ODDLY UNCHANGED

This was posted back in 2013 so quite some time ago. Nothing has really changed and I thought about it off and on all day today. 

The words are a little hard to read but I assure you I have a much better camera and take way better pictures these days. That said, of course nothing ever really changes. The basics remain the same from one age to the next.

The current adventurers are colonizing the New World and with luck no more than 20% are here at the behest of their god and ISIS, Al Quaeda, Hezbullah, Hamas, or any of all the other rabid muslims. A large number appear to be adventurers seeking wealth and perhaps even the means to return home just as the adventurers did for hundreds of years after they explored the New World. 

The vast majority come with their slaves and are intent on conquering and subduing the natives they find in the New World and they are about as amoral, vicious and unknown to God as the bulk of the Spanish explorers were. Like the Spanish before them they bring their diseases, customs and hatreds to our shores and mean to set them up as the new contagion. They're the sex-traffickers, pedaphiles, procurers, pimps, druglords and the bottom 20% of their own society. Needless to say, our feckless rulers have invited them in to share our goodies just as Montezuma and the Incans did in their time.

They're not all that keen on dying for God or his Majesty but perhaps for the Chinese Communist Party, Blackrock, ISIS and Allah they'd be willing to risk a brush with death. They're not just our problem, they are our children's problem and theirs' unto the ending of the Age.

Did you know that there are more foreign born residents actually living in London now then native British subjects? It's kind of weird and surreal to see an era ending and it's like nobody even notices it swiftly vanishing away into history.

WOW

 This is the 21st century I was hoping to see. Amazing! The heavy booster just snagged out of the air and hanging from its launch assembly after boosting starship into orbit.

THE SIMPLE TRUTHS

 One for the sidebar,

"Any company that has a commitment to diversity necessarily lacks a commitment to excellence, or even basic competence, and which will eventually have very negative consequences for its products and services." 

— Vox Day

Others have noted that once you fail to select for competence you get incompetents. It is the same with selecting for excellence. Once you no longer make it the focus of your effort it quickly goes away.

MADE ME LAUGH

 I laughed out loud when I saw this in the movie. All the desperate and heroic activity leading up to this scene summed up by a girl who was both there and not there. In truth, I think it sums up the current recruiting pool of talent available in one little 41 second clip. It's still pretty funny and a great movie.

LOUD BUZZZZY NOISE

 Read this bit of tripe and ponder what it truly says about both Slow Joe and Osama or whatever he calls himself these days....

It looks like the right side of the aisle wants to use this as some sort of Lame attack on Osama but if you look behind the curtain you can see the reality. Obama had spent years gutting NATO and the US and when confronted by a Putin who was really in charge and running Russia, he did what any objective ruler would do and bowed to the inevitable. There was no way to keep Russia from taking back a place so strategically vital as Crimea. It was a mistake to allow it to slip into Ukrainian hands and those stupid hacks screwed it up massively by inflaming the Russians by their treatment of ethnic Russians living in what was a premier retirement resort and mecca for wealthy Russian oligarchs.

Biden and other idiots would see this as some sort of blunder by Osama and claim that they would have stood right up and attacked Russia with....................what exactly? Sanctions? That didn't work out well. Economic embargo? That really screwed the Bretton-Woods pooch. War? It's not really on the table anymore as we think of it. If War, then it will be something awful and eye opening; kind of like our defeat in Afghanistan should have been or possibly our inability to deal with a shitty little dump like Yemen.

RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES

 The destruction of America is happening right before your eyes but you cannot see it.

Were the thousands of local news papers around this country destroyed almost overnight so that the destruction of every little town in America would happen in isolation unseen and unnotieced by a press and media that live in just 3 places; New York City, Washington, DC and left coast America?

It never really occurred to me just how destructive dumping thousands of migrants on an unsuspecting little town at 0200 can be. Think about it. Overnight the Feds have doubled the number of kids attending school in your little town. Who pays for that? Who takes account of educating kids that don't speak English and what is more, move into grades based on age alone? You now have public elementary and high schools overwhelmed and destroyed by kids who know literally nothing, cannot read or do math and who outnumber the kids you put in your schools.

When you think about it, what is happening today is profoundly evil and everyone involved in it should be jailed forever and their assets destroyed just as they are destroying this country without anybody really noticing what is happening in the next town over.....

They destroyed all the local and state papers so you wouldn't see it happen or read about it in the news.

THINKING ABOUT THE WIN

 As I contemplate a November soon that sees Republicans winning the election I wonder if they are readying themselves for legislative combat on their terms. It is probably long past time when we let the idiotic American-hating leftists write and set the agenda for each new Congress.

There needs to be a reform of the Judicial Branch of government. It is worth delving into the Constitution to see how we accomplish a few minor but valuable changes in the way our Courts work.  We need to put an end to the longstanding practice of allowing any insane or stupid vicious jerk who wears judicial robes to impose a nationwide injunction on any Law going into effect. That practice has to be brought to an end.

