Napoleonic Wars and Plums

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We welcome everybody, of course, but also our new listeners.

Victor is a scholar.

He's an author.

He works for the Hoover Institution.

He's the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution.

And also at Hillsdale College, he is the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History.

You can find Victor at his website, victorhanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Please come join us either with a free subscription or to read the

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There's lots of material and especially ultra content is just invaluable.

Well, we have a lot on the agenda.

This is our weekend edition.

So we are looking at the history of warfare and we have the Napoleonic Wars on deck.

But we'll look at a few political things first.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, we'd like to start things off on a positive note.

So I noticed in the news that a proposal by, or actually Kirsten Sinema and Representative Toon had proposed to reduce the flight hours to become a commercial pilot for the Federal Aviation Administration's Constitution.

They wanted to amend it, and that got a lot of bad press.

So I thought that that was a happy note.

I was wondering your thoughts on

that.

I think people,

if they fly a lot,

they're starting to notice certain things.

And this is just anecdotal: that the number of rocky landings,

the number of

kind of abrupt takeoffs that go straight up, or when you're at LAX

or JFK or O'Hara and you start to see the margin of error between

baggage carrier tractors or wingtips going in and out, they seem to be less and less.

And by that, I mean you get the impression that there's more and more people flying

and

there are either either labor shortages, or there's non-merocratic criteria being used at very, whether it's air traffic controllers, or pilots, or

people on the ground.

I hope it doesn't include mechanics, but there's been a whole list of near accidents that have had near crashes where we've had planes almost coming down on top of each other, or near misses, or slight little collisions at places like LAX.

So

the last thing in the world we need is to lower the requirements.

And

let's face it, we were getting a lot of great pilots that came out of the military, and

they know how to fly jets, they know how to fly them under the most stressful conditions, and they can adapt very quickly

through simulators.

But that's a different experience than just going on a simulator most of your career without a lot of civilian or military prior flight experience.

So when you hear that United was going to hire into their pilot, to draft into their pilot training programs, 50% of their pilots would be based on equity, diversity, equity, inclusion.

That's kind of scary.

Not because

people who are so-called minorities are not just as good pilots, but the very fact that you have to identify that particular groups by race or minority status rather than just let the system work is in itself an admission that you're using criteria other than merit.

And again, this is this theme that we've talked about a lot: that nobody really cared about affirmative action or identity politics when it was destroy the English department or don't hire a white guy as an administrator, or outside of the Ivy League, you're not going to have white male university presidents.

Who cared?

But

the cautionary rejoinder was they're never going to do this with nuclear plant operators or air traffic controllers or pilots or neurosurgeons or medical schools.

And in fact, they're doing that right now.

Right now.

Yeah, I know.

And so they.

I quoted Tom Sowell.

I'm quoted Tom Sowell a lot.

He used to say something.

It was, he predicted this at a luncheon.

He and I used to go to lunch all the time.

He said, you know, as a rule of thumb, you always want to conduct

legal or medical business with those in the field that

got there against great odds.

And you do not want to conduct them with those who had very few obstacles.

And so on his way of reasoning, he told me that

in the late 50s and 60s and early 70s, he always would seek out a black doctor because he knew that endemic racism and prejudice meant that if you were going to be a black doctor, you had to be better than anybody.

But then he said, once the affirmative action kicked in, then he was less willing to find a black doctor.

And he would like to see a white male once in a while because he thought

it would be very hard for a white male to get through current day medical school, vis-a-vis other minorities.

In other words, he was racially blind.

He didn't care about a person's race.

He just wanted to know

and to what degree

the system,

as it existed in these different periods and

antithetical values,

which

was

the most difficult to overcome.

And that would meant that the person who did overcome them had to be on meritocratic grounds superb.

And it was, I had never thought like that.

And he mentioned a lot of examples that were very convincing.

So I think that's what everybody's worrying about.

If you're a white male and you're not wealthy

and they're taking 9 or 10% of the Stanford incoming class and you're at Stanford University and your parents didn't give money, you're not an athlete, you're not a legacy, your dad's not a

provost or something at Stanford, you've got to be really good.

You know what I'm saying?

Yes.

So you would want that person.

And that might not have been true 20 years ago when there were a lot of white males and a lot of them were getting in for reasons other than Merocratic criterion.

But now,

and that's what I'm trying to point out.

And by the same token, it would refer to, say, African-Americans candidates, say in 1995, when there was not really...

that much of an effort from 85 or 75, and yet their credentials were so superb that

they had to be let in.

But now, if you see that before

the

abolition of the SAT scores, you were seeing

minority candidates with typically 50 to 100 to 150 to 200 points less on average on the SAT score.

And so according to that logic, you would...

If you were going to be operated

by someone who was a minority candidate, candidate, you would prefer that that person graduated from Stanford Law School in 1990 rather than, say, 2023.

Yes.

And by the same token, if you were going to be operated by a white neurosurgeon, I think I would want them to graduate in 2023 than say 1965 or something.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, there's another actually positive story about Tesla, who, you know, the ESG ratings are about, and and I'm quoting an article here, it's a guide to investors for ethical enterprises.

And they were noting that Tesla earned only 37 points on that ESG rating, and that Marlboro earned 84 points.

So Marlboro, producing cigarettes that are very unhealthy for people, had an ethical score twice what Tesla's was.

I thought that was funny and inspiring for Tesla, actually.

What's the subtext of that?

Take Elon Musk post-2020

out of the equation and Tesla would be what?

It would be at the top ESG.

Put Elon Musk in the equation based on his public pronouncements or what he's done with Twitter and that explains everything.

Yeah.

Tells us that ESG is entirely political.

One way to look at this, Sammy, is you just ask yourself, who are the people that are involved in these adjudications or who are the people who,

you know,

these groups would say democracy now or saving democracy.

We know who they are.

They're young bi-coastal elites that come out of these universities that are indoctrinated.

They never mixed.

shoulders with the middle classes or the lower middle classes of the interior.

They don't know much about muscular work.

They don't know much about the country.

And

nobody should listen to them.

They're just,

I don't think they're a historical artifact.

And they're going in, they've been hoisted on their own petard, as we've talked about before.

They created this whole post-2020 madness.

And now it's starting to reach

the tides

is

lapping up.

The waves are lapping up.

The ocean tsunamis are.

overwhelming their own enclaves.

