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| Battle of Delaware Bay |
The Battle of Delaware Bay, or the Battle of Cape May, was a naval engagement fought between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United States during the American Revolutionary War. A British force of three vessels attacked three American privateers that were escorting a fleet of merchantmen. The ensuing combat in Delaware Bay near Cape May ended with the American sloop Hyder Ally capturing the British sloop-of-war HMS General Monk.
Background
Twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Joshua Barney of the Continental Navy commanded the privateer sloop Hyder Ali during the battles. She was owned by Pennsylvania businessman John Willcocks and was issued a letter of marque. The sloop was armed with 16 six-pounders and had a crew of about 110 men, officers and marines, and was named after Hyder Ali, the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore and a British enemy.
Hyder Ali? You mean the king of southern India? Yes, that Hyder Ali:
Hyder Ali was an innovator in the military use of rockets, which were used against positions and territories held by the East India Company during the Anglo-Mysore Wars. Although rocket technology originated in China and had made its way to India and Europe by the 13th century, development of accurate cannons had sidelined rockets as a military technology in Europe. Rocket technology was already in use when Hyder's father served (he commanded a company of 50 rocketmen), but it was Hyder who improved them and significantly expanded their use in the military. Technological innovations included the use of high-quality iron casing (better than was then available in Europe) for the combustion chamber, enabling the use of higher-powered explosive charges. . . . Rockets developed by Hyder and Tipu led to a renaissance of interest in the technology in Britain, where William Congreve, supplied with rocket cases from Mysore, developed what became known as Congreve rockets in the early 19th century.
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| Battle of Pollilur 1780 - Charles H. Hubbell |
In Hyder's time the Mysorean army had a rocket corps of as many as 1,200 men, which Tipu increased to 5,000. At the 1780 Battle of Pollilur, during the second war, Colonel William Baillie's ammunition stores are thought to have been detonated by a hit from one of Hyder's rockets, contributing to the British defeat.
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| Miss Helen - North American P-51D Mustang |
P-51D Mustang “Miss Helen” was delivered to the US Army Air Force (USAAF) in 1945 where she saw active service in World War II with 352 Fighter Group (FG) ‘The Blue Nosed Bastards of Bodney’, and has several confirmed kills to her name. She was flown by Capt. Raymond Littge as ‘Miss Helen’ and by later by Lt. Russell Ross as ‘Miss Nita’. Today wearing the same paint scheme as she did in 1945 and is the last original 352nd Fighter Group P-51 known to exist. 352 FG flew nearly 60,000 combat hours in just 19 months of WWII, claiming 519 enemy aircraft destroyed in the air, 287 on the ground and produced 26 aces for losses of 118 aircraft. Her full name is ‘P-51D-20NA 44-72216’ and when she was delivered to Capt. Littge he already had a kill tally of 10.5, including an Me 262.
It’s uncertain exactly how many missions Littge flew in Miss Helen but it’s known for sure that he flew her on a mission escorting B-17 bombers to the marshalling yards in Dresden on April 17th 1945, along with another 51 Mustangs. They came across an airfield at Platting with about 70 parked aircraft and Littge made an astonishing seven passes, destroying three Me 109s and 2 Me262s on the ground, despite having been hit in the initial attack on enemy flak positions which nearly emptied his oil tank.
She’s passed through several hands since the War, including those of the Royal Swedish Air Force and Israeli Air Force, starred in the Hollywood film Memphis Belle, and is now owned by Robert Tyrrell and based at the Boultbee Flight Academy at Goodwood Aerodrome.
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New York City. January 25, 2026. Laura Brett / ZUMA Press Wire / Scanpix / LETA
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Russia's semi-opposition media Meduza offers some tips for staying warm during this winter storm. Ain't that sweet?
