A COUNTEREXAMPLE CAN BE A DISPROOF.

Detroit News film critic Adam Graham pans Pressure.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower allegedly told John F. Kennedy that the reason the Allies won WWII was because "we had better meteorologists than the Germans," it's possible that Ike was cracking a joke.

But the dead serious "Pressure" takes this assertion as gospel, and crafts a stiff drama around the weather on D-Day, and the brave men — or the brave man, in this case — who predicted it.

It's the kind of premise you'd expect to see on "SNL": In a world so overindexed on WWII movies, one man attempts to craft an Oscar-worthy biopic of the war's true unsung hero — the weatherman.

But "Pressure" isn't joking, at least on purpose, and director Anthony Maras does a good job of almost making viewers forget how ridiculous "Pressure's" premise is.

"This is a true story," reads the card at the introduction of the film, letting viewers know they're in for a Serious History Lesson.

It is very much not a true story, as anyone who knows why this monument is at Slapton Sands can tell you.

A Bohemian corporal noted upon being advised of Kriegsmarine torpedo boats shooting up a landing exercise there noted that there was a beach near Quineville with similar sands.  The houses of Slapton are closer to the Channel today.

Third Coast Review's Steve Prokopy is fine with a few liberties being taken with history in service of a good story.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat myself until I pass out if I have to: docudramas are not documentaries; they don’t show us exactly what happened because they are trying to tell the best cinematic version of a true story. Admittedly, I’d prefer they don’t outright lie to the audience (I’m looking at you, Bohemian Rhapsody), but if something needs to be altered slightly or characters need to be combined for efficiency’s sake, I’m fine with that. Pressure is director and TV veteran Anthony Maras’ second feature (after Hotel Mumbai, also based on horrific true events), and I have no real issues with its account of the 72 hours leading up to the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history that effectively decided the fate of World War II.

Mr Graham disagrees, if not as dramatically as the protagonists attempting to make sense of the incoming soundings. "In a larger movie about D-Day, there's a great two-scene performance to be made about the weather guy who got it right when no one else did. Anything more is overcast, er, overkill."

HOCKEY THE WAY IT USED TO BE.

Milwaukee Admirals beat [Iowa] Wild, coldest game in AHL history.  "The teams played outdoors at the United Heroes League in Hastings, Minnesota as part of Hockey Day Minnesota."  The Wild scored the first two goals, the Admirals the next three, with everybody getting ninety seconds of extra outdoor time.

Years ago, my dad scored some points with his future father-in-law watching my mom's brother play in an outdoor game in Green Bay.  Might be that after December 1944 in Belgium, a chilly night properly bundled up and fed to watch hockey held no terrors.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS?

Islamic fundamentalism has not turned out well for Iran.  The currency has no exchange value and the hydohijab industrial complex apparently failed to recruit the right sort of rain dancers.  Now the rulers have shut down the internet to keep news from getting in and out, and that, as a byproduct, prevents any commerce from taking place.  Thus, Rick Moran argues, "Iran Has Entered a 'Doom Loop' Thanks to the Internet Shutdown."

Our President might be more respectful of the interests of local governments than his predecessors, as the naval task forces might be on the move in order that Air Force assets not overfly countries that have their own gripes with Iran but seek neither war nor internal unrest.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have informed Washington that they will not allow their airspace to be used for an attack on Iran. It hardly matters.

American military assets, including the deadliest weapons platform on Earth, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, along with several guided missile cruisers have officially entered CENTCOM's area of responsibility somewhere in the Arabian Sea.

On January 19, 2026, the Lincoln transited the Strait of Malacca westbound. By January 26, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed the strike group had officially entered the Middle East region.

I doubt whether all that firepower is for show. You don't send the Abraham Lincoln strike group from the Indo-Pacific region to the Middle East on a pleasure cruise.  These ships are going to war sometime in the next few days.

Why now? It may be that U.S. advisors have judged the Iranian regime to be teetering on the edge of collapse and that one good push will bring the whole rotten edifice down.

It's a long shot, to be sure, but it's an opportunity that may not come again anytime soon. It may be a gamble worth taking.

I remember similar talk about Operation Iraqi Freedom likely to go well (yes, the Ba'ath government was gone within a month, but what came next was neither expeditious nor amusing) and "one kick will knock the rotten structure down" might sound better in French or German, but implementing it was another matter.

AS THE WORLD TURNS.

It takes forty-eight hours for a calendar day to be ticked off all the world's calendar pages, from 12.01 am immediately west of the International Date Line to 11.59 pm immediately east of that line.  The Santa Tracker we hear about at Christmas only has to be active for twenty-four hours, as Santa is delivering those toys in the midnight hours of each time zone.

Historian Stanley Weintraub uses that concept, and borrows from Eugene O'Neill to create Long Day's Journey into War: December 7, 1941.  Yes, Book Review N^o. 9 might have better been offered yesterday, but per his logic, it was already December 8 in Tokyo when the first air strikes reached Oahu.

CHARLIE BROWN'S REAL LIFE ENCOUNTER WITH THE RED BARON.

Snoopy flies a Sopwith Camel in the comic strip.  In real life, Charlie Brown, of West Virginia, piloted B-17 The Pub, and on the cover of Adam Makos's A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II, you'll see The Pub with a Messerschmitt fighter tucked in off the starboard wing.  Mr Makos acknowledges the assistance of Larry Alexander.

Book Review N^o. 8 can tell you, dear reader, that the "combat and chivalry" part of the subtitle is accurate.  Recall, for instance, that Hermann Göring surrendered to an Army Air Force unit which treated him as a distinguished guest (as Hauptmann Göring in the first war, he was a pretty good fighter pilot) until higher command authority ordered he be remanded to Allied custody.  Fighter pilots on both sides considered themselves heirs to the knightly tradition and so conducted themselves, as pilots and as captors, and much of Higher Call relates that through the eyes of Franz Stigler, the Messerschmitt pilot whose plane is on the cover.  It's fair to use the Red Baron reference given the missions he flew during the war, particularly as the correlation of forces turned against his country.

I will not reveal here either why the Messerschmitt was flying formation (confirming a shoot-down? escorting to a safe place to land?) or whether the pilots had a chance, as many veterans of the War did, to compare notes late in life.  Why spoil a good war yarn, which this book is, by telling all of it?

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

MY PARENTS SALVAGED THE PEARL HARBOR WEATHER LOGS AND ALL I GOT WAS A T-SHIRT.

Why did those weather logs wind up in California?

In the 1970s, Oretta Kanady was working at the Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California, when she noticed an old logbook in the trash. She didn’t know what it was, but she asked her superiors if she could keep it. They said yes.

When she got home, she gave the tome to her teenage son, Michael William Bonds. He never examined it closely—but he kept it.

“I’ve had it ever since.”

He's now 65, and he recently looked at it.

The volume turned out to be a logbook from the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Now, half a century later, the National Archives has recovered the text, which includes records from before, during and after the attack on December 7, 1941.

At more than 500 pages, the logbook contains “regular, handwritten entries from March 1941—when war in Europe was raging but prior to the entry of the United States—to June 1942 at the Battle of Midway,” according to a statement from the National Archives.

Bonds didn’t recognize the logbook’s significance until last year, when he moved in with his fiancée, Tracylyn Sharrit, in Hemet, California. She was helping him unpack his books when she noticed the mysterious volume. Every page that had been filled in featured a stamp at the top, which read either “Pearl Harbor” or “Pearl Harbor, T.H.”—short for Territory of Hawaii.

The logbook recorded the barometric pressure, air temperature, water temperature, wind direction, wind force and weather every four hours, as well as the names of the ships that came and went each day. It also featured a section at the bottom of each page titled “remarks.”

Yes, there were some interesting remarks.  I wonder if someone in the Pearl Harbor office brought it to California for safekeeping.  Strictly speaking, that logbook is still Federal property, and it has been delivered to the National Archives with a whole lot less fuss than any of the last two presidents' document boxes.  "A special agent with the National Archives flew to California, and the couple handed over their discovery. As gratitude, they received two National Archives T-shirts."  The pages have been saved to pixels.

And now you know the rest of the story.

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

This is what victory looks like.

USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
Unattributed photograph retrieved from Ace of Spades.

The way the surrender came to pass continues to provoke people.  There's a provocative hypothesis nailed to Newmark's Door:  "Did the Nagasaki bomber ‘miss’ on purpose to save lives?"

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

Sometimes, an air mission can change the course of a war.

Eighty years later, the Manhattan Project remains controversial.  Town Hall columnist Arthur Schaper asks the right questions.

How do you break an enemy whose civilians threw themselves off cliffs, with their children? How do you defeat an enemy prepared to lose their lives and the lives of all their loved ones to defend the empire?

Truman could. He would stop this war. He would win.

Truman gave the order. He dropped the bomb.

It was not a necessary evil, as the self-righteous claim. It was a necessary good.

There was no better means to victory than by dropping the bomb. The sheer destruction of one nuclear device outstripped all the blood, sweat, and tears of kamikaze pilots and [banzai] jingoism.

It was still a close-run thing.  Mr Truman promised a rain of ruin.  After Little Man and Fat Boy, there were no more marbles in the fish bowl to deliver a third blow.

HEIMATSRECHT.

Today's Palestinians might be the noisiest of World War II's displaced persons, but they are neither the only such cohort, nor were they always the noisiest.  That honor once belonged to West Germany's expellees, described by Anatole Shub in An Empire Loses Hope, at page 228 as "restless scions of once-great Prussian military and landowning families, former Volksdeutsche who had been expelled from Bohemia and the Baltic coast, Silesia, and the Danube plain."

Their demonstrations provided West Germany's sophisticates with opportunities to deplorable-shame.  Here's Mr Shub at page 229.  "Expellee demonstrations resembled faded replays of the old Nazi newsreels of the 1930s. ... [In a May 1966 demonstration] most of the participants were men and women in their fifties and sixties.  They seemed to have been frozen in prewar unstylishness. ... Placards and banners were lettered in the old Gothic script."  The sophisticates anticipated this era's Daily Show, page 230.  "[D]istinguished West Germans ... pleaded tirelessly for German acceptance of Eastern realities.  They included Klaus von Bismarck, ...Countess Marion Doenhoff, ... Günter Grass ... and numerous leaders of the Evangelical Church."

But again, Empire Loses Hope is a useful source for anticipating future developments.  An un-named Bonn official is quoted at page 229, "German relations with the Slavs go back a thousand years.  Twenty years is nothing in the long view.  Who really knows what Eastern Europe will be like in 1980 or 1990.  If the Soviet Union goes up in smoke, there could be a general move eastward.  Why preclude it now?"

On the other hand, Der Spiegel publisher Rudolf Augstein suggested, see pp. 230-31 for the full quote, "Not many people here really care about reunification at all.  ... [T]he old nationalism is completely dead.  When I was a student before the war, we really worried about the Polish Corridor.  No schoolboy today pays the slightest attention to the Oder-Neisse line."

NICHTS NEUES IM WESTEN.

Somebody is having fun with imagery.  Supposed 5 June diary entry.  "Me and the lads were out kickin’ the ball around on the beach. Not much happenin’ here in Normandy — place is real chill and slow."

5 June was rainy with strong winds and high seas, and the German forecast was for more of the same the next day.  The Germans didn't control enough of the world's geography to pick up the break between storms.

Later that night, the Luftwaffe Ladies' Auxiliary got very busy.  Shortly after midnight, the hour of liberation began for Sainte-Mère-Église.  Before sunrise, Oberkommando Wehrmacht noted communications lost with Sainte-Mère-Église.

By the end of August, Paris was French again.

THE DAY ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO STOPPED RUNNING WILD.

He cautioned his prime minister, Prince Konoye, that his navy could run wild for about a year before Allied production caught up with him.  Reality had other plans, and on 4 June 1942 he lost four carriers at Midway.  From last year, a Midway research compendium, and from the year before, a tribute to the skunk works.

It was a close-run thing.  Contrast Admiral Nimitz sending Yorktown out, patched up though she was, while the Japanese kept Shokaku and Zuikaku refitting after the Coral Sea.

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

The Allies are again commemorating the end of the War in Europe.  My meditation from ten years ago is sufficiently on point that I will simply quote the bulk of it.

Some four score years ago, the survival of constitutional republics and market economies, namely the institutions most friendly to emergence and evolutionary stable interactions, was very much in doubt, and the future looked very much to belong to the totalitarian state.

Saalfeld, Germany, June 1945.  John Karlson photograph.

There was no guarantee of victory going in, no guarantee that the ending would be one conducive to the emergence of expanded freedoms.  Thus, at the end of the war, the Perpetually Aggrieved inherited a starting position for their efforts much more favorable than it could have been.  Unearned privilege?  You decide.

