Monday, November 11, 2024

Saturday, November 11, 1944. Ghastly Japanese losses at Ormoc Bay.

The Battle of Ormoc Bay began in the Camotes Sea off of the Philippines.  It would carry on well into December and result in disproportionate Japanese losses as they attempted to reinforce ground elements on Leyte.  On this day, four destroyers, 1 minesweeper and 5 transports carrying nearly 10,000 troops were sunk in heavy Japanese losses.

Iwo Jima was bombarded by the U.S.Navy.

Remaining German troops in Greece withdrew.

The Battle of Batina began in Croatia.

US troops in France.  Note many are wearing L. L. Bean style "Maine Hunting Shoes", which were adopted for cold weather use by the  U.S. Army.

The U-771 and U-1200 were sunk by the Royal Navy.

The 1942-44 musicians strike ended with RCA Victor and Columbia Records agreeing to union demands.

Last edition:

Friday, November 10, 1944. The Explosion of the Mount Hood.

Today in World War II History—November 11, 1939 & 1944

Today in World War II History—November 11, 1939 & 1944: 80 Years Ago—Nov. 11, 1944: In Italy, First Brazilian Fighter Group begins operations with US Twelfth Air Force in P-47 Thunderbolts.

Tuesday, November 11, 1924. Armistice Day.

 



Last edition:

Monday, November 10, 1924. Henry Cabot Lodge passes.

Thursday, November 11, 1824. Cruel acts and affairs of the heart.

Three weeks after receiving the petition of an interracial couple the Cherokee General Council passed an act outlawing marriage between "negro slaves and Indians, or whites".

Frankly, I can see why they'd outlaw the one against whites, given the oppression they'd face, but slaves was a bit much.

Last edition.

Sunday, November 7, 1824. St. Petersburg Flood.

Sunday, November 10, 2024

Lex Anteinternet: 2024 Election Post Mortem, Part II. Going too far to the left.

Lex Anteinternet: 2024 Election Post Mortem, Part I. What the heck h...: And so the finger pointing, blaming, and name calling has begun. The 2024 Presidential Election was supposed to be close. It wasn't.  An...

As a slight addition to this:

2.  It's actually the social issues, stupid.

El Paso Sheriff : What's it mean? What's it leadin' to? You know, if you'd have told me 20 years ago, that I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses, I just flat-out wouldn't have believed you.

Ed Tom Bell : Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest is soon to foller.

El Paso Sheriff : Oh, it's the tide. It's the dismal tide.

No Country For Old Men. 

We warned prior to 2016 that Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell had awakened a latent sleeping giant.  It did.

People keep analyzing the race in terms of the economy, which I myself partially did above.  But the big issue, to put it bluntly, is that Obergefell shocked many people into confronting the moral decline of the nation, something that had been going on for a very long time.

Sexual immorality in the US really commenced its roll in the late 1940s, as we've discussed before, and started to accelerate in 1953 with the launch of Playboy, and then really took off in the 1960s with the pill and the Sexual Revolution.  The irony of all of this, however, is the public tolerated it, although not always very comfortably, as it fit into conventional immorality.  That is, the White Anglo Saxon Protestant community basically tolerated a boys will be boys attitude at first, and then accommodated itself to other trends later, as long as things roughly worked out the way they were supposed to in the end, although they have not been working out for quite some time.  Once Obergefell came along, however, the public was asked to accommodate something else, and it hasn't, and for a host of reasons.  Transgenderism, which really doesn't exist, came hard on the heels of homosexual marriage, and it was just too much for large sections of the country.

At one time, it might be noted, it was a common assertion that the Babylon Berlin atmosphere of 1920's Germany had brought about the Nazis, in part, as they seemed to stand against unconventional immorality.  In truth, homosexuality was present in the early Nazis, but the movement did a good job of plastering over it so it was ignored, if known, just like Trump's flagrant immoral conduct with women is at least somewhat known, if ignored.  It allowed people to believe that that the Nazis would foster a return to pre 1914 moral standards, while ignoring that they would inflict new horrors.*  A lot of that has gone on in the populist movement as well, which sort of imagines that the country will sort of return to an imagined 1950s, or an imagined 1970s.

