My firearms are LGB, Polyamorous and BIFOC

 

My weapons are breech-loaders that joyfully accept many types of ammunition and have blued-steel.

Geography is destiny

Frequent commenter Michael commented that the supply chain is vulnerable to cities-as-choke-points.

While I am not going to dispute that point, I want to demonstrate that the funnel or choke-point effect is highly dependent on geography.

First, some maps

Columbus, Ohio is in the middle of Ohio and the topography is relatively flat. I-70 is a major artery for commerce and it runs pretty much through the center of Columbus from East-to-West.

Later build-out of the Interstate plan has a "ring" around Columbus with a minimum "radius" to downtown of five miles. Then, minor Interstates and state highways act as spokes radiating out from the downtown area.

From a logistical and supply-chain perspective, this looks pretty robust to me.

This is another map of Columbus and it shows the location of all of the Walmarts. Most of them are located close to an intersection of a "spoke" and the ring-Interstate. You can trash-talk Walmart all you want, but they are really sharp when it comes to logistics.

A map of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is not as busy as Columbus but it follows the same general plan. You might notice that the ring is lopsided. If civil disorder snips the ring at the closest point (five miles from downtown) then they would have to project their force almost four times farther to snip it at the northernmost stretch.

St Louis, Missouri is a little more complicated. The Mississippi and Missouri rivers come into play but there is still a generous ring around the core-city.

Even small cities with relatively little strategic importance like Lansing, Michigan have this "ring" structure. Traffic from Chicago-to-Canada bypasses Lansing by taking the west, then northern legs around the city.

One thing that all of these cities share is that they sit on relatively flat land.

Blue line approximates I-70. Green line approximates I-76. Plum-colored lines approximate other Interstates

That all falls apart when you get to hilly terrain. Pittsburgh was built in hilly terrain at a time when water transportation was strategically significant.

While the Pittsburgh area is laced with many roads, the wrinkles and folds of the landscape makes them a nightmare to bypass. That kind of landscape favors the resistance and potentially handicaps the wheels of commerce.

Topography of southern New England and eastern New York

Many of the "classic" cities in New England and New York are compressed in the east-west direction because they are shoe-horned into the Connecticut and Hudson river valleys due to water power and transportation. That makes the lazy-ring + bicycle spoke arrangement uneconomical.

Springfield, Massachusetts. Blue lines approximate interstates. 5-mile measurement bar added for scale.

 

A sobering assessment of land warfare

The rise of long-range strike, drones, and cyber means that the old (safe) rear area is no more. Supply lines are now a front-line fight from start to finish. (Factories) Supply depots, railheads, ports, repair facilities, and fuel infrastructure are all high-priority targets. If an enemy cannot stop forward brigades, it will attempt to starve them. Analyses of modern logistics under fire emphasize that industrial capacity and resilient supply networks—not efficiency—determine strategic endurance.

An army for the future must be able to fight under conditions of intermittent resupply, contested and damaged infrastructure, disrupted and overloaded communications, and near-constant threats to supply lines. Planning and organization must prioritize resilience, redundancy, and regeneration rather than peacetime efficiency and timeliness.

Land warfare (now) favors armies that can fight dispersed but connected, decentralized but coordinated. Small units must be able to operate at will even when isolated or cut off. Junior leaders must be able to act without micromanagement. Commanders must know their communications will be lost and they must be able to exercise control while that loss is happening. Contemporary doctrinal analysis underscores exactly this requirement for decentralized command in contested environments.

This is a question of more than new radios or drones. It is...a cultural issue. The instinct for centralization, risk aversion, and procedural control stems from the experience of peacekeeping and counterinsurgency missions, not from the needs of a high-tech, fully contested battlespace.   -Source 

The way I read this is that when the US goes into its next "hot" war, the battlefield will extend from the front-lines to the transformer sitting on the power-pole outside your house or apartment block.

It will extend to the bridges crossing our rivers and the pipelines and refineries that refine and move oil and natural gas. The cell and fiber-optic networks will come under attack. Our marine ports and air transportation systems will come under attack.

Car-bombs and drive-by shootings will happen on a daily basis as high-value human targets are identified and "taken out". D.C. and Silicon Valley and Houston will become Moscow on steroids.

