Quotulatiousness

January 19, 2020

“Night Witches” – Female Soviet Pilots – Sabaton History 050 [Official]

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

Sabaton History
Published 18 Jan 2020

This episode is about the Soviet 588th bomber regiment. They were all-female and got the nickname “Night Witches” from the sound their planes made after they killed their engines for maximum effect. This sound made German think of the broomsticks of witches, and they called them “Nachthexen“.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to Heroes (where “Night Witches” is featured):
CD: http://bit.ly/HeroesStore
Spotify: http://bit.ly/HeroesSpotify
Apple Music: http://bit.ly/HeroesAppleMusic
iTunes: http://bit.ly/HeroesiTunes
Amazon: http://bit.ly/HeroesAmz
Google Play: http://bit.ly/HeroesGoogleP

Watch the official lyric video of “Night Witches” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7NSU…

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: 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

Eastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Colorizations:
– Olga Shirnina a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/

Sources:
– Tver United State Museum
– Photo of the instructor Semeon Lykin and a group of pilots posing in front of a Polikarpov Po-2 courtesy of Franco Folini on Flickr
– Po-2 “Sudstroitel”; 588th night light bomber aviation regiment – all courtesy of Segey G on Flickr
– SA-kuva 39220
– Sniper scope icon 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.

Travelling SNCF in the age of the smartphone app

Filed under: Business, France, Humour, Media, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Register, Alistair Dabbs reveals some unfortunate truths about the French railway service (the Société nationale des chemins de fer français or SNCF) and its mobile app:

An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, 1May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.

Actually, the hotel app is rubbish. The booking system is slow, the property information incomplete and some of the buttons don’t do anything at all. From time to time, the app flashes up a notification inviting you to install the app … er, that you’re already running. Much better to book using a proper computer. Still, flashing the screen around got me the Presidential Disability Suite. Franklin D rocked a wheelchair, remember, and I’m a fan.

This, however, pales into insignificance with the tedious and frankly silly collection of smartphone apps I had to juggle to manage my train journey to get here. Yes, it’s my own fault for trying to navigate my way across France on public transport in the midst of a general strike but surely that’s precisely the kind of thing digital communications ought to be able to help you with, don’t you agree?

Map of the French railways on which the TGV (LGV: blue; normal tracks: black) and Intercités (grey) SNCF trains run. Only lines going to and from Paris are shown here.
Wikimedia Commons.

The French train company, SNCF, has been doing its best by notifying travellers with bookings every day at 17:00 which of the following day’s trains would be running and which would be cancelled. I’m a lifelong union member myself and I fully support the workers’ rights to … oh buggeration, my TGV’s been rerouted to set off from a city 300km away. Fucking union arsewipes – sack ’em all bastard wankers.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just have to work out another way. Fire up the SNCF booking app!

A banner at the top informs me that I should seek information about which train services are running by checking its Twitter feed. So I launch the Twitter app. SNCF on Twitter says I should check via the idiotic INOUI brand for TGV bookings. So I launch the INOUI app. This tells me I should check with SNCF or, if I want more information, click on a highlighted link. I click on it: it links to a one-sentence message that tells me there is a strike on and that train services may be affected.

Two hours of thumb-numbing smartphone tomfoolery later, I have worked out my own alternative route via multiple connecting services. This was made more challenging by the SNCF and INOUI apps providing contradictory information about the same journey. Best of all is they can’t agree on where my TGV will actually go. Will it reach its terminus as usual or will it apparently go inexplicably missing from the tracks in the countryside outside Lille? According to SNCF and INOUI, it will do both. It’s Schrodinger’s train.

Just as I go to bed, the Eurostar app sends me a notification reminding me to get to my local station on time tomorrow to catch the TGV that’s been cancelled.

As you can see, my much prolonged, zig-zag route up the country and into Blighty worked, no thanks to these ridiculous apps. It wasn’t all bad: I got to see more French farmland than I expected and experienced first-hand the extraordinarily rich cultural variety of train station beggars that France has to offer the modern rail traveller.

January 17, 2020

The crying need for “regime change” … in Canadian newsrooms

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley discusses the amazingly tone-deaf “corrections” issued by CBC and CTV over their malicious misquoting of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments on the Iranian government:

Harper did not advocate military intervention in Iran, or indeed any particular intervention whatsoever. Despite describing Iran (accurately) as an “anti-Semitic state” premised on “religious fanaticism and regional imperialism” that is standing resolutely in the way of cooperation between other Middle Eastern nations, Harper didn’t even advocate “a complete change of government.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2012.
World Economic Forum photo via Wikimedia Commons.

