Rex Krueger
Published 29 Oct 2026
AI-generated video summary
Rex Krueger demonstrates how to construct an affordable face vise for a workbench using readily available materials like black iron pipe and basic hardware. This project aims to offer woodworkers a functional alternative to expensive cast-iron options, with design considerations provided for achieving smooth, reliable operation through custom tracking.
October 30, 2026
I Built a REAL Woodworking Vise for Almost Nothing
There are useful idiots and then there are extremely useful idiots
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre recounts the efforts of Noam Chomsky to minimize the atrocities happening in Cambodia because he strongly preferred to blame the west for all of the wrongs in the world:
Noam Chomsky, the “Father of modern linguistics”, looked at evidence of industrial-scale murder and decided the real problem was Western media bias.
By 1977, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had already killed roughly 1.7 million Cambodians through execution, forced starvation, and slave labor. Chomsky, writing with Edward Herman in “Distortions at Fourth Hand”, treated survivor testimony and refugee accounts as State Department fabrications, preferring the far lower body counts published in sympathetic leftist sources.
The intellectual gymnastics required to reach that conclusion were extraordinary. Chomsky dismissed Father Ponchaud’s firsthand reporting, questioned Francois Ponchaud’s credibility directly, and leaned on a 1977 State Department document to suggest deaths numbered in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands. He applied maximum skepticism to anti-communist sources and near-zero skepticism to anything that cut against American foreign policy narratives. The methodology was selective to the point of being fraudulent.
Chomsky was not a fringe figure typing in a basement. He held an MIT professorship and commanded enormous intellectual authority among Western leftists. When he cast doubt on Cambodian atrocity reports, journalists and academics listened. Real people died while influential intellectuals debated whether their deaths were sufficiently well-sourced.
Collectivist ideology requires enemies to function. When the Khmer Rouge built their agrarian utopia by emptying Phnom Penh at gunpoint and executing anyone wearing glasses, Chomsky’s instinct was to protect the ideological project by attacking the messengers. Ideology over corpses.
From the .50 M2 to the Mk7 16 Inch Turrets: All the Guns of the USS New Jersey
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Jul 2026I had a chance to spend some time on the USS New Jersey, today docked in Camden NJ as a public museum ship. Today we are going to go through all of the weapons systems on the New Jersey, starting from the humble .50-caliber M2 machine guns and going up to the massive 16″ Mk7 guns in the three-gun turrets. The New Jersey was refitted several times, adding and removing different weapon systems for deployments from World War Two to Desert Storm, so not all of these guns were in place simultaneously — but they are all part of the story of the ship.
Many thanks to the awesome staff of the New Jersey for their hospitality and to World of Warships for making the visit possible!
(more…)
QotD: Opus Dei
Opus Dei means “God’s work”, and while I don’t expect everyone to go out and join, that’s THE principle — work! Everything, no matter how small, contributes to final victory. You are the message. You are the work. Everybody, no matter how old or infirm or weak or poor or whatever, can do something. Dress well. Stand up straight. Sit down in a public park and read a book, a real physical book, not some glowing screen. If you’re walking and you see trash, pick it up. Set some great art as your computer’s background at work. Listen to some classical music. Put a quote from a Dead White Male on your email auto-signature.
Something, anything. Why? Because fuck them, that’s why. They’re ugly and stupid and base, because all those things — ugliness and stupidity and baseness — are just a degraded version of contemptus mundi, contempt for the world. That’s what nihilism IS, at bottom — fake and gay contemptus mundi. “This world is all there is; this world is awful; therefore the only thing to do is wallow in awfulness. We choose ugliness and stupidity and baseness for their own sake, because we choose to wallow.”
The world isn’t awful. It’s beautiful. Even if you don’t believe your Creator made it just for you — and He did, but you can choose not to believe that — just listen to the “Ode to Joy”. There’s at least as much beauty as ugliness in the world, however it got here and whatever its purpose. Maybe it really IS all meaningless, just atoms and void. Even so, why wallow? Choose what’s beautiful while you can enjoy it. And even if you can’t enjoy it for its own sake, choose it because the Left will hate you for it.
Stick a thumb in their eye at every opportunity. Make that your number one scruple, because seriously: Fuck them, that’s why.
Severian, “The Way Ch. 10: Scruples”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-10.
