Robert Harris’s Fatherland takes place in an alternate 1964, where the Nazis won

Monday, January 6th, 2025

Fatherland by Robert HarrisI recently listened to the audiobook edition of Robert Harris’s Fatherland, which takes place in an alternate 1964, where the Nazis won:

The German armies on the Eastern Front launch a major offensive into the Caucasus in 1942, cutting the flow of oil to the Red Army. With its armies immobilized, the USSR surrenders in 1943. German intelligence learns that the British are reading their Enigma code, and sends false intelligence to lure the British fleet to destruction. The U-Boat campaign against the United Kingdom increases, starving Britain into surrender or armistice by 1944. The United States does not invade Europe and withdraws its troops from Britain prior to 1944, and instead concentrates on defeating Japan. Germany tests its first atom bomb in 1946, and also in 1946 forces the U.S. to sign a peace treaty after firing a V-3 missile that explodes above New York City to demonstrate Germany’s ability to attack the U.S. with long-range missiles. Having achieved victory, Germany annexes Eastern Europe and much of the USSR into the Greater German Reich, and corrals the rest of Europe into a pro-German trading bloc, the European Community. The surviving areas of the USSR are deliberately left alone to fight an endless guerrilla war with German forces in the Ural mountains, according to the Nazi belief that a continual war will hold Nazi society together. By 1964, the United States and the Greater German Reich are caught in a Cold War and an arms race to develop more sophisticated nuclear weapons and space technology.

The novel takes place from April 14 to April 20, 1964, as Germany prepares for Adolf Hitler’s 75th birthday celebrations. A visit by the President of the United States, Joseph P. Kennedy, is planned as part of a gradual détente between the United States and the Greater German Reich. The Holocaust has been explained away to the satisfaction of many as merely the relocation of most of the Jewish population to the East into areas where communication and travel are still very poor, explaining why it is impossible for most of their relatives in the West to contact them. Despite this, many Germans are aware — or suspect — that the government has somehow permanently eliminated the Jewish population.

The Greater German Reich stretches from Alsace-Lorraine in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, European Russia, and the areas ceded by Germany under the Treaty of Versailles have all been annexed directly into the Reich. Major cities in the expanded Germany include old German cities such as Berlin (has a population of 10 million in 1964) and Hamburg, but also include newly-annexed cities such as Moscow, Tblisi, Ufa, St. Petersburg, Krakow, and Sevastopol, which has been renamed “Theodorichshafen”. Berlin has been extensively remodelled as Hitler’s “capital of capitals,” designed according to the wishes of Hitler and his top architect, Albert Speer. By 1964, the city boasts gargantuan Nazi monuments such as the Great Hall (which holds over 150,000 people), a mammoth arch inscribed with the names of the German soldiers killed in the two World Wars, and vast, severe, granite civil buildings including Hitler’s vast palace, the Grand Avenue lined with captured Soviet artillery, and the headquarters of the powerless European Union.

The rest of Europe, excluding Switzerland, has been corraled by Germany into a European Economic Community, formed from the nations of Norway, Sweden, Finland (which has absorbed Karelia from Russia), Denmark, Iceland, the United Kingdom (which has absorbed Ireland), France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Italy (it is unspecified if Mussolini is still in control of Italy), Yugoslavia, a greatly expanded Hungary which has absorbed Slovakia and much of neighbouring Romania, which has returned to its pre-1918 borders, Bulgaria, Albania, an expanded Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey. A European Parliament is based in Berlin but is virtually powerless. At the European Parliament building, the flags of the member states are dwarfed by a large swastika flag, symbolising the immense power that Germany has in the E.C. of 1964. The nations of the E.C., despite being nominally free under their own governments and leaders (such as General Franco and Edward VIII), are closely watched by Germany. Their military forces are only just sufficient to police their empires, they are under constant surveillance by Berlin, and the rest of Europe is subordinate to Germany in all but name. For unknown reasons, Switzerland has not been annexed by the Reich and is not a member of the European Community. As a result, Switzerland in 1964 is the only free country in Europe.

It’s not Bevin Alexander’s strategy for How Hitler Could Have Won World War II, but it’s plausible. They don’t go on to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and drain the Mediterranean as they do in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

Harris’s emphasis is not on military strategy though. He portrays a 1964 Berlin rather similar to our own, under a different totalitarian regime.

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An Act of Kindness

Monday, December 30th, 2024

Saturday Night Live brings us An Act of Kindness:

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Dostoevsky became a social media sensation?

Monday, December 23rd, 2024

White Nights by Fyodor DostoyevskyFyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights has been all over BookTok and Bookstagram:

It’s a certain type of book that becomes popular on TikTok, usually. Romance novels do well, as do YA and fantasy, and mostly they’re new or recent releases. So why has a previously little known Russian novella from more than 150 years ago suddenly caught the attention of readers in such a big way?

