As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!Rudyard Kipling, 1919.
August 10, 2024
QotD: “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”
August 9, 2024
Rare signs of growth in the Argentine economy
It looks as if Argentina is managing a trick that Justin Trudeau can’t manage — growing the national economy while keeping inflation down:
Javier Milei, 8 October 2022.
Photo attributed to Vox España via Wikimedia Commons.
During his first year as president, Javier Milei has been waging a bitter but largely successful campaign against inflation.
Now, Argentines received more welcome news: their economy is growing again.
“Economic activity rose 1.3 percent from April, above the 0.1 percent median estimate from analysts in a Bloomberg survey and the first month of growth since Milei’s term began in December,” Bloomberg reported on July 18. “From a year ago, the proxy for gross domestic product grew 2.3 percent.”
The positive economic report, based on data from the Argentine government, is a surprise to many.
The 2.3 percent year-over-year increase defied expectations of a decline of similar magnitude, Bloomberg reported. As Semafor notes, the Argentine economy was projected to have the least economic growth of any country in the world in 2024, according to the International Monetary Fund.
A “Wrecking Ball”?
Argentine economists I spoke to said that the numbers are encouraging, but the country’s economy is far from being out of the woods.
As most people know, Milei inherited an economic mess decades in the making. When the self-described anarcho-capitalist assumed office in December, Argentina was suffering from the third highest inflation rate in the world — 211 percent year over year. The poverty rate was north of 40 percent, and Argentina’s economy was declining.
With his country’s economy in a full tailspin from decades of Peronism, Milei proposed a series of economic reforms dubbed “shock therapy” that consisted primarily of three components: slashing government spending, cutting bureaucracy, and devaluing the peso.
Critics warned that these measures would be disastrous, and many took it for granted that the remedies would deepen Argentina’s recession.
The former head of the International Monetary Fund’s Western Hemisphere Department, Alejandro Werner, said Milei’s strategy could tame inflation, but at great cost.
“A deep recession will also take place,” Werner wrote, “as the fiscal consolidation kicks in and as the decline in household income depresses consumption and uncertainty weighs on investment.”
Felix Salmon, the chief financial correspondent at Axios, concurred, comparing Milei’s policies to “a wrecking ball”.
“Milei’s budget cuts will cause a plunge in household income, as well as a deep recession,” wrote Salmon.
Despite these warnings, Milei delivered his “shock therapy” plan in the first few months of his presidency. Tens of thousands of state workers were cut as were more than half of government ministries, including the Ministry of Culture, as well as the Ministries of Labor, Social Development, Health, and Education (which Milei dubbed “the Ministry of Indoctrination“). Numerous government subsidies were eliminated, and the value of the peso was cut in half.
Even before Milei’s policies were given a chance to succeed, many continued to attack them.
“Shock therapy is pushing more people into poverty,” journalist Lautaro Grinspan wrote in Foreign Policy in early March. “Food prices have risen by roughly 50 percent, according to official government data.”
Yet the official government data Grinspan cited was a report from December 2023, before Milei had even assumed the presidency.
Contrary to the dire predictions, the results of Milei’s policies have been better than even many of his supporters had dared hope.
During the first half of 2024, inflation cooled for five straight months in Argentina, the Associated Press reported in July. Though consumer prices were up 4.6 percent in June from the previous month, that’s down from a 25 percent month-over-month increase in December, when monthly inflation peaked in Argentina. Meanwhile, in February the government saw its first budget surplus in more than a decade. And just days ago, an economic report was published showing a massive decline in poverty in Argentina.
Many doubted that these successes were possible, and the conventional wisdom said that wringing inflation out of the economy and slashing government spending could only be achieved at great cost: a deepening recession.
Domicidal maniacs in charge
Lorenzo Warby provides an oh-so-useful word to accurately capture what the diversity-at-all-costs elites running most western countries these days are actually up to:
Domicide is the destruction of home. It comes in the “hard” version — the physical destruction of houses and infrastructure.
