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Friday’s Forum
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12 responses to “Friday’s Forum”
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I don’t know if this is unprecedented but to this former active duty now retired AF officer, this is brave, foolish, and wrong.
Air Force major arrested on Capitol steps during protest calling for Trump impeachment
A U.S. Air Force major was arrested Wednesday for protesting alone on House steps as he called for the immediate impeachment and removal of President Donald Trump.
Maj. Jason Watson was arrested by Capitol Police officers at approximately 1:15 p.m. local time for demonstrating on the House steps without a sitting member of Congress, Capitol Police told Military Times. Watson, an active-duty service member with a military career dating over 20 years, walked halfway up the steps of the House to its chained railing to hold a sign that read “Impeach Convict Remove.”
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Active-duty service members are strictly prohibited from engaging in partisan political activities, especially while in uniform, per the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Those who do can face criminal or administrative punishment, such as imprisonment, loss of pay, dishonorable discharge and more.Major Watson understands the consequences and accepts them.
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Terrific interview with Jack Smith on Nicole Wallace’s show, yesterday.
Smith was measured, sober, intelligent and clearly dedicated to the country he served.
Everything MAGA is not.
It’s no wonder Fatso soils his diaper every time he thinks of Smith.
Please search out the interview, it’s worth your effort. -
I wonder if Gen Donahue was removed because he was pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia.
Kyiv military chief salutes outgoing US Army commander as war rages in Ukraine
Ukraine’s top general has publicly thanked the departing head of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, Gen. Christopher Donahue, for helping build and sustain Washington’s support pipeline to Kyiv as the officer relinquished his post on Thursday after an unexpectedly brief 18 months in command.
Word broke June 23 that the four-star general had submitted his retirement papers after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth personally requested that he resign, according to multiple reports. The Army has yet to provide a definitive reason for the change.
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Within days of the news, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, held a phone call with Donahue and published a farewell on his personal social media accounts, thanking the outgoing official for creating a partnership that he said delivered long-range systems, strengthened Ukraine’s air defenses and saved thousands of Ukrainian lives. -
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Cruise ships are like human petri dishes.
Salient: “Norovirus is highly contagious and can induce diarrhea and vomiting. It can spread when tiny particles of fecal matter or vomit get into the mouth. ”
Yuck.
It gets worse. Hand sanitizer is ineffective against norovirus. The bug has a protein coat, not a lipid one like most other viruses. Soap and water is a better option.
It’s highly contagious, but not lethal in the vast majority of cases. Symptoms include vomit, diarrhea , fever, headaches, weakness, lethargy, and muscle aches. It won’t kill you, but you might wish it would.
There’s no treatment for it, past rest and fluids to prevent dehydration.
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Ex-Joint Chiefs Chair Questions Domestic Troop Deployments
Retired Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown Jr. is criticizing aspects of President Donald Trump’s military policies, warning that using troops for domestic law enforcement missions and removing senior officers could have lasting consequences for the armed forces.
Brown, who was dismissed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in February 2025, outlined his concerns in a Foreign Affairs essay published Friday and expanded on them during an Aspen Institute discussion last week.
Without naming Trump or War Secretary Pete Hegseth, Brown argued that deploying troops to American cities for politically charged missions risks pulling the military away from its core mission of national defense.
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You can’t solve half a problem, or half solve a problem.
olitical moderates are those who believe that wisdom begins with the rejection of perfection. It would be nice if the world were the way that we wish it would be, but it’s not going to be that way any time soon, and insisting that it should be is therefore a mark of unseriousness. Incrementalism, they believe, is the adult choice; everything else is utopianism, which is an immature waste of time. The moderates, the centrists, the incrementalists, the adults in the room—all are eager to discard the great leap forward in favor of a modest step in the right direction. In many cases, their embrace of this philosophy is rooted in a genuine belief that it is the best that they, and we, can hope for.
