Great Naval Quotes

The isolationists argued that if the US had stayed out of the Great War - or, as it later became known, World War I - there never would have been a World War II. By 1917 the warring protagonists - Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and others - had suffered millions of casualties and were exhausted. The German populace was starving. The isolationists believed that a resolution was inevitable without the US involvement that resulted in 116,000 dead fathers, brothers and sons.  They argued that if the United States had stayed out of the Great War, no one would ever have heard of Adolf Hitler.

If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering.

It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed.

Stephen nodded. 'Tell me,' he said, in a low voice, some moments later. 'Were I under naval discipline, could that fellow have me whipped?'He nodded towards Mr Marshall. 'The master?' cried Jack, with inexpressible amazement. 'Yes,' said Stephen looking attentively at him, with his head slightly inclined to the left. 'But he is the master...' said Jack. If Stephen had called the sophies stem her stern, or her truck her keel, he would have understood the situation directly; but that Stephen should confuse the chain of command, the relative status of a captain and a master, of a commissioned officer and a warrant officer, so subverted the natural order, so undermined the sempiternal universe, that for a moment his mind could hardly encompass it. Yet Jack, though no great scholar, no judge of a hexameter, was tolerably quick, and after gasping no more than twice he said, 'My dear sir, I beleive you have been lead astray by the words master and master and commander- illogical terms, I must confess. The first is subordinate to the second. You must allow me to explain our naval ranks some time. But in any case you will never be flogged- no, no; you shall not be flogged,' he added, gazing with pure affection, and with something like awe, at so magnificent a prodigy, at an ignorance so very far beyond anything that even his wide-ranging mind had yet conceived.

All greatness comes from suffering.

(Corinthians:) And do not be attracted by their offer of a great naval alliance; for to do no wrong to a neighbour is a surer source of strength than to gain a perilous advantage under the influence of a momentary illusion.

(Corinthians:) And do not be attracted by their offer of a great naval alliance; for to do no wrong to a neighbour is a surer source of strength than to gain a perilous advantage under the influence of a momentary illusion. (Book 1 Chapter 42.4)

The new naval treaty permits the United States to spend a billion dollars on warships—a sum greater than has been accumulated by all our endowed institutions of learning in their entire history. Unintelligence could go no further! ... [In Great Britain, the situation is similar.] ... Until the figures are reversed, ... nations deceive themselves as to what they care about most.

On the qualities required of naval officers, Roosevelt was outspoken: “They must have skill in handling the ships, skill in tactics, skill in strategy . . . the dogged ability to bear punishment, the power and desire to inflict it, the daring, the resolution, the willingness to take risks and incur responsibilities which have been possessed by the great captains of all ages, and without which no man can ever hope to stand in the front rank of fighting men.

Italy laid down its first dreadnought, the 19,550-ton Dante Alighieri,

The British test mobilization of July 15–25 coincided almost exactly with the German High Sea Fleet maneuvers of July 14–25 conducted off the coast of Norway,

the dead still numbered a staggering 1,198 (among them 128 American citizens), with 764 survivors. Never before had a single act of war caused so many noncombatant deaths.23

We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go!

astonishing ten capital ships laid down for the British navy within a span of twelve months, demonstrating a resolve to make whatever financial sacrifices were necessary to stay ahead.

I can create a new business within three months: raise the money, assemble a team, and launch it. It’s fun for me. It’s really cool to see what can I put together. It makes money almost as a side effect. Creating businesses is the game I became good at. It’s just my motivation has shifted from being goal-oriented to being artistic. Ironically, I think I’m much better at it now. [74] Even when I invest, it’s because I like the people involved, I like hanging out with them, I learn from them, I think the product is really cool. These days, I will pass on great investments because I don’t find the products interesting.

Under these circumstances, battleships of the Dreadnought design, better suited for warfare in the confined space of the North Sea, appeared more useful than battle cruisers, whose potential global range was no longer as relevant.

Your life is a firefly blink in a night. You’re here for such a brief period of time. If you fully acknowledge the futility of what you’re doing, then I think it can bring great happiness and peace because you realize this is a game.

Under Scheer’s leadership, the Germans had maintained the initiative in the North Sea throughout the year of Jutland, but his six sorties had resulted in just one battle, a tactical victory that had not altered the strategic situation.

By war’s end the British navy would employ more than 180 “mystery ships of all sorts,”58 raising the question of whether their eleven confirmed U-boat victims (far less than one-tenth of the total submarines Germany lost) justified their cost.

About a month after I returned from Vietnam, one of my former prison mates came running to me after a reunion at the Naval Academy. He told me with glee, "This is really great, you won't believe how this country has advanced. They've practically done away with the plebe year at the academy, and they've got computers in the basement of Bancroft Hall." I thought, "Hell, if there was anything that helped us get through those eight years it was plebe year, and if anything screwed up that war, it was computers.

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian water do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they have yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their pelty wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs gives robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the birch canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

Yap in the western Carolines served as Germany’s western Pacific communication hub; the island had a powerful wireless station along with direct undersea cable links to China, to Java in the Dutch East Indies, and to Guam on the United States’ Manila to San Francisco line.

Operations so far north required bases in Scotland, not England; anticipating this need, the navy five years earlier had begun to improve Rosyth, in the Firth of Forth, as the primary base for a North Sea campaign against Germany, with Scapa Flow, in the Orkneys, identified “as another potential main base.”37

Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted. If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways. When they have reached the summit of grandeur, some minute and unsuspected cause commonly affects their ruin, and the empire of the world is transferred to some other place. Immortal Rome was at first but an insignificant village, inhabited only by a few abandoned ruffians, but by degrees it rose to a stupendous height, and excelled in arts and arms all the nations that preceded it. But the demolition of Carthage (what one should think should have established is in supreme dominion) by removing all danger, suffered it to sink into debauchery, and made it at length an easy prey to Barbarians. England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe. Soon after the reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people according to exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men from each colony, desiring the monarchy of the whole, they will destroy each others' influence and keep the country in equilibrio. Be not surprised that I am turned into politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.

raiders, the United States wanted Great Britain to foot the bill for the entire war cost after Gettysburg, some $2 billion, the logic being that after Gettysburg, the Confederacy had abandoned offensive operations, except at sea. If the British hadn’t provided naval aid, the South couldn’t have prolonged the war and Great Britain was therefore liable for the extra astronomical expenses incurred.

In a plot that smacks of James Bond (and has all the hallmarks of an Elliott ruse), a Dutch agent named Peter Tazelaar was put ashore near the seafront casino at Scheveningen, wearing full evening dress and covered with a rubber suit to keep him dry. Once ashore, Tazelaar peeled off his outer suit and began to “mingle with the crowd on the front” in his dinner jacket, which had been sprinkled with brandy to reinforce the “party-goer’s image.” Formally dressed and alcoholically perfumed, Tazelaar successfully made it past the German guards and picked up a radio previously dropped by parachute. The echo of 007 may not be coincidental: among the young blades of British intelligence at this time was a young officer in naval intelligence named Ian Fleming, the future author of the James Bond books. Ian Fleming and Nicholas Elliott had both experienced the trauma of being educated at Durnford School; they became close friends.

