Quotulatiousness

September 17, 2019

“How did staging dinner-theatre raids to seize eleven grand’s worth of knock-off NFL merchandise become an ICE priority?”

Filed under: Football, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on a recent you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me raid by ICE:

Because AOC and the open-borders left want to abolish ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the right is obliged to defend it. This is a pity, because ICE is a deeply weird agency with, to put it mildly, increasingly curious and eccentric priorities.

Last week, for example, under crack agent Tatum King, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit staged (that seems the appropriate word) a raid in Oakland of the Oakland Raiders game:

    ICE targeted vendors of unauthorized T-shirts, hats, caps and bandannas. The agency said the raid was done in partnership with NFL brand security representatives and state and local law enforcement. The Oakland Police Department said it was not involved.

    Officials said they seized about $11,000 worth of illegal swag — undoubtedly, most of it silver and black — during the ‘Monday Night Football’ game and its pre- and postgame tailgate parties.

    Tatum King, special agent in charge of the San Francisco Homeland Security Investigations unit, said about 400 pieces of merchandise were seized but no one was arrested. NFL brand officials issued warning letters and may be pursuing civil action, he said.

As they should — and in small claims court, if eleven grand is the best a no-expense-spared federal-state-local raid with everyone in the full Robocop can come up with.

But what business is it of ICE’s “Homeland Security Investigations” division? This arrest-less “raid” and its attendant publicity ballyhoo undoubtedly cost US taxpayers more than the barely five figures’ worth of Oakland Raiders swag they’re now passing round the office.

Like ICE, HSI was created post-9/11 — to enforce four hundred laws “combating terrorism and enhancing national security”. How did staging dinner-theatre raids to seize eleven grand’s worth of knock-off NFL merchandise become an ICE priority? Which it undoubtedly is:

    King said the agency is committed to ensuring the public purchases ‘legitimate products’ instead of cheaper knockoffs often sold outside stadiums like the Coliseum.

[…]

Tatum King appears to be the usual showboating tosspot in this regard. The picture above shows him after a previous raid netted him some Golden State Warriors merchandise. Agent King can’t keep actual MS-13 warriors out of the Golden State, but he can crack down on underpriced baseball caps and sweatshirts.

The President has declared, repeatedly, that there is an emergency at the southern border. I agree with that. He has also said that, therefore, he needs more resources. That’s harder to agree with when a rogue bureaucracy refuses to act as if there’s an emergency and deploy its existing resources accordingly.

In fact, I’m not sure the left’s alleged war on ICE isn’t just their usual sly deflection, intended to provide a bit of useful cover for a subversive immigration bureaucracy to carry on doing as it’s done for a generation now and refuse to enforce existing immigration law — at least for anything that matters.

September 16, 2019

QotD: If we’d been taken over by aliens, how would we know?

Filed under: Education, Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Look around you – if we in the West and we humans, in general, had been invaded by aliens, what would be different?

  • Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively … very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
  • Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
  • Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
  • Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
  • As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
  • As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
  • Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.

If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?

Sarah Hoyt, “What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-21.

September 14, 2019

QotD: America and its army

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

Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.

When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained the civilians who heeded the trumpet’s call. The civilians did the fighting, of course — but they did it the Army’s way.

In 1861 millions of volunteers donned blue or gray. Millions of words have been written on American valor, but few books dwell on the fact that of the sixty important battles, fifty-five were commanded on both sides by West Pointers, and on one side in the remaining five.

In 1917 four million men were mustered in. Few of them liked it, but again they did things the way the professionals wanted them done.

The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.

But since the Civil War, the Army had neither the esteem nor the favor of public or government. Liberal opinion, whether business-liberal or labor-liberal, dominated the United States after the destruction of the South, and the illiberal Army grew constantly more alienated from its own society.

In a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never citizens to begin with.

There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around — the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiesence of the military toward the liberal view of life.

Domination and control society should have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy Praetorians to the juntas of Latin America, to the attempted fiasco of the Légion Étrangére, are pages of history singularly foul in odor.

But acquiesence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society’s purpose is to live; the military’s is to stand ready, if need be, to die.

Soldiers are rarely fit to rule — but they must be fit to fight.

The military is in essence a tool, to be used by its society. If its society is good, it may hope to be used honorably, even if badly. If its society is criminal, it may be, like the Wehrmacht, unleashed upon a helpless world.

