Things I’ve noticed while reading military history

  1. Civilian leadership usually appoints the wrong commanders.
  2. The main thing lacking in military leaders, from the highest level to the lowest, is a willingness to accept the risk of defeat. Nothing assures failure like indecisiveness.
  3. Advances in communications technology increases the amount of civilian interference into war operations.
  4. Civilian leadership seldom has a clear objective in mind.
  5. Military commanders regard “the book” as an intrinsic excuse and therefore have a tendency to cling to it.
  6. A historian’s take on a given war is strongly influenced by his nationalist sympathies.
  7. The temptation to interfere with a strategic plan once it is put into action appears to be almost overwhelming.

My favorite quote from Max Hastings history of World War I thus far: Falkenhayn noted laconically on taking over command:  “Schlieffen’s notes are at an end and therewith also Moltke’s wits.”

It’s really remarkable to observe how overwhelmed, inept, and generally detached from reality the generals on both sides were. Between the commander of the British Expeditionary Force constantly attempting to retreat and the high commander of the German forces not bothering to even give orders to his generals for literally days at a time, it’s just astonishing.  And they were the relatively competent ones in comparison with the Austrian and Russian commanders.

It’s somewhat sobering to read the historical blunders in light of the lunatic decisions presently being made by the US and European military leaders.

Your album covers totally lied

And so did your porn. It turns out lesbians aren’t hot. Not even a little bit. They’re just fat.

The US government has spent nearly $3 million on a study to explore lesbian obesity. According to the Department of Health and Human Services 69 per cent of American adults over the age of 20 are classified as overweight or obese and yet 75 per cent of America’s lesbian population falls into this category compared to half of the female population.

It’s hilarious to see the shambling lesbian land whales react to the obvious conclusion:

“Lets be absolutely clear. Lesbians are not gay because they can’t get a man.
All of the lesbians I know, and I know quite a few, have had to fight off
the attentions of men frequently. Studies like this only serve to give
ammunition to this type of prejudice.”

Sure, Pete Rose, whatever you say.

A get-out-the-vote tactic

Having repeatedly tried to support the YES vote for Scottish independence by claiming it was 22 points down in the polls, the UK media tries to boost the NO turnout by suddenly reporting that the YES side is ahead by two points:

Scotland WILL become independent, shock new poll claims as it shows 51% now back Yes campaign with just 11 days until vote

  • Fifty-one per cent of voters to choose independence on September 18 
  • Shock poll puts Yes campaign in the lead for the first time
  • Better Together safely holds 49 per cent of the vote
  • Gap between sides narrows to just two points with less than a fortnight before historic referendum 

It’s always interesting to see the way in which the polls move before a big vote of this sort. They always seem to move in the same pattern whenever the media clearly favors one side over another. First a huge lead for the side it is supporting, gradually declining over time, and when the media gets worried it is actually going to lose, a shock poll suddenly appears showing the side it opposes ahead, but only by a little.

It seems to me that the more the English politicians and celebrities huff and puff, the more the Scots appear to favor independence.

Jack the Ripper was an immigrant Jew

It’s rather like finding out Big Ben was made in Hong Kong. But apparently, immigration has been lethal in Britain for longer than we knew:

The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer responsible for  at least five grisly murders in Whitechapel in East London during the autumn of 1888.

DNA evidence has now  shown beyond reasonable doubt which one of six key suspects commonly cited in connection with the Ripper’s reign of terror was the actual killer – and we reveal his identity.

A shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s victims, has been analysed and found to contain DNA from her blood as well as DNA from the killer.

The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes.

Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match.

The revelation puts an end to the fevered speculation over the Ripper’s identity which has lasted since his murderous rampage in the most impoverished and dangerous streets of London.

It’s quite a fascinating story. And yes, the fact that the killer was an immigrant was integral to his eventual unmasking. I wonder if the English will be disappointed to learn that they cannot take credit for London’s most famous murderer. I have to confess, I always favored the Sir William Withey Gull theory. This is the face of Jack the Ripper, who, interestingly enough, was always one of the prime suspects and had been named by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson in his notes.

A non-starter

A good idea doomed to failure by the rapacious US tax bureaucracy:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is slated to introduce legislation next week
that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone fighting or providing
support to terrorist groups working to attack the United States. Cruz said he is filing the Expatriate Terrorist Act in reaction to
the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It would
provide another level of protection to prevent foreign fighters from
re-entering the United States, he said.

