Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Related, TIL that "quieten" (and "quietening") isn't used in non-British dialects of English.
I have to think that English would come a lot closer to justifying all these irregular verbs if we all used the same ones.
TIL: Today I Learned
- Thread starter Cutlass
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I have to think that English would come a lot closer to justifying all these irregular verbs if we all used the same ones.
Timsup2nothin
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That would provide a certain regularity in communication.
The TV series was better.
I heard them a few times, back in the '60s. I don't remember who said them, but I did have a couple of teachers who were from the UK. Maybe it was my Grade 1 teacher.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I think you mean "Thus yin wouldst levee a meat pie govna cor blimey Queen mum", you uncouth colonial.
Timsup2nothin
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With regularity and meat pies, this conversation is headed in a direction best left unexplored.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
TIL what happened to the London Bridge
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_bridge_that_crossed_an_ocean
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_bridge_that_crossed_an_ocean
If it helps, I will point out that ‘pie’ comes from ‘magpie’ the animal originally used for the stuffing. Make of that what you will.
Bamspeedy
CheeseBob
Yeah, forgetting the country code is easy to do. On Skype I forgot a couple times to change it from China back to the USA when making a domestic call, and when my wife first tried calling China ever from the US, it was 11 PM here (which would be the middle of the day in China) she woke up some guy in Connecticut.
TIL: Need an MRI but have a high deductible? Try a 'Freestanding clinic' that does MRIs. A hospital may charge over 3k for one, a freestanding clinic can charge as little as $400 from what I've read in articles.
I checked one out and they told me if they bill my insurance they charge $2700, but if I pay cash I would pay $800 (and later send a receipt to my insurance so at least that $800 would at least maybe apply towards deductible). Would require a two hour drive to get to the nearest freestanding clinic vs. a 45 minute drive to hospital, but worth it. Ended up going to the hospital anyways since I found out my wife's current insurance actually pays 100% of MRIs if done at a 'in network' hospital. With many other employer provided insurances I'd pay for all or most of it unless I've gone over the deductible of several thousand dollars.
TIL: Need an MRI but have a high deductible? Try a 'Freestanding clinic' that does MRIs. A hospital may charge over 3k for one, a freestanding clinic can charge as little as $400 from what I've read in articles.
I checked one out and they told me if they bill my insurance they charge $2700, but if I pay cash I would pay $800 (and later send a receipt to my insurance so at least that $800 would at least maybe apply towards deductible). Would require a two hour drive to get to the nearest freestanding clinic vs. a 45 minute drive to hospital, but worth it. Ended up going to the hospital anyways since I found out my wife's current insurance actually pays 100% of MRIs if done at a 'in network' hospital. With many other employer provided insurances I'd pay for all or most of it unless I've gone over the deductible of several thousand dollars.
EgonSpengler
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When a friend wanted vision-correcting laser surgery, he did the math and figured that he and his husband could spend a long weekend in Montreal and have the surgery done in Canada for less money than having the surgery at home.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled? Getting Americans to conflate health insurance with health care (the part where we think we're doing it right and everybody else is doing is it wrong, the Devil had nothing to do with, that's just us
).
Donald Trump just signed a compromise funding bill to avoid a government shutdown for another few months. There was some concern that he would not sign it because it lacks funding for his beloved border wall, but he signed anyway.
The wall project is, frankly, an absurdity, riven with severe flaws and designed to solve a problem that does not really exist at high cost to American taxpayers. It has inspired some commentators to recall a famous quotation by George Patton on walls:
Patton was, in this case, full of bunk. Fortunately, since he was such an obliging gentleman, Patton himself provided a neat historical counterexample to the absurd notion that fortifications are bad: the siege of Metz in 1944.
The Nazi armies in the west completely collapsed in August 1944 as a result of the Allied victories in Normandy and the Cotentin Peninsula. Operation COBRA shattered the German lines, brought in a massive haul of prisoners, and scattered what few German troops were left to the four winds. With no possible location in France or the Low Countries to hold the Allied advance, the Germans began a great bugout, a Rückzug, back to the German frontier. Patton's Third Army followed in their wake, driving to the limits of their gasoline reserves, capturing more prisoners and smashing German roadblocks. Within a few weeks, the Third Army had covered hundreds of miles and in the first days of September its spearheads were securely in eastern France, within a short drive of the German border.
