Jan 14 2013
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Jan 14 2013
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
January 14 is the 14th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 351 days remaining until the end of the year (352 in leap years).
It is celebrated as New Year’s Day (at least in the 20th & 21st centuries) by countries still following the Julian calendar.
On this day in 1761, the Third Battle of Panipat is fought in India between the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani and the Marhatas. The Afghan victory changes the course of Indian History.
The Third Battle of Panipat took place at Panipat (Haryana State, India), about 60 miles (95.5 km) north of Delhi. The battle pitted the French-supplied artillery and cavalry of the Marathas against the heavy cavalry and mounted artillery(zamburak and jizail) of the Afghans led by Ahmad Shah Durrani, an ethnic Pashtun, also known as Ahmad Shah Abdali. The battle is considered one of the largest battles fought in the 18th century.
The decline of the Mughal Empire had led to territorial gains for the Maratha Confederacy. Ahmad Shah Abdali, amongst others, was unwilling to allow the Marathas’ gains to go unchecked. In 1759, he raised an army from the Pashtun tribes and made several gains against the smaller garrisons. The Marathas, under the command of Sadashivrao Bhau, responded by gathering an army of between 70,000-100,000 people with which they ransacked the Mughal capital of Delhi. There followed a series of skirmishes along the banks of the river Yamuna at Karnal and Kunjpura which eventually turned into a two-month-long siege led by Abdali against the Marathas.
The specific site of the battle itself is disputed by historians but most consider it to have occurred somewhere near modern day Kaalaa Aamb and Sanauli Road. The battle lasted for several days and involved over 125,000 men. Protracted skirmishes occurred, with losses and gains on both sides. The forces led by Ahmad Shah Durrani came out victorious after destroying several Maratha flanks. The extent of the losses on both sides is heavily disputed by historians, but it is believed that between 60,000-70,000 were killed in fighting, while numbers of the injured and prisoners taken vary considerably. The result of the battle was the halting of the Maratha advances in the North.
The Third Battle of Panipat saw an enormous number of casualties and deaths in a single day of battle. It was the last major battle between indigenous South Asian military powers, until the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
To save their kingdom, the Mughals once again changed sides and welcomed the Afghans to Delhi. The Mughals remained in nominal control over small areas of India, but were never a force again. The empire officially ended in 1857 when its last emperor, Bahadur Shah II, was accused of being involved in the Sepoy Mutiny and exiled.
The Marathas’ expansion was stopped in the battle, and soon broke into infighting within their empire. They never regained any unity. They recovered their position under the next Peshwa Madhavrao I and by 1772 were back in control of the north, finally occupying Delhi. However, after the death of Madhavrao, due to infighting and increasing pressure from the British, their claims to empire only officially ended in 1818 after three wars with the British.
Meanwhile the Sikhs, the original reason Ahmad invaded, were left largely untouched by the battle. They soon retook Lahore. When Ahmad Shah returned in March 1764 he was forced to break off his siege after only two weeks due to rebellion in Afghanistan. He returned again in 1767, but was unable to win any decisive battle. With his own troops arguing over a lack of pay, he eventually abandoned the district to the Sikhs, who remained in control until 1849. . . . .
The battle proved the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling‘s poem “With Scindia to Delhi”.
The strength of Afghan military prowess was to both inspire hope in many orthodox Muslims, Mughal royalists and fear in the British. However the real truth of so many battle hardened Afghans killed in the struggle with the Marathas never allowed them to dream of controlling the Mughal Empire realistically again. On the other side, Marathas, possibly one of the only two real Indian military powers left capable of challenging the British were fatally weakened by the defeat and could not mount a serious challenge in the Anglo-Maratha wars 50 years later.
Jan 14 2013
The process was very simple to conceive
First, the creator, who goes by the name shige-ruuu, hacked into his desktop humidifier and hotwired it to pump out a thick volume of fog.
To compensate for the increased mist production he created an adapter so that a 500mL bottle of water could be attached. If you look closely, you’ll see him using a sex lady bottle, which he says gives the best fluid dynamics.
