Quotulatiousness

March 27, 2020

“Aces In Exile” Pt.2 – Non-British RAF Pilots – Sabaton History 060 [Official]

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sabaton History
Published 26 Mar 2020

“Aces in Exile” return! Interesting times make for interesting men. In this second part we talk about some individual stories of Czechoslovakian, Polish and Canadian pilots that all fought under the banner of the British Royal Air Force during the Second World War. How they escaped German occupation, how they traveled through war torn Europe, and how they eventually found themselves fighting in a different uniform for a different country.

We would like to thank the World of Tanks team for their contribution and help with the video filming. If you’re not yet a World of Tanks player, join the game and get your hands on cool in-game stuff for free via the link: https://redir.wargaming.net/w7fwclmx/…
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to “Aces in Exile” on the album Coat of Arms:
CD: http://bit.ly/CoatOfArmsStore
Spotify: http://bit.ly/CoatOfArmsSpotify
Apple Music: http://bit.ly/CoatOfArmsAppleMusic
iTunes: http://bit.ly/CoatOfArmsiTunes
Amazon: http://bit.ly/CoatOfArmsAmzn
Google Play: http://bit.ly/CoatOfArmsGooglePlay

Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory

Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Sources:
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– IWM: CH 1566
– Morane-Saulnier icon by Truszko from Wikimedia
– D.520 icon by PpPachy from Wikimedia
– Hurricane icon by Martin Čížek from Wikimedia

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

The Wuhan Coronavirus sucks, our data on it sucks … but our media suck most of all

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The all-hysteria, all the time media will have much to regret once the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic has run its course:

  • The data we have sucks, and thus any conclusions we are drawing mostly suck too. The data is worse than just being incomplete or bad — if it was randomly distributed, we could live with that. But the lack of test kits and how we have deployed the few we have means that the data is severely biased. We are only testing people who are strongly symptomatic. If there is a normal distribution of outcomes from this disease, we are only testing on the right side of the distribution. We have no idea where the median is or how long the tail is to the left side of asymptomatic outcomes. The only thing we absolutely know about the disease is its not as deadly as the media is portraying as we are missing hundreds of thousands of cases in the denominator of the mortality rates. The media has also been terrible about reporting on risk factors of those who died. When a bunch of people died suddenly in Seattle, one had to read down 5 paragraphs into the story to find that they were all over 70 in an old-age home. Or when prime-of-life people die, facts such as their being type 1 diabetics — a known severe risk factor for this virus (and one that makes it different from the flu) are left out.
  • The media is constantly confusing changes in measurement technique and intensity with changes in the underlying progress of the virus itself. Changes in case numbers have as much to do with testing patterns and availability than they do with the real spread of the disease.
  • While COVID-19 is likely worse than the normal flu, our perceptions of how much worse are strongly affected by observer bias. Frankly, if every news broadcast every night spent 15 minutes reciting flu deaths each day, we would all be hiding in our homes away from flu. They present a healthy man in his thirties dying clearly as the tragedy it is, but the spoken or unspoken subtext is, “this is abnormal so this thing is much worse.” But it seems abnormal because we do not report on the very real stories of healthy young people who die of the flu. My nephew who was 25 years old and totally healthy with no pre-existing conditions died of the flu last month — and no one featured this tragedy on the national news.
  • The data we are getting sucks worse because the media has decided, as one big group, that for our own good they are going to limit all facts about the virus to only the bad ones. There is a strong sense — you see it on Twitter both in Twitter’s policies as well as Twitter group attacks — that saying anything that might in any way reduce one’s fear of the disease should be banned for our own good. One of the more prominent examples was Medium removing an article NOT because it was proven wrong but because it took one side of a very open question and it was obviously decided it was “unsafe” to allow that side to even be aired.

Cutting Grooves and Rebates using Routers | The Cabinet Project #6 | Free Online Woodworking School

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

Matt Estlea
Published 20 Mar 2020

In this part of the project, I will be showing you both the hand tool and the machine tool method of cutting the grooves and rebates to accept the shelf and back panel.

To see both methods, visit my Free Online Woodworking School. This link will take you directly to the correct lesson:
https://mattestlea.com/free-online-wo…

Plans for this project:
https://mattestlea.com/product/cabine…

Buy Pre-Planed Material Packs for this Project Here:
www.mattestlea.com/projectpacks
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Threaded Guide Bush Set: https://mattestlea.com/threaded-guide…
You also NEED this adapter: https://mattestlea.com/threaded-guide…
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Supporting Resources:

GMF1600 Router Review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2TjW…

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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

Don’t want to commit to a monthly direct debit but still want to help out? That’s fine!
You can make a one time donation here: www.mattestlea.com/donate
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SOCIAL MEDIA
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My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 24 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.

If you’re interested in studying at Rycotewood, view their courses here:
www.mattestlea.com/rycotewood

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. I discontinued this at the start of 2019 to focus solely on video creation and teaching.

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 also have a Free Online Woodworking School which you should definitely check out!

www.mattestlea.com/school

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.

Sensible risk management is not compatible with the “precautionary principle”

Filed under: Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Zaruk wrote last week for Science 2.0 Europe:

Two decades of the precautionary principle as the key policy tool for managing uncertainties has neutered risk management capacities by offering, as the only approach, the systematic removal of any exposure to any hazard. As the risk-averse precautionary mindset cements itself, more and more of us have become passive docilians waiting to be nannied. We no longer trust and are no longer trusted with risk-benefit choices as we are channelled down over-engineered preventative paths. While it is important to reduce exposure to risks, our excessively-protective risk managers have, in their zeal, removed our capacity to manage risks ourselves. Precaution over information, safety over autonomy, dictation over accountability.

