LEAPING TO FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS

 It is kind of amusing now to watch the news of the world and see all the European aristocrats patting themselves on their backs for successfully bringing the Special Military Operation in Ukraine to a conclusion and now arguing over whether the USA should provide all 100,000 peacekeeping troops the Europeans have decided will be required to keep the peace and also if the USA should pay 100% of the costs or 200% of the cost. 

They are all most concerned that it does not appear that anybody in the Trump administration wants or needs their valued input into just how to go about screwing the vile Mr. Putin and the equally odious Russians for causing the war and they want to have a huge say in the reparations that President Trump is going to demand that Putin pay. 

It is probably safe to say that you could not find a group of morons more loosely attached to reality than the current heads of the European Unions Defense, Political and Military arms.

These are the faces of the people that have set EU policy for the last 20 years and they mean business. Naturally, they don't mean to wage war on Russia or anything gross like that, they'll be happy to leave that sort of violent and reprehensible behavior to the Americans but they are all unanimous in declaring that they will be significant players in the imaginary peace talks they think that they will roll into and dominate much the way Obama dominated the Peace Talks when he stopped that war and won the Nobel Peace Prize in his first week in office. Socialists are like that.

If you look at the facts in the matter it is pretty clear that between them and Biden they have done about as much damage to Russia as it is possible for them all to do and it is pretty clear that they mean to take back nothing because in their minds Putin and Russia MUST BE PUNISHED! There is little doubt that they are all 100% in favor of continuing the economic embargo, trade embargo, energy embargo and stealing any Russian money they find lying around where they can get their hands on it. You know, for the peace that's in it.

They are content to do all these things for the 'justice' in it and because they will never feel any ill effects out of continuing the war against Russia. Yes friends this does put me in mind of the lines of an old old poem by Kipling because these harpies seem familiar but I'm not going there. Today, I'm reading The Road to Gandolfo again and the rulers of EU made me think of this:

Among the many truly amusing things about what I've been seeing on the news tonight were all the claims and assertions that Sweden and of course the BENELUX and maybe the British would provide peacekeepers in Ukraine and of course I wondered, 'did these idiots totally spaz and miss out on the part where Putin is adamant that there will be no NATO troops in Ukraine and slipping in enemy troops in the guise of peacekeepers is as old and stupid a trick as building a giant horse and rolling it up in front of the gates of your enemy's capital city?' It is not ever going to happen. If any PK come into being which I put at under a 1% chance, they will be from China or maybe South Africa.

I think that the first thing Mr. Putin will insist upon is everyone who stole Russia's money gives it all back with interest and also finding and punishing publicly the people who destroyed the NORDSTREAM pipelines and the people that ordered them destroyed. The kind of people that are that rabid cannot be left to run around loose biting other socialists into doing their bidding. There is too much madness at the top to let the rabid run things.

As usual there is also an underlying assumption made by all those who made and consumed the fake news about the war in Ukraine. All of them believe that Russia is on its last breaths as a nation/state and is going to topple over dead any moment now and the rest of us all know that the only reason the Russians haven't ended the war is because it always helps out the strong men governing any group to be able to point to the EXTERNAL enemies and keep the people focused on them rather than on the sacrifices demanded in the fight against them and wow, haven't the EU and NATO done a bang up job of doing that.

Those interested in the history of actual peacekeeping missions are welcome to look at KFOR, IFOR, SFOR and other NATO PK missions in Europe and of course all the UN Peacekeeping missions. 

It seems that a number of Europeans have missed the appeal of President Trump. It is time to wake up now and realize that the old world passed away painlessly the day he assumed office this time. Literally nobody cares what the clowns running Europe think anymore. We in America haven't cared for decades but the rest of the world is beginning to see Europe as the clowns they have become.

WE FINALLY HEAR FROM USAID

 Restore all our funding or the puppy gets it!

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, TOO

 I see reports from the always predictable world press that Ukraine claims that Russia actually fired an attack drone at Chernobyl and that this Russian drone made it through the teeth of the fierce Ukrainian air defenses and exploded on the containment vessel keeping in all that naughty radiation. There is, as usual, just the statement by the Ukrainians that this happened and the investigators that have covered themselves in glory factchecking the living hell out of everything else on the planet have all breathlessly reported that, "Ukrainian officials have announced that the Russians exploded a drone on the containment shield over the intensely radioactive remains of Chernobyl's exploded reactor." Good work press.

