Lawnmower Boy

Just to speak up for the honour of the medieval war horse, there is no reason to think that they were any different from the animals recruited for the Household Cavalry today.

He deserved it because he committed a crime once, and he assaulted the police officer (who has hardly ever killed anyone for no good reason before) once the police officer broke into his apartment!

Just as an additional note, here's a scenic picture taken at Montepastore, jammed between Bologna and the Appenines just south of the city. This terrain wasn't invented last month. It existed in Roman times. There is a screaming argument in Roman history about the population of the peninsula in the late Republic and the argument over the "public lands" that begins with the assumption that places like this don't exist. Look around you: it's land. People can live a very precarious life on it as autarkic farmers, or they can try to move grain down to Bologna and sell it; but their marginal costs are likely to be so high that they can't. In an ideal, Roman social order, people live on this land, feed themselves, and then serve in the legions in war time. The economic rationality of living here need not be accounted for. But look up at those clearances further up into the hill. Are those grain farms? I doubt it. They're probably pastures --not because you can't plant grain up there, but because you can't sell it, and because the people who might live up there on their own grain can't walk down to the city and participate in its social life . The same may be said of the woods above them. Mixed decidious woodlands are actually more biotically productive than dry arable. It's just that the product is pork and beef --and acorns and chestnuts and all the other food that, in a proper agrarian ideology, people don't live on. What was being done with this land in Roman times? The Romans could have been just ignoring them and leaving the forest to be dark and deep and wild, because it doesn't fit their grain-raising political ideology. But I kind of doubt that this was the case. I assume, on the contrary, that it was being used, at some level of intensity, for raising livestock. You must, however, then herd that livestock down into the valley, first, to winter pasture, second, to market. But before they can be marketed, they must be fattened. That's your feedlots --or your stubbly grain fields, or, in general, the classic "in field." And you must have people to do the herding. Do they live in the heights, on acorns? Probably not --that's a marginal option, at best. But they could. I submit, again, that these people are potentially dangerous --at one and the same time military vital, and threatening the erosion of the state order at the same time. Blah blah.