There’s one prosaic but important reason: it’s just over 80 pages long.

[…]

But the reason this book has resonated with so many new readers this year also has to do with the the story itself. A nameless young man meets a woman called Nastenka by chance one night on the streets of St Petersburg. He is lonely to the point of pain, and she is experiencing her own agony of waiting to hear from her one true love, who has returned from Moscow but has not contacted her as he promised he would. The narrator meets Nastenka on two more nights, and he believes he has fallen deeply in love with her, despite her protestations that he should see her as a friend. When Nastenka starts to think her lover has abandoned her, she and the narrator get carried away imagining the life the two of them might have together instead. The following day, Nastenka’s lover returns, and she abandons the narrator.

It’s a story about someone who feels things very keenly, and lives in his own head. “It begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real,” the narrator laments.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a story about someone who has built an elaborate life of fantasy should become popular on social media, where users intentionally romanticise their lives.

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How to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem

Saturday, December 14th, 2024

The problem with sci-fi body armor, Bret Devereaux notes, is that how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem, but most futuristic ‘hardsuits’ utilize little of the design language of those historical efforts:

Whereas fictional armors are often shaped through a kind of evolution whereby costume designers, artists and animators see each other’s costume ideas and iterate on them, armor development responds (within the limits of the physical materials available) not to other armor design, but to the demands of the human body (you need to be able to bend and move and armor needs to be of a weight a human can wear) and to the threats the armor is meant to defeat.

[…]

Armor works largely by converting various kinds of piercing or slashing attacks into blunt trauma distributed over the widest possible part of the body. And that in turn is part of the advantage of using rigid materials in armor construction.

[…]

A rigid material can spread out the energy of a weapon impact over a large surface; because assuming it remains rigid the entire armor component moves from the impact, contacting the body across a much larger area. The power of distributing impact energy in this way is pretty stark. A 50J impact concentrated into a very small, sharp impact zone (like the tip of a spear or an arrowhead) can easily produce lethal wounds. By contrast 200J applied across your entire chest is something you’ll certainly notice, but probably won’t cause any permanent injury. Indeed, as modern body armors show, impacts upwards of two-thousand joules (the energy delivery of many modern rifle rounds) is quite survivable if spread over enough of the body. So rigid elements (be that a breastplate or, as in modern armor, something like rigid plate inserts) can be of tremendous value precisely because they’re rigid and thus spread out the energy of impact.

[…]

Thicker armor means more weight, which adds up fairly rapidly, while more complete protection around joints means reductions in mobility. So an armorer has to think pretty hard about the tradeoffs between mobility, weight and protection. And one of the key questions here is, quite simply, “where is an opposing blow most likely to land or be most dangerous?”

[…]

By contrast, the threat profile of gunpowder warfare is slightly but importantly different. On the one hand it is a lot harder to armor against bullets because they arrive with much more energy. And I want to stress: much more energy. For a sword or spear swung by human arms, the upper limits6 are around 130J, though most blows will be much weaker than this. Arrows, as we’ve noted, top out around the same energy at launch but fall off somewhat in flight. By contrast, musket bullets can arrive with many hundreds of joules of energy and modern rifle rounds can deliver in the neighborhood of 2,000J of energy on impact. So armor that is trying to stop such a round has to be able to absorb a lot more energy and successfully spread it out over more of the defender’s surface.

The other factor is that, whereas melee strikes originate at the shoulders but can be rising strikes (‘uppercuts’) or falling strikes or horizontal strikes, bullets and other direct-fire weapons (this would be, for instance, equally true of directed energy weapons) fly very fast on relatively flat trajectories, which means the threat is mostly to the front of the body.

[…]

Consequently, whereas armor against contact weapons tends to want fairly complete coverage of the torso (including the sides and the tops of the shoulders), armor against bullets (and other missile weapons) is much more concerned with covering the vertical surfaces of the torso and is willing to compromise armor on the shoulders and even leave gaps in protection, if that means achieving a favorable balance of coverage and weight.

[…]

The first solution to the problem of how to use a rigid material to armor the body is of course to simply armor the parts of the body that don’t bend and then use some other material to protect the parts that do. Archaic Greek ‘bell’ cuirasses and later Greek and Roman muscle cuirasses take this approach, with the cuirass terminating at the hips and hanging leather strips, called pteryges, hanging down to cover the rest of the hips, groin and upper legs. But this is not exactly an ideal solution, as it sacrifices a lot of coverage.

