Through my actions, I both embody and seek Slack. Therefore, my life journey is to find myself.
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Latest Posts by kiltedkeefe - Page 2
Right now, in the West Philippine Sea and South China Sea, there's an unofficial naval conflict going on between the Chinese Coast Guard, "Chinese fishing boats", and various SE Asian nations. Basically, the CCP has decided to basically seize fishing grounds, lay claim to various islands and shoals and try to gain control of the sea lanes. They've been intruding into EEZ areas of smaller nations chasing fish, and are eyeballing the enormous amounts of trade that pass through the area. There's also huge oil fields and natural gas reserves under water that China is eager to control.
"Volunteer fisherman" in special fishing boats that have been reengineered for ramming have been pushing other nations out of their fishing grounds. Much like the little green men of the Crimean invasion, these little blue men (from their blue outfits) are deniable assets used to enforce Chinese will. They basically suck as fishing boats now, but boy howdy can they damage other fishing boats.
Along with this, the Chinese have been building land onto reefs by dredging to create instant sovereignty land which they then claim. Other nations have responded with derelict ships being anchored across reefs that act as permanent bases.
Recently, during a supply run to a Philippine base ship, the Chinese Coast Guard decided to intervene and called the whole thing an intrusion into Chinese waters. They rammed the supply ship and made a hostile boarding brandishing swords, knives and axes, the Philippino sailors fought back with bare hands and whatever weapon like object they could lay hands on. A Philippino sailor reportedly lost his thumb in the fracas along with other injuries.
So, uh, HOLY CRAP. Pirates, cutlasses, boarding actions, water cannons... everything old is new again.
They went with something even more groovy...the Guns-a-gogo project ACH-47. It was a conversion from the regular cargo model where they stripped out all but 5 seats and the lifting winch, added over a ton of armor, fire suppression system, cross engine fuel transfer/cutoff, an intercom system and all the guns. Intended to clear LZs, they worked in pairs with rockets, 20mm cannons and 40mm automatic grenade launchers.
Weapons engineers were better when they dropped acid and did coke. Behold the 105mm Huey. In the 60’s Rock Island Arsenal wanted to modify UH1s to carry a 105mm howitzer with a box magazine.
More medieval dyes for y'all!
One advantage of rock music receding in popularity is that metal can retreat to the darkness and become evil again.
Watterson pulled no punches
The Evil Little Hairy Cave People of Europe in Pulp Fiction
From the 1900s to the 1940s, there was a trendy theme in occult and horror stories that the explanation for widespread European legends of fairies, brownies, pixies, leprechauns and other malicious little people, was that they were a hereditary racial memory of the extremely small non-human, hairy stone age original inhabitants of Europe, who still survive well into modern times in caves and barrows below the earth. Envious of being displaced on the surface, these weird creatures, adapted to the darkness of living underground and unable to withstand the sun, still mean mischief and occasionally go out at night to capture someone.... usually an attractive woman....to take to their dark caves for human sacrifice.
Displaced by the arrival of Indo-European language speakers at the dawn of the Bronze Age, these original, not quite human stone age people of Europe were driven deep underground into caves and barrows below the earth, where they went mad, adapted to the darkness and acquired a fear of daylight, became extremely inbred, in some cases acquired widespread albinism. It is these strange little people who gave the descendants of Europeans a haunting racial dread of places below the earth like mines and caves, and it also is these strange, hairy troglodytes who originally built the uncanny and mysterious menhir, fairy rings, and stone age structures of England, Scotland, and Ireland that predate the coming of the Celts and Romans.
In some cases, these evil troglodytes are usually identified with the mysterious Picts, the pre-Celtic stone age inhabitants of the British Isles. In some cases, they are identified with the Basque people of Spain, best known as the inventors of Jai Alai, and the oldest people in Europe who speak a unique language unrelated to any in the world.
The original codifier of this trend was Arthur Machen, a horror writer who is less remembered than his contemporary, Henry James, but who may be the best horror writer in the generations between Poe on the one end and Lovecraft/CL Moore/Clark Ashton Smith on the other. His story, "the White People" from 1904 (a reference to their strange cave albinism) was a twisted Alice in Wonderland with a girl who is irresistibly attracted to dark pre-Roman stone age ruins and who is eventually pulled underground.
