World War Two
Published 23 Sep 2021The Nazi German occupiers have kept increasing their pressure in occupied territory, and fooled their victims to still have hope, but at some point when the oppression gets unbearable, or all hope is lost, people will resist.
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September 24, 2021
Kill The Nazis – WAH 042 – September 1942, Pt. 1
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Jen Gerson has some helpful advice for the Conservative party
Writing in Maclean’s, Jen Gerson suggests to the “conservatives” that they shouldn’t dump their new-ish leader on the basis of the party’s results in the September 20 election:
It’s come to my understanding that there is some considerable consternation about the future of Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, on the grounds that he underperformed in this week’s election.
I cannot help but wonder whether those now implacably resolved to booting the man for being inadequately conservative might, perhaps, consider getting a goddamn grip.
Yes, I understand that O’Toole ran his leadership campaign further to the right than his personality would otherwise suggest, in order to win over the Conservative base. And, yes, I understand that the unstated agreement behind this bait-and-switch was that O’Toole needed to show progress in key regions, particularly the 905. Also, yes, I understand that these gains failed to materialize, and that many conservatives feel both betrayed, and more importantly, no closer to government.
This state of affairs may ensure O’Toole’s leadership is unsalvageable.
Certainly, O’Toole and his brain trust seem to have rationally concluded that they could leave western conservatives hanging out to dry so they could chase votes in the GTA — because up until now, those westerners had nowhere else to go. However, the rise of the PPC suggests that they may now have somewhere to go …
Conservatives have a bad habit. They go into an election with reasonable expectations, enjoy some early momentum, and then let the excitement get to their heads. They reset those early expectations to something far less probable, and when the campaign produces exactly the results they predicted at the outset they declare the whole affair a disappointing failure.
I will note here that this complements the Liberal temperament, which interprets entirely lacklustre results as nothing short of a sign from the trumpet-wielding messengers of God blessing their mandate. Only the Liberals would see two successive minority governments with declining popular vote totals as clear-cut evidence that they, the worthy elect, have been chosen without reservation to lead the nation to paradise.
The Conservatives could use a little more of that energy.
These observations are provably true of both parties. The only amendment I could suggest is that the Liberals really do believe they have been granted the right to run Canada by divine providence (which few of them actually dare refer to in conversation) and view any interruption in their God-given right to rule as unnatural and a perversion of the arc of history.
Conservatives ought to have seen this election as the first in a two-election strategy. Fundamentally, the urbanites who hold the key to government don’t trust you, Conservatives. They’re worried about the conspiratorial lunatics in your caucus and your base, and they’re worried about who actually holds the reins of power in your party. Their distrust is fair, and will take time to repair.
If you dump your affable, moderate, centrist leader at the first opportunity because he didn’t crack the 905 on his first try, and you replace him with someone who will chase Maxime Bernier’s vanishing social movement like a labradoodle running after the wheels of a mail truck, you will wind up confirming every extant fear and stereotype this crowd already holds about you and your party.
It’s a trap. Be smarter than that.
The PPC nearly tripling the size of their vote over two years doesn’t quite match the characterization of a “vanishing social movement”, but I’m not who she’s trying to persuade here. It’s often said that modern “conservatives” don’t actually have a plan except to do what Liberals/Democrats want to do — just a little bit slower. O’Toole (and Ontario Tories generally) fits that description quite well.
Battle of the Hampton Roads – The Fury of Iron and Steam
Drachinifel
Published 20 Feb 2019The first ironclad vs ironclad battle is reviewed, along with the origins of the ships and some of the myths and legends about this historic battle.
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QotD: The LGBT advocacy group Stonewall proves Hoffer right — “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket”
There is a law of nature that governs campaigning groups and charities, which is that an organisation set up to deal with a particular problem will always find a way to exist even after that problem has been addressed.
The reason is simple: by the time an issue has been solved, or almost solved, the business is at its peak. Employees’ salaries and pensions are at stake, reputations have been built and influence has been secured. And so it is that Eric Hoffer’s great insight is fulfilled: every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.
Very few causes have degenerated into a racket so completely as the former gay-rights group known as Stonewall. When it was founded in 1989, gay rights in Britain, as across Europe, had some way to go to reach equality. Back then, there was a different age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, homosexuals did not have the right to marry or to have their partnerships legally recognised and, most pertinently, a Conservative government had made it impossible for young gay people to be in any way informed about their sexuality during their time at school.
There was certainly a long way to go, and Ian McKellen, Matthew Parris, Simon Fanshawe and the rest of the group’s founders faced an uphill battle for many years. But it was a battle which they helped to win.
