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Everyone criticising inattentive drivers of #Level2 #AutonomousVehicles when outside the Operational Design Domain of the auto steer and incident detection systems seem to be missing the key takeaway from the 1948 Mackworth study on vigilance. The most effective solution is to take "10 mgms. of amphetamine sulphate by mouth one hour before" driving.
https://www.ida.liu.se/~769A09/Literature/Vigilance/Mackworth_1948.pdf
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Today’s top female lead singers of rock! 2026 Update
The list below identifies the reigning female lead singers of today’s rock music scene. Please note that it does not include singers who perform under their given name like Taylor Swift or Phoebe Bridgers. In Phoebe’s case, she does qualify for the list under Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius.
Cliffords – Source: instagram.comHowever, in some instances, the band name listed is the same as the singer’s stage name, such as Blondshell and Girlhouse. As more outstanding female musical artists are discovered, they will added to the list. Peace and rock on!
Deep Sea Diver – Source: instagram.comIona Lynch – Cliffords (Ireland)
Julie Dawson – NewDad (Ireland) – added 12/2/25
Ellie Rowsell – Wolf Alice (England)
Jessica Dobson – Deep Sea Diver
Hayley Williams – Paramore
Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum – Blondshell
Lily Aron – Florence Road (Ireland)
Florence Road- Source: Spotify.comRitzy Bryan – The Joy Formidable (Wales)
Sharon Van Etten – Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten – Momma
Florence Welch – Florence & The Machine (Ireland)
Annie Clark – St. Vincent
Phoebe Bridgers – Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius
Jane Fitzsimmons – Twen – added 4/4/26
Twen – Source: songbyrddc.comShirley Manson – Garbage (England and USA)
Rebecca Lovell – Larkin Poe
Jordan Miller – The Beaches (Canada) – added 4/4/26
Venus O’Broin – Swapmeet (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Swapmeet -Source: monsterchildren.comEmily Haines – Metric and Broken Social Scene (Canada)
Lauren Luiz – Girlhouse
Leah Fay Goldstein – July Talk (Canada)
Karen Orzolek – Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
Maisie Everett – Belair Lip Bombs (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Diana Suteu – The Palais (England)
Wolf Alice – Source: thetimes.co.uk #Blondshell #boygenius #DeepSeaDiver #florenceTheMachine #FlorenceRoad #garbage #girlhouse #Hole #JulyTalk #LarkinPoe #Metric #Momma #music #NewDad #Paramore #rock #StVincent #TheAttachmentTheory #TheJoyFormidable #ThePalais #WolfAlice #YeahYeahYeahs -
Today’s top female lead singers of rock! 2026 Update
The list below identifies the reigning female lead singers of today’s rock music scene. Please note that it does not include singers who perform under their given name like Taylor Swift or Phoebe Bridgers. In Phoebe’s case, she does qualify for the list under Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius.
Cliffords – Source: instagram.comHowever, in some instances, the band name listed is the same as the singer’s stage name, such as Blondshell and Girlhouse. As more outstanding female musical artists are discovered, they will added to the list. Peace and rock on!
Deep Sea Diver – Source: instagram.comIona Lynch – Cliffords (Ireland)
Julie Dawson – NewDad (Ireland) – added 12/2/25
Ellie Rowsell – Wolf Alice (England)
Jessica Dobson – Deep Sea Diver
Hayley Williams – Paramore
Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum – Blondshell
Lily Aron – Florence Road (Ireland)
Florence Road- Source: Spotify.comRitzy Bryan – The Joy Formidable (Wales)
Sharon Van Etten – Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten – Momma
Florence Welch – Florence & The Machine (Ireland)
Annie Clark – St. Vincent
Phoebe Bridgers – Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius
Jane Fitzsimmons – Twen – added 4/4/26
Twen – Source: songbyrddc.comShirley Manson – Garbage (England and USA)
Rebecca Lovell – Larkin Poe
Jordan Miller – The Beaches (Canada) – added 4/4/26
Venus O’Broin – Swapmeet (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Swapmeet -Source: monsterchildren.comEmily Haines – Metric and Broken Social Scene (Canada)
Lauren Luiz – Girlhouse
Leah Fay Goldstein – July Talk (Canada)
Karen Orzolek – Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
Maisie Everett – Belair Lip Bombs (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Diana Suteu – The Palais (England)
Wolf Alice – Source: thetimes.co.uk #Blondshell #boygenius #DeepSeaDiver #florenceTheMachine #FlorenceRoad #garbage #girlhouse #Hole #JulyTalk #LarkinPoe #Metric #Momma #music #NewDad #Paramore #rock #StVincent #TheAttachmentTheory #TheJoyFormidable #ThePalais #WolfAlice #YeahYeahYeahs -
Today’s top female lead singers of rock! 2026 Update
The list below identifies the reigning female lead singers of today’s rock music scene. Please note that it does not include singers who perform under their given name like Taylor Swift or Phoebe Bridgers. In Phoebe’s case, she does qualify for the list under Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius.
Cliffords – Source: instagram.comHowever, in some instances, the band name listed is the same as the singer’s stage name, such as Blondshell and Girlhouse. As more outstanding female musical artists are discovered, they will added to the list. Peace and rock on!
Deep Sea Diver – Source: instagram.comIona Lynch – Cliffords (Ireland)
Julie Dawson – NewDad (Ireland) – added 12/2/25
Ellie Rowsell – Wolf Alice (England)
Jessica Dobson – Deep Sea Diver
Hayley Williams – Paramore
Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum – Blondshell
Lily Aron – Florence Road (Ireland)
Florence Road- Source: Spotify.comRitzy Bryan – The Joy Formidable (Wales)
Sharon Van Etten – Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten – Momma
Florence Welch – Florence & The Machine (Ireland)
Annie Clark – St. Vincent
Phoebe Bridgers – Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius
Jane Fitzsimmons – Twen – added 4/4/26
Twen – Source: songbyrddc.comShirley Manson – Garbage (England and USA)
Rebecca Lovell – Larkin Poe
Jordan Miller – The Beaches (Canada) – added 4/4/26
Venus O’Broin – Swapmeet (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Swapmeet -Source: monsterchildren.comEmily Haines – Metric and Broken Social Scene (Canada)
Lauren Luiz – Girlhouse
Leah Fay Goldstein – July Talk (Canada)
Karen Orzolek – Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
Maisie Everett – Belair Lip Bombs (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Diana Suteu – The Palais (England)
Wolf Alice – Source: thetimes.co.uk #Blondshell #boygenius #DeepSeaDiver #florenceTheMachine #FlorenceRoad #garbage #girlhouse #Hole #JulyTalk #LarkinPoe #Metric #Momma #music #NewDad #Paramore #rock #StVincent #TheAttachmentTheory #TheJoyFormidable #ThePalais #WolfAlice #YeahYeahYeahs -
Today’s top female lead singers of rock! 2026 Update
The list below identifies the reigning female lead singers of today’s rock music scene. Please note that it does not include singers who perform under their given name like Taylor Swift or Phoebe Bridgers. In Phoebe’s case, she does qualify for the list under Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius.
Cliffords – Source: instagram.comHowever, in some instances, the band name listed is the same as the singer’s stage name, such as Blondshell and Girlhouse. As more outstanding female musical artists are discovered, they will added to the list. Peace and rock on!
Deep Sea Diver – Source: instagram.comIona Lynch – Cliffords (Ireland)
Julie Dawson – NewDad (Ireland) – added 12/2/25
Ellie Rowsell – Wolf Alice (England)
Jessica Dobson – Deep Sea Diver
Hayley Williams – Paramore
Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum – Blondshell
Lily Aron – Florence Road (Ireland)
Florence Road- Source: Spotify.comRitzy Bryan – The Joy Formidable (Wales)
Sharon Van Etten – Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten – Momma
Florence Welch – Florence & The Machine (Ireland)
Annie Clark – St. Vincent
Phoebe Bridgers – Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius
Jane Fitzsimmons – Twen – added 4/4/26
Twen – Source: songbyrddc.comShirley Manson – Garbage (England and USA)
Rebecca Lovell – Larkin Poe
Jordan Miller – The Beaches (Canada) – added 4/4/26
Venus O’Broin – Swapmeet (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Swapmeet -Source: monsterchildren.comEmily Haines – Metric and Broken Social Scene (Canada)
Lauren Luiz – Girlhouse
Leah Fay Goldstein – July Talk (Canada)
Karen Orzolek – Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
Maisie Everett – Belair Lip Bombs (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Diana Suteu – The Palais (England)
Wolf Alice – Source: thetimes.co.uk #Blondshell #boygenius #DeepSeaDiver #florenceTheMachine #FlorenceRoad #garbage #girlhouse #Hole #JulyTalk #LarkinPoe #Metric #Momma #music #NewDad #Paramore #rock #StVincent #TheAttachmentTheory #TheJoyFormidable #ThePalais #WolfAlice #YeahYeahYeahs -
Today’s top female lead singers of rock! 2026 Update
The list below identifies the reigning female lead singers of today’s rock music scene. Please note that it does not include singers who perform under their given name like Taylor Swift or Phoebe Bridgers. In Phoebe’s case, she does qualify for the list under Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius.
Cliffords – Source: instagram.comHowever, in some instances, the band name listed is the same as the singer’s stage name, such as Blondshell and Girlhouse. As more outstanding female musical artists are discovered, they will added to the list. Peace and rock on!
Deep Sea Diver – Source: instagram.comIona Lynch – Cliffords (Ireland)
Julie Dawson – NewDad (Ireland) – added 12/2/25
Ellie Rowsell – Wolf Alice (England)
Jessica Dobson – Deep Sea Diver
Hayley Williams – Paramore
Sabrina Mae Teitelbaum – Blondshell
Lily Aron – Florence Road (Ireland)
Florence Road- Source: Spotify.comRitzy Bryan – The Joy Formidable (Wales)
Sharon Van Etten – Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten – Momma
Florence Welch – Florence & The Machine (Ireland)
Annie Clark – St. Vincent
Phoebe Bridgers – Better Oblivion Community Center and boygenius
Jane Fitzsimmons – Twen – added 4/4/26
Twen – Source: songbyrddc.comShirley Manson – Garbage (England and USA)
Rebecca Lovell – Larkin Poe
Jordan Miller – The Beaches (Canada) – added 4/4/26
Venus O’Broin – Swapmeet (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Swapmeet -Source: monsterchildren.comEmily Haines – Metric and Broken Social Scene (Canada)
Lauren Luiz – Girlhouse
Leah Fay Goldstein – July Talk (Canada)
Karen Orzolek – Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
Maisie Everett – Belair Lip Bombs (Australia) – added 4/4/26
Diana Suteu – The Palais (England)
Wolf Alice – Source: thetimes.co.uk #Blondshell #boygenius #DeepSeaDiver #florenceTheMachine #FlorenceRoad #garbage #girlhouse #Hole #JulyTalk #LarkinPoe #Metric #Momma #music #NewDad #Paramore #rock #StVincent #TheAttachmentTheory #TheJoyFormidable #ThePalais #WolfAlice #YeahYeahYeahs -
AUDIOPHILE MAN - HiFi NEWS
Clarus conditioner, Oladra serves, CAD up a ladder, Gadhouse cassette and Fosi keeps CD alive. HiFi is all over the map right now… and I’m here for it.
Click: https://youtu.be/be1cTfXFcRc
Tags #hifi #audiophile #audio #highendaudio #stereo #dac #musicserver #cassetteplayer #cdplayer #clarus #oladra #gadhouse #cad #fosiaudio #vinylcommunity #digitalaudio -
AUDIOPHILE MAN - HiFi NEWS
Clarus conditioner, Oladra serves, CAD up a ladder, Gadhouse cassette and Fosi keeps CD alive. HiFi is all over the map right now… and I’m here for it.
Click: https://youtu.be/be1cTfXFcRc
Tags #hifi #audiophile #audio #highendaudio #stereo #dac #musicserver #cassetteplayer #cdplayer #clarus #oladra #gadhouse #cad #fosiaudio #vinylcommunity #digitalaudio -
AUDIOPHILE MAN - HiFi NEWS
Clarus conditioner, Oladra serves, CAD up a ladder, Gadhouse cassette and Fosi keeps CD alive. HiFi is all over the map right now… and I’m here for it.
