Quotulatiousness

January 22, 2025

The Korean War 031 – Operation Wolfhound – January 21, 1951

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Jan 2025

Matt Ridgway sends forth the US 27th Infantry Regiment, known as the Wolfhounds, into the no-mans-land between the UN and Chinese lines to sniff out and hunt down their enemy. The success or failure of his first few operations in Korea could be crucial, as confidence in the UN mission from generals, politicians, and the US’ allies continues to teeter on a knife edge. A strong showing here could finally put the uncertainty to rest.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:45 Recap
01:11 Meeting at Taegu
04:19 Operation Wolfhound
07:44 Collins Reports
09:35 Trouble in Paradise
12:59 Wonju
14:54 Summary
15:18 Conclusion
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“Do not give institutional power to activists” or “moral projects to bureaucrats”, but “Progressivism systematically does both”

Lorenzo Warby on the dangers of enabling totalitarians and suffering the useful idiots in any political system:

The overthrow of Robespierre in the National Convention on 27 July 1794, Max Adamo (1870),
Wikimedia Commons.

Do not give institutional power to activists, as activism — being power without responsibility that readily lauds bad behaviour — attracts manipulative “Cluster B” personalities. Moreover, activism degrades realms of human action by imposing pre-conceived outcomes and constraints on them. We can see this is in all the entertainment franchises whose internal logics of story and canon have been debauched in the service of political messaging.1

Do not give moral projects to bureaucrats, as such projects elevate the authority of the bureaucrats who become moral masters, devaluing the authority of the citizens turned into moral subjects, and so undermines any ethic of service to said citizenry. Such projects also frustrate accountability, as the grand intentions can, and will, be used to shield the bureaucrats from scrutiny. Indeed, moral projects rapidly become moralised projects, whose grand intentions protects, even aggrandise, the self-interest of the bureaucrats.2

Progressivism systematically does both — give institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats. Hence progressivism has so often proved disastrous for human flourishing. Indeed, it has a powerful tendency to use the grandeur of its moral intentions to free itself from moral constraints: to be moralised, rather than moral.

As various folk “walk away” from what left-progressivism has become, a common sentiment is some version of “this is not the Left I remember” or “this is not what the Left used to stand for”. Yet, one of the striking things about Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (aka “wokery”) within contemporary societies is how thoroughly it is replicating mechanisms of social control familiar to any student of Communism, of Marxist Party-states.

This “not the Left I joined” is typically a notion of “the Left” that does not include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu … So it is an historically illiterate, “wouldn’t-it-be-nice”, Leftism. Yet it is precisely the Left that does include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu and so on whose echoes are being played out in our societies.

When we look around our contemporary societies, we have commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc); Zhdanovism, in the remarkable ideological conformism in the arts, entertainment and gaming (usefully discussed here); Lysenkoism in science journals, especially the genderwoo sex-is-non-binary nonsense, though genetics research and male-female differences also have aspects of it; and censorship that was originally paraded as stopping “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information. Critical Pedagogy — which has become influential in Education Faculties and teacher training — is explicitly about replicating Mao’s Cultural Revolution model of permanent revolution. We have the same, disastrous, patterns of institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats.


    1. There is a large difference from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery, that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics, that gave us universal male and then female suffrage — what I have called the Emancipation Sequence. Such political movements included previously excluded folk in freedoms and political processes that already existed. They did not give institutional power to activists nor moral projects to bureaucrats.

    2. The institutional shrinkage of the Church has not abolished the meaning-and-morality role it used to play, it has just shifted it into academe and the welfare state apparat, making both simultaneously more arrogant and less functional.

Discover the ‘Lost’ Big Dipper Rum Cocktail Recipe

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

Glen And Friends Cooking
Published 2 Oct 2024

Today on Cocktails After Dark we explore the fascinating history of Gander Airport’s iconic Big Dipper bar, once a bustling stopover for the world’s rich and famous during the 1940s to 1960s. This video dives into the golden age of aviation when propeller planes made Gander, Newfoundland, a key refuelling point for transatlantic flights. Discover how legends like Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, and Frank Sinatra sipped cocktails at the Big Dipper while planes refuelled, and learn how to make the bar’s signature cocktail using the infamous Newfoundland Screech rum. If you’ve ever been curious about Gander’s aviation history, old-time airport bars, or unique cocktails, this video has it all. Plus, find out how “Screech” became a part of Newfoundland’s folklore. Whether you’re a history buff, cocktail enthusiast, or simply curious about this legendary airport, you won’t want to miss this journey back in time. Grab your shaker, some rum, and let’s make history — one drink at a time!

