Ummagumma

Proof of purchase. [ Review of Vol 1 ] [ Review of Vol 2 ] Volume three of David A. Powell’s outstanding history of the Atlanta Campaign came out about three weeks ago. I devoured it greedily when my copy arrived. The book opens after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Confederate officials are concerned about retreating below the Chattahoochee River. To lose the rail line to Alabama would isolate the resources of the Southern heartland from both General Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Brig. General Francis Shoup, like many Southern soldiers and officers, was frustrated by Johnston’s constant retreating. He proposed to build a line of fortifications north of the river that could be held “by one division” against General William T. Sherman’s combined Union armies. This would obviously free up enough infantry to allow Johnston to strike with his full weight against any weakness in the Northern advance. Johnston authorized Shoup to begi...

[ Read My Iran Stuff ] October was the busiest month of the tanker war. Lloyd's List counted 28 attacks on shipping, the most of any month since February. Tankers burning off Qatar, off the UAE, off Khasab. A container ship sank. Unlike March, however, this time the oil kept coming. Because this is oil we are talking about here, not Christmas toys from China. In the week through October 18, about 14 million barrels a day moved through Hormuz. That's roughly 60% - 80% of prewar levels, depending on the accountant. Either number would have been unthinkable in May. Meanwhile about 40% of Gulf crude now goes around the Strait by pipeline, against 17% before the war. Total Gulf exports actually topped prewar levels. Iran has never tried harder to close Hormuz. It has never mattered less. And that is why I said in my last post that Iran is starting to lose the war strategically. On July 31 I wrote that Hormuz wouldn't open as long as the IRGC kept hitting oil tankers. I was ...

I remember talking with longtime political friends in November 1994, I was working at a large community bank at the time. Almost every loan officer and the president of the bank were politically minded. I learned a lot of politics from them and managed to show them my own ideas were not too strange. The bank president said, rather blandly, that George W. Bush was predicted to defeat Ann Richards for governor of Texas. I just did not think that would happen. I told him so. And in such missteps I learned to keep my mouth shut a shade more often. It was a big red wave. President Clinton took a beating. The idea of what was then called “national health care” (not Clintoncare or something) was already dying in the Senate that September. I didn’t know it then but it was dead for 16 more years. It did eventually come back, though. Maybe it was just in a coma. Republicans gained 54 House seats and eight in the Senate, taking both chambers for the first time in 40 years. About ten governorshi...

Since I published the books I’ve wrestled with finding better evidence of harmogenics than I actually presented. Reading back on those important sections now, my examples are accurate but too general by themselves. They establish the validity of the claim but do little to put it on display. Ultimately, the best evidence for what I am talking about is going to be you looking into your own life experiences. Nevertheless, I claim that when people combine their practices, something emerges beyond the parts, but where is the proof? Plenty of people garden and paint and run and never connect them in a special way. Plenty of accomplished people have hobbies, and maybe they’d have accomplished just as much without them. Correlation isn’t causation, which is a really inconvenient fact. Show me the evidence. I grounded harmogenics (or tried to anyway) in the science of emergence and complex systems, and I’m confident in that foundation. What I didn’t give enough of were specific lives, people...