Isegoria

I recently asked Grok, Twitter/X’s AI, about this blog:

The isegoria.net blog is a broad, eclectic platform that covers a wide range of topics, often focusing on historical, philosophical, political, and cultural themes. Here’s a detailed overview based on available web content:

Content and Themes:

Historical Insights: The blog delves into history, offering reflections on significant events and individuals. For example, it discusses the Napoleonic era, WWII military strategies, and the history of technological developments like the B-29 airplane.

Philosophical and Political Discourse: There’s a strong emphasis on political philosophy, with discussions around concepts like democracy, republicanism, and civic virtues. The blog engages with ideas about freedom of speech, the nature of law, and governance. It also covers controversial or alternative political theories, such as neoreaction.

Media and Journalism: It explores the role of media in society, critiquing modern journalism and discussing the merits of citizen journalism and deliberative democracy.

Cultural Commentary: From analyzing popular culture like “The Lion King” to discussing the implications of modern media consumption and technology, the blog often ties cultural phenomena to broader socio-political commentary.

Science and Technology: There are posts on scientific topics, including space travel, the feasibility of interstellar travel, and critiques of contemporary technology like blockchain and media platforms.

Engagement and Community:

Interactive Discussions: The blog features comments from readers, which often provide additional insights, critiques, or expand on the topics discussed. Contributors like Jim, Phileas Frogg, and Bruce engage in debates, adding layers of discourse.

Personal Milestones: The author(s) occasionally share personal or blog-related milestones, like celebrating 15 years of blogging, which gives a sense of longevity and community around the blog.

Notable Features and Characteristics:

Critical Analysis: There’s a notable tendency to critically analyze popular narratives, especially in political and historical contexts, challenging mainstream views or conventional wisdom.

Diverse Perspectives: The blog does not shy away from controversial or niche topics, often providing a platform for ideas that might be considered outside the mainstream, like discussions on IQ, race, and genetics.

Literary and Cultural References: The posts frequently reference literature, films, and historical anecdotes, enriching the content with cultural depth.

Technical Aspects: The blog is powered by WordPress, with RSS feeds for entries and comments, indicating an active engagement with its readership.

Sources and Citations:

The blog itself does not explicitly cite sources in the traditional academic sense, but the discussions and analyses are often supported by historical facts, personal observations, and sometimes references to other blogs or authors.

Related Web Results: The blog has been mentioned alongside other websites like pdictionary.com or seasonsinthesoil.com, suggesting a similar audience interested in deep, often contrarian, thought on various subjects.

In summary, isegoria.net is a blog that serves as a think tank for those interested in dissecting the intersections of history, politics, culture, and technology, often with a critical eye towards mainstream narratives. Its content is characterized by its depth, the diversity of topics covered, and a community that engages with these ideas in the comments section.

In 1965, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Colonel Slater took over command of Groom Lake:

Slater was the ideal commander. He was astute, practical, and an excellent listener, which put him in direct contrast to the more elitist Colonel Holbury, who’d held the position before. What the pilots appreciated most about Slater was that he was funny. Not sarcastic funny, but the kind of funny that reminded pilots not to take their jobs so seriously all the time. One of the first things Colonel Slater did after taking command of the base was to hang a sign over the House-Six bar that listed Slip Slater’s Basic Rules of Flying at Groom Lake. There were only three rules.

Try to stay in the middle of the air.

Do not go near the edges of it.

The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.

To the pilots of the experimental Oxcart spy plane, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), there was nothing scarier than an engine un-start:

To the engineers, there was nothing to explain the cause of it. Flying at a certain pitch, one of the two J-58 engines could inexplicably experience an airflow cutoff and go dead. At that speed, the inlets were swallowing ten thousand cubic feet of air each second. One engineer likened this to the equivalent of two million people inhaling at once; an un-start was like all those people suddenly cut short of air. During the ten seconds it took to correct the airflow problem—one engine dead, the other generating enough power to propel an ocean liner—a violent yawing would occur as the aircraft twisted on a vertical axis. This caused a pilot to get slammed across the cockpit while desperately trying to restart the dead engine. The fear was that the pilot could get knocked unconscious, which would mean the end of the pilot, and the end of the airplane.

