Recent well liked threads
Let’s get something straight
1) Most regular peeps don’t own a significant amount of physical Gold bullion compared to sovereigns and CBs
2) PMs price suppression is a game between countries - they don’t care about the tiny number of small peeps who own physical Gold.
1/3
1) Most regular peeps don’t own a significant amount of physical Gold bullion compared to sovereigns and CBs
2) PMs price suppression is a game between countries - they don’t care about the tiny number of small peeps who own physical Gold.
1/3
3) Gold price revaluation will screw over most people in the world except for a few physical Gold owners because it is a act by CBs and sovereigns “capturing productivity” from common folks to write off their debts and finance government.
4) Most small investor peeps are invested in miners which are physical Gold proxies.
5) When physical Gold becomes difficult to get or unavailable and GLD gets exposed as BS,miners will fly because they are only gateway for the mass public to be exposed to physical Gold’s upside
5) When physical Gold becomes difficult to get or unavailable and GLD gets exposed as BS,miners will fly because they are only gateway for the mass public to be exposed to physical Gold’s upside
🇩🇪 #BAERBOCK vs #FckAFD 🇷🇺 !
🧵Putins hörige N4zis kämpfen für #Russland ! Mit Lügen, Hass & Propaganda im 🇩🇪Bundestag!
👇‼️Das ist LANDESVERRAT‼️
Ihre Angst vor #Baerbock ist begründet. Routiniert zerreißt die grüne Außenministerin jeden Angriff von Putins Fußsoldaten.
🧵1/12👇
🧵Putins hörige N4zis kämpfen für #Russland ! Mit Lügen, Hass & Propaganda im 🇩🇪Bundestag!
👇‼️Das ist LANDESVERRAT‼️
Ihre Angst vor #Baerbock ist begründet. Routiniert zerreißt die grüne Außenministerin jeden Angriff von Putins Fußsoldaten.
🧵1/12👇
🧵Bond-Behelfs-Bösewicht Kotre schwurbelt von #Nordstream ,wie es #Stegner kaum besser macht. Steffi's nächstes Thema im Russen-TV? (unten)👇
2/12
2/12
🧵Der Gewinner von "Mach uns den Affen!" (23:30 RTL2) meint, Russlands Genozid in der Ukraine sei halb so wild, gegenüber dem Kalten Krieg Sowjet-Russlands.
Völkermord-Verharmlosung, wie sie auch Scholz betreibt. Wobei der Kanzler Russland nicht nur mit Worten zuarbeitet.
3/12
Völkermord-Verharmlosung, wie sie auch Scholz betreibt. Wobei der Kanzler Russland nicht nur mit Worten zuarbeitet.
3/12
The Field of Lost Shoes: New Market and the Boys of VMI
May 15, 1864
[Author's Note: A day early, but what the hell...]
They were boys — some of them barely old enough to shave — and John C. Breckinridge did not want to use them. He had said so plainly, to anyone who would listen, and when the morning of May 15th broke grey and wet over the Shenandoah Valley, he was still saying it. There were two hundred and fifty-seven of them, the Corps of Cadets from the Virginia Military Institute up at Lexington, and they stood in the Confederate line that morning in their neat grey uniforms with their muskets at order arms, looking precisely like what they were: students who had traded their classrooms for a killing ground they had not yet learned to fear. Breckinridge looked at them and felt something that a former Vice President of the United States, a man who had presided over the Senate while the Republic dissolved beneath him, ought not to have felt on a battlefield. He felt sorry for them.
He would use them anyway. The Valley left him no choice.
***
The strategic logic that placed those boys in the Shenandoah in the spring of 1864 had its origins in Ulysses Grant's mind — specifically, in Grant's determination to squeeze the Confederacy from every direction at once and give Lee no room to rob Peter to pay Paul. The Valley was the corridor that made such borrowing possible, a great natural highway running northeast toward the Potomac and Washington, its farms and mills and granaries feeding Lee's army through the long winters when nothing else could. Grant meant to close it. He gave the job to Franz Sigel.
It was, by most accounts, a mistake the Union could ill afford. Henry Halleck had said it plainly — that giving Sigel important commands was "but little better than murder" — but Lincoln's administration needed the German vote in an election year, and Sigel had the Germans. So he got the Valley, and roughly ninety-five hundred men, and instructions to drive south and make trouble while Grant hammered Lee in the Wilderness and along the North Anna. The plan was sound enough. The man executing it was something less than sound.
Facing him was John C. Breckinridge — forty-three years old, Kentucky-born, a man who had stood at the pinnacle of American political life before the war tore that life apart. He had been James Buchanan's vice president, had run for president himself in 1860, had watched the election of Lincoln from the presiding officer's chair in the Senate, and had gone south when the time came with the quiet certainty of a man who understood that he had no other choice. As a general he was aggressive, clear-eyed, and willing to fight on ground that offered him no particular advantage. He would need all of those qualities on May 15th.
His department was thin. Brigadier General John Imboden's Valley District command amounted to perhaps fifteen hundred men scattered across a region that seemed to grow larger the harder you looked at it. When Sigel finally stirred from Martinsburg in late April and began pushing south toward Winchester, Imboden fell back and called up local reserves and sent word to Breckinridge that the Valley was in danger. Breckinridge pulled together what he could — Echols' brigade, Wharton's brigade, artillery, cavalry, the cadet battalion from VMI — and moved to meet Sigel before the Federal commander could reach Staunton and cut the Virginia Central Railroad. Five thousand, three hundred men in all, counting the boys.
***
Sigel had done him a considerable favor without knowing it.
By May 11th, the Federal commander had reached Woodstock, where his men intercepted telegrams intended for Imboden that suggested Breckinridge was still at Staunton, still assembling his forces, still — in theory — vulnerable to a fast-moving thrust. Sigel had originally planned to advance no further than Woodstock. He changed his mind. He pushed south toward New Market, and in doing so he gave Breckinridge exactly the time he needed to concentrate.
On May 14th, Sigel sent Colonel Augustus Moor forward with a mixed reconnaissance force to probe toward Mount Jackson. Moor found ground he liked north of New Market and stopped — artillery on the flanks, infantry in the center, a reasonable enough position from which to watch and wait. He waited. That was Sigel's army's particular talent in those weeks: waiting, when the situation called for pressing.
