Bread, of course, led to variations like cake — which was good — and the kaiser bun, that tasteless, doughy piece of stodge named as revenge upon the Germans for WWI and served in many pubs to this day to diminish the pleasure of an honest hamburger. (The kaiser bun is mandatory in Ontario bars as a pivotal part of the legislation aimed at curtailing pleasure among the citizenry. Citizens who became accustomed to pleasure might start to see it as their due, which would be inconvenient for the authorities.)
Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.
December 20, 2019
QotD: Ontario pubs
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December 19, 2019
Vive la Résistance! well, not really… French Resistance 1940 – WW2 – War Against Humanity 007
World War Two
Published 18 Dec 2019Immediately after France is occupied by the Nazis in 1940, the French are divided about what to do; resist for collaborate? To put it mildly, it’s complicated.
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
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Sources: Bundesarchiv, Mémorial de la Shoah
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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
Spartacus Olsson
16 hours ago
In the aftermath of WW2, everyone was probably pretty tired of the whole tragedy, and ready to just move on. Many of the people that I have met that lived through the war didn’t like talking about the war much. But somehow I had the privilege of getting many of the them that I met to open up and talk about it to me. Maybe not so much because of any personal quality I have other than being very persistent and curious — a pain in the neck is another way of putting it.Anyway, we talked about many things, terrible things, great things, sad, and happy stories. But there was one thing I never heard anybody talk about, and that was indecision. Fear and regret, yes — everyone spoke of that, but not indecision. There was always an undertone of manifest destiny or complete meaninglessness.
But, when you think about it, how could you not be indecisive when faced with this kind of calamity? How can you not wonder if this is destiny, or just bad luck? How can you not be shocked into a stupor, at least at first? And even if you’re an ideologically convinced partisan or combatant, how do you know for sure what the right thing to do is? Well, when you start looking into it all, those questions were pretty much what gripped France in 1940 after the sudden, tragic loss of independence.
I think that indecision is not something we want to remember, perhaps we shouldn’t if we want to stay our course, perhaps we’re wired not to, so that we can focus better on what we finally decide. But for others who want to learn from our mistakes, and our successes — it is in the moment of indecision that we display our thinking, our reasoning, the true origin of our cause.
I should also tell you that I grew up in France, so this is in many ways the story of the adults around me when I was a child.
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Sir Humphrey’s rebuttal to Sir Max on the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers
In the Times last weekend, Sir Max Hastings spent some time and effort to disparage the Royal Navy for commissioning the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers and trotting out arguments against carriers that echo the criticisms of the cancelled CVA-01 program of the 1960s. Sir Humphrey characterizes Sir Max’s article as “ranting angrily about how the UK is an irrelevance now and how we don’t actually have any military power.”
HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) and HMS Prince of Wales (R09) at Portsmouth in December 2019.
Maybe it’s a generational thing and the fact that for the few remaining, and increasingly less relevant commentators of Sir Max’s elderly generation of OAPs, perhaps memories of their childhood and a sense of national malaise in the late 1940s and 50s has shaped their perception of the world today. The problem is that their view is utterly disconnected from reality, and their approach seems to be best characterised as to answer any question as “the UK is irrelevant, whats the question again”?
It is set against this backdrop of this article that it is worth reviewing why the Carrier force remains so relevant, and why the UK, despite the wishes of Sir Max remains relevant and credible globally. Carriers matter in simple terms because they allow the UK to embark an airwing, and military force, that can sail around the world on a self-sustaining basis and arrive ready to operate at a time and place of the British Governments choosing.
[…]
We like to permanently beat ourselves up as if we’re somehow failures, yet when push comes to shove, we seem to be remarkably good at not being failures. There is always a UK capability or asset that we can help with or support. Only this week the RAF sent an A400M to conduct search and rescue operations in Chile, while at the other end of the world, it finished providing air defence to Iceland with a Typhoon detachment. When disasters occur globally, the UK is always ready to send aid and assist, while in a crisis there is usually a UK military asset nearby that can help.
This reach is in part due to the fact that the UK has invested heavily in jointery and “fusion” bringing together departments and assets to work in a far more coherent and joined up way than most nations. As a nation we enjoy considerably more influence, reach and access than we think, and are usually at the cutting edge of efforts to improve capabilities too.
