Cleg
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clegggg.bsky.social
Cleg
@clegggg.bsky.social
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clegggg.bsky.social
Germany pioneered the jet engine! Do NOT read more
That production concerns were supremely important to Speer's ministry is suggested by the fact that design changes made to ease the production of weapons were made at the cost of dangerous operational shortcomings. The decision to manufacture dangerous jet engines in large numbers was different from the familiar trade-off between quality and quantity inherent in the need to freeze designs to enable mass pro-duction. In the case of the jet engine, lower quality (made worse by shoddy construction work) was accepted-even recommended— as a way to ease production regardless of the known and dangerous consequences of doing 255 The operational cost of these engines of desperation was high. Routine flights were often fatal. The fraction of German jet engines that made it off the ground and into service had extremely short service lives, and many exploded in use. 256 Prob-
November 19, 2025 at 10:31 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
WWII German engineering is so funny man. Like someone got sent back in time with a vague sense of where technology was headed but absolutely no idea how to implement it
In contrast to the British and the Japanese, the Germans undertook ambitious efforts to design high-pressure, high-temperature turbine drives for warships, but the results proved trouble-some. Siemens-Schuckert, Germany's leading electrical engineering firm, developed high-pressure, high-tempera-ture boilers patented by engineer Mark Benson in 1922. Blohm & Voss, whose yard included integrated boiler works, fitted the freighter Uckermark with the Benson boiler, and the Reichsmarine had a similar system installed in the 2,600-ton fleet tender Grille, laid down at Blohm & Voss in 1934. The boiler, which was rated at 1,175 psi/878° Fahren-heit, supplied steam for a set of double-geared turbines. Though Grille's trial trip was an unmitigated disaster because boiler tubes leaked and burst, valves failed, and control instruments malfunctioned, the Reichsmarine ordered Benson boilers for seven destroyers of the Z 1934 class built at Blohm & Voss and Germaniawerft, all of which suffered boiler problems and turbine breakdowns. AG Weser initially bine breakdowns. AG Weser initially achieved better results with a boiler originally developed by the railroad engineer Richard Wagner, which powered the gunnery training ship Brummer. The navy promptly ordered 996 psi/860° Fahrenheit Wagner boilers installed in nine Z 1934 class destroyers built at AG Weser, Deutsche Werke Kiel, and Ger-maniawerft during the late 1930s. Unfortunately for the Germans, destroyers fitted with Wagner boilers likewise experienced troubles during their trial trips and service careers. The Kriegsma-rine, again undeterred by obvious difficulties in design and construction, and without testing the new type thorough-ly, ordered modified Wagner boilers rated at 1,250 psi/842° Fahrenheit for three Admiral Hipper-class heavy cruis-ers, whose engine performance left much to be desired. A 735 psi/950° Fahrenheit drive powered two battle-cruisers of the Scharnhorst class, but their failure-prone turbines and boilers required extensive modifications during the war. An American postwar comparison of U.S. and German systems deemed the latter less reliable and "mediocre [in] design and manufac-ture," faulting them for excessive fuel consumption, poor reduction gear effi-ciency, and insufficient "accessibility for inspection, maintenance, and repair."85 A postwar Royal Navy review attributed some of the problems of German marine engineering to the use of single-reduction gears: "It is obvious that while the lU.S. Navyl has achieved the gains expected from their adoption of higher steam conditions, something went seriously wrong with the German attempt. ... Owing to [the Germans'] failure to use to use double reduction gearing, and to a somewhat unpractical outlook on the design of the machinery itself, most of the possible gains inherent in the higher conditions were squandered."86
November 19, 2025 at 10:14 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
Learned about some new guys
infection. For Harrison Brown and the neo-Malthusians who endorsed his views, other human beings threatened the world. Brown's protégé John Holdren, President Barack Obama's science advis-er, would eulogize Brown as a "warm and witty man, cheerful, always a twinkle in his eye, and surprisingly modest."6 He may have been, but his vision of the future was darkened with antihumanism. In The Challenge of Man's Future, Brown wrote that much of humanity was behaving as if it "would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots."' Given the supposedly selective forces of overpopulation, Brown claimed, to prevent what he called "the long-range degeneration of human stock," it would be necessary to prevent "breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature." For example, he continues: We could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs. . . . Unfortunately, man's knowledge of human genetics is too meager at the present time to permit him to be a really successful