Today also marks the passage into eternity of the last Medal of Honor recipient from World War II. I never met him, but he remained very active in the American Legion for a long time. Other Legionnaires describe him as one of the kindest and most respected members of the organization.
He received the Medal of Honor for actions on Iwo Jima, described at the link.
Sonny Barger has died at 83. He was, most famously, the leader of the Hells Angels charter at the Altamont music festival's great disaster. The culture turned against them after that -- until then, the Angels were appearing regularly in movies as they were picaresque and picturesque, and readily available in Hollywood. However, it is my judgment that they were the only ones there who acted with honor.
Barger is less well known for his more recent life, but if you followed him more recently you'd have found that in his older years he became a devout Christian and helped to publish a series of charming children's books. He continued to ride motorcycles, write books, and to advocate against smoking (which caused him a vicious bout of throat cancer in earlier years).
His final message to the world ends, "Keep your head up high, stay loyal, remain free, and always value honor."
UPDATE: Aggie says the first link bothers his antivirus, so here's a photo of the statement by Sonny announcing his death.
...if Ornato calls her an outright liar? Major disaster. Not just a legal disaster, in that a key witness to potential criminal charges for Trump will have suddenly been blown up, but a political disaster for the committee. It’s unconscionable that they would put a witness on television to make an allegation that shocking without having run it down first. Republicans will say that if they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — separate fact from fiction with the SUV incident, there’s no reason to believe they did so in other aspects of the investigation.
I can't believe anyone is still using the word "unconscionable" with regard to Congress as if it didn't obviously apply to them all of the time. "Congress is unconscionable as usual," sure. "It would be unconscionable for Congress to..." as if that suggested they surely wouldn't do that thing, no.
When a Texas woman found an unsecured M4-style rifle inside an unlocked Texas National Guard truck Monday, June 27, she took matters into her own hands by, well, taking the weapon into her own hands.“Today, I got my hands on a fully automatic weapon thanks to the stupid, irresponsible #TexasNationalGuard #OperationLonestar who left their vehicle running & unlocked with guns inside on the side of the road,” Marianna Wright tweeted Monday. Operation Lone Star is the long-term deployment of Texas National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border within the state. “Guess the truck could’ve been mine, too. #PublicSafety, #Texas Style.”
If it had been a Hummer it could have been. They don't even have keys. I don't know why they left the keys in the pickup they were using, but that's commonly done with fire/rescue people in case somebody needs to move the thing out of the way of another responding vehicle.
It's been a long time since I heard anything but bad news about the Boy Scouts of America, but the Washington Post today has a story of a 15 year old Scout who escaped from the wreckage of the recent Amtrak derailment to comfort the dying truck driver.
Officials say that the number of people who perished in a hot trailer in San Antonio on Monday has risen from 46 to 50 people, with 48 people pronounced dead at the scene and two other people dying in hospital care after suffering from heat related illness...While the vehicle involved bears the colors and DOT number of Alamo-based Betancourt Trucking and Harvesting, company leaders say that the vehicle information was “cloned” or illegally copied. They say that their truck has been used to haul grain from Harlingen to Progreso and has not been in San Antonio recently, and that their trailer is in the company lot.“Our [refrigerated trailer] is sitting right in the yard. That one in San Antonio is not our trailer,” Felipe Betancourt Jr told San Antonio Express-News.
If there is a view from modern biology, it is that genetic information structures the flow of energy and materials. To a first approximation, biology is understood in terms of information networks and control systems. Even the laws of thermodynamics, which govern the behaviour of molecules and their interactions and reactions, can be recast in terms of information – Shannon entropy, the laws of bits of information. But this view generates its own paradox at the origin of life – where does all this information come from? Within the realm of biology, we already have a simple explanation: natural selection sifts through random differences, favouring what works, eliminating what doesn’t, generation after generation. Information accumulates with function over time. We can quibble over details, but there is no conceptual difficulty here. At the origin of life, though, this view will not do. Place information at the heart of life, and there is a problem with the emergence of function, which is to say, the origin of biological information. . . .
