HELLO MAELSTROM, I DIDN'T SEE YOU THERE

 It looks like the idiots and countries that brought us World War I, World War II, The Crimean War, et al are all hellbent on bringing us the next round of universal death and dying. I really don't know how people can fail to notice that there is exactly and only one player in the ugly conflict going on currently who is most definitely not playing around or a dabbler and actually means what he says. If Putin tells you a thing, you can take it to the bank and he has been that way since his first term as President of the Russian Federation.

And so the Chancellor of Germany announces that from now on all range limits on weapons Germany supplies to Ukraine will be removed and the weapons may be used to attack any targets in Russia.

What are some of the things that Russia can do in return for the Germans attack on Russia? 

- Cut off all energy flow to Germany and Western Europe.

- Make deliberate attacks on the energy supplies originating in Scandinavia that power Germany. 

- Make direct attacks on the factories making the weapons.

- Full blown cyber warfare

- 100% blockade of Ukraine

- My perennial favorite, the Pirate Submarines make their long awaited reappearance.

These two are likely to cost the EU everything it has. The EU Foreign Minister and re-imagined Queen

 

When I was much younger I thought that Europeans were a lot like Americans except not as feisty or boisterous. How modern day Europe adopted all of the worst aspects of the 3rd Reich, Loius XVI, the Second Bourbon Restoration and the liberum veto era of the Polish Kingdom is as much a mystery to me as what Starmer is doing selling some IO people the islands that Britain has owned for over 200 years that actually once belonged to some other people now doubly dispossessed by the idiots that mangled and twisted Brexit into a complete disaster for England. 

Is there some sort of competition over there building new European running shoes that will permit them all to race into disaster at the fastest human pace possible? My God, what if they get an AI up and running and it is programmed like the two idiots above.

Europe is doomed, again.

WHERE WE FIND THEM

 Some of them just vanished and never came back. Let us not lose sight of those that went down to the sea. There were a lot of men remembered like this and never got a headstone to name them for future generations.

Names and locations of all the warships sunk in Iron Bottom Sound during the War. A staggering number.

One page of the book of remembrance at Coraopolis Library

Names of War dead in the last two centuries

As usual the Civil War took an enormous toll

An eternity in Ashland, a small town we like to stop in on our way elsewhere

VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE

In the olden days of yore, various chief minions of the Government and Military would appear before the various Congressional Committees to offer Testimony on their Departments and their weapon systems and were there to beg the Congress to be generous in all future funding for said things. Can you spot the difference between the people who appear in front of those Committees today who will sit there and rip the Senator or Congresswoman to pieces for being idiots and stupid and really dim-witted or noted truth dodgers?

That's right gentle readers, the people hand picked by President Trump don't give a Flying Fcuk about what Congress does with their Departmental Budget or to their weapon systems since they're so damned busy pruning out 69 years of pure waste and idiocy and won't miss a single dime cut by Congresscritters enraged at not being deferred to like the perfumed princes of old. 

It really makes for some enjoyable youtube watching.

DIMWITS AND SLOW COACHES

 I find myself wondering if there was ever much in the way of real intelligence at the Ivy League universities and then I think back to when they were absolute bastions of white male superiority and provided 100% of the intellectual heft that created the Manhattan Project, created Plutonium and created the environment that led to every meaningful invention in the last 100 years and realize that there was simply no point in asking such an idiotic question. They had a few POCs even back then but they were standouts of a particular sort not found very much anymore and the women back then had their own colleges nearby in order to secure the future of the race. But honestly, I don't think you could find today a single Harvard or Columbia administrator, dean or board member with an IQ larger than my shoe size.

What kind of imbecile picks a fight with a President who clearly has nothing at all to lose by telling them to clean up their sleazy racist act and fly right and in strict accordance with the newly revised, as interpreted law of the land, as dictated by the black robed morons in DC? What kind of idiot decides that this is the most opportune time to put that 'stupid New York real estate mogul' in his place and tell him to shut up and consider his real place in the world? I mean, does that sound at all smart to anyone?