I'm of two minds on  this. In the first I ask myself why would Russia launch an explosive attack designed to breach the containment vessel it paid blood and money to create and the second mind that asks, why wouldn't Russia try to blow a hole in the containment vessel and send another flock of radioactive particles into the West which is so amusingly using every weapon at its disposal to launch attacks on Russia?

In a sane world there would be no question of attacking something as fiendishly dangerous as a nuclear reactor but this hasn't been a sane world since August, 1914.

You see, if the Ukrainians are the ones that are using the carnage to gain advantage and have decided that they could try a little 4D chess against Putin and the tools in the West by blowing a hole in containment and blaming Russia, I can see that. In Ukraine with the election of President Trump we have finally come to the end of the beginning and perhaps the end of it all. The election has put into place a known Power and his first actions indicate that he will end the war in Ukraine on terms convenient to US alone and never mind the EU or Ukraine. By this there is no doubt that Zelensky has now been forced into a corner from which there is no way out.

If President Putin has ordered the attack then he is also making a statement and it is quite different from Zelensky's. Russia is not afraid of continuing and by this action making it clear that its enemies in Europe have gone well beyond being a distraction and have now engaged the lively interest of a KGB man who rules the most powerful and by far most unified and coherent country in continental Europe and he invites their attention to his complete indifference to any future downwind radiation problems that may occur due to Europe's idiocy in prolonging the 'special military action' in Ukraine for years beyond when it should have ended.

At this point I also would not put an attack on the containment vessel at Chernobyl by rogue CIA agents as beyond belief. The CIA and every other Executive Agency in this country have been wildly out of control and running around destabilizing the world for the last 35 years. I think they would do anything to keep running their little schemes in the shadows because somebody is getting very wealthy at everyone else's expense and they don't care.

I don't think any sane person would attack that containment vessel but the evidence from the last time seems to show the most disinterested party would be someone in the United States or Iberian Peninsula.

UNIFORM OF THE DAY

 I was the first staff officer at NAVCENT to wear camouflage uniforms to the office but certainly not the last. In my defense I was also the caretaker and custodian of a number of 5 ton trucks and generators and they had to be cycled every month to keep them in good running condition. In practice this meant that I would do the pre-start checks on the generators and fire them up and then I'd climb into each truck in turn and drive it for a couple of laps around the outside of the Banz warehouses co-located with our base at Juffair in Bahrain. 

It was activity that didn't go well with my limited supply of khaki uniforms so on those days I showed up in the office wearing desert camouflage and the EOD and SEAL I shared the office with started to copy me. So yeah, it was me, way back in 1996. That said, it is time to put the staff officers and 100% of the flag and general officers back into the real Uniform of the Day and eliminate the practice of wearing camouflage unless duties require it.

It is also long passed the time to stop screwing around and changing the uniform every 2 years. It would be nice if the Secretary of Defense concurred and put out a SECDEC policy memo to everyone wearing the uniform.

THE OVERNIGHT REVOLUTION

 I think that we will now see the end of the old order and the beginning of the new. The lack of responsibility, accountability and authority over the Courts in this country is come to an end. The days of any one judge revoking the power of the Federal Government are now over. It took us awhile to get here but it was obvious a long time ago that the day would come.

The real issue now is not one for the Courts to decide. It is time now for the limits on each branch of government to be measured against the whole cloth of the Constitution and laid definitively to rest. There will be no more lower court injunctions on the powers of either the Legislative Branch or the Executive Branch and those that wish to challenge them will need to do so through appeals up through the court system until they can be decided by the Supreme Court. In short, no more stop work orders from the dumbest and most venal members of the Bar and that is setting a very low bar these days.

BOUNDLESS ADVENTURE

 Since yesterday was a day of predicted stormy weather and looming ice and snow disaster we decided that the time was ripe for us to head to Pittsburgh and attend a meeting of the Art. The Artist had a very good time and the scary weather that was predicted was a complete no-show until very near the end of the journey there and back again. Two hours after leaving Pittsburgh we got to our highway exit and detoured one mile to get some of the best Rita's Italian Ice and custard anywhere and it was there, while waiting to put in our order in the drive through lane that the skies finally opened and commenced a downpour of ice and snow. In the 10 minutes we waited to order and take delivery the ice covered the roads.