It would be nice if Congress acted and eliminated the violation known as Asset Forfeiture. If flies directly in the face of the express written words in the Constitution. End it.

We need to break up the entire Homeland Security apparatus and bureaucracy. It obviously has nothing at all to do with providing Homeland Security and has proven to be more Gestapo than the Gestapo.

It is probably time to get rid of the ATF and the DEA. Neither serves any real purpose under the Constitution and neither has ever served the interests of the American public.

It is time to smite the FBI and get it back under control. It needs to be reduced in size to match its current effectiveness. In other words, it is now an organ of repression used against ordinary American citizens and has lost all real purpose and justification. Frankly, if I was sitting on a jury and the prosecution told me that they were bringing in an expert FBI witness I would just automatically assume that he/she/it is lying to me.

The Congress needs to rewrite the CIA charter. It needs a top down review as does the NSA. Sadly, in the past we would rely upon the old hands as the experts in advising us in these matters but 100% of them all lied and told us that Covid originated in a meat market and that Biden juniors laptop was a Russian Hoax. Frankly they are all liars.

The Department of Defense needs a thorough cleansing and I don't know how to fix it. The Clintons started the corruption at the top and chose 4 stars that then turned around and selected more generals to be 3 and 4 stars whose only qualification was unquestionable social credentials and a willingness to pervert the military at every level with all the things purpose built to destroy military forces. DEI is just a shadow of all the things they did to destroy the military. Look at the long term destructive effects of Navy shipbuilding over the last 25 years. 100% of the new designs were total shit and so useless not one of them has found their way into our line of battle. There is no replacement cruiser, destroyer, frigate or mine sweepers. I mean there is literally NOTHING in the pipeline or under construction now and nothing since the Clintons left office.

Congress needs to move all of the Bureaucrats out of DC and. into the hinterlands. Note, this is expressly not to move them to New York City, San Francisco or LA or to Las Vegas. Let's get them back where the Founders wanted them, in some miserable fever infested swamp. Tell them they have to earn their way back to Washington DC and the only way they can do that is by establishing an American colony on Mars.

That should do it. Americans will be attending baseball games on Mars in a couple of years or they'll die trying.

THE NEW SHEEP, MUCH LIKE THE OLD SHEEP

 As sure as taxes and as easily as death, each generation, except mine, stepped up to the plate to be led by the nose ring of great stupidity into protesting things in the West that were always nonsensical and beyond farce and they all have no regrets because each and every one of the stupid dimwits thinks they are bringing out a necessary change to the World Order. God knows what it was before the "No More War" crowd of anti-Vietnam protesters who demonstrated in stupid mass against keeping South Vietnam from going under the tyrannical boot of communism. I think they lost the point.

This generation also kicked off the overpopulation bomb and acid rain myths.

The next generation leaped into moronic and feisty stupidity with their bleating about "No More Nukes" and "Nuclear Free Zones" and tried to overrun the various bases in Europe that played host (it is alleged) to certain American armaments that were never confirmed nor denied.... In this case as in the previous example it looks very much like the Soviets were the instigators and funded these movements in the hope of winning some idiotic victories of no meaning in the Cold War. In both cases, the adults didn't pay much attention and the feisty stupids are convinced to this day that both Vietnam and our nuclear posture were the pure unbridled meanness of Rethuglicans. Trying to point out that Vietnam was a purely Democratic War and that the nuclear policies were the necessary outflow of the containment policies practiced by Democratic regimes is kind of a waste of air.

There was a boring time when we just didn't do that sort of thing. Sure there was some talk about this enormous hole somebody just noticed in the Ozone layer but we quickly got on top of that and printed billions of new $ for the oligarchs enacting legislation to damage industrialization of the 3rd World.

Finally we turned to the doom cycle of "No More War for Oil" because of course that is what the whole thing was all about. There was no other reason to kick Iraq out of Kuwait and everybody now knows it, according to the dimwits writing the history of the world as it ended in 1991 and declared, "An End To History." Twits.

That wasn't enough by any means so we had to sit up and be made to notice that the whole world was MELTING!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is still getting the full throated war support of the truly stupid among us who believe that CO2 makes up something like 5-30% of the atmosphere and kills polar bears. This was followed by the insanity of BLM and then the COVID Hysteria whipped up by people in control of the media and,

This was quickly followed by the idiotic pro-Palestinian Death Cult now sweeping the land in the absence of any insignificant low-life black thugs getting themselves reset to room temperature by overacting white cops.

What worries me about this and concerns me is that each example above shows a less and less personal involvement in the WHOLE REASON FOR RIOTING. I can understand the youngsters of draft age being a little tired of the idea and fighting back and I can even see some tiny bit of foolish charm in the idiotic old nuns hacking holes in Navy aircraft temporarily lying around airports in Ireland because they were part of the nuclear war machine but the rest of it is just pure stupidity on a stick.