William Henry Bonney was a young participant in the Lincoln County, New Mexico, Range Wars of 1880/1. In 1881, he was killed by surprise by Pat Garrett. In his last moments, he spontaneously spoke Spanish, suggesting that by the time of his death he was highly fluent. From this, we can conclude that either the ethnogenesis that turned a New York-born American Irishman into a cowboy was rapid and thorough, which would support my point; or, I admit, that he was not New York-born at all. The reader can follow up as he will. I would only point out that only a single and somewhat questionable photograph of Billy the Kid exists. It does not show a blue-eyed blond, because it is a black-and-white ferrotype. Not that there is no such thing as a blue-eyed, blond Hispanic. Moving on Knights as a social class Is this a thing? Of course it is! The Athenian Constitution has been the subject of continuing controversy and research, but the traditional claim is that the lawmaker, Solon, remedied tensions between rich and poor by dividing the Athenian population into wealth classes for various purposes, including military service. The second of four classes, the Hippeis, traditionally identified with the "medieval class of knights" (like any thorough researcher, I quote Wikipedia), were classed as those with enough wealth to equip themselves for cavalry service. Much later, corps of first 300 and latter 1200 cavalry were formed; as with many officeholders in the classic Athenian democracy, they were paid, and in return were expected to drill in times of peace. The Romans are a little vaguer, because their history starts later, but we have Livy, an enticing, history-like text to draw us back to before we have any certainty whatsoever. So what? The equites certainly existed as a social class, again, the second rank of the Roman wealth classification, usually seen as the Roman aristocracy. I'll go with that as far as aristocracy goes, I just don't think we ought to blunder with certainty into all the implications of caste and formal hierarchy that words like this carry with them for this early period. They might get in the way of understanding either our sources, or their best interpretation. But equites, sure. Notice that I'm not trying to get rid of the idea of "drilling." I'm trying to wedge apart the ideas of practice, exercise, disciplilne nad regimentation. I've already noticed Pham, and will refer those interested in the question to her work again. Social Class and Nationality Obscures Our Account Here is where I keep trying to put scare quotes around "shepherd," and you keep prying them off. To be as clear as I possibly can be, by "shepherd" [Argument Coherence Danger Warning: Do Not Remove Scare Quotes] I specifically mean a mounted proletariat associated with long-distance livestock drives. It will be noted that cowboys are not essential to cattle, sheep, pig or geese drives. Those would be the Roman shepherds [no scare quotes needed!] that you are discussing. Did these "cowboys" exist in Roman times? I am suggesting that they did, and not just on the distant steppe.They may not be vital, but they are more useful for livestock-driving purposes, and they pay for themselves specifically in the context of stock raising including horse raising --something that does not happen on the Mediterranean littoral, but which, I argue, can be happening on the slopes of the Appenines and Alps. It's an economic argument, in other words. I think we can have an agreement that, say, Scythians, or Tatars, or Mongol cavalries can be explained in these terms? I'm trying to add Germans and Gauls, and you may well want to argue that point. Equites as Cavalry At the first moment at which we have cognisance of them, the Athenian cavalry already contains Scythian horse archers. The Roman case is somewhat more ambiguous. We have an account of Roman warfare against Pyrrhus in 280BC. Unfortunately, it's from Plutarch (46--120AD), but his Greek sources are much more reliable than our Latin ones. At this point, the Roman cavalry is supplied by the Roman senatorial, equites and perhaps the First Class of commoners; and by Italic allies. Roman Barbarian Mercenary Cavalry Again, I think we can all agree that the Romans were using Gallic and Germanic cavalry by the end of the Republic. That is, some time between 280BC and 46BC, they began recruiting mercenary cavalry from the north. A place in the north that contains Gauls is Gallia Cisalpinia, which, as I have noted, is very close indeed to Rome. I won't rehearse the main obstacles to horse raising in Italy, except to note the importance of lack of summer pasture in a Mediterranean climate, which is what makes uplands so important, and especially ones with a reliable snowpack --the Appenine spur and Alps. This doesn't matter in the sense that Gallic cavalry is not attested in Roman service during the Second Punic War. The barbarian mercenaries attested were Numidians, used in the North African campaigns. Slipperiness of Ethnic Construction What do we mean when we say that there was a band of Gauls living north of Roman territory from around 400BC. Ethnicity is hard to attribute from archaeology, after all. What we mean is that a set of authors, and above all, Livy, tell us so. They do have sources, although we cannot always weigh them properly. This is why I am specifically bringing into question the events of 400BC, when, allegedly, several tribes of Gauls invaded northern Italy. (Including the Boii, or "Cowboys," make of that what you will.) Why? Who would it benefit to tell this elaborate story? Here, things get a bit complicated, but I am suggesting that the events of Marius's wars in northern Italy, Germany and France were highly massaged to fit the needs of that rising politician. Subsequently, Roman politicians of Marius' following, most notably the Emperor Augustus, not only used their patronage to give Marius's actions the kindest possible intepretation, but used them for their own purposes. Above all, Augustus' campaigns in the Alps and in Germany can be understood as just war if these peoples represent a longstanding, existential threat to Rome's existence. The sack of 400, the threat of the Cimbri and Teutones, and Augustus's campaigns across the Rhine are all linked by this longstanding threat to Rome. It follows, therefore, that the hazily remembered "Gauls" of 400BC are literally the same as the Gauls of Julius Caesar's day, the Cimbri and Teutones, and even the Germans. Ideology in Its Economic Sense, Cavalry in Roman Service, and Shepherds Are Roman accounts of "shepherds" questionable? Yes! Roman economic ideology is politically-rooted."Shepherds" threaten ideas of what it is to be a citizen-farmer. In the familiar, "stadial" theory of political history (evolution by stages, in less fancy talk) human societies evolve from primitive farmers to less primitive pastoralist to modern, advanced farmers. "Shepherds" are evolutionary throwbacks. Their mobility, and lack of urban ties make them a threat to Roman ideas of politics. Their wealth, which is rooted in remote pasturing rights and mobile livestock, cannot be accounted for by Roman political ideas. Romans are not, therefore, likely to give us a respectful account of "shepherds." Rather, they are going to elide the distinction that I am here trying to make between "shepherds" and shepherds. But we should not be talking about ideology in its political sense! That's just a cover! We need to talk about it in its economic sense! At what point do we get "shepherds" in Rome? Who are their patrons? Who mobilises them for military services? The nexus I see here is: feedlot owner>cattledrive entrepeneur>"shepherd." Here comes a herd of beef down the Via Flaminia to Rome. Rangy from their travels, they need to be fed up on a feedlot so that they can be slaughtered and eaten in a street festival thrown by a Roman senator. Who owns the feedlot? A Roman senator! Who is the entrepeneur who organised this? We don't know. Who are the "shepherds" who have herded these cattle down from the mountains? Good horsemen, potentially good cavalrymen. What is their ethnicity? Who cares? But political ideology says that they ought to be "barbarians," and since we don't care one way or the other, that's the line we'll take. They're barbarians. Hopefully, they'll even throw some Spanish Germanic/Gallic lingo into their talk.

