Author Archives: DT

There Was Once A Town

The New American Digest Posted on by

And it once had a railroad running through it.

Now?

Someplace I forget where

Only the wind and the grain elevator are left.

This comment by Wild, wild west is worthy of adding to the post:
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What you have there is “crib house” construction where the structure is composed of various 8 or 10 foot (+,-) square bins built by laying two-by lumber of various widths, wider at the bottom and narrower at the top, one atop each other in layers and nailed down to each other with a metric crap-ton of nails and some horizontal steel rods for reinforcement against the pressure of the grain exerted against the sidewalls of the bins. Lest they come unzipped. This cribbing starts at ground level and goes up nearly to where the roof starts. You can see some of those crib layers on the side where the missing sheathing indicates a warehouse or maybe a powerhouse used to be.

One of those bins will form a vertical shaft called a leg well located where the windows are stacked. That shaft houses a bucket elevator leg, often built on-site of wood construction, a ladder built from 2×4 rungs and a manual rope manlift that is kind of a platform with (or without) a safety gate guided by vertical rails. The operator steps onto the platform (shades of Steely Dan there) and releases a foot brake and then pulls himself up to the top floor or back down with the rope. No OSHA in those days, but there is a counterweight to make the pull easier. Unless the operator is a little guy and his co-workers have added weights, of course. You could wreck out the elevator leg and rope manlift and build stairs in the leg well and install a modern manlift for utility and safety’s sake, not to mention aging knees.

There will be a central hallway of sorts from the dump pit shed on the elevator leg side thru the structure to the other side where the rail siding used to be. The top floor and head house extension will have the elevator leg head drive and whatever distribution method they used (there were several possible) to channel grain from the elevator leg to the various bins, the truck loadout spout/chute you see on the dump pit shed side, and a railcar loadout spout that may or may not have fallen off or have been removed from the other side. In those days, they loaded boxcars, not hopper cars, and they were a PITA. You had to build a bulkhead in the boxcar door and direct grain flow to both ends of the railcar somehow. As with distribution up top, there were several methods, none user friendly. But I digress. Anyway, the top floor would provide a lot of usable floor space.

Now, consider all the broken windows and metal sheathing that’s missing will have caused massive wood rot and also that you’re dealing with a concrete foundation that’s likely 100 years old, and perhaps older, built without a hint of geotechnical engineering or anything resembling ACI specifications. So, might be better to set fire to the place now rather than later because when those sumbitches do catch fire, there ain’t enough water available to stop ’em. The bins act as chimneys, the metal sheathing keeps the fire in and the wood being dry means they burn really hot and fast. Then you could bulldoze the foundations and build a new structure from the get-go. Then you’d have something.

Never mind the civil and mechanical challenges.

Anyway, alteration of the existing structure to add more floors and expand the ground level “hallway” could be done and certainly would result in a unique and interesting project, but considering all the compartments, not a very easy one.

Or anyway, that’s what I took away from my so-called career (the word “career” is classically defined as a job that dragged on much too long) designing, building and modifying commercial/industrial grain elevator and processing facilities, which began 50 years ago, or near enough, working on those crib elevators when they were still in wide-spread use but being abandoned at a rapid rate. You’ll find some still in operation in the Dakotas and elsewhere, but they’re an endangered species. Thank God. They’re interesting landmarks but don’t look too closely or you’ll see all kinds of warts. The one in the pic is, for all practical purposes, extinct.

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Hummers

The New American Digest Posted on by

Suggested by jd in Comments of Summer's End

Since this short essay by Brian Doyle was published in the Scholar 15 years ago, it has been read hundreds of thousands of times on our website and often borrowed for classroom use. It is the lead piece in a just-published collection of Brian’s essays called One Long River of Sound: Notes on Wonder. Brian died at the age of 60 in 2017.

JOYAS VOLADORAS

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmet-crests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

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Charlie

The New American Digest Posted on by

but only sort-of.

I see we're in the middle of the process of defining a martyr.

I don't mean this in a negative way - it isn't the media defining the martyrdom for us sheeple this time; there is something about THIS assassination that seems to transcend almost any other murder of someone of similar prominence.

For all the value Mr Kirk brought our society, he was ... not really comedian, not really journalist ... but only yet another figure with a message, like it or not, though Charlie's was a more subtle message underlying his debate topics. I would think one could argue that he was a chosen one, intended for a special purpose at a special time; to be the martyr for his cause - at saint level, no less. Jay Leno did much of the same thing with his walk-around segments. Jay Leno - and Johnny Carson before him - was if anything, more popular, more a part of the culture in his time than Charlie Kirk is/was in his. I doubt this saint status would have applied if Jay Leno had been shot.

It almost seems that Charlie Kirk's murder is to be a far more significant historic event - perhaps world-wide as it appears as I write this - than even if Trump had been assassinated.

