Tag: history

US SpecOps KIA in Gaza

The reports are, as yet, unconfirmed, but Col Douglas Macgregor was confident enough in his sources to openly discuss a joint US-IDF recon force taking heavy losses in Gaza recently.

TUCKER CARLSON: How is the U.S. military, do you think, having spent your life in it leading troops in combat and at the Pentagon, positioned to respond to a war with Iran right now? Are we in a strong position or not, in your view?

DOUGLAS MACGREGOR: No I think we are not in a strong position, we are probably at the weakest point in our recent history. I think you’ve got to look at the realities of new weapons systems and new capabilities.

The United States Navy, if it is going to preserve its capability, is probably going to be compelled to operate somewhere North and West of Sicily. If it comes within closer range, it falls into this envelope where the Iranians can strike it. And as I said before, you have to assume the Russians will come into this. Once you move into the Eastern Mediterranean, you are vulnerable to the [Russian] Kinzhal [ballistic missiles] and other cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles that the Russians have.

This makes it very difficult to fly strikes in support of the Israeli Defense Force against Hezbollah because now you are flying a very long distance, you deliver your ordinance, and you have to land in Israel in order to refuel. Israel is going to be operating under a hail, if not a rainstorm, of missiles and rockets, making it very dangerous to do so. So our Naval power, while substantial, may not have the desired impact on the ground that we would like.

And finally, we have no real Army anymore, the Army is down to perhaps 450,000, and how much of that is ready to fight is open to debate. Much of it is sitting in Eastern Europe right now. We don’t have the means to rapidly ship a large force of 80-100,000 troops on the ground into the region, which means were are reliant on Special Forces. And right now 2,000 Marines and perhaps 2,000 Special Forces and special operations forces.

That’s not going to make much of a dent, and as we’ve seen quite recently in the last 24 hours or so, some of our Special Ops forces and Israeli Special Ops forces went into Gaza to reconnoiter, to plan for where they might want to go to free hostages and make an impact, and they were shot to pieces and took heavy losses, as I understand it. I think that is where we are headed and I don’t see that as a win for Israel in any way, shape, or form. And I certainly think it is very dangerous for us.

As I’ve tried to point out to a number of people, until Britain entered World War One, it was just another European war. Once Britain entered it, it became a global war.

When one considers that it took 14 months for 50,000 Russian shock troops supported by 330 tanks to take Bakhmut, a city of 16 square miles with a population of 72,000, the idea that it will only take three months for Israel to clear out Gaza, an urban zone of 141 square miles and a population of 2.3 million in addition to a similar number of active combatants (est. 30,000), is simply not credible, even without the threat of Hezbollah to the north.

It is also highly improbable that the Israeli public will accept the tens of thousands of dead Israeli soldiers such an invasion would likely require, particularly when the wartime Prime Minister’s son is too busy living it up in Miami to share the risks with the common people.

Whether Macgregor’s sources are correct or not, and there is no reason to believe they are not since it was previously announced that US forces were actively training the inexperienced IDF to engage in urban combat against entrenched opposition, he’s correct in observing that neither the US military nor the IDF appears to be capable of successfully fighting a full-scale ground war in the Middle East.

It’s neither 1967 nor 1991 anymore. And frankly, the current parallels between the US military and the pre-WWI British military should seriously concern any perceptive student of military history.

Haldane resolved to transform a British army optimized for irregular warfare—the suppression of rebellious tribes and peoples throughout Britain’s far-flung empire—into a far more lethal professional military establishment… After 1815, the British army’s leadership focused almost exclusively on battles with technologically backward, even primitive, non-European opponents. British colonial warfare was not a complex affair. In battles with tribal opponents at Ulundi, Kandahar, and Omdurman, the application of overwhelming firepower substituted for tactics and strategy.

MARGIN OF VICTORY, Col Douglas Macgregor, 2016

At this point, US strategists need to seriously ask themselves whether there is a risk that support for a Gaza invasion could become the USA’s Sicilian Expedition. The end of the US empire is rapidly approaching, so it’s only a matter of time before someone tests the assumption of US military supremacy.

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The Scorpion’s Lament

In which a US-resident Jew on /pol/ contemplates the self-defeating consequences of his elders’ long-term plans to “destroy the white race”, turn America into “an idea nation” and “a melting pot”, and “transform Europe into a multicultural mode”, and concludes that perhaps the results were not, in the end, desirable.

