Walter H. Hunt

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

@Clint_Davey1 It is excellent, especially epic. 8 people can play and it’s a great time

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Wow

[Dr. Clown, PhD @DrClownPhD]

Mitch McConnell continues to reach new heights in his recovery. 😭

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Cool

[TradeVibe @TradeVibe777]

In 1925, an engineer in a small New Zealand city started a machine that the entire world had already decided to forget.

100 years later, it's still running. And it is the last one on Earth that can.

Let that sink in for a second.

Not "one of the last." Not "rare." The LAST. Every other machine of its exact kind, built for the exact same purpose, using the exact same design, has been scrapped, melted down, or left to rot into scrap metal in a scrapyard somewhere. This one didn't die. And the story of why it didn't die is stranger, darker, and more human than you'd expect from a pile of iron and pistons.

Here's the setup.

In the early 1900s, engineers were obsessed with a problem: how do you cram enormous power into a small, compact space? Ships needed engines that were brutally powerful but didn't eat up half the hull. The answer some engineers landed on was a genuinely bizarre design — a two-stroke diesel engine with four cylinders, but inside each cylinder sat not one piston, but two. Opposed pistons, moving toward each other, linked by oblique connecting rods to a crankshaft in a way that looks, even today, almost impossible to believe actually works.

It's called a Fullagar engine.

Only two of this exact specification were ever built in the entire history of industrial manufacturing. Two. Not two hundred. Not twenty. Two.

One went to England, installed at a factory in Rugby, run for decades, retired, and then put on public display outside as a museum piece — sitting in the open air, exposed to English weather, slowly corroding in front of visitors who had no idea what they were looking at. By 1980, it was quietly scrapped. Gone. Melted down. Erased.

The other one went to a small port city on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island. A city called Napier.

And that's where this story stops being about engineering and starts being about survival.

Napier installed this engine in 1925 as a generator — 600 horsepower driving a 400 kilowatt alternator, humming away at 3,300 volts, feeding electricity into a growing coastal city that desperately needed reliable power. For a few years it did exactly what it was built to do: sit in a power house, burn diesel, spin a crankshaft, and keep the lights on for people who never thought about it twice.

Then, in the late 1920s, Napier connected to New Zealand's national electricity grid. Hydro power arrived. Suddenly this massive, expensive, complicated machine wasn't needed anymore. It became a backup. A just-in-case. The kind of equipment that sits quietly in a corner while the world moves on without it — the exact fate that killed its twin in England.

This is usually where machines like this die. Budgets get reviewed. Someone asks "why are we still paying to maintain this thing we never use?" And it gets sold for parts, or scrapped, or simply left to rust until it's not worth saving anymore.

But then something happened that nobody could have planned for.

On the morning of February 3rd, 1931, the ground underneath Hawke's Bay tore itself apart. One of the deadliest earthquakes in New Zealand's history hit Napier directly — buildings collapsed, fires broke out across the city, hundreds of people died, and the entire regional power infrastructure that Napier had come to rely on was ripped apart in seconds.

The hydro connection that had made this engine "obsolete" just a few years earlier? Gone. Destroyed. Unreachable.

And in the chaos, in the fires, in the search for survivors, in the darkest days a city on this coast had ever faced — there was exactly one machine standing between Napier and total darkness.

The backup. The "unnecessary" engine nobody thought they needed anymore.

It ran. While the city around it was in ruins, this engine kept turning, kept generating, kept the lights on for a community trying to claw its way out of catastrophe. It wasn't a footnote in the recovery. For a period after the quake, it was the only source of electricity the entire city had. One machine, doing the job of an entire power grid, because someone hadn't gotten around to scrapping it yet.

Try to sit with that for a second. A piece of machinery that was one budget decision away from being melted down ended up being the thing that kept a devastated city's hospitals, radios, and emergency response functioning in its darkest hour. If Napier had been slightly more efficient, slightly more eager to modernize, slightly quicker to get rid of "unnecessary" backup equipment — there's a real chance people who survived the earthquake wouldn't have survived what came after it.

That's not a coincidence you can plan for. That's just what happens when you keep something running instead of throwing it away.

