Wow. This isn’t just flames, this is a four-alarm fire of political corruption.
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According to the NYPost:
This story is still developing. And all suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
In case you were wondering: according to the Justice Department, this is, indeed, the “largest number of federal bribery charges” issued in one day.
DEFCON 32 is not – repeat, not cancelled.
It sounds like it was a near thing, though.
According to a post on the forums by Dark Tangent, “Caesars abruptly terminated their contract with DEF CON” seven months before the convention, leaving DEFCON with no location.
The current plan seems to be to hold DEFCON at the Las Vegas Convention Center, “with workshops and training at the Sahara Hotel”. If you’re planning to go, it sounds like your best bet on a place to stay is probably a hotel on the monorail route.
There’s a pretty lively discussion, with a lot of speculation, in the Hacker News thread (where I first heard about this).
Colonel Roger H.C. Donlon (United States Army – ret.)
Col. Donlon was the first person, and first Special Forces member, to receive the Medal of Honor for action in the Vietnam War.
His Medal of Honor citation:
Rank and organization: Captain, U.S. Army. Place and date: Near Nam Dong, Republic of Vietnam, 6 July 1964. Entered service at: Fort Chaffee, Ark. Born: 30 January 1934, Saugerties, N.Y. G.O. No.: 41, 17 December 1964.
Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while defending a U.S. military installation against a fierce attack by hostile forces.
Capt. Donlon was serving as the commanding officer of the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment A-726 at Camp Nam Dong when a reinforced Viet Cong battalion suddenly launched a full-scale, predawn attack on the camp. During the violent battle that ensued, lasting 5 hours and resulting in heavy casualties on both sides, Capt. Donlon directed the defense operations in the midst of an enemy barrage of mortar shells, falling grenades, and extremely heavy gunfire. Upon the initial onslaught, he swiftly marshaled his forces and ordered the removal of the needed ammunition from a blazing building. He then dashed through a hail of small arms and exploding hand grenades to abort a breach of the main gate. En route to this position he detected an enemy demolition team of 3 in the proximity of the main gate and quickly annihilated them. Although exposed to the intense grenade attack, he then succeeded in reaching a 60mm mortar position despite sustaining a severe stomach wound as he was within 5 yards of the gun pit. When he discovered that most of the men in this gunpit were also wounded, he completely disregarded his own injury, directed their withdrawal to a location 30 meters away, and again risked his life by remaining behind and covering the movement with the utmost effectiveness. Noticing that his team sergeant was unable to evacuate the gun pit he crawled toward him and, while dragging the fallen soldier out of the gunpit, an enemy mortar exploded and inflicted a wound in Capt. Donlon’s left shoulder. Although suffering from multiple wounds, he carried the abandoned 60mm mortar weapon to a new location 30 meters away where he found 3 wounded defenders. After administering first aid and encouragement to these men, he left the weapon with them, headed toward another position, and retrieved a 57mm recoilless rifle. Then with great courage and coolness under fire, he returned to the abandoned gun pit, evacuated ammunition for the 2 weapons, and while crawling and dragging the urgently needed ammunition, received a third wound on his leg by an enemy hand grenade. Despite his critical physical condition, he again crawled 175 meters to an 81mm mortar position and directed firing operations which protected the seriously threatened east sector of the camp. He then moved to an eastern 60mm mortar position and upon determining that the vicious enemy assault had weakened, crawled back to the gun pit with the 60mm mortar, set it up for defensive operations, and turned it over to 2 defenders with minor wounds. Without hesitation, he left this sheltered position, and moved from position to position around the beleaguered perimeter while hurling hand grenades at the enemy and inspiring his men to superhuman effort. As he bravely continued to move around the perimeter, a mortar shell exploded, wounding him in the face and body. As the long awaited daylight brought defeat to the enemy forces and their retreat back to the jungle leaving behind 54 of their dead, many weapons, and grenades, Capt. Donlon immediately reorganized his defenses and administered first aid to the wounded. His dynamic leadership, fortitude, and valiant efforts inspired not only the American personnel but the friendly Vietnamese defenders as well and resulted in the successful defense of the camp. Capt. Donlon’s extraordinary heroism, at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.
The linked NYT obit provides a little more color. This was a wild battle.
He wrote two books. I think his first, Outpost of Freedom, was a pretty big seller at the time. We had a version of that in a “Reader’s Digest Condensed Book” at my house when I was a little kid, and I remember reading it pretty regularly. (That same Condensed book also had The Century of the Detective and The Yearling.) His other book was Beyond Nam Dong, about his post-war return.
David Kahn, cryptographic historian and author. (The Codebreakers.)
I read The Codebreakers (the original edition, the one with the key on the cover) when I was in middle school, and it was a big influence on me. I suspect there are a lot of other folks out there who can say the same thing. (Hattip: Bruce Schneier.)
Carl Weathers. THR. IMDB. Pretty well covered elsewhere, and I don’t have much to add.
Don Murray, actor. Other credits include “T.J. Hooker”, “Ghosts Can’t Do It”, and “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes”.
Jennell Jaquays, prominent D&D creator.
Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow-capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack-o’-lanterns.
Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.
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In the early 1980s Ms. Jaquays went to work for Coleco, and she eventually oversaw the teams that designed games for the Coleco Vision, an early home video game console; one notable project was WarGames, an adaptation of the 1983 film.
