World War Two
Published 25 Jan 2022With high losses of German soldiers and low birth rates, the Nazis worry about who will inherit the Nazi paradise they are fighting to build. One of their ideas to breed a new Aryan generation is the Lebensborn association.
(more…)
January 26, 2022
Nazi Breeding Farms – Lebensborn – On the Homefront 014
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“Last year, we’re told, was the ‘deadliest’ year for transgender people since records began”
Tish Still, parent of a child who identifies as transgender, was worried about the “epidemic” of trans murder victims:
Facts always matter — but they take on a particular importance when they’re being used to claim that your child could be murdered. So I decided to delve into the research used to inform these claims. For me, it was personal.
The Government doesn’t publish data on the number of transgender people in the UK, though in 2018 it “tentatively” estimated that the figure stood between “approximately 200,000-500,000”. What proportion of that number must have been killed to warrant today’s warnings of trans murder epidemic? 10? 100? 1,000?
To find out, I analysed data collected by the trans-led organisation Transgender Europe, which has received more than a million dollars from the Arcus Foundation, who are based in the US and take a keen interest in transgender issues. As well as donating almost $150,000 to Stonewall, in 2015 the Arcus Foundation handed $312,000 to Transgender Europe specifically to supply reliable global data on transgender murders. The website it created provides an interactive map and links to documents naming the transgender victims.
Looking at Transgender Europe’s list of cases, it became clear — to my relief — that the total murders reported for the United Kingdom since 2008 amounted to 11. This translates as a murder rate of around 0.165%.
Now, that is still significantly higher than the murder rate for the UK as a whole: the ONS reports that the homicide rate in the UK for the year ending March 2020 was 11.7 per million people, rising to 17 per million among men. But look a bit closer at the list of trans murder victims, and that figure of 11 becomes increasingly suspect.
For instance, two of the listed victims, Vikki Thompson and Jacqueline Cowdry, appear to have been erroneously included. Thompson died by suicide while incarcerated in HMP Leeds, while Cowdry’s death was ultimately ruled as non-suspicious. This reduces the total to nine unlawful deaths, all of whom were born male. (By contrast, the number of homicides committed by transgender people between 2008 and 2017 was 12.) For context, the number of women killed by men during the same period was 1800. So much for our alleged “cis-privilege”.
Searching for more information led me to the work of Karen Ingala-Smith, who founded the Counting Dead Women project in 2012 after she realised that there was no central record of the extent of femicide here in the UK; thanks to her, a list of murdered women is read out in the House of Commons each year to imprint the rate of femicide on the minds our political class. Ingala-Smith’s tireless work focusses on female victims of, predominantly, male violence, though she made an exception to highlight the discrepancy between the mass hysteria about transgender victims of homicide compared to the treatment of woman-killing as mere background noise. (There is still no equivalent to the Trans Day of Remembrance for the much greater number of women killed by male violence.)
Crucially, her research sheds a vital spotlight on the nine remaining victims identified by the Trans Murder Monitoring report. Reading it, two things become clear. The first is that it is not entirely certain that all the victims themselves identified with the label “transgender”. The second is that the motives behind these crimes are more complex than straightforward “transphobia”.
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“Soldier of Heaven” – Mountain Warfare in WW1 – Sabaton History 108 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 25 Jan 2022The war in the Alps between the Italians and the Austro-Hungarians added new dimensions to the fighting in the Great War since mountain warfare has its own unique set of challenges and dangers. What sort of men were doing the fighting here? And how did they cope with it? How did the survivors survive? Let’s take a look.
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Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editor: Marek Kaminski
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.com
Sources:
– IWM Q 65115, IWM Q 65299, IWM Q 65062, IWM Q 65324, IWM Q 65102, IWM 1034-4, IWM 1062-14, IWM 459, IWM Q 114805б IWM Q 65104, IWM Q 65053, IWM Q 54778, IWM Q 65114, IWM Q 65130, IWM Q 65158
– esercito.difesa.it
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Three generations of the OG Puritans
At Founding Questions, Severian considers the New England Puritans and the world they inhabited:
Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.
Total cultural and intellectual uniformity, constantly reinforced. If those Puritans were going to go crazy, in other words, they’d do it within very carefully circumscribed boundaries. The only thing close to that level of mental control is Twitter … and I suppose I must put the disclaimer out front, so that you can factor it in if you disagree with me: I hate the Puritans. They’re just SJWs with balls and a slightly less tedious prose style. When they’re not obsessing over the tiniest motions of their pwecious widdle selves, they’re screwing you over for the hellbound heathen you are.
