Vulnerability to being in want due to a dependence on imported goods amidst geopolitcal and environmental change

Iremember reading that when the Roman Empire lost the provinces of Syria and Egypt to Islamic invasions in the early 7th century, Romans lost access to olive oil and large amounts of bread (prior to the loss of Egypt, the residents of the capital Constantinople enjoyed access to a daily bread dole). Here in the US we develop a lot of raw materials in our own homeland, but we depend on for example on eucalyptus products from Australia, or opium from central and far eastern Asia, or tropical fruits from Latin America.

It would be crazy to think that due to certain environmental or geopolitcal changes (God forbid), Americans could lose access to such of those imported goods which are enjoyed us so often that we take them for granted as staples of our diet or general lifestyle

Coincidental dreams i had the night of my friend’s funeral (lastnight) Requiescat in pace 💚🙏🏽

Tristan was buried yesterday…lastnight i dreamt that myself and our friends from high school were back in Chicago hanging out and walking up and down either downtown or somewhere up north going to stores and getting food like we used to. i vaguely remember it but it was really coincidental. I had thought about him and some convos we had years ago the day before i found out what happened. its kinda crazy cos i dont really dream about things like that at all. i last remember us all hanging out when we were teenagers. Requiescat in pace, amice meus 🙏🏽

Brief comments on the nature of Russia itself and its behavior (defining Russia and how it acts)

1) Russia itself has fundamentally remained the same as it has been since it was invaded by the Mongols. The despotic system of government created by them has formally prevailed throughout the ages since, differing only in its specific type and the officials running it: the boyar system, the more despotic Czar system established by John IV Vasilievich (commonly known as Ivan the Terrible), the imperial system begun by Peter I the Great, the Soviet system begun by Lenin, and the modern federal semi-presidential system of today (which its de facto authoritarian and oligarchic character) all have in common the nature of a system in which authority is concentrated in a single person who is checked by a very small, very wealthy elite; and who runs the country for the benefit of himself and the same elite at the expense of the mostly powerless and indifferent vast majority (i believe one could argue that this stark distinction between the governing and the governed saw a slight blurring during the Soviet era)

2) Russia is, despite being physically the largest country on earth, barren of many resources, and often unable to find reliable markets for the resources it does have; and the result is that it has attacked its neighbors throughout history, beginning in the days of the aforesaid czar John IV. Illustrative of this reality is the utter hatred of the people of nations neighboring it towards Russia: i do not think i have ever met a Polish, Ukrainian, Turkish, Georgian, Armenian, Afghan, etc. person that has not had at least a negative, and often a very odious, view of Russia; and it is worth noting that the reasons they give are that Russia has invaded and ravaged their ancestral homeland and their people for a very long time. I believe one can learn of a country even as of an individual a lot of information based on what close neighbors have to say about them.

Anyways, thanks for reading 🙂

Learning to deal with short men, jealousy in men, and the consequent dangers of “short dude energy” in Texas

No disrespect but since ive moved to Texas ive learned to keep short dudes faaaar away from me, esp in professional/work environments. ive always been open to befriending anyone whos a good person but ive realized here that short dude energy is a real thing and my height and body type (it is from God alone, and to him im grateful 🙏🏽) can really trigger that kind of attitude in men who believe themselves to be inadequate. Unlike Virginia and esp Chicago, Texas is becoming a very superficial place.

I hypothesize the cause of this change to be part of the broader shift in lifestyle from rurality and small towns to the growing metroplex culture, in which huge swathes of previously undeveloped and often rural land and their inhabitants are rapidly growing and urbanizing (e.g. obv the Dallas-Arlington-Fort Worth Metroplex, as well as the budding San Antonio-Austin and Houston metroplexes): people used to a very rural, simple, and independent way of life have now been forced to enter into the broader national and global society that is our modern world, and to do so they attempt to meet certain superficial metrics by which they believe they can gauge their progress, such as wearing certain clothes, driving certain cars, or in this case being of a certain height.

I believe also more deeply that it is a natural human response to rapidly increasing competition from a rapid influx of immigrants to Texas from other parts of the United States and from all over the world, by which human beings are compelled to be the best and standout in a greater pool of social and natural competition (ie competition in modern society, but more deeply as organisms seeking to surviving and ultimately thriving existence for themselves and their offspring).