[…]

The earliest of these articulation solutions is scale armor, by which we mean an armor composed of a lot of small rigid scales (metal or hardened leather, typically) which are fixed to backing material (textile or leather), so that they hang down. The scales overlap, which presents a solid metal face to the enemy, but since they move independently, little mobility is lost, allowing a scale coat to extend down past the waist and even cover the legs. The weakness of the approach, however, is that the scales are only anchored to the backing material at the top; there’s not much to stop a blade or spear-tip from sliding up one scale and beneath another, thus penetrating the armor. That’s less of a concern for something like an arrow-strike (which is going to be descending at least somewhat when it arrives) but against an opponent with a sword or dagger in close combat, that is a very real weakness.

A way to solve that weakness is to connect the scales to each other rather than to the backing, so that an opponent cannot slide a weapon underneath them or flip up a scale to render the opponent vulnerable. That solution — small metal plates connected to each other, rather than a backing — we call lamellar armor and it was very common in a wide range of cultures, but it has very little purchase in modern fantasy or science fiction armor designs, I think primarily because it was not included in the Dungeons and Dragons armor system. Nevertheless, lamellar armor was quite common in a wide range of cultures: we see it in the Near East, in Europe, in China and in Japan. The rigidity of the overall armor for lamellar varies based on how the plates are connected together (which you can see quite clearly in Japanese armor, in which a single set of armor often includes both rigid surfaces and articulation both using lamellar, connected more or less rigidly). In Europe, we see a variation on this concept, the brigandine (also underused in fantasy settings) where the metal plates are riveted through each other and a textile or leather backing.

But of course the solution we’re most interested in is plate armor, where a set of armor (a ‘harness’) is composed of a set of articulating plates which both provide a rigid protection to the wearer but also articulate where the wearer needs them to bend. Now going through all of the different methods late medieval plate armor uses to allow the armor to articulate would run beyond the scope of this post, but the relevant part here is the way that plate armor articulates over the torso, broadly speaking. The key components here are the cuirass, composed of a breastplate and a backplate, which covers the upper-half of the torso; this component is generally entirely rigid over that surface because the human body doesn’t bend there much either (on account of the rib-cage).

Below the cuirass, often directly attached to it, is a component called faulds. This consists of a set of articulating ‘lames’ (horizontal strips of armor) connected via leather straps or sometimes sliding rivets so that the lames can telescope into each other to enable the user to bend at the waist or raise their legs or even sit down. Faulds usually extend over the hips (sometimes only on the front) and a bit of the upper legs but occasionally run down as far as the knees. Then in many armors, an additional pair of metal plates hang down from the faulds to cover the upper legs called tassets.

Above the cuirass, we have pauldrons or spaulders (we needn’t here get into the differences), which protect the shoulders and upper arms. These are structured with a shoulder ‘cop’ — a dome-shaped metal piece — covering the shoulders, to which were attached a series of descending lames (articulated the same way the faulds would be) to apply coverage to the upper arms. Crucially, these pieces generally attach to the cuirass (though spaulders often also attach to the upper-arm armor called the rerebrace) rather than just to the upper arms, because as you will recall protecting the top of the shoulder is really quite important. Indeed, even a casual look through ancient and medieval armor will quickly reveal that this armor tends to be the thickest on the shoulder: Early mail armor often featured a second layer of mail to cover the shoulders, for instance; for some medieval armor, a mail coif or aventail also provided a layer of protection over the mail covering the shoulder.

The key advantage of this setup is that by terminating the solid form of the cuirass at the ‘natural waist’ (where the body is thinnest) the cuirass allows the wearer to bend and rotate at the waist, while the faulds, with their telescoping design, allow the wearer to bend down at the waist, raise their legs or sit. Likewise, the segmented, articulated construction of the pauldron both protects the shoulder, but also allows the arms to be raised.

Posted in Media, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together

Wednesday, December 11th, 2024

John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together first aired December 5, 1979, on ABC and apparently has never been released on any standard home video format, but you can now find this version on YouTube, which says it “has been restored from three VHS sources as originally aired, by Garrett Gilchrist”:

The highlight is the opening number, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” but the album apparently includes a different version.

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There was nothing innocent about it

Friday, November 29th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillTom O’Neill coaxed Bill Tennant, Polanski’s old manager, into talking to him (for Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties):

Tennant had never given an interview about the murders, in part because the events of 1969 had sent his life into a tailspin. He’d had the somber task of identifying the bodies at the Tate house. A 1993 piece in Variety (by Peter Bart, as coincidence would have it) described Tennant’s fall from grace. Through the sixties and seventies, he’d found great success in Hollywood, discovering the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and agenting Peter Fonda’s deal for Easy Rider. But Bart had found him, “a gaunt, battered figure,” “sleeping in a doorway on Ventura Boulevard.” A cocaine addiction had done away with his marriage and his money, leading him to trade “even the gold inlays in his teeth for a fix.” In Bart’s assessment, “the shock of the Manson murders began unraveling him.”