Credit where it’s due, though: If you need to go sodbusting in an unexplored continent, the Puritans are your guys. The original Plymouth Bay colony was thoroughly militarized, and they didn’t fuck around — when the local Indian tribes were beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t do something about these White devils they’d let loose, the Puritans attacked the fiercest tribe and wiped them out, as a show of force. Life was hard in the OG Plymouth Colony, but it was about as good as you were going to get in that era.
But the typical inheritance pattern soon took over. “Regression to the mean” is a behavioral phenomenon, too, not just an IQ one. Puritanism is an obsessive, paranoid creed; it can only flourish in times of high stress and dire insecurity. But by the 1690s, Plymouth Colony was arguably the healthiest, wealthiest, safest place per capita in Christendom (not a high bar, obviously, but still). The OG settlers were all gone by that time, of course — the original settlement, you’ll recall, was 1620 — and so were most of their almost as hardcore kids. The third generation was coming up fast …
… but finding their way blocked by the old men of the previous generation, who were as tediously, dogmatically Puritan as the OGs, but without the stones. This made them — the 2nd generation — enormous hypocrites, but even without the hypocrisy, imagine living in a world where the ultra-wealthy who control everything in society tell you that they deserve it all, because they’re God’s Elect, while you, sinner, deserve to live in a rented box and eat bugs and own nothing, because God hates you.
History’s full of weird stuff like that, and that was the situation circa 1690. One example will have to do: Since we probably all got to experience Nathaniel Hawthorne’s existential angst back in high school, consider that the ancestor who caused him so much grief, Judge John Hathorne, was born in 1641. He would’ve been 51, then, during his trial service – a ripe old age by 17th century standards.
Not only that, but the 2nd generation — the one that stubbornly refused to move on and let the kids take their place in the sun — had spent the previous twenty years grievously fucking things up. King Philip’s War nearly ruined the colony, there’d been widespread plague, and oh yeah, that whole Restoration thing back in England — the hardest of hardcore Puritan thinkers in the run-up to the Civil War had been colonials; guys like Col. Rainsborough were closely associated with Massachusetts, etc. Lots of bad blood on the other side of the water, and while the third generation was willing to let bygones by bygones, the 2nd generation wasn’t.
So: Hypocritical old throwbacks and cavemen, with a decades-long track record of dumbfuckery, who just wouldn’t get out of the way. As they got older, they got more insular and inward-looking, as old people tend to do … and “more inward looking” for a Puritan is a near-BCG level of narcissism. Meanwhile, the new generation is eager to take their place in the burgeoning Atlantic world, especially after the Glorious Revolution (1688) … but can’t.
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Reliant Robin Three Wheeler | British Cars | Drive in (1973)
ThamesTv
Published 21 Jul 2019Tony Bastable takes the iconic Reliant Robin for a spin to see what this new British car has to offer.
First shown: 29/10/1973
If you would like to license a clip from this video please e mail:
archive@fremantle.com
Quote: VT8219
From the comments:
Tortinwall
2 years ago
I love the idea that you buy a Reliant Robin and then keep “valuable objects” in the boot.
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QotD: “Waltzing Matilda”
The poet Banjo Paterson is traditionally credited with the song in the version generally performed, though some scholars continue to question this. Still, the song we know today began life in January 1895, when Paterson was visiting the Macpherson property at Dagworth Station in Queensland, north-west of Winton. Also visiting, from Victoria, was Christina Macpherson, who’d come home to spend Christmas with her father and brothers after the death of their mother. One day Christina played Paterson a tune she’d heard at the races in western Victoria, and the poet said he thought he could put words to it. The tune is said to have been “Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea”, but there was also an 18th century English marching song called “The Bold Fusilier”. Paterson claimed never to have heard the earlier lyric but its pattern is so similar it’s impossible to believe that “Matilda” wasn’t laid out to the scheme of the earlier number:
A gay Fusilier was marching down through Rochester
Bound for the war in the Low Country
And he cried as he tramped through the dear streets of Rochester
Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?
Who’ll be a sojer? Who’ll be a sojer?Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?
Marlborough being the Duke thereof: Winston Churchill’s forebear. “Cried as he tramped”? “Sang as he watched”? Don’t tell me that’s not a conscious evocation. Nonetheless, “Waltzing Matilda” is a splendid improvement on the original. If you’re a non-Australian who learned the song as a child, chances are you loved singing it long before you had a clue what the hell was going on. What’s a swagman? What’s a billabong? Why’s it under a coolibah tree? Who cares? It’s one of the most euphonious songs ever written, and the fact that the euphonies are all explicitly Australian and the words recur in no other well known song is all the more reason why “Matilda” should have been upgraded to official anthem status.