Domicide also comes in a “soft” version — flooding localities with new people, separating people from, and otherwise degrading, their heritage. When folk say Britain is becoming “unrecognisable”, it is the domicidal effect of mass migration they are referring to.
The UK is suffering from a domicidal elite, one that uses mass migration to break up working-class communities; asymmetric multiculturalism to elevate incoming cultures over those of native English (the Celtic fringe get minority brownie points); favours non-“white” faces in advertising; asymmetric race-swapping in entertainment against the native English; denigration of British history as racist, white supremacist, imperialist, colonialist, etc.
Much of this is insulting virtue-signalling allied to, or presenting, cartoonish (simplified) and caricature (distorted) history. It all undermines social cohesion. But it is the use of migration policy as a systematic weapon against the resident working class which does the most damage. Though two-tier policing — obviously treating Muslims in particular with a deference not shown to the natives, especially when it comes to policing speech — is also highly corrosive of social cohesion.
Many working-class communities in Britain were already fairly dysfunctional — though the British state is not innocent in those dysfunctions1 — and sections of the British working class are very far from admirable. None of this justifies the use of mass migration to make things worse for such folk, however much it may help to explain the moralised class contempt that underlies so much of modern progressivism and modern managerialism.
To improve such things, to “level up”, requires a strong sense of how to create and maintain social order. Modern progressivism is strongly antipathetic to such understanding. To “level up” also requires a strong sense of custodianship, which managerialism typically lacks: particularly progressivist managerialism.
Indeed, modern feminist, progressivist, managerialism—in its lack of custodianship; lack of social solidarity;2 in its antipathy to taking the problems of social order seriously — is running the British state into the ground. The post-medieval British aristocratic and mercantile elite did a much better job of state management. But those elites had mechanisms — such as duelling, that forced men to defend their reputation at the risk of their life, and grand country houses, that turned into expensive investments in social isolation if you behaved badly — that selected for character.
Nowadays, the British elite only selects for capacity and even that is being degraded by DEI undermining the signals of competence. It turns out, over the longer term, character matters more than capacity. For capacity without character selects for manipulative, anti-social personalities that degrade institutions over time.
1. For a particularly brutal depiction in fiction of the dysfunctional British welfare state — especially its school system — see Christopher Nuttall’s Mystic Albion series, especially the first book.
2. Feminisation of institutions and discourse has tended to degrade social solidarity, see Benenson et al, 2009. The most conspicuous example of this in the UK is how uncouth it is in elite circles to mention the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of underage working class girls by overwhelmingly Muslim gangs.
A crisis of competence
Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on one of the biggest yet least recognized issues of most modern nations — our overall declining institutional competence:
Almost everywhere you look, we are in a crisis of institutional competence.
The Secret Service, whose failures in securing Trump’s Butler, PA speech are legendary and frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)
The Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.
Major software vendor Crowdstrike, whose botched update shut down major computer systems around the world.
The United States government, which built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, but couldn’t build a workable floating pier in Gaza.
And of course, Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft is stuck, apparently indefinitely, at the International Space Station. (Its crew’s six-day mission, now extended perhaps into 2025, is giving off real Gilligan’s Island energy.) At present, Starliner is clogging up a necessary docking point at the ISS, and they can’t even send Starliner back to Earth on its own because it lacks the necessary software to operate unmanned – even though an earlier build of Starliner did just that.
Then there are all the problems with Boeing’s airliners, literally too numerous to list here.
Roads and bridges take forever to be built or repaired, new airports are nearly unknown, and the Covid response was extraordinary for its combination of arrogant self-assurance and evident ineptitude.
These are not the only examples, of course, and readers can no doubt provide more (feel free to do so in the comments) but the question is, Why? Why are our institutions suffering from such widespread incompetence? Americans used to be known for “know how,” for a “can-do spirit”, for “Yankee ingenuity” and the like. Now? Not so much.
Americans in the old days were hardly perfect, of course. Once the Transcontinental Railroad was finished and the golden spike driven in Promontory, Utah, large parts of it had to be reconstructed for poor grading, defective track, etc. Transport planes full of American paratroopers were shot down during the invasion of Sicily by American ships, whose gunners somehow confused them for German bombers. But those were failures along the way to big successes, which is not so much the case today.