A historic winter storm has paralyzed much of the eastern United States, forcing airlines to cancel at least 10,000 flights and prompting more than 20 states to declare emergencies. On Sunday, more than a million homes and businesses lost power, leaving many people unaccustomed to severe cold to face freezing temperatures without indoor heating. For those suddenly confronting harsh winter conditions in parts of the U.S. that rarely see snow, Meduza’s employees — no strangers to the bitter cold — share their top tips for staying toasty.
Their tips come from:
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| 1910 Ford Model T |
Ford and the Birth of the Model T
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| La Hague, France (left) & The Hague, Netherlands (right) |
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| La Hague Nuclear Recycling and Reprocessing Plant |
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| Chance of Earthquake |
I come across a story on Zerohedge about the FIT21 Crypto Bill. I'm skimming the page and U.S. Representative Maxine Waters tweets her opinion:
Who benefits from the passage of the #NotFIT4PurposeAct:
✅Wealthy #crypto firms that have chosen not to register w/the @SECGov or otherwise comply w/the securities laws
Who stands to lose:
❌Ordinary investors trying to build wealth
Seems like most of the stuff I've heard about Maxine has been stuff I don't like, but I do remember the name. Doesn't matter, it's the Wealthy versus Ordinary comparison that got me to thinking, so I asked our Lord and Benevolent Savior Google a couple of questions.
Ask what separates the top 1% and Google's AI response is:
The top 1% of Americans are typically defined as the wealthiest group, based on their annual income or net worth. In 2023, the average household net worth of the top 1% was almost $13.7 million, and an individual needed to earn around $407,500 per year to be in the top 1%. However, the exact income and net worth required to be in the top 1% varies by location:
Ask what separates the top 10% in wealth in america and Google's AI response is:
As of January 2024, the top 10% of Americans have a net worth of around $854,900. The top 10% of households by wealth in the US have an average of $6.7 million, and own 66.9% of the country's total household wealth. In contrast, the bottom 50% of households have an average of $50,000, and only own 2.5% of the total household wealth.
So the top 1% own 30% of the country. Alrighty then.
As for the crypto bill, I don't care. You play with crypto, you're playing with fire. Like fire, it can be very useful, but you best be careful because you can easily get burned. And you best pay attention because Murply's Law says bad things wait to happen till you aren't paying attention. I don't have the energy or the inclination for any of that.
As for Maxine, I just have a negative opinion. What I really need is a scorecard so I can keep a tally of all the stupid shit that comes across the wire everyday. Or maybe I should just use a variation of the headline law - if their name is in the paper they are undoubtedly scum sucking weasels and should be shot. After a fair and impartial trial, of course.
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| The Death of Jane McCrea (1804) by John Vanderlyn |
IAman picked up a book at the swim center free-library.
[It] is the short journal of a young woman traversing the Oregon trail with her family 1870s. May to November, 7 months. Striking how matter of fact she is. And how there is an expectation of proper behaviour, even scallywags are tame compared to what we see on TV these days. People acting outside these norms (Indians) are termed savages, and not to be trusted.
There was a short story embedded in movie about gangsters, Goodfellas maybe. Several of the guys liked to hang out at this Tiki bar but they would never pay their bar tab. The owner was at his wits end. These guys were his best customers, but they were driving his business into the ground. In desperation he offers to make them partners in his bar. I suppose he was thinking that if they had a stake in the bar, they would want to ensure that it remained a viable business. Problem was, they didn't pay for that stake. They took him up on his offer and then proceeded to really run the place into the ground. They were taking deliveries of cases of booze and then selling it out the back door at discounted prices. They weren't paying the bills, but they were pocketing the cash from these sales. I don't think the business lasted more than a couple of months.
This is exactly what the US Congress is doing to our country.
Blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline was an act of war. As long as we can plausibly deny having blown it up, we may forestall a reprisal. Besides not knowing who did it, I also wonder who this blast was aimed at. You might say it was aimed at the Russians and was designed to cut off the supply of money that Germany was paying for the natural gas being pumped through this pipeline. But the Russia shut off the supply of gas to these pipelines some time ago, so there's no gas flowing west and likewise no money going east. Now it will make a difference in the future if Russia and Germany ever normalize relations again, but without the pipeline Germany has less reason to do this. Right now it's a hammer blow against Germany and the European Union.
