Real Engineering
Published on 29 Dec 2017
October 7, 2019
The History of The London Underground
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QotD: Politicians’ promises
It is said of Obama that his every promise had an expiration date. That way of phrasing it seems almost too kind – as if each promise once had value and then lost it after it expired. Some promises are only ever meant to be believed – they are never meant to be kept.
Niall Killmartin, “The promise that was never meant to be kept is now the hill they have chosen to die on”, The Great Realignment, 2019-09-04.
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October 6, 2019
Cutting the Lid Rebates by Hand | Dovetail Box Project #13 | Free Online Woodworking School
Matt Estlea
Published 4 Oct 2019In this video, I show you two effective methods of cutting the rebates to locate the lid. Firstly, I show you how to use a shoulder plane to complete the task. Then I follow that up and show you how to use a rebate plane. Supporting resources for this lesson are listed below.
_________________________________________________________________How to Plane Correctly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGvR…Veritas Shoulder Plane:
http://bit.ly/2OinWPQProject Tool List:
https://mailchi.mp/c7ac30e21fed/boxre…
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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 with a further 1 year working as an Artist in Residence at the Sylva Foundation. I now teach City and Guilds Furniture Making at Rycotewood as of September 2018.
I also had 5 years of experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I helped customers with purchasing tools, demonstrated in stores and events, and gained extensive knowledge about a variety of tools and brands.
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.
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Finally a reason to climb on the impeachment bandwagon
Andrew Heaton, in his latest newsletter, explains why he’s finally come down on the side of impeaching President Trump:
Okay, here’s the main thing I wanted to talk to you about: America is about to slap a TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT tariff on scotch. The underlying story involves the WTO and Airbus, but I think I can save everybody a lot of time by pointing out that our president is a mouthbreathing protectionist who’s too lazy to read Adam Smith’s wikipedia page.
Here are a few things to consider:
- Tariffs are just taxes, designed to punish you for having the gall to buy something from a foreigner.
- This will hurt Scottish distillers, and potentially price out distillers with low profit margins.
- I might have to switch to wine on dates.
- We have now spent more money needlessly bailing out farmers from a trade war with China than we did bailing out banks under Bush.
- We’ve known about the idiocy of tariffs since The Wealth of Nations came out in 1776.
- Trump, a man lacking an ideological core, for reasons which boggle the mind, seems to genuinely believe tariffs and protectionism are good things, as he has maintained since the 80s.
Chances are if you subscribe to this newsletter you’re not a teetotaler, but on the off chance you are, allow me to make a case against whisky taxes even if you are not personally apoplectic about a tax hike on Laphroaig. (A concoction personally invented by Almighty God. It’s like you’re drinking a campfire. Try it.)
There’s an old saying: when goods don’t cross borders, armies do. I concur with this. In fact my largest contribution to the field of economics (Nobel Prize forthcoming) is Heaton’s Peace Through International Mistresses Theory.My groundbreaking idea is that we want to have an interconnected, global economy with lots of transnational trade, because businessmen will be less supportive of bombing cities their mistresses live in. When trade wars happen, international trade collapses, and suddenly businessmen are flying to Berlin and Paris a lot less. Pretty soon we’re firebombing Tokyo.
It would probably be more appropriate of me to dedicate my political analysis to the forthcoming Ukraine/Trump/Biden/Impeachment circus which will dominate our lives for the next few months. However in my case I don’t need to. The president has messed with my scotch. Now it’s personal. I’m all in.
Impeach the guy.
#FreeTrade
You can subscribe to Andrew’s email newsletter here.
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Hitler and the Art of the Deal – WW2 – 058 – October 5 1940
World War Two
Published 5 Oct 2019Hitler is trying to get new Axis Powers on board in his fight against Britain, promising them all huge territorial gains.
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
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Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.Sources:
– IWM: A 220
– Photos of Herbert Morrison and John Anderson by Yousuf Karsh, Dutch National Archives
– National Library of Australia
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– Colorized portrait of Mao Zedong by Olga Shirnina, aka Klimbim
– Flag of Spain by SanchoPanzaXXI on Wikimedia CommonsA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
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The cultural influence of George Orwell
George Orwell, the chosen pen name of Eric Blair, is one of the best known writers of the 20th century and even people who have never read any of his writings are aware of his influence. John Rodden and John Rossi outline the immediate post-war period that saw Orwell publish his final and best-known work:
Seven decades ago on June 8, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four exploded on the cultural front—fittingly enough, just two months before the Soviet Union’s first successful atomic test that August, which broke America’s nuclear monopoly. Orwell’s warning was urgent — and timely. Almost overnight, in the wake of the surrender of Germany and Japan that ended World War II in 1945, a new war—the so-called Cold War — had emerged. (Orwell is often credited with coining the term.)
