Notes, Brainstorming & Research

Curious History & Facts About Warfare

Submitted by redkabbage on Thu, 08/28/2008 - 02:52

Do you want to hear some curious facts & history about warfare--from Alexander the Great to George W. Bush? If you're a man, you're goddamn right you do. Who doesn't want to know this shit!? It's awesome!

You want to sell newspapers? Start a War.
1898: Press magnate William Randolf Heart, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, gave his New York Journal the edge in a newspaper circulation war with his rival World by launching a successful campaign for U.S. intervention in the Cuban struggle for independence, leading to the Spanish-American War. What's a little war to sell a few newspapers, eh?

Sparta on boosting morale:
Lycrugus of Sparta (c. 800 B.C.) encouraged gay sex for soldiers as a way of bonding. He wrote it into the Sparta constitution.

Trotsky's 'Blocking detachments':
During the Russian civil war (1918-1920) Leon Trotsky ordered troops for "blocking detachments" behind the front lines in order to shoot soldiers who attempted to retreat.

The past lives of General George S. Patton:

  1. A prehistoric mammoth hunter
  2. A Greek hoplite who fought the Persians
  3. A soldier of Alexander the Great at the siege of Tyre
  4. Hannibal
  5. A Roman legionary under Julius Caesar
  6. An English knight during the Hundred Years' War
  7. A Napoleonic marshal

Patton uses the tough love approach:

"Hell, you are just a goddamned coward, you yellow son of a bitch. Shut up that goddamned crying. I won't have these brave men here who have been shot seeing a yellow bastard here crying. You're a disgrace to the army and you're going back to the front to fight, although that's too good for you. You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. In fact, I ought to shoot you myself right now, goddamned you!" -- George S. Patton, who was notorious for slapping and punching shell-shocked soldiers as well as threatening them with his pistol

Gays in the Military:
(Commanders reputed to be homosexual or bisexual)

  • Achilles
  • Leonidas of Sparta
  • Alexander the Great
  • Julius Caesar
  • Richard the Lionheart
  • Saladin
  • William of Orange
  • Frederick the Great
  • Lawrence of Arabia

U.S. Navy Seal Training Program:

FIRST PHASE (Basic Conditioning), 8 weeks:  Begins with four-mile timed runs in boots, timed obstacle courses, and two-mile ocean swims. The  fourth week is known as "Hell Week," in which recruits undergo five and a half days of continuous running, swimming, boat drills, and lifting 500-pound logs, with no more than four hours' sleep in total. The ordeal commenses just before midnight with an instructor waking trainees with machine-gun fire. The remaining four weeks are spent in the classroom.

SECOND PHASE (Diving), 8 weeks: Qualifies recruits as basic combat simmers.

THIRD PHASE (Land Warfare), 9 weeks: Trains candidates in weapons, demolition, and small unit tactics. Physical training becomes more strenuousas run distances increase and the passing times are lowered for the runs, swims, and obstacle course. The final three and a half weeks are spent on San Clemente Island, where recruits apply all the techniques they have learned.

Notebook IV pg. 5-7, ix-xii

Submitted by redkabbage on Tue, 11/25/2008 - 01:27

I felt like transcribing some notes from an old red notebook of mine that I'd stuck on a shelf and left for dead in a closet dustbin. I regret that I haven't made it a habit to go back over my notebooks. I'll be using this page to post some of my old notebook writings--the ones worth remembering at least. Most of them I don't even recall writing down, but now that I read over them I can see why I noted them in the first place.

Red Brain

The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. James Howard Kunstler.

    • "Fossil Fuels had the effect of temporarily raising the carrying capacity of the earth." (12)

    • "The oil crisis of the 1970s stimulated so much frantic drilling and extraction that a twenty-year oil glut ensued." (13)

    • "Much of suburbua is unreformable. It does not lend itself to being retroifitted into the kind of mixed-use, smaller-scaled, more fine-grained walkable environments we will need to carry daily life in the coming age of greatly reduced motoring." (17-18)

    • "Suburban divisions will become the slums of the future." (18)

    • "Food production at the local level may become the focus of the American economy." (18)

    • "Parts of the Southwest may be significantly depopulated, starved for energy and thirsting for water that depended on cheap energy. [...] The prospects for disorder in the southeastern states is especially high, given the extremes of religiosity, hyperindividualism, and a cultural disinhibition regarding violence. The social glue holding communities and regions together will be severly strained by the loss of amenities presumed to be normal." (20)

    • "The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope, that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on." (21)


Fun Fact

  • Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990.

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