Have you ever played a video game where the Al just sat there and did nothing while you took it apart methodically?

We “won” in a game that nobody else was playing because they did not think anyone would be stupid enough to do so. Our” victory”? We killed our host, the survivors will hate us, they will eat us because we look white, the muslims will exterminate us the moment our goy slaves become too weak to protect us. not to mention we are giving the muslims nuclear weapons by giving them France and England.

Our daughters misceginate or are whores, my favorite niece married a “jewish” black who was 20 years older than her. She lived in a mixed-race neighborhood, her house was the only one that did not look like trash because she tried, ended up divorced with a half-black kid. Breaks my heart.

Brother is incel, can’t find a wife because all women are whores, almost all the men in the extended family are ruined, either marrying roasties or failing to marry at all. And why? Because the weapons we set on the goy cattle also affected us.

So yay, we “won” by default because nobody else was dumb enough to try for a game of lets destroy civilization, our victory is such that our host species is going extinct due to our actions, and the only two paths forwards are:

  1. whites finally wake up and kill us all
  2. whites finally die out and the blacks eat us for being white

Great victory.

Some on /pol/ have suggested that this lament is too self-aware to be genuine, but in the light of current events in the Middle East, I see no reason to assume that the average individual of modest intelligence, of any race or ethnicity, who would prefer to live in some reasonable approximation of civilized European culture, cannot observe that the consequences of the Kalergi Plan, or the Lerner-Spectre Plan, or the Celler Plan, all of which amount to exactly the same thing, have been utterly disastrous for everyone, including the descendants of those who originally conceived those evil plans and enacted them.

From a historical point of view, this shouldn’t be a surprise. In six thousand years of recorded history, there have only been a limited number of great civilizations, which collectively make up a very small percentage of the total number of peoples and societies across world history. And the preferences, customs, traditions, and laws of most societies are observably not capable of creating or sustaining any form of civilization, let alone one that approaches the heights of Western European civilization circa 1800 – 1950.

Everyone likes the idea of being in charge, in theory. Everyone likes the idea of his tribe being on top, and in possession of the reins of power. The problem is that not everyone is capable of successfully being in charge. This is why it is so important to be careful what you wish for. Because you just might get it.

In addition to the time to civilization requirement that has been previously pointed out here on this blog, there is also a dyscivilizational values problem. No civilization that comes to be dominated by individuals from a society with dyscivilizational values can sustain itself in a functional manner over time. The more that Western Civilization is influenced by non-Christian, non-European people from societies that never successfully established their own civilizations and with values that contradict the historical values of Western civilization, the more likely it is that the resulting societal structure will not transition into a post-Western civilization with post-Western values as expected, but rather, collapse entirely into a post-civilized state.

Atheists such as Richard Dawkins have already discovered that post-Christian society is worse for atheists than Christian society ever was. Both internal and external foes of the West will almost certainly come to the same conclusion in time.

There is an older version of the Russian tale of the scorpion and the frog. In the Persian tale, which dates back to 1487, the scorpion is riding the back of a turtle. Unlike the frog, the turtle survives the scorpion’s sting due to its hard shell, tells the scorpion that it is wicked, and drowns it in order to prevent the scorpion from harming anyone else.

So, this naturally tends to raise the question, which civilized societies are frogs and which are turtles?

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From the Maine to the Maddox

The stage has been set for another Gulf of Tonkin-style incident. Remember, from the USS Maine to the USS Morton, false flags and fake enemy attacks at sea is how the USA customarily justified its foreign wars. The following is from a book about baseball, of all things.

While Ralph Houk and Johnny Keane were carrying out their embarrassing charade [with the New York Yankees], in Washington, DC., President Johnson, running for reelection after finishing John Kennedy’s term, was leading an unsuspecting American public into a devastating war with a charade of his own.

In late September it was reported by the State Department that two American destroyers, the Richard Edward and the Morton, were fired upon by four attacking North Vietnamese gunboats, seemingly all poor shots as no damage to the American ships was reported. The Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, proclaimed, “As sure as the sun sets, we are at war.” The North Vietnamese swore that none of their ships attacked anyone. Johnson, firm, told the American people that the Vietnamese were lying.

The Pentagon had some doubts as to whether the attacks ever did take place, and there was censorship of letters from American seamen on the two ships who tried to write home that they had not been attacked. One sailor, whose letter got through the censorship, wrote that North Vietnamese ships were sighted. We shot at them, the sailor wrote home. “They didn’t shoot at us. Johnson, gearing the country for war, coerced Congress, citing the attack on our ships, into backing his escalation of the fighting in Vietnam.

Before the Tonkin Gulf incident, only 190 U.S. soldiers had been killed. “Before I send American G.I.’s into war,” Johnson said, “I must consider every facet very carefully.” After Johnson’s term, 25,000 American soldiers lay dead in the hostile rice paddies of a devastated country.

In fact, the USA staged not one, but two Gulf of Tonkin incidents in order to justify its war in Vietnam. Two days prior, the USS Maddox had also had a confrontation with North Vietnamese torpedo boats after repeatedly intruding upon Vietnam’s territorial waters in an attempt to provoke the Vietnamese into firing at it.

So don’t fall for whatever naval event is being staged in the eastern Mediterranean in the coming weeks, or the solemn pronouncements about how “we are at war”.

The Pentagon has dispatched a second US Navy carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean in a move that will deliver additional American firepower to the waters near Israel as fears mount that its war with Hamas could worsen and spiral into a regional conflict. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group is moving into the area “as part of our effort to deter hostile actions against Israel or any efforts toward widening this war following Hamas’s attack on Israel,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement on Saturday. The strike group includes the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, and guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason.

UPDATE: A note about the two USN carriers sent to the region from a reader.

Something worth noting about the two carriers sent to Israel. One is the oldest nuclear carrier on the east coast, nearing end of life. The other is the newest carrier, which has been plagued with expensive technical issues. One being sunk would spare the Navy the hassle of decommissioning and defueling down the road. The other being sunk would spare the headache and hassle of trying to fix a badly designed carrier.

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Agreement Incapable

Iran discovers why neither Russia nor China are interested in talking substantively to the USA or making any deals with it anymore.

Washington has gone back on its promise to unblock $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets even after Tehran released five American citizens accused of espionage against the Islamic Republic.

Under the deal last month, the money was transferred from a South Korean bank to a bank in Qatar, where Tehran could access it under strict monitoring by the US Treasury Department to ensure that the cash is used only for humanitarian purposes.

However, on Thursday, the US and Qatar reportedly reached an “understanding” that Doha will ignore any withdrawal requests from Tehran, according to several officials who spoke to the media on condition of anonymity.

You know, the American Indians could have told them how pointless and self-defeating it is to make any deal with the USA. From 1772 to 1867, the US government signed 374 treaties with American Indian tribes. It broke nearly every single one.

The Russians are right. The USA is agreement-incapable, which is why it is incredibly stupid and short-sighted for any sovereign entity, be it friendly or inimical, to sign any agreement or come to any “understanding” with a representative of the US government.

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An Informative Analogy

An open admission that the recent Hamas attacks are akin to the historical Japanese attack on the USA:

Former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) international spokesperson Jonathan Conricus has summed up what this day means for Israel, calling in the country’s “Pearl Harbor” moment.

“The entire system failed. It’s not just one component. It’s the entire defense architecture that evidently failed to provide the necessary defense for Israeli civilians,” he told CNN of the surprise invasion from Gaza militants. “This is a Pearl Harbor type of moment for Israel, where there was reality up until today, and then there will be reality after today.”

So, did it fail or was it turned off? If this truly was Israel’s “Pearl Harbor”, then we know it didn’t fail. Remember, the most effective rhetoric points toward the truth…

“There will be a mighty vengeance for this dark day” doesn’t quite live up to the standard set by “a date which will live in infamy,” though.

UPDATE: It’s becoming increasingly likely that this is all very cold-blooded geopolitical theatre that is an attempt to ensure that the Middle East conflict becomes the second WW III front instead of the South East Asian conflict.

  • I say with certainty this was a “stand-down” order – they do indeed have a very expensive “obstacle” to prevent this, sophisticated tracking surveillance with remote operated machine gun emplacements, and even if they were “overrun by surprise” which is IMPOSSIBLE, the IAF has Apache helicopters for this case, and there were NONE airborne until at least 6 hours later (when hostages were being taken back to Gaza, and the terrorist were coming and going as they pleased in great numbers). The Navy managed to destroy every single enemy that attempted a mass distributed coastal landing without a single loss.
  • None of the above (eight separate border security systems listed) was working. Hamas militants were able to cross open ground and infiltrate into multiple Israeli cities and yeshuvim without detection or being challenged. Hamas militants were even able to make it back into Gaza afterwards with the bodies of captured soldiers, civilians and vehicles. Somehow every single security measure was ineffective. This does not make sense.
  • “Hamas is a creature of Israel.” – Yassir Arafat
  • Over 800 Israeli settlers storm Al-Aqsa compound during Jewish Sukkot holiday. Rabbis, heads of settlement associations and far-right university lecturers were among 832 people who stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Thursday morning.
  • Iron Dome appears to have been turned off rather than overwhelmed.
  • Since Saturday, Israel has struck more than 400 targets it says are ‘linked’ to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is not unusual in itself. This time, however, jets have also been targeting the houses of top Hamas commanders and political leaders, sending a message to the group that their whereabouts are well known.

