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nordleuchten · 2 years ago

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24 Days of La Fayette – Day 16: François-Louis Teissèdre de Fleury

Today’s aide-de-camp is François-Louis Teissèdre de Fleury, Marquis de Fleury and son of François Teisseydre de Fleury. He was born in 1749 and first served in the French army as a volunteer from 1768 onwards. In 1772 he was made sous-aide-major in the Rouergue Regiment.

While La Fayette and his group of fellow travelers are certainly among the most famous foreign personal in the continental army, their idea was by no means novel. There were several groups of Frenchman that tried one way or another to join the War in America (and for one reason or another). Fleury was part of such a group - and he was one of the, comparatively speaking, few successful ones.

He was made a Captain of Enginers by the Continental Congress on May 22, 1777 and was awarded 50 Dollar for his travelling expenses. William Heath wrote to George Washington on April 26, 1777:

The Three appear to be Officers of Abilities—They inform me that Mr Dean promised them that their Expences should be born to Philadelphia &c.—I must confess I scarcely know what to do with them, & wish Direction, I have advanced to Col. Conway, as advance pay 150 Dollars to enable him to proceed to Philadelphia—And to Capt. Lewis Fleury 50 Dollars—The latter is engaged as a Capt. Engineer.

“To George Washington from Major General William Heath, 26 April 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 9, 28 March 1777 – 10 June 1777, ed. Philander D. Chase. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999, pp. 277–280.] (12/16/2022)

He was initially assigned to a corps of rifleman but soon got promoted and re-assigned after he fought with distinction at the Battle of Brandywine, where his horse was shot from under him. A Boston newspaper wrote on December 4, 1777:

The Chevalier du Plessis, who is one of General Knox’s Family, had three Balls thro’ his Hat. Young Fleuri’s Horse was killed under him. He shew’d so much Bravery, and was so useful in rallying the Troops, that the Congress have made him a Present of another.

“Extract from a Boston Newspaper, [after 4 December 1777],” Founders Online, National Archives, [Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 25, October 1, 1777, through February 28, 1778, ed. William B. Willcox. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 244–245.] (12/16/2022)

Fleury also participated in the Battle of Germantown, where, in classical La Fayette-fashion, he was wounded in the leg. The General Orders from October 3, 1777 read as follows:

Lewis Fleury Esqr. is appointed Brigade Major to The Count Pulaski, Brigadier General of the Light Dragoons, and is to be respected as such.

“General Orders, 3 October 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 11, 19 August 1777 – 25 October 1777, ed. Philander D. Chase and Edward G. Lengel. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001, pp. 372–375.] (12/16/2022)

Fleury was ordered to defend Fort Mifflin on November 4, 1777, where he would be engaged in the attack on Fort Mifflin on November 15 of the same year. Fleury was again wounded but even more important, he kept a very detailed journal and his entries from October 15-19 were often cited to illustrate the events surrounding the attack.

Concerning his wounds (and his personal value) Colonel Samuel Smith wrote to George Washington on November 16, 1777:

Major Fleury is hurt but not very much. he is a Treasure that ought not to be lost.

To George Washington from Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Smith, 16 November 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 12, 26 October 1777 – 25 December 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. and David R. Hoth. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002, pp. 281–282.] (12/16/2022)

La Fayette became aware of Fleury’s brave conduct and wrote to Henry Laurens on November 18, 1777:

You heard as soon almost as myself of all the interesting niews on the Delaware. The gallant defense of our forts deserves praisespraise and her daughter emulation arethe necessary attendants of an army. I am told that Major Fleury and Captain du Plessis have done theyr duty. It is a pleasant enjoyement for my mind, when some frenchmen behave a la francoise, and I can assure you that everyone who in the defense of our noble cause will show himself worthy of his country shall be mentionned in the most high terms to the king, ministry, and my friends of France when I’l be back in my natal air.

Idzerda Stanley J. et al., editors, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, Volume 1, December 7, 1776–March 30, 1778, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 151-153.

George Washington had recommended Fleury and as a result of this recommendation, Fleury was commissioned a Lieutenant Colonel on November 26. La Fayette was very much in Fleury’s favour, and he wrote again to Henry Laurens on November 29, 1777:

The bearer of my letter is Mr. de Fleury who was in Fort Miflin, and as he is reccommanded by his excellency I have nothing more to say but that I am very sensible of his good conduct. (…) Mr. de Fleury receives just now the commission of lieutenant colonel, I think he wo’nt go to day to Congress, and I send this letter by one other occasion (…)

Fleury was also recommended by Colonel Henry Leonard Philip, Baron d’Arendt, the commander of Fort Mifflin. Arendt wrote to Alexander Hamilton on October 26, 1777:

Col. Smith who is well acquainted with this place, its defence, and my Intentions respecting them, will make every necessary arrangement in my absence to maintain harmony between himself and Colo. [John] Green—I must do him the justice to say that he is a good Officer and I wish America a great many of the same cast. I must render the same justice likewise to Maj. Fleury who is very brave and active.

Notes of “To George Washington from Brigadier General David Forman, 26 October 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 12, 26 October 1777 – 25 December 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. and David R. Hoth. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002, pp. 13–16.] (12/16/2022)

George Washington also had something to say about this quarrel between his soldiers. He wrote to James Mitchell Varnum on November 4, 1777:

I thank you for your endeavours to restore confidence between the Comodore & Smith—I find something of the same kind existing between Smith and Monsr Fleury, who I consider as a very valuable Officer. How strange it is that Men, engaged in the same Important Service, should be eternally bickering, instead of giving mutual aid. Officers cannot act upon proper principles who suffer trifles to interpose to create distrust, & jealousy (…)

“From George Washington to Brigadier General James Mitchell Varnum, 4 November 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 12, 26 October 1777 – 25 December 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. and David R. Hoth. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002, pp. 128–129.] (12/16/2022)

I do not praise you often, but in this case I will – well said, Sir!

There was no division in the army at the present that Fleury could assume command of and he was therefor appointed sub-inspector under the Baron von Steuben. The General Orders from April 27, 1778 read:

Lieutt Coll Fleury is to act as Sub-Inspector and will attend the Baron Stuben ’till Circumstances shall admit of assigning him a Division of the Army—Each Sub-Inspector is to be attended daily by an Orderly-Serjeant drawn by turns from the Brigades of his own Inspection that the necessary orders may be communicated without delay.

“General Orders, 27 April 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives, [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 14, 1 March 1778 – 30 April 1778, ed. David R. Hoth. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, pp. 657–658.] (12/126/2022)

La Fayette, in the meantime, was lobbying for Fleury and other French officers – apparently to a degree or in a way that he later was unwilling to admit. The following passage was removed by the Marquis from a letter to George Washington from January 20, 1778:

I am told that Mullens is to be lieutenant colonel, if it is so, as that the same commission was done for Mssrs. de Fleury and du Plessis who are on every respect so much out of the line of Mullens who being by his birth of the lowest rank, and not so long ago a private soldier, I hope that those gentlemen are to be at least brigadier generals.

It was around this time that preparations for the Canadian expedition were made – an expedition under La Fayette’s command that never came into fruition and probably was never really intended to do so. It was here that Fleury was appointed aide-de-camp to La Fayette. Horatio Gates wrote to our Marquis on January 24, 1778:

Congress having thought proper and in compliance with the wishes of this Board, from a Conviction of your Ardent Desire to signalize yourself in the Service of these States, to appoint you to the Command of an Expedition meditated against Montreal it is the Wish of the Board that you would immediately repair to Albany, taking with you Lt. Colo. de Fleury, and such other gallant French officers as you think will be serviceable in an Enterprise in that Quarter. (…)

La Fayette in his turn wrote to Henry Laurens on February 4 and on February 7, 1778 respectively to inform him of the proceedings. He also used the opportunity to get a word for Fleury in and to gossip a bit about the same.

