Quotulatiousness

May 31, 2020

LIVE Q&A – Wood Preparation | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Paul Sellers
Published 28 May 2020

Tune in with Paul, where he discusses your questions on Wood Preparation!
——————–

Want to learn more about woodworking?

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Sink the Bismarck! – The Pride of the Kriegsmarine‘s Demise – WW2 – 092 – May 30 1941

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 30 May 2020

This week, the Battle of Crete continues as the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen set sail to the Atlantic, starting one of the most dramatic episodes in the histories of the Royal Navy and the Kriegsmarine.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: NN
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Daniel Weiss
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man), https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
– Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations, https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…

Sources:
– Imperial War Museum: A 6152, A 6155, A 3898, IWM A4057, HU 50190, HU 374, FL 2120, E 3464, E 450
– U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– Drawing of Churchill from Museon
– Battlecruiser Renown shape by Emoscopes from Wikimedia

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

On “spontaneous” riots

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren had a brush with a riot as a youngster — not as a participant, but as a near-victim — so the psychology of riots has a personal edge:

To a trained observer, the organizers of the riot stand out. They are dressed distinctly, they are giving orders; they are directing the attacks. They will usually be wearing expensive communications equipment. A drama coach would notice that their harangues are premeditated and rehearsed, to stir violence. That anger in the crowd was available to them, as their raw material, goes without saying; their art consists of “weaponizing” it.

Fascists — the real ones, in pre-war Italy and Germany — were masters of this art. So were the Communists with whom they had streetfights. The blackshirts today, a near-monopoly of the Left, descend from this rich tradition. When Antifa and other leftist scum shut down public discussions in universities and elsewhere, they may use the latest technology, but to old-fashioned ends.

What is alarming is not that these people exist — radical evil is a fact in human nature — but that they are given permission to act lawlessly. Rather than arrest and prosecute them, the liberal authorities agree to silence the legitimate speaker. They are trying to avoid confrontation, with people who sought confrontation, and will seek a larger confrontation next time. The prestige of these devils in human flesh is increased by their victories.

An injustice, such as the apparent murder of George Flynn by a vicious cop, while three more stood and watched, was the pretext for the riots. It was convenient for aggravating racial tensions, by which the Democrat party hopes to retrieve black votes that had been getting away from them. I would not wish to omit this dimension of the permission they grant to rioters. Politics are a cynical business.

But note, the mostly white folk in Antifa, prefer black neighbourhoods to start race riots, for that is where resentments will be easiest to exploit. (Masks help to conceal their whiteness.) This means that the victims of the riots, whose property and businesses are gutted, will also be mostly black. The media elide this aspect of the lawlessness, because they want Republicans to be defeated, too.

The moral stench is overpowering.

Drill Bit Storage / Charging Station / Tape Rack / Paper Towel Holder – Workshop Organisation

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

Rag ‘n’ Bone Brown
Published 23 Feb 2020

In this video I work on four workshop organisation projects.

I make a drill bit storage system, a charging station to hold all my power tool batteries and chargers using a Bisley drawer unit, a tape rack to store my rolls of sticky tape and a paper towel holder.

Free instructions for the drill bit storage: https://www.patreon.com/posts/34214169

Please note: the instructions feature some design improvements over the one which I made, so if you follow them it won’t be exactly the same as mine, it’ll be better!

#woodworking #workshop #project

Thanks for watching!

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QotD: Measuring what can be measured

Filed under: Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that get measured may draw effort away from the things we really care about. And measurement may provide us with distorted knowledge – knowledge that seems solid but is actually deceptive.

Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics, 2018.

May 30, 2020

The Spanish Flu Influenza Pandemic 1918 – 1920 I THE GREAT WAR 1920

The Great War
Published 29 May 2020

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It was far deadlier than even the global war that had preceded it: The Influenza pandemic or Spanish Flu that hit the world between 1918 and 1920 in multiple waves.

» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
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» SOURCES
Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, (New York : Penguin Books, 2018)
Byerly, Carol R. ‘The U.S. Military and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919’ Public Health Reports; 125 Supplement 3 (Apr. 2010)
Crosby, Alfred W, America’s forgotten pandemic : the influenza of 1918, (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Hoover, Irwin Hood, Forty-two years in the White House, (New York : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1934)
Killingray, David & Phillips, Howard, (eds.) The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19: New Perspectives, (London : Routledge, 2011)
Johnson, NP & Mueller J, ‘Updating the accounts: global mortality of the 1918-1920 “Spanish” influenza pandemic’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 76(1) (Spring 2002)
Dock, Lavinia et al., History of American Red Cross Nursing (1922)
Macdonald L. The Roses of No Man’s Land. (London : Penguin Books, 1993)
Robertson, John Dill, ‘Spanish Influenza — The Flu’ The Public Health Journal Vol. 9, No. 10 (Oct 1918)
Rosner, David, ‘”Spanish flu, or whatever it is…”: The paradox of public health in a time of crisis’ Public Health Reports, 125 Supplement 3, (Apr. 2010)
Stanford University, ‘The Influenza Pandemic of 1918’ https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
“Surgeon General’s Advice to Avoid Influenza”: Washington Evening Star, (Sept. 22, 1918)
Wever, Peter C & van Bergen, Leo, ‘Death from 1918 pandemic influenza during the First World War: a perspective from personal and anecdotal evidence’ Influenza Other Respiratory Viruses, 8(5), (Sept 2014)
https://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2008/1…

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David Warren reports from “the High Doganate” (Parkdale, Toronto)

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

I haven’t lived in Toronto for many years now, but as David Warren highlights in his Essays in Idleness posts, things haven’t changed much in all that time:

The Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto.
Map by Alaney2k via Wikimedia Commons.

We continue to be well-as-can-be-expected, up here in the High Doganate, though stir-crazy, and over-informed about the Batflu (also known as the Kung Flu, or Peking Pox). The housefinches on our balconata persist in their social distancing, and at street level, the dogs continue to walk their masters. The brave, without a dog, may go out, without a mask, if they can stand up to the Virtue Signallers (or as I prefer to call them, the Smugly Foocklings). But that is in the respectable parts of town, at least three miles away, where designer masks are now de rigueur. There are plenty of trolleys, but they travel mostly empty. This is because the transit authorities are “committed to keeping customers and staff safe.” Knowing that most of the public health measures are fraudulent, and/or counter-productive, is not helpful to one’s peace of mind.

These measures would include the vast public doles which our guvmints have been generating, electronically. It could be taken as pay, for those who’d otherwise riot. Eventually, the guvmints hope to electronically rake it back, both from those who were paid and those who were not, in the form of much extended taxes. To understand the Batflu response, is to understand the welcome it gave to bureaucrats and their patrons, wherever the Left won the last election. They do not surrender such powers lightly.

Most of the people I hang out with are their particular targets — from freelance giguers to flea marketeers to those with religious vocations. Such people naturally resist the Kafkaesque arrangements our progressives relish and demand. The Batflu “crisis” put as many as possible of these statistically inconvenient people out of work. (Many are compulsive tax-evaders, after all!) These “little people,” especially those trying to support uncool, old-fashioned, frankly heterosexual families, are the ones for whom I most pray, as they and their children face the “green” future, which will exclude them in the name of “diversity.”

But also I think of the vast slave armies, in the “service economy,” with their idiotizing jobs, from flipping hamburgers to humping boxes in the Amazon warehouse — pinned to their minimum wages until their functions can be mechanized. (When they unionize, this happens faster.)

The “professional classes,” who can work from home, because they do nothing of value, needn’t go months without revenue, while their debts are piling up. They sneer at those who oppose a lockdown, that is perfectly comfortable for the professional classes, who at worst save money by dining in, or must order what they want through Amazon.

Some of Ian’s Gun Collection, on a Matrix Armory Display Wall

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Apr 2017

https://www.matrixarmory.com/

Matrix Armory is a new gun display system developed by Jeff High (a long-time Forgotten Weapons supporter, incidentally) who wanted something that would really do justice to guns that you want to display and appreciate. The other sorts of display/racking systems out there are much more industrial in style, primarily to store guns. Matrix Armory was designed to make your guns look their best, because nothing is quite as sad as a great gun collection squashed into a safe and never actually seen (assuming one has a secure room for display, naturally).