Imagine a social order in which a Montgomery bus boycott, a Pettus Bridge, a march in Cicero would seem to non-Aryans as if a stroll in the park compared to life under a North American version of the Nuremberg Laws.

Imagine a social order in which expanded labor force participation for women might as well be a hallucination, given official encouragement of large families and official discouragement of the single life.

Imagine same-sex dating and mating criminalized so stringently that a Stonewall Bar would seem more like a car-port than a closet.

Imagine a Middle East free of conflict, because there would be no Israel, and whatever differences Shia and Sunni have with each other are secondary to Persians being Aryan and Bedouins being Semitic.

And thus, dear reader, whatever grievances you might have with the way things are, keep in mind that there's stuff in your privilege knapsack that you might not otherwise have.

CONFRONTING GENUINE FASCISM IN MILWAUKEE.

Last week, Federal marshals arrested a Milwaukee County judge who might have interfered with Federal immigration authorities arresting an illegal alien.

Chief Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Carl Ashley said he and his colleagues are "all concerned" about the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan.

Dugan, 65, was charged April 25 with one felony and one misdemeanor linked to allegations that she tried to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom. Dugan was led out of the courthouse in handcuffs.

I write "might have interfered" because although it is common practice for state or federal law enforcement personnel to arrest people in the county courthouse, as everyone entering the courthouse is screened for weapons, thus reducing the likelihood of an arrest going sideways, most such arrests take place outside the courtroom.

THE SIMPLER, THE BETTER.

A British regimental commander of tanks, Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, repeats an old lesson.  "German tanks are failing in Ukraine for the same reasons they lost the Second World War."  It's the same lesson a sedan driver learns the first time he goes off-roading.

The leaked report from the German Defence Ministry about the shortcomings of the Leopard 2 tank in the Ukraine should come as no surprise to anybody who even has a cursory understanding of German tank history, or even western tank history in general.

It is certainly no surprise to me. I spent thousands of hours in the ancient British Chieftain tank as well as the current Challenger 2 (CR2). The uninitiated may think that we’re seeing the end of the rule of tanks after 110 years as the kings of the battlefield, but this would be a failed assumption. Nonetheless, with the new British tank – imaginatively called Challenger 3 – about to arrive, its designers must take on board the identified shortcomings of Leopard 2 or it too will fail.

The Leopard 2 is a technical marvel, with echoes of the German Tiger tank in WW2: perhaps the most dangerous tank of the war. Leopard 2 has a very complex fire control system, an outstandingly powerful MTU power pack (the engine to the “non tankies”), and an excellent 120mm smoothbore gun. However it is very susceptible to drone and “top” attack and very difficult to fix if damaged or broken down. Worse still, like the Tiger of WW2, it is very few in numbers. The Russians have lost thousands of T-72s, T-80s and T-90 tanks. Just 18 Leopard 2s have been supplied to Ukraine!

The first issue identified is how difficult it is for Ukraine soldiers to mend these tanks and keep them battle worthy. If the engine breaks down it must be taken hundreds of miles for repair in a specialist facility, whereas the old, simple engines of the Russian tanks can be easily fixed by any automotive mechanic, in situ if necessary. The first tank I commanded was a Chieftain, designed in the 1950s, which had a “London bus” engine to power it. The engine frequently stopped when the fuel injection solenoid got stuck shut.  This was simply remedied using a clothes peg to keep it open! A similar problem with a Leopard 2 or CR2 would require a new engine.

The fortunes of war might not be on the side of the resilient, but that is the way to bet.

Would you rather go to war, dear reader, with tanks that epitomized Platonic perfection and precision engineering, or would you take your chances with tanks machined to something less than precise tolerances, and where it would be wise to drop the oil pan 50 kilometers out of the works, to drain the metal shavings from the oil sump?

Those of you who are familiar with the War will recognize in the former the imposing looking German super-tanks that had an annoying habit of throwing a sprocket when the tread was digging into snow, and in the latter the Soviet T-34s that shrugged off tundra and steppe and mud all the way to the Elbe.

Leave aside the vulnerability of tanks of any kind to drone attack (or Smart Pigs?) and consider how resilience at scale pays off.