Breckinridge, watching from the Confederate side of the Shenandoah, understood that waiting was a luxury he could not afford. Grant's hammer was already falling in the Wilderness. Every day the Valley remained contested was a day Lee might need Breckinridge's men somewhere else. He offered battle. Sigel declined. By ten o'clock on the morning of May 15th, with the rain coming down steadily and his infantry formed behind the screening hills south of New Market, Breckinridge had reached his conclusion.
"I have offered him battle," he said, "and he declines to advance. We can attack and whip them here, and I'll do it."
He looked once more at his order of battle. Wharton on the right. Echols on the left. Artillery. Cavalry on the flanks. And there, tucked into the line with the rest of them, the cadet battalion — four companies of young men who had never been in a fight and whose average age, across all two hundred and fifty-seven of them, barely reached eighteen.
He sent them forward.
***
The cadets had come down from Lexington in high spirits, as young men going to war for the first time are apt to do. They were not innocent of military knowledge — VMI had spent three years drilling them in the manual of arms and the rudiments of tactics, and some of their instructors had stood in real battles and knew what was coming — but knowledge and experience are different things entirely, and no textbook had prepared them for the particular quality of sound that artillery makes when it is pointed at you and the crews know what they are doing. They learned that sound on the approach to Bushong's Hill.
They crossed ground that was a misery of Virginia mud — the spring rains had been working on that field for days, and the soil had achieved a particular consistency that grabbed at a man's feet and held on. More than a few of the cadets lost their shoes in that mud and kept walking anyway, stockinged feet in the cold Virginia clay, because stopping was not an option the situation offered them. Years later, when survivors tried to explain what the advance had been like, they would call it the Field of Lost Shoes, and the name stuck the way names do when they catch something true about a moment.
The Federal batteries on the high ground above Bushong's farm were working hard. Double canister at close range has a sound unlike anything else in the repertoire of nineteenth-century warfare — a flat, percussive roar followed by the hiss of several hundred iron balls spread across the face of an advancing line — and it tore gaps in Wharton's brigade as the Confederates came up the slope. Men went down. The line slowed, wavered, found cover behind fences and outbuildings, and in one regiment, broke entirely, pulling back and opening a hole in Breckinridge's assault line at precisely the moment he could least afford a hole.
He turned to the staff officer beside him. He already knew what the answer would have to be.
"Put the boys in," he said. Then, quietly, almost to himself: "And may God forgive me."
***
Captain Benjamin Colonna was twenty years old, which made him one of the older men in the cadet battalion, and he led them forward at the double-quick into the gap where the Confederate line had given way. They went with a steadiness that surprised the veterans watching from either side — not the reckless rush of men who do not understand their danger, but the determined advance of young men who understood it perfectly and had decided that understanding it was not a sufficient reason to stop. The Federal artillery shifted to meet them. Men stumbled and fell. The line closed over the gaps and kept moving.
What happened next on that rain-soaked hillside became, in the years that followed, the kind of story that a defeated people tell and retell until it has achieved the luminous quality of myth — which is not to say it wasn't true, because it was, every word of it. The cadets reached the Federal line. They went in with the bayonet. A battery of Union artillery that had been pouring canister into them moments before suddenly became their battery, the gun crews down or running, the pieces standing silent in the rain. Ten of the boys would not go home. Forty-seven more were wounded. The ones who came through intact would carry that hillside in their memories for the rest of their lives, the mud and the noise and the particular cold of a Virginia May when the rain won't stop, the moment when they stopped being students and became something else.
Breckinridge watched them come across that field and reportedly turned his face away.
***
Sigel, for his part, had managed to arrive on the battlefield around noon — which was late, given that the fighting had begun at dawn — and had then proceeded to demonstrate, at some length and with considerable thoroughness, why Halleck's assessment of him had not been entirely wrong. He repositioned units at the wrong moments, creating confusion in ranks that were already uncertain. He ordered a counterattack at three o'clock that the Union infantry could not execute because nobody seemed entirely sure of where they were supposed to go or who was supposed to lead them there. On the left flank, Julius Stahel's cavalry — good men, capable men, men who deserved better than what they were given — charged Confederate guns and infantry along the Valley Pike and were cut to pieces by concentrated fire before they could close.
When Sigel repositioned his artillery to avoid incoming Confederate rounds, he surrendered the high ground on the Federal right. Breckinridge saw it immediately. He sent Wharton's brigade forward with the cadets on their flank, and the Confederate line swept up and over Bushong's Hill into what remained of the Union position. Some Federal regiments fell back in good order, fighting as they went. Others simply went, as troops will when the situation has moved past the point that discipline can address.
By late afternoon it was finished. Sigel had his army back across the North Fork of the Shenandoah and was moving north toward Cedar Creek, which he reached on May 17th. He had left behind nearly eight hundred and forty men — killed, wounded, or captured — and five artillery pieces and several hundred small arms that his men had dropped in the interest of moving faster. Breckinridge had lost five hundred and thirty, including sixty-one of the boys from VMI.
The Valley was Confederate again.
***
The aftermath came quickly, as aftermaths do when the larger war demands attention. Grant was pressing Lee in the Wilderness and along the North Anna, and Lee needed every man he could get. Breckinridge and his division received orders for Richmond within days of the fight. Sigel received orders of a different kind: he was relieved of field command on May 19th and replaced by David Hunter, who was considerably more aggressive and who would prove it by burning VMI to the ground the following month when he swept through Lexington — a piece of news that reached the cadets and settled over them with the particular weight of things that cannot be undone.
The boys went home to find their school a ruin of smoke-stained walls and empty window frames, the library scattered, the barracks gutted. They had saved the Valley and come back to ashes. There is a particular kind of Confederate story that has that shape — sacrifice answered by destruction, valor rewarded with loss — and this was one of them, as true and as hard as any the war produced.
Hunter's advance would carry him to Lynchburg before Jubal Early's Second Corps arrived from Lee's army and pushed him back. Early would then carry the war north again, crossing the Potomac in July and threatening Washington itself — a final, brilliant, ultimately futile gesture toward a victory that the Confederacy had already moved too far from the possibility of achieving. Philip Sheridan would come to the Valley in August with Grant's full backing and a mandate to destroy it so thoroughly that "a crow flying over it will have to carry its own rations," and by November of 1864 he would have done precisely that.