I have gotten a lot of people asking to see my own personal collection, and so I figured this would be a cool way to do that; showing you some of the highlights of my collection in conjunction with the Matrix Armory wall we installed in my office. I have no financial stake in the product — I think the years of work Jeff has put into it have led to a really nice product that I think will be of interest to some of the folks who read Forgotten Weapons.

QotD: The “Americanization” of German philosophy

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This popularization of German philosophy in the United States is of peculiar interest to me because I have watched it occur during my own intellectual lifetime, and I feel a little like someone who knew Napoleon when he was six. I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier; Herbert Marcuse’s accent has been turned into a Middle Western twang; the echt Deutsch label has been replaced by a Made in America label; and the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987.

May 29, 2020

Der Bismarck: Doomed to Fail? – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 28 May 2020

The Bismarck is without a doubt a force to be reckoned with. But with the Kriegsmarine experiencing an identity crisis throughout the 1930s, the Bismarck‘s design and strategic purpose foreshadow a dramatic ending.

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Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Ruffneck88, Wikimedia Commons
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
Bundesarchiv
IWM HU 374, HU 67486, HU 1041, HU 108392, A 6155, D 2373, HU 55631
From the Noun Project: Game by Ecem Afacan, Shield by Nikita Kozin

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 10”
Max Anson – “Ancient Saga”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”

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Theodore Dalrymple reviews 100 Principles for a New World by Nicolas Hulot

Filed under: Books, France — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s kind of subtle, but I don’t think he’s a fan of the writer or his work:

Theodore Dalrymple on 24 September 2007.
Photo by jaapstronks at Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.

No opinion is worth expressing that is not also worth contradicting (except, perhaps, this one); nevertheless, clichés have their attraction. They are the teddy-bears of the mind, or, to change the metaphor slightly, the mental lifebuoys we cling to in times of stormy intellectual or political weather. They are the sovereign remedy for thought, which is always a rather painful activity.

“Can’t you stop me thinking, doctor?” asked some of my patients in the prison in which I worked, in the hope of a prescription of pills that would make them feel fuzzy and incapable of coherent mentation. For those who prefer a less drastic or non-pharmacological solution to the discomforts wrought by the contemplation of the world and their part in it, there are pseudo-thoughts with comforting connotations of wisdom, generosity, goodness, kindness, benevolence, etc. They are the kind of people, I suppose, who might think that Kahil Gibran’s kitsch vapourings are profound.

They would no doubt like Nicolas Hulot’s 100 Principles for a New World, published on 7 May in Le Monde. Hulot, an ecological activist, television personality and journalist once specialising in motorcycle racing, was M. Macron’s Minister for the Ecological and Solidary Transition (by their job titles shall ye know them) until he resigned with maximal noise in August 2018, having held the post for 15 months.

I confess that I was shocked by the banality of the mind, or alternatively the cynicism, of the person who could have written and published a manifesto such as Hulot’s – to say nothing of the astonishing lack of judgment of a respectable newspaper in publishing it. The last time that I was shocked so much by a politician’s vacuity was when I heard another Nicolas, Sarkozy this time, give a speech in person. He was like a dried pea rattling about and shaken in a tin box. He jumped around the stage making a passionate verbal noise, but nothing he said had any discernible tether to anything concrete. Within seconds of his finishing, no one could have given any account of what he had said. Is mastery of this kind of meaningless verbalisation, eloquently empty and passionately delivered, the key to political success? And if so what does it say of us, the citizens of democracies?

But to return to Hulot and his Hundred Principles. They each started “The time has come to…” or “The time has come for…”, followed by a cliché, a truism, or a banal falsehood, all expressed with a self-satisfaction that would have made Mr Pecksniff seem like a self-doubter.

“Night Witches” Pt. 2 – Female Soldiers – Sabaton History 069 [Official]

Filed under: France, History, Media, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 28 May 2020

Quarantined Sabaton History is back! And this week we talk about female badass warriors of the Second World War! From a Soviet sniper to a French resistance fighter, many women chose to volunteer for the front and fight alongside the men. These are some of their tales.

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Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson, substituting for 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.