“I do believe we need to see a change in Iran if we are going to see peace in the Middle East,” he said.

“Without a change in the nature of the government of Tehran,” he said, “the Middle East will continue to be in turmoil.”

He said he hoped the furious protests in Iran might nudge the country toward “a better trajectory.”

These are perfectly anodyne statements. Who doesn’t want the Iranian regime to alter its behaviour?

Clarification or correction? I would say this calls for something more like “colossal embarrassment necessitating deep introspection.”

The root problem, I think, is that so much of Canadian politics is purely for show. We are a sparsely populated, not very powerful nation where the differences between the two major federal parties are remarkably small — and thus so are the stakes. It requires special measures to keep people interested, as much for the media as for politicians.

[…]

That’s how the big outlets like CBC and CTV make the sausage of the day, and it’s understandable. They do great investigative work, but the beast needs feeding not just every day, but all day every day. During the campaign I would watch colleagues set up for live hits in various parking lots and back yards and sometimes even on the campaign bus, and imagine them speaking the truth: “I’m here in Delta, B.C. and there’s f–k-all to report. Back to you, Kent.” But the viewers must never know. They need drama, as weak as it might be. I can easily imagine how that principle transformed “a changed regime” into “regime change.”

The real problem with this reporting regime is when it’s applied to things that actually do matter. There are serious potential consequences to telling the world that Stephen Harper thinks, in essence, that we should declare war on Iran with an eye to bouncing the ayatollahs. Harper’s successor and his government are in the midst of an extremely delicate and frankly improbable operation to find out precisely what happened the morning of Jan. 8 in the skies above Tehran and seek justice for the victims and their families. Those families don’t deserve fake news about a warmongering former PM, and I’m sure our diplomats would prefer members of the unchanged Iranian regime didn’t come across it either.

This isn’t a Canadian federal election. It’s real life, and needs to be covered as such.

January 16, 2020

“… he returned to settle in a 250-year-old farmhouse in Wiltshire which he named ‘Scrutopia'”

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

In Quillette, Barbara Kay remembers Sir Roger Scruton:

Scruton’s breadth of knowledge was astonishing. None of his enemies could dispute that. He wrote whole books with complete authority on religion, architecture, opera, the environment, Islam, philosophy. But running through them all was a guilt-free love for, and fidelity to his — our — cultural inheritance. He loved his own home, England, and he would not repudiate it for its disfiguring historical warts, which seemed to preoccupy almost everyone else. It was Scruton who gave us the word “oikophobia” — hatred of one’s home — which is the hallmark of progressivism. He was out of sync with the hey-hey-ho-ho-western-civ-has-got-to-go zeitgeist. It didn’t help that he was the son of a lowly schoolmaster and had gone to the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe, a selective public high school.

Sir Roger Scruton
Photo by Pete Helme via Wikimedia Commons.

Feeling isolated, like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens before him, Scruton drifted “across the pond” to breathe the friendlier air of the last western redoubt where conservative thought finds a welcoming hearth. From 1992 to 1995, he taught a philosophy course at Boston University, and he spent a second stint in America from 2004 to 2009. But the pull of his beloved England proved too great, and he returned to settle in a 250-year-old farmhouse in Wiltshire which he named “Scrutopia.”

[…]

Among those who expressed their gratitude to Scruton in his final year were the governments of Poland and Hungary, who garlanded him with honors for the role he’d played in overthrowing the Communist regimes that had blighted their countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This recognition followed his receipt of the Czech Medal of Merit (First Class), presented to him by Vaclav Havel in 1998. At great risk to himself, Scruton had smuggled banned books across the Iron Curtain and helped dissidents organize an underground university, even arranging for degrees to be awarded by the Cambridge theology department. Among his other achievements, he was on the right side of history.

I cherish the memory of a brief conversation I had with Scruton after his Ottawa talk, in which he had expanded on the idea of decency, a concept of great interest and importance for me, especially in retrospect, for Scruton was himself a supremely decent man, although that did not save him from the postmodern jackals. I remember he said decency was easy to regulate in small towns, because you can’t be happy in a small town without a willingness to conform to standards. But these standards aren’t written down. There is no need. Everyone knows what they are. You know you’ve transgressed them when you receive disapproving glances or are cold-shouldered.