Anyways returning from the tangent of the above two paragraphs, i would like to say that from ages at least 8 to ~20 i struggled with very low self-esteem, such that im just now learning to accept that ppl and esp dudes can actually be jealous of me (me? whaaaat 🤯), and to recognize and prepare for it when i see it (and this is largely enabled by friends pointing out the jealousy for me; it is hard to overstate how stuck one can be in a childhood complex of any kind, esp one by which one has been wired to bear a low estimation of themselves).

Its worth remembering that whereas jealous women will be petty towards the woman they hate, jealous men will try to fuck a dude up/over if theyre jealous of him. Women gossip when they get jealous but men kill over jealousy..

But God preserves me and im grateful😇🙏🏽

Learning to live in the soft and sensitive culture of my town (life in a mini-Austin)

The town i live in is essentially a mini-Austin and the ppl are by and large soft pussies: they dont refrain from conflict, but rather engage in it in two-faced, undermining, fake ways that totally avoid confrontation; and they are utterly afraid of verbal, let alone physical clashes. I would like to say that growing up in south Chicago, living for some years in southeastern Virginia, and having a nearly year-long stay in Los Angeles County, i have never been around more fake ppl in my life.

Ppl here often leave social interactions terrified that theyve offended someone, bc everyone knows that few ppl here are ever honest to say when someone does something wrong to them, but are quick to talk about it behind their backs. If u know anything about Austin, with its raging far-left culture (and its naturally concomittal homeless problem) then u know what im talking about.

Obv Chicago is a very different place, and so is the Midwest as a whole. Chicago obv is full of shootings and we fight from a young age, and Midwestern culture is simple and fostering of a much more direct, bland form of communication.

So living in a place where u cant beat someones ass over disrespect, and having to tip-toe over ppls feelings, is one of the toughest adjustments ive ever had to make.

Tbh i havent truly made this adjustment. I will not be in this pussy ass town much longer i can tell. Its crazy growing up with pussies that had a non-violent childhood. Anyways yea

Strategic Context of Sheridan’s Winter Campaign of 1868 (against the hostile southern plains Indians)

“Go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority. If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result of what they have been warned of again and again. I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all power confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry out their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext they may choose to allege.”

—LTG William T. Sherman (US Army, Commander of the Military Division of the Missouri) in a letter to MG Philip H. Sheridan (US Army, Commander of the Department of the Missouri) on the eve of the Winter Campaign of 1868 against the plains Indians

The context of this statement is the eruption of the hostilities with plains Indians on the southern plains (Texas and Colorado, northward to Oklahoma, and finally Kansas [as well as other places]).

The United States having crushed the rebellion of the southern states and reabsorbed them into the federal republic, now wished to enrich its transcontinental expansion with connective railroads; and since these railroads cut right through the lands of such plains Indian nations as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, et. al., the same nations immediately began attacking in killing railway workers in particular and settlers in general, in defense of their homeland. The result was that the southern plains were ridden with raids of such a violent and savage intensity as deterred construction or any settlement whatsoever. Infants and elders were killed, women were raped, men were tortured to death, and bodies were found to be so badly mutilated as often to be unidentifiable. It is worth noting that whereas in our society survival depends on taking in victuals from grocery stores, or one’s farm, etc, survival in that of the plains Indians depended on taking victuals directly from the general ecosystem; so any disturbance in their ecosystem (and any failure on anyones part to live in anything other than perfect harmony with it) would kill the plants and animals with which they fed and clothed themselves, and result therefore in their starvation and nakedness.

The nature of the Indian raids was a particular dilemma for the contemporary US Army. This service branch had been during the recent Civil War a war organism so massive, well equipped, experienced, and ferocious as to have been able to contend with such legendary forces as those of the British Empire, the French Empire, and the Kingdom of Prussia; but after the war, both itself and its funding (and consequently its quality) were gravely downsized, such that frontier soldiers simply could not contend with the Indians: for while indeed the Indian warrior himself was a true and experienced warrior in tactical contexts (ie in battle he fought better than his US counterparts), the Indians as a people were in an operational context mobile to an extend beyond any the US soldiers could have conceived entering into the conflict (ie not only the smaller war parties, but whole bands of Indians, could move around the plains and hide themselves from the cavalry that sought after them).

