HardThrasher
Published 18 Sept 2024Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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September 23, 2024
Forgotten War Ep3 – Death in the Arakan
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What Food was Served at Wild West Saloons?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jun 11, 2024Baked beans made with molasses and salt pork
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1886One of the definitions for a saloon is a place that serves food and drink, but makes most of its money from drink. This certainly was the case in the Old West, where a lot of saloons served a free lunch as long as you bought a drink. Just because it was free, didn’t mean it was low quality food. In fact, many saloons, especially those in larger cities with more competition, served fancier and fancier meals to draw in patrons.
These beans aren’t the French cuisine that some saloons served, but they are delicious. Even without the onions and spices that some recipes used, they’re so flavorful and much better than canned versions.
Baked Pork and Beans
Wash and pick over a large heaping cupful of navy beans and steep them in water over night. Put them on next morning with fresh water to more than cover, and baking soda the size of a bean and let boil about an hour. Then carry them to the sink, pour all into a colander letting the water run away and put back into the saucepan with cold water enough to come up to a level. Boil again and in a few minutes they will be soft. Season with a little salt and tablespoon of molasses. Put them into four pint bowls or tin pans, lay an ounce slice of salt pork on each and bake half an hour.
— Cooking for Profit by Jessup Whitehead, 1886
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September 22, 2024
Canada’s latest moral preening on the international stage includes a partial arms embargo against … the USA?
In the National Post, Conrad Black points out that the Canadian government’s tedious and never-ending virtue signalling has reached a new and barely believable low:
It is the usual pious and cowardly humbug that causes Ottawa to announce it is suspending the sales of some non-lethal military equipment to Israel because it has the effrontery to opine that the Israeli Defense forces are insufficiently protective of the lives of civilian Palestinians in Gaza. But it is breathtaking that Canada should include in this practically irrelevant step an embargo on some equipment to the United States that it suspects the Americans might pass on to Israel. This initiative is a trifecta of fatuous error. First, it is clear from thoroughly available evidence that Israel has achieved an unprecedentedly low ratio of civilian to authentic military casualties for modern urban counter-guerrilla warfare. This is especially difficult as the enemy in this case, Hamas, proudly states that civilian casualties are useful to its propaganda campaign (which has brainwashed our foreign policy-makers), and which habitually embeds its terrorist cadres in and near schools, hospitals, and places of worship to incite as much collateral damage on its own population as possible.
Second, it departs completely from any real concept of the nature of war. The invasion of Israel on October 7 and the slaughter of more than a thousand Israeli, mostly civilians, was intended and received as an act of war. Wars are not fought by dropping pamphlets or posturing with trivial gestures. As General Douglas MacArthur famously said during the Korean War, “In war there is no substitute for victory”. This is particularly the case in the current war in Gaza as Hamas has made it clear that it will never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. As long as that condition prevails, there can be no peace and Israel’s pledge to exterminate Hamas as a terrorist force enables it accurately to be described in the Wilsonian phrase: “a war to end war”. Canada’s government is engaged in a contemptible assertion of moral relativism between the heroic and democratic state of the long wronged Jewish people and a ragtag of vicious terrorists happy to be the cannon fodder of the principal terrorism-promoting state in the world — the primitive racist totalitarian theocracy of Iran.
Finally in the trifecta, in the bankruptcy of their imagination, our foreign policy makers have taken up the trite evasion of the outgoing Biden administration, that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, but we reserve the right to coach it on how to do that and this effectively limits self-defence to the expulsion of invaders but muffled and insulated retaliation against the invaders after they have been evicted from Israel. This is a formula for perpetual conflict and is a moral and military under-reaction to the enormity of Hamas’ provocation. What our government imagines it is accomplishing with this pallid, torpid, and ludicrous gesture surely escapes the imagination of all interested parties.
It must slightly bemuse the United States government that it is boycotted by Canada, which has benefited from an American guarantee of our security since President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking at Queen’s University in Kingston in 1938, said that the United States would not “stand idly by” if Canada were invaded by any power from another continent.