There is Lieutenant Colonel Fleury who not only out of my esteem and affection for him but even by a particular reccommandation of the board of war is destinated to follow me to Canada. I schould have desired of Congress every thing or employement which I could have believed more convenient to his wishes, had I not expected to see him before-you know he was upon my list. He desires to be at the head of an independent troop with the rank of Colonel. I do’nt know which will be the intentions of Congress but every thing which can please Mr. de Fleury not only as a frenchman but as a good officer, and as being Mr. de Fleury will be very agreable to me. (…) I have showed to Colonel Fleury the first lines of my letter, in order to let him know my giving willingly the reccommandation he asks for you. You know that gentleman's merit and that Duplessis and himself were made lieutenant colonels as reward of fine actions.

You have seen Mr. de Fleury. I fancy entre nous that he will not be satisfied in so high pretensions. He is very unhappy that Mr. Duer is no more in Congress because he is his intimate friend and confident-that will perhaps surprise you.’ Mr. de Fleury is entre nous a fine officer but rather too ambitious. When I say such things I beg you to burn the letters.

Henry Laurens replied on February 7, 1778 and his wording at the end especially is quite interesting given La Fayette’s previous letter.

I had the honour this Morning of receiving your Commands by the hands of Lt. Colo. Fleury. This Gentleman notwithstanding the aid of some able advocates in Congress has failed in his pursuit of a Colonel's Commission. You will wonder less, when you learn that the preceeding day I had strove very arduously as second to a warm recommendation from a favorite General, Gates, on behalf of Monsr. Failly, for the same Rank, without effect. The arguments adduced by Gentlemen who have opposed these measures, are strong & obvious. “We are reforming & reducing the Number of Officers in our Army, let us wait the event, & see how our own Native Officers are to be disposed of”-& besides, there is a plan in embrio for abolishing the Class of Colonel in our Army, while the Enemy have none of that Rank in the Field. Some difficulty attended obtaining leave for Monsr. Fleury to follow Your Excellency, Congress were at first of opinion he might be more usefully employed against the shipping in Delaware & formed a Resolve very flattering & tempting to induce him-but his perseverence in petitioning to be sent to Canada, prevailed. Monsr. Fleury strongly hopes Your Excellency will encourage him to raise & give him the Command of a distinct Corps of Canadians. I am persuaded you will adopt all such measures as shall promise advantage to the Service & there is no ground to doubt of your doing every reasonable & proper thing for the gratification & honour of [a] Gentleman of whom Your Excellency speaks & writes so favorably.

With the failure of the expedition, Fleury once again longed for an independent command and La Fayette wrote to Charles Lee in June of 1778:

One of the best young french officers in America Mr. de Fleury wishes much to be annexed to the Rifle Corps and is desired by Clel. Morgan.

Idzerda Stanley J. et al., editors, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, Volume 2, April 10, 1778–March 20, 1780, Cornell University Press, 1978, pp. 62-64.

In the end, Fleury was given command of a light infantry battalion on June 15, 1779. The General Orders for that day read as follows:

The sixteen companies of Light-Infantry drafted from the three divisions on this ground are to be divided into four battalions and commanded by the following officers;

4. companies from the Virginia line by Major Posey.

4—ditto from the Pennsylvania line by Lt Colo. Hay.

4—ditto two from each of the aforesaid lines by Lieutenant Colonel Fleury.

“General Orders, 15 June 1779,” Founders Online, National Archives,[Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 21, 1 June–31 July 1779, ed. William M. Ferraro. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012, p. 176.] (12/16/2022)

He led his battalion into the attack of Stony Point on July 16, 1779. His conduct was, by all accounts, heroic and George Washington wrote on September 30, 1779:

Colo. Fleury who I expect will have the honour of presenting this lettr. to you, and who acted an important & honourable part in the event, will give you the particulars of the assault & reduction at Stony Point (…) He led one of the columns – struck the colours of the garrison with his own hands – and in all respects behaved with intrepidity & intelligence which marks his conduct upon all occasions.

His actions were indeed so gallant that Congress awarded him a silver medal on July 26, 1779. This is indeed quite remarkable since he was the only foreign officer thus honoured. No other foreign officer, not even La Fayette, received such a silver medal during the Revolutionary War.

Fleury obtained a leave of absence from Congress in September of 1779 and left America on November 16. La Fayette was at this time in France as well and was eager to receive a first-hand account from Fleury with respect to political as well as to military matters. Although still in possession of his American commission, Fleury re-entered the French army and was made a Major of the Saintonge Regiment in March of 1780 (this might interest you @acrossthewavesoftime.) A few months later, in July of 1780, he joined General Rochambeau’s expeditionary force. Fleury was one of the French soldiers at the Battle of Yorktown. He left America for good in January of 1783 and sailed from Boston to France. It was only at this point, that he resigned his American commission. In France, he joined the Pondichéry Regiment and was named its Colonel. He was elevated to a maréshal de camp in 1791 and fought in the battle of Mons on April 28-30, 1792. During the retreat, he was wounded for the third time. While his previous injuries were all relative mild, this one appears to have been rather serious. He resigned from the army not long after.

Not much is known about Fleury’s later life, and I have seen drastically different accounts of the time of his death. While some editors of (La Fayette’s) letters/papers have put the date of his death around 1814, it is far more likely that he died in 1799. Fleury never married and there are no known children of his.

François Louis Teisseydre, Marquis de Fleury’s legacy is the De Fleury Medal that is granted to outstanding members of the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

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aronarchy · 2 years ago

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No, Antifa is not the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis

Comparisons between [people] fighting against fascism and tiki-torch wielding anti-Semites are absurd—and dangerous.

Andrew Mitrovica 14 Sep 2017

[image ID: Counter demonstrators clash with white supremacists at the entrance to Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, US. Photograph credits: Steve Helber, Associated Press. /end image ID]

Recently, a fresh pathogen, which poses an urgent threat to public safety and discourse, has appeared suddenly on the political landscape. A batch of “liberals,” saddled with fragile sensibilities, have warned that liberty and lives are being threatened by ordinary, largely anonymous people seized with the duty to confront the ignorance and hate that Hurricane Donald and his abominable acolytes brandish routinely with impunity.

Predictably, the historically illiterate, ubiquitous members of the right-wing commentariat in America and beyond have attempted to tar the Antifa (anti-fascists) for resisting, and, if need be, defending itself against, the delinquents that march en masse at night with torches and mow down innocents in daylight with automobiles.

It’s an old trick: to negate real evil by manufacturing a phantom villain as a convenient foil or facile distraction.

Regrettably, but not surprisingly, this transparent rhetorical slight of hand is magnified repeatedly by an amnesiac establishment media that habitually finds and amplifies moral and intellectual equivalences where none exist.

In their attacks on the Antifa, these “liberals” have joined a pack of conservatives who—apart from accusing anti-fascists of fascism—howl on TV and elsewhere that climate change is a pan-scientific hoax, that Saddam Hussein certainly possessed weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq will eventually be “liberated,” and that Trump will indeed make America “great again.”

Given their unconscionable record, isn’t it about time these charlatans were disqualified permanently from passing judgment on the motives and conduct of others since they forfeited long ago any claim to enjoy any measure of seriousness or subtlety.

Of course, the legion of unrepentant hucksters and their enablers will never recognise, let alone acknowledge, their complicity in trafficking in such calamitous lies and disastrous designs.

So, instead of taking up perpetual residence in pundit purgatory, they have been rewarded with an unfettered licence on “elite” media to continue to defame people who were on the right of history and decency yesterday and are on the right side of history and decency today.

Women like Danuta Danielsson, the Polish-Swedish daughter of a Holocaust survivor who famously swatted her handbag at a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads strutting through a square in Vaxjo, Sweden in 1985.

I challenge the smear merchants to impugn Danielsson and desecrate the memory of the anguish her family endured at the homicidal hands of Nazis by describing her and, in particular, her remembrance-fuelled, spontaneous act, as the personification of fascism.

The same challenge applies to Irmela Mensah-Schramm, a 70-year-old anti-fascist who has devoted the past 31 years to defacing neo-Nazi graffiti and propaganda in public spaces principally across Germany.

Mensah-Schramm’s act of resistance landed her in court, where she was fined for “vandalism” and ordered to stop. Her reply: she’s not going to stop, nor pay the fine.