But none of that had happened yet on the afternoon of May 15th, when the rain finally slackened over the Shenandoah and Breckinridge's men held the ground they had taken, and the boys from VMI — those who could still walk — gathered their wounded and began counting who had not come through.
Ten of them were already past counting. They lay in the Virginia mud they had crossed that afternoon, in the field that would carry their name forward into history, shoes and all.
***
Graphics: 1) Major General John C. Breckinridge; 2) Major General Franz Siegel; 3) Tactical Battle Map - Battle of New Market; 4) "Lions of the Hour" by Keith Rocco - 'Cadets from Virginia Military Institute, led by 20-year-old Captain Benjamin A. Colonna, race past Bushong’s Farm to fill a gap in the Confederate line at New Market
May 15, 1864
[Author's Note: A day early, but what the hell...]
They were boys — some of them barely old enough to shave — and John C. Breckinridge did not want to use them. He had said so plainly, to anyone who would listen, and when the morning of May 15th broke grey and wet over the Shenandoah Valley, he was still saying it. There were two hundred and fifty-seven of them, the Corps of Cadets from the Virginia Military Institute up at Lexington, and they stood in the Confederate line that morning in their neat grey uniforms with their muskets at order arms, looking precisely like what they were: students who had traded their classrooms for a killing ground they had not yet learned to fear. Breckinridge looked at them and felt something that a former Vice President of the United States, a man who had presided over the Senate while the Republic dissolved beneath him, ought not to have felt on a battlefield. He felt sorry for them.
He would use them anyway. The Valley left him no choice.
***
The strategic logic that placed those boys in the Shenandoah in the spring of 1864 had its origins in Ulysses Grant's mind — specifically, in Grant's determination to squeeze the Confederacy from every direction at once and give Lee no room to rob Peter to pay Paul. The Valley was the corridor that made such borrowing possible, a great natural highway running northeast toward the Potomac and Washington, its farms and mills and granaries feeding Lee's army through the long winters when nothing else could. Grant meant to close it. He gave the job to Franz Sigel.
It was, by most accounts, a mistake the Union could ill afford. Henry Halleck had said it plainly — that giving Sigel important commands was "but little better than murder" — but Lincoln's administration needed the German vote in an election year, and Sigel had the Germans. So he got the Valley, and roughly ninety-five hundred men, and instructions to drive south and make trouble while Grant hammered Lee in the Wilderness and along the North Anna. The plan was sound enough. The man executing it was something less than sound.
Facing him was John C. Breckinridge — forty-three years old, Kentucky-born, a man who had stood at the pinnacle of American political life before the war tore that life apart. He had been James Buchanan's vice president, had run for president himself in 1860, had watched the election of Lincoln from the presiding officer's chair in the Senate, and had gone south when the time came with the quiet certainty of a man who understood that he had no other choice. As a general he was aggressive, clear-eyed, and willing to fight on ground that offered him no particular advantage. He would need all of those qualities on May 15th.
His department was thin. Brigadier General John Imboden's Valley District command amounted to perhaps fifteen hundred men scattered across a region that seemed to grow larger the harder you looked at it. When Sigel finally stirred from Martinsburg in late April and began pushing south toward Winchester, Imboden fell back and called up local reserves and sent word to Breckinridge that the Valley was in danger. Breckinridge pulled together what he could — Echols' brigade, Wharton's brigade, artillery, cavalry, the cadet battalion from VMI — and moved to meet Sigel before the Federal commander could reach Staunton and cut the Virginia Central Railroad. Five thousand, three hundred men in all, counting the boys.
***
Sigel had done him a considerable favor without knowing it.
By May 11th, the Federal commander had reached Woodstock, where his men intercepted telegrams intended for Imboden that suggested Breckinridge was still at Staunton, still assembling his forces, still — in theory — vulnerable to a fast-moving thrust. Sigel had originally planned to advance no further than Woodstock. He changed his mind. He pushed south toward New Market, and in doing so he gave Breckinridge exactly the time he needed to concentrate.
On May 14th, Sigel sent Colonel Augustus Moor forward with a mixed reconnaissance force to probe toward Mount Jackson. Moor found ground he liked north of New Market and stopped — artillery on the flanks, infantry in the center, a reasonable enough position from which to watch and wait. He waited. That was Sigel's army's particular talent in those weeks: waiting, when the situation called for pressing.
Breckinridge, watching from the Confederate side of the Shenandoah, understood that waiting was a luxury he could not afford. Grant's hammer was already falling in the Wilderness. Every day the Valley remained contested was a day Lee might need Breckinridge's men somewhere else. He offered battle. Sigel declined. By ten o'clock on the morning of May 15th, with the rain coming down steadily and his infantry formed behind the screening hills south of New Market, Breckinridge had reached his conclusion.
"I have offered him battle," he said, "and he declines to advance. We can attack and whip them here, and I'll do it."
He looked once more at his order of battle. Wharton on the right. Echols on the left. Artillery. Cavalry on the flanks. And there, tucked into the line with the rest of them, the cadet battalion — four companies of young men who had never been in a fight and whose average age, across all two hundred and fifty-seven of them, barely reached eighteen.
He sent them forward.
***
The cadets had come down from Lexington in high spirits, as young men going to war for the first time are apt to do. They were not innocent of military knowledge — VMI had spent three years drilling them in the manual of arms and the rudiments of tactics, and some of their instructors had stood in real battles and knew what was coming — but knowledge and experience are different things entirely, and no textbook had prepared them for the particular quality of sound that artillery makes when it is pointed at you and the crews know what they are doing. They learned that sound on the approach to Bushong's Hill.
They crossed ground that was a misery of Virginia mud — the spring rains had been working on that field for days, and the soil had achieved a particular consistency that grabbed at a man's feet and held on. More than a few of the cadets lost their shoes in that mud and kept walking anyway, stockinged feet in the cold Virginia clay, because stopping was not an option the situation offered them. Years later, when survivors tried to explain what the advance had been like, they would call it the Field of Lost Shoes, and the name stuck the way names do when they catch something true about a moment.
