UH UH, BUT THE BATTERIES ARE FINE, AND NEVER BURN UP:  The Lithium-Ion Battery ‘Energy Storage’ Facility Blaze You Hadn’t Heard About…Is Still Burning UPDATE.

SERIOUSLY, WHY DO WE CARE WHAT CRITICS SAY?  “Not woke enough for critics?”: Rotten Tomatoes disappointing score for Horizon: An American Saga has fans furious.

LET’S HOPE THE FRAUD IS NOT UNBEATABLE:  Trump’s bumper Bronx rally is a bad omen for Biden.

I ALMOST SENT THIS TO MY BROTHER, BUT HE WOULDN’T READ IT:  Defying the Odds: Trump’s Bronx Speech and Its Impact.

SOME FINAL MEMORIAL DAY THOUGHTS:

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the long weekend.

AT AMAZON, Shop the Memorial Day Sale. #CommissionEarned

METAPHOR ALERT:

Biden's PR stunt of a Gaza floating pier is reportedly sinking pic.twitter.com/5Ol4sDrSPV

— HalalFlow (@halalflow) May 27, 2024

SPACE JUNK, BETTER PUT UP MY UMBRELLA: NASA report identifies cost-effective approaches to dealing with orbital debris.

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY: Biden Warns European Allies Not to Rebuke Iran’s Nuclear Program.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Sunak’s Campaign: From Bad to Worse.

The Conservative Party has said it would bring back mandatory national service if it wins the general election.

It said 18-year-olds would have a choice of either joining the military full-time for 12 months, or volunteering one weekend every month carrying out a community service.

The party is proposing a Royal Commission to consider the details but would plan for the first teenagers to take part in September 2025.

The cost is expected to be around £2.5bn per year.

Under the plans, young people could choose a full-time placement in the armed forces or UK cyber defence, learning about logistics, cyber security, procurement or civil response operations.

Their other option would be to volunteer one weekend per month — or 25 days per year — in their community with organisations such as fire, police and the NHS.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.

In response, NRO’s Andrew Stuttaford writes at the above link:

Sunak wants to bring back the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic, does he? The spirit of an overmighty state, hysterical overreaction, and petty denunciations.

If Sunak had any sense, he would keep very, very quiet about the behavior of the Tory government during the pandemic.

It’s worth adding that national service has, for good reasons (individual liberty and all that), played a very small part in British tradition, existing for only two periods in its history. The first was 1916–19, when having entered (unwisely) into a voluntary war in 1914, it ran out of volunteers to fight it. The second time was 1939–60, understandably enough, at least, during the Second World War but decreasingly so thereafter. The last conscript was discharged in 1963, ridiculously late.

The Tory party, the party of lockdowns, net zero, penal taxation, and social-media censorship has already shown itself to be a party, like its rivals even further to the left, of the authoritarian state. Now we have this. . . .

* * * * * * * *

Sunak has, of course, now made it easier for the coming Labour government to introduce some sort of (voluntary) eco corps or the like. But then thinking ahead is not his strongest point.

In 2022 at the American Conservative Jason Garshfield wrote that then-conservative PM Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment in 2020:

When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.

This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.

Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.

As Stuttaford noted above, “If Sunak had any sense, he would keep very, very quiet about the behavior of the Tory government during the pandemic.” Since he doesn’t, in response, Tom Slater, the editor the conservative-themed Spiked Website in England is concise: Bring on the bloodbath.

UPDATE: UK Tories: Life Imitates Art. “Seriously, Tories? You’re now lifting campaign ideas from 35-year old episodes of Yes, Prime Minister? Will it really be ‘the Grand Design’ for real?”

“The Labour Party will be terrible in office, but the Tory Party deserves to lose,” Steve Hayward writes.

HOW IT STARTED:  Giffords warned heated rhetoric could have ‘consequences.’

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was shot in the head at a public event in Tucson, Ariz., Saturday, said in a March interview the heated political rhetoric surrounding the healthcare reform debate could have “consequences.”

Giffords, whose Tucson office was vandalized after she voted in favor of healthcare reform last March, discussed the matter in an appearance on MSNBC. She is currently in critical condition, but doctors are optimistic.

Some Democrats have responded to the shooting, in which five people were killed including a federal judge, by targeting inflammatory rhetoric that they said could encourage violent behavior.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) said, “America must not tolerate violence or inflammatory rhetoric that incites political violence.”

