The Erector Set

Here is an old post from my own blog. I thought it deserved another go.

Glenn Reynolds today has a link to Lionel Trains in the anticipation of Christmas. I had Lionel trains and eventually had HO gauge trains, as well. When I had sons old enough to play with trains, I built an elaborate train set in my garage. Then I learned that southern California is not the place for toy trains. The boys were outdoors all the time and the train set gathered dust.

Another toy that kids today will never have the chance to enjoy is the Erector Set. There is still a small source for this toy but the glory days of the Erector Set were long ago. The toy was invented by A.C. Gilbert in 1913. The story is interesting. Gilbert was a Yale Medical School graduate and had also won a gold medal, for the pole vault, in the 1908 Olympic Games. He had a new design bamboo pole that he used in his winning vault and he sold these, as well as other toys.

Like many residents of New Haven, Connecticut, he often took the train to New York City; and on one trip in 1911 he was inspired with what would be the most popular of his dozens of inventions.

Watching out the train window as some workmen positioned and riveted the steel beams of an electrical power-line tower, Gilbert decided to create a children’s construction kit: not just a toy, but an assemblage of metal beams with evenly spaced holes for bolts to pass through, screws, bolts, pulleys, gears and eventually even engines. A British toy company called Meccano Company was then selling a similar kit, but Gilbert’s Erector set was more realistic and had a number of technical advantages — most notably, steel beams that were not flat but bent lengthwise at a 90-degree angle, so that four of them nested side-to-side formed a very sturdy, square, hollow support beam.

Read more

“The Strategic Genius Behind Allowing Qatari Suitcases of Cash into Gaza”

Via Lex:

Political analysts were likely no less surprised. I’m certainly one of them, having looked on in amazement ever since the reemergence of Hamas violence in early 2018 after three and a half years of quiet. Why did the Israeli government, with Benjamin Netanyahu firmly at its helm, tolerate renewed Hamas missile strikes, then missiles and incendiary balloons, then missiles and incendiary balloons and rioting along the fence dividing Hamas- controlled Gaza and Israel?
 
This is to say nothing of the high-profile visits of the Qatari special envoy, who brought suitcases full of millions of dollar bills to be placed in Hamas coffers—either directly or indirectly with Israel’s permission.
 
[. . .]
 
The mystery was solved on the fourth night of the offensive, when the Israeli Air Force made aviation history by amassing, over the small space of Gaza, 160 fighter jets and other air vehicles to pound and destroy—over a mere 40 minutes—the “Hamas Metro”: a vast array of interlocking tunnels Hamas had dug to protect its command posts, ease the movement of its terrorists, and enable the transport of its missiles and other ordnance.
 
What Netanyahu and the IDF did unto Hezbollah on a much smaller scale two years ago they repeated successfully on a far larger scale against Hamas. Israel, having discovered and then meticulously monitored Hezbollah tunneling activities across the northern border, waited for the expensive tunnels to be dug and then destroyed them just as they were about to be completed. It was Hamas’s turn to be similarly duped.

Read the whole thing.

Giap’s Insight

Via Lex: Hamas’s forever war against Israel has a glitch, and it isn’t Iron Dome

[The two retired Israeli generals] were avid students of military history, including of the Vietnam conflict. They applied for visas and made a special request to the Vietnamese authorities: to meet General Vo Nguyen Giap.
 
Unexpectedly, the request was approved. Giap agreed to meet them. When the Israelis arrived in Vietnam, they sat down with the man who by then had spent decades as his country’s defense minister. It was a long meeting, as [Gen.] Ben Hanan would later recall to Eran Lerman, a former top-ranked IDF intelligence officer and later deputy national security adviser. Lerman, now at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told the story to this writer.

Read more

Dr. Peter McCullough on the Response to Covid

The best thing I’ve encountered on the medical and governmental responses to Covid: An interview by John Leake with Dr. Peter McCullough.

Interview: https://vimeo.com/553060860 — leaves no doubt about what was known and when.

Dr. McCullough’s background: https://www.cardiometabolichealth.org/peter-mccullough.html

Interviewer, John Leake: https://www.coldalongtime.com/pages/about-us

McCullough is good on integrative medicine, as well as conventional.

A response by the interviewer to a question about motives for hiding effective treatments from the public:

“Dr. McCullough was careful to avoid speculation about motive. He encouraged investigative authors like me to try to figure out why extraordinary occurrences like the fake Lancet report occurred. What he has witnessed has led him to believe that there has been a coordinated effort to suppress early outpatient therapies like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, even though they have long been FDA approved for treating other conditions. In an effort to ascertain motive, it is useful to consider the record of Pfizer, which pled guilty to US criminal charges and 2009 and has a long rap sheet of civil judgements against it for harmfully misrepresenting its products. The company booked $3.5 billion in revenue from its Emergency Authorization Use vaccine in the first quarter of this year. Following standard investigative practice, a logical inference can be drawn from these facts — namely, that inexpensive outpatient therapies were suppressed in order to pave the way for mandatory mass vaccination. To prove that this was indeed the case will require further investigation.”