In addition to being a great horror writer, Arthur Machen was a member of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, an occult organization, and was often seen at the Isis-Urania Temple in London. Many of his works have secretive occult knowledge.
H.P. Lovecraft in particular always pointed out Arthur Machen as his single biggest inspiration, though he combined Machen's dread and occultism with Abraham Merritt's sense of fear of the cosmic unknown, seen in "Dwellers in the Mirage" and "People of the Pit."
Another and scarier example of this trend would be "No Man's Land," a story by John Buchan, a Scotsman fascinated by paganism and horror, who often wrote stories of horrific discoveries and evil rites on the Scottish moors. He is often reduced to being described as a "Scottish Ghost Story" writer, a painfully reductivist description as in his career, Buchan wrote a lot of thrillers, detective, and adventure stories as well. In later life, he was appointed Governor General of Canada, meaning he may be the first head of state to be a horror writer.
It was Buchan who first identified the cave creatures with the Picts, something that another Weird Tales writer decades later, Robert E. Howard, would roll with in the 1920s.
Howard is a very identifiable kind of modern person you often see on the internet: a guy who talks tough, but who was terrified to leave his small town. He created manly man, tough guy heroes like Conan the Barbarian, Kull, and El Borak, but he himself never left his mother's house. It's no wonder he got along well with his fellow Weird Tales writer and weird shut in, HP Lovecraft. With 1920s Weird Tales writers, despite your admiration for their incredible talent, you also can't help but laugh at them a little, a feeling you also apply to a lot of Victorians, who achieved incredible things, but who are often closet cases and cranks who died virgins ("Chinese" Gordon comes to mind, as does Immelmann).
With Howard, his obsession with the Picts and the stone age cave dwelling people of Europe started with an unpublished manuscript where at a dinner party, a man gets knocked out and regresses to his past life in the Bronze Age, where he remembers the earliest contact between modern humans and the original inhabitants of the British Isles, the evil darkskinned Picts. This is a mix of both the "little cave people" story and another cliche at the time, "the stone age past life regression novel," another turn of the century cliche.
Still with the Picts on his mind, Howard would later create Bran Mak Morn, a Pict chieftain, who predated Kull and Conan as his Celtic caveman muscle hero. Howard was of Irish descent and proudly anti-Colonial and anti-British, with his Roman Empire and Civilized Kingdoms as a stand in for the British and other Empires, which he viewed as rapacious and humbug, a view shared by his greatest inspiration, Talbot Mundy. His "Worms of the Earth" gets to the heart of why these little cave people scare us so much: they remind us that we live on land that is impossibly ancient and we don't fully understand at all.
It was another Weird Tales Writer a decade later who wrote one of the last stories about the little hairy cave people of Europe, though, Manly Wade Wellman in 1942. Wellman was mainly known for creating the blond beefcake caveman hero Hok the Mighty set in stone age times, and for his supernatural ghost stories of Silver John the Balladeer set in modern, ghostly Appalachia (like many ex-Weird Tales writers, he made a turn to being a regional author in his later career, in the same way Hugh B. Cave became a Caribbean writer), but Wellman also had a regular character known as John Thunstone, a muscular and wealthy playboy known for his moustache who used his great wealth to investigate the supernatural and the occult. Thunstone had a silver sword made by St. Dunstan, patron of Silversmiths, well known for his confrontations with the Devil.
Most John Thunstone stories featured familiar stories, like a demon possessed seance and so on, but one in particular featured a unique enemy, the Shonokins.
The Shonokins were the original rulers of North America, descendants of Neanderthal man displaced by American Indians. This fear that the land we live is ancient and unknowable and we just arrived on it and don't know any of its secrets is common to settler societies, who often hold the landscape with dread, as in Patricia Wrightson's fantasies of the Australian Outback. It was easy enough to transport the hairy cave people from the Scottish Moors to North America. I suspect that's what they are, a personification of a fear shared in the middle class, that in the back of their minds, that everything they have supposedly earned is merely an accident of history, built by rapacity and the crimes of history, and that someday a bill will come due.
