Calum
Published 5 Oct 2022The humble shipping container changed our society — it made International shipping cheaper, economies larger and the world much, much smaller. But what did the shipping container replace, how did it take over shipping and where has our dependance on these simple metal boxes led us?
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August 2, 2023
How Shipping Containers Took Over the World (then broke it)
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QotD: The Coolidge years
I washed my car this morning and it rained this afternoon. Therefore, washing cars causes rain.
So-called “progressives” tell us that Calvin Coolidge was a bad president because the Great Depression started just months after he left office.
This is precisely the same, lame argument expressed in two different contexts.
In five years (August 2023), we will mark the 100th anniversary of the day that Silent Cal became America’s 30th President. I intend to celebrate it along with others who believe in small government, but you can bet there’ll be plenty of progressives trying to rain on our parade. So let’s get those umbrellas ready.
Let’s remember that the eight years of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) were economically disastrous. Taxes soared, the dollar plummeted, and the economy soured. A sharp, corrective recession in 1921 ended quickly because the new Harding-Coolidge administration responded to it by reducing the burden of government. When Harding died suddenly in 1923, Coolidge became President and for the next six years, America enjoyed the unprecedented growth of “the Roaring ’20s.” Historian Burton Folsom elaborates:
One measure of prosperity is the misery index, which combines unemployment and inflation. During Coolidge’s six years as president, his misery index was 4.3 percent — the lowest of any president during the twentieth century. Unemployment, which had stood at 11.7 percent in 1921, was slashed to 3.3 percent from 1923 to 1929. What’s more, [Coolidge’s Treasury Secretary] Andrew Mellon was correct on the effects of the tax-rate cuts — revenue from income taxes steadily increased from $719 million in 1921 to over $1 billion by 1929. Finally, the United States had budget surpluses every year of Coolidge’s presidency, which cut about one-fourth of the national debt.
That’s a record “progressives” can only dream about but never deliver. Yet when they rank U.S. presidents, Coolidge gets the shaft. If you can get your hands on a copy of the out-of-print 1983 book, Coolidge and the Historians by Thomas Silver, buy it! You’ll be delighted at what Coolidge actually said, and simultaneously incensed at the shameless distortions of his words at the hands of progressives like Arthur Schlesinger.
Lawrence W. Reed, “Cal and the Big Cal-Amity”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-07-25.
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August 1, 2023
“Tonight in the news: the moon is made of green chees- wait, patch downloading … not made of green cheese, and anyone who says it is is a MAGA conspiracist h8er.”
Sarah Hoyt on the amazing co-ordination of messaging from so many legacy media and their social media collaborators:
Many of us are amused with how fast the left acquires a sudden mission to propagate the one holy acceptable opinion. How it changes overnight, and how it comes from all of them at once, in almost the same words. And how it gets repeated ad-nauseam, in defiance of all sense, until the message changes.
This has led the least kind among us (eh. Myself, sometimes) to refer to our leftist brethren as “NPC”s who do whatever the programmers put in their heads.The sad truth, though, is they’re not NPCs. They’re humans, like the rest of us, just — a lot of them — through cowardice or a more conformist temperament, humans who want to be “right” with the “majority” as they perceive it. They, like most primitives the world over, have no moral center, and want to back the winner and the strong horse.
Add in a dose of truly bad education, and their self-conceit as smart, and what you have is someone who reads all the accepted publications, catches on to what they’re saying, and runs to get ahead of what they think will be (and to be fair is, of their kind only) a parade.
The sequence goes something like this: Leftists, for nefarious, stupid, or money reasons (and often all three) declare that they want something utterly, inconceivably stupid to happen: ban something, force some tech, whatever.
Immediately, on command, some “scientist” (usually of the softer side) who smells grant money does studies showing this idea is brilliant and will bring about utopia. The stupid is flawed and irreproducible, but the journalists are all leftists who want to “support the current thing” and jump on it. Suddenly every possible and some imaginary publications tell us how the Current Thing is the most important thing ever, and it must be done nowwwww.