Well, I can tell you also that Chevron edged out Tesla for the lowest score on the ESG.

So I think investment decisions might be made on that.

Chevron,

if I could list all the people I know

on the coast of California that have A, damned oil companies, A, and then unknowingly complained about high gasoline prices at the same time, I couldn't even finish the list.

They never make the connection that when they want wood floors or they want

an addition put off, they're just outraged about the price.

They don't think that two by six studs

come from anywhere.

They don't think it, you know, if you have 20 lumber companies, now you have two in California and you let 60 million trees burn up because you don't manage the forest, then you're going to pay a lot for wood.

They never make that connection.

They always think it's going to fall on some poor guy, you know, in Porterville or something.

something but it does it does affect them of course they have the money and they have they know how to navigate around but it's coming to an end where it's come it's all coming to an end it is just walk through san francisco or talk to upper upper middle class upper professional class white liberals they don't they don't believe in their gods anymore they don't because it's their kid didn't get into yale or

they were walking in san francisco and some homeless person threw a spent needle at them, or their car was broken into,

or

they went to a San Francisco Giants game, and there was a big brawl outside, or whatever.

They just, they don't believe in their system anymore.

They're not the point yet of rejecting.

They're not apostates, but they're getting close.

Yeah.

This was a terrible experiment, but we were the guinea pigs.

They produced the experiment.

We were the guinea pigs.

And now the scientists got infected by their own virus that they injected us with.

Yes.

And the guinea pigs are getting smart and they vote.

So

are the

on a more serious note, we have Biden's document keeper, Kathy S.

Chung, worked for the Clinton administration as part of a team that withheld and destroyed key documents in the Chinagate fundraising investigation of the 1990s where they tried to where China was trying to influence U.S.

politics by giving to the DNC

during the Clinton administration.

You remember that.

I can remember that came up in the election

that they were doing that all the time.

And you know,

it's really funny, you know, what's coming out.

It's like

All these people are little landmines and they've been buried deep in the Washington battlefield.

And all of a sudden, now they're popping up and blowing off.

Remember this guy, Mike McCormick, who was that Obama stenographer?

Yeah.

He suddenly come out and say, well, yeah, I went on trips with Biden and he just went to get cash and shake down people.

And you think, well, where the hell were you all these years?

Why are you just coming out now?

And I guess he feels that there's a chance that the story has legs and he can contribute to it.

And otherwise he'd be destroyed.

But there's a real element of fear if you go against the left.

If you go against the Clintons or Obama or Biden, I mean, everybody says this is egregious what they're doing to Trump, but the idea that you are impeaching a president twice, or as a private citizen, or you get 51 authorities in the intelligence committee to lie right on the eve of debate that this authentic laptop is Russian disinformation,

or you give Robert Mueller 22 months and 40 million, whatever it is, it sends a message to people in Washington, in the bureaucracy,

in politics.

Do you really, really, really want to cross these people?

Because if you do, you're going to, even if you're innocent, you're going to spend a quarter million dollars in legal fees, and then you're not going to be innocent because you can be innocent and have the jury nullified by a DC jury.

And they know that.

And that creates a lot of deterrence.

It really does.

Oh, yeah, it sure does.

That's why a lot of people don't want to go to Washington.

If you say,

let's say if Trump or DeSantis is elected, like, come on to Washington and help like another Reagan revolution.

Yeah.

And then we know what's going to happen.

The media are going to concoct some story about Russian disinformation or misinformation or something.

They're going to run with it.

All these people will be on the Sunday talk shows.

And the next thing you know, there's going to be some prosecutor in the Southern District of Manhattan or an albin brag that's going to indict you you're going to everybody's going to laugh it off and then they're going to tell you you know what you better get a good dc attorney you go through your rolodex a thousand dollars an hour and they're going to tie you up and tie you up and tie you up and bankrupt you yeah you're going to get a you're going to get a james comey or a patrick fitzgerald or somebody like that just what they did to comrad black or

scooter libby Yeah, or that young guy that was in the Trump administration, he really just seemed like he didn't know what was going on around him.

I felt so sorry for him.

What was his name?

Which one is that?

Carter Page?

Carter Page, yes.

He was one of the, I think he was, he might have been the top.

I think he would graduate the top from the U.S.

Naval Academy.

He's very bright, but

he was very idealistic.

He had, I think.

People had suggested he might have a touch of Asperger's syndrome.

I don't know.

Or a slight autism.

I don't know.

He seemed a little awkward socially, but he seemed a very nice person.

He was very bright.

He wanted to help.

The next thing they knew, they ruined his life.

And they took a FISA warrant out

that we should all remember.

Eric Kleinsmith forged or doctored that document and got off with a minor felony and then didn't even lose his license for very long.

He's back at it again.

And then you had James Comey, who knowingly presented the steel dossier after he had offered a million dollars.

His agency had offered a million dollars for one correct fact, and they couldn't find it, and that didn't stop him at all.

He diluted a FISA court.

And by the way, we always say the FISA court, the FISA court judge should have known that.

So he was implicit.

You know what I'm saying?

There was no, that thing was so bogus.

You could bring it to a guy who operated a gas pump in Selma and he would have seen that thing was phony.

Capitals, scare capital letters, all this crap that you could find on the internet in two minutes was false.

You know, it was just a joke.

PP tape.

And,

you know, and then all these people in CNN, these bicol elites that keep using that word, but that's what they were.

Bombshells, walls are closing in.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk about the Napoleonic Wars.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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We're back and Victor, so very excited to talk about Napoleon, partly because I was in France one time and I was at a restaurant and the young waiter was trying to connect and

he wanted to say something that was great about France.

And he said, don't you know Napoleon?

And I thought, well, that was a couple of hundred years ago.

Do you have any generals in more recent times you want to refer to?

But so I thought that was interesting.

But I was hoping you would talk about the strengths that explain his meteoric rise and then explain his battlefield victories as well.

And I have other questions, but go ahead.

The one thing you cannot say to a French person is, could you please explain to me why

from 1789

all the way to 1803, you had a revolutionary government, you know, these

iterations of radicals.

constitutional monarchists, parliamentarians, Jacobins, Thermidors, Gironde, all these people.

And then you get this authoritarian, and they don't see it that way.

They see that Napoleon saved the French Revolution and that he was not a right-wing dictator.