This region was where the American armies had fought in the fall of 1918, and Patton, a veteran of the Great War, knew the terrain well. The line of the Moselle River ran perpendicular to his axis of advance. The river was not particularly wide, deep, or fast, but it posed an obstacle to armored movement and there were relatively few viable crossings. Patton correctly understood that the key terrain features for operational-level armored warfare were the roads and river crossings, not ridges and valleys. He wanted to "bounce" the Moselle in a hurry, get to a point where he could unleash his armor, and continue along the major roads while letting his tactical commanders sort out the hills and mountains - a mark of a good commander. He selected two points for crossing, at Nancy and Metz, and assigned each of his two army corps to one: Walton Walker's XX Corps to Metz, and Manton Eddy's XII Corps to Nancy.
There were two problems with this approach. Firstly, Patton divided his forces outside of the range of mutual support. Metz was far enough away from Nancy that if Eddy got across the river, Walker would still have a fight on his hands for Metz, and vice versa. This consideration did make his logistical situation slightly easier, because each corps had more roads available, but supply was so tight anyway that congestion was a relative nonissue. This meant that Patton was dispersing his combat power, which is sort of like Mistake 1a. Now, dispersal made sense in the context of a pursuit, which is what Third Army had been doing in August. But Patton had some warnings that Nazi resistance would increase around the Moselle. He had an outstanding G-2 (intelligence staff officer), Colonel Oscar Koch, who predicted a tough fight to gain the German frontier. He also had warnings from Eisenhower that the pursuit would probably slow soon. Patton had already lost a few days due to gas shortage (he blamed this on Ike and the British, unreasonably) which should have been yet another warning bell. Finally, as his troops closed up on the Moselle, he insisted on maintaining speed rather than reconnoitering the riverline, which saved time but proved costly in lives: mistake 1b.
The second problem was Metz, the crossing point for XX Corps. Under the Kaiserreich, the city had been the center of the Metz-Diedenhofen fortified zone, one of the largest fortress complexes in Europe and undoubtedly the best-protected. The Americans targeted it after their victory at St.-Mihiel in September 1918 but orders from then-Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch pushed them into the Argonne Forest instead. The Americans cleared the Argonne with heavy losses and were preparing to finally follow up on Metz when the armistice went into effect in November. Patton made no secret of feeling as though an opportunity had been stolen from him and the rest of the AEF. He believed that taking Metz was his duty, even his birthright, and insisted that Walker capture it instead of crossing the river and masking the German fortifications there. He believed it wouldn't be that costly because, well, of his original comments about the worth of fortifications. The fact that Walker's initial push at Metz ended up falling apart did not dissuade him. (As a side note, Patton insisted that Metz was last captured by Attila the Hun, presumably to enhance his own historical reputation when he finally did capture Metz himself. This was factually wrong and more than a little absurd. Metz was last captured in 1870 by the Germans, and had been captured by various other armies in the centuries before that.)
With XX Corps stuck in front of Metz, Patton redoubled his efforts at Nancy. The Germans made it a tough fight. At one point, they successfully isolated the American infantry crossing the Moselle on the east bank, and even counterattacked on the west bank (!). But eventually, Third Army battled its way to the heights overlooking the river, chased the Germans off of them, and cleared the way for pontoons to be emplaced. Eddy inserted the 4th Armored Division into the bridgehead near Dieulouard to exploit his success, which ran headlong into a German armored counterattack. The Battle of Arracourt that resulted showed American tankers and tactical fighter-bombers at their best. Vaunted German panzer formations armed with the feared Panther-A tank shattered in close-in combat against 4th Armored's Combat Command A. It was a decisive victory for American armor, but it halted Patton's drive east, and rain and the worsening supply situation did the rest. He was unable to exploit his victory.
Instead, he turned to Walker and XX Corps at Metz. He insisted on capturing the fortress rather than putting everything into the Moselle bridgehead and driving for the Rhine. He called on intense levels of bombing attacks, increasingly heavy artillery preparations, and massive infantry assaults. They went nowhere. The new German commanders at Army Group G, Hermann Balck and his chief of staff, Friedrich von Mellenthin, were under direct orders from the Führer to hold Metz as a fester Platz, an unyielding fortress. Balck understood that the fester Platz concept was generally disastrous and resulted in locking up large amounts of combat power in sieges that they could not and would not survive. He withdrew most of his troops from Metz and left a unit of cadets training from the local military academy, along with aging Landwehr and Landsturm call-ups, to hold it. These men were no match for the Americans even on a man-to-man basis, and they were outnumbered. But the fortifications of Metz acted as a tremendous force multiplier. The cemented steel and reinforced concrete of the bunkers proved almost impossible for the Americans to destroy, and the old imperial German designers had sited them perfectly. Each fort was a death-struggle that the Americans sometimes lost.