The Germans lost WW2 because they could not match the mass the Allies could generate. For instance, in the later stages of the war the Allies produced around 60,000 Sherman tanks, which eventually overwhelmed the more sophisticated and capable Tiger and Panther tanks because the Germans only had a few thousand of these. Likewise the 18 Leopard 2s and the 14 CR2s we have sent barely scratch the surface in Ukraine today. The report does state that the much more numerous, older and simpler Leopard 1s are highly effective.

Those who do not remember the past! "We must avoid the same old German tank story from WW2. We must avoid the temptation to make our tanks too complex, too easy to hit, too difficult to maintain and too few."

EIGHTY YEARS AGO.

A spotter pilot for the U.S. Army noticed that the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, Germany, was still standing.  It was not along the obvious axes of advance for the Allied armies, which might have been why the Germans had not yet destroyed it.

On this day in history, an Army task force secured that bridge before the Germans could destroy it.  Yes, it was in the wrong place relative to the axis of advance, and yet having a Rhine crossing in the wrong place was worth a lot of preparation for a crossing in the right place.

The gods of war sometimes approve of your initiative, doctrine notwithstanding.  An Army task force secured the bridge and enough of the east bank to protect the bridge and bring up bridging equipment to get several pontoon bridges across before the Ludendorff Bridge collapsed.  The Germans used all sorts of ordnance to disrupt the crossing, including floating mines downstream, redirecting a few of their scarce V-2 Urscuds at the bridge, and even a midget submarine or two.

These days the towers of the bridge are home to a peace museum, and doesn't that east end have potential as a layout design element, cross the river directly into a tunnel?

THERE OUR TANK ROARS, AMIDST THE STORM WINDS.

Eighty years ago, Allied forces were rallying to the relief of Bastogne and the liquidation of the Bulge.

To this day, tankers train whether it storms or snows, which is why we're not singing those words auf Deutsch.

Trains contributor Larry Ground recalls a move from Southern training grounds to Fort Drum.

The past months had been busy for the 24th Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga. A year earlier, the unit was regular infantry with jeeps and light trucks. Now the division worked feverishly exchanging light equipment for tanks and armored personnel carriers. Even the unit’s name was updated — 24th Mechanized Infantry Division.

The next step for the new mechanized division was a major training exercise. Fort Drum, N.Y., was selected for a January 1980 event. Located close to Lake Placid, the site for the upcoming Winter Olympics, Fort Drum would provide a different climate. There might be snow, something many of the soldiers had not experienced.

Joining Fort Stewart soldiers would be units from the 194th Armored Brigade (Separate), Fort Knox, Ky., as well as units from Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; and Scott Air Force Base, Ill. The equipment move was a logistical challenge. All of the division’s heavy equipment would need to be transported nearly 1,100 miles from Fort Stewart to Fort Drum.

Rail transportation is often best for deploying a large, mechanized infantry or armored unit. Soldiers routinely train on all aspects of loading and unloading such rail movements. Experienced noncommissioned officers and railroad personnel provide supervision and hands-on training.

A few things have changed since the war, for instance Sarge didn't say "I want eight volunteers, you, you, and ..."  Mr Ground was not subject to that call in any event.

Routinely, in the early 1980s, a detachment of soldiers traveled along to provide security and logistical support. For the rail movement between Fort Stewart and Fort Drum, eight soldiers would serve as rail guards or “supernumeraries,” the military term for personnel accompanying shipments by rail or sea. Six served as guards, one would be the cook and a sergeant was in charge of the detail. A caboose was provided by the railroad, which had room to sleep four at a time — more or less comfortably — a simple kitchen setup, a toilet, and a coal-burning stove.

The supernumeraries boarded the train at Fort Stewart and stayed with it to Fort Drum. The rail movement was tentatively scheduled to begin a week before Christmas. Transit time was estimated at three or four days, putting the eight soldiers in Fort Drum a few days before Christmas and nearly two weeks before the rest of the unit was due to arrive via Air Force transports.

In the end, the first sergeant had no trouble getting volunteers. It was a chance at an adventure, operating as a small team on an important mission. It would mean being away from family over the holidays, but that was part of military service. Being a staff officer in the division logistics office, I did not volunteer, but monitored the train’s progress from Fort Stewart.

In the same way that battle plans rarely survive their first encounter with the enemy, train movements, particularly of extra trains at Christmas, rarely survive their first hours with the dispatcher.

WHAT WILL THE EXIT CONDITIONS BE?