He was kind of a Hugo Chavez-type left-wing dictator and with a Napoleonic law court.

code and the meritocracy that he introduced to the military, that he was the embodiment of the revolutionary.

Remember that.

The second, and that's that cry of the gargoyle.

Remember Mr.

Villepon?

He was the French ambassador to the UN, and he

may or may have not been right, but he gave a big lecture to the U.S.

why France wouldn't participate.

But he was really rude, and he just

tore apart Colin Powell's presentation on WMD.

But he had written a book at the same time I read it.

It was called Cry of the Gargoyle, and it was

basically

a laudatory appraisal of Napoleon as the father of the EU.

And even Andrew Roberts, who wrote, I wrote

the title of his book on Napoleon, which is excellent, but in Britain, I think it was, or Europe was called Napoleon the Great.

I think I reviewed that in the TLS or somewhere.

But he was very favorable to Napoleon as the father of the modern continental system that came from his continental system.

Second thing, very quickly, remember, is

when you go into the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles,

the victories kind of end, don't they?

With right on the eve of the Russian invasion.

And I mean that for the next 200 years.

I mean, think about it.

There's the French fought valiantly in North Africa, but they lost.

Valiantly in Vietnam, they lost.

They lost their country in eight weeks in 1940.

I know that the division Leclerc and Tassignet, all those great French generals that Patton and others rehabilitated, they did excellently, but they were under the auspices of the Anglo-American Alliance.

And then you look at World War I, they shall not pass at Verdun, but that was a draw.

The miracle on the Marne, you can say that Joffe had a victory, but more or less it was a standstill in World War I.

They won after

heroic, heroic service, but it was mostly the introduction of 2 million million Americans and 2 million Americans that came in in 1917 and 18.

Not that we did the burden of the killing and dying, of course, we didn't, but we were the final push that allowed them to win when the Russian front had collapsed and Germany was sending thousands of divisions westward and would have won the war in March of 1918

had that Americans not started arriving that summer.

But

anyway, the point I'm making is Napoleon is in the French mind, the last guy who won, right?

And so he's idealized.

So that's the first two things to remember about him.

And the third is that

he wasn't really French.

He was from Corsica.

I think his first language was either Corsican or Italian, time of...

of patois and then he learned French.

I've read some of the things he wrote in French.

They're not, they don't seem classically French, is what I'm saying.

And contemporaries said he had an accent.

And he was a very small guy.

And he was a brilliant, he was just a military genius.

And he was an artillery officer that came to the attention

of the directorate.

That was that five-person

group that assumed control from the Thermidor reaction and then the consulship.

And then I guess in 1803, it was Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon.

And I guess when we say Napoleonic Wars, we're talking about those 12 years that ended finally in Waterloo in 1815.

And

one thing to remember before we start is that France doesn't have the relative position today that it had then.

I think Britain was only 12 or 13 million people.

And Prussia, there was no unified Germany.

It was broken up with Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire monarchies, etc.

And then there was Austria, but

Prussia probably had about 18 million.

And I think even Russia was only about 35.

My point is France had 25 million people.

And then this second thing to remember is that these were small armies that fought for

basically for monarchs.

And they were 20 or 30,000.

The revolution had introduced the idea of an army, a nation in arms, a mass levy of conscription.

And so until Britain caught on or Prussia caught on or Russia caught on,

Napoleon from 1803 to 1811 or 12 ran wild, except for the Peninsula War in Spain, because he was fielding massive armies of 60 and 70,000.

And after the first and second coalitions, that was Britain basically with Prussia and some other Scandinavian states and Russia

had been able to check or hold in check the revolutionary armies.

Once Napoleon took over, there was the third coalition, the fourth coalition, the fifth coalition, the sixth coalition, and the seventh.

And the word coalition means that we don't have the manpower to stop this maniac, even though he's from one nation.

He didn't have a lot of allies.

Sometimes he allied, you know, at Trafalgar with the Spanish fleet.

and sometimes with the Portuguese.

But mostly it was a nation in arms.

Everybody was conscripted.

And that was one reason that he overran Europe.

And when you look at those, the greatest battles at Austerdad, at Austerlitz and Jena,

he was outnumbered.

And it was the Napoleonic idea of

the central position where he destroyed one army and then

he almost did it at Waterloo, as you remember.

He almost pulled it off.

If they had destroyed the Prussian army when they beat them the first day, they would have won the war.

But it was destroy one army and then go back and fight the other one, but don't let them combine.

Because he was always outnumbered, even though he had these huge armies.

The other thing to remember, go ahead.

Could I ask you something about that levee en masse?

It seems to me that he would have had a huge army, but it would have been largely less trained than the Prussian army or the British army.

No.

Right.

So,

no, okay.

No, no, no, no, no.

They were better trained.

And he is.

I think so, though.

Because

first of all, he made a meritocratic officer corps.

Not that there weren't aristocrats, but when you look at the British Army and you look at the Russian Army and you look at the Prussian Army, except for people like Buchler

or Wellington,

there was no comparison.

I mean,

the marshals of France

that he created, And I mean, when you look at Murat, I know Ney screwed up at Waterloo, but you look at Ney's career as a defensive genius or De Sault or Soult

or Messina, I think his name was, there was nothing close to them.

They were geniuses, and they wouldn't have made it under the Bourbons, is what I'm saying.

But he set up a meritocratic evaluation system, and then he gave revolutionary egalitarianism the

rewards and the honors of the old aristocratic class.

So you could be a French aristocrat for the first time by being a general that made it up through talent.

And then the second thing was

it wasn't a top-down army.

Everybody said if Napoleon was, you know, dictatorial, but what he did was he created this first idea of corps, 1st Corps, 2nd Corps, 3rd Corps.

And these were independent armies

run by a Marshal of France.

And I mean independent.

They had their own artillery.

They had their own logistical setups.

And so they could converge on a central point.

You could have Sult or Marat or Ney

or Assault.

They could come with 70,000 people and then they could converge and form an army or a theater command of 200,000.

But they were all self-contained.

There wasn't just a monolithic army that, you know,

came on.

to you.

And so they were much better trained.

And then there was a, I mean, they often fought in columns, which doesn't make a lot of sense in the age of firearms.

I mean, you can see it in phalanxes, where you're pushing perhaps in the rear ranks, or the ranks one, two, and three can hit the, or in the case of the Macedonian phalangites, ranks one, two, three, or five.