The Cold War pitted the capitalist West against the communist East, above all the United States against the USSR (and soon China). Just three weeks before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Soviet Union lifted the Berlin Blockade, thereby avoiding a potentially deadly showdown with the West that might have triggered World War III. Two weeks later, on May 23, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was officially established, effectively ending prospects in the near future of German reunification. On the very day of Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s publication, June 8, fears swept through liberal America of a growing Red Scare when a leaked document named numerous celebrities as Communist Party members (e.g., Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Fredric March, Danny Kaye, Edward G. Robinson). That same month, the communist armies of Mao Zedong captured Shanghai, and less than six months later on October 1, declared victory in the civil war against the American-backed Nationalists and the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
What educated person is not at least vaguely familiar with the language and vision of Orwell’s novel — even if he or she does not recognize the source? Indeed the very ignorance of the source represents an inadvertent tribute to the power of Orwell’s language and vision. Like Shakespeare’s poetry (“All the world’s a stage,” “To be or not to be,” “This above all: to thine own self be true”), so deeply have some of Orwell’s locutions become lodged in the cultural lexicon and political imagination that most people no longer recognize their author, let alone the source.
Today, as in the case of Shakespeare, hundreds of millions of people mouth Orwell’s coinages and catchphrases, such as “Big Brother” and “doublethink” — including his name as proper adjective, “Orwellian” (i.e., nightmarish, oppressive). And that’s just in English. Tens of millions more recognize and repeat them in foreign translations, as I [Rodden] discovered in our travels and teaching in the communist East Germany as well as in Asia. Rudimentary acquaintance with such locutions is regarded as a sine qua non of cultural literacy in English — even today, when prolefeed (mindless chatter) floods the print columns and dominates the airwaves.
Nineteen Eighty-Four represents Orwell’s Orwellian vision — in the form of a fictional anti-utopia (or “dystopia”) — of what a nightmarish, oppressive future might hold. It projects a world 35 years away — half the biblical lifespan of three score and ten. Having completed his novel by the end of 1948, Orwell flipped the last two digits to underscore his anti-utopian theme of a world turned upside down and inside out. Or so many scholars have reasonably claimed. The date resultant from the flipped digits also gave the novel its immediacy. Previous anti-utopias, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), had cast their ominous scenarios far into the future, which lessened their dramatic impact and tended to render them entertaining thought experiments. (Huxley’s action is set in the 26th century.) By contrast, Orwell’s dire future is too close for comfort — and depicts the planet in the immediate aftermath of a global nuclear war that has nearly annihilated the human species. His vision thus projects a world in which middle-aged readers in 1949 might find themselves in old age — and certainly their children and grandchildren were likely to witness it. (If he had lived, Orwell himself would have still been just 80 years old on April 4, 1984, when the story opens.)
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Shieldwalls
Lindybeige
Published on 24 Mar 2011This may address many of the comments I had for my spears video. Many of my theories are based on the I think fairly reliable notion that people in the past were similar to people today in that they tended towards a desire for self-preservation, and away from reckless bravery.
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QotD: Modern middle-class “cosmopolitans”
Still, there is a good chance that Jennifer and Jason actually like their IKEA dressers, and prefer them to the old oak chest that their grandparents tried to foist on them. Indeed, the extraordinary popularity of IKEA testifies not only to its convenience but to its ability to appeal to the middle-class self-image. Jennifer and Jason are drawn to IKEA because it reflects who they are: they too are modern, movable, and interchangeable, their wants satisfiable in any neighborhood with a food co-op and a coffee shop. More fundamentally, Jennifer and Jason are untraceable, a “composite material” made from numberless scraps and pieces. They have a long catalog of home towns, and their accents are NPR neutral. They can probably rattle off the various nationalities in their family trees — Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Jewish, maybe some Venezuelan or Honduran for a little color. From these backgrounds they retain no more than a humorous word or phrase, a recipe, or an Ellis Island anecdote, if that. They grew up amidst a scramble of white-collar professionals and went to college with a scramble of white-collar professionals’ kids. Their values are defined mainly by mass media, their tastes adorably quirky but never straying too far from their peers’, and like the IKEA furniture that they buy in boxes, they too cut themselves into manageable, packaged pieces and market themselves online. They are probably “spiritual but not religious.” They have no pattern or model of life that bears any relation to the past before the internet. For all intents and purposes, they sprang up de novo in the modern city. Whereas the Veneerings’ high fashion covered over an essential vulgarity, Jennifer’s and Jason’s urbane style masks a hollowness.
It may be tempting to call Jennifer and Jason, and the the group of people whom they represent, “cosmopolitans.” (And indeed, IKEA, with its vaguely exotic Swedish names, provides a dash of cosmopolitanism on the cheap.) However, Jennifer and Jason are something newer and more bizarre than cosmopolitans: as Ross Douthat aptly pointed out in the wake of the Trump election, the increasingly insulated college-educated classes of the coastal cities do not grapple with real, substantive differences in beliefs and values, associating instead with cliques of like-minded classmates. In addition, classic cosmopolitans seek out what is best in others’ traditions while showing a fierce pride in their own — a Jordanian extolling the majesty of Petra, a Mexican diplomat breaking into lines of Octavio Paz, etc. Westerners like Jennifer and Jason show no such pride or attachment, instead leaping at opportunities to mock the foibles of their native lands.
Conversely, we must also avoid cheap epithets. The word “cosmopolitan” is a double-edged sword – long a shibboleth for worldly sophistication, it has lately turned upon its makers, serving as a political weapon against urban liberals; it is not surprising that a Trump spokesman recently attacked the “cosmopolitan bias” of a journalist who questioned the White House’s immigration policies. There is nothing particularly new or insightful about attacking urbanites tainted by association with the foreign, like the Judean exiles railing against the silken whores of Babylon. Still, as shallow and hackneyed as this rhetorical strategy might be, it packs a populist punch because the very concept of “cosmopolitan” is purely relative: since no one, legally speaking, is a citizen of the world, one can be “cosmopolitan” only in contrast to someone else – a “provincial” in the Victorian terminology, or a “xenophobe” in contemporary talk. In other words, the idea of cosmopolitanism carries an unavoidable subtext of class superiority.
Samuel Biagetti, “The IKEA Humans: The Social Base of Contemporary Liberalism”, Jacobite, 2017-09-13.
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October 5, 2019
Legends Summarized: El Dorado
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 4 Oct 2019El Dorado! A shining golden city packed with promises of wealth, power and everlasting glory. An unspoiled paradise deep in the jungle, the PERFECT destination for treasure-hunters and anthropologists alike. Something that perfect is something EVERYONE wants to be real.
Aaaaand that’s the trick, isn’t it? Wanting something that badly isn’t healthy. Just ask the conquistadors!
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Sultan Knish – Hillaryland must be the saddest place on earth
I think it would be safe to say that Daniel Greenfield does not anticipate Hillary Clinton making a move to enter the Democratic primaries for the 2020 election, based on this:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Intramural Fields at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona on 2 November 2016
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
They say that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, but Hillaryland must be the saddest.
What is Hillaryland? It’s a social network “aiming to connect all the people who’ve worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton during her more than 40 years of public service.” It’s run by “volunteers” and offers a plain white $15 Hillaryland tote bag which it claims that it’s selling “at cost” and “not for profit”.
How the mighty have fallen.
Once upon a time, Hillary and her people gaslit the country on the big issues. Now they’ve gone from Benghazi to trying to convince a declining handful of suckers that $15 is the cost price for a tote bag.
Hillaryland is the sad successor to Clintonworld networks like the Clinton Foundation which connected world leaders, foreign criminals and a prospective president. The alumni network is now a joke. The Clintons will never hold public office again. Hillaryland isn’t an alumni network, it’s a political leper colony run by “volunteers” too dumb to realize that the S.S. Slick Willy will never rise again.
Hillaryland promotes such promising ventures as Nasty Women Serve which holds an annual Hillary Rodham Clinton Day of Service. The highest level of service in Hillaryland is hosting a “house party” on November 8, which is National Hillary Day, also known as the day of Hillary’s downfall and defeat. The party will have, “in the true spirit of HRC — some Chardonnay” and will go on “until the wine runs out”.
Only Nazi war criminals in Argentina have sadder and more pathetic reunions than Hillary minions.
Nazis and potheads have 4/20 to get high. Hillary fans have 11/8 to get drunk on white wine. And both of them even blame the Russians for the defeat of their miserably corrupt murderous regimes.
And where’s Madame Fuhrer?
Hillary stopped by the Venice Biennale, the umbrella organization that includes the Venice Film Festival, allegedly a favorite stalking ground of old Clinton pal, Harvey Weinstein, to attend the exhibit of “HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails.”
For an hour, Hillary sat in a replica of the Oval Office pretending to read her own emails as part of an art project. To make her humiliation more complete, HILLARY was staged at the Despar Teatro Italia, a former theater turned into a supermarket. Confused shoppers watched a former American presidential contender pretending to be the President of the United States in an Italian supermarket.