It is a little tiresome to play every single round 9 times over as the Courts get to piss on the breakfast crunchies before a higher court tells them to butt out but at the end of the day that man who is most clearly not any kind of stupid or idiot is going to win and the Ivies are going to lose and lose big. What I want to know is, WTF did they think they were going to WIN by picking this fight?

That is where the true magnitude of the stupid rings like a bell. The President of Harvard has just delivered a real humdinger of a zinger and put that orange headed oaf in his place and so there! I can see you scratching your heads and asking, what? Who made these people the heads of these IVY universities and why have they not been hauled out of their crypts and burned alive on the hallowed quads of the pathetic remains of once great universities? They should all be named and shamed and turned out but that's the real kicker isn't it? There is nobody left to point out to anyone that matters that only the clowns and stupid fools remain at the colleges and universities at every level.

I doubt that any of them ever see the irony of repeatedly calling what started at Berkeley so long ago, 'The Free Speech Movement.' The very last thing anybody of the left or the liberal bent want or will permit is free speech. These are the ones that use antifa thugs as their enforcers and when they don't enforce hard enough they call up the Red Guard and the PFLP along with the eco-freeks and they batter into submission anyone who dares to speak against them. These people strongly believe in censorship of all speech and particularly any speech by anyone who disagrees with them. They are corrupt beyond your worst imagination because every single one of them thinks this is the most logical and American decision ever made and see nothing wrong with throttling you to death if you don't agree with their pronouns or any other little thing.

I applaud the government for shutting down all their government funds, slashing their ridiculous pass-throughs and overhead rates and terminating their desire to educate the foreign elite in their pigsty of liberal perfection. I hope that they also lose their tax exemption and that they be investigated for every bit of fraud and chicanery they have been party to since 1968. All those research papers that keep getting recalled because they're nothing but made up lies and fake statistics, they should be investigated as frauds perpetrated on the Government and the PIs should be looking at jail and restitution.

Honestly, how did people this damned stupid manage to take over and run every single one of our great universities?

WE SHALL SEE

 It will be interesting to see if Zelensky and Putin can negotiate an end to the war absent a sincere desire by either man to actually settle for anything less than all of what they demand. It will be interesting to see where the wriggle room develops as the negotiate the end of hostilities because if there was ever a conflict based in ineluctable divisions of geography this is it. At the end of the fighting there can only be an outcome that is favored by Russia because Russia is the only one that must be convinced to stop fighting and I haven't seen any reason at all for them to stop in even a single proposal out of the West.

The history of this type of conflict is pretty clear and well known to anybody who reads history. Russia cannot stop now without some pretty meaningful changes to the way Europe operates these days and there is zero sign that Europe has picked up on this. This war boils down to Russia being forced back on its final frontier by a power crazed coterie of madmen and women running the EU and American diplomacy since Clinton entered office.

They pushed and shoved NATO to expand to the East despite every assurance to Russia that they would not and then they arranged for all kinds of 'color revolutions' to sweep nationalist out of power throughout the former nationalist countries of all of Europe. It's like there are no real Europeans running any country in Europe because what kind of European would destroy their own countries by unlimited immigration, ruthless failure to assimilate immigrants, destruction of their military forces and finally the destruction of their economic basis by converting overnight to net zero energy insanity?

How can you conclude any kind of peace deal with fanatics of that stripe? They don't care at all about destroying their own countries and they have made it crystal clear that they urgently want to destroy Russia. With that kind of conclusion going into the talks how can anyone expect Europe or its lackeys to negotiate in good faith or keep even a fraction of what they do agree to? The outcome is foreordained and what Russia gets out of any 'peace' with Ukraine is nothing but a breathing space that allows Europe to rearm Ukraine before pointing them at Russia's throat again.

I think the talks will look as dishonest and filled with ill intent as you can believe and that the instant hostilities end the EU will try to do to Russia exactly what the Allies did to Germany after the Armistice was signed in 1918. Remember that Armistice? It wasn't a surrender, it was an agreement to stop fighting to talk peace and what went on in the meantime to a Germany? Well, you can still read about it.

You know what that poisonous peace with Germany brought a mere 15 years later? That's what I expect out of any kind of armistice between Russia and the EU. The EU is in it to win and to win they must topple Putin and break up Russia and there is no evidence at all that they mean to stop.