But if our ancestors mostly did better, it’s probably because they operated closer to the bone. One characteristic of most of our recent failures is that nobody gets fired. (Secret Service Director Kim Cheatle did resign, eventually, but nobody fired her, and I think heads should have rolled on down the line).
Why Oil Paint Is So Expensive | So Expensive
Business Insider
Published Jul 13, 2019Oil paint is simple. At its most basic, it’s just a mixture of oil and pigment. But depending on the color and quality, a liter of this paint could cost you $285 to $1,100.
While the rise of oil paint is associated with the Renaissance, paintings using poppy-seed oil have been dated as far back as seventh-century Afghanistan. So what is it that makes this paint so special? And why is it so expensive?
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QotD: Celebrity fund-raising for foreign aid
Unlike private capital, foreign “aid” enters a country not because conditions there favor economic growth but because that country is poor — because that country lacks institutions and policies necessary for growth. And the more miserable its citizens’ lives, the more foreign “aid” its government receives.
Can you imagine a more perverse incentive? The poorer and more wretched are a nation’s people, the more likely celebrities such as Bono will convince Westerners and their governments to take pity on that country and to send large sums of money to its government. And because that country’s citizens are poor largely because their government is corrupt and tyrannical, the money paid in “aid” to that government will do nothing to help that country develop economically.
The cycle truly is vicious. Aid money naively paid by Westerners to alleviate Third-World poverty is stolen or misspent by the thugs who control the governments there. Nothing is done to foster the rule of law and private property rights that alone are the foundation for widespread prosperity. The people remain mired in ghastly poverty, their awful plight further attracting the attention and sympathy of Western celebrities, who use their star attraction and media savvy to shame politicians in the developed world into doling out yet more money to the thugs wielding power in the (pathetically misnamed) “developing world”.
If I could figure out a way to measure the long-term consequences of this new round of debt relief — a way that is so clear and objective that even the most biased party could not quibble with it — I would offer to bet a substantial sum of money that years from now this debt relief will be found to have done absolutely no good for the average citizens of the developing world.
It’s a bet I would surely — and sadly — win.
Don Boudreaux, “Faulty Band-Aid”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 2005-06-18.
August 8, 2024
“The future was then” – the Avant-Garde is so passé
Ted Gioia shares some observations on the Avant-Garde in modern culture, where the bourgeoisie seem to have become immune — or at least inured — to all the épater-ie:
Some time back, I was invited to attend a concert by an up-and-coming avant-garde band. These musicians were hellbent on disruption and mayhem, proving their transgressive credentials at every turn.
My companion that evening was a well-known jazz musician and, at the end of the concert, he turned to me and said:
“The future was then.”
I laughed, because this was so true. The performance we had just experienced wanted to be cutting-edge and futuristic, but every note played reflected a notion of the avant-garde as it existed sixty years ago.
The future was then.
I thought of that concert recently when a magazine convened a group of artists and intellectuals and asked them a troubling question:
What happened to the avant-garde?
Few people paid attention to their hand-wringing. I didn’t even hear about this online colloquium until months had passed — and I try to stay on top of precisely these kinds of issues. Nobody I know mentioned it, and I stumbled upon it purely by chance.
But that only proves that there really is a crisis in the avant-garde. It’s a crisis of neglect. Of disinterest.
People once got worked up about cutting edge art and transgressive culture. They loved it or hated it, but they always had strong feelings. Nowadays they hardly notice.
Perhaps they are just deadened to it from over-exposure.
You can put up the strangest statue in the town square nowadays — let’s say Albert Einstein getting swallowed by a monster snail — and people just walk by it. They’ve seen it all before.
You have too.
Artists can make the most bizarre music, destroying instruments, shouting obscenities, and creating all sorts of noise. But — yawn! — somebody’s great-grandpa was doing all that three generations ago.