The Federal batteries on the high ground above Bushong's farm were working hard. Double canister at close range has a sound unlike anything else in the repertoire of nineteenth-century warfare — a flat, percussive roar followed by the hiss of several hundred iron balls spread across the face of an advancing line — and it tore gaps in Wharton's brigade as the Confederates came up the slope. Men went down. The line slowed, wavered, found cover behind fences and outbuildings, and in one regiment, broke entirely, pulling back and opening a hole in Breckinridge's assault line at precisely the moment he could least afford a hole.
He turned to the staff officer beside him. He already knew what the answer would have to be.
"Put the boys in," he said. Then, quietly, almost to himself: "And may God forgive me."
***
Captain Benjamin Colonna was twenty years old, which made him one of the older men in the cadet battalion, and he led them forward at the double-quick into the gap where the Confederate line had given way. They went with a steadiness that surprised the veterans watching from either side — not the reckless rush of men who do not understand their danger, but the determined advance of young men who understood it perfectly and had decided that understanding it was not a sufficient reason to stop. The Federal artillery shifted to meet them. Men stumbled and fell. The line closed over the gaps and kept moving.
What happened next on that rain-soaked hillside became, in the years that followed, the kind of story that a defeated people tell and retell until it has achieved the luminous quality of myth — which is not to say it wasn't true, because it was, every word of it. The cadets reached the Federal line. They went in with the bayonet. A battery of Union artillery that had been pouring canister into them moments before suddenly became their battery, the gun crews down or running, the pieces standing silent in the rain. Ten of the boys would not go home. Forty-seven more were wounded. The ones who came through intact would carry that hillside in their memories for the rest of their lives, the mud and the noise and the particular cold of a Virginia May when the rain won't stop, the moment when they stopped being students and became something else.
Breckinridge watched them come across that field and reportedly turned his face away.
***
Sigel, for his part, had managed to arrive on the battlefield around noon — which was late, given that the fighting had begun at dawn — and had then proceeded to demonstrate, at some length and with considerable thoroughness, why Halleck's assessment of him had not been entirely wrong. He repositioned units at the wrong moments, creating confusion in ranks that were already uncertain. He ordered a counterattack at three o'clock that the Union infantry could not execute because nobody seemed entirely sure of where they were supposed to go or who was supposed to lead them there. On the left flank, Julius Stahel's cavalry — good men, capable men, men who deserved better than what they were given — charged Confederate guns and infantry along the Valley Pike and were cut to pieces by concentrated fire before they could close.
When Sigel repositioned his artillery to avoid incoming Confederate rounds, he surrendered the high ground on the Federal right. Breckinridge saw it immediately. He sent Wharton's brigade forward with the cadets on their flank, and the Confederate line swept up and over Bushong's Hill into what remained of the Union position. Some Federal regiments fell back in good order, fighting as they went. Others simply went, as troops will when the situation has moved past the point that discipline can address.
By late afternoon it was finished. Sigel had his army back across the North Fork of the Shenandoah and was moving north toward Cedar Creek, which he reached on May 17th. He had left behind nearly eight hundred and forty men — killed, wounded, or captured — and five artillery pieces and several hundred small arms that his men had dropped in the interest of moving faster. Breckinridge had lost five hundred and thirty, including sixty-one of the boys from VMI.
The Valley was Confederate again.
***
The aftermath came quickly, as aftermaths do when the larger war demands attention. Grant was pressing Lee in the Wilderness and along the North Anna, and Lee needed every man he could get. Breckinridge and his division received orders for Richmond within days of the fight. Sigel received orders of a different kind: he was relieved of field command on May 19th and replaced by David Hunter, who was considerably more aggressive and who would prove it by burning VMI to the ground the following month when he swept through Lexington — a piece of news that reached the cadets and settled over them with the particular weight of things that cannot be undone.
The boys went home to find their school a ruin of smoke-stained walls and empty window frames, the library scattered, the barracks gutted. They had saved the Valley and come back to ashes. There is a particular kind of Confederate story that has that shape — sacrifice answered by destruction, valor rewarded with loss — and this was one of them, as true and as hard as any the war produced.
Hunter's advance would carry him to Lynchburg before Jubal Early's Second Corps arrived from Lee's army and pushed him back. Early would then carry the war north again, crossing the Potomac in July and threatening Washington itself — a final, brilliant, ultimately futile gesture toward a victory that the Confederacy had already moved too far from the possibility of achieving. Philip Sheridan would come to the Valley in August with Grant's full backing and a mandate to destroy it so thoroughly that "a crow flying over it will have to carry its own rations," and by November of 1864 he would have done precisely that.
But none of that had happened yet on the afternoon of May 15th, when the rain finally slackened over the Shenandoah and Breckinridge's men held the ground they had taken, and the boys from VMI — those who could still walk — gathered their wounded and began counting who had not come through.
Ten of them were already past counting. They lay in the Virginia mud they had crossed that afternoon, in the field that would carry their name forward into history, shoes and all.
***
Graphics: 1) Major General John C. Breckinridge; 2) Major General Franz Siegel; 3) Tactical Battle Map - Battle of New Market; 4) "Lions of the Hour" by Keith Rocco - 'Cadets from Virginia Military Institute, led by 20-year-old Captain Benjamin A. Colonna, race past Bushong’s Farm to fill a gap in the Confederate line at New Market
2/3 "In War a Tower of Strength"
The VMI Cadets at New Market: Capturing the Napoleon
Look at the boy standing on the gun.
He has one foot on the wheel and one hand raised with the VMI flag — white silk snapping in the storm wind, the Virginia seal bright against the darkening sky — and he is perhaps seventeen years old, perhaps eighteen, and he has just done something that veterans of three years' hard fighting would speak of for the rest of their lives as the finest thing they ever witnessed. The lightning is working behind him. The rain is coming down in sheets. His comrades are swarming over the Napoleon's carriage with bayonets and fury, and somewhere in the mud at their feet, half-swallowed by the Virginia clay, lies a cadet's shoe — pulled clean off in the charge across that terrible field, its owner too committed to the work ahead to stop and retrieve it.