I will know that there is some real interest in peace over there if there is a sudden wave of unexpected deaths among the people that are quietly and secretly running the destroyers of the West. The puppet masters need to be pruned back hard perhaps and perhaps join the xroyalty of the Holy Roman Empire in the past. The world cannot afford letting the people who engineered the total destruction of the old Imperial West to continue to run things.

Remember who we're dealing with, these mean seriously float the idea that you should be made to eat bugs and like it while squatting in the dark surrounded by 3rd world savages who prey upon you and use every means at the State's disposal to make damned sure you aren't allowed to fight back.

THE STUPID PREVAILS

 It's hard to grasp just how vast the expanding bubble of really stupid ideas is and strange that almost nobody can see it. In this comedic story out of Newsweek we are treated to the idea that the Republic of Korea just got the plans to build an aircraft carrier and are going to rush off and build one because every country needs them and besides, it will look good on their resume.

Aircraft carriers are built for one reason only and that is it, they exist to project power. They allow any country in the world to go out and menace every other country in the world. That's all they do. They don't show the flag, they don't pull into port and deter crime, they don't build men, they just float around projecting one nation's will on all the other nations. It's really not all that difficult to grasp.

Now ask yourself why South Korea would need an aircraft carrier? They have one enemy and no world spanning interests anywhere else in the world that require power projection for resolution so why would they spend the 20 trillion dollars to build one? Their one single solitary enemy shares a border with them and is all within easy fighter/bomber range of any airbase in South Korea so there is no shortage of aircraft, bombs, or targets. Why would they need an aircraft carrier?

One could ask of the Australians why they need a fleet of nuclear submarines and get just about as much of a well reasoned answer. Some highly educated twit thinks they will need them for the inevitable war with ______________________.

The problem is of course that they will never now fight that enemy which is slowly and gradually taking over Australia in the quietest way every single day. Australia already lost that war the twit feared so much he contracted with the Bidens to get nuclear submarines built for the RAN. Australia caved into unlimited immigration and within a generation or two there will be almost no native non aboriginal Aussies left. Indonesia has been sponsoring the longest invasion since the fall of Rome.

There is also the problem that they cannot man and operate the submarines they currently have and show little inclination to do anything about it. 

Everyone thinks its easy to exist without purpose but it is hard to do that today. The USN maintains fleets of carriers and submarines because we have spent every moment since 1945 meddling with or invading every country on the planet except, maybe, the Vatican. Our subs were out spying on the USSR and then blowing things up very quietly and accomplishing real serious things, not just swanning* about like the Royal Navy for the last 80 years.

*swanning–that thing you do with an entire fleet consisting of scores of warships rather than send one of them down to the single solitary sole flash point remaining of your whole entire former empire in order to deter some feckless MILITARY JUNTA from invading islands they have claimed for a century or more.

Kind of makes you wonder how many of the RN's ships are actually swanning around the Malvinas today....Some people learn from history, some lost the knack and others never had it.

PUSHING CIVILIZATION RIGHT OFF THE CLIFF

 I think the major reason for the disaster that is our public education policy is that the politicians all figured out that a well educated, well read and intelligent population would demand real answers and real solutions from people eager to just kick the cans down the road. No politician wants 100% of the real voters knowledgeable about the Constitution and all of its amendments and none of them want educated people who know damned well that face masks do not stop a virus and never will and that social distancing your away from catching a disease is about as stupid as it gets.

What they lost sight of about 80 years ago was that the same ignorant dumb morons they permit to become public teachers also took over the Unions and the policy maker positions at every level in the Education Departments and that they then took over the Private and Parochial Schools that were once used by the rich and the professionals to educate their own children. Without that last bastion of smart students and educated adults, things started to come apart faster and faster. Now you have people who cannot find South Dakota on a map, know what language they speak in China and cannot tell you the square root of 9.

Most of the tiny handful that persist in the ability to do these things end up as....middle managers working for policy idiots from the main stream. In a country that doesn't honor merit there is no natural rise to the top for the smart and well educated. You get DIE morons at every level and especially at the top because they owned the HR system before you thought about how much damage they could do there and you let them.

