A Soldier fires an M17 handgun at targets during the Victory Week Pistol Competition, or Regional Combat Pistol Championship, June 4. The top 10% of firers at the event earned a bronze Excellence in Competition marksmanship badge. (Photo Credit: Nathan Clinebelle)
The M17 and M18 pistols, manufactured by SIG, which are versions of their P320 handgun, are really taking the heat.
They have been for awhile, but this local incident really ramped things up:
Air Force Division Grounds M18 Handguns After Airman Dies On Wyoming Base
Let's first say, anyway you look at this, this is a terrible tragedy (but see below).
But is anything really wrong with the pistol. SIG says there isn't.
SIG, or expanded Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, is one of the premier firearms manufacturers in the world. In this context its party of a trade union with the German firm of J. P. Sauer und Sohn GmbH in order to work around Swiss laws that would largely prohibit the export of military weapons. SIG did export some prior to the industrial union, with the excellent Stg 57 in export variants, being a prime example, but in recent years SIG has seriously moved into the export arms market in a way that it had not before, following the well blazed trail of Mauser and Fabrique Nationale, both of which at one time occupied the stage of supplier of small arms to the world at different points.
The US was never part of that market until Robert Strange McNamara vandalized Springfield Armory and foisted the AR15 upon the military against its will. That had the impact of making the US a commercial small arms purchaser in a way that it had not been since the American Revolution, and we've paid for it every since. It's completely true that the US had purchased commercial arms prior to that, with it notably going to commercial sidearms after Colt's perfection of cap and ball revolvers, and it interestingly relied upon commercial firms for machineguns, but when Springfield Armory was around, it always had an excellent in house backup. After that, the US became entirely reliant upon civilian suppliers.
A lesson there, interestingly enough, is that to some degree being a commercial supplier of small arms to the US military has been historically a really bad deal for commercial firms. Being the manufacturer of the M1917 rifle during World War One nearly killed Remington right after the war, and relying on sales of AR15 models to the service has actually been sort of a bad economic bet for Colt. The lesson probably is that really relying on military sales to the US is risky.
The old model that Colt used, which was basically "here's what we have, it's really good, buy if you want it" is probably the best one.
Advertisement for Colt double action revolver.
And that's particularly the case as there hasn't been a single US handgun the US military has purchased since the M1873 was replaced by the M1892 which hasn't drawn criticism.
The M1892 is a nice double action revolver, but its .38 cartridge, ideal for police use, was anemic for combat, something that the Philippine Insurrection rapidly demonstrated. M1873s were brought back into service (more on that in a minute) and .45 Colt New Army's were purchased as M1982s were pulled. That was a stopgap measure until the Army could adopt an "automatic" pistol, which it did after leisurely testing in the form of the M1911.
The M1911 is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time, so its surprising that at first there were plenty of Army officers who hated it. They regarded it outright dangers as it was too easy to fire and it was found that excited cavalrymen would accidentally shoot their horses in the head during charges. Criticism of its short trigger pull lead to a new version of the pistol, the M1911A1, coming out during hit 1920s, simply to make it a bit harder to shoot, but as late as World War Two old cavalrymen were clinging to double action revolvers, which had no safeties at all, but which featured a long heavy trigger pull.
By that time the M1911 was beloved and for good reason.
The M1911 took the services all the way into the late 80s. In 1985, the Baretta M9 was chosen to replace it, when it really didn't need to be replaced. Indeed, the Army had to be forced to make a decision, which it was resisting, by Congress threatening to turn the project over to the Air Force, which had been responsible for the adoption of the AR 15. That caught Colt flat footed as even t hough they'd been the supplier of most military handguns to the military for over a century, they weren't really expecting the Army to move forward with the entire project.
