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Thursday’s Forum
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23 responses to “Thursday’s Forum”
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Panel to study Pentagon’s COVID vaccine mandate, troops dismissal
The Department of Defense plans to convene a panel to study its mid-2021 decision to require the COVID-19 vaccine for all service members and the circumstances that led to the dismissal of more than 8,400 troops who refused the shots.
The Pentagon announced Wednesday that Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata will draw from military personnel and civilian employees to create the panel, which is tasked with reviewing “the official decisions, coordination, planning, and execution of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate from January 2020 through January 2023.”
If there is any doubt about the outcome of this fake panel:
In a statement, Tata said the effort will help “establish permanent safeguards against future mandates.”
More undermining of good order and discipline from this incompetent, yet radical regime.
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Take in these two press releases side by side and reconcile the reasoning behind each.
Today, Secretary Hegseth directed an enhanced screening protocol for Service members to optimize performance, combat Operator Syndrome, and maximize mission readiness. Effective immediately, all Active Duty and Reserve Component personnel aged 30 and older will undergo mandatory screening for testosterone deficiency during their Periodic Health Assessment.
“The Department is fully committed to restoring honor and rebuilding trust with the warfighters impacted by the COVID-19 vaccine mandate,” said Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness Anthony J. Tata. Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, we continue to prioritize reinstatement, deliver remedies, and establish permanent safeguards against future mandates.”
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Reuters is reporting that Iran is working with the Houthis to close the Red Sea, another shipping gateway, if the US strikes power networks.
It seems like it would be bad to have another shipping pass closed, no?
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Some Saudi oil is shipped through there. The Houthis might not eb able to mine the passage, but if they hit a few ships with drone or missiles, the rest would be reluctant to attempt passage through the Bab al-Mandab Strait.
The Saudis ought to be willing, or feel forced, to put a stop to this. It won’t be easy, and might (will) require boots on the ground.
El Taco is the answer to every instance of the question “how could it possibly get any worse?”
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And Iran has demonstrated its willingness to hit ships outside the Strait of Hormuz, putting into question UAE’s ability to continue loading tankers from its pipeline termination on the Gulf of Oman. The trump threats to Iranian civil infrastructure are bonkers, considering the vulnerabilities of the US and its allies in the Gulf and wider middle east. We haven’t adequately protected even our military facilities in the region’s host nations; the consequences for those countries could be catastrophic if their civilian power and water systems are attacked.
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IN a way it’s even good that Iran is going first after the Saudi oil through the Red Sea, rather than for the desalinization plants all over the Gulf.
BTW, shutting down transit through Bab al-Mandab would also affect some commerce to and from Israel, as well as that from Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and maybe Djibouti.
Egypt is rather salient here, as it also means commerce that moves through the Suez Canal. That means a lot of tonnage that moves to and from Europe.
Stunning, isn’t it, that a poorly thought out and completely unnecessary war is in danger of spreading to another continent, and will affect commerce from a third one?
European commerce can go around Africa, as some did some years ago when the Suez Canal was blocked temporarily by a grounded ship. But this adds to shipping costs and consumes more fuel that produces more pollution and CO2. Good thing the climate thing is a Chinese hoax.
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Every time Trump talks about Iran I keep flashing back to his daily pressers when COVID arrived. He clearly didn’t know what he was talking about, and yet he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
ETA – and the media sent political reporters to cover those pressers instead of science reporters.
Whiskey Pete has defenestrated the Pentagon reporters. -
A few days ago, @inhumans99 mentioned an ep of Trevor Noah’s podcast “What Now?” dealing with China.
Many thanks. I downloaded it and listened to it, and found other eps of interest. I had no idea Noah had a podcast (though this days it seems everyone else does, or a Youtube channel).
In particular I recommend one with Corey Doctorow about, what else enshitification. Here’s a link to the podcast eps.
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At long last, the snoozefest is over. I think there are some games remaining for some reason, but they’re on the weekend. Meaning I don’t have to try to work for 2 hours with a 70″ TV blaring excited voices nonstop.
To celebrate, I’m designing my dream solar system primed for relatively easy space exploration. It helps with the two main problems.
1) The first mile problem.
Leaving the planet’s surface to get into orbit is hellishly expensive. You need huge rockets loaded with many tons of fuel. Making the rockets wholly or partially reusable helps, but it remains very expensive. So you can have satellites and some people in low orbits, but anything further costs too much. that’s why most exploration past low orbit is carried out by probes.
Now, in our dream system, large inhabited planet, let’s call it Algion*, has three moons. One is about 450,000 kilometers up, the second is like 275,000 kilometers, but the third, and smallest, is only 36,000 kilometers off the surface. this puts it in synchronous orbit with Algion, meaning it takes a whole planetary revolution to make one orbit of the planet, meaning it stays over the same line of longitude forever.