Take Joe Biden’s idea of cooling the Earth by covering the sunlight. — Okay, not his idea. Or maybe it is. Who knows how much meth they’re putting in his ice-cream? — But the idea of the group of people who form “Joe Biden.” Or the idea of those jokers at the WEF that the planet is BOILING and the only solution if for us peasants to surrender to their wisdom and eat the bugs, and give up private transportation.
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QotD: US Army culture before the Korean War
A sergeant, by shouting at some sensitive yardbird, could get his captain into a lot of trouble. For the real effect of the Doolittle recommendations was psychological. Officers had not been made wholly powerless — but they felt that they had been slapped in the teeth. The officer corps, by 1946 again wholly professional, did not know how to live with the newer code.
One important thing was forgotten by the citizenry: by 1946 all the intellectual and sensitive types had said goodbye to the Army — they hoped for good. The new men coming in now were the kind of men who join armies the world over, blank-faced, unmolded — and they needed shaping. They got it; but it wasn’t the kind of shaping they needed.
Now an N.C.O. greeted new arrivals with a smile. Where once he would have told them they made him sick to his stomach, didn’t look tough enough to make a go of his outfit, he now led them meekly to his company commander. And this clean-cut young man, who once would have sat remote at the right hand of God in his orderly room, issuing orders that crackled like thunder, now smiled too. “Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I am your company commander; I’m here to help you. I’ll try to make your stay both pleasant and profitable.”
This was all very democratic and pleasant — but it is the nature of young men to get away with anything they can, and soon these young men found they could get away with plenty.
A soldier could tell a sergeant to blow it. In the old Army he might have been bashed, and found immediately what the rules were going to be. In the Canadian Army — which oddly enough no American liberals have found fascistic or bestial — he would have been marched in front of his company commander, had his pay reduced, perhaps even been confined for thirty days, with no damaging mark on his record. He would have learned, instantly, that orders are to be obeyed.
But in the new American Army, the sergeant reported such a case to his C.O. But the C.O. couldn’t do anything drastic or educational to the man; for any real action, he had to pass the case up higher. And nobody wanted to court-martial the man, to put a permanent damaging mark on his record. The most likely outcome was for the man to be chided for being rude, and requested to do better in the future.
Some privates, behind their smirks, liked it fine.
Pretty soon, the sergeants, realizing the score, started to fraternize with the men. Perhaps, through popularity, they could get something done. The junior officers, with no sergeants to knock heads, decided that the better part of valor was never to give an unpopular order.
The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like “Can Do”. In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots — there was money for these — the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.
What they lacked couldn’t be seen, not until the guns sounded.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.
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July 31, 2023
2023 compared with the world of C.M. Kornbluth’s “Marching Morons”
John C. Wright on what he calls our “incompetocracy”:
The conceit of the C.M. Kornbluth story “The Marching Morons” (Galaxy, April 1951) is that low-IQ people, having less practical ability to plan for the future, will reproduce more recklessly hence in greater numbers than high-IQ people, leading to a catastrophic general decline in intelligence over the generations.
A small group of elite thinkers tries, by any means necessary, to maintain a crumbling world civilization being overrun by an ever increasing underclass of morons.
In this morbid and unhappy little short story, the solution to overpopulation was the Final Solution, that is, mass murder of undesirables followed by the murder of the architect of the solution.
The eugenic genocide is played for laughs, as the morons are herded aboard death-ships, told they are going on vacation to Venus. The government forges postcards to their widows and orphans to maintain the fraud, which the morons are too stupid to penetrate.
You may recognize a similar conceit from the film Idiocracy (2006), written and directed by Mike Judge. Unlike the short story, no solution is proposed for the overpopulation of undesirables.