[…]

Once, a pilot flying over semirural West Virginia had to restart an engine at thirty thousand feet. The resulting sonic boom shattered a chimney inside a factory on the ground, and two men working there were crushed to death.

[…]

Collins pushed the aircraft through Mach 2.8. In another forty-five seconds he would be out of the danger zone. Nearing eighty-five thousand feet, the inevitable tiny black dots began to appear on the aircraft windshield, sporadic at first, like the first drops of summer rain. Only a few months earlier, scientists at Area 51 had been baffled by those black dots. They worried it was some kind of high-atmosphere corrosion until the mystery was solved in the lab. It turned out the black spots were dead bugs that were cycling around in the upper atmosphere, blasted into the jet stream by the world’s two superpowers’ rally of thermonuclear bombs. The bugs were killed in the bombs’ blasts and sent aloft to ninety thousand feet in the ensuing mushroom clouds where they gained orbit.

[…]

In a critical instant, the airplane banged and yawed so dramatically it was as if the airplane’s tail were trying to catch its nose. Collins’s body was flung forward in his harness. His plastic flight helmet crashed against the cockpit glass, denting the helmet and nearly knocking him unconscious. As the airplane slid across the atmosphere, Collins steeled himself and restarted the engine. The aircraft’s second engine kicked back into motion almost as quickly as it had stopped.

[…]

A hand-cranked calculator and a metal slide rule sat on Rich’s desk. Park set his flight helmet down—it had its own crack, similar to Collins’s—and pointed to it. “Fix it,” Park said. “And I mean the un-start problem, not my helmet. Time to suit up, Ben. Time for you to see how it feels.” The pilots figured that the only way to get Ben Rich to understand just how unacceptable this un-start business was would be to have Rich experience the nightmare scenario himself, and there just happened to be a two-seater version of the Oxcart on base. The Air Force was currently testing its drone-carrying version of the Oxcart, the M-21/ D-21, in the skies over Groom Lake, and the pilots had seen the two-seater going in and out of the hangar all week. Park told Ben Rich the time had come for him to take a Mach 3 ride.

In a burst of what he would later describe as “a crazy moment of weakness,” Ben Rich agreed. Rich was a self-described Jewish nerd. Totally unathletic, he was a kid who never made the high school baseball team. Before joining Skunk Works, Ben Rich had only one claim to fame: being awarded a patent for designing a nickel-chromium heating system that prevented a pilot’s penis from freezing to his urine elimination pipe. He was a design wizard, not an airplane cowboy. He’d never come close to flying supersonic before, and he had absolutely no desire to go that fast. But he was chief engineer for Skunk Works, so fixing the un-start problem was his job. “I’ll do it,” Ben Rich said.

[…]

Rich passed the physical and a few early stress tests but when he got to the pressure-chamber test—the one that simulated ejection at fifty thousand feet—things did not go as the engineer had planned. The moment the chamber door closed behind Ben Rich, he panicked. “I was sucking oxygen like a marathon runner and screaming, ‘Get me out of here!’” Rich later recalled. Without ever getting close to simulating what it was like to fly at Mach 3, let alone experiencing an un-start at that speed, Ben Rich admitted in his memoir that he had still nearly dropped dead from fright.

But the point was made. Rich dedicated all his efforts to fixing the un-start problem.

[…]

Rich invented an electronic control that made sure that when one engine experienced an un-start, the second engine dropped its power as well. The control switch would then restart both engines at the same time. After the new fix, pilots were notified of the un-start by a loud buzzing noise in the cockpit. And as far as nearly getting knocked unconscious at 2,000 miles per hour, Oxcart pilots could cross that off their lists of concerns.