Getting to 36,000 kilometers is comparatively easy. You’d need a smaller rocket than the Saturn V required to get to the Moon, assuming a short mission by three people. Since the moon is smaller, you probably don’t need a separate orbital and landing craft, either. So instead of 7 very limited short missions over a few years, you could launch dozens, for a longer term. In time, it would make sense to mine it, and set up manufacturing there. Why? to make electromagnetic launch tracks that can boost payloads and crewed ships to higher orbits, or to boost them out fo the planet-moon system entirely (no fuel needed).
The reason is the second problem.
2) There needs to be somewhere to go where investing resources would produce a return on the investment.
Meet Planet B, the second planet from Algion’s sun. It’s a bit smaller than Algion, much warmer, but has a similar atmosphere, rotation period, and a magnetic field. Meaning there’s liquid water on it. In fact, there’s native life there, too, and there’s free oxygen in the air. It also has a small moon of its own.
Not all the planet is congenial with human life, but the arctic and antarctic regions would be. You’d just have to get used to long days part of the year and long nights the other of the year. This might complicate growing crops, so maybe hydroponics would be the order of the day. The bottom line, though, is it would be relatively cheap to settle the planet. That’s a massive, very long term ROI. It might take decades to pay off, but it pays off for centuries. Aside from having a whole ecosystem that evolved independently of yours, which would let us learn a hell of a lot about biology.
You can see why it’s a dream.
A bit of irony, Algion means nothing, but it derives from the Greek word “algos” which means pain. The term survives to this days in words like analgesic.
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How many people remember this?
Will the same standard hold true for Trump?
I kid myself.
‘Scared s–tless’: Republicans brace for Trump’s primetime speech
President Donald Trump is promising to reveal “really big news” on election security. Many Republicans wish he wouldn’t.
The president’s speech, expected to be delivered in prime time Thursday from the White House, comes amid renewed hostilities with Iran, which are once again driving up fuel prices ahead of an election that most strategists still expect to turn on cost-of-living issues.
But instead of touting the recent good news on declining inflation or hyping the new housing law, Trump plans to talk about 2020 and “free and fair elections,” alarming some in the GOP who worry he will continue to make baseless claims or repeat debunked conspiracies.
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This is the best description I have ever read about epsitemological bubbles and how they work, written by someone who has worked his way out of one and is now describing the process.
I was not a stupid man during the Obama years. I read widely. I engaged with the arguments. I had theological reasons for my political positions or at least believed I did. Kahan’s research suggests that this is precisely the profile of someone most at risk: analytical enough to construct a sophisticated defense, motivated enough by group identity to need one. The intelligence becomes the problem. You are better than most at building the cage and calling it a house.
[…]
Iris Murdoch, the British philosopher, wrote about what she called the “fat, relentless ego” that distorts moral perception. Her argument was that the primary failure of moral vision is not wickedness but a kind of solipsism: the inability to see other people and the world as genuinely other, rather than as extensions of your own needs, fears, and assumptions. Clear moral vision requires what she called “unselfing” — the deliberate effort to stop seeing the world through your ego’s requirements and see it as it actually is. The person in Sartre’s terms who lives in bad faith, pretending their choices are not even choices, their tribe’s ideology is simply truth, their formed perception is simply reality, has not done this work. I had not done this work.
I can completely recognize and identify with the sort of person described in the first paragraph. It was so easy to become that guy, and I’m sure I have at times.
I recognize the “work” described in the second paragraph above. I did three very difficult weeks of such work right after my daughter came out and began to transition. I was buffetted by so many thoughts and feelings that didn’t come from any reality, didn’t come from my daughter, but from my own fears and needs.
I had gone through a similar process with regard to the presence of gay people in society decades earlier. Not nearly as bracing or challenging. Not nearly as personal.
Anyway, let me reiterate: The best description I have ever read of this process.
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That was really very heartbreaking. Argentina has a track record of late-game surges. I cannot account for this.
Meanwhile, I don’t have the same somewhat negative feelings I had for Maradona carry over to Messi. Argentina still plays rough, but it seems that they mostly are within bounds of civilized play. So be it.
It’s just sad. I would have liked to see England in the final, even though I would credit them with little to no chance of beating Spain, whose dismantling of France was astonishing. I would say the same of Argentina, but there’s that strange, unaccountable late-game surge thing they’ve been doing.
Better conditioning? Maybe, though hard to imagine given todays environment.
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England played quite well, UNTIL that England goal.
Then camped in defence, and failed to keep possession and get the ball midfield.
You just can’t do that against a team like Argentina with a playmaker like Messi.
It’s just asking to get punished.I suspect Spain won’t get caught that way; they play defensively, but try to do so in the middle of the pitch.
England France might be interesting: on the one hand, it’s for third place, so nobody really cares.
otoh, because nobody cares, both teams might be inclined to say throw caution to the winds and just go for it.
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