Thanksgiving is a truly American holiday. Where Americans reflect and give thanks for the incredible fortune we have enjoyed. It is the dinner, the gathering of family around a meat which makes thanksgiving special, but it has given rise to a new tradition, the Friendsgiving.
1/ Like many of you, I spent many Thanksgivings far from my blood family, sometimes sharing an MRE in an 1151 off Tampa, eating off a paper plate at NTC, or spending it with other homesick expats all over the world.
2/ For me, “Friendsgiving” started before the trend, and for over a decade I spent more thanksgivings with friends and my adopted brothers than I did with my blood family.
3/ It is these Thanksgivings that in retrospect mean the most to me, because they weren’t the obligatory family gathering, they were people we chose to spend the evening with.
4/ Inviting non blood relations into our homes and feeding them from our tables is one of the most intimate and nurturing things we can do.
This attraction towards supping with our friends is rooted in our history.
5/ From the days of Pliny the Younger witnessing early Christian Agape Feasts to frontier trappers gathering around a strangers fire to get out from the cold, the tradition of dining with those we are not forced to was once strong in the West. Somehow along the way we lost it.
6/ As we shifted towards a life of consumerism we often preferred the ease of eating in restaurants and meeting in bars. Public places are a crutch of formality, and reduce the intimacy of dinner at home in a society increasingly shying away from close interpersonal contact.
7/ And while the food at a restaurant may taste better, it will never match home cooked meals, the sense of accomplishment they provide and collegial participation of accomplishing something together.
8/ The imagery of close, friends and neighbors gathered around a home table, talkin, bonding and getting to know one another is the very basis of our culture.
9/ Unique to the spaces of the American frontier, finding another Christian home was paramount in the vast and hostile distances one traveled.
10/ We talk a lot about forming bonds and creating networks, but one of the best ways to solidify those bonds are through shared meals and great evenings.
11/ As Sebastian Junger once said “humans are the only species in which a young male will sacrifice his own life for another male he is not related to.’ One of the best evenings of my life was spent getting to know a group of officers over dinner at Balhousie.
12/ Veterans all, we ate, drank and for nearly six hours discussed battles old and new and debated the merits of American bourbon versus highland scotch. Over dinner you learn about one another, you have nowhere to hide, and your honest self will always reveal itself.
13/ By focusing on quality and production over consumption, it is our little way of pushing back against the current zeitgeist of consumerism. This isn’t some Ancient tradition, it is the way our Parents and Grandparents lived. The hard generations found it helpful, so will we.
14/ It is our way of bringing back solid traditions of old in the hopes that with the traditions come some of the close bonds of community that we remember from our youth. They are social events and whether they are co-ed, or divided the goal is to have fun.
15/ So sometime between family Thanksgiving and family Christmas find a night to gather some friends together bring them over, feed them food drink some of whatever it is you drink and start putting our society back together. If you need help, I’ll help you put together a menu.
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Grab a beer, we are going to talk markets and people who put their finger on the scale of them. (And no, this isn’t a thread about the small hat people, so just stop)
Almost all of Salt Lake City’s housing woes can be told in the story of this one house.
Why does this house cost over $300,000? It is by all objective measures a shitbox in a not great neighborhood Well, we have this wonderful tool called Zillow to help us. zillow.com/homedetails/63…
But first, a little history. The American residential real estate market used to be pretty simple. I invest in my house, hoping the market goes up and when it is time to sell, I sell it for a profit. Homes were huge purchases. The biggest most people made.
Here is your guide to the “they march like bums” and the “we don’t need to march” debate.
The truth is somewhere in the middle, but neither side it wrong.
(Caveat: the side posting the North Koreans as an example are wrong. Clowns)
Caveat, I have had a drink or two.
1 For millennia, the ability of individual soldiers to march, turn, and act as one with their comrades is why the West became what it was. That is how wars were won. From Phalanxes to the triple line, tercios, hollow squares, and line volleys, the disciplen of the West dominated
2 the discipline and the order and the obedience became synonymous with success. The Roman Vegetius said
“Few men are born brave. Many become so through training and force of discipline.”
One of my favorite D Day stories is the HMS Rodney, who, while providing direct fire support at Gold Beach, slammed a 16 inch shell directly into a Panzer IV
Rodney had been damaged by am LCT, and had a 9 foot hole in her side, but refused to be left out of the fight
She knew the Germans had their big guns waiting for the Allies coming ashore. Despite water rushing into his ship, Rodney's Captain would be damned if Britain's sons went ashore without their big guns behind them
While the courage of the men in the small boats is without question, what amazes me most is the senior officers in the battleships who basically said "fuck it, we ball". Like USS Texas flooding its own damned torpedo room to bring its guns to bear and got the boys off Omaha
Why is what Thomas Ricks wrote either buffoonishly dumb, or a straight up lie?
He fails to understand both history and how wars are won. He mischaracterizes both the US experience building auxiliary forces, and how World War 2 was won. It is comically bad.
Let us start with the role of auxiliaries in general. Large powers throughout history have used foreign troops to bolster their imperial forces abroad. From the Greeks to the Americans. Balearic slingers fought with the Romans, and Montagnards fought with the Americans.
Auxiliaries provide a difficult skill (Genoese crossbowmen) or some local expertise (Crow scouts). They are useful... when used properly.
Sometimes we try something, and it fails. The dumb pout, the smart learn. One never knows where that lesson will lead. Years or decades later it might come back into play, and might serve you and your people again. Like the Soviet Space Program and the Battle of Katya Roof.
1/ As the great "Space Race" began in 1957, the autocratic and highly centralized Soviet Union was in a perfect position to get out to an early lead. Their willingness to slap stuff together and catapult things into space outpaced the methodical approach of the Americans.
2/ The Soviets dominated the early days of the program, under the expert leadership of Sergei Korolev, whose name was kept secret in the Soviet Union, (This doesn't mean he is @ChestyPullerGst , but it doesn't mean he isn't) for fear of assassination attempts.