Built to naval specifications, with gun mountings on a reinforced deck and turbine engines capable of 25 knots, the Lusitania was requisitioned as an armed merchant cruiser at the outbreak of war, painted grey, then promptly returned to the Cunard Line after the Admiralty realized that the ship, at or near top speed, consumed nearly 1,000 tons of coal per day. The high cost of fuel and of the crew of 800 required to man her could be taken in its stride by a private firm

Therefore, Sir Walter, what I would take leave to suggest is, that if in consequence of any rumours getting abroad of your intention; which must be contemplated as a possible thing, because we know how difficult it is to keep the actions and designs of one part of the world from the notice and curiosity of the other; consequence has its tax; I, John Shepherd, might conceal any family-matters that I chose, for nobody would think it worth their while to observe me; but Sir Walter Elliot has eyes upon him which it may be very difficult to elude; and therefore, thus much I venture upon, that it will not greatly surprise me if, with all our caution, some rumour of the truth should get abroad; in the supposition of which, as I was going to observe, since applications will unquestionably follow, I should think any from our wealthy naval commanders particularly worth attending to; and beg leave to add, that two hours will bring me over at any time, to save you the trouble of replying.

I had incipient ulcers most of the years that I was at Bell Labs. I have since gone off to the Naval Postgraduate School and laid back somewhat, and now my health is much better. But if you want to be a great scientist you’re going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist. But nice guys end last, is what Leo Durocher said. If you want to lead a nice happy life with a lot of recreation and everything else, you’ll lead a nice life.

Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

munitions exports, which stood at just $40 million in 1914, boomed to nearly $1.3 billion in 1916, while the total value for exported manufactured goods rose from $2.4 billion (or 6 percent of the gross national product) in 1914 to $5.5 billion (or 12 percent of GNP) in 1916, almost exclusively because of increased trade with the Allies. While J. P. Morgan, which brokered most of the transactions, led a long list of American firms that reaped enormous profits from this trade, millions of ordinary Americans, from workers to farmers, benefited as well.

The history of sea power is largely, though by no means solely, a narrative of contests between nations, of mutual rivalries, of violence frequently culminating in war. The profound influence of sea commerce upon the wealth and strength of countries was clearly seen long before the true principles which governed its growth and prosperity were detected. To secure to one's own people a disproportionate share of such benefits, every effort was made to exclude others, either by the peaceful legislative methods of monopoly or prohibitory regulations, or, when these failed, by direct violence. The clash of interests, the angry feelings roused by conflicting attempts thus to appropriate the larger share, if not the whole, of the advantages of commerce, and of distant unsettled commercial regions, led to wars. On the other hand, wars arising from other causes have been greatly modified in their conduct and issue by the control of the sea. Therefore the history of sea power, while embracing in its broad sweep all that tends to make a people great upon the sea or by the sea, is largely a military history...

The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This book is dense, difficult, long, full of blood and guts. It wasn’t written, as Thucydides himself attests at the start, to be easy or fun. But it is loaded with hardcore, timeless truths and the story it tells ought to be required reading for every citizen in a democracy. Thucydides was an Athenian general who was beaten and disgraced in a battle early in the 27-year conflagration that came to be called the Peloponnesian War. He decided to drop out of the fighting and dedicate himself to recording, in all the detail he could manage, this conflict, which, he felt certain, would turn out to be the greatest and most significant war ever fought up to that time. He did just that. Have you heard of Pericles’ Funeral Oration? Thucydides was there for it. He transcribed it. He was there for the debates in the Athenian assembly over the treatment of the island of Melos, the famous Melian Dialogue. If he wasn’t there for the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse or the betrayal of Athens by Alcibiades, he knew people who were there and he went to extremes to record what they told him.Thucydides, like all the Greeks of his era, was unencumbered by Christian theology, or Marxist dogma, or Freudian psychology, or any of the other “isms” that attempt to convince us that man is basically good, or perhaps perfectible. He saw things as they were, in my opinion. It’s a dark vision but tremendously bracing and empowering because it’s true. On the island of Corcyra, a great naval power in its day, one faction of citizens trapped their neighbors and fellow Corcyreans in a temple. They slaughtered the prisoners’ children outside before their eyes and when the captives gave themselves up based on pledges of clemency and oaths sworn before the gods, the captors massacred them as well. This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth. To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It’s the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many. Hoi polloi in Greek means “the many.” Oligoi means “the few.” I can’t recommend Thucydides for fun, but if you want to expose yourself to a towering intellect writing on the deepest stuff imaginable, give it a try.

Married to a naval commander who happened to be Benjamin Franklin’s great-great-grandson, Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. “We, the women of the United States,” she told the bronze Lafayette, “denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.” She beseeched the inanimate Frenchman, “Let that outstretched hand of yours pointing to the White House recall to him”—President Wilson—“his words and promises, his trumpet call for all of us, to see that the world is made safe for democracy. As our army now in France spoke to you there, saying here we are to help your country fight for liberty, will you not speak here and now for us, a little band with no army, no power but justice and right, no strength but in our Constitution and in the Declaration of Independence; and win a great victory again in this country by giving us the opportunity we ask—to be heard through the Susan B. Anthony amendment.” She then echoed the words uttered by the American officer in Paris on July 4, 1917. “Lafayette,” she said, “we are here!

Great Britain, for instance, is too big and too diverse to be home to a small-island civilization, but in modern times the English—though not, I think, other peoples of the island—have cultivated what might be called a small-island mentality: all their most tiresome history books stress, sometimes in their opening words, that their history is a function of their insularity. They still write and read histories with such titles as Our Island Story and The Offshore Islanders.4The conviction that their island “arose from the azure main” and is like a gem “set in the silver sea” resounds in national songs and scraps of verse which they hear repeatedly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English invested heavily in naval security. They created the cult of the “English eccentric”—which is a way of idealizing the outcome of isolation. They have projected an image as “a singular race, one which prides itself on being a little mad.

They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; the furnish long maritime approaches to out numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wig-wams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forest, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartart Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

That must be my surgeon coming aboard. You will like him; a reading man too, most amazing learned; a full-blown physician into the bargain, and my particular friend. But I must tell you this, Yorke; he is wealthy – ‘ In point of fact Captain Aubrey had little idea of his surgeon’s fortune, apart from knowing that he owned a good deal of hilly land in Catalonia with a tumbledown castle on it. But Stephen had done pretty well out of the Mauritius campaign; his manner of living was Spartan – one suit of clothes every five years and perhaps a couple of shirts – and apart from books he had no visible expenses at all. Jack was no Macchiavel, but he did know that to the rich it should be given; that capital possessed a mystical significance; that even the most perfectly disinterested respected it and its owner; and that although a naval surgeon was ordinarily a person of no great consequence, the same man moved into quite a different category the moment he was endowed with comfortable private means. In short, that whereas an ordinary surgeon, living on his pay, might not readily be indulged in room for exotic livestock, an imperfectly- preserved giant squid, and several tons of natural specimens, in a stranger’s ship, a wealthy natural philosopher might meet with more consideration; and Jack knew how Stephen prized the collection he had made during their arduous voyage. ‘ – he is wealthy, and he only comes with me because of the opportunities for natural philosophy; though he is a first-rate surgeon, too, and we are lucky to have him. But this voyage the opportunities have been prodigious, and he has turned the Leopard into a down-right Ark. Most of the Desolation creatures are stuffed or pickled but there are some from New Holland that skip and bound about: I hope you are not too crowded in La Fleche?

Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review If you had been a security policy-maker in the world’s greatest power in 1900, you would have been a Brit, looking warily at your age-old enemy, France. By 1910, you would be allied with France and your enemy would be Germany. By 1920, World War I would have been fought and won, and you’d be engaged in a naval arms race with your erstwhile allies, the U.S. and Japan. By 1930, naval arms limitation treaties were in effect, the Great Depression was underway, and the defense planning standard said ‘no war for ten years.’ Nine years later World War II had begun. By 1950, Britain no longer was the world’s greatest power, the Atomic Age had dawned, and a ‘police action’ was underway in Korea. Ten years later the political focus was on the ‘missile gap,’ the strategic paradigm was shifting from massive retaliation to flexible response, and few people had heard of Vietnam. By 1970, the peak of our involvement in Vietnam had come and gone, we were beginning détente with the Soviets, and we were anointing the Shah as our protégé in the Gulf region. By 1980, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in the throes of revolution, there was talk of our ‘hollow forces’ and a ‘window of vulnerability,’ and the U.S. was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen. By 1990, the Soviet Union was within a year of dissolution, American forces in the Desert were on the verge of showing they were anything but hollow, the U.S. had become the greatest debtor nation the world had ever known, and almost no one had heard of the internet. Ten years later, Warsaw was the capital of a NATO nation, asymmetric threats transcended geography, and the parallel revolutions of information, biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and high density energy sources foreshadowed changes almost beyond forecasting. All of which is to say that I’m not sure what 2010 will look like, but I’m sure that it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly. Lin Wells

Naval’s Laws The below is Naval’s response to the question “Are there any quotes you live by or think of often?” These are gold. Take the time necessary to digest them. “These aren’t all quotes from others. Many are maxims that I’ve carved for myself.” Be present above all else. Desire is suffering (Buddha). Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying). If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett). Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle). Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. A Few of Naval’s Tweets that are Too Good to Leave Out “What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.” “Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.” “If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” “We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.” “The guns aren’t new. The violence isn’t new. The connected cameras are new, and that changes everything.” “You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.” “My one repeated learning in life: ‘There are no adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.” “A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

As we pulled up at the big school gates, I saw tears rolling down my dad’s face. I felt confused as to what part of nature or love thought this was a good idea. My instinct certainly didn’t; but what did I know? I was only eight. So I embarked on this mission called boarding school. And how do you prepare for that one? In truth, I found it really hard; there were some great moments like building dens in the snow in winter, or getting chosen for the tennis team, or earning a naval button, but on the whole it was a survival exercise in learning to cope. Coping with fear was the big one. The fear of being left and the fear of being bullied--both of which were very real. What I learned was that I couldn’t manage either of those things very well on my own. It wasn’t anything to do with the school itself, in fact the headmaster and teachers were almost invariably kind, well-meaning and good people, but that sadly didn’t make surviving it much easier. I was learning very young that if I were to survive this place then I had to find some coping mechanisms. My way was to behave badly, and learn to scrap, as a way to avoid bullies wanting to target me. It was also a way to avoid thinking about home. But not thinking about home is hard when all you want is to be at home. I missed my mum and dad terribly, and on the occasional night where I felt this worst, I remember trying to muffle my tears in my pillow while the rest of the dormitory slept. In fact I was not alone in doing this. Almost everyone cried, but we all learned to hide it, and those who didn’t were the ones who got bullied. As a kid, you can only cry so much before you run out of tears and learn to get tough. I meet lots of folks nowadays who say how great boarding school is as a way of toughening kids up. That feels a bit back-to-front to me. I was much tougher before school. I had learned to love the outdoors and to understand the wild, and how to push myself. When I hit school, suddenly all I felt was fear. Fear forces you to look tough on the outside but makes you weak on the inside. This was the opposite of all I had ever known as a kid growing up. I had been shown by my dad that it was good to be fun, cozy, homely--but then as tough as boots when needed. At prep school I was unlearning this lesson and adopting new ways to survive. And age eight, I didn’t always pick them so well.

Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time—and has been since—to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur—forming a goodly half of the polite company—would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world—which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother—there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.

the Cook expedition had another, far less benign result. Cook was not only an experienced seaman and geographer, but also a naval officer. The Royal Society financed a large part of the expedition’s expenses, but the ship itself was provided by the Royal Navy. The navy also seconded eighty-five well-armed sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with artillery, muskets, gunpowder and other weaponry. Much of the information collected by the expedition – particularly the astronomical, geographical, meteorological and anthropological data – was of obvious political and military value. The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world. Cook claimed for Britain many of the islands and lands he ‘discovered’, most notably Australia. The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the south-western Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.2 In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never recovered. An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were completely wiped out, to the last man, woman and child, within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically. The few survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity and various ‘productive skills’ such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress – death. Alas,

Most of the cadets accepted an invitation to attend a reception at the Venezuelan Naval Academy in La Guaira. Don Silke and I had other ideas and figured on getting a cab to the capital city of Caracas. The ride would take about a half hour, if the car did not overheat going over the mountain pass on the newly constructed highway. The capital city had an elevation of 7,083 feet and we were at sea level. As we stepped off the gangway, I noticed two stunningly beautiful girls standing on the concrete dock looking at the ship. Neither of us could figure out why the girls were there. Perhaps they were tourists, but I would find out. Approaching them, I asked if we could help, but soon discovered that they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak what seemed to be French. It could have led to an impasse but my knowledge of German saved the day. It turned out that both girls were from France and one of them came from the Alsace Province and spoke German. They were both quite bubbly and we soon found out that they were dancers with the Folies Bergère, on tour to South America. From what I understood, they would be performing in Caracas that night and could get us free tickets. It all sounded great except that we had to be back aboard by 10:00 p.m., since the ship would be leaving first thing in the morning. Rats! You win some and you lose some, but at least we were with them for now. Don and I offered to take them aboard for lunch. It all seemed exciting for them to board a ship with so many single men. Ooh là là. The girls attracted a lot of attention and the ship’s photographer couldn’t stop taking pictures. The rest of our classmates couldn’t believe what they saw and of course thought that we were luckier than we really were. For us, the illusion had to be enough and fortunately the lunch served that day was reasonably good.