It is particularly frustrating then to see attacks on the existence of the carrier force in a way that treats this priceless national asset as if it is some kind of toy for the Royal Navy. It smacks of a total lack of understanding about how defence works in support of wider national security, and how joined up things really are these days.
The carrier is a national investment designed to provide a wide plethora of capabilities to support and defend the nation, and its allies, for decades to come. To see it purely through the prism of a myopic lens and an overt and tedious hatred of the Royal Navy for reasons more probably linked to events of the 1980s than any fact is fairly sad to observe.
To be honest this piece seems to mark yet another part of the opening of hostilities in the SDSR campaign. It seems intended to cause debate about the value of carriers and gently reinforce the message that somehow money should go elsewhere – ignoring the fact that this money has now been spent.
Its hard to understand what the thinking is here, but at its heart it feels like this is a piece intended to condition the public into thinking “the Navy and to a lesser extent the RAF has had lots of money wasted on it, lets go be nice to the Army for a change”. Such a view though is utterly removed from the reality of how defence works, but it feels as if it is intended to reinforce stereotypes that wouldn’t hold up to any scrutiny.
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Modern Classics Summarized: A Christmas Carol
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 21 Dec 2018Have a holly, jolly christmas! Spend time with your family, eat tons of good food, and don’t forget to ponder the looming specter of your mortality and the worth of how you’ve spent your fleeting existence!
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Repost – “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute xkcd on Christmas music:
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Machine Gun Terminology – LMG, MMG, SAW, LSW, HMG, GPMG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Dec 2017http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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Today we will look at the various different categories of machine guns — what makes them, why they exist, and what their place in military history is. Specifically …
Automatic Rifle: Shoulder or hip fired, limited magazine capacity, minimal sustained fire capacity. Examples: M1918 BAR, Chauchat.
LMG: Magazine fed, rifle caliber, bipod fired. Examples: Bren, Madsen, Lewis.
HMG: Belt fed, usually water cooled, minimal portability, fired from tripod only. Examples: Maxim, Vickers, Hotchkiss 1914. Evolved into guns of caliber 12.7mm – 20mm, like the M2 and DShK.
MMG: Air cooled, tripod fired only, belt fed. Examples: Browning 1919A4, SG-43.
GPMG: Bipod or tripod fired, belt fed, rifle caliber, quick-change barrel. Examples: MG42, PKM, M240.
SAW/LSW: Intermediate caliber, magazine fed, bipod fired. Examples: L86A1, FN Minimi, RPK.
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QotD: The “fitness club” scam
Here’s how you talk yourself into a
gymfitness club membership: “I need to get in shape. So I’ll buy a club membership. That way, I can go whenever I want.” In Festinger’s taxonomy […] you’re at step 2: You’ve taken a significant action in line with your belief.Gymsfitness clubs add a further refinement of late-20th century marketing, in that they offer you a yuuuuge “discount” off the outrageously-high signup fee, but the underlying psychological process is the same.And now you’re set up for the disconfirmations — that is, all those times you think about going to the gym, but don’t actually go. Objectively you’re wasting your money, but psychologically you’re committed to the idea of yourself as someone who does “fitness” — you’re in a fitness club, after all! And since everyone you know is doing the same thing — fully 75% of conversations one overhears at Starbucks are soccer moms griping about how they need to work out, but just can’t find the time — you’re in, all the way, […].
The “climate change” scam works the same way. When she’s on the campaign trail pimping the “Green New Deal,” Fauxcahontas Warren knows she doesn’t have to pitch it to the eco-freaks; they’d vote for her no matter what. She has to pitch it to the normies, fitness club-style. That’s where the “climate change” nomenclature really pays off. It’s shockingly easy to get people convinced of a lunatic belief. All you have to do is a) get ’em early, and b) overload them with “evidence.” You know the drill: These days, we’re lectured practically from birth that we must Do Something! for The Environment! … and the “evidence” for this, of course, is the ceaseless, dramatic variation in daily temperature the un-indoctrinated call “weather,” plus all the other dramatic variations in climate that didn’t happen. So long as you pitch it with complete self-righteousness, people with the critical thinking skills of five year olds will fall in line every time.
Then all you have to do is get people to take action … which the government, in all its wonderful helpfulness, has already done: Low-flow toilets, those stupid twisty “light” bulbs, toilet paper that either shreds on contact with skin or sandpapers your asshole off, plastic straw bans, mandatory recycling, you name it. And I’m sure y’all realize by now that the fact that none of this stuff actually works is a feature, not a bug. Since it’s the disconfirmations that get you. That’s the pitch to the normies — you obviously care about “the environment,” in the same way you care about “fitness.” Just as the “fitness club” owners will happily keep cashing your checks while you remain a diabetic lardass, so Fauxcahontas will keep cashing your checks while the weather stubbornly remains the weather …
Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.
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December 18, 2019
Adolf Hitler’s First Steps In Politics – The Foundation Of The Nazi Party I THE GREAT WAR 1919
The Great War
Published 17 Dec 2019Get a free audiobook and 2 Audible Originals with a 30-day trial: http://audible.com/greatwar or text
greatwarto 500 500.Like many former soldiers, lance corporal Adolf Hitler was disillusioned with the new German Republic after the Armistice in 1918. Like man of his country men he was also in dire need of a job. The Bavarian Army provided an opportunity and soon young Adolf Hitler found himself in the ranks of an obscure political party in Munich: The German Workers’ Party.
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Dietrich Eckart, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin.
Gottfried Feder, Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft 1919.
Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler. Eine Biographie, 1973.
Heiden, Konrad: Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Ein Mann gegen Europa, 2016.
Ulrich, Volker: Adolf Hitler. Band 1: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889-1939. 2013.
Fest, Joachim C: The face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. 1999
Program of the German Workers’ Party, 1920 (http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/s…)
Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919-1945, Vol. 1, The Rise to Power 1919-1934. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998, pp. 12-14.»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Motion Design: Phillip Appelt
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Mark Steyn on what passes as “conservatism” these days
It’s certainly Conservative-In-Name-Only:
In 2000, when the Vermont Supreme Court mandated same-sex “civil unions”, American conservatives were outraged. By 2010, when the left had moved on to gay marriage, conservatives were supportive of civil unions but insisted marriage was an ancient institution between a man and a woman. Now, the left having won that one and moved on to transgenderism, conservatives profess to be a bit queasy about transitioning grade-schoolers.
So you can take it to the bank that by 2030 rock-ribbed Republicans will be on board with penises in the girls’ changing rooms, but determined to hold the line against whatever the left’s next cause du jour is: human cloning, the state appropriation of parenthood, voting rights for animals.
There really isn’t much point to conservatism that’s just leftism ten years late, is there? It’s like that ITV+1 satellite service they have in Britain that offers you the ITV schedule but an hour later, in case you were caught in traffic heading home. If you’re considering on which side to bestow your tribal loyalty, the left is right quicker; the right is left behind — but only for a few years until they throw in the towel. If you’re all headed to the same destination, why not ride first class on the TGV instead of the creaking, jerking stopping service? Justin Trudeau’s vapid modishness was perfectly distilled by his campaign catchphrase of four years ago: “Because it’s 2015.” But that beats waiting till 2025 to say “Because it’s 2015”.
While we’re on the subject of the northern Tories: Because the late unlamented Andrew Scheer finessed his views on same-sex nuptials as lethargically as did Barack Obama, he was flayed by the Canadian media as some fire-and-brimstone social conservative of televangical inflexibility. I wish. As I wrote the other day, he’s as unmoored from principle as Boris Johnson, but without the countervailing strengths of being able to stick it to the other guy and to pass himself off as a human being. He was particularly contemptible in the hours before my appearance at the House of Commons Justice Committee, as I may discuss in detail one of these days. Yet the never-learn Conservatives are minded to replace an entirely hollow man with someone just like him, only more so.
It is surely telling that the only issues on which the right has made any progress at all in moving the ball in its direction — Brexit in the UK; illegal immigration and a belated honesty about the rise of China in the US — had to be injected into public discourse by two outsiders, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. And indeed in the teeth of opposition by the establishment’s catch-up conservatives.
Catch-up conservatism gives the game away: The right has lost the knack of persuasion, and increasingly doesn’t even bother to try.