There’s your chicken, your canned tomatoes and your pasta. Upstairs is a crazy lady who thinks she’s the President of the United States. Go easy on the chardonnay, you don’t want to end up like her.
Even Lady Macbeth went mad with more dignity than Hillary Clinton.
The Oval Office recreated in an Italian supermarket is only the second most famous piece of eponymous Hillary art. The National Museum of Women in the Arts also features a 6-foot-tall painting of a black fabric swatch named Hillary gifted to it by Heather and Tony Podesta. Heather and Tony have since split up. And Tony, a Hillarylander, got caught up in the Russia scandal and shut down his lobbying operation.
Sic transit gloria clintonmundi.
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The Fillister Plane | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 4 Oct 2019Paul has been using the fillister plane for over 50 years because of its versatility, compactness and reliable neatness. The fillister plane is simply a rebate or rabbet plane and can be called such in the day-to-day of benchwork. In this video Paul gives you a detailed look at the plane’s mechanics and efficiency when rebating.
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/
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Losing our religion
Arthur Chrenkoff found another report on the inverse relationship between development and religious belief:
A few weeks ago I wrote a longish blog post arguing that for many people in the developed world environmentalism has become a religion, filling up the gap in spirituality left by the decline of Christianity. I don’t claim any originality or new insight in this observation; it has been noted many times before, including by my friend, former artilleryman and now man of God, Rev Donald Sensing, and it has made an appearance quite a few times subsequent to my piece, a propos Greta Thunberg’s performance at the United Nations and the reaction it inspired around the (developed) world.
Today, I chanced upon another interesting analysis by Pew Research Center, about religious belief and commitment around the world. Results are not surprising but are nevertheless interesting, including this world map:
Unfortunately, Pew does not provide additional data on those for whom religion might be “important” or “somewhat important” so as to paint a slightly fuller picture of religious sentiment, but the results illustrated above are probably quite indicative. The developed world is well and truly secular now, with the United States and Greece being the only outliers (and by a long mile), while most of the developing world (with the notable exception of China after seven decades of communism) remains extremely religious. Thus, Pew notes that “if current trends continue, countries with high levels of religious affiliation will grow fastest. The same is true for levels of religious commitment: The fastest population growth appears to be occurring in countries where many people say religion is very important in their lives.”
As the main topic of this Pew study is the age gap in religious faith around the world, it should be noted that the younger generations in the developed world are even less religious than their elders, often significantly less, putting the already low rates across the West in an even starker perspective (by contrast, throughout most of the developing world, there is little, if any, gap in religious commitment between the young and the old).
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Dreyse Model 1835 Needlefire Breechloading Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 19 Aug 2019RIA on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/RockIsla…
RIA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rockislanda…Johann Nicolaus Dreyse, later promoted to the aristocracy as Nicolaus von Dreyse, designed the first mainstream military breechloading rifle. His rifle was adopted by Prussia and changed military history, but this was not his only work. Dreyse also endeavored to sell guns commercially, both rifles and handguns. This is an example of one of his first, the Model 1835. It is a single shot breechloader, with the chamber consisting of a rotating tumbler. The firing mechanism is identical in concept to that of his Model 1841 rifle, just scaled down for the smaller pistol. The piece uses a power charge of just 6 grains, but its breechloading action was quite advanced for the 1830s!
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QotD: Individual liberty
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.
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October 4, 2019
Rise of Evil – From Populism to Fascism | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1932 Part 4 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published 3 Oct 2019Democracy finds itself in a crisis as the 1930s take off. On a global scale, Fascist or otherwise authoritarian and repressive movements and governments seek to destroy the pillars of liberal society.
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Joram Appel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Sound design: Marek KamińskiSources icons: Graphic Enginer, Luis Prado
Colorizations: Daniel Weiss, Cassowary Colorizations, KlimbimA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
1 hour ago (edited)
This episode might be a little more academic than our other episodes, but we wanted to cover the global Fascist surge AND that it’s just too simple to refer to all totalitarian states and authoritarian and repressive movements as “Fascist”. Fascism is a very complicated concept that is still today being debated by political scientists and historians, as well as politicians and journalists. We try to give some insight to what Fascism is, what it isn’t and what all those movements and countries were, if not Fascist. We appreciate that you might have a different opinion as to what Fascism was or is, and we’re interested to hear your opinion. Just keep it civil and try to stay away from modern political debates, as that is not what we’re here for. EDIT: As for comments claiming that Fascism was left-wing/socialist, watch the video again. Don’t bother commenting if you can’t bring a proper argument to the table.
Cheers,
Joram
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