—The Hill, January 8^th, 2011.

How it’s going: Who will hang next week, Trump or the jury?

—James D. Zirin, The Hill, today.

Exit question:

Hahah, remember when Sara Palin got dragged for crosshairs on a map? https://t.co/hduNlSfoMw

— apocalypse.jpg (@apocalypse_jpg) May 27, 2024

AT THE TIME, IT WAS SORT OF EMBARRASSING, BUT NOW IT MAKES FOR A FOND MEMORY:  At the age of 11 or so, I was “Miss Poppy” of Northern Virginia.  It meant that I dressed in a white dress decorated with crepe paper poppies (actually my Confirmation dress re-tooled for Memorial Day and other patriotic holidays).  My job was to go to American Legion Posts in the area where I would recite John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.”  I could also recite “America’s Answer.”

My favorite lines from the latter are:

Fear not that ye have died for naught;
The torch ye threw to us we caught,
Ten million hands will hold it high,
And freedom’s light shall never die!
We’ve learned the lesson that ye taught
In Flanders’ fields.

I don’t think I was the world’s best (or even Northern Virginia’s best) poetry reciter at the time.  But the dress and the little green shoes and hat were cute.

HUMANS: We’re “super predators.” “Multiple studies in the Northern Hemisphere show the sound of our voices evokes more terror than other apex predators and now new research in the Southern Hemisphere reaches the same conclusion.”

Top of the food chain, baby, and don’t you forget it. If you don’t believe me, ask a saber-tooth tiger.

IF IT WERE A MEDICINE IT WOULD BE A MIRACLE DRUG: New Research Reveals That Exercise Can Rewire Brains and Erase Traumatic Memories.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS: The origin of the Remembrance Poppy.

BEEGE WELBORN: On Serving Your Country: Honor and Remembrance.

Memorial Day weekends are especially hard at our house. As a military family with someone in uniform for every conflict this great nation has faced going back to the Revolutionary War, we have a reverence for this land, what it takes to defend it, and those who do. We cherish the time spent in the uniforms representing her, and have been so damn proud to wear them.

We had also been singularly blessed through all those generations that we never lost a family member while wearing one. There have been close calls. The most spectacular is my memory of the story of my Uncle Bobby, a young Marine at the time, who fell three decks on the USS New Jersey during the chaos of a typhoon while off the coast of Korea during that conflict. Months in the hospital in traction, and they weren’t sure if he’d even walk again.

He did.

But that run of good fortune and health changed in 2016, when, as I recounted in my Memorial Day post last year, we lost SSG John Perry to a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Read the whole thing.

#GREENFAIL: Those ‘All Electric’ Fire Trucks are a Sad Joke. “The supposedly ‘all-electric’ fire engine has a diesel engine in it. The pumps that actually deliver the water to put out fires run off of the diesel engine and the truck itself can run off of diesel when the battery inevitably runs out. So the entire description of ‘all-electric’ is a farce.”

WELL, GOOD: HPV vaccine linked to sharp reduction in risk of cancers in men. It’s too bad, though, that dishonesty and malfeasance among public health people has led to an increased skepticism of vaccines in general.

OUR ACADEMIC CLASS’S SELF-MARGINALIZATION CONTINUES: Shrieking Eel: Had That Been My Commencement When Ken Burns Spoke, I’d Want My Tuition Back.

BE PREPARED: Victorinox Jetsetter Swiss Army Knife. #CommissionEarned

DESPITE ALL THE LEFTY HYSTERIA: Firearm-Related Fatalities are Third Lowest on Record.

IF PUTIN DOESN’T LIKE HIS NEIGHBORS JOINING NATO, HE SHOULD TRY NOT INVADING HIS NEIGHBORS: Sweden’s NATO Membership Unlocks the Baltic Sea for Alliance, Ends 200 Years of Neutrality.

HIS QUALIFICATION FOR OFFICE WAS THAT HE LIKES TRAINS: Buttigieg Blames Increase in Extreme Turbulence on Climate Change Because… Why Not?

DIED IN BED AS A TRIPLE ACE, 80 YEARS AFTER THE WAR: Bud Anderson, America’s last World War II ‘triple ace,’ dies at 102.

I know Memorial Day is for those who died in combat, not in bed, so here’s to all the guys who didn’t manage to achieve this kind of an end.