When people babble about what the Idiocracy and the Left have done to Education of our Youth this is what I think they are working towards. They want a stupid and ignorant and violent and sick and twisted mob ready on command to make war and mayhem on the civil authority on demand and these are just them testing to see if they have refined their techniques enough to overthrow a Western Democracy. 

I used to think there would be some sort of payback for those who led the violence but that isn't the case. The graduates of all these Ivy Colleges are hired in droves to work in the university, the media, in NGOs that claim your money as theirs, in government at all levels and in the Bureaucratic State. They hire each other and they don't want any of you to even think about ending their gravy trains.

Based on the evidence, I'd say they're pretty close to takeoff for the All Powerful Bureaucratic State.

COMPREHENSIVE AND TOTAL FAILURE

 The nice feature of this ridiculous story is that no lives were lost. The wonder of course is that any lives were ever even hazarded in such a pointless and stupid total waste of time, money, effort, and ship. Just what part of getting an up close survey of a reef calls for stranding a ship on it? Surely if you want to muck about on a reef you used divers and small boats. You know, the kind of thing you can buy at KMart in Australia. The captain of the poor ship thought snuggling up to a well charted reef in 4 meter ocean swells was a great idea.....

The part that amuses me more than most of the rest is that the ship ran aground, was stranded, burned to a crisp and then sank. You really cannot do much more than that to a ship unless you want to use it again. I'll say it again though, it is far too late now, but when we pick the people to run our Navy and run our ships we really need to stop making anything other than ability a distant last when it comes to measures of performance necessary to take on the job. That kind of thinking applies all the way down to the deck plates and it's not just about this ridiculous accident, it's about all of them over the last 30 years or so.

Lovely day for a stranding, fire and gentle fall to the bottom of the sea.

A LONG DRIVE

 All told it was about 7 hours to get there and about the same to get home and Fall is well along in turning the foliage into a glorious golden and red blanket for the hills that not quite bar the way from Philadelphia to the Western Pennsylvania border. It was darned nice out there and the company at the other end was the best. In short, it was a fairly typical gathering of the clan minus the outriders who were unable to make it and catch up with everybody else. Still, we had family in from all over the country and Canada which happens to be where a good bit of the clan started out while up working in Newfoundland a very very long time ago.

I thought it was interesting to note how once again one could almost tell at a glance just who one was dealing with. Nice house with splendid slightly out of control-not to say exuberantly crazy garden? Yep. Enough chairs to comfortably seat 50 in a pinch? Yep. Food literally hitting the tables like successive waves from an ocean hitting a beach? Yep.

This was the first family gathering I've been to though where the youngest was just fifteen. There were no little kids or babies for this one. This was more an occasion for people to play the do you remember when game and kids don't play that very well. No babies, no little kids but plenty of people done with work and exploring their own passions and quite a few that have passed those passions along to the next adult generation who are busy raising the next one.

It was a quiet affair but it went on for a few days and, just like life, everyone enjoyed it.

ON THE WINGS OF MORTALITY

 Taking a trip to the east today to see off a relative I knew all my life. She certainly knew me all mine since hers started a good 23 years earlier. That I suppose is the window through which my own mortality can be viewed barring accidents. By and large the men in my extended families make it well beyond their given three score and ten but for many reasons I never really thought I'd get anywhere near that far myself. I doubt I would have without the help I got along the way. It is a constant amazement what the power of love alone can achieve.

It is the first in what will become a sea of sorrow and loss but an occasion that we can all be glad was so long in making it's appearance.

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The Poem, Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

SUDDENLY

 Looking into the news just now it came up with a caution to us and the USN in particular that we should not gloat at China's submarine problems. After all, it could have sunk for any reason. Made me think that did.

So, the USNS Big Horn operating south of Oman suddenly becomes the first ship ever to run aground in the North Arabian Sea and every single thing about it is kept very very quiet.

You don't suppose the USNS Big Horn ran over a submarine do you?

    I hope it wasn't one of ours.

    That far from the subcontinent I doubt that it is an Indian submarine

    I don't think the Houthis have any submarines

    I'd be very surprised if Egypt has let one of its submarines submerge in more than 20 years

    I don't know what to think about Iranian submarines but Jask isn't all that far away.

On the gripping hand, even at full periscope depth colliding with a submerged submarine would damage the bow of the ship hitting it.

HAS ANYONE LOOKED

 Is P Diddy still alive or did die of “suddenly” or just kill himself? I mean it's only a matter of time.

IMAGINE

 I was interested to see if Ashe Schow is still writing these days and found myself at the Washington Examiner to have a dekko. I did find this interesting video there which with the media's usual want of perception and true understanding was enough to ruin the day. If you watch the quick video you learn something you might not want to know.