Giant Squirrel cavalry for cross-country mobility, and Even More Giant Golden Retriever Cavalry for speed in the charge. What could possibly go wrong?

Being a good cavalry fighter is hard, because it comes down to getting good at riding and taking care of horses. It takes work and exertion and a solid base in horses to exercise on. We tend to think of the Athenian knights and the Roman equites in terms of an evolutionary history of politics, in which the "democracy" of the city states is rooted in an prehistory of primeval feudalism. It isn't, and can't be, because we can follow the rise of the cavalry arm in the Assyrian annals, and see that horse riding, whatever its Bronze (or even Neolithic) history in central Eurasia, it did not become a socially reproducible skill until around 600. The knights and equites would have been established in the 600s --and they didn't work. Now, I didn't paste this in without reason, by the way. Okay, I'm cheating: I'm actually listening to the promised "Roy Rogers/Emmylou Harris" collaboration right now. Give it a listen --it's less meandering than the traditional Don Edwards version, and beats my first test of using "remuda" and "extra guard" rather than Marty Robbins' Anglicisations. Why am I inflicting old country and westtern on you? Because it hurts my heart to think of young men like Little Joe the Wrangler, trying so hard, to the limit of their skills and courage and further, to earn their places in an unwelcoming society. The only way to get a solid cavalry on a scale that gives you even 1 sabre to every 10 infantry on the basis of mass mobilisation is to recruit young men like this, men that the Romans used to call "shepherds." Little Joe is one of those recruited shepherds. He has an old horse, a bad saddle, and doesn't know anything about cattle, but he has nowwhere else to go than the remuda, and is willing to learn its ways --again I'm emphasising the Hispanicisms of the working life that he has entered. He is not becoming Mexican so much as Southwestern, rather in the way that a boy who was allegedly born in New York City would eventually become the fluently Spanish-speaking Billy the Kid.* The rest of this post is devoted to problematising "shepherd," suggesting that as both a class and (implicit) ethnic construction, it also masks the interest of the senatorial class in resisting agrarian reform laws intended to put land near Rome back into "proper" grain land to support the yeomanry perceived to have been the ancient foundation of Roman power. So now let us go back to the Rome of circa 220BC. Here is the Via Flaminia again: Rome is an important road juncture due to its positin on the lowest ford on the Tiber, and the natural salt market for the Pontine marshes. One of the roads that crosses path at Rome heads north to Tuscany. We don't care about that one. The other follows the Tiber, which climbs into the Appenines and descends via passes and gorges and even a tunnel first cut in the 2nd century BC, but which is the most practicable route to the extent that the Tiber rises in a water gap. The Via Flaminia ends at the Adriatic coast at Ravenna. The upper reaches of the route paasses through the territory of the Sennones, a Gallic nation with their capital at Senegallia on the Adriatic coast in Ancona, which in ancient times rose to become one of five such towns in the Pentapolis. This gives you a sense of just how far south and east "Gallia Cisalpinia" extended --to the point of raising questions of whether they were understood as being on thisi side of the Alps, or the Appenine spur! The Sennones were conquered in 280BC by P. Cornelius Dolabela, and the conquered region, the ager Gallicus, the modern Marche, shows signs of the earliest centuriation of lands falling to Rome. I'm going to highlight this by pointing out just how far we are into the ancient past of Rome. We are fascinated by these early days and the picturesque stories of Livy, and so we tell them with great certainty, even though they are all that we have. And when it comes to stories we like, we have a a far greater certainty than Livy, who is constantly speculating about what his sources are telling him --because he lacks an anthropological perspective, he is even more puzzled by the fragments he passes on than we are! By far our earliest source, and most scientific, is Polybius, who is almost two two centuries separate from the incursion of the Gauls, about which he tells us, in any case, little. (The Etruscans are the earliest settlers of what Polybius calls the "plain of the Po." The Gauls, near neighbours, cast covetous eyes at this fertile land, and cast the Etruscans from it.) Livy, on the other hand, tells us that the Sennones crossed the Alps in search of land to settle around 400BC. Friction developed with the Etruscan city of Clusium, and three Roman ambassadors of the Fabian clan were sent to negotiate a settlement, and did horrible things. The result was a war, in which the