PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018More than 50,000 British soldiers, sailors and airmen police the rivers and jungles of Borneo.
September 16, 2022
Look at Life — East of Suez (1966)
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September 13, 2022
Down the Line – A look into the legacy of the cuts made to the rail network by Doctor Beeching (2008)
Kevin Birch
Published 29 Jul 2013Joe Crowley meets the people who battled to save their local railway lines in the South of England in the 1960’s.
First aired on BBC One 26th October 2008
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September 10, 2022
The Land Rover Defender Story
Big Car
Published 27 Dec 2019The Land Rover is Britain’s bullet-proof off-roader born out of Rover’s post-war desperation and became the indispensable go-anywhere vehicle. Like its famed bullet-proof ruggedness, Land Rover production kept going, and going, and going. But with a brief gap of 4 years, the Land Rover is still with us and looks like it’s not going away any time soon.
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August 18, 2022
QotD: Nostalgie de la boue
TWS suggests we take a hard look at the concept of nostalgie de la boue:
Nostalgie de la boue (French: “nostalgia for mud”) is the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements … Tom Wolfe described a party in New York in 1970: “It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano — there was also a south piano — in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future in which, after the revolution, there would no longer be any such thing as a two-story, thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, with twin grand pianos in the living room, for one family.”
I think TWS is right:
It explains everything from those parties where they pretend to eat people and the Podesta brothers love of pedo-murder art to the Jersey Shore and all rap music. People of Wal-Mart and people who enjoy mocking them. The idea covers everything happening.
Back in the days, they called all that “authenticity”. The Working Man ™ was supposed to have an “authenticity”, a raw experience of life, that the Intelligentsia did not, so the Intelligentsia made it their mission to ape “authentic” proletarian manners and mores. That’s why every self-styled “Intellectual” since Marx has carried on like an unbathed schizophrenic hobo — they think they’re being “authentic”.
It never occurs to them that this is grossly insulting to The Workers they’re supposedly helping, because of course they never ever meet any Workers — they imagine how they think a longshoreman would act, and then go do that.
I have far more respect for “the People of Walmart” than I do for those who make fun of them, because “the People of Walmart” have been beaten down and brutalized by the dominant culture. They’ve had all their self-respect kicked out of them by little college snots with Gender Studies degrees. It’s like the peasantry in pre-Revolution Russia: Everything the intellectuals said about the nobility was true … but everything the nobility said about the serfs was also true. It was a chicken-and-egg problem with no solution save one.
I also have some respect for Walmart as an institution. Yeah, I know, it’s cheap Chinese shit, but trust me: Though I didn’t grow up poor, you could see “poor” from my house for a lot of my childhood. I don’t recall having Walmart back then, but K-Mart’s Blue Light Specials improved our day to day quality of life enormously. And when I first got out on my own, I decorated my entire first apartment in Walmart — it wasn’t fancy, but it worked, and I had a hell of a lot more stuff that I could actually use than I ever could’ve afforded any other way.
You want to make fun of Walmart, and the people who shop there? Ok, fine, motherfucker, but first try living in a trailer where your couch is patched up with duct tape, and go to school wearing your California cousins’ hand me down clothes, so that you’re dressed like a surfer when you’re 500 miles from the nearest ocean.
I will never, ever understand this. You can choose to be ugly, and to surround yourself with ugliness. Or you can choose NOT to do that. Why would anyone pick the former?
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-13.
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August 15, 2022
Look at Life – Goodbye, Picadilly (1967)
nostalgoteket
Published 1 Sep 2011U.K. Newsreel. A look at the Piccadilly Circus of the Swinging Sixties! A lot of what is shown here no longer exists as it was soon “modernized” to meet the demands of a changing world. Also a look at underground Piccadilly to see sights that few people have ever seen.
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August 1, 2022
Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann’s exemplification of the “banality of evil”
Lawrence W. Reed on what Hannah Arendt observed during Eichmann’s trial:
Nine months after the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann died at the end of a noose in Israel, a controversial but thoughtful commentary about his trial appeared in The New Yorker. The public reaction stunned its author, the famed political theorist and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It was February 1963.
Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise. Her phrase, “the banality of evil”, entered the lexicon of social science, probably forever. It was taken for granted that Eichmann, despite his soft-spoken and avuncular demeanor, must be a monster of epic proportions to play such an important role in one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century.
“I was only following orders,” he claimed in the colorless, matter-of-fact fashion of a typical bureaucrat. The world thought his performance a fiendishly deceptive show, but Hannah Arendt concluded that Eichmann was indeed a rather “ordinary” and “unthinking” functionary.
[…]
As Arendt explained, “Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”
Eichmann was a “shallow” and “clueless” joiner, someone whose thoughts never ventured any deeper than how to become a cog in the great, historic Nazi machine. In a sense, he was a tool of Evil more than evil himself.
Commenting on Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, philosopher Thomas White writes, “Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’.”
Perhaps Hannah Arendt underestimated Eichmann. He did, after all, attempt to conceal evidence and cover his tracks long before the Israelis nabbed him in Argentina in 1960 — facts which suggest he did indeed comprehend the gravity of his offenses. It is undeniable, however, that “ordinary” people are capable of horrific crimes when possessed with power or a desire to obtain it, especially if it helps them “fit in” with the gang that already wields it.
The big lesson of her thesis, I think, is this: If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favorite uncle or your sweet grandmother. It just might cloak itself in grandiloquent platitudes like “equality”, “social justice”, and the “common good”. It could even be a prominent member of Parliament or Congress.
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July 31, 2022
Look at Life — Pipeline (1961)
ian16th Jones
Published 20 Aug 2017Refuelling at Sea and in the Air 1960’s style
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July 30, 2022
Beartrap: The Best Way To Land A Big Helicopter On A Small Ship At Sea
Polyus Studios
Published 29 Jul 2022Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosToday, navies across the world use an ingenious system to land helicopters on the rolling deck of a ship at sea. It enabled the powerful helicopter-destroyer combination that has become the dominant form of at sea anti-submarine warfare. It’s the “helicopter haul down and rapid securing device”, more commonly known as Beartrap. This device may be little known to the public, but it stands as one of the greatest contributions Canada has ever made to naval aviation, and ushered in the age of helicopters at sea.
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July 29, 2022
Nightmare Fuel For Soviet Submarines; the story of the Canadair CP-107 Argus
Polyus Studios
Published 4 Dec 2020Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosIn its day the Argus was the most formidable anti-submarine warfare platform fielded by any NATO country. Canadair adapted the Bristol Britannia into a highly effective low and slow sub hunter. This gave Maritime Air Command the edge in the North Atlantic. It served on the front-line of the Cold War and kept the Soviet submarine threat in check for almost 25 years.
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July 24, 2022
Stoner 63A Automatic Rifle – The Original Modular Weapon
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Mar 2018The Stoner 63 was a remarkably advanced and clever modular firearm designed by Eugene Stoner (along with Bob Fremont and Jim Sullivan) after he left Armalite. This was tested by DARPA and the US Marine Corps in 1963, and showed significant potential — enough that the US Navy SEALs adopted it and kept it in service into the 1980s. It was a fantastic balance of weight and controllability, offering a belt-fed 5.56mm platform at less than half the weight of the M60. The other fundamental characteristic of the Stoner 63 was modularity. It was built around a single universal receiver component which could be configured into a multitude of different configurations, from carbine to medium machine gun. Today we have one of the rarer configurations, an Automatic Rifle type. In addition, today’s rifle is actually a Stoner 63A, the improved version introduced in 1966 to resolve some of the problems that had been found in the original.
Ultimately, the Stoner system was able to achieve its remarkably light weight by sacrificing durability. The weapon was engineered extremely well and was not a danger to itself (like, for example, the FG-42), but it was prone to damage when mishandled by the average grunt. This would limit its application to elite units like the SEALs, who were willing to devote the necessary care to the maintenance and operation of the guns in exchange for the excellent handling characteristics it offered.
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July 22, 2022
Sexual liberation to sexual revolution to … today’s sexual desert
Chris Bray thinks that the sexual revolution “missed a turn, somewhere out in the desert”:
The discussion of what we didn’t mean to do is becoming an interesting one:
After decades of sexual liberation — Mattachine, Stonewall, Loving v. Virginia, Griswold v. Connecticut, Second Wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges, and whatever else I’m missing in there (and I’m not sure Roe belongs on the list, but maybe) — we somehow arrive at a moment in which we merge a sexualized display of childhood and a relentless media-driven commodification of sexuality with the very clear reality that nobody’s having any sex:
One of the most comprehensive sex studies to date — the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior — found evidence of declines in all types of partnered sexual activity in the U.S. Over the course of the study from 2009 to 2018, those surveyed reported declines in penile-vaginal intercourse, anal sex and partnered masturbation …
Over the last 22 years, Herbenick has co-authored several studies about our sexual activity. Her most recent research finds that all of us, regardless of age, are having less sex, with the most dramatic decline among teenagers.
At the start of the study in 2009, 79% of those ages 14 to 17, revealed they were not having sex. By 2018, that number rose to 89%.
Liberation stabbed pleasure in the heart; we emptied sex. Hypersexualization turns out to be desexualization. The unrelenting joylessness and death odor of contemporary sexual culture emerges from seventy years of growing openness and freedom. How?
There’s no way to fully cover a question of that scope in a single post — but I refer, as a start, to the earlier posts I wrote about the sexualization of childhood and the way Jim Jones used sex as a weapon. Breaking barriers and repressive anchors broke connections and reference points: Yes, some people were trapped in oppressive societal norms, and it’s not at all my view that all the sexual liberation in our past wasn’t really liberating. But we broke marriage to set people free, and whoops. Some people experienced bourgeois heteronormativity as a prison, and so set out to release everybody from their cages, which seem to have not been cages for a whole lot of people. Congratulations, we’ve freed you from being part of a family.
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July 21, 2022
The Railrodder (1965)
NFB
Published 15 May 2015This short film from director Gerald Potterton (Heavy Metal) stars Buster Keaton in one of the last films of his long career. As “the railrodder”, Keaton crosses Canada from east to west on a railway track speeder. True to Keaton’s genre, the film is full of sight gags as our protagonist putt-putts his way to British Columbia. Not a word is spoken throughout, and Keaton is as spry and ingenious at fetching laughs as he was in the old days of the silent slapsticks.
Directed by Gerald Potterton – 1965
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July 8, 2022
The Missing Rings • The Story Of The 1969 Minnesota Vikings
Randy Fast
Published 28 May 2016I know that this video has already been posted on YouTube, but for those of you that have never seen it, here’s a great documentary by NFL Films on the 1969 Minnesota Vikings season. I was only seven at the time, and professional football wasn’t quite yet on my radar, but for hardcore Vikings fans, the finale of this season must have been a pretty hard pill to swallow. Anyway, I hope YouTube/NFL Films allows me to keep this video posted, so until then…
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July 6, 2022
Look at Life — Playing Trains (1967)
Classic Vehicle Channel
Published 19 Apr 2020
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June 27, 2022
High Altitude Research Project and the Martlet Launch Vehicles; Gerald Bull’s dream of a space gun
Polyus Studios
Published 26 Jun 2022Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios
In 1968, 7 countries were operating satellites in orbit, while only 3 countries had the ability to launch one themselves. But they were on the verge of being joined by a Canadian university. Starting in the early 1960s, Montreal, Quebec based McGill University developed and began testing an ambitious concept to place small satellites into orbit. It was the culmination of decades of pioneering work across multiple fields. It was the High Altitude Research Project and the Martlet orbital launch vehicle.
Music:
Denmark – Portland Cello Project
Your Suggestions – Unicorn HeadsChapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:28 Bull’s early career
3:00 Birth of the Program
7:47 Getting HARP off the ground
10:52 Martlet 1
13:26 Early Martlet 2
15:41 Martlet 3
18:05 Enhanced Martlet 2s
21:40 Other HARP Guns
24:19 Quest for an Orbital Capability, the 2G-1
27:53 Satellite Delivery Model, Martlet 4
30:27 Advanced gun research
31:30 Hard times for HARP
32:30 Bull’s Ambition Gets The Best Of Him
35:28 Legacy of the HARP Project
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