Quotulatiousness

May 29, 2019

US Soldiers Fighting in Russia – The End of the “Polar Bear Expedition” I THE GREAT WAR May 1919

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 28 May 2019

The so called Allied intervention into the Russian Civil War suffered from no clear operational goals and mandate and when US President Woodrow Wilson pulled out the American soldiers that were fighting in Northern Russia in May 1919, the operation suffered another setback. Public pressure against US foreign intervention was increasing now that Germany had been beaten and many people didn’t understand what American soldiers were doing in Russia anyway. At the same time Winston Churchill and his supporters maintained that it was vital to defeat the Bolsheviks in Russia once and for all.

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» SOURCES
Crownover, Roger. The United States Intervention in North Russia, 1918-1919: The Polar Bear Odyssey. Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.

Wright, Damien. Churchill’s Secret War With Lenin: British and Commonwealth Military Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20, Helion and Company, 2017

Long, John W. “American Intervention in Russia: the North Russian Expedition, 1918-1919,” in Arthur Dudden, ed. American empire in the Pacific: from trade to strategic balance 1700 – 1922 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 321-344.

Mawdsley Evan. The Russian Civil War, Pegasus Books, 2019

Moore, Joel. The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 (1920)

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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
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The EU election was “the Tories’ worst result since 1678”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on the results of last week’s EU parliamentary elections:

In any normal UK election, it would be inconceivable for either of the two main parties – Conservative and Labour – to attract just 23 per cent of the vote. The fact that that is all they could muster between them is hilarious, and greatly to be enjoyed. As I put it on the radio last week, the departing Theresa May has led the Tories to their worst result in two hundred years. But, really, that’s praising with faint damns. I saw Daniel Hannan on the telly extending Mrs May’s impressive feat back through the pre-Reform Act era and accounting it the Tories’ worst result since 1678. Which is kind of hard to spin. Her forced resignation last Friday morning (by which point her party had made it clear they wouldn’t stick with her past lunch) ensures that she and that election result will be yoked together for all time. And jolly well deserved it is.

When the party of government falls from favor, the beneficiary is usually the principal opposition. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party saw its vote fall almost as precipitously as the Tories’. Against the Conservatives’ single-digit nine per cent, Labour could muster only fourteen per cent, its own worst result in a century – in fact, since 1910. Which would also be hard to spin, had Theresa May not done Corbyn the favor of pulling off an unbeatable record.

[…]

Instead, Mrs May in particular but also Parliament in general chose to double-down on the estrangement from the masses revealed by the referendum, and spent the next three years demonstrating that, whatever the Prime Minister had in mind when she first declared “Brexit means Brexit”, it obviously doesn’t mean leaving the European Union. Either through malice or stupidity or condescension, the political class opted to widen its breach with the people – and Nigel Farage, who is a very canny fellow, decided six weeks ago to create a party to fill the gap in a European election the UK shouldn’t have had to participate in.

Listening and/or watching to the BBC on Sunday for as long as I could stomach it, I detected a strange urge to suggest that the Brexit Party had somehow under-performed, as though it’s normal for a six-week-old party to win twenty-nine out of seventy-three seats, while the century-old Labour Party wins only ten, and the Tories four and the nearest Nigel gets to a run for his money is the second-placed Liberal Democrats with sixteen seats. Farage and the other officially pro-Brexit parties (Labour, Tory, Democratic Unionist) won 44 seats. The Lib Dems and the other officially Remainer parties (Green, Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin, Alliance Party) got 29. Adding in the unelected UKIP and Ulster Unionists, the Leave share of the vote was 58 per cent.

Yes, yes, I know, that’s a bit of a simplification, in that the Tories are supposedly pro-Brexit but totally bollocksed it, and Labour is only pretending to be pro-Brexit as part of a difficult straddle between its Old Labour working-class base and the New Labour preening metropolitan Euro-luvvies. Many of the latter – including such hitherto loyal champagne socialists as actors Simon Callow and Michael Cashman and even Blair’s old Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell. – flew Corbyn’s coop and voted for the Lib Dems. Even so, for those demanding a second referendum (or, as they cynically call it, a “people’s vote”), there’s not much evidence for a second-time-around sadder-but-wiser Remain majority. Among riven Tory families, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sister stood for the new Brexit Party while Boris Johnson’s sister stood for the equally new “Change UK”, a militantly anti-Brexit party formed by a coterie of disaffected Remainer media self-promoters of the soft left and soft right. Annuziata Rees-Mogg was duly elected in the Farage surge, while Rachel Johnson flopped out because “Change UK” had barely any statistical support outside the more desperate bookers of telly current affairs shows.

How to Sharpen a Router Plane | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Paul Sellers
Published on 28 May 2019

One of our most highly demanded videos is how to sharpen a router plane. Whether you have a new or second hand router plane, Paul Sellers’ sharpening method ensures you get the best performance from your router plane.

