Quotulatiousness

April 12, 2022

Last War Patrol of HMS Terrapin

Filed under: Britain, History, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to be Remembered
Published April 11, 2022

On her seventh war patrol, in the south Java Sea, the T class British submarine HMS Terrapin and her crew had faced the terror of battle and barely survived. Badly damaged and far from home, sometimes the drama of war is not just in the battle, but in the voyage home.

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How to Make a Royal Marines Officer: Part 1 (1989)

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

Royal Marines
Published 13 Sep 2012

First transmitted in 1989, this is the first part of a programme that follows the progress of 29 men who want to be Royal Marine officers. After arriving at Commando Training Centre, Devon, they find that their fortitude is tested to the very limits as they undertake the All Arms Commando Course to earn their green berets.

Mark Steyn on the first round of the French Presidential election

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

It must seem uncanny to Americans that the French can hold a vote, count all the votes, and announce the results all within the same 24-hour window …

Say what you will about la République française but, unlike America, its election operations are not a rusted malodorous sewer of brazenly corrupt practices. So the election was held, the votes were counted in hours, and the official result was known by 1am Paris time. There are no unmarked vans motoring the Dordogne or the Pas de Calais in the dead of night bearing additional votes sufficient to the need.

That speaks well for any nation. Alas, not much else about yesterday does. The Top Three is as follows:

    Emmanuel Macron 27.6 per cent; Marine Le Pen 23.41 per cent;
    Jean-Luc Mélenchon 21.95 per cent.

Mme Le Pen is designated by the BBC “far right” and M Mélenchon “hard left”. I am unclear whether, in Beeb parlance, it is worse to be “hard” than “far. But, be that as it may, they could at least cease applying the label “mainstream” to candidates who can’t crack five per cent, which is the threshold below which your election expenses are not covered by the French state.

On Friday’s Clubland Q&A I mentioned en passant that I’m all about the urgency: The west will die unless we change what we’re doing very fast. Yesterday was yet another of those election nights when the people turn but passing slow. Especially after the buzz about a Le Pen surge and a looming Macron humiliation, last night she didn’t have a spectacular breakthrough and he survived.

There will now be a fortnight to the run-off in which the forty per cent of French voters who cast their ballots for “hard left”, soft left, Green left and nutso left will be told that a vote for other than Macron is a vote against democracy itself. Mme Le Pen ran the blandest, most inoffensive campaign she has ever run, leaving it to the “even farther right” Éric Zemmour to do all the heavy lifting on la fenêtre d’Overton. And in the end all that got her was a couple of extra points in the first round.

We will see how well that approach withstands the onslaught already under way. The one man who could make a difference is the soi-disant “hard leftie”, M Mélenchon. His own surge attracted less attention in the last week or two, but it’s likely that, had not M Zemmour bungled his response to the war, the even-more-far rightist would have drawn enough votes from Mme Le Pen to enable Mélenchon to come through the middle and give France a run-off between a bloodless globalist and a full-bore Marxist.

In pocketbook terms, the gap between “hard left” and “far right” is now barely detectable: Mme Le Pen is pledging that no one under thirty will pay tax. There is surely plenty of overlap between the Mélenchon and Le Pen voters. Yet his priority was plain at last night’s speech, because he said it four times:

    Il ne faut pas donner une seule voix à Mme Le Pen.

Not a single vote for Marine!

So even the hardcore class-warrior shrugs: Better the globalist you know …

Calvin Coolidge: The Silent President

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Biographics
Published 27 Sep 2021

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Source/Further reading:

Miller Center, in-depth overview: https://millercenter.org/president/co…

History Today, overview: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/…

New Yorker, “The case for Coolidge” (cached): https://webcache.googleusercontent.co…

NY Times, “Coolidge, the great refrainer”: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/bo…

NY Times, 1933 obituary for Coolidge: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim…

Atlantic, “Coolidge and depression”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…

Politico, “How Coolidge survived the Harding-era scandals”: https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto…

History, “Boston Police Strike of 1919”: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-h…

Coolidge letter written after death of his son: https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/pr…

QotD: Writers are like otters

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

Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden had a wonderful rant some years back. She had been talking to an animal trainer, who explained to her why otters were untrainable. Other animals, it seemed, when given their food reward or whatever by their human handler, would seem to think, “Great, he liked it! I’ll do that again!” Otters, by contrast, would seem to think, “Great, he liked it! Now I’ll do something else that’s even cooler!” Writers, Teresa concluded in a moment of Zen enlightenment, were otters. At least from an editor’s point of view.

When I boot up a new book in my brain, I am not greatly interested in what has and hasn’t won awards. I want to write something else that’s even cooler.

Lois McMaster Bujold, interview at Blogcritics, 2005-05-24.

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