Tag: Regrettable Acts

Revision

History, Wars & Other Fun Games

I have to say that I’ve always thought that WWII’s Operation Market Garden was actually a very successful military campaign, and not the horrible failure as it’s been painted.  And this guy agrees with me:

In fact, the operation succeeded at six of its seven principal objectives, a rate of achievement that would be considered remarkable in almost any other military context. The American 82nd Airborne Division, under Brigadier General James Gavin, faced the daunting task of seizing the great road bridge at Nijmegen across the Waal River, one of the widest river crossings in Western Europe. They did so after brutal urban combat and a daylight assault river crossing in canvas boats under direct enemy fire, one of the most audacious tactical actions of the entire war.7 The bridge was taken intact even after the Germans tried to blow it up. The 101st Airborne Division, led by Major General Maxwell Taylor, seized the majority of its assigned bridges and canal crossings in the southern portion of the corridor and held the vital road that the operation depended on, quickly dubbed “Hell’s Highway” by the soldiers who fought along it, against repeated and determined German counterattacks. British armored units of XXX Corps advanced deeper into occupied territory in a shorter period than in any previous operation in the Western campaign. The scale of what was accomplished tends to disappear in the shadow of Arnhem, but it was genuinely extraordinary, representing the successful coordination of tens of thousands of men, hundreds of aircraft, and an armored column driving north along a single road through hostile country.

I have read a ton of history on the topic — WWII is very much a period of history near to my heart — and I think that too often Market Garden is used a lot by American historians to have a go at Brit Field Marshal Montgomery.  (He’s too often caricatured instead of appreciated.  Not that I have a problem with that, in general terms, because he set himself up for it pretty much all the way through the war.  But we tend to forget that the reason Monty was so cautious a military commander was that he was faced with the stark fact that British and Commonwealth manpower’s losses were, to use the modern term, quite unsustainable.)

Going back to Market Garden:  it may well have been a bridge too far (Arnhem), but its only real failure was that even if it had been a total success, it’s doubtful that it would have been the war-ender that Montgomery believed it would be.

I await Reader Sage Grouch’s informed opinion on this.

Related Actions

Military, Wars & Other Fun Games

First up, there’s this excellent thought from Bill Lehman (and read all of it because it’s excellent):

Take down their military structure. All of it. Take out their Quds Force, the entire IRGC in as far as we can find it, and leave their government, their military and their military logistics a pile of burning rubble. I would be a fan of flying a few hundred supply runs over Iran, C-17s and C-5s, full of crates of rifles, and ammunition, and dropping them, for the People of Iran to use, to finish the job. Then we need to LEAVE.

And here’s a manifestation of the above:

Thousands of Kurdish fighters have launched a ground invasion in Iran, according to a US official.  The Kurdish militias, based across the border in Iraq, began the offensive in northwestern Iran on Wednesday.  The Kurdish groups are widely seen as the most well-organized faction of the fragmented Iranian opposition and are believed to have thousands of battle-hardened fighters. 

President Donald Trump on Sunday night spoke with the heads of Kurdish militant groups in Iraq to discuss the situation in Iran.  The CIA was exploring plans to arm the Kurdish forces with the aim of sparking a popular uprising, CNN reported Tuesday. 

Yeah, I’m all over this idea, as long as we remember that sometime not so long ago we armed a group called the Taliban to rebel against the Russian invaders of Afghanistan, and that didn’t work out so well.  And I’m also a little apprehensive that these guys are coming over the border from Iraq — FFS, that whole area is a snake pit, isn’t it?

And just to remind everyone:  the PKK (main Kurdish political party) is soft-core Muslim but hardcore Marxist.  If that combination isn’t a toxic brew, I can’t think of a better one.  None of which bodes well for the future.

Me, I’d prefer to drop those rifles and machine guns into towns and villages all over Iran, after first notifying the local resistance leaders — we know who they are, right, CIA? — where and when the guns are going to arrive so that they aren’t just taken by the IRGC fanatics when the crates hit the ground.  Using history as a pointer, this would be akin to randomly air-dropping guns into Nazi-occupied Europe, only to have the SS intercept the shipments and use them for their own purposes, i.e. killing resistance fighters (and a few Jews, just for fun).