A text page in the May 1942 issue of Weird Tales gives strange additional information on the Shonokins not found elsewhere:
Since then, there have been too many examples of evil cave people who predate Europeans. Philip Jose Farmer's "The All White Elf" features the last survivor of a pre-European people who live in caves. A lot of other fiction of course has featured the Picts, but according to our modern scientific understanding, which describes them as much, much less exotically, as a blue tattooed people not too different and practically indistinguishable from the Celtic tribes that surrounded them, and which they eventually blended into.
Thinking back, I guess one of the more surreal episodes of my life is when I would serve Mass as an altar boy and I was wearing my Slayer Reign in Blood t-shirt under my cassock. Then biked home listening to Morbid Angel on my Walkman. Just doing my part for minor blasphemy.
If you ever want hilarity in your life, watch a couple of chiweenies tear off hell bent for leather to try and murder a deer. And the look of sheer terror on the deer's face as Death approaches yipping at ankle height.
So basically the whole county is shut down. Bad ice, unusually heavy snow, freezing rains, nasty temps. Got the pantry filled ahead of time, got new heater wires on the plumbing, replaced the hot lamp bulb, got plenty of wood. There's no mail, no UPS, no garbage and definitely no running to the store. I managed to get to the dump in a gap in the weather, and it shut again.
It's not as bad as it was in California, no feet of snow to shovel or chain restrictions. But it is definitely more isolated. Ah, the joys of mountain living.
Side effect or bonus? Because the primary heating is wood, I basically smell like a combination of my aftershave (bay rum) and wood smoke all the time. Gotta get the fire going or build it back up, and a bit of smoke gets out. The cabin smells like sandalwood and wood smoke as well.
We Have Super Grass - I Love Hollywood
When in doubt, go to primary sources. This picture is a drawing of Irish soldiers by Albrecht Dürer, 1521. Gallowglass and Kern, the gallowglass are the two on the left wearing the padded gambeson and the maille shirt with the burgonet. Gallowglass were (originally)Scottish mercenaries from the highlands hired by Irish nobles as heavy infantry, though in later years they incorporated locals into the companies. See the dude on the left with the claymore? Carries it like a polearm over his shoulder. See the Kern on the right? Holding the claymore under his brat (mantle)? He's acting as a sword bearer for the gallowglass with the spear. He's got the blade wrapped up in his brat so it doesn't cut him.
Here's a landsknecht of the Renaissance, a German mercenary and a doppelsöldner (double pay man) by his weapons. The zweihander he's carrying is to break up the large blocks of pike by chopping through the pikes and then dismemberment of the lightly armored pikemen.
The whole greatsword scabbard discourse gets me because, like, we know the answer to this one. We've got primary sources talking about it. The answer to "how do you carry a weapon that's more than a yard or so long" is:
If you don't think you'll need it on short notice and you're lucky enough to have access to a wagon or other means of transport, you don't carry it at all – you stick it in the wagon.
If you do think you'll need it on short notice or you don't have a wagon, you just carry it in your hands everywhere you go and constantly complain about how dumb and awkward that is, unless you're a professional mercenary and/or independently wealthy, in which case you hire a guy to follow you around carrying it in his hands everywhere you go and he complains about how dumb and awkward that is (though probably not while you're listening).
When the old world and the new collide:
Feeding the wood stove earlier, and the fire set slipped. Had to grab a burning log to keep it from falling out, and burned the fingerprint off my finger. My phone doesn't recognize my finger now to open.
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Rodrigo A. Branco
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If you're actively advocating for genocide, no matter how pure your political theory, you are a shitheel and a bad person.
Purposefully targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Purposefully using civilian infrastructure to shield military infrastructure is a war crime. Destruction of civilian housing without immediate military necessity is a war crime. Targeting civilians for killing and kidnapping is a war crime. Collective punishment in any instance is a war crime.
