HuffPo delivered news this morning which will curdle every Baby Boomer’s blood.
Sir Mick Jagger, the 70-year-old frontman for the Rolling Stones, has become a great-grandfather.
Jagger achieved the new status over the weekend when his granddaughter Assisi Jackson, 21, gave birth to a baby girl, the Daily Mail reported.
According to CBS News, the infant is the first child for Jackson and her boyfriend, 25-year-old chef Alex Key. The baby’s name has not been released.
The rock legend, who has been performing since 1962, has seven children with four women, and four grandchildren. Jade Jagger, Mick’s daughter by ex-wife Bianca Jagger, is the baby’s 42-year-old grandmother. The former model and socialite is expected to give birth to her third child in the next few weeks.
The indictment of Jim Gant, a major in the U.S. Army Special Forces until his reduction in rank and compulsory retirement as a captain in 2013, is as follows. While leading the American effort to mobilize Afghan tribes against the Taliban in the Konar valley during 2011 and 2012, he drank alcohol. He used prescription pain medication that was not, in fact, prescribed for him by a physician. He stored explosives in his room, rather than in an approved space. He kept inappropriate materials of a sexual nature in his room. He exchanged government funds, and his own personal money, with Afghans for goods and services in a series of transactions that were not approved by his chain of command. He provided the Afghan tribal militias he was training with U.S. government gasoline, again without authorization. He falsified numerous documents in support of these unapproved transactions.
Additionally—and notably—during his time living among the Konar tribes he also regularly cohabited with his now-wife, Washington Post reporter Ann Scott Tyson, who participated in operations with the tribes and was granted access to classified information pursuant to those operations. Finally, to quote from a memo by a Brig. Gen. Christopher Haas and sent to Gant in April of 2012:
During your time in command, you purposely and repeatedly endangered the lives of your Soldiers. You taught, and ordered executed, [SIC] unconventional and unsafe ‘figure-8’ immediate actions in response to enemy contact. You painted inappropriate and unauthorized symbols on Government vehicles, painted the symbol on your vehicle a different color, then challenged the enemy to try and kill you without consideration to your Service Members’ lives or well being. [SIC] You sent ‘night letters’ to the enemy, further drawing dangerous attention to yourself and subordinates. These are the same Soldiers that you have the duty to properly train, mentor, lead, and most importantly, defend.
In March 2012, when the curtain finally descended on Major Gant’s operation in the Konar, his superiors sent a U.S. Army Special Forces team to seize his camp and to arrest him and his second-in-command. Yet Gant’s soldiers—young infantrymen from a regular battalion, earlier provided to Gant instead of the seasoned special operations team that he had been promised—wept openly. The Afghan tribesmen who maintained the position jointly with the soldiers warned the newly arrived team not to handcuff Maj. Gant. Things might get ugly. Shortly after his removal, several Konar tribes sent a deputation of dozens of elders to petition the provincial governor, Fazllulah Wahidi, to ask Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the U.S. Army to allow Gant to return to the valley.
With such an extensive list of charges against him, what had Jim Gant done to be so popular with his own soldiers, and with the Afghans among whom he lived?
He had won.
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But David Axe doesn’t care about Gant’s success. The man violated chickenshit Army regulations. He drank, used drugs, and armed his girlfriend. We can’t have our wars won by men capable of breaking rules.
Tyson took a leave of absence from The Washington Post and joined Gant in Kunar in late 2010, ostensibly in order to write American Spartan. But Tyson’s experiences with the Special Forces in Kunar were more intimate than a typical media embed—something Wood fails to point out.
Gant taught Tyson to use Special Forces’ weapons, presumably including, at a minimum, assault rifles and handguns. “On missions with Gant and his team, she wore U.S. military fatigues and tucked her hair up under a ballcap,†Wood writes. “Her job in a firefight was to pass ammunition to the turret gunner.â€
I’ve embedded dozens of times with a dozen different armies—once even with Army Special Forces. My hosts never offered to train me on their weapons. In several firefights, no one ever assigned me the job of handing out ammo. I never wore military fatigues, in part because I didn’t want anyone to mistake me for a soldier.
Because I’m not one. It seems that in the company of a warrior she greatly admired—and was growing to love—Tyson forgot that she’s not a soldier, either.