I tracked down Tennant in London, where he was sober, remarried, and managing Michael Flatley, the Lord of the Dance. He’d become a born-again Christian, but he displayed little compassion or forgiveness for Polanski, his onetime client and friend. “Roman is a shit,” he said. Echoing what I’d heard from other friends of the couple, Tennant said there were two versions of their story. “Which one do you want to tell?”

On one hand, Polanski had fallen into dissolution in London, where he was working on a movie and sleeping around while, back in California, his pregnant wife was putting together a home. Tate “wound up getting murdered because he was fucking around in London,” he said. But that was just one side of it.

“The other story is sitting in the Bel Air Hotel with Roman after the funerals and having to address his financial situation, which was not very good,” Tennant said, “and Roman looking across the table at me and saying, I wish I had spent more. I wish I had bought more dresses. I wish I had given more gifts. So what story do you want to tell? The one about this little prick who left his wife alone… with Jay Sebring and Gibby [Folger] and Voytek, these wankers, these four tragic losers, or do you want to talk about a poor kid, Roman Polanski?”

Tennant resisted the idea that the murders represented a loss of innocence for Hollywood. “There was nothing innocent about it,” he said. “It was retribution.” The big value in Los Angeles when he was there, Tennant said, was this: “He who dies with the most toys wins. I think it’s pretty self-serving to call that period, and what was going on, innocent… What’s innocent about drugs? What’s innocent about promiscuous sex?… You tell me where the innocence was.” Within a week of the murders, Polanski was “partying it up” with Warren Beatty, he added. The brutal reality was that “nobody cared or gave a shit about Sharon Tate. Not because they weren’t nice but because she was expendable. As expendable as an actor whose option comes up and gets dropped.”

After his wife’s murder, Polanski stayed on the Paramount studios lot as much as he could. It was the only place he felt safe. And not just from the killers or the media — from the LAPD. “You found the police surveillance units and you found that the police in Los Angeles knew everything about everybody,” Tennant said: “that there was a kind of FBI-slash-CIA aspect of the Los Angeles Police Department, and that they knew everything there was to know.”

Posted in Crime, Media | 3 Comments »

His real name was Espera Oscar de Coti

Thursday, November 21st, 2024

Jim Varney’s Ernest Goes to Camp has been locked away in the Disney vault alongside Song of the South:

If an out-of-touch portrayal of Native Americans was the only mark against Ernest Goes to Camp, it would be streaming today; after all, Ernest Goes to Africa, is on AppleTV. The problem isn’t how the film depicts Native Americans, it’s who is playing Chief St. Cloud that’s the problem. Iron Eyes Cody, a veteran of Hollywood Westerns going back to the 1940s, plays camp owner Chief St. Cloud, and the controversy over him has doomed the film to obscurity.

Crying Indian Ad

Ernest Goes to Camp was far from the first film to cast Iron Eyes Cody as a Native American, and chances are, you know him from the famous “Crying Indian” commercial about littering. A close friend of Walt Disney, Iron Eyes Cody was Hollywood’s go-to for Native American roles, but in 1996, it was revealed that his real name was Espera Oscar de Coti, and he was Italian. This was after he spent decades living as a Native American, wearing “traditional” outfits in his daily life, and fooling everyone, including Disney. Espera denied this claim until he passed away in 1999, despite his family producing a baptismal certificate with his real name.

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I feel like Geoffrey Boothroyd, compelled to write to Ian Fleming about Bond’s choice in firearms

Wednesday, November 20th, 2024

Fourth Protocol Audiobook by Frederick ForsythWhen I recently listened to the audiobook of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol — primarily out of curiosity about the fictitious Manifesto for the British Revolution — I couldn’t help but notice that the Soviet operator in Britain, when finally cornered, reached for his Sako target pistol, which was set up to use the largest of the three calibers it could chamber.

What calibers were those? Certainly .22 Long Rifle has been the standard for international competition for a long, long time, so what other calibers would it be built for?

Between 1976 and 1988, Sako produced an autoloading match pistol, the “.22-32″, then “.22-32 New Model”, then “Triace”, three versions of the same handgun, slightly modified. It was chambered for .22 Short, .22 Long Rifle and .32 Smith & Wesson Wadcutter, with conversions (barrels, slides and magazines) for each caliber. It is suitable for ISSF (then “UIT”) sport pistol events (Rapid Fire Pistol, Standard Pistol, 25m Pistol, and Centerfire Pistol events).

The .32 is popular in Centerfire Pistol competition, which is not an Olympic event.

.22 Short is the original metallic cartridge, and it has its uses:

The .22 Short was popularly used in shooting galleries at fairs and arcades; several rifle makers produced “gallery” models for .22 Short exclusively. Due to its low recoil and good inherent accuracy, the .22 Short was used for the Olympic 25 meter rapid fire pistol event until 2004, and they were allowed in the shooting part of modern pentathlon competitions before they switched to air pistols.

