Month: April 2025
Guest Contributor -Chemist – 28APR2025 – Military Women
I have had two friends with daughters who went into the military.
(Small sample size, I know.)
Both young women were stronger than I am and may well have been physically stronger and in better health than I was at 18.
Neither woman saw combat.
Both washed out within a year of graduating basic training for “Medical” reasons.
Whatever medical issue they had was not obvious nor did it affect their ability to work post service. Both were able to carry to term and deliver healthy baby’s. They both get full VA benefits.
IMHO, for these women, military service was a scam to get benefits that will last them the rest of their lives without really earning them.
Guest Contributor -ArthurinCali – 28APR2025 – Military Women
There are many well-qualified women in the military.
Alright, now with that said, in almost 30 years of active, reserve, and now civilian DoD experience, the parable of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” is probably the best metaphor regarding women in the armed forces. Every reasonable person who has looked at the requirements and conditions sees that it is not an enhancement to try and put women into every role performed in the armed services. Not one single deployment was enhanced with having females around. In fact, it usually presented unnecessary hindrances and complications to the mission at hand. Military service has one purpose — defense of the country and its national interests. To treat the institution as a grand laboratory for social sciences has been a complete detriment overall.
Women in the Military – God Help Us
I saw two stories today about the military and both of them were associated in one way or another with women and DEI.
The first one has to do with Defense Secretary Hegseth’s orders to force women to pass the same physical fitness tests as men for combat and other physically challenging roles.
You would think this should already be in place since women claim not to be inferior to men in any way. But reality rears its ugly head and now this will essentially eliminate 99.9% of female candidates from the special forces organizations and a very large chunk of women from even basic combat roles.
This is one of the first things I see happening in the Trump administration that I can point to as a clear improvement on the status quo. Ever since Obama the military has been woke and women in command positions has been a big part of the problem. Hopefully now a lot of combat officer positions will be restricted to men and that should have a very positive effect on our combat capability. Now if there are women who are physically capable of pulling their own weight in combat circumstances, I don’t necessarily think they should be in combat roles. There are other problems with mixing women and men in close physical quarters. But at the very least eliminating women who aren’t strong enough to fight from the equation is a big plus.
The second story is a NY Times article about the investigation of the crash of the Black Hawk helicopter and the civilian airliner near Ronald Reagan airport.
The first item is that the pilot was a woman who was performing a periodic training flight to maintain her flight status. The article says she had 500 hours of flying experience at that time. But the most disturbing aspect of the article was the statement that the control tower had warned her of the collision danger and her trainer told her to change course to the left to avoid the collision and she did not. She had fifteen seconds to change course and she did not. In addition, the female pilot had some linkage to the Biden White House. I didn’t see any details about what her role was. But that immediately raised a red flag in my mind.
So, it’s very easy for me to immediately take these details and say that this disaster was caused by DEI. Is that fair? I don’t know, but as a first approximation I think it’s a reasonable starting hypothesis. If even the NY Times is throwing this woman under the bus, then who am I not to cast the second stone? And this goes hand in hand with a number of stories I’ve read of women in the military whose aircraft and naval vessel piloting have been less than adequate. When I think of Camera Girl behind the wheel of her car and all the times I’ve told her to go left and she’s gone right (or other-left as she calls it) I get the sense that DEI can be a recipe for disaster.
Well, anyway, Pete Hegseth, keep going the way you are. Put women back in the kitchen and the nursery and everyone will be that much safer and happier.
Update:
Here’s another more detailed article about the female helicopter pilot.
28APR2025 – Photo of the Day
28APR2025 – Quote of the Day
I saw bank booms … land booms, silver booms, Northern Territory booms, and they all had one thing in common—they always burst.
Andrew “Banjo” Paterson
That Was Entertainment
If you’re older than fifty then you remember when entertainment was big business. Big American corporations made our movies, published our books, recorded our music and amused us sitting around the television set every night. And they made good money doing it. Going to the movies was a national pastime and buying records of popular music was what teenagers did relentlessly. And everyone watched must-see-tv whether it was a Thursday night sit-com or the late-night show with Johnny Carson. Entertainment was bankable.
Well, that’s all over. Kids don’t buy music. They stream it for almost nothing. They stream movies too so they don’t go to theaters. And they really don’t want to pay for it either. Same for books, same for television. The only thing that still kind of pays is cable television. That’s because cable is set up so the fees are lucrative. But guess what? Millennials and zoomers have now cut the cable. Only old people pay for or watch cable. So, the change is complete.