Well, not you gentle reader, I'm talking about the people that were running things into the ground. Did you ever think that even in this moment of time a leading Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America would express both his contempt and disdain for the very idea of helping white refugees? Did they learn nothing at all from the DIE FEMA morons that were deliberately bypassing homes in Western Carolina that gave away their political leanings by having the nerve to fly an American flag over the flood and wind ravaged ruins of their homes? I guess not.

Sadly, I think every single mainline Christian church in America is aligned with the Episcopal jerks on this topic. The only hope out there now is the Evangelicals.

MY QUESTION

 When do we get to know who was actually running the United States of America for the previous four years? That's all. Who was really pulling the strings, doing the national security policy making and decision making and who let that happen despite what must be some Constitutional objection to permitting a vegetable to rule the United States of America.

When do we get to know what that was?

ON THE SUBLIME

 When you have more than a moment this small piece For Dorothy at Sippican Cottage is easily one of the most sublime pieces that I have ever read. You might enjoy it too. It provides perspective.

LET'S GO TO THE TAPES

 One of the more fascinating aspects to the Watergate Coup was how it was so carefully blown onto the rocks of Lie and Deceit because 18 minutes of the tapes from the Oval Office somehow went missing and thus the press and coup leaders were free to scream to the nation that Nixon was evil and stuff like that. It takes its place among the saddest episodes of pure evil and chicanery in Washington, DC.

But speaking of tapes there is one thing that can now be thrown into sharp focus and that is something as simple as releasing hours and hours of the tapes from the Oval Office when slow Joe Biden was in there being all Presidential. I'd like to listen to those tapes and I don't think I'd just hear the hiss of dead air as the tape played and I don't think it would all be just snoring sounds from the direction of the Resolute desk and chair set. Nope.

I think we'd hear the sausage getting made right there in the Oval Office as the various Enemies of the State divvied up the loot among themselves and their sponsors. They probably cut deals right there in the Oval Office. We are talking about evil but stupid people. They could be that stupid and I'd like to see if it is true because it sounds like a criminal enterprise run amok in the White House and why not go to the tapes and end any doubt as they are doing now by releasing the JFK assassination records in full (even if they are redacted to hell and gone) and of course the munificent release of the copious files, tapes, digital records and the thousands of terabytes of data removed from Epstein's little pleasure island, his mansion in New York City, his bank vaults and all the other places a blackmailer stashes the evidence.

Yes yes, I hear you say, what about Executive Privilege? Yes, that's right, Biden waived that privilege when it was President Trump's records, notes and documents and it is probably a nice touch if he returned the favor and simply turned over every single minute of what went on in the Oval Office when it was used by his predecessor and the other members of that criminal enterprise.

 Release the Tapes!

INTO AFRICA

 As I saw this I laughed out loud. Who wouldn't?

Either Rwanda or Congo would be fine. A good place for them.

AND NOW WE ASK, HOW DID HE KNOW?

 For those following the news closely you may have observed that our President was prescient last week when he gently hinted that the next Pope would be an American. Through the Ages of mankind, future generations will stand in awe of this amazing man and his otherworldly capacity to somehow divine all things.

Musings from the dark early morning hours not long after midnight if one lives in California.

ONLY PLAY AT WAR TO WIN

 Happy Victory in Europe Day!

GOING ATOMIC

 Well it has happened again, we have two nuclear armed powers exchanging rocket fire and aerial bombardment over the simple utterly predictable massacre of a bunch of harmless people out simply enjoying nature in their own country because a group of implacably evil islamic enemies of civilization found them without any means of self-defense. It could be a real atomic war. Both sides are the very essence of fanatics and they don't hesitate to share their enthusiasm for killing the other side and never shirk from killing in the name of some god.

...and you thought the special military operation was a bad thing.

Oh, and the other little plucky warriors are gearing up to snag others into striking long-range blows against a nuclear armed state (Iran) in order to prevent them from making their own nuclear weapons and you have these idiot morons who claim, "oh it's just some airstrikes, it's not like we're really attacking them," and your mind boggles.

....and then you read the sudden 'unexpected' revelation that Saudi Arabia has nuclear weapons and the people who know or just found out are like all shocked and stuff. They are the same kind of twit that swans around informing the poor that, 'money doesn't buy happiness' and totally oblivious to the fact that it buys every other thing on the planet which includes both islamic and Russian nuclear weapons.

