Yaba Blay: “White people, your money will not assuage your way out of guilt. You can not pay your way out of this. There are not enough reparations in the world.”
Amusingly, Yaba Blay was born to Ghanian parents in New Orleans. If reparations are due for Slavery, her Ghanian ancestors undoubtedly owe a lot more than any white Americans. Naturally, she contributes to CNN. link
A woman in England was interrogated before being issued a penalty for praying silently outside an abortion clinic. Thought crimes will now get you punished in England pic.twitter.com/szq6ehephM
Europe’s bog bodies have fascinated people since one was first documented in 1640 in Holstein, Germany. Since then, some 2,000 more bodies have emerged in the wetlands of Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Scandinavia, and the Baltic States. A groundbreaking study published in January 2023 in the journal Antiquity estimates that figure is conservative, and the actual number could be much higher.
Bog bodies provide a tangible connection with a remote ancestral past, while also serving as a grim reminder of the harsh daily lives of most people. Looking at the mortal remains—whether the peaceful visage of Tollund Man or the curly hair of Bocksten Man—one cannot help but imagine their lives and ponder the causes of their deaths. Were they the most loathed among their people, or were they sacrificed to please the gods? Whether accidental drownings, executed outlaws, fallen warriors, or human sacrifices, these people’s well-preserved remains are providing fascinating windows into a 7,000-year-old tradition and the cultures who practiced it.
I thought I knew almost everything about guns, but reading Louis L’Amour’s short story “Mistakes Can Kill You” in the collection West of the Tularosa, I was rather astonished to find Johnny O’Day surviving the gloating of the villainous Loss Degner, who confesses his crimes and expresses the intention of cold-bloodedly gunning Johnny down at his leisure, since Johnny has just fired six times winning a shootout with two of Degner’s henchmen.
Johnny responds by putting three rounds into Degner’s chest, telling him:
“This ain’t a six-shooter. It’s a Walch twelve-shot Navy gun, thirty-six caliber. She’s right handy, Loss, and it only goes to show you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
The 12-shot Walch is one of the more rare American percussion revolvers. Patented in 1859 by John Walch of New York City, only 200-300 were reportedly manufactured by Walch Firearms & Co. Walch contracted the production to the Union Knife Company in Naugatuck, Conn., as he did not own production facilities.
The Navy designation suggests it was purchased by this branch of the service – it wasn’t – but because the Navy favored .36 caliber martial revolvers.
The Walch had a 6-chambered cylinder with each chamber taking a stacked double load. The mechanism of the Walch Navy Revolver was unique, with two nipples per chamber and two hammers to fire them, along with two triggers to do so. This invention is at the core of Walch’s patent.
In practice, the shooter pulled the right trigger first to fire the front charge, then the second trigger to fire the rear charge. If the shooter was not paying attention and pulled the wrong sequence of triggers, the ignition of the rear charge before the front charge was previously fired from the front of the cylinder, and mayhem would ensue. As firearms collectors have seen many times, the invention of a better mousetrap does not necessarily mean so. Certainly, the lack of acceptance of the Walch Navy Revolver for the above reasons contributed to its limited production.
The Business Insider reports that suddenly, who would ever have imagined? Woke Extremism in the form of on-campus support for Hamas may have untoward consequences for students at elite schools like Harvard.
It started when dozens of student groups issued a statement holding Israel’s government “entirely responsible” for the violence that Hamas unleashed in Gaza. That, in turn, prompted billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to demand that his alma mater disclose the names of students who are members of the signatory groups — even those who didn’t know about the statement — so Wall Street firms could avoid hiring them. Adding to the tension, a truck roamed campus displaying the names and photos of students alleged to be involved with the statement.
It was a strange position for Harvard to find itself in. The university has long enjoyed a place of honor among the power elite. It sends more graduates into the bulge bracket banks than any other school. Large law firms also love hiring from Harvard, and Silicon Valley loves to place big bets on the university’s graduates. Over the past three years, according to Crunchbase, about one of every 10 dollars invested in early-stage startups went to Harvard alumni.
But Ackman’s broadside exposed a deeper rift among conservative industries like Wall Street and Big Law and the campuses they’ve historically recruited from. As a new generation of graduates has emerged, they have found themselves and the campus culture they’re a part of increasingly at odds with the values and expectations of the big banks and white-shoe law firms they’ve been trained to staff. …
An investor at an asset management firm in Silicon Valley privately told Insider that he recently spoke to a hedge-fund founder who made no bones about how he approaches hiring. When a résumé hits his desk, the founder said, he skips over the sections on experience and education and instead races to the bottom of the page, where applicants list their “activities.” Then, if he sees something he doesn’t like, he will simply “rip up” the résumé and reject the applicant as a “bad cultural fit.”
For Harvard students — especially those in the business and law schools — having prominent leaders in your chosen profession openly declare that they won’t hire graduates who hold political views they disagree with is not an academic issue — it’s an existential threat. …
now, some Harvard students fear that the backlash from the business community will have a chilling effect on student speech. Like it or not, they say, students have to think about how expressing their views could affect their financial and professional prospects. That’s especially true when Wall Street billionaires are posting on X, formerly Twitter, and professional network LinkedIn has become a home for all kinds of sharing. There’s every chance today that what’s said on campus won’t stay on campus.
A first-year law student told Insider that students would be wise to think through what voicing their opinions could mean for their future employment, especially in a buttoned-down field like law. “The general advice,” he said, “is to keep your opinions to yourself for the most part.”
A second-year law student, who was appalled by the letter, likewise sympathized with fellow students who were unnerved by having their words provoke such ire beyond the campus. “There is a real employment consequence for people — and that is a scary situation,” she said. “We are all here with a lot of student loans, and we need to work.”
Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.
In his magisterial biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison observes:
[Christopher Columbus did] more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. …
The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration.
The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.
Palestinians marching around the body of a young Israeli woman. These are the people world leaders want Israel to make peace with. pic.twitter.com/VWR9su4SHs