We may not have any proof of who blew it up, but the most belligerent and capable actor is the USA. The standard method of criminal investigation is to identify who had the means, the motive and the opportunity, and all three of those point to the USA.
All of which makes me wonder who is in charge here. There's been a lot of blather in the blog-o-sphere that President Joe Biden mental faculties are in serious decline. Some of the stories are rather persuasive. If those stories are true, then someone else must be running the show. Who would that be? The White House chief of staff, Ron Klain? He's leaving after the elections next month. The Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin? He denies that we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Or do we have a rogue faction operating under cover? The same rogue faction that panicked Pelosi into calling out the National Guard back in early 2021 (and I don't mean Trump and the 'insurrectionists')?
Or maybe Biden hasn't lost his marbles, he just doesn't care what the press or the public thinks anymore. After all he's the Imperial President of the Empire of America, nobody can touch him.
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| Gasoline Prices 1980 2022 |
I skim a lot of stuff on the internet and I think I have a pretty good idea of what's going on. To me, it looks like the Democrats are systematically destroying our country. I could be wrong, but that's what it looks like to me. I quit looking at any of the major media players because I kept coming across stories that sounded like bullshit. Maybe I'm just not looking at things the right way, or maybe I haven't seen the light, but here's where I am and to me it looks like the Democrats are just plain evil.
Now if a majority of the voters in this country felt like me, we could be sure that come the elections this fall the Democrats would be booted out on their rumps and a new batch of upstanding, Republican citizens would be sworn into Congress. But I'm not sure how much of the federal government's malfeasance is apparent to the average voter. About the only thing that is going to be apparent to everyone is that gas prices are now five dollars a gallon which seems outrageous when gas cost two dollars a gallon two years ago, but how many people remember that? It was so long ago it seems like a dream. People who live in big cities have surely noticed the increase in the number of homeless people camped out on city sidewalks, but again, it's been going on for so long it becomes hard to remember if there ever was a time when there weren't homeless people camped on the sidewalks.
I don't watch the news on broadcast TV, but a big proportion of voters still do. Digital is making gains, and while there is more diversity in the digital realm, I suspect there are a few big players who have the largest audience share and it probably mirrors what's coming from broadcast news.
I'm not sure it matters, because the vast majority of news is propaganda, and propaganda is designed to tell people what they want to hear. If you think things are going great, you're going to listen to people tell you things are going great. If you think the world is going to hell, you're more likely to listen to people who agree with you.
Anyway, I don't know which way the wind is blowing. I hope it's blowing the right way, but I have no clue.
And what if the mid-term elections do result in the wholesale replacement of Democrat Congressmen with Republicans? Will we any better off? Maybe, Republicans seem to be slightly better grounded in economics, but given the quagmire we are in I'm not sure they will be able to stop or even slow our headlong plunge into catastrophe. And the Republicans are just as much in bed with the big industrial complexes as the Democrats, so we probably won't see any changes there. The Democrats have shown a big bias to the medical- and educational-industrial complexes. If the Republicans gain the upper hand we might see a shift toward the military-industrial complex.
We really need a new party that doesn't have these longstanding understandings with the giant corporations, but getting a new party off the ground, much less gaining a foothold in Congress is going to be a giant uphill battle that will take decades. You are going to need an army of dedicated true believers, and where are you going to find the financing to fund that? And who is going to decide whether your faith is pure enough? Gah. We're doomed.
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| American Land Use |
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| A homeless man sits near the New York Stock Exchange, where many of the world's wealthiest companies are listed [Reuters] |
I took the title from this piece. It's a great line.
Trump and I can agree: The US is a ‘third-world country’ by Belén Fernández
The imperial hubris on display in the use of such lingo towards poorer nations can’t hide America’s own failures.
