America enters World War I on April 06, 1917

America enters World War I Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally enters World War I.

When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America’s closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany over the latter’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American vessel. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake.

On May 7, the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner was torpedoed without warning just off the coast of Ireland. Of the 1,959 passengers, 1,198 were killed, including 128 Americans. The German government maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, but the U.S. demanded reparations and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. In August, Germany pledged to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed vessels, but in November sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.

In 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced the resumption of unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and just hours after that the American liner Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat. On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war. In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2 President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. Four days later, his request was granted.

On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into the conflict marked a major turning point in the war and helped the Allies to victory. When the war finally ended, on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives.

History Channel / Wikipedia / Britannica Encyclopedia / ARMY.mil / The Atlantic / The National WW Museum and Memorial.org / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.org World War I (1914 - 1918) (YouTube)

Understanding Military Terminology - Military standard requisitioning and issue procedure

(DOD) A Federal civilian employee providing full-time support to a National Guard, Reserve, or Active Component organization for administration, training, and maintenance of the Selected Reserve. Also called MILTECH.

Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCSM 3150.13) Joint Reporting. Structure - Personnel Manual

The Old Salt’s Corner

Air Wings

As mentioned earlier, the carrier air wing forms the primary offensive capability of the deployed carrier battlegroup. The air wing is a balanced force that performs a multitude of missions for the battlegroup commander.

These include fleet air defense, attack and strike missions, early airborne warning, electronic warfare, SUW, USW, AW, and day-to-day logistics. The air wing is a self-contained unit with its own commanding officer and administrative support (air wing organization will be discussed in Module 6).

Listed below is a typical carrier air wing (CVW). Note that it contains both fixed and variable wing aircraft of different class and capability. Actual CVW compositions may vary.

Typical Carrier Air Wing (CVW):

AC Type   AC Name   Mission   Squadrons   Planes per Squadron

F/A-18   Hornet   AW/Strike   3   10-12 planes

F-14   Tomcat   Air Superiority   2   10-14 planes

E-2C   Hawkeye   Surveillance   1   4 planes

S-3A/B   Viking   USW/Attack/EW   1 (detachment)   8 planes

ES-3B   Viking   EW Surveillance   1   2 planes

EA-6B   Prowler   EW   1   4 planes

SH-60    Sea Hawk   USW/OTH/SAR   1   6 helicopters

C-2   Cod   Cargo/Transport   1 (detachment)   2 planes

“I’m Just Sayin”

“Our bodies are our gardens

to which our wills

are gardeners.”

~ William Shakespeare

“Thought for the Day”

“Progress is impossible without change,

and those who cannot change their minds

cannot change anything.”

~ George Bernard Shaw

“What I Have Learned”

“A real leader faces the music,

even when he doesn't like the tune.”

~ Anonymous

Bizarre News (we couldn’t make up stuff this good – real news story)

Yelling ‘Dilly Dilly’ Is Banned at the Masters, and Bud Light Is Royally Offended

The brand will send 1,000 shirts with the catchphrase to Augusta

It’s the advertising catchphrase heard ’round the world, but it won’t be heard at Augusta National Golf Club.

“Dilly Dilly” has reportedly been banned at the PGA’s 2018 Masters Tournament, according to British golf publication Bunkered, whose reporter got wind of a list of phrases that will get spectators ejected immediately from the tournament.

Most fans of advertising, beer, Super Bowl battlefields and pits of misery, however, are likely familiar with the phrase, which Wieden + Kennedy New York introduced in 2017. It rapidly gained traction as a celebratory phrase worth yelling at almost any social event, and it ended up being the centerpiece of a multi-part medieval ad series that culminated in the brand’s 2018 Super Bowl spot.

Now Bud Light, much like its campaign’s charmingly indifferent monarch, isn’t backing down from a fight.

The brand has fired back at the (not officially PGA-confirmed) reports by tweeting out a response from its fictional king, who is apparently named King John Barley IV:

The tweet’s proclamation reads:

“Your king hath received word that the guards of the Green Jacket plan to escort any patron who dare utter Dilly Dilly off yon premises. Except for myself, I am against tyranny in all forms. So I have instructed my royal tailors to make 1,000 Dilly Dilly shirts that shall be delivered to Georgia in time for the festivities.”

