Josh Brooks @F530Josh
·
Big Army deciding their Soldiers from 130 years ago don't deserve the MOH because history is inconvenient and doesn't work with the modern narrative is a pretty good look.

10:58 AM · Jul 25, 2024 //

Congress started down this road by apologizing in 1990. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act required the Department of Defense to examine the medals. //

No matter what this Potemkin board organized by Austin finds, the facts remain that the 7th Cavalry was operating under legal orders, and the men awarded the Medal of Honor met the criteria of the time. There is no wrong to be righted here. This is simply a political act by the losers to count coup on the winners. Austin's order to “consider the context of the overall engagement" is just a way to open the door to relitigating the Indian Wars by the "stolen land" nutters.

Don't think this is the end of it. //

DaleS 2 hours ago

Wikipedia has a list of the 20 medal winners for Wounded Knee, though they claim the award to Marvin Hillock was for fighting at White Clay Creek, and he was listed for Wounded Knee "due to a later error in War Department lists."

I believe that the battle at Wounded Knee was certainly mishandled and probably avoidable. I'm sympathetic in general to the U.S. Army during the western Indian Wars; they were forced to do a difficult job (often made much worse by the behavior of local settlers and government bureacrats), and most of the time I think they did a pretty good job. But this wasn't one of those times. I care nothing for Austin's conclusions, but Miles at the time was appalled by the battle, and he was actually the superior to the commander at the battle (Forsyth) and relieved him of command. He was in a better position to make that judgment than anyone in the DoD today, and certainly had more experience in Indian fighting than the folks in Washington who reinstated Forsyth. Miles was a fine general, but hard-hearted enough to exile his own apache scouts after Geromino's capture, so for him to call for compensation to Wounded Knee survivors demonstrated that this wasn't the usual brand of Indian fighting. It was a battle, but also ended up as a massacre. I'm willing to trust Miles' assessment of the battle.

With that said, even if what we would now consider war crimes happened at Wounded Knee, this wasn't an unprovoked slaughter like Sand Creek. There was actual combat and likely actual heroism. To take an example from the list:

"Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy."

I don't know what the late-19th century criteria for assigning Medal of Honor was, but that sounds pretty darn heroic to me, and has nothing to do with killing Sioux, justly or not. After all these years, how could you possibly determine that John Clancy not only didn't deserve his medal, but that he and his fellow honorees should be singled out for "cruelty".

It seems to me if you want to virtue signal by dishonoring the dead, the place to start should be with Forsyth, who was the responsible for the force there. It was his job to see his soldiers acted properly, and to take measures against any of his soldiers who targetted non-combatants. //

Sojourner 2 hours ago edited

The Medal of Honor, at that time, was the only decoration for valor, and the criteria were very different from those today.

^^^This^^^

The whole Wounded Knee episode was a mess. Mistakes committed by both sides. A messy almost-ending to the Indian Wars. But make no mistake, it was a war.

These social justice warriors are wrong here, just as they are wrong in opposing dropping the A-bombs on Japan in August 1945 or, as Streiff notes, our recent base renaming and statue removal mania. They are sermonizing with the luxury of hindsight in a way that is wrong in terms of historiography/hermeneutics.

Just as in mid-July 1945 (when it was clear Japan was going to fight until no one was left alive on the Home Islands; a view, btw, which the Japanese didn't change until AFTER the second bomb dropped), at the time of the Ghost Dance no one knew what was going to happen. But there were enough Indians who felt the pull to cause the Army to be legitimately concerned. On one hand, sorry for the dead Indians. On the other, they paid (perhaps unjustly) the price for the style of warfare their tribe and other tribes had historically waged. Whatever the injustices of Wounded Knee might there have been, it clearly signaled the end of our first War on Terror (which we won, unlike Round 2). The question no one on the social justice side of things wants to answer (b/c they can't) is to name a better outcome (and path to that outcome) than what happened. I'll repeat what I've written here before: the tribes were lucky how the Indian Wars ended. It could have been much worse.