John Paul Strain caught it all — the storm, the gun, the flag, the bare foot in the mud — and painted a moment that Shelby Foote might have spent three pages building toward.
***
The Napoleon was a twelve-pounder smoothbore, the workhorse of Civil War artillery, and it had been doing considerable damage to the Confederate line for the better part of an afternoon before the boys from VMI got their hands on it. Federal gunners knew their business. They had loaded with double canister — a charge that turned a cannon into something closer to a giant shotgun, scattering hundreds of iron balls across an advancing line at murderously close range — and the rounds had done what double canister does, tearing gaps in Wharton's brigade until one regiment gave way entirely and the Confederate assault line had a hole in it that the situation could not afford.
That was the moment Breckinridge turned to his staff with the words he would carry to his grave.
Put the boys in. And may God forgive me for the order.
They went forward in the rain — two hundred and fifty-seven of them, ranging from fifteen to twenty-one years of age, their grey and white cadet uniforms darkening in the downpour, their feet punching through the saturated crust of the field into the soft black mud beneath. The field gave up their shoes and kept them. Some of the boys didn't notice. Some noticed and kept moving anyway. The guns were still firing.
***
What the painting renders, and what the historical record confirms, is that they did not simply advance into the gap and hold it. They went through. Past the fence line. Past the Bushong farm. Up the slope and into the Federal position, where the Napoleon and its crew were still working — loading, traversing, firing — and where the cadet line hit them before the crew could get off another round.
The color-bearer who raised the VMI flag over the captured gun was making a statement that required no translation. In Bello Praesidium — In War, A Tower of Strength — the Institute's motto, stitched onto white silk, now flying above a piece of Federal artillery that had been killing Confederates twenty minutes before. Whatever the boys had been when they left Lexington — students, cadets, young men with textbooks and examination grades — they were something else now. The veterans watching from either side of the line knew it. A Confederate officer who had stood in a dozen engagements from First Manassas onward told anyone who would listen that the cadets' charge had "surpassed anything that I witnessed during the war." He was not a man given to easy praise.
Ten of the boys were already dead by the time that flag went up. Forty-seven more were wounded. In a battalion of two hundred and fifty-seven, that was better than one man in five down before the afternoon was over — a casualty rate that would have broken veteran units that had earned their toughness the hard way, across three years of the hardest kind of fighting the war had produced.
The boys had earned theirs in an afternoon.
***
Breckinridge came to them afterward, when the guns had gone quiet and the rain had slackened to a grey drizzle over the Valley he had just saved. He was not a man who found sentiment easy — former vice presidents seldom are — but what he said to them in the aftermath was as close to unconditional as a general of his particular formality was likely to manage.
Young gentlemen, I have you to thank for the result of today's operations. Well done, Virginians. Well done, men.
That last word — men — was the one that mattered. They had gone into that field as boys, as cadets, as students whose examination records and demerit reports still sat in ledgers back at the Institute. They came out the other side as something the word men only barely contained. The field had made them that, and the field had taken ten of them, and those two facts would not come uncoupled in Southern memory for as long as the memory lasted.
Every May 15th since, VMI has called the roll of those ten — Thomas Jefferson, Preston Cocke, Charles Crockett, William McDowell, Cabell Hutter, Henry Jones, Jaqueline Stanard, Gideon Doerr, Luther Cransler, Joseph Wheelwright — and left each name hanging in the air a moment, unanswered, before moving on. It is the oldest and most honest answer to the question of what that afternoon cost.
The shoe in Strain's foreground mud knows the answer too. It lies there in the clay of the Shenandoah, abandoned by a boy who had more important things to carry, staring up at a sky full of lightning and a flag full of meaning, and it will not be moved.
Graphics: "In War a Tower of Strength," by John Paul Strain
The VMI Cadets at New Market: Capturing the Napoleon
Look at the boy standing on the gun.
He has one foot on the wheel and one hand raised with the VMI flag — white silk snapping in the storm wind, the Virginia seal bright against the darkening sky — and he is perhaps seventeen years old, perhaps eighteen, and he has just done something that veterans of three years' hard fighting would speak of for the rest of their lives as the finest thing they ever witnessed. The lightning is working behind him. The rain is coming down in sheets. His comrades are swarming over the Napoleon's carriage with bayonets and fury, and somewhere in the mud at their feet, half-swallowed by the Virginia clay, lies a cadet's shoe — pulled clean off in the charge across that terrible field, its owner too committed to the work ahead to stop and retrieve it.
John Paul Strain caught it all — the storm, the gun, the flag, the bare foot in the mud — and painted a moment that Shelby Foote might have spent three pages building toward.
***
The Napoleon was a twelve-pounder smoothbore, the workhorse of Civil War artillery, and it had been doing considerable damage to the Confederate line for the better part of an afternoon before the boys from VMI got their hands on it. Federal gunners knew their business. They had loaded with double canister — a charge that turned a cannon into something closer to a giant shotgun, scattering hundreds of iron balls across an advancing line at murderously close range — and the rounds had done what double canister does, tearing gaps in Wharton's brigade until one regiment gave way entirely and the Confederate assault line had a hole in it that the situation could not afford.
That was the moment Breckinridge turned to his staff with the words he would carry to his grave.
Put the boys in. And may God forgive me for the order.
They went forward in the rain — two hundred and fifty-seven of them, ranging from fifteen to twenty-one years of age, their grey and white cadet uniforms darkening in the downpour, their feet punching through the saturated crust of the field into the soft black mud beneath. The field gave up their shoes and kept them. Some of the boys didn't notice. Some noticed and kept moving anyway. The guns were still firing.
***
What the painting renders, and what the historical record confirms, is that they did not simply advance into the gap and hold it. They went through. Past the fence line. Past the Bushong farm. Up the slope and into the Federal position, where the Napoleon and its crew were still working — loading, traversing, firing — and where the cadet line hit them before the crew could get off another round.
The color-bearer who raised the VMI flag over the captured gun was making a statement that required no translation. In Bello Praesidium — In War, A Tower of Strength — the Institute's motto, stitched onto white silk, now flying above a piece of Federal artillery that had been killing Confederates twenty minutes before. Whatever the boys had been when they left Lexington — students, cadets, young men with textbooks and examination grades — they were something else now. The veterans watching from either side of the line knew it. A Confederate officer who had stood in a dozen engagements from First Manassas onward told anyone who would listen that the cadets' charge had "surpassed anything that I witnessed during the war." He was not a man given to easy praise.
