Start by doing what is necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you’re doing the impossible. – Saint Francis of Assisi
What My Friend Thinks vs Reality
Lt General Paul Van Riper
(Tom: An adversary that does not play to your strengths but builds its own is always going to do better than you expect it to do.
The ability to face hard truths is a survival skill. Those who would survive would do well to learn that skill well. It is called ’confront’ – the ability to face without flinching. I know a course you can do that vastly increases your ability to confront. It is also a vital skill to have if you would not be drawn into responding when provoked. PM me for more data.)
It was the most expensive war game in Pentagon history.
$250 million. Two years of planning. 13,500 participants. Live exercises and simulations across multiple locations.
The year was 2002. The U.S. military was riding a wave of technological supremacy unlike anything the world had seen. Advanced surveillance systems. Real-time intelligence. Precision weapons. Networked command structures. The belief, which had been building for years, was that modern technology had fundamentally changed war — and that the United States was now essentially unbeatable.
Millennium Challenge 2002 was supposed to prove it.
The Blue Force would represent America. The Red Force would represent a fictional adversary — a rogue Middle Eastern military, essentially modeled on Iran.
To lead the Red Force, commanders selected retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper — a 41-year veteran of combat, from Vietnam to Desert Storm. They chose him specifically because he was difficult. Unpredictable. The kind of man who would genuinely try to win, not just go through the motions.
They believed the system could handle him.
It could not.
Van Riper had watched previous war games produce false confidence. He had complained about it for years. He had been promised this one would be different — honest, open, free-play. A real test.
He intended to hold them to that promise.
When the Blue Force delivered an ultimatum — effectively demanding Red’s surrender — Van Riper read the message for what it was.
A declaration of war.
He struck first.
He knew Blue’s technological advantage depended on communication — tracking signals, monitoring networks, intercepting digital traffic. So he went dark. He sent orders by motorcycle courier. He relayed signals using coded lights on his airfields — World War II tactics. He even embedded hidden messages inside the calls to prayer broadcast from local mosques.
There was nothing to intercept. No signal to trace. No digital footprint at all.
Then he launched every asset he had — simultaneously.
A massive salvo from commercial ships, low-flying aircraft, and suicide speedboats overwhelmed the Navy’s electronic defense systems. National Security Archive
The simulated U.S. Navy battle group was defeated in ten minutes. National Security Archive
One aircraft carrier. Ten cruisers. Five amphibious ships. Sixteen warships gone.
Had it been real, an estimated 20,000 American sailors and Marines would have been dead before most of them understood what was happening.
The exercise was immediately suspended.
The ships were — in the language of the simulation — “refloated.“
And then the rules changed.
Red Force was ordered to turn on its radar so it could be targeted and destroyed. Van Riper was told he could not shoot down incoming aircraft. His unit locations were revealed to the enemy. His officers began receiving instructions directly from exercise controllers — instructions that overrode his commands. His team was handed a script and told to follow it.
The second round proceeded predictably. Blue Force won comfortably. The after-action report would later describe the exercise as a “major milestone.“
Van Riper walked out.
He submitted a 21-page classified critique. He received no response. When he realized his name was going to be used to validate conclusions he had explicitly rejected, he went public.
“Nothing was learned from this,“ he said. “A culture not willing to think hard and test itself does not augur well for the future.“
Within a year, the United States invaded Iraq — using many of the same operational concepts that Millennium Challenge had been designed to validate.
The lessons Van Riper had demonstrated, at $250 million, in ten minutes — the vulnerability to asymmetric attack, the fragility of technology-dependent systems against low-tech improvisation, the danger of scripting your own victory — were not incorporated into the planning.
The Pentagon’s own after-action report would eventually acknowledge, years later, that the Red Force’s free play had been constrained to ensure a Blue victory. The documents were classified for over a decade.
Paul Van Riper never stopped saying what he had seen.
He did not embarrass the system.
He showed it the truth.
And the truth was simpler than $250 million worth of technology:
An enemy that thinks for itself, moves fast, and doesn’t fight by your rules — will not lose by your rules either.