Once most of their objectives had been achieved, though, what were Stonewall to do? There were several options in front of them. The most obvious, one might think, would have been to scale down and remain in place to deal with residual issues, such as the existence of homophobia in schools and other remaining pockets of society.
Douglas Murray, “How Stonewall sacrificed gay rights”, UnHerd, 2021-05-25.
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September 23, 2021
How to Choose a Woodworking Workbench
Rex Krueger
Published 22 Sep 2021Take a closer look at classic workbench designs & and pick the right one for YOU.
More video and exclusive content: http://www.patreon.com/rexkrueger
Get Workbench plans! (Scroll down)English Joiner’s Bench
Plans: https://bit.ly/2QZls9T
Video: https://youtu.be/zcq1LQq08lkLightweight Traveler’s Bench
Plans: https://www.woodworkforhumans.com/sto…
Video: https://youtu.be/lPiMjv7lkqI———————————————————————-
Workbench Related Videos
Four Workbench Building Mistakes (that we all make)
https://youtu.be/5CwIX6jE-qAJoinery for Knock-Down Workbenches
https://youtu.be/soJZ1u3cozc———————————————————————-
Resources for Bench Builders
Landis, The Workbench Book (Lost Art Reissue): https://lostartpress.com/collections/…
Schwarz, The Anarchists’s Workbench (Lost Art): https://lostartpress.com/collections/…
(FREE download: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-cont…)
Schwarz, Workbenches: From Theory and Design to Construction and Use (Popular Woodworking Books) https://amzn.to/2Xsiws6 (*affiliate link)
Schwarz, Ingenious Mechaniks: Early Workbenches and Workholding (Lost Art) https://lostartpress.com/collections/…
Siemsen, The Naked Woodworker DVD (Lost Art) https://lostartpress.com/products/the…
Siemsen’s Video on using his bench: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhn-…
Maguire “How to Build a Workbench” (Self Published) https://www.theenglishwoodworker.com/…
Wil Meyer’s site with lots of information on the Moravian Bench: https://eclecticmechanicals.com/
Rob Cosman’s Bench: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0kN1…
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Nazi Fanatics and Gangland Executions | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.26 Winter 1925
TimeGhost History
Publisheed 22 Sep 2021The winter of 1925 is a season of gun battles and assassinations. Al Capone is fighting both the Chicago police and rival gangs to gain control of the bootlegging racket, and a Nazi party fanatic murders a Viennese author for his writings on anti-Semitism and eroticism. It’s not all violence, though. This season, a landmark documentary film is released.
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“The truth about the origins of Covid would have serious consequences for the US Government and its ‘public health’ bureaucracies …”
Mark Steyn on the deliberate blindness of western governments to any evidence that points to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic actually originating in Wuhan:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
The first pieces published about ChiCom-19 at this website were on the insanity of empowering China and the lies of Beijing when it comes to the spread of infectious diseases. Nineteen months in, my main interest remains the origins of the WuFlu.
At the same time, one notices the almost total lack of interest in its origins from virtually anyone who matters, starting at the very highest levels of government. As Rumsfeld used to say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Somewhat analogously, overwhelming lack of interest in evidence is paradoxically evidence of interest. The truth about the origins of Covid would have serious consequences for the US Government and its “public health” bureaucracies, and for the broader “science” community and its peer-reviewed journals and grant-application processes. Furthermore, the public deference to political leaders who claim to be “following the science” — already fraying badly in France and Australia — would take a huge hit once it became clear that the killer virus is itself the creation of “science” and of a Washington public-health bureaucracy that followed it all the way to an insecure lab in Wuhan.
From my old friends at the Telegraph:
New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.
They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund the work.
Papers, confirmed as genuine by a former member of the Trump administration, show they were hoping to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” to bat coronaviruses which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells.
Ah, I miss the old days when a Google search for “human-specific cleavage sites” would be strictly NSFW. Now it’s links that are Not Safe For Google or Facebook or Twitter or any of the other media so censorious of anything that dissents from the official line. The Telegraph report is based on the work of DRASTIC, the ad-hoc group of international researchers who, so Wikipedia assures us, “have engaged in personal attacks against virologists” – so just hitch your mask up over your ears and don’t listen to them.
As for “novel chimeric spikes”, that’s the last year and a half, starting with the chimera of “zero Covid”. And we are in this mess because the central strategy of American foreign policy for a third of a century — that China can be economically endowed into behaving as a normal part of the global order — is the biggest chimera of all.
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Tank Chats #125 | Sherman M74 ARV | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 7 May 2021David Fletcher takes a look at the mighty M74 Armoured Recovery Vehicle (ARV), built on a Sherman M4A3 chassis.
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If you’re interested in the general topic of battlefield vehicle recovery, last year I posted a WW2 British training film for the Royal Mechanical and Electrical Engineers that covered the topic quite well.