So the bad guy relied on a huge, hard-to-conceal, crazy-looking, .32-caliber, low-capacity pistol?

I feel like Geoffrey Boothroyd, compelled to write to Ian Fleming about Bond’s choice in firearms.

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This amused him enough that he agreed

Thursday, November 14th, 2024

Dwarkesh recently interviewed the inimitable Gwern — who (a) wanted to remain anonymous and (b) isn’t comfortable speaking to an audience, because of the “deaf accent” he retains from growing up with impaired hearing: “In order to protect Gwern’s anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed.”

After the episode, Dwarkesh convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he’s up to.

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Manifesto for the British Revolution

Wednesday, November 13th, 2024

Fourth Protocol Audiobook by Frederick ForsythI mentioned recently that Larry Taunton had listened to the audiobook of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol and then went to take a closer look at certain passages — about how British democracy might be subverted from within via a classic “march through the institutions” — and found, first, that the book was out of print, and then, second, that the used copy he could find was missing those passages entirely.

Naturally, I listened to the audiobook myself and recommend it. There’s no Kindle edition, and I assume the mass-market paperback is missing the “offending” passages — but you can find them by searching for the fictitious Manifesto for the British Revolution:

The twenty-point plan is known as the Manifesto for the British Revolution — or MBR for short. The first fifteen points concern mass nationalization of private enterprise, property, and wealth; abolition of all private landholding, medical care, and education; subordination of the teaching professions, police force, information media, and law courts to state control; and abolition of the House of Lords, which has the power to veto an act of self-perpetuation by an elected government. (Evidently, the British revolution could not be stopped or put into reverse at the whim of the electorate.)

But the final five points of the MBR vitally concern us here in the Soviet Union, so I will list them.

1. Britain’s immediate withdrawal, regardless of any treaty obligations, from the European Economic Community.

2. The downscaling without delay of all Britain’s conventional armed forces to one fifth of their present size.

3. The immediate abolition and destruction of all Britain’s nuclear weapons and weapon-delivery systems.

4. The expulsion from Britain without delay of all United States forces, nuclear and conventional, along with all their personnel and matériel.

5. Britain’s immediate withdrawal from, and repudiation of, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I need hardly underline, Comrade General Secretary, that these last five proposals would wreck the defenses of the Western Alliance beyond any possible hope of repair in our lifetimes, if indeed ever. With Britain gone, the smaller NATO nations would probably follow suit, and NATO would wither on the vine, isolating the United States firmly on the other side of the Atlantic.

Obviously, everything I have outlined and described within this memorandum depends for its full implementation on a Labour Party victory, and for this the next election, expected in the spring of 1988, may well be the last opportunity.

All the above was, in fact, what I meant by my remark at General Kryuchkov’s dinner that the political stability of Britain is constantly overestimated in Moscow “and never more so than at the present time.”

Yours sincerely,

Harold Adrian Russell Philby

I purchased a used hardback copy of Dogs of War a decade ago and quite enjoyed it. It seemed to be completely out of print, aside from the audiobook — which may or may not include any excised passages — until I stumbled across it under the slightly different name of Dogs of War: A Spy Thriller.

Posted in Media, Policy | 5 Comments »

It is one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa and is considered to be the genesis of the lost world literary genre

Saturday, October 26th, 2024

King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider HaggardI recently listened to and enjoyed an audiobook version of King Solomon’s Mines narrated by Patrick Tull, who has narrated the Master and Commander series and other very English works:

It is one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa and is considered to be the genesis of the lost world literary genre. It is the first of fourteen novels and four short stories by Haggard about Allan Quatermain.

I was shocked by how little I remembered from reading it decades ago, and then I checked my bookshelves. I’d only read the first sequel, Allan Quartermain, and H. Rider Haggard‘s other famous work, She. She is one of the handful of books that Tolkien explicitly acknowledges as an influence, but King Solomon’s Mines is obviously an influence too — and on Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, etc. Any D&D player will nod knowingly at our hero following an old scrap of a map to an isolated kingdom with a mine full of treasure.

The isolated kingdom does not belong to dwarves or elves, in this case, but to Africans, the fictional Kukuana tribe:

Indeed, in Kukuanaland, as among the Germans, the Zulus, and the Masai, every able-bodied man is a soldier, so that the whole force of the nation is available for its wars, offensive or defensive.

I got a chuckle at that comment about Germans.

Anyway, Quartermain’s role in the big battle reminded me of Bilbo’s in the Battle of Five Armies:

All I can remember is a dreadful rolling noise of the meeting of shields, and the sudden apparition of a huge ruffian, whose eyes seemed literally to be starting out of his head, making straight at me with a bloody spear. But — I say it with pride — I rose — or rather sank — to the occasion. It was one before which most people would have collapsed once and for all. Seeing that if I stood where I was I must be killed, as the horrid apparition came I flung myself down in front of him so cleverly that, being unable to stop himself, he took a header right over my prostrate form. Before he could rise again, I had risen and settled the matter from behind with my revolver.