These days, it’s fashionable among the predominately white, male liberal intelligentsia to join the hysterical assault on the Antifa by insisting that, in effect, Danielsson’s and Menash-Schramm’s “violent” “law-breaking” must be condemned, rather than applauded, because it mirrors the malignant modus operandi of the fascists they defied.

This is absurd.

Even a cursory understanding of recent history reveals that individual and collective acts of resistance by progressive forces have traditionally been the target of these generic, hyperbolic attacks which are designed to delegitimise legitimate protest and marginalise the protesters.

From the 1960s “freedom riders” through to Occupy Wall Street, and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Black Lives Matter movements, the same tired polemicists have employed the same tired polemics to try to deflect attention and guilt from the oppressors onto the oppressed.

Words and phrases like: “outsiders,” “agitators,” “provocateurs,” “Crypto-Marxists or fascists,” “bent on mayhem and violence” are the decades-old, cliched staples of this pedantic lot.

Liberals pining for a bucolic anti-fascist campaign will quibble in vain because while the vast majority of anti-fascists are peaceable, they will always be reduced to an ugly caricature by rabid reactionaries who customarily point an accusatory finger at everyone but themselves.

Still, in a windy, densely worded column dripping with condescension, one prominent liberal writer not only castigated the Antifa for squandering its “moral authority,” but claimed—without offering an ounce of empirical evidence in support—that neo-Nazis are “victims” of the exploitative corporate state too, thus requiring our sympathy and consideration.

Intended or not, this astonishing logic—such as it is—resembles Trump’s rambling, semi-coherent assertion that “many sides” were responsible for the violence that took Heather Heyer’s life in Charlottesville, Virginia in early August and that among the army of tiki-torch wielding anti-Semites were some misunderstood “fine people.”

Neo-Nazis are not “fine people,” nor are they “victims.” They are, aptly put, scum. There must be no equivocation, no obfuscation, no shading on this score from any quarter, at any time, for any reason.

To do otherwise is to provide succour to the philosophical descendants of genocidal murderers, who, given the opportunity, would relish enslaving and, once again, executing, wholesale, Jews, Muslims, Roma, homosexuals, the infirm, other vulnerable minorities and, yes, liberals.

Richard Spencer and his verminous brethren are, no doubt, chortling at the profoundly preposterous but increasingly popular media-propelled construct that the Antifa is as pathological as the fascists it reviles.

These are bizarre and dangerous times.

#repost of someone else’s content #al jazeera #trump #antisemitism #racism #nazism #liberalism #antifa

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leutjaneausten · 3 months ago

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Everyone is reporting this, not just the left leaning media outlets, but nobody’s doing the complete story on why this is suddenly an issue. Localities have historically faced increased policing costs due to political activities of both parties, and it is also true that some Democratic campaigns have not covered those costs in a timely fashion. But the reason we are having this discussion now goes straight back to Charlottesville. Please don’t try to pretend that fakepresident’s behavior is just business as usual, not only is he weird, he actually incites violence. That’s new.

Map of cities owed money by the Trump campaign

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anotherworldnowblog · 20 days ago

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WE WILL NEVER BE FORGIVEN

“Although the fascist phenomenon can be resisted and avoided, there is a point in its growth after which it appears difficult to turn it back. The moment is not that at which fascism actually comes into power; the accession to power seems such a simple final act, occurring only when the essentials are already decided and done with, in short, a confirmation of a victory already won.” Nicos Poulantzas Fascism and Dictatorship, p. 66

PART II

The defeat of the George Floyd uprising seems everywhere to signal the closure of a cycle of struggle stretching back at least to Ferguson, maybe Rodney King, with its roots going all the way to Watts. Whether the George Floyd uprising was the end of a chain of urban rebellions and circulation struggles or the first link in a quantitatively and qualitatively new series of nationwide uprisings remains to be seen. How and when the proletariat announces its return is not clear. Troublingly, what has happened since 2020 is increasingly so.

On January 6th, the closest thing in contemporary American history to a mass fascist street action coalesced in a foolish attempt to overturn the election results. We laugh at the ill-fated coup at our own risk however, as by this point the proletariat was entirely defeated and the right-wing antidemocratic attack was only foiled by a combination of the fascists’ astounding stupidity and the incoming regime's control over local police power. Fascists are always fools. It is the fact that their goals so closely align to those of the power elite and that their methods violently liberate the movement of capital from its fragile humanistic ties that make them dangerous, not their intelligence. Despite its admittedly farcical appearance, the effects of this coup-attempt were absolutely profound. The media cynically used this event to wipe clean the rebellion of the previous summer from the memories of nearly all Americans, to strongly associate “insurrection” with right-wing activity, to forcefully reverse what had then become a common disdain for police, and to neutralize all left-critique of the incoming administration. The left-wing of liberalism, the fraction of the community of capital that had momentarily sided with the proletariat in a moment of acute crisis, is completely disentangled from radical politics and psychically sealed off from protest itself.[1] As will become an obvious tendency in what follows, the gains of the working class in the period of crisis and its aftermath, both in terms of consciousness and in terms of policy, are steadily and methodically reversed in bipartisan fashion.

“Start the forgetting machine!” - Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (p. 32)

The consolidation of the victory of capital over the working class unfolds in cascading action across multiple fronts. It proceeds relatively uninhibited because of the persistent unity of the various capitalist fractions. In the interest of concision, I will henceforth abandon a rigidly chronological presentation.

The first and most direct response to the working class rebellion in 2020 is the passage of several bills granting immunity to anyone who uses their vehicle to run over protestors demonstrating in the street, first in Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, and with at least eight more bills across the country being debated across the country's state houses in 2021.[2] The significance of such bills cannot be overstated. After the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville culminated in the use of an automobile as a weapon of mass murder, a tactic formerly associated exclusively with the specter of Islamic terror, elite liberals of all political persuasions recoiled in horror. However, as we have seen in the above, it would not be long before this all-too American technique of violence would be repeated, this time against a far more militant anti-racist offensive. The right to murder protestors is being quietly legalized under the guise of protecting an individual’s right to free movement and often even more cynically, by invoking the hypothetical needs of imaginary emergency vehicles. The pedestrian, the cyclist, are sacrificed at the fascist altar of the internal combustion engine, a trend further accelerated by the destruction of public transit during COVID-19. As usual, Adorno’s words read like prophecy: “which auto-driver has not felt the temptation, in the power of the motor, to run over the vermin of the street – passersby, children, bicyclists? In the movements which machines demand from their operators, lies already that which is violent, crashing, propulsively unceasing in Fascist mistreatment.”[3] The temptation then is all the more powerful when the ‘vermin of the street’ is not merely passive but actively attempting to weaponize a constructed interruption in those violent, crashing movements, which otherwise ceaselessly accelerate the flows of global commodities, towards ends quite at odds with the valorization of capital; in a word, liberation.

Regrettably, this violence is far from an exclusively petit bourgeois pastime. Fractions of the proletariat are pit against one another as increasingly large numbers of urban workers come to rely on delivery and driving gigs, a sector swollen further during the pandemic. The city street is all but erased as social space, transformed into an exclusive conveyor of private goods carried by independent contractors with overlapping commitments, coerced by the mute compulsions of capital to at times restore the free flow of commodities with violence. The rural highway remains a blood-stained latticework criss-crossed by drowsy laborers called to traverse ever-increasing distances to balance employment and disintegrating familial ties. Studies indicate that the roadways of the United States have never been more deadly, a tragedy compounded by the fact that the great majority of this increase in auto traffic is nothing but our own life energies confronting us, and killing us, as services marketed as simplification.[4] That this machine’s victims are now willing, and legally empowered, to murder those who would dare gum-up the gnashing of its steel teeth is a tragedy of anthropological proportion.

This rapid movement to sweep political struggle from the streets of America apparently knows no partisan loyalty. The militant struggle in Atlanta to Stop Cop City and the nationwide street action aimed at halting the genocide in Gaza have galvanized hesitant Democrats to abandon all pretense at connection to their grassroots and join Republicans in criminalizing constitutionally protected and normatively accepted forms of public protest. In 2023, Georgia Democrats pushed the meaning of domestic terrorism to include attendance at a music festival or muddy shoes[5] and in 2024, New York Democrats will likely level at any protest that “blocks a road or a bridge” terrorism enhancements, this coming amidst increasingly infrastructure-intelligent anti-war mobilization.[6] The latter move, a continuation of and qualitative leap-up from the endorsement of stochastic terror by state Republicans, is a direct response to the collective awareness of systemic choke points in the networks of circulation gained by the working class in the latest cycle of struggles; an attempt to dispatch with this desperate counter-riposte to decades of deindustrialization and dispersion that has all-but destroyed the effectiveness of the proletariat’s traditional, production-point tactics.

