From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
BBC News — read the full story
A cable came in over the wire this morning from the BBC: Ukraine is striking Russian fuel ships near Crimea. This isn't territorial warfare—it's economic strangulation, a systematic assault on supply lines. The occupation survives on logistics; Ukraine is betting it dies on them. Hildegard of Bingen speaks first, then Henry David Thoreau.
This is not escalation — this is siege. The shape is old: you do not take the fortress by assault; you make it uninhabitable. You poison the wells. You cut the roads. You wait.
Ukraine understands what the occupation cannot survive: the slow drought of supply. A garrison ten thousand strong, sitting in land that is not theirs, eating from supply-lines stretched across water and over ground they do not hold — that garrison becomes a mouth that grows hungrier each month. The ships burning are not victories in battle; they are the severing of veins. I watched this in reverse. When the Mainz prelates placed my abbey under interdict — forbade the Mass, forbade the music, forbade the sacraments — they believed silence would break us into obedience.
They understood the logic of deprivation. They were right that silence nearly killed me. But they were wrong about who would break first. They withdrew the interdict within a year. The garrison that cannot feed itself breaks before the starving city surrenders.
The question now is only time: whose reserves empty first — the supply-line, or the will to defend it.
With fortifications. A thousand shields hang from it, all the armor of the strong. This is such. Just as the incarnation of the Son of the highest ruler, namely the strongest lion coming from the virgin flower, the strongest instrument of new grace was placed, so the fortitude of…
that is it weakens by debilitating it or if the food is dry, such as meats, or fish, or eggs, it puts ignited steel on the wine, and pours that wine over the same food; and if there is poison in it, it weakens it or if it is bread, it puts the same bread, or similar dry food, hea…
In what manner? Namely by tasting and eating this which is evil; whence also they do not know the way by which in the heat of the sun it ascends, in their works, because they do not taste the sweetness of God either in honor or in love, where they reject his fear as the fear of a…
It is. But of the same shellfish animals, certain ones are accustomed to dwell in the middle of the same rivers, where the water itself is pure, and there the same animals draw less filth into themselves, and therefore they also have a moderate amount of venom in themselves. When…
They will contaminate. Whence also those days will manifest other most wicked days to come, and will also uncover the advent of the lost man, because just as the unclean one, who always polluted himself in uncleanness, is not saved from there, so also those same days full of uncl…
Supply-line denial is a clean-seeming strategy. The occupied region loses its fuel, its food, its ability to sustain itself.
The military force weakens. But so does everything else—the hospital, the bakery, the school.
The general who ordered it does not lose these things. I have observed enough to know this shape well: it works efficiently, and it tolerates the suffering of the dependent as a side effect.
The news merely records what has been settled elsewhere: that this price is acceptable.
crisis? “A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut, To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.” Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, …
Such near aspects had we Of our life’s scenery. It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is _mediterranean_ sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm-bounds and cottage-lights. For my own part, but for the geograp…
new passages and all improvements in navigation;—charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should…
W. I., “one cod line,” “one brown mug,” and “a line for the seine”; rum and sugar, sugar and rum, “good loaf sugar,” and “good brown,” W. I. and N. E., in short and uniform entries to the bottom of the page, all carried out in pounds, shillings, and pence, from March 25th to June…
the antipodes? We prayed that their bright anticipations might not be rudely disappointed. Though all the fates should prove unkind, Leave not your native land behind. The ship, becalmed, at length stands still; The steed must rest beneath the hill; But swiftly still our fortunes…
BBC News carried the piece. Strategy by attrition—cutting supply lines, waiting for the place to empty itself—is old wisdom that hasn't lost its edge. That's Old News for today.