The logical conclusion is that the Hamas attacks were provoked and knowingly permitted by the Netanyahu government and the IDF, in much the same way the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked and knowingly permitted by the Roosevelt administration and the US Navy. It’s what I think can be best described as a Green Flag rather than a False Flag.

The purpose of permitting such a large-scale Green Flag at such apparent cost to the Israeli citizenry appears to be two-fold. One, to provide a justification for an IDF attack on Gaza that could range from a punitive short-term incursion to a full-scale Hama-style assault that amounts to ethnic cleansing. Two, and much more important, to provoke Hezbollah into attacking northern Israel and using that as a means of drawing Iran into what Netanyahu has already declared is a “war”, with the ultimate aim of forcing the USA to abandon its support of Ukraine and Taiwan and focus its military resources on Israel instead.

It looks like a very risky bet at first glance, especially in light of the possibility that China and Russia could support Iran more effectively than the USA can support Israel, but it could be considered a necessary gamble given the way it is now obvious to every military strategist that US econo-military power, and its concomitant ability to successfully intervene in the Middle East, is in rapid decline. If Israel is going to fight a war with Iran, and for whatever reason, both the neocons and the Israeli Right have been seeking that war for at least 40 years, the time to do so with any reasonable probability of success is right now, under the aegis of WWIII.

But even if Israel is unsuccessful in drawing Iran into direct conflict – and I think they will be unsuccessful in doing so – achieving the elimination of Gaza as Plan B would be seen as a major win by the Israeli Right as well as a significant improvement in the strategic challenge presented by the post-Pax American world.

UPDATE: Please note that I wrote the above before the news that Hezbollah and the IDF have exchanged artillery fire in the north. However, what is being reported as “Hezbollah attacks” and “the northern front” do not appear to be much more serious than the organization’s previous statement about “monitoring the situation.”

Hezbollah has officially joined the attack by Palestinian armed factions against Israel by launching attacks from southern Lebanon. In a statement released on October 8 morning, Hezbollah announced that it had attacked three sites of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the occupied Shebaa Farms in support of “the glorious Palestinian resistance and the struggling and patient Palestinian people.”

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Of Games and Civilizations

This is an interesting digression on the multiple aspects of what can be described as “Western civilization” and how game developers have attempted to account for some of its various aspects:

Civilization is not so much an architectural style but a thought process of metaphysics. And these different metaphysics create different cultures which create different civilizations.

From the other side of the world, the West might as well just be ‘Western Civilization’ with all histories plopped together as ‘History of the West’. Yet, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Without understanding the multiple Western Civilizations, how can one learn to utilize it? Or even to understand it?

One Western Civilization is a Christianized Paganism. The Second Western Civilization is the Protestation of the former. While you may think these are mere religious differences gone today, you would be completely wrong. There are two Western Civilizations that exist today.

The Christianized Paganism is easier to find its roots. You have the Greeks and Roman Empire metaphysics converted (e.g. instead of an Emperor, you have a Pope). This Western Civilization can mostly be found in non-English speaking countries or in some isolated conclaves of English speaking countries.

As far as the Second Western Civilization, it is better to see it as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ especially with its English language. The Paganism has been rooted out and obliterated in this civilization. It is the civilization of individualism, of hypocrisy, of the Enlightenment thinkers, but also of constant Revolutions. The modern ‘Woke’ culture is a byproduct of the Calvinistic Second Western Civilization metaphysical reality asserting itself. While Christianized Paganism stresses the experience of life, the Western Protestant Civilization stresses the rules of life. Aesthetically, Christianized Paganism bathes itself in the glamour of the ancient arts. Western Protestant Civilization lives in a stark utilitarian mindset and removes all such ancient glamour.

