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!
July 25, 2023
WWI Footage: Narrow Gauge Train Lines in France
July 24, 2023
Revolutionary boredom
Chris Bray rises to passionately denounce [Comrade to be named later] as a traitor to the revolution who must be purged from the movement instantly!
Well-written histories of the Great Terror or the Cultural Revolution — or of the final years of the Roman republic, say for example — have the strange effect of becoming incredibly boring. The 94th bonfire of humanity, appearing on page 678, resembles the previous 93 bonfires. The grim machine of political purges makes brutal depravity tedious. Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z run the Committee to Kill Wrongthinkers; then, and you always see this coming, Commissar X, Commissar Y, and Commissar Z are declared to be wrongthinkers, and are tossed on their own bonfire. The managerial tier is always consumed by its own instrument. Purge culture is the center of a politics of repression, the inevitable dynamic of a system that has degenerated to the stage of an unprincipled grasping for status and position. Someone was denounced yesterday; someone is being denounced today; someone will be denounced tomorrow.
The “Gang of Four” on trial in 1981.
In two instances, now — the frenzied shark attack on Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, and the obviously insane response to RFK Jr. this week — prominent House Democrats have mimicked a cultural style that should be extremely familiar to anyone who has read some history. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is so fascinatingly horrible a figure that she echoes, a bug-eyed ranting halfwitted sociopath with a hollow core like a long historical line of hollow bug-eyed sociopaths. These are the people who are drawn to destructive political stages. Repellent and ascendant, they call to others of the type. Destroyers flock.
I assume you’ve seen some footage from yesterday’s hearing, which was widely covered and widely discussed, so I’m not going to rehash that nasty piece of Theatre of Cruelty. If you missed it, just know that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is OBSOLETE OBSOLETE OBSOLETE.
But I want to point at the water underneath the waves we can see in national media, because the presumptions of the Central Commissariat go all the way down.
The week that led to the ritual denunciation of RFK Jr. started with a fascinatingly naked declaration in a Pasadena courthouse. Two California physicians, Mark McDonald and Jeff Barke, are suing the California Medical Board to block enforcement of AB 2098, the new law that threatens the medical license of any doctor in the state who expresses consensus-deviating crimethink about the darkly sacred Covid-19, a High Enemy of the Glorious Motherland. McDonald and Barke are relying on the First Amendment and its protection of the so-called “free speech” trope, a well-known tool of dangerous far-right extremists.
Courts have split on AB 2098, and so far some have declined the premise that this regulation of physicians’ speech is unconstitutional, so the case is now before the 9th Circuit on appeal. A three-judge panel heard oral argument in the case this week, in an architecturally pleasant forum that used to be a luxury hotel. And this is where Deputy Attorney General Kristin Liska said this to the court: “In order to effectively regulate the practice of medicine, the state needs to be able to reach the aspects of speech that are used to care for patients.”
If you take a professional license from the state, the regulatory power of the state reaches your speech acts; you can lose your license not only for harming patients or providing poor quality care, but for saying things that the state disagrees with. Your conversations belong to the government.
July 23, 2023
Sayonara Tojo – WW2 – Week 256 – July 22, 1944
World War Two
Published 22 Jul 2023This week, Adolf Hitler is blown up and Hideki Tojo steps down. In the Pacific, the Americans land on Guam and prepare for hard fighting. In France, the Americans take Saint-Lô and British and German armored forces clash around Caen. In the East, the Red Army enters Latvia, tears a gap in Army Group North, and reaches the gates of Lvov.
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July 22, 2023
QotD: “Managing” your way to victory
Some of the greatest victories of all time were managed by ad hoc organization that, like Topsy, just “growed“ from 1939 to 1945, as Churchill and Roosevelt searched for ways to operate a grand, strategic alliance fighting against formidable enemies, while the postwar fascination with process, led in large part by US Defence Secretary (1961-68) Robert S. McNamara, contributed, I believe, in a major way to the strategic and military debacle that was the Vietnam War (1955-75) when data began to replace tactics, and management theory, coupled with complex organization charts, replaced military acumen and strategic vision.
There is nothing wrong with good, sound management and management theory and management science (and, yes, I believe there actually is a such a thing) have much to teach us all, including governments and the military, about how to get the most from one’s always limited resources, especially time. But, too often, in my opinion, management becomes an end in itself and process replaces critical thinking and analysis. When this happens in both the political/bureaucratic and in the military realms, as I believe it has in Canada (which has tended, since about 1970, to follow the USA almost slavishly) then I believe that our national defence is in peril.
