The Chaplain Speaks

It's pretty tough when your chaplain reads you out from the altar, as it were. 

The chaplain of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s field artillery regiment said there is no excuse for the Democratic VP pick to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment — not even running for Congress.

“In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told The Post.

Bjertness, 61, was the chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, of which Walz was command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, two months before the unit deployed to Iraq....

“Running for Congress is not an excuse,” Bjertness said of Walz’s decision to quit. “I stopped everything and went to war. I left my wife with three teenagers and a 6-year-old and I was gone for 19 months.”

Several other of his unit mates have choice words as well, as does the mother of one of them who didn't come home.

Thomas Behrends, the command sergeant major who replaced Walz, previously told The Post of the Minnesota governor: “He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States.”

...

Walz’s old unit, whose main job was running security for US convoys in Iraq, suffered three casualties during the deployment he missed — including Kyle Miller, 19, who joined the National Guard while still in high school, and David Berry, 37.... 

Miller’s mother told the Daily Mail this week that Walz had taken “the coward’s way out” by retiring before deployment....

“Honestly, I think we lucked out when we got Command Sergeant Behrends,” he said of the CMS who took over after Walz retired. “Maybe Walz resigned because he knew he wasn’t up to the job, that he didn’t have the confidence to lead.”

Behrends, who is from Brewster, Minn., called the Democratic vice presidential candidate “a traitor” for the timing of his retirement.

“When your country calls, you are supposed to run into battle — not the other way,” the retired command sergeant major told The Post Tuesday. “He ran away. It’s sad.”

Meanwhile his brigade says that they were was informed that they were selected to deploy during 2004, months earlier than first reported, and before he made any decisions about running for Congress.

Not How That Works

While discussing the CSM matter, a left-wing fellow said to me, "Well, he was against the Iraq War. He couldn't go serve in it, could he?"

For socialists, that's a remarkably egotistical view of the ethics of national service. What about your oath? What about the men you trained with, who were depending on you to look out for their interests as their CSM? Even if you were staunchly opposed to the war, don't you have duties to your word, to your comrades, to the country you swore to serve? 

Amazing.

A Pyramid of Falsehood

Picking up on yesterday's topic, an investigative reporter I've met decides to press on the Stolen Valor bit. He finds a couple of actual lies built upon the initial falsehoods about the CSM status.

The first falsehood might have an innocent explanation, but Waltz never appears to have attempted to correct the report:

Bloomberg’s Joshua Green, then employed at The Atlantic, was the first major reporter to profile Walz. In an interview with the then-congressional candidate, Green writes that in 2004, Walz left his hometown in Minnesota “to serve overseas in Operation Enduring Freedom.”

It’s unclear if this is Green, a veteran reporter, omitting major facts, or if Walz, the interviewee, is selling Green on a particular narrative. Nonetheless, the assertion is incredibly misleading, as it leaves the reader under the impression that Walz served as boots on the ground in the Global War on Terror, when in reality, he merely deployed to Italy in 2003 for a six month stint.

It gets much worse.

During a confrontation with the hated George W. Bush's team, Waltz engineered a claim that the Secret Service might "arrest" him over "opposing the president." He then challenged them in a way that made it into the press:

Green discusses a 2004 visit from former President George W. Bush to Gov. Walz’s hometown, in which a protesting Walz (who was still serving in the military) told the reporter about him supposedly demanding to speak to the then commander in chief.

“Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who'd just returned from fighting the war on terrorism,” Green writes.

This was before the Warning Order, so not only had he not "just returned from fighting the war on terrorism," he hadn't even been asked to fight the war on terrorism. We now know that, when asked, he found a way to evade his orders and responsibilities. 

The piece closes with another set of outright lies by Waltz, one intended to disarm fellow veterans of the rifle with which they can best defend their families:

On Tuesday, The X account for the Kamala Harris campaign posted a video of Governor Walz discussing the need to disarm American citizens.

“We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war,” he tells the audience.

