The Great War
Published on 30 Dec 2017Play Warthunder For Free:
https://warthunder.com/play4free?r=greatwarIndy takes a look at the Sopwith Snipe and meets Trevor who shows us the typical gear of a WW1 pilot.
December 31, 2017
The Sopwith Snipe – WW1 Pilot’s Gear I THE GREAT WAR Special
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A contrarian view of hijabs, niqabs, and burqas
Western views of full-coverage clothing, including hijabs, niqabs, and burqas, may be concealing a hidden benefit to those who choose to wear such clothes voluntarily:
Hijabs, niqabs, and burqas — different sorts of coverings worn by Islamic women — are divisive apparel in the West, associated with patriarchal oppression, cultural outsiders, and even suicide bombers. Yet few accounts actually discuss the experiences of the women wearing the veils, and the freedom and anonymity coverings can afford if worn voluntarily.
Born in Pakistan and educated in America, Rafia Zakaria is the author of Veil, a new book which explores the history and shifting meanings of female coverings in Islamic countries and Western secular society. In a wide-ranging conversation, she talks with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie about the theological underpinnings of veils, their use as a means of controlling female sexuality, and how they have become markers of socio-economic status and virtue signaling.
Veils present a particular conflict for Western feminists. On the one hand, veils — especially burqas — are emblematic of regimes that are particularly oppressive to women. Feminists and others have moved to ban the wearing of veils in public in the name of female empowerment. But if a Muslim women wants to wear one, is she endorsing patriarchy and setting back the women’s rights movement or simply owning her own choices, especially in a culture that might itself be anti-Islamic?
Who Invented Hawaiian Pizza?
Today I Found Out
Published on 4 Dec 2017In this video:
On June 8, 2017, Greek-born, Canadian-bred pizza maker Sam Panopoulos died. His career slinging pies was rather unremarkable save for one notable thing – he was the inventor of the popular, yet infamous pineapple-topped “Hawaiian Pizza,” named as such because of the brand of canned fruit he used. Loved by some and hated by others, the sweet and salty pizza is so controversial that it once triggered an argument between friendly nations. While such arguments rage on both sides of it being a delicacy or an abomination, the fact is that the Hawaiian pizza is actually not Hawaiian – it’s Canadian. Here now is the story of pizza and the man who decided to add pineapples to it.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
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QotD: The rise of the man-child
I just turned 51, and a disturbingly large percentage of men in their twenties and thirties seem like spoiled narcissistic man-children to me. I thought for a while that this might mean I was turning into the sort of crusty old fart I laughed at when I was twenty-five, until I noticed that the percentage of man-children varied a great deal depending on my social context.
At the martial-arts school where I’m training, zero to not much. Even the teenage boys there are pretty manly, on the whole – not surprising, since manliness is very nearly defined by stoicism and grace under pressure, and a martial-arts school should teach those things if it teaches nothing else. Anywhere firearms are worn or displayed openly, ditto — go to a tactical-shooting match, for example, and you’ll see even prepubescent boys (and, though rarely, some girls) exemplifying quiet manliness in a very heartening degree.
On the other hand…when I go to places where people are talking rather than doing, the percentage of man-children rises. Occasionally my wife Cathy and I go to screenings at the Bryn Mawr Film institute, most recently to see Sergei Bodrov’s The Mongol; it’s pretty much wall-to-wall man-children there, at least in the space not occupied by middle-aged women. If our sample is representative, my wife is manlier than the average male art-film buff.
How does one tell? The man-child projects a simultaneous sense of not being comfortable in his own skin and perpetually on display to others. He’s twitchy, approval-seeking, and doesn’t know when to shut up. He’s never been tested to anywhere near the limits of his physical or moral courage, and deep within himself he knows that because of this he is weak. Unproven. Not really a man. And it shows in a lot of little ways – posture, gaze patterns, that sort of thing. He’ll overreact to small challenges and freeze or crumble under big ones.
One of the things this culture badly needs is a set of manhood ordeals. Unlike the tribal societies of the past, we’re too various for one size to fit all — but to reliably turn boys into men (or, to put it in more fashionable terms, to help them become mature and inner-directed) you need to put them under stress in a way that, except for the small percentage that go through military boot camps, we basically don’t any more.