But with firearms, it's hard to, but there was this idea that you could just

plow through with a revolutionary Alan.

So the tip, it was very Alexander the Great-like.

He would have a, he would typically be outnumbered and he would find a particular weak spot.

And

sort of what Lee thought he could do at Little Elmtop failed.

And then he would saturate it with cannon fusillades.

And then he would send a mass of infantry in there and hope to break it apart and cause havoc.

And then the old guard would come in, and then there would be panic.

And that's what happened

at all of these battles until, you know, what

they asked Wellington how he won at Waterloo.

and he said he came on in the old way and we dealt with him in the old way.

Meaning, I'd seen this guy's marshals in Portugal and Spain.

And after our first setbacks, I knew how they fought, and I knew exactly what they would do.

They would get the simple position between two armies.

They would try to knock off one.

And then they would swarm a particular point in the British line, and then they would with cannon fire, and then they would swarm it with infantry, and then they'd unloose

these magnificent and almost unstoppable French heavy cavalry with lances.

But he learned how to deal with it.

He would set traps so the second army that

a French marshal would be

would be well entrenched, or it would be in a landscape that was uphill.

And it would be very, and he would he would play defense, and he knew exactly what their tactics were, and he mastered them.

And the weird thing about Waterloo, 1850, he didn't change much of it.

The high point of the whole Napoleonic system, I guess, was in

if you had just stopped everything in 1811, he was after eight years, he'd accomplished almost everything he wanted, except for the peninsula, the Portuguese Spanish.

But he'd caused havoc among his allies.

They could not unite successfully.

He defeated them on the field of battle.

And that army that went into Russia of 600,000, I don't think more than 250,000 were French.

He had conquered peoples that were joining him.

If he just had not gone into Russia, same thing with Hitler.

Same thing with the Swedes.

If they had not gone in there, they probably, I don't know how you'd ever got rid of him.

Yeah.

Because he was kind of in the situation where Hitler was

at April or May 1941.

And there was was everything in the EU as we know it today was essentially under Hitler's control in 1941, before June.

The same thing was true of Napoleon before 1812.

He had control de facto of all of Europe.

And

what was the result of all those campaigns, that brilliant

fighting?

Two million French dead, two million French dead.

And the Napoleonic, four million of the ally, they wrecked Europe, six million people got killed.

I mean, everybody talks about the Gaza campaign and the invasion when he was for the working for the directorate before the actual Napoleonic Wars, when he went to Egypt and all the scientists he brought along, he was emulating Alexander the Great and they did this, the Rosetta Stone and the obelisk and all the,

but he just left people, he left 20 or 30,000 dead from typhoid and various tropical diseases along the coast of what what is today, you know, Lebanon and Israel and then in Egypt, and he sailed back.

The other thing to remember about him was

nobody could stop the British fleet.

They had a tradition of.

I mentioned that other quote before, I think once, where the first Lord of the Admiralty was asked, because by 1805 or 30 or 4,

I think they could have invaded England before Trafalgar.

And

they were asking the first sea lord, how's he going to come?

When's he going to come?

And he said, I don't know.

I can just guarantee you he's not coming by sea.

And given there's no airplanes or paratroopers or bridges, he was essentially saying he's not coming.

Don't worry.

That was quoted in World War II a lot by the British Navy.

Was part of his tactic to defeat an army on the battlefield and then follow it off the battlefield and retreat.

And so that's true about him.

So yeah, well,

he quoted Kellertas, Kaiseris, the swiftness of Caesar.

In typical 18th century wars, and you can see them in the American Revolution, when a classical battle between armies of 15 to 20,000 collided, one side lost, and the side surrendered,

but not Napoleon.

His idea was every single person on the field of battle of the defeated, if you don't get rid of him, he's going to come back and haunt you.

And so he was, he would unleash his cavalry and try to destroy them as a unit.

And

they were pretty fierce people.

And

it's...

What do you think happened with that invasion of Russia?

I mean,

why did he plan it in the first place if it was sort of out of reach?

And then

how did he even think he was ever going to defeat the Russians?

I guess that's my, you know, why go in there in the first place?

I mean, in Egypt, as you said, he leaves his army and comes back and lots of dead.

So they must have predicted that the Russian invasion would

be strewn with dead.

And it was

to the tune of 90% of his army, which is really strange.

But go ahead.

Well, they were fighting over Poland, Alexander, i think the first and

napoleon thought that by virtue of his excesses on the battlefield uh

it was

russia their dispute over poland grew into a larger uh anger that he had this continental system kind of like the eu where you could not import

goods

uh

and you had high tariffs outside the continental system i.e with britain and britain and russia hated that system and they were opposing it.

And

he had at eight, in 1812, he was on top of Europe, and he had enormous,

you know, he had enormous levies and mass of people, not just 200,000 to 250,000 French, but he had another 300 or 400,000 coerced allies.

And it wasn't just coerced.

I mean, there were Poles who hated Russians, 100,000 of them.

And

when they went in, you know,

it was kind of, Hitler studied that battle very carefully.

You know,

they got, they left on June 24th.

And Hitler was told that for Army Group North Center and South to get to Moscow, to take Leningrad and get to

the Caspian Sea, they needed to leave in May.

And of course, there were rains and mud.

So they postponed Operation Barbarossa a month.

And he had said, well,

if we go on the 21st, Napoleon went on the 24th.

And they're saying, yes, he went on the 24th.

And look what happened to him.

But what Hitler was trying to say is that

there were those minorities, I mean, he ran wild all through June, July, and August.

And

they were deterred, as everybody always was, from getting to St.

Petersburg.

But

the Russians,

and this is very important because in the 1941, Stalin just emulated what Alexander had done, the first as Tsar, in 1812.

And that is,

they just burned everything, scorched earth all the way to Moscow.

And so when you look at that famous chart of this 600, how they each day,

three things were happening.

One, as they acquired territory, they had to slough off what occupation troops, right, to pacify what they had passed through.

Two, they were being attrited by guerrillas, Cossack cavalry, and things, and losing people as they went eastward.

And three,

their supply lines lengthened and they were more and more dependent on local

pigs, sheep, goats, wheat, grains, fruit, everything.

And the Russians were completely destroying it.

So by the time

that was a very important and

influential decision when he went into Moscow,

Gwuderian, remember, was in August of 1941.

