ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS

 The screw ups that I know about after just a few months on my first ship:

- Hull Technicians left (forgot) an Oxy-Acetylene rig on the pallet conveyor and when the mess decks people energized the conveyor, the rig dropped into the well at the bottom of the very greasy pit and somehow the next pallet in the chain didn't strike off the head of the O2 bottle so there was no huge explosion and fire.

- The Chief Electrician used a metal comb to bypass the interlocks on the 16,000 pound weapons and cargo elevator while it was being used to strike down stores during an underway replenishment in the North Arabian Sea. The Elevator over-traveled the top deck (Damage Control Deck on an LPD) which broke the suspension cables or snapped the 19 inch steel eyebolts holding them to the car and the car dropped about 8 feet before the diamond knurl elevator safeties tripped and locked it in place for the next 8 months I was onboard. Next stop on the way down was the bottom 6 decks below and the stuffed Landing Force Magazine which actually was full of 5 inch ammo for the Middle East Force but not for us. 

- A Gunner's Mate was conducting preventive maintenance on a Super Rabid Blooming Overhead Chaff system inport Dahran, Saudi Arabia. I'm pretty sure the maintenance card dictates the physical unloading of all SRBOC rounds prior to conducting fire circuit testing because weren't we all surprised when a 5" chaff round blew up on top of a warehouse next to the ship.

- A very unusual crew of HM-14 pilots towed their acoustic mine sweeping cable over what was probably the only actual reef in the Red Sea and then had the nerve to complain that the coxswain had "run over it with the propeller" which caused those 30 foot long straight as a ruler gouged tears in the casing.

- A supply clerk from the same squadron decided to end the problem of a sweaty pipe that was getting some of his cardboard boxes wet by closing the pesky valve. I'm not sure if he ever knew that the valve he closed was the one that lined up firemain cooling to the #2 Emergency Diesel Generator which surely burned up the next time it went into auto-start and run during a power outage.

I went to the Guided Missile School at Dam Neck, VA where they really wanted us to know and take to heart that under no circumstances should you or anyone else conduct missile firing checks with the high voltage ignition cables connected between the Harpoon Guided Missile Control panel and the missiles. I mean they told us about a missile that wandered into a Belgian village one day and caused havoc and about another that was last seen heading in the direction of St. Croix. In fact, they told us that only an idiot would leave the key lying around or have those cables anywhere but in the Weapons Department Safe. I was therefore somewhat surprised that the Gulf of Sidra Harpoon employments were actually as successful as they were although I did hear they had to chase down the off-watch Tactical Action Officer and shake the key out of him before they could fire.

- I think we have all seen the pictures of the sad looking torpedo in the dumpster on the pier next to the Frigate that was just "firing air slugs in port" when it turns out there was a torpedo sleeping in the tube that nobody knew about or remembered and those stories were a dime a dozen. I heard one frigate was going to paint both a dumpster and a staff car on their bridge wing to signify their torpedomen's successful engagement of targets of opportunity.  

- There was also a positive slew of accidental discharges of the 76mm guns on our guided missile frigates. It seems that sometimes when the weapons were fired properly and then returned to a proper centerline stow position pointing dead aft, the gun would cause its own self to load and fire just one more round right through the ship's smokestack and unoffending little Phalanx Close in Weapon System which made a hole in the one and blew apart the other. I recall walking down the pier to the Main Brace at 32nd Street one fine evening and an FFG was coming in to moor alongside another of that class that had painted a giant smiley face target on their stack as a sort of doink in the eye for the newly arriving ship that had just blown its stack and CIWS off. Gunner's Mates can be pretty brutal.

As I look back it is a wonder that we did so well and confined most of the real damage to the enemy. I could however tell dozens more tales of patrol boats and night patrols and floodings and accidental didn't really happen because nobody saw it kind of collisions but there really are so many and my fingers are so tired. Maybe another day. 

ON QUAKES

 I read today that the penny finally dropped and that the man leading the charge into the future has shifted targets and is focusing now on building a new home for mankind on the Moon. I can't see anything wrong with that because to put it mildly, Mars was a long shot at best. Looking at Musk's plans for building a mass driver and putting gigawatts of solar power plants in orbit as a start is fascinating for a number of reasons but it is obvious that far more money and investment can be found near earth than in the outer worlds.

I'm still not clear on who is paying for all this stuff that Musk apparently builds but somebody must be buying it or leasing it because he appears to have plenty of money to burn. Of more than a hundred family members I know only one of them has a Starlink. He also lives off the grid and is even now heading for a place in Florida that will take him and his low impact lifestyle. He's a digital nomad. 

Still, I'm impressed, I get to see mankind start to build a new life in space close at hand. I just wonder where are they going to find all the slaves out there that the universe down here on earth seems to think built the entire new world all by themselves the last time. On the gripping hand, the last time the old world sent pioneers to take new worlds, they were the ruthless warriors that had taken their country back from hundreds of years of muslim occupation. I trust that this will not be a requirement for the spaceX pioneers or we won't see any English, Scots, German or Spanish at all in the new world this time around.