“For if thou cannot say Dilly Dilly, thou can still wear Dilly Dilly. Yours in friendship and beer, King John Barley IV.”

AD Week (04/03/2018)

Mr. Answer Man Please Tell Us: Is There Really Such Thing As 'Muscle Memory'?

If you’ve spent any amount of time lifting weights, taken a break for a bit, and then started back up again, you probably noticed that you seemed to regain strength and size much quicker than the first time around.

Well, this isn’t your mind playing tricks on you–the acceleration in progress is a scientifically verified phenomenon often referred to as “muscle memory”. Neurological mechanisms can explain the rapid regain of strength, but not muscle size.

Do muscle fibers have some sort of “memory” of their previous, more conditioned states? Or is something else responsible for these effects?

Muscles Cells Are Specially Equipped to Grow

The answer to the muscle memory enigma begins with an interesting fact about muscle cells themselves: they are quite large and one of the very few multinuclear cells in our bodies. That is, they don’t contain just one nucleus but many.

As you overload your muscles with resistance training, new nuclei are added to the muscle cells, which then allows them to grow larger in size. In fact, the number of nuclei within the muscle fibers is one of the most important conditions that regulates muscle size.

If resistance training causes the body to add nuclei to the muscle fibers, which then allows them to grow larger, what happens to our muscles when we stop training for extended periods of time?

The Physiology of “Muscle Memory”

It was long believed that, after a having stopped training a muscle for a certain amount of time (“detraining,” as it’s known scientifically), the new muscle nuclei acquired during the training period were lost to apoptosis.

It turns out that while detraining clearly results in smaller, weaker muscles, the new nuclei added during the training period are retained for at least 3 months of inactivity. In fact, there’s evidence that these new nuclei are never lost, meaning that resistance training induces permanent physiological changes in muscle fibers.

1. Muscles are subjected to overload and new nuclei are acquired for the first time. Through further training and proper diet, these nuclei synthesize new muscle proteins and thus, the muscle fibers grow larger.

2. If detraining continues for long enough, however, protein degradation rates exceed protein synthesis rates and the muscles shrink in size…but the nuclei aren’t lost.

3. At some later time, when training is resumed, the muscles rapidly grow in size because the step of adding nuclei is “skipped”–they’re already there, ready to synthesize muscle proteins again, rapidly increasing muscle size.

“Muscle Memory” is Our Best Friend

In fact, scientists believe that “filling up” our muscles with as many nuclei as we can while we’re young can greatly benefit us as we age because

a) building muscle gets harder in our later years and

b) persistent muscle loss is one of the most serious health risks associated with aging.

Mens Health • Muscle for Life • Psychology Today • Quora • Wikipedia • Womens Health • Muscle Memory (YouTube)

NAVSPEAK aka U.S. Navy Slang

Scrambled Eggs: Gold embroidered decoration on a Commander's/Captain's cover. Admirals have Double Eggs. The similar silver clouds and lightning bolts addition to an Air Force Major's/Colonel's hat is called Farts and Darts.

Screw: Propeller.

Screwing the Pooch: Making a huge mistake. “You really screwed the pooch this time.”

Just for you MARINE

UA: Unauthorized Absence, the naval version of the term AWOL.

UCMJ: Uniform Code of Military Justice (Public Law 506, 81st Congress) 1951, the system of military law, both judicial and non-judicial.

UD: Unit Diary, the computerized system that maintains all administrative records for a unit. Also, Uniform of the Day (or UDs) – prescribed uniform for the day; more generally associated with “Charlies”.

Naval Aviation Squadron Nicknames

VFA-86 - “Sidewinders”
Naval Air Station Lemoore, Kings / Fresno counties, near Lemoore, California - Established February 1, 1951

Where Did That Saying Come From?

“Cooking the books”  Meaning: The deliberate distorting of a firm's financial accounts, often with the aim of avoiding the payment of tax.

