Forgotten Weapons
Published on 27 Apr 2014Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
Theme music by Dylan Benson – http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com
The Swedish Bofors company developed a sophisticated and very high-quality light anti-tank gun in the early 1930s, and found significant commercial success with it. A variety of countries either purchased the guns outright from Bofors or paid for licenses to produce them domestically. These countries included Denmark, Finland, Poland, the Netherlands, and Sweden itself. The largest number were in Poland (1200 or more), and there is speculation that some may have been sold to Spain during the Spanish Civil War (both these guns and a 40mm AA gun which definitely went to Spain were designated wz.36). A significant number were also captured and reused by German and Russian forces during WWII. On the Allied side, some of the guns were sold to the Sudan and used by British forces in North Africa (generally mounted on trucks).
The gun itself was an excellent design, capable of 12 rounds/minute of accurate fire and potent enough to deal with most of the smaller tanks in existence at the beginning of WWII. New tank developments made it obsolete, but it was at least effective against Russian light tanks (BT, T-26, T-28) in the Winter War if not the heavier T-34s. The gun has a sophisticated suspension system to help absorb recoil energy, and fired a 37 x 257mm shell with a 740g projectile at about 825 m/s (26oz @ 2700 fps). The action was semi-automatic, meaning that once fired, the action would recoil on the carriage, and automatically eject the empty case. It would then return to battery with the breech open, ready for a new shell to be loaded (in the video, the ejection mechanism has been disabled to help preserve the brass cases).
June 16, 2019
Finnish Bofors 37mm anti-tank gun
QotD: Critical gender studies
The first thing you must understand is that gender is a social construct. “Woman” and “man” are concepts arbitrarily invented by society. They have nothing to do with reality. A child is assigned one of these labels randomly at birth by primitive, backward-thinking doctors who, for no good or objective reason, have decided that a human child with a penis must be a boy and a human child with a vagina must be a girl. These words are all interchangeable, as are the body parts. None of it means anything, really.
But remember that the generic people we meaninglessly call “women” are beautiful and powerful and their arbitrary womanhood should be constantly celebrated. Women must band together and lift each other up. Women must be represented equally in all of our institutions. Women are truly wonderful, splendid, special creatures.
But there is nothing special about women. Literally anyone can be a woman. A woman is not anything in particular. A person with a penis can be a woman. A person with a vagina can be a woman. If a bucket of sand came to life and wanted to be a woman, it could be a woman. There is no aspect of womanhood that is ingrained or biological or inaccessible to males. And womanhood certainly has nothing at all to do with your body parts.
But if you don’t have a uterus then you shouldn’t be giving your opinion on women’s rights. No uterus, no opinion. That’s the motto. We’re tired of men making decisions about women’s bodies.
But there is no such thing as a woman’s body. Transwomen are women, too. A transwoman is just a much a woman as any other woman. There is absolutely no difference between the two and to suggest otherwise is the height of bigotry.
Matt Walsh, “Explaining Progressive Gender Theory To Right Wing Bigots”, The Daily Wire, 2019-05-14.
June 15, 2019
Miscellaneous Myths: Io
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 14 Jun 2019The moon! The myth! The legend! The three millionth woman to live through an absolute nightmare just because Zeus couldn’t be bothered to keep it in his pants!
Still had a better life than Callisto, though.
Pro tip, if someone is listed on wikipedia as a “lover” of zeus, that does not at all indicate that their relationship was consensual.
PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
13-0
The US Women’s national soccer team eviscerated Thailand by an unheard-of 13-0 score in the group stage of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. It was not a great day for sportsmanship, as the American women celebrated every goal as if they’d just broken a 0-0 tie in injury time of the final:

A screen capture from the highlight video at YouTube. Amusingly, if you try to watch this clip on the official FIFA Women’s World Cup site, you get an error saying “This video contains content from FIFA, who has blocked it from display on this website”
At American Thinker, Jonathan Keiler recounts the reaction to the game and the counter-reaction that followed:
On Tuesday the U.S. Women’s National (soccer) Team (WNT) obliterated a hapless Thailand squad in a 13-0 rout. That’s about 91-0 in football terms, but in a sense even worse, given soccer’s relative dearth of scoring. It would not be worth noting, except that many present and former WNT players recently sued the U.S. Soccer Federation claiming disparate treatment and pay, and to the general championing of all things female in a supposed age of “toxic masculinity.”