Compelled conformity — not legislated, God forbid, but enforced by social pressure — looks stifling to progressives, but in its own way it can be a great comfort, knowing the rules of what is and isn’t decent, and, through them, belonging. We all want to belong, but healthy belonging is sensitive to scale. We’re not made for globalization. We’re made for homes and homelands. If people don’t have homes to keep them rooted, feeling they belong in a good way, they will find fake homes that are tethered to ideas and theories, and then they often belong in a bad way. These are Scrutonesque musings.

Conformity and its effects, good and bad, absorbed Scruton. He once described the entire trajectory of his life as a constant movement toward “that impossible thing: an original path to conformity.” Like so many other of his gnomic utterances, it forces one to stop and think, really think, about what it means. And you know it means something worth thinking about because Roger Scruton never thought or spoke or wrote bullshit. He left that to his critics.

January 15, 2020

History Buffs: Amadeus

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

History Buffs
Published 3 Dec 2015

In this episode we look at the original Rock n Roll bad boy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! And who says this show isn’t classy and sophisticated 🙂

● Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HistoryBuffs_

________________________________________­_________________________________

Amadeus is a 1984 American period drama film directed by Miloš Forman, written by Peter Shaffer, and adapted from Shaffer’s stage play Amadeus (1979). The story is set in Vienna, Austria, during the latter half of the 18th century.

The film was nominated for 53 awards and received 40, including eight Academy Awards (including Best Picture), four BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globes, and a Directors Guild of America (DGA) award. In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked Amadeus 53rd on its 100 Years… 100 Movies list.

The story begins in 1823 as the elderly Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) attempts suicide by slitting his throat while loudly begging forgiveness for having killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) in 1791. Placed in a lunatic asylum for the act, Salieri is visited by Father Vogler (Richard Frank), a young priest who seeks to hear his confession. Salieri is sullen and uninterested but eventually warms to the priest and launches into a long “confession” about his relationship with Mozart.

“Subdivisions”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on the way Rush responded to the “New Wave” on their 1982 album Signals:

Every Rush fan is presenting his own list of essential tracks this week: unexpectedly I found myself returning over and over again to “Subdivisions,” the opener from Signals (1982). No Rush song ever had a more portentous dividing effect: there are still fans who haven’t forgiven. Moving Pictures had come out in February of 1981, and its sales set up the band for life and beyond. But it was a consciously backward-looking record — the cover is a big clue — and a culmination of Rush’s original identity. Moving Pictures is an affectionate farewell to 11-minute track lengths and science-fiction song lyrics (mostly).

After just a few months came the first 51 seconds of “Subdivisions” — Rush’s own astonishing riposte to the New Wave. A lone synthesizer pulses (in 7/8) for a few seconds and then Neil comes in: no further description is possible or necessary. The passage would make a career calling card for any drummer, but what was novel was the upside-down structure of the song, with Alex Lifeson’s guitar showing up late and then carrying the rhythm (beautifully, if you take the trouble to pick him out) while the drums truly lead the way. This is rare, outside of a drum-solo setting, for any rock drummer not named Moon or Bonham.

It was as if Rush, until then a very loud group fuelled by metaphors of battle, had made a conscious decision to cool down and give the spotlight to its ultimate weapon. Very well, the start of Signals announced, this is the age of the synthesizer and we’re going along with it — but let’s see you S.O.B.s synthesize Neil Peart.

Not coincidentally, Peart’s lyrics for “Subdivisions” also took an artistic step: they shake free of the SF/fantasy tropes and the 1930s poetic conceits he had mostly hidden behind until then. Heard in 2020, the song drags the mind of the listener helplessly back to the moment when “Subdivisions” was on the radio, yet seems to have been written for us to hear now. “Some will sell their dreams for small desires,” Peart warned in a mood of cranky prophecy, “or lose the race to rats …”.

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

January 12, 2020

Neil Peart, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was very saddened to see the news, but it explains why the band retired:

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

Neil Peart, the virtuoso drummer and lyricist for Rush, died Tuesday, January 7th, in Santa Monica, California, at age 67, according to Elliot Mintz, a family spokesperson. The cause was brain cancer, which Peart had been quietly battling for three-and-a-half years. A representative for the band confirmed the news to Rolling Stone.