It is common, amongst military people, to accept that there is a “master principle of war”: Selection and Maintenance of the Aim. That means that one MUST understand what one is trying to do and then focus all one’s efforts on getting that done. The corollary is that if you don’t know what you need to be doing then getting the results you want (need) is unlikely. I believe that the Canadian Armed Forces lack good strategic direction because the Government of Canada, the Trudeau government, is unconcerned with anything past the next election. I also believe that the military leadership, lacking strategic direction, simply follows whatever new process seems to be popular in the Pentagon. Canadians, therefore, are not getting value for money from either the government they elected nor from the military forces for which they pay.
Ted Campbell, “Following the blind leader (3)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2019-05-21.
July 21, 2023
Country music world (and legacy media) convulsed by country song that isn’t woke
There’s been a lot of wailing by the usual suspects about a recent video released by Jason Aldean for his song “Try That in a Small Town”, alleging all sorts of horrible things including promotion of lynching, outright racism, and inciting violence:
… writer Zachary Faria notes that the left is rabidly protective of Black Lives Matter. In fact, they’re so protective of it that they’ll take issue with criticism of literally anything that ever even happened at a Black Lives Matter protest.
Entire neighborhoods were burned to the ground? A small price to pay for social justice, at least in their minds.
So the idea of people standing up to them — warning them to try that in a small town — is despicable.
Remember that these are the same people who continue to accuse Kyle Rittenhouse of murder despite having been acquitted of the crime. These are the same people who call the kid a racist despite him having shot three white dudes. They say he acted unprovoked despite one trying to take his gun from him, another hitting him in the head with a blunt object, and a third literally pointing a gun at him.
Through it all, they act like Rittenhouse should have just rolled over and allowed his murder to happen, all because the cause of Black Lives Matter cannot be criticized.
Where Aldean sinned is because he, too, thinks ill of the riots that engulfed every major city in this nation.
He’s harkening back to a time when communities were full of people protecting one another. That’s a very good thing, and I’m someone who would love to see that happen again.
Instead, the people claiming that Aldean’s song is about lynching are telling on themselves.
There doesn’t seem to be any part of the song that says a thing about black people or anything like that. In fact, most of the people involved in the riots, at least as I saw them, seemed to be white. But the fact that this is where the leftists went tells us plenty. It tells us they think the only kind of person who would cross that line is a black person.
July 19, 2023
Ever wonder where the term “two-spirit” came from?
In Spiked, Malcolm Clark explains the origin of the now commonly used term as a portmanteau for many different words — with significant variation in meaning — in indiginous languages:
Typical media presentation of Two-spirit individuals
The term two-spirit was first formally endorsed at a conference of Native American gay activists in 1990 in Winnipeg in Canada. It is a catch-all term to cover over 150 different words used by the various Indian tribes to describe what we think of today as gay, trans or various forms of gender-bending, such as cross-dressing. Two-spirit people, the conference declared, combine the masculine and the feminine spirits in one.
From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey. Myra Laramee, the woman who proposed the term in 1990, said it had been given to her by ancestor spirits who appeared to her in a dream. The spirits, she said, had both male and female faces.
Incredibly, three decades on, there are now celebrities and politicians who endorse the concept or even identify as two-spirit. The term has found its way into one of Joe Biden’s presidential proclamations and is a constant feature of Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s doe-eyed bleating about “2SLGBTQQIA+ rights”.
The term’s success is no doubt due in part to white guilt. There is a tendency to associate anything Native American with a lost wisdom that is beyond whitey’s comprehension. Ever since Marlon Brando sent “Apache” activist Sacheen Littlefeather to collect his Oscar in 1973, nothing has signalled ethical superiority as much as someone wearing a feather headdress.
The problem is that too many will believe almost any old guff they are told about Native Americans. This is an open invitation to fakery. Ms Littlefeather, for example, may have built a career as a symbol of Native American womanhood. But after her death last year, she was exposed as a member of one of the fastest growing tribes in North America: the Pretendians. Her real name was Marie Louise Cruz. She was born to a white mother and a Mexican father, and her supposed Indian heritage had just been made up.
Much of the fashionable two-spirit shtick is just as fake. For one thing, it’s presented as an acknowledgment of the respect Indian tribes allegedly showed individuals who were gender non-conforming. Yet many of the words that two-spirit effectively replaces are derogatory terms.