We did it for Art and we enjoyed it. It was once quite predictable that every single time we drove to Pittsburgh it would snow or there would be rain so hard you couldn't see the road but this time our journey was untroubled by weather and to give you some idea how that worked out,

I ate that large Italian black wild cherry with vanilla custard gelati with a spoon while driving up 271 in snowy icy arctic conditions with scores of other drivers and didn't spill a drop on my shirt or in the car. Such is the mighty scale of my life that the lists of my victories are so littered with such major achievements. Your mileage may vary.

NOW IT BEGINS

 As I predicted, the idiots wearing black have decided that they have the mighty power of barring anyone in America from performing any action that they have their hate on about and so a judge today ordered that no political appointee has the power to let anyone including themselves look at anything the career civil servants don't want them to see.

Well, now we see if President Trump and his lawyers play that game or opt for the new game of lawfare.

"That's a mighty fine looking decision you got there Judge Evil but we don't think it applies to us so we plan to just ignore you from now on but if you are really serious about it then you just appeal our actions right on up to the next Court and see how that plays out because Homey doesn't play your stupid game anymore and invites you to just go shoot yourself."

"We no longer intend to allow any single Judge in this country or any other country to overturn the rule of Law and the Constitutional Powers allocated to each branch of government."

I think this is a good thing because it means that the agonizing process of slowly working through the Courts themselves to get to the real decision is now left entirely up to the Courts and if they don't want to push it to the next level then they obviously weren't serious about it or know that they were totally wrong in their decision and behavior and their own stamp marks them for the intemperate and stupid morons that they really are. And, too, the Supreme Court can obviously step in and Act as they are empowered to act by the Constitution but again, we are going to play by some new rules where the Will of the People enjoys and Equal Playing Field and Nobody just invites the People to get lost without showing due process.

RELIABLY CORRUPT

 It is nice to imagine that one of the first acts of the new Director at the FBI is to send a team of trustworthy agents to the home and offices of his predecessor to search every document and seize every information processing device and memory system and thoroughly search them for even a single classified document and then charge the SOB with as many felony charges as possible and prosecute him to the full extent of the Law and beyond, just for the fairness that's in it. And if his house and offices get a little trashed, well we all know how thoroughly we reap what we sow and Wray and the rest of his predecessors could all use a dose of what they have miserably meted out to us as Justice.

THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES

 How could the rethuglicans in Congress permit the hard left communists and freaks to take $40 billion of our tax dollars every single year and use it to fund every single posse of extreme leftists, communists, devil worshipers and other democrats and ALL of their so-called news organizations and outlets and then turn around and ask us every 5 minutes to donate money to their reelection campaigns? How? 

Is the FCC going to go after every one of the scumbags who did this and nail them for interference in elections over the last 50 years or are we going to allow this one to pass too?

Every single sitting and former member of the House and Senate Republican Party owes all of us a formal apology followed by a ritual disemboweling on the steps of the Capital. This is not mere stupidity run amok, this is every single one of those scumbags thinking they could pull the wool over our eyes forever and get away with it and damned if they haven't one more time because they know we won't deal with them as we should. We leave the murder and mayhem to the democrats and that's all we can hope for now if we want justice. The lunatics let go from running the bureaucracy are now out on the street without a dime and are suddenly contemplating how they're going to get even and discovering the 10 day waiting period is a monstrous and unconstitutional infringement on their rights!

You know, it might be a good idea to consider your situational awareness a bit more carefully in the coming weeks since the democrats and other weak-minded terrorists always lash out against the most harmless looking creatures. Carry a big stick or something when you go out.

I hear people talk about the numbers coming out of DOGE and the incontestably evil USAID and they mutter loudly that it's like less than 1% man and that all means nothing. DOGE is working it's way through them all and I suspect each and every other bureaucratic swamp is more corrupt and massive than even the most woke at USAID ever imagined. They're going to turn up $trillions in HHS that was simply funneled straight into the bank account of the most evil thieves. The prisons in El Salvador will need to double in size every month to hold all the villains that have been ripping us off to the tune of trillions and trillions of dollars and we haven't even started auditing the Defense contractors.

Have you noticed that about the only politicians on the right that do anything for America are the ones routinely slandered by the left?