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QotD: The problem with “free” tech stuff
It has gotten so bad lately that they don’t just barrage you with ads, they’re now starting to force-feed you content. I used to have Amazon Music — the free one, of course — because it was a good way to listen to The Z Man’s podcasts and my classical library during my commute. I’d download albums to my phone, switch to “offline” mode, and listen that way. Which Amazon obviously considers no good, because they pushed out some “car mode” bullshit that now automatically turns your wifi on, then starts blasting hip hop at you. And that’s not all! A few weeks back, while trying to figure out a way to turn the damn thing off, I noticed that it now has a “your playlist” feature, based on “your” music … which is, of course, the same force-fed rap shit I’ve been trying so desperately to avoid. It has decided that not only shall I listen to Young Jeezy, Big Weezy, and MC Funetik Spelyn, I will also like it, to such a degree that they will start force-feeding me other shit based on my “likes”.
Yeah. Uninstalled. Fuck you, Bezos. I’ve got a CD player. And when Microsoft decides that I’m not listening to the right music on that, and uninstalls the driver, I’ve got a tape deck. And when that breaks, I will sing to myself as I go down the highway. 99 bottles of beer on the wall, motherfucker, just like bus trips back in Boy Scouts. Enough is enough.
Severian, “Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-18.
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September 22, 2021
The “She-lection” or the “what was that?” election or the “what was the point?” election
In Tuesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh looks at the sham election we just experienced … differently … here:
“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
What to say about a federal election in which nothing happened? Surely last night’s refusal by the Canadian public to budge an inch is more astonishing than almost any other imaginable result could be. Our last two elections were separated by exactly 700 days. During that brief time, Canada experienced a science-fiction disease pandemic with mass death and violent protests, a fairly urgent diplomatic crisis with China, a dramatic change in the U.S. presidency, a foreign-policy disaster in Afghanistan, epic Liberal scandals and constitutional strife. Canadians seem to have lived through all of this and decided that it made no difference, or no net difference, in how they wanted to vote.
Maybe this could be considered a psychological defence reaction to the surprising prospect of an election. Given the incredible result — no consecutive Canadian elections have ever been remotely this close in seat outcome — we can hardly even say “surprising and unwelcome”. Everyone knew who was responsible for calling an election. In Liberal ridings, the response seems to have been gratitude for the opportunity to vote Liberal again so soon.
In conversation with a non-representative sample of Canadian voters outside the Toronto border, it’s rare to find people who admit to voting Liberal, yet clearly enough people did yet again — nearly 20,000 of them in my riding alone. I live in Erin O’Toole’s riding, so the winner wasn’t in a lot of doubt despite him not having any spare time to campaign here. I was pleased to find over 3,600 other Durham voters willing to vote PPC this time around, giving Patricia Conlin about 5.6% of the vote. I’ve generally been a Libertarian voter all these years … at least when there’s been a Libertarian candidate to vote for … but this time around as in 2019 the Libertarians didn’t have anyone running here, so voting PPC was my best option.
The more we watch NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh campaign, the more we think, “Toronto does have an awful lot of people who ought not to be especially eager to run headlong into stuff like wealth taxes and confiscatory rates on capital gains.” The New Democrats seem increasingly determined to cement their all-urban base among youths and convinced leftists with bolshie rhetoric. Are the resentful, hopeless millions they hope to add to these stagnant forces really out there? Was this an election result that reveals a populace disaffected with neoliberal capitalism — of a kind genuinely beset by rent-seeking, cronyism and corruption — and keen on revolutionary change?
Unfortunately, the very failure of the election to yield a different result probably means that every party can treat last night as a rehearsal rather than a test. NP Platformed‘s initial instinct, which we reserve the right to throw out, is that we’ll be back at it with the same cast of characters in another 700 days or so. Everyone failed: what else is there but to follow Beckett’s dictum? “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Other than Maxime Bernier, is there a federal party leader who can point to the results of this election and claim much more than a bare moral victory?
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The Extremely Bizarre Engineering Rituals of Canada (And the Fascinating Way They Came to Be)
Today I Found Out
Published 31 Jul 2021This video is #sponsored by NordVPN.