After the earthquake, the engine went back to quiet backup duty. It sat there, ready, for decades — through the 1930s, through a world war, through the 1950s, through the 1960s — running occasionally, being maintained by people who understood exactly what they were looking after, until 1970. Fifty years after it was installed, it was finally taken fully out of active electrical service.

Fifty years. Not five. Not fifteen. Fifty.

And here's the part that should genuinely unsettle you: it should have ended there. Decommissioned machines like this almost never survive contact with time. No fuel supply, no active purpose, no economic reason to keep it — the natural endpoint for something like this is a scrapyard, exactly like what happened to its identical twin on the other side of the world.

Instead, it got something almost no retired industrial machine on the planet ever gets: a second life as something to be understood, not discarded.

The old power house where it had lived its entire working life was handed over to become a museum — what's now known as the Faraday Museum of Technology, right there on Faraday Street in Napier. The engine didn't get moved to a warehouse. It didn't get partially disassembled for parts. It stayed exactly where it had always stood, in the exact building it had always occupied, and a small group of people made a decision that changes everything about how this story ends:

They decided to keep it moving.

Not running on diesel anymore — there's no fuel supply left for it and no silencer, so burning it the way it used to run simply isn't practical anymore. Instead, volunteers fitted it with a friction drive powered by a large electric motor, so the entire mechanism — every piston, every oblique rod, every moving part inside — can still turn, still cycle, still demonstrate exactly how this bizarre and brilliant piece of engineering actually functions. They even installed Perspex windows into the crankcase and internal lighting, so you can look directly inside a hundred-year-old engine and watch the opposed pistons move in real time, lit up like something out of a museum exhibit designed by people who genuinely love what they're preserving.

That detail matters more than it seems. Most industrial museums show you machines behind glass, frozen, dead, described only by a plaque. This is different. This is a machine that still moves the way it was designed to move, still demonstrates the actual mechanical logic that made it revolutionary in 1912, still lets you watch pistons that were manufactured before either world war do exactly what they were built to do.

There are other Fullagar-style engines scattered around the world — a couple in Australia, several in Malta, a few reportedly in Gibraltar, and units that once sat on Nauru Island. But scattered survival isn't the same as this. Most of those are static. Silent. Preserved the way a taxidermied animal is preserved — present, but not alive in any meaningful sense.

This is the one that still moves. The only operational example of its kind, of this specification, of this design lineage, anywhere on the planet. Not "one of a handful still around." The single one still capable of demonstrating, in motion, what an entire generation of marine and industrial engineers were trying to solve for.

And it stays alive for one reason that has nothing to do with government funding, corporate sponsorship, or institutional preservation budgets.

Volunteers.

A rotating crew of people — some with decades of mechanical experience, some who simply fell in love with the machine the first time they saw it — show up, again and again, to service it, maintain it, keep the friction drive running, keep the lighting working, keep a hundred-year-old mechanical system from quietly seizing up the way almost every other machine of its era already has. There's no massive institutional budget guaranteeing this thing survives another decade. There's a small group of people who decided it mattered, and kept showing up.

In November 2024, the Faraday Museum marked exactly 100 years since this engine first started supplying power to Napier. A century since a piece of machinery, built to solve a compact-power problem for ships, ended up becoming the literal pulse of an entire city for fifty years, and then the reason that city didn't go dark on its worst day, and then a hundred-year-old museum centerpiece kept alive purely by people who refused to let it die.

Most machines don't get a hundred-year anniversary. Most machines don't get a second act. Most machines get scrapped the moment they stop being economically convenient — exactly like the identical twin engine that was left outside in England to rot until it was finally destroyed in 1980.

This one didn't. This one is still turning right now, today, because somebody decided a piece of history deserved to keep moving instead of being melted down.

There's something almost uncomfortable about how close this engine came to not existing anymore. One earthquake earlier, and it might have already been decommissioned before it ever got the chance to save a city. One budget cut later, and it might have gone the way of its twin. One generation of volunteers who didn't show up, and it would be a silent, frozen artifact behind a rope line instead of a living mechanical demonstration you can actually watch move.

Every single piece of that timeline had an off-ramp where this machine simply disappears from history. It didn't take any of them.

And now here it is. A hundred years old. The only one of its kind left standing anywhere in the world, still capable of doing the one thing it was built to do — turn.

If you've never seen opposed pistons on oblique rods actually moving inside a diesel engine built before your great-grandparents were born, you've genuinely never seen anything like this. It doesn't look like modern machinery. It doesn't move like modern machinery. It looks like something from a different branch of engineering history entirely — because it is. It's a mechanical dead end that happened to survive, a design philosophy that lost the industrial arms race everywhere except one power house in a small New Zealand city that refused to let it go.

Watch how it moves. Watch what a century of survival actually looks like up close. This isn't a replica. This isn't a static display. This is the real, original, hundred-year-old machine that once kept an entire earthquake-shattered city alive, still doing the thing it was built to do, because a handful of people decided that history deserved to keep running instead of quietly stopping forever.

There is exactly one of these left on the planet. You're looking at it.

Let's go back further, because the "why" behind this design is almost as wild as the survival story.

The man behind the concept was a British engineer named Alan John Fullagar, working in the early 1910s, in an era when internal combustion was still fighting for legitimacy against steam. Steam engines were proven, reliable, understood by every engineer on Earth. Diesel was new, unpredictable, and — critically for marine use — usually meant sacrificing a huge amount of hull space just to fit an engine big enough to move a ship. Fullagar's obsession was compactness. He wanted an engine that could deliver serious horsepower without eating the ship alive.

His solution was mechanically audacious: instead of one piston per cylinder pushing against a fixed cylinder head, he put two pistons in each cylinder, facing each other, moving toward each other on every power stroke, compressing the fuel-air charge between them with no cylinder head at all. No head means no head to cool, no head gasket to fail, and — most importantly — twice the working surface per cylinder in roughly the same physical footprint.

But here's the genuinely strange part: how do you get power out of an engine where two pistons are moving toward each other in the same cylinder? You can't just hook them both straight to a normal crankshaft in the usual way. Fullagar's answer was oblique connecting rods — rods set at an angle, not straight up and down like almost every piston engine you've ever seen — translating that opposing motion into rotation through a geometry that most engineers of the era considered borderline theoretical.

It worked. Barely twenty of the very largest specification were ever manufactured worldwide, and only two of the exact size and configuration installed in Napier and in Rugby, England ever existed. This wasn't a mass-production engine. This was closer to a mechanical proof of concept that happened to also generate real, usable industrial power for half a century.

Most engineering dead ends stay dead ends because they simply don't work well enough to justify their complexity. This one worked. It worked so well it ran continuously, on and off, for fifty straight years, through a world war, through a national depression, through one of the deadliest natural disasters in New Zealand's history — and it was still mechanically sound enough in 1970 that the reason it stopped wasn't failure. It was simply no longer needed.

Compare that to how much of what we build today is designed to fail on a schedule. This machine was designed before anyone had a concept of planned obsolescence, built like the people making it assumed someone might still be looking at it a century later. They were right.

Now picture what maintaining something like this actually looks like in practice, because it isn't romantic in the way a museum plaque makes it sound. There's no manufacturer to call. There's no parts catalog. There's no service manual sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere with torque specs for every bolt. If a part needs replacing, someone has to understand the original 1912 engineering well enough to either fabricate it from scratch or adapt something that was never designed to fit. That's not maintenance. That's closer to forensic engineering — reverse-engineering the intentions of a designer who's been dead for the better part of a century, using tools and materials he never had access to, to keep a machine moving the exact way he intended it to move.

That's what the volunteers at the Faraday Museum actually do. Not polish the paint. Not vacuum around it for visitors. They keep a piece of mechanical history that has no living expert, no active manufacturer, and no modern equivalent functioning exactly as designed — because if they stop, there's no factory to call for parts. There's no backup. There's no second chance. If this one seizes up permanently, that's not a repair job. That's the last operational example of an entire branch of engineering history going silent forever.

Every time it turns, it's not just a demonstration. It's a small, ongoing act of defiance against the fact that almost everything else like it has already been destroyed.

