Here is a short article on the comparisons between slowly heating animosity between colonial citizens and the English crown and elites, and a brief outline of their individual and collective delusions about the truth of the situation they were in, and how things changed and what they did with that realization.
Category Archives: History
Books on stuff
Sometimes you fall down a rabbit hole and find all kinds of stuff. Maybe it’s things you know a little bit about, and you find out there is more science behind it than you thought, maybe it is a totally new thing that makes you go “uhhhh.. huh?” So here is a list of books and papers that I’ve come across recently that look at some part of the world in a totally different way than conventional wisdom, all put in one place just because reasons… Continue reading Books on stuff
Alternate history, or real history
I came across this on Social Galactic. Fascinating video. A two hour rant about who really runs things, etc. He says it’s the life insurance companies. Has a lot of history and science and economics, some really good, some really out there. But a very good presentation.
Fauci Dossier PDF mentioned at 55 min. The quote there is… enlightening.
Stalin’s War
An interview with Dr. Sean McMeekin, author of “Stalin’s War,” one of several books he’s written about the former Soviet Union and Russia.
Links to his Amazon page here, though I’d recommend you buy his books elsewhere if you can for various political reasons.
Self-sealing fuel tanks
I’ve read about self-sealing fuel tanks, usually in reference to WWII aircraft, but I never learned how they work. Came across the following video to explain it. It is surprisingly simple, and he’s got a pretty nifty demo to illustrate it, too.
War on privilege
WAR ON PRIVILEGE WAS THE CORE THEME OF THE COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA IN MY HOME COUNTRY AND ALL SOVIET BLOCK
by Silviu “Silview” Costinescu
Interesting article, spells out many of the parallels between the rhetoric and actions of the early communists and today’s radical left in all its forms. The voice of experience sees things. “And right after that I’ve witnessed the Overton Window sliding in US from total vilification of communism to active flirting. I saw who pushed it, openly, the same people who made up over three quarters of the early Communist or Bolshevik parties’ highest echelons.” Then he cites names. “The privileged who led the propaganda there are the same ones leading the mainstream media and the communist propaganda in US now.
The most privileged people in the world, always at the controls of both sides, sponsoring the war against privilege.”
“Once they had taken power, the Bolsheviks didn’t immediately launch Stalin-style mass purges. Instead, the Bolsheviks started off in a way modern Americans would find disturbingly familiar: By legitimizing criminal anarchy and co-opting the justice system.”
Yeah. studying history can be sort of dark at time. You study the past so you don’t repeat its mistakes, but you also get to watch others making them. I feel like a low budget Casandra sometimes.
Old History
Might sound redundant, but it is not. A “History Book” is one that attempts to expound the events and possibly explain the connections and “whys” between them, so that the reader has a better understand of what has happened in the past and how we got here. Sometimes our understanding of past events changes when new information comes to light. This is generally a good thing, though sometimes more (but still incomplete) information confuses things from the initial simple or largely speculative view.
However, there are also people trying to rewrite history and make the ‘wrong” things go away, and constantly invent or “reinterpret” things in order to push a particular narrative. This is NOT good. It is something the SJW and Marxists do a lot.
so it is expected that what history books say will, to some degree, change over time. But the whole-sale revisions going on now are all the wrong type. So I think it might be good for people to make it a goal to accumulate or copy or locate or translate or make availible older history texts to that it is not lost. For example I came across one the other day – US History – in a used book store printed in 1904. That means there were still a considerable number of Civil War survivors around to point out flaws. Any bets I discover something in it that is not popular in today’s books?
Real alternate history
This interview with James Lafond is fascinating.
He has written a LOT of books, and his summary of the historical non-fiction series “Plantation America” and what order they might be best read in looks useful. He expects to wrap them up with a summary and consolidation with a comprehensive narrative of the practice of white servitude / slavery / bondage in the colonies and early USA.
I’ve completed “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: The Foundation of Our Misbegotten Nation“, and found it fascinating. Technically there are some errors (e.g., a two-page repeated passage about twenty pages apart and typos), and the style is kind of rambling, but it’s a fast and easy read with a lot of good sources cited. He does seem to have a passion for using primary sources, and a distain for secondary sources, which is nice. Well worth reading. Part of it ties in well with another book I read recently, “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World” by Virginia Postrel. In both they use and learn from runaway slave reward posters and advertisements. LaFond learns about the races and how language was used, Postrel learns about fashion and clothing because it was often described as being part of the stolen property the runaways took.
Look at a war none of us have heard about
Well, maybe technically a few readers here might have heard a little bit about the NAGORNO-KARABAKH WAR. Here is an article titled “WHAT THE UNITED STATES MILITARY CAN LEARN FROM THE NAGORNO-KARABAKH WAR” in the Small Wars Journal.
short version: they made extensive use of cheap off-the-shelf items like old biplanes converted for remote control and other unmanned areal system to identify and destroy much more expensive air-defense systems. Shows how unconventional thinking, uses of miniaturized digital systems, and unmanned systems to reduce your own casualties can radically change the course of things. I do hope our military is paying attention to it.
So should we non-military people.
QOTD- James LaFond
“Plantation American of the 1600’s was almost exclusively white-over-white slave-system.
The 1700’s was a time of very mixed-race slavery, roughly 60% white, 30% black and 10% Indian or mixed race in terms of total bondage rations across the original 13 states”
From The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: The Foundation of Our Misbegotten Nation by James LaFond, from the chapter titled “Boys and girls”, where he shows a bit of the etymology of the terms and their use in America and why they are perceived so differently by black and white men.
I knew from a quote in “White Cargo” that in 1775 George Washington posted a runaway slave notice that only described three of the ten runaways as black, but I didn’t think it likely that was a typical ratio. LaFond goes on to say it wasn’t until the 1800’s that slavery gradually morphed into an almost exclusively black institution.
The book is oddly organized, more like a lightly edited set of research notes, emails, blog posts and snippets, but he’s got some interesting sources quoted. Not as many specific sources cited for specific claims as a more formal history book might, but this is something like book 9 out of a planned 13. I’m thinking some if some grad student wants a good research thesis, documenting just how many slaves/indentures were shipped to North America in the 1600’s and 1700’s by decade, and what their survival / runaway / actually able to claim their headright acreage numbers and rates were, it might be very eye-opening and would have a good-sized audience.