But when the Wehrmacht dashed against the world, it was brought to ruin, not by a throng of amateurs, but by well-motivated, well-generaled Allied troops, who had learned their military lessons.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

September 12, 2019

QotD: Canadians and Europeans

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the current issue of The Spectator, Niall Ferguson argues that the Anglo-American “special relationship” is doomed.

“The typical British family,” he writes, “looks much more like the typical German family than the typical American family. We eat Italian food. We watch Spanish soccer. We drive German cars. We work Belgian hours. And we buy second homes in France. Above all, we bow before central government as only true Europeans can.”

He has a point, though cultural similarities are not always determinative: Canadians eat American food, watch American sports, drive American cars, work American hours (more or less), and buy second homes in Florida. But they still bow down before central government as only true Europeans can.

Mark Steyn, Telegraph, originally posted to the old blog (no longer online), 2004-09-30.

September 11, 2019

Environmental virtue signalling – it’s other people who need to change, not me

Filed under: Environment, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Heather Mac Donald notes that, as with so many other things, young people who like to virtue signal about their environmental concerns don’t consider it incumbent on them to change … it’s always other people whose habits must be changed, by force if necessary:

FridaysForFuture Demonstration, 25 January 2018 in Berlin.
Photo by C. Suthorn via Wikimedia Commons.

The claim about youth’s transformative commitment to radical environmental change is — based on informal observation — bunk. The cardinal rule when it comes to environmental virtue-signaling is that people give up what they’re willing to give up. Young people are no different. If being environmentally sound required sacrificing anything that a self-described environmental warrior actually valued, the conversation would quickly change to a different topic. One’s own habits are necessary; it’s everyone else’s that need to change.

This always-unreached threshold for environmental sacrifice is particularly notable on the part of celebrity Greens, with their fortress-like SUVs, multiple residences, and massive carbon footprints — whether it’s the cavalcade of yachts and private jets that brought such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Zuckerberg, and Katy Perry to Google’s three-day climate-change summit in Sicily this July; environmental crusaders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle jetting off to Elton John’s French estate; or Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter’s “quick day trip” to Los Angeles from New York just ahead of the CNN climate-change debate. A police caravan drives New York City mayor Bill de Blasio 11 miles from his mayoral mansion in Manhattan to his favorite gym in Brooklyn. “Everyone in their own life has to change their own habits to start protecting the earth,” he has intoned, but taking the subway is not one of those changes appropriate for him.

Most young people have not yet reached such a flamboyant level of energy use, but if they could, they undoubtedly would, with as little sense of anachronism as that of Al Gore in his energy-guzzling mansion. These are the consumers who keep football fields of computer servers buzzing round the clock to support their social media habits. If being green meant turning off one’s phone for 22 hours a day or foregoing the latest smartphone upgrade, the reasons why such sacrifices are not required would spout from every Gen Z-er and millennial’s lips. Students from the University of California, Irvine, constantly run their air-conditioners in the apartment complex where I spend summers, regardless of how cool the temperature outside is. They drive with their windows sealed and the car AC on, no matter how fresh the day (this is the new driving norm for almost everyone now). The meteoric rise of food-delivery apps, producing torrents of plastic and paper waste and a constant circulation of cars and electric bikes, has been fueled by young people’s demand for convenience and instant gratification. Cooking is apparently unthinkable. At best, one buys precut and washed food in the inevitable plastic containers. A daily Starbucks habit is deemed consistent with railing against environmentally destructive corporate greed.

New York’s tap water is among the purest in the world. Yet a young neighbor of mine in New York, like progressives throughout the city, receives towering deliveries of bottled water, entailing huge energy outlays to package and transport, not to mention generating flotillas of discarded plastic. The swim team members in my gym turn on their showers in the locker room, then walk away or do nothing other than chat as water gushes down the drain. Uber drivers in college towns report that students regularly call a car to get to class, rather than walk or ride a bike.

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

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

Colby Cosh discusses the genesis of Atwood’s best-known work from 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale and the new sequel published this week, The Testaments:

In a CBS interview broadcast on Sunday, Atwood insisted again, as she always has, that her book wasn’t a prediction. People who read her book in a spirit of active dread, the kind of people who dress up as Handmaids and march on legislatures, will say that, well, dystopias are created specifically so that they won’t come true. What Atwood is trying to say goes deeper than that, and contradicts it. She won’t even insist that the book was intended as a warning. “I’m not a prophet,” she pleads, while everyone around her tells her what a terrific prophet she is.