Shortly after this somebody knocked me down, and I remember no more of that charge.

As you may recall, Bilbo spots the eagles before suffering a similar fate:

“The Eagles!” cried Bilbo once more, but at that moment a stone hurtling from above smote heavily on his helm, and he fell with a crash and knew no more.

Later, Quartermain’s companion, Good, gets brutally stabbed with a spear:

Before we had gone far, suddenly we discovered the figure of Good sitting on an ant-heap about one hundred paces from us. Close beside him was the body of a Kukuana.

“He must be wounded,” said Sir Henry anxiously. As he made the remark, an untoward thing happened. The dead body of the Kukuana soldier, or rather what had appeared to be his dead body, suddenly sprang up, knocked Good head over heels off the ant-heap, and began to spear him. We rushed forward in terror, and as we drew near we saw the brawny warrior making dig after dig at the prostrate Good, who at each prod jerked all his limbs into the air. Seeing us coming, the Kukuana gave one final and most vicious dig, and with a shout of “Take that, wizard!” bolted away. Good did not move, and we concluded that our poor comrade was done for. Sadly we came towards him, and were astonished to find him pale and faint indeed, but with a serene smile upon his face, and his eyeglass still fixed in his eye.

“Capital armour this,” he murmured, on catching sight of our faces bending over him. “How sold that beggar must have been,” and then he fainted. On examination we discovered that he had been seriously wounded in the leg by a tolla in the course of the pursuit, but that the chain armour had prevented his last assailant’s spear from doing anything more than bruise him badly. It was a merciful escape. As nothing could be done for him at the moment, he was placed on one of the wicker shields used for the wounded, and carried along with us.

This might call to mind Frodo’s experience in the Mines of Moria:

But even as they retreated, and before Pippin and Merry had reached the stair outside, a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot, leaped into the chamber; behind him his followers clustered in the doorway. His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red; he wielded a great spear. With a thrust of his huge hide shield he turned Boromir’s sword and bore him backwards, throwing him to the ground. Diving under Aragorn’s blow with the speed of a striking snake he charged into the Company and thrust with his spear straight at Frodo. The blow caught him on the right side, and Frodo was hurled against the wall and pinned. Sam, with a cry, hacked at the spear-shaft, and it broke. But even as the orc flung down the truncheon and swept out his scimitar, Andúril came down upon his helm. There was a flash like flame and the helm burst asunder. The orc fell with cloven head. His followers fled howling, as Boromir and Aragorn sprang at them.

[…]

‘I am all right,’ gasped Frodo. ‘I can walk. Put me down!’

Aragorn nearly dropped him in his amazement. ‘I thought you were dead!’ he cried.

[…]

‘I am all right,’ said Frodo, reluctant to have his garments touched. ‘All I needed was some food and a little rest.’

‘No!’ said Aragorn. ‘We must have a look and see what the hammer and the anvil have done to you. I still marvel that you are alive at all.’ Gently he stripped off Frodo’s old jacket and worn tunic, and gave a gasp of wonder. Then he laughed. The silver corslet shimmered before his eyes like the light upon a rippling sea. Carefully he took it off and held it up, and the gems on it glittered like stars, and the sound of the shaken rings was like the tinkle of rain in a pool.

‘Look, my friends!’ he called. ‘Here’s a pretty hobbit-skin to wrap an elven-princeling in! If it were known that hobbits had such hides, all the hunters of Middle-earth would be riding to the Shire.’

‘And all the arrows of all the hunters in the world would be in vain,’ said Gimli, gazing at the mail in wonder. ‘It is a mithril-coat. Mithril! I have never seen or heard tell of one so fair. Is this the coat that Gandalf spoke of? Then he undervalued it. But it was well given!’

‘I have often wondered what you and Bilbo were doing, so close in his little room,’ said Merry. ‘Bless the old hobbit! I love him more than ever. I hope we get a chance of telling him about it!’

There was a dark and blackened bruise on Frodo’s right side and breast. Under the mail there was a shirt of soft leather, but at one point the rings had been driven through it into the flesh. Frodo’s left side also was scored and bruised where he had been hurled against the wall.

Earlier in the story, our heroes must impress the natives with their magic, and they threaten to put out the sun. The old eclipse trope? I had to look it up, and King Solomon’s Mines was published in 1885, four years before A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, so add Twain to the long list of authors inspired by Haggard.

The audiobook I listened to was apparently based on an early edition of the book, because Haggard went on to change it to a lunar eclipse in later editions, after realising that his description of a solar eclipse was not realistic.