Colorizations:
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man), https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
– Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations, https://www.instagram.com/blaucoloriz…

Sources:
– Central Intelligence Agency
– Museum.ru
– Imperial War Museum:HU 66187
– Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0: Bild_101I-027-1477-24, 101I-301-1951-11, 101i-721-0395-22
– ETH-Bibliothek
– RIA Novosti archive, image #58861 / V. Krasutskiy / CC-BY-SA 3.0
– Crosshair by DTDesign from the Noun Project

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

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

The contagion of fear and the progressive loss of perspective in the modern world

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

In the Hector Drummond Magazine, Dan C. discusses what he calls the “comfort of fear”:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

This is the sort of glib response (akin to “so you WANT people to die then?”) that has essentially hijacked all conversation and debate since the start of the Coronavirus outbreak. I didn’t respond, partly because I didn’t have the energy for an argument with a friend (at least Twitter rows tend to be anonymous) and quite frankly, what does one say to this? That we shouldn’t send out children back to school ever again in case one child happens to pass away from any illness or disease? That we should continue in lockdown until we cure death itself?

My concern is that this bizarre way of thinking is commonplace right now for many parents. Locked inside their houses for weeks on end, soaking up an endless stream of Netflix programs, mawkish Instagram feeds and daily Government briefings, convinced that Black Death Mk II has landed outside their front door, paid by the state to stop working and lapping up every rainbow-based hashtag that emerges from “our NHS”, all sense of balance and perspective has vanished. With such an unprecedented paradigm shift, this new state of heightened safety has led many to consider their view on illness and risk for the very first time in their lives and unfortunately the concept of critical thinking has been found lacking. Real life, which has been slowly eroded for many decades, has suddenly been switched off completely overnight and the worst of it is that most people don’t seem to care.

The scary part of all of this is that if the adults in the room have suddenly lost their desire to engage in the outside world, to have meaningful human interaction, to take risks (don’t get me started on the definition of “risk”) and to live their lives in the fullest possible way then what chance do children stand? After all, you can’t miss what you’ve never had.

Historians will look back in bewilderment at this period, noting that it took no more than a month during the spring of 2020 for fearlessness to completely evaporate in society. In its place is a comfortable sense of fear.

Aldous Huxley and Brave New World: The Dark Side of Pleasure

Filed under: Books, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Academy of Ideas
Published 21 Jun 2018

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QotD: Historical ways to deal with your “rage heads”

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The main lesson I hope our distant descendants draw from the Orange Man Era is: The rage heads ye have always with you, so ye must find a way to channel them into something as non-destructive as possible. The story of modern politics can be written in a sentence: The weaponization of rage heads, combined with the inability of any society to properly dispose of said WMDs.

Set the Wayback Machine to the turn of the 20th century. Lenin’s great insight is that “the masses” will never achieve the proper revolutionary consciousness without a dedicated cadre of hardcore, professional revolutionaries to lead the way. Lenin recognized the prevalence of incipient rage heads in his society — how could he not? — but realized that, absent some guiding hand, they’d flounder around incoherently. At best (from the “furthering the Revolution” point of view), they’d do what his, Lenin’s, idiot brother did: Try to knock off the tsar, and get himself hung for it. Thus, the Bolsheviks.

The problem, though, is that rage heads by definition suffer from poor impulse control. The tiny subset of them that are pure sociopaths (like Lenin), and thus have the icy-veined self-control to hold their fire, have to maintain the very tightest discipline over the Party, or all hell breaks loose. See, for example, the massive street battles in Weimar Germany between the KPD (German Commies) and the SD. Hitler, like Lenin, had to get his rage heads on a tight leash, so he channeled the disciplined sociopaths from the SD into the SS, cooled out the coolable in the SD by buying them off, and shanked the incorrigible remainder. See also the almost-exactly-contemporary Moscow Show Trials.

Note please that this is your best-case scenario for a purely ideological revolution. From Robespierre to Kim Il Sung, the first step in consolidating the Revolution is killing off a large fraction of the original revolutionaries.

The worst-case scenario (again, from the “furthering the Revolution” standpoint) is what the American wannabe-bolshies did / are currently doing. Knowing that you can’t shank or show-trial the dreadlocked poetry majors that make up your goon squad, you try to channel them into academia, the Media, the “arts.” Which fails egregiously, because whatever tenuous contact with reality they once had gets completely severed by those institutions’ social bubbles. They never were very good at holding fire, and now they can’t, literally can’t, see any reason to — life is great here on campus, so why can’t it be that way everywhere?

Severian, “Living in End Times”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-28.

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