import/export

On display at the corporate headquarters based in Memphis, Tennessee is by good fortune and foresight the overnight shipping and cargo airline firm Federal Express’ first delivery van, a second generation Ford Econoline van from 1973. Founded in the same year by Fred Smith, confident that time’s value was on an upward trajectory, the company now has the rather redundant title of FedEx Express and more competition from courier services have come on to the scene but the corporation still remains the leader in overnight deliveries—plus had the wherewithal to conserve its humble beginnings. Be sure to visit Just a Car guy at the link above for more automotive wonders.

disbanded

When sixteen out of seventeen members of Dear Leader’s Committee of the Arts and Humanities, whose duties include overseeing the doomed National Endowment for the Arts, resigned en masse (the one public official—the honorary chairman found her hands tied), the signed a collective thoughtful and urgent letter expressing their disgust towards the White House’s response to last week’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. If one takes the first letter of each paragraph after the salutation and puts them together, the acrostic reveals a hidden message. Additionally note the opening line, “Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms.”

black jack

Though always eager to be the centre of attention be it through palace intrigues or disgraceful provocation and the news that Trump dismissed his chief propagandist to return to the managing the media properties that helped create the landscape that made it possible for this regime to seize power became the dominant headline, Trump’s doltish antics ought not to cause us to be distracted from his awful reaction to the violence in Barcelona with an appeal to a patent and self-plagiarised falsehood.
Ironically, the public figure who just the day prior berated the press for speaking before they knew all the facts (unlike himself) related a crass story that he was already told was untrue. Instead of condolences and statements of solidarity, Trump offered that Europe should study Pershing, most likely—although restricted to one hundred and forty characters, one has to fill in the blanks sometimes, to the military commander’s nation-building exercise in the Philippines and his tough stance on terrorism with an apocryphal account of executing Islamic terrorist in a defiling manner and how the example set ended insurgency in the region. Who is feeding this troll?  Do not make this tragic moment and movement about you.  While this libellous, revisionist and frankly criminal fable is unlikely to do anything other than cause more inflammatory feelings, the injunction to study General “Black Jack” Pershing might be illuminating in terms of understanding what America’s foreign “policy” might become going forward with a return to imperial aspirations and what sort of messenging (through a restored Bannon) that might entail.

an army marches on its stomach

Though the idea has spread far and wide at least on informal terms, the French were the first in the seventeen-hundreds to acknowledge and commission the commissariat corps styled vivandièred or cantinières. These women were for the most part affiliated with those on the battlefield and could provide far better fare and refreshment than what the military was capable of providing. These women at the front also experienced quite a lot of mission-creep—often omitted in histories, figured quite large in the outcomes on the battlefield.