Furthermore, just in the past several weeks, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles has announced her intent to ban protective face masks at protests and the Democratic governor of the state of New York has signaled her intention to ban masks from public transit entirely.[7] Such shocking policies, not only whiplash-inducing for their incongruity with all conceptions of public health and civic responsibility, ostensibly designed to combat crime and ensure accountability for largely fictitious acts of anti-semitic violence, are obviously intended to chill protected speech acts and guarantee the effectiveness of facial recognition software in tracking the movements of protest attendees. It is no coincidence that these suggestions come on the heels of an anti-imperialist protest movement that is militantly imbuing the struggle against white supremacy, the struggle of which the George Floyd Rebellion was but one battle, with a refreshingly internationalist perspective. Such obscene policy measures, in addition to signaling an ever-deepening political unity between the two domestic political parties when it comes to shirking government responsibility for social welfare and crushing working class protest, accelerate the devastating impact of COVID on those with pre-existing conditions, amounting to a policy of murderous social cleansing on top of the troubling implications for any who dare dissent. Politically, the Democrats’ pathetic tailing of Republican reaction will almost certainly earn them no additional votes at the ballot box. But their willingness to abandon COVID-era convictions at the first sign of working-class internationalism is quite telling indeed. It is regretful that such clarity is achieved at so high a price.

American economic policy in the wake of the pandemic (which I submit also includes intentional prolongation of the War in Ukraine), that has, among other things, led to inflationary pressures that have wiped out Covid-era wage gains, called forth unprecedented state intervention to stabilize big and small businesses, and generally sent stocks stratospheric, must also be seen as part of the offensive of capital against the working class and as an expression of exceptional bourgeois unity.[8] The concentration of capital, accelerated by inflationary pressures, pushes us towards fascism by 1. unifying rentier and industrial capital (platform capital and hardgoods producers unified through mergers, bundles, and partnerships)[9], as well as national with transnational capital (friendshoring)[10] 2. negatively impacting and threatening to cast into the proletariat the petit bourgeois, thereby spontaneously developing shallowly “anti-capitalist” ideas in a vengeful middle class, the National Socialists of tomorrow’s America who merely wish to swap the current elites with their own, and 3. reversing gains of the proletariat, prompting economistic and defensive struggles, as well as by expanding the national and international army of surplus labor (all evident in an erosion of purchasing power; digitized productivity monitoring introduced under the cover of COVID-19 exceptionalism; the repeal of state child labor law[11]; immigration policy that divides the proletariat into tiers of formality and fixes certain workers within preferable national legal systems; the lawsuit seeking to destroy the NLRA brought by SpaceX, Amazon, Trader Joe’s[12]; multifront international warfare creating huge migratory movements of refugees; etc.) as a means of reinforcing and deepening the domination of capital over labor.

“It is characteristic of the rise of fascism that the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the working class assumes an increasingly political nature, while the working-class struggle against the bourgeoisie falls further and further back into the domain of economic demands… it is the economic struggle which progressively assumes the dominant role in the struggle of the working class.” -Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (p. 142)

Meanwhile, the chauvinism of the American right deepens, and it finds ever more dangerous expression for its hatreds structurally, even under Democratic administration. In fact, the far-right agenda seems to have had far more success nationally under the current Democratic administration than during Trump’s tenure. Between 2021 and 2023, 129 anti-trans bills were passed in states across America. We have no way to know the true number of murders and suicides these bills have led to–we know of far too many as it is–but we can say the United States is no doubt becoming an intolerably dangerous place for queer life. Even President Obama was willing to credibly threaten to withhold critical federal education funds from state governments who refused to follow the administration’s guidance with respect to the usage of bathrooms by trans and gender nonconforming people. This powerful intervention to protect and normalize trans life, perhaps as a means to protect an image of capitalism as tolerant and progressive, was immediately reversed by the Trump administration in 2017.[13] Today, the Biden administration has done absolutely nothing to forestall the ongoing attempt to erase trans people from existence in State Houses across America, suggesting a new ruling class consensus to abandon the illusion of a progressive capitalist culture, and perhaps liberalism itself.

In 2022, Roe vs. Wade was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, all but condemning working class pregnant people to carry their babies to term or go broke attempting to procure abortion services in one of a dwindling number of safe states. As of now, 21 states “ban abortion or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade,” with no indication that the adoption of such policies are slowing down.[14] It is far from controversial or groundbreaking to insist on anti-abortion policies as class warfare. The lack of safe, free abortion services divides the working class; the Bolsheviks institutionalized recognition of this basic fact in the very first years of the Soviet experiment over a century ago. Capital does not merely homogenize the laboring class as labor-power; it ceaselessly differentiates it along the axes of race, sex/gender, and age. Fascism, as the political expression of an exceptionally class-conscious ruling class, ruthlessly exploits and expands such divisions. That such a strategy emerges as a compliment to traditionalist reaction to the social atomization of the capitalist system it seeks to renew and defend is simply an example of the extraordinary opportunism of our bourgeoisie. It is an ideological pivot around which the petit bourgeoisie can align itself with a capitalist class that cares little about what is traditional and only about maximizing the rate of exploitation domestically.

On the southern border medieval death traps are erected, placed there by far-right politicians, and defended against the regulation of federal guidance by National Guards of neighboring and distant states. Migrants that have made it beyond our ramparts are shipped into the city centers of various Democratic mayors where they are subject to subhuman levels of care and a brutal, a shadow labor regime, absolutely maximizing rates of exploitation and dragging the wages of citizen-workers down, fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia across all of the national classes. Even the farthest-left members of our political system can seem only able to refer to these newly-arrived proletarian faces, often entire families, in the language of the far-right: as a crisis. Yet, far from becoming the constitutional crisis suggested at Eagle Pass, murderous border policy, irrational from the perspective of national economic interest but rational from the perspective of protecting the consistency of the national ideology, becomes another point of practical unity for Democratic and Republican officials alike. In fact, what marginal differences exist between the two Amerikan politikal parties on border policy allow the ruling class to have it both ways: a zone of blood sacrifice is established along the southern border for the ritualistic simulation of protection of the White body politic, while the majority of migrants do make it into our country for the sole purpose of superexploitation. These huddled masses are then weaponized in the cynical assault on the basis of the domestic laboring classes’ bargaining power: solidarity.

No matter; this convenient capitulation of the Democratic Party to Republican bloodlust has not dislodged the purely spectacular appearance of intense partisan division, nor has it stopped the wealthiest capitalist in this country from articulating anti-semitic conspiracy theories about the providence of this influx of migrants. Elon Musk, regrettably one of the more powerful of the bourgeoisie, appears to be spontaneously recreating National Socialism (With American Characteristics) in a haze of his own weed smoke. At various points, he has more or less explicitly called the immigration of people from the global south a Jewish conspiracy to destroy American prosperity and traditional family values, coming increasingly close to simply tweeting out the 14 words and decisively aligning himself with the ultraright fractions of the petit bourgeois and capitalist elements of the Republican party.

But Elon Musk is not alone in signaling his preference for a Republican presidency in the coming election; Jamie Diamond of JP Morgan,[15] Vice-Chair of Black Rock Philipp Hildebrand, and many other capitalists in the wake of conferences such as Davos have more or less openly declared their preference for a Trump victory in 2024.[16] Nonetheless, Trump’s most consistent base of support has long been that of the small-business owner, not the large capitalist. His electoral strength is his appearance as a disruptor, and it is exactly this trait which makes large capital uneasy. It is in this light which we can begin to understand the logic of Trump’s baffling selection of JD Vance as his 2024 running mate. The choice of a man so obviously disliked by the general public can only be made sense of as an attempt to further signal to the bourgeoisie what type of dictatorship a second Trump presidency would really be: a dictatorship of capital. Vance is, above all else, a creature of large tech capital, and much more so than Trump, a man who is wholly up for sale. If big capital continues to warm to a Trump presidency, despite Harris now backing away from all of Biden’s regulatory commitments, this would represent a development in the radicalization of capital that was unfathomable in 2016, when the prospect of a Trump presidency nearly crashed global markets. The ruling class is now beginning to sense both what kind of violence is truly necessary to restore profit rates to acceptable levels and that Trumpism poses no direct threat to the capitalist economic order.