Romans, having violated the sacred laws of the gods, were justly deteated at the Battle of the Allia (NSFW Wikipedia page). The Claudian clan won back some of the gods' respect by dying en masse on the battlefield, but not enough to spare Rome from a sack at the hands of Brennus, "Vae victis" and all of that. Except that the sack was interrupted by the honking of the sacred geese of Juno, as often happened in those days, allowing the exiled Roman dictator, Marcus Furius Camillus, who just happened to be in the vicinity with a spare army, to intervene and save the city. So, uhm, yay Claudians and Furians, boo Fabii. One might even go s far as to suggest that the version of the story we have from Livy has been written with an eye to contemporary politics. Meanwhile, the defeated Gauls wandered off to Bologna, so called as the "City of the Boii," which means "City of the Cowboys," although in this case we are taking "Cowboy" to be the name of a remarkably far-travelled tribe of Gauls. (If we go with tracing migrations by placenames, they also hung out at Bologna, in Bohemia, and in Bavaria, and I think a town on the Rhine.) And, as Polybius says, cast the Etruscans from it. Only they didn't. We identify the Etruscans with the Villanovan archaeological culture, which has longstanding affinities with the central European Urnfield culture, usually associated with the proto-Celts, if that concept is at all useful. (Remember that Gauls and Celts are to be considered as approximately equivalent for the purposes of this discussion. Romans didn't know what they were talking about, except when they did.) The extensively excavated cemetery at Villanova that gives the culture its type-name shows no break at c. 400BC. This has long been acknowledged in the form of a conceptualised Gaullic-Etruscan cultural fusion. We preserve the trans-Alpine incursion of the Gallic tribes (which, recall, is known to Livy, but not the much earlier Polybius, unless we chosse to read "near neighbours" as meaning "just across the Alps," as is often done.) It is, in general, hard to distinguish the earlier Villanovan from later Etruscan, Galic and Italic cultures, so that the latter tend to be recognised from the literature, or, to put it another way, the single stool of Livy, rather than by the archaeology. Not that I'd put much faith on the ability of the archaeologists to recognise "culture." "this grave has ashes on the right side. Therefore they were Proto-Indo-European speakers, and we can say with certainty that they had a warrior caste, worshipped a sky god, and that their word for "hundred" started with a soft 'c!'" What we can say with certainty is that Etrusco-Gallic culture persistently hugs the edges of the Appenine and Alpine mountains, building cities and roads at places like Bologna at what archaeology calls the "spring line," the point where softer sedimentary rock caps rest on underlying igneous formations, creating a constant contour of subterranean springs breaking the surface as water percolating down from the heights is forced into the open. Traditional roads follow spring lines, because they combine frequent watering stops, a low altitude, and an ability to avoid bridging. The pasture-and-pannage country at the spring line is also particularly valuable, especially for traditional economies which have not made much head at draining the lowlands or deforesting the heights. Hence the whole Bologna ham, "country of the Boii" thing. So if we look at what we know about the social composition of Italy out along the Via Flaminia/Via Aemilia in circa 280-180BC, we see a traditional claim, dating to much later, that the people there were Gauls, well-supported in the literary and placename tradition, but not archaeologically evident. If we look at its economic relationship with Rome, we see a traditional cattle or pig droving route links Bologna with the city --the wealther the city of Rome, the more livestock is going to travel this route, and, not surprisingly, the more money there is going to be in mixed farming around Bologna. Now I'm going to jump well forward, to a guy named Marius, (157--86 BC0, a prominent Roman politician-general of the late Republic, perhaps best known for his electoral and political hijinks down south, but who gained his original fame by i) throwing a titanic tantrum when he was cut out of the business of allotting colonial lands in north Africa; ii) raising a quasi-illegal army to defeat an imminent invasion of ...uhm, Rome, yeah, that's what we're going to go with, Rome. .. by tribes from Denmark, or Germany, or Sweden, or somewhere up there, who were gathering just on the other side of the Alps, in France or Austria. One or the other. They're close, right? So, up and down the spring line marging the swampy lowlands of the Po goes Marius, darting across this pass or that to defeat armies of barbarians just on the cusp of attacking Rome. All this marching naturally forces Marius (actually, his colleague Lucius