Quotulatiousness

January 17, 2022

“We need to address the corrosive influence of behavioural science on public life”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Frank Furedi on the British government’s use (and over-use) of “nudge” polices to influence the behaviour of the British public:

Behavioural science, aka “nudging”, has been used by the government during the pandemic to scare people into doing the “right” thing. This insidious development has even been acknowledged by Simon Ruda, one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, which is part-owned by the UK government. He wrote that the “most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed [to] the public”.

Though he said that the propagation of fear had more to do “with government communicators and the incentives of news broadcasters” than with behavioural scientists themselves, Ruda’s admission is still striking. He even expressed concern about the state’s willingness “to use its heft to influence our lives without the accountability of legislative and parliamentary scrutiny”.

Ruda is not the only behavioural scientist concerned about officialdom’s systematic scaremongering. On 22 March 2020, a paper written by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Behaviour Advisory Committee (SPI-B) for the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) complained that the public was too relaxed about the pandemic. “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”, it stated, adding that too many “are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group”. It then urged the government to increase “the perceived level of personal threat… among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”.

Some members of SAGE have since reported feeling “embarrassed” by the nature of SPI-B’s advice. As one regular SAGE attendee put it last year: “The British people have been subjected to an unevaluated psychological experiment without being told that is what’s happening.”

It is to be welcomed that at least some behavioural scientists are now questioning the political use of their discipline. But the problem goes deeper than fear-mongering during the pandemic. We need to address the corrosive influence of behavioural science on public life in general.

The shooting range where you fire over a busy road

Filed under: Europe, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 18 Oct 2021

The Brünnlisau shooting range in Switzerland has its targets on the other side of a major road. And it’s safe. Here’s how and why. Thanks to everyone at the Schiessanlage Brünnlisau!

Camera: Alicja Pahl
Producer: Sebastian Capeda at Viven https://viven.ch
Editor: Michelle Martin https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin

I’m at https://tomscott.com

on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott

and on Instagram as tomscottgo

QotD: The British ruling class reaction to fascism and communism

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out of date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine gun – by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they must be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the “Red” does not understand the theories the “Red” is preaching; if he did, his own position as bodyguard of the monied class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.

The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain, etc. was to come to an agreement with Hitler. But – and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense of national solidarity, comes in – they could only do so by breaking up the Empire and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing speeches about “the duty of loyalty to our conquerors” are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do anything but make the worst of both worlds.

One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what-not were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

January 16, 2022

Library borrowing versus book store sales

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I used to be a regular library user, but tapered off substantially after a few unhappy visits to the Toronto Reference Library on Yonge Street in the late ’80s (I’m now fully a believer in some of the wilder tales of disruptive and even criminal behaviour within libraries). I had my doubts about the direction most western library systems chose to concentrate on “popular” books and to get rid of “old” or infrequently borrowed books. It seemed to me that this was an attempt to set up libraries in direct competition with bookstores, and a deliberate act of neglect toward the function of libraries as repositories of valuable but less popular media. In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte details a fascinating natural experiment we’ve all be involved in over the last two years that seems to prove that library systems have been, in effect, taking money away from book sellers:

“Toronto Public Library” by Jim of JimOnLight is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Those of you who have been reading SHuSH for a while know that I suspect public libraries are doing harm to the publishing industry and author incomes.

Before the shooting starts, my standard qualifiers: I love libraries; they do a lot of fine work and are crucial civic institutions, running many outstanding programs and providing many necessary services, including the lending of books to children and people who genuinely can’t afford to buy them; I am always in libraries for research and to borrow and read hard-to-find books; I don’t want libraries to go away; I don’t want them harmed; I want their lending practices adjusted before they swallow what’s left of commercial publishing, book retailing, and, along with it, what’s left of author incomes.