What she means, but cannot say because it would sound arrogant, is: “I’m not a prophet, dammit, I’m an artist.” If tyrannies were easy to predict and prevent by spritzing around a bit of literary bug spray, they couldn’t come about in the first place. Atwood knows better than this; she knows that tragedies of this scale never take the form that an author might anticipate. Moreover, people who read The Handmaid’s Tale as a mere tract are deaf to its satirical elements — particularly those of the epilogue, in which the story is revealed to have been unearthed by scholars in a still-more-distant future.

These people are also failing to see that The Handmaid’s Tale is a book — researched, not merely imagined — about the past of humankind. The whole book is predicated on the observation (also made implicitly in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) that totalitarian regimes are never libertine; they all police sexuality at least as strenuously as they do trade and creative activity, and always come with puritanical, sexually homogenizing features. The novel was heavily influenced by Ceausescu’s Romania and its pro-natalist Decree 770, which abolished contraception and imposed mass gynecological inspection on women of fertile age. Europeans and students (or veterans) of the Cold War will notice this, but how many of the young folk who dress up as Handmaids at protests have any idea? (Are some of them also cosplaying on Twitter as postmodern retro-communists?)

I am curious to see what the critics make of the sequel, because the act of writing one seems a bit cynical, and yet perhaps Atwood has found some clever way of making it work. Offred’s narrative in The Handmaid’s Tale is, as I say, unearthed in a later future; it is important to the functioning of the book that we come to see her as a figure from the past, a human voice whose plea from an obscure period has been flung forward into the hands of half-comprehending and unsympathetic scholarly boobs.

September 10, 2019

We’ve noticed this too…

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt on the increasing “green-ness” of her appliances — and the increasing uselessness of same:

For years we got expensive front loaders, and yet our clothes kept smelling, there were stains that would not come out, and these things seemed to last only 5 years, on the outside. And I knew it wasn’t our problem, as such, because at the same time we started noticing we couldn’t get our clothes clean, the detergent aisle of the supermarket sprouted an entire section of odor removing things, Febreeze got added to detergents, and, in general, people smelled odd …

Then the washer broke while we were also very, very broke (we were paying mortgage and rent in the run up to buying this. I saw an ad for, I THINK a $300 washer, and we went to look. What we found, instead, was a $200, not advertised washer. As we’re looking at it the saleswoman hurries over and tells us we don’t want it. This washer, she says, uses lots of water. For those who don’t know I suffer from an unusual form of eczema. While it’s triggered mostly by stress with a side of carbs, it can also, out of the blue, take offense at a slight trace of detergent left on the clothes. I’ve found that the eczema got markedly worse the less water the washer used. And it required me to run the washer three times, once with soap and two without to avoid major outbreaks. The idea of using lots and lots of water was great, so I was all excited. Which shocked the poor saleswoman halfway to death. I will point out, though, though that this washer washes well enough I can get away with only one extra rinse cycle and if I forget it it’s usually survivable. Also, our clothes don’t smell. Unfortunately, we’ve not found that [type] of washer any of the times we’ve walked through the appliance aisle, so I think that choice has been eliminated.

Certainly the choice of dishwashers that use “lots” (i.e. what they used 20 years ago) of water and electricity was never offered to us. And since we seemed to have really lousy luck with dishwashers, I found every time we replaced one over the last 20 years, they had less space for dishes (more insulation, to allow for less electricity) to the point that I needed to do 3 or even 4 loads for a family of four. I mean, I cook from scratch, but I really don’t use that much stuff. And it ran slower than before. Right now our dishwasher actually washes (a bonus) but it takes four hours to run a cycle. I rarely do more than one wash a day, though, because it’s just Dan and I, and we … well … the kids used a lot more glasses and little plates, and frankly meals get more complicated for four people.

All the same, there was a time there, for like 10 years, where we were running all this “green” approved stuff, and not only was I running the washer and drier more or less continuously, but to make things more “interesting” I was using MORE water and electricity, in the sense that I was running the appliances a ton more.

This of course is what I also found with the “low flush” toilets. We had them in our previous house, and we found that we spent an inordinate amount of time flushing the toilet. Also, since it took four or five flushes to do the job or one, the fact we were actually only using half the water per flush didn’t save any water. We spent instead twice to three times the amount of water the “high flush” toilets had spent.