Click: https://youtu.be/be1cTfXFcRc
Tags #hifi #audiophile #audio #highendaudio #stereo #dac #musicserver #cassetteplayer #cdplayer #clarus #oladra #gadhouse #cad #fosiaudio #vinylcommunity #digitalaudio -
AUDIOPHILE MAN - HiFi NEWS
Clarus conditioner, Oladra serves, CAD up a ladder, Gadhouse cassette and Fosi keeps CD alive. HiFi is all over the map right now… and I’m here for it.
Click: https://youtu.be/be1cTfXFcRc
Tags #hifi #audiophile #audio #highendaudio #stereo #dac #musicserver #cassetteplayer #cdplayer #clarus #oladra #gadhouse #cad #fosiaudio #vinylcommunity #digitalaudio -
The thread about Leith Fort and why it was soon abandoned as a defensive position
Historic Environment Scotland released a very nice 3D model of a 19th century gun from Fort George mounted on a “traversing frame“.
Screengrab of the 3D model, follow this link to see it for yourself.In case you didn’t know, there was also once an artillery fort in Leith – Leith Battery or Redoubt (but for simplicity’s sake we shall call it the Fort) – and most of its guns were mounted in this manner. The animation shows a 32pdr weapon and Leith originally had smaller 24pdrs (pdr, or pounder, was the weight of the shot in pounds, the method by which such artillery was classified).
The Fort had been built in something of a panic commencing in 1780, after Leith and Edinburgh had been threatened by the squadron of the American John Paul Jones in 1779 during the War of Independence. A temporary battery of cannon was placed in North Leith to cover the entrance to the Port of Leith from seaborne assault; the tidal nature of the harbour meant any ship intent on entry had to navigate a relatively narrow and defined channel. When the dust from the John Paul Jones panic had settled it was decided to formalise this battery into a permanent defensive fortification. It was somewhat unusual in origin in that it was largely paid for and constructed by not the military but by the City of Edinburgh and the town of Leith. It was further unusual in that its architect was the mason James Craig – better known for his plan of Edinburgh’s New Town – who was not a military engineer. Captain Andrew Frazer, the Army’s Chief Engineer for Scotland who had designed and superintended the construction of Fort George, therefore oversaw the practical details. The Board of Ordnance completed the construction and fitting out of the Fort after it was handed over to them by the Town Council only completed up to the level of the first storey. It took until 1793 until everything was finalised and it was formally occupied by the Royal Artillery.
I have read more than once than the Fort was something of a folly, incapable of fulfilling its intended purpose of defending the Port of Leith. But if you plot the fields of fire of its artillery you get a good idea of how advantageously sited it actually was; the intensity of the red shading shows how many guns can be trained to fire at that particular point. The effective range of the 24pdr weapons was just shy of 1,000 metres; any ship making an attack on the port therefore had to transit a considerable distance under the overlapping fire of the Fort‘s guns. A newspaper report of artillery practice in 1840 confirmed the guns were capable of firing on practice targets located at 200 to 1,200 yards distant with some degree of accuracy.
A map for the Inspector General of Fortifications showing Edinburgh and Leith, made c. 1780-90 by an unknown cartographer. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandA contemporary account notes;
The Battery will effectually command the range from one mile to one mile and a half of the road for shipping and the entry to the harbour
John Smith’s Houses and Streets of EdinburghAn original survey of the fort made by the Board of Ordnance in 1785 gives details of its planned artillery. The principal battery, annotated at a and b were the eight 24pdr cannons; those at b were on traversing frames, those at a on wheeled carriages. The traversing frame offered the advantage that the gun could be rapidly trained to aim at the target, the wheel carriage was quite cumbersome and required block and tackle to shift its aim. If you follow the link to this Youtube video, it shows such a 24pdr cannon on a traversing frame being loaded, aimed and fired by re-enactors at Old Fort Henry in Ontario, Canada. Notice it takes the best part of 3.5 minutes to complete the loading and firing drill although regular gunners in the 18th and 19th century would have probably had this down nearer to a minute.
Plan of Leith Fort, Board of Ordnance, 1785. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAt c was a colossal 13 inch mortar: that distance being the diameter of the bore, not the length of the weapon! The mortar was a terrifying weapon, more suited to siege work and with a very slow rate of fire thanks to its huge 195lb (90kg) explosive bombs. But even a near miss from one of these would have made it very difficult for any small boats caught in the blast, or for ships trying to anchor outside the port or come alongside its piers. In addition it could fire a special “ball light” shot to help illuminating the scene for night actions. You can read a full information leaflet about the 13 inch mortar here.
In addition to all this firepower there was a trainable 18pdr weapon to protect the seaward entrance and a single 68pdr Carronade mounted at the lower level. The Carronade was for point-blank use against ships trying to force their way into the Port of Leith. It was a compact but very powerful weapon intended to cause extreme damage at shorter ranges. It took its name from its inventors, the Carron Company, a pioneering Scottish ironworks which was further up the River Forth, near Falkirk. Coincidentally they had a foundry in Leith at this time.
A 68 pounder Carronade on the ship HMS Victory. CC-by-SA 3.0 BjenksTo protect the Fort from naval gunfire it had two broad parapet walls, faced and backed with masonry. The inner parapet, of the battery itself (at B on the diagram) was further protected with a ditch, through which ran a fence.
Section of Leith Fort, Board of Ordnance, 1785. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandProtection from the ravages of the waters and storms of the Firth of Forth – which had reduced the seaward walls and bastions of Cromwell’s nearby 1655 Citadel to rubble in a matter of years – came from a sea wall was constructed in front in 1785. To reinforce this and to secure it against direct assault by small boats, 3 rows of large wooden posts were driven into it.
The road to Newhaven, infront of the fort, the sea wall and the rows of posts on the shore. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe rest of the Fort‘s defences all pointed landward, with loopholes along the walls and corner bastions to provide enfilading fire (i.e. they can shoot lengthways along the face of a wall, to prevent any attackers from taking refuge up against it from the defenders above). As well as its 100 gunners, there was accommodation for a squad of 12 defending soldiers and their sergeant. It was not designed or intended to resist a siege, this was purely self defence to prevent it being overwhelmed before regular forces from Edinburgh could come to its relief.
Landward defences of Leith Fort. Note the characteristic “arrowhead” shape of the defensive corner bastions. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThere is a single contemporary image of the Fort that I am aware of, a sketch made in 1784 looking from the west towards Leith. In it we can see the grass-covered battery wall, with the notches cut in it for firing the guns through, the flag pole, and some of the accommodation buildings to the right.
Leith Fort, 1784, from the Hutton Drawings. CC-by-4.0 National Library of ScotlandHelpfully, it confirms that the Fort was actually armed, one of the 24 pounders can be seen poking through its loophole.
Leith Fort, 1784, from the Hutton Drawings. CC-by-4.0 National Library of ScotlandIn 1805 and 1806, it is recorded that Leith had five 24pdrs and four, later siz, 18pdrs. The 24pdrs were still there, on more modern carriages, around 1843 when David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson took some calotype photographs of some of the weapons and men of the Fort. A newspaper report in the Caledonian Mercury of April 1847 noted the strength at Leith Fort was seven 24pdrs, four 18pdrs and a 10 inch mortar.
Major Crawford, Major Wright, Captain St. George and Captain Bortringham of the Leith Fort Artillery. Hill & Adamson, CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandAn 1860s newspaper illustration shows the City of Edinburgh Artillery Volunteers practising at the Fort, but their weapons look to be rather larger than the 24pdrs and on more substantial carriages than the iron ones shown in Hill and Adamson’s photos. It was reported that in February 1860 that three 32pdr and three 64pdr cannon were delivered to Leith from Woolwich; judging by the scale the weapons below are the 64pdrs. The Volunteers were raised in 1859 on the back of an invasion scare, and there was much enthusiasm to join; 9 batteries were formed in Edinburgh and Leith alone. Their role was to man the home defences in times of invasion and to provide mobile support to the regulars, using agricultural horses to haul their weaponry to where it was required.
The Artillery Volunteers drilling at Leith FortA side-effect of the invasion scare was that the military stockpiled immense quantities of gunpowder and ammunition in both Leith Fort and Edinburgh Castle. Leith found itself being used as the main ordnance store for all of “North Britain”. The Town Councils of Edinburgh and Leith were alarmed to discover in 1865 that there were one hundred and thirty barrels at Leith, each containing 100lbs of black powder. This 130,000lbs amounts to 59 metric tonnes, “sufficient to blow the whole town into the Firth of Forth” as Mr Wishart, a Leith Town Councillor, put it. Official remonstrations to the government resulted in Blackness Castle, further up the Forth, being converted into a central gunpowder store for Scotland and by 1870 the stockpiles had a much safer new home, away from the centres of population and industry.
Hill & Adamson’s pictures also show a number of small, horse-drawn field artillery pieces. These would have been suitable for rapid deployment to firing positions outwith the Fort in the event of action.
Unknown Offcer and three mounted soldiers of the Leith Fort Artillery, 1843. Hill & Adamson. CC-by-NC National Galleries Scotland.Between 1795 and 1815, there are thirteen recorded substantial repair and improvement works at Leith, including making provision for it to hold French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars. However the Fort‘s life as an artillery battery was cut short. When the new wet docks began to be constructed in Leith along Commercial Street in 1801 by John Rennie they blocked the field of fire of the Fort and rendered it “useless as a work of defence“. These docks would take some 16 years to complete and ended in a government bail-out of the near-bankrupt Edinburgh Town Council, requiring that the latter cede land to the Naval Board who moved the Leith Naval Yard from Constitution Street to a more advantageous position directly below the Fort.
John Thomson’s Plan of Leith, 1827, showing the wet docks and Naval Yard built in front of it. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandNew defensive bastions were constructed on the sea wall of the wet docks, where cannons could be mounted in times of threat. The outer approaches of the harbour were to be defended by a Martello Tower, work on which commenced in 1809. Left also to the City of Edinburgh to finance and construct, it took them a whole 29 years before they handed it over to the military; unfinished! The Fort was ultimately re-purposed as an artillery depot, as a barracks and as a muster and training depot for artillery volunteers. By the end of the 19th century, the weaponry allocated to the Fort was a mixed bag of older weapons for drill purposes. It continued to serve as an artillery depot right up until the 1950s and its final occupants, the Royal Army Pay Corps, paraded out in 1956 and the location was locked up and abandoned.
The gates locked and Leith Fort abandoned in 1957. Notice the “bollards” at the gate which appear to be a pair of old cannon set in the road surface, and the decorative piles of cannonballs on the gate piers. Most of the structures within are Victorian or later, the pair of guardhouses are Georgian. Contemporary newspaper photograph from the SphereIt was afterwards re-purchased by the City of Edinburgh and it formed a core part of the Leith Fort Comprehensive Redevelopment Area, its inner buildings apart from a pair of guard houses were demolished and an infamous housing scheme was constructed within it’s tall, oppressive walls.
Leith Fort housing scheme in 2008, CC-by-SA 3.0 Jonathan OldenbuckThis scheme, which had all the ambience and aesthetic of a prison (and in later life, most of the social ills of one), was demolished in 2013 and a much more pleasant housing development replaced it, with the Fort’s oppressive walls much reduced in height. Somewhat appropriately, the new streets within are called Guardhouse Parade, Cannon Wynd and John Paul Jones View.
Leith Fort in 2022, looking through the old entrance way on North Fort Street, past the guardhouse to the new council housing.For a comprehensive paper with detailed research on the Fort and the Napoleonic defences of the Forth, you can download The Fixed Defences of the Forth in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1779-1815 by Gordon Barclay and Ron Morris from the Tayside and Fife Archaeological Journal. This has proved an invaluable source for me on some of the details of how Leith Fort was actually used and equipped.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
The thread about Edinburgh and Leith under occupation; when “Gardyloo”, Christmas and being rude to Frenchmen were banned
From 1548 to 1560, the Port of Leith was occupied by a French garrison in support of the Queen Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise. During that time the French fortified the town and made themselves generally unpopular with the locals. Such was the mutual bad feeling that in 1555 Mary of Guise’s Parliament made it an offence to speak ill of Frenchmen. I am not sure if this act has been repealed yet…
The arms of Mary of Guise, Regent of Scotland (Maria de Loraine, Regina Scotie) in South Leith Kirk. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Kim TraynorOne of the reasons for the French being so unpopular was their constant requisitioning of ships – this was a town that relied on the sea for its prosperity and in doing so the occupiers were directly impoverishing its occupants. As a result of this, shipowners were in the habit of making their vessels be spontaneously elsewhere whenever they got wind that the French might need them, which created logistical problems for the garrison commander. In 1550, the French governor in Leith employed two pynours (porters) to remove and impound all the rudders of the ships of Leith to prevent them from slipping away without his say-so. Twelve days later, all Scottish vessels from Kinghorn to Crail were ordered to leave for Leith within three hours or face being forfeited with their masters put to death.