We've also seen an assault on proletarian culture come in the form of the RICO charges brought against the YSL group, and Young Thug in particular. The charges are murder and organized crime and the prosecution is relying very heavily on the lyrical content of Young Thug’s songs to make their case. Rap music has long been an artistic form that creatively and dramatically expressed the harsh realities of racialized economic exclusion, the experience of savage competition accelerated by decades of neoliberal policy, and the psychic ramifications of ghettoization and state violence, even if it’s rarely presented in such terms. That this form of expression, one which is explicitly black, militant, and working class, is being attacked by the state is yet another symptom of the fascist spiral, here found at the point of legal-cultural intersection. While most rap music is not partisan, neither is the class itself, and the music is most certainly aggressively proletarian. Even lyrics about cars and money must be recognized as expressions of working class desire, specifically a desire to get out of the trenches or the mud one came from. It is important to recall that there once was a robust, self-consciously proletarian culture in this country, which often produced songs about fighting cops, offing your boss, and killing fascists. Such songs might have once been sung at red taverns, or union halls, or even at the dinner table with red-diaper babies bewilderedly looking on in hand-me-down high-chairs. While the fragmentation of the class and structural shifts in the economy have pushed such traditions to the margins of memory, we still find that vulgarity, militancy, and violence are not uncommon themes in the working class anthems of today, “fuck the police” being just one such example. To produce such content is a freedom we have long enjoyed thanks to the liberalism of our national bourgeoisie (and perhaps their own self-confidence, now rattled) and if we want to protect it, we can begin by recognizing the prosecution of Young Thug as a dangerous escalation in the assault on proletarian speech.

“what the fuck you mean put my gun down muthafucka? you must ain’t heard about Trayvon Martin you muthafucka” “When they killed my nigga, I seen the footage on the tape Man I must've threw up everything I ever ate” “R.I.P. Mike Brown, fuck the Cops Screamin' R.I.P Bennie shootin' up a block” “Hey, this that slime shit, hey YSL shit, hey Killin' 12 shit, hey Fuck a jail shit, hey”

This naturally brings us back to Atlanta. What is happening in Atlanta is nothing short of a nightmare. A Cop City is being rammed down the throats of an entire major metropolis, at the expense of the whole population's civil liberties, clean air, drinkable water, navigable streets. All democratic resistance has been shut down by Democratic politicians. Restrained clandestine activity and constitutionally protected street action have been met equally with the most intense repression since the George Floyd uprising. Unlike the George Floyd Rebellion, this struggle has generated a lasting unity across the various resistance interest groups, ideologies, and identities because of the intersectionality of the object of its opposition and an explicit and hard-won agreement to embrace a diversity of tactics—perhaps a direct response to the failure of the George Floyd Uprising and specifically the self-defeating division around responses to the police murder of Rayshard Brooks.

The tact taken by the state is notable here: rather than fragment the movement by erasing the intersectional content of the struggle through slight of hand (e.g. moving the center outside of the black, working-class neighborhood, or away from such an ecologically important site), they have decided to crush the movement with terrorism, murder, and demoralization. The construction of this center is a gesture. International capital and bipartisan politicians have come together to send a message while they prepare for a new cycle of struggle, one which we can expect will proceed on greatly expanded foundations, in the near future; the message reads: you will never be forgiven. In the last year alone, dozens of protesters have been rounded up on RICO charges with terror enhancements with hardly any evidence at all of wrongdoing. A protester, a militant forest defender, a queer person of color, a revolutionary named Tortuguita, was murdered for their unwavering commitment to the Earth and its creatures. Now, bail funds are under attack. This novel technology, mainstreamed during the May-June Rebellion, has served as a lifeline for working-class protesters assured of their righteousness, but no longer of their freedom. Make no mistake, the assault on bail-funds is a test-case for the nation as these funds made possible the sustained rebellion over the course of the months of May-August of 2020, during which well over 10,000 people were arrested. Today, huge swaths of pristine forest have been mercilessly cleared as construction of the police playhouse enters its early stages. To share a belief is now seditious conspiracy. To pool resources is organized crime. And to defend the earth is now terrorism. These are some of the tentative outcomes of the ongoing struggle against Cop City in Atlanta.

“One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity.” -George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (p. 138)

One last, but certainly not final, expression of the rising unity of capital and the resurgence of American fascism is the Watermelon Scare, or the reaction to domestic Palestinian liberation activity. Artists have lost shows, workers have lost jobs, unions have been sued by their employers, schools are being investigated by their national boards, insufficiently reactionary Heads of Ivy League institutions are cut down and replaced with more pliant personnel responsive only to the dictates of capital, and protest is further criminalized in the name of preventing anti-semitism. My words can hardly keep pace with events. The masks are all off and we are treated to front row seats to a dispiriting disappearing act; bourgeois democracy reveals itself to be bourgeois dictatorship, announced by a stomach-turning demonstration of their disregard for Life itself in Gaza. They are inaugurating a new period of their open domination with the screams of air-to-surface missiles, baptizing us all as powerless subjects in the blood of innocent Palestinians.

A few words, with the knowledge that the coming days will make my horrifying balance-sheet of the development of American fascism seem quite quaint, and awareness that we are rapidly flying headlong into a space beyond language’s expressive capacities: it is perhaps the most urgent task of the American left to insist that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people concerns us all. It is not merely that the violence against the colonized disfigures the colonizer into something monstrous beyond recognition, not only that these necro-technologies will rapidly be deployed on our own streets against us, and it goes beyond the fact that passivity in the face of such violence hardens our hearts to the violence that comes next (the sweeps of our homeless neighbors, the increasing murder-ability of “criminals” and “migrants,” and the erasure of trans and queer people from social space). The history of the American left since the birth of this nation is the history of its failures. There have been two prime stumbling blocks no configuration has succeeded in clearing: the white chauvinism of our working classes and the nationalism of our socialist organizations. Robust solidarity with Palestine in the moment of its genocide would be an advanced expression of an American left at last shaking off the weight of dead generations; an internationalist attack on white supremacy, recognized not as an individual attitude but a globe-spanning technique of government; a long awaited rejection of the substitution of universal rights with exclusive privileges; and an urgently necessary reversal of the decades-long drift towards short-term economic interest and away from political consciousness.

The American proletariat is once again being tested. Its historical task is the seizure of political power, but the road to political power necessarily passes through the relinquishing of its exceptional privilege. What we have tracked in the paragraphs above is the violent, state and extra-state, repression and reversal of legitimate gains in the political consciousness of various fractions of the American working class. Such reversals at a time of persistent crisis ensure that when the ruling classes unite around fascist strategies of systemic renewal, the forces of resistance will be disoriented, disorganized, and desperately clinging to the very privileges that we must betray in order to fulfill our historical mission. We must begin only with total acceptance of our defeat. Paradoxically, such a defeat liberates us from the urgent temporality of crisis. We must resist the temptation to fling ourselves headlong into every project of survival and take seriously the fact that the reemergence of fascism in the United States is not a symptom of systemic strength, but of great weakness. We must allow ourselves to be fully convinced that far more important than our survival is that the barbarism of this world does not. Then, tactics and strategy can begin.

