"Go tell the Spartans, thou who passeth by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie."
Joined November 2014
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Yeah, bring your own brown-bag lunch ..... hot carrots!
You're standing on the surface of Venus — and this hellscape never changes.
The temperature is a blistering 465°C, hot enough to melt lead. The atmospheric pressure is 92 times Earth’s — equivalent to being crushed nearly a kilometer underwater. No human has ever set foot here; the toughest Soviet lander, Venera 13, survived just 127 minutes before the planet destroyed it.
How long do you think you’d last? 🪐🔥
Ok, but what have you done for us lately?
Jim Bolen is a former Special Forces operative, who went into Laos and Cambodia on dangerous and top secret SOG operations to the Ho Chi Minh and Sihanouk Trails during the Vietnam War. He was a recon team leader and went on over 40 SOG missions, being extracted under fire from over 30 of them.
Bolen in the photo: "It was possibly taken in 1967 or early 1968 at Ban Me Thuot. I’d just got back from the range and was sitting on a bunker. The weapon I was holding was a M-3 Grease Gun with a integral silencer. Normally one member of the recon team carried this weapon.
It was a 45 caliber and was used as a RON (remain over night) gun (in case at night someone or something stumbles upon your position and you have to kill them or it without giving away your position) and also for prisoner snatches to get in and out without being compromised. The weapon was reliable but with the amount of ammo needed for a mission it was very heavy."
- Jim Bolen
David Murray retweeted
Mad to think this is how the engine of a WWll German tank was started up back in the day.
You can see that they're hiding something; something that we seek. Yes, Precious. We Maun go. Deep shall it take us; who will go? We need the fearless, now.
Time is short:
Always with the Italians; "Of course one can govern them, it's just that there is no point." (Mussolini)
He's facing the WRONG WAY!
The wiry strength of that man, moving forward with his own lean self, cutting the bastards down, against the recoil, his whole body shaking and holding ground; I think American misses those men?
Might have died there, riding hard, firing my pistol, sure of my horse. That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished, for a horseman; I say, bring me my fate: there will be here no small men:
🇺🇸 The saddles those troopers rode in the last U.S. cavalry charge in 1942 were McClellans. Designed by George McClellan.
Yes, THAT George McClellan, then a young captain, after he studied European cavalry equipment in the 1850s.
The Army adopted his design in 1859. It stayed the standard U.S. cavalry saddle, with later modifications, all the way through World War II. Model 1928 McClellan saddles were with the 26th Cavalry.
He led the Army of the Potomac early in the Civil War. And he created the equipment still in use when American horse cavalry made its final charge nearly 80 years later.
Glory is fleeting. The constant sky over-mands.
J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839
The HMS Temeraire was a famous warship from Trafalgar. By 1838, it was obsolete.
Turner saw a small steam tug drag the wooden giant down the Thames for scrap.
It changed art history forever, anticipating Impressionism and setting the stage for modern art.
Turner called this painting "My Darling". He refused every offer to sell it during his lifetime and left it to the British nation when he died.
How lovely; the beauty of the design is related to its purpose; protection. When majestically beautiful (this appears sand-cast, done by lone artist), it shall ward off harm to your arrow-arm. Against power, stands beauty.
David Murray retweeted
A statistician is afraid of flying because there's a small chance of a bomb being on the plane.
So he starts carrying a bomb himself.
Reason?
“The probability of two bombs being on the same plane must be much smaller.”
I believe that is a young Werner Heisenberg sitting to the left of Dirac. Met and talked with him once. U. Chicago, about 1974.
Niels Bohr on Paul Dirac ✍️
Dirac was the strangest man who ever visited my institute. During one of Dirac’s visits I asked him what he was doing. He replied that he was trying to take the square-root of a matrix, and I thought to myself what a strange thing for such a brilliant man to be doing. Not long afterwards the proof sheets of his article on the equation arrived, and I saw he had not even told me that he had been trying to take the square root of the unit matrix!
David Murray retweeted
“The truth is that trout fishermen scheme and lie and toss in their sleep. They dream of great dripping trout, shapely and elusive as mermaids, and arise cranky and haggard from their fantasies. They are moody and neglectful and all of them a little daft. Moreover they are inclined to drink too much.”
— Robert Traver (John D. Voelker)
Much to learn.
Geronimo, a prominent leader and medicine man of the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache, photographed at the age of 75 by the Gerhard Sisters in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904.
The portrait was taken while Geronimo was attending the St. Louis World’s Fair. Although still officially a prisoner of war, he was permitted to attend the fair, where he became a popular attraction and sold photographs, autographs and handmade bows and arrows to visitors. Geronimo had been a prisoner since his surrender to U.S. forces in 1886. While his confinement at Fort Sill allowed him some freedom in daily life, his trips to fairs, shows, and other public events took place under military escort. He could not freely leave or return to his homeland and remained a prisoner until his death in 1909.
David Murray retweeted
There was a semi-well known interview of the famed Argentine writer JL Borges where he explains this.
Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.
William F Buckley: Why?
Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.
WFB: The most what?
Borges: Physical. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.
WFB: “Asomó?”*
Borges: Well, no, no, they’re not exactly the same. And then you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to “live up to” something—you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language.
Yet another two-state solution.....
Map shows North America about 77 Millions years ago. Saying things like “the US is more divided now than ever before” clearly isn’t factually correct 😜 Source: buff.ly/39psJq2
David Murray retweeted
On the 3rd of October 1526, a clerk at the Arsenal of Venice wrote out a receipt.
296 ducats for 185 arquebus barrels. Paid to a gun-barrel maker in a valley above Brescia, one Bartolomeo Beretta.
That scrap of paper is still in the Venetian archives. Last Saturday, five hundred years to the day, the company it started turned 500.
Most family firms don't survive the third generation. Beretta is on the fifteenth, and the sixteenth is already at work. Today, the company is run by Pietro and Franco Gussalli Beretta. Same surname. Same valley. And they still make the guns where Bartolomeo lit the forge.
Think about what that receipt, and the company, has outlived: The Republic of Venice. The Spanish Empire. Napoleon. The British Empire. Two world wars. The Soviet Union.
No other industrial family, they say, has run a business for five centuries without a break.
And this year, some limited-edition anniversary guns are numbered 1,526, the year on the receipt.
What it boils down to is this: a man took an order, did the work, and taught his son. Then his son did the same. Fifteen times.
Now that's a family legacy!
To the Berettas 🥂
