Rex Krueger
Published 27 Oct 2021It’s easy to buy handsaws for your woodwork, but you need to know a few things before you buy.
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October 28, 2021
Getting Started with Hand Saws | Total beginner, hand tool woodworking
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Identifying victims over 40 years later
In Wednesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh goes back in time to a very different era: the 1970s, when they still hadn’t formally defined the term “serial killer”.
Des Plaines Police Department mugshots of John Wayne Gacy, 22 December, 1978.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
The 1970s are another country, and it is the one your correspondent comes from. We have always been interested in the unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy because it shows just how distant that country really is, even though it seems, in memory, close enough to touch. People who know Gacy as merely the killer clown may not understand how unbelievable the details are when viewed from 2021.
In 1968, Gacy was actually convicted of raping a 15-year-old boy in Iowa and served 18 months in prison. There were sexual assault complaints against him in Chicago — where he had been sent on probation — beginning in 1971. And when he told his surviving victims that the police wouldn’t believe them, he knew what he was talking about, having become respectable enough to be an honorary police precinct captain. One rape-murder victim whose family was searching for him found that he had done work for Gacy, who simply told them the boy had “run away from home”. In other case, a missing boy’s car was found at Gacy’s house. Gacy just admitted to having bought it from the kid, and the trail ran cold.
About half of Gacy’s victims were minors. In a modern city, you couldn’t have more than a few young people vanish from the street or the bus station without the cops realizing they had an enormous investigative problem. But in the ’70s, there was no awareness of anyone “vanishing” at all. Teenagers really were running away from home in simply inconceivable quantities, bouncing around from city to city, and picking up odd jobs like the ones Gacy offered. In the social environment then existing, parents often just accepted the disappearance of children. And runaways still happen, obviously, but now if some 16-year-old stays out too late and doesn’t call home, there’s an official bulletin on Twitter within a few hours.
Police forces still had not quite formulated the concept of a “serial killer”. Gacy’s luck running out was a major reason this finally happened. He was caught only because someone had seen him speaking with a 15-year-old later reported missing; a local cop happened to have a child who was a high school classmate of Gacy’s last victim, and he did extra legwork that nobody had bothered with, finding out about Gacy’s old sodomy conviction.
The minds of professional crime investigators simply did not have room to accommodate the idea of Gacy — or the dozens more like him who began to turn up in the ’80s. NP Platformed is the first to bewail a world of “helicopter parenting” that is creating stunted, fragile adults; but sometimes we remember the fractured, strange, disorderly post-’60s society from which we ourselves came, and we shudder.
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Tank Chats #130 | Ikv 91 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 18 Jun 2021Curator David Willey discusses the Cold War era Swedish Ikv 91. Short for Infanterikanonvagn 91, this tank destroyer was developed to meet the operational requirements of the Swedish Army post-WW2.
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QotD: Romantics
Romantics tend to love not others, but romance itself. And when the “romance” fades they can’t move to a higher, deeper love, but only on to the next incident in a long chain of catastrophe tarted up into cheap opera.
Gerard Vanderleun, “The Man Who Loved Not Wisely But At Least Twice”, American Digest, 2005-04-29.
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October 27, 2021
Looting WW2 Java Sea Wrecks – “The Biggest Grave Robbery in History”
Historigraph
Published 26 Oct 2021Support on Patreon to help keep the videos coming https://www.patreon.com/historigraph
Come join the historigraph discord: https://discord.gg/cjTaHFNAjS
Buy Historigraph Posters here! historigraph.creator-spring.comFollow me on Twitch for upcoming livestreams! https://www.twitch.tv/historigraph
► Second Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpIj…
► Twitter: https://twitter.com/historigraph
► Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/historigraphSources:
[A] Mediacorp documentary on the salvaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9iRR…
[B] Footage of the wreck of Prince of Wales, by Nigel Sinclair – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD96F…
[C] Footage of the wreck of Repulse, by Clayton Neilson – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3U_e…[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia…
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/201…
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/201…
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-…
[5] https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitst…
[6] https://www.reclamet.co.uk/scrap-meta…
[7] https://www.nst.com.my/news/2015/10/n…
[8] https://www.maritime-executive.com/ar…
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The psychological attraction of conspiracy theories
Scott Alexander considers why people are attracted to various conspiracy theories:
QAnon alleged clues about the NYC bombing, 10 December 2017.
Wikimedia Commons.
Viral game designer Adrian Hon wrote an article about What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon.
It argues that people fall for QAnon because it gives them an interesting mystery. It’s a place where new discoveries are always around the corner, where a few hours of research by an amateur like you can fill in one of the missing links between Joe Biden and the Lizard Pope. The thrill of QAnon isn’t just learning that all your political opponents are secretly Satanists or Illuminati or whatever. It’s the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it.
