HT: Bird Dog.

Babylon Bee:

AFGHANISTAN—Sergeant Bruce Larson, 28, was deployed to Afghanistan as part of a mechanized Army combat unit in the fall, after informing his superiors that he self-identified as an M1A1 Abrams tank.

Tragically, the man was killed in his first combat engagement over the weekend.

After being ordered to flank an enemy position, Larson crested a hill, making tank noises and yelling, “BOOM!” as he fired his imaginary 105mm gun at Taliban forces. Confused enemy soldiers watched him from a distance as he continued to lay down “suppressing fire” by making loud “pew pew pew” noises with his mouth, which he identifies as his .50-caliber secondary armament.

Finally, the bewildered Taliban forces shot at him, according to an Army debriefing. Sadly, although the man identified as the advanced modern combat vehicle, the bullets shot at him from an enemy combatant’s AK-47 did not agree with his perception of reality, and he tragically lost his life, according to sources.

The man was not buried but was scrapped for parts at a U.S. Army scrapyard, per his wishes. He is survived by his wife, who identifies as an F-22 Raptor.

At Sotheby’s London, “Of Royal and Noble Descent” Auction, Lot 116:

AN EXCEPTIONALLY LARGE FRAGMENT OF THE UNION FLAG, BELIEVED TO HAVE FLOWN FROM HMS VICTORY AT THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR
comprising eight panels of red, white and blue hand-woven woollen bunting, hand-stitched together to form part of the bottom-right (or top-left) quadrant of the Union flag, hemmed at the bottom (or top), hem turned over enclosing c.460mm of twine, crudely torn at the edges, c.860 x 920 mm, mounted, framed, and glazed (frame size 1125 x 1125mm), c.1801-1805

AN EVOCATIVE AND IMPRESSIVE RELIC OF NELSON AND TRAFALGAR. Nelson’s ships sailed into battle at Trafalgar flying the national flag rather than just their squadron colours, as a result of an order issued by Nelson in the days before the battle: “When in the presence of an Enemy, all the Ships under my command are to bear white Colours [i.e. St George’s Ensign], and a Union Jack is to be suspended from the fore top-gallant stay” (10 October 1805). HMS Victory consequently flew two Union flags and a St George’s Ensign, which were returned to England with the ship and the body of Nelson.

These battle ensigns, unique patriotic mementoes of Nelson’s final and greatest victory, were later woven into the solemn and dignified series of ceremonials that marked his state funeral in January 1806. The body lay in state at the Painted Hall at Greenwich for four days before processing upriver in a funeral barge with a flotilla of naval escorts, disembarking at Whitehall Stairs and resting overnight in the Admiralty. The following day, 9 January, a vast procession followed Nelson’s remains to St Paul’s Cathedral, the site of the funeral. Incorporated into the funeral cortege was a group of 48 seamen and Marines from HMS Victory, who bore with them the ship’s three battle ensigns and were, according to one eyewitness, “repeatedly and almost continually cheered as they passed along”. At the conclusion of the funeral service, with the coffin placed at the heart of the cathedral beneath Wren’s great dome, the sailors were supposed to fold the flags and place them reverently on the coffin. The conclusion of the service, in fact, played out rather differently, as described by the Naval Chronicle (1806): “the Comptroller, Treasurer and Steward of his Lordship’s household then broke their staves, and gave the pieces to Garter, who threw then into the grave, in which all the flags of the Victory, furled up by the sailors were deposited – These brave fellows, however, desirous of retaining some memorials of their great and favourite commander, had torn off a considerable part of the largest flag, of which most of them obtained a portion.” According to one acute observer: “That was Nelson: the rest was so much the Herald’s office.” (See The Nelson Companion, ed. White (1995), pp8-14)

Most of the surviving fragments of the Victory’s flags are much smaller than the current piece. Small fragments of white and blue bunting, no more than 12cm in length, have appeared at auction (e.g. Bonhams, 28 September 2004, lot 117; Sotheby’s, 17 December 2009, lot 9) and other similar fragments are found at the National Maritime Museum and other institutional collections. Only two complete Union jacks that were used as battle ensigns at Trafalgar survive: one from HMS Minotaur (National Maritime Museum), the other from HMS Spartiate (sold at auction by Charles Miller Ltd., 21 October 2009, lot 53, £384,000).

Estimate: 80,000 — 100,000 GBP — 105,376 – 131,720 USD

People who are just smart enough to graduate from college and to read establishment organs commonly lack any capability for sound reasoning and critical thinking. Instead, they rely on a trained ability to recognize the group consensus of the community of fashion, and they cling to that consensus like lemmings. Membership in the in-group matters to them, above everything else.

Selwyn Duke explains:

[The Progressive ideology is] wholly resistant to intellectual appeals. You can’t logically talk someone out of something irrational on which his self-worth is based. In fact, if it begins to dawn on such a person that his notions of superiority – and hence his self-image – rest on a lie, it will be intensely painful and depressing. The individual will thus have a strong incentive to rationalize away this realization.

I don’t claim that every single leftist derives his self-esteem from the notion that he’s part of a superior group called “liberals,” nor does this phenomenon completely explain leftist resistance to reason. But it is common among devoted liberals, and it’s part of why, as a group, they can’t give traditionalist views a fair hearing. Doing so doesn’t just threaten their ideology; it threatens who they are, their entire self-image. Any argument that may give them even an inkling that they’re wrong can induce a bit of panic and is thus quickly rationalized away – often as the rambling of uneducated, un-evolved mouth-breathers who just don’t know any better.