No one seems to note the absurd self-flattery involved in entertaining Malthusian eugenicist fears: no one regards himself as a moron unworthy of reproduction. Margaret Sanger did not volunteer to sterilize herself on the grounds that she was a moral cripple suffering from Progressive mental illness, hence unfit.
It is only the working man, the factory hand, the field hand, who is unfit, and usually he is an immigrant from some Catholic hence illiterate nation, with a fertile wife and a happy home.
The happy Catholic with his ten children will not die alone, empty and unloved, in some sterile euthanasia center in Canada, like the Progressive will, and so the Progressive hates the happy father like Gollum hates the sun.
The self-flattery is absurd because, first, IQ is not genetic — if it were, average IQ scores for a given bloodline would not change over two generations. Darwinism allows for genetic changes only over geologic eras.
Second, education in the modern day is inversely proportional to intelligence. No intelligent man would or does subject himself to the insolent falsehoods of college indoctrination: we are too independent in thought to be allowed to pass.
Third, a truly intelligent man, if he thought his bloodline was in danger of being outnumbered and swamped, rather than trying to inflict infertility on the competition, would seek the only intelligent solution compatible with honesty and decency: lifelong monogamy in a culture that forbids contraception and encourages maternity. He would, indeed, become Catholic, and attempt to evangelize his neighbors likewise.
A truly intelligent man would accept rather than reject the divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The idea of overpopulation is and always was a Progressive scare tactic, meant to undermine and control the underclass. It is the tactic of making the poor feel poorly for trying to use resources and grow rich. It is the politics of enforced poverty.
Why else would billionaires on private jets fly to Davos to eat steak dinners over wine, in order to pressure peons to ride bikes and eat bugs?
Our salvation is that they cannot even do that right. These James Bond style villains who are committing slow genocides with experimental injections, with wars against farming, against guns, against police, against oil drilling, against nuclear energy, and against family life, have not sacrificed the billions their dark and ancient gods crave dead, but this is due only to their lack of skill and organization.
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QotD: Stranger in a Strange Land at 50
Sexual mores changed but not, for most, in that direction. Living in southern California in the eighties, the view that seemed most common among young adults — many of those I associated with would have been people I met through the SCA,1 a subculture that had noticeable overlap with both science fiction fandom and hippiedom — was very different. The ideal pattern was stable monogamy but who could be so lucky? Insofar as it had been replaced it was mostly by the increasing acceptability and practice of casual sex.
There has been some development since Stranger was published, in practice and theory, along the lines of group marriage of a somewhat different sort. Polyamory is more self-conscious and, at least in theory, more structured than what we see in Stranger. Partners are classified as primary or secondary and a good deal of attention paid to what those terms mean and what behavior they imply. The result is in theory closer to the Oneida Commune of the 19th century, on a much smaller scale, than to the nest described in Stranger.2
This fits not only what happened in the real world but what happened in Heinlein’s fictional worlds. Consider a more sophisticated version of group marriage, the line marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is highly organized, with new members brought in at the low age end on a regular pattern of alternating gender. There is extensive search/courtship. And the protagonist offers a plausible explanation of its social role, why the institutions developed and what purposes it served.
Finally, consider Friday, a later novel. The protagonist, surprisingly naive given her profession — secret agent — joins a group marriage, makes a substantial commitment to it and is booted out, her share of the assets stolen, when it is discovered that she is an artificial person, the superior product of genetic engineering. Her much later commitment to a second group marriage follows more careful research.
David D. Friedman, “Odds and Ends”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2023-04-29.
1. The Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization I have been active in for a very long time.
2. The practice sometimes ends up as open marriage, monogamous for purposes of producing and rearing children but with no obligation to sexual exclusivity — an option made possible by reliable contraception.
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July 30, 2023
Bradley Unleashes His Cobra – WW2 – Week 257 – July 29, 1944
World War Two
Published 29 Jul 2023Operation Cobra is the drop that finally opens the floodgates and the Allies make a breakthrough in Normandy; up in the Baltics the Soviets take Shaulyai, Dvinsk, and finally Narva, though their big prize this week is Lvov further south. This happens during the Poles’ Lvov Uprising, which ends badly for the Poles. Things also go badly for the Japanese on Guam, though, as their assault this week devastates their own troops.