Valerius Flavius) to create Bologna as an official colony, in association with a likely lad name of Caesar. Then, with the support of the men he established around Bologna, Marius was off to the aforementioned hijinks, which, blah blah Social War, civil war proscriptions civil war proscriptions civil war proscriptions civil war Empire leads us to Augustus, and his official court historian, Livy. Who wants to tell us about the threat of all those ancient Gauls (Germans? They're pretty similar, right?) who used to invade Rome and stuff like that. In conclusion, Drusus is awesome. Because history. In a less facetious tone, what I would rather say is that the whole idea of a "Gallic invasion," back in about 400BC or so, is vague ancient history and urban myth, recreated to the needs of Roman politics, and historians/politicians writing in the late Republic. As to what actually happened in the transition from villanovan to its successor cultures, it is very difficult to make claims about ethnicity and language, but it is at least potentially possible to make claims about economic changes. Above all, I am going to insist on the primacy of these livestock drives, which are in any case at least indirectly supported by the archaeological survival of taxing pens at provincial borders. Now I turn the podium over to the late Empire panegyrist Claudius Mamertius, talking about the "Bagaudae," whoever the heck they were: "simple farmers sought military garb; the plowman imitated the infantryman, the shepherd the cavalryman, the rustic harvester of his own crops the barbarian enemy". Notice the implicit social hierarchy here. Simple farmers are the landless labourers; "plowman" are usually those who own animals, and so can contract plow-work; shepherds own horses; and "the rustic harvester of his own crops" is a free-holder. Shepherds are not seen here as poor, precisely, but as the third of four steps of insurgent rural society. Of course they are! They own their own horses! Now, shepherds are seen by (not only) Classical sources as a dangerous strata of society. They are rootless, unsettled folk who do not own proper arable land on neatly centuriated fields near cities in which they can participate in the public political life which defines the patrician. That does not mean that they are poor, nor even landless. Landlessness is, in fact, a pretty vague idea for Little Joe, who, had he not gotten himself killed by trying too hard, would probably have ended his life as a rancher way up in the back of nowhere in Montana or some such place. Then he would have owned a lot more land, and stil have been much poorer than someone who owns a quarter acre of super productive truck garden land just outside Central City. Where his wealth would lie is in the cattle he brings to market every year. Except that you don't really sell cattle in Rome. They usually speak of a "meat market," rather than a "cattle market." Traditionally, cattle are driven in from the pasture land, then held in feedlots near the city, where they are "finished" by fattening them up on good quality fodder. Roman politicians, begining well before Marius, were apoplectic at the tendency of the lands near the city going from proper grain farms where stout, potentially legionary yeomen raise proper crops such as grain, and take time out to go vote in civic elections. People have continued to complain about this trend down into the Twentieth Century, at which point we haven't so much given up as shifted to a different line of attack, in which tofu and fibre replace wheat in our hierarchy of values. And who owns the feedlots? I'm tempted to say the equites do --except that it's not reallly true, it's mostly the even richer senatorial class. But what I will say is that the wealthiest sector of the Roman population, the very class that is supposed to provide its citizen cavalry, have the closest association with the rootless up-country "shepherds" who in reality make the best cavalry. In conclusion --my conclusion, not the conclusion of some strawman version of Livy, the supposedly clear ethnic and cultural boundaries between Italic and Gaullic,or later Germanic, and between citizen and mercenary cavalry rest on a refusal to see that the mixed pastoral economy is necessarily fluid in local and social-associational terms. The kind of "ethnogenesis" that I'm trying to illustrate with the example of Little Joe the Wrangler is, I believe, in action even in ancient times. It's just that it is in the interest of the senatorial class to blur it. I know, I know, all of this line of thinking is just so many doggies all meandering around the range. I've done my best to drive them to a logical conclusion, and if I haven't go there, it's their misfortune, and none of my own. *The "allegedly" is doing a lot of work here. The back story of Billy the Kid makes a great deal more sense if we throw out the early anecdotes entirely, allowing him to be Hispanic-American. but neve rmind.