Today, if you don't know how to turn nutrient-dense ingredients like flour, lard, sugar, dried spaghetti rice and beans into edible food, you still have time to learn. When the supply chain takes a beating, among of the first things to fall off the back of the wagon will be bags-of-air (Doritos, potato chip, popped popcorn, breakfast cereals) and highly processed foods like hot-pockets, frozen pizzas and Jimmy Dean's sausage-egg croissants. I would also plan on bottled water imported from out-of-town soda-pop and iceberg lettuce to become rare/expensive. Plan accordingly.

Christmas: A Season of Bravery

If you are a believer, then you probably believe that Mary and Joseph were devout Jews who practiced their religion with correctness.

I want to look at what they risked by agreeing to be the parents of Jesus.

Mary

Mary risked being rejected by Joseph, the man she was engaged to. Joseph knew that they had not had intercourse so Mary knew that there was a very high probability that Joseph would terminate the engagement and expose her as a fornicator. There was even the potential that Mary could have been stoned for committing the act of adultery.

At another level, Mary's family was very highly regarded. Her brother-in-law was one of the priests allowed into the sanctuary of the temple. Being pregnant before she was supposed to be would bring dishonor upon her whole family. Likely, she would have been disowned. 

Joseph

Joseph was a tradesman. Traditionally, his profession has been translated as "carpenter" but some scholars think it he could have been a brick maker or a potter or some other building trade. Their reasoning is that wood is scarce in the Holy Land and having one person working solely with wood seemed unlikely in a village.

It is almost a certainty that the crones would count the months from when Joseph took Mary into his house and when Jesus was born. They would look at his size when he was born and they would quickly figure out that Mary had conceived before they were married.

This will seem like a very, very small thing to many modern people...but it was a very big deal not so long ago.

The people in the village (many of them family members) would conclude that Joseph did not follow the rules, that he cut corners and "cheated". Not a very good look for a tradesman whose reputation pays his wages.

That would have been a cruel, hard blow to an upright man who took pride in his strict compliance to Mosaic Law. 

Flight to Egypt

Shortly after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Joseph, Mary and Jesus fled to Egypt to evade King Herrod's massacre of the infants. In some ways this is a repeat of the Jews fleeing to Egypt to evade the famine during the time of Joseph, son of Jacob.

In this case, Mary's time with Elizabeth, Jesus's birth in Bethlehem (not Nazareth) and the subsequent flight to Egypt stymied the old hags who would have counted the months and then wagged their tongues.

The message for us in 2025/26

Mary and Joseph followed the mission that God gave them. They knew the risks and did the right thing anyway. They had no way of knowing that other things would happen that would short-circuit the likely outcomes.

To me it is a message of "Do the right thing. Be merciful. Pray. Let the chips fall where they may." Don't be enslaved by the bad decisions we may have made in the past. This is what we signed-on for.

"The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."  Luke 12:53 KJV

Another Christmas Party After-Action-Report

The immediate ERJ Family Christmas celebration is in-the-bag for 2025.

Mrs ERJ and I will attend Mass tomorrow morning, but all of the heavy-lifting (socially) is done. 

Highlights

We have been enjoying beautiful sunrises.

Most of the high-calorie treats were sent home with the kids (Yeah!!!)

Our new son-in-law made the salad and we kept that here (Double Yeah!!!)

The presents were modest and everybody seemed grateful. Even the gag-gifts were well received.

I learned that my regular attire is now considered fashionable. The family fashionista informed me that New Balance shoes are retro-cool. And in the summer, so is wearing calf-height crew socks AND sandals. Ironically, the last combination was once known as "Senior Citizen birth-control" since it would NOT get you any dates. 

Nobody unearthed sensitive, unpleasant events from the past. We did talk about some times that were unpleasant but those were times when the family pulled-together and got through it; no victims but plenty of heroes.

Belladonna was dragged out to the swing set by Quicksilver. I learned that they both share a dislike of snakes.

This guy was pretty lively for an air temperature of 40F.  He keyed out as Heterodon platirhinos 

White Oak leaf included in the frame to provide a size reference.

"No fangs, none for me today" You can kind-of see the "hog-nose" that gives this snake its common name "Hognose Snake". One of his defenses is to spoof being a venomous snake.