Peart was one of rock’s greatest drummers, with a flamboyant yet precise style that paid homage to his hero, the Who’s Keith Moon, while expanding the technical and imaginative possibilities of his instrument. He joined singer-bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson in Rush in 1974, and his musicianship and literate, philosophical lyrics — which initially drew on Ayn Rand and science fiction, and later became more personal and emotive — helped make the trio one of the classic-rock era’s essential bands. His drum fills on songs like “Tom Sawyer” were pop hooks in their own right, each one an indelible mini-composition; his lengthy drum solos, carefully constructed and packed with drama, were highlights of every Rush concert.

In a statement released Friday afternoon, Lee and Lifeson called Peart their “friend, soul brother and bandmate over 45 years,” and said he had been “incredibly brave” in his battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. “We ask that friends, fans, and media alike understandably respect the family’s need for privacy and peace at this extremely painful and difficult time,” Lee and Lifeson wrote. “Those wishing to express their condolences can choose a cancer research group or charity of their choice and make a donation in Neil Peart’s name. Rest in peace, brother.”

A rigorous autodidact, Peart was also the author of numerous books, beginning with 1996’s The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa, which chronicled a 1988 bicycle tour in Cameroon — in that memoir, he recalled an impromptu hand-drum performance that drew an entire village to watch.

Peart never stopped believing in the possibilities of rock (“a gift beyond price,” he called it in Rush’s 1980 track “The Spirit of Radio”) and despised what he saw as over-commercialization of the music industry and dumbed-down artists he saw as “panderers.” “It’s about being your own hero,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. A compromise is what I can never accept.”

Update: At AIER Peter C. Earle pays tribute to Peart’s life and work.

The announcement of the death of Rush drummer Neil Peart came as a tremendous shock. Having only retired about four years ago, so many fans of Rush (myself included) had convinced ourselves that this was a temporary hiatus, and that in a year or two – eventually, at any rate – there would be an announcement of a new album, a short tour, or some other project. Surely musicians of their virtuosity and passion couldn’t stay away from the studio or stage for long. But now we know we were wrong, and we know why.

It was revealed that Neil had been battling a brain tumor for over three years. Characteristically, he, his family, and friends (among the closest of whom, Rush vocalist/bass player Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson) upheld his desire for privacy. I haven’t done the math as to whether Neil’s illness was likely a causative factor in the decision to retire, or whether it seems to have come along not long after the decision to retire.

[…]

In his role as the lyricist of Rush, Peart took on such topics as pernicious nationalism (“Territories”), mass hysteria (“Witch Hunt”), the division between constructive and destructive belief (“Faithless”), the fall of Communism (“Heresy”), conflict and power (“The Trees”), the horrors of totalitarian rule (“2112,” “Red Sector A”) and many allusions to individual liberty (“Tom Sawyer,” “Anthem,” “The Analog Kid,” “Finding My Way,” “Caravan”). He did so via lyrics which artfully and passionately evinced those sentiments; sentiments which early on suggested Objectivist perspectives, but over time developed into what he called “Bleeding Heart” libertarianism:

    I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist. Paul Theroux’s definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also – I’ve just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into … a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.

Neil, through his lyrics, managed to do what so many lyricists and writers – even, perhaps especially, so many libertarian intellectuals – fail to do: make liberty neither an alien fixture, a flat slogan, or a utopian slog. It is a way of thinking and living, and one which not only doesn’t ignore, but embraces the flaws and frailty of humanity, tempering realism with hope and optimism.

QotD: Progressive snobbery is part of the kink

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Do they really hate ordinary people that much?

Yes, they do. For liberals, the distinction between the “dumb masses” and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful. Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary trait of liberalism. It is fundamental to the its nature.

At its heart, liberalism is a gnostic religion, and the essence of that religion is the believer’s faith that he possesses the means of changing the world for the better. The belief that the world must be changed requires there to be a mass of individuals whose lives are in need of change. Following this logic, it is the liberal, not those deplorables in need of change, who knows what must be changed. For liberals, there must be a mass of people in need of this knowledge for life to make sense.

Above all, liberalism is a hubristic faith. Its followers share the fatal flaw of pride in their own intellectual capacity. This is why liberalism appeals so strongly to those in the knowledge trades: teachers, journalists, writers, psychologists, and social workers. The sense of “knowing more than others” is its strongest attraction – particularly to the young, who otherwise know so little. Liberalism confers, or seems to confer, almost immediate power and authority to those who embrace it.