It baldly states that since the inception of the program 28,000 people have graduated from this course of instruction that helps unfit and stupid candidates to pass the most basic military tests after 3 months of super high intensity training. We’re almost talking the old see lightning, hear thunder tests. Imagine that. The military has been lowering its recruiting standards for years and accepts almost anybody as a member and yet they have a 3 month long program for people who fail to meet even that low standard so that they can then go to Boot Camp and be the future warriors the Nation needs. I snicker at the methods used in Ukraine to drag cannon fodder into the ranks but his is simply amazing. We don't really have a lo-tech military anymore. I mean, if you're too stupid you will starve to death trying to tempt MREs out of the wrappers.

The other thing about those numbers graduating? The video claims 28,000 graduates from this dismal course with over a 90% pass rate. Imagine that. You are working with a truly sad herd and yet 90% of them make it over the fence and graduate and then become the platoon commander's nightmare and the Army will turn around in a few years and find that these graduates are all that they have left.  George Carlin springs to mind; "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." The Armed Forces are picking the best of the bottom half and sending them off to pre-boot camp for 3 months hoping that will fix the Army, Navy and Air Force.

What do you think reader? Is that going to work in the short term, mid term or long term? Nah.

It makes you miss those old ads where they were looking for the best young men. I hesitate to mention it but making up shortfalls in the ranks by adding unfit is no way to win a battle or the war. It’s semi-OK to pretend that adding physically weak and weak minded soldiers somehow makes a herd of bodies a lethal war machine but those who have been there know better. This falls into, “the bad drives out the good.” The ones left doing 175% of the heavy lifting for the same pay and benefits as the ones who do nothing aren’t going to persevere because they soon realize that it will always be this way. 

Pretty soon you find nothing but incompetent NCOs, company officers and generals and you soon dimly come to realize that with this mix it is impossible to fight and win wars. For those not following recent events since 1994, that’s where we are today.

WINTER IS COMING

 But for all that it’s still very nice. Helene hasn’t bothered us up here in the heartland.

EVERYDAY SABOTEURS

 I think one of the things that the East got used to after a time was accepting that there were simply saboteurs working in every part of industry, the military and even in things like education and medicine. I have long accepted the fact that they dominate in education these days but it wasn't until the rise and broad acceptance of DIE that I came to accept that the American Hate they have been spewing unchecked for 3 generations now has invariably led to the infiltration of haters at every level in industry and government.

I thought the communists were bad but these people are worse. They took over at the top in Boeing and then those people ensured that at every level the company was penetrated by people indifferent to safety and they proudly underachieved at every task. They simply didn't do proper welding, they didn't do proper QA checks, they skimped on materials ordered and accepted cheap and shoddy substitutes and then they passed it all off as just what Americans deserve.

I accepted a long time ago that American Shipyards were simply the worst shipyards in the world. I don't have much experience since I only suffered through Todd Shipyard in Seattle for 9 miserable months in a yard so uniformly awful and dishonest that we were the very last USN warship that ever pulled in for work. The last government contract was in alongside us in the other drydock and it turns out to be one of the USCG Polar Ice Breakers. That ship was quite broken when it arrived and got knocked over on its beam ends coming into the Strait to get into Seattle and lost a sailor in a fall on the Bridge.

I also spent some months in a Southwest Marine shipyard in San Diego as the Overhaul manager and found that staying on top of them was a 24/7 day job or they'd be happy to burn without firewatches, paint the hull in the rain, sandblast the ship in drydock next to me without mitigating the blast and grit getting into my ship. I compared that to yard appearances in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and the differences were like night and day in terms of professionalism and attitude towards the work and that was a long time ago.

So it now appears that the saboteurs don't merely set fires and burn ships to the waterline, they also deliberately perform inferior welds on things like submarines.

I don't know what it will take to turn this around. If we have reached that level of profound despair and failure that slapped down the Soviet Union then it's going to take some very hard times. As I recall, before the fall the workers there and in the Eastern Bloc used to say, "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." I think we've reached that point now. In the Soviet Union you knew the end was nigh because vodka was almost free and widely available. Here? Well here it is a bit concerning that the most lethal and dangerous substances on earth find their way into drugs that are almost free, widely available and distributed with the help and concurrence of the government and the Karens.

On the other hand, this is the best of all possible worlds. OTGH, I'll probably much less concerned if I stay away from X. Maybe I should do that and not peer too closely at the sausage apparatus. Sweeping world changes don't happen in a vacuum.

NOTING THE COST

 It really does look like the lunatics running the world are intent on reducing the cost of sweeping away all of the old and bringing in the new. Very little of true value and worth exists right now and thus it can be replaced with something new and different for a fraction of the cost of building, maintaining and operating the old stuff. Of course this applies only to insanity that is government and Publicly funded stuff. It's different for people with real and meaningful bottom lines. 

To get some idea of the scale of this consider: Microsoft is swinging a deal that will see 3 Mile Island nuclear reactors come back online solely in order to supply microsoft with power it needs to run data centers. The cost of nuclear power has we've been told, grown too hideously expensive for you and me but microsoft alone can afford to overcome the nuclear regulatory state (without bribes, naturally) and bring back online an OLD NUCLEAR POWER STATION. We the public ordered them shut down in the name of foolish economy and toooooooooo dangerousssssss!