The Korean War Week 007 – The Pusan Perimeter – August 6, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published Aug 6, 2024The UN forces are withdrawn this week across the Naktong River into a new defensive zone in the Southeast corner of the Peninsula — the Pusan Perimeter, but already as the week begins they are in great danger from the right hook near the coast by the North Korean 6th Division, that threatens to upend everything, taking Chinju and aiming for Masan. There are also machinations afoot with the Chinese in Taiwan, and the fear that a larger war could erupt if things aren’t handled right concerning the Chinese; it’s a week full of tension.
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Tulsi Gabbard is reportedly on a US government terrorist watch list
Publicly demolish the candidate who goes on to become Vice President and then Presidential candidate, get on a terrorist watch list, apparently:
Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard hasn’t exactly been toeing the progressive line since she left the House. In fact, she’s been on a bit of a rampage, destroying the extreme left with every public appearance.
Yet as a former federal lawmaker and a military veteran — one who didn’t leave her unit high and dry as they prepared for deployment, unlike some others I could name — you’d think she’d be someone we wouldn’t suspect of anything illegal.
And I’m willing to bet that no one does suspect her of anything.
That didn’t stop the feds, though.
In an exclusive breaking story, several Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward with information showing that former U.S. Representative and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is currently enrolled in the Quiet Skies program. Quiet Skies is a TSA surveillance program with its own compartmentalized suspected terrorist watchlist. It is the same program being weaponized against J6 defendants and their families. Quiet Skies is allegedly used to protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists. The photo below is a screenshot from the actual Target Package used by the FAMS to surveil Gabbard.
The whistleblowers first shared the information with Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), a national advocacy group for the Federal Air Marshals (FAMs). According to LaBosco, at least one of the whistleblowers is ready to go on the record with pertinent documentation. LaBosco shared that Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards. LaBosco has attempted to contact Gabbard and her staff but has not received a response.
There’s literally nothing about Gabbard that should warrant this kind of attention. I can think of a few folks where I can at least comprehend an argument for such a thing, but Gabbard is far from one of them.
So what gives?
Matt Taibbi has more:
This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection”. The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.
“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.
“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.
That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military’,” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’
Gabbard goes on: “Then I said, ‘The only thing I can think of is, I work in politics’. And he said, oh.”
The agent told her he’d encountered supporters of a certain former president who’d had no issues traveling before, but were now “marked quad-S every time they traveled”. Gabbard shrugged and slogged through, still encountering extra security. At one flight, she says, there were “at least six TSA agents doing additional screening”, along with canine support. “There were dogs in Dallas when we got there, dogs at a couple of the gates.”
It’s not just high profile people like Gabbard who’ve been added to this domestic harassment enhanced security list, it’s apparently anyone deemed to be too closely identified with a current presidential candidate who can be added to these lists:
Quite the contrary, according to LaBosco, who says the program has grown “off the charts”, especially since January 6th. “They’re watching 8-year-old children. They’re following 17-year-old cheerleaders that were traveling for cheer competitions, people who lost their legs in combat … TSA is out of control against the American people.”
Gabbard’s recent political career has already been marked by bizarre attacks and harassment. A feature describing her as a favorite of the Putin government was timed to the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton made waves by denouncing her as a Russian “asset”. After this episode, she intends to fight back. “I’m going to be encouraging former colleagues of mine in Congress who I know are concerned about this to exercise their oversight authorities,” she says.
“These actions are those of a tyrannical dictator. There’s no other way to describe what they’re doing.”
Panzer III: Versatile stalwart of the Panzer force
The Tank Museum
Published Apr 19, 2024See inside the Panzer III and discover the story of the most numerous German armoured fighting vehicle of World War II.
Intended as the German army’s main gun tank, with its brother, the Panzer IV, acting as support, the Panzer III fought in Europe and North Africa but was effectively obsolete by 1942 in the face of better opposition like the Soviet T-34. So the two changed places – an up-gunned Panzer IV becoming the gun tank with the Panzer III — now with a short barrelled 75mm gun — in the support role. This wouldn’t last long — but the Panzer III chassis would form the basis of the highly successful Stug III.