Last February, characters in a Tom Clancy novel were in a better place.

Early in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I asked, "Might there still be a compromise in the Tom Clancy style available?"  A year into the trench warfare, the Tom Clancy outcome still looked better than what the peaceniks were contemplating.  "In Command Authority, the Russians gained Crimea and everything east of Mariupol, with relatively little loss of life.  The territorial outcome Mr Gerson advocates is similar, only with the puppet oblasts of Lugansk and Donetsk picked over and destitute."

That post concluded, "Whether the western, more Catholic bits of Ukraine west of the Dnieper will eventually become a separate state, part of the European Union, and potentially part of a future Atlantic Alliance remains to be seen."

MESSAGE, SENT?

A Newsweek headline from two weeks ago:  "Satellite Photos Show US Reclaiming World War II Airfield for China War."

An overgrown airfield on a small island in the Pacific, once instrumental in America's role in ending World War II, is being reclaimed by the U.S. Air Force as it prepares for a possible future fight with China.

The remote island of Tinian, which is less than 40 square miles, is one of three principal islands in the Northern Mariana Islands, a string of sparsely populated islets in the Western Pacific Ocean that make up the U.S.'s westernmost frontier, along with the major military hub of Guam some 100 miles to the south.

Tinian was known for its strategic value during the war. Due to its proximity to Tokyo—less than 1,500 miles—it later became a staging base to launch bomber attacks on mainland Japan. The island is a similar distance to China and other flashpoints in Asia, with a U.S. Defense Department plan costed at nearly half a billion dollars now preparing it to help the United States deter, or defeat, the Chinese military.

If you know, you know.

IMMIGRATION IS A STRENGTH.

I keep preaching that both major parties are getting immigration policy wrong.  Maybe a video clip will reinforce the posting.

That's a conversation among World War II re-enactors at last weekend's Rails to Victory show along the rails of the Fox River Trolley.  (Pictures from a year ago here.)  Their unit is the Third Carpathian Division of the Free Polish Army.  In history, that division was with the British in Italy, but for re-enactments you find ways for all sorts of participants to get in on the action.  That included the Soviet Pacific Fleet operating on the Fox River.  Perhaps I will post an elaboration.

HOW BADLY HAVE WE SQUANDERED THE VICTORY DIVIDEND?

One reason the Germans discounted the possibility of OVERLORD landing on the Normandie beaches, that is, besides Der Führer having several intuitions that it would be there, was that there was no port of substance nearby.  Once the beaches were safe for the follow-on forces to arrive, floating caissons and derelict freighters were towed through the Channel chop to establish two MULBERRY harbors.  The Germans apparently never expected that.  Two weeks later, another Channel storm destroyed the installation at OMAHA.  The other harbor, at Arromanches, was broken up but put back into operation, and remnants of it, proving too costly to salvage or otherwise remove, remain today.

Perhaps it is fortunate that most of the soldiers and sailors who made these ports possible have passed on, in order to be spared the sight of today's idea of a portable port being poorly placed.  "Busted Gaza Pier Has All the Markings of a Joe Biden Op."

The Gaza Pier — you know, the one where the U.S. and allied countries unloaded food, so it could be stolen off trucks before reaching its intended destination — is no longer operational, and it will be out of operation for “at least over a week.” It turns out that the pier system was not intended to be used in waters with waves higher than three feet, and three-foot waves occur in that part of the Mediterranean Sea frequently. We know that Pentagon officials can read a weather and surf report. Now the question is, did someone in the administration tell them to go ahead with the operation, knowing the risks?

That's politics as usual though, take some action so as to claim you are taking some action, then, when it goes wrong, invoke your good intentions. "If the Gaza pier proposal appears half-baked, hastily assembled, and more driven by political fears than a clear-eyed assessment of the situation on the ground . . . it’s probably because that’s exactly what it is."  Thus does a saecular order lose its legitimacy, and thus does a justice-involved individual look more attractive as president precisely because he was convicted of something.  About the only thing we can do is look on with dismay, and mock The Best and The Brightest.

At the country's Populist Newspaper of Record, it's simply another handout to buy off a favored constituency.  "At publishing time, Hamas had been seen training scuba divers to retrieve large pallets of cash from coastal waters."

Our Credentialed Elite demonstrate their skill at destroying monuments on the expediency of the moment, and leaving only wreckage.