I dare say nobody there even breathed the words, "build a new one." No no.

I recall the days of old when I was but the Engineer on an old ship of ones. Warships have back up capabilities and have redundancies at the start because long experience of naval war has shown that taken into battle many things that are necessary will be killed and destroyed outright while yet the battle must go on. Nevertheles, at height of the Cold War, we had a ship's company that presented me with just a single Sonar Technician, a single Interior Communications Electrician, a single Electronics Technician, a single Hull Technician, a single Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Technician, a single Signalman, a single, well you get the point. That ship got underway around 3 days/week. We were a test platform for this newfangled Global Positioning System. Yep, we were the one and only.

Every time one of the one's decided to go on leave, it reduced the ability of the ship to absorb damage in that area down to zero. Fry a synchro-converter that converted the gyro inputs with the radar bearing information and you would instantly step down from true bearing navigation to relative bearing navigation. Yeah, it's almost the same thing but a pain in the ass when you're navigating a ship channel after dark when coming back into port and both the radar and the gyros still work. However without those particular techs it's very difficult to troubleshoot and repair either system. One can only imagine the hysteria of some of the later ship's CO's if both gyros or the single radar stopped working and we had to do it using just magnetic bearings. Nobody practices that anymore.

I suspect modern ships just self-adhere to the pier when they no longer have the critical skills required to go to sea. For us back then this was not an option. To be honest, how much trouble could you get into just off the coast of San Diego? We would sometimes get underway on one engine, one shaft but, and here's the rub, worst case we'd have to drop the anchor and spend awhile troubleshooting or putting back together things that had been taken apart for maintenance before being rudely interrupted with an order to make space for some other ships at our pier. We learned from that and decided to keep and use a little pier that no other ships could use. It also cut our time at Sea and Anchor Detail by about an hour each way and when you get underway at 0630 and come back into port sometimes at 0430 it matters a lot.

Seriously though, how does the United States Navy get from an oceans spanning fleet of hundreds of ships down to one single solitary oiler to service the Battle Groups in the IO? JUST HTF did that happen?

The lunatics running this place have serially broken and destroyed a near monolithic system of infrastructure and men that could wage war 24/7 across and around the world and now it cannot support a single Battle Group much less 3 or 5 deployed in support of military operations in the Middle East. Do you remember that we used to have 5 Battle Groups operating simultaneously in that area during contingency operations just 20 years ago? Where did all of that go?

Yes I know. It was all discarded one piece at a time by morons that didn't care or know any better who had reached the point where they thought, just one would be enough. Well yeah, I spent some time in that Navy and while I made it look easy I was also extremely fortunate enough to have the best and best qualified young sailors of their generation working with me. They were all smart, motivated and well disciplined. 

How did a USNS oiler run aground off the coast of Oman? I could see it off the coast of Qatar or UAE but it takes a special kind of stupid to run aground off Oman. One assumes from experience that it was taken on food and stores in someplace like Fujairah and somehow 90 giant tankers and cargo ships head into and out of that port every week without incident unless they run afoul of the Iranians. So, just how did our one and only IO oiler run aground? Well, it immediately calls to mind the serial incompetence we have grown to expect from our Navy but which was kind of unexpected from our contract Military Sealift Command sailors. With no exceptions, I found them to be solid professionals. I wonder what changed?

ON MODERN NATIONALISM AND WAR

I spent a few months working closely with one of our allies that sort of started to stand in our corner back when the Iran-Iraq Tanker War surged and the neocons in America and the West united to agree that something must be done to guarantee Europe's oil supply. So, that was a good few years earlier than my last visit there after Desert Storm. In the period of time leading up to the invasion of Kuwait their Emir had spent some money to buy something that looked like a modern day military. It was a hopeless gesture then but almost nobody recognized it as such. I mean ask yourself, how is a tiny nation of absolute hedonists and load-shedders ever going to stand up to a force that was going toe to toe with Persia in the Al Faw Peninsula? Yeah, it wasn't. 

The part that I found amusing and troubling was the after hours conversations in their offices with the middle grade officers of the Kuwait Navy who had all gone in the bag when the Iraqis stormed into Kuwait and captured it overnight. They told me about freezing in the far north in the POW enclosures and of their wives visiting them there as the US got ready to take back Kuwait and kick a little ass and each and every one of them talked about the first night of the invasion as they collectively stood gathered and ready to do something, anything, as the Iraqi forces rolled over Failaka and Bubyon and into Kuwait City and that the orders never came. 

There was never a single peep from the high command and every single one of the officers I talked with assured me that the next time it happened they would give the order, Run Away!! I think this is the reality of war now in what passes for the civilized world. The powers that be have so gutted nationalism and manliness that nobody sees any point in sacrificing their lives for something as gutless and useless as the EU or France or England and certainly not Germany or the Nordic states. There is nothing there anymore that remotely resembles the Warrior Castes of the past. As far as one can tell from over here, every government since 1990 has done its best to stamp out every vestige of nationalism and militarism and crush the military under their pretty socialist loving shoes. But Europe is not alone. 