LEARNING IS HARD

Here in metroparkcentralis they are closing some of the schools on account of flu outbreaks. I laughed when I heard this because it sure sounds like the people in charge of educating don't ever learn anything. As I was thinking what a disaster the schools reaction to the covid was I thought back to my days long ago when we were still either rushing out of the class to take up positions along the walls for an atomic bomb nearby or hiding under our desks for the same kind of attack and it occurs to me now that I never questioned that if by some wonderful fluke we survived the bomb, school would resume the next day and teachers would demand to know why you didn't turn in your homework.

On the other hand, my aged parents were hit with the NORO virus last week while my sister was visiting them. It evidently slashed its way throughout their complex laying low many of the retired folks living there.

ON ROAD KILL

There has been an enormous explosion in drone technology and a massive decrease in cost since we are now talking about one-way attack drones. While my first thought on the subject 15 years ago was that they would inevitably be used by terrorists and other democrats against politicians they don't like, it occurs to me after reading an article on how leftist all 'tech-bros' are that there is another perfectly acceptable use for one-way attack drones and that would be to use them against antifa terrorists and the idiots from blm and Mexico that like to play in the street and block traffic. By all accounts attack drones are ubiquitous and impossible to stop or track down so it seems they would make the perfect modern alternative to what street rioters need the most; a whiff of canister and grape shot.

When you think about it, point detonating fuzes aren't that hard to make.

And you know, I think if I troubled to look I would find scores of open-source plans for building your own attack drones helpfully put online by all those thoroughly evil souls trying to keep the wars in Gaza and Ukraine going on forever. On the other hand, they were probably paid to do that by someone at USAID so perhaps the funding for that has finally dried up.

MOMENTS FROM THE DAY

 There I am listening to my mother describing Admiral Rickover as that really nice old man because she happens to be very old friends with Admiral Rickover's hospice nurse who described him as just the nicest man and then my mother describes going to deliver a lesson at the house of another Admiral at Newport and finding him out in the yard dressed for yard work and raking leaves and says he greeted her, came into the house with her, shucked his shoes, put on some inside shoes, washed his hands and made a cup of tea which he carried into the room where all the ladies were meeting and in the nicest way asked if he could join them. She related this to my father who was teaching at the War College and who routinely described that admiral as a savage beast unfit for human company and told us how all his subordinates quaked in fear at his slightest frown.

Funny how different reality looks when you shift the lens through which it is perceived.

ON THE HAND INVISIBLE

One of the obvious-in-retrospect things that happened in the last couple of months was that a large number of people quietly came together in a very private setting where none stood out for their presence and they had themselves a sit-down strategy and policy meeting for how they would all act, in concert, on the first day and in the first hour of the new Presidency. As you look at the results it is obvious.

President Trump put Acting Leaders in place at the very top of most of the die-hard bureaucracies and they acted immediately and serially and in parallel to dismiss the incompetent upper levels and start getting rid of the crooked and incompetents throughout each organization. The President started it with his Executive Order on Acting Leaders and they ran with it and while they were rolling up the kills on people like Fagan and some of the more corrupt FBI, SS and Intel Community types, Elon appears to have been deep in the background or, at the forefront of the campaign that took over the Office of Personnel and Management lock stock and barrel in the first hour of the new administration. I wonder if he's left the building since he took it over......

This was no ragtag feel their way slowly into their new powers and duties scramble, this was men and women, informed by some really sharp lawyers with all their writs ready and targets lists in their hands as they assumed their duties while waiting for the Senate to do its job and confirm the President's desired office holders. I really get a kick out of how this is played out. 

The real activity was of course, playing out in the dark and in the various computer networks that actually control the ebb and flow of money, influence and power and while everyone was looking at the skimpily dressed showgirls twirling batons, DOGE took away ALL THE POWER OF THE STATE from the smug arrogant bastards that thought they had us by the balls since they controlled the levers and passwords to the promised land.

As Elon says, they missed a bet and that whole working from home notion is really pretty silly when the real owners show up at the office building and find it dead easy to take control from people that aren't there to put a fight. The flow of our money to our actual enemies is over. That doesn't mean that they aren't going to continue swimming in Olympic pools of $20 and $100 bills because every government and most high power cartels and businesses are already churning out trillions of $ every month in fake US Currency and they have been for the last 45 years.

The author of an Invisible Hand was noted economist Adam Smith. He and the other Smith used a principle of enlightened self-interest to describe a perfect system but my title has more to do with what just happened in the United States, a coup de main which is described a swift attack that relies on speed and surprise and in this case it was used by the actual government of the United States against the fake government of the United States and oh was it a surprise. It does make you think though. 