Long after leaving Coleco, when video games were vastly more sophisticated, Ms. Jaquays designed levels for the first-person shooters Quake II and III and the military strategy game Halo Wars. She also made The War Chiefs, an expansion pack that let users play as Native American cultures vying for power against European civilizations in Age of Empires III.
This is an obit that made me say “Wow.” when I read it.
Jack Jennings has died at the age of 104.
Mr. Jennings was a private in the British Army (1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment) and was serving in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942. He was one of “an estimated 85,000” soldiers captured and taken prisoner.
He and the other POWs were put to work building the Burma Railway.
He survived the searing heat of the Indochinese jungle; a daily diet of rice, watery gruel and a teaspoon of sugar; and a battery of ailments: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and renal colic. He developed a leg ulcer that required skin grafts, which were performed without anesthesia.
“At least 15 soldiers died each day of malaria and cholera,” Mr. Jennings told the British newspaper The Mirror in 2019. “I remember sitting in camp just counting the days I had left to live. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there alive.”
His memoir, Prisoner Without A Crime, is available from Amazon in the US.
This is also in the linked NYT obit, but if you don’t want to click over there to watch it, here’s the commercial Mr. Jennings did for the British National Lottery.
Two months after he came home, he married. He had at least two daughters. (“Complete information on survivors besides Mr. Jennings’ daughters was unavailable.”) The daughters believe he was the last survivor of the captured soldiers.
I’ve said before that I have a high bar for linking to ESPN. This clears that bar, especially since I think the story is kind of buried.
“How fears over CTE and football outpaced what researchers know”.
Nut graph:
Beginning of a CTE backlash? Or ESPN positioning themselves for a possible partial buyout from the NFL?
Jean Carnahan, former Senator from Missouri. As some may recall, she succeeded to the seat after her husband, Mel, died in a plane crash while campaigning.
So, it has come to this. Kansas City and San Francisco. Again.
We’re a little bit disappointed, but honestly, Detroit has nothing to be ashamed of this season. They played well, and we hope this continues next year.
In other news, it’s Baltimore, gentlemen. The football gods will not save you.
After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…
Generally, I like to give credits beyond the ones in the headline. But Mr. Coward’s other credits as an actor are “Ghost Town: The Movie” and one episode of the “Hillbilly Blood” TV series. That’s it. (He also produced “Ghost Town” and it looks like he appeared as himself in an episode of “Moonshiners”.)
The NYT ran a very nice obit for David J. Skal. (Previously.)
Jon Franklin, journalist. I’d never heard of him before today, but he had an interesting career:
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“Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” online.
David L. Mills, Internet guy. He developed the Network Time Protocol, and did a lot of other leading edge work as well.
Carl Andre, “minimalist sculptor”. I thought this was worth noting because I haven’t done anything with (regular) art recently, and because Mr. Andre was also famous for a lengthy interruption in his career.
He was aquitted of second-degree murder, but there were a lot of people in the art world who thought he’d gotten away with it and the prosecution botched the case.
No big firings still, but a few coordinators lost their jobs. I’m playing catch-up here, so please forgive the ESPN links.
Vic Fangio has been let go as defensive coordinator of the Miami Dolphins, supposedly by “mutual decision”.
Joe Barry fired as defensive coordinator of the Green Bay Packers. That’s the Green Bay Packers who made it as far as the divisional round of the playoffs.
Dr. Arno A. Penzias has passed away at the age of 90.
While this is another one of those obits for a relatively obscure figure, I feel there’s a good chance many of my readers have actually heard of Dr. Penzias.
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In 1961, Dr. Penzias joined AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., with the intention of using a radio antenna, which was being developed for satellite communications, as a radio telescope to make cosmological measurements…
In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?…
The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation…
The discovery not only helped cement the cosmos’s grand narrative; it also opened a window through which to investigate the nature of reality — all as a result of that vexing hiss first heard 60 years ago by a couple of junior physicists looking for something else.
Charles Osgood. THR. I feel like I’m giving him the short end of the stick, but there’s really nothing I can add to what others have said about him.
Gary Graham, actor. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and the 2003 “Dragnet”.
Melanie (aka Melanie Safka), who sang at Woodstock. This is another one where there’s not much I can say: pigpen51 may be more familiar with her music than I am.
Excuses, excuses.
I had fancy plans for a JMB birthday post. (And pants to match!)
I was going to post a triptych (not really, but you know what I mean) of three JMB designs, including one that I’m not sure most people associate with JMB. But the weather here the past few days has been awful: not just cold (by Austin standards) but also overcast and wet. That’s not good for taking firearm photos.
And I don’t really have a good space inside where I could set up a three-gun photo shoot. Not right now, anyway.
So some substitute links for your pleasure:
John M. Browning, American Gunmaker: An Illustrated Biography of the Man and His Guns. I can remember when this was easily available, at extremely reasonable prices, at Half-Price Books. I wonder what’s going on with those prices?
The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World. Haven’t decided if I’m going to read this or The Rifle next.
Bob Rayburn’s Colt Woodsman Home Page. Mike-SMO asked a while back for some more Colt links, so I think this is going on the firearms reference sidebar. (Also, I have another reason. Hint. Hint.) Bob Rayburn was a serious Woodsman collector (he sold off his collection a few years ago) and this seems to be one of the best Internet references on the Woodsman.