We have the same vibe going on here and even more so do they have that going on in the Far East. One would think that countries faced with an overwhelming threat would see some cause or justification for pulling together and coming up with some sort of collective defense mechanism like has happened all through history but I'm not seeing it anywhere along the Pacific Rim. 

The current existing flashpoints are just China vs Taiwan and the two Koreas. All the other nation/states along the rim seem to be interested in keeping the boats afloat as the tide comes in and ebbs away. None of them see anything to be gained from challenging the regional superpower about potential resources lying in and below the China Sea. There is no shortage of materials flowing from Africa and these countries now that they have shed their idiotic Social/Communist whining are in the business of making money. They still make it the old fashioned way by building goods other people want to buy, not by selling themselves expensive weapons they never plan or intend to use and which would just give some people bad ideas. 

There is a reason for all this I think and it has something to do with the near universal acceptance of a simple reality that everyone seems to have discovered at about the same time, 'it just doesn't matter.' In Asia everyone knows that China is like the weather. It is not something one can plan to defeat since elemental China will always be there and there in vast numbers. In Europe the Europeans have sold their souls to the EU Commission for Peace in their Minds and have a near fatalistic attitude towards everything. They don't anywhere have even a tiny spark of what made Europe the rulers of the world that spread enlightenment and technology to the rest of the world. 

 I know, you might be asking yourself, what about Africa, South America and the Middle East? The short answer about all of them is that outside of them nobody really gives a damn what they do or how they do it. They make nothing, they don't have nuclear weapons and they squabble over every single pointless and stupid thing. As a case to consider, serious minded people thought they could double their national income by widening the Panama Canal. They never appear to have asked themselves if the original builders had considered first and foremost, how much water did the interior generate from rain that it could then be used as a continuously renewing source of water to float the ships up and down the waterway through the higher elevations. 

That is the simplest and most basic calculation about any talk about expansion and it doesn't look like it ever even crossed their minds before they started building. I'm a little concerned that the neocons are trying to unlock the long range weapons they gave to Ukraine to attack Russia with so that Russia will retaliate in kind and use some of their unstoppable missiles to hit cities or other targets in England and France but I think the lassitude and moral indifference in Europe means that even if Russia did respond in kind NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN. Nothing can happen. Those countries don't have a war machine with which to make war or respond to attacks. There is no hope of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of eager young men to draw weapons and ammunition from the national armories and ammo bunkers and head out to smite bad guys. There are no weapons and their is no ammunition and it isn't that kind of war anymore and people know it now.

What is more, some of them know that all the boundaries in Europe are as fluid as water flowing in a stream and that introducing the idea that nationalism is evil has simply reduced any moral reasoning to wage war in defense of some people somewhere is gone. Flooding all those countries with millions of enemies from Islam and Africa has not simply weakened those countries, it has wrecked them.

 That's too bad really. On the gripping hand, I imagine the entire sweep of history is one of change and at the time very little of it looked like it was going to be good. Yet here we are! 

Panorama of the Great Camp 50th Reunion at Gettysburg. May embiggen.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

 I stumbled across this while reading an article found posted on Large Regular. I thought it was amusing based on my own story about learning to ride a bike. I think many people learn in different ways and found that in this case the title of the story applied equally to two entirely different ways of learning to ride a bike. In both cases we shared this:

I learned to ride my older sister's bike while my dad was in Vietnam. I learned how by finding it unattended anywhere in the neighborhood there in Carlisle and taking it away. I would throw myself on it and pedal for all I was worth. As I recall she was, in the earlier attempts, easily able to run me down and take it back and throw in a few punches and scratches. As I became more adept at riding I quickly became more adept at making a clean getaway. As you might imagine, the learning curve on this sort of approach is pretty steep if you mean to ride somebody else's bike.

The clean getaway is something that should be learned at the very youngest age possible. See the rules.

IYKYK

I found this at John Ringo's place. I immediately laughed out loud.

Yep. That would explain it.

NOW HERE IS A QUESTION

I wonder how many pagers blew up in the United States and Europe yesterday? It's a given that dozens or hundreds blew up in Doha and Iran but I'd be curious at the number of pagers that blew up outside Lebanon yesterday.

As to who launched the attack on terrorists it could be anybody really. Some people like to blame the Jews for everything or Mossad but in this case there is a lot of hate out there and it could have been planned and implemented by the Maronites, Druze, Sunni Lebanese or the old standbys, the CIA and KGB. Who else hates the PLO that much? Oh, yeah, just about every other country on earth.

PLANe TO HELL

 We have seen just how broken the SS is in the last few weeks. There isn't much doubt about their massive incompetence and serial indifference to protecting the life of the man both the FBI and inJustice Department are pursuing on a variety of farcical charges but there is perhaps method to the indifferent, lackadaisical, incompetence on display. 