Now think about the earthquake again, but slower this time, because the timeline is more brutal than it sounds at first pass.

February 3rd, 1931. 10:47 in the morning. Magnitude 7.8, centered just off the coast, close enough and shallow enough to hit Napier and neighboring Hastings with a violence that flattened entire commercial districts in under three minutes. Roughly 256 people died across the region — one of the deadliest disasters in New Zealand's recorded history. Fires broke out almost immediately in the rubble, spreading through what was left of the central city because water mains had ruptured and firefighting capability was crippled. Communication lines were down. Roads were cracked and impassable. And the modern hydro-electric grid that had made this old diesel engine "redundant" less than a decade earlier was among the infrastructure that failed.

In a disaster like that, electricity isn't a convenience. It's the difference between hospitals being able to operate and hospitals working in the dark. It's the difference between coordinating a rescue effort and stumbling through rubble blind. It's the difference between radio communication reaching the outside world for help and a city being cut off entirely, alone, with no way to call for aid.

And the machine that stepped into that gap wasn't some purpose-built emergency generator installed in anticipation of disaster. It was a six-year-old backup unit that the city had essentially already mentally filed away as obsolete. Nobody built it to be a hero. It just happened to still be there, still capable, still ready, when everything else failed at once.

That's the detail that should actually stick with you. Heroism, in this story, isn't dramatic. It's not a rescue, not a sacrifice, not a single decisive moment. It's the quiet, boring fact that somebody, at some point, decided not to get rid of the backup equipment just because it wasn't being used much anymore. And because of that one unglamorous decision, an entire city had light and power on the worst day in its history.

Multiply that by the decades that followed. Every year this thing sat in that power house not actively needed was a year someone could have reasonably argued to scrap it, sell the metal, free up the space, cut the maintenance budget. Every single year, someone didn't make that argument — or made it and lost. Fifty years of that. Fifty years of a piece of machinery surviving purely because enough people, over and over, across generations, decided it wasn't time to let it go yet.

And then in 1970, when it finally was retired from active duty, the story could have ended exactly the way its twin's did in England — sitting outside, exposed, deteriorating in public view as a "museum piece" that nobody was actually maintaining, until it quietly got scrapped a decade later because upkeep costs more than most institutions are willing to spend on nostalgia.

Napier's engine got something almost none of its contemporaries received: people who treated preservation as an active, ongoing responsibility instead of a passive hope. The difference between "on display" and "still alive" is entirely a function of whether anyone is willing to keep doing the unglamorous work. England's Fullagar sat outside looking impressive for a while and then died anyway. Napier's engine sits inside, gets serviced, gets its friction drive maintained, gets its lighting checked, gets watched over by people who show up on a schedule because they've decided this machine is worth the effort. That's the entire difference between "artifact" and "survivor."

There's a specific kind of quiet most people never notice until they stand in front of something like this — the sound of an enormous mechanical structure built for raw industrial power moving smoothly, deliberately, at a scale that dwarfs a human being standing next to it. Most of the engineering we interact with daily is designed to disappear — engines hidden under hoods, motors sealed inside plastic housings, mechanisms we're actively discouraged from looking at directly. This is the complete opposite. Every moving part is exposed, visible, deliberately lit so you can watch a hundred-year-old mechanical answer to a hundred-year-old engineering problem play out in real time, a few feet from your face.

You don't get that experience from a photograph. You don't get it from a plaque describing horsepower figures and historical dates. You get it by watching the thing actually move — watching opposed pistons close the distance between each other inside a cylinder that predates radio broadcasting, powered today by a friction drive and an electric motor because the volunteers who look after it refuse to let "no fuel supply" be the reason a piece of history stops turning.

A hundred years ago, an engineer solved a problem nobody else could solve as elegantly, in a design so specific that only two were ever built to that exact specification. One died slowly, outside, forgotten, scrapped by 1980. The other became the only thing standing between an earthquake-shattered city and total darkness, then spent another four decades quietly doing its job, then got saved — not by luck, not by a corporation, not by government mandate, but by ordinary people who kept showing up.

It is, right now, today, the only operational example of its kind anywhere on the surface of this planet.

You are one video away from watching a piece of mechanical history that should not exist anymore, doing exactly what it was built to do, exactly the way it did it for the earthquake survivors of 1931, exactly the way it did it in 1925, still moving, still alive, still the last one standing.

Watch it turn.

One more thing worth sitting with before you scroll away.

We live surrounded by machines that are designed to be temporary. Phones that are engineered to slow down after two years so you'll buy the next one. Appliances built with parts that fail right after the warranty runs out. Cars with plastic components under the hood that nobody expects to survive past a decade. We've normalized the idea that machines are disposable by nature — that everything mechanical has a shelf life, and once it's past that shelf life, the correct response is to replace it, not repair it.

This engine is a direct rebuttal to that entire worldview. It was built in an era before anyone had optimized for planned obsolescence, by people who over-engineered things because they simply didn't know how not to. And a century later, it's still standing specifically because a group of humans decided that "old" and "useless" are not the same word. They looked at a machine that had already outlived its economic purpose twice over — first when the grid arrived, then when it was formally decommissioned in 1970 — and decided that outliving its usefulness didn't mean it had stopped mattering.

That's a genuinely rare decision. Most of history doesn't get preserved. Most of it gets scrapped, sold for parts, quietly discarded because keeping it around costs money and effort with no immediate payoff. The stuff that survives a hundred years almost never survives by accident. It survives because somebody, somewhere, refused to let the easy option win.

Think about how many machines exactly like this one existed in the early 20th century, doing exactly the same job, built to exactly the same ambitious specifications. Dozens, at minimum, across shipping fleets and power stations and industrial plants around the world. Every single one of them is gone except this one. Not because this one was better built. Not because this one was luckier in some cosmic sense. It's the last one standing because, generation after generation, somebody made the boring, unglamorous, thankless decision to keep showing up and keep it running instead of letting it join all the others in a scrapyard somewhere.

That's not really a story about an engine. That's a story about what it actually takes for anything — a machine, a skill, a piece of history, a tradition — to survive long enough to matter to people who weren't even born when it was built. It takes people who don't need recognition for it. It takes maintenance nobody claps for. It takes decades of unglamorous, repetitive care from volunteers whose names most visitors will never learn, who show up not because anyone's paying them enough to justify it, but because they've decided this particular piece of the past deserves a future.

So when you watch this thing turn — when you see opposed pistons that were forged before either World War slide toward each other inside a machine that once kept a devastated city alive — you're not just watching an old engine spin. You're watching the physical result of a hundred years of people refusing to give up on something the rest of the world had already written off twice.

Ask yourself honestly: how many things in your own life have you already decided are "too old to bother with," the same way an entire industry decided this design was a dead end after only two were ever built? How many of those things might still be worth keeping running, if someone was simply willing to put in the unglamorous work?

