Octopodial Chrome

Now here is a treat: an audio recording of gas shells being fired by the British on 9 October 1918 outside Lille.

I happened upon Television under the Swastika, a documentary concerning Nazi television. It’s pretty interesting stuff: cabaret acts, political interviews, cooking shows—all designed to show the greatness of the Party and its benevolent Leader.

Watching stuff like that always gets me wondering about that lost world. It’s not a sense of nostalgia, of course—the Nazis were one of the great evils of the 20th century—but one does wonder what it was actually like to live in that world.

It’s also strange to see actual pictures of the era, as opposed to movie interpretations. In the movies, everyone is a blond-haired, clean-shaven Aryan stereotype, but in the films one sees a lot of old-fashioned Imperial Germans with their forked beards and dark hair.

I also wonder about what was going on underneath the surface. The barbers being retrained as hairdressers, for example: did they ask for the retraining, or did the party simply tell some quota of barbers that they had to submit for retraining? What dark secrets lay behind the sunny scenes?

Back in 1994 Bruce Bartlett wrote a great essay about the fall of Rome. Basically, Rome’s foolish economic policies (driven by the emperor’s desire to destroy the senatorial class and prop up their armies) destroyed the empire and paved the way for the Dark Ages. Pretty cool stuff, and an object lesson to nations the world over.

This article on war pigeons is serious and interesting, but I’m shallow enough to just love the phrase war pigeon. It’s absolutely wonderful, really. Loose the war pigeons! Beware the mighty war pigeons!

I want to have a boat so I can name it the S.S. War Pigeon.

I don’t usually read Mother Jones (I’ve better things to do than read fascist claptrap—I use fascist advisedly), but it has a top-notch history of the anti-slavery movement in Britain. Their achievement was really quite remarkable: in less than 80 years slavery went from being accepted over the entire world to being illegal in the entire civilised sphere. When they started, slavery was just accepted as part of life; by the time they finished it was universally unacceptable.

The story gives hope to those of us who would fight other seemingly impossible battles. The anti-infanticide movement in particular should learn from the fight against slavery. Infanticide is considered a perfectly acceptable practise by much of the world right now, but a lot can change in a few years. Eventually, reason wins.

I just discovered the tale of John I of Bohemia. He died at Crécy a few days after his birthday. He was blind, but desired to take part in the battle and so had two of his knights tie their horses to his own, saying, God willing, it will never happen that a Bohemian king runs off a fight!

Meanwhile his son Charles ran away.

Hat-tip to my brother John for the story.

Most folks don’t realise that Xerox passed up the chance to be the computer company. Back in 1975—almost a full decade before Apple released the Macintosh—Xerox had a dynamic programming language, a windowed GUI, a cool computer and more. Alan Kay recollects how Smalltalk 76 was born.

In 1943 Polish soldiers adopted an Iranian bear, gave it a name, rank and serial number, taught it to carry mortar rounds, drink beer and smoke cigarettes and brought it along on the Italian campaign. I swear that I’m not making this up. It is perhaps the oddest story I’ve ever read.

The Daily Mail has even more. And someone on the net pointed out this pic (some language)...

World War I: Experiences of an English Soldier is a blog with a difference: it is about the Great War. The entries are from letters home written by William Henry Harry Bonser Lamin; his grandson Bill. He posts each one exactly 90 years after it was written. He hasn’t yet revealed if his grandfather survived or not—only time will tell, now as then.

Hat-tip to CNN of all places.

Every year Australia has a 544-mile footrace from Sydney to Melbourne; it attracts the best of the best, runners from all over the world, heavily sponsored and highly trained. In 1984, a 61-year-old farmer won it. His secret? He didn’t realise that he was supposed to sleep—so he ran it straight through! A must-read story.

From reason comes a great article, Hooded Progressivism: the secret reformist history of the KKK. It reinforces the thesis of Liberal Fascism—that progressivism is inherently anti-liberty.

It turns out that the KKK of the 1920s was racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic—and politically progressive, pushing for such progressive ideas as eugenics, compulsory public-funded education and alcohol prohibition.