Ten of the boys were already dead by the time that flag went up. Forty-seven more were wounded. In a battalion of two hundred and fifty-seven, that was better than one man in five down before the afternoon was over — a casualty rate that would have broken veteran units that had earned their toughness the hard way, across three years of the hardest kind of fighting the war had produced.
The boys had earned theirs in an afternoon.
***
Breckinridge came to them afterward, when the guns had gone quiet and the rain had slackened to a grey drizzle over the Valley he had just saved. He was not a man who found sentiment easy — former vice presidents seldom are — but what he said to them in the aftermath was as close to unconditional as a general of his particular formality was likely to manage.
Young gentlemen, I have you to thank for the result of today's operations. Well done, Virginians. Well done, men.
That last word — men — was the one that mattered. They had gone into that field as boys, as cadets, as students whose examination records and demerit reports still sat in ledgers back at the Institute. They came out the other side as something the word men only barely contained. The field had made them that, and the field had taken ten of them, and those two facts would not come uncoupled in Southern memory for as long as the memory lasted.
Every May 15th since, VMI has called the roll of those ten — Thomas Jefferson, Preston Cocke, Charles Crockett, William McDowell, Cabell Hutter, Henry Jones, Jaqueline Stanard, Gideon Doerr, Luther Cransler, Joseph Wheelwright — and left each name hanging in the air a moment, unanswered, before moving on. It is the oldest and most honest answer to the question of what that afternoon cost.
The shoe in Strain's foreground mud knows the answer too. It lies there in the clay of the Shenandoah, abandoned by a boy who had more important things to carry, staring up at a sky full of lightning and a flag full of meaning, and it will not be moved.
Graphics: "In War a Tower of Strength," by John Paul Strain
3/3 Additional Graphics 1- Don Troiani's "Put the Boys In"; 2- Historical Marker - New Market Battlefield "Baptism of Fire"; 3- Major General David "Black Dave" Hunter - burned VMI; 3) VMI after Hunter burned it, 1864
OSEL Device[900Cr Marketcap] - A Trader ( Sorry Manufacturer) of hearing aids and LED Display System.
A Thread on
How OSEL Turned Negative Ops Cash into Positive?
And Many More things...
A Thread on
How OSEL Turned Negative Ops Cash into Positive?
And Many More things...
If you see Sep-25 Cashflow,
If reported correctly, Operating Cash Flow would likely be negative -₹40 Cr (vs. reported positive ~₹10 Cr).
How?
By classifying increase in short-term borrowings (e.g., Cash Credit) under Operating Activities instead of Financing.
If reported correctly, Operating Cash Flow would likely be negative -₹40 Cr (vs. reported positive ~₹10 Cr).
How?
By classifying increase in short-term borrowings (e.g., Cash Credit) under Operating Activities instead of Financing.
Standard Accounting: Short-term borrowings belong in Financing Activities. Operations should reflect core business cash generation from customers, inventory, etc. This adjustment artificially inflates CFO, masking underlying working Capital Stress.
Hello @JeffBezos, since you question the results of our studies on the unfairness of the US tax system, please allow me to remind you of the main conclusions of our work, the most comprehensive research to date on this issue.
Your claim that the top 1% pays 40% of taxes and the bottom 50% only 3% is misleading:
It captures just one tax – the federal income tax – and ignores all the rest: payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise duties, etc., many of which are regressive.
It captures just one tax – the federal income tax – and ignores all the rest: payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise duties, etc., many of which are regressive.
If one takes a comprehensive view of taxation in the US, here’s the picture that emerges:
All social groups pay broadly the same effective tax rate today – around 25%-30% of income, all taxes included – with billionaires having the lowest tax rate: 24% on average in 2018–20.
gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucm…
All social groups pay broadly the same effective tax rate today – around 25%-30% of income, all taxes included – with billionaires having the lowest tax rate: 24% on average in 2018–20.
gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucm…
1/9
SCMP: "To address widening trade imbalances across the Asia-Pacific region, surplus-heavy nations such as China should be buying more, and deficit-running economies need to bolster their competitiveness, a top Apec official said on Thursday."
sc.mp/y49ox?utm_sour…
SCMP: "To address widening trade imbalances across the Asia-Pacific region, surplus-heavy nations such as China should be buying more, and deficit-running economies need to bolster their competitiveness, a top Apec official said on Thursday."
sc.mp/y49ox?utm_sour…
2/9
The article continues: "Carlos Kuriyama warned that structural imbalances would remain wide in the near future and cautioned that protectionist responses could exacerbate regional fragmentation rather than resolving underlying issues."
The article continues: "Carlos Kuriyama warned that structural imbalances would remain wide in the near future and cautioned that protectionist responses could exacerbate regional fragmentation rather than resolving underlying issues."
3/9
We are definitely in the age of Joan Robinson. She warned that large, beggar-thy-neighbor trade surpluses would eventually force deficit countries into protectionist retaliation which could lead to a breakdown in trade that would harm the global economy.
We are definitely in the age of Joan Robinson. She warned that large, beggar-thy-neighbor trade surpluses would eventually force deficit countries into protectionist retaliation which could lead to a breakdown in trade that would harm the global economy.
Cara praktis buat “Brain Dump” pas kepala udah overload banget
Tujuannya satu: ngeluarin isi pikiran yang numpuk di otak biar nervous system ikut lebih rileks.
Gimana caranya? sini gue kasih tau :
Tujuannya satu: ngeluarin isi pikiran yang numpuk di otak biar nervous system ikut lebih rileks.
Gimana caranya? sini gue kasih tau :
Coba ikutin 4 langkah simpel ini:
Langkah 1: Pakai kertas & pulpen (jangan digital dulu)
Saran banget nulis di kertas dibanding di HP. Karena pas kita nulis tangan, gerakan kecil itu bisa kasih efek grounding ke otak. Jadi rasa anxious juga bisa sedikit lebih reda.
