🏛️ Apologetics Fact

Paleontologists are performing more research at the longest dinosaur trackway in the world, located in North Oxfordshire, England. The over 700-foot continuous path of footprints features numerous prints which pass through several layers of rock. This contradicts the assumption that the layers of rock were laid down over eons. Like many other polystrate fossils, these footprints suggest the layers were laid down rapidly, such as by a catastrophic global flood.

🗣️ Quote

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse.
A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." — John Stuart Mill

🏅 Person: John Chapman (1965-2002)

The first airman to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam war, John Chapman served as a combat controller with the Air Force's elite 24th Special Tactics Squadron. While attempting the rescue of a lost Navy SEAL on a mountaintop in Afghanistan, Chapman singlehandedly charged and cleared an Al-Qaeda bunker when he was wounded by enemy fire. After being left behind by the SEAL team he was attached to, Chapman continued to fight on, protecting both the SEALs and the helicopters of other rescue forces that were vulnerable to enemy fire. After more than an hour of solo close quarters combat in the middle of an enemy stronghold, some of it recorded on drone footage, Chapman died of his wounds. Unfortunately his heroism was not recognized with the Medal of Honor until 2018, due to significant pushback from the Naval Special Warfare community which did not want to admit that Chapman had been left behind.

📕 Book: Unrestricted Warfare

Locus Lectorum's latest group read, here are our thoughts on the PLA's most famous book on modern military theory.
• Caleb: 6/10 -- Completely unoriginal from a military strategy perspective; however its core concept of "unlimited means to achieve limited ends" is an insightful encapsulation of the Machiavellian disregard for ethics that pervades Chinese military philosophy.
• Justin: 6/10 -- Regardless of the book's title, the authors offer ideas of what future warfare could be and an analysis of the U.S. military. Though their concepts are somewhat interesting, they could have achieved the same result in 100 fewer pages. Only in the last few pages do they address "unrestricted warfare," but their conclusions are rather obvious.
• Josiah: 5/10 -- Despite its reputation as China's secret military plan to destroy the West, this book is largely unoriginal analysis and restatement of Western military doctrines, though there is value in understanding the comparative lack of morality with which China seems to view total war on civilian populations.
• Lane: 5/10 -- Two Chinese randos give a terrible look at military strategy, but a good look at how integrated the CCP views pushing their ideology. They thought they were Sun Tzu, but mostly yapped like a Shih Tzu.
• Zack: 5/10 -- While the final concept of "unrestricted warfare" was interesting, there were about 150 too many pages of banal, inconsistent and sometimes even laughable "reasoning" to get there, with the biggest lesson being that the Chinese military takes no consideration for wartime ethics and thinks the rest of the world is unintelligent for not recognizing total war on civilians as the future of military action.
• Isaac: 2/10 -- "When setting objectives, give full consideration to the feasibility of accomplishing them." is a real quote from this book, and sums it up tremendously. Painfully obvious, extremely boring, and utterly useless to anyone with an IQ over room temperature.