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.

FUNNY THING TO SEE

 Just about the only thing I do not see Harvard standing for is fairness. I echo the sentiment of Thomas Sewell and observe with him that at the middle of every catastrophe in American history there stood a man with a Harvard degree.

Harvard somehow turned into the embodiment of all evil which used to be rare in a place that started out with a theological bent. Of course most of what we once embraced as divine has become corrupt beyond all understanding at the hands of men and now women from Harvard and various seminaries.

It is kind of amusing that the liberal left elects to see Harvard standing up for the right. On the gripping hand, Harvard only wants to continue to discriminate against people based solely on their race and background and they demand that you and I do as well. In fact, they are going to argue in Court in front of judges who mostly went to Harvard and other serial racist schools that they have a right to the Public's money and they don't care what anyone thinks about how they do business.

Did you ever imagine in your darkest nightmares that the idiots in charge of the Ivy League were an Entitlement Program even more worthy of your money then Social Security? I think it is long passed the time to tell these entitled jackasses to go to Hell. What do they produce for all those billions? At least if we funded MIT or Cal Tech there is some tiny chance that there would be spinoffs to benefit mankind. 

I wonder if they have figured out yet that the majority of America has fallen out of love with the whole idea of public funded higher education/indoctrination? I doubt it. They all get all of their news from NPR and PBS. As I hear them read all the news they make up I sometimes recall wuzzadem from long ago.

those were some funny sockpuppets

A MAN TALKING ABOUT ETERNITY

 It happened April 22, 2008. A couple of men and a time worth remembering.

A NEW DAY DAWNING

 I hope that all are granted a day of joyful repose and time with family and friends. It wouldn't be Easter without a picture and so,

A FIERY PATH

 I wondered to myself what would happen if the President decides that he has had enough of the Courts and declares himself the sovereign leader of the Executive Branch of the Country and tells the Courts that he will no longer abide by their insanity.

It would erupt in violence and it would be very ugly and it would be ugly in the same way that the last 2 wars fought in this country were but I think we're running out of room and time to entertain the idea that the Founders deliberately and with malice left the Republic's fate solely up to a bunch of black robed idiots who cannot tell us what a 'woman' is. 

I don't think that's what the Founders had in mind.

I do know that if it comes to a test, it will be the outright fascists who set fires and try to burn the entire country down. Unlike the Germans? I'm perfectly fine with shooting fascists.

NEUTRALIZATION

 If war was your dominant thought and you thought a lot about going to war against a country that seemingly had overwhelming dominance on land, sea and air and even in space, what direction would your thoughts trend as you prepared for a war with that dominance?

Me? I'd think about it long and hard and then I'd think of putting together not one but up to 20 or 30 schemes to neutralize all that dominance. It wouldn't be by launching a massive wave of ICBMs or launching a frontal attack across the border but by being sneaky. I'd be really sneaky.

I shudder to think what happens as the next confrontation takes place with people who are so sneaky they work out a way to get exploding devices into the hands of our ruling elite. I mean, now that we know it has been done, everyone is eager to try it again and see if it really works. Can people really be that damned stupid?

I'm just picturing some Senators plucking their new "senatorial use only free cell phone" out of their pocket to take a very important message from their sponsor....... I'm pretty sure most dems would fall for it and everyone ever promoted by General Milley or any 4 star in the last 20 years. 

so, i guess we got that going for us....

THIS IS A LITTLE WORRYING

 From Instapundit comes this in his italics. My response is in bold.

    China has done everything possible to incur global distrust and fear.

But nowhere near to incurring the global distrust and fear of the United States earned by US.

    Most of the world accepts that the COVID-19 epidemic that killed and maimed millions worldwide was birthed in a Wuhan virology lab under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army. The world also remembers that China and the Chinese-controlled WHO lied repeatedly about the origins and spread of the virus.

From what I've seen, that research was backed, supported, funded and guided by the CDC and the United States of America who lied about every single aspect of the virus and its origins for a damned good reason....they were behind it.