"False praxis is no praxis. Desperation that, because it finds the exits blocked, blindly leaps into praxis, with the purest of intentions joins forces with catastrophe." -Theodor W. Adorno "They have the clocks, but we have the time." Afghani proverb "When you're running out of time, you're not out of time." Kanye West Donda (2021)

(August 2024)

NOTES

[1] This is a dynamic that very closely mirrors that identified in Poulantzas’ 1974 study of historical fascism:

“The petty bourgeoisie is itself divided into class fractions… it is also possible for dislocations to appear between its different fractions. These dislocations can even be deep enough for one fraction to swing one way, the other in the opposite direction. Experience shows that a common political position is generally maintained in ‘normal’ conjunctures of class struggle, or in conjunctures of acute political crisis where the working class is on the defensive, as in the case of fascism. The dislocations appear above all in revolutionary conjunctures or in political crises corresponding to the working-class offensive, as in Germany and Italy between 1919 and 1921.” (p. 244)

The integrated fraction of the laboring classes, the capitalized, home-owning upper fraction of salaried employees breaks with the capitalist class and stands with the proletariat during the early phase of the revolutionary conjuncture. It does not stay this way:

“Before stabilization and during the first period of open crisis between the bourgeoisie and the working class, a large part of the petty bourgeoisie clearly swings over to the side of the working class… we can say that this is mainly the case with the salaried employees… After its open swing to the working class side, this part of the petty bourgeoisie seems to stick to social democracy during the stabilization step. Subsequently it becomes disillusioned with social democracy, which fails to defend its interests. Turning away from social democracy, the petty bourgeoisie as a whole finds itself faced, at the beginning of the rise of fascism, with that instability and lack of hegemony among the dominant classes and fractions which characterizes the bourgeois parties’ crisis of representation.” (p. 248)

While we have no social democracy in this country, the Black Lives Matter movement laid down the ideological foundations for a unified class acting for itself in a way hitherto unseen in this country, a movement capable of challenging and even abolishing property relations as we know it. As the stabilization of the fascist arrangement occurred with the defeat of the proletariat, in this case coinciding with the literal stabilization of the economy, the proletariat was abandoned by the now re-integrated middle classes.

[2] U.S. Current Trend: Bills Provide Immunity to Drivers Who Hit Protesters,

https://www.icnl.org/post/analysis/bills-provide-immunity-to-drivers-who-hit-protesters

[3] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm

[4] https://www.chainlaw.com/why-are-u-s-roadways-getting-more-dangerous-while-other-countries-are-getting-safer/

[5] Muddy clothes? ‘Cop City’ activists question police evidence, AP, March 23, 2023

https://apnews.com/article/cop-city-protest-domestic-terrorism-atlanta-6d114e109d489d316f588f51c7cab0cc

[6] Some Assembly Democrats look to criminalize disruptive protests, February 21, 2024

https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2024/02/some-assembly-democrats-look-criminalize-disruptive-protests/394322/

[7] New York Governor considers face mask ban to deter crime https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/15/new-york-face-masks-ban-subway-crime#:~:text=New%20York%20has%20historically%20had,two%20years%20until%20September%202022.

[8] “Covid and the War in Ukraine,” IMF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ar/2022/in-focus/covid-19/

[9] There are many examples of these phenomena. A new unity of interest, and sometimes identity, between landed and digital capitals: Apple is now both a hardgoods producer and a streaming platform, Amazon is a platform, brick and mortar, logistics, a grocery store, and a pharmacy; and most recently Netflix has announced it is opening a chain of malls:

https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/netflix-house-entertainment-dining-shopping-complexes-cities-2025-1236040989/

[10] “Friendshoring set to lift prices” Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/c7fa3fdb-195f-449f-b7b4-461c1e93b5d1

[11] “Child labor remains a key state legislative issue in 2024” Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/blog/child-labor-remains-a-key-state-legislative-issue-in-2024-state-lawmakers-must-seize-opportunities-to-strengthen-standards-resist-ongoing-attacks-on-child-labor-laws/#:~:text=Two%20states%E2%80%94Missouri%20and%20West,they%20are%20otherwise%20prohibited%20from

[12] “What’s behind the corporate effort to kneecap the National Labor Relations Board?” Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/blog/whats-behind-the-corporate-effort-to-kneecap-the-national-labor-relations-board-spacex-amazon-trader-joes-and-starbucks-are-trying-to-have-the-nlrb-declared-unconstitutional/

[13] White House Reverses Obama Era Transgender Bathroom Policy https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-reverses-obama-era-transgender-bathroom-protections-n724426

[14] Tracking Abortion Bans Across the Country https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html

[15] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/17/jamie-dimon-praises-trump-warns-maga-criticism-could-hurt-biden.html

[16] https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2024/01/15/exp-blackrock-vice-chair-trump-iowa-caucuses-011503pseg2-cnni-business.cnn

[Hildebrand did not declare his preference for Trump as indicated in this statement. He called him the “wake up call that Europe needs” to regain sovereignty. Trump’s base of support comes overwhelmingly from the small business owner, not the large capitalist.]

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hasufin · 1 month ago

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The pinnacle of technology

I am lucky enough to be able to do some volunteer work. A couple of days each month, I go to a nearby archaeology museum and do some volunteer work.

in the past that meant cleaning artifacts - when they do a dig they put whatever they find in paper bags and in the lab we'd follow a protocol to clean the dirt off as a precursor to identifying the artifact.

Recently, though, they've had me gluing labels on the artifacts. This is actually a super important thing, because most artifacts get put back in their bags, which will go into a box or drawer and sit for most of the next century until some grad student wants to do research on revolutionary-era pottery in the US mid-Atlantic region. And, see, when that happens there's a chance they'll find a bag of 80 pottery sherds, with 80 labels in the bottom of the bag. There are stories of centuries-old drawers being opened only to find all the labeling had fallen off or faded to illegibility. Which is a disaster; artifacts are important for their context: the specific location in which they were found, and what else was found with them. We get visitors who ask "What is the most valuable item you have?" and there's no answer because it's not like a piece of wood from a ship matters unless you know it's from a barque which was buried in the mud of the river in 1783; otherwise it's just a soggy chunk of wood.

Now, here's where I'm gonna go off the rails. This is relevant, I promise.

The two most important forms of technology are materials technology and information technology. Everything else is finding clever applications for those two things.

I know, I know - "But what about-" - we only did that because we were able to create the materials with which to do it. We only know about it because we developed a way to observe, describe, and understand the world around us in a systematic, repeatable fashion. These technologies are so ubiquitous that we don't think of them as technologies. But consider: we can survive in any climate on Earth, we can live in one place and have a healthy diet, because of our mastery of textiles and ceramics. They are literally what makes us human.

And we have been able to keep, and improve upon, those technologies because we developed means of recording and transferring knowledge: the spoken word, and writing.

So, going back to archaeology. Right, context. Excuse me: CONTEXT. In archaeology, every artifact has a context number. In American archaeology, the context numbers have a specific meaning. They are a code which is thus

<Two-digit state code> <Two-letter region code> <Numeric designation of dig site> <Context number>

Okay, so the state codes are ostensibly in alphabetical order - e.g., since Virginia is the 44th state alphabetically, the number for Virginia is 44. However, this system pre-dates the admission of Hawaii and Alaska, so they're I think 49 and 50.

The region code is usually, but not always, a reasonable abbreviation for the town or city. Like, if there's a dig in Charlottesville I believe it's designated CV. These are not necessarily tied to a town, however - there are specific regions laid out and certain local governments have authority over digs in their region. This can come into play when, like last week, we had some guy show up with some rocks he found in his yard. On asking, it turns out he does not live in our region and we sent him packing because we cannot do a dig there even if we wanted [He has been shopping around to various archaeology authorities because while he's convinced he found ancient artifacts they're really just rocks, but anyway]

The dig site number is given by the regional authority. They can do it however they want - in order by site opening, or by some system based on locations, whatever. However, the dig site is mapped out by the lead archaeologist and surveyed to they know very precisely where the dig is and where each grid is in their site map.

The context is the specific grid and depth. It's usually separated from the site number by "CN" to prevent confusion.

So, if we opened a site in Charlottesville, a potential context number might be:

44CV9876CN0003.

That would tell me it's in Charlottesville, Virginia; that if I want more details I contact the regional authority there for information on dig site 9876, and then using the site map on file I look for grid and context 0003. With that I can get where a given artifact was down to a square meter (and possible better if it was a feature, but I digress).