And he said, he could have taken Moscow.

There's no doubt about it.

Army Group Center could have taken Moscow.

And he was diverted to go back all the way back to Ukraine and encircle Kiev, which was the greatest loss, second greatest loss, first greatest loss of military, of a single army in history.

I think they encircled 650,000

Russians.

And then he lost two months.

So when he went back in, it was 200 miles now back to Moscow.

But in that ensuing six weeks, he had lost the momentum.

And Stalin was desperately organizing Russians to come on the Trans-Siberian Railway from the Eastern Front because he'd had a non-aggression pact with the Japanese since April.

So by the time Gwedarian started again,

it was getting too late.

And he was very angry.

And he said, if he had taken Moscow, they would have won the war.

And people in

the Uber command of the Wehrmacht said, ah, I don't think Moscow is that important.

Napoleon took Moscow.

And look what happened to him.

Well, Napoleon took, when he arrived at Moscow, they were starving.

And they burned the city down, and there was nothing there.

And instead of being a prize, it was a tomb.

Yeah.

And so then they had, he realized that the longer he stayed in Moscow overwinter, then the harder it was going to be to get back home because

they had no supply.

Yes.

And so it was, that was the end of

basically, that was the

end of, what do you want to call it?

The end of his ability to transform European politics after the exhaustion.

And then these,

the Battle of Leipzig, and I guess that was in 1813.

That was the, I don't know, I always compare it to that Tolkien book, you know, in the Hobbit, The Battle of the Five Armies.

Yeah, I think there were six, but okay, yeah,

Leipzig.

Yeah, the Battle of Nations.

And, you know, there was, they had the huge, this, I don't know how he got 200,000 Frenchmen after the disaster, but they had a levy en masse and people came back from France and they got to Germany, but they were facing 300,000

and they had no allies left, maybe some Scandinavians.

And then they invaded France and the Allies, they got into Paris and that was it.

And

he was at the, you know, even at the last moments, he was thinking he could get another million Frenchmen under arms.

He probably could.

But

when they brought back the Bourbons and they put put him on Elba, they thought

that was the end in 1814.

It sounds like

the invasion of Russia was the beginning of the end because it emboldened all his enemies in Europe to band together.

Is that okay?

It did two or three things.

It emboldened all of his enemies, and those enemies would form the 1815 coalition, you know, the seventh coalition.

There were Britain, Russia, Switzerland, Austria,

Sweden, and especially Prussia.

And

so they vastly outnumbered Napoleon during the 100 days.

But he still could have, he almost won.

It was,

Wellington said it was a near-run thing.

And had they, had Marshal Ney not preemptively charged with the cavalry, or had...

his subordinates kept pursuing the Prussians when they had fought them back before Waterloo, they might have won.

Or what did Wellington say, give me blucher or give me night, meaning I'm so desperate right now, the thin red line's going to fold

British and they're going to break through.

And I either need the darkness to end the battle or I need the Prussians.

And you know, it's a very important battle because it had a

a profound effect on

European politics after that, because that was really the end of the idea that France was going to be the dominant power.

And it looked like it would be the dominant power.

And it was really the rise of Britain as a, that was the beginning of what we call the British Empire.

I know they had concessions in India, et cetera, et cetera, but after

the Napoleonic Wars, they controlled all of the ocean.

90%

of

oceanic military activity was under the control of the British.

And that was the rise of Prussia, and it was the end of the Holy Roman Empire.

And whether we liked it or not, 1871 and the unification of Germany was on the horizon.

And so the winners of that war were the allies

of

Russia,

Prussia, and Great Britain.

And the United States, who got Britain off of its back in the 1812 war, right?

Yeah.

Well, the United States

would not really, I I think

it reached parity with Britain around as far as

the economy about 1865, 1870.

Its economy was the same size or larger than Britain.

But

the German and British military attachés that were at the victory parade after Appomattox,

especially the German military attaché,

when Sherman marched 65,000 troops who had just gone from

Tennessee to Atlanta to Savannah and then up through the Carolinas in the winter with corduroys, with black engineers that had joined the Army, superb support troops.

And then he had these Midwesterners.

We'll talk about that when we talk about the Civil War, but it was the Army of the West when they looked at it.

And they were all, I mean, remember what Sherman did?

Grant had brand new uniforms and there were many immigrants and they were, and these guys were homestead farmers.

They were tanned.

They had been fighting on the road for a year.

Sherman deliberately made them wear the same uniforms.

They were all torn up.

They were all suntanned, even though it had been winter in the spring.

And they had not lost a battle.

They hadn't really fought that many battles, but they had destroyed the cohesion of the South.

And he had people, miners, riding on donkeys with shovels.

The whole parade snaked through Washington.

And

the German attaché took a look at it and said, This army could defeat any army in Europe, no questions.

And then Halleck and other people that had insulted Sherman

and

a lot of people in Lincoln's cabinet were terrified because people said this army could take over all of Washington.

And Sherman was kind of crazy.

He said things like Trump, you know, he didn't mean them really, but he said, you know, I'm going to hang all the reporters and I'm not going to,

when I get to Washington, be careful and things like that.

Of course, he disbanded the Army because he was

a very honorable guy.

But my point is that it was the start of the United States.

It was left alone from the British and it learned a lot.

The Civil War, the problem with the South was that they had some of the top officers,

Robert E.

Lee included, but Longstreet and all those people that had come out of West Point, but their doctrine, Hardy, for example, I think he had written a military treatise that was based on, they all were based on Napoleonic tactics, and that had come from Napoleon.

But the problem was it was 50 years old.

And so

once they stripped all of the supposed brilliant officers out of West Point for the last eight or 10 years,

they were all classically trained in Napoleonic tactics.

You could see it at Shiloh, for example.

But all the losers at West Point, the nuts, the guys last in our class, but who were brilliant, that were idiosyncratic, and that's people like Sherman and Grant,

and then weirdos like Thomas or Sheridan.

They were far better.

They were intrinsically military geniuses.

They were open to all sorts of new ideas about fighting.

They weren't confined by Napoleonic, ossified half-century tactics.

Yeah.

Well, Napoleon and his wars obviously had a long shadow.

So

maybe we're we're we got a little we got time constraints here.

So I'm going to have to end this and then we're going to turn to agriculture and the cultivation of plums after the break.

So stay with us.

We're back.