The Big Dipper
1½ ounces Newfoundland Screech
1 ounce Cointreau
¾ ounce lemon juice
1 teaspoon simple syrup
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QotD: The Who

Filed under: Britain, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Who’s case for being the greatest rock band in history, and it has one, depends on the band having been a four-piece act in which all four pieces had the absolute maximum of performing ability and musical personality. To find any equivalent — maybe Zeppelin comes close — you would probably have to quit rock and go rummaging through the jazz section.

But I’ll tell you right now, there ain’t no Moon over there. I mean, good Lord: OF COURSE Keith Moon and John Entwistle were a difficult rhythm section for a guitarist to play in front of. Have you listened to those records? Professionals have talked about how watching Moon play up close was an exercise in constant suspense — you would see him take off at the start of the bar and go roaming around the drum kit and wonder how he could possibly make it back in time. He usually did make it — when he wasn’t so zonked he was falling off his stool, which is also a thing that happened sometimes.

This intricate, frantic quality is what made Moon the most inimitable of the great rock drummers — someone whose style you could recognize in a matter of seconds if he were playing on biscuit tins — but the difficulty of playing in front of a notional “timekeeper” so adventurous, and particularly doing it in concert, ought to be self-evident.

The standard advice for a rock guitarist in this predicament would be to make sure he had a very steady, unadventurous bass player to anchor the group. And the bassists for many excellent groups do, in fact, secretly stick to four or five notes they’re real comfortable with. But Entwistle offered Moon-like challenges as part of a rhythm section, albeit without inducing the same terror. At any moment his left hand might start leaping like a salmon on the fretboard, and if he played half notes in one bar, this was no guarantee he wouldn’t be doing startling, blinding sixteenths in the next.

That’s what makes Who records Who records; that’s what lifts the best ones above even the empyrean level of Townshend’s songwriting. But it meant, as Pete explained in his apology, that he could never step out and “shred” as a guitarist. The entire structure of the traditional rock group was topsy-turvy with the Who, and Townshend, whose ego is at least as big as the next fellow’s (spoiler: it’s bigger), was forced in some regard to be the responsible one, the custodian of the rhythm.

Colby Cosh, “Leave Pete Townshend alone!”, National Post, 2019-11-29.

January 21, 2025

Claim – First Nations lived sustainably and harmoniously with their natural environment. Reality – “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Pim Wiebel contrasts how children are taught about how First Nations before contact with Europeans were living fully sustainable lives in a kind of Garden of Eden until the white snakes man arrived and the rather less Edenic reality:

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort McLeod, Alberta.
Photo by Mike via Wikipedia Commons.

Among the many “proofs” offered in First Nations circles to support the claim of a pre-contact Eden imbued with an ethos of environmental harmony, is the idea that before the Europeans arrived, the buffalo was considered sacred, treated with great respect, and killed only in numbers that would sustain it in perpetuity.

Each of these notions require scrutiny.

For the Great Plains tribes, the buffalo was an essential source of food and of materials for tools, clothing and lodges. It is unsurprising that the buffalo featured prominently in tribal mythology. Among the Blackfoot, the animal was considered Nato’ye (of the Sun) sacred and to have great power. Buffalo skulls were placed at the top of the medicine lodges and prominently featured at communal ceremonies.

It is ubiquitously asserted that the tribes only killed as many buffalo as they needed for their sustenance between hunts, and that every part of the animal was used. A Canadian history website suggests, “The buffalo hunt was a major community effort and every part of the slaughtered animal was used“. An American publication states, presumptuously: “It’s one of the cliches of the West; Native Americans used all the parts of the buffalo. It’s something that almost everyone knows, whether you are interested in history or not.” The Assembly of First Nations weighs in, teaching Canadian school children in their heavily promoted “Learning Modules”, that “Hunters took only what was necessary to survive. Every part of the animal was used.”

But was the Indigenous relationship with the buffalo in reality one of supreme reverence? Was every part of the animal used, and were the buffalo always killed only in numbers that would satisfy immediate needs while ensuring the sustainability of the herds?

The evidence suggests something quite different.