In truth, there was a startling range of attitudes to the “two-spirited” among the more than 500 separate indigenous Native American tribes. Certain tribes may have been relaxed about, say, effeminate men. Others were not. In his history of homosexuality, The Construction of Homosexuality (1998), David Greenberg points out that those who are now being called “two spirit” were ridiculed by the Papago, held in contempt by the Choctaws, disliked by the Cocopa, treated by the Seven Nations with “the most sovereign contempt” and “derided” by the Sioux. In the case of the Yuma, who lived in what is now Colorado, the two-spirited were sometimes treated as rape objects for the young men of the tribe.
QotD: If they were serious …
I suppose this should be a post unto itself, but very briefly, If They Were Serious about war with China, you’d expect a few very basic things. Massively stepped-up armaments production, if nothing else, and if you wanted to be really slick about it, you’d do it under the guise of replenishing all the stocks we sent to our plucky allies in Ukraine — purchase orders for 100x the total amount shipped to Keeeeeve, that kind of thing. But that’s the kind of retooling that’s hard to hide, because it would also involved massively stepped-up mining, refining, and so on, not to mention upgrading the transportation infrastructure and so on.
None of those things appear to be happening. And since even an all hands on deck, Nazi-style crash rearmament program has a lag time of a few years, If They Were Serious about premiering Showdown in the Taiwan Strait anytime in the next decade, they’d be jamming that shit out NOW. Right now. Afterburners full.
You also need soldiers to use all that stuff, so you’d expect massively stepped-up military recruiting. Which would entail, at minimum, a push to get American boys into some kind of fighting shape. Which not only isn’t happening, but the exact opposite is happening. Unless you want Uncle Sugar to pay for your “top surgery” or your addadicktome, why would anyone enlist? When you further consider that the same TLAs who are so smoothly rolling out their Hate the Han™ campaign could easily order up some ultra-jingoistic remakes of Stallone movies from the 1980s, it seems as if They are not, in fact, Serious …
… but some of the nodes are, because failure is a distributed system. I love playing If They Were Serious — it’s my favorite drinking game — but alas for me, it relies on the Assumed Internal Consistency Fallacy. Like the Japanese Navy, or the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, or even poor Adm. Kimmel, you’ve got certain nodes of the Apparat performing competently to brilliantly in the service of skull-fuckingly stupid objectives, or NO objectives. The Flying TIGRs are even dumber than [Hitler], who at least called a meeting to say “Hey, how’s about we invade Russia in the winter?” While it’s clear to everyone who matters that the TIGRs really really really really really want their war, nobody’s in charge, so everyone is left to figure it out as best they can, on their own initiative, with the resources they have to hand.
And again, much like the Wehrmacht etc., the better the competent nodes perform, the harder and faster the overall system failure. We’re going to end up charging headlong into a war with China because the TLAs at Twitter etc. are doing such a great job making Hate the Han™ the Current Thing. Meanwhile, one imagines Brandon’s handlers telling their Chinese paymasters that no no, that won’t be happening, please don’t cut off our paychecks. And since they’re pretty good at their job, too — their job being “telling Beijing what they want to hear while lugging away huge sacks of cash” — it’s gotta fuck with the People’s Liberation Army command staff.
Consider further that the Army (etc.) are, Kimmel-style, doing a pretty decent job of carrying out their on-paper objectives. Kimmel was told “Get the Fleet ready for a likely confrontation with Japan a few years down the line”, and he did it. The Fistagon has told all its commanders to get ready for a war with China, yeah, sometime down the line … but right now, the important thing is to get as many gays, girls, and trannies as possible into uniform while promoting the Diversity that’s already in uniform as far up the chain of command as possible. General Sasqueetchia, in command of the Fightin’ 45th Mechanized Hairdresser Battalion, says thanks for a job well done … and it IS a job well done, according to the only actual orders anyone has received.
Fun times, right?
Severian, “Failure Nodes”, Founding Questions, 2023-04-18.
July 18, 2023
Life lessons from Thomas Sowell’s memoir
Rob Henderson took a lot away from his recent reading of Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey, including some fascinating lessons from Sowell’s time in the US Marine Corps:
Trust people who value being honest more than being nice.
As the Korean War intensified, Sowell was drafted into the Marine Corps. He notes that color did not matter, as all new recruits were treated with equal disdain. Sowell describes his life in the Marine barracks in Pensacola. There were two non-commissioned officers permanently stationed to oversee the young marines. One was Sergeant Gordon, “a genial, wisecracking guy who took a somewhat relaxed view of life”. The other was Sergeant Pachuki, “a disciplinarian who spoke in a cutting and ominous way” and was always “impeccably dressed”.