By way of background, I’ve written at length in previous newsletters about how public libraries in the last decades of the last century abandoned their traditional role as gatekeepers of the culture, responsible for the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic growth of the public, choosing instead to pander to their patrons. They began pimping the likes of Mickey Spillane and Jacqueline Susann to goose the foot traffic and circulation stats they habitually use to demand of their political masters more funding and better buildings.

Over time, librarians have trained people who can afford to buy books for their own entertainment — the vast majority of library reading is for entertainment — to borrow them instead. Today, three out of four books read in the US and four out of five read in Canada are borrowed, not bought. That is bad for publishing, bookselling, and author incomes.

And then the Winged Hussars Wuhan Coronavirus arrived:

I believe it is self-evident that spending loads of taxpayer money to make the most popular books available at no charge at dozens of points around a city (as well as online) undermines retail sales of books, as it would if the same were done for coffee, running shoes, or Leafs’ tickets.

I have to admit, at the same time, that I’ve lacked hard evidence showing a portion of book borrowing represents lost sales. Nobody has thoroughly researched the question (it certainly isn’t in the interests of libraries to do so). The absence of a smoking gun has made it easy for library defenders to throw up their hands: maybe there’s a relationship, maybe not. People love free shit and will cheerfully strangle good faith to retain access to it.

I’ve tried to devise ways to prove conclusively that libraries are seriously undermining book sales. Maybe some huge experiment where we closed the public libraries in a large jurisdiction and studied what happened to retail book sales. But who was going to organize that? It seemed impossible until COVID-19 stepped up.

Libraries across North America and, indeed, around the world, have been closed, semi-closed, or otherwise limited in their borrowing activities throughout the two-year course of the pandemic. According to Library Journal, total circulation of library materials collapsed by 25.7% in 2020 (notwithstanding a huge spike in e-book borrowing). It looks like physical borrowing fell by roughly half. The 2021 numbers aren’t out yet but individual library reports suggest they will look a lot like 2020.

Meanwhile, over in publishing land, the champagne corks are flying. US book sales, which grew healthily in the first pandemic year 2020, grew again in 2021 and are now 19% ahead of the pre-pandemic year, 2019. All the major publishers have reported smashing sales (attributing the increase to their own genius). All categories are up, including adult fiction (31% over 2019) and adult non-fiction (10% over 2019).

Going by these numbers, it appears that a roughly 25% reduction in library borrowing leads over a two-year period to an increase of 19% in bookselling. I wouldn’t bank on those numbers, or even on the rough proportions, but I think the data demonstrates that when you make books more difficult to borrow for free, people turn more frequently to booksellers.

Food for Leningrad, Breaking the Siege! – WW2 – 177- January 15th, 1943

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

World War Two
Published 15 Jan 2022

Soviet attacks are launched this week to destroy the Hungarians, all while the German desperation at Stalingrad and Velikie Luki continues, but in the far north the Soviets have broken through the siege of Leningrad after 16 months. And the Casablanca Conference begins, a meeting to guide the war’s future progress.
(more…)

Is the narrative about the Trans Movement about to change?

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan marks a perhaps significant change in how mainstream media outlets are discussing the Trans Movement:

An unusual thing happened in the conversation about transgender identity in America this week. The New York Times conceded that there is, indeed, a debate among medical professionals, transgender people, gays and lesbians and others about medical intervention for pre-pubescent minors who have gender dysphoria. The story pulled some factual punches, but any mildly-fair airing of this debate in the US MSM is a breakthrough of a kind.

Here’s the truth that the NYT was finally forced to acknowledge: “Clinicians are divided” over the role of mental health counseling before making irreversible changes to a child’s body. Among those who are urging more counseling and caution for kids are ground-breaking transgender surgeons. This very public divide was first aired by Abigail Shrier a few months ago on Bari’s Substack, of course, where a trans pioneer in sex-change surgery opined: “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the … I’ll call it just ‘sloppy’, sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process.” Oof.

