{"id":90189,"date":"2019-08-25T11:30:41","date_gmt":"2019-08-25T15:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=90189"},"modified":"2019-08-25T16:06:40","modified_gmt":"2019-08-25T20:06:40","slug":"a-view-from-my-window-pt-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=90189","title":{"rendered":"A View From My Window – Pt. 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
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1967 Blizzard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This interesting Telegraph article from 2005 is a take on how\/why Rome \u201cfell\u201d. It seems to be an exaggeration because Rome as an empire was already split into provinces with local caesars and subcaesars. This eventually formed the basis for what became the various nations and rulerships of Europe, and, no, the Barbarians did not destroy Rome. The Empire as a governing entity had already fallen into decay and was done by 476 AD with the death of Romulus Augustulus. The article linked reviews books on the subject by authors with differing views.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/culture\/books\/3643937\/Rome-didnt-fall-in-a-day.html<\/a><\/p>\n

How do we compare, and how would anyone prognosticate the future of the USA based on past history? I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve peaked yet, but that the \u201cpeak\u201d will likely come when people decide to leave for other planets (e.g., Mars) because they don\u2019t like Earth any more. There is a distinct difference between the Roman Imperium, which was a class-based society, and the USofA, which is not. As we’ve frequently seen, having lots of cash does not mean you have any “class” at all.<\/p>\n

In the Imperium, if you were born into a family of tax collectors, that was what you were, period. There was no wiggle room. Even if you had a bright idea, you had no chance to do anything with it. In the USA, the opportunities to choose your own path to follow have been with us since the start of Europeans moving to North America and deciding what they wanted to do with their lives. The only ‘stuck in the mud’ group is the hyperwealthy – ‘but we’ve always<\/em> been lawyers, why do you want to be a cowboy?’ Even that has eroded over time.<\/p>\n

A quote at the end of the article: “Bryan Ward-Perkins’s “but” is based on a mass of closely interpreted archaeological evidence. Setting his face firmly against scholarly fashion, which dictates that everything about “Europe” must be “positive” and that no cultures are allowed to be more sophisticated than others, he argues that the demise of Rome led to a collapse of general living standards from the 5th to the 7th centuries so severe that the result was effectively “the end of civilisation”.<\/p>\n

Because Rome’s complex and highly developed economic, social, military and cultural infrastructure folded with the empire, a huge range of material goods, taken for granted across the whole Roman world by rich and poor alike, could no longer be produced, let alone delivered. No more fine pottery in massive quantities from far-off places for any who wanted it; little by way of coinage, or brick, tile and stone building (and what there was, like churches, much smaller than before); luxury goods only for the few, and these locally produced; agricultural productivity in decline; severely restricted levels of literacy (no more of those Pompeian walls covered in graffiti); insecurity the norm. Simplicity was the order of the day and the effects were felt from peasants to kings. It took centuries to get things back to where they had once been.<\/p>\n

Edward Gibbon argued that this world was inherently unstable, doomed to collapse. Peter Heather disagrees. Multiple emperors, admittedly, did cause sporadic and dangerous civil wars. But the problems generated by, for example, slow communications over massive distances, rigid economies and reactive bureaucracies were not new; tax increases to pay for the military did not lead to revolt, since provincials still saw benefits outweighing disadvantages\u2026.\u00a0– article<\/p>\n

The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather <\/strong>and The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins\u00a0 — <\/strong>both are available directly from Amazon for about $14++<\/strong> each<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

While there are many similarities between the USA and Rome, partly based on the fact that until the Roman Senate elected Gaius Julius Caesar as its Dictator (Monitor and Primary Speaker), Rome was a republic. The Republic was voted out by the Senate and the Imperium came into existence. The observation that Rome’s real issues were slow communications, among other things, is valid. If the\u00a0 Imperium had, at the time, had the instant telecommunications we take for granted now, and the speedy transportation systems that have been in place since the first cross-continental rail line was built in the 19th century, they might still be in business.<\/p>\n

To be clear on how much we’ve advanced, when my family lived on a farm in the 1950s, we had to put up with a party line. Party lines were still in place in some areas in 1968.\u00a0 The first home refrigerators, the monitor top machines, became available in the 1920s. Until closed stoves such as woodburning ranges were developed, people cooked their food in the fireplace, whether it was in the center of the home or in the kitchen. Central heating did not exist until the development of the home furnace and forced air, usually fired with coal. I used to go down to the basement and help my Dad pull the clinkers out of the bottom of the furnace.\u00a0 And road salt was not used in the winter: it was the cinders, which were tossed out and ground to small particles and spread on the road surface. We also had snowchains on the tires for the winter months.<\/p>\n

The bulk of what we take for granted comes in the last 90 to 130 years. This includes the electricity we all take for granted by flipping the wall switches or plugging something into an outlet. When our local power outage happened last winter (388,000 people lost power) in the middle of a sloppy ice\/snow storm, restoring power to the entire county took from the 1 AM notice to the power company until 6:30 PM.<\/p>\n

And yet, the entire power grid in the UK failed earlier this month, causing a national blackout, because the eco-friendly wind power grid failed completely and its backup, a gas-fired power plant, failed.\u00a0 https:\/\/www.thisismoney.co.uk\/money\/news\/article-7367413\/Renewable-energy-blackout-risk-warns-National-Grid-outage.html<\/a><\/p>\n

And this is exactly why we must never take such things as electricity for granted.<\/p>\n

Rome took a long time to disintegrate. The eastern<\/span> Western Roman Empire had already begun to disintegrate, as noted above, while the Western<\/span> Eastern Roman Empire, located in Constantinople remained stable and survived.<\/p>\n

If we pay attention, we can prevent the same collapse. If we take what we have for granted, well….<\/p>\n

More later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This interesting Telegraph article from 2005 is a take on how\/why Rome \u201cfell\u201d. It seems to … A View From My Window – Pt. 1<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":653,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-floggings-will-continue-until-morale-improves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/653"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90231,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90189\/revisions\/90231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}