Sources:
Andrews, Gordon, Canadian Professional Engineering and Geoscience: Practice and Ethics, Thomson Nelson Canada Ltd, 2005
Kipling, Rudyard, “The Hymn of Breaking Strain”, 1935, http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~branderr/risk_…
2 Esdras 4:5-10, https://thekingjamesversionbible.com/…
Bateman, Chris, The Secrets of Engineering’s Strange and Mysterious Initiation Ritual, TVO, April 24, 2018, https://www.tvo.org/article/the-secre…
“Background: The Calling of an Engineer, The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer”, https://www.ironring.ca/background-en/
Anderson, Bill, “Why Engineering is Purple”, April 16, 2019, https://profbillanderson.com/2019/04/…
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Speaking of highly sus votes … here’s an example from California’s recall election
At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin recounts what he heard from a Californian friend after their recent election on recalling the sitting governor:
“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
He was sent a postal ballot – a ballot and an envelope to return it in. He had not asked for it and did not want it but got it anyway. His wife was also sent one and what I say below applies to her as well.
Both envelope and ballot had serial numbers printed on them – and they were sequential: the return envelope’s serial number differed by one from its ballot’s serial number. (His wife’s likewise, so it seemed to be a pattern.) This gave him some concerns.
- As the state had posted the serial-numbered ballot specifically to him, it sure looked like, after the election, the authorities would be able to tell how he’d voted. In a state where expressing a heterodox thought can be career-ending, this was a little worrying. Of course, he could have chosen to trust the Governor’s assurance that the state would never dream of recording the serial-to-address data, let alone exploiting it afterwards (if the Governor had given that specific assurance, but he did not recall whether Newsom had clearly promised that as such).
- As the envelope and ballot serials had this simple sequential relationship, it sure looked like anyone who saw the returned envelope (which had to have his name and address on it), would be able to deduce the serial of his ballot. In a state where the operation of the law can make defying antifa more dangerous to you than to them, this was a little worrying. Of course, he could have chosen to trust the Governor’s assurance that no such person would later be able to get access to the ballots or their scanned data to relate his name and address to his vote (if the Governor had given that specific assurance, but he did not recall whether Newsom had clearly promised that as such).
- As there was no secrecy sleeve, it sure looked like whoever ripped the envelope open to get the ballot during the count would have a hard time not seeing his name, address and vote all at once anyway. In a state where supporting the wrong party can lead to unequal application of the law, this was a little worrying. Of course, he could have chosen to trust the Governor’s assurance that the electoral staff would be unable to record or memorise such information (if the Governor had given that specific assurance, but he did not recall whether Newsom had clearly promised that as such).
After thinking about this, he went to the local polling station on election day to try and get a ballot from them and put it in the ballot box the old-fashioned way. Wisely, he took the postal ballot with him, knowing they should – and in this case probably would – want to see it destroyed. Unwisely, he filled it in beforehand in case they refused to let him vote the old fashioned way (so that, in that case, he could at least put the postal ballot straight into the box, thus cutting some intermediaries out of the insecure loop, without making a second visit). He gave me a vivid word-picture of the crossed-arms, blocking-the-way lady in change of the polling place when he made his request. They did not absolutely refuse, but it was made clear to him that the first thing to happen would be his postal vote being torn open and carefully examined before its destruction. Cursing himself for the “forethought” of filling it in “in case”, he decided that that would destroy the point of the exercise, which was to cast a secret ballot – though he did wonder by then whether, despite his studiously-meek demeanour, the lady felt any more doubt of whom he was voting for than he felt of whom she was voting for. So in the end he used it as the state intended he should.
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Ishapore SMLE MkI** India Pattern
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Feb 2017While many people are familiar with the Ishapore 2A1 rifles chambered in 7.62mm NATO (largely thanks to their importation and sale in the US in large numbers), production of Indian Enfield rifles actually dates back to 1905, when the Ishapore arsenal was opened. The first rifles produced there were a batch of 3,000 MkI Enfield rifles in 1908/9. These were of course early pattern SMLEs, with features like split charger bridges, volley sights, and magazine cutoffs. Production quickly changed to the No1 Mk III pattern of rifle, which had been formally adopted in Britain in 1907.
During World War One, the need for arms led to those first early rifles being rebuilt in the MkIII configuration, but they retain their original markings, showing their origin. Today we have one of those first 3,000 to look at.
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QotD: Urban bohemians
Powers fails to recognize that her bohemia is predicated upon a market liberalism that throws off so much wealth that you can live like a Pharaoh just by scavenging what other people throw out — as she and her slacker buddies did in San Francisco in the ’80s and early ’90s. Her bohemian lifestyle is part of the same system that underwrites free markets, consumerism, and tolerance for all sorts of offensive speech and alternative lifestyles. In other words, the liberty to be bohemian is a glorious result of the very capitalist reality that Powers says a real bohemian must be against.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason Online, 2000-10.
Update: Broken link fixed, thanks to “somercet1” for the heads-up.
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September 21, 2021
Early Rome, Part V: Introduction to Modern Scholarship
Thersites the Historian
Published 6 Sep 2021In this video, we look at what modern scholars tend to think about early Rome and some of the ways in which they approach this fraught topic.
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