The game and the result might cause a reasonable observer to question popular progressive views on these issues, not because the U.S. women won, but how they did it.
[…]
This lack of competitive edge to the women’s game affects it at all levels, from youth leagues to international soccer. It’s not the individual players’ fault, but it’s a fact. I coached soccer for years (boys and girls.) On the women/girls side, routs like what happened on Tuesday are relatively commonplace in many leagues, up to and including high school — and obviously even after. And while this happens on the boys/men’s side too, it is less common and exaggerated.
So even leaving aside the issue of whether the men’s game is better in terms of speed/skill/aggression, the fact is generally the men’s game is more interesting and competitive more often. That puts additional fannies in seats, people watching on TV, and generates greater income, which is reflected in pay. Non-soccer aficionados may pooh-pooh the game’s rhythms and low scoring generally, but the fact is, first round games in the Men’s World Cup are far more interesting and exciting than the female version. So the WNT did themselves no favor in their legal case by making a major shortcoming of the women’s game painfully obvious.
They also did themselves no favors winning over international fans (and a lot of on-the-fence Americans) by their graceless destruction of the Thailand ladies. It’s not just that the WNT ran up the score, it’s that as they did so they acted as if they were heroes doing the impossible, rather than seasoned pros essentially carving up an amateur squad. They screamed, danced, ran around crazily, slid on the ground and the like, after every one of those thirteen goals. They didn’t act like children — they acted worse than children.
Just Peace Or Day of Dishonor? – The Treaty of Versailles I THE GREAT WAR June 1919
The Great War
Published on 14 Jun 2019Support us on Patreon and get an actual WW1 postcard signed by the team: http://patreon.com/thegreatwar
The Treaty of Versailles was the first of the big peace treaties after the armistice of 1918. In just six months the allied powers had – without talking to the defeated powers – negotiated a new world order while trying to make sure Germany would pay reparations to rebuild. The German delegation was only informed about the peace terms a few weeks before signing the Treaty and they were shocked about the terms. In May 1919 they even considered not signing the contract at all.
» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar
Merchandise: https://shop.spreadshirt.de/thegreatwar/» SOURCES
Gerwarth, Robert. The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (Penguin, 2017).Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018)
Macmillan, Margaret. The Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2001).
Sharp, Alan. The Versailles Settlement. Peacemaking after the First World War, 1919-1923 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).
Stevenson, David. 1914-1918 (London: Penguin, 2012).
Winter, Jay and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (Abacus, 1994).
http://www.ataa.org/reference/iacom.pdfhttp://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/p… quoting:
Philipp Scheidemann, “Gegen die Annahme des Versailler Vertrages 12. Mai 1919”, Politische Reden III, herausgegeben von Peter Wende. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag:Frankfurt am Main, 1994, S.254-62»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
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Motion Design: Christian Graef – GRAEFX
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian WittigChannel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van StepholdA Mediakraft Networks Original Channel
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All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2019
The real explanation for our lack of moonbases/Concorde 2’s/great walls/pyramids
Homoitalicus Blog responds to a new book [At Our Wit’s End by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie] that concludes that we (western civilization) are headed toward a similar fate as the western Roman Empire:
The reason that these staggering feats of engineering haven’t been repeated is more to do with economics and politics than with any perceived lack of engineering Genius in the population. The authors fail to reflect that emerging from the massively centralised wartime economy of the West there was an enormous technological infrastructure of scientists and capable administrators just sat there with no more Nazis to fight, communist megalomaniacs to support, Atom bombs to build and test, or greatest seabourne invasions in history to plan and implement.
This was probably the greatest concentration of intellect ever harnessed to a single cause and hopefully we’ll never need to see its like again
With the war done and dusted some new purpose needed to be found for all this talent, the way of government being what it is, returning all these geniuses to normal boring peacetime activity was never an option.
Newly nationalised aircraft industries took the wartime inventions of jet engine and the rest and evolved them with massive amounts of financial input from the government into Concorde, truly a magnificent aircraft but one which could uncharitably be described as using taxpayers’ money to ferry plutocrats from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Whether it ever really paid for itself is a moot point and the unseemly haste with which it was dumped after the crash tends to imply that its 50-year-old airframes were becoming a burden, and the economic case for making a new generation of supersonic planes is weak – luckily the will in the west for another taxpayer-funded effort doesn’t seem to be there. That is progress.
Likewise the man on the moon, possible only because of the Cold War space race.