All this, btw, to appease Paul Ehrlich — the prophet of wrong. As in, if he foresees something it will be wrong — and his ridiculous idea we’d run out of potable water in 1978. Apparently none of these people have noticed that 1978 has come and gone with no problems. And as for electricity, if they stop their idiocy about nuclear, it’s not even a consideration. (And no, Chernobyl isn’t a caution about nuclear energy. It’s a caution about stupid communist regimes. They can’t run anything — not even a nuclear plant — without destroying it.)

Lightbulbs are another favourite … several years back, our provincial government was pushing us all to get rid of our old incandescent bulbs and replace them with these great new energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs. The new CFLs cost roughly ten times as much as the old bulbs, but we were assured up and down that they’d last twenty times longer, so we’d not only save money on electricity, but also have to replace the bulbs so infrequently. Of course, the CFL bulbs were pathetically bad — not only were they expensive, the light they gave was (at best) marginal and they didn’t even last as long as typical incandescent bulbs.

So now, of course, we’re being encouraged to use LED bulbs. Sure, they’re more expensive than the old incandescent bulbs, but they save on electricity and last many times longer! Except, of course, they don’t. The old incandescent bulbs in my office started to fail one after another, so when I was down to only one working bulb, I gave in and bought four replacement LED bulbs … they were on sale for only 2-3 times as much as the old bulbs! That was in March. I’ve already had to replace two of the LED bulbs. This is starting to feel familiar…

On the bright side (pun unintentional), the LED bulbs don’t provide the entertainment of a toxic waste cleanup in your home the way the CFL bulbs did when they were broken.

Shooting the Milkor M32 40mm Grenade Launcher

Filed under: Africa, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 6 Jul 2019

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

Thanks to Milkor USA, I have a chance today to do some shooting with both the M32 and M32A1 rotary grenade launchers they make for the US military. I’m using 40mm chalk training ammunition, with some steel targets at about 75-85 meters. In live fire, it’s quite clear how much of an improvement the M32A1 trigger is over its predecessor!

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754

QotD: Mere words are not “violence”

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“I’m very concerned about a phenomenon called ‘concept creep’ – which has been happening to a lot of psychological terms since the 1990s”, he says. “When a word like ‘violence’ is allowed to creep so that it includes a lot of things that are not violence, then this causes a cascade of bad effects. It’s bad for the students themselves because they now perceive an idea that they dislike, or a speaker that they dislike, as having committed a much graver offence against themselves – which means that they will perceive more victimisation of themselves. And it’s also really bad for society because, as we are seeing in a spectacular way in the United States this year, when each side can point to rampant occurrences of what they see as violence by the other side, this then justifies acts of actual physical violence on their side. And there’s no obvious end to this mutual escalation process.”

He adds: “Everybody involved in education needs to be dampening down violence and the acceptance of violence. Telling students that words are violence is counterproductive to that effort.”

Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Naomi Firsht, “The Fragile Generation”, Spiked, 2017-08-31.

September 9, 2019

Milkor M32 and M32A1 40mm Grenade Launchers

Filed under: Africa, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 5 Jul 2019

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

The USMC adopted the Milkor USA M32A1 rotary multiple grenade launcher (MGL) in 2012. The history of this weapon goes back to South Africa, where designer Andries Piek was inspired to create it after building the 37mm “Stopper” for the South African police and then seeing a Manville 25mm gas launcher in the movie Dogs of War. He created a 6-barrel 40mm launcher that was adopted by the South African military, and proved quite popular. It was adopted by other countries subsequently, and by the early 2000s a company bought rights to produce it in the United States – Milkor USA.

The original M32 version was used in small numbers by US SOCOM, and the updated M32A1 widely purchased by the US Marines. The A1 version has a shorter barrel and is generally strengthen, allowing it to fire medium-velocity grenades instead of just the low velocity loadings. This increased its effective range from 375m to 800m as well as allowing larger grenade payloads and increased effectiveness on target.

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754

QotD: War

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

The object of warfare is to dominate a portion of the earth, with its peoples, for causes either just or unjust. It is not to destroy the land and people, unless you have gone wholly mad.

Pushbotton war has its place. There is another kind of conflict — crusade, jihad, holy war, call it what you choose. It has been loosed before, with attendant horror but indecisive results. In the past, there were never means enough to exterminate all the unholy, whether Christian, Moslem, Protestant, Papist, or Communist. If jihad is preached again, undoubtedly the modern age will do much better.

Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war — against militarism, against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy, disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red.

Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.

For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions — as its prophets have long proclaimed.

