If this had been a text for American History, more people would have loved history! Bruce Lancaster brings the people and events to life, and I found myself reading it as though it were a novel. Not only was it history, it was well written history! Henry Knox, Dan Morgan, Francis Marion, von Steuben–all the men who have been just names became living, breathing people. — edited Customer Review @ Amazon
This is an excellent history of the American Revolution. What made it even better, the author was a writer and a novelist that wrote it to be read by the plebs not academic elites. He was also able to write the entire book without using a single footnote. Highly recommended. So far all the books I have read in the Mainstream of America Series are recommended.
But diversity doesn’t read. And increasingly, neither does the three-second attention span crowd. Books are in the process of returning to the elite status they once held prior to the release of the dime novel and the mass market paperback, which is not a bad thing for deluxe leather book binders, but isn’t a healthy sign for society. — The Decline Of The Literary West by Vox Day
Tuesday afternoon I went back to the dentist in Naco and got the temporary dental bridge installed. It can be taken out for cleaning and then put back in. I have some difficulty doing that but it will become easier after I do it for a few days. It feels strange in my mouth but that should go away in a few days also. Back in October to get the permanent bridge which I think will be the traditional type that will mount with crowns on my two canine teeth. Haven’t asked the dentist about that; just let him do what ever he is going to do and then live with it.
On the drive yesterday I stopped at the Country House and ate my first breakfast with the new front teeth. It went reasonably well with some discomfort on the left side near the canine where the wire hook is holding the temporary bridge in place. A lot of gas to fill Desperado at Fry’s; I was nearing empty.
The rifle trade at Sarge’s sidearms in Benson went about as I expected. I took a hit on the trade but was expected that. It would have been better to private sell it but I’m not in a position where I can deal with trying to do that. So it is what it is. I’ll pick up the Henry Lever Action Octagon Frontier .22 S/L/LR that I got in the trade next week. It will probably be available tomorrow or Friday but I’m not going to make a separate trip to Benson, I get it when I do a shopping trip.
In 100 years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college. ― Joseph Sobran
This is why privileged classes in highly stratified societies like ours are so often blindsided by events that everyone else saw coming a long way off. The more stratified a society, the more social layers there are between the people on the ground level who actually deal with the grubby realities of life and the people up there in the corner offices who make the decisions. Since each such layer of hierarchy is subject to the law just cited, some information gets lost in passing from one level to another. Thus the people at the top quite often end up with utterly fatuous misunderstandings of what’s happening down there in the real world, and the people at the bottom—who know what’s actually going on—have neither the means nor the motivation to communicate this to those higher up.…
Societies decay and die, in turn, when a formerly creative minority loses its willingness to respond to a changing world, and becomes more interested in shielding its members from the consequences of failure than in finding new ways to succeed. Such a class becomes a dominant minority, in Toynbee’s terms. Since it can no longer inspire loyalty and trust, it turns to bribery, coercion, and sheer institutional inertia to maintain its control over the society it once led and now merely exploits. Once a dominant minority has stopped coming up with effective solutions to the problems its society faces, of course, those problems go unsolved, and eventually bring the society crashing down. — Lenocracy In Extremis The Case Of Publishing by John Michael Greer