Archaeologists have studied ancient buffalo “jump sites”, places where Indigenous bands hunted buffalo herds by driving them over high cliffs. Investigations of sites from the Late Archaic period (1000 B.C. to 700 A.D.) reveal that many more buffalo than could be used were killed and that rotting heaps of only partially butchered bison carcasses were left behind.

Buffalo jumps continued to be used as a hunting method long after first contact with Europeans. Early Canadian fur trader and explorer Alexander Henry, made the following entry on May 29th, 1805 in his diary of travels in the Missouri country: “Today we passed on the Stard. (starboard) side the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffaloe which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still there remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses they created a most horrid stench. In this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke.

Alexander Henry described how the buffalo jump unfolded. The hunters approached the herd from the rear and sides, and chased it toward a cliff. A particularly agile young man disguised in a buffalo head and robe positioned himself between the herd and the cliff edge, luring the animals forward. Henry was told on one occasion that the decoy sometimes met the same fate as the buffalo: “The part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous if they are not very fleet runers the buffaloe tread them under foot and crush them to death, and sometimes drive them over the precipice also, where they perish in common with the buffaloe.”

The Blackfoot called their jump sites Pishkun, meaning “deep blood kettle”. It is not difficult to imagine the horrendous bawling of the animals that suffered physical trauma from the fall but did not immediately succumb. Did the hunters have the ability, or even make an attempt, to put them out of their misery with dispatch? We do not know.

Cooking on the Soviet Home Front during WWII

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Sept 2024

Vibrantly colored pumpkin and millet porridge

City/Region: Soviet Union
Time Period: 1939

By the time WWII started, the Soviet Union had already been dealing with famine due to several years of poor harvests. When the German invasion and a scorched earth policy left them with only half of their farm acreage, rationing began, and even so, millions starved.

This Soviet wartime cookbook, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, contains mostly recipes that would’ve only been made during the best of times or by those who had access to better food. Even this simple recipe uses milk and sugar, which would have been hard to come by.

The porridge, or kasha, is filling and delicious. It’s lightly sweet from the pumpkin and sugar (though personally I would add more sugar), and the millet has a nice earthy quality. Though not very ration-friendly, you could add some butter for a bit of extra richness.

    Place peeled and finely chopped pumpkin in hot milk and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, then add washed millet. Add salt, and stirring, continue cooking for another 15 to 20 minutes until thickened. Place the cooked porridge in a water bath or in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes.
    Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище (The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food), by the Institute of Nutrition, 1939

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QotD: Raw democracy

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

In a democracy, the majority rules and individual rights are irrelevant. If the majority votes that half of your income be confiscated before you can even buy groceries, oh well. If the majority votes that you must educate your children in a certain location because you live on a certain side of an arbitrary line, oh well. If the majority votes that you must be disarmed and defenseless against violent criminals, oh well. If the majority votes that your religion be designated an “outlaw religion” and that you and all other practitioners be committed to mental institutions, oh flipping well.

(And this is what our political, economic and media elites want to export across the globe?)

Doug Newman, “An Understatement: The Founding Fathers Hated Democracy”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-08-14.

January 20, 2025

“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:

There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.

“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:

    Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.

But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

Substack

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I subscribe to a lot of other folks’ Substack blogs and I’ve been linking to a lot of posts there over the last year or so. It’s a very good site and you’re bound to find things of interest there if you like some of the things I’ve been linking to.

If you would like notifications/summaries of posts here but don’t want to check in every day, you can subscribe to my Substack at https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson as I mail out a daily update with links to all of the day’s blog posts. For example, yesterday’s summary looked like this:

Campo-Giro M1913 – Spain’s First Domestic Selfloader

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 31 May 2015

The Campo-Giro was Spain’s first indigenous self-loading military pistol, adopted in 1912 to replace the Belgian 1908 Bergmann-Mars. Only a small number were made of the original M1913 variety, with the vast majority being the later and slightly more refined M1913/16. This particular example is an early one, and particularly interesting to look at for that reason. The gun is a straight blowback design in 9mm Largo, and only lasted as Spain’s standard pistol until its descendent, the Astra 400, was adopted in 1921.