People need to quit it with these simplified, asinine shit takes on an extremely long running and complicated situation. It doesn't boil down to simplistic slogans fed to you by some blood and soil types hiding behind leftie platitudes or dipshits that still read the Protocols of Elder Zion and masturbate to it. There is no binary good guy/bad guy here. It's a proxy war, and in a proxy war the people who suffer are civilians just trying to live.
Do yourself a favor and if you're a fucking anti-semite, just be honest about it. If that makes you uncomfortable, why? Using a war thousands of miles away as an excuse to join the tiki torch crowd is an eleven on the asinine scale.
The punk on the bus was Kirk Thatcher. He was an associate producer on the movie, and he wrote and performed that song with his band Edge of Etiquette.
what gets me is the idea it is a "boomer" thing to think it's trashy to be listening to shit over a speaker in public.
I mean...no, no before a decade ago this was not a problem humanity had. People listened to things on headphones or tiny transistor radios you had to hold up to your ear practically.
The idea that no one wants to listen to your shitty fucking music is not some "boomer" thing it's basic human decency.
And unlike say--swimsuits getting more revealing or other social trends, blasting your shitty fucking noise over a speaker is directly harmful to everyone around you.
Honestly the idea this needs to be explained at all is enough to make you give up, because it should be self evident--no one wants to listen to your fucking noise. The idea this must be explained is fucking insane.
The idea it's a "boomer" thing to hate is fucking insane. In my day it was trashy to force others to pay attention to you. It was attention whore behavior and it was universally repugnant.
It's the 21st century and I'm dealing with wood heating like it's still pre industrial times. There's supplemental electric heaters for places like the bathroom and a propane burner to keep the roof clear, but otherwise I'm dealing with cords and ricks of splits and rounds. Sharp axe, sharp hatchet, dead blow hammer, splitting wedges, ash can, hearth broom, ash scuttle, aaaaaaaagh.
First engine installed on Artemis 2 Moon rocket
The installation of RS-25 engine E2059 at the base of the core stage for NASA’s second Space Launch System rocket. Credit: NASA Technicians have installed the first engine on the core stage of the second Space Launch System rocket, which is tasked with sending the first people to the Moon in more than a half century. Continue reading Untitled
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Being punished for other's political affiliations or actions is called collective punishment. It's a war crime. Violates Section 33 of the Geneva Accords. It's also what Nazi Germany did when they'd machine gun villages when their occupation forces experienced sabotage. Also what the Soviets did when they machine gunned villages when someone collaborated.
turning universal human rights into an "all rights matter," promoting the ideas that civilians in a particular place are fair targets for a particular reason, that you can be lethally punished for the political affiliations of those around you is inane, morally monstrous, and politically inexpedient. it is in everyone's best interest that this line of thinking is not pursued
There's a place in Mesa close to the border with Chandler that has killer tacos and local beers on tap. Put your laundry in, gorge on Mexican food and beer, put laundry in, more tacos and beer, stumble out to the car with your laundry all wadded up, and sleep it off on a bed of freshly cleaned shirts.
Like we have got to make laundromats aesthetic. In my entire life I have only ever been in one laundromat that didn’t have the grungiest, nastiest, most meth-core vibe I’ve ever seen.
If I’m going to have to drag my laundry somewhere and pay to wash it I at least want my surroundings to be clean and pretty.
There's another contributing theory that the large brim, pointy hats of the stereotypical witch closely followed the hat worn by alewives. Not the stinky fish that washes up on the shore, but women who were the brewing industry from medieval times until about the 18th century. These women would brew up batches of ale and beer at home, and then sell them come local market day. They wore the hats to stand out in a crowded market. Women ran brewing until it started to shift from a cottage industry towards industrializing, and the dude brewers started a whisper campaign to impugn the quality of the alewives' product. Alewives were also known for their herb knowledge, necessary for things like hopping beer or using germander if hops weren't available.
speaking as a Jew, i’m extra-super dubious of all that stuff that talks about cartoon witches being an antisemitic stereotype. I can get where the thing with the nose is coming from, but the claims about the hats are based on flimsy claims that require a lot of mental reaching. The hats that Jews were forced to wear were not a universal thing, and I’ve yet to see any evidence that they were part of the cultural consciousness by the time the image of the pointy-hatted witch became common.