The NYT piece also concedes another key fact: that puberty blockers are neither harmless nor totally reversible. Money quote:

    Some of the drug regimens bring long-term risks, such as irreversible fertility loss. And in some cases, thought to be quite rare, transgender people later “detransition” to the gender they were assigned at birth. Given these risks, as well as the increasing number of adolescents seeking these treatments, some clinicians say that teens need more psychological assessment than adults do.

I would think that, just as a general rule, minors making permanent, life-changing decisions should receive more psychological treatment than adults. How on earth is this not the default? In what other field of medicine do patients diagnose themselves, and that alone is justification for dramatic, irreversible medication?

The NYT doesn’t give you the data for the “increasing number” of transitions because it’s hard to find in the US. In the UK, however, the data show a 3,200 percent rise in adolescents seeking transition over a decade — 70 percent of whom are girls seeking to become boys, a break from historical norms where boys/men were much more likely to seek transition. Nor does the NYT give any data for “detransitioners”. But any brief look online suggests they are not exactly “quite rare”. They are, in fact, becoming a small but recognizable and tenacious part of the trans landscape. And among the risks of puberty blockers that the NYT does not mention are neurological damage, bone-density loss, and a permanent inability to experience sexual pleasure. And in almost every case (98 percent in one report), puberty blockers are never reversed.

The world’s most useful model railway

Filed under: Germany, Railways — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 27 Sep 2021

In Darmstadt, Germany, there’s the Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld: a model railway connected to actual railway signalling equipment, so that controllers can learn without putting any real trains in danger. I got to learn the very basics.
■ More about the railway (in German): https://www.eisenbahnbetriebsfeld.de/

Camera: Moritz Janisch
Producer: Marcel Fenchel https://www.fenchel-janisch.de
Editor: Isla McTear

With thanks to Deutsche Bahn and DB Training, AKA Bahn, the Institut für Bahnsysteme und Bahntechnik at TU Darmstadt, and all the team at the Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld!

I’m at https://tomscott.com

on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott

and on Instagram as tomscottgo

QotD: Once “discovered”, colonization of the Americas was inevitable

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Another major structural issue is this: what precisely would our pious anthropology professors have had Europeans do with the New World once they found it?

This is not a joke. Political reality has a way of crashing in on the pipe dreams of liberal academics. The reality is, if the English had not colonised, then the French or the Dutch would have. If the Spanish had not colonised, the Portuguese would have. This would have shifted the balance of power at home, and any European country which had not colonised, would have been relegated to secondary status. And it is easy to overestimate the amount of control that European governments actually had. As soon as the New World was discovered, many fisherman and traders sailed across the Atlantic on their own, in hopes of circumventing tax authorities and scoring a fortune. Long before colonies were established in most regions, the New World was crawling with Europeans whose superior technology gave them an edge in combat. Nonetheless, it was extremely dangerous for Europeans to provoke fights with Native Americans, and most of them tried to avoid this when possible. In retrospect, one could in theory be impressed that so many European governments showed a genuine concern to rein in the worst excesses of their subjects, with an express eye to protecting the Indians from depredation. The logic was simple: they attempted to protect their subjects at home, in order to secure good order and a better tax base. So they would do the same to their subjects in the New World. For a long time, few Europeans harboured any master plan of pushing the Native Americans out of their own lands. In more densely populated regions such as Mexico, such an idea must have seemed an absurdity. Reality tends to occur ad hoc. Boundaries often took generations to move, and would have seemed fixed at the time. For several centuries, many Europeans assumed that they would long be a minority on the North American continent. In Mexico and Peru, they always have been.