Opposing the French in Leith were Scottish Protestant lords – the grandiosely titled Lords of the Congregation, or The Faithful – backed by an English army. An English general, Randolph, noted in 1560 that “in no other country were ever seen so many particular quarrels, which daily cause many to keep off who mortally hate the French“: Randolph could not understand how the Scots resented the French occupiers so much but yet were so reluctant to fight with the English against them. He had money to finance 2-3,000 Scots troops to eject the French but could not get them “for love nor money“. The English ended up assaulting Leith under an incompetent commander, with untrained recruits and ladders that were too short to scale the walls. This amateurish attack was repulsed by the stretched, starving but competent and well entrenched French garrison. Further bloodshed was spared when Mary of Guise died shortly thereafter and a short peace was agreed, allowing the French to leave.
“Incident in the Siege of Leith”. It is not clear which party is which here and what they are fighting over. But nobody seemed to be getting along.Less than 100 years after the exit of the French, Leith would find itself once again under military occupation after the calamitous defeat in 1650 of the Scottish Covenanter forces at the hands of Oliver Cromwell in the Battle of Dunbar. Relations between occupier and occupied this time were less strained; although English rule was firm and uncompromising there appeared to be more mutual tolerance on both sides, probably both were just exhausted from nearly 12 years of bloody warfare. The population and economy of Leith had also been shattered by a plague in 1645 that killed nearly half its population.
Cromwell at the head of his Army at Dunbar, a 19th century painting by Andrew Carrick Gow. CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 Tate GalleryCromwell entered Edinburgh on Saturday 7th December, just days after victory at Dunbar. Although the remnants of the Scottish army fought on it had abandoned the city to wage a protracted war of retreat across the country. The occupation was initially marked by restraint on the part of the victors and under Cromwell’s direct orders on 27th December three of his men were publicly flogged through the town by the “Provest marschellis men” for the offence of plundering houses without orders. Another unfortunate Roundhead was strapped to a horse with a pint jug tied around his neck, his hands bound and muskets tied to his feet, and ridden around the town for 2 hours for the offence of drunkenness. In May 1652, an English officer had his ear nailed to the public gallows and thereafter cut off for toasting the King’s health.
Cromwell enters Edinburgh, from an 1886 souvenir of the Edinburgh International Exhibition telling the history of the cityCivilian administration in those days was relatively limited, but the English were sensible enough to allow that of Edinburgh to continue to function – under close observation. Leith however had no such local authority of its own beyond that of Edinburgh and so was ruled directly through military courts headed by English officers “without partiality or favour“. In November 1651 they hung one of their own troopers at the Market Cross “a gallant, stout fellow” for robbing a butcher. A soldier found drunk and swearing in Leith was bound, hit repeatedly in the mouth and tied to a pillar with “a paper bound to his breast” specifying his crimes. Relations in Leith with the English seemed to be downright cordial at times (perhaps because the locals were pleased to be relieved of the constant political and economic interference from Edinburgh) but things ended up becoming too cordial. In October 1651 English soldiers had to be forbidden from marrying Leith women without the written permission of their Major and in February 1652 this prohibition was extended to the keeping of female servants!
In Edinburgh, although the town itself had been easily taken, the Castle garrison had held out and was being besieged by Cromwell’s New Model Army. Anyone found treating with the garrison was dealt with severely. A gardener at the West Kirk (now St. Cuthbert’s Parish Church) was accused of giving intelligence to the Castle; he was taken to the city guardhouse and hung from his thumbs with burning slow matches (the sort used in matchlock firearms) between his fingers until they were “burnt to the bone“.
“Cromwell’s Bartizan, Edinburgh”, by James Drummond RSA, 1861. Oliver Cromwell surveys his newly conquered lands from a rooftop in the Old Town of Edinburgh after the Battle of Dunbar. A bartizan is an overhanging projection from a defensive wall. The solider in the background has a matchlock firearm over his shoulder, and the slow match is the fine cord that can be seen above his gloved hand. The auction listing suggests this is Cromwell at the Castle, but it was then under siege and he is lower than surrounding buildings. The original RSA listing confirms he is actually stood on a housetop.In March 1651 the English soldiers in Edinburgh mutinied due to the lack of provisions and pay; what had been sent to them by sea had been turned back by unfavourable weather. They put their own commanders in jail and “ran through the markets of Edinburgh, plundering and robbing the people of the town, so that few would go out on the streets“. General John Lambert arrived in Edinburgh at the end of November that year to restore order and to make arrangements for quartering of his army in the city over winter. He seems to have made a positive impression with the locals; on finding out that there was no local magistrate in place to dispense justice, he reinstated some of the old ones. He also ordered the Incorporated Trades to choose their own Deacons (the principal officers of the Trades, who formed a core of the Town Council). He did however maintain a right of veto over appointments and kept the appointment of the Castle’s governor to his personal choice.
Oliver Cromwell (left) and Lieutenant General John Lambert (right), 1745 mezzotint by Andrew Miller after Robert Walker, 1650. © National Portrait Gallery, London NPG D32974In December, Lambert ordered citizens in both Edinburgh and Leith to hang out lanterns and place candles in their windows or doors from 6PM to 9PM on account of the disorder being committed by the soldiers. This was observed but cost the inhabitants dearly as candles were an expensive commodity. Anybody found not complying was to be fined 4 shillings sterling, with the master or mistress of the house being thrown in the city guardhouse until it was paid. He also set about the perhaps impossible task of the cleaning up of Auld Reekie. Orders were given on the 24th December that the streets, closes and wynds in Edinburgh were be cleansed within 13 days and “no filth or water should be thrown forth from their windows upon pain of paying immediately 4 shillings sterling“. The proceeds of such fines were to be split equally between the informant and the poor of the town. Clearly it did not have a long lasting effect as just three years later the city was ordered to procure carts and horses for the carrying away of the filth.
“The Flowers of Edinburgh”, a satirical 18th century print on the traditional manner of “flushing the toilet” in Old Town Edinburgh. © The Trustees of the British MuseumOn December 25th 1651 the English authorities in Leith ordered that Christmas should be banned. The point being made here was probably moot however given it was not something that would have been openly observed or celebrated in Presbyterian Scotland. Indeed the Kirk, the usual incumbent authority on moral matters in Scottish towns and burghs, had banned its celebration back in 1640. However ten years later it had nothing like its former authority, especially in Leith where it had been evicted from its church buildings and relieved of its civic duties by the occupiers.
Entry for 2th December 1651 from the Diary of John NicollOn February 7th 1652, under orders of the Commissioners of the English Parliament who were at that time resident in Dalkeith, the symbols of the Stuart Kings’ arms, crowns and royal unicorns of the city were taken down wherever they were to be found. They were stripped from the King’s pew at St. Giles’ Kirk, from the Mercat cross, the Netherbow Port, Parliament House, Edinburgh Castle and the palace of Holyroodhouse. They were then taken to the gallows and publicly hung.
In May 1654 General Monck, who had been Cromwell’s military commander in Scotland until 1652, came once again to Edinburgh to proclaim the union of England and Scotland as the Commonwealth. He was received by the Lord Provost and Bailies of the Town Council (the most senior members of the civilian authority) in their finery. Perhaps they were mindful of the rape and pillage of Dundee committed by Monck’s men back in 1651 and set out to woo the General lest they incur his wrath. They conveyed him to a “sumptuous dinner and feast, prepared by the Town of Edinburgh for him and his special officers. This feast was six days in preparing, and the bailies of Edinburgh did stand and serve the whole time of that dinner“. They also laid on a “great preparation” of fireworks which were set off from the Mercat Cross between 9PM and midnight, “to the admiration of many people“.
George Monck by Peter Lely, c. 1665Cromwell also left it to Monck to resolve the interminable squabbles between the city of Edinburgh and Port of Leith. The latter wanted freedom to trade without interference from its neighbour, the former wanted to assert its historic legal rights to her port. An English merchant in Leith at the time said that the town had been “under the greatest slavery that I ever knew” and should subject to under Edinburgh no more than “Westminster to London.” As part of his overall strategy to pacify and control Scotland, Monck proposed enclosing Leith in fortifications as a garrison town – probably reconstructing the 1560 walls and bastions. The prospect of this terrified Edinburgh, as it would make it substantially easier for Leith to act independently. Edinburgh shrewdly counter-offered that it would pay £5,000 instead for a standalone Citadel outside of Leith – or it may be that the it was Monck being shrewd and he had played Edinburgh off against Leith to get them to finance his scheme. In the end the £5,000 citadel apparently cost many times that to build. The city would later buy it back for a further £5,000 from Charles II, so ended up paying for it twice. Although it was well engineered it was soon abandoned as a defensive fortification; the seaward walls and bastions had been impossible to protect from erosion by the sea and had collapsed within 30 years.
By May 1660, the Commonwealth was over (assisted in no small part by Monck) and the Houses of Parliament had proclaimed Charles II to be King. Orders were sent to the Governor of Edinburgh castle to fire 3 volleys from the guns, one for each of the Three Kingdoms. The chief gunner at the Castle gave the orders to his men but one refused saying that “The devil [would] blow him in the air that loosed a cannon for that purpose” and “if he loosed any cannon that day sum man should repent it“. The complainant was transferred to a gun overlooking the West Kirk. The first volley was duly fired and when this man went to reload his weapon, he recharged it with powder only for it to spontaneously discharge while he was doing so, there being a smouldering ember in the barrel. He was blown clean over the castle walls and off the Castle Rock itself, falling over 250 feet to his death. He was buried near where he landed in the West Kirk.
“The Prospect of the Castle and City of Edinburgh from the Nor’ Loch”, by John Slezer in 1693. The unfortunate gunner met his end by falling from the walls on this, the north side of the castle. © Edinburgh City LibrariesNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
I’m presently working on developing a page dedicated to the career of Pepper Martin with the Cardinals and the Gashouse Gang. In the meantime, here is a link I do have on the Gashouse Gang. #stlcards #baseball #baseballphotography #baseballhistory #stlouis
https://socprofb.wordpress.com/2024/03/07/colorizing-early-st-louis-baseball-the-gashouse-gang/
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Joe Medwick, Spanky McFarland, and Dizzy Dean #stlcards #baseballhistory #mlb
https://socprofb.wordpress.com/2024/03/07/colorizing-early-st-louis-baseball-the-gashouse-gang/ -
The Architecture of Abandonment: What the Billionaire Bunker Tells Us About the Coming Century
There’s an old saying in the theatre that if you see a gun in the first act, it will be fired in the third act. We are seeing the same drama play out in our real lives as the Billionaire Oligarchs of the world load their Doomsday bunkers in the act one, and we, the unwashed and unknown, prepare for its firing in act three. Yes, the dramatic arc carries its own answer. Mark Zuckerberg’s Koʻolau Ranch on Kauai, valued north of three hundred million dollars, includes two mansions joined by a tunnel that leads to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, sealed behind a blast-resistant metal door packed with concrete, with its own living quarters, mechanical room, and escape hatch. The compound is engineered for self-sufficiency in water, energy, and food, monitored by round-the-clock security and a six-foot perimeter wall, with construction crews bound by non-disclosure agreements that have been enforced through firings. The owner of that property has called it “a little shelter,” “like a hurricane shelter, whatever,” in remarks to Bloomberg. The engineering specifications tell a different story. Blast doors and escape hatches are absent from the standard Hawaiian hurricane code. They appear on the architectural plans of people who expect to be hunted.