And yes, a “swagman” is a hobo, and this one steals a “jumbuck” (sheep), but he ends up drowning, which gives the song a surer moral resolution than most similar material. Yet in a sense that’s over-thinking it. It’s not about the literal meaning of the words, but rather the bigger picture that opens up when they’re set to the notes of that great rollicking melody: the big sky and empty horizon and blessed climate, all the possibilities of an island continent, a literally boundless liberation from the Victorian tenements and laborers’ cottages of cramped little England. Few of us would wish to be an actual swagman with a tucker bag, but the song is itself a kind of musical swagman with a psychological tucker bag, a rowdy vignette that captures the size of the land. One early version of it went “Rovin’ Australia, rovin’ Australia, who’ll come a-rovin’ Australia with me” – which is a lousy lyric, but accurately describes what the song does.
One sign of the song’s muscular quality is the number of variations. Of the rock’n’roll crowd’s monkeying around with it, I think I’ll stick with Bill Haley and the Comets’ goofy “Rockin’ Matilda”. The Pogues-Tom Waits approach – “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, “Tom Traubert’s Blues” – seems to me to glum up the works unnecessarily. To use it for the story of a soldier who loses his legs at Gallipoli is unduly reductive: It’s too good a real marching song to be recast as an ironic marching song. I don’t know whether today’s diggers marched to “Matilda” in Afghanistan and Iraq and East Timor and wherever’s next but it’s one of the greatest marching songs ever, and today as a century ago it remains the great Australian contribution to the global songbook:
Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabongYou’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me
Mark Steyn, adapted from A Song for the Season, 2008.
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January 25, 2022
US Armored Doctrine 1919-1942, Part 1
The Chieftain
Published 22 Jan 2022Continuing on this series of videos supporting the WW2 Channel, this is part one of a two-part look at how the US Army ended up with the armored force with which it entered combat in North Africa.
Sources include:
Forging the Thunderbolt (Gillie)
Men on Iron Ponies (Morton)
Greasy Automatons and the Horsey Set (Tedesco)
A number of Center of Military History documents
A few other things I’ve forgotten about, but the above will get you 90% of the way there.Improved-Computer-And-Scout Car Fund:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/The_Chieftain
Direct Paypal https://paypal.me/thechieftainshatChristie Tank Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0APcE…
1930 Cavalry Journal.
https://mcoepublic.blob.core.usgovclo…
1939 Cavalry Journal
https://mcoepublic.blob.core.usgovclo…
Soviet doctrine video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7nr8…
Interview with Ken Estes on USMC tank history
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DBmN…
Assessment of USMC light tanks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy4dw…
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The fantasy of a modern economy without money
Jon Hersey and Thomas Walker-Werth consider the claim that we’d all be better off without money in a truly modern, egalitarian society:
Capitalism, to the extent it has existed, has been incredibly successful at lifting most of humanity out of poverty, incentivizing the creation of incredible, life-enhancing technologies, such as those Maezawa used to make his fortune — not to mention, travel to space. But it’s long had its critics, and he is far from the first to propose a sort of Garden-of-Eden world where everything is plentiful and free. Karl Marx envisioned a similar utopia. Communism, he said, ultimately would bring about a world without money:
In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.
And although “society distributes labour-power” — meaning government planners tell people what to do to ensure that things (such as “free” Ferraris) get made — workers could also all pursue whatever hobbies or occupations strike their fancy. “[I]n communist society,” Marx explained,
where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
[…]
Although Marx considered himself a social scientist and economist — and although his ideas are still some of the most widely taught — they aren’t much taught in social science or economics departments, except as foils. That’s because virtually all of Marx’s hypotheses have been debunked. For one, who’s going to build the free Ferraris that Maezawa has dreamed up, never mind tackle more mundane tasks, with no incentive? But for those who don’t find such commonsense thought experiments convincing — or who think, as Marx did, that human nature will somehow mysteriously change — the impracticality of Marx’s moneyless state was demonstrated by what Austrian economists have come to call the calculation problem. Ludwig von Mises once explained the problem as follows:
If a hydroelectric power station is to be built, one must know whether or not this is the most economical way to produce the energy needed. How can he know this if he cannot calculate costs and output?
We may admit that in its initial period a socialist regime could to some extent rely upon the experience of the preceding age of capitalism. But what is to be done later, as conditions change more and more? Of what use could the prices of 1900 be for the director in 1949? And what use can the director in 1980 derive from the knowledge of the prices of 1949?
The paradox of “planning” is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark.