It's a brave new world out there but fortunately our best and brightest are keenly involved in getting us into a shooting war with China over something or a minuscule spat over a pointless thing that they are literally dying to sell us. As you know, the whole Vietnam War was predicated on not letting the dirty commies win there but we're supposed to overlook that and defend them to the death against the bad Chinese communists. If not for human design factors, heads would spin right off.

Everyone remember that Pakistan was hiding Osama bin Laden right outside their military academy? The pakistanis have a penchant for terrorism that matches, oh just about every islamic regimes'.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL FAILURE

 There was a launch failure at Andoya but it was really quite beautiful. If you haven't seen it I recommend giving it the 30 seconds or so that it needs. I thought they would blow it up before it returned to earth but perhaps they thought they could get it to start flying again.....who knows.

Full screen if you please, the screen shots don't do it justice.

POWER AND WILL

 If there was yet another place that would force anyone to the conclusion that there really is a role for sea power and air power it is the unpleasant Yemen that exists today. As you can see from the map below, Yemen is a very isolated little bit of Hell on earth and so the question must be asked, why are we tolerating their nonsense?

The Southern End of the Red Sea and most of Yemen

Yemen is pretty close to the equator and so much larger than you picture it. It does however, share some qualities which make it almost as unique as Cuba. It is bounded by the sea on both the south and west sides and it has only enemies to the north. From the east there is a sand drift of deep unpleasantness and then Oman. Beyond Oman lies Iran.

It is not a place of great industry or technical might and can probably best be described as backwards. 

Some people might think that if the problems there were overwhelming and damaging to the countries outside the Red Sea that rely on safe passage for much of their energy supplies and quite a bit of their commerce, they might shut off all international trade and commerce between Yemen and the rest of the world in retaliation.

France is not one of those countries since they had the good sense to go nuclear and stay nuclear decades ago but they are the former colonial power in Djibouti and as nice as the French have been to all of their former colonies in Africa I'm sure that if Macron asked nicely that Djibouti would be happy to allow expanded basing rights for a powerful force out of the EU to stage their naval and air blockades out of. 

To the north lies the Empty Quarter and desert. It's also known as Saudi Arabia and the Saud's like Yemen even less than we do. It is possible that some smart diplomacy would weld the Gulf Cooperative Council to the EU effort to open up the Red Sea to the free passage of tankers and this might help control the continued flow of support from Iran to Yemen.

I don't advocate any of this and I don't see any reason for the US to take any active part, or any part at all in the process of restoring Europe's other gas supply. I would hate for us to decide that the thing to do was to create in Yemen something like our arrangement with Shah Massoud in Afghanistan. Let's stop giving high performance SAMs to tribesmen and gold to our sworn enemies.

If the flow of weapons and the materials to make them is cut off then we might paraphrase Tacitus and his quote from Calgacus, "the EU forces can make a desert and call it peace." It's already a desert so that part shouldn't be too hard.

I'll reiterate though that we should really sit on our hands this time and stay out of it. Let the EU put aside the animosity they share with their Houthi brothers for Israel and see if they can make the Red Sea safe for goods bound to and away from the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal. This is one of those countless times where the best thing for US to do is nothing.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

 This was funny.

The sudden onslaught of massive supporters of Pope Francis in the media never fail to refer to him as a reformer. I suppose he could be described so if you mean along the lines of Obama or Clinton but less so if you are going to talk about the place and role of God in this world or the nature and the sins of the Catholic Church not just in this century but in the last 20.

Now of course, the all-knowing good-souls that make up NPR and PBS and the rest of the MSM are speaking of a new reform candidate who will no doubt toss all the pitiful remnants of Christ's teachings out the window of the Sistine Chapel and start wearing polyester leisure suits on his pontifical visits around the world.

I was wondering how they will react to the near inevitable selection of an African or Asian Pope. I'm kind of looking forward to it. OTGH, we are talking about the Church so it could be a Drag Queen from Australia.

