It might surprise many to know that the French Army was feared throughout Europe, France was the most populous country and had the most manpower for its armies. All of its neighboring states were quite apprehensive about it, and usually did what they could to placate the French Crown.

Let’s first look at the Renaissance Italian wars, most of the time France was on the losing side. Why? Their army was so scary that their enemies formed coalitions to drive them off. (French Loss)

After the Renaissance the French continue to enjoy a military supremacy through their enormous armies, King Louis XIV even join up with England in the third Anglo-Dutch war but are soon abandoned by their allies which allows the Dutch control of the seas, and after the Dutch open up the Dikes Antwerp became an impregnable island fortress. Despite his failure to obliterate the Netherlands Louis XIV wins the war and gains territory. (French Win)

The next time France goes against the Low Countries the Dutch and England have become unified by the Glorious Revolution. This sets the precedent for every war between England and France, France’s army can’t get to England because of the Royal Navy, and even when they do gain control of the channel they can’t stay there! Also the French had to pay for their huge army in order to defend their territory, which meant they couldn’t afford as big of a Navy. The war of the League of Augsburg ended with a treaty that merely blunted the ambition of Louis XIV. (French Win)

Next came the war of Spanish succession, Louis IX’s heir was next in line for the Spanish crown meaning that the two most powerful nations in Europe would be unified under one Monarch, and he would own the vast overseas empire and regular supply of silver that came with it! The rest of Europe panicked. In the end Portugal, Great Britain, The Dutch Republic, The Duchy of Savoy, the Holy Roman Empire, and Prussia joined forces to prevent this from happening. Great Britain (who was able to capture Gibraltar) and the Dutch blockaded France, while their Allies surrounded it by land. After 12 years the French were forced to open negotiations. Louis XIV’s heir would sit on the throne of Spain, but he would never be the King of France. Louis XIV died old, decrepit, and bankrupt (French Loss)

Next, the French and Indian War (really its the seven year’s war)

Great Britain allied with Portugal Frederick the Great of Prussia, and used its Navy, once again, to strangle France and Spain. This was made much easier by their possession of Gibraltar. The British soon discovered that they could fund Frederick of Prussia almost indefinitely allowing him to do quite a bit of damage. In the end France lost much of its territory, and lost most of its Navy.

The American Revolution gave France and Spain the ability to avenge their various humiliations by Great Britain. While the British are bogged down in America the French and Spanish achieve a great deal of success at sea! The French Navy achieved victory in the Battle of the Chesapeake, and won the Battle of Yorktown for the American Colonists, who proceeded to sign a treaty with Great Britain and leave France high and dry. The British no longer needed to worry about their ground forces and were able to turn the war around on the French leaving their King Louis the XVI so strapped for cash that in a few years he would call the Estates General. (French Loss)

Which leads us to the French Revolution, and the rise of Napoleon. If Napoleon had joined the French Navy like he wanted (after his rejection he even considered the British Navy!) he may have landed French troops on British soil! Unfortunately for France he was rejected from the Academie, and his poor grasp of Naval tactics combined with his Continental System ultimately doomed him. (French Loss)

As I hope you can see, the French Armed Forces have done quite well over the centuries. The difficulties of balancing land and sea power and their sometimes inability to make nice with their neighbors has made their skilled warriors seem ineffectual. Remember, don’t judge a man by his record, judge him by his character.

On the maiden voyage of her first command (Voyager), Captain Janeway and her crew are not only sent to the other side of the galaxy, they are forced to make the journey home with the people they were sent to arrest. Captain Janeway is not only able to unite the crews, but is able to uphold the principles that the Federation holds dear, even when they may lengthen their journey home. She is able to make contact with more alien species than any other captain in Federation history, but is also able survive without having the support of the federation fleet which all the other Star Trek captains relied upon. And while surviving Voyager does more to hurt the Borg than any vessel in Starfleet

Perhaps the most enjoyable trait about this captain is her personality. She has a sophisticated sense of humor that Picard and Kirk both lacked, but is also incredibly serious when it comes to the safety of her crew. She also is unafraid to break protocol when she deems it necessary, but she is unwilling to compromise her principles. She has a stubbornness that seems to pull Voyager out of every deadly situation it encounters.