Welcome back.

So in this weekend edition, as we always do, or we try to always do, sometimes we miss it, but Victor talks a little bit about agriculture.

And today he's looking at plums.

And

my understanding is that stone fruit is more laborious than grapes or almonds.

And I don't know if that's true, Victor, but maybe that's something you can answer as you talk about this plum crop.

Well, everybody should remember if you go to your supermarket and you look at peaches or apricots or plums and you say to yourself, my God, they used to be 89 cents a pound before COVID.

There's four bucks, $5.

Why is that?

Well, I can tell you why it is, that we used to have about 150,000 acres of deciduous fruit, and we're down to about 30,000.

So what happened?

Well, part of it was the almond boom where we had 100,000 acres of almonds in, say, 1980, 75, and now we have a million point five.

So why did that happen?

Well, part of it was the high price of almonds, but part of it was the ease of almonds to cultivate and harvest, especially in terms of labor and fuel and cultivation versus deciduous fruit.

So, you know, it's it my mom always said

she

She grew up with her father, who was a deciduous fruit grower.

He had some raised grapes, with my grandfather had santa rosa plums and alberta peaches and i mean big blocks 10 20 30 acres of us 130 acres

and

she always said it's a shipwreck of our dreams and you never knew what the price was so i when i was a little boy we always would listen to the radio and they would give you the fob they called it price And one day, Santa Rosa, the first day of the season when everybody rushed out to get Santa Rosa plums, it would be $5 a box for 28-pound loose pack.

And then it would get down to 50 cents.

And then my grandfather would say, I don't know if I should pick or not,

because I can recoup my harvesting costs, but I might not, maybe.

So

it was very difficult.

And I was always remember what, what, why was it difficult?

Well, let's say you have 10 acres.

120 trees, you got 1,200 trees, let's say.

They all have to be pruned.

You start the year, they have to be pruned.

And that means you get a, in those days, you had to get a, not a 12, but a 16-foot ladder.

They let them get, they didn't have toppers in those days, mechanical toppers, but you pruned and you had made a 360-degree circle, taking, you know, you pruned, shaped the tree, cleared out the interior brush, and you wanted to cut almost every little small limb to spike it and, you know, eight or ten buds so your thinning bill would not be too big.

And

it was much cheaper to prune in the winter than to thin.

But if you took too much off the tree,

then of course you didn't have enough plums to make it worthwhile.

So there was that magical point.

Every tree has a golden rule that you don't know what it is.

And it says to you, I can produce

X amount of fruit at a proper size.

If you over-thin or over-prune, I can produce bigger fruit, but there won't be enough of them for you to make a profit.

If you don't prune enough and you don't thin, I will produce so much fruit that they will be, you know,

look like almond pits or be so small that nobody will want them.

So it was very hard.

And what makes you know that?

When you walk through an orchard of an acre even, because of soil types, you will see some trees.

trees are just like people six feet people five foot four

i could you could drive through i once flew over with a friend and you could just see orchards that they looked like waves where there were alkali spots or sandy spots or nematodes within an orchard so you had to look at every particular tree i had an uncle who farmed with my

grandfather and he could go down and there was no bins in those days there were boxes so he would spread boxes and we were in high school or grammar school we'd come home home from school and work for him and he would look at the tree and he'd say three there, eight there, 15 there.

He could look at the size of the tree and he knew exactly how many boxes that particular tree would have.

So it was very touch and go.

Well, after you had to prune them, it took an hour.

And that was when wages, when I was in high school, we got $1.75 per tree per hour.

But now at $18.20 an hour, it's $20 a tree if you got a good pruner.

And the pruners today are not nearly as good as they were were experts in those days.

It was so, I mean, there was a big debate when I was in eighth grade whether you allowed people to have radios or not, you know, pocket transistor radios, because that would distract you from the science of pruning, supposedly.

Well, then once you prune, then you had to go in with winter spray, and that was oil and diazona.

And then you had to fertilize and you had to cultivate.

And then the next thing was bloom.

So they were all cross.

In those days, we had things like Vermosa plums, early Santa Rosas, late Santa Rosas, and then the red butte came on, the black butte.

But the point I'm making is in the early days, they were delicious fruit, but they had a shelf life of about five days.

And when you were out in that orchard, I've literally seen this happen.

We had a Santa Rosa orchard where most of the fruit was half red.

And we made a decision that it was 108 that day, that they would be three quarters the next day day red.

And then we would pick them, and then they would be into cold storage, and they'd make it to the East Coast.

It got to 112 the next day, and all of those turned into bright red mush.

And when you put them on the belt, it just looked like cobbler and lost the whole, they were that sensitive.

But anyway, you had to pollinate them in February, and that meant you brought all these bees in and they had to cross-pollinate.

They didn't work if it was 55 degrees or below.

So all of a sudden you'd prune, put all this money into it.

And then right around February 28th, it's supposed to be 70 degrees, you'd get a frost or the damn bees.

And so what did you do?

Sometimes you put,

I can remember really dumb stuff like putting sugar and water in the agitator of the spray tank.

cleaning it out, cleaning it out, cleaning it out so there were no pesticide residues, and then spraying sweetness stuff on the blossoms to lure the bees out when it was too cold.

One day, every day, I would walk around the ranch and if I saw a bee, I would throw rocks at its hive and say, wake up, get out there, it's not that cold.

And if they didn't work, you wouldn't pollinate and you would have nothing.

Then if they pollinated,

the blossoms fell out.

You thought you had a crop.

It's supposed to stop freezing basically March 1st.

We had frost some years May 4th

and it would destroy the bloom.

We've lost crops that way.

So then let's say that you pruned right, you sprayed, you fertilized, you cultivated, you got some three good days during pollination, you got a crop, it didn't freeze, now you have, and now this is the big thing.

How many days did the bees work?

You want about three days, but the blooms are open about 12.

If it got 80 degrees for 12 days and the bees went nuts and every one of those blossoms blossoms got pollen, cross-pollinated.

And even if you pruned just right, you had a ton of crops.

Then you had to go in.

It's not $1.75 an hour in those days, or I guess in the 80s, it was about $4.50 an hour.

It was not one hour per tree to prune.

It was three hours to thin.

And you would have to tear off all these plums.