Full disclosure, I was previously more inclined to review the actions at Wounded Knee. But we no longer live in that better universe. Streiff is 100% correct: this isn't going to be a review conducted in good conscience. Instead, it's 100% political warfare waged by those who hate America on those of us who love America. It's yet another play in a series of plays to destroy the fabric of our military and of our country under the guise of "righting wrongs." Base renamings, land acknowledgments, etc. IT'S ALL BS. And it's also utterly ironic; they're doing to us what they criticize America for doing to the Indians. They believe we should have left the Indians alone to live in peace, so to make their point they won't let us live in peace.

Want to be even more revolted, see this:
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/07/20/medals-of-honor-for-soldiers-who-perpetrated-wounded-knee-massacre-may-be-rescinded/

This is what we're up against. When even our supposed allies in the press lead off their articles with titles like this.

Dem Rep. said FEC chair’s presentation of federal law might “sow misguided doubt and confusion about the state of the presidential election.” //

The Trump campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Tuesday challenging the transfer of funds and reportedly calling it “the largest campaign finance violation in American history.”

In the complaint, Trump campaign General Counsel David Warrington reportedly contended that the $91.5 million in campaign funds originally raised by Biden’s presidential campaign cannot be transferred to Harris, who has yet to be named the official Democrat nominee.

Biden and Harris are “flagrantly violating the [Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971, as amended] by making and receiving an excessive contribution of nearly one hundred million dollars, and for filing fraudulent forms with the Commission purporting to repurpose one candidate’s principal campaign committee for the use of another candidate,” Warrington reportedly wrote in the complaint.

MRC NewsBusters @newsbusters
·
Now that Joe Biden is out of the race, the media are pretending Kamala Harris was never the border czar.

Even though they had no problem calling her that before Biden dropped out.

4:24 PM · Jul 24, 2024 //

Viscount Montgomery of Arkansi
3 hours ago
Why would Kamala not want to be recognized as the Border Czar? According to the MSM the border is secure.

Alexa Henning @alexahenning
Remember: the people telling you Kamala is a great candidate...
Were the ones telling you Biden was fit for the job last week
8:29 PM · Jul 24, 2024

That is an absolutely undeniable fact. //

The other thing to remember in all of this is that these same people who are proclaiming Kamala Harris has what it takes to be the leader of the free world are the same people who are now basically saying she had no real responsibilities as vice president:

T. Becket Adams @BecketAdams
·
It will be interesting to watch her supporters thread the needle of: "Ignore her Senate record and look at the VP record, but also she wasn't responsible for anything as VP."

Kyle Mann @The_Kyle_Mann
I like that the media's defense of Kamala has become "she actually wasn't in charge of anything"
5:51 PM · Jul 25, 2024

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A left-wing nonprofit that interfered in the 2020 election to Democrats’ benefit is coaching election offices on how to address concerns about leftist oligarchs’ silent coup to replace Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.

On Tuesday, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) sent an email to its newsletter subscribers highlighting Biden’s Sunday exit from the 2024 race and informing election officials that “voters and media outlets will be looking to you for guidance in the coming weeks, and you will play a powerful role in shaping this emerging story.”

‘The public deserves answers for how this Executive Order is being implemented, particularly as VP Harris becomes the new nominee,’ Rep. Bryan Steil said. //

President Joe Biden may have left the presidential race, but “Bidenbucks” lives on.

And you can bet your federal tax bill that the Biden administration will be revving up the taxpayer-funded, get-out-the-vote machine for not-so-accidental candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I think they definitely will,” Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, told me in an interview this week. “I think what they’re doing is an unlawful use of federal taxpayer dollars, and I don’t think any president has the right to do it.”

Documents obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project expose federal agencies working with left-wing activist groups in targeting traditionally Democrat voters to cast mail-in ballots for Biden’s No. 2 in November’s election. And there appears no slowdown in the constitutionally suspect initiative now that Biden has withdrawn from his reelection run and endorsed his leftist lieutenant.

Despite talk of ’emergency abortions,’ there is never a circumstance in which the mother’s health would benefit from the death of her unborn child. //

Recently the Association for American Physicians and Surgeons filed a suit after multiple doctors were targeted by credentialing boards and the U.S. government for their anti-abortion stance post-Dobbs. Public ignorance and confusion over a “necessary” abortion continues to permeate political language and Biden’s rule is yet another coercive attempt to install national abortion “must-haves.”