However, Sherman realized two central dependencies of the plains Indians, inherent in their way of life, which could become weaknesses that could be exploited. The first of these dependencies, applicable to the Indians year-round, was on the bison; they ate bison meat and organs, clothed themselves in bison fur, and used as tools all other parts of the same animal. Sherman herefore decided to establish a peace treaty with the Indians, in which they would be allowed to roam freely on the plains so long as they stopped attacking railway workers (the railway construction was no longer to damage their ecosystem), and they could hunt bison in their free roaming *so long as there were sufficient bison to justify the hunt* (this tail-end addendum to the second clause is what essentially defined it). Sherman then contracted hunters to use the railway to arrive on the plains, slaughter the bison, and thereby deprive the Indians of their source of food.

The second dependency of the plains Indians recognized by Sherman and other soldiers was on their static winter encampents: from late spring to late autumn the Indian method of warfare, viz., raiding atop warponies, thrived because the lack of snow and abundance of grass (among other things) made the terrain traversible and the ponies able to be well-fed and strong; but in the cold winter, which bore with it the absence of these conditions, the Indians sheltered in encampments and awaited warmer seasons to begin their attacks again. Sherman therefore wished to strike them in their winter encampments, as this would have the result of hitting them while they were concentrated in one place, destroying their remaining resources during their most vulnerable time of the year, and consequently breaking their will to fight by making them showing feel the true pain of war in the resulting bloodshed and loss of livelihood.

Sherman had in himself the perfect man to direct this sort of war, and in the Sheridan the perfect man to direct specifically such a winter campaign, due to the previous experience of both in the Civil War. For Grant had always recognized the nature of the war as such a massive and highly industrialized one as would require not so much the direct destruction of Confederate field forces (e.g. the Army of Northern Virginia) as their indirect destruction through the direct destruction of their ability to make war; but it was Sherman whose principal contribution was the destruction of the Confederate States belligerative capacity with his famous March to the Sea, in which, after capturing that center of production and transportation which was Atlanta, he divided his Military Division of the Mississippi (essentially the US’ army group in the western theater) in two, personally directing his Army of the Tennessee and Army of Georgia in laying a path of waste from the same city to the Atlantic coast at Savannah, while also charging MGs George H. Thomas and John M. Schofield to direct respectively their Army of the Cumberland and Army of the Ohio in defending his crucial lines of communication, as well as federal forces’ critical supply lines, in central Tennessee. The result was that as Grant hammered Lee’s army in eastern Virginia, Sherman broke the economic back of the Confederacy as whole in Georgia and the Carolinas. Sheridan, likewise, had been utilized by Grant at this time to lay waste to that resevoir of resources for Lee’s army which was the Virginian Shenendoah Valley; the young, aggressive cavalry commander had experience razing this valley, largely directly through MG George A. Custer and other reliable subordinates. Sherman and Sheridan can be said therefore to have had a great deal of experience in breaking the enemy’s will to fight by not only destroying his supplies and economy in particular, but by bringing the war and its horrors into the home and heart of the enemy. And so they sought to do against the southern plains Indians the same basic thing that they had done to the southern rebels four years earlier.

And so eventually the plains Indians realized that despite their treaty, they could no longer refrain from killing railway workers, settlers, and especially bison hunters, as the latter of these especially were themselves killing their principal source of food. As the attacks began to increase, Sherman all the pretext necessary to direct Sheridan’s Department of the Missouri to reenter a state of war with the hostile southern plains Indians. Sheridan knew that to achieve the objective of searching out and destroying the various hostile Indian bands, he would need not only cavalry forces themselves, but a genuinely reliable, aggressive commander to direct the same forces in this objective. Custer had at this time been suspended for 10 months without pay for his mishandling of his duties and mistreatment of his men the previous summer in an impulse to be with his wife (which severely angered the hot-tempered Sherman); but Sheridan urged Sherman to allow Custer to direct the campaign, and Sherman persuaded GA Grant to end Custer’s suspension and allow him to proceed forthwith to the southern plains. And while Sheridan (as well as Grant) knew that Custer was indeed a very aggressive, energetic cavalry commander, “Sherman may have reasoned that Custer would be so eager to recover his reputation that he would either get the job done or die in the attempt…[after 10 months in suspension] Custer was like coiled spring, ready to strike” (Ambrose, 1975)