And so the rule was they should have

the length of your hand between each plum or peach or apricot that would size supposedly and one day

we had thinned

and when you walked through the orchard i'm not kidding you it looked like a green wall-to-wall carpet of plums you'd knocked off it was so expensive in other words that had been 12 days of pollination

We hadn't pruned as severely as we had because the year before we'd lost a crop and the year before we'd lost a crop.

So we wanted something to work with.

And so I said to a field man who was our packer,

we were packing our own, but he would sell them.

I said, wow, I think we took off too many.

And he said, why are you looking at the ground?

You look at the tree.

You don't look at the ground.

It doesn't matter how many is on the ground.

It's on the tree.

And you've got plums three inches apart.

four they should be six and they said well look at this it's a c doesn't matter you got too many Now do it again.

So we had to go back and we thinned it again.

And then if you got it thinned, now you're up to four or five thousand an acre into that crop.

And then you had to water

every 10 days.

You had to put another calcium, late calcium nitrase boost.

And you had to let the weeds grow because you didn't want to cultivate after March 1st because those plum trees each year put little feeder roots at the very top of the soil that size the fruit, and you didn't want to cut them.

And then you didn't want to have, if it got hot, you didn't want to have sunburn from the.

Some people put foil if they had plums or peaches that wouldn't color right.

But most of the time, you were worried about sunburn or too hot.

So you let this grass grow and it would be like two feet high.

And it was like a jungle in there.

It was humid, and you irrigated.

You had to irrigate every 10 days.

And then you got near harvest, and that was the key.

You had to know exactly the day to pick.

And you had to pick twice and sometimes three times.

So you went first picking by color.

And you had to have exactly the right, because if you, when we start, when we start packing our fruit, if that fruit came across the belt and it was too green, you had to throw it out.

If it was too ripe, you had to throw it out.

It had to be just perfect.

And that wasn't in your control because if you're going to get 30 or 40 people to come out and pick,

I mean, I can remember days where whole crews didn't show up.

And we had

my daughter, Susanna, my daughter, Polly, my son, Billy, my nephews, Ben, Leif, Matthew,

and

we had Schuyler, my other cousin, and we had Nathan and we had Brittany, and we had them all out there, like 11 or 12 of them, trying to pick.

And they were not, they were anywhere from 8 to 16, desperate because you couldn't get the labor at the time you wanted it.

And then if you did do that right, then you had to wait three or four days or five days.

Then you had to find out when you could, you had to strip.

And then you

then had to, all this is going on.

You had to pack them yourself, throw out the calls, size them.

And there were five or six different sizes, you know, and those days they were two, threes, three, four, fives, four, fives, four, fours.

And they each had a price.

And then you had to adjudicate whether it was better to have a lot of smaller fruit that would sell for less or smaller boxes of big fruit.

And of course, your broker would always come by and say, you know what, I need those big three, fours.

The public loves those things.

They're big and red.

They'll just snap them up.

And you say, yeah, yeah.

But for me to get those, we're going to have to

have to thin too much.

So, what you want will make me go broke.

We want a medium-sized, so we get a lot of them.

And they say, ah, but if you didn't calibrate right, you would send in four or fives or four or fours that were smaller fruit.

And they would sit in that packing house for three, three to six, eight weeks.

And each day, it was harder and harder to ensure they could get the three days to the East Coast fresh.

So finally, the guy would say, I can't sell them.

I'm sorry.

The new varieties came in.

Your variety is now Passe, the shopper in Milwaukee or the shopper in, you know, Newark or downtown Manhattan.

They want this big new red.

They don't want a six-week wrinkled skin.

And then

you'd say, well, what do I do?

And they say, I'll sell them on consignment.

Oh, my gosh.

What consignment means is they call up.

Walmart or Costco and say, would you please take off this?

And they'll say, I'll give you 50 cents a pound.

Then you go into Costco and they look pretty good, but they're not quality like, you know, some supermarkets.

And of course, if it hails during this before you pick, or you get a bad wind score and there are scars, it doesn't affect the taste at all, but people won't buy them.

You say, that's crazy.

People won't buy them.

It's true.

If you go into

a supermarket and you see a big scar on a plum or a peach, but mostly plums, people would not buy them.

They'd say something's wrong, even though it was just the wind taking the plum across a twig and scarring it or a slight hail storm.

And I think I've written about that.

We had four acres of beautiful Santa Rosas that everything went right.

And literally there was warnings of a hail storm.

And I swear to God, it came from Santa Barbara.

It came from the north, circled around.

Clouds came up.

We were in the path.

And I saw this big black cloud.

And I could see a mile away there was no hail.

And it it literally hailed on our square mile area and destroyed everything, everything.

And it passed on.

And when I say destroyed, I mean it didn't knock the plums.

They were beautiful, but every single plum had a big scar and nobody wanted them.

And then you had to pay to pick them and throw them away because you can't leave mummies on a tree.

They'll rot and get worms and stuff.

So it was

It was very difficult.

And plums were very difficult to grow as well in mass because they would get mite,

they would get leaf curl, they would get fungus.

If they were on sandy soil, they would get nematodes.

And

it was like going to Vegas.

And that's why nobody wanted to do it.

The labor, nobody could pay for the thinning or picking or pollinization.

Today with almonds, my God, there is no thinning.

There is no pruning.

There's no these new varieties are self-pollinating.

There's no need for bees.

And there's no hand picking.

It's just,

and today's drip and computerized, it's the computer turns on the

water at particular times when hydrometers tell us that the soil is dry.

And they inject fertilizers on the schedule that goes right into the drip hose.

And

you just wait, and then suddenly they're ripe.

I sound like Michael Bloomberg.

You just drop a seed in the ground and you get an instant crop.

No, it's not that easy.

But one guy and kind of looked like a tank.

It's got a wire mesh, so he doesn't get a limb in his face.

But he goes through with a little arm and shakes each tree.

They come by, blowers, put them right down in a perfect

line, and then they're scooped up in two or three days, put in a bin, and that's it.

And so it's a fraction of the cost.

And until recently, the price was, you know, $4 a pound.

And these guys with good almond orchards were getting 3,000 pounds, $12,000 per acre,

maybe $3,000 at most for the actual cultivation.

They were walking away, say, from 2010 to 2015.

with $8,000 and $10,000 profit per acre.

And some of these guys had 10,000 acres.

You can see why people were planting almonds.

And now it's down to $1.40, $1.50, which is below the cost of production.