The authors might as well explain the fact that we haven’t build another pyramid of Giza or Great Wall of China.
Their assertion that a general decline in the amount of creativity (which is correlated strongly with g) is justified by the observable decline in the quality of the output of the BBC. However other possible reasons for this are the infestation of Cultural Marxism and its baleful handmaid, Political Correctness, which really mitigate against creative thought. It is impossible to imagine making The Life of Brian, or The Sweeney or countless other shows which we enjoyed in our youth nowadays largely for reasons of PC and the fact that the BBC’s mission is now brainwashing rather than entertainment. State broadcasters the world over will suffer from the same problem, as does (worryingly) the world of academe in which speakers of truth or opinion which lie outwith accepted and very tightly bounded acceptability, are routinely no-platformed or summarily sacked. The teaching of history and the humanities generally has been debased, and only the STEM subjects seem to have resisted (excluding the question of Climate Change which has taken on the trappings of a religion rather than serious science).
As a consequence it is impossible to separate the effects of CM from the mooted results of a generalised decline in intelligence, and the authors are wrong not to point this out.
They don’t consider either the likely effect of the 20th century’s great blood letting in the fields of Flanders. A substantial proportion of the best and brightest of a generation were ground into the mud there before being able to procreate. I would be surprised if that had no effect on the quality of the gene pool.
H/T to the Continental Telegraph for the link.
Hand tools for $100 #2: Buying the planes you really need.
Rex Krueger
Published on 7 Apr 2017More videos and exclusive content: http://www.patreon.com/rexkrueger
You can buy 50 vintage hand-planes and spend the next year restoring them, or you can get three common and useful planes and get to work right now. In this video, I’ll show you the three planes that you will use for 80% of your woodworking even once you become a more experienced craftsman. These planes are common, easy to find, and generally cheap. They each have a specific and important function in the shop. Once you own these models, your ability to process stock in a clean and quiet environment will amaze you. You can always buy expensive machines later, but with good planes, you can get working immediately.
QotD: The early Bauhaus
The ideas of the modernists were generally expressed in the imperative mood and were frequently of a pseudo-mystical nature. Professor Curl’s description of some of the practices prevalent in the early Bauhaus make for hilarity; cranks are always a source of fun. In the early days, the modernists of the Bauhaus tended to a form of health mysticism involving vegetarianism, garlic paste, and regular enemas. Far more important, however, was their early and inherent attraction to totalitarianism. As the author points out, Gropius and Miës van der Rohe had no objection to Nazism other than that the Nazis failed to commission work from them. Gropius was an opportunistic anti-Semitic snob who espoused communism until it was no longer convenient for his career. Miës sucked up to the Nazis as much as he was able. The fact that both of them emigrated from Germany has done much to obscure their accommodation with the Nazis and even allowed the modernists to pose as anti-Nazi — though the most important proponent of modernism in America, Philip Johnson, had for some years been a rank Nazi in more than merely nominal terms. Moreover, as Professor Curl points out, the Nazi aesthetic, like the communist, had much in common with modernism.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Crimes in Concrete”, First Things, 2019-06.
June 14, 2019
Eliminating the trade deficit
A few weeks back, Robert Higgs explained why President Trump’s concerns about the trade deficit are, at best, misplaced and how “fixing” it would lead to a much worse situation:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
So, let’s consider the president’s trade policy in, as it were, its very best light. Suppose, then, that the government succeeded in eliminating the trade deficit entirely. Residents of the USA would continue to sell huge quantities of goods to foreigners but buy nothing at all from foreign sellers. The trade deficit would be not only diminished but wiped out and replaced by a huge trade surplus. Trumpian triumph!
Note, however, that such an outcome would be impossible to sustain for long even if it could be attained (which in fact it could not). Foreigners would be spending huge quantities of dollars to purchase goods from Americans, but they would have no means of earning dollars because Americans would not be buying anything from them. Foreigners could continue to make such purchases only if they received dollar credits from foreigners. But lenders would have no incentive to lend dollars to the Chinese, say, when they knew that the Chinese would have no ability to repay the loans because they would have no means of earning dollars in the future by sales to Americans. So a big U.S. trade surplus requires that totally implausible assumptions be made about international transactions in general and international lending in particular.