I've been assured that the moon quakes are really quite mild and you hardly notice them at all from here. 

IT IS EXISTENTIAL WAR

 People are either unwilling or unable to accept just how awful democrats are. They need to wake up and they need to fight back. This is not a book about history, this is watching history come roaring at you like a runaway train and just standing there on the tracks not moving.

A state that just had a Republican Governor less than a month ago will now only have 1 out of 11 Congressional seats held by a Republican after Democrat gerrymandering.

Every red state needs to fight fire with fire.

Wake up to the war we’re in. https://t.co/aV7GiwaImO

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) February 6, 2026

 We see the rulers in Spain announce the enfranchisement of 500,000 islamic african slavers living in Spain and now the French ruling elite are proposing to do the same thing in France. This does not end well for civilization.

One of the more amusing ideas I have is for the next phony war. It is pretty obvious that Europe does not have the will, the means or the intent to rearm and present itself as a unitary power on the continent but that was always so and I don't really see the harm in it. They got to pretend that they were ever so much larger than they really are because we shaped a NATO for them to fill in around the edges and they did that for awhile until it became unfashionable and we all know that Europeans are nothing but slaves to fashion so we carried on until one day we all pretty much decided not to do it anymore. Europe can do it's own thing again without our help, army or air force. 

As the article led me to a place I've been many times before I was sidetracked by the nature of the man ruling Russia who is very different from the beings that own and operate western Europe. I see no reason for Russia to ever invade Europe and indeed, they never have so an invasion would be totally new and different but then I went to the Old School of Europe and it occurred to me that all of Europe has gone out of its way to deal Sovereign Injuries to Russia and nothing has been done about it but things are changing.

What if President Putin offered some real inducements to Turkey to snip off some prime European territory they've always wanted and which used to belong to the Ottomans and thus are properly islamic and Turkish? The rest of Cypress? Malta?

What if he made the same kind of deal with Hungary and Poland and suggested that they were screwed by the westerners who tore apart their ancient lands and gave them to a pack of no good thieving upstarts and offered them discounted oil and perhaps a few nuclear weapons? I mean, we all did see that the last remaining bilateral nuclear pact the US shared with Russia died and withered away last week so what is to keep alive the dreams of the people who proposed and signed, some at gunpoint, the non-proliferation treaties? It's not like anybody was ever punished for independently building their own nuclear weapons and everyone knows it.

Russia doesn't have to invade Europe, all it really has to do is raise my old friend irredentism and the world will shudder anew at the horrors Europeans inflict on each other all in the name of peace and harmony.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

 Does anyone else sense the wrongness here? What exact reason is given for risking the lives of three men and a woman in something as pointless as a manned loop around the moon? The only new thing in all of this is that a woman is going to the near vicinity of the moon for the first time and that seems to be the sum total of the missions scientific purpose/achievement and let's be honest, sending pioneering women along for the ride has not proven all that wildly successful the past.

I can see the point if it was landing on the moon. That way leads to science but repeating a simple trick we've done successfully 9 times seems utterly unnecessary.  We are risking lives of people who are in all senses of the word, passengers and there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. I see the risk but not the reward.

When I think of going backwards 40 years in science and engineering why does NASA spring to mind? 

TRUMP TAKES DIEGO GARCIA FOR THE WIN

 Neatly sidestepping all the usual top-tier pedophile British angst at doing the wrong thing for all the wrong reasons, President Trump saves the day and takes Diego Garcia with the stroke of a pen and an Executive Order declaring himself King of Day'Gar!

It may take a couple of weeks or maybe even a month. 

In a concession to the thieves in Mauritius, he gives them Northern Ireland in return for their lost dreams of ruling the largest naval base in the Indian Ocean. What could be fairer? 

ABOUT THAT UPS

 There is a thing left over from the 90s that may still raise its fuzzy little head from time to time and I wondered about it the other day when I was asked if we had an UPS. My first experience with the uninterruptible power supply concept was found in the dark in the Navy's Battle Lanterns of great and unforgiving darkness. When a ship loses power unexpectedly it gets very very dark and so they have these lanterns that automatically energize when the circuit feeding them power dies. They have batteries in them and there is a preventive maintenance check to ensure the lights are tested routinely and batteries replaced as required. What one usually finds in the less visited places on a ship is that when the power goes away the lights do not come on.

So we had the UPS back in the day to give our sailors just enough time to safely power down the surveillance systems so they did not suffer any damage due to a sudden unplanned loss of power. We stressed in training that it was just enough time to shut the damned thing down and not to mess around if we wanted the systems to restore properly when the power came back. You can guess how that played out in the event.