The media is 99.6% controlled by a handful of billionaires and follows their orders to the letter and has an unrivaled reputation for FAILING TO ACTUALLY DO ANY IN DEPTH INVESTIGATION because these sorts of things always turn up the odd connected pedophile who is the friend and banker to all the most wealthy and exclusive democrats and neocons and the billionaires really don't want anyone asking about that but that means that there was NOBODY on the side of the devils out trying to investigate what suddenly took a lot of the most powerful movers and shakers out of the limelight together for a long weekend at some swank conference hotel in downtown Manhattan or possibly even Mar-a-Lago while the easily fooled were misdirected by the sudden new glimpses into the Trumps by a photogenic youngster and missed what was really happening in the other rooms.

There seems to have been quite a few invisible hands working together out there for awhile now. I hope they keep it up for the next 8 to 12 years.

FLUID AND FLUENT ENGLISH

 Contrast this performance off the cuff with the arglebargle of the former VP.

I find it hard to believe this needs to be said, but since Democrats vehemently deny it, it needs to be said pic.twitter.com/2OENW8Hu0B

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 31, 2025

ACQUISITION COSTS

 As they used to explain to us back in basic navy school, it isn't the initial acquisition cost that hurts, it's the maintenance costs. It would have been somewhat clearer if they used a graphic.

I don't know about you, but my wanderings through the internet are now accompanied everywhere by little ads from Temu like the screen shot above. I've never bought anything there or even looked but I thought the juxtaposition in this one was amusing.

BEGGING YOUR PARDON

 General Milley is in real trouble because he took the pardon Joe Biden offered and with that comes the acceptance that Miley’s behavior as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was criminal and certainly, Other Than Honorable and any officer can easily be separated from the service at the pay grade in which he last served honorably. For Milley that might be the rank he held 40 years ago.

SLIMY SENATOR WHITEHOUSE

 I was looking at confirmation hearings on RFK, Jr. and saw that he was maltreated by Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island. I used to live in Rhode Island and I saw a reference to a private white's only beach club that the Senator is a member of because of course he is and I saw this wonderful picture of it here.

 You see the nice big house in the background? It is bigger than it looks. I lived right behind that house and I used to deliver the Newport Daily News to the door there everyday and when I collected every month I would ring the bell on that nice mansion and an elderly lady wearing slippers, a bathrobe/housecoat that was safety pinned together in front would open the door and then wander back 5 to 10 minutes later with enough money to cover the cost of the paper. 

The mansion on the left had been turned into some really nice apartments occupied by the kind of people you'd expect....no you wouldn't, one was a Lieutenant Commander working at the Navy Base and two were photographers and a very nice graphic design lady. They were the last 4 deliveries on my paper route. Up at the other end or closer to it, was another very nice mansion, the door of which was unfailingly opened by the butler when they were in residence and he took care of paying me for the paper. I knew they were in because that's when I'd have to maneuver my bike around the Rolls in the driveway.

I always thought it was funny that this exclusive beach club was on our shore and of course we walked down there whenever we felt like it and nobody said boo because you need a car to get there unless you were finishing Cliff Walk. It was a nice place to live but this is the only part of the island that seems unchanged by the passage of 50 years. It is just about the only place I ever lived that I can say that about.

CHUMPS

 It is always amusing to see the lesser lights of the dimmer party blast themselves to smithereens with their own stupidity but honestly, sometimes it's even more enjoyable to watch President Trump give them a little push and set them off. This was entirely predictable. The media wants to make it look like the rethuglicans got too far over their skis and thus created a debacle that needs Courts to straighten out and unfuck. They think that way for a reason. They're really really stupid.

The Executive Power to run the Executive Branch is effectively unlimited. It will reach a point someday where the Executive will simply invite the Courts to butt out and get back in their own lane. As Congress sets the rules for the Courts below the Supreme Court, the Executive makes the rules for the Executive Branch. 

The dimwits and trolls that leaped to shut down Medicaid payments and things along those lines supposedly 'in accordance with the OPM directive didn't do themselves any favors. They knowingly tried to screw the President and the Executive Branch above them and they did it in a way that OUTED THEMSELVES. In short they demonstrated that they were too stupid to hold the positions they hold in the government and thus they need to be demoted and reassigned immediately. 

Honestly, it's like pulling the wings off mosquitoes at this point. Anybody can do it and it's OK but it shouldn't have to be done. These idiots are self-pruning themselves from the rolls of government as if it never occurred to them that they would be held accountable.