"Physical conditioning" is a bit problematic. Here's a review of Sara Phang's Roman Military Service which gets at what is probably really going on with the Roman insistence that regular soldiers go out and exercise. I doubt that it was sufficient to build up infantry mobility, but I wouldn't be the farm on that argument. Cavalry, though, was certainly not getting the necessary physical exercise, because it would impose wear and tear on the horses, and that was expensive! That's why you want rich kids who spend their days riding around chasing foxes and suchlike. (Except that they don't usually spend enough time chasing the inedible.) As for the mercenaries --well, I'm thinking here, and I'll admit that my thinking isn't really that well developed, that whether you call them "Italic" or "Gallic," you're talking about the same people: the shepherds who rode the Via Flaminia and Via Aemilia. The process by which they became "Gallic" is either one of wholesale migration and population replacement, or, I would argue, an ethnogenesis in situ of a working population in relation to Rome. What can I say? It's all about my crazy theories deconstructing ethnicity as an essential category in favour of understanding it as being constantly socially constructed.

I had nothing to gain from Nemtsov being shot, and everything to lose. Therefore, the people who shot Nemtsov were out to get me, personally. The only way to show your shock and horror at the assassination is to send me all your money. That's Lawnmower Boy, c/o Mrs. Aposdoupoulous, 213 Stevens Street, Vancouver, B.C. No small bills, please, USD preferred.

You really, really don't want to recruit troopers from a "regular" population. First, a cavalry trooper must, just must be able to take care of his animal. Horses are expensive, and there's a fair bit to learn about horse care. I seem to recall a book about that, pitched to teenaged female audiences?* Second, riders really need to be physically fit in ways that walkers aren't, and in premodern armies, you do not physically condition your soldiers to do the jobs. (Notice the historical dominance of infantry branches by people from mountainous regions, of the artillery by urban populations, etc, etc. Where life's built your muscles, that's where your military niche will be.) Third, and probably most important, if your mobilisation is expedient and half-arsed, you are going to get most of your cavalry out of men coming in with their own horses. Both the Romans and Greeks intended to built state cavalries from amongst the wealthiest population classes, since they owned horses and supposedly were all about the equestrian sports. That, however, doesn't work without a huge amount of social pressure to keep the boys on horseback, rather than chillin' with their homeboys and drinking. Probably it doesn't even work then: turn-of-the-Twentieth Century mass conscription armies had minute cavalry arms in proportion to their populations, and not by choice, either. The exception to that is, of course, Russia, and for obvious reasons. (Cossacks, Kalmycks, Tatars, etc.) In the end, you turn to working class equestian populations. and you get those by looking to "shepherds," as Claudius Mamertius put it in describing the horse arm of the "Bacaudae," and, as you lose control of the shepherds, to the "Young ones" (1,2). There's an interesting question here about why the Romans could not find "Roman" shepherds for their own cavalry. I suspect that it is because of geography, that the mountains where transhumant pastoralism is practiced in the vicinity of Rome are connected by lowland drovepaths to the Appenines, and thus with a region imagined by the Romans as "Gallic," or "Celtic." That is, the ethnic label assigned to the young men who practiced this work, and, to some extent, the social communities they entered as they proved themselves, were "Gallic" rather than Roman. There is evidence of intensified horse raising in downlands in southern Italy during the early-to-late Republic which might be interpreted as attempts to develop a domesticated, Roman cavalry, or, on the other hand, simply the high price that horses were fetching in the Mediterranean basin. *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTwnwbG9YLE

Normalised pupils leave tipping one smartphones.

Serves 'em right for putting liver in sausage!

And just up from it is a new development that they're selling as "affordable familly living in convenient commuting distance from Vancouver."

"I'll explain this one more time. You are not being railroaded. This campaign is not on tracks. Okay, it was on tacks when you went through the Pawnee Narrows, but that was because of the ruts. Now you're on a trail. Completely different."