These are not isolated cases. Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship in June 2011 under an “exceptional circumstances” clause after spending only twelve days in the country, less than one percent of the typical 1,350-day residency requirement. In 2015 he purchased a 477-acre estate at Glendhu Bay on Lake Wānaka through a private entity called Second Star Limited, named for a reference to Peter Pan, and commissioned a hillside lodge complex from the Tokyo Olympic Stadium architect Kengo Kuma; the Queenstown-Lakes District Council rejected the proposal in 2022 on landscape-impact grounds, and an Environment Court appeal failed. Sam Altman, in his 2016 New Yorker profile, described his own preparedness inventory: guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks issued by the Israeli Defense Forces, and a private patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to, with Thiel’s New Zealand house as his backup plan. Larry Ellison bought ninety-eight percent of Lānaʻi in 2012 for three hundred million dollars from David Murdock, including the water utility, two Four Seasons resorts, and roughly a third of the island’s housing stock; three thousand residents now live on land overwhelmingly held by one private owner.
The most revealing evidence comes not from the architectural drawings but from a single sentence spoken in private. Douglas Rushkoff, a media-theory professor at Queens College, was paid roughly half his annual salary to fly to a desert resort in 2017 to address what he assumed would be an audience of investment bankers; he found instead five hedge fund billionaires who wanted to know which region would be more survivable, Alaska or New Zealand, whether Ray Kurzweil really was uploading his consciousness, and at last, from the CEO of a brokerage house who had nearly completed his own underground bunker system, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” That last question is the smoking gun. The man asking it has already built a bunker, stocked it, hardened it, and hired guards. He has thought past the apocalypse, past the moment when capital ceases to function as a coordination mechanism, past the question of how to retain feudal control over armed retainers in a post-monetary world. He is calm. He has accepted the loss of the system that produced his wealth, and he is calculating the second move.
The middle class is the first move. Every dollar of attention extracted by a social-media platform, each hour of labor metered by a delivery app, retirement accounts loaded with index funds that hold the same fifty companies, tax dollars flowing up the bracket through preferential treatment of capital gains: all of it funds the apparatus that will be used to leave the rest of us behind. The hedge fund manager’s bunker was built with pension money. Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian compound was paid for by the data labor of three billion people who joined Facebook because their friends were there. Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship was a sovereign gift to a man who has never been required to live in the country, granted on the theory that his presence would benefit the nation, by a government persuaded that the benefit had already been delivered through his arrival in the cabinet minister’s office.
The objections write themselves and they all collapse on inspection. The first claim is that these are rich-person hobbies, no different in kind from yachts. Yachts do not require self-sufficient food, water, and energy systems, do not depend on non-disclosure agreements covering construction crews, and remain visible by design. The defining features of the bunker are invisibility, redundancy, and operational independence from civic infrastructure. A yacht assumes the world keeps working. A bunker assumes it does not. The second claim is that these are insurance policies, not statements of intent. Insurance is purchased against losses one believes plausible. The act of buying apocalypse insurance at this scale is itself a data point about what the purchasers expect. If the men with the most access to economic, scientific, and political information are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to harden private exits, that information deserves a hearing.
The third claim is that climate adaptation is rational and the rest of us should do the same. Rational climate adaptation funds public seawalls, public power grids, public emergency services, and public housing relocation. Private adaptation at the billionaire scale withdraws resources from the common pool. The grain that feeds the cattle on Koʻolau Ranch is grain that does not feed the rest of Kauai. The water in the fifty-five-foot-diameter tank does not flow to neighbors. The fenced acreage on Lānaʻi cannot be walked across by the locals whose ancestors are buried there. The fourth claim is that the argument amounts to conspiracy thinking. Every fact assembled here comes from public records, court filings, planning applications, on-the-record interviews, and the billionaires’ own statements. The conspiracy, if there is one, is being conducted in plain view, with planning permits filed and architectural renderings published.
The fifth claim, usually muttered rather than spoken, is that the argument sounds envious. The argument tracks structures, and not personalities. How much money any individual billionaire holds matters less than whether the political order they have helped construct will survive the next thirty years for the rest of us, and the bunkers answer that question. Some of the very wealthy give large portions of their fortunes away during their lifetimes, fund public health initiatives at scale, and have signed pledges to deplete their estates in the name of philanthropy. The argument here concerns a different subset, the ones who have looked at the trajectory and concluded that the rational allocation of capital is toward private hardening rather than public repair. They are an instructive sample because their behavior reveals the working theory of capital itself, and the working theory holds that the system is not worth saving on its current terms.
Democracy assumes shared fate. The whole project of representative government rests on the premise that the people making decisions live in the same world as the people affected by them, breathe the same air, drink the same water, send their children to schools at minimum adjacent to ours. When the decision-makers build self-contained habitats with private water, private food, private energy, and private security, they sever the feedback loop that makes democracy work. Their interest in public infrastructure terminates at the gatehouse. Public health concerns them only as far as the perimeter wall. Climate stability matters to them insofar as they expect to outrun it. The middle class has historically been the buffer between the rich and the poor, absorbing economic shocks through household savings, generational housing wealth, and pension solvency, dampening political shocks through civic participation, jury duty, school board attendance, and local journalism, and providing the cultural ballast that kept the country from tipping. That buffer has thinned for forty years through wage stagnation, healthcare cost transfer, education debt, the conversion of pensions into self-managed retirement accounts, and the conversion of housing from shelter to speculative asset. The bunker is the announcement that the thinning is now sufficient and the wealthy are exiting the social contract entirely.
Consider the concrete consequences. When the next pandemic arrives, those who can ride it out behind blast doors will do so, while the rest will be sent back to work because the economy must run. The next climate event that closes a major American city will find the people with helicopters and private islands on the helicopters and private islands, while their fellow citizens take shelter or scramble onto rooftops. As for the next major financial event, those whose assets are denominated in farmland, gold, hardened compounds, and offshore citizenships will weather it, while the rest lose their houses for the third time in twenty-five years. The bunker is a hedge against the failure of the system that paid for the bunker. It is a short position on civilization, financed by the people whose civilization it is.
Rushkoff gave the hedge fund managers good advice. He told them that the most reliable way to maintain authority over their security force after the event was to treat those people well right now, and the most reliable way to prevent the event was to extend the same ethos to everyone else. They paid his fee and went back to building bunkers. The middle class faces a related choice with a much shorter clock. Either we tax the men building the bunkers at rates that prevent them from completing the bunkers, or we accept that the country will be reorganized around finished bunkers. The same choice presents itself in antitrust enforcement, financial regulation, and progressive taxation: restore them to the levels that built the post-war middle class, or accept the bifurcation into hardened compound and precariat. None of those policies are exotic. They are the conditions under which the American middle class actually existed, between roughly 1945 and 1980, when the top marginal tax rate sat above seventy percent for most of the period and the country produced its single greatest expansion of upward mobility, public infrastructure, and home ownership.
The One Percenters do not build multi-billion-dollar bunkers on private islands as a hobby. They build them because they have run the numbers and the numbers tell them that the rest of us are not going to make it. Whether they are correct about the numbers is a question we get to answer collectively, while we still can answer anything collectively at all. The good news, if there is any, sits inside the same evidence. The bunker-builders are betting that civic life will fail. The bet pays out only if the rest of us let it.
Works Cited
Hvistendahl, Mara. “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound.” WIRED, December 14, 2023.
Montanez, Abigail. “Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Added Another 1,000 Acres to His $300 Million Compound in Hawaii.” Robb Report, July 22, 2025.
Lang, Cady. “Mark Zuckerberg Calls Massive Bunker in Hawaii ‘a Little Shelter.'” The Hollywood Reporter, December 21, 2024.
KHON2 News Staff. “14 Facts: Zuckerberg’s Secret +$270M Hawaiʻi Compound.” KHON2, April 4, 2025.
Nippert, Matt. “Revealed: Peter Thiel’s Path to New Zealand Citizenship.” The New Zealand Herald, January 25, 2017.
Browne, Ryan. “Peter Thiel Files Plans to Build Luxury Lodge, Private Home and Meditation Pod on New Zealand Estate.” CNBC, September 1, 2021.
Australian National Review Editorial Staff. “American Billionaire Peter Thiel Quits New Zealand After Being Handed Citizenship.” Australian National Review, February 25, 2025.
Osnos, Evan. “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” The New Yorker, January 22, 2017.
Friedman, Thomas L., reporting on Sam Altman in Olson, Parmy. Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World. St. Martin’s Press, 2024.
Rushkoff, Douglas. “Survival of the Richest.” Medium / OneZero, July 5, 2018.
Rushkoff, Douglas. Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
Wei, Will, and Tim Loh. “Larry Ellison Wants to Turn a Hawaiian Island Into His Vision of the Future. Locals Are Fighting Him.” Bloomberg, June 9, 2022.
Eagle, Nathan. “Billionaire Larry Ellison Shuts Down Vacation Home Division on Lānaʻi.” Honolulu Civil Beat, September 25, 2025.
O’Connell, Mark. Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back. Doubleday, 2020.
Garrett, Bradley. Bunker: Building for the End Times. Scribner, 2020.
#bunker #doomsday #elite #gop #middleClass #onePercent #payment #rent #rich #suffering -
The Architecture of Abandonment: What the Billionaire Bunker Tells Us About the Coming Century
There’s an old saying in the theatre that if you see a gun in the first act, it will be fired in the third act. We are seeing the same drama play out in our real lives as the Billionaire Oligarchs of the world load their Doomsday bunkers in the act one, and we, the unwashed and unknown, prepare for its firing in act three. Yes, the dramatic arc carries its own answer. Mark Zuckerberg’s Koʻolau Ranch on Kauai, valued north of three hundred million dollars, includes two mansions joined by a tunnel that leads to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, sealed behind a blast-resistant metal door packed with concrete, with its own living quarters, mechanical room, and escape hatch. The compound is engineered for self-sufficiency in water, energy, and food, monitored by round-the-clock security and a six-foot perimeter wall, with construction crews bound by non-disclosure agreements that have been enforced through firings. The owner of that property has called it “a little shelter,” “like a hurricane shelter, whatever,” in remarks to Bloomberg. The engineering specifications tell a different story. Blast doors and escape hatches are absent from the standard Hawaiian hurricane code. They appear on the architectural plans of people who expect to be hunted.
These are not isolated cases. Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship in June 2011 under an “exceptional circumstances” clause after spending only twelve days in the country, less than one percent of the typical 1,350-day residency requirement. In 2015 he purchased a 477-acre estate at Glendhu Bay on Lake Wānaka through a private entity called Second Star Limited, named for a reference to Peter Pan, and commissioned a hillside lodge complex from the Tokyo Olympic Stadium architect Kengo Kuma; the Queenstown-Lakes District Council rejected the proposal in 2022 on landscape-impact grounds, and an Environment Court appeal failed. Sam Altman, in his 2016 New Yorker profile, described his own preparedness inventory: guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks issued by the Israeli Defense Forces, and a private patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to, with Thiel’s New Zealand house as his backup plan. Larry Ellison bought ninety-eight percent of Lānaʻi in 2012 for three hundred million dollars from David Murdock, including the water utility, two Four Seasons resorts, and roughly a third of the island’s housing stock; three thousand residents now live on land overwhelmingly held by one private owner.
The most revealing evidence comes not from the architectural drawings but from a single sentence spoken in private. Douglas Rushkoff, a media-theory professor at Queens College, was paid roughly half his annual salary to fly to a desert resort in 2017 to address what he assumed would be an audience of investment bankers; he found instead five hedge fund billionaires who wanted to know which region would be more survivable, Alaska or New Zealand, whether Ray Kurzweil really was uploading his consciousness, and at last, from the CEO of a brokerage house who had nearly completed his own underground bunker system, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” That last question is the smoking gun. The man asking it has already built a bunker, stocked it, hardened it, and hired guards. He has thought past the apocalypse, past the moment when capital ceases to function as a coordination mechanism, past the question of how to retain feudal control over armed retainers in a post-monetary world. He is calm. He has accepted the loss of the system that produced his wealth, and he is calculating the second move.
The middle class is the first move. Every dollar of attention extracted by a social-media platform, each hour of labor metered by a delivery app, retirement accounts loaded with index funds that hold the same fifty companies, tax dollars flowing up the bracket through preferential treatment of capital gains: all of it funds the apparatus that will be used to leave the rest of us behind. The hedge fund manager’s bunker was built with pension money. Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian compound was paid for by the data labor of three billion people who joined Facebook because their friends were there. Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship was a sovereign gift to a man who has never been required to live in the country, granted on the theory that his presence would benefit the nation, by a government persuaded that the benefit had already been delivered through his arrival in the cabinet minister’s office.
