Edifices of Light - Part 1

Engineering and Global Trade?

It is as Thomas “Stonewall”Jackson stated;

“The rules of strategy are few and simple. They may be learned in a week. They may be taught by familiar illustrations or a dozen diagrams. But such knowledge will no more teach a man to lead an army like Napoleon than a knowledge of grammar will teach him to write like Gibbon.”

More germane to our immediate concerns is the cause of the collapse of a portion of the Champlain Towers in Miami.?

Engineer Marabito reported in 2018 that poorly sloped waterproofing had led salt water to so deteriorate the iron-barred concrete supports of this building that unless remediated, this posed a clear and present danger to the integrity of the building itself. He also stated that remediation would be costly and complex. Remediation did not occur.

Relevance

No one has yet related the collapse of the tower to the rise of the oceans or Climate Change or the to the creeping rise of mediocrity in American business management, govrnancein the US. This is also reminiscent of the “creeping mediocrity” of thought in America, enduced by those who would divide us;

through misinformation and incompetence;

for their own selfish purposes.?

Civil War

Shelby Foote, who wrote an extraordinary 3-volume epic on the US Civil War, served in both the US Army and the US Marine Corps. No “armchair general” he. Foote declared that one cannot fully understand US history without understanding the Civil War and its battles - in the season during which they took place. This is a contention with which I partially agree.?

One cannot fully understand America without an understanding of American Dialogue, a book by Joseph J. Ellis;

The First Salute;

and The March of Folly;

books written by Barbara Tuchman;

Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard B. Fall;

The Prince and The Discourses of Machiavelli;?

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon;?

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History by Alfred Thayer Mahan;

The Prize by Daniel Yergin;

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway;?

The Path Between the Seas by McCullough;

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath;

The Holy Bible, William Shakespeare, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address;

and many of the other books my parents, teachers and mentors encouraged me to read.

During my time in the Marines, General Mattis;

encouraged all Marines and especially the officer corps to read a library of military history because it saves lives and because the fundamental responsibility of the officer corps is to take care of the troops in or out of battle.

The "warrior monk

"In this age, I don't care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are,” declared the studious “warrior monk,” if you cannot create harmony — even vicious harmony — on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete. We have got to have officers who can create harmony across all those lines."

Continued