A MERE TRIFLE

 I see that Mr. Rubio is accumulating titles at a fearsome rate. Some wag said he was looking like a 16th century Duke who had won the favors of a grateful monarch. Rubio is now Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Administrator of USAID and dozens of other titles that come with those jobs.

I wonder if President Trump is dreaming up some sort of parallel to the Order of the Garter or a newfangled Marshall’s Baton for highly favored principals in his orbit. I’m sure he has several suitable schemes in mind already.

As I recall from my reading of C S Forester’s Hornblower books, the monarch used to give such men the title and pay of Colonel of Marines. President Trump could do something like that and award them the title, Colonel of the Space Marines. First up, Elon Musk. I suppose Colonel of Colonial Marines would work as well.

SEARCH ENGINES

 Why did the various people who have them decide to destroy them? It used to be so easy to write a query and get a reasonably complete set of good or valid answers in return but now they are hopelessly and ridiculously off the reservation so it must have been done by design. I'm not interested in AI for something as unprofound as searching the web for a string of words using an algorithm and simply only returning results that are contained within the " " like it used to.

It used to work!

CLEAR AND SIMPLE AS THE TRUTH

 The Russian Foreign Minister appeared on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan and she asked him right off the bat a simple question. See for yourself:

What I find fascinating is that I don't think one single solitary main stream news person has ever read Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal and 100% of them would be shocked and horrified if someone proposed to them that they might gain some insight and appreciation for the man they love to hate if they simply picked up his book and read it. We are talking about the very same people that thrilled to read the fabulous fabrications of Obama and the outright lies of both Clintons.

AS I WAS SAYING

 This is now the current state of the USN. It demonstrates very clearly the extent of damage any sailor of ill-will can wreak on a supine and helpless navy that allowed itself to recruit possibly thousands of men and women who don’t love America and sadly the mechanisms to get rid of them need to be imposed starting at the very top of the organization.

IN THE TRENCHES WITH THE ILLUMINATI

 One of the things that is becoming sadly apparent is that the United States military is no longer fit for purpose. There is currently a war being waged against the people of the United States by some truly evil and despicable people and those people are allied with a small number of judges and are dedicated to overturning the will of the people as expressed in the last election. It is nothing less than a coup d'etat and the only reason it has been allowed to persist for as long as it has is because it is now clear that the military will almost certainly not follow the orders of the Civilian Commander-in-Chief.

The impact of this division that has been engineered by 100% of the men and women now wearing four stars and all of the officers who preceded them in that rank for the last 25 years is that the military is fundamentally unreliable. We know it is truly incompetent at the things that professional military forces routinely accomplish. They are unable to perform anything like reasonable and competent research and development leading to the design, development and construction of modern weapons and weapon systems.

They cannot wage war competently anywhere on earth. The incredible failures in the Air Force that saw a pack of men wander into a nuclear weapons magazine, pick up and carry out live nuclear weapons and adorn a B52 with them and then fly that aircraft to another Air Force base and nobody knew they had taken away nuclear weapons, left them unattended on the wings of a bomber far away and nobody was hung, drawn and quartered is kind of the military that we have today.

The debacle in Afghanistan showcased the idiocy and incompetence of officers selected not for their ability but for being toadies of the democrats and toadies of DIE is just the latest case in point. Every single officer involved in that debacle should have been terminated and sent to Leavenworth for a couple of decades. That was no rude military shock, that was basic in-your-face incompetence at every level.

The recent discarding of truly stupid officers in command positions for loss of confidence in their ability is just the lowest wave of the Terrible Great Wave that you can see if you step back far enough. The President was forced to reach out to find a retired 3 star general to nominate as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That screams, every other serving 3 and 4 star general is a useless and probably despicable toady of the left who would, like general Milley just casually commit treason by calling his communist Chinese counterpart and telling him that he would disobey the orders of the President.

The top ranks of the 5 services and the Coast Guard do need to be purged and when that happens it is also essential to purge every single member of the Senior Executive Service because if there is anyone even more dishonest and despicable than the 4 star generals and admirals, it is the hordes of jealous rice bowl guarding bureaucrats that are like a massive anchor on any and all change.