The history of the development of the Ultima games is very nearly as interesting as playing them, and to this day, Akalabeth remains one of my all-time favorite computer games.

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An Astute and Early Observation

A business analyst predicted the Great Bifurcation on the basis of nationalism back in 2018, not due to any geostrategic acumen or historical pattern analysis, but his observation of international business activity and the transition to a younger generation of leaders:

Most great business leaders are successful because they are able to create, nurture, and support a unique and believable company value system that sets the tone for their strategy and execution. But according to the leaders I spoke with, something has changed; “Country-based value systems” are becoming increasingly important and the foundational roots of “nationalism” are starting to become more apparent in the business. By way of example, twice this week I was running different Leadership Simulations for high potential leaders. In the simulation, small teams are responsible for setting and executing a global strategy across multiple regions (which are made up of countries). I saw something in both sessions that I’ve never seen before; intense and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about how countries are losing their identities and therefore customer segments are also losing their identities which makes it harder to differentiate solutions to customers. I was surprised to see the concept of Nationalism show up in conversations about business acumen.

My take-away observation is that this is an issue that business leaders should put on their radars as my sense is that different value systems by country and market are going to be disruptive forces.

Generational Disparities are Real

The next generation of leaders are knocking on the door and their perspectives are different which is truly bothering the current leaders, but apparently not the stock markets. The next generation of leader wants their companies to do something important and meaningful and are very adept at building strong cultures quickly around values. Legacy companies that don’t make “new and cool stuff” are losing key talent and the war on talent is actually showing up in a way that is much different than anyway ever expected.

My take-away observation is that the big disruptions aren’t going to come directly from new technologies, but from new types of employees that want more value in in their business lives and if they don’t get it, will close once-thriving businesses.

Laws and Regulations are Going to Matter More

Political nationalism and in some cases political isolationism has direct impacts on business specifically when it comes to new laws and regulations. We can only all pray that physical wars don’t erupt between nations because of increased global fractionalization but one big challenge is going to be wars fought through regulations on business. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

This is fascinating, because it has long been my belief that the future can be seen, indeed, must be seen, from varying perspectives due to the fact that every change from present to future will be eventually be observed by a wide variety of individuals specializing in a wide variety of subjects. Just as a military historian can correctly anticipate that a NATO-supported Ukraine will lose a war with Russia, or that the Japan-USA historical analogy applies to a future USA-China naval war, an astute business consultant can perceive a shift in the qualitative nature of the coming executive class in the international business community and extrapolate successfully from that change.

If one is extrapolating successfully – and only time can confirm that – then the predictions in one area will necessarily line up with the predictions from another area. Think of it as transdomain futurology.

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Reclaiming Their Name

“When someone conquers you, the first thing they will do is change your name. This is the technology of dominance, the technology of enslavement.”

India is the colonial-era name for the subcontinental state. Hindoo – Hindustan – Industan – India.

Hence the choice to adopt Bharat as the name for their country is an expression of anti-Clown World nationalism, as the clowns recognize.

There are some detractors, though, who believe the new posture change is a dangerous shift in the Hindu nationalist movement, and may spark repressions against ethnic minorities.

So touching, these endless concerns for ethnic minorities.

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Birth of the Neoclown World Order

The neoclowns are officially declaring the end of the “Old World Order” that began in 1989:

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has claimed the world is transitioning to a new diplomatic order in which Washington must lead the way in overcoming increasing threats from Russia and China.

“One era is ending, a new one is beginning, and the decisions that we make now will shape the future for decades to come,” Blinken said on Wednesday in a speech at John Hopkins University in Washington. He said the “post-Cold War order” ended as “decades of relative geopolitical stability have given way to an intensifying competition with authoritarian powers.”

Those powers are led by Russia and China, Blinken said, adding that “Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is the most immediate, the most acute threat to the international order.” China poses the biggest long-term challenge, he claimed, because it aspires to reshape the international order and is developing the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so.

“Beijing and Moscow are working together to make the world safe for autocracy through their ‘no limits’ partnership,” Blinken argued. He claimed that Russia and China have framed the existing order as a “Western imposition,” but that system is, he claimed, anchored in universal values and enshrined in international law. Ironically, he also accused the two rivals of believing that big countries can “dictate their choices to others,” a charge that is increasingly made against Washington.

