As one thing leads to another..........

      For the French, helping the American rebels held obvious allure.  It presented an opportunity to avenge their defeat in the Seven Years' War.  True, the territorial loss of Canada could be exaggerated—Voltaire infamously dismissed Canada as "a few acres of snow."  It was also true the economic impact of the defeat could be exaggerated—France retained control over her Caribbean colonies, where enslaved Africans produced the sugar, coffee, and cotton generating the real wealth of the French colonial empire. But statecraft was not all hard economics: pride and prestige were important, too.  Since the end of the last war, the French had wallowed in national resentment.  Any chance to knock the British down a peg was a chance worth taking.  The public certainly seemed enthusiastic.  When the rebellion in America broke out, the cause of les insurgents became all the rage in French society.

-Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution

They did show up in a timely fashion though.........

       But there were risks.  Lord Stormont, British ambassador to France and a seasoned diplomat, made it plain his government considered the conflict an internal affair.  The consequences for a foreign power aiding the rebels would be dire.  He was confident France would stay out of it, though.  Despite the allure of humbling the British, the literal cost of getting involved seemed prohibitive.  France's national treasury faced growing budget deficits each year thanks to an archaic tax system exempting anyone who actually possessed real wealth.  The French monarchy floundered in dysfunctional debt for most of the eighteenth century and things were only getting worse.  It did not seem France's dream of cleaving the British Empire in twain could survive the reality of her annual budget reports.  King Louis XVI would be wise to focus on financial reform, not imperial war.

-Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds, The Marqui de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution

Courage.........................

  thanks Rob

Fifty years ago...........................

The Rolling Stones.........................Sweet Virginia

 

The beauty of studying history..........

...................comes from realizing the world has always and forever been a glorious mess.   

      The French expansion into the Ohio country put their plans in jeopardy.  Not only did the French reject the right of the British crown to grant lands in Ohio to the Ohio Company or anyone else, but a French presence in Ohio would render the region insecure for Anglo-American settlers.  The French themselves would be hostile; more threateningly they would turn the Indians of the region hostile.  The various tribes there understood the competition between the two European empires, and they played one against the other, to their own benefit.  Part of the benefit consisted of trade goods that made the lives of Indians easier—firearms, steel knives and the like; another part entailed military support in the rivalries of the tribes against one another.  The sum of the interplay of empires and tribes was a welter of intrigues and conflicts on the frontier: British against French, British against France's Indian allies, Britain's Indian allies against the French and the French Indians, Indians against Indians.  There was even competition between Virginians and residents of other British colonies, notably Pennsylvania and New York, who had their own claims to the Ohio country.

-H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution

The hopeful birth..............................

 ......................of a subdivision:  Episode 17:

Getting the base coat of asphalt paving down before they closed the asphalt plant for winter was a big deal in my world.  Heroic efforts by our contractor, Layton, Inc., got it done.  Work has continued at the site since then; just haven't posted anything for a while.  Time to catch up.

The Energy Cooperative will be providing natural gas service to the subdivision.  They are user friendly.  They come when called, and they don't charge the developer for the installation of the gas lines.

Especially........................

 Seek distance from coercive people, especially those who long to command you for your good.

-Michael Wade

Going all out for my Sweetie..............

 

   more fun here

Opening paragraphs..........................

      The fighting had been vicious in the Carolinas since the start of the war.  And it was the more vicious for pitting not American against Briton, nor even American against Hessian, but American against American.  John Adams would say that the American Revolution was in the "minds and hearts" of the American people before it produced the armed struggle between the United States and Britain; what Adams neglected to mention was the degree to which those minds and hearts were at odds, one American against another.  In every colony, and then every state, were thousands of men and women who wanted nothing to do with independence.  They valued the freedom and security they had enjoyed under British rule, and they resented the rebel Patriots for bringing on the war.  These Loyalists cast their lot with the mother country; the result was the shattering of trust among neighbors, the rending of families, and the murderous conflict like that convulsing the Carolina backcountry.

-H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in The American Revolution

Not sure this is possible.............

 more fun here

Quest.............................

 . . . the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison; that the quest to define ourselves on our own is a kind of El Dorado, driving to madness the many who seek after it; that for our best, highest selves to soar, other parts of us must be tied down, enclosed, limited, bound.

-Sohrab Ahmari,  The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos

      

From the wide wide world of....................

.......................................... Leo Moracchioli

 

thanks Doug

On commerce....................

 The Fall of Rome was largely a fiscal affair.  The low interest rates of the Pax Romana were not sufficient to offset the unhealthy effects of an economy based on conquest rather than commerce.

-William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created

tales of daring.....................

      When Gilbert turned seven, Madame Chavaniac hired a young local priest, Abbé Fayon, to serve as a live-in tutor.  Fayon taught young Gilbert reading, writing, and math.  He introduced classics like The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War, which was the story of the conquest of Lafayette's own homeland.  The province of Auvergne derived its name from the Arverni, an ancient Gallic tribe that produced Vercingetorix, the last and greatest leader of the Gallic resistance to the Roman conquest.  The Battle of Gergovia, one of Caesar's rare defeats in the war, occurred practically in Lafayette's backyard.  The boy thrilled with these tales of daring, adventure, courage, rebellion, and glory.  He said later, "I can recall no time in my life when I did not love stories of glorious deeds, or have dreams of traveling the world in search of fame."

-Mike Duncan, Hero Of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution

Mind....................

 If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious.  Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?

-Epictetus, from here

Not ranting here..............

 The great predicament of our moment in history is the collapse of the public’s trust in democratic institutions. That collapse is long-running, well-established, and catastrophic. Every corner of our fractured political landscape feels compelled to express, vociferously, its anger and repudiation. The default rhetorical posture of the web has become the rant.

-Martin Gurri, from here

Unplugged...............................

  “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.”

-Wendell Berry, from here

It's the vision thing.............................

In the short-run it’s difficult to see an easy way out of the current geopolitical nightmare.

In the long-run it’s always a bad idea to bet against the power of the human spirit.

-Ben Carlson, from here

We love our elaborate stories.....................

 A warehouse of experimental evidence now attests to our cognitive shortcomings: our willingness to jump the inferential gun, to be too quick to draw strong conclusions from ambiguous evidence, and to be too slow to change our minds as disconfirming observations trickle in. A balanced apportionment of blame should acknowledge that learning is hard because even seasoned professionals are ill-equipped to cope with the complexity, ambiguity, and dissonance inherent in assessing causation in history. Life throws up a lot of puzzling events that thoughtful observers feel impelled to explain because the policy stakes are so high. However, just because we want an explanation does not mean that one is within reach. To achieve explanatory closure in history, observers must fill in the missing counterfactual comparison scenarios with elaborate stories grounded in their deepest assumptions about how the world works.

-Philip Tetlock

In the background..............................

Russ Freeman and Craig Chaquico