Instead, we prolong adolescence into the twenties and thirties. With dolorous consequences for everyone…
Eric S. Raymond, “Where the men are”, Armed and Dangerous, 2008-12-15.
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December 30, 2017
Congressional New Year’s Resolutions
ReasonTV
Published on 29 Dec 2017In this special holiday edition of “Mostly Weekly” Andrew Heaton comes up with some out-of-the-box New Year’s resolutions for our legislators.
As 2017 thankfully limps to its conclusion, we turn our sights to 2018 and ways in which Congress can be less awful. In this special holiday edition of “Mostly Weekly” Andrew Heaton comes up with some out-of-the-box ideas for our legislators:
•Find out what’s inside the stuff they vote on
•Quit hemorrhaging money like a drunken sailor
•Balance mental health with Mr. Trump’s twitter account
•Find healthy outlets for pint up sexual energy otherwise directed at staffersAnd, of course, what to do about that shrimp running on a government-funded treadmill.
Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.
Script by Andrew Heaton with writing assistance from Sarah Rose Siskind
Edited by Sarah Rose Siskind and Austin Bragg
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.
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The Dark Ages of Sex – All Pleasure is Sin! l THE HISTORY OF SEX
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 21 Sep 2015Sex became a sin in the Middle Ages. Following the promiscuous Ancient Rome and Greece, the Western World was indoctrinated with Medieval concepts of guilt and immorality. Adultery and sex for pleasure became unthinkable. Churches implemented strict rules, breaking them could result in public shaming. The severity of punishments would only increase after the Reformation.
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QotD: The “Celtic” peoples
… I became a little more aware of what might be described as a genetic disorder, shared generally by the “Celtic” peoples, from Shetlands and Orkneys to Galicia.
“Celtic” is of course a creation of the modern academic mind, which keeps tidier files than I do. There never was, in fact, such a race or people. They were just a bunch of mongrels driven west, ever west, until they came against The Ocean — while the more settling tribes established their European lebensraum.
Also, perhaps, they flit north, and east, but let us put those refugees out of sight and mind, as most were made extinct. For I refer expressly to “the people of the fiddle,” who, when delivered to the New World (invariably by some persecution), instinctively found the least arable land, and scattered up anything that resembled mountains. We find them still today not only in “the highlands” of Cape Breton, but right down the Appalachian cordillera, where they dug in as “hillbillies” and such. They remain the ethnic backbone of our English-speaking armies, ever eager to sign up.
David Warren, “Of mercy & forgiveness”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-06-02.
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December 29, 2017
2017 wasn’t all doom and gloom and Trump tweet wars
Veronique de Rugy manages to find three things that 2017 produced that somehow didn’t kill millions of Americans (so far, as far as we know):
First, President Donald Trump just signed a historic reduction in the corporate income tax rate, from 35 percent — the highest of all industrialized nations — to 21 percent. And except for a one-time repatriation tax, the U.S. will no longer tax most profits made by businesses overseas.
Both changes should boost economic growth and American workers’ wages. Moreover, the reform removes many of the distortions that discourage companies from investing foreign-earned income in the United States and prompt them to use tax avoidance techniques.
Second, this was a very good year for deregulation. Cutting taxes isn’t the only way to boost growth and raise wages; innovation may matter even more. Getting rid of duplicative and outdated regulatory hurdles to innovation promises to have a real impact on our lives. That’s what the Trump administration, with the help of Congress, seems committed to doing.
When the president first got to the White House, for example, he froze many not-yet-implemented Obama-era regulations. These include the punishing overtime pay regulation, which would have increased the cost of employing workers and ultimately reduced their base compensation to offset the increase in overtime pay.
[…]
Last but not least are the sustained efforts by Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Richard Shelby, R-Ala., to slow down the process that would restore the Export-Import Bank, a bastion of cronyism, to its full and former glory.
Appointing enough board members to give Ex-Im a full quorum would instantly restore the agency’s ability to sign off on deals above $10 million for the benefit of a handful of very large foreign and domestic corporations. By resisting, the two senators are fighting a lonely fight on behalf of the unseen victims of corporate welfare.