It took the Americans three months and a great many lives to finally evict the Germans from the Metz fortifications. Patton had won his victory, but at tremendous cost. He lost lives, ammunition, equipment, and valuable time. Another of Patton's aphorisms was that he insisted on filling "the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds of distance run". He wasted many, many minutes in front of Metz rather than outflanking the fortress complex to the north or south and continuing on his way. Balck and the Germans were happy to oblige. Third Army lost all its momentum and got itself stuck in the Lorraine mud, giving Hitler valuable time and space to amass reserves and prepare a counterattack - a counterattack that materialized out of the snow and fog of the Eifel on 16 December.
Fortifications were not intrinsically bad. They had utility, just as much in the twentieth century as in the second century. They could be force multipliers, depots, and flank guards. Locking up one's entire army in fortresses would be stupid, but attacking them head-on would be even more stupid. A good number of American soldiers lost their lives because of Patton's pigheadedness about fortifications.
The proposed border wall with Mexico is much more stupid than the fortress of Metz. Metz was designed with real operational and tactical utility. It was the response to a real problem that Germany faced. Trump's wall is neither of those things. It is a monument to the stupidity of man.
The wall project is, frankly, an absurdity, riven with severe flaws and designed to solve a problem that does not really exist at high cost to American taxpayers. It has inspired some commentators to recall a famous quotation by George Patton on walls:
Patton resolutely insisted that mobility and aggressive maneuvering, even in the defense, were the only ways to effectively fight. He argued that walls sapped soldierly morale, and that any man who had to hide behind a fortification knew that he only had to do it because he was the weaker man.Patton said:
Patton was, in this case, full of bunk. Fortunately, since he was such an obliging gentleman, Patton himself provided a neat historical counterexample to the absurd notion that fortifications are bad: the siege of Metz in 1944.
The Nazi armies in the west completely collapsed in August 1944 as a result of the Allied victories in Normandy and the Cotentin Peninsula. Operation COBRA shattered the German lines, brought in a massive haul of prisoners, and scattered what few German troops were left to the four winds. With no possible location in France or the Low Countries to hold the Allied advance, the Germans began a great bugout, a Rückzug, back to the German frontier. Patton's Third Army followed in their wake, driving to the limits of their gasoline reserves, capturing more prisoners and smashing German roadblocks. Within a few weeks, the Third Army had covered hundreds of miles and in the first days of September its spearheads were securely in eastern France, within a short drive of the German border.
This region was where the American armies had fought in the fall of 1918, and Patton, a veteran of the Great War, knew the terrain well. The line of the Moselle River ran perpendicular to his axis of advance. The river was not particularly wide, deep, or fast, but it posed an obstacle to armored movement and there were relatively few viable crossings. Patton correctly understood that the key terrain features for operational-level armored warfare were the roads and river crossings, not ridges and valleys. He wanted to "bounce" the Moselle in a hurry, get to a point where he could unleash his armor, and continue along the major roads while letting his tactical commanders sort out the hills and mountains - a mark of a good commander. He selected two points for crossing, at Nancy and Metz, and assigned each of his two army corps to one: Walton Walker's XX Corps to Metz, and Manton Eddy's XII Corps to Nancy.
There were two problems with this approach. Firstly, Patton divided his forces outside of the range of mutual support. Metz was far enough away from Nancy that if Eddy got across the river, Walker would still have a fight on his hands for Metz, and vice versa. This consideration did make his logistical situation slightly easier, because each corps had more roads available, but supply was so tight anyway that congestion was a relative nonissue. This meant that Patton was dispersing his combat power, which is sort of like Mistake 1a. Now, dispersal made sense in the context of a pursuit, which is what Third Army had been doing in August. But Patton had some warnings that Nazi resistance would increase around the Moselle. He had an outstanding G-2 (intelligence staff officer), Colonel Oscar Koch, who predicted a tough fight to gain the German frontier. He also had warnings from Eisenhower that the pursuit would probably slow soon. Patton had already lost a few days due to gas shortage (he blamed this on Ike and the British, unreasonably) which should have been yet another warning bell. Finally, as his troops closed up on the Moselle, he insisted on maintaining speed rather than reconnoitering the riverline, which saved time but proved costly in lives: mistake 1b.