The Pentagon doesn’t authorize journalists to participate in combat. When reporter Michael Yon, himself a former Green Beret, picked up a rifle and opened fire to help protect a wounded American soldier in Iraq in 2005, it whipped up a bureaucratic shitstorm inside the Pentagon—and what one news report described as “a stern reprimand from the Army†for Yon.
But Wood gives Gant a pass for more or less enlisting Tyson. “They argue in the book that her presence was a useful link to village women and helped cement ties between the Americans and the Afghans,†Wood writes.
It doesn’t occur to him that, in fact, the mere presence of an unmarried woman in a formal setting might be highly offensive to conservative Afghans.
Besides arming his girlfriend journalist, Gant broke lots of other Army rules in Kunar. He drank alcohol and took sleeping pills, painkillers and “other pharmaceuticals,†according to Wood. Gant kept classified documents in his room, in violation of specific government guidelines for securing secret information.
“Yes, I broke those rules and I never say I didn’t,†Gant told Wood. “But I mean, we’re not talking rape, murder, stealing property.†…
Most Green Berets don’t take their girlfriends, booze and drugs to war with them. They certainly don’t need lovers and gullible reporters to write elaborate defenses of their combat records.
Gant is no hero. His behavior in Afghanistan was unacceptable. And no hagiography… can redeem the man’s shameful legacy.
Gavin MacInnes says Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia are myths, and contends that “If you killed every racist in the country right now, America would be all white again.”
Long-shot candidates at the Republican primary husting for the Idaho governor’s race made for hilarious viewing Wednesday with their bizarre takes on life.
The politically incorrect leader of a biker gang, Harley Brown, claimed his fellow riders were “cop magnets, like a Playboy bunny in a mini-skirt gets hit on all the time.”
Meanwhile, second wannabe guv Walt Bayes insisted the Bible foretold nuclear accidents and urged every citizen to take potassium iodide tablets to protect their thyroid glands.
The unpredictability of what the duo, who’ve both qualified for the May 20 primary, would say saw the contest was broadcast by Idaho Public Television on a 30-second delay.
Representing the mainstream was incumbent Gov. Butch Otter and state Sen. Russ Fulche.
“I don’t like political correctness. Can I say this? It sucks! It’s bondage,” Brown, who had a cigar firmly placed into his shirt pocket the whole time, told the cameras.
“I’m going for the vote of the real people out there, not these bondage-type who don’t have a clue about picking up strangers at night and hauling them God-knows-where,” he added.
After claiming he had “a Master’s in raisin’ hell,” he told viewers his plan to seize power.
“You bind those evil spirits behind the feds with the blood of Jesus, the name of Jesus, the power of entombment of the Holy Spirit, the power of agreement, the word of God. Take air superiority, and then roll in with your tanks on the ground, like … lawsuits. Blitzkrieg!”
One of the earliest examples of human remains ever found in the Americas, an Ice Age skeleton, 12,000 to 13,000 years old, of a sixteen-year-old girl was found in 2007 in Hoyo Negro, an underwater cave in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The cave also contained skeletal remains of saber-toothed tigers, gomphotheres, two species of giant ground sloth (including one previously unknown to Science), cougars, cave bears, coyotes, bats and other small animals. The girl’s skeletal remains were DNA-tested, and her Mitochondrial DNA identified as belonging to Haplogroup D1, one of five haplogroups typical of Native Americans.
Tyler Durden passes along Simon Black, who notes: “We’re already there.”
Last week in the Land of the Free, I heard a radio campaign ad for a local political candidate while in Texas.
In the ad, he was talking about the debt and excessive government spending. And then he said something along the lines of, “We need to get this under control before America goes bankrupt.â€
‘Buddy,’ I remember thinking, ‘America isn’t going bankrupt. It already IS bankrupt.’
Just so that we don’t mince words, my dictionary defines ‘bankrupt’ as “any insolvent debtor,†i.e. a debtor whose liabilities exceeds assets.
That’s the US government, by its own admission.
As we’ve discussed before, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) publishes financial statements each year in which they list all official government assets and liabilities.
The liabilities far exceed the assets. Big time. And the hole is getting deeper each year.
At this point the government’s net worth is roughly NEGATIVE $17 trillion, about 110% of GDP. That’s textbook insolvency.
The only reason the US government is still able to service its debts is because they are borrowing money just to pay interest… and because the Federal Reserve keeps printing money to buy up US debt.