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Ballester-Molina Pistols from German Pocket Battleship Armor?
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Dec 2019http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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There is an old gun shop tale that Argentine Ballester-Molina pistols were made form the salvaged armor plate of the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. The Graf Spee was scuttled in the Rio de la Plata estuary in December 1939, only a few miles from the HAFDASA factory in Buenos Aires, and Argentina did not have the domestic steel reserves to make enough pistols…
See Michael Parker’s full article on this, including the exact results of his metallurgical analysis, here:
https://www.americanrifleman.org/arti…
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Repost – Induced aversion to a particular Christmas song
Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why — to this day — I can barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:
Seasonal Melodies
James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:
This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.
It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”
This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.
Back in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameway’s Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.
Note that singular. “Tape”.
Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …
So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (White Christmas and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned Drummer Boy song.
We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.
To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from snatching boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.
Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.
And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
It’s been over 20 years 30 years now, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two three decades.
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History Summarized: Pope Fights
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Aug 2018The Medieval Catholic Church was … an interesting place, to put it lightly. Sometimes there was more than one Pope at a time, and sometimes they fought each other for power. Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you Pope Fights! The most absurd chapter in all of Catholicism.
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QotD: Approaching 60
Well, it’s just a number. I feel engaged with my times, apart from them as well; amused, concerned, optimistic, and not scared: I’ve been on 7 cruises since I bought my last suit and the pants still fit with a 29″ waist. My eyes are crap but my eyes have always been crap. I look older but why shouldn’t I? I have the same energy I had when I was 20, except I know more. I’ve done everything I wanted to do and regret nothing. Hoorah!
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2017-11-29.
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December 17, 2019
How to Make Winding Sticks – Long Format Hand Tool Woodworking Project
Wood By Wright
Published 28 Jan 2017A pair of winding sticks is often the first tool that a hand tool woodworker will make for himself. These were made with Maple, Boxelder, Ebony and an Oak dowel. This is a long format video to show in depth how to make winding sticks with all hand tools. This How-to was a fun woodworking project to set up.
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“Oh, shut-up. Pound sand, you scowling urchin”
I don’t often find myself nodding along with Kurt Schlicter‘s writings, but I have to agree that Greta Thunberg’s fifteen minutes must surely be up by now?
Clearly Greta Thunberg is being exploited by her cynical puppetmasters, but equally clearly she’s a tiresome, bizarre Marxist scold whose exploitation of the hapless dummies who buy into the climate change hoax is part of what is an increasingly violent plot to undermine capitalism and freedom. Recently, the cretins at TIME, which shockingly still exists in 2019, named her “Person of the Year.” That’s appropriate, since 2019 has been a very annoying year.
In 2029, after the world hasn’t ended but her usefulness has, she’ll be a Jeopardy question and probably shacked up with an unemployed performance artist named Björn in an Oslo suburb. Fun fact: “Greta Thunberg” is Swedish for “Cindy Sheenhan.”
But today, we’re all supposed to fall over ourselves over Pippi Longnagging – at least that’s what our betters command – yet it’s unclear why. Teenagers are notoriously ignorant, and ones spewing recycled Marxism are the worst of all. But the idea is not that this tiresome truant is some visionary thinker. The idea is to leverage her youth and awkwardness to keep you from speaking the indisputable truth that she’s a weird brat who presses for an ideology that butchered 100 million people in the last century. And now, she is hinting she wants to run up that score.
Trump mocked her and a zillion pearls were clutched. How dare you … criticize the Luddite pest who presumes to tell you how to live, leveraging the full benefit of her nearly 17 years of experience to explain to you how stuff should be. How dare you!
Oh, shut-up. Pound sand, you scowling urchin.
The kid is a fanatic, and though that’s no fault of her own – she’s a victim of her pinko exploiters – she is still spewing bloodstained poison.
Bloodstained poison, really? Isn’t she just a nice Eastern Norwegian who wants a better world with love and hugging? Or is she yet another aspiring fanatic ready to kill for the kreepy kommie climate kult?
The other day, this malignant muppet “told cheering protesters … ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.” Now, maybe her English is bad, or maybe she’s just ignorant, but then again the murder of opponents is the Marxist way.
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