QotD: Brainwashing

Filed under: Books, Europe, Germany, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve always had a fascination with “brainwashing”. It turns out that the human mind is, indeed, pretty plastic out on the far edges, and so long as you don’t care about the health and wellbeing of the object of your literal skullfuckery, you can do some interesting things. For instance, a book on every dissident’s shelf should be The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, by Joost Meerloo. You’ll need to get it used, or on Kindle (the usual caveats apply). Meerloo was a Dutch (or Flemish or Walloon, I forget) MD who was briefly detained by the Gestapo during the war. They had nothing more than a cordial chat (by Gestapo standards), but they obviously knew what they were doing, and the only reason Meerloo didn’t get Der Prozess for real was that they didn’t feel the need at that time. He escaped, and the experience charted the course of his professional life.

Like Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (another must-read), I read Meerloo years ago, so my recall of the details is fuzzy, but the upshot is obvious: The techniques of “brainwashing” have been known since at least the Middle Ages, and they’re still the same. Suspected witches in the Early Modern period, for instance, got Der Prozess, and though the witch hunters also had recourse to the rack and thumbscrews and all the rest, none of it was really necessary — isolation, starvation, and sleep deprivation work even better, provided you hit that sweet spot when they’re just starting to go insane …

I’m being deliberately flip about a horrible thing, comrades, because as no doubt distasteful as that is to read, the fact is, we’re doing it to ourselves, everywhere, all the time. Not the starvation part, obviously, but we eat such horribly unnatural diets that our minds are indeed grossly affected. Want proof? Go hardcore keto for a week and watch what happens. Or if that’s too much, you can simulate the experience by going cold turkey off caffeine. I promise you, by the end of day two you’d give the NKVD the worst dirt on your own mother if they sat a steaming hot cup of java in front of you.

Severian, “Kickin’ It Old Skool”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-04.

January 19, 2025

Mark Carney is a serious man … that doesn’t mean he’d be a good political leader

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Line‘s Jen Gerson likes Mark Carney, but she hastens to add that this isn’t necessarily good news for Mr. Carney as she felt the same way about Jim Prentice who was very briefly Premier of Alberta but “demonstrated the political nous of a chicken nugget” and quickly was out of power:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I learned the most valuable lesson from that period of political reporting, one I try to carry with me unto this very day: Never, never let one’s personal feelings about an individual candidate corrupt one’s political analysis. And if you think about it, this is a very important lesson to learn.

I am not a normal person. That which appeals to me is very unlikely to find purchase with sane, feeling voters who hold ordinary jobs and live lives filled with meaningful human connections and real, not-political conversations.

I was thinking about this as I watched Mark Carney announce his intention to run as Liberal leader in Edmonton on Thursday. Carney is a serious man. He has a real CV and a long list of meaningful accomplishments. He’s a man who seems to understand that the “good old times are over”. He’s a man who has navigated several international crises — as he was keen to point out. He’s a man who despises the excesses of both the right and the left. He’s a man who is is focused on building Canada’s economy.

He’s a man who has correctly identified one of the Conservatives’ core weaknesses, their tendency to channel legitimate anger and grievance into thin slogans that offer few substantive plans toward the kinds of significant changes that this country will be required to make. The fact that Carney is making this critique while coming to the fore without offering any substantive plans of his own is only to be expected considering the timeline’s he’s working with, I suppose.

Regardless, Carney is giving Jim Prentice Energy. Jean Charest Energy. Jeb! Energy.

I like him.

[…]

For that matter, if Carney wants to present himself as a strong supporter of Canada, a defender of our sovereignty in the face of America’s re-articulated expansionist ambitions, why did he preempt his leadership launch with an appearance on The Daily Show? What message are we to take from this: that Carney is well liked and respected by the American political milieu that was roundly trounced by Donald Trump?

It doesn’t signal a lot of faith in Canada as a cohesive cultural concept to soft launch your political leadership campaign through a marshmallow chat with an American comedy host. (As an aside, I realize that foreigners aren’t real to Americans, but I’m begging literally any television journalist on a mainstream U.S. network to stop treating our politicians like kawaii pets [Wiki] on loan from a northern Democrat utopia that exists only in their minds. These people can handle hard questions — even about matters that are important to an American audience; like, for example, Canada’s delinquent NATO spending.)

Did Mark Carney not believe that the CBC that I presume he will be campaigning to preserve was up to the challenge of doing the first interview with him? Look, I wouldn’t turn down a chat at Jon Stewart’s table if I got the call, but if the best possible way to reach potential Liberal leadership voters in 2025 is to pop onto American TV, we might as well pack it in, call ourselves 51 and be done with it.