Origin: Cooking seems a rather odd choice of word to convey fraud. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a dozen or so meanings of the verb 'to cook', ranging from 'prepare opium for use' to 'make the call of a cuckoo' and, of course, 'prepare food by the action of heat'. Tucked away at the bottom there is also the meaning 'present in a surreptitiously altered form' and it is that meaning of cook that was used in the coinage of the phrase 'cook the books'. The allusion appears to be the changing of one thing into another, as in the conversion of food ingredients into meals.

This usage dates back to Stuart and possibly Tudor England and was used by the Earl of Strafford in his Letters and dispatches, 1636:

“The Proof was once clear, however they have cook'd it since.”

The verb was in common use by the 18th century and Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 1751, made the link to finance explicit:

“Some falsified printed accounts, artfully cooked up, on purpose to mislead and deceive..”

Apart from the expression 'cooking the books' this use of 'cook' has become less common in the 19th and 20th centuries. The preferred euphemism for the manipulation of financial statements has come to be 'creative accounting'. This is first recorded in the 1960s and is attributed to the U.S. comedian Irwin Corey, as in this example from the Middlesboro Daily News, May 1968:

“Professor” Irwin Corey claims his CPA [Certified Public Accountant] isn't exactly crooked - but the government's questioning him about his “creative accounting”.

The numerous corporate fraud cases of the 1990s turned public opinion against the semi-admiring tone of 'creative accounting' and journalists stopped using it. That, and the transformation of bookshops, which now seem to sell more coffee and cakes than they do books, has brought about a revival of the term 'cooking the books', which looks like staying with us for some years to come.

Phrases.org UK

Science & Technology

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Popular Mechanics

The Strange, Mysterious or Downright Weird

What Your Genes Do After Death Can Help Detectives Solve Crimes

So, you've died. Your heart's stopped pumping, your brain's stopped thinking and, yes, your hair and nails have stopped growing. And yet, despite all this, your genes are still hard at work. Why?

Gene expression - the process by which information stored in DNA is used to create proteins and other molecules — has been shown to continue in the human body after blood stops flowing, sometimes for several days, according to previous research. This cellular skeleton-crew is responsible for shutting down your immune system, metabolism, cell production and other key processes.

And, according to a new paper published Feb. 13 in Nature Communications, watching the activity of these genes in the dead could reveal valuable insights to the living. In the paper, an international team of researchers suggests that monitoring gene expression in various tissues of recently deceased bodies can provide a shockingly accurate timestamp of when that person died. [The Science of Death: 10 Tales from History]

“We found that many genes change expression over relatively short post-mortem intervals, in a largely tissue specific manner”, study author Pedro G. Ferreira, a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology at the University of Porto in Portugal, said in a statement. By learning to recognize when and where these gene changes occur after an individual dies, researchers may be able to develop models that can accurately estimate time of death.

Scientists can monitor gene expression in various cells by looking at molecules called RNA transcripts, which copy segments of DNA to create proteins. In the new study, researchers analyzed RNA transcription data from more than 7,000 tissue samples collected from 540 deceased donors, including samples from donors' brains, skin and most major organs. The researchers also compared blood samples taken before and after death from select donors, providing the researchers opportunities for direct comparison between pre- and post-mortem gene expression.

“Immediately following death (and up to seven consecutive hours) we observe an increase in the expression of many genes, and a decrease in the expression of a few”, the researchers wrote. Most changes occurred between 7 and 14 hours after death, and stabilized significantly within 24 hours.

Using this RNA transcription data, the researchers developed tissue-specific models to predict how much time had elapsed since an individual's death — also known as the post-mortem interval. By averaging the results from each tissue, the researchers found their model could accurately predict the post-mortem interval within about 10 minutes of the actual time, the researchers wrote.

“We conclude there is a signature or a fingerprint in the pattern of gene expression after death that could eventually be used in forensic science, but we don't pretend we have now a method that can be used in the field”, lead author Roderic Guigó, a coordinator of the Bioinformatics and Genomics Program at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, told the BBC.

“Longer post-mortem intervals, not only 24 hours, the age of the individual, the cause of death - all of these will need to be taken into account if we are to convert this into a useful tool.”

Live Science (02/15/2018)