The left’s obsession with superior knowledge runs through its entire history. As Woodrow Wilson remarked, the “instrument” of political science “is insight. A nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.” Lyndon B. Johnson thought “a president’s hardest task” is “to know what is right.” And the most hubristic of all is Obama’s “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Yes, we are wonderfully bright, and we’ve been waiting eons for ourselves to appear.

Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.

January 11, 2020

What does a former royal do?

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

At UnHerd, Douglas Murray discusses membership in the (extended) royal family as a “predicament”:

The royal family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour 2010, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.

There is a line in Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III which is so good that the makers of The Crown lifted it — without attribution — in their most recent season. The heir to the throne, waiting for Parliament to declare him regent, says that to be Prince of Wales is not a position: “It is a predicament.”

Whether or not that is the case for the current Prince of Wales, it is certainly true for the Sussexes, who have just announced that they are going to step back from public duties in order to become “financially independent”.

Even the most devout republican will recognise that there is something worse than the now-defunct Civil List; something undisguisably worse than members of the Royal Family receiving public subsidy. It is the predicament of Royal privilege.

Such is the cruelty of public life, that people born into a position of undeniable privilege are rewarded — or revenged — by being placed into an impossible situation. If a prince or princess is carrying out public duties, but also having the occasional moment of private enjoyment, they will be lambasted by the press for freeloading and gallivanting on the public’s dime. If they decide to relieve the strains on the public coffers by accepting the largesse of some wealthy individuals, then the same press will attack said royal for freeloading on someone else’s dime, and being caught up with sleazy or shallow celebrity characters.

There is a way out, of course, one demonstrated by Her Majesty the Queen throughout her public life, which has been to doggedly and dutifully carry out an unceasing round of obligations for so many years that in her tenth decade of service, no reasonable person could begrudge her the occasional day off.

But the head of the family is at an advantage. That role is well defined. It is the other royals — especially the “minor royals” — who find themselves in the worst situation. True, there are people — almost everybody else on earth if it comes to that — who are in a materially worse position. But in terms of being born into a difficult role, being born a non-monarch in the royal family must count as among the most impossible to carry out.

In the 1990s, when the Civil List was whittled down, we were given an inkling of how the Sussex situation might play out. Members of the Royal Family, such as the Michaels of Kent, were suddenly expected to strike out on their own; forced to sell their home while the press enjoyed ogling at their embarrassment. When the Michaels had an attic sale, they were attacked for cheapening themselves and the Royal Family by auctioning their possessions. They then attempted to make money through various forms of consultancy and authorship, but every way they turned they were accused of using their position to “cash in”. What else were they to do, though? What other commodity — other than royalty — did they have?

January 10, 2020

Brendan O’Neill on “Megxit”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

He calls the Duchess a “woke Wallis Simpson”:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle visit Titanic Belfast in March 2018.
Photo from the Northern Ireland Office via Wikimedia Commons.

So Harry and Meghan are stepping back. They’re resigning from The Firm. They’re ducking out of the Sovereign Grant and royal duties and going it alone. They’re going to split their time between the UK and North America – think of all the CO2! – and become more “independent”.

Why? Come on, we all know why. Forget the tripe about them fleeing the racism of the UK tabloids and the nonsense about the first DOC (duchess of colour) not being made to feel welcome in the stiff, white House of Windsor. No, H&M, the most right-on royals in history, are breaking off so that they can foist even more woke bollocks on the plebs without having to worry about receiving a tutting phone-call from Her Maj’s press secretary reminding them that they’re royalty and not virtue-signalling Hollywood celebs.

Megxit, as this royal bombshell is wittily being called, is a striking sign of the times. What Harry and Meghan are doing is virtually unprecedented in the history of the royals. They are jacking in their jobs (I say jobs) as senior royals and pursuing a more “financially independent” path that will allow them to earn, travel and – this is important – jabber on about their pet concerns and causes as much as they like.

Even leaving aside the fact that they won’t actually be financially independent – they’ll still get wads of cash from the Duchy of Cornwall and will still stay in that Frogmore Cottage us British taxpayers just splashed 2.4million quid on – still their move is a startling and concerning one.

What it fundamentally reveals is the incompatibility of the modern culture of narcissism with the values of duty, loyalty and self-negation traditionally associated with royal life. To someone like Meghan, who sprang from celebville, who sees herself as the embodiment of right-on goodness, and who loves nothing more than advertising her eco-virtue and performing her PC credentials, life in the British monarchy was never going to be a good fit.