But apart from such practical difficulties and impossibilities, a Trumpian trade triumph, even if it could be achieved, would be a horrible objective to attain. Americans would be employing labor services, natural resources, and other productive inputs to produce goods and shipping them to foreign buyers. In exchange, they would receive nothing but bank account balances. Such a deal! Surrendering huge volumes of valuable goods and receiving in return larger numerals in people’s bank account statements, more dollars that could not be used to purchase anything, no matter how important or desirable, from abroad — all such purchases having somehow been stopped by a harebrained government and the economic ignoramus in charge of it.
“Great War” – World War One – Sabaton History 019 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published on 13 Jun 2019The title track of the upcoming Sabaton Album The Great War is about the conflict in general. The horrors, modern techniques and tactics and the differences with other conflicts.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon (and possibly get a History Channel special edition): https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Pre-order The Great War here: https://www.sabaton.net/pre-order-of-…
Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek KaminskiEastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.Sources:
– IWM: Q 57096, Q 24285, IWM 1053, Art.IWM ART 1921, Art.IWM ART 4028, Art.IWM ART 876, Art.IWM ART 2660, IWM 1062-02a, Q 23760, IWM 59, IWM 1043a, Q 2891, Q 5733, Q 2902, CO 2246, Q 2712, Q 5937, Q 2735, Q 5714, Q 3117, Q 3002
– National Library of Scotland
-Colorization: KlimbimAn OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
From the comments:
Sabaton History
1 day ago
This episode is somewhat different from what we normally do. Usually, the episodes are about battles, confrontations or individuals in war. This time, it is about an ENTIRE WAR. The title track of the upcoming Sabaton Album The Great War is about the horror and overall experience of the Great War. We have showcased a number of songs now, so if you’re certain that it is to your liking, make sure to go over to our Patreon site to check out the exclusive “History Edition” of The Great War album! -> https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistoryCheers!
“[P]eople aren’t really arguing about the existence or logic of the Laffer Curve they just hate the empirical answer”
The Laffer Curve is one of those ideas that drives some people mad, because if it’s true (and empirically it appears to hold most of the time), it militates against raising taxes on the wealthy:
That working out where the peak of the Laffer Curve is is difficult is entirely true. That it’s going to be different for each tax in each different legal and societal set up is also true. But that doesn’t excuse drivel like this:
The ends of the curve are basic enough – at a tax rate of 0, the government will raise $0 in revenue, and at a tax rate of 100, the government will still raise $0 in revenue because people won’t work without take-home pay. At the extremes, the Laffer curve is correct, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the points in the middle. Laffer’s idea, however, was that a “tipping point” existed on the continuum in between, where people’s incentives to work and invest decreased because tax rates were too onerous.
If the end points are true – something admitted – then it’s a matter of simple, pure, and true logic that there are one or more revenue maximising points inbetween. For it’s simple enough for us to observe that there are tax rates which do raise revenue. And if we have tax rates which raise no revenue and tax rates which raise some then there are those one or more rates which raise the most.
So, please, can we stop the drivel?
Sure, Art Laffer himself is incorrect when stating that all tax cuts always pay for themselves through increased economic growth. But that doesn’t invalidate the logic of the curve, only the use to which it is put.
Fifty-four percent. That’s approximately it: the tax maximizing point on the curve when you include all of the taxes on income (including the things they often don’t call taxes — social security, unemployment insurance, and other non-tax taxes — but which are still withheld from paycheques or payable at tax deadline time). Go much above that and the government’s take begins to decrease, defeating the purpose of raising the tax rate in the first place. (Unless the real purpose is just to harm the rich … which might be true in a number of cases.)
How Streamlining Changed Trains Forever | Spark
Spark
Published on 25 Jun 2018Steam trains leapt forward in speed once Nigel Gresley decided to make them slick, sexy and streamlined.
In the 1930’s, Britain had a railway network that was envied around the world. The East and West Coast railway companies fought to transport passengers from London to Scotland in the shortest time possible.
Originally broadcast in 2003. Content licensed by DRG Distributions. Any queries, contact us at hello@littledotstudios.com
QotD: Kink-shaming
Paradoxically, redrawing the boundaries of what is “acceptable” and “appropriate” in order not to make anyone feel “excluded” actually has the counter-productive effect of literally excluding many groups from both social media and public platforms: ex-Muslims espousing atheism, women querying the rights of the transgendered to play them at sport, and lesbians not attracted to a penis even if it has a frock over it. A whole page of last week’s Sunday Times was entirely composed of items reflecting what I call the Perils Of Inclusivity: “Tax expert fired for saying trans women aren’t women” – “Gallery covers up art after complaints by Muslim viewers” – “Anonymous journal lets academics publish and not be damned”. All in aid of preventing hurty feelz!