Sowell and his peers preferred Sergeant Gordon, as he was more easygoing. Sowell had to go into town to pick up a package. Sowell asked his Chief Petty Officer if he could leave the base to retrieve his package. Sowell received permission.
Later, while Sowell was not on base, he was marked as absent and was accused of being AWOL (absent without leave), a serious offense. Sowell knew Sergeant Gordon, the nice one, had overheard him asking for permission to leave the base. Gordon denied having heard anything, and told Sowell, “You’re just going to have to take your punishment like a man”. Gordon fretted that if he crossed the higher-ups, he would be reassigned to fight in Korea.
But unasked, Sergeant Pachuki came forward and spoke with the colonel, explaining the situation. As a result, Sowell was exonerated and returned back to his duties.
Referring to Gordon, the “nice” sergeant who betrayed him, Sowell writes, “People who are everybody’s friend usually means they are nobody’s friend”.
A “free good” is a costless good that is not scarce, and is available without limit.
Sowell would regularly needle Sergeant Grover, another member who outranked him.
Here’s the excerpt:
Some were surprised that I dared to give Sergeant Grover a hard time, on this and other occasions, especially since he was a nasty character to deal with. Unfortunately for him, I knew that he was going to give me as hard a time as he could, regardless of what I did. That meant it didn’t really cost me anything to give him as hard a time as I could. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was already thinking like an economist. Giving Sergeant Grover a hard time was, in effect, a free good and at a zero price my demand for it was considerable.
Sowell learned he could receive something he enjoyed (pleasure at provoking Grover) in exchange for nothing.
Much of what you see has been carefully curated with an agenda in mind.
One of Sowell’s assignments in the Marine Corps was as a Duty Photographer on base. One day after submitting some of his photos, Sowell had the following exchange with the public information office sergeant:
“They are good pictures, he said. “But they do not convey the image that the public information office wants conveyed.”
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
“Well, take that picture of the reservists walking across the little wooden bridge carrying their duffle bags.”
“Yeah. What’s wrong with it?”
“The men in that picture are perspiring. You can see the damp spots on their uniforms.”
“Well, if you carry a duffle bag on a 90-degree day, you are going to sweat.”
“Marines do not sweat in public information photographs.”
“Okay, what was wrong with the picture of the reservists picking up shell casings after they had finished firing? That was one of my favorites.”
“Marines do not perform menial chores like that, in our public relations image.”
“But all these photos showed a very true picture of the reservists’ summer here.”
“We’re not here to tell the truth, Sowell,” he said impatiently. “We are here to perpetuate the big lie. Now, the sooner you understand that, the better it will be for all of us.”
When I visited the Air Force recruiter in high school, I saw the brochures with images of well-groomed airmen in their dress blues graduating from basic training. I had no knowledge that much of that training would involve mind-numbing minutia. I suppose this is true for other career fields too. You see radiant coverage of academic research in legacy media outlets, or fun twitter threads outlining interesting research findings. You see the brand new hardcover book with all the glowing blurbs and reviews. You don’t see all the drudgery of research or writing behind the scenes.
Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to have too big a reputation.
Sowell and his fellow marines would sometimes have impromptu boxing matches around the barracks on base. One day Sowell was up against another guy and threw a sloppy right hand. The guy stumbled back, tripped, and fell to the ground. Although Sowell had swung and missed, witnesses thought he had knocked the other guy out.
Later, Sowell went up against another guy named Douglas. Douglas relentlessly came at Sowell and gave him a serious beating. Douglas told Sowell afterwards that the reason he was so aggressive was that he feared Sowell’s “one punch” could turn the fight around at any time. “Sometimes,” Sowell writes, “it doesn’t pay to have too big a reputation.”
Seaplanes? How 1940s. No, we’re seeking to “leverage emerging technologies” instead
CDR Salamander wonders about a modern need for military sea rescue capability that the US Navy filled with flying boats and seaplanes during the Second World War, then supplemented with helicopters during Korea and Vietnam. For ocean search-and-rescue in a combat environment in the present or near future, what are the USN’s plans?
I will be the first person to admit that good, well-meaning, and informed people can disagree with seaplanes in general or the US-2 specifically, but they have to engage the conversation. Directly argue the requirement or offer realistic alternatives.