There were three reasons in reality to find a new handgun. One was that no new M1911s had been purchased since the Second World War, so they were all getting internally rebuilt. New pistols needed to be ordered. The second one was tha ti was felt that the .45 ACP round was too stout for women, who now were in roles where they needed handguns. That was moronic, as women can shoot any handgun a man can. The third was that the US was foisting the 5.56 on our NATO allies and by adopting a 9mm pistol, we were throwing htem a bone, as every other NATO member save for NOrway used a 9mm pistol.
Which is something we shoudl have paused to think about right there.
The US, until after World War Two, had never been a supplier of small arms to other nations in any signficiant degree. Even after World War Two we were't a supplier of new arms, but our suprlus arms. IT wasn't until after teh Vietnam War that this changed. The big suppliers of military arms to the Western World were Germany and Belgium. The Browning designed Belgian handgun, the High Power, was to some degree the handgun of the free world. It had a proven track record.
The Baretta was a reengineerd P-38. The P-38, like the High Power, and the M1911, is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time. Given that, the M9 is a very good handgun.
US troops at first hated it.
Marines with M9s.
They hated it because they didn't want it, and soon attention was focused on breakages in the slides of the early Italian manufactured pistols. Baretta stated there was nothing wrong with the gun, and in fact, there wasn't.
It never really fully replaced the M1911, as if you really need a pistol, the M1911 wins hands down every time. But as 9mms go, it was a really good one.
Well, then came the Glock.
Glocks are frankly nothing special and a lot of real pistol aficionados do not like them. But they used a striker instead of an external hammer. There are some advantages to that, but for the most part, the advantages are more theoretical than real. Frankly, anyone carrying a striker pistol would be just as well off with a hammer fired one and never notice the difference if they actually had to use it.
Anyhow, the service determined that it needed a striker fired pistol because everyone else was getting one. Not too surprisingly, some in the service dithered on the project as it wasn't really needed, but them some senior officers who didn't know what the crap they were talking about threatened to directly procure Glocks, which would have been a horrible idea.
Tests were held and the P320 chosen.
Disclaimer here, I have one.
I have one, oddly enough, due to a Ducks Unlimited event. I didn't go out and look for one.
Having said that, it shoots extremely nicely. I can see why people like/liked them. In a heads up contest between the M9 and the M17/18, I think the SIG wins every time.
And now we have this issue.
Is it one?
I don't really know. I hope that its figured out. SIG, which also won the Army contest for new rifle (M7) and machine gun (M250), is taking piles of ill informed heat right now.
Let's take a look at the problem, some potential causes, and some fixes.
First, let's start with this.
Is there really a problem?
Sounds fantastical to even ask that, but the chatter about the SIG fits into a long US service tradition of claiming that the prior firearm was perfect and the new one plagued with flaws. Sometimes its even true, or perhaps a little true. Sometimes, it's bunk.
The history of Army handguns certain fits that, however. The Army was really long in replacing the M1873 and soldiers came to immediately hate its replacement. Was the M1892 bad? Well, not as a design, it was far more advanced than the M1873, but the cartridge really was a bad choice. The criticism was warranted.
What about the criticism of the M1911, which actually lead to it being redesigned a bit? Not hardly. The M1911 was a great pistol from day one and its defects, so to speak, were ones of perception on the part of those who were used to old heavy trigger double actions.
And the M9. Well, I'll admit that I was one of its critics. But the M9 is a really good handgun. The frame cracking was a freakish event and not something that proved to be an overall problem. The eral problem is that its a 9mm, but that doesn't have anything to do with the design itself.
And, if we expand out and look at the history of US rifles we'll find the same thing. When the M1 Garand was adopted there were some legitimate problems wtih its gas system, which lead to that being rapidly resdesigned. Still, that didn't keep pleny of critics of faulting the rifle as inferior to the M1903 and soldiers actually were very conscerned that stoppages they experienced in stateside training, which apparently were due to the ammunition being used for a time, meant the rifle was defective. Combat would rapidly prove that to be false, but it received that criticm at first.
The M14 received criticism for having some supposed problem with its bolt and action, which critics of the rifle will reference even today. One civilian produced variant supposedly featured reengingeering to address the prblem, whatever it is. It's difficult to find out hwat hte supposed problem was, and in actual use, ti seems to have been completely unnoticed. Some M14s, for that matter, featured M1 Garand lock bar rear sights which drives some competitive rifleman absolutely nuts. Anyhow, the rifle didn't have faults, but it received criticism for having them.
The M16 of course, did have real faults, and still does, all of which are attributable to its direct impingment gas system. However, the Army made the faults worse by suggesting the rifle never needed to be cleaned, wich was absurd, and by using fouling powder in early cartridge production. AR15 fans and the military seem to have gotten largely over this, but at first the rifle was really hated, and I'll admit that I didn't like it.
The point is that there might not be anything wrong with the M17 at all. What we could be seeing is an element of operator error.
Something about the entire "it discharged all on its owned from its holster" story sounded like a fable.
I started this post before the news above broke, but I kept expecting something like this. Frankly, murder or manslaughter wasn't what I was expecting, but some sort of operator error, or I'll confess suicide.
But here's the deal, once something gets a bit of a bad wrap in American society, particularly litigious American society, it's hard to unring the bell on the story.
And the story here, dare we say it, involves a lot of service users. . . .
Now ,why would that be significant?
Well, frankly, because service users are amongst those who are the least likely to be paying attention to what they're doing and screw up. Being in the Armed Forces or a police department doesn't make you a gun fan. It doesn't even really make you all that knowledgeable on weapons, quite frankly.
SIG might be right. There might be no problem here at all.
And if there is one, it might be an introduced one. That is, users messing with their sidearm accidentally or intentionally. Some police forces actually issue sidearms just to keep their policemen from doing that with firearms they own.
But let's assume there is a problem. What would it be?
The M17 features a really complicated striker design and the pistol was designed not to have a safety. Those two things alone may mean that the design has been somewhat compromised by complication and the addition of a safety it wasn't designed to have. That might, somehow, be defeated the need for a trigger "command". It's important to note that if the pistols are firing on their own, they're defeating the safety, but then the safety only prevents the trigger from being pulled.
That is, I'd note, a much less effective safety design than that on the M1911, but we'll get back to that.
Anyhow, the safety isn't going to stop block the striker. It doesn't work, say, like the safety on a M1903 or G98, which does. It just keeps the trigger from being accidentally pulled.
Another possibility is that something about the holsters is playing a weird role It seems unlikely, but its not completely impossible.
If I were a SIG engineer, and I'm not an engineer at all, I'd look at trying to develop a safety that hold the striker, if possible, and it might not be.
Okay, let's assume that it's all just hopeless, there's something wrong with the SIG and it can't be fixed. I'm not saying that's the case, but what if there is. Clearly a different handgun is in order.
Some have suggested just going back to the M9, and that's not a bad idea. The problem might be that after decades of use most of the M9s are in rough shape. I doubt that, but it's possible.
Well, so what. Just sort through the ones in the inventory and weed out those in bad shape. Issue the ones that aren't, and adopt the newest variant of the M9, which is nearly universally regarded as a very fine weapon.
The only reason not to do that is it has a hammer.
M'eh.
The other possibility. . . oh my. . .dare we say it. . . is to bring back the M1911.
Marine Corps MEU-SOC, the M1911 that proceeded the M45.
There's no reason not to, and in fact the Marine Corps did for awhile. There's nothing the M17/18 and M9 can do that the M1911 doesn't do better.
Women could no longer be involuntarily discharged from the United States Armed Forces as a result of pregnancy, by orders of the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
Donald Trump, who hasn't served a day in the military, will preside over the largest military parade in the United States since the end of the First Gulf War.
Trump, who has made disparaging comments about members of the military, didn't serve during the Vietnam War due to a medical exemption for shin splints.
The parade is ostensibly for the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the U.S. Army, which came into existence on June 14, 1775.
The Army is not as old as the National Guard, which dates its existence, due to colonial militia lineage, to December 13, 1636.
