Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura, the son of Japanese immigrants who was awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor for holding off an attack to allow an American squad to withdraw during the Korean War, has died.
The Congressional Medal of Honor Society announced that Miyamura died Tuesday at his home in Phoenix. He was 97.
Born in Gallup, New Mexico, Miyamura’s parents operated a 24-hour diner near the Navajo Nation where the family interacted with the diverse population of miners and travelers who passed along Route 66.
Miyamura’s mother died when he was 11 and his father never talked about Japan, Miyamura said in later interviews. He would earn the nickname “Hershey” because a teacher couldn’t pronounce his first name.
Miyamura worked as an auto mechanic during high school. He joined the U.S. Army late in World War II after the federal government lifted restrictions on Japanese Americans serving. Miyamura was allowed to join the 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed almost entirely of “nisei” — those born in the U.S. to parents who were Japanese immigrants.
After the war, Miyamura met Terry Tsuchimori, a woman from a family who had been forced to live at the Poston internment camp in southwestern Arizona following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They married in 1948 and had three children.
Miyamura continued to serve in the Army Reserves and was called into action during the Korean War.
On the night of April 24, 1951, near Taejon-ni, Miyamura’s company came under attack by an invading Chinese force. Miyamura ordered his squad to retreat while he stayed behind and continued to fight, giving his men enough time to evacuate.
Miyamura and fellow squad leader Joseph Lawrence Annello, of Castle Rock, Colorado, were captured. Though wounded, Miyamura carried the injured Annello for miles until Chinese soldiers ordered him at gunpoint to leave Annello by the side of a road. Miyamura refused the orders until Annello convinced him to put him down.
Annello was later picked up by another Chinese unit and taken to a POW camp, from which he escaped.
Miyamura was held as a prisoner for two years and four months.
Upon his release, he was presented the Medal of Honor by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It had been awarded in secret while he was still a prisoner of war.
Ordinary Chinese have gotten so fed up with the endless Flu Manchu lockdowns that they’ve started mass protests in multiple cities, even going so far as to demand the CCP and Xi Jinping step down.
Some commenters have even suggested that a revolution is the offing. I’ve seen too many hopeful shoots of Democracy crushed in not only China, but also Iran, Russia, Venezuela, etc. to have much optimism on this front. It would be nice to be proved wrong.
So how are Chinese communist authorities fighting the movement? Would you believe with pornbots?
As Chinese citizens take to the streets to protest the county’s “Zero Covid” policies and President Xi Jinping’s lockdowns, searches for names of cities and hashtags regarding the protests on Twitter have been filled with sexually explicit posts and ads for escorts to reportedly block out news of the massive protests.
Searches for the names of major Chinese cities have resulted in a massive spike in content for porn, escorts, and gambling, “drowning out legitimate search results,” wrote Twitter user Air-Moving Device. The account shared a chart showing a massive spike in the number of accounts posting such content on November 28. “Data analysis in this thread suggests that there has been a significantuptick in these spam tweets.”
For example, searching for the Chinese characters for Shanghai (上海) brings up the following on Twitter:
In my previous post on crime statistics, several commenters (here and over on Instapundit) noted that Louis Rossmann had also put up a video covering the final straw that caused him to decide to leave New York: an audit he was subjected to after making a video discussing how incompetent New York taxing authorities were. I had seen it, but it was a bit long and I already had the crime statistics video cued up. Here it is by way of prologue for the next video.
The upshot is that, after having millions in fines and the possible destruction of his business dangling over his head for over a year thanks to New York authorities, the audit found that Rossman’s reporting had a 0.11% error rate.
If you thought that was the end of it, you underestimate the penny-ante fury of petty bureaucrats against those who would dare to criticize them. New York has launched a spite audit of Rossmann on his way out of the state:
Yet another excellent reason for business owners to leave New York as soon as possible…
Much of China’s last two decades of apparent prosperity seems to be an illusion designed to fool both its own people and outside investors. But the Potemkin village of Huaxi takes China’s illusory prosperity to the next level.