This phenomenon is exacerbated by two related factors. First, liberals are generally dysfunctional, vice-ridden people who embrace what we call liberalism because its underlying relativism and nihilism help them justify their sins. (They become the arbiters of their own “values.” “Everything is gray, a matter of perspective. I have my own ‘truth.'”) Simultaneously, liberalism allows these virtue-bereft people to virtue-signal by paying homage to the day’s fashionable values. In other words, liberals are generally morally “unaccomplished” people who often have nothing to cling to but the illusion of intellectual, and often moral, superiority.

RTWT

If conservatives ever figure out how to make good sense chic, Liberalism is doomed.

But they’re OK. They sink into a lower metabolic state when it gets cold and stick their snouts out of icy ponds to continue breathing.

National Post

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The tradition of Swans on the Moat at The Bishop’s Palace (adjacent to Wells Cathedral) goes back to 1870’s when one of Bishop Hervey’s daughters first taught the swans to ring a bell at the Gatehouse for lunch to be fed to them by the caretakers who live in the gatehouse.

New generations of swans learn to ring the bell from their parents.

Yesterday 2067 years ago.

And Ghostsniper succeeds very well in persuading me that I don’t really need one of these myself.

I bought a Harley, of sorts, back in 1974 and I was 19 at the time.

Hanging around a marina waiting for them to finish up welding a lower unit for an Evinrude inboard/outboard engine my dad and I were rebuilding I spotted a cardboard box in a fenced in area in the back lot. Inspection showed it to contain Harley parts and a frame close by. I asked the owner about it and he said $500 and I could take it home. I went to the house and told my dad and he got all wobbly and handed me 5 crisp C-notes from his wallet. Back at the house we found the box, and 3 other boxes that went with it, contained parts from 3 old Harley’s with most of the parts going to a 49 Knucklehead. So that’s what we built. Took about 3 months from boxes to running but still had a ways to go.

With my dad next to me on his 69 Harley and me driving the 49 we headed down Gladiolus Blvd to the state inspection station to get it inspected, registered, and tagged. Going into the first curve just east of Harlem Heights the 49 locked tight at about 60 mph. If it had been the front wheel things would have gotten nasty quick but since it was the rear wheel a skid spontaneously started about the same time 20 mph were knocked off causing me to slide up onto the tank and losing my balance. The sides of the road curved down steeply and that’s where I ended up, at the bottom of the easement with both me and the bike tore up. Leaving the 49 there I rode home with my dad and got patched up then we took the truck back and picked it up and brought it home.

Under close inspection we found the engine had seized. We had spent I don’t know how many hours putting that engine together the right way. A machine shop was commissioned to blueprint the crankshaft, plane the block, barrels and heads, port and relieve the valves, etc. The barrels were bored .30 over and new pistons and wrist pins were installed. It ran really good.

As we tried to determine what went wrong, I discovered that in the bottom of the external oil tank was a small pipe leading to a pipe that fed the engine. In the bottom of that tank was a double edged razor blade that I presumed a previous owner had used to scrape off a gasket and it had fallen it. The slot in the razor blade was where the oil flowed through and in it’s limited quantity it had quickly caused the engine to heat up, swell, and seize. As this happened very quickly and was shut down very quickly the damage was minimal. No galling of the piston skirts or any of that stuff. All gaskets were removed with close attention spent on gasket removing tools and materials, and replaced and several trips around the block after assembly showed everything was alright. We got the thing registered.

RTWT

HT: Vanderleun.

I’m not a motorcycle guy. Some biker friends taught me to ride one a bit, back when I was a teenager. But I only ever owned one once.

I had a mad mathematical genius friend at Yale. He was the wealthy scion of a Southern family, but he lived by choice a life of Thoreauvian simplicity. He owned nothing beyond two shirts, two pair of jeans, and one of those unadmired little Italian cycles mendaciously labelled “Harley Davidson.” (I just looked it up. It was an “H” really made by Aermacchi.)

He roomed with some druggie friends of mine in a beach house in Milford and commuted (with difficulty) into Yale every day on that unreliable bike. We used to draw considerable amusement watching him start it. Kick (the routine would go), sputter, silence, kick, sputter, silence, kick, sputter, LOUD CURSING. Yet somehow, mysteriously, he would finally get that sucker running.

For some reason I’ve never understood, he decided I needed his bike. He had graduated and was going off to grad school, and he announced that he was selling me his Harley for $150. I don’t want it, I replied. You need it, he insisted. I’m not buying it, I said firmly.

But he simply left it at my door, when he departed town, so I concluded I owed him $150, payable when Hell froze over or the swallows came back to Capistrano or whenever.

I finally took a notion to try to ride the thing. I got my best mechanically-minded friend to help, and I climbed astride. Kick, I went. Sputter, it went. Then, silence. We kicked some more. We fiddled with it. We monkeyed with the beast for hours, but we just did not have our friend’s magic touch. We could not start it at all.

I finally successfully traded it off for an ancient shotgun to a cousin of mine, and sent my friend his $150. I concluded that Fate just did not want me owning a bike.

Elizabeth Lambert of the University of New Mexico Lobos (despite being suspended) has won a lot of fans nationally with her hard-hitting style of soccer, seen here against the Brigham Young Cougars.