It’s all a little complicated and so on, but in this case, anything is better than dropping American boots on the ground to handle the thing.  Once again, a history lesson:  Afghanistan and a little further back, Vietnam.

Guns and ammo are cheap;  American lives are expensive, and worth more than the game.  Especially in this Middle Eastern shit pit.

Once A Commie

Illegal immigrants, Unions

…always a Commie, even at the risk of sounding hypocritical:

American unions, once wary of — or even outright hostile — to immigration because of its threat towards American wages and bargaining power, are now at the forefront of the anti-ICE protests opposing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns.

Since President Donald Trump took office last year, several of America’s most prominent unions, like the Service Employees International Union, United Auto Workers, and others under the AFL-CIO umbrella, have opposed deportations of illegal immigrants and other ICE operations through general strikes, protests, and workplace training.

Oftentimes, these unions partner closely with radical leftist organizations to do so, such as the radical Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Marxist People’s Forum, the Revolutionary Communists of America, and local chapters of the Communist Party USA, as Just the News has previously documented. 

Unions under the AFL-CIO umbrella have been instrumental in organizing strikes across the country to protest Trump administration deportation operations. AFL-CIO even provides a tracking map for users to identify workers’ strikes organized by its affiliates.

So let’s see if I’ve got this right:  Trump’s major foreign policy initiatives have been directed towards “reshoring” manufacturing from Asia and back into the United States.  These initiatives, if successful, would create the construction of factories and the concomitant recruitment of labor forces here in the U.S., i.e. blue-collar jobs that labor unions are supposedly all about protecting.

But the unions are behind protests to send illegal immigrants — who have been instrumental in taking away blue-collar jobs from Americans and / or lowering the average wage for said jobs — back to Shitholia.

Does anyone else see the irony here?

Or should workers just start shooting their unions’ leadership?

Easy Temptation

Crime

Here’s one that made me think for a bit:

Florida Charter Captain Busted For Allegedly Trying to Sell Cocaine He Found at Sea

What at first appeared to be a floating treasure may have turned into a career-sinking criminal case for a Florida Keys charter boat captain arrested this week for allegedly trying to sell cocaine he found at sea.

Bradford Todd Picariello, 65, of Marathon, Florida, was arrested Monday after allegedly selling a kilogram of cocaine for $10,000 to undercover detectives, according to a statement released Tuesday by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.

That’s not even the half of it. The captain allegedly said he had more. Lots more.

If ever I came across a “windfall” that involved questionable merchandise, I know for a fact that the very first time I tried to offload any of it, the potential buyer would turn out to be a cop, of some flavor or other.  That’s because I would be, and am, a complete naïf  in matters of criminality, and in such a situation I would be the easiest capture in law enforcement history.

But that’s not what made me think.

I used to know a guy who farmed on a tiny piece of land — something like a hundred acres, if memory serves — somewhere in northern Indiana.  I don’t recall exactly where it was, but I do know that it was only reachable by dirt roads.  Easily accessible, it wasn’t.

Anyway, he and I were chatting about the problems of farming, that almost every year brought a good chance of financial ruin, and I asked him what crop would be the most profitable, then.

“Weed.”
“What?”
“Yup, weed.”  And then came the killer:  “About three rows would do it.”

Then we got to discussing how he’d sell it and still stay under the  DEI  DEA radar*;  and without going into details, it would have been astonishingly easy.

Financial security for him and his family, for a lousy three rows of weed.

For our luckless charter captain, the money and therefore the temptation was too great.  But small-scale larceny?

I couldn’t do it.  But I’m pretty damn sure a lot of people would jump at the chance — and I don’t mean people of the career-criminal / gangster ilk.  No, I’m talking about pillars of the community, ordinarily law-abiding in all things.

And I have to tell you, I’m not at all sure how I feel about that.

*Thankee for the correction, guys.  And thankee, cold meds, for your input.   (I’m amazed I can write anything at the moment.)