This does neither. If anything is demonstrates the narrowness of thought and fragility of substance used in opposition.
What an patronizingly toxic stew that answer is. I highly doubt Lung typed out that answer himself, so my commentary below is not directed at him personally, but … and it is what comes after the “but” that counts — but at the three-digit J or N code that extruded that from the random acquisitions professional statement subroutine from ChatGPT.
Let’s give that answer a full Fisking;
- “The Indo-Pacific operational environment has evolved significantly since World War II”:
Let me check my WWII Pacific chart, my Vietnam War era globe, and GoogleEarth … and … no. The geography has not changed. The distances have not changed. The requirement of thousands of years to take and hold territory or eliminate your enemy from access to it has not changed. All the little islands, regardless of what Al Gore and John Kerry say, are still there. As we are seeing in the Russo-Ukrainian War, a million PPT slides saying so does not change the fundamentals of war.
Sentence one is invalid.
- “The employment of seaplanes today would not meet the operational demands and current threat scenario.”
Is there an operational demand for us to rescue downed airmen and to be able to reach remote islands without airfields? Yes. Does your “current threat scenario” run from Northern Japan through to Darwin, Australia? Yes.
Sentence two is invalid.
- “However, we support the continuous development of new and innovative solutions that may provide solutions to logistical challenges.”
So, you define “new” as something that only exists on PPT slides? By “continuous development” you mean never matures as a design that goes into production. By “innovative” you mean high on technology risk. Undefined program risk. Unknown design risk. No known production line or remote estimate to IOC, much less FOC when we know that the next decade is the time of most danger of the next Great Pacific War.
Sentence three is irresponsible and professionally embarrassing given the history of transformational wunderwaffe this century.
- “As an example, DARPA’s Liberty Lifter X-Plane seeks to leverage emerging technologies that may demonstrate seaborn strategic and tactical lift capabilities.”
Well, goodness, we will have to micro-Fisk this gaslighting horror show of a sentence. To start with, they are talking about either this from General Atomics;
… that could only be used on a very few select beaches under ideal weather in a completely permissive environment and could only be used for one specific mission and nowhere any possible hostile aircraft or ground forces. Also looks like we’d need a whole new engine and a small town’s worth of engine mechanics to maintain the maintenance schedule on those engines.
Then we have this offspring of an accidental mating of the Spruce Goose with the Caspian Sea Monster idea from Aurora Flight Sciences;
I give the odds of either one of those taking to the air prior to 2035, if ever, on par with a return of the submarine LST of Cold War fame (deck gun not included).
Let’s get back to the wording of that dog’s breakfast of a final sentence. Feel slimy reading it? You should;
- “seeks to leverage” — that is just a way of saying, “hope in magic beans.” Gobbledegook.
- “emerging technologies” — oh, you mean something that hasn’t left the computer, white board, or PPT slide.
- “that may demonstrate” — so, even if our magic beans managed to fuse unobtainium with Amrita, we’re not really sure if the strip mining of strange blue creatures’s holy sites and drilling holes in the soft pallet of whale-like thing will result in something of use.
- “strategic and tactical lift capabilities” — I’m sorry, an eight or ten-engined aircraft that any goober with a 1960s-era iron-sighted RPG-7 could target at maximum range is going do anything “tactical” — especially at the expected price of those things and the resulting precious few that wind up displacing water. Oh, and you admit that it will only be used for cargo, so it can’t do the full range of possible missions the US-2 can … just cargo. On just a few beaches that are fully surveyed ahead of time. At the right tide. In the right weather. In a 100% safe and permissive environment.
- The final sentence is a caricature.
Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) should feel at least mildly insulted by this reply. It was a serious question given a canned answer that, slightly modified, could have been provided at any time in the last quarter century by the lethargically complacent maintainers of the suboptimal habits of the mistakingly entitled acquisitions nomenklatura
At some point we moved from “therapy for serious issues” to “it’s totally normal for everyone you know to be in therapy”
In occasional conversations with younger folks (mainly Millennials and GenZ’ers), it’s surprising how often the topic of “therapy” comes up. Everyone I talk to under the age of 40 seems to be in therapy for this or that … when did that change? I’m no iron man (ask any of my friends), but it would never have occurred to me to seek counselling for what appeared to be the ordinary kind of issues that everyone else was dealing with. Friends and acquaintances who did were almost always struggling with some out-of-the-ordinary concern and certainly weren’t eager to discuss the course of their sessions as part of casual chit-chat. Freddie de Boer seems to share some of my discomfort on this topic:
Ladies, is your man engaging in the method of quasi-scientific self-improvement that’s currently mandated by high-status urbanites aged 21-45? If not, run, girl.