Quotes on Washinton’s Indian War in the Ohio Country

“Having gleaned him of vital intelligence for themselves and the British, the Indians informed William May (a captured American scout) of his fate: ‘Tomorrow we take you to that oak tree…We will tie you up with a mark on your chest, and see which Indian can shoot nearest to it’…May was dragged to the designated tree and summarily executed. His body was riddled with at least fifty bullets”

“Having lost two good soldiers to the lone warrior they had just killed, Cpt Irwin’s militia soon and attacked and burned a third Indian village, Wapotomica. Alerted by refugees of the last destroyed village, this one was nearly deserted when the Kentucky troops arrived; but a handful of warriors made a determined stand, and ten were found dead in the village. Here the soldiers allegedly burned one warrior at the stake in retribution for Indian cruelties…small bags of gunpowder were tied to his body for added effect”

Amateur’s take on the potential obstacles for Napoleon had he won at Waterloo

Amateur’s take on the potential obstacles for Napoleon had he won at Waterloo

This is my three-part answer to Roger on my guess for what wouldve happened if Napoleon defeated Wellington.

1)Suppose that tactically Napoleon’s cavalry or infantry charges had achieved their goal of breaking through Wellington’s exhausted defensive line and broken his army, such that Napoleon wins the particular Battle of Waterloo and drives away the Anglo-Allied army.

2)In the immediate operational context Napoleon would then have had to overcome Blucher’s fresh Prussian army, which he had been unable to defeat at Ligny several days before he met Wellington at Waterloo. And so if he defeated Wellington’s army in the late afternoon (when both armies had been most exhausted and Wellington’s line closest to collapse), he would have had to face a fresh and motivated Prussian army, under its zealous commander Marshall Blucher (et al). From what i know (with my limited base of knowledge) Napoleon’s army likely wouldn’t have the strength (nor likely the motivation) to engage and drive away yet another fresh army the same day as or next after facing Wellington’s difficult force at Waterloo. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Prussian army was already bearing into Napoleon’s right flank throughout much of the afternoon of the last day at Waterloo.

3)But supposing Napoleon had indeed defeated the Prussians operationally, ie achieving victory in the Waterloo Campaign, then in the broader strategic context the weakened Napoleon would have to be able to face off with a stronger Europe (that had not only a more intense and bitter resolve to put an end to him for good in the aftermath of the war and political upheaval he had caused, but further a greater knowledge of how to deal with him). Could Napoleon really have overcome a stronger Europe that had already defeated him, and a British navy that would certainly strangle off his resources (the American War of 1812 having ended months before, the British could divert their full attention to continental Europe)? Personally I do not believe his ravaged and exhausted French Empire could have maintained a long war, unless he could follow up Waterloo with an assuring diplomatic victory.

4)But supposing he had indeed achieved the outcomes mentioned in 2) and 3), securing the French Empire for the longterm, then Europe and consequently the world would have had a more enduring French imprint upon itself. I think in particular that a confict like the Great War would have been very different, as the British and French empires would be the warring parties, and I think it is possible that the United States may have sided with the French over the vast colonial British Empire. I wonder if Europe countries would have allied themselves in a way they had done in the Napoleonic Wars, with Russia and other eastern Europe countries being pro- or anti- British based on the times. But perhaps the British one would take place of Germany’s (would there even have been a united German state) as the great evil empire of the world.

But yea that’s just my guess haha

Cattle

It is interesting to note that as Viking mythology proposes that the world was squirted as milk from the utter of a cow, so in India some people worship cattle. The Germanic origin of our English word “fee”, as well as the Italic origin of “pecus” (from which we have in English words like pecuniary, etc) come from the same Indo-European word for cattle. It suggests that cattle were widely accepted as a bartering currency at some point several thousand years ago in places taken over by those cattle- and horse-herding peoples who took over all of Europe and much of Asia

The Lord is most very gracious

No matter how bleak or unsure life or my future looks i cant help but thank God for making me able to excel at anything i put my mind to. Its unfortunate that i get so caught up in very specific goals, missing the fact that the basic point of my life is to live strong and care for my family (and grow it with a family of my own), but its nice to reset and to remember that ill be great at honestly anything as long as i jus want it and decide to do it. God has blessed me and i need to be more grateful than ive been.

The Lord is gracious 🙏🏽