pruner. "Pruning" the species, Brown concludes, could be accomplished in two ways: discouraging "unfit" persons from breeding, and encouraging breeding by people who pass physical and mental testing and whose ancestors were fit. There were more radical methods of pruning unde-sirables, Brown hinted, only a decade after the Holocaust, but he suspected that such methods "would probably not be palatable to many of us who are alive today."" If this cool invitation to racial selection and maiming echoes with the pseudoscience of Nazi eugenics, it does so for a reason: there is a direct link between the original eugenics movement that inspired Adolf Hitler and the veiled postwar eugenics organizations that endorsed Malthusian nightmares of a "population explosion." Tracing that link in detail is outside the scope of this book, but several scholars have done so, including Robert Zubrin in his 2013 study Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antibumanism, and Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer in a lengthy 2009 paper, "The Postwar Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb.»10 Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-cen-tury English proto-economist, was himself no piker at human pruning, notoriously proposing: Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate [i.e., reject, repudiate] specific remedies for ravaging diseases, and those benevo-lent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular dis-orders. 11 An insolent contempt for humanity channels through all these high-minded works. The most widely read popular formulation of the neo-Malthusian argu-ment, entomologist Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, commissioned by the Sierra Club in 1967, opens with the Ehrlich family culture-shocked into panic on "a stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago":
November 17, 2025 at 11:55 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
We’re doing this again huh
This caused many northerners and some historians to exaggerate the strength of unionism in the lower South. As late as July 1861, Lincoln expressed doubt "whether there is, to-day, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Car-olina, in favor of disunion." A century later several historians echoed this faith in a silent majority of southern unionists. "It can hardly be said that a majority of the South's white people deliberately chose to dissolve the Union in 1861," wrote one. "Secession was not basically desired even by a majority in the lower South," concluded another, "and the secessionists succeeded less because of the intrinsic popularity of their program than because of the extreme skill with which they utilized an emergency psychology."9 Though an emergency psychology certainly existed, the belief in a repressed unionist majority rests on a misunderstanding of southern unionism. As a Mississippi "unionist" explained after Lincoln's election, he was no longer "a Union man in the sense in which the North is Union." His unionism was conditional; the North had violated the condition by electing Lincoln. Cooperationists in Alabama who voted against secession cautioned outsiders not to "misconstrue" their action. "We scorn the Black Republicans," they declared. "The State of Alabama cannot and will not submit to the Administration of Lincoln. ... We intend to resist... but our resistance is based upon... unity of action, with the other slave states." Or as a Mississippi cooperationist put it: "Cooperation before secession was the first object of my desire. Failing this I am willing to take the next best, subsequent cooperation or cooperation after secession."10 This was the position of most delegates who initially opposed immediate secession. It was a weak foundation on which to build a faith in southern union-ism.
November 17, 2025 at 9:44 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
Fukushima daiichi
November 8, 2025 at 4:12 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
California
As for Germany, Stalin made it clear that he intended to deal harshly, even cruelly, with his Nazi foes. He spoke bitterly about the political docility and submissiveness of the German people. He recalled an old story about a band of several hundred German workers who failed to reach a political rally in Leipzig because they meekly declined to leave a railway station at which there was no controller to punch their tickets. Time and again he insisted that Germany must be reduced to several smaller states, else it would recover within a generation and once again plunge the world into the maelstrom. At dinner on the twen-ty-ninth Stalin proposed that fifty thousand German officers be "physi-cally liquidated." The statement brought Churchill indignantly to his feet, saying: "I will not be a party to any butchery in cold blood. ...I would rather be taken out now and shot than so disgrace my country." Roosevelt, ever eager to play the con-ciliator, interjected: "I have a compromise to propose. Not fifty thousand, but only forty-nine thousand should be shot."20 The discussion ended with general but unspecified agreement on the postwar dismemberment of Ger-many, which, Roosevelt remarked, "had been less dangerous to civilization when in 107 provinces," before Bismarck's day.21
