Independence Day 2022

At such a time as this, brevity feels advisable.

I just reread the 4 July post from 2018, and was struck by its continued resonance.  Though I think the Democrats of 2022 have progressed even beyond their more perfect resonance with the Democrats lamented in the 1860 op-ed at the New York Times, this passage from that old piece still rings (nor should we kid ourselves that it’s not a fit for at least some portion of the GOP):

The American Spring will be forward, not back

A tweet caught my eye today, and stirred up a need to write about the American situation and where we ought to be heading.  The tweet promoted a Human Events opinion piece by Jane Coleman, which is well worth the time and easy to commend to your perusal.

"Why were we doing this in school, I wondered?" – @janebcoleman https://t.co/Xp7ocuW4tY…

— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) June 16, 2022

It’s about CRT as it is manifested in America’s schools,

TOC Ready Room 28 April 2022: How do you solve a problem like the Navy? (and other naval musings)

Modern naval problems, it turns out, look pretty much like naval problems from any time.  The parameters are resources, logistics, geography, and technology.

This will be a tweet-enriched lightning round.  The big punch comes at the end.  It’s a doozy (and yes, I know:  if I were tediously pedantic I’d spell it Duesy.  Life is short).

A number of negative things are happening in a concentrated burst.  One is that the Navy brass – “Big Navy” – has just proposed to whack out a big chunk of the fleet for the foreseeable future.  With a target over the last half-decade of 355 ships, the Navy would decline from its current 296 ships to 280 in Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27).  In the best case among three options proposed by the Navy, the fleet would recover to 299 by FY32, 10 years from now.

Thanksgiving 2021: America’s mightiest blessing

Most years now, one of the things I do for the major holidays is look at what I wrote the year before to see how it has held up.

Doing that in 2021 took me back to this post for 2020.  Surprisingly, perhaps, it wasn’t about the pandemic or the lockdowns, at least not in any direct or explicit way.  It was about something that was getting almost no attention at the time: the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival in the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock.

A Tyler O’Neil article at PJ Media was a pretext for writing about something I was already concerned with.  He highlighted an exceptionally important concept from the Mayflower Compact executed by the arriving settlers: the idea of a “Civil Body Politic.”  America’s connection with that concept is unique, historic, and essential, as in, going to our essence as a nation.

TOC Ready Room 20 Nov 2021: Rittenhouse, an odd-duck judge: Checking in on the rule of law

The verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was rendered on Friday 19 November, by a courageous jury that ruled on the evidence and not on the prosecution’s or the media’s false narrative.

Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all five counts, meaning the jury understood fully that he was acting in self-defense.  As numerous commentators said on Friday, this was obvious to anyone who actually watched the trial.

Those who watched the actual Rittenhouse trial on television should not have been surprised at the not guilty verdict. But those who got their information about the trial from biased commentators on CNN or CNBC may well have been shocked and surprised.

— Alan Dershowitz (@AlanDersh) November 19, 2021

Not only did the evidence, including prosecution witness testimony, make it clear that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense;