Quotulatiousness

February 24, 2023

“… they are all weedy, weird sylphs who are essentially un-people, without any wisdom or sense”

Elizabeth Nickson on the current cohort of raised-in-a-vat, cloned “leaders” of most of the western world:

Easily the most destructive cohort in the culture is the financially secure, semi-educated female on the cultural left. She reads nothing but literary fiction, is a book and knitting club member and knows absolutely nothing about the real world. But she is “bold” and “powerful” and never shuts up. Her views are confirmed, amplified and imposed by corporate media, for whom she is the aspirational shopper from whom all wealth flows.

It is the opposite of a virtuous circle. Ignorant protected women of all colors are courted by corporations because she makes 90% of buying decisions (and less fortunate women emulate her). Corporations force the press to slavishly pander to her every stupid whim and deep feel of the month so their adverts work like charms.

All the above leaders [Jacinda, Trudeau, Nicola, Rishi, and Macron] are manufactured in some MKULTRA facility to appeal to her ignorance, her prejudices, her over-weening self-regard. With the exception of the vegetable in the White House, they are all weedy, weird sylphs who are essentially un-people, without any wisdom or sense. They’ve lived their lives in classrooms and meeting rooms. They serve as pretty, platitudinous ciphers on which to project a profound political ignorance and emotional immaturity.

Our girl, for she has never grown up, has abandoned adult responsibility to luxuriate in narcissism.

She is ruthlessly used by the vicious communist left (as described below) and she has no idea who or what they are. She is the stupidest person on the planet.

And Michelle Obama? If you are thinking of running, think again. Because the hell we will unleash on your ignorant self will make Jacinda tremble with PTSD.

Let someone far less impassioned and far more knowledgeable than me describe Ardern’s humiliating failures below. The damage she caused to her people, to her party, to her country’s economy was as titanic as her ego. Every single other leader listed in the head of this piece is following the same dictated-from-above public policy initiatives. Their fate and that of their citizenry will be the same.

By their fruits ye shall know them.

If you want to know more about the rise and fall of Justin Trudeau’s New Zealand counterpart, Elizabeth’s post includes an extensive discussion of Jacinda Ardern’s career from Dr Muriel Newman of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research.

Up Close and Personal – Mountain Warfare in Italy – WW2 Special

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 23 Feb 2023

Thanks to Curiosity Stream for sponsoring today’s video

Even as the Allied and Axis commanders focus on the sweeping warfare of the Eastern Front and the planning for the invasion of Europe, their men continue to fight a grinding war of attrition high in the Italian mountains. It’s a war of merciless terrain, brutal close-quarters combat, and vast quantities of artillery and bombs. They may be playing second fiddle, but the soldiers on the Italian front will never forget these battles.
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You may call it “interest cycling”, but I call it “normality”

Filed under: Books, Personal, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Knighton on what is apparently called “interest cycling” in hobbies and other leisure-time activities:

An article from a late 1950s issue of Model Railroader magazine showing a very small HO scale layout plan. The author later admitted that it’s really too small to do much with after it’s built — without some expansion — but the building can take more time than you might expect and you’d need to develop some new skills to do it properly.

Something many ADHD people do — and maybe others, I don’t know — is what I call “interest cycling”.

Basically, I get insanely hyperfocused on one thing, devoting almost all of my time to this One Thing for weeks at a time, then suddenly stop for whatever reason and then jump onto something else.

As a result, I never become truly great at anything. What’s more, since many of these areas of hyperfocus — one article called them obsessions, and with plenty of cause — require money, I end up needing to spend large quantities of money that I really can’t afford to spend.

But, it’s a need.

And it’s a problem. For a lot of us.

See, I have obligations that surround some of my interests. I’m a group leader for the local chapter of an organization I’m part of, for example, that requires not just me to teach a class once per week, but also to advance my own knowledge.

I still teach the class because others are counting on me to do so, but I haven’t been devoting much time to the rest of it, and I should since there are some tangential benefits to what I’m trying to accomplish here at The Knighton Experiment. Sure, some of it isn’t, but that’s just part of the game, so to speak.

What’s worse is that, so far as I’ve been able to find, there aren’t a lot of ways to combat this.

Which suggests that I’m kind of doomed to go through this cycle for the rest of my life.

Now, there are upsides. I mean, there aren’t many people who could detail both how to build a chest of drawers and a 14th-century transitional plate harness, for example. While I can’t necessarily build either with a high degree of proficiency, I at least know what’s involved.

In my own case, those sound like perfectly normal interests — I share both of them — although since my income dropped precipitously several years ago, I don’t spend money as Tom still does. What I have done, however, is to accumulate future stocks of books on those topics I typically cycle through over time so that when the urge strikes I can at least ameliorate some of the need by reading about rather than actively engaging in the hobby/interest/activity. That might be the difference between Tom’s concern and my experience … I cycle among a number of interests, but not brand new ones all the time.

War of 1812 – Freshwater Edition

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Drachinifel
Published 4 Sept 2019

Today we take a look at the War of 1812 as it progressed on the Great Lakes.
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QotD: Relearning lessons as old as warfare

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of American intervention in Korea, reports from the front burst upon an America and world stunned beyond belief. Day after day, the forces of the admitted first power of the earth reeled backward under the blows of the army of a nation of nine million largely illiterate peasants, the product of the kind of culture advanced nations once overawed with gunboats. Then, after fleeting victory, Americans fell back once more before an army of equally illiterate, lightly armed Chinese.

The people of Asia had changed, true. The day of the gunboat and a few Marines would never return. But that was not the whole story. The people of the West had changed, too. They forgot that the West had dominated not only by arms, but by superior force of will.

During the summer of 1950, and later, Asians would watch. Some, friends of the West, would even smile. And none of them would ever forget.

News reports in 1950 talked of vast numbers, overwhelming hordes of fanatic North Koreans, hundreds of monstrous tanks, against which the thin United States forces could not stand. In these reports there was truth, but not the whole truth.

The American units were outnumbered. They were outgunned. They were given an impossible task at the outset.

But they were also outfought.

In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What had happened to the widely heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who had never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?

In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated.

Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on earth were at hand — at too many hands. But pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.

Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life — but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963

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