An anonymous Food and Drug Administration committee determines “arbitrary safety standards” and what defines “emergency use” and “necessity,” said John Seeds, former department chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and can then utilize those standards to hide and mislead the public on the point of abortion.

Seeds testified in favor of a bill in Virginia that would change Health Department standards for abortionists, requiring providers to report any significant complication of an abortion. //

Since the legalization of abortion 50 years ago, huge strides have been made in maternal and perinatal care, with viability improving from 27 to 22 weeks gestation, said Dr. John Bruchalski, a former abortionist who now runs Tepeyac OB-GYN, the largest pro-life OB-GYN practice in the nation.

“What these ‘emergency abortion’ laws are saying is if there’s another medical approach to the situation, like real medical treatment or stabilization to closely follow the course of disease in the patients … you still have to provide an abortion if a woman wants it,” Bruchalski said.

The two primary situations when a pregnancy must be induced before viability to save the life of the mother, first-trimester hemorrhaging and ectopic pregnancy, have clear treatments that do not require an abortion, Bruchalski said.

“In [catastrophic uterine bleeding] you’re targeting the placenta and its removal because that is the cause of bleeding, the preborn child is not your target,” Bruchalski said.

In the case of an ectopic pregnancy, an OB-GYN removes the diseased segment of the fallopian tube containing the embryo.

“This is intellectually and scientifically not a direct abortion,” Bruchalski said. “The definition and the intent of an elective abortion is to terminate the life of the fetus. The intention and truth matter not only to the profession and the doctor but to the patient.”

In the vast majority of cases of ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages, the preborn child has already died due to the disease, Bruchalski said. In either situation, targeting the child is never the intent and is therefore not an abortion, but abortion practitioners deceive physicians and patients by saying ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, and elective abortions are all the same.

“This coercion is based on fundamental lies and half-truths, from beginning to end,” Bruchalski said. //

“There are sometimes reasons for early induction that require additional support for the baby, as the baby is not ‘ready’ to be born, but it’s essential for the well-being of the mother,” Johnson said. “However, there is never a circumstance that the mother’s health would benefit from the death of her unborn child. Even in true crash C-sections where mom has to be in the OR [operating room] literally within minutes, there is never a reason to end the baby’s life in the hope of saving mom.”

“The whole discussion of ER abortion of a healthy pregnancy is bogus,” Seeds said.

We recommend that you use the current long-term support (LTS) version of the MariaDB database for your Plesk server.

An old version of the database server poses a risk because, in this case, the server’s web applications use the old version as well. New versions of MariaDB are more stable, secure, efficient, and have more useful features compared to old versions.

In the Plesk interface, you can upgrade your MariaDB database server to the current long-term support (LTS) version.

Netanyahu was polite despite the earlier diss from the Biden team, although what he said about Biden knowing every Israeli prime minister for 50 years was a nice way of emphasizing how old Biden is. Biden tried to rebut that with a joke, claiming he was only "12" then. No one laughed. //

853 OKG
5 hours ago
PM Netanyahu is smiling because he's meeting the real president at Mar-a-Lago tomorrow.

The Original John Doe 853 OKG
2 hours ago
Exactly. And Biden initially refused to take this meeting. Biden only agreed after Trump agreed to meet Netanyahu. The Trump meeting was originally scheduled for Wednesday night immediately after he addressed Congress (according to the Times of Israel). However, after Biden wanted to meet Thursday, Netanyahu asked Trump to move their meet to after the meeting with Biden so he can tell Trump what Biden said.

anon-fr0d The Original John Doe
41 minutes ago
Yes, FJB is always a day late and 10% short. //

flguy
4 hours ago
I love how Bibi called Biden a 'Zionist,' guaranteeing more Muslims vote for Trump, or at least do not vote for Harris in November. I think that was highly intentional.

The catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. It’s complex, deeply interconnected, and filled with single points of failure. As we experienced last week, a single problem in a small piece of software can take large swaths of the internet and global economy offline.