Even if we grant the moderates the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their sincerity, we do not have to grant them anything when it comes to their skills as negotiators. They are masters of bargaining against themselves. Their most reliable move is to cede ground before the battle even starts. While they imagine that picking a more modest starting point marks them as realists, it actually marks them as marks. They give their opponents something for nothing. It is not necessary for the other side to wrestle them as far. If the moderates had had the courage to ask for everything rather than an increment, they would, after all the tussling was over, land closer to where they actually wanted to be. This basic principle of negotiation is clear to anyone who has had to struggle for something they need. But since moderates need nothing, and approach politics with a bias towards stasis rather than progress, they are prone to the pitfall of giving up on political substance in exchange for keeping the struggle itself as genteel as possible.
Another way to say this is that the philosophy of moderates, their approach to politics, only works if the people on the other side are moderates as well. Theirs is a game with intelligible rules played by people who live in horror of being perceived as extremists. When a moderate comes up against someone whose political beliefs are stronger than their beliefs in decorum, the moderates get destroyed. They get yanked towards their opponents position due to their own abhorrence of sweat, of conflict. If moderates had deep ethical beliefs, they would recognize the need to change their strategy when their opponents grew more radical. Sadly, the moderate mind, lulled into paralysis by the air-conditioned air of Washington, DC conference rooms, always seems unable to rouse itself to evolve past the rudimentary epoch of polite political jousting.
Etc. Etc.
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What I find far more disappointing is this:
“The president’s views – frankly, disappointment – at some of our Nato allies and their response to our operations in the Middle East, they are well documented,” Rubio said. “That will have to be addressed.”
El Taco, in the immortal words of one of Rubio’s predecessors, is a fucking moron. This is amply documented. I had no idea Rubio aspired to become one.
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Clearly, a lot of people don’t want data centers in their communities.
Perfectly normal. What’s odd is the companies building the data centers don’t want to disclose who hired them to do so.
And then there’s this: Meta, formerly Fakebook, is building a cloud business to sell excess AI compute. And so is XpaceS, Adolf’s ISP with a rocket launch unit and a certified nazi bot.
This just may mean Zucks and Adolf have spawned inferior LLM models. I’ve yet to even try either*. And having found no serious, everyday use for any LLM yet, I probably couldn’t tell.
The reports are all over the web. What it menas is still anyone’s guess. It may be, as noted above, no one uses the inferior models, and so they have compute capacity to spare. Or it may be there’s just no money to be made with a tool that’s expensive to operate which yields unsatisfactory results.
Maybe this is the sounds of a bubble slooooowly popping.
One can hope.
*I may have used Zucks’ model once. If so, t was to ask it how I could remove the Meta AI icon from Whatsapp. I recall asking that of some LLM. the response was a useless hallucination.
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Those are possibly sane decisions. Serious cloud computing became a thing after Bezos (or more likely his staff) figured out that lots of companies faced the same sort of problems Amazon did for scaling, reliability, global reach, etc. AWS marketing was always “Why reinvent the wheel, possibly badly, rather than renting capacity from someone who has poured effort into solving the problems well?” Followed by Google and Microsoft, who had had to solve the same sort of problems to support massive search engine capacity.
Maybe generative AI will be the thing so many hope it is. I’m inclined to think that the revenue dollars are not in companies like Anthropic selling the use of a small number of generic models, but selling the compute resource for many smaller companies building large numbers of tailored models.
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On today’s daily podcast on the Iran war and related matters, co-host Malcolm Nance discussed his first-hand experience with the shootdown of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes on this day in 1988. His description of events, in which he says he was “neck deep”, is surprisingly detailed and revealing, and also damning. He said that his upcoming memoir has a chapter on it, and has been cleared for release by DoD and the intelligence agencies.
The daily Nance/Lion/Kaarsbo US-Iran podcast tends to run an hour or more, and today’s is 1 hour 27 minutes, but this YouTube link goes to the start of the nearly 11-minute discussion of the shootdown of the civilian airliner.
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