Thanks to my very important contacts, I've obtained the original draft of this speech: "Dudes. Thanks for coming out. I know all you reporters for major newspapers and websites had to skip your shifts at Starbucks to be here. It means a lot to me, that you, like, gave up a cool fifty and might not be able to make rent this month. I know you're burning up with anger and resentment at most everybody. Hey! I've seen your tweets!" So. I know you're all, like, saying to yourselves, "Why am I even here? Social media is so, like, 2012." Plus also, "I bet if I were a woman/minority/trans, I'd have the last job at NEWSWEEK, and not that loser, Tamara." And I hear you, folks. I mean, the last time I logged on to Facebook was, like, LOL I don't remember, and it was full of whiny people then, too. Stop whining, is what I'm saying. You'd be awesomely rich, too, if you'd come up with a plan to DISRUPT ALL MEDIA like me." "So, anyway, Facebook is way better than Twitter, 'cuz it's got more of those meemie things the kids love. Not as many as Snapchat, but they're working on it. We're working on that. That's totally an important part of Project HOLDING USER DECLINE RATES FOR 2015 BELOW 30%. More memes and LOLcats. That and spamming your email every five minutes. BING. Heh heh. No, tots seriously, don't bother looking at your phones. That's us, asking why you haven't been on Twitter lately. "Yeah, I know, it makes us look needy. But hey! We're needy for reals! I mean, the company is worth --just let me check my phone here-- a gazillion billion dollars right now by stock valuation. Still, someday, someone's going to ask us how, exactly, we plan to make enough money to justify a $50 stock valuation. To which my answer continues to be, uhm, I don't know, you tell me? Which is good enough for "venture capitalists," or, as I like to call them, "Morons with too much money," but not for "value investors." Or, as I like to call them, "Morons with too much money they got from their grandparents." "So, to summarise, I sold 10% of my stock six months ago. Do you know what 1% of 24 billion is? Here, let my get my phone. Holy crap, I am swimming in moron money. Like, I make more than a doctor just on interest if I hold my money in Treasuries! For doing nothing! And in America, it's taxed below 15%! So I was at, like, Twitter HQ the other day, and I'm like, I'm outta here! And everyone was, like, 'Oh no you don't. We know where your compound is.' And we decided to wait another six months or so, till everybody else had sold off, like, 1%, too. "So we're going to hold on for six months. But how, you ask? Like this: 'How?' I'm hilarious. So our plan is that we're going to do something about those Gamergate arseholes. That's something you thin-skinned weenies care about, I hear. Ladies, amirite? Or, no, wait. Trolls. All the trolls. Gonna get rid of 'em. We have a plan. Which doesn't involve a compound on a lake in the Sierra Nevada you never heard of. For another six months."

You're backing out now? We had a date!

It's a well known fact that city street corners were invented by those notoriously Lawful authoritarian fascists, the Romans.

Hunh? That part where he killed everybody was the funniest bit of TV since that episode of Game of Thrones with the wedding! Or is that just me?

I'm thinking that this is not where no-one has mocked before....

Please disregard the preceding fatuous and juvenile comment. As a responsible Canadian voter in solidarity with my Ukrainian-Canadian fellow citizens, I firmly believe that it is incumbent on the Canadian government to support the Ukrainian motherland in its democratic aspirations against the revanchist and quasi-fascistic nationalism of the Russian Federation. It is clear that only boots on the ground will suffice, and that the Canadian Armed Forces have been too far reduced in human resources to provide this support. It is for this reason that I support the recruiting of large numbers of youth into the Canadian Armed Forces. While it might be objected that demographics makes this unpromising, it will be noted that a number of low-wage, non-unionised firms in the grocery sector continue to rely on labour meeting this profile. Thus, there does exist a reservoir of potential service people, in the form of the workforce of these firms. I would also like to take this opportunity to offer the services of my employer in providing logistics support in the area of grocery goods for a new infrastructure of training camps.

Guys, guys, relax. The world is suffering from deficient consumer demand right now. People need more money in their pocket to spend, is the problem. Well, you can't just be giving out money to anyone, LOL obvs. But, hey, you can buy tanks, and the tank factory can hire a buncha guys, and give 'em lots of OT to make even more tanks, and then everyone will be rolling in the benjamins. Prob', though. People are all, like, "we don't need more tanks 11!1" And you can't just say, "NO, RONG, need more tanks LOL!" Cuz' some reason. It was explained to me, but I forget. Something about doxing and death threats not being good ways to win debates, needing actual arguments? Cra-a-a-zy. Anyway, put polonium in that guy's tea, but I do listen. So, argument. That Putin guy be Hitler. Need guns to fight Hitler. Stands to reason. (Cool, New Jersey!) Okay, but what if you're Russian? Easy! Americans like Nazis! (Or Ukrainians, same same.) See, works both ways. Also, if you're European, you can say Putin and Americans like Nazis. Then you need twice as many tanks, which is awesome on account of Europe needing even more bling.

i) Call us to the office for a confidential talk, and then make me sit and watch while you tear a strip off my co-worker for his work ethic, with specific examples, and even demands for explanations while I squirm. ii) Get rid of a new cashier with bad attendance and a tendency to vanish from the checkstands by insulting her appearance until she "can't take it any more" and quits. And then boast about it. What the heck? You act like a nice guy, you seem like a nice guy. Are you just oblivious, or do I have to adjust my personal sociopath detection checklist?