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September 21, 2024
The Dramatic Birth of Two Korean States
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 20 Sep 2024The United Nations plan is to reunite the divided Korean peninsula into a single state. But soon the USA and USSR have installed their own leaders, neither of whom are willing to compromise. By the end of 1948 Kim Il-Sung and Syngman Rhee stand at the head of separate North and South Korean states.
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M1911A1: America’s Definitive World War Two Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 12, 2024The United States adopted the M1911 pistol just in time for the First World War, and between Colt and Springfield Arsenal some 643,000 of these pistols were made by the end of 1918. During that production and the gun’s field service in France, a number of potential improvements were recognized. They were put together in a batch of 10,000 new pistols ordered from Colt in 1924, but not officially designated until years later. A second batch of 10,000 was ordered from Colt in 1938. These were the first guns officially designated M1911A1. The changes were all about improving user handling, with a reshaped mainspring housing, larger sights, longer grip tang, and shorter reach to the trigger.
In 1939 the government put out a tender for M1911A1 education contracts. These contracts were for production of just 500 pistols, and they were intended to pay a company to build the a complete set of production line tooling and then store it in case of future need (similar contracts were also issued for rifles and machine guns). Two companies were granted such contracts – Harrington & Richardson and the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Singer produced a quite satisfactory batch of pistols, but ended up making higher-priority material like artillery sights. H&R was unable to complete its contract, which was cancelled in the spring of 1942.
When the US entered the war, pistols were needed in large number, and three companies were given contracts to produce the M1911A1: Remington-Rand, Ithaca, and Union Switch & Signal. These three new contractors, along with existing production lines at Colt and Springfield, produced 1.9 million new pistols during World War Two, enough to fully supply all branches of the US military until 1985 when the 1911 was replaced by the Beretta 92.
The example we are looking at today is a Remington-Rand, manufactured in April 1945. Remington-Rand received its first contract in May 1942, and delivered its final pistols in July 1945. In total, it made 877,751, in the following serial number blocks:
916405 – 1041404
1279699 – 1441430
1471431 – 1609528
1743847 – 1816641
1890504 – 2075103
2164404 – 2244803
2380014 – 2619013 (the last one made was 2465139)
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QotD: Progressivism
At its core, liberalism can be defined in gnostic terms as the human mind’s idolizing of itself. In this sense, Obama’s famous aphorism is spot on. The liberal mind really is what the liberal mind has been waiting for.
What it seeks is not, however, goodness, or security, or higher living standards, or even better health care. What it seeks is the celebration of its own brilliance. “Smug” is a small word that perfectly captures the nature of the progressive mind.
This gnostic trait is the source of all of the damage liberalism has wrought for more than 300 years. From the French Revolution to the Third Reich, from Stalinism to North Korea, liberalism has brought with it repression of liberty, death camps, and executions on a mass scale. What’s often not well understood is the fact that violence and repression are inevitable because liberalism seeks to change what does not wish to change – and it does so not for the purpose of making things better, but as an attempt to confirm the superiority of the liberal mind and its ability to manage society.
Most Americans find this conception of existence repulsive. They follow the true path of love, marriage, childbirth, hard work, and faith in God and country. Liberals actively seek to destroy this conception of existence because it rejects their mission of transforming society. It’s either the true path or liberalism. Both cannot be true.
To succeed, liberalism must acquire and retain clients in need of change. It is not in the interest of the liberal to solve problems. What the liberal needs is continually to discover new problems and hold them up as in need of solution. The fate of the “DREAMers”, held in limbo by generations of liberals, is one example. The “downtrodden”, as they were once called, are indeed the pawns of liberal politicians.
Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.
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September 19, 2024
D-Day Tanks: Operation Overlord’s Strangest Tanks
The Tank Museum
Published Jun 7, 2024An opposed beach landing is the most difficult and dangerous military operation it is possible to undertake. Anticipating massive casualties in the Normandy Landings, the British Army devised a series of highly specialized tanks to solve some of the problems – Hobart’s Funnies.
Named after General Sir Percy Hobart, commander of their parent unit, 79th Armoured Division, the Funnies included a mine clearing tank – the Sherman Crab, a flamethrower – the Churchill Crocodile and the AVRE – Assault Vehicle Royal Engineers which could lay bridges and trackways, blow up fortifications and much else besides.