Prediction: once the IRS realizes that this legislation would provide an cost-efficient means for expatriates to get rid of their US citizenship, it will become a non-starter. In fact, with the recent 400 percent increase in administrative fees, (it now costs about $2,500 to drop your citizenship even though it’s about a two-minute process) it would probably cost less to do it by simply donating to ISIS.

The Unionists are getting scared

I’m starting to think that the Scottish people might actually have the courage to choose independence:

David Cameron today warned that Scotland would be more at risk from terrorism if it votes for independence. The Prime Minister said the United Kingdom had the best security and intelligence services in the world to keep people safe. He said the safety of staying together in a ‘very dangerous and insecure world’ was one of the ‘strongest arguments’ against separation.

Seriously, he’s going to pull out the Terrorism Card now? Obviously the Pound Card, the NHS Card, and the Darling Card failed. Smacks of desperation, doesn’t it. If I were a Scot, I would vote for independence simply out of respect for the great Scots throughout history who died defending it. And I wonder if UKIP’s Farage might be engaging in a bit of strategic black knighting:

Speculation is growing that a poll this weekend will show a significant Yes lead for the first time at a crucial time in the campaign.

Last night, Murdo Fraser, a Tory member of the Scottish Parliament, said: ‘I think it would be best if Nigel Farage stayed as far away from Scotland as possible. The arguments for staying in the UK are strong. The majority of Scots are on our side and we don’t need a distraction at this point.’

But Ukip’s Scottish chairman, Arthur Thackeray, dismissed calls for Mr Farage to stay away as ‘absolute, complete and utter nonsense’. He said: ‘We are a mainstream party Nigel as our leader is coming up in support of a No vote.’

Who will benefit more from the excise of the heavy left-leaning vote from Westminster than UKIP? Going to Scotland and infuriating the Scots with an obnoxious, ostensibly pro-Union display would be a brilliant move by Farage.

Education is not the answer

A study shows that the push to provide more people with college educations is counterproductive and was fundamentally misguided:

Almost half of all recent college graduates are working at jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

While it might have been rare to see college graduates in these low-quality jobs a few years ago, they’re increasingly the norm these days. That same New York Fed study found that more and more recent college graduates are taking low-wage jobs and working part-time while fewer and fewer of them are working full-time at high-quality jobs.

Wharton School professor Peter Capelli tried to figure out whether the problem in the labor market is because the jobs don’t require the skills that candidates are offering or because workers don’t have the proper skills that employers are seeking.

Here’s what he found. The main problem with the U.S. job market isn’t a gap in basic skills or a shortage of employees with particular skills, but a mismatch between the supply and the demand for certain skills. There’s a greater supply of college graduates than a demand for college graduates in the labor market.

This mismatch, according to Capelli, exists because most jobs in today’s economy don’t require a college degree.

“Indeed, a reasonable conclusion is that over-education remains the persistent and even growing situation of the U.S. labor force with respect to skills,” Capelli said in his study.

The worst thing is that the expense of these unnecessary educations make it harder for women to do the one thing American society actually needs them to do, which is to get married and have children. Which, of course, may have been the real objective all along.

You don’t need to know the difference between first-wave feminism and third-wave feminism, or what Sun Tzu meant by “Heaven” to work at Starbucks. Education doesn’t create jobs, in fact, many new jobs are created by men who dropped out of the educational process in order to start new companies.

I’ll bet proportionately fewer jobs have been created by people with PhDs than by non-graduates who started college but never finished.

Vibrancy on video

Don’t think you’ll be left out of the fun, ladies. This is why you must carry. If both those victims had had compact .357s, there would be five fewer predators out there looking for kicks through beating up white people. Remember, vibrants never fight fair, so you always have to be prepared to deal with at least three of them at a time, and four is the safer assumption. Or, as in this case, five.

If you’re armed, it’s actually better if there is more than one attacker because it’s that much less likely that the pro-diversity crowd will try to concoct a case against you. Just don’t pull a Bernie Goetz and shoot anyone in the back or when they’re already down.

Even if you can’t carry a gun for some reason, a serrated three-inch blade on your keychain will be enough to address the first attacker. Get the blade out, keep your hand out of sight as the first attacker comes in, stay low, drive in with your left shoulder, rear hand in and up, and the attacker should be out of commission before he even knows you’re armed. Don’t try to warn them off, because when outnumbered you want surprise on your side. Vibrants tend to be cowardly, as you can see by the way they dart in and out when they attack, so they’re probably not going to stick around after the first guy goes down. But don’t pause and wait for them to run off, move in and take out the second one as soon as the first one is incapacitated.