The Democrats didn't even try to do anything about this, but rather embraced the matters that the Trump populists and their fellow travellers opposed.  That's a big part of what occured.  Americans proved to be willing to go pretty far with changes in Christian morality before they started regretting it, which they did, but to be kicked into a new room with a bunch of very unconventional behaviors was more than they could bear.  It not only spawned a massive counterreaction, but it spawned radical new theories about the nature of what was going on, much of them false, and sort of a modified variant of a Great Awakening, that we haven't seen the end of yet.**  This reaction, moreover, wasn't limited to the US, but has been scene all over the Western World, caused by similar events.

You have to know the times you live in.

I heard on a podcast, by somebody who didn't vote for Trump or Harris, the social issue boiled down to this:


Dr. Richard Levine, a pediatrician, was appointed the head of HHS.  He claims to be transgendered, something that doesn't exist.  The podcaster didn't mention his name (he goes by Rachel) but just vague referred to him as "the dude" appearing as a woman, and that there were some places you really can't go.

That likely does sum up what occurred in a lot of ways.  The Democrats no doubt thing they are out in front on this, but the country got dragged out to its present status by Justice Kennedy's opinion and a lot of the country doesn't want to go there.  It was a bridge too far.

Democrats are going to have to do a lot of soul searching.  Some are already claiming that the Democratic Party needs to double down on its leftward views, but all around the world that is flat out not working.  The vacuum is in the middle.  Nobody is seeking to fill it.

Artillery and Prime Movers. National Museum of Military Vehicles.















 Last edition:

Friday, November 10, 1944. The Explosion of the Mount Hood.

The USS Mount Hood, an ammunition ship, exploded at Seeadler Harbor at Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, killing all on board and damaging 22 other ships.

Imperial Japanese forces took U.S. airfields in China as part of Operation Ichi-Go.  The Japanese were gaining ground in China.

The Germans rounded up over 50,000 Dutch me in Rotterdam as slave labor, and effectively as hostages.

"Sgt. Sam S. McNealy, Morgantown, N.C., stands watch by his machine gun during the first snowfall of the year in this sector of the western front. 1st Army, Monschau, Germany. 10 November, 1944."

Last edition:

Thursday, November 9, 1944. Sorge meets his end.

Today in World War II History—November 10, 1939 & 1944

Today in World War II History—November 10, 1939 & 1944: 80 Years Ago—Nov. 10, 1944: Japanese take US Fourteenth Air Force air bases at Kweilin and Liuchow in their drive through southern China.

Monday, November 10, 1924. Henry Cabot Lodge passes.


He was a giant of American politics.

The Tientsin Conference opened in China between warlords Zhang Zuolin, Feng Yuxiang, and Lu Yongxiang.   Former president Sun Yat-sen, the ongoing head of the Kuomintang and the government sitting in Canton, organized the meeting to discuss the ongoing civil war.

Ranch property belonging to Mexican president elect Plutarco Elías Calles was expropriated by the state in accordance with Mexican agrarian laws.

Chicago mobster Dean O'Banion, leader of Chicago's North Side Gang, was gunned down in his florist shop, making the cover of The Casper Herald.  His murder was nearly inevitable as he'd grown crosswise with one of the Italian mob families in Chicago.

Last edition:

Saturday, November 8, 1924. Declaration from Honolulu.

Saturday, November 9, 2024

Best Posts of the Week of November 3, 2024.

The best posts of the week of November 3, 2024.

Sunday Morning Scene; Part One. Contrasts























An Open Letter to National Conservatives.

Dear National Conservatives,

First of all, allow me to say, well played.  

You well know that there was no earthly way that the public would vote for one of your members at any time in the near future, if ever.  Indeed, while your movement has risen considerably in recent years, you know that it was likely to be at most just an outside influence on the periphery of conservative thought at the very most, and likely not for long.  Your sense of urgency required a bold move, before, in your view, things were too late, and you made it.