But

that was the story.

There is a downside to all that mechanism.

Yeah, there is.

I've been driving along the freeway before, and some almond farmer is doing his blowing, and it turns the freeway all in dust where you almost have

the car in front of you.

Yeah, what happens is they have to get a flat, smooth surface.

And

that's dusty.

So if you drop the almonds on the ground

and then you're going to sweep them up, you make these horrible dust colours.

But recently, because of air quality particulate standards, what's happened is

a lot of these, they will keep the ground weed-free through herbicides and they'll get it hard and they won't cultivate at all.

They have problems with squirrels and golfers when they don't, but you'll see to cut down on the dust, they will cultivate maybe in May or something and then water irrigate and it gets hard, the ground gets hard, and then they'll use herbicides to keep the weeds off.

And then it's not as dusty.

And now I just looked at some new, I spoke to an almond group not long ago and they had new almond, there were salesmen for new almond, and they have huge vacuum cleaners now that are coming out.

So when they sweep up the almonds or shake, they vacuum all of the particulants so they don't go up in the air.

And even they even have some that are crazy.

They look like terminators.

They're huge platforms that go over the top of the tree.

Can you believe that?

And

instead of just shaking from the side, they put a kind of a balloon over the tree and enclose it and get everything off.

But

I don't know.

We inherited the idea that our family were deciduous tree farmers.

So when we started farming, my grandfather who had gotten older, couldn't do it anymore in his 60s.

So he had gradually pulled out all of his old orchards.

In his day, you left a plum orchard in for 50 years, even though it was going down in production by year 30.

And there was three or four varieties.

When I started farming, it was 50 varieties.

And one new variety would knock off the other one, knock off by it would be two days earlier, or it'd be brighter red, or or it would be, you could drop it on the ground and it wouldn't bruise.

That kind of stuff.

Didn't matter about the taste, unfortunately.

And so I would always, I'd grown up with these horror stories.

I would always try to tell members of my family who are farming:

let's not do this.

Please don't do this.

These are, you can only do this if you're a corporation.

You have endless supplies of capital.

But it was like going to

Vegas.

So, one year, to take one example, I think we had three acres.

Everything worked right.

Pruning was perfect.

Then was perfect.

Pollinization was perfect.

Price was perfect.

Picking was priced.

Every decision was made.

And on three acres, we made $28,000.

This was in the 80s.

And I would say that 28 was offset by this other, but in the farmer's mind, my God, three acres.

What if I had 100?

I would have been a millionaire.

It's like going to Vegas.

And so then you think, no, this was an exception.

So I was always timid.

I always said, why don't we just pull them out and plant Thompson seedless and get a slightly break-even price on raisins?

Or let's get into the almonds.

I was always saying, let's plant almonds.

That was 20 years ago.

But we grew up as deciduous tree farmers.

So we said, nope, we're going to be deciduous tree farmers.

And then the only reason that we survived as long as we did 20 years, was

the calls that went through our belt were delicious.

They just had scars that you couldn't ship.

So what we would do is

we would pick our apricots, pears, plums, peaches, nectarines, and put them in used telephone bands and take our army of 12 children and assign them a market.

And sometimes we would go with them, usually did.

And I would get off class at five o'clock on Friday.

Kids would be there.

My daughter was 16, I think, and her cousin was 17.

They'd pick me up.

I would go.

My turn was Fridays, sometimes in Santa Cruz, drive over the past 200 miles, get up in the morning, or go on Thursdays.

But my point was that you could take that fruit that would have been otherwise thrown away.

and you could sell it fresh right off the tree within a day.

And people in Santa Cruz or Palo Alto or

Santa Barbara or Santa, they loved it because you just put all these beautiful old varieties on a table, apricot, big ones.

And then you would put your early grapes on there and you just said

50 cents a pound.

And people would just swarm and get, you know, and it was organic.

We had 20 acres with no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers.

And we would make more in that 20 acres than we did on the other 160.

at that time.

Wow.

And I'd say, let's just quit shipping and do this.

But, you know, people said,

I don't want to be a peddler.

I'm a farmer.

My kids loved it when they were younger.

And they go, oh, I don't want to go drive all the way to Santa Cruz in a crappy old thirdhand bell telephone used van.

No air conditioning.

Can't we just let us go to the football game on Friday nights or something?

So it was hard.

Yeah, I bet it was hard.

Well, Victor, that's our time today.

So we're going to have to close off here.

Thank you so much for that saga into the planting of a plum.

I mean, it really opened up everything about what the farmer was up against.

I can't go buy a plum orchard or peach orchard without shaking my finger and say, you're going to be the death of me.

I'm not going to let you near me.

Well, I have one comment from

a reader on your website, and you have a new VDH Ultra article on who killed Homer and the demise of classical education.

And this particular reader wrote, Thank you for this writing.

As a family, we recently stumbled into homeschooling and we're fortunate to find classical education.

What an eye-opener it has been.

I hope we can stay the course and successfully guide our ship past Skyland Charibdis.

And that was by John McIntosh.

Boy,

when kids are homeschooled, I have

a Stanford student, Andre, I I won't tell you his last name, but when you see somebody who's properly homeschooled, they are so much better educated than the public or private schools.

But my gosh, it takes a huge investment on the part of the parents

to do that.

But I really admire people that are homeschooled.

I think there's two or three million now that are doing it.

I don't know what it is.

It's three or four or five percent of the students.

Yeah, it seems like homeschooled students that I've come across are much more careful about their education and they're much more interested and they're much more able, even if they don't know a lot, they have the process of knowledge down a lot better than the public schools.

They do.

I mean, they look at, they're taught.

They look at the Odyssey and it's about a man trying to get home and all of the different challenges he faces and why does he want to get home so much and why what are his skills that allow him to defeat these monstrous people in a way that say an Achilles and Ajax wouldn't have been able to do and you go to the university and it's all about

you know Penelope's the feminist icon that was treated terribly terribly by his sexist husband and the Cyclops is the other with

disabled with one eye that you're making fun of and the Lystragonians are caricatured and Circe and Calypso are really the heroes, even though, because

they construct sex on their own terms on their own islands.

It's just all ideological.

Yeah, yeah, nothing like what the Greeks actually thought.

No, that's what's so funny about it.

All right, Victor.

Well, thank you very much.

And this is Victor Davis Hanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

Okay, thank you.