Also today,. Pope Leo XIV will make a virtual appearance at an event in Chicago.
Pretty effective 1970s vintage Army recruiting poster seeking female recruits.
There's been some interesting signs of things to come recently, including where Hegseth is headed on women in the military, and where Trump's close acolytes are headed in regard to his increasing mental decline.
Interesting times.
We'll start with Hegseth.
As anyone who stops in here is well aware, I'm not a Trump fan. I'm conservative, actually conservative, but I'm not lockstep in line with anyone. Frankly, anyone who is, just isn't thinking. Anyhow, The Trump regime is not conservative but populist, and populist in the same way that gave rise to fascism in various European nations in the 30s, or to Communism to others in the teens and twenties. But I can see how we got here and indeed I'd been warning about this for some time before it happened. As readers here know, once Obergefell was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court I feared a political breakdown was inevitable.1 I also thought that claims made at the time that Obergefell wouldn't lead to a more radical development in the category of gender norms were badly misguided, and I was proved correct about that. The country was headed toward acceptance of homosexual unions as marriages, irrespective of what social conservatives may think of that, but Justice Kennedy and his fellow travelers hijacking the trend line without any real legal weight behind it jump started the country right into the transgender movement which helped radicalize an already radicalizing populist base in the right wing of the GOP.2
Women in combat roles in the US came the following year, 2016, and was controversial at the time and remains so in social conservative I recently posted on it, and I remain very much opposed to it. While I'm not a fan of Hegseth, he's on record as opposing it as well.
Some time ago Hegseth ordered that the service review its physical fitness standards on a gender neutral basis.3 This isn't really the first time that this has been done and the results can probably be predicted.
Indeed, they can be predicted in part due to the experiences of women in sports competing with men who are surgically and chemically altered to female morphologies, but more on that in a moment.
At the time, I thought that was probably step one towards removing women from combat roles.
Then Hegseth came out with a tweet (I wish government officials would stay off Twitter) endorsing a story in the Telegraph, a British newspaper. The article was this one:
Hegseth, in his comment, noted the problems of women in combat roles, although only briefly and vaguely.
Like a lot of things repeated on Twitter, the Tweet falls sort of teh full story:
The IDF is just suspending the study and will get back to a new one.
Before all of this, Hegseth ordered that "transgendered" troops leave the service. That was probably the least controversial thing he could do, and it makes perfect sense. Gender Dysphoria may exist, but transgenderism does not. Moreover, if you have to take medication just to keep your morphology, you really aren't ready for the rigors of military life.
Transgenderism in general, which will also get to below, is really a manifestation of, in my view, a mental illness. It's a trendy one, however, and is part of the culture wars which gave rise to a radicalized far right, and then to Trump.
Ordering that "transgendered" troops get out of the service is one thing, but then there's this:
This isn't related to women in combat, but it's certainly a shot in the culture wars and a surprising one. With the constant storm surrounding the Trump Regime, it didn't generate nearly as much controversy as I thought it would, and that may have been why it was done. Running that up the flagpole may have been a test by Hegseth to see how much flak he'll get if he orders women out of combat roles.
There's a lot of evidence of this around, and it makes a big difference to what Hegseth, and others in the Trump Administration, depending upon how savvy they are to trends, are behaving.
Trump is increasingly erratic and weird. He's also becoming increasingly ineffective. Having done a lot early on in a flurry of Executive Orders, the Courts, save for the Supreme Court, so far, are effectively saying "hold on Buckwheat" and stopping much of what he's done. The entire goofball DOGE effort is the same. Indeed, at least one minor agency is being reconstructed, amazingly, after Musk and his wrecking crew attacked it.4 Indeed, DOGE achieved a mess, but that's about it. Bill Clinton's effort to cut the size of the government, which lead to a surplus in its day, was much more effective.
Now the wheels are coming off. Musk is feuding with Trump. The Senate may not pass the Big Ugly Bill, at least not in the form the sycophantic House did. Questions are being razed.