 
    The global public may recall that China stopped all domestic flights out of Wuhan on the internal news of the lab leak of the virus, while for days greenlighting nonstop air travel to major European and American cities. The world now accepts that China will never explain exactly when the virus appeared, how it “escaped” from the lab, why it was created in the first place, why Beijing repeatedly lied about all such inquiries, and what happened to an array of whistleblowers who warned of the leak.

What were the World's foremost Intelligence Communities telling us the reasons for that were and WHY DID WE IGNORE THEM and let those flights into our airspace?

These are of course the same brain dead morons that insist its perfectly safe to bring Ebola infected people here out of Africa because it's 'perfectly safe.'

    China’s so-called allies, such as Russia and India, have historical grievances and ongoing border disputes fueled by Chinese aggression.

Nobody on earth has 'so-called allies' like the United States does. See below. Have you looked at our borders and border history?

    NATO, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the US also are curious as to why China is using its vast foreign exchange not to lift about a quarter of its population out of third-world-level poverty. Instead, it is frantically building 3-4 nuclear bombs a month, a 700-ship navy, and 2,500 combat aircraft as it ratchets up pressure on Taiwan.

Putting on my Oz disguise I look at the whole world and would you believe that when you say NATO, EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia and the United States what China sees is a sea of enemies that have repeatedly attacked and invaded China for centuries and have, for the last 30 years since the Cold War ended, seen the US leading the pack trying to ramp up China as the new ne plus ultra enemy to be feared and demonized. What exactly did you expect China's rulers to do faced with this existential threat?

    The complexities of trade and tariffs present all sorts of minefields. But the Trump administration is beginning to navigate them, and its trajectory is rather simple. In the next 90 days, it will likely conclude trade deals with our allies and third parties that bring either tariff parity or no tariffs at all that will reduce the U.S. trade deficit.

Perhaps. I'm still curious about these allies you keep mentioning. In just what way have they proven to be allies of ours as opposed to, say, very troublesome freeloading moochers who have been gouging US since 1941?

    Of course, our allies and neutrals still use stealth tariffs to ensure advantage by money manipulation, VAT taxes, and pseudo-health and security impediments to free trade. And they deeply resent the Trump administration’s loud denunciations of their surpluses and asymmetrical tariffs. But those machinations can be addressed later in round two after tariff reciprocity or elimination is finalized.

Honesty compels me to point out that we have rigged the whole entire world so thoroughly in our favor it is hard to see around the bend to where these guys are really getting away with all that much. It cuts both ways all this talk about manipulating markets, gold supplies, the $ and little things like the FED gaming it all for its own benefit.

    For now, Trump should persuade our allies that if they were not so subject to Chinese mercantilism, they would have more flexibility to ensure fair trade with the U.S. And thus, they should not do something self-destructive and side with China but instead join the U.S. to force China to keep its long-broken promises and play by international rules. A reduced import footprint from China in the U.S. could make room for increased imports from the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—if they strike parity deals with the Trump administration. Barring that, they should simply get out of the way and not opportunistically cut reformist trade deals with China.

Perhaps you recall when President Trump warned Europe 4 years ago to stop subsidizing Russia and relying 100% for its Energy supply on Russia? How'd that work out? 

I was not there but I can guarantee that nobody left that meeting of the WTO all those years and thought for even one microsecond that China was going to play by the WTO rules. 99% of them left after voting for China entry because they were unforgivably stupid, unforgivably corrupt or pushed really hard by the United States ruling entity at that time to admit China. Nobody thought that China would play by rules none of them were playing by either. Srsly, Airbus?

    If China really does reduce most of its exports to the U.S., America will have to scramble for a year or so to establish new supply chains and some alternate importers of U.S. products. But after a year of gradual dislocation, China will begin to hemorrhage, and then quite suddenly, given the U.S. has almost all the advantages—if it chooses to use them.

On Pen in Korea, those of us from CONUS got used to the IC and USFK and 8th Army and Combined Forces Command telling us that what they feared when North Korea inevitably collapsed was that the ruler would give way to the impulse to "USE IT OR LOSE IT" and take us down when North Korea inevitably went into the Dark. What do you think they all have to say there and in Hawaii about China going down into the Darkness if/when their economy is wiped out?

Seriously, did all the Pol/Mil and Geo-strategists just all dry up and blow away? 

THEY ALL KNEW

 I keep hearing reading that some people are sick and tired of waiting for all the arrests and indictments of all the lying thieving scum that were recently run out of office or let go from misservice to the State and people seem to have forgotten that the bureaucracy is just about 90% toxic democratic/liberal progressive types and that even with the very top of the heap trying to do the right thing it takes time and a lot of work to push any bureaucrats to even begin to do their job even when they agree with what they're supposed to be doing.

At least this time the new heads of department know that they have some damned good backup in the form of the various headhunters that President Trump appointed to lead just about every federal agency even before he finished his first day in office this time. Keep in the back of your mind that it is all too easy to fire crappy insubordinate pricks but getting cases built, charges in place and rounding up all the miscreants takes a lot of willing hands dedicated to making the country better. It won't happen overnight.

It's also worth keeping in mind that it will take a professional lifetime to change the bureaucracy and military back into the sleek professional force they once were. The whole merit promotion test and board for promotion in the Civil Service is a start and weeding out the crooked and the incompetents will help a lot in this regard but it may require reopening Adak to put all the bureaucrats that cannot be dumped or reformed and to assign midlevel incompetent military personnel to if they won't quit.

An awful lot of that shower of dreck really think they are the best and brightest and they know this because "look where they at!!!" It is hopeless to try to change minds that were never all that sharp to begin with and have just gone downhill ever since they 'legalized' pot.

Right now the Secretaries running their Departments know all this but they still have to find and place the lawyers and officers who will do the tasks assigned rather than just drag their feet or actively sabotage the efforts of the Administration.  it will take time before we see any mass effects or legal charges.

ON THE CONTRARY

 There is a man who ruminates on the Law for a living and that is what he does all day. More power to him because some would say it is good to know the law and to understand it well. I find satisfaction in knowing that there are people who make the study of Law their whole point in life. That said, I have my own understanding of the Law and it is not a trivial understanding since I used to wage war in the military law trenches both as the prosecutor and as the Judge and here is my take on Tillman's judgement of understanding the Law. "Oh Bullshit!"  You may quote me.

When the Law is murky it is no law at all and after over 200 years of tootling around with it there is no excuse for any of us to accept some lawyer's or judge's decision that, 'on this the law is murky.' If you cannot explain it satisfactorily in every situation you mean to apply it then you have no business trying to apply it at all.

If you don't like the laws the way they are written then why should anyone accept every black robed idiots interpretation of it? Obviously the Law is championed by a subruling class that makes their whole living and way of life out of making every aspect of the Law they can as murky as possible. That's not a justice system, that's full employment at any cost for judges and lawyers. It really isn't that hard to write sensible and understandable laws and if there are no such then there is no law and it cannot be applied unless it is done at the point of a gun.

I see all the lawyers admiring the cut and thrust of applying law to perfectly sane and understandable actions and none of them seem to let themselves get carried away by any enthusiasm for the other parts of the Constitution that lay out the powers reserved to the Executive and the Legislative. They also seem to cave in entirely when dealing with the Regulatory state.

It might be time to sweep all of that away. Perhaps Shakespeare had something when he mentioned the just fate of lawyers.

ON THAT NOTE

 From the esteemed Large Regular,  yeah, wars are mostly about trade. The hifalootin chicanery used to describe the source of the conflict always skips lightly over that part. You should have seen what we did to Japan and that’s nothing compared to what we do to Russia.

THE ETERNAL VERITIES OF AIRFIELD DEFENSE

 I've never had to do it myself but I lived and worked on a number of air bases and it would occur to me just how one would go about securing an air base from attack. There are a number of approaches and of course there are the standard definitions of the word 'secure'. It's an old joke among us:

If you were a Marine you think it means to attack the building with fire and maneuver.

If you were in the Army you think it means post guards to control access to the building.

If you were in the Navy it means to turn out all the lights and lock the door.

If you were in the Air Force it means to take out a five year lease with an option to buy.

But with that old saw, what is the current environment for securing an air base in the 21st century? In the old days we would expect to find that some degree of ground force combat element was present in sufficient numbers to keep out the bad guys. "On March 8, 1965, about 3,500 Marines from the 3rd Marine Division’s 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade landed at Red Beach in Da Nang. The landing force, the first U.S. ground combat unit in Vietnam, consisted of troops from the division’s 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, and 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines. The battalions were sent to Da Nang to protect an air base there, which the South Vietnamese and U.S. air forces had been using to launch attacks on North Vietnam since Operation Rolling Thunder began on March 2, and the air base needed added security." 

There would also be some form of anti-aircraft capability and one might even speculate on whether or not there was some form of ballistic missile defense.  

That being said, what exactly is the air base defense against the already widely spread killer drones? It would have to be something pretty damned devastating and effective if it is to cover an air field that covers square miles of wide open land. Those runways alone are more than 10,000 feet long and there are usually several of them aligned in different directions and in among them are the hangers, armament buildings, parking ramps, taxi-ways and all the usual infrastructure of petroleum, oil and lubricants and the officer's club liquor supplies.

I'd really like to know what the Air Force is using or planning on using to defend its installations overseas and here in America from thousands and tens of thousands of drones that can be programmed to seek and destroy B2 bombers and any winged thing it finds in the vicinity of a control tower. Right now I think we have nothing at all out there and no prospects of immediate deployment of useful systems and let's just be honest here and say that a useful system incorporates a 99.9% kill rate on incoming drones and costs far less than the drones. It would also have someway to backtrack to the drone controllers and kill them as well.

I think we're talking about bringing out of the black a number of existing programs that nobody wants to admit exist because then every base commander will be clamoring for them and the people that own and control that capability don't want to tip their hand or let on that they have the means to neutralize drones.

I've been writing about this now for 15 years and so far there hasn't been a lot of innovation deployed but then I could be wrong. It was not very often that we took a Close-in-Weapon System and shifted it to Air Auto where it would automatically detect and engage air contacts in its vicinity. Still, that was a long time ago.

I do hope that they are looking at multitudes of anti-drone systems and not doing our usual one-size-fit's all nonsense. It would be interesting to see what the Mission Needs Statement looks like and the Required Operational Capability  and Projected Operational Environment look like for all the systems that I'm sure the Marines, Army and Navy want. If they were smart, the FAA would get aboard along with HLS and New York City.

I'll tell you one thing for free though; it is hard. Adding fire control and deadly weapons to the mix top-filled with aircraft can only be deadly and requires extreme focus. It's 2 o'clock in the morning and you have a radar contact. How do you decide to unleash the killer bots? Welcome to the past.

OFF TO THE RIVAL SCHOOL

 Back in a minute.

ON WAR

Every war in history started out as a Trade War.

Not every Trade War resulted in immediate Armed Conflict

Most did.

War is described as the continuation of politics by other means and we all know that politics is really nothing more than getting, maintaining and controlling access to scarce resources and politicians will literally go to any lengths in order to get what they want.

All those dreams of building up our Navy to take on China are toast now. It is and always was too late. You cannot defeat a land power like China with a naval war and you'd look pretty silly trying. Now we see if the words that Robert Heinlein tossed off in jest have any merit.* I suspect they do and one of the most interesting things in them is the way that China itself left giant gaping holes to trade through and the world will find it palatable to do so.

What holes? Well, Hong Kong is still there being Hong Kong. Taiwan is 100% Chinese or did you all forget that when you moaned about having to prepare ourselves to defend the Chinese in Taiwan from the Western Chinese? I kind of wonder what kind of blandishments and inducement Xi is preparing to make to his dear cousins in Taipei to seal the deal.

It will be interesting to see the various twists and turns it takes and people far smarter than I am have been gaming this scenario for the last 30 years ever since they wrapped up Hong Kong and saw a chance to do the same bloodless thing with the big island. I mean, people pretended for over 100 years that Hong Kong was not China. They can do it again.

*The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:"

"
 

SPOTTED AT THE LOCAL BOOK SHOP

 In the window,

I liked the arrangement but suspect the book shop is enjoying new management. 

NEW SHARDS

I wonder if there are any potters out there turning out the modern and updated versions of the ancient Greek pots featuring the various soldiers of the era. Can't you see people rushing to buy old looking urns painted with Bradley IFV and Strykers? Perhaps we can see what they would look like with updated war machines and men on them. Can you see an ancient Greek amphora with a nice looking Warthog front and center?

I'll put out a call to The Pirate Potter and see if she is interested... It could happen.

ARE THERE ANY TEETH IN ALL THAT BARKING?

 It looks like the ruling class all over the world are a bit ired by the President's decision to reflect upon them their trade policies toward US. Quite a few of them are rearing way up on their hind legs to screech about how they are going to make US rue the day!!!!! 

I suspect it's almost all theater and there isn't a single country except maybe one unexpected one that will be stupid enough to embark on an all out trade war with US because Trump does have a point. We won't lose anything if they don't buy our goods in the pitiful volumes they allow today and they'll be gutted like fish if we don't buy any of their goods in volume and in the meantime we'll be pocketing the lucre and nobody really needs a new BMW or VW since they last forever anyway.

I am really interested in what form their destructor will take when President Trump retaliates on a massive scale for the EU Commission's ongoing Censorship and Deplatforming Campaign against Musk and the rest. It's not like he doesn't have a massive dog or two of his own in this fight.

I think Gozer the Gozerian sounds like Ursula von der Leyen. I think they're all just barking a lot and will roll over and play dead as soon as nobody is looking. Kind of like what they're doing now in Ukraine as it becomes apparent to all that the rulers of the EU cannot reach out and dredge up any cannon fodder to send to Ukraine since they have run short of their own and cannot find anybody stupid enough to step up and do it for them.

UNKIND RAW POLITICS

 It occurs to me that there is a very easy way to hire the smarter employees. All an employer really has to do is spend a minute discussing political philosophy with new candidates and they will self-sort on intelligence just like that. I imagine the other side feels the same exact way so this is easily applicable to both parties and all I can say is it would be helpful if there was some secret sign that every store and business displayed to let all potential customers know what kind of service they can expect within.

I really enjoyed Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. In retrospect his vision of a future of franchise stores for everything from jails to pizza delivery all included the sacred Employee Binder which told every employee every step of every store process in order that every transaction was always the same for every customer. As I said, kind of amusing in hindsight since it is now looking like very few of our high school graduates can read anything at that level.

OTGH, one could simply ask potential employees how they feel about Elon Musk and you'd get your sort right there too. No need to be fancy.

ON TARIFFS

 Tariffs served two primary purposes throughout history. They raised revenue for the State/King and they protected domestic industries that the King/State thought were vital to the State. This is obviously dead as a door nail in any State that is sustained on nothing but 35 trillion $ in debt and has offshored almost 100% of its heavy industry and most of every other kind of industry ranging from pharmaceuticals to household goods. 

This is an interesting experiment in reinvention that I'm looking forward to watching. There is no place for our industry to go but up and only fairies believe that superpowers can be funded by external revenue cutters collecting tariffs on imported goods.

Has anyone else noticed how literally every single thing that Europeans now do is disagreeable and always amounts to an attack on freedoms and liberties that we have long enjoyed? It really is like reading the books about the slide into both World Wars where the European leaders almost deliberately took every single action that would and could only lead to an outbreak of War. They're all doing it again and it's like they cannot even see it. 

And no, I don't see their enemy as Russia so much as the nature of tyranny. Europe is rapidly becoming every bit as ugly and evil as the USSR was and with the same impact on its economy, GDP, and relations between nations. I almost wonder if they realize how close they all are to living on a knife's edge? The EU exists today only because the Germans worked their asses off to make it and lead it and now the German work ethic is essentially gone and so is much of their industrial power. They are following England and they don't have nearly as far to fall.

I hope that we have historians as honest and enthusiastic as those from the past.