Except that in this world are tigers.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

September 6, 2019

Germany Commits Suicide by Cancelling War Reparations | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1931 Part 3 of 3

Filed under: Economics, Germany, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 5 Sep 2019

Contrary to popular belief it is not so much reparations themselves that puts the first stepping stone in place for the Nazi to rise to power. Instead it is the cancellation of war reparations, or more correctly put; the measures that “The Hunger Chancellor” Heinrich Brüning implements to get reparations cancelled that pushes Germany over the financial brink and into the hands of Hitler and Goebbels.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Subscribe to our World War Two series: https://www.youtube.com/c/worldwartwo…

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Francis van Berkel
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: Francis van Berkel and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns and Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Iryna Dulka
Colorization by Daniel Weiss

Thumbnail: Goebbels colorized bu Olga Shirnina, aka Klimbim

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Sources:
Ruth Henig, The Weimar Republic 1919-1933
Theo Balderston, Economics and Politics in the Weimar Republic
Kolbe, The Weimar Republic
Harold James, The Causes of the German Banking Crisis of 1931
Feuchtwanger, From Weimar to Hitler

Sources images: Bundesarchiv

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
49 minutes ago (edited)

OK, so this video is about Naziism to some degree, it’s also a serious look at how Germany started transitioning into Naziism – this is not speculation, it’s not even very controversial, it just happens to not fit with many popular superficial misconceptions. Now, we love it when you guys debate under our videos, even when it’s in disagreement with something we or somebody else said, but before you do so please save us some time and read our rules and consider if your post is against our rules. If you think it might be, consider editing or just not posting it — otherwise you’re just wasting our time and your own — because no matter what, we will moderate this.

If your going to post that the Versailles Treaty was to blame you might want to read this instead: https://community.timeghost.tv/t/why-the-treaty-of-versailles-didnt-cause-naziism-answering-a-guy-on-youtube/1858 — that’s Indy’s extensive answer to that claim.

If you’re going to claim “Naziism was Left Wing” well you can do that, we don’t suppress opinions, not even silly ones, but we suggest that you read this instead: https://timeghost.tv/national-socialism-an-extreme-left-wing-ideology/ that’s Spartacus’s explanation why it is not considered so by historians (and why it’s not really that important).

If you’re going to praise Naziism or celebrate Communism, or propose that any other form of lethal extremism is a great idea — just don’t, we do remove any promotion for lethal anti-democratic ideologies, and will probably revoke your positing privileges.

If you’re going to start peddling conspiracy theories about Jews controlling [insert your crazy idea here] or “it was the Jews” — definitely don’t do that or it will be last thing you post here.

If you’re going to say that stopping German Communism is what caused Naziism — well you can do that … it’s pretty much wrong or at least a gross misrepresentation, and you’ll look like an idiot to anyone who knows their factual German history, but you can do that if publicly proclaiming ignorance is your thing — we would however suggest waiting for our next video on Germany’s elections in 1932 for a more correct take on that instead.

“This is the worst [weather event] in history!”

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

At some point in the last decade or so, media organizations decided to make the weather report into an extension of the news, to (as I’m sure they’d have explained) provide a richer media experience for their audiences. This has degenerated into some pretty ridiculous weather-event related claims, as it seems every month for the last several years has been “the hottest evah!” if you got your news from the TV. Claiming something is the best/worst in history sounds very impressive, until you realize just how short a time we’re considering when we talk about the weather:

“This is the worst [weather event] in history!” You see it in all the headlines: “Hottest day in history!” “Worst hurricane in history!” “Coldest winter in history!” These headlines make me crazy and it’s not just because they’re being used to shill anthropogenic climate change fears nor is it because a lot of them are false. (For example, since 1924, there have been thirty-five Category Five hurricanes in our part of the Atlantic, most in September. Dorian was just the latest, not the most exceptional.)

No, what really irks me is that phrase “in history” or its companion phrase “ever” (“Worst heat wave ever!”) What the dopes in the media miss, or perhaps willfully ignore, is the fact that we have barely any weather history. Instead, we’ve only been measuring weather data since the second half of the 19th century. I learned this when I read Simon Winchester’s delightful Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. In it, he notes that the volcano’s explosion was the loudest sound ever recorded — and that it was recorded only because the Victorians had an obsession with record keeping.

Before the Victorians came along, there were always people who kept records, but once the Victorians came along it became a “thing.” For the first time in human history, people had (a) instruments that could measure things with a fair degree of accuracy and that were affordable, and (b) the literacy and leisure time to note and record these things.