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July 28, 2023
Progressive objections to Oppenheimer
Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the movie, and have no immediate plans to do so. That said, there’s a lot of discussion about the movie, its successes and its failures and how it relates to today’s issues. Over at Founding Questions, Severian felt the need to do a proper fisking of one particularly irritating take:
This is one of two Oppenheimer stories that popped up this morning. I don’t watch tv and haven’t seen a movie in the theater in decades; I doubt I’ve seen more than a handful of “new” movies in the last ten years. So I really am not the target audience for this kind of thing, but … I don’t get it. Why is this movie such a big deal? Have they decided to simply create The One Pop Culture Thing out of whole cloth?
Anyway, let’s see what they have to say:
There’s a cabal online, and even in some professional circles, arguing that Nolan has made the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a sideshow: that Oppenheimer looks away from the devastating effects of what happened on August 6 and 9 1945.
I guess this is where the Historian in me will forever override the pop culture critic. Obviously Robert Oppenheimer knew he was developing a weapon. The difference between a nuclear bomb and a regular bomb is one of degree, not kind. American firebombing had already done to dozens of Japanese cities what Oppenheimer’s nuke did to Hiroshima. Curtis LeMay knew it, too — after the war, he said that he’d have been rightfully tried for war crimes had the outcome gone the other way. I simply cannot see how this man is uniquely culpable for anything … or if he is, then Rosie the Riveter should be held accountable for every bomber that rolled off the assembly line.
Anti-nuclear groups have been similarly disappointed, with Carol Turner from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament telling The Guardian that “the effect of the [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] blasts was to remove the skin in a much more gory and horrible way – in [Oppenheimer] it was tastefully, artfully presented.”
That‘s your objection? That people weren’t shown getting killed in a realistic-enough manner? Jesus Christ, do you people ever listen to yourselves? That’s fucking sick. You are a loathsome excuse for a human being, Carol Turner.
Although it says much about the morals and mechanics of war, Oppenheimer isn’t a war film: it’s ultimately about the internal conflict and persecution of one individual. To painstakingly focus on the Japanese victims would have made it an entirely different film, and one at odds with the rest of Nolan’s vision. (His fellow director James Cameron, meanwhile, is said to be planning a film on the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
“Victims”. You keep using that word.
There is currently a trend for great cultural works, such as Oppenheimer, to be denigrated if they don’t tick certain boxes, and such complaints often come from the Left. A lack of focus on victims has been a frequent criticism: it’s an argument that gets wheeled out, for example, whenever a drama is being made about serial killers. Yet I don’t think artists are obliged to do this if it doesn’t fit into their own authorial vision.
I have to admit, I’m getting that old College Town feeling right now. The one where it feels like someone dropped some low-grade acid in my coffee, and I’m hallucinating. I know what all those words mean, but put together like that they don’t make any sense at all. On the most basic level, the objection here seems to be that movies require plots. A “drama about a serial killer”, for example (“drama” … what an odd word choice), requires murders. You know, mechanically speaking. But what does “focusing” on them add? Is it any more or less awful, learning that the dead guy killed at random by a lunatic was really into soccer and had a dog and liked classic rock?
And all this is before you consider that the most vocal critics of Oppenheimer are Leftists … the very same Leftists who are determined to fight to the very last drop of Ukrainian blood, and who seem to think that giving Zelensky tactical nukes is a super idea. Reading the Left’s pronouncements on Vladimir Putin, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’d like to nuke him twice, just to be sure.
Your concern for the “victims” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki rings a little hollow, gang, when you’ve been howling for blood 24/7 on Twitter for a year and a half.
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Merwin & Hulbert Revolvers
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!
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QotD: “Stakeholder” Capitalism
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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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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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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