Tag: History

Amid the Absurdity of Clownworld: How Should We Then Live?

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 

I believe people are as they think. The choice we make in the next decade will mold irrevocably the direction of our culture… and the lives of our children.

– Author and theologian Francis A. Schaeffer in 1976

 

The picture at the top of this article shows one of America’s founding fathers according to Google’s Gemini image generation tool.  Pursuant to complaints about the blatant inaccuracy and the ensuing maelstrom of negative press coverage, Google claimed it was “actively working on a fix”. Nonetheless, there remain claims that Google is “not telling the truth” and the company will never give up on its “desire to reshape the world in a specific way”.

Indeed.  It appears artificial intelligence, woke relativism, and Orwell’s “two plus two equaling five” are here to stay. And the “memory hole” first conjured by Orwell has increasingly manifested in The Borg’s nearly completed Simulacrum – as misinformation, false flags, and propaganda daily populate our collective screens.

With that in mind, amid the absurdity of Western culture in the twenty-first century, I will often seek credible information and insights where they are more surely found: in the printed past, and by the words of authors and researchers mostly forgotten.

Having written previously on the prescient prognostications of twentieth-century thinkers like C.S. Lewis and Augusto Del Noce, another book was recommended by a commenter in the thread of my last article.  The book was said to have predicted the decline of empirical science, the rise of technological science, and a frightening future.

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The Great Depression II

Via International Man

Whenever a movie has been a huge hit, the film industry tries to follow it up by doing a sequel. The sequel is almost invariably far more costly, as there’s the anticipation by those who create it that it will be an even bigger blockbuster than the original.

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When Ukraine Was Invaded 700 Years Ago… Another Superpower Was in Decline

Via Sovereign Man

In the autumn of 1362, on the banks of Syniukha River in eastern Europe, General Algirdas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was about to do something that would have been unthinkable only a few decades before.

He was going to invade Ukraine and take over the Principality of Kiev.

Kiev at the time was a client state of the Mongolian Empire which had long been the world’s dominant superpower. But Mongolia was in obvious decline.

In the early 1200s under Genghis Khan, everyone in the known world was terrified of the Mongols. No one would have dared to antagonize them.

Genghis’s successors, including his grandson Kublai Khan, continued to wield this immense power into the early 1300s, a century after the empire’s formation.

But then things started to change.

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The Ashes of Our Fathers

By Tim  Stebbins

 

“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods”

Thomas Babington Macaulay

I have been trying for some days to get my head around what it is I want to say in this particular essay. I grow weary of endless discussion and pointless speculation about the current condition of this country. A different voice whispers in my ear. A different picture forms in my mind’s eye.

An increasing number of my countrymen, it seems, no longer possess the ability to look to the past with any degree of honesty. Nor are there many left able to look to the future with any degree of hope. We live in Orwell’s eternal present, adrift on a sea of ignorance and apathy, bereft of any mooring in the truth of our history, or any lodestar to guide us into our future.

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The Fastest Speed Ever Reached by a Man-made Object?

https://sierrahotel.net/blogs/news/the-fastest-speed-ever-reached-by-a-manmade-object?_pos=1&_sid=7414a29b1&_ss=r

Fastest boat … 317 mph
Fastest land vehicle … 763 mph
Fastest air breathing aircraft … 2,193 mph
Fastest rocket powered aircraft … 4,520 mph
Fastest manned vehicle … Apollo 10 Command Service Module … 24,791 mph (Space Shuttle in orbit … only 17,180 mph)
Voyager 1 Space Probe … 38,000 mph (most distant man-made object from Earth, but not the fastest)

The highest velocity ever achieved by a man-made object in human history was …

a manhole cover

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A Short History Of Christmas In America

What is wrong with the picture below? Everything.

Jesus wasn’t born on Dec.25th … or, even in December.  He wasn’t visited by three Kings. Christmas trees had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t born in a barn/stable surrounded by farm animals. He wasn’t laid on a wooden manger.  There was no literal star, or other celestial body, hovering over Bethlehem.  Two gospels conflict whether or not Jesus was even born in Bethlehem.  We don’t know if angels were present at the manger. And until  about 400 A.D., the early church knew absolutely nothing about celebrating Jesus’ birth.

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The Beaches of Normandy 75 Years Ago: Images, Links and Stories

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower made the final decision to launch Overlord, as the D-Day invasion was code-named, June 5, 1944.   Storms delayed the original invading force,  but only briefly.  Eisenhower assembled and briefed the invading forces on the launch planned for the following day, June 6.