“Huaxi in east China, is a mysterious socialist town that once believed that the residents were entitled to extraordinary amenities, including free healthcare, education, luxurious homes, cars, and at least $250,000 in their bank accounts. The so-called richest village in China is now running into debt with villagers waiting in the rain to claim their money back from Huaxi.”
Potemkin prosperity is a poor substitute for an actual productive economy.
Some leftists have asserted, despite all evidence, that crime rates in blue states are no higher than in red states. One for this illusion is that Soros-backed DAs game the statistics. Another is that in many deep blue cities, residents simply no longer report crime, because they know police won’t investigate the case or pursue suspects, and that even if suspects are apprehended, those same Soros-backed DAs will simply let them go without bail. Another is that, even if citizens try to make a complaint, the police will simply refuse to take it, believing it to be a waste of their time.
Here New York City-to-Austin transplant Louis Rossmann talks about the decay of the Big Apple from it’s Rudy Giuliani broken windows policing heyday to its current state of disorder, and why you can’t trust the statistics.
At first, I was not at all enthused about the Air Force’s new Sky Warden platform, a step back to a single-seat, propeller-driven combat aircraft not used since the Douglas A-1 Skyraider was retired in 1973. Some background:
U.S. Special Operations Command on Monday announced it has selected the AT-802U Sky Warden, made by L3Harris Technologies and Air Tractor, for its Armed Overwatch program.
The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract will be worth up to $3 billion, L3Harris said in a release Monday. The initial program contract award is for $170 million.
Air Tractor is an aircraft manufacturer from Olney, Texas, that typically makes firefighting aircraft and agricultural planes such as crop dusters.
Initial production of the Sky Warden will take place at Air Tractor’s facility in Olney. L3Harris will then modify those planes into the Armed Overwatch mission configuration at its Tulsa, Oklahoma modification center, beginning in 2023. L3Harris said work will also take place at its other sites in Greenville, Rockwall and Waco, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee.
Air Force Special Operations Command’s Armed Overwatch program aims to build a fleet of up to 75 flexible, fixed-wing aircraft suitable for deployment to austere locations, with little logistical tail needed to keep them operating.
SOCOM is planning for the single-engine Sky Warden, as AFSOC’s Armed Overwatch plane, to be able to provide close air support, precision strike and armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for counterterrorism operations and irregular warfare.
When I heard that the Air Force was considering going back to a prop plane for a ground attack aircraft, I thought that: A.) This was a sign of their continuing disdain for the A-10, and B.) This was a role better suited for drones that manned aircraft, and thus the Air Force wanted it only to keep their institutional budget up, since anyone can fly a drone.
However, if it’s specifically geared toward supporting special forces operations, then the move makes a lot more sense. In that case, you need the hyper-loiter capabilities, and larger drones can be of limited use if you’re out of line-of-radio-control (say, in mountainous terrain) and you don’t have them set up for satellite relay.
Here’s a YouTuber who’s quite enthusiastic about it:
“That is an up-armored crop duster with rocket launchers on it. It looks like somebody maxed out the starter item in a video game.”
“It’s got bulletproof windows, a heavily armored cabin engine compartment, self-healing fuel lines [and] reinforced landing gear allowing you to land virtually anywhere. And it absolutely packed with ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] equipment, [basically] making this a spy plane.”
“The standard payload is currently set to be 14 APK WS laser-guided Hydra rockets.”
“It’s basically an acoustic version of an F-22.”
It can loiter about 6 hours, as opposed to 1.5 hours for the A-10.
It’s also cheaper: “For every hour the A10 is in the air, there’s $20,000 in maintenance to be done. Compare that to the Sky Warden, which is less than $1,000 per flight.”
“Nobody wants to be the guy getting murked by a plane with a propeller in 2022. If you wake up dead, and you got to explain to all your buddies in the afterlife you got taken out by an A-10 Warthog, that’s respectable. You tell them you got taken out by a crop duster, they’re gonna talk shit for the rest of Eternity. ‘Hey guys, you hear that Groot over here got taken out by the fucking Wright Brothers.'”