The second problem was Metz, the crossing point for XX Corps. Under the Kaiserreich, the city had been the center of the Metz-Diedenhofen fortified zone, one of the largest fortress complexes in Europe and undoubtedly the best-protected. The Americans targeted it after their victory at St.-Mihiel in September 1918 but orders from then-Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch pushed them into the Argonne Forest instead. The Americans cleared the Argonne with heavy losses and were preparing to finally follow up on Metz when the armistice went into effect in November. Patton made no secret of feeling as though an opportunity had been stolen from him and the rest of the AEF. He believed that taking Metz was his duty, even his birthright, and insisted that Walker capture it instead of crossing the river and masking the German fortifications there. He believed it wouldn't be that costly because, well, of his original comments about the worth of fortifications. The fact that Walker's initial push at Metz ended up falling apart did not dissuade him. (As a side note, Patton insisted that Metz was last captured by Attila the Hun, presumably to enhance his own historical reputation when he finally did capture Metz himself. This was factually wrong and more than a little absurd. Metz was last captured in 1870 by the Germans, and had been captured by various other armies in the centuries before that.)
With XX Corps stuck in front of Metz, Patton redoubled his efforts at Nancy. The Germans made it a tough fight. At one point, they successfully isolated the American infantry crossing the Moselle on the east bank, and even counterattacked on the west bank (!). But eventually, Third Army battled its way to the heights overlooking the river, chased the Germans off of them, and cleared the way for pontoons to be emplaced. Eddy inserted the 4th Armored Division into the bridgehead near Dieulouard to exploit his success, which ran headlong into a German armored counterattack. The Battle of Arracourt that resulted showed American tankers and tactical fighter-bombers at their best. Vaunted German panzer formations armed with the feared Panther-A tank shattered in close-in combat against 4th Armored's Combat Command A. It was a decisive victory for American armor, but it halted Patton's drive east, and rain and the worsening supply situation did the rest. He was unable to exploit his victory.
Instead, he turned to Walker and XX Corps at Metz. He insisted on capturing the fortress rather than putting everything into the Moselle bridgehead and driving for the Rhine. He called on intense levels of bombing attacks, increasingly heavy artillery preparations, and massive infantry assaults. They went nowhere. The new German commanders at Army Group G, Hermann Balck and his chief of staff, Friedrich von Mellenthin, were under direct orders from the Führer to hold Metz as a fester Platz, an unyielding fortress. Balck understood that the fester Platz concept was generally disastrous and resulted in locking up large amounts of combat power in sieges that they could not and would not survive. He withdrew most of his troops from Metz and left a unit of cadets training from the local military academy, along with aging Landwehr and Landsturm call-ups, to hold it. These men were no match for the Americans even on a man-to-man basis, and they were outnumbered. But the fortifications of Metz acted as a tremendous force multiplier. The cemented steel and reinforced concrete of the bunkers proved almost impossible for the Americans to destroy, and the old imperial German designers had sited them perfectly. Each fort was a death-struggle that the Americans sometimes lost.
It took the Americans three months and a great many lives to finally evict the Germans from the Metz fortifications. Patton had won his victory, but at tremendous cost. He lost lives, ammunition, equipment, and valuable time. Another of Patton's aphorisms was that he insisted on filling "the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds of distance run". He wasted many, many minutes in front of Metz rather than outflanking the fortress complex to the north or south and continuing on his way. Balck and the Germans were happy to oblige. Third Army lost all its momentum and got itself stuck in the Lorraine mud, giving Hitler valuable time and space to amass reserves and prepare a counterattack - a counterattack that materialized out of the snow and fog of the Eifel on 16 December.
Fortifications were not intrinsically bad. They had utility, just as much in the twentieth century as in the second century. They could be force multipliers, depots, and flank guards. Locking up one's entire army in fortresses would be stupid, but attacking them head-on would be even more stupid. A good number of American soldiers lost their lives because of Patton's pigheadedness about fortifications.
The proposed border wall with Mexico is much more stupid than the fortress of Metz. Metz was designed with real operational and tactical utility. It was the response to a real problem that Germany faced. Trump's wall is neither of those things. It is a monument to the stupidity of man.
sophie
Break My Heart
So which was the learned information?
The signed bill?
The siege of Metz?
The association between the border wall and Metz?
The signed bill?
The siege of Metz?
The association between the border wall and Metz?
The signed bill, I suppose. I had a brief discussion earlier today with a politically active student who mentioned that Patton quotation, and it made me think of a thing, and I didn't really know where else to put it.
I use eye drops daily for high pressure in my eyes. In the US those drops cost $700+ for a 90 day supply. I can get the identical 90 day supply through Canada for $78. but, rather than same day delivery, it takes 3 weeks, so some planning is involved. I had to put an alert in my phone.
Synobun
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The need and opportunity for US profits.
- Status