The upshot, when President Trump decides he has had enough of the Courts and their blatant usurpation of the rights and prerogatives reserved by the Constitution to the Executive Branch of our government, we can expect every Blue city to go up in flames and there are still good people who live in some of them who will need protection just as the Guard, the Army and the Reserves have protected them from Civil Unrest in the past and right now, nobody knows if those forces will follow orders or not.

Good job Bill Clinton, Obama and Biden and every one of you lickspittle politicians in uniform that have forced us to this point. You did that. You created a mush of lies and deceit and destroyed the unitary military mindset that had held this country safely at the core of its regard for over 200 years and all it took was you, your corrupt cronies at every level of government and the bureaucracy and ruthlessly purging the finest officers out of the military at the the 06 and 07 level.

That was another thing 30 years of naval service got me was duties in the Middle East, Far East and West Coast. I worked exclusively for officers that had eschewed the Pentagon tours and somehow still made it to the top back then to be CINCPAC, CINCPACFLT, COMUSNAVCENT, 3RD Fleet and the rest. You would not believe how different those admirals are from the ones serving today and over the last 20 years. It is night and day.

There may be a few that point out that the Navy is executing well in the Red Sea but that is not so much tribute to them and us as it is to the utter uselessness of the enemy. What does concern us is that we are expending our missiles at a significant rate and the production lines for some of them were shut down years ago and no longer exist. There is no production line rolling out scores of land attack munitions every month, much less the hundreds that would be needed in a real war. There is nothing like that at all.

We ate, sank, destroyed or gave away what we used to call the War Reserve materials. We also ended production of just about every form of ammunition, missile and bomb. Outside Destructors, I'd be surprised if we have so much as a single sea mine anywhere outside of a museum. 

That and the sad state of the Fleet and the maintenance for that Fleet is a concern. Back when I was in we could fix just about anything onboard a ship. We had a level of spares that was in constant decline but I'd be surprised if spares exist outside of cannibalization now for many systems on our ships and the longer a ship stays in maintenance status the more likely it has been stripped of parts needed for operations elsewhere.

What I find most concerning is that the problems we face require highly motivated and ethical young people in large numbers and yet every single shiny new face is going to be received by the DIE hires of the previous administrations who now occupy every level of management and are infected with the woke and DIED mindset and who will resist any efforts to revitalize the military with every fiber of their weak being. I am not too sanguine about the up and coming officers who will be products of Academies and Colleges that don't prepare them to work unrelentingly and tirelessly to rebuild the military.

BREEZING UP

 

SIC THE DEVIL ON THEM

My cunning Middle East Peace plan has no shiny parts and costs nothing of any importance.  Start by disarming Hamas in Gaza. This will, according to all our left-wing friends and Europeans, be dead easy. Abbas orders Hamas to surrender the hostages and weapons to his agents and then he sends the PLO and Fatah in to disarm Hamas, free the hostages and punish the wicked. (probably nothing more than a smack on the wrist but it could take the form of flying lessons off tall buildings.)

Everyone is so used to paying palestinians to kill stuff that they can all stay on the payrolls of European countries and slip on down the Red Sea to Yemen and disarm the Houthis. And then, the peace de la résistance; they stay there. They deserve each other.

THE WAR DABBLERS

 NATO is the very poster child of lost and forgotten mythical beings that only lived in the backs of closets under something you'd rather not shove out of the way to look under. This amusing site  points out that our NATO allies are about as honest and forthcoming as one can expect from a group of terrified people on the brink of fighting a hopeless war against a terrible and powerful enemy that cannot fail to smash them into the dust.........wait. I'll go back. 

Showing uncommon nonchalance in the face of a titanic evil superpower, the good people of western Europe cheerfully spat on America and woefully under-prepared for war by ignoring all the wisdom of the ages that shows the truth that if you fear war you should be prepared.....wait, I'll start again.

Perhaps we should do our bit and tell the good people of Europe our history of waging war on that continent and they will understand their position a little more thoroughly then heretofore. In 1914 all the European twits lunged at each other with murder and mayhem in their hearts and tore each others guts out before we decided 3 years later to get involved.

In 1939 all European twits lunged at each other with murder and mayhem in their hearts and tore each others guts out before we decided 2 years later to get involved but only after one of the stupid bastards declared war on US. 