This engine didn't survive because it was rare. It survived because people decided rarity was worth protecting.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Before you decide who James Talarico is based on a campaign ad, a sound bite or a meme, it’s worth knowing a little about the person behind the politics.
Have you ever read James Talarico’s story? Researched his background? Did you know that he taught sixth-grade language arts at a high-poverty middle school in San Antonio? That he earned a master’s degree in education policy from Harvard? That he has concentrated heavily on public education, children’s welfare and access to health care? That he has served in the Texas House since 2018? That he’s studying at a Presbyterian seminary?
Talarico is a native Texan with eight generations of Texas roots. He was born and raised by a single mother in Round Rock. His grandfather was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, and Talarico still attends the Presbyterian church where he was baptized as a child. His faith has been a significant part of his life since childhood.
After graduating from UT, he went to Harvard where he earned a master’sdegree in education. He then went into public education, teaching sixth-grade language arts at Rhodes Middle School on San Antonio’s West Side, in one of the poorest ZIP codes in Texas. He didn't just teach from a textbook and go home. Former colleagues and school administrators have described him as a teacher who connected with students, encouraged struggling readers and earned the respect of kids who were often difficult to reach.
One former colleague recalled that some students who had never finished an entire book ended up loving reading in Talarico's classroom. His former principal said students generally respected him enough that even kids with serious behavior problems stayed in line in his classroom.
That experience changed the direction of his life.
He came away believing that many of the problems he saw in his classroom couldn't be fixed one student at a time. So he went into public policy and eventually into the Texas Legislature.
He was elected to the Texas House in 2018 at just 29 years old and has now served for 8 years in the Legislature. He has worked on education, child care, prescription drug costs, juvenile justice and other issues. Texas Monthly named him one of its Ten Best Legislators in 2021, citing his intelligence, collegiality and political savvy. Among his legislative accomplishments are a $25 insulin copay cap, legislation allowing incarcerated minors to earn high-school diplomas, a statewide pre-K class-size cap and other education and healthcare measures.
And then there's something else about Talarico that gets surprisingly little attention:
He is studying to become a Presbyterian minister.
He enrolled at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary because, in his words, he wanted to explore the first of Jesus' two commandments - loving God - while he was already trying to live out the second, loving his neighbor. He has studied the New Testament and Hebrew biblical interpretation, and he has said that he hopes to become a minister one day.
He's also been very clear that his Christian faith is what motivates his public service. He talks about lowering the cost of child care and prescription drugs, funding public schools and reforming the justice system as ways of loving his neighbors. At the same time, he believes strongly in separation of church and state and says he doesn't want politicians teaching people what their faith should be.
We should look at the whole person and the actual record, rather than letting political memes define him.
This isn't some guy who suddenly appeared in Texas politics yesterday.
He's a Texan from a family with eight generations of Texas roots. A Harvard graduate. A former public-school teacher. A legislator who has actually passed legislation. A lifelong Christian. A grandson of a preacher. And a seminary student preparing for ministry.
That's the James Talarico I see. VIA~~ Chauntel Moore

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

FFS
But to his credit Vivek issued a statement through his spokesman.

[Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 @RachelBitecofer]

🚨🚨🚨Some maga lunatic just tried to assassinate Dem Gov candidate Amy Acton in Ohio.

Her and her husband are safe but there are reports of injuries. https://t.co/3fxFQ8hqHE

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

@hines_stephen Just clue me in Brother

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

@NiallHarbison I read your posts about the dogs you have rescued, and it always gives me hope for humanity. Whatever has gripped you, I trust it will let go in time. Many people believe in you. I do, though we have never met.

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

He’s lying, of course.

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

@esrtweet @ojessie__ Always our choice. But there are places where no one has heard of it :(

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Sign me up

[tim russ @timruss2]

10 years from now a man in NY city sees an ad:
"Piss on Trump's grave for 10$."
He calls the number but is told 
he as to go to Los Angeles.
"LA?  Why....did you move his grave?"
"No, that's where the back of the line is."

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

True.

[The Biblical Man @Biblicalman]

Dolly Parton is dead, and the church never knew what to do with her.

Half my feed is posting rhinestones today. The other half never trusted her, because she would not wear the uniform.

She never preached a sermon.

She just did the works.

One man. Fifty-eight years. In an industry that eats marriages. No scandal reel, no reality show, no trading up. Just Carl, and a promise kept until death did them part.

She could have built towers in Nashville. Instead she built in the mountains she came from, so the people she came from could work.

Two hundred million books. Given away to children, free, no strings, while the rest of us argued about what to read.

A million dollars for a vaccine in the middle of a plague, and she called it what it was: helping.

She was a feminist who never used the word, a superstar who never left home, and a believer who never made you watch her pray.

"Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works." James 2:18.

We spent years asking whether she was one of ours.

She never asked whether we were one of hers. She was too busy feeding children.

I do not know her heart. That was never my job. I know her works, because the whole county she came from lives on them.

"Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Matthew 7:20.

You want to honor her today? Put down the tribute post. Put a book in a kid's hands. Stay married. Do the works.

That was the whole sermon. She just never said it out loud.

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Well that’s clever

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Iceland has a breed of sheep that nobody breeds for meat, because for a thousand years it has been bred for one quality only. Judgement.

They are called forystufe. Leader sheep. Taller, longer in the leg, narrower through the body, oddly marked, and always at the front, with their heads up while the rest of the flock has its head down. When they move, the flock moves. Nobody votes.