Picard was inspiring, Kirk was courageous, and Janeway is nurturing. She takes a personal interest in the lives of her crew, she personally rehabilitated Seven of Nine, she guided Tom Paris and gave him a second chance with is life, she took Harry Kim under her wings from day one, she even took the three most underperforming crew-members and mentored them to improve their performance. Janeway let her crew know that she cared for and valued them, and they would have followed her anywhere.

This woman took two crews from opposing sides, and merged them into one. She got almost all of them home safely in one tenth of the time it should have taken, and achieved more than any captain could have dreamed of all during her first command. Kirk and Picard are wonderful captains, but Janeway had  fewer resources, a divided crew, less assistance, and less experience, and still managed to accomplish more than the other captains.

The P-51 gained its long range (able to escort bombers from England to Germany) from its Rolls-Royce Merlin 60 series engine. This was an in-line engine, meaning that the cylinders are in a straight line. Inline engines were narrow which reduced drag, the tradeoff was that they were not very durable, a stray bullet could easily puncture a coolant tube which would cause the engine to overheat, which usually meant the plane would crash. Despite this, the P-51 became the primary allied air superiority fighter in the European Theater, and has an impressive record.

The F6F Hellcat’s engine is a radial engine, which means that the cylinders are actually in a circle around the propeller. This made the plane less aerodynamic, but the engine took up less room allowing the Hellcat to be compact enough to land on carriers. The other advantage to the engine was that it was air-cooled, meaning that the engine could sustain much more punishment. The F6F’s engine allows it to take on the Zero, which was the best fighter in the Pacific at the beginning of the war. The Hellcat enabled US Naval Pilots for the first time to take on the Zero and be confident of victory.

So my contention is that the P-51 may have been more maneuverable, but the F6F was quite maneuverable as well, and was able to withstand a huge amount of damage, making it the better airplane.

Which airplane from the war is your favorite?

To answer that question one must go back to the dark ages, right after the fall of the Roman Empire. The place: the island of Great Britain, the former province of Britannia. Recently the Angles and Saxons have colonized this Island becoming the dominant powers. At this time Germanic tribes elected their kings, and when a king got out of hand, they just chose another one. They already viewed their government as being at the consent of the people. As time goes on and the states of England and Scotland arise this view holds strong. The local Earls served as a check to the king’s power, and documents such as the Magna Carta which limit the kings power are signed.

The most important provision of the Magna Carta was the need for the king to call a Parliament to collect taxes (ie no taxation without representation). No English King could afford to build a Versailles without taxing his people and a Parliament would always block such a tax. This also turned England into a wealthy nation, the standard of living was quite high, even during the reign of King Henry VIII due to the lack of taxes.

The english people were even the first people to actually abolish their monarchy, they did so for “liberty, freedom, and freedom from tyranny.”

sound familiar?

Indeed, the english had been using those three words for quite some time. They viewed their system of government as the best in Europe (they were probably right). No other European monarch had such limits on his power.

After the English Civil War, the parliamentary general Oliver Cromwell became the puritan Napoleon because of the English People’s belief in “Liberty, Freedom, and Freedom from Tyranny”, and the army became the new government. Oliver Cromwell did not accept the crown of King, even though he was more powerful than any english monarch before him, he did so to preserve his people’s liberties.

After Cromwell’s death, Parliament was in a deadlock and had become a self-sustaining Oligarchy. The English then brought back their kings, and King Charles II took his throne.

The English kept their love of liberty with them as they colonized the Americas, and after America revolted the English proved to be better champions of freedom than their daughter state. The first nation to actively fight the slave trade was the United Kingdom. They arrested all slave traders coming into and out of Africa throughout the 19th century.

We still endorsed the slave trade in the Americas.

Of all the Colonial powers the UK interfered in their colonies the least. They even willingly let go of all Colonies that no longer wanted to be part of the Empire, as opposed to the French who fought bloody wars to maintain their overseas empires.

America has inherited the majority of its cultural values from the United Kingdom. If the French, Spanish, or Austrians had colonized this area we probably would not have become an independent nation. Unlike these nations the British had a limited Monarchy, and viewed the government as serving the people. This view is the cornerstone of American political thought.

In this sense we are still very much a British Colony.

Astrolopithicus Afarensis was the first ape to walk upright, and its social structure was similar to many other animals who travelled in groups. One dominant Male bred with all the females and led the pack, but only because the females allowed him to. The younger Males couldn’t breed with the females and one day, one of them would challenge and defeat the leader and lead the pack. When we evolved into Homo Erectus we probably began pairing with single mates, Males moved from fighting over groups of females to single females. It is built into a Male’s nature to fight over women, if you are close with a female and another Male moves in, you want to knock him senseless.