The objections write themselves and they all collapse on inspection. The first claim is that these are rich-person hobbies, no different in kind from yachts. Yachts do not require self-sufficient food, water, and energy systems, do not depend on non-disclosure agreements covering construction crews, and remain visible by design. The defining features of the bunker are invisibility, redundancy, and operational independence from civic infrastructure. A yacht assumes the world keeps working. A bunker assumes it does not. The second claim is that these are insurance policies, not statements of intent. Insurance is purchased against losses one believes plausible. The act of buying apocalypse insurance at this scale is itself a data point about what the purchasers expect. If the men with the most access to economic, scientific, and political information are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to harden private exits, that information deserves a hearing.
The third claim is that climate adaptation is rational and the rest of us should do the same. Rational climate adaptation funds public seawalls, public power grids, public emergency services, and public housing relocation. Private adaptation at the billionaire scale withdraws resources from the common pool. The grain that feeds the cattle on Koʻolau Ranch is grain that does not feed the rest of Kauai. The water in the fifty-five-foot-diameter tank does not flow to neighbors. The fenced acreage on Lānaʻi cannot be walked across by the locals whose ancestors are buried there. The fourth claim is that the argument amounts to conspiracy thinking. Every fact assembled here comes from public records, court filings, planning applications, on-the-record interviews, and the billionaires’ own statements. The conspiracy, if there is one, is being conducted in plain view, with planning permits filed and architectural renderings published.
The fifth claim, usually muttered rather than spoken, is that the argument sounds envious. The argument tracks structures, and not personalities. How much money any individual billionaire holds matters less than whether the political order they have helped construct will survive the next thirty years for the rest of us, and the bunkers answer that question. Some of the very wealthy give large portions of their fortunes away during their lifetimes, fund public health initiatives at scale, and have signed pledges to deplete their estates in the name of philanthropy. The argument here concerns a different subset, the ones who have looked at the trajectory and concluded that the rational allocation of capital is toward private hardening rather than public repair. They are an instructive sample because their behavior reveals the working theory of capital itself, and the working theory holds that the system is not worth saving on its current terms.
Democracy assumes shared fate. The whole project of representative government rests on the premise that the people making decisions live in the same world as the people affected by them, breathe the same air, drink the same water, send their children to schools at minimum adjacent to ours. When the decision-makers build self-contained habitats with private water, private food, private energy, and private security, they sever the feedback loop that makes democracy work. Their interest in public infrastructure terminates at the gatehouse. Public health concerns them only as far as the perimeter wall. Climate stability matters to them insofar as they expect to outrun it. The middle class has historically been the buffer between the rich and the poor, absorbing economic shocks through household savings, generational housing wealth, and pension solvency, dampening political shocks through civic participation, jury duty, school board attendance, and local journalism, and providing the cultural ballast that kept the country from tipping. That buffer has thinned for forty years through wage stagnation, healthcare cost transfer, education debt, the conversion of pensions into self-managed retirement accounts, and the conversion of housing from shelter to speculative asset. The bunker is the announcement that the thinning is now sufficient and the wealthy are exiting the social contract entirely.
Consider the concrete consequences. When the next pandemic arrives, those who can ride it out behind blast doors will do so, while the rest will be sent back to work because the economy must run. The next climate event that closes a major American city will find the people with helicopters and private islands on the helicopters and private islands, while their fellow citizens take shelter or scramble onto rooftops. As for the next major financial event, those whose assets are denominated in farmland, gold, hardened compounds, and offshore citizenships will weather it, while the rest lose their houses for the third time in twenty-five years. The bunker is a hedge against the failure of the system that paid for the bunker. It is a short position on civilization, financed by the people whose civilization it is.
Rushkoff gave the hedge fund managers good advice. He told them that the most reliable way to maintain authority over their security force after the event was to treat those people well right now, and the most reliable way to prevent the event was to extend the same ethos to everyone else. They paid his fee and went back to building bunkers. The middle class faces a related choice with a much shorter clock. Either we tax the men building the bunkers at rates that prevent them from completing the bunkers, or we accept that the country will be reorganized around finished bunkers. The same choice presents itself in antitrust enforcement, financial regulation, and progressive taxation: restore them to the levels that built the post-war middle class, or accept the bifurcation into hardened compound and precariat. None of those policies are exotic. They are the conditions under which the American middle class actually existed, between roughly 1945 and 1980, when the top marginal tax rate sat above seventy percent for most of the period and the country produced its single greatest expansion of upward mobility, public infrastructure, and home ownership.
The One Percenters do not build multi-billion-dollar bunkers on private islands as a hobby. They build them because they have run the numbers and the numbers tell them that the rest of us are not going to make it. Whether they are correct about the numbers is a question we get to answer collectively, while we still can answer anything collectively at all. The good news, if there is any, sits inside the same evidence. The bunker-builders are betting that civic life will fail. The bet pays out only if the rest of us let it.
#bunker #doomsday #elite #gop #middleClass #onePercent #payment #rent #rich #suffering -
The Architecture of Abandonment: What the Billionaire Bunker Tells Us About the Coming Century
There’s an old saying in the theatre that if you see a gun in the first act, it will be fired in the third act. We are seeing the same drama play out in our real lives as the Billionaire Oligarchs of the world load their Doomsday bunkers in the act one, and we, the unwashed and unknown, prepare for its firing in act three. Yes, the dramatic arc carries its own answer. Mark Zuckerberg’s Koʻolau Ranch on Kauai, valued north of three hundred million dollars, includes two mansions joined by a tunnel that leads to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, sealed behind a blast-resistant metal door packed with concrete, with its own living quarters, mechanical room, and escape hatch. The compound is engineered for self-sufficiency in water, energy, and food, monitored by round-the-clock security and a six-foot perimeter wall, with construction crews bound by non-disclosure agreements that have been enforced through firings. The owner of that property has called it “a little shelter,” “like a hurricane shelter, whatever,” in remarks to Bloomberg. The engineering specifications tell a different story. Blast doors and escape hatches are absent from the standard Hawaiian hurricane code. They appear on the architectural plans of people who expect to be hunted.
These are not isolated cases. Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship in June 2011 under an “exceptional circumstances” clause after spending only twelve days in the country, less than one percent of the typical 1,350-day residency requirement. In 2015 he purchased a 477-acre estate at Glendhu Bay on Lake Wānaka through a private entity called Second Star Limited, named for a reference to Peter Pan, and commissioned a hillside lodge complex from the Tokyo Olympic Stadium architect Kengo Kuma; the Queenstown-Lakes District Council rejected the proposal in 2022 on landscape-impact grounds, and an Environment Court appeal failed. Sam Altman, in his 2016 New Yorker profile, described his own preparedness inventory: guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks issued by the Israeli Defense Forces, and a private patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to, with Thiel’s New Zealand house as his backup plan. Larry Ellison bought ninety-eight percent of Lānaʻi in 2012 for three hundred million dollars from David Murdock, including the water utility, two Four Seasons resorts, and roughly a third of the island’s housing stock; three thousand residents now live on land overwhelmingly held by one private owner.
The most revealing evidence comes not from the architectural drawings but from a single sentence spoken in private. Douglas Rushkoff, a media-theory professor at Queens College, was paid roughly half his annual salary to fly to a desert resort in 2017 to address what he assumed would be an audience of investment bankers; he found instead five hedge fund billionaires who wanted to know which region would be more survivable, Alaska or New Zealand, whether Ray Kurzweil really was uploading his consciousness, and at last, from the CEO of a brokerage house who had nearly completed his own underground bunker system, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” That last question is the smoking gun. The man asking it has already built a bunker, stocked it, hardened it, and hired guards. He has thought past the apocalypse, past the moment when capital ceases to function as a coordination mechanism, past the question of how to retain feudal control over armed retainers in a post-monetary world. He is calm. He has accepted the loss of the system that produced his wealth, and he is calculating the second move.
The middle class is the first move. Every dollar of attention extracted by a social-media platform, each hour of labor metered by a delivery app, retirement accounts loaded with index funds that hold the same fifty companies, tax dollars flowing up the bracket through preferential treatment of capital gains: all of it funds the apparatus that will be used to leave the rest of us behind. The hedge fund manager’s bunker was built with pension money. Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian compound was paid for by the data labor of three billion people who joined Facebook because their friends were there. Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship was a sovereign gift to a man who has never been required to live in the country, granted on the theory that his presence would benefit the nation, by a government persuaded that the benefit had already been delivered through his arrival in the cabinet minister’s office.
The objections write themselves and they all collapse on inspection. The first claim is that these are rich-person hobbies, no different in kind from yachts. Yachts do not require self-sufficient food, water, and energy systems, do not depend on non-disclosure agreements covering construction crews, and remain visible by design. The defining features of the bunker are invisibility, redundancy, and operational independence from civic infrastructure. A yacht assumes the world keeps working. A bunker assumes it does not. The second claim is that these are insurance policies, not statements of intent. Insurance is purchased against losses one believes plausible. The act of buying apocalypse insurance at this scale is itself a data point about what the purchasers expect. If the men with the most access to economic, scientific, and political information are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to harden private exits, that information deserves a hearing.
The third claim is that climate adaptation is rational and the rest of us should do the same. Rational climate adaptation funds public seawalls, public power grids, public emergency services, and public housing relocation. Private adaptation at the billionaire scale withdraws resources from the common pool. The grain that feeds the cattle on Koʻolau Ranch is grain that does not feed the rest of Kauai. The water in the fifty-five-foot-diameter tank does not flow to neighbors. The fenced acreage on Lānaʻi cannot be walked across by the locals whose ancestors are buried there. The fourth claim is that the argument amounts to conspiracy thinking. Every fact assembled here comes from public records, court filings, planning applications, on-the-record interviews, and the billionaires’ own statements. The conspiracy, if there is one, is being conducted in plain view, with planning permits filed and architectural renderings published.
The fifth claim, usually muttered rather than spoken, is that the argument sounds envious. The argument tracks structures, and not personalities. How much money any individual billionaire holds matters less than whether the political order they have helped construct will survive the next thirty years for the rest of us, and the bunkers answer that question. Some of the very wealthy give large portions of their fortunes away during their lifetimes, fund public health initiatives at scale, and have signed pledges to deplete their estates in the name of philanthropy. The argument here concerns a different subset, the ones who have looked at the trajectory and concluded that the rational allocation of capital is toward private hardening rather than public repair. They are an instructive sample because their behavior reveals the working theory of capital itself, and the working theory holds that the system is not worth saving on its current terms.
Democracy assumes shared fate. The whole project of representative government rests on the premise that the people making decisions live in the same world as the people affected by them, breathe the same air, drink the same water, send their children to schools at minimum adjacent to ours. When the decision-makers build self-contained habitats with private water, private food, private energy, and private security, they sever the feedback loop that makes democracy work. Their interest in public infrastructure terminates at the gatehouse. Public health concerns them only as far as the perimeter wall. Climate stability matters to them insofar as they expect to outrun it. The middle class has historically been the buffer between the rich and the poor, absorbing economic shocks through household savings, generational housing wealth, and pension solvency, dampening political shocks through civic participation, jury duty, school board attendance, and local journalism, and providing the cultural ballast that kept the country from tipping. That buffer has thinned for forty years through wage stagnation, healthcare cost transfer, education debt, the conversion of pensions into self-managed retirement accounts, and the conversion of housing from shelter to speculative asset. The bunker is the announcement that the thinning is now sufficient and the wealthy are exiting the social contract entirely.
Consider the concrete consequences. When the next pandemic arrives, those who can ride it out behind blast doors will do so, while the rest will be sent back to work because the economy must run. The next climate event that closes a major American city will find the people with helicopters and private islands on the helicopters and private islands, while their fellow citizens take shelter or scramble onto rooftops. As for the next major financial event, those whose assets are denominated in farmland, gold, hardened compounds, and offshore citizenships will weather it, while the rest lose their houses for the third time in twenty-five years. The bunker is a hedge against the failure of the system that paid for the bunker. It is a short position on civilization, financed by the people whose civilization it is.