Then he built a rectangular box, which is meant to disperse the mist evenly, and mounted it to the wall. The box and humidifier were connected with a vacuum tube.
A projector was set up behind the box to send the images from the computer.
With everything set, it was time to flick the on switch.
It wasn’t long before the screen of water vapor started gently descending and the PC’s display could be seen. Even the standard Hatsune Miku music video test was performed with adequate results.
However, the device is far from perfect. It’s easy to see from the demonstration that the mist couldn’t remain thick as it neared the bottom of the screen and produced an often flickering image.
Jan 14 2013
A SOLDIER was bashed by three or four men at his Darwin army base and says he was left for two days with no medical treatment.
Private Lachlan Nimmo, 33, has told The NT News about a culture of violence and a lack of support for victims in Defence.
He was bashed by “three or four men” in a carpark at Robertson Barracks on October 12 last year.
He was found bloodied and slipping in and out of consciousness in his room two days later.
Despite calls from his distraught wife, Evelyn, 29, guards did not look for him until he missed a shift.
By the time he was found and taken to Royal Darwin Hospital, his kidneys had shut down. He was put in an induced coma, underwent 10 operations and spent the next two months in hospital.
Doctors said he was just hours away from death.
http://www.news.com.au/nationa…
Despite the horrible circumstances of this event, it is oddly satisfying to learn (as if it wasn’t obvious enough already) that the phobia against social lepers like victims and particularly the manifest treatment of disabled enlisted soldiers is universal.
Victims carry a lifelong stigma and I suspect few understand it.
It is most obvious and ugly in the case of the raped female but omnipresent for all victims.
Real men win, you see, and good girls avoid being raped.
Damn you, Chuck Hagel, you put the problem front and center despite all your heroics and attractions.
Rachel Maddow Lays Out Why Chuck Hagel’s Positions on Rape, Abortion, and Gays are Important
http://www.towleroad.com/2013/…
A personal note:
My wife wanted oh so bad to rescue a tiny “rare” tiger kitten from the shelter. For whatever reason I couldn’t tell her the tiger cats were by far the most common of all cats and a tiny kitten in a house with a PTSD German Shepherd and a warrior half-breed Border Collie might not be safe for a tiny, undersized kitten.
I had seen kittens killed by farm dogs. Not a pretty sight.
But this tiny kitten was a true tiger. She quickly put the dogs and and another cat in their places. Only really, really dumb dogs are willing to take the punishment from unsheathed claws.
We named the tiny tiger Rachael.
Best, Terry
Jan 14 2013
The transcript can be read here
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you often feel exhausted and sore. And the next morning it’s even worse.
If that was all that happened, you’d probably never do it. It’s not that much fun being sore. Yet we do it anyway – because we know that, in the long run, the pain will make us stronger. Next time we’ll be able to run harder and lift more before the pain starts.
And knowing this makes all the difference. Indeed, we come to see the pain as a sort of pleasure – it feels good to really push yourself, to fight through the pain and make yourself stronger. Feel the burn! It’s fun to wake up sore the next morning, because you know that’s just a sign that you’re getting stronger.
Few people realize it, but psychological pain works the same way. Most people treat psychological pain like the hot stove – if starting to think about something scares them or stresses them out, they quickly stop thinking about it and change the subject.
The problem is that the topics that are most painful also tend to be the topics that are most important for us: they’re the projects we most want to do, the relationships we care most about, the decisions that have the biggest consequences for our future, the most dangerous risks that we run. We’re scared of them because we know the stakes are so high. But if we never think about them, then we can never do anything about them. [..]
Next time you start feeling that feeling, that sense of pain from deep in your head that tells you to avoid a subject – ignore it. Lean into the pain instead. You’ll be glad you did.
Jan 14 2013
What nation can intentionally target children for death and still expect the world to love us? Didn’t we used to denounce the Soviet Union for this stuff?
“In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”
– Lt Col Marion Carrington, Marine Corp Times
It sort of puts those school shooting deaths in perspective, doesn’t it? Our lack of respect for the lives of children overseas will eventually come home.