The Pentagon is spending $3 million for the program, which is a lot of cheddar by normal people standards, but nothing by Pentagon standards. Being the biggest and baddest on the bloc means you can buy niche role weapons like this.
Let me start out by explaining how cryptocurrency works: You exchange your money for digital strings of numbers based on math you don’t understand, for one of the following reasons:
A. You believe those digital strings of numbers will be worth more money at some point in the future.
B. You want to buy drugs online in a theoretically untraceable manner (said theoretical untraceability being a key property of the math you don’t understand).
C. You want to place your money beyond the reach of your national government.
There are exceptions to the above (say, you’re mining your own cryptocurrency, or you know enough math to understand exactly the mathematical properties of how blockchain-based cryptocurrency works), but I’m going to guess that one of the three above use cases apply to 95% people using cryptocurrency.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to C, and even understand how A might be tempting (hey, crypto has dropped so much I might buy a couple thousand worth of Dogecoin, just for the hell of it, as a pure speculation play), but cryptocurrencies as a whole are not a proven store of worth on par with, say, a bar of gold, a share Apple stock, or a
Is cryptocurrency money? Sort of.
Cryptocurrency offers something that sometimes acts like money, offers anonymity like money, and offers an alternative to government-backed fiat currencies. Instead of being backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government, cryptocurrency is backed by the full faith of millions of technologically savvy individuals who believe the math is sound.
The math may indeed be sound, but that didn’t save it from the loss of investor confidence of the Crypto Winter we’re now experiencing. And that winter is absolutely slamming the business models of people who sought to make crypto more like other forms of money.
Enter Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, whose crypto empire just collapsed.
Amid all the jubilation and gloating by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and pals over the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the midterms comes a disturbing story that may explain something about how they won such a curious election.
Biden’s second-biggest donor, cryptocurrency billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, a k a SBF, saw his business file for bankruptcy days after the election, but not before pumping $40 million into the Democratic Party to spend on “get-out-the-vote” and other shadowy ballot-harvesting mechanics for the midterms.
The shambolic 30-year-old whiz kid, once said to have been worth $16 billion, had spent $10 million helping get Biden elected in 2020.
SBF’s mother, Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, also is co-founder of left-wing political action committee Mind The Gap, which has raised a reported $140 million to help Democrats win elections through the same “get-out-the-vote” grift.
Tree. Acorn. Distances.
A more unlikely billionaire you could not find — and of course his money was built on thin air. A math genius with poor social skills, SBF reportedly lived in a “polycule” — a polyamorous relationship with multiple people — in a luxury penthouse with about 10 co-workers in the tax haven of the Bahamas, where his collapsed crypto exchange FTX was headquartered.
Otherwise, he was sleeping on beanbags in his office, eating vegan fries and, according to his own Twitter feed, popping amphetamines and sleeping pills to regulate his chaotic sleeping habits.
Just the sort of person you want to entrust billions in currency to!
Now Reuters is reporting that between $1 billion and $2 billion of customer funds have vanished from FTX, conveniently after the Democrats safely spent his money.
At last report, SBF and his mysterious co-founder, Gary Wang, were being held “under supervision” by Bahamian authorities after reportedly planning to flee to Dubai, according to fintech publication Cointelegraph.
It is a stunning fall to earth. The financial media and big investors have feted the young billionaire as a saint who shunned earthly pleasures like Lamborghinis and Rolexes, but lived only to give away all his money and make the world a better place.
He was the most famous millennial adherent of a cult known as “Effective Altruism,” which originated at Oxford University, found fertile ground in Silicon Valley — and now has gone down in flames along with him.
“Indulgences! Buy your Social Justice Indulgences here!”
EA is a disguised form of socialism, because all the “good” that is done just happens to match up perfectly with the left’s obsessions, whether climate change, social justice, equity, banning meat or his favorite, “pandemic preparedness.”
In a Nas Daily online video, an awkward Bankman-Fried was featured this year as a role model of altruism for young people: “Sam is not a traditional billionaire because he believes in the concept of ‘earn to give’ … Next decade he will probably give away more than $10 million … He wants to get rich in order to impact the world and change it.”