Pericles’ speech is not only a programme. It is also a defence, and perhaps even an attack. It reads, as I have already hinted, like a direct attack on Plato. I do not doubt that it was directed, not only against the arrested tribalism of Sparta, but also against the totalitarian ring or ‘link’ at home; against the movement for the paternal state, the Athenian ‘Society of the Friends of Laconia’ (as Th. Gomperz called them in 190232). The speech is the earliest33 and at the same time perhaps the strongest statement ever made in opposition to this kind of movement. Its importance was felt by Plato, who caricatured Pericles’ oration half a century later in the passages of the Republic34 in which he attacks democracy, as well as in that undisguised parody, the dialogue called Menexenus or the Funeral Oration35. But the Friends of Laconia whom Pericles attacked retaliated long before Plato. Only five or six years after Pericles’ oration, a pamphlet on the Constitution of Athens36 was published by an unknown author (possibly Critias), now usually called the ‘Old Oligarch’. This ingenious pamphlet, the oldest extant treatise on political theory, is, at the same time, perhaps the oldest monument of the desertion of mankind by its intellectual leaders. It is a ruthless attack upon Athens, written no doubt by one of her best brains. Its central idea, an idea which became an article of faith with Thucydides and Plato, is the close connection between naval imperialism and democracy. And it tries to show that there can be no compromise in a conflict between two worlds37, the worlds of democracy and of oligarchy; that only the use of ruthless violence, of total measures, including the intervention of allies from outside (the Spartans), can put an end to the unholy rule of freedom. This remarkable pamphlet was to become the first of a practically infinite sequence of works on political philosophy which were to repeat more or less, openly or covertly, the same theme down to our own day. Unwilling and unable to help mankind along their difficult path into an unknown future which they have to create for themselves, some of the ‘educated’ tried to make them turn back into the past. Incapable of leading a new way, they could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom. It became the more necessary for them to assert their superiority by fighting against equality as they were (using Socratic language) misanthropists and misologists—incapable of that simple and ordinary generosity which inspires faith in men, and faith in human reason and freedom. Harsh as this judgement may sound, it is just, I fear, if it is applied to those intellectual leaders of the revolt against freedom who came after the Great Generation, and especially after Socrates. We can now try to see them against the background of our historical interpretation.

It proved conclusively the great accuracy of naval fire, provided good observation could be obtained.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Once upon a time our politicians did not tend to apologize for our country’s prior actions! Here’s a refresher on how some of our former patriots handled negative comments about our great country. These are quite good JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60’s when De Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO. De Gaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible. Rusk’s response: “Does that include those who are buried here?” De Gaulle did not respond. You could have heard a pin drop. When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of ‘empire building’ by George Bush. He answered by saying, “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.” You could have heard a pin drop. There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying, “Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intend to do, bomb them?” A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: “Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?” You could have heard a pin drop. A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Germany and France. At morning tea the Frenchman complained that the conference should be conducted in French since it was being held in Paris. The German replied that, so far as he could see, the reason that it was being held in English was as a mark of respect to the other attendees, since their troops had shed so much blood so that the Frenchman wouldn’t be speaking German.

By some quirk of fate, I had been chosen—along with five others—as a candidate to be the next equerry to the Princess of Wales. I knew little about what an equerry actually did, but I did not greatly care. I already knew I wanted to do the job. Two years on loan to the royal household would surely be good for promotion, and even if it was not, it had to be better than slaving in the Ministry of Defense, which was the most likely alternative. I wondered what it would be like to work in a palace. Through friends and relatives I had an idea it was not all red carpets and footmen. Running the royal family must involve a lot of hard work for somebody, I realized, but not, surely, for the type of tiny cog that was all I expected to be. In the wardroom of the frigate, alongside in Loch Ewe, news of the signal summoning me to London for an interview had been greeted with predictable ribaldry and a swift expectation that I therefore owed everybody several free drinks. Doug, our quiet American on loan from the U.S. Navy, spoke for many. He observed me in skeptical silence for several minutes. Then he took a long pull at his beer, blew out his mustache, and said, “Let me get this straight. You are going to work for Princess Di?” I had to admit it sounded improbable. Anyway, I had not even been selected yet. I did not honestly think I would be. “Might work for her, Doug. Only might. There’re probably several smooth Army buggers ahead of me in the line. I’m just there to make it look democratic.” The First Lieutenant, thinking of duty rosters, was more practical. “Whatever about that, you’ve wangled a week ashore. Lucky bastard!” Everyone agreed with him, so I bought more drinks. While these were being poured, my eye fell on the portraits hanging on the bulkhead. There were the regulation official photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip, and there, surprisingly, was a distinctly nonregulation picture of the Princess of Wales, cut from an old magazine and lovingly framed by an officer long since appointed elsewhere. The picture had been hung so that it lay between the formality of the official portraits and the misty eroticism of some art prints we had never quite got around to throwing away. The symbolic link did not require the services of one of the notoriously sex-obsessed naval psychologists for interpretation. As she looked down at us in our off-duty moments the Princess represented youth, femininity, and a glamour beyond our gray steel world. She embodied the innocent vulnerability we were in extremis employed to defend. Also, being royal, she commanded the tribal loyalty our profession had valued above all else for more than a thousand years, since the days of King Alfred. In addition, as a matter of simple fact, this tasty-looking bird was our future Queen. Later, when that day in Loch Ewe felt like a relic from another lifetime, I often marveled at the Princess’s effect on military people. That unabashed loyalty symbolized by Arethusa’s portrait was typical of reactions in messhalls and barracks worldwide. Sometimes the men gave the impression that they would have died for her not because it was their duty, but because they wanted to. She really seemed worth it.

The Germans are excellent soldiers and superb tacticians, but their grasp of strategy, certainly at the geo-political level, is often weak. In threatening British naval supremacy, the Germans drew British attention to their long-term plans, which is the last thing they should have done. As a result, when war loomed in 1914, the British were determined that, whatever else happened, the Germans must not gain naval bases on the French and Belgian coasts, from which they could directly threaten the east coast of England

During the Great War tens of thousands of German civilians died of malnutrition and starvation because of the British naval blockade; the accepted estimate is that between half a million and one million people died of hunger in Germany between 1914 and 1918,

Money buys you freedom in the material world. It’s not going to make you happy, it’s not going to solve your health problems, it’s not going to make your family great, it’s not going to make you fit, it’s not going to make you calm. But it will solve a lot of external problems. It’s a reasonable step to go ahead and make money.

Corbett condemned a failure of imagination that devalued the process: the persistent heresy of regarding military and naval strategy as two different subjects that can be dealt with apart, of refusing to see them broadly as mere branches of the great art of war, two branches so intimately intertwined that one can never be treated apart from the other, and least of all when we are dealing with the fundamental problems of Insular or Imperial Defence. Lord Elgin’s Commission had treated the Navy as ‘a negligible quantity’, because it had no authority to consider wider strategic issues.76

Second. The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect, his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies—all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature

Read what you love until you love to read. You almost have to read the stuff you’re reading, because you’re into it. You don’t need any other reason. There’s no mission here to accomplish. Just read because you enjoy it. These days, I find myself rereading as much (or more) as I do reading. A tweet from @illacertus said, “I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.” I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people. Then, you can really absorb those.

Happiness is a very evolving thing, I think, like all the great questions. When you’re a little kid, you go to your mom and ask, “What happens when we die? Is there a Santa Claus? Is there a God? Should I be happy? Who should I marry?” Those kinds of things. There are no glib answers because no answers apply to everybody. These kinds of questions ultimately do have answers, but they have personal answers. The answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you, and vice versa. Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are.

To write a great book, you must first become the book.

Prince of Wales still lies, her huge 44,000-ton bulk turned upside down by the violence of the enemy, nearly 40 fathoms deep off the Malaysian coast. Here, in all its concentrated, solemn vastness, an official war grave, is a solid, enduring relic of Britain’s final days as a great industrial, economic and naval power. At 745 feet long and 105 feet wide, she contains centuries of shipbuilding and fighting experience, now dead, scattered, disbanded, forgotten or lost, thousands of tons of steel from blast furnaces, mills and forges long demolished, made with coal from mines long ago closed and sealed, and dug and smelted and hammered by an industrial working class now vanished. Every intricate part of her was made according to the traditional measurements of England, feet, inches, pounds and hundredweight. These are now abandoned in favour of the metric system which was used by our enemies in that war and which would have been imposed upon us had we been defeated. But in this matter, as in so many others, we have made a conquest of ourselves. Somewhere in her barnacled ruins is the cabin where Churchill slept, the cinema where he watched That Hamilton Woman with tears in his eyes, the bridge from which he waved so cheerfully, and perhaps the rotted fragments of the hymn book from which he so lustily sang ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!’, beside his ally and supposed friend, the president of the United States.

On July 10, as the Austrian Foreign Ministry was drafting its ultimatum to Serbia, thousands of British naval reservists began arriving at manning depots, where they were issued uniforms and boarded their assigned ships. By July 16, the Second and Third Fleets had sailed from their home ports to join the First Fleet for the royal review at Spithead, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. On July 17, King George arrived and the First Lord, bursting with pride, presented the monarch with a fleet that Churchill declared to be “incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world.” On

By 1941 the loss of British ships to German submarines exceeded the rate of production in the shipyards of both Great Britain and the United States. In order to deliver to Great Britain the material aid required, the United States instituted a naval patrol force to protect British ships in the Western Atlantic.

Naval Ravikant has said, “To write a great book, you must first become the book.

In the same year as the great naval defeat, Marwan faced both an uprising in Syria and another rebellion in Khorasan. Some of the rebels wanted a descendent of Ali to occupy the caliphate; since Ali’s death, a strong subcurrent within Islam had insisted that only a man of Ali’s blood could properly carry on as his successor (the followers of this current, who also believed that a successor of Ali would be spiritually and supernaturally fitted to rule, were known as Shi’at Ali, the “Party of Ali”). Others, willing to cast their net wider, argued that the caliphate should simply go to a member of Muhammad’s clan, the Banu Hashim: they were known, generally, as Hashimites.6 The revolt in Khorasan soon spread through the entire province, taking it out of Marwan’s control.

Grateful for the business, the dealer gave Bogle a copy of the original book, Naval Battles of Great Britain 1775–1815, from which the naval prints had been lifted. Leafing through it, Bogle came across something Admiral Nelson had written after the Battle of the Nile in 1798: “Nothing could withstand the squadron under my command. The judgment of the captains, together with the valor and high state of discipline of the officers and men of every description, was irresistible.”1 This resonated immediately with Bogle, who then spied below Nelson’s signature, “HMS Vanguard, off the mouth of the Nile.

Stephen Maturin sipped his scalding coffee, the right Mocha berry, brought back from Arabia Felix in the pilgrim dhows, and considered. He was naturally a reserved and even a secretive man: his illegitimate birth (his father was an Irish officer in the service of His Most Catholic Majesty, his mother a Catalan lady) had to do with this; his activities in the cause of the liberation of Ireland had more; and his voluntary, gratuitous alliance with naval intelligence, undertaken with the sole aim of helping to defeat Bonaparte, whom he loathed with all his heart as a vile tyrant, a wicked cruel vulgar man, a destroyer of freedom and of nations, and as a betrayor of all that was good in the Revolution, had even more. Yet the power of keeping his mouth shut was innate; so perhaps was the integrity that made him one of the Admiralty’s most valued secret agents, particularly in Catalonia – a calling very well disguised by his also being an active naval surgeon, as well as a natural philosopher of international renown, one whose name was familiar to all those who cared deeply about the extinct solitaire of Rodriguez (close cousin to the dodo), the great land tortoise Testudo aubreii of the Indian Ocean, or the habits of the African aardvark. Excellent agent though he was, he was burdened with a heart, a loving heart that had very nearly broken for a woman named Diana Villiers: she had preferred an American to him – a natural preference, since Mr. Johnson was a fine upstanding witty intelligent man, and very rich, whereas Stephen was a plain bastard at the best, sallow with odd pale eyes, sparse hair and meager limbs, and rather poor.

Only certain portions of the line had to undergo carnage in the French style, but knowledge of it was all-pervasive. Everything the 19th River Guard knew came from quiet meetings in the communications trenches, conversations with sleepless, bitter infantrymen who had been transferred up from the fiercer fighting in the south. If some of the River Guard were on the edge, many of the regular infantry had gone over it long before. Especially disturbing to the naval contingent were reports from down below that Italian troops now were shot quite casually for disciplinary reasons, and that the Italian generals, like their French counterparts, were executing men in decimations for crimes they had not committed. Men with families were pulled from the ranks along with equally mystified adolescents and put to death for acts attributed to others whom they had never seen.

The earth is four-fifths water, that's a lot of room to hide, so the great trick of naval warfare has always been to find the enemy before he finds you. You're finished, if you can't do that, and all the courage and sacrifice in the world simply adds up to a lost war.

A huge fleet comprised of thousands of large naval and other seaworthy vessels from almost every nation on earth laid in wait off the coasts of the United States of America. The ships were stationary, poised and ready, positioned miles out to sea but still within plain view of every major port city, along every coastal waterway on all three sides of the great North American land mass.