Before you go worrying or lecturing over my title here, let me say my personal life has never been better, really. But my total alienation from what I take to be my culture and its various attitudes and assumptions just grows and grows. Every day, it seems, there’s a fresh horror, and nowhere does it smack me in the face more than with mental health.
The above advertisement, which I think premiered in 2022, takes the medical tool of therapy and renders it a bit of dating-market gamesmanship, something bros just have to get on board with in order to hook up with high-value gals. I don’t expect a 30-second advertisement to reflect the reality that therapy is a frequently-adversarial process, that it’s at times uncomfortable by design, that it only works for certain kinds of problems, or that there are times when it can actually exacerbate them. And while I certainly do hold it against them for contributing to the corrosive “everybody should be in therapy” attitude — which is little different from believing that everybody should be on antibiotics — I also know that a for-profit therapy company is going to be pushing that line. (A macro-problem with for-profit medicine lies in the fact that the financial incentive is always to go on treating a medical problem forever without curing it.) What really gets to me is how a therapy company is going out of its way to make therapy appear so trivial, how the characters appear deliberately portrayed as unserious people and therapy so unapologetically represented as just a dating-market football. The commercial is somehow both grandiose about therapy’s purpose and dismissive about therapy’s actual use.
I don’t know how it is that we’ve simultaneously spent so much time validating and honoring people who struggle with their mental health and at the same time made mental health as a topic so frivolous.
I appreciated this conversation about TV therapy from The New Yorker. In it, Inkoo Kang says “I feel like there’s this idea that therapy is easy. And then you actually go to therapy, and you’re, like, ‘Oh, this is actually the worst’. That particular realization is very rarely dramatized.” I would argue that if therapy never feels like the worst, then you probably aren’t getting as much as you could out of the therapeutic process. Part of what makes finding and sticking with a therapist so difficult is that it’s close to impossible to divide your sense of what you want from a therapist from a broader understanding of what you need from a therapist. Are you sure you don’t like your current therapist because you’re “just not vibing with them”? Are you sure you want to fire your therapist because they seem “toxic”? Or is it because you signed up for therapy expecting it to be a constant exercise in validating everything you think and say and instead you’re one of the lucky few with a therapist who actually does their job and sometimes calls you on your bullshit? Of course, some therapists really aren’t very good, or more commonly, you can be a receptive patient and the therapist can be a competent practitioner but you have communication styles that just don’t gel. These things can be very difficult to parse on your own, which is why I always tell people to give it more time than they think they need. But either way, nothing is served by this effort to make therapy just another elite checklist item that shows you’re an enlightened person, except maybe Betterhelp’s share price.
Manville Gas Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Oct 2012Charles Manville developed this weapon in the 1930s as a riot control tool, and they were built in 12ga, 25mm, and 37mm. We should point out that the 12ga version was for tear gas rounds only (like today’s 12ga flare launchers) and not safe to use with high-pressure ammunition. Anyway, it was intended for use by prison guards and riot police, offering a much greater ammunition capacity than any other contemporary launcher.
During World War II, Manville tried to sell the military on a high-pressure version to fire 37mm explosive rounds, but was unsuccessful. Instead, the Manville company spent the was making parts for the Oerlikon 20mm AA guns, and the tooling for the gas launcher was all destroyed.
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July 17, 2023
The WEF considers whether to use the carrot or the stick next time
Elizabeth Nickson on the World Economic Forum’s latest gathering in China:
Last week the WEFers held their summer camp in China. More to come, they warned us. More pandemics, more catastrophic global warming, more inflation, hell on wheels, they promise us, Armageddon is coming. Be very afraid.
The following was a particularly lovely event:
“How to Stay Within Planetary Boundaries — Carrot or Stick?” which focused on whether to incentivize or force compliance with “climate goals”. It was hosted by some joker who edits a magazine called Nature Energy, no doubt funded by the WEF and read by exactly nobody. And some very po-faced morons of various colors, paid in the six figures, cited a bunch of falsified statistics ending with these pretty little paragraphs:
We are — broadly speaking — agreed that we need to get on track towards a net-zero, climate-safe and nature-positive future, but we know this will not be easy. And we’re going to need to change behaviours of both individuals but also the way that our industries and corporations and also our governments work and practices.