But in Nature the Female usually decides whom she mates with, she usually picks the Male who can best support her and her children. In prehistoric times this meant the strongest Male who was also usually the best hunter, and also the winner of fights. Nowadays things have become more complicated and the winner of the fight isn’t always the man the woman picks. In fact many times the winner of the fight loses points for fighting in the first place. A man who is prone to rash actions and violent solutions to problems is not a man who can be relied upon to support the family. The rules of the game have changed, but the Male psyche hasn’t caught up yet.

Women have jealousy hard-wired into their DNA as well. A new female joining a group (mature females often moved to new groups to prevent in-breeding) often meant a political shake-up, especially if she became the Alpha-male’s new favorite. A newcomer had to be put in her place, and the Alpha Female needed to keep the Alpha Male’s attention to maintain her own position. They often fought for a man’s attention through more underhanded methods such as isolating the new female from the group.

Jealousy has been hard-wired into the male and female psyche, we can’t help it, jealousy encouraged us to fight for our mates making us more likely to pass on our DNA. Still, in modern society it isn’t as important. Lasting relationships depend on trust, not the ability to kill animals. It takes effort but the jealous instinct can be overcome, and when it is a relationship can truly flourish.

After much thought I realized that in battle one stops thinking and (ideally) enters a state of heightened awareness. OR they soil their pants and run away. In pre-gunpowder warfare one needed a lifetime of training to become proficient in their weapons. A skilled warrior was also able to survive purely on skill (unless they were overwhelmed by sheer numbers). There are often descriptions of warriors entering a euphoric state on the battlefield,. In those times people were either more accustomed to the horrors of war, or war without guns and effective artillery is a lot less horrifying.

Think of what the gun meant! Instead of a lifetime of training, the US armed forces only need about 4 months to train a soldier. Guns? You point the barrel, and shoot, sure accuracy takes some time, but semi-automatics can just spray an area with bullets reducing the need for accuracy. The skill and dedication needed to become a fighter has been significantly reduced, one untrained kid can slaughter an entire school if he has an Uzi and enough ammo. If he tried it with a crossbow, he’d do a lot less damage.

The point is, that (if you ignore the raping, pillaging, and killing part of it) war used to have a sort of nobility to it. Discipline is required (even today) in warfare, and in spirituality. The discipline to become a master of various weapons by training every day of your life is perhaps the primary link to the world of spirit, but you also had the heightened state of awareness by being in constant danger, which is considered by many to be a spiritual experience. This combination is what provided the that nobility. Artillery and automatic weapons took that out of the picture (the euphoria, not the discipline) and eliminated what remained of war’s spiritual side.

Cells are so perfectly assembled that I cannot fathom them coming into being by accident. Even if we account for over a billion years of evolution, it doesn’t seem to me they could have been assembled by pure chance. There is one theory that water is alien to Earth, that it came here in an ice meteorite billions of years ago… what if there were cells in that meteorite? Or maybe there was a higher power at work that gave a few nudges here and there to construct cells? The possible answers are innumerable, and quite honestly irrelevant. What does matter is that there are some things that science can’t answer which is good, this world is so amazing in that every mystery we solves unlocks another three.

Some accuse science of taking the mystery out of life, I think that it just deepens it.

But one thing puzzles me. A cell is nothing more than a complex collection of Molecules. Sure, if you look at an animal or plant cell you see sophisticated organ-like structures, but prokaryotic bacteria (ie. no nucleus) don’t have anything but DNA inside of them. So all we have here are collections of molecules surrounding DNA (which is itself a molecule) so why do they move and interact with their environment? What makes them alive? I have a feeling that when I ask my professor this question on Thursday he’s going to shrug and say ‘we don’t know.’

I’ll let you know when I get his reply.

But at the same time all of these people I know seem to feel that they are in that place where they can handle a marriage and begin a family. Some of these people have never left the country in their lifetimes and have all of these plans for traveling the world, yet they are rushing headlong into having kids and losing the opportunity to do these things.

At the same time I see some of these couples and I get the sense that they will last forever, which is a wonderful thing to behold.

I wish these people all the best and hope that their marriages are happy and lasting.

Hopefully I’ll have been in my first serious relationship before too many more of my friends get married!