In this video, Chris Copson looks at surviving examples of the Funnies and assesses their effectiveness on D Day and after.
00:00 | Introduction
01:24 | Operation Overlord
03:02 | Lessons from the Dieppe Raid
05:31 | The Sherman DD
07:21 | Exercise Smash
14:38 | Sherman Crab
17:38 | The AVRE
19:47 | Churchill Crocodile
23:15 | Did the Funnies Work?
28:49 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum #d-day #operationoverlord
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September 18, 2024
The Korean War 013 – 70,000 UN Troops Head for Incheon – September 17, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 17 Sep 2024[NR: For some unknown reason, YT decided to restrict the original release of this video, so I’m replacing it with the “Censored” version posted a couple of days later.]
This week sees the UN forces execute Operation Chromite, the amphibious invasion of the port of Incheon, far behind enemy lines. There are many hurdles to clear before this can happen, including the physical one of one of the world’s largest tidal ranges, which leaves many kilometers of mud flats in the approaches. There is also a UN counterattack at the same time, designed to perhaps break out of the Pusan Perimeter, or at least tie down big chunks of the enemy in the south.
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D-Day 80th Anniversary Special, Part 1: Paratroopers, with firearms expert Jonathan Ferguson
Royal Armouries
Published Jun 5, 2024This year marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of France which took place on 6th June 1944. From landing on the beaches of Normandy, the Allies would push the Nazi war machine and breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.
To commemorate this, we’re collaborating with Imperial War Museums to release a special two-part episode as Jonathan will look at some of the weapons that influenced and shaped this historic moment in history.
Part 1 is all about the “tip of the spear”, the Paratroopers.
0:00 Intro
0:55 STEN MK V
1:40 History of the Sten
3:00 Mark V Details
6:23 Usage in D-Day
8:38 M1A1 Carbine
10:38 M1A1 Details
14:09 Usage in D-Day
15:01 ACME ‘Cricket’ Clicker
17:31 The Longest Day
19:30 Outro[NR: I’m glad Jonathan discussed that bloody clicker scene in The Longest Day … it bugged me the very first time I watched the movie as a young army cadet in the mid-1970s.]
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September 16, 2024
Anger sells – “Words like ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘awful’, ‘hate’, ‘sick’, ‘fight’, and ‘scary’ each predict a 2.3% increase in click-through rates”
Rob Henderson explains the incentives that lead to provoking as much anger as possible among readers (and especially voters):
It seems like people are angrier than ever. According to a poll by CBS News, 84 percent of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Another survey recently found that nine in ten Americans can name either a recent news event or something about American politics that made them angry, while only half could identify a recent news event or something about American politics that made them proud.
What explains this feeling of rage? One noteworthy reason is that exploiting anger is politically convenient.
The strategic use of anger in politics has transformed it from a natural human emotion into a weapon of division, with far-reaching consequences for our social cohesion and democratic governance.
According to Steven Webster, author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics” and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, “Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully”.
Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters”.
Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.
In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others”.
Provoking rage against selected groups is an effective way to promote unity in politics. Today, many Americans across the political spectrum are encouraged to feel they are being victimized. It’s no coincidence that one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines on the campaign trail is “They’re laughing at us”. Being laughed at induces humiliation, which often quickly transforms into rage.
In a notable historical illustration of a political movement using anger as a limitless source of ideological fuel, consider the case of the “Recalling Bitterness” campaign in Maoist China. In the 1960s, the communist dictator Mao Zedong grew worried that ordinary Chinese citizens were developing lukewarm attitudes about the socialist revolution. In response, the regime forced people into rituals in which they publicly announced how bad life was before they had been liberated. Mao ordered writers and artists to rewrite history through the lens of class struggle to suit the needs of his political agenda. Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to pre-liberation, hoping to convince them that the revolution’s successes outnumbered its failures. The “devils” here were reactionaries, landlords, rich farmers, and counterrevolutionaries. Documenting the rituals of the Recalling Bitterness campaign, the historian Guo Wu has written, “Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced”.
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Who Really Won The Korean War?
Real Time History
Published May 17, 2024Only five years after the end of WW2, the major nations of the world are once again up in arms. A global UN coalition and an emerging Chinese juggernaut are fighting it out in a war that will see both sides approach the brink of victory — and defeat.