Population density mattered, a lot, when it came to pre-modern global migrations. China and India were “safe” from excessive European colonisation because they had the densest populations in the world, and they were likewise largely immune to any diseases brought by Europeans. SubSaharan Africa had a lower population density depleted by slave raiding, but they still outnumbered European colonists by a large margin throughout the colonial era — again because European contact did not decimate their numbers through disease the way it did in the Americas. It is worth noting that no one claims that Europeans committed genocide in India, Asia or even Africa, although their technological advantages gave them every opportunity had they actually been of a genocidal mindset (as were for example the Mongols). In fact, the European track record shows them to be almost shockingly un-genocidal, given their clear technological advantages over the rest of the world for a period of several centuries. Few other civilisations, given similar power over so much of the world’s people, would have behaved in a less reprehensible manner. This is not to give Europeans a pat on the back. Rather it is to point out that Europeans are regularly painted as the very worst society on Earth, when in fact they had the power to do far, far more evil than they actually did. Let us at least acknowledge this fact.

Jeff Fynn-Paul, “The myth of the ‘stolen century'”, Spectator Magazine, 2020-09-26.

January 15, 2022

The futility of “ethical” divestment agitation

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Education, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In C2C Journal, William McNally explains why activists are demanding that university investments be moved away from fossil fuel companies in favour of “green” investment, and why it won’t work the way they expect:

A recent press release announced that 100 faculty and other staff at three Ontario postsecondary institutions have petitioned the University Pension Plan (UPP) to divest from the fossil fuel sector. The UPP manages the pension funds for over 30,000 employees at the University of Toronto, Queen’s and Guelph. The press release was issued by Shift Action, an organization that helps activist pension members agitate for divestment from what it calls “high-carbon, high-risk fossil fuel investments” such as oil producers and pipeline companies, and shift investments to a “decarbonized” portfolio focused on climate solutions.

I highlighted the UPP petition to draw attention to its activist source, but it is not unique, as it reflects a broader trend of politically driven or, as proponents prefer, “ethical” investing. The motivating claim for divestment in the Shift press release is that we are experiencing a “worsening climate crisis”. That too is a common sentiment nowadays. Because it is a crisis, we have a moral duty to mitigate the threat. The underlying reasoning is that divestment will starve fossil fuel companies of capital and less capital means less production which, in turn, means less CO2 emitted and ultimately slower climate change.

All campaigns of this sort trigger some immediate questions, such as, why choose a strategy as indirect as divestment? Why not reduce fossil fuel use in one’s own backyard, in this case the universities? Looking more broadly, Shift’s argument is more wishful thinking than sound economic analysis. Investors should feel free to hold any portfolio they want, but they should do so without illusions. In particular, they shouldn’t expect divestment to influence climate change by starving oil and natural gas companies of capital.

The first thing wrong is the underlying motivation: there is no climate crisis. As well-known author Bjorn Lomborg states in his most recent book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet: “Climate change is real, but it’s not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is.” One of the clearest ways to see this is through climate economics. Scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that over the next 80 years worldwide GDP per capita will likely increase to 450 percent of today’s level.

Lomborg estimates that climate damages will reduce this anticipated increase to 434 percent. Climate change is a problem. Accepting all of the assumptions that went into this modelling, climate change is likely to leave us somewhat less well off than we otherwise would be, by modestly slowing humanity’s overall progress. But judging by these figures, it is not a crisis.

H/T to Robert at SDA for the link.

Constantinople: The Capital of Eastern Rome

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

Thersites the Historian
Published 13 May 2020

In this video, we look at the new capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire built by Constantine. We start out by briefly exploring the history of the Megarian colony of Byzantion and also how the city was patronized by the emperor Septimius Severus before looking at the late antique origins and medieval history of Constantinople.

Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/thersites

PayPal link: paypal.me/thersites

https://brave.com/noa557

Twitter link: https://twitter.com/ThersitesAthens

Minds.com link: https://www.minds.com/ThersitestheHis…

Steemit/dtube link: https://steemit.com/@thersites/feed

BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/jbyg…

Merely to be accused of transphobia is enough proof for condemnation

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

Jean Hatchet on the plight of Staffordshire University professor James Treadwell, who has been anonymously accused of “transphobia” … and therefore must be punished:

Yesterday evening Professor James Treadwell, a criminologist at Staffordshire University, announced his dismay on Twitter at being accused of “transphobia”. The details are vague, even to him. He has not been presented with evidence and he doesn’t and may never know who has accused him.