Based on verified historical records, Wikipedia, the National Security Archive, and the War on the Rocks journal. Shared for educational and historical awareness.
William Marshal
The year was 1152, and a five-year-old boy stood trembling before a massive siege engine.
His name was William Marshal, and his father had just signed his death warrant.
During the brutal civil war known as The Anarchy, William’s father had given the boy to King Stephen as a hostage to guarantee a truce.
But when the father broke that truce immediately, the King sent word that he would hang the boy or launch him from a catapult over the castle walls.
His father’s response was chilling: “I still have the hammer and the anvil with which to forge still more and better sons.”
To his father, William was a disposable pawn. To the King, he was a nuisance.
But the King looked into the eyes of the boy playing with his spears and saw something different. He saw a spark of courage that stayed the executioner’s hand.
William survived that day, but he was left with nothing—no land, no inheritance, and no future but the one he could carve with a sword.
He spent his youth in the brutal world of medieval tournaments, which were less like sports and more like chaotic, small-scale wars.
He didn’t just participate; he dominated. It is said he captured over 500 knights in his career, amassing a fortune in ransoms and a reputation that echoed across Europe.
But William Marshal was more than a mercenary. He was a man of an extinct brand of loyalty.
In 1189, during a rebellion, a young and hot-headed Prince Richard—the man who would become Richard the Lionheart—found himself face-to-face with Marshal on the battlefield.
Richard was the greatest warrior of his age, yet Marshal charged him with such ferocity that the Prince was terrified.
“By God’s legs, Marshal, do not kill me!” Richard shouted.
Marshal had the power to change history with one thrust of his spear. Instead, he chose a different path.
He pivoted his aim at the last second and drove his lance through Richard’s horse, killing the animal and pinning the Prince to the ground.
He had proven he could take the life of a future king, yet his code of honor forbade it. He simply turned his horse and rode away.
When Richard eventually took the throne, he didn’t seek revenge. He sought the service of the man who was brave enough to best him.
William Marshal would go on to serve five different English kings, often acting as the only pillar of stability in a kingdom tearing itself apart.
His greatest test came during the reign of King John, a man widely regarded as one of the worst monarchs in history.
While other barons betrayed the King and invited a French invasion, Marshal remained steadfast.
It wasn’t because he loved the tyrant John; it was because he had sworn an oath before God to protect the crown.
When King John died in 1216, the kingdom was in ruins. Half of England was occupied by the French, and the heir to the throne, Henry III, was only nine years old.
The boy king was crowned with his mother’s golden belt because the royal crown had been lost in a swamp.
At nearly 70 years old—an ancient age for a medieval warrior—William Marshal was named Protector of the Realm.
He didn’t retreat to his estates. He put on his armor one last time.
At the Battle of Lincoln in 1217, the old man led the charge himself, his white hair flowing from beneath his helmet as he smashed the French forces and secured the throne for the boy king.
He saved England when no one else could, then voluntarily gave up his power as Regent once the threat had passed.
As he felt his final days approaching in 1219, he did something that surprised the royal court.
He summoned the Knights Templar to his bedside. Years earlier, while on crusade in the Holy Land, he had secretly promised to join their order.
On his deathbed, the greatest knight of the age took the vows of poverty and service, dying not as a wealthy Earl, but as a humble brother of the Temple.
At his funeral, the Archbishop of Canterbury stood over his body and addressed the grieving crowd.
He didn’t call him a politician, a lord, or a general. He gave him the title that has followed him through the centuries.
“He was,” the Archbishop said, “the greatest knight that ever lived.”
He began his life as a boy destined for a catapult and ended it as the savior of a nation, proving that a man’s worth is not born in his blood, but forged in his honor.
Sources: ’The History of William Marshal’ (13th-century biography) / British Library Archives / University of Oxford Historical Records
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Remedies For Plant Diseases
The garden center sells a bottle for every plant disease. Your grocery store sells the same active ingredients for a fraction of the price.
Milk kills powdery mildew. Baking soda kills black spot. Cinnamon kills damping off. The science behind all three is real, and you probably already own them.