So, when we say, "that you can count on us to save you from your silly little wars of the future," consider how we mean those words. You guys fight on your own for a year or two and we'll start thinking about getting involved in yet another one of your pointless, stupid, meaningless wars.

And who knows? The way things look now, Europe would be forced to surrender even faster than France or Belgium in the last war and we won't have to fight at all. 

On the other hand, it may well be that Europeans have finally woken up to the fact that if they maintain anything at all that even looks or smells like an actual army or navy they will be buried in politicians eager to use it to go commit murder and mayhem somewhere else in Europe. Maybe its best if they really did just disarm.

I know, how many of us can say Kellogg-Briand Pact with a straight face even now almost 100 years later?

You know it was a dream once that sane and mostly sober men could take away the fear and banish war just by making ready for it because they all understood the one single essential true thing about every war in history. Every single one of them started because some powerful fool thought, "this time, he could win!" Modernists over the last 170 years modified that charming nonsense into the newer and more powerful version that declared that every war would always be over by Christmas. You see? "A quick war that we will win"!

I see that President Trump et al is winding down his attempt at making a peace in Ukraine and accepting the reality that Zelensky is not the slightest bit interested in peace. All the idiots propping him and Ukraine up to continue a pointless war they cannot ever win has gone to his head and convinced him that he can just keep on fighting and to a certain point there is some truth in that. The thing is of course and what almost nobody in the world really understands is that neither side has actually been fighting any kind of war. It is all bloody theater.

Neither Putin nor Russia are fighting a war. They keep telling everyone that but nobody understands what is being said. Russia is fighting a Special Military Operation and to make it clear that means that Russia is very much waging a special operation whose entire purpose is to gut western Europe and NATO and destroy and level their economies. Everyone poopoo's Russia as a gas station with Nukes but seriously, they grow more powerful every day and Europe only shrinks into less and less relevance anywhere.

Just try to think how would you go about destroying NATO as it was, if you had 60 years and special KGB Training to set it up?

-long march through the institutions turning them all against their own governments/peoples (done)

-fund the suicidal peace and anti-nuke cavalcades of dimwits all through the 60s, 70s and 80s (done)

-create out of whole cloth the Green Movement outside the COMINTERN to devastate the west (done)

-spark great friction between the allies over Treaty failures and unfair trade (done)

-gut the military through under-funding and public ridicule until nobody joins up anymore (done)

-continuously gut their economies by emphasizing free trade and globalization (done)

-have them import vast numbers (hordes) of people antithetical to everything in the West (done)

Create and cast the image of your nation as just a friendly and not so thuggish bear, sort of like Paddington. (done)

-Wage a mostly gentle and harmless special military operation that gradually consumes every $ and free Euro to pour into Ukraine's bottomless pit of corruption instead of spending it on their own military and carefully manage one of the most fake wars since The Phony War to lure the idiots into thinking they were on the point of victory or triumph or at least nondefeat in spite of the facts on the ground. (in progress)

-Don't shut down the gas lines, energy grids, don't attack the gas lines, energy grids, don't declare and enforce a naval blockade of Ukraine and don't retaliate even after it is painfully obvious that the Europeans have crossed the line and are now co-belligerents with Ukraine in a war against Russia. Do not rile up the lib/progs in the US.

You see Putin and his guys understand something that is true now but we don't know how much longer it will be true. "Nobody at all in the West is the slightest bit interested in fighting and dying for their country, way of life or anybody else's and absent the Will, there is no Way."

It kind of helps that the Arsenal of Democracy cannot make weapons in quantities necessary to fight even the most limited and harmless little war and the production lines are all gone or impossible to scale up to meaningful numbers. The arsenals and depots in the West are all empty. The old War Reserve stocks of vehicles and ammo is long gone.

The talking heads persist in thinking and saying that Russia is in trouble but failed to notice the BRICS and the loss of the $ as the world's reserve currency. They kind of failed to notice the offshoring of all the critical components of our modern war machines such as the microchips and the rare earth metals. The thing is though, Russia can maintain this level of effort for decades. The West cannot.

Tomorrow I'll write about peace in the little Satan reaches of the middle east.