Balfour, a member of the Conservative Party, took Winston Churchill’s place as first lord of the Admiralty. Churchill, condemned for his role in the unsuccessful naval campaign in the Dardanelles, was demoted to chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, becoming essentially a minister without portfolio.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Behind “The Exciting Story of Cuba” It was on a rainy evening in January of 2013, after Captain Hank and his wife Ursula returned by ship from a cruise in the Mediterranean, that Captain Hank was pondering on how to market his book, Seawater One. Some years prior he had published the book “Suppressed I Rise.” But lacking a good marketing plan the book floundered. Locally it was well received and the newspapers gave it great reviews, but Ursula was battling allergies and, unfortunately, the timing was off, as was the economy. Captain Hank has the ability to see sunshine when it’s raining and he’s not one easily deterred. Perhaps the timing was off for a novel or a textbook, like the Scramble Book he wrote years before computers made the scene. The history of West Africa was an option, however such a book would have limited public interest and besides, he had written a section regarding this topic for the second Seawater book. No, what he was embarking on would have to be steeped in history and be intertwined with true-life adventures that people could identify with. Out of the blue, his friend Jorge suggested that he write about Cuba. “You were there prior to the Revolution when Fidel Castro was in jail,” he ventured. Laughing, Captain Hank told a story of Mardi Gras in Havana. “Half of the Miami Police Department was there and the Coca-Cola cost more than the rum. Havana was one hell of a place!” Hank said. “I’ll tell you what I could do. I could write a pamphlet about the history of the island. It doesn’t have to be very long… 25 to 30 pages would do it.” His idea was to test the waters for public interest and then later add it to his book Seawater One. Writing is a passion surpassed only by his love for telling stories. It is true that Captain Hank had visited Cuba prior to the Revolution, but back then he was interested more in the beauty of the Latino girls than the history or politics of the country. “You don’t have to be Greek to appreciate Greek history,” Hank once said. “History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone’s heritage.” And so it was that he started to write about Cuba. When asked about why he wasn’t footnoting his work, he replied that the pamphlet, which grew into a book over 600 pages long, was a book for the people. “I’m not writing this to be a history book or an academic paper. I’m writing this book, so that by knowing Cuba’s past, people would understand it’s present.” He added that unless you lived it, you got it from somewhere else anyway, and footnoting just identifies where it came from. Aside from having been a ship’s captain and harbor pilot, Captain Hank was a high school math and science teacher and was once awarded the status of “Teacher of the Month” by the Connecticut State Board of Education. He has done extensive graduate work, was a union leader and the attendance officer at a vocational technical school. He was also an officer in the Naval Reserve and an officer in the U.S. Army for a total of over 40 years. He once said that “Life is to be lived,” and he certainly has. Active with Military Intelligence he returned to Europe, and when I asked what he did there, he jokingly said that if he had told me he would have to kill me. The Exciting Story of Cuba has the exhilaration of a novel. It is packed full of interesting details and, with the normalizing of the United States and Cuba, it belongs on everyone’s bookshelf, or at least in the bathroom if that’s where you do your reading. Captain Hank is not someone you can hold down and after having read a Proof Copy I know that it will be universally received as the book to go to, if you want to know anything about Cuba! Excerpts from a conversation with Chief Warrant Officer Peter Rommel, USA Retired, Military Intelligence Corps, Winter of 2014.

Captain Joseph Frye One of the nicest parks in present day downtown Tampa, Florida, is the Cotanchobee Fort Brooke Park. The 5-acre park, which lies between the Tampa Bay Times Forum (Amalie Arena) and the mouth of the Hillsborough River at the Garrison Channel, is used for many weddings and special events such as the dragon boat races and the duck race. Few people give thought to the historic significance of the location, or to Captain Joseph Frye, considered Tampa’s first native son, who was born there on June 14, 1826. Going to sea was a tradition in the Frye family, starting with his paternal great-grandfather Samuel Frye from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, who was the master of the sloop Humbird. As a young man, Joseph attended the United States Naval Academy and graduated with the second class in 1847. Starting as an Ensign, he served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy until the Civil War, at which time he resigned and took a commission as a Lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. The Ten Years’ War, also known as “the Great War,” which started in 1868 became the first of three wars of Cuban Independence. In October 1873, following the defeat of the Confederacy and five years into the Cuban revolution, Frye became Captain of a side-wheeler, the S/S Virginius. His mission was to take guns and ammunition, as well as approximately 300 Cuban rebels to Cuba, with the intent of fighting the Spanish army for Cuban Independence. Unfortunately, the mission failed when the ship was intercepted by the Spanish warship Tornado. Captain Frye and his crew were taken to Santiago de Cuba and given a hasty trial and before a British warship Commander, hearing of the incident, could intervene, they were sentenced to death. After thanking the members of his crew for their service, Captain Frye and fifty-three members of his crew were put to death by firing squad, and were then decapitated and trampled upon by the Spanish soldiers. However, the British Commander Sir Lambton Lorraine of HMS Niobe did manage to save the lives of a few of the remaining crewmembers and rebels.

His faith was rewarded. Hard on its tail came astonishing news from the Mediterranean. Since the arrival of Lord Hood's blockading fleet, the great naval arsenal of Toulon, isolated by the general anarchy of France, had been threatened with starvation. On August 27th, moderate elements in the town, terrified by the holocaust of massacre, rape and arson at Marseilles, ran up the white flag and invited Hood to take possession of the town in the name of Louis XVII. Thus it came about that the greatest arsenal in France and thirty ships of the line passed into the hands of a British fleet of only twelve. When eleven days later the news reached England people could scarcely believe their ears.

In the years following Hannibal’s birth, his father Hamilcar had fought doggedly and with great skill to preserve the remnants of the Carthaginian garrisons in western Sicily. That he was finally unsuccessful was because the Romans had been quick to learn an all-important lesson—to succeed in the Mediterranean theatre it is essential to have command of the sea. In the early stages of this great war the Carthaginians, with centuries of experience behind them, had found little difficulty in trouncing the Romans in naval engagements and in harrying their coastline. But one of the Roman qualities which would greatly assist them to their successful imperial role was an ability to learn from mistakes.

It was painful to consider that the nation which could produce the world's greatest battleships was unable under pressure to produce a single satisfactory torpedo boat.

Ad – Add               Ail – Ale               Air – Heir               Are - R               Ate - Eight               Aye - Eye - I                 B                            B – Be - Bee               Base - Bass               Bi – Buy - By – Bye               Bite - Byte               Boar - Bore               Board - Bored                 C               C – Sea - See               Capital – Capitol               Chord – Cord               Coarse - Course               Core - Corps               Creak – Creek               Cue – Q - Queue                 D               Dam - Damn               Dawg – Dog               Days – Daze               Dew – Do – Due               Die – Dye               Dual - Duel                 E               Earn – Urn               Elicit – Illicit               Elude - Illude               Ex – X                 F               Fat – Phat               Faze - Phase               Feat - Feet               Find – Fined               Flea – Flee               Forth - Fourth                 G               Gait – Gate               Genes – Jeans               Gnawed - Nod               Grate – Great                 H               Hair - Hare               Heal - Heel               Hear - Here               Heard - Herd               Hi - High               Higher – Hire               Hoarse - Horse               Hour - Our                 I               Idle - Idol               Ill – Ill               In – Inn               Inc – Ink               IV – Ivy                 J               Juggler - Jugular                 K               Knead - Need               Knew - New               Knight - Night               Knot – Naught - Not               Know - No               Knows - Nose                 L               Lead – Led               Lie - Lie               Light – Lite               Loan - Lone                 M               Mach – Mock               Made - Maid               Mane – Main               Meat - Meet               Might - Mite               Mouse - Mouth                 N               Naval - Navel               None - Nun                 O               Oar - Or – Ore               One - Won                 P               Paced – Paste               Pail – Pale                            Pair - Pear               Peace - Piece               Peak - Peek               Peer - Pier               Pray - Prey                 Q               Quarts - Quartz                 R               Rain - Reign               Rap - Wrap               Read - Red               Real - Reel               Right - Write               Ring - Wring                 S               Scene - Seen               Seas – Sees - Seize               Sole – Soul               Some - Sum               Son - Sun               Steal – Steel               Suite - Sweet                 T               T - Tee               Tail – Tale               Team – Teem               Their – There - They’re               Thyme - Time               To – Too - Two                 U               U - You                 V               Vale - Veil               Vain – Vane - Vein               Vary – Very               Verses - Versus                 W               Waive - Wave               Ware – Wear - Where               Wait - Weight               Waist - Waste               Which - Witch               Why – Y               Wood - Would                 X                 Y               Yoke - Yolk               Yore - Your – You’re                 Z

Many of the more ghastly and idiotic aspects of the Great War were made possible by the coincidence of mass-production and the social religion of deference.