“When the Beijings and Moscows of the world try to rewrite – or rip down – the pillars of the multilateral system, when they falsely claim that the order exists merely to advance the interests of the West at the expense of the rest, a growing global chorus of nations and people will stand up to say, ‘No, the system you are trying to change is our system. It serves our interests,’” Blinken claimed.

One wonders who Blinken thinks he is fooling, besides a paltry number of Americans and Europeans who have no ability to distinguish between the Old World Order and the Neoclown World Order. The reality is that the “post-Cold War order” is what we know as Clown World, which financially pillaged both the USA and Russia, as well as Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Four Asian Tigers.

Now that China and Russia are standing firmly against Clown World, and have been joined by the growing number of BRICS nations, the neoclowns are attempting to put an appealing new spin on their corrupt, satanic system.

But the old lies won’t work anymore. The inversions are all-too-easily recognized. Democracy is a lie. Freedom is a lie. Human rights are a lie. Free speech is a lie. Equality is a lie. Ideology of every flavor is a collection of lies. They are all observable lies that lead inexorably to Hell on Earth. Babelism is Babelism, by any name the same.

But the nations persist. And the nations will survive, although many states will not.

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Genius Trumps Expertise

There are two important business lessons here in this story about the success of a humble kitchen tool:

Richard Grace, inventor of one of the greatest tools the kitchen has ever seen, neither knows how to cook nor cares to learn. In the mid-’90s, he set out to make a wood-carving rasper and ended up with a culinary masterpiece called the Microplane: a cheese-grating, citrus-zesting, nutmeg-dusting revelation that today costs as little as $12 on Amazon. He’s an inventor in the truest spirit of the word, someone who treats ideation as a profession, not a calling. He doesn’t speak in buzzwords and has never hosted a TED Talk. He simply makes things and finds uses for them later.

Lorraine, a baker with an affinity for Armenian orange cake, wasn’t happy with her old kitchen grater. So she slid her husband’s Microplane over an orange. She was so astounded by the results, she had the description of the product changed in the store catalog to include its effectiveness at this seemingly niche kitchen task. This is how the story, “Test Kitchen; A Gift for the Cook, or Carpenter,” published by The New York Times four years later, began.

Before the Microplane brass could blink, they had become a kitchenware company — whether they liked it or not. Penned by Amanda Hesser, who later cofounded the award-winning food publication Food52, this 516-word story was to become Microplane’s crossing of the Rubicon, from carpentry to culinary.

“After the Times article, basically everybody who sells anything contacted us,” Arivett told me. “Williams Sonoma; Bed, Bath & Beyond; Sur La Table — everybody. It was almost too much to keep up with.”

Before the Microplane brass could blink, they had become a kitchenware company — whether they liked it or not. Within the first month following the article’s publication, the brand saw its kitchen customers eclipse its woodworking customers ten times over. Microplane, the wood rasp, sold between $300,000 and $400,000 a year; by 2002, Microplane, the kitchen gadget, did that in a month.

Then came an even bigger boom, one fueled by the power of the original kitchen influencers: celebrity chefs. Martha Stewart, Ina Garten, Rachel Ray and virtually anyone that mattered used a Microplane on their shows, calling it out by name for their audience. Julia Child liked the product so much, it earned a permanent spot hanging on the wall of her kitchen, which was later replicated at the Smithsonian. And Oprah’s personal chef, Art Smith, once called it “the most coveted tool in chefdom.”

But for all the brilliance of the original invention and the Grace family business savvy, they still weren’t sure what they were selling. “None of us were cooks,” Chris said when I asked him if the Grace family was culinarily inclined.

Lesson One: The experts know what has been done before. That’s what makes them experts. However, they do not know what is possible nor are they usually psychologically inclined to explore the various possibilities and tangents related to their knowledge. So, if you’re doing something new, do not permit yourself to be guided solely by their expertise. This is something we’ve been learning with regards to the bindery operation.

Lesson Two: Don’t be married to your business plan. I would bet that less than one-third of the most successful companies are actually successful doing what they initially started out to do. For example, Castalia intended to avoid doing print editions and focus on selling ebooks through Amazon. My favorite example, however, is the Connecticut Leather Company, which started out making leather goods in 1932, and later began producing plastic wading pools, which led to it making children’s plush toys, and eventually, the home video game system called Colecovision.

Of course, Coleco offers another lesson, which is the danger of success. Despite average sales of one million Colecovisions a year for six years, the company that started in and survived the Great Depression collapsed in 1988 after digging a hole for itself with its attempt to produce its own computer.

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