We’re going to need to do this through a mixture of carrots and hopefully perhaps not so many sticks, in some kind of mix. And there is a very active and live debate as to how we go about this. But we’re likely to see an increasing move towards more stick-like interventions …
These guys, they make me laugh. Seriously? How stupid do they think we are? How hated are they? All over the world, they are loathed and laughed at. Every time one of them is taken out, we laugh and laugh and laugh. Larry Fink from BlackRock? Hiding, Scared. Mocked, publicly humiliated. We need a lot more of that.
[…]
They have to destroy western culture, because we middle-class-unnecessary-eaters are too damned uppity. They have stolen so much that when the tipping point arrives, and it will, they will be hung from the highest tree. “Better to ruin those likely to catch and imprison us, and feed on peasants and serfs, the desperate in the rest of the world.”
Proof?
OK, let’s review the Biden/Trudeau/Macron/Sunak economy shall we? Since the out-in-the-open globalist theft of elections during the past three years — Sunak was installed, Trudeau is the most hated man in Canada, Biden is gaga and Macron is just crazy — this is what the bottom 50% are experiencing. Short form, ground into the dirt.
Ninety percent of the jobs “created” were those gained back after the pandemic. Most jobs are going to the foreign born – they work cheap.
Of the roughly 900 days Joe Biden has been in the White House, real wages have fallen for almost 700 days — about 75% of Biden’s time in office. All total, the collective drop in real wages has been 3% rather than the robust real wage gains workers deserve and expect.
Every single American has lost $36,000 to Biden’s inflation. It has crippled us, especially those working in the real (not digital) economy — Uber drivers, truckers, farmers, manufacturers, ranchers, the bottom 50% — gas prices have gone up 50%. Home heating up 23%, milk 16%, beef 25%, eggs 83%. Home prices 32%, rents 15%, electricity 21%.
Let’s not even talk about interest rates. Ten raises in the last 30 months. Last week the Bank of Canada gave its people $26 million in bonuses. Meanwhile, people are losing their houses.
How much more punishment are we expected to take? This is directly caused by their mad hatter spending during the pandemic — which was fake but for a few months in early 2020 — and their subsequent restriction of the energy supply. Restriction of energy causes prices to skyrocket because producing anything requires energy.
Canada has been one of the biggest freeloaders in NATO for more than 40 years
From the weekend Dispatch from the editors of The Line, some indication that even the American legacy media are tired of Canada’s generations-long peace dividend freeloading at the expense of our allies:
American media doesn’t often notice Canada, and as much as Canadians like to whinge about being ignored, the lack of interest in our affairs from south of the border is usually a good thing. If you’re looking for a rule of thumb here, it’s this: attention from the Americans is almost always negative.
A case in point this week was an editorial published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, headlined “Canada is a military free-rider in NATO”. The subhed was “Ottawa still spends only a pathetic 1.38% of GDP on defense”. The editorial makes a number of points almost all of which will be familiar to readers of the Line, which are all variations of: Canada shirks its NATO commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence, while engaging in relentless virtue signalling and moral preening, both domestically and to its allies. It treats national defence as social project, while doing little to nothing in the way of actually projecting the power that is needed to defend the values it purports to advance.
There are some absolutely killer lines in the editorial, beginning with the lede: “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Lithuania this week for the annual NATO summit, but it’s too bad there wasn’t a junior table where he could sit.” A few paragraphs later: “Last week Ottawa put in its two cents against cluster munitions. But asking its citizens to meet their actual obligations to the cause of freedom is apparently too much to ask.” And then: “Nowadays Ottawa can be counted on to ‘fight’ for human rights, which is to say that it talks a lot about them.”
Again, for anyone paying attention here in Canada, these are not new arguments. But the editorial does add one twist at the end, suggesting that if Canada can’t be bothered keeping its NATO commitments, then perhaps it should be kicked out of the G7 and replaced by a country willing to play a leadership role. They suggest Poland as a possibility.
Reaction in Canada has been surprisingly muted. On our own social media feeds, we noted a lot of rather sad attempts at dismissing the editorial — the paper is a Rupert Murdoch owned rag; this is Trumpist nonsense; Europeans juice their defence spending through useless mandatory service requirements. But curiously, we didn’t see anyone try to pull a Julie Dzerowicz and argue that, despite all evidence to the contrary, Canada is actually punching above its weight in NATO.
