Archive for November, 2021
10 Nov 2021


Founded November 10, 1775.
——————————
Maj. Gen. John A. Lejeune’s Birthday Message
RPS ORDERS
No. 47 (Series 1921)
HEADQUARTERS U.S. MARINE CORPS
Washington, November 1, 1921
759. The following will be read to the command on the 10th of November, 1921, and hereafter on the 10th of November of every year. Should the order not be received by the 10th of November, 1921, it will be read upon receipt.
(1) On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of Continental Congress. Since that date many thousand men have borne the name “Marine”. In memory of them it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the birthday of our corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history.
(2) The record of our corps is one which will bear comparison with that of the most famous military organizations in the world’s history. During 90 of the 146 years of its existence the Marine Corps has been in action against the Nation’s foes. From the Battle of Trenton to the Argonne, Marines have won foremost honors in war, and is the long eras of tranquility at home, generation after generation of Marines have grown gray in war in both hemispheres and in every corner of the seven seas, that our country and its citizens might enjoy peace and security.
(3) In every battle and skirmish since the birth of our corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term “Marine” has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.
(4) This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the corps. With it we have also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our corps from generation to generation and has been the distinguishing mark of the Marines in every age. So long as that spirit continues to flourish Marines will be found equal to every emergency in the future as they have been in the past, and the men of our Nation will regard us as worthy successors to the long line of illustrious men who have served as “Soldiers of the Sea” since the founding of the Corps.
JOHN A. LEJEUNE,
Major General Commandant
————————————-
The Magic of “a Few Good Men”
————————————-
The Old Corps
Tun Tavern, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 10th 1775
Captains Nicholas and Mullens, having been tasked by the 2nd Continental Congress to form 2 battalions of Marines, set up the Corps’ first recruiting station in the tavern.
The first likely prospect was, in typical recruiters fashion, promised a “life of high adventure in service to Country and Corps”. And, as an extra bonus: If he enlisted now he would receive a free tankard of ale….
The recruit gladly accepted the challenge and, receiving the free tankard of ale, was told to wait at the corner table for orders.
The first Marine sat quietly at the table sipping the ale when he was joined by another young man, who had two tankards of ale.
The first Marine looked at the lad and asked where he had gotten the two tankards of ale?
The lad replied that he had just joined this new outfit called the Continental Marines, and as an enlistment bonus was given two tankards of ale.
The first Marine took a long hard look at the second Marine and said, ” It wasn’t like that in the old Corps.”
An annual post.
09 Nov 2021


Yorkshire Post:
Calverley Old Hall, between Leeds and Bradford, is currently subject to a major repair and renovation programme funded by the Landmark Trust, who have owned the building and run part of it as a holiday let since 1981.
The oldest parts of the hall date back to the 14th century but most of it is Tudor. It was the seat of the Calverley family for centuries until the 1750s, when they sold the estate and moved to Esholt Hall. Calverley Old Hall was then subdivided into cottages.
Ahead of the current restoration work, historians and conservation specialists were able to examine the fabric of the building and made an incredible discovery behind a 1930s fireplace. …
Dr Anna Keay, who worked at the site, said: “An exposed area of timber seemed to have something on it; reddish, greenish, and blackish stains on the oak. We thought they could just be the streaks and smudges of mould and dirt and decay. It looked to be wishful thinking that this was anything of note. But just on the off chance, ever cautious, we decided to ask the conservators at Lincoln Conservation to have a look. …
Two days were allocated… to remove the later plaster altogether and see how much remained beneath. I stopped in on the morning of day two, expecting them to have only just begun. When I walked up the stairs into the room I was simply overcome. The plaster had gone and there on all three walls before me was a revelation. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, a complete, highly decorated Tudor chamber, stripped with black and red and white and ochre. Mythical creatures and twining vines, classical columns and roaring griffins.
“Wall paintings were prized in grand Tudor houses, and from time to time patches of them are revealed. But never in my own 27 years of working in historic buildings have I ever witnessed a discovery like this. Hidden panelling, yes, little snatches of decorative painting, once or twice. But an entire painted chamber absolutely lost to memory, a time machine to the age of the Reformation and the Virgin Queen, never. …
“Suddenly, we are transported from a dusty, dilapidated building into the rich and cultured world of the Elizabethan Calverleys, a well-educated family keen to display their learning and wealth by demonstrating their appreciation of Renaissance culture. The Calverley paintings are very carefully planned, in a vertical design that uses the timber studwork as a framework. Teethed birds laugh in profile; the torsos of little men in triangular hats sit on vases or balustrades. When the fantastical figures and architectural elements are incorporated into dense vertical stacks as at Calverley Old hall, they’re known as ‘candelabra.’
“The whole chamber was probably originally covered in the scheme, a rich, dark, private space that must have been all the more impressive by candlelight.”
RTWT
Wikipedia entry:
The hall was witness to dreadful violence in April 1605, when Walter Calverley murdered two of his sons, William and Walter, after drinking heavily. He was tried in York for murder, but refused to plead and was therefore pressed to death. Because of his refusal, his property could not be seized by the state, and passed to his surviving baby son. The murder inspired the Jacobean play A Yorkshire Tragedy, the authorship of which was attributed to William Shakespeare in the first printed edition (1608) but which is now thought to have been written by Thomas Middleton.
09 Nov 2021

HT: Vanderleun.
And there’s no penalty for being wrong. You still get to keep the prizes and awards and your faculty position at some elite university.
Paul Erlich, in 1968, famously warned:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Erlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies Emeritus at Stanford University, president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
You can spout utter and complete horsecrap, but still wind up successful and covered with honors as long as it’s fashionable horsecrap.
07 Nov 2021


“Gotta problem? Send Rip.”
Tracy Moore assures fellow Coastal Elite liberal Vanity Fair readers that they, too, can watch Yellowstone’s new season (starting tonight).
The show’s flagrant Conservative values and attitudes, you see, are only on the surface and they’re simply there to pull the wool over the eyes of the bitter clinging yokels. In reality, the popular program is speaking the orthodox leftist gospel: denouncing cisgendered masculine violence and ruthless individualism, condemning the white colonialists’ crimes against the noble red man, and agreeing with Proudhon that Property is Theft.
Yellowstone has been called “prestige TV for conservatives,” which explains a lot. “People perceive all my stuff as red state, and it’s the most ridiculous thing,” Sheridan told the New York Times in 2019. “If you truly look at this show…these are pretty wildly progressive notions. The people who are calling it a red-state show have probably never watched it.”
That may be. Or maybe it’s that Yellowstone buries its progressive notions in soapy scenes, over-the-top violence, and grandstanding soliloquies. But either way, Yellowstone is up to something curious. It’s an entertaining and sometimes graphically violent drama, but one that hooks viewers with entertaining brawls, complex family threads, and a willingness to (mostly) punch up. The show may not enjoy the prestige it wants, but it’s a clever conceit that pulls a nifty trick on its core audience.
At a glance, Yellowstone does look like a white male conservative power fantasy—and a white conservative female fantasy of the protection that comes with that. Son Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley) is a weak-willed college boy who brought his Harvard law degree home to protect his family’s empire. Son Kayce (Luke Grimes), a Navy vet, married Native American woman Monica (Kelsey Asbille), and had a son, Tate (Brecken Merrill), all of whom remain on the reservation, far from the ranch’s perks. Over three seasons, we’ve watched the Duttons negotiate with Broken Rock leaders, whose new chairman, Thomas Rainwater (Gil Birmingham), intends to use his own Harvard MBA to settle an age-old score. We’ve seen a stream of villainous billionaire developers eager to refashion this natural wonder into ski resorts and second homes. We’ve seen alliances change faster than a horse bucks a cowboy at the rodeo.
There’s also a steady stream of sick burns about California and the white libruls enticed to Big Sky Country, whether it’s mocking pour-over coffee in nearby Bozeman, or scheming developer Dan Jenkins (Danny Huston) delivering this scathing line: “This isn’t California, gentleman. It’s Montana. We can do anything we want here.”
City folk are endless fodder, depicted as weak, soft-handed interlopers. Most every granola tourist is from the Golden State, and they often meet gruesome ends thanks to their arrogance about the landscape’s beauty, which hides danger at every turn.
There are only two kinds of men here: Real ones and pussies, a word slung so often in the show—mostly by women, all spun from golden hyperfeminine grit—that I lost count. It’s easy to imagine old-school conservatives—the kind who already had a boner for Reagan but save their biggest boner for Teddy Roosevelt—eating this up.
As entertaining as it sounds, there’s more going on beneath Yellowstone’s surface. One fascinating through line is the insurmountable struggles of the Native Americans on the rez, who endure poverty, addiction, violence, and suicide, with the elders determined to change that by casino, lawsuit, or land grab. Another involves the hardscrabble existence of the cowboys (and occasional cowgirls) in the bunkhouse: the orphans, drifters and ex-cons Yellowstone Ranch hires, who keep the ranch going with their backbreaking labor and the muscling. In a place that makes its own rules, street justice must be served swiftly with brawn on both sides.
But the Duttons’ wrongheaded white ways are also undercut at every turn, with hypocritical callouts aplenty. “No man should own this much land,” scolds a trespassing Chinese tourist when confronted by Dutton with a shotgun. “This is America,” Dutton grumbles. “We don’t share land.”
Yet the show never shies from underlining how Dutton is a dinosaur under threat of extinction. Under all that tough cowboy sumbitch stuff, Yellowstone slow-doles a harsh critique of every form of white supremacy even as it humanizes its central family. Monica may be married to a Dutton, but she teaches oblivious, mostly white freshman at the nearby state school the truth about American history and the genocide that nearly killed her people. On the ranch, a barrel racer tells her cowboy boyfriend that the Yellowstone brand on his chest—the Duttons like to brand their cattle and their men—doesn’t prove he belongs there, but that he’s only as good as property.
It’s obvious that the show believes our history’s ideology and laws are deeply encoded with racism; it also thinks things won’t always stay this way. Watching the series, its conservative viewers are forced to face their biggest fears, whether they realize it or not.
I originally misidentified the author as a Canadian television critic. Actually, the correct Tracy Moore is this one.
RTWT
My biggest fear is that Rip won’t get his hands on those responsible for the attacks on the Duttons in the first episode of Season 4.
06 Nov 2021

