Final Finals, Target Trump, Smoking or not? LIV Free or Die, Damned Russians, and Remember D-Day
My Lord what a day, or should I say what a week? I got derailed so many times in the past week as I wrote final exams for AP Modern European History, Ancient History, and American History. I put a lot of time into teaching, providing my students with the best and most accurate history, study materials and tests that are challenging and so well written that the students can use them as study guides when the get to college. That takes a lot of time and effort. When it comes to finals, the materials they need to know come from the entire semester, so they are doubly difficult, not only for the students, but for me to craft. Today was exam day and it was a day. After giving them I graded them and entered the grades into the grade book. The students who prepared did great, those who didn’t, well didn’t. However, if they were really final exams, those who failed would be taken out and shot, but on the positive side, that won’t happen, and redemption is always possible.
While I was out this evening I heard that from President Trump received notice that he is a target in the Mar El Lago documents case. That notice usually indicates that the target will be indicted. Since Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is no slouch and has put war criminals away, I expect that sometime relatively soon the indictment will be delivered and Trump will have to go before yet another judge, be arraigned and read his Carmen Miranda Rights. As Jimmy Buffett sings, “they don’t dance like Carmen no more.” It will be interesting to see who sings when Orange Julius goes to trial.
See the article here: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/07/trump-notified-that-he-is-the-target-of-an-ongoing-criminal-investigation-00100920
Evidently I now live in the “Smoking Section” of the country. It seems that a mythical pony named Wildfire has been setting Canada aflame. These are seriously serious fires, kind of on the order of the Seventh Circle of Hell, Canadian style. Anyway, the massive amounts of smoke these fires are putting out is turning the American northeast and Mid-Atlantic into an apocalyptic hell scape of smoke so thick you can eat it with a fork, but use a spoon to get the last whiff. I lived in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s and remember when we couldn’t see the foothills which were just a few miles away, and served in Iraq’s Al Anbar Province with our Marine and Army Advisors, and the smoke around here is giving me flashbacks. Yes, PTSD, the gift that keeps on giving.
The pictures from New York are surreal, and down here in the Virginia Tidewater it is starting to get bad, hell, the National Weather Service has called Code Red on our air quality. When asked the NWS director was asked by a reporter if he called the Code Red, he replied, “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of protection that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.” Asked again by the tiresome reporter he shouted “YOU'RE GOD DAMN RIGHT I DID!!!”
See the less dramatized, but still serious story here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canadian-wildfire-smoke-maps-air-quality-alerts/
Let me preface this next section to say that I am not a golfer, I’ve golfed, but never seriously. However, before Alzheimer’s robbed him of that he was, my dad was an avid golfer who was really pretty good. I always tried to get him special golf items from when I travelled, especially to Scotland. However, when I was in Iraq in 2007 we had just gotten back to our base from two weeks in the badlands with our little groups of advisors, and were told that Butch Harmon, David Fehrety, Tom Watson, Tom Lehman and other PGA Tour Professionals were visiting and signing autographed pictures and other items. They were great, they personalized what they signed for him and he treasured them, they were among the last things he could really appreciate before his condition deteriorated to the point that he didn’t know who I was.
Anyway, the unexpected merger of the PGA and the Saudi Petro-Dollar funded LIV tour would have sent dad into conniptions and if he knows about it his ashes are probably spinning in the urn. It was less than a year ago when the money grubbing filthy lucre founders of the LIV Tour split from the PGA and the PGA condemned them, and without warning, even to the players, the PGA decided that it couldn’t LIV Free. Feel free to call me judgmental, because I am, but I have seen what Saudi money is doing to other sports, it’s slowly killing them by taking away local ownership and control of beloved franchises, especially in the English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, and the French Liga Un. Now they are sucking up some of the greats to play on Saudi teams. The Saudi regime is a serial violator of human rights, persecutes and murders dissidents, treats women as chattel with no rights, even rights that they should have under Islam, and has no problem torturing or killing LGBTQ people, and how they treat guest workers from South Asia and the Philippines is nothing short of slavery by another name. How the leaders of LIV surrendered all principle to join with them, and how the President of the PGA rolled over and made a deal without the knowledge of its players is unpardonable. Of course the twice impeached, indicted, and proven sexual abuser Trump praised the merger, but why not? He loves the Saudis, especially their money and tyrannical government.