Six diseases, six grocery-store fixes:– White powdery coating on squash, cucumber, or rose leaves — mix forty percent whole milk with sixty percent water, spray weekly in morning sun. The milk proteins create a reaction on the leaf surface that kills the spores.
– Black spots with yellow halos on roses — one tablespoon of baking soda in a gallon of water with a drop of dish soap. Spray weekly. It raises the leaf surface pH above the range where the fungus can germinate.
– Seedlings collapsing at the soil line — sprinkle ground cinnamon directly on the soil surface. It kills fungal spores on contact. Also works on cut surfaces when dividing plants or taking cuttings.
– Aphid clusters on leaf undersides — one tablespoon of cold-pressed neem oil in a gallon of water with a drop of dish soap. Spray directly on the clusters in the evening. Target only where you see them — neem kills beneficial insects too.
– Weak pale seedlings that won’t thrive — water trays with cooled chamomile tea instead of plain water. The gentlest treatment on the list.
– Dark water-soaked spots spreading fast on tomatoes in wet weather — copper spray from the garden center, applied before infection as a preventive. The only one on this list with real risks from overuse — follow label rates exactly.
The grocery store treatment aisle costs less than the garden center one. And it works.
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
John Leake writes:
“…it’s clear that by any standard apart from technical prowess, American civilization is in a state of rapid decline.
Why has this decline occurred? Pondering the question took me back to the thesis of a book that I was assigned to read in one of my college history classes—that is, Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, in which he set forth his theory of civilizational decline.
As he famously put it, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
As he saw it, a civilization collapses not from external conquest, but from internal rot. This “suicide” is not a sudden act but a process of self-disintegration.
Toynbee reached this conclusion through a comparative analysis of multiple civilizations, including the Hellenic (Greco-Roman), Egyptian, and Chinese.
In his view, civilizations grow strong when a “creative minority”—an elite group of leaders—meets environmental, military, or social challenges. The majority follows not by coercion but through willing imitation. Growth continues so long as the minority retains its creative vitality and inspires collective effort.
Decline begins when this creative minority degenerates into a “dominant minority.”
Proud and complacent about its past successes, the erstwhile creative minority idolizes its own power and prestige, loses moral authority, and begins to rule by force rather than from genuine care, responsibility, and desire to build and create.
Hubris, nationalism, militarism, and the pursuit of material comfort replace creative innovation. Society fractures into a “schism” between the alienated “internal proletariat” (the masses who remain geographically inside the civilization but withdraw their trust and faith in the elite, and the elite that is increasingly detached from the material reality of the people it rules.
A “time of troubles” ensues—marked by internal conflict, class warfare, and futile attempts to freeze the status quo through imperial expansion and domination of other tribes. These actions are symptoms of decline. The civilization has already committed suicide by failing to respond in a creative and productive way to the challenges it faces.
Toynbee illustrated the pattern repeatedly. In the Hellenic case, Rome’s imperial machinery could not compensate for the spiritual exhaustion and social alienation that rotted the republic. Pressure from the barbarians on the frontier merely accelerated the collapse that had occurred internally in the way a storm knocks down an old tree whose core was already dying.
It’s consoling to note that Toynbee did not regard decline as inevitable. He believed that human agency matters, and that it may be possible for a new creative minority to slow or even stop the decline. Civilizations die because they choose—through undue pride, complacency, hubris, greed, and a disconnection from reality—to stop maintaining and building.
Toynbee died in 1975. Were he alive today, he would certainly see in the West a perfect illustration of this thesis.”
20 Veggies To Grow In Shade
There are some inclusions here with which other data I have does not agree. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Cabbage and Kale are commonly held to require more sun to produce larger yields. Probably the difference between what you can get away with to produce a result versus what is optimal.
Paul Simon
Paul Simon sat down in 1969 and wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in a single sitting.
When he played it for Art Garfunkel, the room went silent in the way rooms only go silent when something is clearly, undeniably extraordinary.
Then Garfunkel said something that surprised him.
“You should sing it yourself.”
It wasn’t false modesty. Garfunkel knew exactly what this song was. A centerpiece. A career-defining moment. The kind of performance that follows a singer for the rest of their life. And deep down, he wasn’t sure he wanted that weight.
