SOME THOUGHTS ON THINKIN' ABOUT STUFF

     We have honored thinkers for longer than we have had a "Western Democracy". For those who watch Foxnews, that was about 2500 years before John Wayne. People think about many things, philosophy, science, physics, political science, medicine and many things that require sustained thought about serious issues, and a published record of accomplishments. Most people stopped thinking about how deeply people thought prior to the Greek philosophers of ancient Athens, even though there were Egyption pyramids 2000 years before classical Greece. Somebody had to do some serious thinking in order to accomplish all of the schools of thought necessary for that construction. From cutting and transporting the massive limestone and granite blocks, to the method of lifting them into place (still not understood), to the design of the various internal chambers. Adding to that we must think of the construction of the barges to transport those massive blocks down the Nile to the construction sites, or the logistics of feeding, housing, and equipping the laborers, not we are now told, slaves. 

     We could go back to our early hominid ancestors for examples of thinking. What foragable plants were food, and what was medicine. Which vegetation was poisonous, how to preserve foods, and which hunting techniques to use on the various animals they preyed on. We have been thinking about stuff for a very long time. Early in its history YouTube introduced us to video blogs by people of the various thinking specialties. People who had advanced degrees and international reputations. Eventually, science fell into disfavor by some of our people. It was, to use one of their dismissive words, "elitist". Of course it's elitist, you twit! There are only a few people among us capable of arguing key points with people with advanced degrees, because there are only a few people with advanced degrees. Even fewer when you limit the pool of people to only scientific specialties relative to the topic. Global warming comes to mind. Gradually we were gifted with You Tube vloggers who have day jobs hanging drywall, and a social media influencer reputation after they have cleaned up from work. As an added bonus the viewer can purchase 5-gallon buckets of freeze-dried survival food and male potency enhancement pills from these media influencers. It is somewhere in this timeframe that thinking became thinkin'. It was here that climate denial grew into a belief by those who disparage science, and that mass shootings of grade-school children became a hoax. 

     A philosopher will admit that questioning is necessary to find the truth. Some thoughtful person even invented a word that allows for the testing of scientific proof. It's called theory: a hypothesis that has been successfully questioned through blind tests until it has been acknowledged as a truth. Of course this means that these theories can still be tested, but eventually a questioning science student loses interest in proving wrong something that no one has successfully proven wrong. Maybe too, there is another thoughtful way to scientifically examine a subject of thought. Sometimes we find that the utility of a deign is dependent on its use. Sometimes we find that the proponent of a new idea is batshit crazy. Take the designs of ships hulls and sailplans by the various trading ships of the ancient world. Every hull type has its strengths and weaknesses. The same can be said for sailplans. If we put a Greek Trireme next to an aircraft carrier or other ship of war from today, it would be a tiny dot of wood, it's planks bound together  with wood fiber and sealed with pitch. Yet Athens of the 5th century BCE was a master of naval battle, and those tiny triremes were feared by Mediterranean fleets. Naval architecture had advanced to this point and would remain there for a long time. Phoenician traders had used the same trireme a century earlier to circumnavigate the continent of Africa and places still unknown. Roman's would use even more banks of oars to conquor the Mediterranean a century later. But other watercraft existed at that time in the Mediterranean. Of a much different hull design. The ceremonial ship of Pharoa Khufu, some 1500 years before the Trojan war, was disassembled and buried for him to use to carry him to the after-life. At around 142 feet long, it  was a sleek-hulled ship with both square sail, and oars along its hull. Later versions were the xebec and falucca. To illustrate how effective the egyption xebec and felucca was, 18th century British sailing vessels were harassed by much smaller Egyption war craft in the Battle of the Nile in 1798 CE. Brittain won that battle but the Egyption ships were faster and more agile and caused much damage to the British navy.