The most impressive naval career of all the female sailors is that of William Brown, a black woman who spent at least twelve years on British warships, much of this time in the extremely demanding role of captain of the foretop. A good description of her appeared in London’s Annual Register in September 1815: “She is a smart, well-formed figure, about five feet four inches in height, possessed of considerable strength and great activity; her features are rather handsome for a black, and she appears to be about twenty-six years of age.” The article also noted that “in her manner she exhibits all the traits of a British tar and takes her grog with her late messmates with the greatest gaiety.” Brown was a married woman and had joined the navy around 1804 following a quarrel with her husband. For several years she served on the Queen Charlotte, a three-decker with 104 guns and one of the largest ships in the Royal Navy. Brown must have had nerve, strength, and unusual ability to have been made captain of the foretop on such a ship….The captain of the foretop had to lead a team of seamen up the shrouds of the foremast, and then up the shrouds of the fore-topmast and out along the yards a hundred feet or more above the deck…. At some point in 1815, it was discovered that Brown was a woman and her story was published in the papers, but this does not seem to have affected her naval career….What is certain is that Brown returned to the Queen Charlotte and rejoined the crew.

Anglo-Dutch naval wars of the 1660’s

But I might add that it is neither France, England, nor Russia that we must fear. It is a certain other great nation, which at present I will not name.

NAVAL’S RULES (2016) → Be present above all else. → Desire is suffering. (Buddha) → Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. (Buddha) → If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. → Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. → All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. → Earn with your mind, not your time. → 99 percent of all effort is wasted. → Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. → Praise specifically, criticize generally. (Warren Buffett) → Truth is that which has predictive power. → Watch every thought. (Ask “Why am I having this thought?”) → All greatness comes from suffering. → Love is given, not received. → Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. (Eck-hart Tolle) → Mathematics is the language of nature. → Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. [5] Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.

cross of St. Andrew—the naval flag of Russia—approaching in line of battle.

With the rank of rear admiral, he was Chief Inspector of Naval Stores and Equipment of the Dutch Admiralty at Amsterdam,

I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.

Any moment where you’re not having a great time, when you’re not really happy, you’re not doing anyone any favors. It’s not like your unhappiness makes them better off somehow. All you’re doing is wasting this incredibly small and precious time you have on this Earth. Keeping death on the forefront and not denying it is very important.

Life Formulas I (2008) These are notes to myself. Your frame of reference, and therefore your calculations, may vary. These are not definitions—these are algorithms for success. Contributions are welcome. Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants Sleep = No alarms + 8–9 hours + Circadian rhythms Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment) Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk? Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do Return on Investment = “Buy-and-Hold” + Valuation + Margin of Safety [72] Naval’s Rules (2016) Be present above all else. Desire is suffering. (Buddha) Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. (Buddha) If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99 percent of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally. (Warren Buffett) Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Ask “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. (Eckhart Tolle) Mathematics is the language of nature.

Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco’s return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West. Coal, another item that had caught Marco’s attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe. Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses), which some accounts say he brought back with him, became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight. In addition, lenses gave rise to the telescope—which in turn revolutionized naval battles, since it allowed combatants to view ships at a great distance—and the microscope. Two hundred years later, Galileo used the telescope—based on the same technology—to revolutionize science and cosmology by supporting and disseminating the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare as armies exchanged their lances, swords, and crossbows for cannon, portable harquebuses, and pistols. Marco brought back gifts of a more personal nature as well. The golden paiza, or passport, given to him by Kublai Khan had seen him through years of travel, war, and hardship. Marco kept it still, and would to the end of his days. He also brought back a Mongol servant, whom he named Peter, a living reminder of the status he had once enjoyed in a far-off land. In all, it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance—or, for that matter, the modern world—without the benefit of Marco Polo’s example of cultural transmission between East and West.

The attitude of the black camp’s commander, Lieutenant Commander Daniel Armstrong, was typical of the times. He had his men decorate the base with murals of black naval heroes throughout history, from Dorie Miller all the way back to black sailors who served with Revolutionary captain John Paul Jones. The murals were Armstrong’s way of honoring black sailors. But this same officer wouldn’t allow black recruits at Great Lakes to compete with whites for spots in special schools that trained sailors to be electricians, radiomen, and mechanics. He didn’t think they were smart enough, so he didn’t even let them try.

In a visionary flash, Priuli foresaw, and much of Venice with him, the end of a whole system, a paradigm shift: not just Venice, but a whole network of long-distance commerce doomed to decline. All the old trade routes and their burgeoning cities that had flourished since antiquity were suddenly glimpsed as backwaters — Cairo, the Black Sea, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Smyrna, the ports of the Red Sea, and the great cities of the Levant, Constantinople itself — all these threatened to be cut out from the cycles of world trade by oceangoing galleons. The Mediterranean would be bypassed; the Adriatic would no longer be the route to anywhere; important outstations such as Cyprus and Crete would sink into decline. The Portuguese rubbed this in. The king invited Venetian merchants to buy their spices in Lisbon; they would no longer need to treat with the fickle infidel. Some were tempted, but the Republic had too much invested in the Levant to withdraw easily; their merchants there would be soft targets for the sultan's wrath if they bought elsewhere. Nor, from the eastern Mediterranean, was sending their own ships to India readily practical. The whole business model of the Venetian state appeared, at a stroke, obsolete.

great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or gal is super capable—so smart and dedicated”…all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want, or they want, but it does happen.

The entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant has said, “To write a great book, you must first become the book.

It’s better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced mathematics. I would read microeconomics all day long—Microeconomics 101.

It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.

The bird life, was, as ever, of great interest to ship’s surgeon McCormick. On seeing hovering over the ship what he believed to be a new species of Lestris, or Arctic Yager, described by Audubon, the great American bird illustrator, as an ‘indefatigable teaser of the smaller gulls’, he took a pot-shot at it. His shot failed to despatch the bird cleanly and, after descending near the deck, it recovered and flew away with one leg broken. McCormick, unusually, felt compelled to justify himself: ‘For notwithstanding that my duties as ornithologist compel me to take the lives of these most beautiful and interesting creatures . . . I never do so without a sharp sting of pain and qualm of conscience, so fond am I of all the feathered race.’ So fond, indeed, that on the same night he recorded that ‘Between midnight and one a.m. I succeeded in adding two more of the elegant white petrel to my collection, one falling dead on the quarter-deck and the other on the gun-room skylight . . . a third I shot . . . fell overboard into the sea.