Trump is being publicly mocked as "Taco".
The bloom is off the rose, Trump's authority is declining, and the looming 25th Amendment is getting warmed up.
Have you noticed that James Donald Bowman, aka J. D. Vance, whom we heard from constantly early on, is now pretty much silent. That's not an accident. Vance will take over when Trump is booted, and my guess that he doesn't want to be tainted with Trump any more than he has to be. He's gone from insulting Ukrainian Presidents for not wearing suits, to just not being there.
Which brings this back around to women in the military, and other social issues. National Conservatives and Christian Nationalist rode into power on Trump's back as they knew that they could. They also know, however, that they need time to completely overhaul the nation to look like they want it to, and 18 months, all the more time I've given Trump before he is hauled off to an assisted living wing of Mar A Lago, isn't enough. Four years isn't either, and frankly the Democrats are going to retake the House of Representatives nexts year. If Vance doesn't secure reelection after this administration is done with, much of what the National Conservatives/Christian Nationalist did during their four years will just be dust in the wind.
In order for anything to stick, it has to be done quickly, so that the electorate is acclimated to it by 2028, or there has to be a plan to stay in power in 2028. My guess that Vance's disappearing act is part of that.
I fear what else may be.5
Back to some rambling.
As is often the case, a certain element of synchronicity tends to work on these posts, with various things coming up with that cause the thread to be posted. Just as I started contemplating the women in combat topic, again, a couple of such things did which are related.
I subscribe to Mandatory Fun Day on Instagram. A buddy of mine who had been in the service sent me some of his clips and they're hilarious, if you've been in the Army. If you haven't, they're probably completely baffling.
Anyhow, as I subscribe on Instagram, they started coming up on Facebook as "reels". No problem. The fact that they did, however, meant that I'd get suggested reels by other service members following in the creator's wake. They were uniformly pretty bad.
All of a sudden, having not taken interest in those, Facebook started suggesting reels by female service members, a large number of which are service women in their t-shirts being cute in a college coed fashion, or worse. Dancing female soldiers show up, and even twerking ones. Women showing how they dress in their uniforms, starting with pretty much only skivvies on, is another. Perhaps the one most illustrative of why I regard this all a problem was one in which a female soldier photographed herself in GI trousers, and regulation brown t-shirt, showing "how I feel when I see my man in uniform", which involved clutching her breasts and and having her free hand south of her fly.
And all of this is observable just on the suggested feed, not on what shows up if you click on it.
One I did click on, as it was so oddly titled, involved a cute young woman making babyish "moo" sounds, in an item entitled "she found her moo". The voice of the filmer was also female. Apparently the moo thing is some sort internet trend.
Anyhow, relationships, and you can use your imagination as to what I mean by that, are a problem in college dorms where nobody is expected to kill anyone. They've been a huge problem in the service, and the Marine Corps had to take steps some time ago to order female Marines to knock off seductive filming, some of which featured female Marines nude. Young women acting like young women away from home and in college dorms isn't surprising, but it sure isn't conductive to unit cohesiveness in organizations in which death and destruction is a routine norm.
Put another way, the "man" whom the young woman touching body parts which used to be referenced in the Jody Call "The Prettiest Girl I Ever Saw" is going to be a problem in any unit, let alone one in which a soldier may be expected to leave her behind to be killed.6 7
Moo.
Anyhow, while noting all of this, I also saw a series of stories recently about women being upset by having to compete against men, who are "transgendered". Also, UW is now being investigated due to Artemis Langford being in a sorority, at the same time that sorority sisters are trying to keep him out.
That caused me to realize how often its women who lead the charge in this are. Women know they are women and they justifiably feel that in sports they shouldn't have to compete against men. And they aren't the only ones. An international body that regulates boxing has imposed genetic tests on female boxers to make sure they're female.
The reason for all of this is that even second rate male athletes turn out to be almost unstoppable competition in female sports, when they compete as transgendered. Women resent it, and rightfully.