November 5, 2025 at 4:40 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
Idk much about the British airframes so I’ll take your word for it
use. The Bf 109 was designed by Messerschmitt well before the war, yet made up "by far the largest share" of the fighter aircraft produced by National Socialist Germany after 1942. Hitler gave his approval to stop production of the airframe only in late March 1945.162 Some 24,000 Bf 109 airframes were mass-produced between 1942 and the end of 1944. Through the more efficient production of older, familiar types, the monthly output of aircraft in Germany more than doubled between 1942 and 1943 with a minimal increase in labor and no additional aluminum. 163 A less welcome consequence of this production drive, however, was the Luftwaffe's increasing technological inferiority as compared to its enemies. Showing the trade-offs that the regime accepted-improvements aimed at increasing the Bf 109's speed in level flight to compete with Allied aircraft, for example-were achieved by sacrificing the aircraft's handling characteristics.164
October 30, 2025 at 8:02 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
Hoover was kind of an interesting guy. A proto jimmy carter
The overwhelming emotion that drove the Paris conference was fear of what Wilson called "the poison of Bolshevism." Secretary Lansing described Communism as "the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever con-ceived," supported only by "the crim-inal, the depraved, and the mentally unfit." His nephews enthusiastically agreed. This was a natural reaction from men devoted to defending the existing order. Not every capitalist at the Paris talks, however, saw the ideological threat so simply. No less a pillar of conservatism than Herbert Hoover, who was advising President Wilson on food relief issues, urged the president to recognize Bolshevism's "true social ends" and roots in "grievous injustices to the lowest classes in all the countries that have been affected," and to "rap our own reactionaries for their destruction of social betterment and thereby their stimulation of Bolshevism." No such thoughts clouded the mind of either Dulles brother. Hoover was no mossback conservative in the Harding-Coolidge mold, and the men gathered in the White House dining room knew it. "[The time when the employer could ride roughshod over his labor is disappearing with the doctrine of 'laissez-faire' on which it is founded," he had written as early as 1909. Long sympathetic to the progressive wing of his party, Hoover as secretary of commerce had not only supported the cause of labor but also urged closer busi-ness-government cooperation, established government control over the new technology of radio, and proposed a multibillion-dollar federal public works fund as a tool to offset downswings in the business cycle. As president, he meant to be no passive custodian. He dreamt the progressive generation's dream of actively managing social change through informed, though scrupulously limited, government action. "A new era and new forces have come into our economic life and our setting among nations of the world," he said in accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1928. "These forces demand of us constant study and effort if prosperity, peace, and contentment shall be
October 19, 2025 at 12:07 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
A piece of pure escapism punctuated at this time Hitler's daily dose of gloom from the fronts: his visits to the model of his home-town Linz, his intended place of retirement, as it was to have been rebuilt at the end of the war, following a glorious German victory. The model had been designed by his architect Hermann Giesler (who had been commissioned by Hitler in autumn 1940 with the rebuilding of Linz), and was set up in February 1945 in the spacious cellar of the New Reich Chancellery. In January 1945, as the failure of the Ardennes offensive became apparent, as the eastern front caved in under the Red Army's assault, and as bombs rained down also on the Danube region in which Linz was situated, Giesler's office was repeatedly telephoned by Hitler's adjutants, and by Bormann. The Führer kept speaking of the model of Linz, they told Giesler; when would it be ready for him to inspect? Giesler's team worked through the nights to meet Hitler's request. When the model was finally ready for him to see, on 9 February, Hitler was entranced. Bent over the model, he viewed it from all angles, and in different kinds of lighting. He asked for a seat. He checked the proportions of the different buildings. He asked about the details of the bridges. He studied the model for a long time, apparently lost in thought. While Giesler stayed in Berlin, Hitler accompanied him twice daily to view the model, in the afternoon and again during the night. Others in his entourage were taken down to have his building plans explained to them as they pored over the model. Looking down on the model of a city which, he knew, would never be built, Hitler could fall into rever-
October 18, 2025 at 12:50 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
I’m an fdr guy