This is a demonstration of a very high level of information technology. See, we've got a carefully surveyed map of the region already in place, courtesy of the USGS. The USGS not only creates detailed maps of the USA, it designated or places permanent markers which allow anyone to find out very precisely where they are on those maps. These markers are long bronze rods driven into the ground - materials technology, creating something which will not degrade in that environment - and you use surveying tools (more materials tech!) to site from those markers. Then, using our measurement system which is clearly designated and consistent, you can make a site map and have those exact context numbers I mentioned before.

With that, I can print out a page of those context numbers on acid-free paper. I apply a base coat of B-72, which is a n acryloid in acetone. It's great stuff, drying and curing quickly but not so quickly I can't put a slip of paper on it to hold it in place; after waiting 15 minutes I put on a top coat, sealing the paper so the ink isn't exposed to air and does not fade. And if I screw up, I can use acetone to dissolve the B-72 and try again, without damaging the pottery I'm labeling.

These are high applications of information and materials technology. They represent millennia of development in each field, and while it looks like I'm just gluing slips of paper onto tiny pieces of pottery, in truth what I'm doing would not have been possible before the modern era.

#technology #archaeology #records #maps #data science #material science

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palanciacabinet · 4 months ago

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The Foolproof Way to Make Jam at Home, According to an Expert

Preserving fruit at home can be a sticky and expensive process. Skip the stress and guesswork with this streamlined recipe.

By Jane Black -- Wall Street Journal

August 9, 2024

There is an undeniable romance to making jam. Three ingredients—fruit, sugar and lemon juice—plus heat transform excess into extraordinary and capture summer in a jar. It’s true alchemy.

Except when it’s not.

Every few summers, I spend extortionate amounts of money on fruit at the farmers market, then pass a sticky day in the kitchen. The results are uneven: sometimes, a rubbery preserve; others, more a loose compote than a jam. Alchemy, per its reputation, is elusive.

This summer, I decided to apprentice myself to a jam master, Daniel Perry. I had picked up a jar of his Jam According to Daniel plum jam on a visit to Charlottesville, Va.; after tasting it I immediately went online and ordered a dozen more.

These jams are magic: plush, with chunks of fruit and an intense brightness to balance the sweet. Perry, 39, first made jam during orientation at Hampshire College. In the weeks that followed, he made almost-daily trips to the campus farm to experiment. The next summer, he lucked into a job helping to make jam at a Charlottesville vineyard, where French jam legend Christine Ferber’s book “Mes Confitures” was the team’s bible.

Today, Perry turns out some 12,000 jars of jam a year and is a bit of a legend himself in the Charlottesville food universe. In a mint-green commercial kitchen in his basement, with the help of his wife and his mom, he stirs up small batches of the expected varieties—berry, peach, plum, apricot—as well as strawberry with a whisper of lavender, or yellow plum with calamondin, a ping-pong-ball-size citrus grown in nearby Stanardsville, Va.

I arrived on a blistering July day full of questions and not a little anxiety. With Perry’s help, I mastered the fundamentals to perform some summer alchemy of my own.

Small Batch Rules

With jam, small is all. If the pan is too full, the fruit will burn on the bottom before the water cooks out; the pectin (a natural fiber in fruits that helps jam thicken) will get bouncy. A copper jam pan, which conducts heat extraordinarily well and has a wide bottom, helps to prevent burning. (Find the one Perry likes—a very good value—along with other recommended tools, below.)

The Right Ratio

Jam recipes vary in their ratios of fruit to sugar. Perry keeps it simple: 1 quart fruit, 1 cup sugar, ¼ cup lemon juice.

No adjusting for high and low pectin, or the sweetness of raspberry versus rhubarb? That’s right, and it works if, like Perry, you’re after the essence of the fruit at that time. “The pursuit of sameness is not meaningful,” he said. “I want the jam to be consistently of quality. But I want it to express itself.”

Overnight Sensation

Making jam is a two-day project: Prepare the fruit the first day and macerate it with sugar overnight. Mixing fruit with sugar helps break down the fruit’s cell walls and extract juice, essentially starting the cooking before you even turn on the stove.

French Style

For a plush texture, Perry recommends the French method: After fruit and sugar come to a gentle simmer, strain the fruit and return the syrup to the pan to cook on its own. This way, the liquid can concentrate without risk of the fruit burning or turning to mush. Jam sets at 220 degrees, but Perry often brings the syrup only to 217, which makes for a gloriously drippy consistency. Then he returns the fruit to the pan and cooks it until great, big bubbles appear.

Ready? Set?

Many recipes recommend a fussy freezer test for doneness: Drip hot jam onto a spoon straight from the freezer, see if it clings. “There’s too much preciousness in craft food,” said Perry. He lets a drop of jam fall from a rubber spatula onto a room-temperature surface. If the drop resembles an old-fashioned gumdrop with high sides before collapsing, it’s ready.

And so was I. A week after my morning lesson, I made a stress-free and, if I do say so, heavenly batch of apricot jam. Sweet.

The Right Tools for the Job

Practice makes perfect, sure. But so, it turns out, does having the right pans and utensils. These tools will help you up your jam game.

opper Jam Pan

Copper is an exquisite conductor of heat, which means you can cook the fruit for less time, retaining the flavor and preventing scorching. The wide bottom offers maximum surface area, and sloping sides catch boiling jam from spilling onto your stove. A 9- or 10-quart jam pan is big enough for most home cooks and will easily hold the four 8-ounce jars of jam this recipe yields. Daniel Perry recommends the excellent pots from French manufacturer Matfer Bourgeat, which are more reasonably priced than some competitors. Matfer Bourgeat 10-quart jam pan, $162 at Kitchen Restock

Clip-On Thermometer

A reliable thermometer will help you pull the jam off the heat at just the right moment. This version gets rave reviews and clips to the side of the pan. King Arthur Baking Company Candy Thermometer, $20

Y-Peeler

If you are peeling fuzzy peaches, this style of peeler with a fine-toothed serrated blade is a gamechanger. Swissmar Y-Peeler, $7

Stainless-Steel Ladle and Funnel

Hot liquids on plastic is a no-no, so use a stainless-steel ladle and funnel to pour jam into its jars. Winco 8-ounce Stainless Steel Ladle, $10 at Amazon; Stainless Steel Canning Funnel, $10 at Mason Jar Lifestyle

Find Your Jam

Even if you make a great batch, it’s still okay—recommended, even—to buy jam, especially from these talented American artisans.

Jam According to Daniel

Daniel Perry’s gorgeously loose jams are made from fruit local to the Shenandoah Valley. Damson, apricot and any fruit mixed with tart cherries are standouts. $12 per 8-ounce jar, or $10 each when you buy 12

Girl Meets Dirt

When Audra Query Lawlor moved to Orcas Island, Wash., she discovered her new home had a plum tree. With a harvest of 150 pounds of fruit, she taught herself to make jam. Her company, which still produces everything on-island, offers classic flavors with a twist, like donut peach with lime or Orcas pear with bay leaf. The tomato jam, served with soft cheese, is dreamy. 7.75-ounce jar, $14

Bonnie’s Jams

Bonnie Shershow got her start in the late ’90s in Massachusetts before moving her operation to California to have the pick of the very best fruit. Her red pepper jelly or peach ginger jam will be the star of any cheeseboard. 8.75-ounce jar, $10

Corrections & Amplifications Daniel Perry’s jam ratio is 1 quart fruit, 1 cup sugar, ¼ cup lemon juice. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said 2 quarts fruit. (Corrected on Aug. 8)

Foolproof Apricot Jam

Apricots are one of the best fruits to make jam with thanks to their natural acidity and fragrance. Plus, you don’t have to peel them. If you have a copper jam pan, that’s ideal. But a wide-bottomed enamel or stainless-steel pot will work too. This small-batch recipe uses two quarts of fruit. You can double it but no more. Feel free to sub in peaches if they are easier to find than apricots. You will have to peel them, and the cook times may be a bit longer because of the fruit’s water content.

Total Time: 9 hours

Active Time: 1 hour

makes: 4 (8-ounce) jars

Scott Semler for WSJ, Prop Styling by Sean Dooley

Ingredients

8 cups washed, pitted apricots chopped into bite-size pieces (about 4½ pounds ripe or slightly underripe whole fruit)

2 cups granulated sugar

½ cup fresh lemon juice (from 3-6 lemons)

Directions

Place fruit in a large non-reactive container. Add sugar and lemon juice. No need to stir. Cover and refrigerate overnight or up to 24 hours to allow fruit to release juices.