But oddly enough society hasn't seemingly noted something that Hemingway noted many years ago.
I'm not saying that war is nice. Quite the contrary. But in some ways its the ultimate athletic endeavor, even now in the era of high tech weapons. And let us be honest Killing is part of it, but there's never been a conflict anywhere in the world where brutalization and rape haven't been part of it, nor has there ever been one in which some women took advantage of their assets in a wartime pinch.
Women don't belong in combat.
Let's go back to the plight of the UW sorority for a second.
The entire saga here shows how difficult it can be for public institutions in this bizarre era in which we live. It's obvious that a male should not be in a sorority, and Langford may dress as a female and wish to be regarded as one, but at least the last time I checked on the story, he hadn't "transitioned", which means he's full equipped. There's no reason that a young woman should be forced to live in close residential confines with a man if she doesn't wish to.
The other sad aspect of this is that this entire saga, in which they've sued, and I don't blame them, and now the Trump Administration is investigating UW, means that his entire delusion has become his identity, when had this been treated as what it was, a mental illness, it might all be past tense by now. Indeed, just looking it would suggest that it might very well have been.8
Anyhow, stuff like this puts universities in the can't win for losing situation. Charlie Kirk, a right wing populist babbler, has made comments on Langford, and a right wing populist law student just sponsored him talking on campus.
Pity poor UW.
Back to Hegseth t he White House is looking for a new chief of staff and several senior advisers to support him, but there's been no takers.
Again, this Administration has shot its bolt, and its showing.
Some are declaring that this is a first step towards nationwide martial law. I doubt it. It's a bad move however. Troops, including National Guardsmen, make poor police. They really aren't trained for it, but are trained to use force.
Usually troops, including National Guardsmen, who are deployed in this role aren't given ammunition. The opposite can happen, of course, as Kent State famously and tragically indicated. This is a bad look, anyway you view it.
To circle back, how much of what we're seeing now, will stick? Trump's really on his way out, and it's doubtful the culture has been much impacted, so far.
Footnotes:
1. This thread has been getting a lot of views for some reason recently, and is often one of the most popular ones of the week.
2. Kennedy provides us with another example of the disaster of the very aged being in a position of authority.
3. The order states:
High standards are what made the United States military the greatest fighting force on the planet. The strength of our military is our unity and our shared purpose. We are made stronger and more disciplined with high, uncompromising, and clear standards.
I am directing the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (USD(P&R)) to gather the existing standards set by the Military Departments pertaining to physical fitness, body composition, and grooming, which includes but is not limited to beards. The USD(P&R) will conduct a review of these standards and how they have changed since January 1, 2015 . The review will also provide insight on why those standards changed and the impact of those changes. The USD(P&R) has the authority to task the Secretaries of the Military Departments and other DoD Component heads as necessary to provide any required information in support of this review and will provide detailed guidance to the Military Departments.
We must remain vigilant in maintaining the standards that enable the men and women of our military to protect the American people and our homeland as the world' s most lethal and effective fighting force. Our adversaries are not growing weaker, and our tasks are not growing less challenging. This review will illuminate how the Department has maintained the level of standards required over the recent past and the trajectory of any change in those standards.
4. None of which has kept the perpetually behind the curve Wyoming legislature from heading off with its own DOGE effort, just as the Federal effort is sinking.
5. Having said that, by any standard Vance will be more normal than Trump, which doesn't mean he will get reelected in 2028.
6. They must be banned now, but the Army used to have a lot of Jody Calls that were outright foul, but probably serve to illustrate the atmosphere that units of young men tend to have, for good or ill. In this call, a solder recalls drinking in a bar and touching a woman next to him in various place until she says "GI, you know the rest", resulting in his now having a bunch of children.