A proven leader sold for two or three times the price of a good sheep. Bloodlines became famous. When a great one died, the farm kept the head.

And the claim attached to them sounds like folklore until you read the records. They know the weather is coming, sometimes a full day out. If the leader will not leave the barn on a morning that looks perfectly fine, you do not move the flock. Farmers arranged their winters around the opinion of a sheep, and wrote it down as fact.

Autumn round-up, 1884. A large flock is being driven across the interior when a blizzard comes down on open sand and rock. Every landmark goes. You cannot pitch a tent on that ground and turning back is worse than going on.

At the front is a ram called Surtur, from Svinavatn, already known as a superior leader. The fjallkongur, the man running the round-up, makes a decision. He hands the whole thing to the sheep and tells his men to stay together.

A third of the way across, Surtur stops, turns, and walks back down through the flock to find the men. His face is packed solid with ice and he cannot see. They clear it. He returns to the front and walks back into the weather.

He comes back for the same service several more times that night. Nobody has to fetch him.

Then he stops and will not move at all. The men feel about and find grass under their boots, which tells them they are off the desert and nothing else whatsoever.

At dawn the storm eases and they work out where they are.

They are standing on the exact spot the round-up stops every year after crossing the sands. Surtur had halted there since he was a lamb. Afterwards the fjallkongur told his owner that without the ram, men would have died out there as well as sheep.

There are fewer than 1,500 leader sheep left, all of them descended from one district in the north east. Iceland recognised them as a breed of their own in 2017. There is a small museum out there, run by a local teacher, with the heads of the great ones on the wall and a coffee blend named after the animals. The saying on the wall is that if you wear clothes made from their wool, you will always find your way home.

Genetic work has since confirmed they really are distinct from every other Icelandic sheep. The folklore was right. Folklore usually is, out where the weather kills people.

No laboratory. No pedigree software. No genome. Just farmer after farmer, century after century, watching which animal was at the front when the light went, and breeding from that one.

A thousand years of selecting a sheep for its judgement, and at the end of it they built it a museum.

And here we are, in the country that calls them stupid.

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Yep

[Willie Ross Jr. Knee Deep @RossKneeDeep]

By Rev. Joseph Yoo+:

I completely understand why some people are angry with Fauci.

He told Americans the virus was under control and would soon disappear.
He predicted cases would soon be close to zero.

He said the virus would miraculously go away.

He privately admitted the virus was “deadly stuff”… “more deadly than even your strenuous flus”… “this is deadly stuff”… while publicly minimizing it.

He privately said, “This thing is a killer… if it gets you, it rips you apart.”

He told Bob Woodward COVID was far more dangerous than the flu while saying something very different in public.

He promoted hydroxychloroquine as a game changer before good evidence supported it.

He suggested looking into disinfectant injections or using powerful light inside the body.

He said, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

He publicly congratulated himself on his handling of the pandemic and repeatedly gave his response top marks.

Oh.
Wait.
None of those things were Anthony Fauci.
Every single one of them was Donald Trump.

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Cool

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The US Navy operates a 50,000 acre forest in Indiana whose entire job is keeping one wooden ship from 1797 afloat.

The ship is USS Constitution, still a commissioned warship with an active-duty crew. Cannonballs bounced off her in 1812 because the hull sandwiches a wall of live oak ribs between two layers of white oak planking, nearly 2 feet of solid wood so dense it barely floats. British 18-pounders hit it and dropped into the sea. A sailor yelled "her sides are made of iron" and the nickname stuck.

Here's the problem with owning a 229-year-old wooden ship: you can't buy the parts. Hull planks run up to 40 feet long and 7 inches thick, cut from single white oak trunks. A white oak takes over a century to grow that big. No lumberyard on earth stocks it.

So the Navy grows its own. Constitution Grove at Naval Support Activity Crane holds trees over 100 years old, reserved exclusively for this ship. Foresters there are managing oaks today that will become hull planking in the 2100s. The maintenance plan literally runs on tree time.

Every 20 years or so she enters dry dock and shipwrights swap out rotted timber. After two centuries of this, estimates put original 1797 wood at maybe 10 to 15 percent of the ship. The Navy keeps replacing her plank by plank because Congress mandated her preservation and because she's the only active US warship that has sunk an enemy vessel.