Zelensky is coming to America to make another grovel for advanced weapons he cannot afford, Ukraine cannot maintain or repair and which doesn't have the manpower with the training and background to make use of them. So anyway, mister super PNG with that ogre Putin is going to climb into an aircraft (perhaps a Boeing product?), fly to the United States, grovel, beg and plead all over Washington, DC and other well healed places where the elite live who can scrape billions of $ out of monsters like Zelensky and where he will be ferociously guarded by the SS and others of that stamp and presuming he survives their inattention, will climb back into some airplane and take wing for the Continent.

I really don't know what will happen and neither do I care very much. I see Putin has ordered the Nation to make significant increases to the Red Army and Forces because he sees obvious signs that idiot NATO scum are lining up to attack Russia with long-range weapons and then gasp and pretend that it wasn't them, no, it was Zelensky and Ukraine!!!!!

So the question I have is, does Putin want the war to go on for another year or two or does he want it to end?  The obvious and easiest way to end it would be to tag Zelensky while he's doing his best Kamala imitation in the US. The way things work with the brain-dead DC elite is that a Russian assassin using the cover of the Red Army Chorus or a French marching band could sneak up behind Zelensky and shoot him or just slip him a little dose of polonium with his soup or maybe via the ferule on an umbrella without anybody at all noticing. The Russians are really good at this sort of thing and even if they get caught and held by our doofus hooligan bureaucrats all Putin will need to do to get them back is scrape up another trans athlete visiting Russia with 42 ounces of fentanyl in her bag and offer to trade it back to US for all the Russians involved and even the French marching band if he adopts an aggressive bargaining position that involves some shoe-banging.

I for one would not fly on the same plane as Zelensky, ever. In fact, I wouldn't want to be in the sky within a thousand miles of Zelensky's airplane.

ONE CAN ONLY HOPE

 We're back to the math of tragedies. We are counting on the Secret Service to get it right every single time and the enemy only has to get it right once. That is the kind of thing that leads one to despair. It's like hoping you have some part of the new Boeing that worked even half as well as the old Boeing before it left Seattle.

Intellectually we all know and accept that the Secret Service is there to make it more difficult to shoot the Presidents but we also know that short of the most drastic measures, a determined enemy will always makes it way through to the target. Wasn't that Day of the Jackal and all those other thrillers from the 60's and 70s always showed? It would be nice if the SS put forth more of an effort to protect President Trump than it does to assist the DHS in settling Haitian migrants in little Ohio cities but there is absolutely no evidence of that happening.

The sheer hate and contempt exhibited by the media and democrats for the Republic, for Trump and for the people who happen to dislike what the Left is and are in this country is kind of breathtaking. They seem totally unaware of how they come across to those of us who are sane. They sound evil and malevolent and even were one to catch them and get them to reflect about what they're saying and what they obviously believe, there would be no changing their minds. This is what indoctrination looks like. This is why it is so difficult to pry true believers away from any cult no matter how bizarre it is.

It is amazing that it has come to this. Some organization is setting these vicious losers up to kill. It would be helpful if some trustworthy organization with credibility looked into it and reported back to us.

INSANITY

 I find that there are an awful lot of people that look at the war in Ukraine and think we are perfectly justified in sending our best weapons to Ukraine so that Ukrainians can then shoot them deep into Russia and kill Russians. That's how these simpletons think. They think that this would be 'justice'.

Wars and retaliation are not about 'justice'. War and retaliation has nothing to do with 'justice'. Sending Ukraine our missiles to shoot in our name of justice into Russia for justice is exactly the same thing as us shooting those missiles into Russia. It will be met with instant and fully justified retaliation and unlike Russia which is maintaining to the best of its ability a live and active air defense system, neither the United States nor NATO is doing any such thing as they struggle with contemplating using their weapons to launch long-range attacks on Russian cities.

MAD was about mutual assured destruction and the triggers were readily apparent to even the stupidest politicians and most idiotic generals. In our case it was missiles or bombers coming over the pole to attack cities and other targets in America. Our response was spelled out well in advance and the whole world knew we would retaliate with launch on warning using 100% of our nuclear assets. As soon as we confirmed missiles coming in from the Soviet Union we were going to launch everything we had at them.

What do you imagine our response would be now that we don't know if those missiles now contain nuclear weapons or maybe they're just hi-explosive like the ones we're thinking of shooting into Russia? If it's not flocks of inbound missiles but just a small handful and they're targeting 'demonstration' cities that America doesn't really care about anymore and not Washington, DC, as a warning to US to stop giving Russia's enemy long range weapons from our arsenals to use killing Russians are we still going to salvo the full load of our nukes on Russia?