The Washington Examiner reveals the latest and greatest conspiracy theory.
Though the dead Kennedys didn’t make an appearance in Dallas on Tuesday, that didn’t deter a faction of QAnon supporters expecting the return of the political dynasty, who now have a new target for their affection, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
When the Kennedys failed to appear during the Tuesday gathering, some started to posit that the reveal might still happen at a Rolling Stones concert coincidentally happening in the city that evening. When this also didn’t happen, QAnon accounts on Telegram and Twitter started to speculate that Richards was actually the 35th president, and if 1993 movie Wayne’s World 2 taught the world anything, it’s that “Keith Richards cannot be killed by conventional weapons.”
RTWT
04 Nov 2021


The Week:
A global coalition of financial institutions announced Wednesday that more than 450 firms controlling $130 trillion in assets have committed to shifting the global economy to cleaner energy. On Day 3 of the United Nations’ COP26 climate summit, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero said these banks, investors, and insurers have vowed that the companies and projects they invest in will reach net-zero emissions by 2050. This will mean “every financial decision takes climate change into account,” said former Bank of England chief Mark Carney, who leads the coalition with billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
This, of course, represents nothing but an enormous economic distortion and malallocation of capital on the basis of junk science catastrophist superstition. This will be a staggering-scale tax on the economies of the trans-Atlantic democracies which will very significantly reduce growth and cause the standard of living of the unfortunate citizens of all these participating countries in future to be far lower than otherwise might have been the case. Stupidity, bad leadership, and bad ideas exact a terrible cost on societies.
If we all had the tax rates, the monetary policies, and the kind of sensible leadership that Britain and the United States had in the late Victorian — eariy Edwardian eras, we’d already have those flying cars and have been vacationing on Mars long since.
04 Nov 2021


