Jack of Harts

The expansion of the Ottoman Empire was a bit of an odd duck when it comes to accompanying mass migrations. They conquered much of South Eastern Europe, South Western Asia, and the old Arabic Caliphates in the Middle East and the North African territories. Some of the mass migrations, like those into Europe and Asia, are easy to see in the styles of buildings and mosques that exist to this day. Or in some cases don’t. Other mass migrations like those into and out of the Arabian and African regions are harder to track.

The exact reasons for this are relatively unclear. Did they move in and then leave again, or did they never move in more than a few basic administrators to watch over the conquered territories who were later absorbed into the general population? The predominant faith of both ethnic groups was Muslim by that time, so the religious wars that took place were more disagreements between the different flavors of Islam, and those flavors crossed ethnic borders. This all makes mass migrations in those areas a bit harder to track.

There are basic types of architecture that are famously Ottoman that can be seen throughout the old Ottoman Empire. Experts can easily recognize a surviving Ottoman government building, but the Turks themselves were far more willing to pull up stakes and move somewhere else than their European counterparts. And the modern Middle East and North African nations they once controlled exhibit a distinct lack of respect for or influence from their former rulers if you ask the modern day Turks.

The original Arab invasions were a mass migration that conquered half of Rome’s farflung empire, but the French, the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Indians drove them back from their core regions of power. But not before they converted a large number of mountain Turks to their new religion. Then the Mongols drove into Europe and the Middle East and brought the Black Death that wiped out between half and a third of the local populations before disappearing back into the East.

The Turkic tribes of the high mountains walked into that power vacuum with a smile. The Afghan Turks conquered most of India with the help of Persian Turks while Anatolian Turks conquered the plague-weakened Eastern Roman Empire, including Constantinople. The new Ottoman Empire quickly controlled three quarters of the old Roman Empire, from South-Eastern Europe to North Africa, while their fellows ruled modern day Iran and India as well.

And the Turks ruled in a rather de-centralized manner over the regions they conquered. They weren’t even all allied with each other. They fought and betrayed each other almost as much as they fought with Europeans in fact. Maybe more. The next few hundred years have more rising and falling tribes and peoples than European minds are really equipped to understand. For us, the French have been French for a thousand years, and the Gauls before them were kinda proto-French. Ditto the Germans, the Poles, the Scandinavians, and the Russians. But the various Turk and Turk-adjacent and Resisting-The-Turk tribes and peoples seem to remember all of it, and can tell you in detail every single one of them. Every time they were on top and every time those people two villages over were on top. It is just one long series of migrations from place to place as the tribes wax and wane in strength.

Cancer Sucks.

My mom died of cancer three years ago after fighting it for a few months. It was fast. Far more aggressive than the doctors expected. It attacked her faster and harder. It was originally skin cancer but went to her bones, chewed up her spine, and went everywhere. The treatment worked, but it blasted her heart, so they took her off it because they didn’t want her heart to stop. And the cancer roared back fast enough to overwhelm anything the treatments could do. In the end, Mom saw no hope and chose to stop fighting it. She would have died better if the treatments had finished killing her heart. Instead, the cancer chewed through her brain, painfully and destructively and painfully, until she just went away.

Now we know that Scott Adams has cancer. He says he has prostate cancer that has gone to his bones. He’s known about it since at least last year and probably won’t last through the summer. He’s been using a walker for months, he’s always in pain, and he has weeks or months left. He’s going to probably take a little drink, go to sleep, and drift away. I wish Mom would have had that option.

And of course news came out on Sunday that Joe Biden has prostate cancer as well. That it is in the bones and that he is going to die soon. Cancer sucks. How long as he known about it? They say Friday. I don’t believe that. It’s caught by a standard yearly blood test. The same blood test his doctor’s didn’t talk about last time. And he said back in 2022 that had cancer. That might have been his mind going, but I think it was probably just him forgetting to censor that bit out. Because his mind was going. We deserve to know how long he’s had it. We need to know for very important political and criminal reasons.

And at the same time, I can say I’m sorry for him. Cancer is not an easy way to go. The cancer is ripping you apart piece by piece and it hurts. It hurts for a long time. It hurts until you die. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, and I hope he gets out easier and quicker than Mom did. Maybe he can take a drink with Scott Adams and they can check out together.

In the end, Cancer Sucks. And that’s all there is.