It required your man, J. D. Vance, to lie and say outrageous things, but he proved willing to do it.  Aquinas may have declared all lies to be sins, but obviously you felt that lying for the greater cause, as you see it, would be forgivable.  You seek to reform the nation into a province of 15th Century Christendom, and you have been willing to do what is necessary to do that.

Now, of course, your next move depends on Trump getting out of the way.  You know, as well as I, that Trump isn't a member of your movement and is unpredictable.  Indeed, his philandering and serial polygamy is abhorrent to what you stand for.  Moreover, his economic policies are likely to make Vance unelectable as a successor, and you know it.  By 2028, somebody else will be waiting in the wings. Vice Presidents are not elected to office more often than not, as Kamala Harris' plight just demonstrated.  And Trump's meandering thoughts and unpredictability are just as likely to cause him to replace Mr. Vance with Jenny McCarthy or Robert Kennedy as they are to really keep your boy around.

So you have limited time.

The plan, I suspect, is to declare an increasingly addled Donald Trump mentally incompetent soon.  You can't do it in January, 2026. But you likely can by March, 2027. At any rate, the sooner the better.

Not that I'm your fan. Not hardly.  You scare me.  But you don't scare me as much as Donald Trump.  

And he should scare you too.

Sincerely,

Yeoman.  


Last edition:

An Open Letter to National Conservatives.

Dear National Conservatives,

First of all, allow me to say, well played.  

You well know that there was no earthly way that the public would vote for one of your members at any time in the near future, if ever.  Indeed, while your movement has risen considerably in recent years, you know that it was likely to be at most just an outside influence on the periphery of conservative thought at the very most, and likely not for long.  Your sense of urgency required a bold move, before, in your view, things were too late, and you made it.

It required your man, J. D. Vance, to lie and say outrageous things, but he proved willing to do it.  Aquinas may have declared all lies to be sins, but obviously you felt that lying for the greater cause, as you see it, would be forgivable.  You seek to reform the nation into a province of 15th Century Christendom, and you have been willing to do what is necessary to do that.

Now, of course, your next move depends on Trump getting out of the way.  You know, as well as I, that Trump isn't a member of your movement and is unpredictable.  Indeed, his philandering and serial polygamy is abhorrent to what you stand for.  Moreover, his economic policies are likely to make Vance unelectable as a successor, and you know it.  By 2028, somebody else will be waiting in the wings. Vice Presidents are not elected to office more often than not, as Kamala Harris' plight just demonstrated.  And Trump's meandering thoughts and unpredictability are just as likely to cause him to replace Mr. Vance with Jenny McCarthy or Robert Kennedy as they are to really keep your boy around.

So you have limited time.

The plan, I suspect, is to declare an increasingly addled Donald Trump mentally incompetent soon.  You can't do it in January, 2026. But you likely can by March, 2027. At any rate, the sooner the better.

Not that I'm your fan. Not hardly.  You scare me.  But you don't scare me as much as Donald Trump.  

And he should scare you too.

Sincerely,

Yeoman.  

SPW 152 "Iron Pig" (BTR 152). National Museum of Military Vehicles.

This peculiar looking vehicle is an East German SPW 152 "Iron Pig", which was their variant of the Soviet BTR 152.  The armored vehicle was designed as an armored personnel carrier, but utilized for other things as well.  The gun in this one is likely an anti-aircraft gun.


This particular example bears the markings of the current Bundesherr and likely saw service in the reunited German Army after the country was reunited.

The Jeeps in these photographs are M151s, which will be dealt with elsewhere.


 Last edition:

Out back.

Not mine.  Just interesting as I hardly ever run into motorcycles way out back.


 

This is why we can't have nice things.



 

Going Feral: A mid summer dinner.

Going Feral: A mid summer dinner.:  

Sea of red.

On a dreary Friday morning, more than a dozen people gathered outside Courtroom 1A of the Townsend Justice Center to witness the end of the prosecution of the killer of 17-year-old Lene’a Brown, who was shot dead near Buckboard Park on May 14. 

Most of those hearing attendees wore red in one form or another to support Brown — fl annel shirts, hoodies and T-shirts lined the left rows of the courtroom ahead of the trial.

I stepped out of the courtroom after a hearing to see this crowd.  It was a sea of red.