1) The AR-15 is not a 'weapon of war,' but a purpose-designed civilian rifle capable of only semi-automatic fire.

2) It is therefore not the same as the M-16 or M-4 carbines that Waltz's fellow servicemen carried in war.

3) Waltz never went to war, and therefore never carried any sort of rifle at war.

4) In fact, Waltz not only didn't go to war, he abandoned his unit and left them to go without him even though as the assigned CSM he was their senior enlisted advisor. In other words it was his job to defend the interests of the enlisted servicemembers in that battalion to the commanding officer.

Instead, he abandoned them. 

UPDATE: The National Guard officially disputes his claimed biography. 

As Governor, he’s ex officio their commander, and you might expect them to avoid embarrassment for their commander if they could find a way. Far from taking steps to protect him they’re out with their top PAO to officially state that his claim is false. That underlines that he doesn’t have the respect of those who serve under him. 

Warning Order

A 'warning order' or WARNO is an official order alerting you to expect another order that is coming soon. It's meant as a heads-up to let everyone start getting ready for something in advance of the complete information about what they are going to be commanded to do.

What you're supposed to do when you get one is to start taking appropriate steps to prepare for the command, in this case to prepare to deploy on a combat mission to Iraq. What you're not supposed to do is use the warning to figure out how to evade the command.

Two retired Command Sergeants Major accuse our new VP nominee of having done the latter.

On May 16th, 2005 he quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war. His excuse to other leaders was that he needed to retire in order to run for congress. Which is false, according to a Department of Defense Directive, he could have run and requested permission from the Secretary of Defense before entering active duty; as many reservists have. If he had retired normally and respectfully, you would think he would have ensured his retirement documents were correctly filled out and signed, and that he would have ensured he was reduced to Master Sergeant for dropping out of the academy. Instead he waited for the paperwork to catch up to him. His official retirement document states, SOLDIER NOT AVAILABLE FOR SIGNATURE.

On September 10th, 2005 conditionally promoted Command Sergeant Major Walz was reduced to Master Sergeant. It took a while for the system to catch up to him as it was uncharted territory, literally no one quits in the position he was in, or drops out of the academy. Except him....

The 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion was deployed for 22 months in 2006 - 2007. During this time, they were restricted by Army regulations and could not speak out against a candidate for office. In November 2006 he was elected to the House of Representatives. 

Is it true? Well, he doesn't deny it.

A spokesperson for Walz previously said this topic has been covered before and referred Alpha News to a past story where Walz said “normally this type of partisan political attack only comes from one who’s never worn a uniform.”

Yeah? Ask John F. Kerry about what happens to those who betray their comrades in arms.

She May Argue With Her Logic

From the Easy Rider soundtrack, which is why I know the song, the lyrics came to my mind for some reason this morning and I was struck by how odd they are. The name of the song is "Wasn't Born to Follow," and this is how experts quoted by Wikipedia talk about the lyrics:

The lyrics of "Wasn't Born to Follow" celebrate the freedom that hippies enjoyed in the late 1960s. They express the need for escape and independence. Music critic Johnny Rogan describes the lyrics as an "evocation of pastoral freedom and the implicit desire to escape from the restrictions of conventional society." Music professor James E. Perone describes the singer as "a rugged individualist at one with nature."

But that's not what the lyrics are about at all. They're about a guy who is trying to seduce, and then later abandons, a young woman who is part of the hippie culture.

And when it's time I'll go and wait
Beside the legendary fountain
'Til I see your form reflected
In its clear and jeweled waters
And if you think I'm ready
You may lead me to the chasm
Where the rivers of our visions
Flow into one another.

That is a non-subtle metaphor if I've ever heard one. Though this song is called 'wasn't born to follow,' the young man expresses not only his willingness to follow ("you may lead me") but even to be judged ("if you think I'm ready") until the act is completed. Only then will he leave her in spite of her pleas:

She may beg and she may plead
And she may argue with her logic
Mention all the things I'll lose
That really have no value
Though I doubt that she will ever
Come to understand my meaning
In the end she'll surely know
I was not born to follow.

