Honey, I Finished The Internet
The Last Cape Horners: rare first hand accounts from men who sailed from Europe to Australia to load grain and return to Europe by way of the treacherous Cape Horn
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Why All Our Maps Are The Wrong Way Round
Fog of war
At least the Wall Street Journal is willing to step back, however tentatively, from the jingoistic cheerleading choir when it comes to the war in the Ukraine. In reality, Ukraine’s inability to control the skies is going to doom any offensive. And there’s no simple or cheap way to rectify that.
Ukraine had hoped to find gaps in Russia’s fortifications, flood troops through, and cause the kind of havoc that its forces achieved last year among enemy ranks. Instead, unexpectedly dense minefields slowed Kyiv’s initial attacking forces, leaving them exposed to strikes from Russian aircraft and rockets.
Russian drones and attack helicopters, particularly Kamov Ka-52 “Alligator” gunships, have proven particularly dangerous. Ka-52s, which are among Russia’s most modern aircraft, can remain far behind Russian lines and rely on targeting data from spotter drones scanning the front. Their laser-guided Vikhr missiles have a range of roughly 5 miles, which is more than twice the range of any portable antiaircraft missiles in Ukraine’s armory.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
A Brief History of the St. Francis Dam Disaster
Going Cold Turkey
CBS- Goats With Appetite For Human Urine Airlifted Out Of National Park
h/t Cameron
Honey, I Finished The Internet
The 1976 Collapse of the Teton Dam: Investigating the Geology
More here.
Mischief Is Important
— illuminatibot (@iluminatibot) July 19, 2023
War Of The Worlds
In Hollywood, the writers always imagine the world coming together to fight the outside threat. It makes a better story that way and we get to hear some inspiring speeches. But the example of the Bronze Age Collapse teaches us that it’s just as likely that if aliens ever arrived and begin blowing things up, some… might see that as an opportunity.
From Paul Cooper’s Fall of Civilizations, the best channel on Youtube. (1 hour)
Honey, I Finished The Internet
The (Mostly) Forgotten Battle For American Independence…in Yorkshire.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Native American Flood Myths – Randall Carlson
Honey, I Finished The Internet
We all know that Westerns aren’t accurate representations of Old West history.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Since we’re all talking about the Titanic today, the reason finding the Titanic was such a Huge Deal is because it proved the women who survived the disaster weren’t hallucinating.
How Do You Like Your Coffee?
Starbucks Removes Pride Decorations from Stores https://t.co/RqTLydqJz4
— Timcast News (@TimcastNews) June 13, 2023
Never Forget
A forgetful society lives on the precipice of history’s abyss. Lloyd Billingsley reminded us of this when he warned, “as ever, the struggle against genocide is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Billingsley was referencing the Communist Khmer Rouge’s democidal frenzy of 1975-1979 that killed over 2,000,000 people, specifically “Cambodian children were clubbed to death and babies smashed against trees.” He provided a link to an historical, contemporaneous 1977 account of the communist regime and its bloodthirsty Angka Loeu (“organization on high”) leadership’s initial crimes against the Cambodian people and humanity: Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia, by John Barron and Anthony Paul. It is a horrific chronicle of how the insidious tactics and crimes into which the murderous ideology of communism metastasizes and, ultimately, consumes a people.
It is a lesson of history that humanity ignores at its peril. Consequently, in the hope of reminding the present about the past to preserve the future, let us delve into Barron and Paul’s reportage of the survivors’ accounts of the Khmer Rouge’s barbarity perpetrated in the name of the very people these communists tortured and killed.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
Grand Coulee Ice Age Floods, with Nick Zentner
RIP Claudia Rosett
You may remember her reporting from the Oil For Food days;
Much of her career was spent with the Wall Street Journal, serving as its Moscow bureau chief and editorial page editor for the Asia division. She was fearless and passionate, especially when reporting about repressive regimes around the world. Claudia was the only print journalist who witnessed the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, dodging bullets to get the story out to the world (you can read her first-hand account here). She was also a fierce critic of the United Nations and is widely credited with exposing corruption in the international body. She received several awards for her reporting on the UN’s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. In recent years she had traveled to Hong Kong to cover protests over the encroachment of China. She was also a foreign policy fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
They don’t make them like her anymore. (And those that they do are shunted off to Substack).
Honey, I Finished The Internet
New finds at Pompeii. (h/t andycanuck)
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
[Mao] tampered around with agriculture too and came to the perfectly ignorant but quintessentially Marxist conclusion that household vermin are agents of capitalism. Yes, like capitalists, they exploit the labour of the proletariat and therefore must be totally eradicated. And by far the worst of all these bourgeoisie oppressors was, naturally, that most vile and heinous creature, the sparrow…
As part of the “Smash Sparrow Campaign,” children were enlisted to bang pots and pans around, chasing the sparrows out of their nests. Later, adults knocked the nests out of the trees and crushed the eggs underneath their sandals, until there were almost no sparrows left in all of China… Within a year of the “Smash Sparrow Campaign,” itself part of the larger “Four Pests Campaign,” the locust population exploded and did what locusts do best. The Communists had played God and literally created a Biblical plague.
For devotees of the absurd and grotesque, Professor James O’Flannery’s lively documentary series on the Chinese Revolution. Or, to borrow one of the professor’s chapter headings, Our Turn Fuck Up World.
Honey, I Finished Genesis
Native American Flood Myths – Randall Carlson