HOW TO MAKE IT NOT YOUR PROBLEM

 If you glance at the map far below (last Tuesday) you can see Yanbu up there on the top right side on the Saudi coast. The last time I was there was to exchange prisoners offload some unnecessary Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys and their megaton of equipment on Ocean Unit 5. I have no idea what the Harkness did with them but we were well shed of them and we then drifted down to Jeddah to get rid of the rest of the useless supercargo.

While I was there I learned that the Saudis had actually chosen Yanbu as a critical component of the new infrastructure that the Kingdom was building to get around that little geographic trap known as the Strait of Hormuz. They were sufficiently insightful and well advised to see that having 100% of their oil exports flow through a narrow waterway controlled by the Islamic Shiite Republic of Iran was simply a disaster waiting to happen. They were losing tankers every week to missile attacks launched by Iran on ships destined for Dammam and Ras Tanura and could see that there was no end in sight which I'm sure they found particularly bothersome. One might say they did it to themselves but they had help and literally everyone else wanted Iraq to kick Iran's butt in that long dismal pointless war.

So anyway, here we have the most stable monarchy in the world, long called the most conservative stick in the mud since Noah tied off the ark at the end of the float and what were they up to back in 1984? Why yes, they were making sure that they could ship their oil products and receive any goods they wanted without having to risk the narrow waters of the Bab el Mendeb or the Strait of Hormuz. Iran still squats atop the entrance/exit to the Persian Gulf and the very unstable and psychotic Yemenis control the southern access to the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Yanbu neatly avoids both.

Now ask yourself if there are any strategic geographic traps that we have perhaps been very busy ignoring for the last 50 years or so. Are there any signs at all that we plan to do anything about them? I make mention from time to time that we don't actually have any means to sweep enemy mines laid in the approaches to our harbors or even in our harbors. You can wonder how they would get there but that would simply mean you've never been there.

The Panama Canal is not as important as it was. It's not just that the world gets smaller every time another enormous ship class is built that is actually too big to fit through the canal, it is also because the idiots that operate the country and canal thought they could double their national income by doubling the size of the canal. They didn't think it through. The canal only works because of the rainfall that collects in the Gatun Lake and nobody doubled the rainfall. Every time a ship passes through the canal it takes 52 million gallons of water out of the lake. The hard limit on the canal is not the size or number of locks, it is the amount of rainfall collected by the Lake. The idiots forgot that.

I keep seeing references every day to making sure that we spend way too much money getting ready for a war with China. It is always called the coming war with China and I keep asking how these people expect us to win or fight our way to a draw with China and if they can do neither now, what exactly has to be done to let us win or fight China to a draw in the future and how much will that cost and WHY? Nobody ever answers. They all insist that we need a huge navy to fight China for Taiwan or something and I have yet to see any evidence that the Taiwanese are willing to fight for Taiwan and absent some sincere and massive weapons programs and military buildups by the Taiwanese themselves, I'm not inclined to include them in among our vital interests. We can get whatever it is you can't do without from Vietnam or Thailand.

I've never been to China but I hear they have high speed trains whizzing all over the place and their infrastructure is like brand new....well, OK, they've only had to build it this one time in the last 3000 years which has no doubt saved them a lot of money. They don't spend a lot on defense, on the army or invading other places and they haven't really invaded anybody in my lifetime or even beyond that. They have a track record for not invading other countries that goes way back. Srsly, they should be a lesson to us all in that regard.

It really is true that all politicians and their like minded scalawags do is try to make you afraid of something and then con you into giving them more money to fight against it. Look at them! They made 2 entire generations terrified of CO2!

Look at the leading clowns of Europe who want a war with Russia and are allegedly rushing to spend a trillion $ to fake making a serious military threat to Russia and then they mean to invade Ukraine peacefully and squat on the Russian frontier after Putin has made it pretty damned obvious that he doesn't want NATO troop sitting right on his front porch. I'm sure he's beginning to wonder if he really does have to nuke a city or two just to prove his sincerity since the Europeans seem remarkably obtuse. We should bow out of the NATO and leave the kids to their idiotic spats. Our best shtick may be old but it serves us best if we let them go a little crazy killing each other for a few years before we step in and help. As we noted though at the time, there is very little upside to entering a war on a continent flush with nuclear weapons and long range delivery systems. They are quite literally incapable of behaving rationally and we really don't need to be a party to madness.