In short, without prices, people have no relatable, quantifiable means of comparing and contrasting options about how to spend time and capital, which is vital for determining how best to use these naturally scarce resources. “New Scientist magazine reported that in the future, cars could be powered by hazelnuts,” said comedian Jimmy Fallon, in a skit that captures this point hilariously. “That’s encouraging, considering an eight-ounce jar of hazelnuts costs about nine dollars. Yeah, I’ve got an idea for a car that runs on bald eagle heads and Fabergé eggs.”
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Tank Chats #138 | White Scout Car | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 22 Oct 2021Our Patreons have already enjoyed Early Access and AD free viewing of our weekly YouTube video! Consider becoming a Patreon Supporter today: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
David Fletcher is back with a new Tank Chat on White Scout Car this week! Find out how a sewing machine manufacturer, from Cleveland Ohio, became one of the largest producers of vehicles in the USA.
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QotD: James Bond’s stand-in
Julie Burchill, “How James Bond became the prisoner of woke”, Spiked, 2021-10-14.
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January 24, 2022
David Starkey – The Churchills episode 3
Whitehall Moll History Clips
Published 29 May 2019How did Winston Churchill draw on the lessons of his ancestor John Churchill to fight World War II? The Duke of Marlborough’s influence is apparent as Dr David Starkey explains
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“Men and woman exist”, opens What Do Men Want?, “Occasionally, we even like each other”
Jarryd Bartle reviews What Do Men Want? by Nina Power:
“Most men are, like most women, a mixture of good and bad, but they are not, as a rule, irredeemable,” Power notes.
Indeed, if there is ever to be a reconciliation between men and women, it may require considering the interests, needs and desires of good men, rather than a laser focus on the bad.
What then, do men want?
When Power asked her male friends this incredibly leading question, the responses ranged from “To be left alone” to “Pussy” to “Beer”. However, the real answer seems to be: something to do.
Power writes, “It is hard to imagine how the role [of men] today could be any more evacuated of meaning or status.”
The old-fashioned role of the Patriarch has been dead for at least one full generation now, and we haven’t really found an adequate replacement. The result is that men are adrift in a state of nihilism. In pop culture men seem to play the role of the “horny jester” to the self-serious goals of feminine social change. But men aren’t just interested in sex and frivolity; they also want a life of meaning.
The consequences of this listlessness are all too evident. Men are vastly overrepresented in statistics on suicide, unemployment, drug overdoses and crime.
Most men aren’t violent, but they are far more violent than women. Women are sometimes the target of this violence, but far more often men take out their pent-up aggression and sadism on other men. Often, we are told to blame these pathologies on “toxic masculinity” — that men need to be liberated from their preferences and to embrace the feminine ideals of tenderness, openness and sociability.
This solution sees sex difference as an irrelevancy, merely a reified founding myth of hegemonic masculinity, perfectly capable of tinkering. For Power, this approach is exceedingly cruel, failing to accept men as embodied creatures with a distinct way of experiencing the world:
To describe masculinity as “toxic” is to suggest that not only have men been poisoned, but that they are extending their poison to the rest of society.
This recent call to feminise men also didn’t occur in a vacuum.
There has been a significant decline in the needs for physical labour in Western countries since the turn of the century. Our increasingly service-oriented, tech-mediated economy requires very different temperaments, often drawing on the feminine virtues of empathic communication.
For Power, these broader structural changes have meant “certain kinds of behaviour come to be rewarded over others”.
Whilst we can’t turn back the clock, this re-evaluation of the role of men in society should be done in a manner which respects the dignity of men as different from woman.
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Parker-Hale .303-.22 Conversion Kits for the Enfield, Lewis, and Vickers
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
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In July of 1918, the British military formally adopted a Parker-Hale system of adapting .303-caliber arms to .22 rimfire for short range training. The system involved lining standard barrels with .22 caliber blanks that were machined with full size .303 chambers. Special cartridge inserts were used which had the external dimensions of .303 cartridges, but held .22LR cartridges inside. This allowed the weapon to use the same feeding system as it normally would, and to duplicate the handling and trigger mechanism of a standard .303 caliber gun while only firing a small rimfire cartridge.
Parker-Hale built kits of this type for the Lee Enfield rifle, the Lewis LMG, and the Vickers HMG, and all were used by the British military. In the Lewis and Vickers, there was no accommodation made to actually cycle the guns; this sort of .22 practice drill was done by manually cycling the actions after each shot. Still, it was a good way to practice basic drill (loading, unloading, etc) as well as basic marksmanship without the noise of full power cartridges and without the need for a full-power-rated backstop.