The result is that except for truly bankable extravaganzas like Marvel superhero movies (mostly) or Taylor Swift concerts entertainment producers aren’t spending the money needed to make entertainment entertaining. Case in point, have you looked at broadcast television in the last five years? Don’t. It’s unbelievably bad. The production values are awful, the actors can’t act but worst of all the writing is putrid. It’s as if it were written by emotionally disturbed cretins. The characters are unlikable and the plots are idiotic and completely predictable.
After what passed for Oscar nominees this year, we don’t even have to bother talking about how bad Hollywood has become. Up until recently the only bright spot was that some of the cable channels and corporations like Amazon and Netflix were spending generously on good writers and good actors for some of their series. It could be debated whether these shows were as well made as Hollywood movies were in their heyday but without a doubt, they were head and shoulders above anything that was on broadcast television in the last ten years and they absolutely entertained. But now even these shows are starting to fall apart. Amazon recently spent a billion dollars on a Lord of the Rings adjacent production called “The Rings of Power” and it flopped very badly.
So, what is next for entertainment?
Well, the answer is confusing. What young people like is video games. And because of this they consume other entertainment in a way that relates to this medium. They like to read fan-fic about those games. In other words, fans of the video games write amateur stories and post them to websites so that other gamers can read them. And now these writers are even seeing their fan-fic turned into videos or even movies of these video-centric stories. These stories adhere closely to the limitations and conventions of the games. The characters are constantly referencing their health levels and skill levels as they attempt to conquer different challenges. So, the plot is very much tied to the experience of the game.
I find all of this confusing and somewhat disturbing. I don’t doubt that these video games are exciting and maybe even challenging but how much of the same thing can you stand to consume before something more original and intellectually and even emotionally stimulating will be needed? And at some point, wouldn’t it be reasonable to want a movie about real life where normal people overcome the challenges that happen in the real world? Or how about a comedy or a drama? It can’t all be video games, can it?
Well, anyway that’s what I was thinking about today. I don’t know how all this ends but it’s something that is worth thinking about.
27APR2025 – Quote of the Day
All men are born free and equal; and each man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of horse racing.
Andrew “Banjo” Paterson
27APR2025 – Photo of the Day
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) – A Movie Review
When I watched and reviewed the earlier chapters in the John Wick “saga” I noted that the number of bullets and kills had increased orders of magnitude between the first and second installments and if that trend were to be continued into a third movie it would be necessary for Mr. Wick to slaughter whole sectors of the galaxy to provide the sheer numbers necessary.
Well, I was wrong. In this third movie, John Wick is still only killing gangsters within the confines of the borough of Manhattan. Well, except for a short sojourn to Casablanca to get some help from Halle Berry in finding a mystical Arab mafioso who requires John to cut off a finger Yakuza style and rededicate himself to “The Table.” While there, he barely kills anyone at all, less than a hundred.
Okay, forget about plot. It’s entirely too stupid to even mention. Suffice it to say that John Wick is fighting and killing assassins so quickly and continuously that he must have single-handedly used up all the ammunition on the planet. He even depleted all of the armor piercing rounds on Earth.
On a personal note, Keanu Reeves is looking very old. It’s clear that all this fighting is taking a terrible toll on him. And it’s no surprise. Without a serious count I’ll say conservatively Mr. Wick was hurled through several dozen panes of glass, thrown off a four-story building, shot a half dozen times, stabbed several times, crashed his motorcycle into a building, had a finger amputated then cauterized, he was branded and punched close to a thousand times. That’s got to take it out of fellow.
Look I get it. These movies provide a video game-like environment where the audience experiences the adrenaline rush of a non-stop first-person shooter experience. And looked at from that point of view John Wick 3 gets the job done. There are knife fights, endless gun fights, fist fights, dog fights, karate fights, there are even fights on motorcycles. Some of the assassins even turn out to be fans of John and tell him during the battles that they really admire him and killing him isn’t personal, it’s just business.
And the end of the movie isn’t really an end. It looks like just the end of round three. But I’m not sure there will be a round four. The net profit from the movie was only $89 million. And as blockbusters go that’s small potatoes. So, this might be the final installment of the adventures of John Wick.
As far as recommendations, see the first John Wick movie. It’s the best one. Unless that movie strikes you as incredibly fun don’t bother with the sequels. Neither of them materially improves on the action and as far as storytelling they lack the emotional rationale of the first film.
One little interesting cinematic moment in the film is where an homage to the spaghetti western, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is included. Wick is in a gun store looking for a gun to defend himself with and he takes components from several revolvers and matches them together and listens to the gun’s action to see if the composite is smooth operating. Of course, he barely has time to use the gun before abandoning for the next scene so it is purely a staged moment in the film. But I still liked it.