The guy actually acquitted himself fairly well, but the key mistake he initially made was to try to pretend the predators weren’t there and hope they would just pass by. Never ignore groups of vibrants, especially not at night, and not when they are approaching from behind you. If you whirl around, aggressively meet their eyes and stand there in silence watching them, they will usually slink off in search of less dangerous prey. Remember, most blacks are even more frightened of whites than whites are scared of blacks because they have been raised on scary stories about white racism and oppression since they were small. Use the fear.

The very last thing they want to see is a cold smile that says: “Why, hello there, Mr. Vibrant. I have been waiting my entire life for someone to give me this excuse.”

Los revisores querían

If you speak Spanish and are interested in reviewing Una Estrella Brillante para Guiarlos by John C. Wright for Amazon, please shoot me an email with ESTRELLA in the subject. The translator, Emilio, explains why it made sense to use Mexican Spanish rather than theoretically more proper Spanish.

According to the royal academy of the Spanish language, the country
that speaks the most proper Spanish is Colombia. But large companies,
like Disney, use the Mexican translation for their movies or shows for
all Latin America, since it’s considered the most neutral by most Latin American countries. It’s easier to understand a translation to Mexican Spanish in Peru, Argentina, or the Dominican Republic than any of those
dialects elsewhere. So there’s an argument to be made, that if you want
it to be successful economically, it should have a Mexican translation.

Good enough for me. Emilio is also one of the guys who has expressed interest in setting up a new gaming review site, as is Caedryn, who posted the following comment yesterday:

If anyone is interested, I would really like to start a push for making and contributing to a blue gaming site. I have been putting around on making my own using blogger, but I run into a scope of just how much there is to cover in the industry for one person, and a realization of how relatively mediocre my writing ability is to carry a place on its own.

I personally have very limited experience on the blogging side of things, but I was a QA tester in college for a couple of companies and am working on a table top game independently as a hobby. So… very limited experience on that side as well past an obsessive desire to learn and dissect mechanics and writing.

I’d like a place for people who actually like games to be able to write about them without the need to feed into the industry and clickbait for revenue.

I’d personally want it to be a place for tabletop and video gaming or any other genres I may have missed that tie into such a framework. We could include gameplay/podcasts/whatever medium you’re into for providing commentary and reporting on news and events. I’d like to get a solid group of people together from the ilk to start talking about site design and structure and anyone initially interested in writing regardless of time dedication then branch out from there with requests for regular writers and so on.

If anyone is interested in writing at all or helping build the site, please send me an email at the account I’ve made for the project gammaphiedATgmail.com so I can get an email chain together to start discussion over this weekend.

This is a project that both I and Castalia House will definitely want to support. Castalia, of course, is inspired by the most famous game-related novel of all, Das Glasperlenspiel by Hermann Hesse. I don’t have time to head up the project, but would be more than pleased to help out, as I am willing contribute my old game review columns to serve as an archive of historical reviews. I’ve also been teaching a game development course at a technical institute, and I suspect some of the students might be very interested in getting involved.

In other news, one really has to respect the power of Instapundit. Last week, we put up a free novella. There were 848 downloads and it climbed to a respectable Amazon rank although I don’t recall what it was. Yesterday, Instapundit mentioned  that QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED was a free download. It’s presently #1 in military fiction, #4 in science fiction, and #52 on Amazon.

They made their bed

Leave them lie in it. Britain would be mad if they permit their “nationals” to return to Britain after joining ISIS:

British jihadis fighting in Syria want to come home after becoming disillusioned with the conflict, it emerged today. In the last three years, more than 500 radicalised Britons are believed to have headed out to the war-torn country, where Islamist groups are fighting President Bashar Assad’s forces. But some of those who signed up to fight have now contacted authorities in Britain saying they have had enough of the war-zone and want to return home, it was reported today.

A man representing a group of 30 militants reportedly contacted King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), telling them his group want to come back.

The men, who went to the region in the hope of toppling President Assad, are reportedly unhappy at having to fight against other rebel factions. According to The Times, the man told researchers: ‘We came to fight the regime and instead we are involved in gang warfare. It’s not what we came for but if we go back [to Britain] we will go to jail.’

The ICSR’s Professor Peter Neumann told newspaper: ‘The people we have been talking to… want to quit but feel trapped because all the Government is talking about is locking them up for 30 years.’

Forget locking them up. They ought to simply have their citizenships revoked, their passports cancelled, and left to fight their gang wars. Which is exactly what the USA and every other Western state should do to every member of ISIS, wherever they are.

Based on the comments that follow the article, there is barely a Briton who wants them back.