This past September’s Vanity Fair had a great article about the legacy of the Little Rock school integration as seen through the life of Elizabeth Eckford. Reading all that now, it’s hard to imagine that people cared that much about something as stupid as preserving segregation.

A collection of Second World War pics—the difference? They’re in colour!

Frank Buckles is the last American veteran of the First World War; there’s a good chance that this was his final Veteran’s Day. A neat story.

Sixty-five years ago, one Marine and one ship changed the course of history. On this very day, Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige stopped an entire Japanese regiment singlehandedly; a few weeks later Rear Admiral Willis Lee’s fleet was reduced to a single ship—and it sank the Japanese battleship, pushing back the remainder of their fleet. Less than a year after Pearl Harbour, we had managed to turn from defense to offense—and a few years further, American boots stood in Tokyo.

And of course, it was America’s navy and marines which did the job.

The great-great-great-grandson of Prince Otto von Bismarck was found dead of a massive cocaine overdose. Sad how low the house has fallen since its glory days.

There’s new evidence that the USS Liberty was deliberately sunk by the Isrælis in 1967. If Isræl (quite properly) hunted down Eichmann and hanged him for his crimes, can we expect them to hand over those responsible for the decision to sink and the pilots who did the actual shooting? I rather doubt it.

The Atlantic has a survey of American military memoirs of Vietnam. Very different stuff from what most Americans remember; very different stuff from what Hollywood depicts; very different stuff from what the newspapers reported. This, y’see, is true, unlike that other drivel.

Today is the 143rd anniversary of the Battle of New Market in which 257 cadets from the Virginia Military Institute (aged 12–17) helped a much larger force of Confederate regulars force a Union, army twice as large as they were, out of the Shenandoah Valley. Ten cadets fell in the action; one was a descendant of Thomas Jefferson himself.

Four hundred years ago today the first permanent English colony was started at Jamestown in Virginia. That settlement was the seed which grew into a mighty republic stretching from one ocean to the next; a republic whose system of government has been used as a model by many, many others (arguably, even Great Britain took some ideas back from her child…). In a very real sense, today is America’s four hundredth birthday. Happy birthday!

Oh, and the Mayflower didn’t land in Massachusetts until 13½ years later. Nyaah nyaah nyaah:-)

The Telegraph report on a little-known tale: the post-war massacre of Germans in Europe. Something like a million soldiers and two million civilians were murdered; nearly every woman and girl in Russian-controlled territory was raped; a quarter-million Sudetenlanders were simply slaughtered.

142 years ago General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, and the South’s hopes for freedom were dashed.

Any state has a right to secede; the Constitution does not forbid it, and thus that right is retained, under the terms of the Tenth Amendment. The southern states had every right to leave the Union, and the Union had no right to maintain armed forces on their territory, or to use force of arms to conquer them.

That said, the South was wrong to secede. Its secession (like those of 1776 & 1835) was inspired primarily by a fear that slavery would be abolished; chattel slavery as it was practised in the American South being itself wrong, actions taken to safeguard it are themselves wrong.

That being said, the Union had no business stopping the South from leaving. The appropriate response would have been, good-bye, and good riddance!. Instead, the Yankees killed nearly 600,000 men, raped women, destroyed private property and subjugated 9.1 million citizens for over a century. It was, quite simply, the single most unjust war in American history; it wasn’t until the 1980s that the South truly recovered.

And yet I’m glad that it ended as it did. Had America been split permanently in twain, I don’t believe we would ever have achieved the prominence and power we now have. The United States have been the greatest, freest nation on earth, and I’m proud to be a citizen thereof. My heart swells when I see the flag and hear the Star Spangled Banner. The war was a long time ago, and we’re all Americans now.

Saturday was the 231st anniversary of the Raid of Nassau, the first amphibious operation of the United States Navy and what would become the Unites States Marine Corps (they were known as the Continental Marines, first recruited at a bar known as Peggy Mullan’s Red Hot beef Steak Club at Tun Tavern—no joke).

Great pictures of ’60s airline stewardesses. That was back when the airlines could hire young, attractive women. Nowadays we get women who started in the ’60s, and gay men. Why oh why couldn’t I have been born forty years earlier?