The song is much less romantic than it sounds over the music; and rather than being an 'evocation of pastoral freedom,' or an 'escape from conventional society,' it's just about betraying a woman's love after a moment's pleasure. 

Civility and Collegiality

These are qualities I respect, but I notice that they like everything are turned into weapons these days. On civility:

With less than a month before the primary, however, Smith withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Nethercott. Smith’s decision came after he and Nethercott met for coffee to discuss the campaign and the issues at stake.

Another topic over coffee was the tenor of politics in Wyoming these days...the scorched earth nature of campaigns, the deluge of misinformation presented to voters, the intensely personal attacks and the overall feeling of nausea that results from seeing our political process degenerate into a gutter fight.

Smith, not wanting to contribute to this political angst, withdrew and endorsed his opponent.

I’ll correct myself. There are two examples of political statesmanship evident here. 

The first being two political rivals setting differences and all the attendant bullshit aside to sit down over coffee and pick each other’s brain. That is almost a revolutionary act of civility in today’s atmosphere. It should be applauded by voters and emulated by other candidates.

The second act of statesmanship is Smith stepping down. This took courage and suggests that both candidates were motivated by reason instead of emotion. Politics in Wyoming needs a lot more reason and a lot less emotion these days. And this act, too, deserves to be applauded and emulated.

So, my sweaty ol’ Stetson is tipped to both Tara Nethercott and Gregg Smith. 

I really do appreciate that, but I notice that the rest of the column is devoted to running down "the Freedom Caucus" and "Young Americans for Liberty," and so forth and so on. So civility is great, as long as the right wing guy steps down and endorses the left wing girl.

Meanwhile, collegiality:

Of late, Justice Kagan has been pushing the latter conception of collegiality–that it entails having an open mind, and a willingness to be persuaded. I have to imagine this push is part of her effort to corral Justice Barrett's votes at every opportunity. If there is any common thread with Joan Biskupic's reporting, is that Justice Kagan flipped Justice Barrett in several cases. I've yet to see any indication that a conservative Justice has flipped a liberal member of the court to reach a conservative outcome. Flipping is not ambidextrous–it only works on the left.

There's got to be a way to be civil and collegial without giving away the store. 

UPDATE: Related. 

Facebook Crime

Not a joke: in the UK, you can now be arrested for comments on Facebook.

Unbelief

But Mark was come of the glittering towns 

Where hot white details show, 

Where men can number and expound, 

And his faith grew in a hard ground 

Of doubt and reason and falsehood found, 

Where no faith else could grow. 

Belief that grew of all beliefs 

One moment back was blown 

And belief that stood on unbelief 

Stood up iron and alone.

-GK Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse

It would be reckless indeed to vote for someone who has repudiated all their claimed beliefs. Perhaps they were lying then; perhaps they are lying now. Perhaps they have no core principles from which to reason, and will simply say or do whatever seems to help them in the moment. Either way, how could you know what you were voting for? 

This is a very strange election; indeed it is not an election yet on the Democratic side, because all the votes were also repudiated in favor of a new candidate appointed by acclamation. Given her walk-back of all of her existing positions, we are in a situation in which no one has voted in favor of a candidate who has no positions. She gives no interviews; she takes no questions.

I don't know what we're doing here, but it isn't American democracy. This is something different, something I have not seen in this country before now. 

Philosophy of Plants

This article has a nice introduction to a fairly new problem: what should we think now that we know that plants communicate with each other and, therefore, have a degree of agency? The article helpfully spells out the origin of our thoughts on the subject, which unsurprisingly lies with Aristotle's work. 

Plants have a teleogical end of existence, survival, and reproduction: that was known from Aristotle's time. Now we know that they can pursue this end through the emission of organic compounds that cause not only themselves, but nearby plants as well, to erect defenses to further their survival against dangers. They're not especially good at it -- I have cut down quite a few trees in my time, and though I prefer to cut dead ones rather than living ones I have sometimes had to cut living trees too -- but it does show that they have a kind of consciousness, and are pursuing an end in communication with each other. Thus, they also have a kind of community.