When on August 8 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in search of classified documents, the ex-president of the United States decried the episode as “an assault [that] could only take place in broken, third-world countries”. He continued to lament that America had “now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before”.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, chimed in on Twitter with the assessment: “This is what you see happen in 3rd World Banana Republics!!!” Never mind that the FBI’s seizure of secret documents does not fit the “corruption” bill quite as well as some other characteristics of American democracy: say, the fact that non-taxpaying billionaires can be president or that the country is run as a crooked, oligarchic corporatocracy.
This is not the first time Trump has likened the US to a “third-world country”, which was also his epithet of choice when he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. But Trump & Co are not the only members of the US ruling elite to exercise this vocabulary. The January 2021 attack on the US Capitol prompted a surge in pejorative “third world” and “banana republic” comparisons from everyone from Biden to George W Bush, former US leader and civilised ravager of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Indeed, it is impossible to understate the bipartisan imperial hubris that is on display in the casual deployment of such lingo. By implicitly and unironically mocking underdeveloped nations, the US political establishment appears to have conveniently forgotten the country’s own historical role in creating the “banana republic” phenomenon in the first place — and in ensuring that the “third world” remains, you know, “third”.
The term “banana republic” was coined in 1904 by American writer O Henry in reference to the Central American nation of Honduras, which, like neighbouring Guatemala, was an early victim of predatory US capitalism and corporate exploitation. The economic and physical wellbeing of the inhabitants of such lowly nations was naturally of no concern to the hemispheric behemoth, which ensured its unfettered access to regional resources by backing right-wing coups, bloody civil wars, corrupt dictatorships and death squads — in other words, stuff that was slightly more devastating than an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.
The Cold War, of course, provided a handy alibi for US-backed killing worldwide, from Nicaragua to Angola — while also spawning the “third-world” designation that would go on to accrue patronising connotations. Once the communist menace had been replaced with the terrorist menace as the primary US excuse for lethal international interference, the remaining global superpower continued to extend a charitable hand to the impoverished “third world” — often via a form of corporate neocolonialism cast as “development”.
And while Trump’s recent tantrum about the US as a “broken, third-world” country can certainly be filed under the expansive category of Distastefully Kooky Things Trump Has Said, there is also an unintended element of truth to it. Like it or not, the US fits the third-world stereotype in many respects — and not just in terms of its oligarchic style of governance.
The US advertises itself as being at the vanguard of global “development”, but the nation’s healthcare, poverty and other indicators suggest a policy of wilful counterdevelopment instead. Back in 2017, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the US for two weeks. At the end of his trip, he issued a statement on how he found the country “exceptional in … ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights”.
Despite managing to spend more money on “national defence” than China, Russia, the United Kingdom and a bunch of other big spenders combined, the US had some “40 million people” living in poverty amid glaring “contrasts between private wealth and public squalor”.
As Alston noted, the US was also “alone among developed countries” in insisting that human rights did “not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare, or growing up in a context of total deprivation”. So much for that line from the US Declaration of Independence about “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It’s hard to pursue anything if you’re dead.
Speaking of death, infant mortality rates in the US are higher than in Cuba, an island that has spent more than 60 years under an asphyxiating US embargo. Trump himself imposed no fewer than 243 new sanctions against the Cubans — as punishment for their crime of pursuing national sovereignty over the “banana republic” model — and, for good measure, threw Cuba back on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Back in the land of the free, meanwhile, homelessness has reached ghastly levels unseen even in many “underdeveloped” countries, and the US has long maintained the highest incarceration rate in the world — although it may have recently been surpassed by El Salvador, another place where US support for “human rights” has involved backing right-wing state terror.
Such is the ironic nature of imperial power, it seems, that the global hegemon responsible for oppressing much of the third world must also keep a significant portion of its own populace in third-world conditions.