Thinking about life only in terms of information is distorting. Seeking new laws of physics to explain the origin of information is to ask the wrong question, which can’t be answered precisely because it is not meaningful. A far better question goes back to the formative years of biology: what processes animate cells and set them apart from inanimate matter? The idea that there is a vital force, that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter, was disproved long ago and is now only wheeled out as a straw man to burn – even though it’s an understandable illusion for anyone who has shared van Leeuwenhoek’s captivation with busy animalcules. Yet biochemistry – my own discipline, which deals with the flow of energy and materials through cells – has, with a few notable exceptions, been blithely indifferent to how this unceasing flux might have arisen, or how its elemental imprint could still dictate the lives and deaths of cells today, along with the organisms they compose. You and me.
Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis has finally gotten married after decades of putting his devotion to the Marine Corps and the rest of the U.S. military above his personal life. And he did it in the most Marine way possible...
Yes, with Elvis in attendance.
From VDH, on the "Great Reset":
Assume the worst when the adjective “great” appears in connection with envisioned fundamental, government-driven, or global political changes. What was similar between Lyndon Johnson’s massively expensive but failed “Great Society” and Mao’s genocidal “Great Leap Forward” was the idea of a top-down, centrally planned schema, cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor.
Those precedents certainly didn't turn out as intended. Are there any counterexamples of centralized policies billed as "Great" by their advocates that actually did what they promised? "The Great Depression" doesn't count because it wasn't something people were advocating for being great, just something they were enduring.
The number of American troops in Europe has risen sharply in the four months since Russia invaded Ukraine, from about 65,000 in mid-February to 100,000 today.That increase, one of the most rapid U.S. military buildups on the continent in the post-Cold War era, has no clear end date or any obvious metrics to determine when troops could come home or be repositioned to other theaters such as the Indo-Pacific.Instead, their mission is to deter further Russian aggression and prevent any attack on NATO territory. That goal will prove difficult to measure and could justify a years-long mission as Russia and Ukraine settle into a slow, bloody war of attrition in the Donbas.The long-term consequences for the U.S. and its foreign policy priorities could be significant, some analysts say, because Washington likely can’t afford to maintain such troop levels in Europe over the long haul without sacrificing resources in the Pacific.
Speaking of the Pacific, Taiwan is facing increasing threats from Beijing, which is also loudly opposed to American military activities in the South China Sea.
We don't have the force structure for a two-theater conflict at this time, not even if one of them is limited to 'reassuring' Europeans with increased presence. We aren't going to get it, either, because recruiting has become a serious challenge in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle -- and the refusal by the military to hold anyone accountable.
“This is the start of a long drought for military recruiting,” said Ret. Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank. He said the military has not had such a hard time signing recruits since 1973, the year the U.S. left Vietnam and the draft officially ended. Spoehr said he does not believe a revival of the draft is imminent, but “2022 is the year we question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.”
The pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink, with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. Last month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testified before Congress that only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years.
An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007.
Things are so bad that the Army is dropping the requirement for a high school education -- not even a G.E.D. will now be required. Retention is also bad, with big bonuses being pondered as a means of trying to keep the people who have been willing to serve in the past. The Army is also fronting cash bonuses for new recruits -- up to $50,000 just to join the Army. In spite of the economy being terrible, and worsening, military service is not appealing with the command environment so broken.
It's hard to remain a great power when your people stop being willing to fight for you, but it is a problem the US Federal Government has brought upon itself. If they cannot restore confidence, and find ways to educate youth to want to serve -- and to have the physical capacities to do so -- they will not remain a power that bestrides the world.
I have just been made aware that there is an annoying captcha requirement on comments for some people. I’m not sure why. According to the settings page I have that turned off.
To whit:
Any ideas on why it’s bothering some people and not others? Or how to keep it from bothering anyone, more to the point?