What I think I'm saying is this seems far outside of fate and evolution; this has an element of Presence about it. Would you laugh or condemn or just figure I'm nuts if I suggested "2nd Coming"? I might the last myself: what? Charlie Kirk is Christ returned? - but there's something really spooky about how and what is happening here ... and how would you know that he isn't?

This one's beyond the media ...
This one might change the world.

It probably won't happen right away - maybe. The history books of the future may let us know.

And I might even be wrong on both counts. Won't be the first time.

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Summer’s End

The New American Digest Posted on by

Different people define the seasons by different methods. Take summer for example.

Some define the season by the calendar: solstice to equinox. Some by holidays: Memorial Day to Labor Day. Others, children and those with children, as between the end and beginning of the school year.

I define it by the hummingbirds.

Summer ended sometime between yesterday and today. The hummers were buzzing around the feeder just yesterday.

Today? Not a hummer around.

Summer's over even if the daytime temperatures are still in the 80s

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In Aftermath

The New American Digest Posted on by

It appears the wailing and gnashing of teeth may be calming down ... but it also appears it may be time to go from grieving to remediation.

Here I go again, pointing you away from this site of near-TikTok levels of fascination to one where my words are spoken more elegantly than I am able.

Brandon Smith: "Men Of The West: We Are At War"
https://alt-market.us/men-of-the-west-we-are-at-war/

The problem is that the system is infected. It’s infested by parasites. In order for social discourse to achieve anything constructive, both sides have to be patriotic. Both sides have to love their culture and country to a certain degree and want the best for the future. Leftists and globalists HATE the west. They hate the US. They want to turn it to dust. They want the memory of it erased from history. There is no level of reason or diplomacy that can dissolve their bitter psychopathy.

I was thinking about measured responses – Particularly the subject of “martial law” and whether or not this is a justifiable solution given the circumstances, or a reaction of fear leading to a slippery slope of government authoritarianism.

Frankly, I see martial law as nothing more than a stop gap even with the best of intentions; like giving someone morphine for their Stage 4 cancer. It feels good and takes the pain away for a little while but on the inside the body is still dying. Martial law doesn’t go far enough. The time for measured responses is over.

Consider for a moment, though, what the natural alternative is? What is going to happen next? It’s not hard to predict: It’s going to be open season on leftist activists and the elites who fund them. It’s going to be widespread vigilantism. And, honestly I welcome it. I wish that this was not necessary, but I accept the reality that it is inevitable.

I don’t think leftists understand what is about to happen. I think they have gotten away with their evil for so long they think they are untouchable.

My fear and expectation is that "what is about to happen" will not be much, only a few scattered elements. SSDD. Anything else would be too much effort (/sarc). And near-on half the country "believes" the left - and would rather face prison than change their minds.

[to say nothing of the idea the legal/justice system from police to prisons is likely already against you]

Go ahead. Read the whole thing. Let me (us) know what you think.

I've felt vigilantism is inevitable for quite some time now; it's not just individuals against us, it's that the remediation system itself has been shattered. The legal system is not a means of balanced justice anymore; putting one's faith in the courts is like betting one's economic future on a winning lottery ticket. Yep - you might win.

Consider there's not much difference between vigilantism and guerilla warfare.

I follow the stock market fairly closely. I'm no expert but between the financial system, geopolitics, and questionable news sources about questionable antics, it feels like the top's going to blow off any day now. But maybe not by violence ... at first.

The stock market is not going up; the value of the dollar is dropping faster than most realize. You are not getting rich, the number simply looks better. You are getting poorer; you're that half-gallon of ice cream that is now more expensive with less ice cream.

Inflation is going to hit hard; I can envision a change in currency value - the US could pull an FDR; change the dollar to the "new dollar" overnight. How fast did Washington Mutual collapse?

How long can one play Jenga?

Just for consideration, what will people do if the internet is shut down ... ?

I think it's a good idea to have significant cash in hand - the Bank of Mattress. If the banks do shut down and you can't access your money (how much notice do you think you'll have?), you can be assured your payment-dues will not stop: groceries, utilities, fuel. How long will it take for the welfare classes to howl once their checks stop, even temporarily?

Like guns: better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Might be a long, hard, cold winter.
When the time comes, don't be there.

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I’m Sure Not An Original Thought

The New American Digest Posted on by

I'm too old for this crap ...

This isn't just some shooter that needs to be taken down - it's a whole movement ... from the DNC and their tranzy critters down through judges overstepping their bounds and down to all the Karens that feel they're special enough to steal little kids' baseballs out of their hands.

This isn't time for long drawn-out court "investigations" and legal "we don't knows" and show trials with show judges that do nothing but enrich the legal system and provide news items.

Blood asks for blood. "Legally" is preferred but speedy and decisive is necessary.
Someone prove it's not time to call on the Committees ...

Because it's feeling like it is time ... and what that means is simply a different path of destruction than the one we're on.
But a path of destruction nonetheless.

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Later that same day ...
But wait, there's more!

A school shooting in the Denver suburb of Evergreen about lunchtime today left three students critically injured.

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