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/446403-ikes-soldiers-remember-d-day-those-who-served-and-why

More than two and a half million soldiers, sailors, and airmen were briefed on the details of the invasion, which included landing troops on five sections of beach to move inland on roads and exits secured by paratroopers dropped behind line.

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Da Joos, Pollack’s, and the History of Ukraine

Yup, a somewhat lengthy article. Few will give a rat’s ass. Except those, like me, who love a good historical tale. T4C might like it, cuz Russia. Yojimbo might like it, cuz Joos. Austrians might like it, cuz our once mighty Empire. Nostalgia, baby. Hungarians might drool over their goulash. Pollack’s might hate it, cuz … well, they’re Pollack’s.

The Jews, The Poles, and the History of Western Ukraine (Galicia)

WW2 drove hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Slavic peoples who identified as part of the Russian world off of lands they had been inhabiting for 1000 years, beginning with the original Russian nation state of Kievan Rus’. These lands are now part of Poland.

Understanding the historical backdrop to this, going back hundreds of years, is critical to understanding what is happening today in the region, especially to understanding relations between Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

Galicia – a land trapped between east and west.

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If We Erase Our History, Who Are We?

Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan

When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson.

Before Fields ran down the protesters, and then backed up, running down more, what was happening seemed but a bloody brawl between extremists on both sides of the issue of whether Robert E. Lee’s statue should be removed from Emancipation Park, formerly Lee Park.

With Heyer’s death, the brawl was elevated to a moral issue. And President Donald Trump’s initial failure to denounce the neo-Nazi and Klan presence was declared a moral failure.

How did we get here, and where are we going?

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The Confluence

Guest Post by The Zman

Everyone likes to think they live in interesting times, but it is really hard to know as you can only really know your age. You can read about the past, but you really can’t know what it was like to be alive in a prior age. What we come to think of us great eras or important periods are usually when one period ends and another begins. That means the violent end of some portion of the established order and the noisy birth of its replacement. The French Revolution is an obvious example.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.”

James Fenimore Cooper

“The first duty of a man is to think for himself”

José Martí

“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”

Dan Brown

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Carl Sagan

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YGTBSM

This just in. George Washington University (GWU) has changed its course requirements for obtaining a history major to no longer include U.S. history. The university’s history department recently introduced new requirements with the stated aim of giving students greater flexibility to pursue their interests, and to “better reflect a globalizing world,” whatever that means. (In case you were interested, the annual tuition to this private Snowflake U. is $51,800. Great, Mommy and Daddy spend over $207,000 for their precious son or daughter to get a history degree that may completely exclude any deep historical knowledge of the country in which they live.)

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. ”

Michael Crichton

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

George Orwell

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Mark Twain

“Study the past if you would define the future.”

Confucius


CORRUPTION

Guest Post by James the Wanderer

In 1981 I was a fresh young fellow, just out of college, and needed a job. I joined the Port Arthur Research Laboratories of Texaco Inc. in Port Arthur, TX, which was the most lucrative offer I had gotten out of college. It was one of a couple of offers I had received at the time; another was a company that made fibers for carpets and other things, Millikan. There was something of a stigma on them at the time, for periodically the owner would fire an entire corps of engineers if something went wrong, and was known for it; other companies would eagerly hire the fallen, since it was known that Millikan did this, despite having only hired the best he could find. But I was not interested in this, so I went for stability, which was TXC (their stock exchange symbol back then, hereafter a handy shortcut for the name); they were known for their veteran employees, and rarely fired anyone except for theft, incompetence or similar good reasons. I was neither a thief nor incompetent, so I took their offer.

Here I must apologize; despite the passage of over a quarter-century, I have not been able to establish that ALL the people I worked with are dead, retired or otherwise employed. And TXC had people of honor, character and discipline, which I have come to value wherever I find them; so EVERY name here is a pseudonym, to protect those who might still be serving in some capacity for their successor company, which turned out to be mainly Chevron, or somewhere else. I have no interest in gossip, nor maligning by association those who honorably do their jobs in this world. The worst perpetrators in these stories are dead, so it serves no purpose to name them either.

This article is to demonstrate by example the challenge of working honorably for an organization that is corrupt at the top. And how, despite the existence of honorable men and women (such as those who worked for TXC all over the world), a corrupt organization is doomed eventually.
I didn’t work at PARL for long; about eighteen months. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers were restless; there was strike fever in the air at the oil refinery next door, but the Research lab staff didn’t think there would be one; after all, they had “gone out” a few years earlier, and several members of the union had lost cars, boats, even homes when they had insufficient funds coming in to keep up their payments; they were too hurt from the last time to go out again so soon, so if there was a strike it would be short, a kind of face-saving gesture.

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