Want to learn more about woodworking? See https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com or https://commonwoodworking.com for step-by-step videos, guides and tutorials. You can also follow Paul’s latest ventures on his woodworking blog at https://paulsellers.com/

Trudeau’s Liberals consider running on “more taxes” platform for fall election

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Are you ready for more taxes? Justin Trudeau seems to think you are, and internal Liberal Party documents indicate that several “revenue enhancement” tools are among the ideas being considered for inclusion in the party’s election campaign:

Are you ready for a tax on pop?

That is what some Liberals want to run on in October’s election.

Well, that and a carbon tax, a plastic tax, a tax on selling your home and more.

When it comes to taxes, Liberal like them all.

Lest you think I’m picking on Liberals, this actually comes from an internal party document that was first reported by the Liberal-friendly CBC.

“Ontario Liberal MPs want to pitch voters on a “sugar sweetened beverages levy — more commonly known as a soda tax — in the coming federal election campaign,” reported CBC over the weekend.

The information came from a series of policy proposals put forward by Ontario Liberal MPs that were to be considered for both the budget earlier this year and as potential policies for the upcoming election.

“We have a problem with sugar sweetened beverages being too readily available at too low a price and it is massively contributing to the obesity epidemic,” Liberal MP Mark Holland wrote in support of the proposal.

The Liberals want a tax of 20% on any sugar sweetened beverage believing it could bring in an estimated $1.2 billion a year or $29.6 billion over 25 years and health-care savings of $7.3 billion over 25 years.

How to Use a Marking Gauge CORRECTLY

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Matt Estlea
Published on 26 Apr 2019

In this video, I show you how to use a marking gauge correctly as well as share some extra tips and pointers to help you with your woodworking. Accurate measuring and marking is an essential skill when it comes to fine woodworking. It doesn’t matter how good you are with a saw or a chisel, if your layout is inaccurate every operation after will be inaccurate too.
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Support what I do by becoming a Patron! This will help fund new tools, equipment and cover my overheads. Meaning I can continue to bring you regular, high quality, free content. Thank you so much for your support! https://www.patreon.com/mattestlea
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See what tools I use here: https://kit.com/MattEstlea
My Website: http://www.mattestlea.com
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My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 23 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***.

I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre and 4 years experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I still currently work on weekends. During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best.

I like to have a laugh and my videos are quite fast paced BUT you will learn a lot, I assure you.

Lets go make a mess.

QotD: Past civilizations

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… when anyone says “there was a civilization before us” your head (our head) jumps to airplanes, trains, steel mills, refrigerators, dentistry.

I’m telling you the chances of that are negligible, though I won’t scruple using a more advanced than us past civilization to give my characters a nasty shock when they get to space. I won’t because that’s just cool.

However of things like Ancient Greece or Rome? I almost think the chances against it are worse. And of course civilizations that live and die by coastal sailing would be mostly engulfed in the great melt of the last ice age.

And no, Europe hasn’t been extensively studied. As I said before, Europe is mostly built on Europe. And you can’t dig in a field without finding SOMETHING. If you think everyone runs to the academics or the authorities when something is found, you don’t understand people’s interest in building a house, or sowing a field, as opposed to you know, giving up ownership of their land in all but fact. Frankly I’m amazed so many people do report discoveries.

But the thought of “superior civilizations” got me to thinking of what say the Romans or the Greeks, or those other ancient civilizations if they ever existed, would make of us in the West. We cross the globe by flying through the air. Not just heads of state or priests, no, common people. Hell, our pets fly. Most places have clean, fresh water that someone doesn’t have to carry a mile or so (which has been most of the work of humanity I think, forever.) Forget aqueducts. We have water that comes from our faucets whenever we want it. Cold AND hot. We have temperature control inside our houses, allowing us ignore the weather and keep warm in winter and cold in summer. We can magically cure diseases that killed millions of people by injecting this magical elixir into the sick person’s veins. Our old live a long time in relative comfort. We get our teeth fixed and replaced, so most people can chew to the end of their lives. Most of us can read, and most of us have access to untold wisdom of the sort their hermetic orders would kill for.

We are the superior civilization. We are the enlightened ones, the shining and resplendent inhabitants of the wonderful future.

And we worry about what gender we feel like being that day, who is allowed to pee where, whether someone used the wrong word to refer to someone else who might be offended, whether our use of fossil fuels offends Gaia, whether slapping a kid on the behind is a criminal offense, whether we are doing all we could do with our lives.

In other words, we’re neurotic, unsatisfied, and a bit crazy like most of people who were born and raised rich throughout most of human history.

Which is why if we really were doomed to repeating a cycle, and if the civilizations before us were the same but more advanced, the message of the pyramids would be “Don’t use so much toilet paper. Just wash one square and reuse it.”

Perhaps we should be grateful they are truly profoundly unlikely to ever have existed or tried to send us any message.

Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.

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