I give you William Smith, the discoverer of the South Shetland Islands at the age of 29 and Nathaniel Palmer, second mate of the first American sealer to visit the archipelago, at the age of 21 --probably not the only precocious Antarctic sailors/explorers I could find if I spent long enough at Wikipedia. So Federation staffing policies are fairly easy to understand, just as long as you remember that it's a primarily rural society in which families are large, and parents often die young, so that great burdens are thrust on people at a very young age. Call me James Tiberius. My parents did, when they named me, some years ago, in the little village in Iowa where I was born. I shall tell you a tale, of star lanes and systems, and planets, Type M and otherwise, and the men and women (I guess --but they have to wear miniskirts) who ply their trade in that expanse. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having few or no credits --quatloos? Latinum? Do we even have money? I can never keep this straight-- in my account, and nothing particular to interest me planetside, I thought I would sail about a little and see the voidy part of the universe. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before men in red shirts, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to space as soon as I can. This is my substitute for a double-fisted punch followed by a knockdown kick. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

The spear + shield combo is pretty elementary. (Shove the sabretooth tiger away with the shield --it's got sharp bits!-- and poke it with the wooden stick with the fire-hardened end.) That looks a lot more dangerous than I was imagining it, and you can see why the guys want big shields! We'd have had a hard time becoming the dominant mamalian predator, much less herdsmen, without this combo, and it seems crazy to penalise people for using it, although Markdoc's proposed rules don't, at least for a larger shield. The spear has to be short enough to throw, though. No pikes or half-pikes. (Or guisarme-volage, either.) On the other hand, it's pretty crazy to disarm yourself when facing a bear or a boar, and that's where you bet bigger, two-handed boar-and-bear spears, typically with heads long enough to be useful for slashing (or deepening the penetration wound), and a cross-guard. There's your two-handed spear. Now, once you have a two-handed spear, they tend, all other things being equal, to turn into pikes for a very, very basic reason. You can poke people who can't poke back! I'll admit to being a wee bit skeptical that the Macedonian sarissa was actually 21ft long, since it seems to me that an arms race would have brought 21ft pikes back in the Renaissance if they were actually practical. 18ft pikes, on the other hand, not only existed, but seem to have been quite handy weapons, to the point where they seem to have been weapons of choice in hand-to-hand affrays, like the arrest/assassination/execution of Wallenstein. (Though the sources maybe conflating half-pikes with pikes.) Certainly if you watch a skilled arborist in action you'll gain some respect for bardiches and Lucerne Hammers. It seems pretty pointless to me to encumber a pikeman with a defensive shield, when he's supposed to be poking people at long range and foining off their attempts to do the same with the aid of his buddies. As Markdoc points out, the main defensive effort involved putting pikemen in body armour, not shields. Now you say, but why weren't pikes everywhere and always used? I have a crazy theory. Although going to war in the Early Modern was "trailing a pike," it is hard to imagine a column of men making a route march down a road dragging the heels of their pikes behind them. In practice, a wagon was attached to each company to carry pikes. If your army can't afford wagons (which means wagon roads, and pioneer detachments to improve them, and axes, shovels, pulleys and crowbars to equip the pioneers, and animals to pull the wagons, and foraging details to feed the traction animals, and cavalry to cover the foragers), then you give up on the pikes. The Macedonians obviously "cheated" somehow, perhaps by having large numbers of camp followers carry the pikes around on stretchers, but once the Romans arrived to punish their ponderous road movements, the weapon system was given up until the emergence of a whole new level of military-infrastructural-logistical effort. For using the two-handed spear in melee, I'm tempted to say that it's a wash, unless you use weapon ranks and lengths rules, since there are offsetting OCV and DCV advantages and disadvantages. If you do use some kind of weapon rank rule --and I'd have to go back to the books to see what Steven Long recommends-- then the two-handed spear is going to have whatever advantages come from outreaching swors and single-handed spears.

Oh, my.... Must have link. NOW. For research.