Mosquito vs B-17

There's a story going around that the Mosquito could carry the same bomb load from England to Berlin as a B-17, and on long nights make two trips. It turns out the story is misleading: Could the Mosquito Really Replace the B-17?

 

 

Stephen Kotkin on Vladimir Putin and Despots

 In The Weakness of the Despot David Remnick interviews Stephen Kotkin on Putin, Russia, and the West.

Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.
I would even go further. I would say that NATO expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today. Where would we be now if Poland or the Baltic states were not in NATO? They would be in the same limbo, in the same world that Ukraine is in. In fact, Poland’s membership in NATO stiffened NATO’s spine.

....

Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place––a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a “special place” in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful.

....

The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with a personal ruler. Instead of getting the strong state that they want, to manage the gulf with the West and push and force Russia up to the highest level, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism.

....

We’re talking, at most, about six people, and certainly one person as the decision-maker. This is the thing about authoritarian regimes: they’re terrible at everything. They can’t feed their people. They can’t provide security for their people. They can’t educate their people. But they only have to be good at one thing to survive. If they can deny political alternatives, if they can force all opposition into exile or prison, they can survive, no matter how incompetent or corrupt or terrible they are.

....

You have to remember that these regimes practice something called “negative selection.” You’re going to promote people to be editors, and you’re going to hire writers, because they’re talented; you’re not afraid if they’re geniuses. But, in an authoritarian regime, that’s not what they do. They hire people who are a little bit, as they say in Russian, tupoi, not very bright. They hire them precisely because they won’t be too competent, too clever, to organize a coup against them. Putin surrounds himself with people who are maybe not the sharpest tools in the drawer on purpose.
That does two things. It enables him to feel more secure, through all his paranoia, that they’re not clever enough to take him down. But it also diminishes the power of the Russian state because you have a construction foreman who’s the defense minister [Sergei Shoigu], and he was feeding Putin all sorts of nonsense about what they were going to do in Ukraine. Negative selection does protect the leader, but it also undermines his regime.

No, Nazism isn't Socialism

Some in the right have been arguing that Nazis were socialists. Historians Matthew Fitzpatrick and A. Dirk Moses argue why this is false in Nazism, Socialism and the Falsification of History.

Evidence supporting claims pirated Australian ship visited Japan unearthed

In Australian convict pirates in Japan: evidence of 1830 voyage unearthed Joshua Robertson reports on evidence confirming the visit of a ship from Australia to Japan in 1830. The ship had been hijacked by convicts being transported from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour.

An amateur historian has unearthed compelling evidence that the first Australian maritime foray into Japanese waters was by convict pirates on an audacious escape from Tasmania almost two centuries ago.

Fresh translations of samurai accounts of a “barbarian” ship in 1830 give startling corroboration to a story modern scholars had long dismissed as convict fantasy: that a ragtag crew of criminals encountered a forbidden Japan at the height of its feudal isolation.

The brig Cyprus was hijacked by convicts bound from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour in 1829, in a mutiny that took them all the way to China.

German vs US Military Command and Leadership Philosophy

In An elusive command philosophy and a different command culture Thomas E. Ricks explains the German Army concept of Auftragstaktik and why the US Army doesn't get it.

Why civilisation was built on grains and not tubers

In The sinister, secret history of a food that everybody loves Jeff Guo looks at work by some economists that counters the generally accepted argument that civilisation arose because of an excess of food from agricultural production.

In his 1997 bestseller “Guns, Germs and Steel,” historian Jared Diamond argued that the availability of nutritious and easily domesticated plants and animals gave some societies a head start. In the Middle East there was barley and wheat; in Asia there was millet and rice. “People around the world who had access to the most productive crops became the most productive farmers,” Diamond later said on his PBS show. And more productivity led to more advanced civilizations.

Going against the generally accepted theory are those societies that depended on tubers (such as potato, tapioca and sweet potato) as their main cultivated food source. These societies had an abundance of food, tubers are generally more productive and nutritious than grains, but never developed the technical and political complexity of societies that depended on grains.

The study, published last year by economists at the United Kingdom and Israel doing novel work on archaeological and anthropological evidence, attempts to explain a strange pattern in agricultural practices. The most advanced civilizations all tended to cultivate grain crops, like wheat and barley and corn. Less advanced societies tended to rely on root crops like potatoes, taro and manioc.

It's not that grains crops were much easier to grow than tubers, or that they provided more food, the economists say. Instead, the economists believe that grains crops transformed the politics of the societies that grew them, while tubers held them back.

How crops changed the world

The argument depends on the differences between how grains and tubers are grown. Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. These can be stored for long periods of time and are easily transported — or stolen.

Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten. This provided some protection against theft in ancient times. It's hard for bandits to make off with your harvest when most of it is in the ground, instead of stockpiled in a granary somewhere.

So grains can easily be stolen or taxed. There for they more easily support an infrastructure to defend them, on built on the gains from taxing them.

Fascism

"The Archdruid" whoever that might be, as written several posts on the history of fascism. I'm not sure how accurate they are but they're interesting reading:
Fascism and the Future, Part One: Up From Newspeak
Fascism and the Future, Part Two: The Totalitarian Center

Part one also had a link to the post Fascism, Feudalism, and the Future.