Random News and Notes 11 May
Today in 1858 the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” becomes the 32nd state. Minnesota is the northern terminus of the Mississippi River’s traffic and the westernmost point of the inland waterway that extends through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean. The white settlement of the area began in 1820 with the establishment of Fort Snelling.
On this date in 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who organized Adolf Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question,” is captured by Mossad agents in Argentina. Following the war, Eichmann was captured by U.S. troops, but he escaped the prison camp in 1946 before having to face the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunal. Eichmann traveled under an assumed identity between Europe and the Middle East and in 1950 arrived in Argentina, which maintained lax immigration policies and was a safe haven for many Nazi war criminals. In 1957, a German prosecutor secretly informed Israel that Eichmann was living in Argentina. Agents from Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, were deployed to Argentina, and in early 1960 they finally located Eichmann. On May 31, 1962, after being found guilty of all charges against him, he was hanged near Tel Aviv. His body was subsequently cremated and his ashes thrown into the sea.
We start today’s news with a bit on the Hormuz situation. The Royal Navy has announced it is deploying HMS Dragon to the region. The UK and France are co-chairing a meeting of defense ministers from over 40 nations to discuss plans for restoring safe commercial shipping through the strait, with France’s Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier strike group also converging on the region.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister warned that deploying warships would prompt a decisive response from Iranian forces.
That response? “Deep roaming” submarines apparently. The official Iranian regime outlet Tasnim announced that the regime has deployed subs into the strait. I dunno how “deep roaming” they are, seeing as the shipping channels are only a couple of hundred feet deep, just deep enough to take a VLCC at full load. If you happen to see video of a sub “operating” in the Gulf coming assume it isn’t Iranian if it’s even real.
A Walgreens in Chicago is closing. Local pols have gotten their panties in a twist over the closing. So much so, one retard Alderman wants the chain to face criminal charges over it. What charges the company could possibly face aren’t clear.
Regardless, the store is closing and the reason just got announced. That one location lost more than $1 million.
Apparently, employees were being assaulted along with the theft.
An older, but still applicable, study is making the rounds again. A study from the Crime Prevention Research Center, using 2014 FBI data, shows the worst 2% of counties accounted for 51% of murders, even though they held 28% of the population. Patterns persisted into 2020, with top spots like Chicago’s Cook County and Los Angeles County leading, while 54% of counties had zero murders.
Critics note these areas house 30-38% of Americans but violence often stays hyper-local in specific neighborhoods.
I’ll let you decide what neighborhoods those are.
The sun came up in Utqiagvik Alaska yesterday about 0300. It will not dip below the Horizon again until August.
This Editor is in Upstate NY. We get longer days come summertime, but we top out around 15 and a half hours. Conversely, in the winter the days shorten, as short as 9 hours. In Utqiagvik, the sun sets in mid November and doesn’t rise above the horizon until late January.