Some detail snipped.
The sinister neo-socialists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) loved SBF so much, they made FTX a “corporate partner” — but that page on the WEF website has vanished in the last 48 hours, leaving an error message.
Venture capital firm Sequoia was a big backer, investing over $200 million in SBF, a lot of which he then invested back in Sequoia, whose chairman and managing partner Michael Moritz is a big donor to the Dems as well as to anti-Trump hate group the Lincoln Project, and reportedly is a neighbor of Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco.
Right after Kherson city was liberated and spans on the Antonivsky and Nova Kakhkovka bridges blown, a whole lot of commenters went “Well, Ukraine obviously isn’t going to try to cross the Dnipro there, it’s too wide.”
The Kinburn Spit is a narrow finger of sand and scrub, barely three miles long, that juts from the wider Kinburn Peninsula into the Black Sea at the mouth of the Dnipro River south of Kherson. It and the adjacent peninsula also are the last parts of Ukraine’s Mykolaiv Oblast that remain under Russian occupation.
Don’t expect that to last. The Kremlin on Wednesday ordered its battered forces on the right bank of the Dnipro to retreat to the river’s opposite bank.
The order came six months after Ukrainian brigades, re-armed with European howitzers and American rocket-launchers, began bombarding Russian supply lines in the south—and two months after those same brigades launched a counteroffensive aimed at liberating Mykolaiv and Kherson Oblasts.
The Ukrainians have the Kinburn Spit in their sights. They’ve got the troops, the equipment … and a plan.
Russian troops seized the Kinburn Spit in mid-June as Russian advances in the south—having already overwhelmed Kherson city—ran into stiff resistance a few miles south of Mykolaiv city. Capturing the spit would turn out to be one of the Russian army’s last victories in the south. The four-month Ukrainian counterlogistics campaign that preceded Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive already was underway.
Kinburn matters. Russian control of the sandy strip “will allow them to exert further control of the Black Sea coast,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. explained in June. For the Ukrainians, Kinburn is a back door—a way to get forces onto the left bank of the Dnipro without crossing the river, likely while under fire.
As far back as April, U.K. intelligence agents were advising their government to support Ukrainian forces in any future attempt to “conduct beach reconnaissance” on the Kinburn Spit. The recon could “Identify good landing locations for a larger assault force for a future counterattack,” the agents explained in a presentation that later leaked to the press.
It’s possible Ukrainian special operations forces riding in rigid-hull inflatable boats began reconnoitering the spit as early as September. In October, video circulated online reportedly depicting the Ukrainian navy’s last remaining big ship, the 240-foot amphibious vessel Yuri Olefirenko, apparently firing rockets at Russian forces on or near the spit.
The Ukrainian military’s southern command on Saturday announced its intention to liberate Kinburn. Within a day, there were videos online possibly depicting Ukrainian commandos riding toward the spit in their small boats.
Here’s a video of Ukrainian forces doing just that:
Looks more like a commando raid or a reconnaissance in force. And here’s a video analyzing Russia defensive position on the Spit:
There are unconfirmed reports of other river crossing zones. I’d take those with several grains of salt. But it seems possible. Indeed, there are reports confirming that Russia has indeed bugged out from towns in Kherson south of the Dnipro, like this video of apparently abandoned posts in Oleshky, directly south of the Antonovsky Bridge:
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has evidently confirmed Russia’s pullout from the banks of the Dnipro as well:
Russia is preparing defensive positions in Crimea:
Three areas they’ve prepared defensive lines are on the isthmus just south of Perekop, just south of the Chongar Strait, and even on the Arabat Spit, that tiny bit we talked about having a tiny dirt road here. Says Suchomimus: “It’s a bit of preparedness and foresight we haven’t seen from them so far.”
Peter Zeihan thinks that Crimea is so hard to supply that Russia would be better off abandoning it:
I suspect Putin would rather die that give up Crimea voluntarily.
Pooty Poot certainly knows how to make friends and influence people…
Update: Current thinking seems to be that the Polish missile strike was a Ukrainian ground to air missile that went astray trying to intercept a Russian missile.