By the way, in case anyone hasn’t yet pointed it out; the average age of a Daily Show audience member is 63. The audience is in steep decline, and it doesn’t even air on any Canadian TV channels anymore. To watch the Carney clip, Canadians have to seek it out on Apple TV or YouTube. Usually the day after because the target demo is usually in bed by 9 p.m. MST now.

​​Dozens of Dead Tiger Tanks at Prokhorovka? – Prokhorovka Part 6

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 18 Jan 2025

As the dust settles on the fields of Prokhorovka, Indy takes a look at the losses suffered by the Red Army and the Waffen-SS. But we soon see that Rotmistrov and the Soviets have launched a calculated propaganda operation to distort the numbers and paint the battle as a crushing victory.
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California’s wildfire plight

Theophilus Chilton on the end of California dreamin’:

Southern California has had a REALLY rough week. Wildfires, started by arsonists and driven by the Santa Ana winds, have burned thousands of acres in the city and county of Los Angeles and destroyed over $150 billion worth of property (and counting). As I write this, the fires still burn and largely remain uncontained, even as new blazes break out. It is a disaster of epic proportions, striking one of the richest and most economically and culturally relevant portions of the country.

Never ones to let a crisis go to waste, the Left responded to this disaster by … focusing on climate change. Not empty fire hydrants, not drained reservoirs, not incompetent leadership, but climate change. These fires, we have been breathlessly assured, are the result of ever-worsening climatic conditions in the region, drying it out and making it susceptible to this kind of affliction. Never mind that observers since Spanish times consistently noted the same kind of weather conditions and hazards that we see today, which suggests that maybe things aren’t actually changing all that much. Of course, those who are blaming climate change fail to recognise the fundamentally chaotic, nonlinear nature of the Earth’s biosphere and the interactions of its constituent parts, something governed by complexity (in the chaos/complexity theory sense of the term). As a result, it’s somewhat foolish to try to draw a direct, causal link between two variables (such as atmospheric CO2 content and temperature) which depend upon nonlinear interactions with hundreds of other factors. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be getting much traction with this.

So what did create the conditions that burned down Los Angeles?

First of all, there was the implementation of a number of policies driven by the state’s radical environmentalist lobby. Thanks to the fanatics, common sense policies that would help to mitigate the region’s inherent fire hazard went undone. Regular controlled burns of underbrush are a standard conservation technique in dry areas that help to thin out brush and prevent wildfires from getting out of control. Building a sufficient number of desalination plants is a good way for coastal desert areas to provide themselves with abundant fresh water for things like drinking, watering crops, filling reservoirs, and fighting fires. In fact, filling reservoirs for future needs would make a lot of sense. But all of these things are “unnatural” and might have “negative impacts” on local wildlife and whatnot.

Another contributory issue is the state’s policies towards the chronically homeless and its de facto sanctuary status for illegal aliens. The Reagan-era deinstitutionalisation of the homeless has been a nationwide disaster for years and California’s particular policies have made the situation in their state even worse. For decades, California has regularly seen wildfires caused by untended campfires started by homeless junkies getting out of control, which the state’s liberal approach to its indigent population has only made more prevalent. Likewise, California’s harbouring of illegal aliens has created a situation in which the state is flooded with masses of hostile foreign elements, some of whom have been caught starting fires all around the LA basin and creating the current catastrophe.

Then there is the fact that California has systematically implemented a set of DEI policies for its governmental workers, including its firefighters. As a result, the state’s leadership in the relevant departments is very good at “promoting inclusion,” but not so good at dealing competently with emergencies when they take place. Indeed, Los Angeles’ mayor Karen Bass and LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley presided over budget cuts for the city’s firefighting capabilities while adding layers of “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracy aimed at systematically de-white-maleing the department and depriving it of the demographic most prone to self-sacrifice and overall technical competence. That reflects trends across the board in which the state and the city have regularly spent more on gay choirs and social justice artwork than they have on necessary functions of government.

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How to Make a Wallclock | Episode 5

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 13 Sept 2024

The main joinery for the clock and the panel all came together, and now we are ready to form the roundovers to the top and bottom pieces.

We will use the traditional method using a bench plane and, in our case, a #4 version. Following this shaping, we can focus on the final finishing of all of the components by scraping and sanding the surfaces.

After all of the parts are sanded, we follow specific patterns for gluing up the main carcass of the clock.
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