Rushkoff gave the hedge fund managers good advice. He told them that the most reliable way to maintain authority over their security force after the event was to treat those people well right now, and the most reliable way to prevent the event was to extend the same ethos to everyone else. They paid his fee and went back to building bunkers. The middle class faces a related choice with a much shorter clock. Either we tax the men building the bunkers at rates that prevent them from completing the bunkers, or we accept that the country will be reorganized around finished bunkers. The same choice presents itself in antitrust enforcement, financial regulation, and progressive taxation: restore them to the levels that built the post-war middle class, or accept the bifurcation into hardened compound and precariat. None of those policies are exotic. They are the conditions under which the American middle class actually existed, between roughly 1945 and 1980, when the top marginal tax rate sat above seventy percent for most of the period and the country produced its single greatest expansion of upward mobility, public infrastructure, and home ownership.
The One Percenters do not build multi-billion-dollar bunkers on private islands as a hobby. They build them because they have run the numbers and the numbers tell them that the rest of us are not going to make it. Whether they are correct about the numbers is a question we get to answer collectively, while we still can answer anything collectively at all. The good news, if there is any, sits inside the same evidence. The bunker-builders are betting that civic life will fail. The bet pays out only if the rest of us let it.
Works Cited
Hvistendahl, Mara. “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound.” WIRED, December 14, 2023.
Montanez, Abigail. “Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Added Another 1,000 Acres to His $300 Million Compound in Hawaii.” Robb Report, July 22, 2025.
Lang, Cady. “Mark Zuckerberg Calls Massive Bunker in Hawaii ‘a Little Shelter.'” The Hollywood Reporter, December 21, 2024.
KHON2 News Staff. “14 Facts: Zuckerberg’s Secret +$270M Hawaiʻi Compound.” KHON2, April 4, 2025.
Nippert, Matt. “Revealed: Peter Thiel’s Path to New Zealand Citizenship.” The New Zealand Herald, January 25, 2017.
Browne, Ryan. “Peter Thiel Files Plans to Build Luxury Lodge, Private Home and Meditation Pod on New Zealand Estate.” CNBC, September 1, 2021.
Australian National Review Editorial Staff. “American Billionaire Peter Thiel Quits New Zealand After Being Handed Citizenship.” Australian National Review, February 25, 2025.
Osnos, Evan. “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” The New Yorker, January 22, 2017.
Friedman, Thomas L., reporting on Sam Altman in Olson, Parmy. Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World. St. Martin’s Press, 2024.
Rushkoff, Douglas. “Survival of the Richest.” Medium / OneZero, July 5, 2018.
Rushkoff, Douglas. Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
Wei, Will, and Tim Loh. “Larry Ellison Wants to Turn a Hawaiian Island Into His Vision of the Future. Locals Are Fighting Him.” Bloomberg, June 9, 2022.
Eagle, Nathan. “Billionaire Larry Ellison Shuts Down Vacation Home Division on Lānaʻi.” Honolulu Civil Beat, September 25, 2025.
O’Connell, Mark. Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back. Doubleday, 2020.
Garrett, Bradley. Bunker: Building for the End Times. Scribner, 2020.
#bunker #doomsday #elite #gop #middleClass #onePercent #payment #rent #rich #suffering -
The Architecture of Abandonment: What the Billionaire Bunker Tells Us About the Coming Century
There’s an old saying in the theatre that if you see a gun in the first act, it will be fired in the third act. We are seeing the same drama play out in our real lives as the Billionaire Oligarchs of the world load their Doomsday bunkers in the act one, and we, the unwashed and unknown, prepare for its firing in act three. Yes, the dramatic arc carries its own answer. Mark Zuckerberg’s Koʻolau Ranch on Kauai, valued north of three hundred million dollars, includes two mansions joined by a tunnel that leads to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, sealed behind a blast-resistant metal door packed with concrete, with its own living quarters, mechanical room, and escape hatch. The compound is engineered for self-sufficiency in water, energy, and food, monitored by round-the-clock security and a six-foot perimeter wall, with construction crews bound by non-disclosure agreements that have been enforced through firings. The owner of that property has called it “a little shelter,” “like a hurricane shelter, whatever,” in remarks to Bloomberg. The engineering specifications tell a different story. Blast doors and escape hatches are absent from the standard Hawaiian hurricane code. They appear on the architectural plans of people who expect to be hunted.
These are not isolated cases. Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship in June 2011 under an “exceptional circumstances” clause after spending only twelve days in the country, less than one percent of the typical 1,350-day residency requirement. In 2015 he purchased a 477-acre estate at Glendhu Bay on Lake Wānaka through a private entity called Second Star Limited, named for a reference to Peter Pan, and commissioned a hillside lodge complex from the Tokyo Olympic Stadium architect Kengo Kuma; the Queenstown-Lakes District Council rejected the proposal in 2022 on landscape-impact grounds, and an Environment Court appeal failed. Sam Altman, in his 2016 New Yorker profile, described his own preparedness inventory: guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks issued by the Israeli Defense Forces, and a private patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to, with Thiel’s New Zealand house as his backup plan. Larry Ellison bought ninety-eight percent of Lānaʻi in 2012 for three hundred million dollars from David Murdock, including the water utility, two Four Seasons resorts, and roughly a third of the island’s housing stock; three thousand residents now live on land overwhelmingly held by one private owner.
The most revealing evidence comes not from the architectural drawings but from a single sentence spoken in private. Douglas Rushkoff, a media-theory professor at Queens College, was paid roughly half his annual salary to fly to a desert resort in 2017 to address what he assumed would be an audience of investment bankers; he found instead five hedge fund billionaires who wanted to know which region would be more survivable, Alaska or New Zealand, whether Ray Kurzweil really was uploading his consciousness, and at last, from the CEO of a brokerage house who had nearly completed his own underground bunker system, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” That last question is the smoking gun. The man asking it has already built a bunker, stocked it, hardened it, and hired guards. He has thought past the apocalypse, past the moment when capital ceases to function as a coordination mechanism, past the question of how to retain feudal control over armed retainers in a post-monetary world. He is calm. He has accepted the loss of the system that produced his wealth, and he is calculating the second move.
The middle class is the first move. Every dollar of attention extracted by a social-media platform, each hour of labor metered by a delivery app, retirement accounts loaded with index funds that hold the same fifty companies, tax dollars flowing up the bracket through preferential treatment of capital gains: all of it funds the apparatus that will be used to leave the rest of us behind. The hedge fund manager’s bunker was built with pension money. Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian compound was paid for by the data labor of three billion people who joined Facebook because their friends were there. Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship was a sovereign gift to a man who has never been required to live in the country, granted on the theory that his presence would benefit the nation, by a government persuaded that the benefit had already been delivered through his arrival in the cabinet minister’s office.
The objections write themselves and they all collapse on inspection. The first claim is that these are rich-person hobbies, no different in kind from yachts. Yachts do not require self-sufficient food, water, and energy systems, do not depend on non-disclosure agreements covering construction crews, and remain visible by design. The defining features of the bunker are invisibility, redundancy, and operational independence from civic infrastructure. A yacht assumes the world keeps working. A bunker assumes it does not. The second claim is that these are insurance policies, not statements of intent. Insurance is purchased against losses one believes plausible. The act of buying apocalypse insurance at this scale is itself a data point about what the purchasers expect. If the men with the most access to economic, scientific, and political information are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to harden private exits, that information deserves a hearing.
The third claim is that climate adaptation is rational and the rest of us should do the same. Rational climate adaptation funds public seawalls, public power grids, public emergency services, and public housing relocation. Private adaptation at the billionaire scale withdraws resources from the common pool. The grain that feeds the cattle on Koʻolau Ranch is grain that does not feed the rest of Kauai. The water in the fifty-five-foot-diameter tank does not flow to neighbors. The fenced acreage on Lānaʻi cannot be walked across by the locals whose ancestors are buried there. The fourth claim is that the argument amounts to conspiracy thinking. Every fact assembled here comes from public records, court filings, planning applications, on-the-record interviews, and the billionaires’ own statements. The conspiracy, if there is one, is being conducted in plain view, with planning permits filed and architectural renderings published.
The fifth claim, usually muttered rather than spoken, is that the argument sounds envious. The argument tracks structures, and not personalities. How much money any individual billionaire holds matters less than whether the political order they have helped construct will survive the next thirty years for the rest of us, and the bunkers answer that question. Some of the very wealthy give large portions of their fortunes away during their lifetimes, fund public health initiatives at scale, and have signed pledges to deplete their estates in the name of philanthropy. The argument here concerns a different subset, the ones who have looked at the trajectory and concluded that the rational allocation of capital is toward private hardening rather than public repair. They are an instructive sample because their behavior reveals the working theory of capital itself, and the working theory holds that the system is not worth saving on its current terms.
Democracy assumes shared fate. The whole project of representative government rests on the premise that the people making decisions live in the same world as the people affected by them, breathe the same air, drink the same water, send their children to schools at minimum adjacent to ours. When the decision-makers build self-contained habitats with private water, private food, private energy, and private security, they sever the feedback loop that makes democracy work. Their interest in public infrastructure terminates at the gatehouse. Public health concerns them only as far as the perimeter wall. Climate stability matters to them insofar as they expect to outrun it. The middle class has historically been the buffer between the rich and the poor, absorbing economic shocks through household savings, generational housing wealth, and pension solvency, dampening political shocks through civic participation, jury duty, school board attendance, and local journalism, and providing the cultural ballast that kept the country from tipping. That buffer has thinned for forty years through wage stagnation, healthcare cost transfer, education debt, the conversion of pensions into self-managed retirement accounts, and the conversion of housing from shelter to speculative asset. The bunker is the announcement that the thinning is now sufficient and the wealthy are exiting the social contract entirely.
Consider the concrete consequences. When the next pandemic arrives, those who can ride it out behind blast doors will do so, while the rest will be sent back to work because the economy must run. The next climate event that closes a major American city will find the people with helicopters and private islands on the helicopters and private islands, while their fellow citizens take shelter or scramble onto rooftops. As for the next major financial event, those whose assets are denominated in farmland, gold, hardened compounds, and offshore citizenships will weather it, while the rest lose their houses for the third time in twenty-five years. The bunker is a hedge against the failure of the system that paid for the bunker. It is a short position on civilization, financed by the people whose civilization it is.
Rushkoff gave the hedge fund managers good advice. He told them that the most reliable way to maintain authority over their security force after the event was to treat those people well right now, and the most reliable way to prevent the event was to extend the same ethos to everyone else. They paid his fee and went back to building bunkers. The middle class faces a related choice with a much shorter clock. Either we tax the men building the bunkers at rates that prevent them from completing the bunkers, or we accept that the country will be reorganized around finished bunkers. The same choice presents itself in antitrust enforcement, financial regulation, and progressive taxation: restore them to the levels that built the post-war middle class, or accept the bifurcation into hardened compound and precariat. None of those policies are exotic. They are the conditions under which the American middle class actually existed, between roughly 1945 and 1980, when the top marginal tax rate sat above seventy percent for most of the period and the country produced its single greatest expansion of upward mobility, public infrastructure, and home ownership.
The One Percenters do not build multi-billion-dollar bunkers on private islands as a hobby. They build them because they have run the numbers and the numbers tell them that the rest of us are not going to make it. Whether they are correct about the numbers is a question we get to answer collectively, while we still can answer anything collectively at all. The good news, if there is any, sits inside the same evidence. The bunker-builders are betting that civic life will fail. The bet pays out only if the rest of us let it.
Works Cited
Hvistendahl, Mara. “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound.” WIRED, December 14, 2023.
Montanez, Abigail. “Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Added Another 1,000 Acres to His $300 Million Compound in Hawaii.” Robb Report, July 22, 2025.
Lang, Cady. “Mark Zuckerberg Calls Massive Bunker in Hawaii ‘a Little Shelter.'” The Hollywood Reporter, December 21, 2024.
KHON2 News Staff. “14 Facts: Zuckerberg’s Secret +$270M Hawaiʻi Compound.” KHON2, April 4, 2025.
Nippert, Matt. “Revealed: Peter Thiel’s Path to New Zealand Citizenship.” The New Zealand Herald, January 25, 2017.
Browne, Ryan. “Peter Thiel Files Plans to Build Luxury Lodge, Private Home and Meditation Pod on New Zealand Estate.” CNBC, September 1, 2021.