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September 15, 2024
The Occupation of Japan Begins – a WW2 Epilogue Special
World War Two
Published 14 Sep 2024The war is over and the occupation of Japan has begun. The country has largely been destroyed by Allied bombs, and shall be rebuilt, physically, economically, and even governmentally. But what will the new government be? What shall become of the Emperor? Who is to actually do the occupation? Today we look at all this and more.
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My Man Godfrey (1936) with William Powell and Carole Lombard
The Film Detective
Published Nov 15, 2018During the height of the Great Depression, a scavenger hunt party game brings a pair of spoiled sisters, Irene and Cornelia Bullock (Carole Lombard and Gail Patrick) to a city dump looking for a “forgotten man”. They find down-and-out hobo Godfrey Parks (William Powell), who accompanies one of the sisters back to the party to be presented as a scavenger hunt find, and ends up warily accepting her offer to become the family butler. Irene falls for Godfrey, but is unaware of his mysterious past. Nominated for six Academy Awards, My Man Godfrey might be the screwiest of all screwball comedies.
Director: Gregory La Cava
Writers: Morrie Ryskind, Eric Hatch
Starring: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick, Eugene Pallette, Jean Dixon
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September 14, 2024
QotD: Academia
Severian, “Storytelling Fail”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-13.
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September 13, 2024
“The problem [with America] is and has always been the people and their beliefs”
Chris Bray puts on the old biohazard suit and goes wading into the political book section, this time looking at two recent tomes by NeverTrumpers Robert Kagan and Tom Nichols:
Robert Kagan speaking in Warsaw, 2008-04-17.
Photo by Mariusz Kubik via Wikimedia Commons.
If you want to know where we are as a country, get your hands on a copy of Robert Kagan’s new book, Rebellion. Don’t worry, you won’t even need to crack the spine and open it. Kagan, who married the Queen of Eternal War Victoria Nuland and helped found the now defunct neoconservative Project for a New American Century, has written a warning about the dangerous renascence of antiliberalism in American political life: intolerance, a rejection of minority rights, hatred of progress. America is in deep trouble, Kagan warns. We’re close to losing our democracy! You can already see the freshness and originality of his thought.
Flip it. Take the book, turn it around, and look at that back cover, which carries an excerpt from inside, getting right to the meat of the thing. The problem isn’t the media, Kagan concludes. And it isn’t government. It isn’t a problem with institutions at all: “The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs”. The thing that’s wrong with America is Americans, full stop. The country works brilliantly, except for the existence of the population. Imagine how healthy we would become if we could just get rid of them.
Should you make the mistake of opening the book, your experience will get worse in a hurry. The intellectual muddle is fatal. Here’s Kagan’s summary of the one big problem that runs through all of American history: “A straight line runs from the slaveholding South in the early to mid-nineteenth century to the post-Reconstruction South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 60s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.”
All of those movements are precisely the same, you see. Ronald Reagan was a latter-day Ben Tillman, the Birchers merely a rebrand for the 1940s Southern Democrats, and Barry Goldwater was a fitting heir to Nathan Bedford Forrest. A shrewd mind is at work here. All, Kagan concludes, were figures representing “antiliberal groups”: “All have sought to ‘make America great again,’ by defending and restoring the old hierarchies and traditions that predated the Revolution.” The American Revolution, he means. The Dixiecrats and the Birchers and Reagan and Trump all want to restore Parliamentary supremacy and the landed aristocracy, or … something.
But pretend, for a moment, that Kagan has made some form of coherent statement about American history. He is arguing for the protection of the liberal order, the dignity of the common man and the premise that we’re all created equal. At the same time, he says, the biggest problem with America is … the American people themselves. How do those two claims fit together? What kind of politics can we frame around the dignity and inherent worth of the common man, who is stupid and worthless?
See also, on this theme, anything the former U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols has written in the last decade, such as his warning in Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy that “our fellow citizens are an intolerable threat to our own safety” — a claim that closely mirrors Kagan’s warning about America being plagued by Americans. Consider this framing very carefully: if a threat is intolerable, what do you have to do about it?
Kagan’s base argument sounded better in the original German.
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