Posted in Media | 5 Comments »

Raiders of the Lost Anachronism

Wednesday, July 10th, 2024

I recently re-watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in decades, and I noticed that the film takes place in 1936 — which got me thinking about the year and what didn’t fit.

Fortunately Indy is approached by Army Intelligence, not the CIA, which didn’t exist yet, or its predecessor, the OSS, which was still a few years off, too.

What stood out though was the firearms. I couldn’t have told you what model of revolver Indy carried — apparently it was a Smith & Wesson M1917 — but it looked appropriate.

I couldn’t have told you what model of semiautomatic Indy carried, either. In fact, I didn’t remember him even carrying one, but it looked appropriate, too. It turns out the semiautomatic he used at the bar in Nepal was a Browning Hi-Power — introduced in 1935, and not comercially available for sale in the United States until decades later. This makes sense when you realize that Indy was originally envisioned as carrying a Colt 1911, and the Hi-Power is its rather similar successor — and the prop-masters found it more reliable with 9-mm blanks than the 1911 with .45 blanks.

Then the Gestapo agent pulls out his Walther P38, which, of course, was introduced in 1938. I would expect all the Nazis in a Hollywood film to be armed with the iconic Luger P08, and many are. If you pay attention, you can also catch an iconic Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” in the bar scene.

But what caught my attention was the German submachine guns. There’s a lot of fully automatic fire in the movie, and the German soldiers and Nepalese and Arab henchmen are all using MP40s, which, of course, were introduced in 1940. The MP40 did have a predecessor though, the MP38, introduced in 1938.

Apparently the German soldiers are mostly armed with the brand new Mauser Karabiner 98k bolt-action carbine, rather than the established Gewehr 98s rifle, but that’s a minor quibble.

It’s odd that large numbers of Germans are openly operating in Egypt in 1936, and its downright odd that they have a one-of-a-kind flying wing to transport the Ark:

The Flying Wing was designed for Raiders of the Lost Ark by production designer Norman Reynolds. It was inspired by the Horten Ho 229, a prototype German fighter/bomber that never entered production during World War II, and modeled after a Horten VII by the German brothers Reimar and Walter Horten. It was built in 1944 as a test bed for a bigger jet propelled Horten IX.

The design of the aircraft is similar to the Junkers G 38 that came out in the late 1920′s, particularly with regard to the landing gear, general shape and appearance. It was a flying wing based on Prof. Junkers’ own patent that predated Jack Northrop’s theories that the Horton Brothers used for their Ho 229.

The elaborate prop was built in England by Vickers Aircraft Company and painted at EMI Elstree Studios in London, before being disassembled and sent in parts to Tunisia, then rebuilt on location for filming.

After the Flying Wing was destroyed in the film in 1981, the remains sat quietly in the Tunisian desert, where parts of it was salvaged by prop collectors.

Indiana Jones with Panzerfaust
Perhaps the most anachronistic bit of military hardware though is the shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon Indy threatens to use against the Ark. The film prop is a Chinese Type 56 copy of the Soviet RPG-2, outfitted with a shoulder grip similar to an M9 Bazooka’s. The German Panzerfaust didn’t enter service until 1943. The American bazooka combined two cutting-edge innovations, shaped charges and rockets, and got shipped to our Soviet allies. Captured models inspired the German Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck.

Posted in Media, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

Curiously, the book was out of print

Wednesday, June 26th, 2024

Fourth Protocol by Frederick ForsythLarry Taunton downloaded Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol from Audible during the pandemic and listened to it while bouncing through the fields of his ranch on a tractor during breaks in his own writing. The novel contains fictitious letters from the very real English traitor Kim Philby, in which he explains to his communist hosts how British democracy might be subverted from within via a classic “march through the institutions”:

…all history teaches that soundly based democracies can only be toppled by mass action in the streets when the police and armed forces have been sufficiently penetrated by the revolutionaries that large numbers of them can be expected to refuse to obey the orders of their officers and side instead with the demonstrators….

Our friends have done what they can. Since taking control of numerous large metropolitan authorities, through the press and the media, at every level high and low, they have either themselves, or using wild young people of the Trotskyite [i.e., communist] splinter factions as shock troops, carried out an unrelenting campaign to denigrate, vilify and undermine the British police. The aim, of course, is to vitiate or destroy the confidence of the British public in their police, which unfortunately remains the most affable and disciplined in the world….

I have narrated all of this only to substantiate one argument … that the path [to socialism] now lies though … the largely successful campaign of the Hard Left to take over the Labour Party from inside…

He decided to order a hard copy of the book to inspect those passages more closely:

Curiously, the book was out of print.