Australian National Review Editorial Staff. “American Billionaire Peter Thiel Quits New Zealand After Being Handed Citizenship.” Australian National Review, February 25, 2025.
Osnos, Evan. “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” The New Yorker, January 22, 2017.
Friedman, Thomas L., reporting on Sam Altman in Olson, Parmy. Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World. St. Martin’s Press, 2024.
Rushkoff, Douglas. “Survival of the Richest.” Medium / OneZero, July 5, 2018.
Rushkoff, Douglas. Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
Wei, Will, and Tim Loh. “Larry Ellison Wants to Turn a Hawaiian Island Into His Vision of the Future. Locals Are Fighting Him.” Bloomberg, June 9, 2022.
Eagle, Nathan. “Billionaire Larry Ellison Shuts Down Vacation Home Division on Lānaʻi.” Honolulu Civil Beat, September 25, 2025.
O’Connell, Mark. Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back. Doubleday, 2020.
Garrett, Bradley. Bunker: Building for the End Times. Scribner, 2020.
#bunker #doomsday #elite #gop #middleClass #onePercent #payment #rent #rich #suffering -
The Architecture of Abandonment: What the Billionaire Bunker Tells Us About the Coming Century
There’s an old saying in the theatre that if you see a gun in the first act, it will be fired in the third act. We are seeing the same drama play out in our real lives as the Billionaire Oligarchs of the world load their Doomsday bunkers in the act one, and we, the unwashed and unknown, prepare for its firing in act three. Yes, the dramatic arc carries its own answer. Mark Zuckerberg’s Koʻolau Ranch on Kauai, valued north of three hundred million dollars, includes two mansions joined by a tunnel that leads to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter, sealed behind a blast-resistant metal door packed with concrete, with its own living quarters, mechanical room, and escape hatch. The compound is engineered for self-sufficiency in water, energy, and food, monitored by round-the-clock security and a six-foot perimeter wall, with construction crews bound by non-disclosure agreements that have been enforced through firings. The owner of that property has called it “a little shelter,” “like a hurricane shelter, whatever,” in remarks to Bloomberg. The engineering specifications tell a different story. Blast doors and escape hatches are absent from the standard Hawaiian hurricane code. They appear on the architectural plans of people who expect to be hunted.
These are not isolated cases. Peter Thiel was granted New Zealand citizenship in June 2011 under an “exceptional circumstances” clause after spending only twelve days in the country, less than one percent of the typical 1,350-day residency requirement. In 2015 he purchased a 477-acre estate at Glendhu Bay on Lake Wānaka through a private entity called Second Star Limited, named for a reference to Peter Pan, and commissioned a hillside lodge complex from the Tokyo Olympic Stadium architect Kengo Kuma; the Queenstown-Lakes District Council rejected the proposal in 2022 on landscape-impact grounds, and an Environment Court appeal failed. Sam Altman, in his 2016 New Yorker profile, described his own preparedness inventory: guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks issued by the Israeli Defense Forces, and a private patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to, with Thiel’s New Zealand house as his backup plan. Larry Ellison bought ninety-eight percent of Lānaʻi in 2012 for three hundred million dollars from David Murdock, including the water utility, two Four Seasons resorts, and roughly a third of the island’s housing stock; three thousand residents now live on land overwhelmingly held by one private owner.
The most revealing evidence comes not from the architectural drawings but from a single sentence spoken in private. Douglas Rushkoff, a media-theory professor at Queens College, was paid roughly half his annual salary to fly to a desert resort in 2017 to address what he assumed would be an audience of investment bankers; he found instead five hedge fund billionaires who wanted to know which region would be more survivable, Alaska or New Zealand, whether Ray Kurzweil really was uploading his consciousness, and at last, from the CEO of a brokerage house who had nearly completed his own underground bunker system, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” That last question is the smoking gun. The man asking it has already built a bunker, stocked it, hardened it, and hired guards. He has thought past the apocalypse, past the moment when capital ceases to function as a coordination mechanism, past the question of how to retain feudal control over armed retainers in a post-monetary world. He is calm. He has accepted the loss of the system that produced his wealth, and he is calculating the second move.
The middle class is the first move. Every dollar of attention extracted by a social-media platform, each hour of labor metered by a delivery app, retirement accounts loaded with index funds that hold the same fifty companies, tax dollars flowing up the bracket through preferential treatment of capital gains: all of it funds the apparatus that will be used to leave the rest of us behind. The hedge fund manager’s bunker was built with pension money. Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian compound was paid for by the data labor of three billion people who joined Facebook because their friends were there. Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship was a sovereign gift to a man who has never been required to live in the country, granted on the theory that his presence would benefit the nation, by a government persuaded that the benefit had already been delivered through his arrival in the cabinet minister’s office.
The objections write themselves and they all collapse on inspection. The first claim is that these are rich-person hobbies, no different in kind from yachts. Yachts do not require self-sufficient food, water, and energy systems, do not depend on non-disclosure agreements covering construction crews, and remain visible by design. The defining features of the bunker are invisibility, redundancy, and operational independence from civic infrastructure. A yacht assumes the world keeps working. A bunker assumes it does not. The second claim is that these are insurance policies, not statements of intent. Insurance is purchased against losses one believes plausible. The act of buying apocalypse insurance at this scale is itself a data point about what the purchasers expect. If the men with the most access to economic, scientific, and political information are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to harden private exits, that information deserves a hearing.
The third claim is that climate adaptation is rational and the rest of us should do the same. Rational climate adaptation funds public seawalls, public power grids, public emergency services, and public housing relocation. Private adaptation at the billionaire scale withdraws resources from the common pool. The grain that feeds the cattle on Koʻolau Ranch is grain that does not feed the rest of Kauai. The water in the fifty-five-foot-diameter tank does not flow to neighbors. The fenced acreage on Lānaʻi cannot be walked across by the locals whose ancestors are buried there. The fourth claim is that the argument amounts to conspiracy thinking. Every fact assembled here comes from public records, court filings, planning applications, on-the-record interviews, and the billionaires’ own statements. The conspiracy, if there is one, is being conducted in plain view, with planning permits filed and architectural renderings published.
The fifth claim, usually muttered rather than spoken, is that the argument sounds envious. The argument tracks structures, and not personalities. How much money any individual billionaire holds matters less than whether the political order they have helped construct will survive the next thirty years for the rest of us, and the bunkers answer that question. Some of the very wealthy give large portions of their fortunes away during their lifetimes, fund public health initiatives at scale, and have signed pledges to deplete their estates in the name of philanthropy. The argument here concerns a different subset, the ones who have looked at the trajectory and concluded that the rational allocation of capital is toward private hardening rather than public repair. They are an instructive sample because their behavior reveals the working theory of capital itself, and the working theory holds that the system is not worth saving on its current terms.
Democracy assumes shared fate. The whole project of representative government rests on the premise that the people making decisions live in the same world as the people affected by them, breathe the same air, drink the same water, send their children to schools at minimum adjacent to ours. When the decision-makers build self-contained habitats with private water, private food, private energy, and private security, they sever the feedback loop that makes democracy work. Their interest in public infrastructure terminates at the gatehouse. Public health concerns them only as far as the perimeter wall. Climate stability matters to them insofar as they expect to outrun it. The middle class has historically been the buffer between the rich and the poor, absorbing economic shocks through household savings, generational housing wealth, and pension solvency, dampening political shocks through civic participation, jury duty, school board attendance, and local journalism, and providing the cultural ballast that kept the country from tipping. That buffer has thinned for forty years through wage stagnation, healthcare cost transfer, education debt, the conversion of pensions into self-managed retirement accounts, and the conversion of housing from shelter to speculative asset. The bunker is the announcement that the thinning is now sufficient and the wealthy are exiting the social contract entirely.
Consider the concrete consequences. When the next pandemic arrives, those who can ride it out behind blast doors will do so, while the rest will be sent back to work because the economy must run. The next climate event that closes a major American city will find the people with helicopters and private islands on the helicopters and private islands, while their fellow citizens take shelter or scramble onto rooftops. As for the next major financial event, those whose assets are denominated in farmland, gold, hardened compounds, and offshore citizenships will weather it, while the rest lose their houses for the third time in twenty-five years. The bunker is a hedge against the failure of the system that paid for the bunker. It is a short position on civilization, financed by the people whose civilization it is.
Rushkoff gave the hedge fund managers good advice. He told them that the most reliable way to maintain authority over their security force after the event was to treat those people well right now, and the most reliable way to prevent the event was to extend the same ethos to everyone else. They paid his fee and went back to building bunkers. The middle class faces a related choice with a much shorter clock. Either we tax the men building the bunkers at rates that prevent them from completing the bunkers, or we accept that the country will be reorganized around finished bunkers. The same choice presents itself in antitrust enforcement, financial regulation, and progressive taxation: restore them to the levels that built the post-war middle class, or accept the bifurcation into hardened compound and precariat. None of those policies are exotic. They are the conditions under which the American middle class actually existed, between roughly 1945 and 1980, when the top marginal tax rate sat above seventy percent for most of the period and the country produced its single greatest expansion of upward mobility, public infrastructure, and home ownership.
The One Percenters do not build multi-billion-dollar bunkers on private islands as a hobby. They build them because they have run the numbers and the numbers tell them that the rest of us are not going to make it. Whether they are correct about the numbers is a question we get to answer collectively, while we still can answer anything collectively at all. The good news, if there is any, sits inside the same evidence. The bunker-builders are betting that civic life will fail. The bet pays out only if the rest of us let it.
#bunker #doomsday #elite #gop #middleClass #onePercent #payment #rent #rich #suffering -
#15maggio
Auguri a #BrianEno che oggi compie 77 anni!
#SSS lo omaggia con una recensione al documentario #Eno, dedicato al celebre compositore e inventore della #musica d'ambiente.
Il film di #GaryHustwit si ispira agli stessi principi generativi che guidano il processo compositivo di Brian Eno, con versioni multiple dello stesso film che variano a ogni proiezione grazie all'uso di un software in grado di modificare le sequenze in tempo reale.⬇️ https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/sss/article/view/28377?mtm_campaign=mastodon
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More than just dismissing us: the thread about the history of the Leith Police
Today’s auction house artefact is this Victorian Leith Burgh Police truncheon.
Victorian Leith Police truncheonPolicing in Leith goes back to the 17th century, when the first High Constables of the Port of Leith were established. They were appointed by the Magistrates of the Royal Burgh of Leith to uphold “cleanliness and orderliness, keeping the peace, law and order“. But at this point they acted as empowered individuals, rather than a force. Orders were given in 1725 stating that “they were responsible for the apprehension of beggars and vagabonds, persons guilty of a crime or disturbance, informing on houses of ill repute, bringing order to mobs and overseeing weights and measures.”
At this time, the principal civic building of Leith was the Tolbooth. It functioned as a seat of municipal government and administration, a customs house, a guardhouse, a jail and a meeting house and was one of the three essential public buildings of the Scottish Burgh; the others being the Mercat Cross and the Kirk.
Leith Tolbooth by James Skene, 1818. © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn 1762, the seven constables held a meeting and elected a moderator, treasurer and clerk, and drew up regulations to form themselves into the Honourable Society of the High Constables of the Port of Leith. In 1771, Parliament passed the “Act for Cleansing and Lighting the Streets of the Town of South Leith, the Territory of St. Anthony’s and Yardheads thereunto adjoining, and for supplying the several parts thereof with fresh water“. The description of the act itself is a reminder that at this time, the municipal police were primarily concerned with lighting, cleansing and water supply; not watch keeping or law enforcement.
The act saw the election of 30 Police Commissioners to enact its provisions; the electors were the 2 magistrates of Leith (appointed by Edinburgh), the masters and 6 assistants of the 4 Leith trade incorporations (the Cordiners, Carters, Tailors and Weavers) and all heritors (the feudal landholders of a Scottish parish who were obligated to pay tax), liferenters (landholders for life) and proprietors of lands and tenement within the burgh. Basically, the people (men) with claim over land and/or property. Added to the Commissioners were the Lord Provost, Town Clerk of Leith, The Baillie (a civic officer) of St. Anthony’s Preceptory, and 2 others elected by the feudal heritors of Yardheads and St. Anthony’s.
