This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I will be up in Rome, NY, taking a class in how to pull hamons [temper-lines] out of mono-steel, taught by journeyman bladesmith Greg Cimms.
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This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I will be up in Rome, NY, taking a class in how to pull hamons [temper-lines] out of mono-steel, taught by journeyman bladesmith Greg Cimms.
I mentioned this in the comments of my last posting, but I think it’s worth going into a bit more detail.
If any ad can impress me, it’s impressive; I am a hard target.
It’s the hot topic, so I must weigh in upon it. No; that’s not true. It’s the hot topic and I’m relentlessly interested in the evolution of ideas and philosophy, and so, when I encounter something new, I do something a republican congressman or governor is incapable of: I do my research and try to learn. You’ve probably already figured out that a great deal of the topics I go into here are things I’ve become interested in, and I’m using the expedient of writing about them (once I’ve done my research and thinking) in order to cement the high points into my less and less reliable memory.
I’m going to be uncharacteristically open about something that has emotional weight for me. But, because it’s important to me, I need to have this conversation with you.
This is a difficult topic, for me, because it entails trying to pull together a bunch of tangled threads that don’t make sense. Pseudo-science and racism are tough, like that, since the pseudo-science in the service of racism may look like it’s science, but it’s not. Yet, for most purposes, I’m going to declare a lot of American popular science as pseudo-science.
Whoever came up with that stupid, cruel, “boil a frog slowly” story? It’s wrong at many levels.
It’s amazing what you can find on Ebay.
Shiro Ishii has died and moved on. The US, predictably, did not really shut down its biowarfare efforts after the Korean War – it just changed them, outsourced some of them, transformed them, and took different approaches here and there. I see no way that Agent Orange, the famous cancer-causing dioxin-based defoliant sprayed all over Vietnam, can be seen as anything but biological or chemical warfare. Either way, it’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” – that thing the US resolutely rains sanctions down upon, when anyone except us tries to use them. And, we re-define ours so they’re not WMD. Thus, we have the irony of the US invading Iraq in an illegal war ostensibly to take away their WMD, then using WMD on the Iraqi population (White phosphorus and area bombardment). Yes, high explosive is a weapon of mass destruction. It’s one of the tragedies of our historical period that we even need to mention that.
I don’t want to say this, but Ka-Bar has become sort of like “The Collector’s Armory.” I don’t think their knives were ever particularly good – they tend to snap off right at the guard – but the US Marines needed an Official Knife and that was what they went with.