I have the pleasure of knowing Jon Mollison, Alexandru Constantin, and Sky Hernstrom. I got to know Sky Hernstrom as a friend before I knew he was an author, and had not read any of his work until he had released The Law of Wolves, and Mortu and Kyrus in the White City. Alexandru over at Dacian has proposed a kind of book-club blog discussion, which Jon has picked up on. Alexander Hellene is also in on it. Alexandru's first choice was the story Mortu and Kyrus in the White City by Schuyler hernstrom ("Sky"), originally published on its own,…
Unfortunately, as I wrote it, the quote that inspired my most recent post on safety was utterly forgotten. During the Battle of Belleau Wood in WW1, First Sargeant Daniel Daly, 73rd Machine Gun Company, USMC, exhorted his men with the call "Come on, you sons-o'-bitches! Do you want to live forever?" before charging the Germans. Interestingly, Daly himself apparently disputes that, and claims he said "For Christ's sake men—come on! Do you want to live forever?" In either case, this quote was immortalized in lore, to the point that RA Heinlein used a similar line in his novel Starship…
A While back I'd written a post on safety being important, but not the most important thing. Safety has to serve repeatably getting things done, and is not an ultimate virtue in and of itself. Put another way, there is a difference between staying alive, and living. Every choice involves risks, and one of the most common causes of death is slipping in the shower or bathtub. A guy can die as a result of simply falling over in his house and hitting his head. While I'm not in the "just a flu" or "it doesn't exist" crowd - there's…
Over at Peter Grants blog, he links to the story of the triton submarines, capable of getting to the deepest parts of the world, period. It's a fascinating read. I certainly never wanted my boat to go that deep - it would be a one-way ride.…
I'd already covered this once, but more information has come to light, and Rekeita had Branco on for an interview. I think the overall discussion by Branca with Rekeita is good, but I'd like to address one area where he, by focusing on the legal argument, undercuts the moral argument by declaring he thought the McMichaels were unwise, but worse, by classifying citizens arrest laws as an artifact of the past. He also discards any importance in looking at the grounds/reasonability of citizen's arrest. Annoyingly - he even states why those laws are on the books in the first…
I've been slow to keep up with the outrages du jour, so it was only the other day I heard about the shooting of a guy in Florida for "just going out for a jog while black". I know the media and the grievance cultists have been looking for another genuine Dylan Roof, and demand has so exceeded supply that nearly every supposed hate crime - Smollett, anyone? - has been faked by the supposed victims. "But, there's video!" OK - maybe the NAACP struck gold again after all this time, but I was still skeptical that the story of…
Yes, Karens are everywhere. I don't know if they are predominantly an anglo-saxon thing, but every example seen so far has met that demographic quite nicely. There is a male version though. For those born in the 70's, you may remember the animated smurfs series, with "Brainy", an obnoxious gamma twit, having the tagline "Papa smurf always says". That is your male proto-Karen. The guy who can't stand to see someone "breaking the rules" and just has to do something about it. In extreme cases, they kill. Take Michael Drejka. I know perfectly well that MD's defense lawyer made a…
I was talking to a friend this weekend, and one observation that both of us madee in our way is how often we stop delving into a topic, teacher, etc., because we find that through little or no fault of their own, they are no longer worth the time. Before you drag the knives out and look for places to bury the body; again, it's not their fault, it's me. I spent over a decade in the Navy as a nuke operator. One of the biggest reasons I got out though had everything to do with this. After over ten…