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Ludendorff Plans for a Spring Offensive I THE GREAT WAR – Week 179
The Great War
Published on 28 Dec 2017This week, the peace negotiations are underway at Brest-Litovsk. Meanwhile, the German High Command begins to plan for a game-changing offensive in the spring. There’s action in Italy on the Piave Front, and the Ottomans try to recapture the Holy City.
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Autopsy of the “Remain” campaign – but the rules only apply to the little people!
It’ll be interesting to see if anything comes of this:
The Remain campaign flouted Electoral Commission rules so it could overspend by up to £7.5 million during the referendum, a Guido investigation can reveal. Over the next few days Guido will be looking at how the various Remain groups coordinated their messaging, campaign plans, data, materials and donations, causing them to overspend by more than double the legal limit. Sorry Electoral Commission HQ, you’re going to have to come back early from your Christmas holidays…
The Electoral Commission rules are clear: if one campaign “coordinates [its] activity with another campaigner”, then they are “highly likely to be working together”. This definition of “working together” is important, because the Electoral Commission also says: “the lead campaign group must count all of the spending of all the campaigners it works together with towards its own limit”. Guess what… they didn’t.
Two books provide detailed accounts of a number of Remain campaigns coordinating plans and working together in the weeks leading up to the referendum. Tim Shipman’s All Out War reveals “[Craig] Oliver led an early-morning conference call for the media teams at 6.15am. At 7.30am there was a second conference call, in which Stronger In would tell Labour In, Conservatives IN and the Liberal Democrats about their plans for the day”. This clearly counts as “coordinating” and “working together” under the Electoral Commission’s definition.
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How to make a Rag-in-a-can Oiler | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published on 8 Feb 2017Paul demonstrates how to make a Rag-in-a-can Oiler. A useful accessory for smoothing cuts with saws and planes.
For more information on these topics, see https://paulsellers.com or https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com
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QotD: Post-structuralism
Another problem in 1970s academe was a job recession in the humanities that arose just as deconstruction and post-structuralism arrived from Europe. The deconstructionist trend started when J. Hillis Miller moved from Johns Hopkins University to Yale and began bringing Jacques Derrida over from France for regular visits. The Derrida and Lacan fad was followed by the cult of Michel Foucault, who remains a deity in the humanities but whom I regard as a derivative game-player whose theories make no sense whatever about any period preceding the Enlightenment. The first time I witnessed a continental theorist discoursing with professors at a Yale event, I said in exasperation to a fellow student, “They’re like high priests murmuring to each other.” It is absurd that that elitist theoretical style, with its opaque and contorted jargon, was ever considered Leftist, as it still is. Authentic Leftism is populist, with a brutal directness of speech.
Post-structuralism, in asserting that language forms reality, is a reactionary reversal of the authentic revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, when the arts had turned toward a radical liberation of the body and a re-engagement with the sensory realm. By treating language as the definitive force in the world — a foolish thesis that could easily be refuted by the dance, music, or visual arts majors in my classes — post-structuralism set the groundwork for the present campus impasse where offensive language is conflated with material injury and alleged to have a magical power to create reality. Furthermore, post-structuralism treats history as a false narrative and encourages a random, fragmented, impressionistic approach that has given students a fancy technique but little actual knowledge of history itself.
Camille Paglia, “The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech”, Heat Street, 2016-05-09.
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December 28, 2017
How A Cargo Ship Helped Win WW2: The Liberty Ship Story
Mustard
Published on 14 Nov 2017During World War Two, hundreds of cargo ships raced across the Atlantic in an effort to keep Britain supplied. But these ships were being sunk by German U-boats, warships and aircraft. In 1940 alone, over a thousand allied ships were lost on their way to Britain.
The United States, while not yet at war, was playing a vital role in supplying Britain. But with ships being sunk daily, Britain and America desperately needed a way to keep all that material moving across the Atlantic. In response, 18 shipyards across the coastal United States mobilized to build thousands of large cargo ships known as Liberty Ships. They would be built even faster than the enemy could sink them. At one point the shipyards were building one large Liberty Ship every eight hours.
Two revolutionary changes in shipbuilding will make this enormous feat possible. The first is welding and the second is the use of a modular assembly process. By mid 1941, the sheer number Liberties out at sea, along with increasing armed escorts overwhelmed German forces. Advances in anti-submarine technologies also started stamping out the U-boat threat.