INCONGRUOUSLY

I find it interesting that just a week ago everyone involved in pushing DEI and sucking off that particular tit was proud of it and now you can't find a single one them with radar, sonar, hound dogs, both hands or seeing eye dog. They all seem to have vanished into the mist.

Oh well, the internet is forever so all we really have to do to track them down is look for them where they so proudly boasted of being last week and we'll still find them there unless they decided to take the public employee option and work from home. In any event, we can stop paying them today and they earned it.

ALLEGATIONS

 It reared its ugly head again as it always will now and there is no answer or solution that I can see to the problem and it is a very ugly problem. Once again a Presidential appointment was tainted by the allegations laid by some person who had no direct knowledge and no proof at all of anything she was talking about were all set to derail the nomination and appointment of the new Secretary of Defense. You remember this vile game, it was played by the left on Justice Kavanaugh and it was the same sort of thing, allegations about something that allegedly happened decades ago with no proof, no witnesses, nothing at all to back it up and suddenly the man's appointment to the Supreme Court was in jeopardy because, allegations.

I was reading today one of those things about the huge number of fully qualified Army officers that were point blank refusing command of Battalions. In the old days the only way to be a general was to have commanded a battalion along the way and now officers wanted nothing to do with it. The article explored some of the reasons for that but it all boiled down to the fact that any officer's career and pension and reputation could be destroyed by just one person making allegations without any proof or evidence. That's all it takes to be gone and a non-person in the modern military.

As a youngish Lieutenant I remember one of my Department Heads on my second ship telling me that he had turned down command of a minesweeper. Back then those were Lieutenant Commander commands and could be a plum for any officer wanting to make Captain and then Admiral. He described it as stepping into Hell because all it would take on a pathetically undermanned, underresourced ship was one sailor screwing up and it would be curtains for his career and he'd be what's known as a terminal Lieutenant Commander with no hope of promotion. That was a considered risk for advancement and he figured if he did all right and kept his nose clean he would make Commander and retire happy because there really aren't a lot of retired Limited Duty Officer Commanders who were promoted up from E1 to E8 and then to 05. They were very rare in 1986.

I have to admit it never even entered my mind when I was offered command because at that point it had not grown to anything like the basilisk it has become today but back in 1990 we also didn't have anything like "toxic leadership environment" and endless command surveys. We happily charged along never thinking that someone with their hate on would stab us in the back. OK, I was perhaps more clueless than most but it certainly never occurred to me.

Now I personally know people that would cheerfully stab you in the back if they discovered that you voted for Trump. Cheerfully, because you deserve it! 

ON POSTS

 I've been doing this for awhile and sometimes I spend a day or so writing, rereading and not posting as I think about the posts I've just drafted. The numbers seem to be increasing in all directions and I wonder why. I occasionally touch on some of the darker aspects of life and the possible futures we have in front of us and some of those drafts are bleaker than I care to share but this is getting a little ridiculous especially when I consider that I periodically go through and cull the draft population back down to a reasonable number. 

 This is ridiculous. There's been 10 in the last 5 days that are just sitting there ready to go.

WATCHING THE COLUMBIA CRAWL DOWN

 It is long passed time to read The Art of the Deal. I have it around here somewhere.

 If you know any tyrants, despots, tin-horn dictators or cartel leaders you might consider loaning them your copy.

DEFIANTLY BEATING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES

 Now that Mr Hegseth is our Secretary of Defense I imagine that one of the very first things he wants to do is to sit down with some of the permanent 06s in each of the services and ask them what shape their branch of the military is truly in. I think for a couple of the services he can ask very simply if, "they can fight their way out of wet paper bag" and get some reluctance to share with him that the bag might win.

The true state of the US Military and Navy is not that hard to assess. Each of the Services does individual assessments all the time on each unit especially as each unit works up for the deployment cycle. The goal though is to have that one unit reach peak readiness at the moment it deploys and there is really very little care or attention given to post deployment and non-deploying units. That is kind of where we are at now because when you ask the Flag and General Officers of the Services where their Service stands now on readiness I think every single one of them defaults to assuring one and all that we are enjoying excellent readiness because those units tapped for deployment next week are in good shape material and training-wise.

Of course, that's not how any country fights a War. I suspect Mr. Hegseth might pitch his question a bit differently and ask:

How many of our submarines are deployable as fully mission capable submarines on 72 hours notice?