These are ordinarily significant considerations in ethics. Why wouldn't they be here? And if they are, what does that mean for us in how we treat with these conscious beings and their communities? 

Slaughtering Girl Children

So until I saw this today, I didn't understand that the children murdered in the knife attack in England were all girls. Somehow the media failed to convey that to me in their reporting.

The point of that post is that the British government has turned hard against anyone who is upset by that. All this gender neutrality is working out badly: Gods of the Copybook Headings badly, if you ask me. All those old rules may not all be necessary, but maybe we should rethink this commitment to treating sex as if it were subject to the rule of cæteris paribus rather than mutatis mutandum. 

UPDATE: The post I linked was deleted, and Janet denies a part of it in the comments below. I'll take her word that she's better informed about that aspect. 

Below Waterrock Knob

UPDATE: I met a biker turning 70 today who was riding the whole Blue Ridge Parkway while he still could. His lungs were ravaged by COVID back when it was new and nobody had any resistance. Still, he survived and now gets to take his ride. He was cheerful, and we had a long talk. I’ve done the ride several times, and was happy to help. His comrade on the ride was a firefighter.

More Google Cleanup

I went back through a few months of comments and restored the ones Google wrongly marked as spam. There were a lot of them, including some Mr. Hines made multiple times, along with a comment that he couldn’t understand why they kept disappearing. 

The effect of AI is likely to include increased speech suppression. Disapproved ideas will be much harder to express because human attention will no longer be a limiting factor on how much suppression can be done. 

FPC Wins Again

These boys are on a roll. This time they managed to have several of Maryland's firearm carry bans struck down as unconstitutional restrictions on the right to bear arms. 

Maryland is one of only twelve states where I cannot carry a handgun with my North Carolina permit, because Maryland only respects its own permits. North Carolina will accept the permits of forty-nine other states as well as its own; Maryland zero other states. This is common among states run by gun control regimes: they routinely disarm everyone they can, and disallowing any other states' permits means that they can insist that citizens of other states be disarmed while in their state. The FPC lawsuit doesn't help that issue.

However, it does allow Marylanders with permits -- not easy to come by in Maryland, but easier now thanks to groups like FPC -- to carry in places they were formerly forbidden from doing so. Everything that can be done to dismantle the disarmament regime is good; a free people have the right to defend themselves from harm, and therefore they have also the right to the necessary conditions of an effective defense to include the tools they need.

Drones

Recently drone warfare came up in the comments. Here are some videos I've found helpful in understanding this evolution of battlefield technology. There's a lot of focus on drones in warfare, but it's not exclusively that.

I would be very interested in any other sources any of you consider useful for understanding this aspect of warfare.

Task & Purpose offers a 16-minute overview of the development of drone warfare going back to the 19th century and bringing it up to about November 2023. (There's a sponsor ad in it after the intro. Skip to 2:17 to miss that, although it is a drone ad if you're interested.)

T.REX ARMS / LABS has a good series on drones. The first is a 25-minute dive into drone warfare in the Ukraine/Russia conflict. I've then posted the rest of their 5-part series below that.

Community Standards Vary

My wife has houseguests this weekend. I am of course detailed to cook for them. I just made dinner (bacon-wrapped jalapeño shrimp, with bruschetta and honey/balsamic Brussel sprouts as sides). To decide how much jalapeño to use, I yelled downstairs:

"Dear, verify your friends' comfort level with spice?"

"I like spicy!" one of them yelled back.

"I like spicy!" the other one yelled back.

"OK, here it comes," I said and walked away. 

Downstairs, I could hear my wife panicking. "No! No! You don't know what you asked for! Mildly spicy! Mildly!"

Strong Work, SECDEF

I met Lloyd Austin once briefly in Iraq, when he was the commanding general of the war effort. This is what I want to see from a man like him.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Friday relieved the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices....

In taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case.

Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.

“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024.”

That's what I'm talking about. 'You are relieved and we're going to do it right' is something we need to hear a lot more often pointed at the senior officers corps. Well done. 

Rumors of War

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. 

Mt. 24:6

It's looking like a real war is brewing in the Middle East. It's the long-expected war between Iran and Israel, which Iran will be fighting from a disadvantage because they haven't finished their nuclear program yet. The rocket strikes are ongoing, but ineffective so far; Israel has designated medical facilities and emergency radio frequencies in expectation of a larger barrage. There are no-fly zones in the north. The United States appears to be evacuating our diplomatic personnel, but has deployed 12 additional warships in addition to the carrier group already in the Persian Gulf. 

As mentioned on Wednesday, Iran is throwing away its most effective strategy in favor of a more dangerous but less effective one. It will do more damage in the short term, but it will end the deniability of the proxy war and expose Iran to direct retaliation. Iran is a lot more fragile than it looks, and has only survived this long by avoiding being drawn into a real war.

Coincidentally, Sen. Cotton has opened a probe into Kamala Harris' national security adviser over ties to Iranian networks. Now that's not necessarily anything untoward; it can be helpful for your national security guy to have a backchannel to the people you're worried about. Sometimes you want to talk to them, or hear their perspective. Still, it's the sort of thing that ought to be interrogated, so good for the Senator for pressing them on it. 

Recession

Unsurprisingly, the economy slipped into recession according to a usual test. Dad29 has been pointing out that indicators have been unfavorable for some time. The price of copper, another heuristic, is at a four-month low as manufacturers don't expect to be making as much stuff. At the same link you can see that the price of lithium is way down, as the much-vaunted shift to electric vehicles stalls out in the face of both technical difficulty and consumer resistance. But the price of gasoline is also down, because people aren't traveling as much -- little money for summer vacations.

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, but it's hard to see much good here. As D29 points out, even if the recession were to get a new president elected he's going to have a rough couple of years.

One of the Good Ones

Someone of significant importance to my life died just a few days ago. She was, inter alia, the heroine of Grenada. This is not a secret any longer: here is a declassified cable between the CIA and the State Department describing her arrival under official cover. Her name was Linda Flohr.

She arrived three days before "the 1st and 2nd battalions of the US Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, the 82nd Airborne Division, and elements of the former Rapid Deployment Force, U.S. Marines, US Army Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and ancillary forces, totaling 7,600 troops, together with Jamaican forces and troops of the Regional Security System (RSS)." She is the one who took photographs of the airport and other assault sites, and smuggled day-glo spraypaint to the hostage students somehow so that they could mark the roof of their building for the SEALs.

(Relevant to current events also involving hostages, the UN was hotly opposed to this rescue mission. "The invasion was criticized by many countries.... The United Nations General Assembly condemned it as "a flagrant violation of international law" on 2 November 1983, by a vote of 108 to 9.")

I met her shortly after 9/11, when I was still young and highly adventurous. She taught me a great deal, and trusted me enough to introduce me to her old friends, who taught me more yet. My life would have been very different without that friendship and trust. The last time I saw her was at the deathbed of one of those old friends, Dewey Clarridge. 

These Reagan-era spies that I've met were all intensely patriotic, and conservative politically in spite of the wild tales they found themselves involved in over their careers. The Agency is not what it was in their day; a lot of reforms were made starting in the Clinton years to try to turn it into something else. Too bad: it used to draw some of the good ones, and put them into service of a nation that still deserved it. 

Boxing is a Male's Sport

This could be the year a male wins both the Men's and Women's boxing events in the Olympics. Incredible showing by Imane Khelif, whose opponent surrendered in the first round after taking a few shots to the head. 

I don't remember ever seeing a boxing match end in surrender before. Apparently it happens on very rare occasions, and is the subject of introspection when it does because it points to some extraordinary condition that should have been avoided. We will see if there is any introspection on this occasion.