Samuel John Carter (1835-1892), Legend of St. Hubert, Private Collection (sold December 2007).
Wikipedia:
Saint Hubertus was born (probably in Toulouse) about the year 656. He was the eldest son of Bertrand, Duke of Aquitaine. As a youth, Hubert was sent to the Neustrian court of Theuderic III at Paris, where his charm and agreeable address led to his investment with the dignity of “count of the palace”. Like many nobles of the time, Hubert was addicted to the chase. Meanwhile, the tyrannical conduct of Ebroin, mayor of the Neustrian palace, caused a general emigration of the nobles and others to the court of Austrasia at Metz. Hubert soon followed them and was warmly welcomed by Pepin of Herstal, mayor of the palace, who created him almost immediately grand-master of the household. About this time (682) Hubert married Floribanne, daughter of Dagobert, Count of Leuven.Their son Floribert of Liége would later become bishop of Liége, for bishoprics were all but accounted fiefs heritable in the great families of the Merovingian kingdoms. He nearly died at the age of 10 from “fever”.
His wife died giving birth to their son and Hubert retreated from the court, withdrew into the forested Ardennes, and gave himself up entirely to hunting. However, a great spiritual revolution was imminent. On Good Friday morning, when the faithful were crowding the churches, Hubert sallied forth to the chase. As he was pursuing a magnificent stag or hart, the animal turned and, as the pious legend narrates, he was astounded at perceiving a crucifix standing between its antlers, while he heard a voice saying: “Hubert, unless thou turnest to the Lord, and leadest an holy life, thou shalt quickly go down into hell”. Hubert dismounted, prostrated himself and said, “Lord, what wouldst Thou have me do?” He received the answer, “Go and seek Lambert, and he will instruct you.”…
Saint Hubertus (German) is honored among sport-hunters as the originator of ethical hunting behavior.
During Hubert’s religious vision, the Hirsch (German: deer) is said to have lectured Hubertus into holding animals in higher regard and having compassion for them as God’s creatures with a value in their own right. For example, the hunter ought to only shoot when a humane, clean and quick kill is assured. He ought shoot only old stags past their prime breeding years and to relinquish a much anticipated shot on a trophy to instead euthanize a sick or injured animal that might appear on the scene. Further, one ought never shoot a female with young in tow to assure the young deer have a mother to guide them to food during the winter. Such is the legacy of Hubert who still today is taught and held in high regard in the extensive and rigorous German and Austrian hunter education courses.
The legacy is also followed by the French chasse à courre masters, huntsmen and followers, who hunt deer, boar and roe on horseback and are the last direct heirs of Saint Hubert in Europe. Chasse à courre is currently enjoying a revival in France. The Hunts apply a specific set of ethics, rituals, rules and tactics dating back to the early Middle-Ages. Saint Hubert is venerated every year by the Hunts in formal ceremonies.
——————-
03 Nov 2021


Joy Pullman read Mollie Hemingway’s new boom Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections and found a number of appalling things you and I never had heard of, just for instance:
The DNC Controlled All Poll Watchers for 40 Years
I had to read this section of the book two or three times to absorb what it was saying. I couldn’t believe it could possibly be true. Yet it is: “Shockingly, the 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations.”
What? Next sentence: “For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systemic advantage over its Republican counterpart: the Republican National Committee had been prohibited by law from helping out with poll watcher efforts or nearly any litigation related to how voting is being conducted.”
This section in chapter 1 goes on to explain how such an insane thing could be real. Essentially, after Democrats accused Republicans of cheating in a New Jersey race in 1981, a judge banned the RNC from poll-watching and voting litigation everywhere in the country, then kept re-upping the order until 2018, when it finally expired three years after he died.
This handicapped Republicans for almost 40 years while Democrats were free to do things Republicans couldn’t, like give boosts to their voters all along the voting process and track them extensively, challenge ballots, document irregularities, and sue over election disputes. By 2020, then, Mollie writes:
Democrats had spent the last forty years perfecting their Election Day operations while everyone at the Republican National Committee walked on eggshells, knowing that if they so much as looked in the direction of a polling site, there could be another crackdown. As a result, there was no muscle memory about how to watch polls or communicate with a presidential campaign.
RTWT
/div>
Feeds
|