Look, some of us here at The Line have been reading harsh editorials on Canada’s defence spending for decades. (We’ve written a few, too!) And we’ve never seen anything remotely this harsh from an American outlet. This is absolutely devastating stuff, and it can’t be simply shrugged off because of the source.
A bit of history: In 1995, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling Canada “an honorary member of the Third World” in an editorial that also referred to the Canadian dollar as the “northern peso”. This was in response to Canada’s national debt and tax rates hitting unsustainable levels. We were an economic basket case, and the Americans were starting to notice.
Lots of Canadian commentators dismissed the editorial on the grounds that the WSJ was just pushing the supposedly-discredited Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney “neoliberal” agenda. But later that year the Chrétien government, with Paul Martin as finance minister, introduced one of the most significant budgets in Canadian history. They slashed federal spending in ways not seen since the end of the Second World War, slashed the public service, gutted the department of defence. But three years later they had balanced the budget, inaugurating an extended period of federal fiscal responsibility that lasted until the election of the Trudeau Liberals in 2015.
The point is not that there’s a cause and effect here — Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin didn’t sit down and go “oh shit, the Journal has weighed in, we have to do something”. It’s that when serious American media get around to noticing stuff about Canada, it is usually because the stuff they are noticing has become such a problem for other countries that our national Emperor’s New Clothes routine is no longer tenable. It is a sign that things have to change, and quickly.
Remember, the Liberal government doesn’t deny that Canada is a NATO laggard and a free rider on defence. Justin Trudeau has admitted as much, both publicly and privately. But up till now, his attitude has been to sort of smirk at the Americans, give his usually smarmy shrug, and say “what are you going to do about it?”
What the Wall Street Journal editorial does is suggest that there could be real consequences for our professed indigence. It is one thing to be left out of AUKUS, which the Liberals continue to falsely characterize as a submarine procurement deal. Getting kicked out of the G7 would something else entirely — it’s the sort of thing the sorts of people who vote Liberal tend to care about.
Canada’s current attitude to collective defence is not sustainable. Our allies have noticed. Either we change, or our allies will change things for us.
Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 06 George Washington
Nebulous Media
Published 27 Dec 2022Allen Guelzo joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss George Washington. From his early childhood to his years as president, the two analyze the founding father’s legacy. Should the first president stay cancelled?
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July 16, 2023
Tricksy Tucker Carlson “tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president”
Chris Bray helps dispel the hypnotic trance so many American conservatives have been suffering under:
Tucker Carlson busy hypnotizing innocent conservatives to think they hate poor Mike Pence.
A stupid trend is emerging in the coverage of campaign discourse.
By now you’ve probably seen footage of Tucker Carlson interviewing Mike Pence in Iowa, a discussion that produced a memorable exchange regarding Ukraine. Politico would like you to know that it was a kind of hypnosis routine, a mental hijacking in which Carlson tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president.
The former Fox News host, reports the all-seeing Sally Goldenberg, “primarily used his perch to press candidates on issues of importance to him: namely, the United States’ role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.” As the United States sends cluster munitions to Ukraine and calls up thousands of reservists for “combat-ready” service in Eastern Europe, a journalist is asking political leaders about Ukraine only because it’s a quirky itch his ego needs to scratch — a selfish personal cause, pursued for whatever odd reason. Here’s Goldenberg’s eighth paragraph, and compare it to what you saw with your own eyes:
Carlson — a fierce Trump defender who later soured on the ex-president — challenged, interrupted and contradicted the soft-spoken Pence at nearly every turn. As a result, the devout Christian candidate faced hostility and jeers at a summit that would have once provided him with a friendly audience.
The hostility and jeers were inorganic and manufactured; they didn’t happen because the audience didn’t like Pence or his answers, but as a result of the performative maneuvering of an interviewer who challenged and contradicted him. It’s simply not possible that the audience actually didn’t like Pence or his answer; rather, journalism’s David Blaine pulled a “hey, do you wanna see some magic?” on them, whisking them away into a world of illusion. Tucker Carlson entered a thousand helpless brains and drove a Pence-loving audience away like a bus. The story goes on the say that “establishment Republicans expressed dismay,” accusing Carlson of “pro-Kremlin misinfo.” They don’t have to write these stories any more — they can just cut and paste from all the previous versions.
This is a template for all future campaign coverage: Voters were accidentally hypnotized today into wrongfully [fill in blank] after [select: Tucker Carlson / Donald Trump] challenged and contradicted more responsible leaders.
