Random News and Notes 24 June
On this date in 1340, King Edward III attacked a French fleet at a place called Sluys. The smaller English fleet – about 130 vessels – took the wind gauge and defeated the 230 French ships in detail. It was an overwhelming English victory. Edward took some 190 French vessels with only two losses.
The Battle of Sluys was one of the opening battles of the Hundred Year Wars.
In the 1670s after 50 years of peace, tensions started to grow between British colonists and the Indian tribes around the Massachusetts colony. The Natives were beginning to – rightfully I suspect – grow resentful of continued English expansion. On this date in 1675, King Philip, leader of the Pokanoket band and sachem of the Wampanoag, ordered an attack on settlement of Swansea as a reprisal for the hanging of three Wampanoag for the murder of another.
I said attack in reprisal above, and it certainly was, but it was a successful attmept by Pometacomet – Philip’s tribal name – to get the English to start the killing. What unfolded was nearly 3 years (2 years, 9 months) of bloodshed along what was then the frontier. In the space of little more than a year, 12 of the region’s towns were destroyed and many more were damaged, the economy of the Plymouth and Rhode Island Colonies was ruined and their population was decimated, losing one-tenth of all men available for military service. By the time it was all over, some 5000 Indians and 2500 colonists were dead and the power of the Wampanoag was broken forever. King Philip himself would be was assassinated by a Native American in the service of the English. The English drew and quartered Philip’s body and publicly displayed his head on a stake in Plymouth. It would not be until 1700 that English colonists would occupy their pre-war borders again.
The status of Germany in the immediate post WWII era was a thorn in the side of the Soviets. They felt they should have more of a say about what happened in the American, British and French sectors of the defeated nation. In an attempt to get their way, on this date in 1948, Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, decided to blockade Berlin by road and rail. The city was deep inside the Soviet zone of occupation and most resupply to the western – both literally and figuratively – part of Berlin was cut off.
Forget the introduction of the Deutsche Mark as a casus belli for the blockade. It was a factor, but a small one. The Soviets had been toying with a blockade since the division was first worked out,
Regardless, the blockade was a strategic mistake by the Soviets. It gave the allies, particularly the US, a purpose. And a math problem. Coal has weight, so does flour and so do the thousands of other things a city needs to survive. The question was how many flights would it take to keep West Berlin supplied. For the next 11 months near-constant flights landed at the two airports in West Berlin delivering some 2,334,374 tons of materiel, nearly two-thirds of which was coal, on 278,228 flights to Berlin.
We start the news in Texas where a 3-year-old reticulated giraffe named Gracie escaped Cedar Hollow Ranch by pushing through a gate near a steep canyon. Ranch manager Vick Jones spotted her on a game camera west of town and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to her safe return. Late Monday, Jones shared good news: Gracie was located.
She has apparently been rounded up and is back home safely.
I am going to take this story as an excuse to vent about something. Ever since oil was found in Texas, and large sums of money were made by previously broke ranchers, there have been exotics imported into the state. Many of them were bred for sport hunting purposes, particularly the wide variety of African game species.
Well, a finding from the USFWS a couple of decades ago put the kibosh on the sport hunting of some of the glamour species because they might be endangered in their home range. Nevermind that they are introduced and in some cases invasive here. That prohibited list includes several species of antelope, the various oryx species like the scimitar horned and the gemsbok, and the bongo. There are more of the three oryx species in Texas than in their natural range the same can be said for Bongo (we think, bongo are very elusive but natural reproduction has been observed and with no predators. . . ) and Aoudad (Barbary Sheep) yet they cannot be hunted.
When these hunts were occurring, the ranch managers took care of the critters because they were worth money – people paid to go to Texas to shoot things that normally lived in Africa. Since the ruling, they stopped. Many of the ‘high fence’ operations just cut the fences and let them roam free. Am I saying we should restart these hunts? I dunno. What I am saying is the FWS screwed up.
CENTCOM announced they killed a senior daesh leader in Syria. The precision strike killed Ali Husayn al-‘Ulaywi on 19 June.
Whack-a-mole . . .
I didn’t see this coming. Gen. Chris Donahue, the Commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa (USAREUR-AF) and NATO’s Allied Land Command, was forced out. Donohue was the general in charge of the shambolic retreat from Kabul when the US left Afghanistan.
That photo right there should have disqualified him from any future command. He had to re-do that shot 4 fucking times. For those that don’t recognize it, that was him being the last US soldier to leave Afghanistan. I will also point out that he personally ordered US citizens off that flight so he could bring back a pickup to be displayed at the 82nd Airborne museum at Ft. Bragg.
Fuck that guy.