Yes, the woke agenda Meghan expresses so well shares much in common with the old-world elitism of the monarchical system. Both obsess over inherited characteristics (the woke bang on about race and gender, the monarchy is all about bloodline). Both have a penchant for looking down their noses at the little people. And both have an instinctive loathing for modernity, from Charles’ longstanding conservationism to H&M’s humanity-bashing eco-hysteria.

“Light in the Black” – United Nations Peacekeeping – Sabaton History 049 [Official]

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

Sabaton History
Published 9 Jan 2020

The United Nations were created to avoid any future human suffering and all-out conflict. Numerous peacekeeping missions had the goal to deescalate and protect the innocent. However, the success and usefulness of the UN is still quite ambiguous. The Sabaton song “Light in the Black” is about the UN peacekeeping missions and we tell you about the history.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to Attero Dominatus (where “Light in the Black” is featured):
CD: http://bit.ly/AtteroDominatusStore
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Google Play: http://bit.ly/AtteroDominatusGooglePlay

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: 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
Production Intern: Rune Væver Hartvig
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski and Karolina Dolega
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory

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

Sources:
Rijksmuseum

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

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

Pierre Poilievre’s bid for federal Conservative leader

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

Chris Selley on the varying reactions to the notion of Pierre Poilievre as Andrew Scheer’s replacement:

Glee is spreading among Liberal partisans at the thought of Pierre Poilievre succeeding Andrew Scheer as Conservative leader. The theory is he is so pugnacious, so obnoxious, so poisonously, sneeringly partisan as to be literally unelectable.

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It is true that the man longtime Conservative cabinet minister John Baird nicknamed “Skippy,” in tribute to his enthusiastic Question Period performances, does not suffer from an excess of gravitas — though Poilievre’s reported support for his leadership bid from Baird and Jenni Byrne, a former senior adviser to Stephen Harper, lend him some within party ranks. His candidacy hasn’t made any measurable dent thus far in public opinion polls. And the opposition war rooms would certainly have fun unpacking his baggage.

Never mind Poilievre questioning the value-for-money proposition of compensating residential school victims (for which he apologized), or his use of the term “tar baby” in the House of Commons (for which he did not, and nor should he have, because it was a perfectly apt and inoffensive analogy in the context he used it), or the dreaded Green Light from the Campaign Life Coalition. Having been Harper’s parliamentary secretary, Liberals will blame him for every supposed atrocity of the Harper era.

All that said, the notion that people widely viewed as pugnacious, obnoxious and partisan-to-a-fault can’t win in Canadian politics is belied by reality. A quick glance around the federation brings Jason Kenney, Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau immediately to mind.

That’s not to say they won because of those character traits: Kenney’s and Ford’s leadership opponents would likely have fared just as well. Trudeau hoodwinked many with his Sunny Ways fraud, but he might well have won as the classic born-to-rule Liberal he turned out to be. If his government continues venting credibility at the rate it established late in its first mandate, the next Conservative leader could well become prime minister no matter who he is.

After recounting the dismal tale of Sheer’s “leadership”, Selley recounts a favourite story about Boris Johnson which contrasts strongly with the Milk Dud’s occupancy of the job.

Again, that degree of swagger and eloquence is far too much to ask of Canadian politicians. But it shouldn’t be too much to ask a party leader to have enough confidence in his party, his members, his movement and his ideas to arouse him to at least some degree of annoyance when they’re unfairly deprecated. If Conservative members aren’t excited by the prospect of a Poilievre leadership, they shouldn’t be half as mortified as Liberals think they should be.

QotD: Deciding what is “newsworthy”