The heading of a poster from a ceremonial dinner of the Honourable Society of High Constables of the Port of Leith showing the outline of a constable’s baton © Edinburgh City LibrariesSo the Police Commissioners were basically a committee of the local worthies who were charged with keeping the streets clean and supplying water. At this time, Leith had no piped water, sewers, pavements or metalled roads (causeys) of any kind so they had their hands full. Such was the difficulty in resolving these issues in Leith, that for the next 20 years the Commissioners were fully occupied with water, cleansing and lighting. It was not until 1791 that attention turned to “watching and warding”, i.e. something more akin to modern policing.
The mean streets of Leith in 1790. An illustration by Dominic Serres.The Commissioners had always employed a part time “Police Officer”, but his job was to keep order at the wells and to try and keep people to the schedule of the carters who carried away the filth of the town. Perhaps he is the officious looking man in Serres’ illustration conferring with the carter and the town drummer and poring over a schedule?
The Leith “police officer”?In 1791, this was made a full time position, and Leith’s first professional polisman was hired; at £25 a year. 10 years later, in 1801 the officer, one John Ross, was finally provided with a uniform. “A blue coat, red neck with buttons thereon and a red vest with a pair of boots“. In 1802, lawlessness in Leith was such that one of the Baillies proposed to the Police Commissioners that a part-time force of sixty men, in three watches, be hired for the purposes of law enforcement. At this point, Edinburgh stepped in and said “naw”, and that it would sort it. Edinburgh then did nothing for Leith, as was frequently the case; as James Scott Marshall puts it. “Edinburgh’s policy of masterly inactivity once more frustrated [Leith’s] desire for improvement.”
A new Leith Police Act, in 1806, made provision for the recruitment of watchmen for “Guarding, Patrolling and Watching the streets“. But again nothing was done, this time for want of money. Leith had 20,000 inhabitants, but Edinburgh absolutely and tightly controlled its purse strings. Finally in 1814, the size of the Leith Police force was tripled; to 3. Two watchmen were employed to assist the “intendant” (the man in the blue and red coat). The appointments were made by the Paving Committee as they had responsibility for safety on the streets.
In 1815, the force doubled in size, to 6, with 3 more watchmen being recruited. Finally in 1816, a special “Watching Committee” was formed, rather than leave the Police under the direction of the Paving Committee. But the new force was not well thought of and there were complaints asking for it to be better organised. The watchmen were also unhappy, as the day shift worked 6AM-9PM (!) and were unable to take on labouring work on the side as a result like the shorter nightshift could.
The force grew no further until the Municipal and Police Act of 1827, when the whole force of 6 was disbanded and then re-hired under a new system under a Superintendent; one James Stuart on £120 a year. The new force totalled 20, 1 Sergeant Major, 3 Sergeants, 3 “Daymen”, 3 “Night Patrol” and 10 Watchmen. Superintendent Stuart had the force raised to 27 with 1 more Dayman, 2 Night Patrol and 4 more Watchmen. The senior ranks were paid a guaranteed basic rate, which was supplemented by the court fees of each offender they brought in; half to the Sergeant Major, and the other half split between the Sergeants.
Silver and ebony High Constable’s tipstave from 1833. ; “ON ONE END IT IS NUMBERED ’41’ , ON THE OTHER END IS ENGRAVED A SHIP AND GENTLEMAN WITHIN AND AROUND THE SHIP ‘ BURGH OF LEITH 1833’. ON ONE SIDE IS ENGRAVED A SHIP WITH ‘PERSEVERE’ BELOW IT. ON THE OTHER SIDE IT IS ENGRAVED ‘ HIGH CONSTABLE’.” The Tipstave was a symbol of office, and could be unscrewed to reveal the warrant of office carried within.The 1827 act finally settled the boundary of the Leith Police, which had been rather vaguely defined up until this point due to the fragmentary municipal boundaries and land superiority of the separate parishes of North and South Leith. When the 1832 Great Reform Act extended the boundary of Leith to the red line on this map, the reach of the Leith Police extended too. A deal was also struck with the Edinburgh Sheriff to charge him for the lodging of prisoners sent from Edinburgh to languish in Leith.
1831 boundaries of the Burgh of Leith. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe 1827 act also got round to the business of providing Leith with its first modern courthouse and police station, to replace the ancient Tolbooth. Some of the land of “Dr. Colquhoun’s Chapel” was acquired; a 99 year lease being taken on it. Dr Colquhoun was the minister of St. John’s Chapel of Ease on Constitution Street. This is how Leith’s first court house and police station came to be built on the corner of Constitution Street and [Queen] Charlotte Street, where they are to this day – although the courthouse is long unused.
The New Town Hall, Leith, by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, 1829. Dr. Colqhoun’s chapel can be seen behind.The Leith Burgh Police were established in 1859 to cover the wider burgh of Leith defined in 1831 by the Great Reform Act. Policing of the port and docks was subsumed into the new force as a division, but the High Constables were maintained as an honourable society for ceremonial occasions. They still exist in this form, the uniform still being top hats and tails and the badge of office still being an ornamental baton. Until recently it was strictly a gentlemen’s club, although they have more recently elected a woman to their ranks.
The High Constables of Leith form a guard of honour for the arrival of HM The Queen on arrival at Leith on the HMY Britannia in 1956. The girl presenting the bouquet was “6 year old Edwina Burness”. Still from a film of the occasion held by the BFI.The High Constables of Leith and their truncheons meet the late Duke of Edinburgh. CC-by-SA, R. Clapperton via Edinburgh CollectedThey can be seen performing these same ceremonial duties for royalty here in Alexander Carse’s painting of the arrival of George IV in Leith back in 1822, backs to the artist with their top hats off. The fellows with the broad bonnets, white sashes and curving long sticks (bows) are the Company of Royal Archers .
George IV’s visit to Leith by Alexander CarseAt this point, the need for separate Commissioners of Police was redundant, as Leith was finally an independent burgh, The responsibility for oversight of the Police passed to the new Town Council, who made their home in the police station and court on Constitution Street. Below can be seen a picture of the Town Hall / court house / police station in 1870. It shows St. John’s, after the mock Tudor tower was built and parish school buildings were added to the front. Between the two is the small burgh fire station building .
Leith Town Hall, 1870, Adam W. Steele. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe helmet badge adopted by the Burgh Police was from the traditional Leith coat of arms; the Virgin Mary and child on a galleon, underneath a canopy. The date of 1563 beneath refers to a letter signed by Mary Queen of Scots granting South Leith permission to erect its Tolbooth. Granting Leith this was a big step in its ancient struggle to exert independence from Edinburgh. The English had burned Restalrig Tolbooth in 1544 during the “Rough Wooing” (Restalrig at that time was the administrative centre of South Leith parish) and since then Edinburgh had been trying to prevent Leith from re-establishing its own local centre of law, order and taxation.
Leith Police helmet and badge from book coverAnyway, Leith Burgh Police was a small force, but one well respected for keeping law and order in the potentially lawless port town. They were merged into the Edinburgh City Police as D Division in 1921.
The last parade of the Leith Burgh Police in 1921, before becoming D Division of the Edinburgh City Police. © Edinburgh City LibrariesLeith policemen were distinctive for wearing a “ball top” to their custodian helmet, Edinburgh had these only for upper ranks, the rank and file had a “button top”.
British “custodian” Police helmets. Left is button, centre is pike and right is ball top. None are Edinburgh or Leith helmets.Leith’s greatest contribution to the world of policing is of course said to be the legendary tongue twister “The Leith Police Dismisseth Us” – which was apparently a test for drunkenness (but just try saying it sober!)
The Leith police dismisseth us, I’m sorry sir to say;
The Leith Police Dismisseth Us, a version from 1927
The Leith police dismisseth us, They thought we sought to stay;
The Leith police dismisseth us, They thought we’d stay all day;
The Leith police dismisseth us, Which caused us many sighs;
And the size of our sighs, when we said our goodbyes;
Were the size of the Leith police.However the origin of The Leith Police Dismisseth Us is probably nothing to do with Leith. It actually first originates in print on the other side of the Atlantic; in the Boston Youth’s Companion, October 20th 1887, as a line in a list of “verbal snares” or tongue-twisters. It is quite similar to an earlier American tongue-twister; variously The Sea Ceaseth and Dismisseth Us With His Blessing or The Sea Ceaseth And that Sufficeth Us and it is likely these were created for elocution purposes and inspired by biblical verse.
It first appears in a British newspaper shortly afterwards, in December 1887 in the Irvine Times, before being reprinted widely across English papers the following year. These early examples are always in lists of tongue-twisters, many of which are still familiar such as Peter Piper and She Sells Sea Shells. A fuller version does not seem to appear in print until 1919 (in The Childrens Newspaper) but it had been widely popularised before this by the Mancunian musical hall comedian Wilkie Bard, one of the biggest acts of his day, whose stage gimmick was tongue twisters. Variety magazine announced in 1909 that he was appearing in London at the Tivoli, Oxford and Paragon with “a new tongue twister. It is called The Leith Police Dismisseth Us. Bard gets a whole lot out of this number with the aid of an assistant who does a lisping souse.“
Wilkie Bard, 1911, © National Portrait GalleryThe rhyme is still used for elocution, particularly in helping non-native English speakers master the “th” and -“s” sounds of the language.
Thank you to Chris Wright for his assistance and advice in researching the early details of “The Leith Police Dismisseth Us.”
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
https://www.europesays.com/cz/62955/ Uražená Pamela Anderson, arogantní Steven Seagal a trápení playmate v dortu #AkčníFilm #Entertainment #ErikaEleniak #film #GaryBusey #herci/herečky #Hollywood #natáčení #oscary #PamelaAnderson #PřepadeníVPacifiku #Skandál #StevenSeagal #TipNaFilm #Zábava #zajímavosti #Zákulisí
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GitHub's latest buzzword soup—'Gatehouse'—mixes #RBAC, #ABAC, and #ReBAC into a Rusty casserole of confusion 🍲🔧. Promising async-friendly code like a vitamin commercial promises eternal youth, but only time will tell if it’s a miracle or just another overhyped tech smoothie 🥤🤖.
https://github.com/thepartly/gatehouse #GitHub #Gatehouse #Rust #HackerNews #ngated -
The Complete Works Ep. 120: Tom Cruise - THE FIRM (1993)
Link: https://film-book.com/the-complete-works-ep-120-tom-cruise-the-firm-1993/?fsp_sid=147577
#DavidStrathairn #EdHarris #GaryBusey #GeneHackman #HalHolbrook #HollyHunter #JeanneTripplehorn #Podcast #SydneyPollack #TheCompleteWorks #TheFirm #TomCruise
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The Complete Works Ep. 120: Tom Cruise - THE FIRM (1993)
Link: https://film-book.com/the-complete-works-ep-120-tom-cruise-the-firm-1993/?fsp_sid=147577
#DavidStrathairn #EdHarris #GaryBusey #GeneHackman #HalHolbrook #HollyHunter #JeanneTripplehorn #Podcast #SydneyPollack #TheCompleteWorks #TheFirm #TomCruise
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The Complete Works Ep. 120: Tom Cruise - THE FIRM (1993)
Link: https://film-book.com/the-complete-works-ep-120-tom-cruise-the-firm-1993/?fsp_sid=147577
#DavidStrathairn #EdHarris #GaryBusey #GeneHackman #HalHolbrook #HollyHunter #JeanneTripplehorn #Podcast #SydneyPollack #TheCompleteWorks #TheFirm #TomCruise
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The Complete Works Ep. 120: Tom Cruise - THE FIRM (1993)
Link: https://film-book.com/the-complete-works-ep-120-tom-cruise-the-firm-1993/?fsp_sid=147577
#DavidStrathairn #EdHarris #GaryBusey #GeneHackman #HalHolbrook #HollyHunter #JeanneTripplehorn #Podcast #SydneyPollack #TheCompleteWorks #TheFirm #TomCruise
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The Complete Works Ep. 120: Tom Cruise - THE FIRM (1993)
Link: https://film-book.com/the-complete-works-ep-120-tom-cruise-the-firm-1993/?fsp_sid=147577
#DavidStrathairn #EdHarris #GaryBusey #GeneHackman #HalHolbrook #HollyHunter #JeanneTripplehorn #Podcast #SydneyPollack #TheCompleteWorks #TheFirm #TomCruise