8. I don't know all the details, but from what little you can pick up on the net, Langford's parents seem to have gone through a bad divorce and his father obtained custody. Langford relates that he solidified his view of himself as a woman following a desperate nighttime prayer. He was a Mormon, and while many faiths recognize praying for guidance, the Mormon faith has a "burning bosom" line of thought on some things. The LDS are not, however, supportive of transgenderism, which is interesting, and Langford now identifies as an Episcopalian. Some branches of the Episcopal church have been notoriously willing to accept gender trends, which is part of the reason that the Episcopal Church is rapidly declining in membership.
The Center for Disease Control estimates that, taking the massive spread of Omicron around the country into account and the final relatively high vaccination rate in the country, 73% of the nation is now immune from the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, i.e. COVID 19.
Nobody is really sure exactly what that means. But it might mean that we're entering a phase where the virus doesn't disappear, but it's much less disruptive to society.
It's still the case, however, that it remains a danger for the unvaccinated.
March 1, 2022
Wyoming's public health emergency shall expire on March 14.
March 21, 2022
A new variant of Omicron has developed, which is about 30% more transmissible than the already more transmissible Omicron. It's spiking in Europe and in Hong Kong has caused an outbreak with a massive death rate, mostly concentrated in the unvaccinated elderly.
China has reported its first deaths in many months.
According to experts, the world is about 50% through the probable course of the pandemic.
April 14, 2022
Over 1,000,000 Americans have now died from the COVID 19.
July 22, 2022
President Biden has COVID 19.
At this point, two members of our four member family also have, with one having had it quite recently and finding it awful, but being grateful accordingly for having been vaccinated.
A new, more traditional type of vaccine, has now been approved.
September 20, 2022
On 60 Minutes over the weekend, President Biden stated; "The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over." The HHS Secretary later confirmed that position.
Epidemiologically, it isn't over, but then neither is the plague's pandemic either. The statement has been criticized, with 400 people per day dying of the disease, but by and large it reflects the mood of the public which has largely gone back to a new post Covid introduction, world in which COVID 19 is part of the background.
December 15, 2022
The new defense spending authorization includes a requirement that the Secretary of Defense rescind vaccination requirements for troops because, well because that's the idiotic sort of thing that politicians like to stick into bills.
All of the troops should be vaccinated.
December 24, 2022
China, which has not accepted western vaccines, reported 37,000,000 new vaccinations in a single day.
January 2, 2023
A new variant of Omicron, XBB.1.5, now makes up 40% of the new cases in the U.S.
And Covid is still killing.
January 20, 2023
Governor Gordon Tests Positive for COVID-19
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Mark Gordon has received results of a COVID-19 test that showed he is positive for the virus. The Governor is experiencing only minor symptoms at this time and will continue working from home on behalf of Wyoming.
March 1, 2023
The Washington Post broke a story that the Department of Energy issued a report believing, with "low confidence", that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a Chinese lab.
A really good analysis of this story can be found here:
In actuality, the Biden Administration early on ordered governmental intelligence agencies to get to the bottom of the virus' origin. Eight intelligence agencies were assigned to the tasks, two of which have concluded, but with confidence doubts, that the virus was natural in origin. Two, we know now, felt the opposite, with it already known since 2021 what the FBI felt, with "moderate confidence" that the origin was a Chinese lab. Two just haven't reported.
None of this kept some from claiming that it's now proven that the virus originated in the lab.
FWIW, private scientists, as opposed to intelligence agencies, overwhelmingly feel that it originated due to animal transfer in the Wuhan market.
March 18, 2023
Recent evidence points to raccoon dogs at the Wuhan market as the source.
April 11, 2023
President Biden declared the COVID emergency to be over.
August 22, 2023
Declared over or not, two new strains are on the loose and a new booster should be available mid September.
April 12, 2024
The CDC has found there's no link between the COVID vaccines and cardiac arrest in young people.
Not that this is a surprise.
It'll make no difference in the anti-scientific atmosphere of the day. A society that can believe that legalizing marijuana, which is largely untested and wholly unregulated, and that Donald Trump won hte 2020 election, will still believe that the vaccine is risky, but cause it wishes to.
June 15, 2024
Reuters has revealed that during the height of the pandemic, the US ran an anti-vax campaign in the Philippines to try to undermine Chinese efforts there.
The Central Intelligence Agency revised its report on the origin of COVID reporting, with low confidence, that a Chinese laboratory is to blame.
This was a report that was completed during the Biden Administration and was just now released. It's being released now is unfortunate, in that it comes during the Trump Interregnum which is packed with people who generally have a contempt for science, which this will slightly fuel if anyone notices it given all the distraction at the present time. Most Scientists think the most likely hypothesis is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses, before infecting another species.
May 21, 2025
The Trump Administration is limiting vaccine updates to those over 65 or in high risk categories, and requiring extensive testing for new updates.
The Khmer Rouge began to purge Cambodians associated with the former government, a move that would feature mass execution.
This is commonly viewed as the beginning of the Cambodian Genocide.
The House of Representatives voted 303-96 to admit women to the previously all-male service academies. The move was quite controversial at the time.
The Senate would follow suit, with the first women entering the academies in the summer of 1976.
The final episode of the police series Adam-12 was broadcast.
The series had run for 12 years, and in many ways formed the concept for those raised in the 60s, and even the 70s, as to what being a policeman was all about. Much more gritty television police dramas, and even comedies, would come in during the 70s and change much of that view.
The US government declared the Vietnam War era at an end for purposes of veterans benefits.
9,087,000 military personnel served on active duty during the official Vietnam Era, but of course not all of them went to Vietnam. 3.4 million U.S. servicemen were deployed to Southeast Asia. Approximately 2.7 million served in the Republic of Vietnam. Most US servicemen in Vietnam were not combat troops, although because of the nature of the war, any of them could be exposed to combat.
There has never been a U.S. President who served in Vietnam, although one Vice President, Al Gore, did. George W. Bush was in the Texas Air National Guard as a fighter pilot during the war. Bill Clinton had a student deferment. Joe Biden had a deferment for asthma. Trump had one for shin splints.
None of my immediate family (parents, aunts, uncles, cousins) served in Vietnam or would qualify as a Vietnam Era veteran, even though a lot of them had been in the service. The husband of one of my cousins had served in Vietnam as an officer in the Navy, and a Canadian cousin of my mother's who was living in Florida was drafted and served in Vietnam, so there is some family connection. In the neighborhood, the son of the man who lived across the street was a paratrooper in the war.
In junior high, one of the more colorful social studies teachers had been in the Marine Recon, a unit much like the Rangers, during the war, and occasionally wore a green beret, which was never officially adopted by the Marines, to school. In high school, a legendary swimming teacher from the South Pacific had been a Navy SEAL and bore the scars of having been shot in the war and also from having been straffed as a child by a Japanese airplane. The ROTC teacher also had been, but I didn't take ROTC.
In university, a geology professor who also held a job with the State of Wyoming had served in Vietnam, and according to those who knew him well, suffered pretty markedly from PTSD. I never noticed that myself, and he was a good professor.
When I joined the National Guard right after high school I found it packed with Vietnam Veterans. One of my good friends in the Guard was the mechanics section chief but had the Combat Infantryman's Badge awarded for two tours in the country. Another friend of mine also had the CIB from the 1st Cavalry Division, with his uniquely being stitched in dark blue for the subdued patch. A fellow I was friendly with had been a Ranger in Vietnam and when he first joined and was still relying on service period uniforms he'd wear a black beret, another unofficial item. A good friend of mine who was his brother in law was in the Wyoming Air National Guard and had flown medical missions to the country, a deployment you rarely hear about. One of our members had been a Navy pilot. What with the CIBs, combat patches, pilot's wings, etc., we must have been an odd looking bunch to the young soldiers in the Regular Army.
There were a lot of them.
Cartoonist George Baker, the creator of the World War Two era Sad Sack cartoon, died at age 59.