The brittleness of modern society isn’t confined to tech. We can see it in many parts of our infrastructure, from food to electricity, from finance to transportation. This is often a result of globalization and consolidation, but not always. In information technology, brittleness also results from the fact that hundreds of companies, none of which you;ve heard of, each perform a small but essential role in keeping the internet running. CrowdStrike is one of those companies.

This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing—as opposed to personal computing—a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.

But brittleness is profitable only when everything is working. When a brittle system fails, it fails badly. The cost of failure to a company like CrowdStrike is a fraction of the cost to the global economy. And there will be a next CrowdStrike, and one after that. The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes. //

Imagine a house where the drywall, flooring, fireplace, and light fixtures are all made by companies that need continuous access and whose failures would cause the house to collapse. You’d never set foot in such a structure, yet that’s how software systems are built. It’s not that 100 percent of the system relies on each company all the time, but 100 percent of the system can fail if any one of them fails. But doing better is expensive and doesn’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line. //

This is not something we can dismantle overnight. We have built a society based on complex technology that we’re utterly dependent on, with no reliable way to manage that technology. Compare the internet with ecological systems. Both are complex, but ecological systems have deep complexity rather than just surface complexity. In ecological systems, there are fewer single points of failure: If any one thing fails in a healthy natural ecosystem, there are other things that will take over. That gives them a resilience that our tech systems lack.

We need deep complexity in our technological systems, and that will require changes in the market. Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That;s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.

How do we accomplish this? There are examples in the technology world, but they are piecemeal. Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.

Last week’s update wouldn’t have been a major failure if CrowdStrike had rolled out this change incrementally: first 1 percent of their users, then 10 percent, then everyone. But that’s much more expensive, because it requires a commitment of engineer time for monitoring, debugging, and iterating. And can take months to do correctly for complex and mission-critical software. An executive today will look at the market incentives and correctly conclude that it’s better for them to take the chance than to “waste” the time and money.

J.P. Cooney cultivated a politically toxic environment, disseminated baseless conspiracy theories, and engaged in unprofessional conduct, a report says. //

Cooney is mentioned (as the “Fraud and Public Corruption Section Chief”) a whopping 394 times in the 85-page report released from the Justice Department’s inspector general on July 24.

A new whistleblower is revealing another agency failure by the Secret Service two weeks after former President Donald Trump was shot. //

On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., posted a letter on X addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas outlining the new allegations brough forward from an anonymous whistleblower.

“According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally,” Hawley wrote. “This means that the technology was both available to [U.S. Secret Service] and able to be deployed to secure the site.”

The Secret Service, however, “said no,” and the whistleblower “further alleges that after the shooting took place, [U.S. Secret Service] changed course and asked the local partner to deploy the drone technology to surveil the site in the aftermath of the attack.”

The obvious question is: Why are they underfunded? Why was security so understaffed here, why was law enforcement "caught off guard" on Jan. 6, why were they so unprepared for the takeovers of so many of our nation's college campuses?

The answer is actually simple: The left wants this chaos. You don't have to go far to find proof: //

Under Biden, the Democrats have passed bills like the ludicrously named "Inflation Reduction Act" that cost billions upon billions, yet I bet most Americans cannot name a single thing these things have done to improve their lives. In fact, the profligate spending has caused one thing: skyrocketing inflation, which has hit every citizen in the pocketbook and decreased the quality of life for virtually everyone.

So, with all this money being spent, how is it possible that the Park Service has inadequate resources to deal with a riot that was almost as predictable as the rising sun?

It's because the left wanted this, and they will continue to endorse and enable it until—God willing—we and the rest of America’s voters send them packing. //

Cafeblue32 Tommy
2 hours ago
What no one realizes on the D side is that bitching about things and deconstructing them is all they know how to do. They have shown repeatedly since the Russian Revolution that leftists are only reformers, but they have no abilty to reform anything to a better condition. They build nothing, create nothing of value, contribute little, take much, and for some reason are smug and arrogant about how smart and awesome they are. They graduate and go right into government where they can start exercising their own wills and exert control. Since the left can create nothing that works, and can only rework things that already exist and didn't need reworking, they then have to force everyone to comply with their failure it until it does.

That's why all they do is whine about the problems. Fixing things that don't need fixing is their idea of progress.