History Friday – The Angel of Goliad

A project for the Tiny Publishing Bidness this week reminded me again of a woman and incident in Texas history; a woman about whom very little is actually known, but has a full-length statue, a monument to her on the grounds of the old citadel of La Bahia, near Goliad, Texas. Her given name was Francisca or maybe Francita, but what her birth surname was is not known. Anything about her background, family and education is unknown, save that they were supposed to have been good. It is known that she was orphaned as a small child, raised by respectable connections and eventually became the common-law wife and companion of one Captain Telesforo Alavez, who already had legally-wed spouse. There are no contemporary images of her, and no interviews with newspaper writers or historians later in her long life. Her only mark and image remain in the memories and memoirs of the men whose lives she saved – an image of a brave and fiercely moral woman, unafraid to protest the evil of cruelty and murder. Thereby, as the saying goes, hangs a tale.

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“Israel’s strategic game of survival”

Caroline Glick:

(March 15, 2024 / JNS)
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s obscene call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ouster from power on the Senate floor on Thursday was the latest sign that Hamas’s strategy is working. On the “Caroline Glick Show” this week, U.S. Military Academy professor Col. John Spencer, who chairs West Point’s Urban Warfare Studies Program, explained that the terrorist organization’s goal for victory is a concerted political-military strategy.
 
Hamas, he said, knew that Israeli Defense Forces would respond with force to its Oct. 7 assault in southern Israel. “They wanted Israel’s counterattack, and then they wanted to hold in the tunnels and use the hostages just to buy time for the international community—namely, the United States—to stop the IDF in their operations.”
 
“Their only goal is to survive. … It’s all about time. They want to survive Israel’s attack against them, which gives them immense political power. If they survive in any way, they have strategically won the war,” said Spencer…

Yon Tanpèt Pafè

In the wall mural of global incompetence that is our Crisis Era, Haiti has become the most lurid corner, a hallucinatory labyrinth worthy of Hieronymus Bosch; not so much the canary in the mine as a collapsed side tunnel whose maimed and trapped victims are within earshot and line-of-sight of First World institutional leaders already fumbling with a dozen groundwater leaks and toxic gas buildups in the main shafts.

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The Russo-Ukrainian War’s Electronic Warfare Front

I did a direct message interview with Forbes Magazine journalist David Axe the first week of November 2023 about the state of the “Wizard War,” that is electronic warfare, between Ukraine and Russia.  I’ve cleaned it up for mis-spellings, removed extraneous comments, adding links and photos for clarity and I am presenting it below:

 

1. The Russians were famous for their battlefield EW prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. How do you think this EW complex stacked up against other countries’ own EW systems?

Russian EW kit has ranged from good to adequate to poor in terms of individual performance compared to Western standards.

The biggest gap seems to be in the latest VKS (Russian Air Force) Khibiny M Electronic Warfare Self Protection Pod (EWSP), which seems to lack the latest digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) technology. [In 2017 the Russians claimed a Su-24M FENCER carrying the new Khibiny M EWSP system had disabled the SPY-1 Aegis weapon system on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. See the picture below] DFRM is needed to survive very long range air to air missile combat engagements and for delivering anti-radar Kh-31/AS-17 KRYPTON missiles, like the US HARM, against ground radars.

KREB "Khibiny-M" Khibiny-M electronic warfare pod
KREB “Khibiny-M” Khibiny-M electronic warfare pod

There have been X (formerly Twitter) social media videos of VKS jets with pairs of Kh-31 and no EWSP pods. Which meant the jets were using the Kh-31 missile seekers to hunt Ukrainian radars. Shooting both Kh-31 missiles left the jet defenseless!

Where the Russians were outstanding in Feb. 2022 was in terms of the shear numbers of jammers they had with both the force structure and doctrine to operate them. Russia is still a big believer in “Quantity has a quality all its own.

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Rage

So a month and a bit after the Oct. 7th pogrom in Israel, the streets of American and European cities, and university/college campuses are filled with rage, and a disgusting display of Jew-hate. It’s as if none of them ever read Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” or had the slightest clue about what happens when the survivors of a genocide have the chance to pay back the perpetrators of mass murder – the wholesale murder of kin, friends, and coreligionists – with appropriate coin. But mostly … rage. By coincidence, the hand-scribbled ravings of the Covenant School transsexual murderer were leaked to a media outlet – it looks like some local police officers are believed to have been the conduit for the leakage. Because what comes clear about the girl who wanted to be a boy was the pure, white-hot insane and murderous rage, which somehow became focused for whatever reason on the kids, kids who were of a privileged enough background that their parents could send them to a religious-sponsored private school. I wonder if the rage grew out of frustration. The kids had something that Audrey Hale felt that she lacked – a secure sense of self in the world, comfort within their own skin, innocence and trust, parental approval – whatever. They had all that or some other quality – and she didn’t and it wasn’t fair – and so she was consumed with rage, a rage which could only be assuaged by lashing out.

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