The system for the Lee Enfield was replaced in 1920 (after only about 2 years of use) with the No2 MkIV* rifle, a dedicated .22 conversion of an SMLE. Parker-Hale kept the system in their commercial catalog into the 1930s, however.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
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QotD: The Punk-Prog War of 1977
The Sex Pistols were angry young men — sois-dissant situationists who hated the dreamy Jung men with their Hipgnosis gatefold album art, their endless concept albums and “song-cycles”, and their am-dram dressing-up box shenanigans. The progs were pretentious and effete and disdained, not only for being able to read music, but for littering their lyrics with symbols from the collective unconscious. It all came from doing too much prep — they were the decadent ancien regime to punk’s snotty sans culottes.
Whether there was any truth to all this didn’t matter much. As mediated by their friends at the NME, the punks despised prog — a genre they regarded as anything but progressive. And Genesis were among the original sinners. True, it was a Pink Floyd t-shirt onto which Johnny Rotten had scrawled “I hate”, an alteration which amounted to all the wit he needed back then to get hired by Malcolm McLaren. But Genesis were the Druidic Lords of the iddly-diddly — the eye-wash and the whimsy that the bin-bag and safety-pin boys and girls found so contemptible.
The Pistols drew as much of their energy from the desire to make overfed rock dinosaurs like Genesis extinct, as they did from making music themselves. They wanted to see the carcasses of these privately educated fops littering the impact crater of punk rock, exposed for the cold blooded, lumbering, vegetative grotesques that they were. The nimble-witted likes of Rotten and Co. pogoed jubilantly on the wreckage of shattered Melotrons and twin-necked Gibsons and their long-overdue graves. Their hour — 1977, year zero — had surely arrived.
Simon Evans, “Rocker Crocked. Pistol Shot.”, Quillette, 2021-10-04.
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January 23, 2022
“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has become the world’s first Influencer Nation”
In the free-to-cheapskate-free-subscribers version of The Line‘s weekly Dispatch, they look at how the Liberal government’s approach to social media has evolved from a useful way to stay in contact with the voters to, effectively, the primary communication channel to flatter themselves and conduct industrial-strength virtue signalling sessions:
Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”
When Justin Trudeau and his merry band of iPhone-packin’ Liberals came to power in 2015, they quickly established themselves as world leaders in the use of social media to backscratch, logroll, big-up, and otherwise tell one another, and the world, how awesome they thought they all were. We at The Line found it all pretty obnoxious out of the gate, but given Trudeau’s repeated electoral successes, it’s clear that YMMV on this sort of stuff.
But one thing that has happened over the past seven years is that social media has gone from a significant vehicle for the branding and promotion of the Liberal government, into something close to an end itself. It’s not clear when the shift happened, but at some point the Liberals went from Twitter being used as a way of selling policy, to policy being little more than a device for getting the shamrock Twitter army riled up. Similarly, where once Instagram was a way for Liberal ministers to show off while doing Liberal minister-y things, it’s pretty clear that now, the only rationale for a Liberal minister to do anything is if it serves the imperatives of the ‘gram.
To put it plainly: Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has become the world’s first Influencer Nation.
Understanding that Canada’s federal government is now little more than a social media account is the best — nay, only — way we have found of making sense of what Trudeau’s Liberals are up to. For example, earlier this week the Prime Minister’s Office sent an email around that contained a “readout” (that is, a more or less invented summary) of a conversation Trudeau allegedly had with some of his ministers and senior officials. The subject matter was “the latest developments in Ukraine,” and it is absolutely the sort of thing the prime minister of Canada ought to be discussing with his minister of defence, his minister of foreign affairs, and the clerk of the privy council.
But as the sort of thing that you would summarize as a readout and mail to members of the press gallery, it’s utterly preposterous. Paul Wells of Maclean’s, bless his heart, found the time and energy to chapter-and-verse it, and please do read the whole thing. But we would draw your attention to the second last paragraph of the readout:
Together, the Prime Minister and ministers raised the need to find a peaceful solution through dialogue. They reaffirmed Canada’s steadfast support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and considered current and future assistance to Ukraine. Prime Minister Trudeau emphasized that any further military incursion into Ukraine would have serious consequences, including coordinated sanctions.
Does this sound like any conversation you’ve ever had, or overheard? Is anyone credulous enough to think this is remotely how the discussion went? This isn’t the summary of an actual cabinet meeting; at best, it’s a placeholder bit of boilerplate for someone hell bent on trying to write an Aaron Sorkin movie about Canadian politics. But what it really is a sort of reverse New Yorker cartoon contest: It’s the caption for an Instagram post that you’re supposed to imagine in your mind’s eye.
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