Quotulatiousness

October 19, 2020

A bowyer talks about authentic longbows

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lindybeige
Published 10 Sep 2016

Shot in Visby. I talk to Swedish bowyer Henrik Thurfjell about bows, asking stupid questions so that he sounds comparatively clever.
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He talks about wood, of hunting, of string, and of bear fat. Many people in the comments have suggested exotic meanings for the mark on the side of the yew bow. The comparatively mundane truth is that the symbol is a combination of the Norse runes for H and T – the bowyer’s initials.

Thanks to Johan Käll for showing me round the re-enactors’ camp.

Picture credits:
By the Mary Rose Trust, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
By Mary Rose Trust – Mary Rose Trust, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
By Mary Rose Trust – Mary Rose Trust – official webpage, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
By Own scan. Photo by Gerry Bye. Original by Anthony Anthony. – Anthony Roll as reproduced in The Anthony Roll of Henry VIII’s Navy: Pepys Library 2991 and British Library Additional MS 22047 With Related Documents ISBN 0-7546-0094-7, p. 42., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
By the Mary Rose Trust, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…
By the Mary Rose Trust, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index…

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Sarah Hoyt – “… I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape”

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why she’s not expecting the US federal election next month to resolve anything, at least not in a positive way:

At this point I hold about a 10% chance the Democrats/Socialists/Communists (interchangeable now that the masks are off) don’t fraud their way into full power, pack the court and rip our system apart, to install (yet again) a form of communism. This is complicated by the fact that a lot of them are in China’s pockets. Or rather, China has been filling their pockets for a long while. We might find ourselves working for racist, hegemonic overlords, besides suffering all the ills of a descent into communism. (By the way, they’ve already been doing this to some extent to the less fortunate countries, including most African countries. The left in the US and Europe believes this is benevolence. And that Chinese aren’t racist. I wouldn’t believe it, if it hadn’t been said to me over and over.)

There is maybe another 25% of chance we’ll find ourselves in CW II, now with even more foreign interference. What comes out of that, G-d only knows, and I’m not Him. Which is good, because I have trouble enough being me.

And there is a very strong chance that even if Trump wins the White House, besides continuing to have to drive a car where the wheel is disconnected (the extent of which I wasn’t even fully sure of until this month) he won’t do more than delay the crash.

Sometimes here, and particularly at insty, because I tend to do that really late at night when I’m exhausted and less able to control my moods, you’ll catch a hint of how hopeless I feel our situation to be.

In fact since the lockdown, I’ve been feeling we were screwed. That the lockdown was imposed all over the world on such flimsy evidence, that countries and churches, and every cultural institution not only submitted to it but kept telling the people how much it was needed sent me into a deep depression from which I haven’t fully recovered. (Again, the evidence that this virus was MAYBE as bad as the flu has been before our eyes since the beginning. You don’t need special equipment to see it. The homeless were congregating and not dying in droves. The people in slums in the third world weren’t dying at a higher rate than usual. And there were the numbers from the Diamond Princess. Which some idiot here tried to justify with “but they got the best treatment.” In a floating petri dish. With no special equipment. May G-d have mercy on the soul of every idiot who bought that bullshit.).

This last week, on the other hand, I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape.

Oh, not the massive corruption of the Biden crime family. I mean seriously. Any of you who didn’t know already that Crackhead McStripperbang wasn’t being paid for foreign countries for his services must have been living under a rock.

Not even the ridiculous, immediate coordination with which our tech overlords moved to clamp down on that information and preventing it from reaching the virgin ears of most of our willfully and willingly ignorant countrymen.

No, what discouraged me most was the “sexual preference” suddenly becoming a slur and Webster dictionary falling in line. (Seriously, guys, sexual preference goes way beyond orientation. For instance, my sexual preference is monogamous and with someone I love. If you think that there’s no preference involved, you must think people have absolutely no control over their impulses.) Because that bullshit couldn’t happen, even in the most totalitarian of conspiracies.

And that’s the terrifying thought. These people are no more conspiring than your breaklines being cut are a conspiracy not to stop the car.

They are a result of deep inlaid propaganda and misseducation which cause a lot of people to try to fall into line with the “word from above” and be “right” with those they view as the smart people and the masters of society.

Tank Chats #82 Challenger 1 | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 9 Aug 2019

David Willey, The Tank Museum Curator, discusses the development and deployment of the UK’s Main Battle Tank from 1983 – 2001, the Challenger 1.

Challenger 1 was in service with the British Army and saw action during the First Gulf War. It remains in service with the Jordanian Army.

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QotD: Afflicting the comfortable

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

In 1893, Finley Peter Dunne, a journalist-turned-humorist at the Chicago Evening Post, introduced Martin J. Dooley to the people of Chicago. Mr. Dooley, as he was best known, was a thick-accented bartender from Ireland who owned a tavern in the Bridgeport neighborhood. Mr. Dooley became popular among Chicagoans for his rich satire of politics and society. Of course, Mr. Dooley wasn’t real. He was a fictional character created by Dunne. His work included countless sketches and wide-ranging commentary, but he may be best known for his biting one-liner on newspapers, since reclaimed by journalists as central to the profession’s creed: “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

The original quote is from Observations by Mr. Dooley, one of several works Dunne produced as the character, in which Dunne specifically satirizes the press’s penchant for trial-by-media. He presented Mr. Dooley through Irish dialect pieces, hence the diction, so the “affliction” quote below has been lightly edited for comprehension:

    When anything was wrote about a man ’twas put this way: “We understand on good authority that … is on trial before Judge G. on an accusation of larceny. But we don’t think it’s true.” Nowadays, the larceny is discovered by a newspaper. The lead pipe is dug up your backyard by a reporter who knew it was there because he helped you bury it. A man knocks at your door early one mornin’ an’ you answer in your nighty. “In name of the law, I arrest you,” says the man seizin’ you by the throat. “Who are you?” you cry. “I’m a reporter for The Daily Slooth,” says he. “Photographer, do your duty!” You’re hauled off in the circulation wagon to the newspaper office where a confession is ready for you to sign; you’re tried by a jury of the staff, sentenced by the editor-in-chief, and at ten o’clock Friday the fatal thrap is sprung by the fatal thrapper of the family journal. The newspaper does evrything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the militia, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead and roasts them aftherward.

That journalists of all stripes have touted a scathing critique of their profession and repurposed it as a mission statement is a textbook definition of irony that belongs on a Roman pedestal behind bulletproof glass in the Smithsonian. What is most vexing about the modern interpretation of Dunne’s quote is that its new meaning is implied to be synonymous with dispassionately seeking truth, which it necessarily is not.

Robert Showah, “Journalism Is Not Activism”, Quillette, 2018-07-05.

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