Thus, in the late 19th century, owning a reliable thermometer, checking the weather daily, and taking the time to write it down was something entirely new. Before that, there were no reliable thermometers and only the richest could afford such unreliable tools as existed for measuring temperatures. The fact that people were no longer living at subsistence level and were literate enabled them to find the time and have the skills to record data.

That’s why we know how loud Krakatoa was: All over the world, as the sound waves reverberated around the earth, over and over, busy Victorians were looking at their reliable time-pieces (the first affordable, mass-produced watches were driven by railway needs and came onto the market in the late 19th century) and noting down the time at which they heard that strange loud noise.

All of which means that our reliable weather data isn’t about “history” or “ever,” but is, instead, about 150 years old, at most. Everything else is guess work, based upon random reminiscences and best guesses using things such as Arctic core samples or tree rings.

Browning M2 .50cal “Ma Deuce” | HEAVY MACHINE GUN

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

Matsimus
Published on 22 Jul 2019

The Browning heavy machine gun was designed towards the end of World War I. Development of a large-caliber machine gun in the USA was initiated at the direct request of General Pershing, the commander of US expeditionary corps in Europe. He requested a large-caliber machine gun, capable of destroying military aircraft and ground targets such as armored cars and tanks. The task of developing such a gun was passed to John Browning. The task of developing ammunition for this new weapon was passed to Winchester Arms company.

This machine gun is similar to John Browning’s earlier M1919 machine gun, that was chambered for a standard rifle cartridge. In around 1917 Browning started to redesign his weapon for a larger caliber. His new machine gun was chambered for much larger and much more powerful 12.7×99 mm (.50 caliber) cartridge, that was developed alongside this weapon by Winchester. That’s why sometimes this weapon is simply referred as Browning .50 caliber machine gun. After the John Browning’s death in 1926, the design of this weapon was finalized by other designers.

This machine gun entered service with the US armed forces in 1933 and was manufactured by Colt. Design of this weapon proved to be extremely successful. Since the 1930s it has been used extensively to the present day. This remarkable weapon has seen service during countless wars all over the world. Only during WWII nearly 2 million of these HMGs were produced. It has been in production longer than any other machine gun and its production still continues. Furthermore the M2 machine gun has been in use longer than any other small arm in the US armed forces inventory, except the M1911 pistol, that was also designed by John Browning. The M2 machine gun is currently manufactured by General Dynamics and US Ordnance companies. Since the 1930s this weapon is license-produced by FN Herstal of Belgium. Currently the M2 is used by about 100 countries all over the world. It is the primary heavy machine gun of NATO countries.

The M2 is typically used as a vehicle weapon or helicopter armament. It can be also used from a tripod. This heavy machine gun is highly effective against infantry, unarmored or lightly armored vehicles, boats, light fortifications and helicopters. It is closer in power to a small cannon.

This weapon is typically used with standard ball, tracer, armor-piercing, armor-piercing incendiary, or armor-piercing incendiary tracer rounds. There is also an M962 SLAP-T (Saboted Light Armor Penetrator) round, fitted with a tungsten penetrator.

The M2 is fed from disintegrating belt. Spent cartridge cases are extracted down. It can be adapted to feed from the left or right side of the weapon by reinstalling some parts. This conversion takes two minutes. The charging handle can be also changed from right to left hand side.

The M2 has slow and rapid firing modes. It can fire full-auto, as well as single shots. This weapon fires from a closed bolt.

When used as a crew served weapon, the M2 is mounted on an M3 tripod. This tripod weights 20 kg. So the complete weight of the machine gun on tripod is 58 kg. When fired from the tripod this HMG has an effective range of 1 830 m. Maximum effective range is 2 000 m.

The M2 comes with standard iron sights. However various types of telescopic and night sights can be installed using appropriate mountings.

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QotD: The horrors of war

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s no point in pretending that war isn’t horrible — flag-draped coffins are, in fact, a rather pristine symbol of those horrors. There’s a good reason societies honor their warriors.

An aside: I’ve long thought that prettifying World War II for domestic consumption contributed to both the media shock of Vietnam and the generation gap. WWII and Korea vets, who knew war first-hand, didn’t understand just how shocked their doted-on boomer kids were. “The Good War” wasn’t any more pleasant when you were experiencing it.

Virginia Postrel, “Horrors of War”, Dynamist.com, 2004-04-27.

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