the maelstrom. At dinner on the twenty-ninth Stalin proposed that fifty thousand German officers be "physically liquidated." The statement brought Churchill indignantly to his feet, saying: "I will not be a party to any butchery in cold blood.... I would rather be taken out now and shot than so disgrace my country." Roosevelt, ever eager to play the conciliator, interjected: "I have a compromise to propose. Not fifty thousand, but only forty-nine thousand should be shot."20
October 12, 2025 at 1:49 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
the maelstrom. At dinner on the twenty-ninth Stalin proposed that fifty thousand German officers be "physically liquidated." The statement brought Churchill indignantly to his feet, saying: "I will not be a party to any butchery in cold blood.... I would rather be taken out now and shot than so disgrace my country." Roosevelt, ever eager to play the conciliator, interjected: "I have a compromise to propose. Not fifty thousand, but only forty-nine thousand should be shot."20
October 12, 2025 at 1:46 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
More relevant than ever
The Most Irresponsible Officials In Washington DC Are The 'Moderate' Republicans By Josh Barro | Business Insider - 15 hours ago Our government is a disaster because of a small group of Republicans who could break extremists' grip on their caucus' agenda, but choose not to. Ken M 4 hours ago I was just telling my students that today's Republicans can be likened to that perennial pest, the male wasp: haughty, yet servile. Angry, yet asexual. h 4 hours ago #S%S you you dog liberal poisioning our young minds,..,its liberal pigs who hate America and want it to become another commy nation you jackass pig, #S%$ and I hope u see your maker soon,, pig #S%S you libsucks are Ken M 4 hours ago Vulgarity is the fool's fig leaf. Comrade 4 hours ago You're allowed to teach? Ken M 3 hours ago I teach a course called "Entomology & Ideology," two unrelated topics that were combined due to austerity measures
October 12, 2025 at 12:18 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
It’s an old industry
tanks again this year." That in part reflected an enduring loyalty to the horse. "The idea of huge armies rolling along roads at a fast pace is a dream," Cavalry Journal warned in 1940, even after the German blitzkrieg signaled the arrival of mechanized warfare. "Oil and tires cannot like forage be obtained locally." The Army's cavalry chief assured Congress in 1941 that four well-spaced horsemen could charge half a mile across an open field to destroy an enemy machine-gun nest without sustaining a scratch. "The motor-mad advocates are obsessed with a mania for excluding the horse from war," he told the Horse and Mule Association of Ameri-ca, four days before Pearl Harbor. The last Regular Army cavalry regiment would slaughter its mounts to feed the starving garrison on Bataan in the Philippines, ending the cavalry era not with a bang but with a dinner bell.
October 11, 2025 at 10:41 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
Save me
With Ahmed in Konya and Selim in Kefe, Prince Korkud in his turn imagined that he could win the throne by getting to Istanbul first. He left Manisa and arrived quietly, reaching the city by boat, asked Bayezid to forgive him his past disobedi-ence, and awaited Selim's arrival. Korkud thought to buy the janissaries' support by distributing gold; they accepted it, but when Selim arrived in Istanbul in April lol2 they backed his deposition of his father. 105 For the first time the janissaries were instrumental in forcing a ruling Ottoman sultan from power; but it was by no means the last: whatever the Ottoman succession practice in theory, it was the janissaries who made and unmade sul-tans. Sultan Mehmed II had greatly enhanced the status of the janissaries and Selim, who could not accept Bayezid's appeasement of Shah Isma'il's state and its Kizilbas adherents, was heir to this legacy; the majority of his troops were Ottoman by education rather than by birth, and needed a resolute sultan to ful-fil the mission for which they had been recruited. Ahmed, by contrast, was a focus for those who had been dispossessed of their former existence and saw no place for themselves in the new Ottoman state. Bayezid's brother Cem had appealed to broadly the same con-stituency.
October 7, 2025 at 3:35 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
I think this part is key to my belief that there are simply vast empty spaces in his mind that have never been probed
I'm not pushing you to be a political strategist. Something you see me doing here - and something people are reacting to me doing - is saying: There is something about knowing that this much of the country is on the wrong side of what my line would have been, knowing that what Kirk was doing was working - and that imposes a set of questions upon us that needs to be answered. le thing I'm struggling with in this conversation, and even in that question, is the fact that there are things that you, yourself, have actually advocated for that, had they been done, we would be having a very different conversation. I think I want it to not be close. You said what? I want it to not be close. See, you will call this my fatalism, but I am not surprised that it is. I think it's going to be close. I think it will be close for a very long time. I would like for it to be less close, too. But do you think that's within our power — or not really?