Filed under: History, India, Media, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[…] the ripples of battle in their formal sense are guided by the presence of historians, and that means originally Westerners, and more recently in large part Europeans and Americans. And such distortions do not always play out in bias toward Westerners, especially in the present age. In April 2002 the Israeli Defence Forces entered the West Bank community of Jenin to hunt out suspected suicide-murderers, whose co-members had blown up hundreds of Israeli civilians over the prior year. Although fewer than sixty Palestinians were killed in Jenin — the great majority of them combatants — the world media seized upon the street fighting, dubbing it “Jeningrad” as if they were somehow the moral equivalent of one million Germans and Russians lost at Stalingrad. Yet just days after the Israeli withdrawal from Jenin, Pakistan squared off against India. The stakes were surely far higher: One-fifth of the world’s population was involved. Both sides were nuclear powers and issued threats to use their arsenals. In the prior year alone nearly four times more Indians and Pakistanis were killed than Palestinians and Israelis. By any calculation of numbers, the specter of the dead, the geopolitical consequences, or the long-term environmental health of the planet, the world should know all the major cities in Kashmir rather than a few street names in Jenin. And if the world sought to chronicle destruction and death in an Islamic city, then by any fair measure it should have turned its attention to Grozny, where an entire society of Muslim Chechnyans was quite literally obliterated by the Russian army.

The idiosyncracies of historical remembrance of battle do not hinge alone on the presence of a Socrates or Teddy Roosevelt in the ranks. Sometimes there are wild cards of culture and politics as well. In this case and at this time, the fact that Israelis fit the stereotype of affluent and proud Westerners abroad while the Palestinians were constructed as impoverished and oppressed colonial subjects brought to the equation the sympathies of influential Americans and Europeans in the media, universities, and government — the prominent and sometimes worrisome elites who determined to send their reporters, scholars, and diplomats to Jenin rather than to Islamabad or Grozny.

Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle, 2004.

January 9, 2020

QotD: National music

Filed under: Cancon, France, Germany, Italy, Media, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

What does the soul of a people sound like? With the Germans, you have adequate proof; Wagner spoke for them, for better or worse — grandeur and myth that elevated the soul as easily as it rotted to the soundtrack for a meglomaniacal death cult. Italian music — well, no one ever marched off to war to Respighi’s ode to a peacock. Music for life, lived without lasting consequence. (They did their part in the Roman times; they’ve earned a nap.) French music is best expressed by the gauzy wash of Debussy and his comrades, music that doesn’t confront the ear but gently appeases it. America: cheerful tootling Souza marches or great broad optimistic Copeland yawps. Or jazz. Or rock and roll. Or country twangs. (It’s not that we have no sound — we have many, and each is as much a part of us as the other. Few cultures can pull that off.) Russian music has that delicious third-drink moodiness. Canadian music — no such thing, really, which is telling. Unless you define it as American style music recorded in a Canadian studio to satisfy a government requirement.

James Lileks, Screedblog, 2005-07-08.

January 7, 2020

Isaac Asimov at 100 … ish

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s probably the centenary year for the late Isaac Asimov, but the date is only approximately correct:

Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1944.
US government photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In actual fact the centenary is a bit of a fudge because Asimov never knew his actual birthday and picked January 2 as a likely date, and one that allowed for an extra holiday after the Christmas festivities. He was born around the turn of the year in 1920, three years after the Russian revolution, in the Soviet town of Petrovichi, although he emigrated to the US at the age of three.

Like many Russian Jews the family moved to Brooklyn in New York, and Asimov’s father ended up running a confectionery store and newsagent. Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five and taught his sister too, and consumed the pulp science fiction magazine stocked in his father’s shop.

At the age of 15 he applied to Columbia but was rejected, ostensibly on age grounds but, as he wrote in his autobiography I, Asimov, he recounted that the university had filled its quota of Jews for the year. After multiple rejections he eventually earned his Master of Arts degree in chemistry in 1941 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry in 1948, serving as a civilian in the US Army in the Second World War.

An academic career beckoned and in 1949 he joined the Boston University School of Medicine as a biochemistry teacher. But by then he had already been getting science fiction short stories published for nearly ten years. In 1950 he wrote his first book and largely abandoned his teaching career, finding writing more lucrative and enjoyable.

[…]

Some thought Asimov had peaked as a science fiction writer by the mid 1960s, as he spent the next few years writing a lot of popular science books, non-fiction and school textbooks. He was even asked by Paul McCartney to write a science fiction musical for his then-band Wings, although the idea was eventually dropped.

But in the 1970s he came back into the SF fold with a series of books and short stories, winning two Hugo and two Nebula awards in the decade. He was also involved in some television and film work, having acted as a consultant on Star Trek in the 1960s.

In 1981 he was approached by a publisher to return to the Foundation series and add more to the canon. Foundation’s Edge was published the next year year, to wide acclaim. This was followed by Foundation and Earth in 1986, Prelude to Foundation in 1988, and finally Forward the Foundation, which was published in 1993, one year after Asimov’s death.

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