  • Whatever happened to “Keep out of reach of children”? Now we cannot be trusted and all products must be child-safe.
  • Whatever happened to “Handle with care”? Now safety by design has removed the need for individuals to exercise common sense or risk reduction measures.
  • Whatever happened to trust? Now individuals are no longer left with the capacity to make their own decisions in managing personal risks.

“These are good things” precaution advocates would retort “since people often make mistakes and bad things can better be prevented!”. While continuous improvement of safety systems has its value, the bigger the fences, the less autonomously the individuals will react (creating a society of docile followers). The precautionary approach implies a lack of trust in individuals’ capacities to make their own (rational) choices. The over-engineered risk-management process would remove any situation where choices could be made. Fine for cases where there are no trade-offs, disruptions or loss of benefits (when the sheep have plenty of grass in their field), but in times of crisis (exposure to hazards), when precaution is your only tool, then sacrifice is the only solution.

[…]

When the public now sees everything of modern life (work, school, public events …) cancelled in a knee-jerk precautionary impulse, is it any wonder they are panicking? Enter the opportunist to sell you the silver solution or the naturopath detox remedy to put your mind at ease. Enter the quack to tell you to drink bleach. Enter the racist who will use the fear to mobilise outrage. Exit rationality and risk management.

With no bullets left in the risk-management gun, the only thing left to do is run … or as it is more commonly called: apply the precautionary principle. Precaution should only be applied after other risk management measures have failed but given how horribly inadequate our capacities to govern have become, it is the only strategy our regulators have come to know.

Slide from a presentation by Patti Gettinger, 2011-07-11.
Original slideshow at https://fr.slideshare.net/regsgridlock/the-precautionary-principle-8656034

H/T to Johnathan Pearce for the link.

The Best SMLE: The No1 MkV Trials Rifle

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Nov 2019

After World War One, the British looked at how to apply the lessons of the war to development of a new infantry rifle. Even before the war, a decision had been made to move to an aperture type rear sight — which would have been used on the Pattern 1913 Enfield, had the war no interrupted adoption of that model. So after the war, trials were made on some MkIII SMLE rifles refitted with rear aperture sights. These trials were successful enough to justify production of a substantial number of rifles for troop trials. This would be designated the No1 MkV rifle, and 20,000 of them were made between 1922 and 1924.

The magazine cutoff was retained in the MkV rifles, as were the volley sights in the initial production — along with an aperture rear sight marked out to 1500 yards. Following concerns about the durability of the sight and its adjustment latch, it was redesigned slightly, and the new version only went out to 1400 yards. On this second variation, the volley sights were omitted.

The new rifles was taken to Bisley and input was sought from both military units and civilian marksmen from the British NRA. The feedback that was received was that the sight was too fragile, its adjustments were too coarse, and the barrel was too light. These changes were implemented in the No1 MkVI rifle which would ultimately be adopted as the N4 MkI; the classic World War 2 version oft he Lee Enfield.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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Contact:
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QotD: “Jesus was a socialist”

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Christ taught giving. Giving means taking ones own property and passing it on to someone in need. Nowhere did he advocate taking from others by force and “redistributing” it. He certainly did not advocate taking from others, using what’s taken to fund a huge government bureaucracy, and pass out a pittance of the remainder to the poor (have to justify that bureaucracy somehow).

Nowhere in the Bible is there a passage similar to this:

    And I say unto you, take up your sword and shew it to the rich man and say unto him “give to me your wealth that it might care for the poor, lest I smite you to the Earth.”

    And when the wealthy man has given up his wealth, take it and pay for a multitude of scribes and pharisees and learned doctors of the law and say unto them, “use this wealth to provide for your hire, but only this, save a pittance thereof and give it unto the poor so that we may noise about this good work and stand in the marketplace speaking loudly of these alms we give.”

    And when this is done, say unto the people “Behold, we have cared for the poor. Now give us more of your wealth that we may continue to do so and to do other things.”

    And if any dare to resist you, lay your hands upon him and chain him and cast him into a dungeon.

    And in all this way shall you show unto the people your mercy and kindness.

When people advocate socialism enforced by government, they are advocating using force to take from some to give to others. Nowhere in his teachings did Christ advocate that. Nowhere.

This is where some people say “but Christ said Render unto Caesar.” Yes. He did. In response to a question intended to trap him. Context matters. Christ had rising popularity among the masses which concerned the Jewish leadership greatly. So they planted the question of whether they should give tribute to Caesar. If Christ had simply said “yes” he would have lost his popular audience and his ministry would have died right there. If he had said “no”, he would likely have been arrested (“we caught him forbidding tribute to Caesar” was one of the charges the Sanhedrin laid against him when handing him over to the Romans for execution). And his ministry would have died right there. Instead, he asked for an example of the tribute money, asked whose picture was on it, and gave his famous answer. And if people followed him in that, the Roman reprisal, destruction of Jerusalem, and diaspora would have occurred before much of Christ’s mission was fairly begun. If you accept his divinity, you have to accept that he knew this and gave the answer that allowed him to complete his mission.

But did “render unto Caesar” mean an endorsement of everything that tax funds were used for? Did he endorse gladiatorial games? Wars of conquest? The capture and importation of slaves? The use of government troops to put down slave revolts? Let’s not be absurd. Just because the Roman government did something with tax monies, or modern governments do something with it, “Render unto Caesar” is not an endorsement of that use.

Government is force, pure and simple. That’s essentially a definition of government: the legitimizing of the use of force. Socialism imposed by government has nothing to do with Christian charity. It is, in fact, very nearly the exact opposite, wearing a mask to confuse the unwary.

David L. Burkhead, “The “Christian Left”, The Writer in Black, 2018-01-08.

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