00:00 | Introduction
00:15 | Background
02:12 | Two Similar Designs
02:57 | Panzer III Designs
10:22 | Take a Look Inside
14:46 | An Interview with Mike Hayton
23:52 | What’s it like to Drive?
26:00 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum #panzeriii
QotD: The real reason modern music sounds the same
Fast forward a few years, though, and now they’ve got a pretty good idea of what “rock” is. More importantly, they’ve got a pretty good handle on what the market for rock is. At that point, they do what execs in any industry do. Why bother trying to find the hot new thing, when you can just make it yourself?
And that’s why two guys you’ve never heard of, Max Martin and a dude calling himself “Dr. Luke”, have written every #1 pop hit for the last 15 years. I’m sure they don’t work cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than scouting every bar band in America for a sound / look / stage act that might or might not pan out. Much easier to focus group a few traits, call up central casting, have them send over a made-to-order bimbo, and have him / her / xzhem front Dr. Luke’s latest computer-generated ditty.
And if everything on the radio all sounds exactly the same, that’s because it is exactly the same. Max Martin and Dr. Luke, and their zillion Mini-Mes at every level of the record biz, sometimes write songs for specific people — hey, guys, Katy Perry needs another ballad for her new album, hop to it! But mostly they write on spec, and shop it around. Different singers, different bands, different genres, doesn’t matter — this time it’s the two generic prettyboys in the “country” band Florida-Georgia Line singing it, but last time it was Katy Perry, the next time it’ll be the Backstreet Boys on their triumphant comeback tour, feat. Jay-Z and MC Funetik Spelyn. Same exact song, literally — it’s just that Kenny Chesney needed one more track on his album this time, and Taylor Swift didn’t, so now it’s #5 with a bullet on the “country” chart.
Severian, “Own Goals”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-21.
August 7, 2024
Unleashing the Atom: The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – War Against Humanity 139
This video is only available on YouTube itself – click the image above or click here.
World War Two
Published 6 Aug 2024In August 1945, the United States became the first, and to this day only, nation ever to employ nuclear weapons in war. After The fledgling technology proves itself on the testing ground, it is ready for immediate use. The price for this innovation is paid by hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who are blinded, burned, crushed, irradiated, and finally burned in a humanitarian crisis never seen before and never since. Join us to hear the gut-wrenching accounts of survivors and understand the motivations behind this tragic outcome to ensure that the horrors of nuclear war are never forgotten and never again unleashed upon the world and its people.
“Two Tier Keir” fails the latest challenge
Violent protests continued in many British cities over the weekend, and despite promising to crack down on violent groups, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer fluffed it again:
Young Muslim men rampaging through Birmingham should have offered the government a convenient chance to quash the accusations that the Prime Minister is “Two Tier Keir”.
Fuelled by rumours that the far right were organising a protest in the area, the demonstration soon took on a dark life of its own. Young men in balaclavas harassed journalists, driving Sky News’ “communities correspondent” off the air, with an attempt even being made to slash the wheels of the Sky van. LBC’s Fraser Knight was chased out of the area. Mr Knight explained that “6 men ran after us down a road with what looked like a weapon”, and that “cars followed us”. “There wasn’t a safe place for us to go for miles,” he says.
Meanwhile, a white man was attacked outside a pub by a mob of masked men, and attempts were made to stop random drivers. This violence and intimidation, of course, mirrors that which has been perpetrated in riots elsewhere.
But there is a difference. Where were the police in Birmingham? We have seen riot police wielding dogs and batons against the far right, and Keir Starmer was promising that rioters would face the “full force of the law“. In Birmingham, though, the police appear to have acted with a light touch. One officer was recorded apparently dismissing the violence as a “small scuffle“.
Local MP Jess Phillips is famed for her outspoken and combative manner, so one might have expected swift condemnation. (Indeed, given that Phillips was recently bragging about how “unflappable” she is around criminals, it’s a shame she wasn’t there to resolve things.)
