I often consider Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” quote; It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor…
2021 June
The first tactical methods of warfare I find in scripture are in the time of King Kedorlaomer (aka Chedorlaomer). In the 14thchapter of Genesis, Kedorlaomer led a coalition of armies against other kings. Tar-pits (which were really slime pits of surface bitumen) were used into which “some of the men fell.” [i] So the attacked kings lured King Ked’s armies over natural features of the land. According to my Thompson Chain Reference, this occurred about 1913 B.C. By 1500 – 1450 B.C. (Job 39:19-25 & Deuteronomy 20:1-4) horses were being used in battle, and arrows and spears were common. It seems the only knives (and probably spear and arrow tips as well) prior to about 1200 B.C. were made of flint (Exodus 4:25 and Joshua 5:2-3). By the time of Samson (1160 B.C.), it was the bronze age (Judges 16:21) and reasonable to assume the weapons of the time were…
I recently mentioned to an acquaintance, that Doug Buring would be a speaker at our SOS event in Houston. Doug was the lead Pennsylvania State Trooper on the ground on site at the West Nichol Mines Amish School attack where 5 girls were killed. My friend had no clue what I was talking about. It is amazing how quickly we forget some of the worst atrocities. Nickel Mines is the name given to a small, mostly Amish community in SE Pennsylvania. In the 1850’s, nickel was discovered there in a mining operation intended for copper. Joseph Wharton extracted 4.5 million pounds of nickel from there between 1862 and 1893. Wharton (who also co-founded Bethlehem Steel and Swarthmore College) was an influence on the U. S. Mint to use nickel from his mines to produce the 5-cent coin we all know. The mines all closed in 1893 and have disappeared into…