Langkah 1: Pakai kertas & pulpen (jangan digital dulu)
Saran banget nulis di kertas dibanding di HP. Karena pas kita nulis tangan, gerakan kecil itu bisa kasih efek grounding ke otak. Jadi rasa anxious juga bisa sedikit lebih reda.
Langkah 2: “Keluarin” semuanya (ga usah difilter!)
Pasang timer 5 menit. Tulis aj semua yg lewat di kepala. Ga ush dirapiin, ga ush mikirin grammar, ga ush dipilah mana yg penting.
Contoh: besok ada meeting, cucian belum beres, harus bales chat, dompet makin tipis, capek banget
Pasang timer 5 menit. Tulis aj semua yg lewat di kepala. Ga ush dirapiin, ga ush mikirin grammar, ga ush dipilah mana yg penting.
Contoh: besok ada meeting, cucian belum beres, harus bales chat, dompet makin tipis, capek banget
Situation préoccupante à l'ouest d'Houlialpole dans le sud de l'Ukraine, où la Russie a lancé plus de 1 000 frappes aériennes ces 20 derniers jours.
La précision des frappes, environ 80%, et leur localisation montrent que l'armée russe met d'importants moyens dans la région. ⬇️
La précision des frappes, environ 80%, et leur localisation montrent que l'armée russe met d'importants moyens dans la région. ⬇️
A titre de comparaison, voici les frappes aériennes durant le mois d'avril dans la zone :
Et celles en février/mars :
On remarque bien le déplacement vers l'ouest.
On remarque bien le déplacement vers l'ouest.
If your inflammation is out of control, you'll feel exhausted no matter what you try.
Most people don't realize it's the silent cause behind almost every chronic disease.
Here are 8 ways to kill inflammation naturally (& get your energy back):
1) Walk 10,000 steps
Most people don't realize it's the silent cause behind almost every chronic disease.
Here are 8 ways to kill inflammation naturally (& get your energy back):
1) Walk 10,000 steps
A University of Birmingham study of 200 adults found:
3,000 steps/day → high inflammation
5,000-7,000 steps/day → 50% less inflammation
10,000 steps/day → zero inflammation
3,000 steps/day → high inflammation
5,000-7,000 steps/day → 50% less inflammation
10,000 steps/day → zero inflammation
2) Break up sitting every 60 minutes
Most people think one workout cancels out a full day of sitting but it doesn't...
Your muscles produce anti-inflammatory signals when they move. Sit for 8 hours and those signals stop (even if you trained).
Here's why:
Most people think one workout cancels out a full day of sitting but it doesn't...
Your muscles produce anti-inflammatory signals when they move. Sit for 8 hours and those signals stop (even if you trained).
Here's why:
My statin thread reached over 460,000 people. Thousands of you asked the same question.
"If cholesterol does not cause heart disease, then what does?"
The answer has been published for years. In the largest risk factor study ever conducted. 27,939 women. 21 years. Published in JAMA Cardiology.
Here is what they found. And here is why nobody told you.
🧵
"If cholesterol does not cause heart disease, then what does?"
The answer has been published for years. In the largest risk factor study ever conducted. 27,939 women. 21 years. Published in JAMA Cardiology.
Here is what they found. And here is why nobody told you.
🧵
The pharmaceutical industry spent billions of dollars trying to prove that lowering cholesterol saves lives.
60 clinical trials. 323,950 patients. Statins. PCSK9 inhibitors. Ezetimibe. Every drug class. Every dose.
Look at the chart. The x-axis is how much they lowered LDL. Some trials dropped it by 20%. Some by 60%. Some by 80%.
The y-axis is mortality benefit. How many lives were saved.
Every single dot is clustered around zero. Some are below zero. Below zero means more people died.
They reduced LDL by up to 80%. Nobody was saved.
60 clinical trials. 323,950 patients. Statins. PCSK9 inhibitors. Ezetimibe. Every drug class. Every dose.
Look at the chart. The x-axis is how much they lowered LDL. Some trials dropped it by 20%. Some by 60%. Some by 80%.
The y-axis is mortality benefit. How many lives were saved.
Every single dot is clustered around zero. Some are below zero. Below zero means more people died.
They reduced LDL by up to 80%. Nobody was saved.
So how do you take those results and turn them into the best-selling drug class in the history of medicine?
You change the language.
Instead of saying "1 in 200 people benefit," you say "36% risk reduction." Same data. Different framing. One sounds useless. The other sounds like a miracle.
The absolute risk reduction is 1.1%. For every 200 people who take a statin, 1 avoids a heart attack. 199 get no benefit.
Abramson and Wright. BMJ. 2007. 83,000 patients.
With those results you would think this drug would disappear. Instead it became a $200 billion industry. 250 million prescriptions worldwide.
That is not science. That is the greatest marketing campaign in pharmaceutical history. And 250 million people fell for it.
You change the language.
Instead of saying "1 in 200 people benefit," you say "36% risk reduction." Same data. Different framing. One sounds useless. The other sounds like a miracle.
The absolute risk reduction is 1.1%. For every 200 people who take a statin, 1 avoids a heart attack. 199 get no benefit.
Abramson and Wright. BMJ. 2007. 83,000 patients.
With those results you would think this drug would disappear. Instead it became a $200 billion industry. 250 million prescriptions worldwide.
That is not science. That is the greatest marketing campaign in pharmaceutical history. And 250 million people fell for it.
#israele #israelNazi #netanhyau #flottilla
THREAD
La grande colpa di Netanhyau non risiede solo nella azione criminale e genocida del suo governo il cui imput operativo fluttua nell'ambiguità delle responsabilità circa il 7 ottobre
1)
THREAD
La grande colpa di Netanhyau non risiede solo nella azione criminale e genocida del suo governo il cui imput operativo fluttua nell'ambiguità delle responsabilità circa il 7 ottobre
1)
2)
Запорожское направление. ВСУ отбросили российские подразделения из района балки северо-восточнее Каменского. Противник бьёт тревогу: продвижение украинских сил в этом районе создаёт угрозу для всей российской группировки в Плавнях, Приморском и под Степногорском. В ближайшее ⬇️
время противник перебросит сюда дополнительные силы и средства для стабилизации фронта
Петренко
Петренко
Sevim Dağdelen (BSW) beim Betreten der russischen Botschaft im Mai 2025. Empfangen wird sie von einem GRU-Agenten und Kurator des Spionagenetzwerks in Deutschland.