September 30, 2025 at 5:38 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
Same energy
Recorded Books Monday Night Thad Jason Elam and Steve Yohn Narrated by Pete Bradbury
September 30, 2025 at 5:33 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
I think this is the key exchange, and really shows that Klein will accept basically anything from the hyenas, for herrenvolk-but-liberal reasons
what won i get to ulaw tie the. Now it abest theat i don't have one in my own heart. But the thing that I am struggling with is that for most people, or a lot of people, the plurality of the voters in the last election: He is somehow not way over the line. That means there are a lot of people who are willing to accept things that I thought we would have found unacceptable. I would have thought that the way he acts in public is unacceptable. And it's not. So, I think for me - and this goes back to the culture that you maybe feel didn't exist, but I feel did — there was a view that we could work with politics by drawing these lines. That there are people who are going to be inside them and outside them, and we could work that way. I am working with the question of: What happens if you don't believe that? If you don't control the line? What I see is any line that existed at all collapsing. I'm watching, like, Holocaust revisionism on the biggest right-wing podcasts. I'm watching Tucker Carlson turn into what I would describe as a white nationalist and become an absolute dominant force on the right — bigger than he ever was in his smarmy libertarian phase. This stuff has real appeal, as you said. That's not a surprise on some level. It's just something you have to deal with. That's where this question of line drawing — I have lines that I think should and should not be acceptable, but those lines clearly have no relationship to my country and its politics. I've been asking the question without really having an answer — I want to be honest about this — of: What follows from that? I think you do have a line. I'm sure I do. I think there are things, for instance, that I could say that would make you say: There's no point in Ta-Nehisi coming up and being on this podcast. And likewise, there are things you could say that would make me say: There's no point in me talking to Ezra there. I'm saying what happens if 35 percent of the country, 40 percent of the
September 30, 2025 at 4:52 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
Interesting point of reference
The Lynds' study of Muncie detailed the complex personal and social implications of those employment patterns. The principal factor that distinguished the "working class" from the "business class," they found, was insecurity of employment with its consequent disturbance in the rhythms of life. The business class, they noted, "are virtually never subject to interruptions of this kind," while among the working class "the 'shut-down' or 'lay-off' is a recurrent phenomenon." Indeed, they suggested that interruption in employ-ment, even more than occupational category or income, was the chief defining characteristic for membership in the social group they called "working class." Those members of the community who enjoyed a measure of job security were not, virtually by definition, "the workers." They had careers, not jobs. Their very conception of time was different, as were their life chances. They planned with confidence for their futures and for their children's futures. They took annual vacations. They aspired to a better way of life. They also built and sustained the elaborate network of organizations-the Rotary Club, the PTA, the Chamber of Commerce, the Women's Club, and, not least, the political parties-that bound the community together and gave it organic life. From much of that activity the
September 30, 2025 at 12:53 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
Thank you to iOS for commemorating and setting to music the occasion I took this screenshot a month ago
Elon getting sprayed down like a beached whale. I bet he made an unsettling guttural noise while this happened
September 21, 2025 at 4:37 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
Bring back the cavalry (wait until trump learns about the uniforms)
tanks again this year." That in part reflected an enduring loyalty to the horse. "The idea of huge armies rolling along roads at a fast pace is a dream," Cavalry Journal warned in 1940, even after the German blitzkrieg signaled the arrival of mechanized warfare. "Oil and tires cannot like forage be obtained locally." The Army's cavalry chief assured Congress in 1941 that four well-spaced horsemen could charge half a mile across an open field to destroy an enemy machine-gun nest without sustaining a scratch. "The motor-mad advocates are obsessed with a mania for excluding the horse from war," he told the Horse and Mule Association of Ameri-ca, four days before Pearl Harbor. The last Regular Army cavalry regiment would slaughter its mounts to feed the starving garrison on Bataan in the Philippines, ending the cavalry era not with a bang but with a dinner bell.
September 7, 2025 at 7:26 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
August 29, 2025 at 10:55 PM
clegggg.bsky.social
This, to me, is ether
This process and the international public discussion of it fed an illusion of fateful significance. Because Germany did not pay reparations, it came to be widely believed that no or almost no reparations were paid at all. This, of course, is nonsense. All the reparations were paid: the devastated towns were rebuilt, the orchards replanted, the mines pumped out and all the pensions to survivors were paid (with some still being paid). The bill was simply shifted to other shoulders, primarily the very countries that had seen their economies suffer most from the war. This shifting of the burden of repair costs from the less damaged German economy to the more damaged economies of others thus served to redouble rather than off-set the impact of the war itself. Only when a realistic perspective is restored to an examination of the peace settlement, its nature, its impact, and its modifications, can one begin to understand how a period of supposed German enfeeblement could culminate within less than two decades in a Europe, even a world, again terrified of German might.
August 24, 2025 at 4:42 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
Well I’m claiming ten additional titles
Top Headlines - Auburn formally claims seven additional football national titles, bringing school total to nine
August 20, 2025 at 1:18 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
August 9, 2025 at 2:43 AM
clegggg.bsky.social
?
A secure cable from the "Little White House" instructed General Groves to launch the first atomic bombing mission no sooner than August 2, 1945, the final day of the Potsdam Conference. Truman wanted to be away and at sea when the first nuclear weapon was dropped. l12 from Ian toll
August 9, 2025 at 1:33 AM