Today, there are only three Liberty Ships remaining of the 2,710 built that remind us of their enormous contribution to winning World War Two.
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QotD: The 1960s cultural revolution
The entire political and cultural trajectory of the decades following World War II in the U.S. was a movement away from the repressions of the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union, when the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives searched for signs of Communist subversion in every area of American life. A conspicuous target was the Hollywood film industry, where many liberals had indeed been drawn to the Communist Party in the 1930s, before the atrocities of the Stalinist regime were known. To fend off further federal investigation, the major studios blacklisted many actors, screenwriters, and directors, some of whom, like a favorite director of mine, Joseph Losey, fled the country to find work in Europe. Pete Seeger, the leader of the politicized folk music movement whose roots were in the social activism of Appalachian coal-miners in the 1930s, was banned from performing on network TV in the U.S. in the 1950s and ‘60s.
There were sporadic landmark victories for free speech in the literary realm. In 1957, local police raided the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco and arrested the manager and owner, Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for selling an obscene book, Allen Ginsberg’s epic protest poem, Howl. After a long, highly publicized trial, Howl was declared not obscene, and the charges were dropped. The Grove Press publishing house, owned by Barney Rosset, played a heroic role in the battle against censorship in the U.S. In 1953, Grove Press began publishing affordable, accessible paperbacks of the voluminous banned works of the Marquis de Sade, a major thinker about sex and society at the close of the Enlightenment. In 1959, the Grove Press edition of D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, then banned in the U.S., was confiscated as obscene by the U.S. Postal Service. Rosset sued and won the case on federal appeal. In 1961, the publication by Grove Press of another banned book, Henry Miller’s 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, led to 60 obscenity trials in the U.S. until in 1964 it was declared not obscene and its publication permitted.
One of the supreme symbols of newly militant free speech was Lenny Bruce, who with Mort Sahl transformed stand-up comedy from its innocuous vaudevillian roots into a medium of biting social and political commentary. Bruce’s flaunting of profanity and scatology in his improvisational onstage act led to his arrest for obscenity in San Francisco in 1961, in Chicago in 1962, and in New York in 1964, where he and Howard Solomon, owner of the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, were found guilty of obscenity and sentenced to jail. Two years later, while his conviction was still under appeal, Bruce died of a drug overdose at age 40.
This steady liberalizing trend was given huge impetus by the sexual revolution, which was launched in 1959 by the marketing of the first birth control pill. In Hollywood, the puritanical studio production code, which had been adopted in the early 1930s under pressure from conservative groups like the Legion of Decency and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was gradually breaking down and was finally abandoned by the late 1960s. The new standard of sexual expression was defined by European art films, with their sophisticated scripts and frank nudity. Pop music pushed against community norms: in 1956, Elvis Presley’s hip-swiveling gyrations were cut off by the TV camera as too sexual for the Ed Sullivan Show, which was then a national institution. As late as 1967, the Ed Sullivan Show was trying to censor the song lyrics of major bands like the Doors and the Rolling Stones, who were imitating the sexual explicitness of rural and urban African-American blues. (The Stones capitulated to Sullivan, but the Doors fought back — and were never invited on his show again.) Middle-class college students in the 1960s, including women, began freely using four-letter words that had rarely been heard in polite company, except briefly during the flapper fad of the 1920s. In the early 1970s, women for the first time boldly entered theaters showing pornography and helped make huge hits out of X-rated films like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones.
In short, free speech and free expression, no matter how offensive or shocking, were at the heart of the 1960s cultural revolution. Free speech was a primary weapon of the Left against the moralism and conformism of the Right.
Camille Paglia, “The Modern Campus Has Declared War on Free Speech”, Heat Street, 2016-05-09.
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December 27, 2017
JourneyQuest S03E07 – “The Unspeakable Nature of My Existence”
Zombie Orpheus Entertainment
Published on 26 Dec 2017Watch the complete, uncut season on Amazon Prime or ZOE Premium (http://www.zombieorpheus.com) and be sure to follow us on Facebook for the latest updates (http://www.facebook.com/zombieorpheus)
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