Random Ponderings on a lazy Sunday

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump Organization is selling its Washington D.C. hotel to a Miami-based investment group. Sale price is $375 million. The sale is actually not of the building (owned by the federal government) but a lease with extensions that lasts nearly a century.

The hotel has been losing money. But why would Trump unload one of the flagship properties in his business, especially if he hopes to return to the Oval Office?

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The Los Angeles Times has published an editorial criticizing a proposal from LAUSD Superintendent of Schools Austin Beutner to get increased funding for arts education in the public school system. The problem with the idea is that it doesn't generate any new revenue sources. It merely takes from the already overburndened general fund of the state.

As the editorial points out, right now there are funds available in the public coffers. Or are there? Estimates of the amount of California's unfunded pension liabilities range from $93 billion (Legislative Analyst's Office) to $1 trillion (Forbes Magazine to $1.5 trillion (CA Policy Center).

I will not sign the petition for the ballot proposition and I will vote against it.

On a related note, I will be writing a separate blog about how the CA state government continues to break its promise that 34% of lottery revenues will go to education. Accorrding to the CA Lottery's annual financial report (covers the year that ended June 20, 2020), only 25.04% of the lottery revenues for that period went to education. That is $661.8 million short of 34%

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Benghazi is a location we are all familiar with, thanks to what happened there on September 11, 2012. There were ten different investiations into the attack on the U.S. Diplomatic Compound there.

However, the town of Baghuz in Syria is another story. March 18, 2019 saw a U.S. military airstrike that might have been a war crime. The New York Times reports that between 50 and 70 civilians were killed when an F-15E dropped a 2,000 bomb on them.

Dean Korsak is an Air Force attorney who is named in the story. Here is an excerpt from the article:

But the Air Force lawyer, Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, believed he had witnessed possible war crimes and repeatedly pressed his leadership and Air Force criminal investigators to act. When they did not, he alerted the Defense Department’s independent inspector general. Two years after the strike, seeing no evidence that the watchdog agency was taking action, Colonel Korsak emailed the Senate Armed Services Committee, telling its staff that he had top secret material to discuss and adding, “I’m putting myself at great risk of military retaliation for sending this.”

The U.S. Central Command says the strike was justified and that there was no way to determine with certainty that the women and children were not legitimate military targets because "...women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms." If that sounds familiar, think back to March of 1968. Army CPT Ernest Medina instructed the men of Charlie Company, that most of the women and children of the village of Son My (we know it as My Lai) would be gone by 0700 and anyone remaining were either Viet Cong or VC sympathaziers. Army 2LT William Calley led the massacre of between 347 and 504 civilians based on that faulty assumption.

Congress needs to investigate this. Obviously the in-house investigation by the U.S. Central Command was nothing more than another military coverup. To borrow from Juvenal, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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Props to Mr. T for getting the Covid-19 booster shot.

The headline reads that Australian pro golfer Su Oh won a $384,000 Lamborghini with a hole-in-one but the reality is that she won a 2-year lease of the car, not the car itself.

Did Mitch McConnell try to disinvite Donald Trump from the inauguration of Joe Biden? That's the claim in a book coming out Tuesday. Supposedly Kevin McCarthy warned the White House which led to Trump's final tweet.

Veterans Day - 2021

Today is not just for those who died while serving. That is Memorial Day.

Today is not just for those currently serving. That is Armed Forces Day.

Today is for recognizing everyone who ever served in our nation's military. Data from the U.S. Census that dates back to 2018 estimated that to be about 18 million Americans. Including my friend Roberto who is coming up on 20 years of service in the U.S. Army.

It includes TSgt Leonard Matlovich who was discharged from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 solely because he was gay. His tombstone is worth a view:

It includes then Colonel, later on Major General William A. Gorton, who was commander of the 31st Tactical Fighter Wing, the first unit I was ever assigned to after completing basic military training and then technical training. He solved a major problem by just having a sign built. You can read his story here if you are curious.

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Much is being made of the fact that the 50 or so homeless veterans who were living in tents just outside the West L.A. VA Campus on San Vicente are no longer there. They are either in permanent housing, or in a tent city inside the VA fences with more services available to them. The problem is that this is a nice start but does not address the over 3,900 veterans who remain without a home within Los Angeles. What is being done to address their needs? An op-ed in today's L.A. Times explores this question a bit. What it does not address is why the VA has not reclaimed large swaths of the land on its campus being used for UCLA's baseball stadium and by the Brentwood School.

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We are a nation whose image of military service, warfare and so on are shaped as much by motion pictures and television as they are by the media's reporting on war. For most people, mention the name General George S. Patton and this is what comes to mind:

In fact, George Patton represented the U.S. in the 1912 Olympics in the Modern Pentathlon. He finished fifth. He was twice decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross, the 2nd highest award this nation has for extraordinary heroism in combat with an enemy force.

The Air Force Cross is the equivalent of this award for Air Force and Space Force personnel. Its first recipient was Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson, the only combat fatality of the Cuban Missile Crisis. His U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba.

Not quite five years later, the movie The Dirty Dozen was released. Its stars included Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Richard Jaeckel, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker, Robert Ryan, Telly Savalas and more who served in our nation's military. Marvin criticized the film in that he felt it did not portray what really took place during a war. He was much happier with the portrayal of war in 1980's The Big Red One.

Charles Durning was nominated for a Primetime Emmy award for his guest performance in a 2004 episode of NCIS. Hw portrayed a Marine who had been awarded the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jimo during World War II. What most (including me) did not know when watching that episode was that Durning was part of the force that landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day. He earned a Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts during his military service.

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Some of our fallen never came home. September 2, 1958. An EC-130 flying a reconnaissance mission along the border between Turkey and Armenia entered Russian airspace and was shot down. The 11 intelligence gathering crewmembers aboard were never acknowledged by the Soviet Union and their bodies never returned. I am grateful to my fellow veterans. Truly they are the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.