Maybe Not

Men & Women

Them times sure are a-changing… just not quite how Dylan envisaged it:

Tabitha Willett has sparked debate as she criticized ‘commuting men on their phones’ for not offering her a train seat – despite wearing a ‘baby on board’ badge. 

The Made In Chelsea star, 33, who is expecting her second child, took to Instagram on Tuesday to tell London commuters to ‘do better’. 

Sharing a short video of a busy train showing a number of people sitting and standing on their phones, Tabitha penned: ‘I don’t want to be a moan but… 

‘On the way back from the school run and a carriage full of men on their phones and no one stood up for a pregnant woman with a badge or elderly couple next to me. 

‘Do better London’.

Not gonna happen.

I mean, I myself will always stand up to offer my seat to a woman, pregnant or not.  But I’m not a younger man who’s had the shit kicked out of me since childhood by the public school system, by the media and by women in general for my toxic masculinity and frequent screams of “we can do anything that men can do”.

Well then, young men might say, you can bloody well stand on the train when there aren’t any open seats, just like men do.

And let’s be honest:  that passive-aggressive button (“Baby On Board”?  give me strength) isn’t going to help matters.

Back in the day, of course, such boorish and selfish behavior from younger men would have sparked a response from other men in the railway carriage, said miscreants being hoisted out of their seat by the collar, with maybe a few solid cuffs to the head thrown in.

Now?  No chance, chickie.

And you can think your ultra-feministicals for that, because men have a simple response for when the rules of the game are changed to their detriment:  they just stop playing.

Manners and courtesy, you see, have always been an indulgence and not a duty.  And the days of indulgence are over.

Like I said:  I’m not going to change;  the habits and manners of a lifetime are too ingrained in me for that simple rejection.  But when young men have never been taught those simple manners, those lubricants of polite society, and even been chided that said manners are arrogant and prime examples of The Patriarchy / Toxic Masculinity…

Well, they’re just going to stay in their seats.  As they should.

Scaling Down

Lifestyle

This is an interesting development:

Fewer booze buyers are reaching for the top shelf.

Americans aren’t thirsting for for the high-end tequila that once flowed freely, spirits companies said, as demand for $100 spirits has dropped off. Consumers appear to be trading down—or selecting less expensive versions of their preferred beverage—said Lawson Whiting, CEO of Brown-Forman (BF.A, BF.B), on Thursday, as sales of more affordable bottles fell less.

“We are seeing some weakening, for the first time, in terms of trade down,” Whiting said on a conference call, according to a transcript made available by AlphaSense. “When you look at $100 and above or $50-to-$100 [segments], those price points have weakened considerably.”

Industrywide, the number of $100-plus bottles sold has fallen 18% in the past three months, according to the market research firm NielsenIQ.

I’m not surprised.  All that high-end stuff, at the end of the day, delivers not much more in terms of taste and shall we say “knockdown power”, for a premium price.  And that would be okay, in isolation.

But when you have to spend $120,000 for an “economy” car — think I’m joking?  see how much you end up paying in total when you finance $45,000 over seven or ten years — and the cost of even the cheapest meal for two in a non-fast food restaurant will set you back well over $60, and your grocery bill rockets from $30 per week to $140… it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to predict that things are going to change when it comes to spending your money on what is after all an indulgence.

And the change can come with reduced consumption (as above) or simply learning to live with cheaper merchandise.

In earlier, less fucked-up times, I would now have been on my second or maybe even third car after the Tiguan;  instead, I now know that barring some kind of miracle, the Tiggy is going to be my lifetime vehicle.

I can’t remember the last time I bought a bottle of single-malt — years, I suspect — and it doesn’t matter because I seldom drink the stuff unless friends show up for dins, and a single after-dinner cocktail is called for.

It’s not just me, either:  the Son&Heir drinks maybe 10% of what he used to drink, booze-wise, and even my rowdy friends have cut back.

But spare me the sob stories of what this means for the manufacturers of high-end bling.  If ever there’s a case study in ripping people off for the “status” of using their products, vendors like Louis Vuitton, Glenfiddich, Porsche and Swarovski are headed for bleak times;  and I care not a fig for their predicament.