World War Two
Published 16 Oct 2021The Americans win a naval victory off Guadalcanal and even manage to reinforce the Marines there with the first Army units to arrive, but as the week ends the Japanese launch a major offensive on the island. Meanwhile far across the globe, Adolf Hitler orders that all German offensive operations except those at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus cease. There is plenty to do in Stalingrad, though, because this week all hell breaks loose there.
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October 17, 2021
Stalingrad, Stalingrad, Stalingrad, No Retreat! – WW2 – 164 – October 16, 1942
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Just about the least likely 2021 issue … protesting a school principal for her musical taste
In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh reports on some St. Catharines, Ontario parents who apparently just woke up from a 40-year long stasis pod:
Adrian Humphreys has a short item in today’s Post about an attempt to petition against a St. Catharines, Ont., public school principal because of her off-hours fondness for Britain’s ancient heavy-metal act Iron Maiden. NP Platformed can only applaud the success of what is clearly a disguised ploy for global publicity: Maiden, now 46 years into a busy life of recording and touring, released its first new studio LP in six years last month.
Then again, it is vaguely possible that the petition was started out of genuine concern by the “parents”, who claimed to have authored it, none of whom have stepped forward to own their objections to principal Sharon Burns. (She is, perhaps wisely, not giving interviews herself.)
If you’re about Burns’s age, you can only marvel at the operations of Father Time. When we and Burns and Iron Maiden’s (mostly intact) classic lineup were all still young, the band was one whose symbols you might draw on a Duo-Tang to annoy and disquiet a prissy teacher. How the tables have turned, as tables will.
Burns’s Instagram account contained photos of her going to concerts and wearing Iron Maiden merchandise of the sort that has made the group incalculable fortunes. Her gear included some references to 1982’s The Number of the Beast, which critical consensus considers to still be the finest of the group’s studio albums.
This was seen by the anonymous petitioners as signalling an allegiance to Satanism, and perhaps it’s natural for a very sheltered parent to have become upset. (The school, as Humphreys explains, has a distant background as a Mennonite Bible school.) But getting angry at Iron Maiden in 2021 feels a little like getting angry at McDonald’s. Even on a surface level, Maiden, a “new wave” metal group that did its most innovative work in the 1970s and ’80s, has been succeeded by several generations of metal groups and entire subcultures that take the violence, noise, crudity and obscenity into realms we old farts never dreamt of.
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How to set the Lever Cap on a Bench Plane | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 2 Jul 2021Understanding what pressures to apply to your Stanley and Record planes enable you to fully adjust your bench plane in seconds. This video is a good start and shows the reasoning behind get the exact pressures right.
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QotD: Like Justin Trudeau, too many western politicians admire China’s “basic dictatorship”
The Chinese model, such as it is, has a hypnotic appeal to many (too many) among our technocrats, bureaucrats and the political class. These are our betters, after all, and certainly the people who think they are smarter than everyone else, yet they are constantly constrained by the outmoded mechanisms of representative democracy, rule of law, and liberal state. How envious are they of the Chinese authorities (the Party and the government being largely the same, certainly the same for all practical purposes), which are not restrained by any considerations of accountability or public opinion. The Party can do whatever it wants – build a fast train network, carry out massive infrastructure projects, regulate emissions, direct economic resources, and so on – while the Western governments and administrations get bogged down in petty politics. The Chinese Communist Party is also a meritocracy of sorts, which promotes skill and talent (and of course loyalty, ideological reliability, and personal connections), while too many self-described smart people in our democracies are at the mercy of fickle voters. There is no stability and continuity, no long-term planning, no concern for the “national interest”; ah to be a mandarin instead!
Then there is the Chinese government’s ability to surveil and control their people – for their own good, of course. How many over here would love a Social Credit System, where they can reward and punish people according to government’s priorities, from environmentally-conscious behaviour to public health considerations. In democracies, the people rate their leaders; in China the leaders rate their people. Just imagine how much more effectively our governments and health authorities would be able to to deal with all of us during the current pandemic if they could “see” and “nudge” every individual at every moment and in every situation. The most dangerous virus to come from China recently is not COVID, it’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” with its siren call of unrestrained power for large sections of our political and economic elites.
Arthur Chrenkoff, “World hearts commies”, The Daily Chrenk, 2021-07-01.
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