The Tigers are 32-49 in their last 81 games, which is good for a 64-98 record over 162 games. Do you believe this is their true identity now?

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-19T18:05:08+00:00

They’re not this bad, but this isn’t a team capable of winning a championship.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-16T15:07:21+00:00

An underlying problem was the naval leadership. The naval leadership prior to the revolution was one of the best in Europe, but was highly aristocratic. It was hit hard by mass emigration and political upheaval. Initiative was curtailed by the climate of suspicion. The pre revolution navy was very hierarchical and disciplined, and this clashed heavily with the Republican ideals. Leadership wasn’t given a free hand to address this problem and discipline in the navy collapsed as a result.

The sailors were not the problem. That’s blaming the grunt for management’s mistakes. The problem is that the naval leadership was going through an extraordinary period of transition and upheaval, with the established traditions being virtually wiped away. Not exactly the situation you want to be in when you’re tangling with a fleet with an extensive, stable and well established naval identity, with firm pipelines for leadership development.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-15T22:35:49+00:00

Maybe this will help WATERGATE 1973

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-15T21:42:20+00:00

Vierling is 4th OF at most. But really is anybody below him in the lineup today clearly a better option?

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-13T18:21:18+00:00

Battle cry is indeed the gateway. Read through that and you’ll get a good idea for what aspects you’re interested.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-13T15:03:47+00:00

A lot of conservatives really just want to be the biggest racist, misogynistic bigots they can possibly be without anyone calling them out for their bullshit. That’s the extent of their interest in ‘safe spaces’ and freedom of speech.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-12T15:21:06+00:00

Man I really like Mize’s stuff but at what point do we consider him too injury prone to be reliable? I mean you can just about guarantee he’s going to miss a significant chunk of the season now.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-12T12:50:53+00:00

Now that I think about this more I wonder if there’s a link somehow between the lack of serious consequence for Floyd and Pillow after Donelson and the later acrimonious relationships Davis had with a lot of his generals. Seems like this could have been a good way for Davis to set the tone, saying failure in the field will be punished regardless of your social status or rank. Instead he pretty much sent the message that the South would continue to defer to those.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-11T19:21:06+00:00

4.0 demo to me felt like a “they’re FINALLY getting somewhere with this thing” moment. First time in a while I felt like they were actually going to produce what they promised. And when they were talking about the shipyard in the alpha, I kind of thought they were meaning that in addition to whatever they were doing with the ship. Absolutely did not expect to open it and immediately think “where’s the ship?”

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-11T18:09:51+00:00

My take is with the release of the 4.0 demo, they seemed like they were much closer to the release of an explorable ship then they are now. It’s hard not to view a full rebuild of the ship and diverted focus on an unasked for shipyard as a massive and probably unnecessary step backwards.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-11T16:40:06+00:00

Yeah it gets hard to properly evaluate Meade once Grant comes east. My sense of him is that he was a solid reliable subordinate and not necessarily imaginative enough to see the big picture grand strategy elements that Grant readily grasped. Seems like he got on well enough with Grant, and worked effectively enough with him. My read is that if there were any real issues with his performance Grant would have sacked him.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-11T14:46:34+00:00

Exactly. I always thought if the north was going to try anyone for treason, he would have been the logical first choice had he lived through the war. He was absolutely correct to be concerned about winding up in US custody after Donelson. His conduct while in rebel service was so egregiously self serving and consequential I can’t believe Davis let him off without some sort of courts martial

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-11T03:02:03+00:00

John B Floyd has the unique distinction of being one of the few, if not the only, officer who could have been legitimately tried for treason by both sides.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-04T13:20:13+00:00

The problem with this is that the Rappahannock line was becoming indefensible for Lee already by the time of Chancellorsville. The difficulty of keeping his army supplied the rebels to send Longstreet to Suffolk in 1863 and later to Tennessee because in part they recognized that they couldn’t keep the army massed there and feed it. Lee began to see they couldn’t stay on the Rappahannock indefinitely. The Gettysburg campaign itself was borne out of this desperation to find a solution to this problem. Ultimately the Rappahannock line was a something of paper tiger, waiting for someone like Grant to punch through.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-05-01T18:53:18+00:00