Every other asset in the Navy has a decommission date. This one has a tree farm.

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

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[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

"When you come to power, will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?" It was 1931, and American journalist Dorothy Thompson was permitted only three questions during a rare interview with Adolf Hitler that many considered impossible to secure. The leader of Germany's rapidly ascending far-right Nazi party gave her a chillingly candid reply.

"I will get into power legally," Hitler told her. "I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below."

Thompson believed he was telling the truth about his dictatorial ambitions, yet she couldn't fathom that he would be successful. The very idea struck her as absurd: "Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights."

As one of America’s most respected foreign correspondents and the first American woman to head a foreign news bureau, Thompson had been tracking the Nazi movement since 1923. At the time of the interview, she was deeply familiar with Hitler, having watched his speeches, read Mein Kampf, and interviewed numerous German politicians and Nazi supporters.

"When I walked into Adolph Hitler's salon in the Kaiserhof hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany," Thompson later reflected. "In something like fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog."

She recognized that Hitler was a masterful propagandist and orator in front of a crowd but she wasn't prepared for how pathetic he appeared one on one. "He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man," she wrote after their meeting. Thompson found the interview nearly impossible to conduct: "One cannot carry on a conversation with Adolph Hitler... In every question, he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus in some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice, which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance. He bangs the table."

Following the interview, in numerous articles and her book "I Saw Hitler," she warned about the threat Hitler represented to democracy and highlighted Hitler's embrace of racial prejudice, noting that persecution of the Jewish people was among the first planks in his program. But ultimately, she viewed an outright Nazi victory in the upcoming election as "unlikely," not believing that German citizens would embrace such an extremist demagogue in an election.

Within a year, Thompson learned the devastating lesson of how easily democratic citizens could be persuaded to relinquish their rights to a would-be dictator who channeled their anxieties into hatred of a demonized 'other' while promising national greatness. After he came to power in 1933, Hitler began to crush his political opponents, rapidly militarize German society, and persecute targeted groups. Thompson quickly became one of the most vocal chroniclers of Hitler's growing brutality, warning a world that was largely oblivious. “It must be said, it must be re-iterated,” she wrote, “that there has been and still is a widespread terror, which extends throughout the whole of Germany.”

Hitler was sufficiently threatened by Thompson's work that he reportedly demanded the creation of a "Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad" to rush translations of her articles to him. In August 1934, Nazi government expelled Thompson from the country, making her the first American journalist banned from Nazi Germany.

© A Mighty Girl

#archaeohistories

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

However, if you're interested in the two books, whether or not you'll be following the Patreon feed (details to follow), I am now making them available as PDFs on my web site for $1.99 each.
The link is live at
https://t.co/lMfYzlJvET
Enjoy!

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Later this year I will have an opportunity to be a guest on the Patreon feed of my friend Chuck Gannon. I'll be posting the early chapters of the third mesmerism book, *Paths Into Shadow*. It has no publisher at present, and the first two books are currently out of print.

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Brilliant

[LaughBreak: Dad Jokes ‘N More @MediocreJoker85]

A German, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Brit are debating philosophy.

The question arises: What separates man from the animals?

“Technology,” says the German. “Other creatures use tools, but none can match the engineering feats we’ve accomplished. It is our industry that separates us from the beasts.”

“I disagree,” says the Italian. “It is food. Animals eat, but they do not cook. Humans create incredible dishes and endless combinations that make eating one of life’s greatest pleasures.”

“I say it’s art,” declares the Frenchman. “No other creature can create art. Since the earliest days of humanity, we’ve painted, sculpted, written, and composed. Wild animals can never know the deep emotion inspired by a beautiful work of art.”

The Brit sits quietly, sipping his tea.

After several moments, the Frenchman, growing impatient, asks,

“Well, what about you? What do you think separates man from the animals?”

The Brit takes another sip of tea and replies…

“The English Channel.”

[Walter H. Hunt @WalterHHunt]

Wow

[Chris Davis @neddyalleyn]

@RepMarkPocan