See the articles here:
https://www.sbnation.com/golf/2023/6/6/23751537/pga-tour-liv-golf-merger-players-betrayed-humiliated
Those damned Russians have have done it again. The Wunderkind of War Criminals, Vlad the Impaler Putin’s regime blew up the Nova Khakovka dam holding back a reservoir as large as the Great Salt Lake on the Dnipro River near Kherson. The resultant flooding has inundated hundreds of square kilometers of land, submerged towns and parts of cities and forced tens of thousands of people, many of whose lives have already seen horrible tragedy during the Russian invasion, to flee.
See these articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/07/world/russia-ukraine-news
Tuesday, June 6th 2023 was the 79th anniversary of the Allied invasion of German occupied France. It is part of a trinity of connected events that always cause me as a now retired combat veteran of nearly 40 years of service in the Army and Navy, with over a third of my Navy carrier posted to the Marines to enter a period of thoughtful melancholy as I remember all the men and women who I served with who gave their last full measure of devotion to duty or who were physically, psychologically, or spiritually damaged in war.
I am a historian. Much of my study, including my Masters Degree in Military History, the Marine Command and Staff College, and the Joint and Combined Warfighting School has involved World War II in Europe. However, I began reading and studying history, especially military history as a kid. I was reading history books for beyond my age level, and even cut geometry class to spend the period in the reserved section of the school library. Of course, D-Day was a major area of interest. The late Cornelius Ryan’s book The Longest Day was the first book that I read about D-Day, and of course the film based upon it by the same name, is one of the classic films about the invasion. Honestly, I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have watched it. I probably need to watch it again soon, but I digress.
Not only have I studied D-Day and the Normandy campaign, but I have taught it, even at Omaha Beach, Pont Du Hoc, and St. Mare Eglise. As with other battles it is the lives of the men and women who fought them, or participated in some other way. For me the strategy, the decision making, the operational methods and tactics all come down to the men and women involved. Thus, I need to remember, especially those men who landed landed on the beaches of Normandy, those that parachuted or landed on gliders behind the beaches, and those that drove the landing craft or flew the transport aircraft at such great risk.
Former President Barack Obama spoke eloquently of what we the living owe to the remembrance of these men when he delivered an address on Omaha Beach on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day:
“We are on this Earth for only a moment in time. And fewer of us have parents and grandparents to tell us about what the veterans of D-Day did here 70 years ago. As I was landing on Marine One, I told my staff, I don’t think there’s a time where I miss my grandfather more, where I’d be more happy to have him here, than this day. So we have to tell their stories for them. We have to do our best to uphold in our own lives the values that they were prepared to die for. We have to honor those who carry forward that legacy, recognizing that people cannot live in freedom unless free people are prepared to die for it.”
The survivors of the D-Day landings and those on the other side of the hill are continuing to pass from the bonds of this earth and into eternity. The youngest of the living are now in their late 90s, others over 100. We owe it to them and to the world to make what they sacrificed themselves to do into reality, battling tyranny and striving for peace and security.
Their generation built the pillars of peace and economic security that former President Trump often mocks, criticizes, or condemns. D-Day was just part of their story. The burden is now on we the living to carry the torch of freedom that they once held, especially as tyrannies around the world seek to emulate the worst criminal leaders in history, especially Vladimir Putin. My military career of nearly 40 years ended on December 31st 2020, but if again called to defend the oppressed, I would do so.
Here is a reflection of mine from 2014 at my legacy site.
I will close there because I don’t know what else to add.
I wish you the best as we dedicate ourselves to the proposition that all are created equal.
Peace,
Steve