Extra Credits
Published on 28 May 2019Ray Bradbury not only cautions against censorship (the primary theme of Fahrenheit 451), but offers interesting commentary on who censors works at all, and why humans do it anyway.
Fahrenheit 451 is about many things. In Bradbury’s younger days, just coming out of the McCarthy era, he said the book was about censorship and book burning. Later in life, he said it was about the dangers of easy entertainment. Let’s analyze these viewpoints a little further.
May 30, 2019
Fahrenheit 451 – Dystopias and Apocalypses – Extra Sci Fi
Doug Ford versus the Ontario neo-prohibitionists, progressive temperance snobs and other social control freaks
During the last Ontario election, it was common to disparage Doug Ford as being “Trump-like”, and now that he’s the Premier, it turns out to be true in at least one aspect: Ford does have a Trump-like ability to induce a form of hysteria in his opponents. Ford’s crusade to liberalize Ontario’s alcohol market is a case in point. In the Toronto Star, all the old arguments against liberalization — usually portraying Alberta’s long-since liberalized market as a dystopian hell-hole of alcohol-shattered lives — are being dragged out again:
The key is that the Ford team doesn’t actually care about wine that will be sold in corner stores and more supermarkets. It’s a sop to tourists, which seems reasonable.
No, it cares about beer because beer is a social marker, a shorthand. Wine is considered urban but buck-a-beer is rural/semi-urban. Men drink it. Men with beerbellies drink it. To a government mysteriously seeking a vote that it already has, drinking beer is a signal that a man is a regular guy. But Ford is not a regular guy. He doesn’t drink. He’s not anxious. He’s not renting.
It is very much a problem that any government in power would believe this of the regular guy vote. Alcohol causes hospitalization, crime and early death. It destroys families and jobs, and eventually its victims drink to block out what they lost by drinking.
[…]
They may not know it, they may be doing it instinctively, but it is still madness. Alcoholics are costly to treat and they suffer terribly. Courting their vote comes courtesy of a report by a former health minister in Alberta where booze is sold in private liquor stores.
The problem, as Albertans know, is you’re too afraid to buy it. These stores are often shabby places that are magnets for violence. Watch out, Premier Ford, it’s Ontario and there’s going to be NIMBY.
I am aware that I’m writing like a preacher. Preach on, sister. Anyone over 30 learns to distinguish between people who drink for pleasure and those who cannot cope with it. We are horrified. We offer help.
Back in 2013, Colby Cosh neatly summarized the Ontario neo-prohibitionist rhetoric:
Albertans find it instructive to watch Ontario politicians debate the privatization of liquor retailing, which Klein’s cabinet bulldog, Dr. Stephen West, executed almost overnight in 1993. It was perhaps the representative policy move of the Klein era, the best symbol of his approach to government. Today one will hear Ontarians telling themselves the most bizarre things about Alberta in order to support the idiot belief that booze is a natural monopoly. “You can’t even get red wine there! All they have in the stores is various flavours of corn mash and antifreeze! The streets resound with the white canes of the blinded!” Talk to the saner residents and you rapidly discover the real root of Ontarians’ positive feeling for the LCBO, which is esthetic. It’s just nicer to buy a handle of Maker’s Mark from someone who makes a union wage and has a vague halo of officialdom. You leave the shop feeling okay about your vice.
Klein was liked by Albertans, not because of some mythic popular touch, but because there wasn’t an ounce of tolerance for this sort of thing in him. Alcohol was something he understood very well. (Too well.) People do not need liquor to be flogged to them any harder than the manufacturers already do; put a man in prison and he will make the stuff in the toilet starting on day two. What the old ALCB was really marketing to the public, and what the LCBO markets now, was itself — its own role as social protector/moral approver/tastemaker. Klein identified that part of the system as a parasitic growth, a vestige with no function but its own preservation; and he had West ectomize it with the swiftness of a medieval barber.
Tank Chats #47 King Tiger | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 2 Mar 2018Known variously as the Tiger Ausf. B, Tiger II or Königstiger (the British also referred to it as the “Royal Tiger”), 489 Tiger IIs, were produced at the Henschel assembly plant, between January 1944 and March 1945. However, despite lacking in numbers, and being prone to mechanical and mobility issues based on its size and weight, the Tiger II’s combination of devastating firepower, and thick sloped armour plate made it a formidable adversary.
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QotD: Wahhabism and the West
“You’re right,” he says, “it shouldn’t be different for Islam, but we make it different. Muslims fought for king and empire in both world wars. Muslims were the backbone of the Indian army. Ataturk’s Turkey was an example of Muslims functioning perfectly well in a modern democratic society — but Ataturk’s Turkey is going away. We don’t have that trust any more. It was a Wahhabi who assassinated the chief justice in British India, and that is more or less the only brand of Islam exported today — extremist Saudi-style Wahhabism. All these giant mosques you see going up in cities all over the world are not paid for locally, they’re paid for by Saudi Arabia. They’re trying to make it one-size-fits-all Islam, and a type of Islam that regards the West as its enemy, instead of the mom-and-pop Islam of the past.”
So you’re saying the problem is not Islam, the problem is Wahhabism?
“No! Wahhabism is the symptom. The problem is us. We don’t defend ourselves. If you are a woman living alone in a Muslim community in Europe, you do not venture out after 6 p.m. If there are sexual assaults by Muslims, and the allegations are made public by the victims, the accuser is inevitably accused of racism. Nobody disputes that it happened, but they’re held to a different standard because the victims are Swedes or Danes and the accused is from a Muslim country. It’s believed that it’s unreasonable to expect decent behaviour from an Afghan or an Iraqi — which is racist. You’re denying the humanity of these people. And so you surrender incrementally. You live in a citadel. You make ridiculous changes to your own culture. In Britain the banks don’t give piggy banks to children any more, because the “piggy” might be offensive. There’s a fetishisation of the burka, which should be regarded as what it is — a prison for women. Why should we abandon our own heritage to barbarism? I’m a nineteenth-century imperialist a hundred years past my sell-by date.”
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
May 29, 2019
US Soldiers Fighting in Russia – The End of the “Polar Bear Expedition” I THE GREAT WAR May 1919
The Great War
Published on 28 May 2019The so called Allied intervention into the Russian Civil War suffered from no clear operational goals and mandate and when US President Woodrow Wilson pulled out the American soldiers that were fighting in Northern Russia in May 1919, the operation suffered another setback. Public pressure against US foreign intervention was increasing now that Germany had been beaten and many people didn’t understand what American soldiers were doing in Russia anyway. At the same time Winston Churchill and his supporters maintained that it was vital to defeat the Bolsheviks in Russia once and for all.
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Crownover, Roger. The United States Intervention in North Russia, 1918-1919: The Polar Bear Odyssey. Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.Wright, Damien. Churchill’s Secret War With Lenin: British and Commonwealth Military Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918-20, Helion and Company, 2017
Long, John W. “American Intervention in Russia: the North Russian Expedition, 1918-1919,” in Arthur Dudden, ed. American empire in the Pacific: from trade to strategic balance 1700 – 1922 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 321-344.
Mawdsley Evan. The Russian Civil War, Pegasus Books, 2019
Moore, Joel. The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 (1920)
»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Motion Design: Christian Graef – GRAEFX
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian WittigChannel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van StepholdA Mediakraft Networks Original Channel
Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2019
The EU election was “the Tories’ worst result since 1678”
Mark Steyn on the results of last week’s EU parliamentary elections:
In any normal UK election, it would be inconceivable for either of the two main parties – Conservative and Labour – to attract just 23 per cent of the vote. The fact that that is all they could muster between them is hilarious, and greatly to be enjoyed. As I put it on the radio last week, the departing Theresa May has led the Tories to their worst result in two hundred years. But, really, that’s praising with faint damns. I saw Daniel Hannan on the telly extending Mrs May’s impressive feat back through the pre-Reform Act era and accounting it the Tories’ worst result since 1678. Which is kind of hard to spin. Her forced resignation last Friday morning (by which point her party had made it clear they wouldn’t stick with her past lunch) ensures that she and that election result will be yoked together for all time. And jolly well deserved it is.
When the party of government falls from favor, the beneficiary is usually the principal opposition. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party saw its vote fall almost as precipitously as the Tories’. Against the Conservatives’ single-digit nine per cent, Labour could muster only fourteen per cent, its own worst result in a century – in fact, since 1910. Which would also be hard to spin, had Theresa May not done Corbyn the favor of pulling off an unbeatable record.
[…]
Instead, Mrs May in particular but also Parliament in general chose to double-down on the estrangement from the masses revealed by the referendum, and spent the next three years demonstrating that, whatever the Prime Minister had in mind when she first declared “Brexit means Brexit”, it obviously doesn’t mean leaving the European Union. Either through malice or stupidity or condescension, the political class opted to widen its breach with the people – and Nigel Farage, who is a very canny fellow, decided six weeks ago to create a party to fill the gap in a European election the UK shouldn’t have had to participate in.
Listening and/or watching to the BBC on Sunday for as long as I could stomach it, I detected a strange urge to suggest that the Brexit Party had somehow under-performed, as though it’s normal for a six-week-old party to win twenty-nine out of seventy-three seats, while the century-old Labour Party wins only ten, and the Tories four and the nearest Nigel gets to a run for his money is the second-placed Liberal Democrats with sixteen seats. Farage and the other officially pro-Brexit parties (Labour, Tory, Democratic Unionist) won 44 seats. The Lib Dems and the other officially Remainer parties (Green, Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin, Alliance Party) got 29. Adding in the unelected UKIP and Ulster Unionists, the Leave share of the vote was 58 per cent.
Yes, yes, I know, that’s a bit of a simplification, in that the Tories are supposedly pro-Brexit but totally bollocksed it, and Labour is only pretending to be pro-Brexit as part of a difficult straddle between its Old Labour working-class base and the New Labour preening metropolitan Euro-luvvies. Many of the latter – including such hitherto loyal champagne socialists as actors Simon Callow and Michael Cashman and even Blair’s old Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell. – flew Corbyn’s coop and voted for the Lib Dems. Even so, for those demanding a second referendum (or, as they cynically call it, a “people’s vote”), there’s not much evidence for a second-time-around sadder-but-wiser Remain majority. Among riven Tory families, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sister stood for the new Brexit Party while Boris Johnson’s sister stood for the equally new “Change UK”, a militantly anti-Brexit party formed by a coterie of disaffected Remainer media self-promoters of the soft left and soft right. Annuziata Rees-Mogg was duly elected in the Farage surge, while Rachel Johnson flopped out because “Change UK” had barely any statistical support outside the more desperate bookers of telly current affairs shows.
How to Sharpen a Router Plane | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published on 28 May 2019One of our most highly demanded videos is how to sharpen a router plane. Whether you have a new or second hand router plane, Paul Sellers’ sharpening method ensures you get the best performance from your router plane.
Want to learn more about woodworking? See https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com or https://commonwoodworking.com for step-by-step videos, guides and tutorials. You can also follow Paul’s latest ventures on his woodworking blog at https://paulsellers.com/
Trudeau’s Liberals consider running on “more taxes” platform for fall election
Are you ready for more taxes? Justin Trudeau seems to think you are, and internal Liberal Party documents indicate that several “revenue enhancement” tools are among the ideas being considered for inclusion in the party’s election campaign:
Are you ready for a tax on pop?
That is what some Liberals want to run on in October’s election.
Well, that and a carbon tax, a plastic tax, a tax on selling your home and more.
When it comes to taxes, Liberal like them all.
Lest you think I’m picking on Liberals, this actually comes from an internal party document that was first reported by the Liberal-friendly CBC.
“Ontario Liberal MPs want to pitch voters on a “sugar sweetened beverages levy — more commonly known as a soda tax — in the coming federal election campaign,” reported CBC over the weekend.
The information came from a series of policy proposals put forward by Ontario Liberal MPs that were to be considered for both the budget earlier this year and as potential policies for the upcoming election.
“We have a problem with sugar sweetened beverages being too readily available at too low a price and it is massively contributing to the obesity epidemic,” Liberal MP Mark Holland wrote in support of the proposal.
The Liberals want a tax of 20% on any sugar sweetened beverage believing it could bring in an estimated $1.2 billion a year or $29.6 billion over 25 years and health-care savings of $7.3 billion over 25 years.
How to Use a Marking Gauge CORRECTLY
Matt Estlea
Published on 26 Apr 2019In this video, I show you how to use a marking gauge correctly as well as share some extra tips and pointers to help you with your woodworking. Accurate measuring and marking is an essential skill when it comes to fine woodworking. It doesn’t matter how good you are with a saw or a chisel, if your layout is inaccurate every operation after will be inaccurate too.
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_________________________________________________________________My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 23 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***.
I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre and 4 years experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I still currently work on weekends. During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best.
I like to have a laugh and my videos are quite fast paced BUT you will learn a lot, I assure you.
Lets go make a mess.
QotD: Past civilizations
… when anyone says “there was a civilization before us” your head (our head) jumps to airplanes, trains, steel mills, refrigerators, dentistry.
I’m telling you the chances of that are negligible, though I won’t scruple using a more advanced than us past civilization to give my characters a nasty shock when they get to space. I won’t because that’s just cool.
However of things like Ancient Greece or Rome? I almost think the chances against it are worse. And of course civilizations that live and die by coastal sailing would be mostly engulfed in the great melt of the last ice age.
And no, Europe hasn’t been extensively studied. As I said before, Europe is mostly built on Europe. And you can’t dig in a field without finding SOMETHING. If you think everyone runs to the academics or the authorities when something is found, you don’t understand people’s interest in building a house, or sowing a field, as opposed to you know, giving up ownership of their land in all but fact. Frankly I’m amazed so many people do report discoveries.
But the thought of “superior civilizations” got me to thinking of what say the Romans or the Greeks, or those other ancient civilizations if they ever existed, would make of us in the West. We cross the globe by flying through the air. Not just heads of state or priests, no, common people. Hell, our pets fly. Most places have clean, fresh water that someone doesn’t have to carry a mile or so (which has been most of the work of humanity I think, forever.) Forget aqueducts. We have water that comes from our faucets whenever we want it. Cold AND hot. We have temperature control inside our houses, allowing us ignore the weather and keep warm in winter and cold in summer. We can magically cure diseases that killed millions of people by injecting this magical elixir into the sick person’s veins. Our old live a long time in relative comfort. We get our teeth fixed and replaced, so most people can chew to the end of their lives. Most of us can read, and most of us have access to untold wisdom of the sort their hermetic orders would kill for.
We are the superior civilization. We are the enlightened ones, the shining and resplendent inhabitants of the wonderful future.
And we worry about what gender we feel like being that day, who is allowed to pee where, whether someone used the wrong word to refer to someone else who might be offended, whether our use of fossil fuels offends Gaia, whether slapping a kid on the behind is a criminal offense, whether we are doing all we could do with our lives.
In other words, we’re neurotic, unsatisfied, and a bit crazy like most of people who were born and raised rich throughout most of human history.
Which is why if we really were doomed to repeating a cycle, and if the civilizations before us were the same but more advanced, the message of the pyramids would be “Don’t use so much toilet paper. Just wash one square and reuse it.”
Perhaps we should be grateful they are truly profoundly unlikely to ever have existed or tried to send us any message.
Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.
May 28, 2019
Brexit Party wins big in European elections
Nigel Farage and his brand-new Brexit Party took 31.6% of the popular vote in England, Scotland, and Wales in the European elections (the Northern Irish results are delayed):
The distribution of the seats:
At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says that despite the Brexit Party’s stunning results, the establishment is still determined to prevent Brexit and deny the democratically expressed wishes of British voters:
And still the establishment is in denial. Even following the stellar performance of a brand new party in the Euro elections, still the political establishment and its cheerleaders on social media are in a state of blinkered, fingers-in-ears denial about political feeling in the UK. How bad is their denial? Get this: the Brexit Party, barely six weeks old, soared to victory in the EU elections, decimated the Tories, conquered historic Labour-held territories like Bolsover and Hartlepool, and became the largest party in the entire European Parliament, and yet the No1 political trend on Twitter is… #RemainSurge.
Yes, these people, these inhabitants of the Brexitphobic echo chamber, have convinced themselves that this electoral revolt in which the Brexit Party steamrollered all the other parties is actually a victory for them. This takes self-delusion to giddy new heights.
“This is a really strong night for Remain”, said Caroline Lucas, like a real-life version of that meme showing a dog saying “This is fine” as his house burns down. “Tonight the Brexit Party wasn’t supported by around two-thirds of voters”, said Hilary Benn, perversely ignoring the millions of people who did vote for the Brexit Party, who vastly outnumber those who voted for his Labour Party. Alastair Campbell interpreted the election results as a mandate for a second referendum, which is almost as mad as saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes.
In the face of this colossal culture of denial among the political and media elites, let’s reiterate some basic facts. The Brexit Party battered Labour and the Tories. It won more than five million votes. It won 31.6 per cent of the vote, which is 8.4 per cent more than the Tories and Labour combined: the Tories got 9.1 per cent (fifth place) and Labour got 14.1 per cent (third place). The Brexit Party got 28 seats, making it the largest party in the European Parliament. It won in every single region in England apart from London, speaking profoundly to the massive political and moral divide separating the capital – the heart of the political establishment – from the rest of England. It also did spectacularly well in Wales, topping the poll and winning in 19 out of 22 council areas.
And yet myths are already taking hold, being feverishly promoted by pro-EU figures. The first is that the Brexit Party is “just” – why just? – picking up the old UKIP vote and therefore its victory isn’t all that significant. Actually, the Brexit Party has got almost 32 per cent of the vote share, which is five percentage points higher than UKIP got at its high point in the Euro elections of 2014. The other myths – that the Brexit Party is only successful because it is a shadily funded, demagogic outfit, whose new MEPs probably have Russian roubles stuffed in their pockets – is the usual conspiratorial and anti-democratic rubbish we’ve come to expect from the rattled defenders of the status quo.
As for the “Remain surge” idea. Get real. The two parties that are most explicitly anti-Brexit and have expressed their searingly anti-democratic intention to overthrow the mass vote of 2016 – the Lib Dems and the Greens – won a combined vote of 29.7 per cent. That’s two per cent less than the Brexit Party got. The most poisonously elitist anti-Brexit Party – Change UK – disappeared without a trace, winning 2.8 per cent of the vote. Remember how much Change UK was talked up by the liberal media? At one point the chattering classes really did see this party as the saviour of Britain from the horrors of Brexit and yet it won a pathetic, paltry level of electoral support – 600,000 votes to the Brexit Party’s five million.
RAF Phantom Pilot training – from (c) 1973
freddielaker2
Published on 30 May 2016From basic training to flying.
From the comments:
Michel Tangy
2 years ago
Love this. It’s like an Airfix-catalogue come alive
Rumours of a pending gun ban fuel panic buying at Canadian gun stores
During the Obama years in the US, fears of new government restrictions on firearms helped create a booming market for firearms and the same thing is happening here in Canada as the Trudeau government is said to be contemplating some draconian revisions to existing gun laws, especially for handguns and AR-15 style semi-automatic weapons:

Colt Canada’s model SA20, a commercial version of the Canadian C7A2 rifle.
Image from the Colt Canada website.
Federally licensed sport shooters are snapping up $3,000 guns on concern Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will ban new sales to win votes in the October election.
The website of Firearms Outlet Canada showed all AR-15s “Out of Stock” today at 3 p.m. in Toronto. At Al Flaherty’s Outdoor Store, all but 2 of the 17 versions offered online were “Sold Out.” The website of Wolverine Supplies said most are “Out of Stock.”
The Ontario and Manitoba companies are among the biggest independent gun shops in Canada.
“We are completely sold out of AR-15s, AGAIN…except for what’s on consignment,” Select Shooting Supplies in Cambridge, Ontario, said today on Twitter.
[…]
All guns are banned already for everyone who doesn’t have a firearm licence authorized by the federal police.
Anyone who buys, sells, owns or travels with a firearm in Canada is severely restricted by law. They must pass courses, tests, background checks, reference checks and obtain spousal approval to get police permission for a licence. They must disclose breakups and job losses.
More Controls
People who own AR-15s and handguns endure even more controls.
They need special police permission to buy each gun or to take one to another province. They can go to prison for having a standard-capacity AR-15 ammunition magazine, for shooting anywhere besides one of the 1,400 government-approved target ranges, or for taking a detour on the way to the range.
As we all know, crime involving weapons — especially firearms — is widely reported in the media, and many Canadians seem to have the belief that the majority of these criminals are somehow going to be deterred from using firearms if we just pass one more law. Urban Canadians generally have little or no contact with legal gun owners, and tend to assume that gun crime is directly linked to legal guns (often through the totally nonsensical “gun show loophole” that doesn’t exist in Canada).
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
US Navy Driggs Mk IX 37mm Quickfire Cannon
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 23 Apr 2019This Driggs cannon and its accessories are lot #1117 at Morphy’s April 2019 auction:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/us-n…
Developed between 1883 and 1889 by Lt. William Driggs and Commander (later Admiral) Seaton Schroeder, the Driggs cannon was an improvement on the market-standard Hotchkiss quick-fire cannon of the day. By quick-fire, I am referring to a single-shot cannon that has a recoil mechanism and ejects its empty case automatically, leaving the breech open for rapid reloading and subsequent shot. This was the standard type of naval armament for allowing large vessels to combat small and quick torpedo boats in the late 19th century. The Driggs guns were made in many variations and calibers but limited total quantities until about 1908. This example is a Mk IX type in 37mm, made in 1897.
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