Transfer fruit and liquid to a wide-bottomed, high-sided pan and set over high heat. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook until fruit has softened but is still holding its shape, 10-15 minutes.

Remove pan from heat. Use a slotted spoon or a colander fitted over a large bowl to separate fruit solids from syrup. You should have about 3 cups fruit and 4 cups syrup.

Return syrup to pan and bring to a strong simmer over high heat. Continue simmering until foaming subsides, 10-15 minutes. The bubbles will get fat and loud. Use a candy thermometer to test the temperature. If you like a looser jam, it’s ready when the syrup hits about 217 degrees. If you like it a bit firmer, wait until temperature hits 220 degrees.

Return cooked fruit to pan with syrup. Continue to cook over high heat, stirring regularly to prevent fruit from sticking, until jam is bubbling intensely and begins to “jump” out of pan, 10-20 minutes more. The sound of the bubbles will shift from a snapping to the sound of hand-clapping applause.

Check the jam to judge how well it has set: Stir jam and tap your spatula on the edge of the pan three times, until just a bit still clings to it. Hold spatula low over a room-temperature plate, and when a drop hits, look for it to stand up like a gumdrop before flattening out. When it does, the jam is ready.

Spoon jam into prepared, sterilized jars (or into unsterilized jars if you are prepared to keep it in the refrigerator). Seal jars according to manufacturers’ instructions. Jam in sealed sterilized jars will keep 1 year at room temperature.

—Adapted from Daniel Perry

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Camila Mendes Best Inner Fashion August 1, 2024

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Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We had a lot of fun this week tracking down a bug in the project I’m working on. It was exposed by slow server response, which was because the service had grown. So the bug was icky. Once we tracked it down on the client side we were able to fix it up pretty quickly. I love doing stuff like this! Finding and fixing bugs is part of any developers job along with writing code.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Natalie Venegas • Newsweek

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns' rare warning during a commencement speech about former President Donald Trump, sparked outrage from supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement this weekend.

People are right to continue to warn us all of the dangers of electing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to the Presidency.

Anyone who reads this site — thanks to both of you — knows I’m a Liberal Democrat suffering from “The Woke Mind Virus.” 😃 So of course I think a man set on destroying Democracy as we know it is dangerous.

Noah Kirsch • The Daily Beast

Now, former board member Helen Toner is explaining her decision. In a new podcast interview, the artificial intelligence researcher blasted Altman’s lack of transparency and said the board was kept in the dark about key decisions. She accused Altman of “withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening in the company, [and] in some cases outright lying to the board.”

AI will continue to be controversial and it looks like Sam Altman will be the poster boy for the controversy, at least in the short term.

Keeping a full commercial product rollout from the board seems like a bad idea, doesn’t it? No wonder they fired him.

Mark Tyson • Tom’s Hardware

Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers.

TL;DR - Data delivery by pigeon is still faster than the internet. 🤣

Kelly Crandall • Racer

In a joint statement issued Tuesday, Tony Stewart and Gene Haas confirmed that Stewart-Haas Racing will cease NASCAR operations at season’s end.

This is a real bummer for NASCAR fans and the sport in general. Stewart Haas had a championship team not so long ago but it’s been a long time since they’ve seen victory lane.

They have four cars on the grid. Three teams field four drivers and it’s my understanding NASCAR is going to limit team size to three going forward.

In 2016 NASCAR switched to a Charter system. In that system teams purchase a charter from NASCAR to be part of the system. Those charters are expected to grow in value so a team would have more than physical goods to sale should they decide to close shop. They’re not cheap. Spire Motorsports bought one last year for $40mm. What will each Stewart Haas charter sell for? 😳

Tuomas Pirhonen - PDF

Writing an NVMe Driver in Rust

The link above is to a PDF for Thomas Pirhonen’s Bachelors Thesis. Rust has really made inroads into systems development and I’m happy to see it. Having memory safe code at the systems level seems like a smart thing to do, don’t you think? 😃

I’d be curious to see how much unsafe code exists in the various Rust OS level projects I’ve heard of. But, you gotta start somewhere!

When will Swift be used to build major parts of Apple’s OS level code? Or is it already being used?

Cocoanetics

I’ve long had a longing to have a Mac Mini as build server in my technics room. After Apple finally updated it to (now) fashionable space grey, it was a must purchase for my company.

I’ve had a hankering to do this very thing. I can see setting up the server much in the way we see here and trigger builds via GitHub Actions to start the process. Heck, I could use Xcode’s built in support for automating builds and kick it off right from within Xcode on my laptop. Yeah, Xcode has a decent enough build system to make it useful. Makes me wonder how much of it Apple is using for Xcode Cloud or is 100% of that custom code?

Anton Zhiyanov

If you work with sensitive data, and want to be 100% sure that there is no trace of the old data after it has been updated or deleted — SQLite has you covered. The secure_delete pragma (off by default) causes SQLite to overwrite deleted content with zeros.

TIL! I’ve used SQLite in quite a few projects, including Stream. I love it for local storage and still prefer it to CoreData, it’s just straightforward SQL. Anywho, I had no idea you could do this. Another nice tool to keep in the toolbox.

JanerationX

Doctor Who returned to TV recently as a “soft reboot” to attract a new generation of viewers. Yeah, okay, but the older generations didn’t exactly go away, and since I am a member of an older generation, I am qualified to say that the show sucks.

I think we’ve all been here when we see a big change to our favorite Television show.

Heck, I’m torn about continuing to watch The Witcher. Henry Cavil is The Witcher and to see him replaced just feels wrong.

Kim Zetter • WIRED

Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.

You gotta love these hacker folks. At least he’s using his talent for good.

Viktor Petersson

My Home Server Journey - From Raspberry Pi to Ryzen

What’s up with two server based links today? Guess I’m just in a very hardware mood today.

This reminds me I need to setup my $99 Mac Mini I purchased months ago. It’s an x86 based Mini and fairly old but I want it for media streaming and another local backup system.

David Price • Macworld

Those who miss the days of full-time Apple/Microsoft beef will have been heartened last week by bold claims that the latest Surface devices are faster than the M3 MacBook Air. It’s fun to see Microsoft’s marketing department in a combative mood, but part of me wishes the company would stop trying so hard to show it’s better than Apple.

I don’t know that I’d go this far. Microsoft is just trying to lead the industry into an ARM focused world by attempting to create a new standard of PC.

I’ve been on the Mac, almost exclusively, since around 2006(?) and I love the experience from a user and developer point of view.

There’s still that part of me that loves my old development days on Windows. It was also a great platform to build on.

The new Microsoft Surface Pro looks absolutely amazing and I’ve lusted for one of these computers for years. Microsoft has proven for years and years a tablet/laptop can have excellent touch support and a full desktop class OS underpinning it.

It’s only a matter of time before Apple does it. When it happens all doubt around Apple creating a convertible will disappear and folks will think it’s the greatest thing ever.

Chelsea Troy

Each quarter at the University of Chicago includes nine weeks of instruction. In the eighth week, I ask students to submit questions that they would like our ninth and final session to cover. This quarter, a third of the students in the class submitted some version of the question: “How can I use ChatGPT to get ahead in my programming job?”

I know of a lot of developers at work using ChatGPT to their advantage. It’s not that it’s doing their job, no, it’s just another tool to get started with a thought.

Jordan Tigani

The intended takeaway from the “Big Data is coming” chart was that pretty soon, everyone will be inundated by their data. Ten years in, that future just hasn’t materialized. We can validate this several ways: looking at data (quantitatively), asking people if it is consistent with their experience (qualitatively), and thinking it through from first principles (inductively).

I’m not really into backend stuff like this. It seems kind of boring but it’s good to know some folks are really into it.

Declaring something dead is a bit strange to me, because it was never a living thing, but I get the gist.

I’m sure your mileage will vary but this is a small piece worth a read just to understand his declaration.

BigData, it turns out, ain’t all that big.

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