How many of Aircraft Carriers and Air Wings are FMC on 72 hours notice?

How many Large Deck Amphibious Assault ships are FMC " "?

How many of our Destroyers are FMC in 72 hours?

He can then either ask about an extended timeline or ask when the warfighting force would be FMC and what the numbers look like for partially mission capable units and what, by the way, do our ammo stocks look like for a war longer than 3 months?

He can do the same thing with the Army and the Air Force but the one is really contingent on the good behavior and condition of the others. Simply put, the Army's divisions, brigades, battalions and companies can all be maxed out on personnel, training and readiness with all their equipment FMC but they kind of need to have long lost things that once belonged to organizations like Transportation Command such as railcars to carry an Armored Division from Fort Hood to the given seaport of embarkation. They need to have ships to embark on and they need to have cargo handling teams that know how to load and unload things like tanks and vehicles which are very different loads from shipping containers which is how 99% of things move nowadays.

It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall as that goes down and a thoroughly angry man learns that what everyone has actually been working their asses off for the last 30 years was to hide the facts from the People of the United States who think there is something really shiny and dangerous hidden away out there with our name on it. Of course, it's nothing that every Intel service on the planet doesn't know already, it's just Joe Friday and the rest of America who seem to think that the total disaster in Afghanistan was just a fluke.

THE TORRENTS

 I am moving ahead in my studies of China and found this tonight as I was reading some more Spengler.

Westerners think of a nation in organic terms: Nations begin with a common language, culture, and religion. They coalesce from tribes and clans, and then decide what sort of state they will have and what those states will do. The reverse has been true in China since its earliest beginnings, shrouded in legend and unearthed by archaeologists: The Chinese state created China, not vice versa. The core of the country is the enormous flood plain defined by the 8,000 miles of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Taming the floods and irrigating the fields made it possible for successive Chinese dynasties to assimilate peoples who still speak 200 dialects today out of six major language groups. This is not a new or original assertion: Karl Wittvogel’s 1957 book Oriental Despotism, among others, presented a similar thesis.

I bolded the core sentence that the author uses to say that China is nothing like what we think it is. 

 Right now everyone in the West believes deep down that we have both the military might and the economic muscle to compel China but any rational mind that looks at the situation will know that this simply isn't so. I am not happy that so many of the higher levels of government, military and academic keep bleating about how we must prepare to defeat or deter or counter Chinese who are doing.........

To put it in simple terms, if the wheel continues to go around then things have a chance to settle down but right now China needs those resources it is harvesting all over the world in order to keep it on its feet economically and socially. Lodging embargoes or sanctions on China because it is behaving in its own best interests for its own continued survival are bound to have negative consequences that probably exceed in size and scope anything dreamed of by the nitwits and morons pontificating about 'dealing' with China.

Do read the rest of the article at the link.

THE ROLL UP

 I read this morning that the Senate has decided to delay approval of President Trump's Attorney General and perhaps some cabinet secretaries and I think they are so stuck in last time thinking that they failed to comprehend that President Trump was way ahead of their idiocy and intransigence this time around and to me it looks a lot like The Roll Up to Baghdad. The people he appointed Acting Directors and such are moving forward with all speed to implement his policies right now and nobody is waiting for Senate approval of his nominees. There are people sitting in those offices right now executing every single one of the policies that his Executive Orders are putting in place and idiots who think they can outflank Trump in the Senate and screw him over there by putting up roadblocks to Confirmation are just as stupid as stupid can be.

President Trump is eviscerating the entrenched racism, sexism and bigotry that previous governments thought would be a good idea along the same lines as funding research into "gain of function research in killer virus in order to allow it to spread to humans" and other well thought out things like trying to touch lightning or stop a speeding bullet with your thumb.

The Acting Director of OMB is following up gloriously to let the idiots in Congress know that there is no stopping the signal and that the message is going to get through. 

 The amusing thing is that the bureaucrats don't think that the signal or the message applies to them.

 There are people out there in the Civil Service and infinite treeline known as the federal bureaucracy that don't think that the rules or the law apply to them. They really believe the myth that it is impossible to fire a federal employee. 

I'd set up the Office of Relocated Civil Arrogant Servants too Stupid to Quit at the former Naval Base at Adak. There was room for 90,000 troops there in World War II so I'm sure there's plenty of accommodations and it has a killer view.