He wrote: “Ok to hell with it. I have been told by my employer @StaffsUni albeit only verbally that I am being investigated for Transphobia after formal and official complaints about my Twitter conduct. Read my tweets. Go figure.”

Go figure indeed. It is completely baffling. The issue is Professor Treadwell’s tweeting in favour of the right of female inmates to a single-sex prison estate. In a series of tweets on 27 December 2021, Professor Treadwell outlined his experience of the manipulative behaviour of violent sex offenders who will use loopholes to “game” the criminal justice system. He was clear that his tweets were not directed at the transgender community. He wrote:

“The idea that sex offenders are manipulative individuals who would exploit systems and laws could only be unreal to those who do not know how manipulative sexual offenders can be. All groom, seek to exploit and control.”

And he made very clear that his tweets weren’t attacking the transgender community:

“It isn’t about trans people, it’s about bad people who will exploit the law from self interest and work within a legal framework (that could protect women’s spaces) to do as they want and get what they want. You think that won’t happen, you don’t know how many sex offenders act.”

Who would be better placed to discuss this issue than a leading criminologist who has worked with some of the worst sex offenders in the country? The polite and well-informed tweets hit the nerve of public opinion on the topic of trans-identified men incarcerated in the female prison estate and were widely, mostly supportively, distributed.

Today, Professor Treadwell is in the awful position of fearing for his job; for a few tweets about a subject that he is specifically qualified to speak on. Meanwhile an effective message is simultaneously sent to his academic colleagues nationwide, that they could be targeted next. He is not the first and he won’t be the last. Many criminologists are choosing to look the other way. Professor Treadwell felt that he could no longer do so. His professional integrity appears to be exactly what he is being persecuted for.

Vietnam Mk18 Mod0 Hand-Crank Grenade Launcher

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Dec 2017

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

The Mk18 Mod0 grenade launchers was developed by the Honeywell corporation in 1962, and was the first weapon in what would became a category of high volume grenade launchers used by the US military. The modern iterations are all self-loading, but this first example was fired by a manual crank handle, like a Gatling gun. The Mk18 used the same 40x46mm grenade cartridge as the single shot M79 launcher, and this round’s low pressure allowed the Mk18 to use a rather unusual breech mechanism.

Unlike most belt-fed weapons, the cartridges in the Mk18 never left the belt. Instead, the breech consisted of two rotating spindles which would form the top and bottom halves of the chamber, closing around each shell as the handle was cranked. As a result, a loaded belt of grenades fed into the weapon, and a belt of empty cases came out the other side. Another effect of the low pressure cartridge was a rather short effective range, which limited adoption of the weapon to the US Navy, which bought 1200 and used them primarily on riverine patrol boats. In this application, the short effective range was not much of a hindrance, and the volume of high explosive firepower was a significant asset.

Armament Research Services (ARES) is a specialist technical intelligence consultancy, offering expertise and analysis to a range of government and non-government entities in the arms and munitions field. For detailed photos of this very cool early grenade launcher, don’t miss the ARES companion blog post:

http://armamentresearch.com/

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

QotD: “Jack Ketch as Eugenist”

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

Has any historian ever noticed the salubrious effect, on the English character, of the frenzy for hanging that went on in England during the Eighteenth Century? When I say salubrious, of course, I mean in the purely social sense. At the end of the Seventeenth Century the Englishman was still one of the most turbulent and lawless of civilized men; at the beginning of the Ninteenth he was the most law-abiding; i.e., the most docile. What worked the change in him? I believe that it was worked by the rope of Jack Ketch. During the Eighteenth Century the lawless strain was simply choked out of the race. Perhaps a third of those in whose veins it ran were actually hanged; the rest were chased out of the British Isles, never to return. Some fled to Ireland, and revivified the decaying Irish race: in practically all the Irish rebels of the past century there have been plain traces of English blood. Others went to the Dominions. Yet others came to the United States, and after helping to conquer the Western wilderness, begat the yeggman, Prohibition agents, footpads and hijackers of to-day.