As per Trump’s twisted logic, any attempt to hold him accountable for anything is evidence that the US is a “corrupt” and “broken, third-world” country. And while there’s no sense in wasting time on Trumpian delusion, we might nonetheless take the opportunity to recall that old saying about the broken clock — and to acknowledge that the US is definitively broken.
Belén Fernández is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine. And just what is Jacobin Magazine you might ask?
"Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture."
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| Throwing Money Away |
On September 3, 1783, after nearly a year of excruciating back-and-forth negotiations, all sides had finally gathered together in Paris to sign a historic peace agreement.
It was a pretty important peace deal. Because the Treaty of Paris, as it is now known, is what formally ended the American Revolution, and when Great Britain legally recognized the United States as an independent nation.
The treaty was signed in Paris because France had been a major supporter of the US war effort. And just as soon as the ink was dry, French King Louis XVI ordered his finance minister to prepare an accounting of exactly how much money France had spent on US independence.
The result was nothing short of astonishing—more than 1 billion livres.
To put that number in context, the French Treasury’s entire annual revenue only amounted to around 200 million livres.
So they had basically sunk FIVE YEARS worth of their tax revenue fighting someone else’s war.
Granted, Britain was still one of France’s main rivals. And the French did not care for British King George III.
But the American War was simply too costly, and France had already been on very shaky financial footing well before this point.
Louis XIV had nearly bankrupted the country a century before. His successor, Louis XV, had to drastically slash expenses and could barely hang on financially.
Then, in 1774, just prior to the American Revolution, Louis XVI became king at a time that France was rapidly deteriorating.
You’d think that with so much economic turmoil at home that he would have focused on his own national interests… and, in lieu of money, weapons, and ships, he would have instead sent the royal thoughts and prayers to America.
But no. Lucky for the United States, Louis XVI courageously fought the American Revolution down to the very last French taxpayer.
Only after the war did Louis finally take stock of the situation and realize the truth: America was in a much better position. Britain was bruised but still powerful. Yet his own France was nearly bankrupt and desperately in need of cash. Not exactly a win/win.
Louis XVI was King, but his powers were limited; he was beholden to the legislature, called the Estates-General, and he couldn’t simply decree new taxes without their consent.
The King did, however, control the tax collectors. And Louis made sure they had every authority to coerce, harass, and intimidate money out of French citizens.
French tax collectors had the authority to walk right into people’s homes unannounced, conduct surprise inspections to look for hidden wealth, and walk away with whatever money or property they felt would satisfy the peasant’s tax bill.
This is actually a pretty common theme throughout history: governments that are on the ropes routinely resort to plundering the savings of their citizens.
Several ancient Roman emperors, in fact, from Diocletian to Valentinian III, famously sent ruthless tax collectors to harass their citizens and steal their wealth. Several ancient Chinese dynasties did the same thing. So did the declining Ottoman Empire.
Significantly ramping up tax collection efforts is typically a hallmark of an economy and empire in decline.
Please remember that the French Revolution started in 1789, just six years after the Treaty of Paris.
Simon goes on to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act and the effect it is likely to have on the US economy (not good). I like his conclusion:
Taxes ultimately represent the government’s ‘slice’ of an economic pie. So when a country is prosperous and an economy is strong, the government’s slice continues to grow because the overall economic pie is constantly getting bigger.
But nations in decline don’t see it this way. For them, the pie is shrinking. So they think the only way to increase their slice is to go after other people’s crumbs.
History shows this is absolutely the wrong move. Raising tax rates, inventing new taxes, and recruiting armies of tax collectors only makes the pie shrink even more.
Their efforts, instead, should be focused on making the pie bigger. But they don’t think that way.
Bear in mind this is all brought to you by the same people who are shoveling your tax dollars out the door to Ukraine $50 billion at a time. It’s very ‘Louis XVI’ of them.
All of these trends—the cannibalistic surge in tax authorities, the anti-productive regulations, the economic scarcity mentality—are all hallmarks of an empire in decline.
The situation is NOT terminal. It is NOT irreversible. But it is reason enough to have a Plan B.
