, Norway courtesty of Helge Øverås https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pe…
– Promotional Chiclets courtesy of Coolshans https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Ancient Saga” – Max Anson
– “Master of the Hurricane” – Rockin’ For Decades
– “Home on the Prairie” – Sight of Wonders
– “Cocktail Hour” – The Fly Guy Five

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

“After the Second World War, the architecture-industrial complex … began a massive rebuilding of major cities”

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Nikos A. Salingaros decries “architectural urbanicide”:

Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, voted as Britain’s most hated building.
Photo by Ed Webster via Wikimedia Commons.

Biological life transforms energy from the sun into complexes of organic materials that either metabolize while remaining relatively fixed, or move about and eat each other. Human energy creates the analogous case of artifacts and buildings, which give us a healing effect akin to the feedback experienced from our interaction with biological organisms. This positive emotion corresponds to the mechanism of “biophilia”.

Women grow and nurture the human baby. They are predisposed to appreciate the created life form through an intense bond of love through beauty. Most people — though not all, a notable exception being the architect Le Corbusier — love babies and have a built-in reflex of smiling at the sight of one, even if it’s not their own. Beauty is inseparable from creation and life.

Established architecture in our times, and for a century before now, has been an almost exclusively male domain, dominated by sheer power. The profession has aligned itself with ideology and extractive money interests. A design movement that ignores living structure took dominance after World War II. It thrives through global consumption. Mathematical analysis can measure very precise living qualities embedded in design and materials, such as fractal scaling, multiple nested symmetries, color harmonization, organized details, vertical axis, etc. Recent experimental tools of eye-tracking and artificial intelligence using Visual Attention Software determine which designs attract the eye unconsciously, and which remain uninteresting to our sophisticated brain evolved for survival.

[…]

After the Second World War, the architecture-industrial complex of building and real estate industries began a massive rebuilding of major cities. This freed up real estate for new construction, an activity that enriched a certain section of society. Working with politicians at all levels, architectural review boards did not value traditional buildings, nor those in any of several new but non-modernist form languages. Any qualms about the irreversible destruction of the life of cities were offset by the media convincing the population that this was an inexorable and much desired move towards progress. Anybody opposing this program of architectural substitution — replacing living by dead structure — was labeled an obscurantist reactionary. The promised utopia seduced academia to join this campaign. People failed to realize that an ideology ostensibly linked to Marxist beliefs was driven by ruthless industry manipulation.

Nevertheless, architects don’t tear down buildings: it is real estate speculators who do. Those corporate entities are amoral, willing to do anything for profit. It’s not their responsibility to save valuable older buildings; that task falls upon society, which has failed miserably in this duty. The various mechanisms that are supposed to protect a perfectly sound and health-inducing building become a cruel joke when such a building is demolished. A decision is taken outside the light of public scrutiny, while implementing the strategy of the fait accompli — after the bulldozers and wreckers, it’s too late to do anything.

The story of the systematic destruction of the UK’s architectural heritage is long and ugly. To mention just one example, the corrupt Newcastle City Council Member Thomas Daniel Smith managed to erase large swaths of central city districts and replace them with cheaply-built glass-and-steel monstrosities before he was jailed in 1974. Smith worked closely with dishonest — and extremely successful — architect John Poulson, who was also jailed in 1974. He appealed directly to democratic and liberal sentiments to further his ambitions, and the political class at the time fell for his manipulations. This sordid story repeats, with only minor variations, except that the other urbanicides were never prosecuted.

Tank Chat #137 | Achilles | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 10 Sep 2021

Catch up with David Fletcher for this week’s Tank Chat on the M10 Achilles, a joint enterprise between the Americans and the British to create a Tank Destroyer, and discover how the British Achilles varied from the American M10.

00:00 – Intro
00:32 – What is the M10
05:52 – Features of Achilles
(more…)

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