One place you could go from here is to talk about how QAnoners are the sort of people who are excluded from existing systems of knowledge production. They are never going to be Professors of Biology, and they know it. Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert — a position our culture treats as the height of dignity — is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy.
[…]
This isn’t meant in any way as a criticism of Hon. I’m transparently doing the same thing he is here — claiming to have an interesting insight, then contributing it to a shared community of knowledge-seekers. My point isn’t that Hon is similar to QAnon and therefore bad. My point is we’re all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we’re having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are.
Partly this is all for the greater good. If we don’t know about the Lizard Papacy, we won’t be able to resist them; if we don’t know what secretly drives QAnon, we won’t be able to fight it. But another part of it seems to be — a critic might say “intellectual masturbation” but I would argue “intellectual exercise” is a better term. Exercise is sort of about building strength and skill that you might use later, but it’s also guiltlessly joyful, done for nothing’s sake but its own.
Athletes understand that not everyone can be Babe Ruth. That’s why you have local baseball leagues, or Little League, or the Minor Leagues, so that everybody can satisfy their sports competition drive whether they’re a superstar or not. But what’s the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you’re not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?
My stock position on any given conspiracy theory is that the bigger and more important the alleged conspiracy, the less likely it is to be true: most people can’t keep a secret for more than a day before wanting to blab to someone else to show off.
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Alouette and The Ionospheric Satellites; A Beginners Guide To The Early Canadian Space Program
Polyus Studios
Published 22 Aug 2109Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosIn the early 1960s Canada was among the early pioneers of space technology and research. Scientists and engineers took advantage of then cutting edge technologies like the transistor and solar panels, to produce the Alouette and ISIS series of satellites. It was an immense engineering challenge that represented the high water mark of a tradition of ionospheric research that began back before the establishment of Canada as a nation. The Alouette and ISIS series of satellites produced more than 1200 research papers exploring all aspects of the Earth’s ionosphere, the aurora, and other phenomena. They also demonstrated to the world that Canada was a world leader in peaceful space technology.
0:00 Intro
0:29 Arctic exploration and early magnetic field research
2:40 New technologies promote new questions
5:35 Birth of the Canadian Space Program
9:25 Testing and Launch of Alouette
13:04 ISIS series of satellites
17:12 Legacy and ConclusionMusic:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello ProjectResearch sources:
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/space…
https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/i…
http://www.friendsofcrc.ca/Projects/I…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/alouet…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/isis/i…
http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellit…
http://friendsofcrc.ca/Projects/ISIS/…
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/space…
http://acuriousguy.blogspot.com/2017/…
https://photostories.ca/explore/photo…
http://www.ieee.dreamhosters.com/digl…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/alouet…#Spacecraft #PolyusStudios #CanadianAerospace
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QotD: China’s single child policy
Another effect is legions of older people with not enough of a younger population to support them, a social security problem that dwarfs any such in the West.
The Chinese solution is likely to be simplicity itself: shoot the punks and let the geezers starve. Either way, it means social upheaval.
J.R. Dunn, “The Myth of China as Superpower”, American Thinker, 2019-01-09.
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October 26, 2021
The Constitution of Athens
Historia Civilis
Published 15 Dec 2017Patreon | http://historiacivilis.com/patreon
Donate | http://historiacivilis.com/donate
Merch | http://historiacivilis.com/merch
Mailing List | http://historiacivilis.com/mailinglist
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comSources:
The Athenian Constitution by Aristotle: http://amzn.to/2C1mHLv
Politics by Aristotle: http://amzn.to/2AB6KPV
Parallel Lives: The Life of Solon by Plutarch: http://amzn.to/2AT5Viv
The Constitution of the Athenians by Pseudo-Xenophon: http://amzn.to/2z9rE6l
The Rise of Athens by Anthony Everitt: http://amzn.to/2C2ryMu
The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes by Mogens Herman Hansen: http://amzn.to/2AEAtYj
Persian Fire by Tom Holland: http://amzn.to/2AjLB8WMusic:
“Direct to Video,” by Chris Zabriskie
“It’s Always Too Late to Start Over,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Mario Bava Sleeps In a Little Later Than He Expected To,” by Chris Zabriskie
“Hallon,” by Christian BjoerklundWe are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
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“…watching The Media spin for Brandon; it’s just so Pravda-licious”
Severian manages to find entertainment in the full-blown propagandization of “The Media”, especially during the course of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
Back when the Kung Flu nonsense first started, I took it quasi-seriously. Let me clarify: Like America’s greatest philosopher, I assume that everything in the newspaper is 90% bullshit, and I read it because it entertains me. Nonetheless, the bullshit operates on several levels, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you want to extract more than entertainment from it. In the case of Covid, back in the earliest days, I assumed that the bullshit was more top tier — that is, that it was mostly ignorance.
Media people are stupid. We all know that, but unless you’ve been around them (or their inbred, banjo-picking cousins, academics) recently, you probably don’t realize just how stupid they actually are. Remember Michael Crichton’s bit about “Gell-Mann Amnesia“? He said that The Media are so dumb, they routinely get important things not just wrong, but completely backwards: The headline would read the equivalent of “Wet Streets Cause Rain”.
And to be fair to The Media — I know, I know, but again, if you want anything more than a chuckle from the propaganda, you must try — it really did seem to be more ignorance than anything. I’m the kind of guy who needs to pull off a sock every time he has to count past ten, but compared to everyone in The Media I’m Euclid himself. I could see right away that the numbers they were spouting would make Kung Flu exponentially more lethal than even the Black Plague, which would, you know, tend to show up on satellite reconnaissance. And since there’s this thing called “Google Earth” …
But even though I knew right away you’d need to scale back their projections by a factor of about eleventy billion, that wasn’t the end of it, because even doing the necessary mental math to scale it down by eleventy billion — take the cosine, carry the one, divide by zero — it still looked pretty bad. But not “pretty bad” in a factual way. Rather, pretty bad in a second-level bullshit way, the mere propaganda way.
Those were the days, you might recall, when — out of the blue, on a dime — the Official Story changed from “China categorically denies there’s any such thing as germs, much less this particular strain of flu” to “OMG, the Chinese are welding apartment doors shut as people keel over in the streets.” Accompanied, in some cases — and good luck finding those video clips now — with grainy little movies of obvious actors keeling over so hammily, Al Pacino himself would tell them to tone it down. Pravda et al would never have been so crude, but those guys were pros, and as bad as the USSR was, affront-to-basic-intelligence-wise, this is Clown World.
Sure enough, the stories soon came out that China had cornered the market on PPE gear. It was an obvious short con, but remember: Clown World.
This — the CCP cornering the PPE market — soon prompted the third level of Media bullshit, the ideological level. Not content to merely take orders from their Chinese paymasters, the Media, being ideology-addled prize graduates of American “higher” “education”, started taking it upon themselves to lecture us for our own good. Masks, which were once bad, were now good, and if one mask was good, then two were even better! Thus the flood of stories like the one covered at the old RC, where the woman went on about swabbing her eyelids with disinfectant and whatnot. They got their chance to hector us for our own good, and they will never turn that down.
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What is Marmite?
Atomic Shrimp
Published 13 Mar 2021I used Marmite to flavour gravy in a previous video — loads of people asked what it was. Here (I hope) is the answer you need.
I’ve tried — and liked — both Marmite and Vegemite and I have a very slight preference for Marmite, but now I’ll need to search for the reduced salt and XO versions … for science, of course.
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QotD: Blogging
We’ll see. In a way blogs are the refutation of the old joke: “The food’s so bad here.” “Yes, and such small portions.” Dole out crap in large amounts all day and you don’t guarantee traffic; eventually people will tired of poking through the heap with a stick looking for diamonds.
Somewhere in there, there’s a metaphor.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-05-10.
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October 25, 2021
P90: FN’s Bullpup PDW
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Jul 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
FN began developing the P90 in the late 1980s, actually preceding the NATO requirement that it would eventually compete for. The idea of the P90 was to develop a weapon for secondary troops to replace 9mm pistols and SMGs. There was an anticipated threat of Russian paratroops wearing armor that could defeat 9mm ball. The P90 was intended to be a light and handy weapon that was easily controllable without a tremendous about of training, and could defeat that sort of body armor.
The result was the 5.7x28mm cartridge, firing a 31 grain armor-piercing bullet at 2350 fps. This was combined with a simple blowback action and a Hall-style 50-round magazine in a fully ambidextrous, bullpup layout. The gun was introduced onto the market in 1990, and has been widely purchased by security and special operations organizations. In its original intended role for support troops, it has only been adopted by Belgium.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
QotD: Individual tastes
Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur, 2004.
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October 24, 2021
Showdown at El Alamein – WW2 – 165 – October 23, 1942
World War Two
Published 23 Oct 2021Could this be the beginning of the big break in North Africa? The Allies have the men, the armor, and the fuel … they just have to deal with the Axis minefields to try and get started. And the Axis are throwing ever more men at Stalingrad as the Soviets grimly hold on. Another roller coaster of a week.
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