We DON'T HAVE ANY ACTIVE AIR DEFENSE SYSTEM. It was forbidden by the ABM treaty and we tore that up long ago but we never really invested in building ABM sites all over America to take the place of all those old Nike/Hercules missile sites that we had surrounding every major city in America until we scrapped the lot of them.

ANECDOTALLY

I understand the the Bureau of Covering up the Dismal State of the US Economy had to revise its lying numbers rather drastically a little while ago because about 900,000 of the 1.2 million jobs they said had been created in the Biden economy simply never happened and never existed. I sort of wonder what impact this has on military recruiting but anecdotally what I'm getting is that there are jobs out there if you want them as a job entrant and some of them actually pay pretty damned well. They range from full time to part time and seem to exist if you look hard enough in spite of the damned practice my spy tells me about which is that all those Help Wanted ads one sees taped on the doors of various businesses are just for show and that they're not really hiring anyone.

It occurs to me to wonder if that means that a greater number of our youth are more interested in taking up one of the duties of citizenship and joining the semi-armed forces. I see that the numbers are so dire in the Coast Guard Drug Fishing industry that they have laid up dozens of cutters and boat stations all over the place. They simply cannot find the bodies to throw at the fun problem of driving a rescue boat or maintaining helicopters and boats or in manning marine safety positions. I don't know if it's the truly dismal leadership or the fact that we simply gave up and surrendered in the War on Drugs and it all seems rather pointless now.

The Army and Navy are also having trouble meeting their recruiting and retention goals. I don't like to mock sincere men who talk a big game but watching a Marine General try to explain that the Marines really needed to retain a much larger percentage of their first term enlistees was quite remarkable. You can indeed convince an 18 year old man to do just about any damned fool thing but they grow out of that phase and by the time their 22 or 23 they've grown up and started looking for a life that doesn't involve being treated as a fully disposable clothes rack.

The Army's problems with manpower have grown so severe they've essentially stood down an entire Army Division in numbers and said, 'with our revised recruiting number we're not meeting our new and much reduced manpower requirements. The Navy isn't talking anymore and I stopped believing anything they had to say on the topic of manning right about the time they made the decision to shut down Orlando Naval Training Center and San Diego Naval Training Center in favor of keeping gang infested and controlled Great Lakes Naval Training Center as our sole source of Navy enlisted training. That has to be one of the stupidest unforced errors to ever hit Navy Recruiting. It doesn't help to see that our ships are now extending on 9 and 12 month deployments again instead of the 6 months we wanted and that the number of port calls and visits has been reduced in order to meet Operating Tempo Requirements that keep our ships in the Red Sea and North Arabian Sea. 

Port calls there used to include exciting Brief Stops for Fuel in Aden, Yemen until the terrorists blew up USS Cole when it pulled in for a quickie at the fuel pier. Say what you want about Fat Lenard and the totally bogus Fat Lenard fake scandal of giving a ship's husbanding agent details about the ships' movements well in advance so that arrangements to fuel, resupply and paint them in port could be made in advance, at least none of the ships in the Pacific were blown up by some 'friend of the ship chandler' who knew well in advance what ships would be making stops in Aden and probably knew it long before the guys in Bahrain did.

Other exciting ports of call I recall from my time in the Red Sea included Mombasa (very nice) and Djibouti (a horrible place) and then we were going to visit Mogadishu but we got a message from our Ambassador there who told us the place was dangerous, violent and even the trees have VD and we decided to skip it. (It does pay sometimes to be on the flagship when this sort of question comes up). The great liberty ports on the NAS coast include exciting Khor Fakkan (no), Muscat, and Fujairah. While Muscat was nice there is nothing at all there. Other unmentionables in the Red Sea include Hurgada, Yanbu and Jeddah and no, you don't want to go to any of them either.

If you cross the NAS heading east you can troll the Iranian coast and Jask and maybe find out if the ship's defenses are up to dealing with C-801 and C-802 missiles and whatever other excitement the Iranians have going on and then spend an awful visit pierside in Karachi. I wouldn't recommend it and I don't know if we pay port calls there anymore or not. Pakistan is an insane place.

You don't see any posh liberty ports like Rota, France, Naples, the Adriatic Coast, up the Bosphorus or another charming port call in Turkey or Haifa and I'm guessing nobody is stopping in Alexandria or Beirut. It just doesn't seem to have the old cachet where Navy crews could expect to make port calls in Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and a score of other nice places and of course the Army still remains the service with the unofficial motto of, join the Army, travel the world, meet interesting exciting people and kill them.' It just doesn't sound the same when you have nothing but ignorant and stupid leaders who never found an African shithole they didn't think was suitable habitat for a couple hundred American soldiers to broaden themselves. They have, as the saying goes, run out of places like that in Asia but that's probably only temporary.

I wonder what the DACOWITS investigators are finding these days about women in the service and what their reports look like. They may now well be every bit as classified as the Navy's Insurv reports are and very closely held. I can't think it's that bad though. After all, we have women in charge or at the very top of all the Armed Forces and the Coast Guard. What could go wrong?