🧵1/22
🧵1/22
Der Mann in Uniform auf dem Foto am Eingang der Botschaft ist Oberst Andrej Majorow. Nach Medienrecherchen agierte er in Berlin unter diplomatischer Tarnung als stellvertretender Militärattaché. In Wahrheit ist er ein hochrangiger Offizier des russischen Militärgeheimdienstes GRU.
🧵2/22
🧵2/22
Majorow diente zuvor bei den weithin bekannten pskower Fallschirmjägern. Später wechselte er zum hochspezialisierten 162. Zentrum für militärtechnische Informationen des GRU, einer zentralen Einheit für die Beschaffung sensibler militärischer Daten.
🧵3/22
🧵3/22
LA CAÍDA EN DESGRACIA
DE LOS RRHH
Desde hace 20 años veo cómo la función de RRHH pierde peso en las empresas.
Desde su auge como 1 de las 4 actividades de soporte a negocio de la cadena de valor de Portero, hasta hoy, el desgaste es evidente.
Explico por qué.
Abro hilo 🧵
DE LOS RRHH
Desde hace 20 años veo cómo la función de RRHH pierde peso en las empresas.
Desde su auge como 1 de las 4 actividades de soporte a negocio de la cadena de valor de Portero, hasta hoy, el desgaste es evidente.
Explico por qué.
Abro hilo 🧵
1) Lo más básico es aceptar que a RRHH siempre le ha costado tener peso en el aparato decisor de las empresas.
Jamás he conocido a un director/a de RRHH con verdadero poder en ninguna gran corporación y a menudo es un cargo directivo honorífico en mediana empresa.
Jamás he conocido a un director/a de RRHH con verdadero poder en ninguna gran corporación y a menudo es un cargo directivo honorífico en mediana empresa.
Esta posición como función esencial de las empresas pero que a la vez no tiene peso real en las decisiones, sitúa a menudo a RRHH como un mero receptor en la asignación anual o trimestral de presupuestos.
Y esto hace que el departamento sea muy vulnerable ante recortes.
Y esto hace que el departamento sea muy vulnerable ante recortes.
Wenn ein politischer Kurs auf allen staatlichen Ebenen – von der Bundesregierung über die Bundestagsfraktionen bis hin zu den Landesregierungen im Bundesrat – als Konsens gilt, gibt es im Gesetzgebungsverfahren keine reguläre Kontrollinstanz mehr, die Einhalt gebietet...
Die systemisch gewollte Verdrängung
von🐘 Covid funktioniert im Bundesrat daher reibungslos
Die Änderung steckt im neuen Apothekenversorgung-Weiterentwicklungsgesetz (ApoVWG) und wird vom Bundesrat am 12. Juni 2026 noch abschließend beraten werden, dass heißt: durchgewunken👋
von🐘 Covid funktioniert im Bundesrat daher reibungslos
Die Änderung steckt im neuen Apothekenversorgung-Weiterentwicklungsgesetz (ApoVWG) und wird vom Bundesrat am 12. Juni 2026 noch abschließend beraten werden, dass heißt: durchgewunken👋
@UnrollHelper unroll
ᅠᅠ
𝐃.𝐀.𝐃.𝐀 : 𝟤𝟥𝟢𝟧𝟤𝟨.
ᅠᅠ
𝐃.𝐀.𝐃.𝐀 : 𝟤𝟥𝟢𝟧𝟤𝟨.
ᅠᅠ
ᅠᅠ
Suasana hangat yang sangat kontras menyambut kedatangan Seraphina ke dalam ruangan 3C. Jubahnya sedikit lembap akibat terkena cipratan tetes air hujan yang turun dengan deras mengguyur kastel sekolahnya.
ᅠᅠ
Suasana hangat yang sangat kontras menyambut kedatangan Seraphina ke dalam ruangan 3C. Jubahnya sedikit lembap akibat terkena cipratan tetes air hujan yang turun dengan deras mengguyur kastel sekolahnya.
ᅠᅠ
ᅠ
Begitu duduk, segera dilepasnya kemudian ia sampirkan di sandaran kursi dengan harapan air yang menyelinap masuk diantara benang fabrik jubahnya bisa menguap didorong udara panas dari perapian di sudut ruangan.
ᅠᅠ“Huft, dingin.” Suaranya terdengar sedikit bergetar.
ᅠ
Begitu duduk, segera dilepasnya kemudian ia sampirkan di sandaran kursi dengan harapan air yang menyelinap masuk diantara benang fabrik jubahnya bisa menguap didorong udara panas dari perapian di sudut ruangan.
ᅠᅠ“Huft, dingin.” Suaranya terdengar sedikit bergetar.
ᅠ
Chose promise, chose due.
Je vous raconte le Comité de l'Union Sémite Universelle
En pleine colonisation, des Juifs et des Musulmans ont théorisé une alliance fraternelle face à l'extrême droite. Voici leur histoire et celle d'autres initiatives🧵
Je vous raconte le Comité de l'Union Sémite Universelle
En pleine colonisation, des Juifs et des Musulmans ont théorisé une alliance fraternelle face à l'extrême droite. Voici leur histoire et celle d'autres initiatives🧵
Imaginez une organisation où Juifs et Arabes se serrent la main, invoquent Dieu dans deux langues et affirment que leur alliance sera la clé de leur délivrance commune.
Ce n'est pas une fiction : c’était à Alger dans les années 1930.
Ce n'est pas une fiction : c’était à Alger dans les années 1930.
C'est au cœur d'Alger qu'est né le « Comité de l'Union Sémite». Son but ? Prôner la fraternité et l'alliance entre Juifs et Musulmans.
À l’époque, l'extrême droite coloniale 🇫🇷et l'antisémitisme européen font rage en Algérie. Ce comité va y opposer un contre-narratif puissant.
À l’époque, l'extrême droite coloniale 🇫🇷et l'antisémitisme européen font rage en Algérie. Ce comité va y opposer un contre-narratif puissant.