The murder rate is very low in England, perhaps the lowest in the world. It is low because nearly all the potential ancestors of murderers were hanged or exiled in the Eighteenth Century. Why is it so high in the United States? Because most of the potential ancestors of murderers, in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries were not hanged. And why did they escape? For two plain reasons. First, the existing government was too weak to track them down and execute them, especially in the West. Second, the qualities of daring and enterprise that went with their murderousness were so valuable that it was socially profitable to overlook their homicides. In other words the job of occupying and organizing the vast domain of the new Republic was one that demanded the aid of men who, among other things, occasionally butchered their fellow men. The butchering had to be winked at in order to get their help. Thus the murder rate, on the frontier, rose to unprecedented heights, while the execution rate remained very low. Probably 100,000 men altogether were murdered in the territory west of the Ohio between 1776 and 1865; probably not 100 murderers were formally executed. When they were punished at all, it was by other murderers — and this left the strain unimpaired.

H.L. Mencken, “Miscellaneous Notes: Jack Ketch as Eugenist”, Prejudices: Fifth Series, 1926.

January 14, 2022

Decision At The Burgundian Gate – The Battle of Belfort Gap

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

Real Time History
Published 13 Jan 2022

Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/realtimehistory

In minus 20 degrees the ragtag French Armée L’Est still tries to relieve Belfort — which is under siege by the Baden Corps under General von Werder. Belfort’s resistance against the siege is later immortalized in the Lion of Belfort.

» THANK YOU TO OUR CO-PRODUCERS
John Ozment, James Darcangelo, Jacob Carter Landt, Thomas Brendan, Kurt Gillies, Scott Deederly, John Belland, Adam Smith, Taylor Allen, Rustem Sharipov, Christoph Wolf, Simen Røste, Marcus Bondura, Ramon Rijkhoek, Theodore Patrick Shannon, Philip Schoffman, Avi Woolf,

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

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

Barry, Quintin: The Franco-Prussian War 1870-71. Vol 2 After Sedan. Solihull, 2007

Bartmann, Dominik (Hrsg.): Ausst.-Kat DHM Berlin‚ Anton von Werner. Geschichte in Bildern. München 1993

Bauer, Gerhard u.a. (Hrsg.): Ausst.-Kat. MHM Dresden‚ Krieg – Macht – Nation. Wie das deutsche Kaiserreich entstand. Dresden 2020

Howard, Michael: The Franco-Prussian War. London, 1961

Mény, Edouard: Le siège de Belfort 1870-71. 2013

Robichon, François: Alphonse de Neuville 1835-1885, Paris 2010

» SOURCES
Bernardt, Sarah: Ma double vie. Mémoires. Paris 1907

Fontane, Theodor: Der Krieg gegen Frankreich. Bd. 4. Berlin 1876

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

Seigneur, Daniel: Carnets d’un infirmier d’une guerre oubliée. De la Savoie à la Franche-Comté. Divonnes-les-bains 2014

Werner, Anton von: Erlebnisse und Eindrücke 1870-1890. Berlin 1913

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

» OUR STORE
Website: https://realtimehistory.net

»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand, Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Above Zero
Editing: Toni Steller
Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Battlefield Design
Research by: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand
Fact checking: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand

Channel Design: Battlefield Design

Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2022

People who tell “noble lies” are still liars who should not be trusted

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, China, Government, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Matt Ridley considers why so many scientists went along with the disinformation campaign to obscure or discredit the lab-leak theory on the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.
In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Jeremy Farrar – who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Who’s Who of virology – had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.

Now, however, we have an email from Farrar, sent on Sunday 2 February to Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It recounts the overnight thoughts of two other virologists Farrar had consulted, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute, as well as Farrar’s own thoughts. Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress