Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Aug 2015The Merwin & Hulbert company was a short-lived firearms manufacturing partnership between designer Joseph Merwin and the Hulbert brothers as financiers. Merwin wanted to design a particularly strong and high-quality revolver, and he succeeded — his guns are arguably some of the best revolvers of the frontier era. The company made a wide variety of designs, but in this video I will be sticking to just the Frontier and Pocket Army models. Of particular note is the very clever unloading mechanism!
July 28, 2023
Merwin & Hulbert Revolvers
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QotD: “Stakeholder” Capitalism
Like many things faddish and ephemeral — disco, Pet Rocks, feathered hair, taking Michel Foucault seriously as an intellectual — the 1970s gave birth to the concept of stakeholder capitalism, one of the most unfortunate yet enduring of the bad ideas that polyester decade bequeathed us. At its essence, stakeholder capitalism is Marxian capitalism run through a lens of business ethics. It is the attempt to maintain authoritarian control over capitalism by displacing the Invisible Hand with a Velvet Glove, then using that glove, which hides an iron fist, to pound the world into adopting values that both assert and maintain its worldview. It is Theory applied to markets, marketing, wealth creation and management, and an overall globalized ethos of required and policed “virtue”, with the end goal being — as it always is under the discourses of Cultural Marxist thought — power: who has it, who controls it, and who uses it for their own ends most effectively and ruthlessly.
Of course, nobody participating in the push to replace shareholder capitalism with stakeholder capitalism would describe it this way. But then, euphemism and branding are each crucial tools in the Marxist’s verbal toolbox. So when you ask a stakeholder capitalist to describe stakeholder capitalism, what you ordinarily hear is that, as a business ethic, it combines the “sustainability” shareholder capitalism supposedly lacks with the “inclusivity” we’re not supposed to recognize is merely stultifying, policed conformity, the yield being a Woke capitalism that replaces production and consumption with “sharing and caring,” taking it out of the realm of the invisible and mechanical, as Adam Smith would have it, and placing it into the realm of values, where it can be used to shape the Greater Good the Marxist pretends he cares about. It’s fascism with a smiley face.
In the stakeholder capitalist system, investors aren’t — or at least, they shouldn’t be — solely interested in profits driven by production and consumption. And this is because to the stakeholder capitalist, itself a euphemism for collectivist corporatist, “it is well proven that our current form of Capitalism is inherently unsustainable because it requires endless growth on a planet with finite resources.”
Of course, none of this is “well proven” — the history of shareholder capitalism suggests the opposite, in fact, as innovation has led to the production of more and more out of less and less — but whether this is or isn’t the material case is incidental to those who are working on this inorganic worldwide paradigm shift commonly known as The Great Reset.
Because the move toward a “caring and sharing” worldwide economy, especially one that we’re told will be both sustainable and inclusive, requires those who care, those who share, and — most importantly, and at the very heart of the turn — those who get to determine what is cared about, who must do the sharing, and how most effectively to police the excesses that the ruling elite determine aren’t sustainable, while slowly dissolving the idea of the individual and his will to make way for an inclusive collective required to run the machinery of the self-installed Elect. It’s a global system of neo-Feudalism dressed in the finery of familiar values that have been deconstructed and re-signified, often without their consumers even aware that the values they reference — which were once commonly understood and largely shared by the civil society — are now their precise inverse: “tolerance”, thus, becomes the violent rejection of intolerance, as they define it; free speech is separated from “hate speech”, as they adjudicate it; individualism is but a controlling fiction maintained by the white male power structure that must be replaced by an ordered and value-determined collection of identity markers that construct you, while simultaneously acknowledging that there is no “you” beyond this assembly of discourses that assign your being its social situatedness, then places you within a collective of those with similar — though never identical — constructions. Once here, you are graded on the intersectional scale. Your relative worth and power come down to not to the content of your character, but rather to the collection and arrangement of your victimization tokens.
Jeff Goldstein, “Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand, maybe I’ll be there to stakeholder capitalist the land”, protein wisdom reborn!, 2023-04-26.
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July 27, 2023
Instead of a malignant conspiracy, consider the possibility it’s really a society-wide dearth of competence
Sarah Hoyt on a topic I’ve been pushing for years in casual conversation:
Recently, in a conversation between friends, the hypothesis was floated: what if all the burning farms, derailed trains, crop failures, etc. etc. etc. etc. ad scary nauseam aren’t really enemy action, but more a competency crisis.
As in these things happen not because big-bad is plotting against us, but because no one knows how to do the things they purportedly do anymore. Some kind of know, but they are hampered, slow, and sometimes hemmed in by counterproductive regulation or the result of previous “strokes of genius” decisions that broke the system.
I’m not going to bore anyone with what I know to be a massive crisis of competency plus inherited factors breaking ability to function in the field. I already did that at Mad Genius Club this morning, and am not unpacking the whole thing again.
But here’s the thing: All of us can live without a functioning fiction writing/selling market. Maybe not as pleasantly/happily, at least for those of us addicted to reading, but we can survive. We have old books to re-read, and if we get really desperate we can write our own fanfic.
It’s another thing when you talk of transportation or medicine, or farming, or – Well, everything else.
I have friends and fans in a lot of places. And almost everyone’s story is of being caught in the middle of a system where nobody knows or can do much of anything. It’s all the way the cogs and bureaucracy move. And the way they move is completely divorced from what needs done, or what anyone knows how to do.
To give an example: Suppose you were hired to haul buckets from a well. But when you actually get the job, you find out, no. Because of inherited systems, and what your superiors expect, you’re supposed to climb down the wall, hand over hand, and bring up water by the cupfull. And there are regulations in the works to make that by the spoonfull. However, you’ll be fully held to account if you can’t provide the amount of water the company is contracted for. You. Personally.
So, you do what you can. You fudge the books. On paper, you’re getting all this water up. Where the water goes no one knows, every one down stream (pardon the pun) from you does the same.
If this sounds like the soviet system? It is. It’s just that the directives don’t come directly and traceably from the government. (Though under the infestation of Bidentia they increasingly do.) Instead, they come from “experts” “scientists” “Studies” “marketing gurus.” And sometimes they are curtailed or made worse by agencies and regulations.
Yes, the managerial or worse “expert” class is the same that furnishes government. These are not your friends, are not meant to be your friends, and are convinced they know much more than you do.
What they know in fact is “how to manage.” But it’s not how to manage anything. They know theory of management (or whatever) derived from no reality (mostly from the writings of Marx, if you dig a little) and pushed ALL THE WAY DOWN.
It’s like — exactly like — being run by “experts” who memorized the Little Red Book. It might please those in power, but it has nothing to do with accomplishing the actual job in front of you.
Part of this has to do with colleges. Remember all those student demonstrations of the 60s? If you’re like me, and didn’t hit college till the eighties or younger, you might think these are, as the movies show, all anti-war and for civil rights, and all that jazz.
Unspoken to any of us is the fact that half of these demonstrations were to DUMB DOWN THE CURRICULUM. To demand easier grading. And social factors taken into account. And to “update” to “relevant things.”
The idea being that we were in a sort of an year zero and anything else, in the long storied glories of Western civ no longer counted, except for us to declare ourselves superior to it.
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“Harvesting” Green Wood from the Side of the Road
Rex Krueger
Published 26 Jul 2023It’s just cutting up wood. Right?
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The tourism blues
I must admit I’ve never enjoyed the “tourist” experience. Partly because I’m not comfortable in big crowds and I prefer the company of a small group — or just one other person — to the “everybody into the pool” model that many people seem to thrive on. Back when we could still afford to take holidays, Elizabeth and I carefully planned our trips to avoid, as best we could, everyone else’s favourite attractions. There are some things where crowds are a given (Bourbon Street in New Orleans, anywhere in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, everywhere in or around London, etc.) but going as early as possible or at off-peak times helps keep the people-ness down to an almost acceptable level.
In The Line, Andrew Potter relates the lowlights of a trip to wonderfully scenic Banff, Alberta (which I visited once, and it was beautiful but very, very people-y even back in the 1980s):
“Banff Avenue, Banff” by InSapphoWeTrust is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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On an early-summer family vacation to the Rockies, we decided our first excursion would be to Johnston Canyon, which tops any number of “bucket list” rankings of things to do while in Banff.
Turns out we were just four of a few thousand other people who had the same idea. Despite getting to the parking lot just after eight a.m., we spent the next few hours shuffling along a narrow boardwalk, being pushed from behind by tourbusloads of Tilley-hatted boomers while dodging around young couples dragging infants in strollers up the canyon. At each prescribed Important Sight along the way, we’d stop for 20 minutes or so while everyone took turns taking selfies in every possible permutation of their group membership.
Back at the bottom, we vowed we wouldn’t do that again, so we spent the rest of our time in the area doing hikes drawn from the very bottom of the bucket lists, skipping the alleged must-dos like the Sulphur Mountain gondola, Moraine Lake, and Lake Louise. Apparently the town of Banff is lovely, but who knows. We never set foot in it.
Tourism presents the traveller with two main dilemmas: One is what it does to us (the visitors); the other is what it does to them (the visitees). These are problems, respectively, of authenticity and commodification. And as it turns out, they are just two ways of looking at the same underlying dynamic.
For many people, the aim of travel is self-perfection. We move about the Earth in the hope of having new experiences, discovering new cultures, feeling new emotions. We want to get out of our comfort zones, out of the ruts of the familiar and experience something exotic and authentic, as a way of getting in touch with our true or better selves.
The problem is other people have the same ambitions, the same drives and desires. And this creates a market amongst “locals” for these cravings for the authentic or the exotic, which gives rise to the modern tourist industry: Get on the tour bus; see the sight; do the thing; exit through the gift shop. This can be a highly dispiriting experience, leading one to question why one bothers going anywhere, ever.
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History Summarized: The Cities of Ancient Sparta
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Apr 2023Is. This. Sparta???
SOURCES & Further Reading:
– “The Spartans” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
– “The Greek Polis – Sparta” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble
– “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland
– “Being a Greek Slave” from The Other Side of History by Robert Garland.
– The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton
– The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline.
– AskHistorians posts by u/Iphikrates “Is the Military Worship of the Spartans Really Justified?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
– “This. Isn’t. Sparta.” by historian Bret Devereaux argues that Sparta was a horrible place to live, had poorly educated citizens, was militarily mediocre, culturally stagnant, and was ruled by elites who were pretty crappy too. Anything inaccurate in that assessment?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
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QotD: The causes of crime in Britain
Theodore Dalrymple, “Pray for Rain”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-07-08.
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July 26, 2023
Bombing France into Freedom – War Against Humanity 105
World War Two
Published 25 Jul 2023The destruction of German cities has shown how difficult it is for the heavy bombers of the RAF and USAAF to hit small targets with precision. Things will be no different when these big beasts go into action to support the D-Day landings. Thousands of French civilians will pay the price for the flawed logic of Allied bombing.
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Justin Trudeau’s odd choice to agitate Muslim Canadians over his LGBT beliefs
In the weekend’s roundup post from the editors of The Line, one of the topics discussed was Prime Minister Trudeau’s attempt to blow smoke up the collective butts of deeply religious Canadian Muslims that the only reason they were upset about his blatant dedication to LGBT issues was due to brainwashing by extreme right-wing Americans:
this week offered us a video clip of Trudeau that was just too interesting for us to pass up. Readers may recall a story from a few weeks ago in which several Muslim students in Edmonton absented themselves from Pride events and were lambasted by their teacher, who told them that they had to support this event or they “can’t be Canadians.” We didn’t make much note of it at the time because our colleague and friend at the National Post Colby Cosh had the definitive and winning take: that is, the teacher is a fucknut. These kids didn’t protest or object to pride or make their peers feel uncomfortable in any way. They just declined to participate. And in a pluralistic society, politely absenting oneself from ideological events with which one disagrees and instead hanging out at the Orange Julius or wherever the hell kids spend time these days is about the most perfect and Canadian response.
Perhaps not coincidentally, upon receiving such clear signals about the conduct that is now expected of a Canadian, Muslim parents are organizing ever louder protests against what they deem to be LGBTQ “indoctrination” in schools. And if you’ve been paying any attention to the logic pretzels that have been spun about intersectionality, lived experiences, the importance of listening to minority voices in majority cultures and so on, this is about the point at which you’re going to grab the popcorn, because what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a bona fide clash of values between competing minority interest groups.
So we give the prime minister a lot of credit for meeting with Muslim parents in a Calgary-area mosque last week to discuss the issue. And we mean that! Genuinely! Heading face-first into a mob of angry parents is a really difficult thing for anybody to do. He deserves credit for doing this.
However, the response that was recorded by attendees was also very, very interesting. The furore over LGBTQ issues in schools is much ado about nothing, he insisted; the result of right-wing extremists spreading “a lot of untruths about what’s actually in provincial curriculums”.
Trudeau continued: “They are weaponizing the issue of LGBT, which is something that, yes, Islam has strong opinions on …. That is something that is being weaponized by people who are not doing it because of their interest in supporting the Muslim community.”
A few notes about this response: The first is that it is undeniably true. There are anti-LGBTQ activists who are trying to mobilize the Muslim community because this minority population has greater moral suasion among the intersectionality set than socially conservative white Christians. There are right-wing commentators out there who focus on cases, videos, examples and books that they claim demonstrates a pervasive trend of “indoctrination” on LGBTQ issues in school environments. The examples are out there, and some are age-inappropriate. However, we have no sense that those examples are representative of what’s happening in most classrooms. Are there a lot more non-binary 12-year-olds in middle school nowadays? Sure. Is that a problem? We don’t know. Maybe? But we’ve yet to walk into an elementary school hosting a 24/7 Pride Parade with naked men and women throwing rainbow glitter and condoms to the kiddies. We are savvy enough media consumers to know that in a social-media age, edge cases have a habit of being falsely portrayed as routine.
Our snark aside, Trudeau’s response is interesting because it is also a dodge. Trudeau doesn’t actually want to deal with the hard problem of how to accommodate competing minority rights. So instead he pretends there is no problem. He blames the perception of a problem on disinformation agents. Marvellous — right up until the moment we see some video from a Toronto school of a teacher screaming at eight-year-olds that there is no such thing as boys and girls and that the whole concept of biological sex is an expression of imperialism and white supremacy. (Ed note: pin this graf for future victory lap.)
Or, just as an example of the sort of thing that just maybe could happen, when an ostensibly trans shop teacher shows up to class in a wig and Size-Z prosthetic breasts with armour-piercing nipples and the school board responds by saying “This is not a problem, you bigot,” and then it turns out that the teacher in question hasn’t been entirely upfront about their life! Or until, well, some teacher tells a bunch of Edmonton kids that skipping pride to head to the mall makes them un-Canadian. Oops! Wait, so who’s lying now?
The second reason we found this response interesting is that it’s become this government’s go-to deflection. All criticism is just disinformation. Anybody who disagrees with the Liberals is a baddie because can’t you see how awesome and empathetic and genuinely well intentioned they are? Throw in a little threadbare virtue, a touch of white saviour: “you, poor, deluded, Muslims, are just being manipulated by malign forces and can’t possibly understand what you’re saying or what you really believe,” and you’ve got a pitch-perfect urban progressive Canadian non-comment. It’s a mask slip moment, when we see exactly how Trudeau seems himself, and how he sees the people he’s talking to. Oh wait: actual Muslims find this statement condescending and insulting? Don’t they know whose side they’re supposed to be on? Maybe they’re just watching too much Matt Walsh. Why does anybody need to define what a woman is anyway? Maybe we need a new law for that so the plebes stop getting so confused …
You see where this logic takes us. We may wade into this one a bit more at The Line in coming days and weeks, so enough said for now. But for now, it’s enough to note that this is not how a mature, pluralistic society handles irreconcilable differences in values and beliefs. Generally speaking, everyone is pretty content to let adults live and let live, but when you bring kids into any ideological agenda, expect matters to get ugly quickly. And you’re going to need a better response to legitimate concerns about how an emerging secular ideological consensus around gender and ideology crashes against deeply held religious values than: “YouTube lies”.
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Making & Using Drill Bit Guides | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 24 Mar 2023Drilling perpendicular holes on a drill press or pillar drill are as easy as a wink, but when the project is too big or fixed in place, we sometimes need the same accuracy — otherwise, whatever we fit into the hole will not be aligned well at all.
Making a couple of drill guides could not be simpler. I designed two, which I use all the time for twist drills and auger bits. Try them yourself. You won’t be disappointed.
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QotD: Things were better in “the old days”
For example, beer. As ganderson points out in the comments below, beer these days is better than it has ever been. I quote:
the “old” microbrew brands, like Sam Adams, Summit, Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn, etc, are shunned by many millennials as not hip enough.
The very fact that excellent suds like Sam Adams can be found in gas stations across the land — making it tragically un-hip — is all the proof you need of ganderson‘s thesis. I didn’t mean to leave the impression, below, that I consider Lone Star, Natty Lite, etc. to be good beer. They are, in fact, very bad beers. But since I went to college back in the days, and was on scholarship to boot, my choices were almost always between “bad beer” and “no beer”. And since beer, any beer, made me much more interesting and attractive to the opposite sex, and they to me, it was never really a choice at all. I have great sentimental attachment to Lone Star beer, but the very thought of drinking it gives me a hangover. […]
The modern world sucks, but lots of things are far better now. Cars, too. I know, I know, they’re mostly Karen-mobiles, but the muscle cars have a hell of a lot more muscle, and they’re orders of magnitude more reliable. I grew up in a world where you could reliably expect cars to start falling apart at 30,000 miles on the odometer – you expected to lose an alternator at 30, a starter at 50, and by 100K miles you’d have a beater, no matter how scrupulously maintained. These days, with just routine idiot maintenance 100K passes without a hitch. That’s a win, and if “shade-tree mechanic” no longer exists (since you need three computers and a special wrench just to get to the spark plugs), well … still a win.
Materially, these days, most things are better, and the things that aren’t better are cheaper, way cheaper. It’s an open question as to whether the latter fact is good or bad, but the fact is, materially life really is, in some ways, what the Leftards say it is. We pay the spiritual price for most of it, but when it comes to alcohol, at least, give me the Current Year.
Severian, “A Historian’s Fallacy”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-07.
July 25, 2023
If you bet on Admiral Franchetti becoming the next CNO for the US Navy, collect your winnings
I don’t follow US military appointments closely because I’m not in the military, nor an American, so the first time I think I heard of Admiral Franchetti was back in May where Brent Ramsey’s report touted her as the one to watch for the upcoming appointment as the Chief of Naval Operations (she became VCNO in September 2022). Now, CDR Salamander confirms that Admiral Franchetti is almost certainly now the “CNO in waiting”:
Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Vice-Chief of Naval Operations, US Navy.
I am sure that everyone here understands that at the end of last week white smoke rose over The Navy Yard signaling that we had an official nominee for the next Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).
Barring some Ottomanesque bureaucratic defenestration like we saw as Admiral Moran was set to be CNO after Admiral Richardson, the nominee to replace Admiral Gilday as CNO will be Admiral Franchetti — presently the Vice CNO.
Because people in DC can’t seem to keep their mouths shut when they should, unfortunately in mid-month there were some leaks coming out that Admiral Paparo would — surprisingly as the general consensus was the Franchetti was slotted to be the next CNO — be recommended to be the next CNO.
Read the link above it you’re interested in the state of play on the 13th, but things wound up heading as most thought with Franchetti getting the nod. Exceptionally well prepared for INDOPACOM, Paparo will head to there where he is expected to continue to do great and important things for the Navy and the nation it serves at at time where we have no luxury for a learning curve.
Despite Ramsey’s article not-so-subtly raising doubts about Admiral Franchetti’s qualifications for the post, CDR Salamander seems to be signally unruffled with the news:
Her wiki page has a nice concise summary;
Since promotion to flag rank, Franchetti has held appointments as: commander, United States Naval Forces Korea; commander Carrier Strike Group 9; commander, Carrier Strike Group 15; and chief of staff, Joint Staff, J-5, Strategy, Plans and Policy; and Commander, United States Sixth Fleet, Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO; deputy commander, United States Naval Forces Europe; deputy commander United States Naval Forces Africa; and Joint Force Maritime Component Commander.
- Western Pacific: she knows Korea and all associated areas. She also has Pappy coming in to INDOPACOM — an exceptional partner. I hope they have a solid professional relationship already.
- Fleet Challenges: from maintenance to readiness, her time leading CSG-9 and CSG-15 gave her a first person look at it. She knows it.
- JS J5: that speaks for itself.
- C6F et al: she knows Europe and has already built a working and personal relationship with many of her peers in NATO. She’s seen up close what they do and how they do it. Invaluable.
- VCNO: the most important. She’s seen OPNAV and the Potomac Flotilla up close. The greatest danger to her tenure as CNO — and as such our Navy and the nation it serves — is not spotty relationships with the SECNAV and his staff; it not Congress; is not the press; is not the economy; and it sure isn’t her Sailors writ large — no — the greatest threat is the long-dwell nomenklatura in a commuting distance of The Pentagon and The Hill who do not see their job as adjusting their responsibilities to support the CNO, but to bend the CNO towards their personal agendas, projects, and job security. There are some exceptional and valuable people there to support the CNO, but the organization is worm-ridden with rent seekers and bad actors. She’s seen that up close. She knows it.
Since making Flag, she managed to walk around all the rakes, had good luck and timing (part of any success), and she did a solid job as assigned. She has the right experience and performance.
I know a handful of people, some friends of mine for over two decades, who know her personally and have since they were both JOs. With one mild exception, these people I would trust my family with speak well of her. That combined with what I’ve seen in open source works for me.
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Chris Rufo, enemy of the [legacy media] people
Last week, Richard Hanania posted this review of Chris Rufo’s new book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything:
Some facts are so shocking that you don’t want to believe them. And if you do believe them, there’s a tendency to forget, downgrade their importance, and often have to be reminded of them again. Here’s one fact that falls into this category: The American education system, or at least the field of education itself, was taken over by literal communists. Those entrusted to teach children and young adults have as their greatest intellectual inspirations lunatics who would clearly have massacred their fellow Americans if they had the chance.
We know this because during the Cold War, some of the leading lights of modern academia were openly in favor of distant regimes that were engaging in mass killings in the name of equality. Some of them, like members of the Weather Underground and Angela Davis, personally participated in violent acts themselves. Instead of locking these people up and throwing away the key, we made them into tenured professors, and some of the most highly cited scholars in the world. They now are major intellectual figures in education schools, which train future teachers and administrators and ultimately control what kids learn, along with the DEI bureaucracies that exert so much control from within our most powerful institutions.
What does one do with these facts? Chris Rufo’s work over the last several years has been about taking them seriously. Tomorrow, he is publishing his first book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, which explains the history behind and intellectual foundations of modern wokeness. It serves as a wakeup call as to how bad things are. Many of the facts presented may be familiar to the reader, but taken together, they tell a story that serves as a searing indictment of the American establishment.
Rufo’s book is built around intellectual biographies of four activist-scholars: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. He traces their influence through political organizing and propaganda efforts. Marcuse was the intellectual godfather of the New Left. Davis’ Black Panther movement can be considered the precursor to BLM. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed “became the bible of teachers colleges throughout the United States and created a cottage industry in academic publishing,” with the author’s research having garnered about half a million citations. Finally, Derrick Bell was the force behind Critical Race Theory, a movement that seems to have been resisted and laughed at by most of the academic legal establishment before it wore its opponents down and gained a foothold in top law schools.
I can’t help but feeling a certain parallelism between Rufo’s work and my own. We both started becoming well known for writing about wokeness in the last few years. We both make extensive use of Twitter and longform writing to communicate to the world, and we both have books coming out two months apart with the same publisher trying to explain the origins of the radical ideas and concepts that have taken over American institutions. He’s exactly one year and two days older than me, so we’ve lived through the same formative political and cultural experiences, watching “white” become an epithet and homosexuals go from being a leper class when we were in high school to individuals having a preference that seems almost quaint in the era of public celebration of trans and the alphabet people.
Of course, an important difference is that Rufo has maintained a laser-like focus on wokeness and avoided alienating natural allies as he’s built a broad coalition within the conservative movement to take on the enemy. And his accomplishments have been quite impressive. Rufo was almost single-handedly responsible for Trump banning Critical Race Theory in the federal government, as he’s also developed close working relationships with Ron DeSantis and other politicians. Today, when Republican-controlled states ban gender transitions for minors, forbid the discussion of Critical Race Theory in schools, or abolish DEI offices in public universities, Rufo is serving as an intellectual inspiration to decision makers when he’s not directly involved in the policy process himself. If wokeness is ever defeated, one can imagine a leftist in thirty years writing a book on the career and activities of Rufo the way he writes about Marcuse and others today.
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WWI Footage: Narrow Gauge Train Lines in France
Charlie Dean Archives
Published 14 Aug 2013American forces constructing railways throughout France to help move men and supplies during World War One. We see US Army personnel laying the sleepers and track for the extensive network of two foot (60cm) narrow gauge lines, ballasting work, loading and laying of pre-built trackwork. We also see scenes of the railway in action as the little trains trundle along country lanes and through the town streets. The film ends with scenes of the train taking soldiers towards the front lines.
After the war the lines were abandoned and most of the locomotives and rollingstock simply left where they were last used, with many being salvaged by the locals to help with logging activities.
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
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QotD: Non-free farm labourers in pre-modern agriculture
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part II: Big Farms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-31.
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