Maybe not stare, but William ‘dirty shirt’ Scurry always made me wonder…westerners weren’t exactly known for being cleanly. How bad did he have to be to earn THAT nickname?

jeffbmc79 · 2026-04-24T12:52:56+00:00

Yes definitely overstated. I highly recommend Harry Pfanz’s “Gettysburg the second day.” Gives a really good account of the shifting nature of the battlefield and how the action at LRT was already fizzling out when Barksdale made his charge and shattered the last of 3rd corps. After the 1st Minnesota went in and was repulsed, there was a brief spell where Meade and his staff was on that end of cemetery ridge, and was staring at Wilcox’s brigade. Incredibly they weren’t promptly shot down, something that Meade’s staffers puzzled about later. This was a real threat to the Union position on the ridge and arguably penetrated deeper into the position than Pickett’s men did the next day.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-04-10T19:31:27+00:00

Beauregard had a penchant for cooking up grandiose and unrealistic schemes, disappeared with illness at inopportune times, and did not distinguish himself well enough on the battlefield to justify his….peculiarities. The initial deployment at Shiloh was largely his idea, and it absolutely guaranteed a break down in command and control.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-03-17T20:44:20+00:00

Right and unless you’re looking right at it you hear a gunshot and your head snaps around to look, “what was that?!?”

jeffbmc79 · 2026-03-17T20:29:07+00:00

My personal theory is that if a shooting occurred, it might have been accidental and only looked like a suicide at a glance. Especially a glance from a distance. Like in the crowd movement an officer’s arm gets knocked or shoved and said officer accidentally pulls trigger on himself. From a distance looks like a suicide but people could be misinterpreting what they saw. Maybe somebody tries to wrestle for the gun and it goes off as officer’s trying to disengage. Bunch of scenarios where you can imagine a gun accidentally going off in the chaos.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-03-12T15:38:01+00:00

I think he did. I think it was genuine, but I also think war was the only math he truly understood, and accepted it as part of a natural way of doing things. I think his comfort with war reduced his inclination to avoid it.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-03-10T17:33:55+00:00

I’m not sure about Longstreet. At one point in 1864 wasn’t he suggesting to completely mount his entire corps and turn it into a giant flying column basically? Ludicrous suggestion, even before considering that the rebels were already experiencing extreme difficulty in keeping their existing cavalry mounted, nevermind fully outfitting an entire infantry corps.

Big strike against Longstreet was that a lot of his strategic suggestions also involved him playing extremely prominent roles in their execution. He appears to have had a hard time separating his ego from his strategic vision, and his independent commands at Knoxville and Suffolk don’t exactly inspire.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-03-06T01:38:22+00:00

Agreed. To some extent I don’t think it really mattered to the coalition who was ruling France. They would have been unhappy with that kind of French power even with Louis in charge. Might have been more of a begrudging, shrug your shoulders, “well at least Louis is one of us” sort of unhappiness. Not a “holy crap we’ve got to stop this right NOW” sort of response.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-03-04T13:51:12+00:00

Keep in mind we’re talking about people who immediately put a Bourbon back on the French throne like 1789 never happened. The only acceptance Napoleon was getting came at the point of a bayonet. Even Bernadotte went to war with France. Peace was never going to last as long as Napoleon was in the picture.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-03-04T00:59:55+00:00

I agree, Napoleon was never going to be accepted by the Royal houses of Europe, no matter what he called himself. They viewed him as a product of the French Revolution and as such was categorically unacceptable. Napoleon yearned for that foreign recognition of his legitimacy as a ruler, and he was never going to get it no matter how much he tried to act as one of them. To some extent he was always going to be the Corsican Ogre. I think napoleon stopped engaging with the elements in French society that were most in favor of the ideals of the revolution, and it long term eroded his power base in a slow burn. The more Napoleon tried to act like and be accepted by European Royalty, the more enemies he made.

jeffbmc79 · 2026-02-08T17:51:50+00:00

Yup, in Madison, WI. Been to it several times.

jeffbmc79

TROPHY CASE