And now sexual perverts (among whom, on occasion, I happily count myself) are the latest group to demand “inclusion”. Please! When I was young, we thought nothing more desirable than being An Outsider – why are the young of today so obsessed with getting a tick on the register, rather than playing hooky? There is a happy place between believing that no one should be excluded on the basis of race, sex or social class, and believing that official validation of every life choice any person freely makes are the same. Someone who likes dressing up in a gimp mask is not Rosa Parks, and I find the increasing lack of ability to differentiate between the two in some quarters highly risible at best and downright insulting at worst.
The latest snowflake flutter is “Don’t kink-shame me!”. At a Vancouver university last year, a man insisting he was an “adult baby” pestered a university nurse to change his dirty nappy and perved over his repulsed female classmates. A whistle-blowing workplace-safety director was sacked for standing up for the women. In Wolverhampton a few months back, a tattooist calling himself “Dr Evil” was charged with grievous bodily harm after slicing ears and nipples from paying customers. He was reported as having support from “the body-modification community” who set up a petition in his favour.
Perhaps the most gobsmacking illustration of how mainstream perversion has become is a photograph of a Pride march showing a gaggle of kiddies (whose parents obviously got the memo that Pride is family-friendly) staring in what looks like confused repulsion at a man in front of them who leads a group of men, crawling on all fours and dressed as dogs, on leashes. Personally, I don’t think Pride needs to be family-friendly – it’s about the very adult desire to connect your genitalia to the genitalia of the same sex, which is pretty specific. But neither is it about kinks. Considering its origins, lesbians have far more right to be there than men who pretend to be dogs at weekends. Lesbians are now routinely removed from Pride marches by police due to their insistence that lesbians don’t have penises and the hurty feelz this causes in people who believe they can and do.
I’m a broad-minded broad, so I’m not offended by these people – but I do despise them for being so wimpy that they need their kink validated by straight society. When did perverts start being ashamed to be perverts and need to be a community? “Community” used to be such a jolly word, redolent of cheery singing or a nice place to land on the Monopoly board. Now it just means a bunch of whiners whining about stuff.
Julie Burchill, “The pervert community? Oh please”, Spiked!, 2019-05-08
June 13, 2019
American anarchism
Not all anarchists are bomb-throwers, as Christopher Schwarz explains:
The idea of pairing anarchism and design work seems – on its face – to be a ridiculous marriage. After all, design is about creating things from scratch, and anarchism is about burning everything down, right?
Well, no. Anarchism – particularly the American flavor of it – is woefully simplified and misunderstood by people on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The truth is that most of the furniture designers and graphic designers I’ve worked with in my career possess strong anarchistic tendencies. They just don’t know what to call their urges and beliefs.
I’ve been an aesthetic anarchist for more than 25 years, after first encountering the concept in graduate school (thanks Noam Chomsky), then observing one of my cousins, Jessamyn West, an anarchist librarian. There’s a chance you might be one, too. And while I’m certain that you probably should be working on something far more pressing and billable for work at McCorp, reading this short article isn’t going to hurt anything….
The face of American anarchism. Josiah Warren is considered the father of American anarchism. Among his many accomplishments was the founding of the Cincinnati Time Store, where you traded your labor for goods. No money.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.The Briefest Description Ever of American Anarchism
America’s individualist anarchism is not about the violent overthrow of the government and its institutions. Period. Full stop. Instead, it is a tendency to eschew the enormous organizations – churches, states and corporations – that we have created during the last 250 years.
Why do this? While working with others is generally a good thing, there is some threshold upon which an organization becomes so large that it is capable of inhumane behavior – war, slavery, environmental destruction, mass extinctions or even just failing to treat its employees and contractors fairly. These are things that individuals are (mostly) incapable of accomplishing.
Anarchists like myself avoid working with these massive and dehumanizing institutions. I don’t want to burn them down, but I also don’t want to prop them up by shopping in their stores, praying in their cathedrals or voting in their elections.
That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to making money, that I’m an atheist or that I’m uninvolved in my community. I just decline to work, pray and serve others via these institutions. Working with them gives them power, while working with the family architectural firm a few blocks away helps your neighbors in every way imaginable.
Make your own marking gauge for FREE!
Rex Krueger
Premiered 29 minutes agoMore video and exclusive content: http://www.patreon.com/rexkrueger
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