MUCH OF THE UKRAINE DEBACLE IS EXPLAINED

 I suspect that the average Vlad in the Street in Kiev is going to be a little pissed off when he learns that the crack military experts that lost the war in Afghanistan were the ones that were leading, guiding and running the Ukrainian efforts to defeat Russia in a no win war. Srsly, Milley better have all kinds of documentation to show that he was acting at the real direction of President Biden when he undertook to make war on Russia through Ukrainian proxies or he is in real trouble, Immunity Decree or not. 

I think the New York Times just broke the Democratic Party for once and for all. They have to repudiate the actions of Milley and the other generals or they have to stand by waging a secret war on Russia and then they need to explain in squeaky little voices why all of the Presidential Directives and Orders on this matter were signed with an autopen. Does anybody really doubt that they were all autopen? Does anyone really think slow Joe wouldn't have mentioned/dropped by accident/blurted out that he was leading a war against Russia and Milley was in charge of it?

COURAGE

 

Try to imagine the kind of courage it took to strap into one of the seats on planes like this and take off from a carrier far out at sea, fly over the unmarked ocean 200 miles to attack either another fleet or attack targets ashore on an island somewhere in the Pacific and then fly back to your carrier as the sun set behind the clouds over a vast ocean. No GPS, no long range radio navigation, no radar. Just you and your comrades. Imagine doing it again and again and again. People who imagine they have problems today have no idea what real problems look like and they are terrified of things that these men wouldn't even have noticed.

AN UNEXPECTED SIDE EFFECT

 I got a call the other day from the person in my life who knows me better than I do and she told me that what with one thing and another and me being born so long ago and other things but mostly because it hadn't been invented back when I was a baby or toddler, I never got a measles vaccine and also never got the measles so I should be aware of that now that the media is giving the country over to the terror and fear that measles are an epidemic and will kill every unvaccinated person in minutes.... To say that I wasn't terribly concerned would be an overstatement, 

However,

I had noticed a little folder in my desk drawer yesterday when I was searching for something and noticed that it was the thing I kept all my old security badges and driver's licenses in along with my fairly new international immunization record (only 29 years old). I hauled it out while I was talking and after checking it I saw that I had been swept up in the MMR frenzy in 1996. 

It turns out that was a side effect of an edict that the Saudis had put out back then announcing to the world that nobody would be admitted to the Kingdom without proof of certain vaccines. Measles wasn't one of them but since I was driving across the causeway to Saudi Arabia about 10 times a month, the Corpsman I was talking to about it said I might as well get it and made a careful record of it along with the required ones. 

I see that it may have all been in vein for nothing. It seems that the MMR has it's actual performance issues too. Can we really trust a vaccine to do the job when you have to keep getting it over and over again? I don't know. Not going to risk some things though. If another bat flies in my window and bites me on my thumb as I'm tossing it back out I will still head over to the clinic and get the real skinny on whether or not I need to update the rabies shots I got 5 years ago. And I'll nod and go along with anybody that suggests another tetanus shot would be a good idea. Rabies and Lockjaw are way down there on my list of things to do before I die.

WHERE'S THE BLOODY DOG?

 In just about every other field of presidential endeavor President Trump starts right out of the gate with sally towards the enemy's center although he sometimes feints at the flanks. He did this instantly in Trade by announcing Tariffs on all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons against just about every naughty country and instantly the rest of the talking was all about what the tariffs were going to do to destroy trade and end the world as we know it. They were accepted by all as a given. He did the same thing with DOGE and was in the enemy's camp 2 hours after midnight of they day he came to power and draining the swamp. 

I'm curious that he is not taking the battle to the Courts. I'd like to see them on the defensive and not just trying to explain their perversion of the powers laid out in the Constitution but trying to defend it and make the case for continuing to fuck mess things up.

I'm not hearing that dog bark and I'm wondering, why?