     When my sons were young we would go to bookstores. At one bookstore in Newburg, while they were looking for books, I chanced upon a book by James Fennimore Cooper. It was called Wing and Wing, and had a picture of a sleek xebec sailing away from an 18th Century British battleship on the cover. I had never heard of this title and it seemed much different from his tales of the last of the Mohicans in the 18th century. Books that Mark Twain many years later would write an essay on called, The Literary Sins of Fennimore Cooper. I bought that book. It may well be the best book Cooper ever wrote, even one that writer Clemons would approve, though I am biased. Wing and Wing is the finest thing you can do on a sailing craft while not being horizontal. The story takes place in the Meditterranean between Italy, Spain, and Gibralter. The protagonist was a pirate/adventurer who was half French and half Italian. Not surprisingly, he hated the British. He was from a French island  captured by the British, by the name of Guernsey. His vessel was a latteen sailboat from Egypt. Much smaller than the great men of war of Britain, but able to get close enough to cut the rigging with chain and bar shot from its small cannon, then run away before the British could get a shot off. The sail plan allowed it to sail into the wind, thus providing a quick escape from the slow square-sail warships of the British. In the War of 1812, we had ships like the Pride of Baltimore that practiced the same tactics. The pirate, with the romantic name of Raul Yvard was in love with Italian Admiral Caricelli's daughter. The admiral was going to be hung from the yard-arm of a British capitol ship. Yvard and his brave crew rescued the Admiral. Yvard  then chases after the daughter who remains, it seems, chaste, and even dodges the Catholic priests. This was a book written for me. My point in mentioning this is to show how size and cannon-weight are not the most important qualities of a warship, it is the people and officers on board. These xebecs were the (forgive the metaphore) Achilles heel of British naval warfare. 

     I think I got away from my original topic of thinking about thinking. Maybe because I'm always thinking in ways people don't always think. This kind of outside-the-box thinking is not always wrong. Often it is right, though I would argue, not when coupled with rightwing bullshit. Too little of what they say merits being called thinking. Thinking is an activity. It is supposed to tease out the truth of whatever is being examined. It demands questioning, not argument, and here I exhibit argument. 

     At about the same time of the Trojan War, Polynesian voyageurs were exploring thousands of miles of untracked Pacific ocean to find tiny islands to inhabit. Islands they had no charts to study or that they even knew existed. Instead of the single-hulled vessels of the Mediterranean civilizations, they accomplished this by sailing twin-hulled sailing vessels. We westerners never thought much of these catamarans for thousands of years. In 1995, the America's Cup sailing trophy, which had been the sole possession of the United States of America for 175 years, was won by New Zealand in a sleek racing catamaran. There was much hue and cry from the American yachtsmen including Dennis Connors, who was like Ted Turner though without a wife like Jane Fonda, but to no avail. Today, those sleek catamarans spend a good deal of their time on airfoils, lifting those hulls free of the water. My favorite historical era of sail was the Clipper Ship era. It lasted maybe a decade before the much larger Windjammers eclipsed their sailing records. They in turn were eclipsed a few decades later by steamships. Today, with much discussion of the damage to our climate by fossil fuels, sail-driven cargo ships are making a comeback. The sails on these beautiful craft would have been a mystery to the sailing captain of old, though the principles of science that made the airfoil possible has been known to us since the Wright Brothers airplane. Not very long ago, the shipping canals used for trading ships had to be enlarged to accommodate oil tankers and container ships. Perhaps in my lifetime, oil tankers will be sent to a shipping boneyard to be broken down for scrap. Great ideas have a lifetime. We must adapt to new applications. The great naval tri-remes of Athens that had defeated the Persian navy at Artemesia, and later Salamis were either sunk or captured in the Bay of Syracuse during the Pelopponesian War. This battle was proposed by a great cavalry officer named Alcibiedes. It was his idea to move half of the Athenian fleet into this Bay on the southeast of Sicely. What he did not know, because he didn't know any better, was that the Athenian navy had become feared because of their expert handling in the open water, a tactic they could not exhibit in the confined Bay. Ironically, Alcibiedes had achieved great success by creating a cavalry to harass the hoplite fighting tactics of his time. 

     All of the great nations of Europe had great navy's at one time. Those navies allowed them to discover far-flung land masses in the unknown world, land masses peopled with cultures thousands of years old. Eventually they were beaten by better ideas, better sail plans, or better weaponry or sleeker boat design. Sometimes they were destroyed by great storms. Sometimes they were destroyed by incompetance. But mostly, naval thinking created better ships, and better tactics. Like most everything man has accomplished, thinking has helped us to evolve new ideas. Our great weakness is that we can't always determine whose thinking is just thinkin'. Do we listen to the people who have an academic background in higher thought, or do we listen to someone selling male potency pills and survival rations.