I was assigned the job of relocating Heterodon.

Posted for future reference

 

A Youtube short of about a minute.

The speaker says his piece and gets booed.

Paraphrasing (because I know some people dislike Youtube) 

Men: Do you live a life that demonstrates enough virtue that a rational woman will be comfortable submitting to your authority?

When you are probing unknown territory, do you squash down your ego and ask for guidance? Do you ask HER? That is what mature authority looks like; using the best information to make the best decisions.

Women: Do you demonstrate enough virtue that a rational man will be willing to risk dying to protect you? 

This is what "Women, submit to your husbands and men, love your wife the way Christ loved his church"means. 

What we call "Mental Illness" can be a positive adapation for certain environmental stresses

Is it possible that there are situations where "symptoms of mental illness" are positive adaptations?

Anxiety and Depression 

The two largest categories of mental illness in terms of number of diagnoses are Anxiety and Depression.

Anxiety: May I suggest that the ant in the story "The Ant and the Grasshopper" was driven by anxiety to store provisions for the winter?

Mass grave of Medieval famine victims

Getting ready for winter was not a trivial task in medieval Europe. The days of summer were long in terms of number of sunlight hours due to the high latitude. Peasants had to work as if the hounds-of-hell were chasing them every daylight hour. The name of that hound? "Anxiety".

Peasants who were not anxious starved to death before the next harvest.

Incidentally, people who are anxious tend to be great planners. They constantly play "What if..." in their minds and make plans to remediate those issues. Modern society sits on a foundation of What-if plans. 

Depression: Conversely, being able to sleep for 20 hours a day during the winter was an energy conservation strategy. Put the entire family into bed and throw all of the clothing and blankets over them and let the cooking fire drop to a slow-smolder. Relatively little energy was expended. 

If you charted the energy expenditures it would look like the flight of a woodpecker. A burst of beating wings and then a ballistic free-flight that was as long or longer than the burst of wings beating.

Not wanting to socialize was also a benefit. Lice spread typhus and those beds got lousy because boiling all of the bedding and then drying it all-in-one-go was beyond the means of most families. Socializing meant sharing lice with other families...lice which might bring typhus into your family. 

ADHD

It is notable that the surge in diagnosed cases of Attention Deficit, Hyperactive Disorder(ADHD) in boys approximately aligns with the removal of gym classes and recess from elementary schools? It also coincides with the time when kids transitioned from walking to-and-from school with busing being the predominant mode of getting to-and-from school.

A "good student" is one who sits passively and "doesn't make trouble".

There was a time when every person in the family had to contribute to the household economy. Those little boys would scour the area for twigs and sticks to cook the daily porridge. They would trap sparrows and catch minnows for the stew-pot. The child who sat passively and "didn't make trouble" was an economic dead-weight in terms of the family economy in a subsistence environment.

In older people, having a certain percentage of the population with ADHD meant that nearby tribes could not sneak up on your tribe. Nor were flash-floods and sudden wildfires likely to catch the tribe unaware if Billy was relentlessly scanning 360 degrees of the compass.

Finally, I had a conversation with a doctor who claimed to have ADHD.  His intellect was impressive as he quickly leapt from topic-to-topic. It is my impression that he was probably very good at diagnosing issues because he didn't get trapped or "overly-invested" in any one possibility. 

I have seen trouble-shooters in the factory get bogged down when they are "absolutely sure" they know the cause of a problem and then they try to bend the symptoms to match the illness. They would have been far more effective if they considered the four most likely diagnosis consistent with the main complaint and then looked for the best fit. 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

PTSD comes in a lot of flavors, but in some cases it keeps people alive on the battlefield. There are situations where actions must happen faster than conscious thought. Obviously, I am not talking about the PTSD where the person goes catatonic. I mean the PTSD where the patient explodes out of bed 210% awake and sprinting at the sound of whistling or a "pop". Maybe they smash the face of the person who is too close to them.

Summary 

Are these behaviors anomalies or is our current environment a transient anomaly? The subsistence agriculture in Europe lasted for roughly 3000 years. Warfare has been around longer than that. Industrialized education, depending on how you want to define it, has been around for fifty-to-one-hundred years.