Because for years, the unspoken truth of their partnership had been sitting right there on the table between them. Paul created. Art delivered. Singing Simon’s greatest song would cement that reality out in the open, permanently, for the whole world to see.
Simon listened. Then he made his decision.
“No. You’re singing it. Your voice is right for this.”
He wasn’t wrong.
When Garfunkel recorded that vocal, that quiet, almost fragile opening slowly building into something vast and aching by the final verse, it was breathtaking. The song and the voice fit together the way very few things in music ever do. Simon knew it the instant he heard the playback.
But he had just given away the greatest song he would ever write.
The album dropped in January 1970. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” shot to number one and stayed there. It swept the Grammys, winning six awards including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. It became the defining moment of their entire career, the first thing strangers thought of when the name Simon and Garfunkel crossed their minds.
And it was built on a quiet fault line neither man could ignore.
Simon had written every word. Constructed every layer of the arrangement. Made every creative decision. Garfunkel had sung it gloriously, in a way nobody else on earth could have matched. But when audiences heard that song, they heard Art’s voice soaring over everything.
Simon kept the authorship. Garfunkel got the spotlight.
Neither felt they had received what they truly deserved.
By the end of 1970, less than a year after the album’s release, Simon and Garfunkel had quietly gone their separate ways. No dramatic fight. No press conference. No single moment anyone could point to. Just two people who had built something magnificent together, finally acknowledging what they had both already known.
They reunited over the decades. Tours. Performances. A concert in Central Park that drew half a million people. Each time there was genuine warmth between them. But the same unresolved weight was always there too, that same dynamic that had never shifted, never healed, never been fully spoken aloud.
The men who gave the world “The Sound of Silence,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “The Boxer,” and “America” could not sustain the partnership that made those songs possible.
Because “Bridge Over Troubled Water” had told the truth about them before either was ready to hear it.
It was never really a collaboration. It was two separate gifts, offered across a table, to a partnership that had already quietly ended.
Simon gave Garfunkel the song because Art’s voice genuinely deserved it. That was real generosity.
Garfunkel delivered a performance that lifted the song beyond what Simon alone might have made of it. That was real greatness.
But generosity and greatness don’t automatically produce equality.
Paul Simon went on to one of the most celebrated solo careers in music history. Art Garfunkel made beautiful records of his own. Both proved they could stand alone.
But they needed each other. And they couldn’t be what the other needed.
There is a song you already know. You have turned to it in your hardest moments because it promises that someone will lay themselves down, like a bridge, so you can cross.
Paul Simon wrote that promise.
Art Garfunkel made you believe it.
And the distance between those two things turned out to be exactly as wide as everything that separated them.
Greenhouse Chicken Coop
When a coop shares a wall with a greenhouse, four exchanges happen without any equipment. The chickens exhale CO2 that the plants use for photosynthesis. The plants release oxygen that circulates back to the coop. The chickens radiate enough body heat to smooth temperature swings on cold nights. And the manure composts into the fertilizer the greenhouse beds need.
No electricity. No pumps. Just a shared wall with adjustable vents.
The heat contribution is modest — it won’t replace insulation in a harsh winter, but it smooths the overnight temperature swing that kills tender seedlings. The CO2 is modest too — not commercial greenhouse levels, but enough to replenish what the plants consume in a sealed winter greenhouse.
What makes it work:
– Adjustable vents in the shared wall — open during the day for gas exchange, closed at night to trap warmth
– Wire mesh barriers so chickens can’t access growing beds. They’ll scratch up seedlings and dust-bathe in your soil if given the chance
– Deep litter on the coop floor — eight to twelve inches of straw or wood shavings that absorbs moisture, reduces ammonia, and composts in place
– Enough ventilation to prevent ammonia buildup. Chicken manure in an enclosed space harms both plants and birds without airflow
Four exchanges running continuously. The animals feed the plants. The plants clean the air for the animals.
The smartest design is letting biology work together
Vasectomy vs Tubal Ligation
An interesting discussion including percentage risks of each.
Watch video: https://youtube.com/shorts/ZcFQQUqoZq8?si=BSLNYzVqmIS_xc-o