Actually, Phillips’ first public response to the disorder was to quote tweet a video of a group of masked men and write:
To be clear all day rumours have been spread that a far right group were coming and it was done entirely to get Muslim people out on the street to drive this content. It is misinformation being spread to create trouble.
Okay, I can believe it. But surely this was time to tell them to disperse and go home? Phillips then quote tweeted Richard Tice MP, who had published a video of the Sky News team being intimidated. “These people came to this location because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them,” she wrote:
This misinformation was spread entirely to create this content. Don’t spread it MR Tice!
Sure, again, we get it. The gathering was fuelled by misinformation. But when a group of journalists — with a female correspondent, no less — is being intimidated by masked men flashing trigger fingers at the camera, it has clearly evolved into something more hooliganistic. These men were not confronting a skinhead in a “Blood and Honour” t-shirt. They were confronting a woman trying to do her job.
Esmerelda Weatherwax gathers reports from local media in Birmingham over the weekend:
A huge crowd gathered in Bordesley Green this evening following rumours that a “far right rally” was going to take place … hundreds of mostly young men in balaclavas and face masks gathered outside the McDonald’s at the junction of Bordesley Green and Belchers Lane.
300 or so people mostly Asian and male, many dressed in black and wearing masks or coverings, turned up after the rumour spread rapidly online.
Despite the rumours circulating today, there was no rally and the crowd was seen later dispersing, with some young men using the opportunity to show off on motorbikes.
A 45-year-old from Bordesley Green said he was there to stand up against fascism … “We don’t want this portrayed as Muslim men causing trouble …”
Yardley West and Stechford Cllr Baber Baz was among the crowd this evening and said there was a “strong response from the community”. Cllr Baz added: “As long as it remains peaceful which I am sure it will we are sending a strong message to the EDL that they are not welcome here and will not divide our community.”
A Sky News reporter was forced off air after she was sworn at, with one man on a bike riding towards the camera before saying: “Free Palestine, f*** EDL“. A man wearing a balaclava and wielding a knife “stabbed” the tyre of a Sky News van after its reporter was forced off air, it has been reported. Sky News had to cut short its broadcast in Bordesley Green after its reporter was sworn at on TV.
Maxims in the Skies: the German LMG 08/15
Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 24, 2024As soon as the MG08/15 “light” machine gun was adopted by Germany, it was recognized as an ideal basis for an aircraft gun. Weight was of the essence for WW1 aircraft, and a lightened Maxim was just the thing to use. So the Spandau Arsenal began producing the LMG08/15 (the “L” in which might stand for either air-cooled or lightweight; we really don’t know which) in May 1916. In addition to cutting a ton of lightening slots in the water jacket, the guns also had mechanisms added to allow a pilot to cycle both the bolt and the feed system from behind the gun (something not possible with a standard ground model). The example we are looking at today has a great example of an early style of such device completely intact …
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QotD: The crew of HMS Sheffield in the Falklands
May 4th 1982: As HMS Sheffield is abandoned and the fire spreads towards the Sea Dart ammunition. The remaining crew gather on the foredeck singing “Always look on the bright side of life”.
Now I have heard that story and I’ve always thought it were more than a little bit mythmaking. And yet, and yet. Someone I know (our fathers knew each other, he took a sister out a few times, we worked together for 6 months later on) was actually there. Running the flight control stuff from the next ship over:
Singing led by the FC that we had loaned to them. One of our Sea Kings closed on the fo’c’sle to pick up wounded and saw them all swaying from side to side with their arms outstretched. I learned why when he got back.
I’ll take that as being something that really happened then. Not for publication, not something published for home consumption, but something that actually happened. Young men, on a burning ship, not knowing whether they’d be lifted off before the fire got to the missiles and the kaboom of their little bits all over the South Atlantic. […]
We’re a weird, weird culture here in Britain. We will, and do, take the piss out of absolutely anything, including our own impending death.
Now, whether that’s quite what the economists mean by institutions that aid in economic development is another thing but it is indeed one of those institutions of that British culture.
It’s also wholly glorious but then I’m a Brit so I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Tim Worstall, “The British Are A Very, Very, Weird People”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-05-06.