And once you’ve met someone, how do you determine if you can trust someone? What signals do you pay attention to? If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest. That is just a little telltale indicator I’ve learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they’re talking themselves up, they’re covering for something. [4] Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks. I have great people in my life who are extremely successful, very desirable (like everybody wants to be their friend), very smart. Yet, I’ve seen them do one or two things slightly not great to other people. The first time, I’ll say, “Hey, I don’t think you should do this to that other person. Not because you won’t get away with it. You will get away with it, but because it will hurt you in the end.” Not in some cosmic, karma kind of way, but I believe deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will? I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you. The first time someone acts this way, I will warn them. By the way, nobody changes. Then I just distance myself from them. I cut them out of my life. I just have this saying inside my head: “The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.” [4]

Part of making effective decisions boils down to dealing with reality. How do you make sure you’re dealing with reality when you’re making decisions? By not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence. The “monkey mind” will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be. Those desires will cloud your reality. This happens a lot of times when people are mixing politics and business. The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be. One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.” This whole time, you’ve been convinced your business is doing great, and really, you’ve ignored the signs it’s not doing well. Then, your business fails, and you suffer because you’ve been putting off reality. You’ve been hiding it from yourself. The good news is, the moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth. The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality. What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.

When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don’t really want to change—we don’t want to go through the pain just yet. At least recognize it, be aware of it, and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out. [6] Impatience with actions, patience with results. Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You’re not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don’t want to spend it waiting in line. You don’t want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don’t want to spend it doing things you know ultimately aren’t part of your mission. When you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while doing them well with your full attention. But then, you just have to be patient with the results because you’re dealing with complex systems and many people. It takes a long time for markets to adopt products. It takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other. It takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away, polish away, polish away. Impatience with actions, patience with results. As Nivi said, inspiration is perishable. When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there. [78]

These two conditions led almost necessarily to a rush upon each other, not, however, without some dexterous attempts to turn or double on the enemy, followed by a hand-to-hand melee. In such a rush and such a melee a great consensus of respectable, even eminent, naval opinion of the present day finds the necessary outcome of modern naval weapons,-- a kind of Donnybrook Fair, in which, as the history of melees shows, it will be hard to know friend from foe.

Was there a moment you realized you could control how you interpreted things? I think one problem people have is not recognizing they can control how they interpret and respond to a situation. I think everyone knows it’s possible. There’s a great Osho lecture, titled “The Attraction for Drugs Is Spiritual.” He talks about why do people do drugs (everything from alcohol to psychedelics to cannabis). They’re doing it to control their mental state. They’re doing it to control how they react. Some people drink because it helps them not care as much, or they’re potheads because they can zone out, or they do psychedelics to feel very present or connected to nature. The attraction of drugs is spiritual. All of society does this to some extent. People chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasms—any of these states people strive for are people trying to get out of their own heads. They’re trying to get away from the voice in their heads—the overdeveloped sense of self. At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature and the world for what it is, and appreciate it very much as a child would. [4] The first thing to realize is you can observe your mental state. Meditation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state. The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control madperson. You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation. You realize, “Oh, I don’t want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?” Awareness alone calms you down. [4] Insight meditation lets you run your brain in debug mode until you realize you’re just a subroutine in a larger program. I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn’t always work. In the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in “debugging mode” as much as possible. When I’m talking to someone, or when I’m engaged in a group activity, it’s almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle. If I’m by myself, like just this morning, I’m brushing my teeth and I start thinking forward to a podcast. I started going through this little fantasy where I imagined Shane asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy- answering them. Then, I caught myself. I put my brain in debug mode and just watched every little instruction go by. I said, “Why am I fantasy-future planning? Why can’t I just stand here and brush my teeth?” It’s the awareness my brain was running off in the future and planning some fantasy scenario out of ego. I was like, “Well, do I really care if I embarrass myself? Who cares? I’m going to die anyway. This is all going to go to zero, and I won’t remember anything, so this is pointless.” Then, I shut down, and I went back to brushing my teeth. I was noticing how good the toothbrush was and how good it felt. Then the next moment, I’m off to thinking something else. I have to look at my brain again and say, “Do I really need to solve this problem right now?” Ninety-five percent of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don’t need to tackle in that exact moment. If the brain is like a muscle, I’ll be better off resting it, being at peace. When a particular problem arises, I’ll immerse myself in it. Right now as we’re talking, I’d rather dedicate myself to being completely lost in the conversation and to being 100 percent focused on this as opposed to thinking about “Oh, when I brushed my teeth, did I do it the right way?

If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets.

The first was to secure uninterrupted control of the sea-lanes supplying the British Isles, the great future base for the Allied invasion forces, but that had meant the defeat of the U-boat menace, which came only in the summer of 1943. The second was to attain command of the air, not just over France but also over the Reich, and that was properly secured, interestingly enough, only by early 1944.23 The third and absolutely critical prerequisite had been of course the entry of the United States into the war and the commitment by the American government to a Germany First strategy, for only its vast productive power could guarantee that the Allies would be strong enough to push their way into France. Yet there was also a fourth great factor at work, though it was far to the east, namely, the vast Nazi-Soviet struggle that sapped so much of the Third Reich’s resources and was still pinning down the majority of the German Army’s divisions in 1944.

When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state. However, happiness is fleeting because a new desire always comes along. As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.” Likewise, suffering is the space between craving a change in state and getting it. It is the idea of pleasure that we chase. We seek the image of pleasure that we generate in our minds. At the time of action, we do not know what it will be like to attain that image (or even if it will satisfy us). The feeling of satisfaction only comes afterward. This is what the Austrian neurologist Victor Frankl meant when he said that happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. Desire is pursued. Pleasure ensues from action. Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems. The first step in any behavior is observation. You notice a cue, a bit of information, an event. If you do not desire to act on what you observe, then you are at peace. Craving is about wanting to fix everything. Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Your desires are not running rampant. You do not crave a change in state. Your mind does not generate a problem for you to solve. You’re simply observing and existing. With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This phrase harbors an important truth about human behavior. If your motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why you are acting), you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult. Great craving can power great action—even when friction is high. Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior. As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.

Russia selling arms to China, U.S. Navy concerned July 30, 1997 Web posted at: 12:00 P.M. EST (1700 GMT) From Washington chief correspondent Michael Flasetti WASHINGTON (TCN)—As tensions mount in the South China Sea, a confrontation between the Chinese and UN military, led by the U.S. Navy, seems inevitable. Adding to the danger of the situation is the news, reportedly obtained by the CIA, that Russia has been arming China with advanced weapons, among them nuclear attack submarines that may be deployed into the waters surrounding the Spratly Islands. The news that Russia has been selling arms to the Chinese is not new. Over the past two years, China has taken delivery of four Russian Kilo-class diesel submarines, which are considerably less advanced than Russia’s nuclear submarines. However, the possibility that Russia has sold more advanced submarines to the Chinese is of great concern to White House military advisers. A source close to the Joint Chiefs of Staff has disclosed that the Russians have even collaborated with the Chinese on a prototype nuclear attack submarine, and that the submarine may see action in the Spratly conflict. If true, this presents a possible shift in the balance of naval power in the region, and a great concern to the recently downsized U.S. Navy. Russian president Gennadi Zyuganov, himself a conservative Communist like Chinese leader Li Peng, refused to comment on the possibility of advanced weapons sales to China, yet did say that Russia enjoys a balanced trade agreement with China on the sales of certain weapons, including Kilo class submarines. Russia, cash-poor since the breakup of the Soviet Union, clearly depends on submarine sales to China to help fund social and economic projects, as well as the upgrading of its own navy.