How could this be? It was, after all, a major (if somewhat mediocre) movie starring Michael Caine and Pierce Brosnan. Forsyth’s other books remain in print, so why not this one? From the seat of my tractor, I instead purchased a copy of the 1995 Bantam Books (US) edition from an online used book dealer. A few days later, it arrived.

These paragraphs were missing.

This was more than a little strange. Going still deeper into the warren of tunnels, I ordered a copy of the 1994 Viking (US) edition.

Again, not there.

Finally, I ordered the Hutchinson & Company (UK) first edition. Somehow, this was the one Audible had used. Comparing this original text with the Bantam and Viking editions, I found that it contained 24 chapters while the others contained only 23. This was because chapters three and four were combined in the North American editions. But that’s not all that was going on here. Someone had removed select paragraphs in chapters three and four and altogether rewritten portions of them, altering facts, dates, and removing 15 of 20 points enumerated in a Marxist strategy to seize the institutions of political power.

All of this, and yet the publisher’s page of the Bantam Books edition reads:

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

The capitalization is not mine; it is the publisher’s. And, of course, it’s not true. Whole pages had been omitted from the original hardback.

He actually visits Forsyth:

“Did you know that select passages have been removed from The Fourth Protocol?”

His eyebrows shot up. “I did not.”

I explained the missing passages, the total rewrites, and the rabbit hole that had brought me to him. I wasn’t sure which had surprised him more: that the book had been edited without his knowledge or the manner in which I had discovered it. I sensed that I was now being recategorized from groupie to something that intrigued him much more.

“I’ve been bowdlerized!” he exclaimed.

[…]

“I suppose someone,” Forsyth speculated, “decided the details about how to build a nuclear bomb were too dangerous, so they took them out.”

“Those aren’t the missing passages.”

He again looked surprised.

“Besides,” I continued, “Clancy did something very similar in The Sum of All Fears, and those parts weren’t removed either.”

[…]

“No, it’s not the parts about building a bomb. It’s the parts about how Marxists penetrate the government, the police, and the army especially, and capture them from within.”

He looked thoughtful. After a moment’s reflection, he offered a theory:

If you think about it, my earlier works can be read as history. They were all telling a fictitious story of something that had happened: an attempt on de Gaulle’s life; a hunt for a Nazi war criminal; a group of mercenaries overthrowing an African government. But Protocol is different. You don’t have to read it as history, but as something that might happen. Read that way, it could be deemed a dangerous “how-to” manual.

This made sense. The Fourth Protocol is a “what if.” What if a foreign government or terrorists smuggled parts for a nuclear bomb into Britain or the United States, assembled it, and detonated it? What if Marxists were able to penetrate a major political party in Britain or America, radicalize it, and slowly weaponize government agencies and offices, purging them of their conservative and democratic elements? Of the two scenarios, whoever edited the book thought the latter more unsettling.

Posted in Media, Policy, War | 7 Comments »

The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers

Tuesday, May 21st, 2024

OpenAI last week introduced its Sky voice, which sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied AI voice in Her:

Johansson said she had been contacted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in September 2023 about the company hiring her to provide the voice for ChatGPT 4.0. She said she declined for “personal reasons.”

“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference,” Johansson said. “Mr. Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word ‘her’ — a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system, Samantha, who forms an intimate relationship with a human.”

Johansson called for legislation that would protect individuals from having their name, image or likeness misappropriated. “In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” she said. “I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected.”

Asked for comment, OpenAI sent this statement from Altman: “The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson. Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”

The Johansson-soundalike ChatGPT voice was the basis of a joke on the season finale of “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend, aimed at her husband, Colin Jost, co-host of Weekend Update.

Posted in Media, Policy, Technology | 1 Comment »

Once a piece of art becomes mainstream, elites must distance themselves from it

Friday, May 3rd, 2024

Troubled by Rob Henderson Before his first year of college, Rob Henderson had never even been to a musical, he explains (in Troubled):

No one I knew from Red Bluff had ever been to one. But it seemed like everyone on campus had seen Hamilton, the acclaimed musical about the American founding father Alexander Hamilton. I looked up tickets: $400.

This was way beyond my budget. So in 2020, I was pleased to see that five years after Hamilton’s debut, it was available to view on Disney+. But suddenly, the musical was being denigrated by many of the same people who formerly enjoyed it, because it didn’t reflect the failings of American society in the eighteenth century. The creator of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, even posted on Twitter that “All the criticisms are valid.” This reveals how social class works in America.

[…]

Once a piece of art becomes mainstream, elites must distance themselves from it and redirect their attention to something new, obscure, or difficult to obtain. The affluent relentlessly search for signals that distinguish them from the masses.

A former classmate recently told me that he didn’t enjoy Hamilton but never told anyone because everyone at Yale loved it. However, once the musical became unfashionable, he suddenly became open about his dislike of it.

Posted in Economics, Education, Media, Policy | No Comments »

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