I was wondering though, after Fukushima and other disasters, what does the UPS look like for a huge Data Center or an AI? There was a wonderful description of the death of the last AI in The Postman. I thought it was one of his better books but then I liked all of his books except for everything after Earth. I imagine a Data Center UPS would be about the size of New Hampshire and provide enough power for about 5 minutes. I'm thinking the AI is doomed.

LIVING IN THE NEW REICH

 If the people in the Reich have learned but one lesson from both World War I and World War II it is to never ever go to the wall again for a threatened or invaded country. They kicked off the first bloodletting, dynasty-toppling and world destroying war by thinking that Serbia mattered. They idiotically kicked off the second round of full blown stupidity by thinking Poland mattered. Any scholar or schoolboy looking at any historical atlas of Europe would be the first to tell them, NO. Neither matters and never did.

So in the new Reich the people, as fat, dumb and happy as they were, couldn't help but notice that by simply disarming themselves and cheering on the far away superpower that they were spared all the ruination of war and also and importantly, the ruination of their economies by wasting any money at all on buying war machines, raising and training armies and suppressing the desires of the even stupider people to put those armies and war machines to some use, maybe in Africa or Asia.....

They got it. They figured it out. It is kind of pointless and more than a little stupid to condemn them for refusing to pony up the big $ to build a huge military again. You see, they couldn't help but notice that the boogeyman never came. In fact, there is just about no evidence at all that the boogeyman ever planned to come. They notice that the Red Army that so terrorized their grandfathers is advancing in Ukraine at roughly the rate of one farm field per week on their very best week and more like one farm field per month. That's not much of a war machine.

It's a great killing machine, no mistake. It serves that purpose as well as any but as a war machine like the Red Army and any of the Guards Armies that fought the NAZIs to the death in the East, it aint even a pimple on the ass of an elephant. 

In short, they were actually wise to ignore US and just let their armies and navies slowly vanish into the past. None of them want to fight and there's every sign that 99% of them simply won't fight, ever. They won't fight for anything. Sadly, this means they lost everything.

History isn't hard or fair, it simply records the results and the results are coming in now for a whole continent that decided that there was nothing worth fighting for. Well, let us amend that to restate it and say, nothing that Western Europe and Scandinavia will fight for. 

On the Gripping Hand, History is not dead and neither is Nationalism and with Nationalism comes all kinds of wonderful history so we have that to look forward to! 

Speed up the History! 

ODDLY AMUSING BUT....

 Well it sounds like the Epstein Files have tsunamied ashore and everyone is now heaving a vast sigh of relief. "It is finally over. Now Justice can be done!" I imagine the idea of wading through 3 million heavily redacted pages of idiocy trying to find even a single case where some older geezer enjoyed dalliance with some teenager and I wish them luck. Things like this actually happen every single day and yet a small number of insane loudmouths have turned this one single instance into the belch-of-a-generation and I'm sorry, raised on the triumph of the Left over Richard Nixon over a tiny little burglary and I find it all quite boring.

The procurers getting girls for older guys has been going on since the Origin of the Species and frankly only an idiot is surprised by it or thinks it is the End of the Universe. The other thing that is quite obvious by now to even the stupid and the emotocrats is that this was a fairly lively intelligence operation designed at blackmail and subornation of "elites" and most likely run by one of the Big 5 Intelligence Agencies either from here or from abroad and in no case will it ever rise to the point of indicting or convicting those responsible or those that dallied.

Perhaps we can now never ever hear of this stupid thing again. Poe was not the first and certainly not the best at creating horror stories that linger in memory. This whole thing was never anything but a story. The true evil slouched away long ago and will never be found and the dumb louts left holding the bag have suffered enough. 

A TEENY TINY CHANCE

 As one observes the world today it is possible, remotely possible, that there are some out there who are beginning to think that the only chance they have of living free of the dictators that rule the world is to develop and test their own atomic weaponry. The need for any sort of fancy ballistic delivery system is obviated in the world of "just call DHL" to move it but the act of gathering fissionables is sometimes a little less covert and obvious than one could wish.

There's a whole other school of thought that simply poo-poohs that idea and suggests that a pair of countries now under damned near universal embargoes from the rulers of the world may find some measure of economic trade and wealth by serving as purveyors of the finest kind atomic and thermo-nuclear weaponry. 

Do you suppose that there are some people out there that would be shocked if Pakistan or France sold off a few of their surplus nukes? I'm sure that they think that there is some sort of law against that sort of thing. That's how they always think. 

*Yes, I know, you thought I was going to say the Norks and the Russians but they already did it. 

ON TERROR

 I see that Colbert was his usual vignorant self on his show the other night and it's no surprise. Vignorance like that earns its own place with its adherents but this should be refuted. Stephen Colbert: “Do not compare ICE or Border Patrol agents to the Nazis. That’s an unfair comparison. The Nazis were willing to show their faces.”

Every sane person knows that the vignorant will, once they identify the forces of order, try to destroy them. They will dox them, attack their homes, their families, their children, their children's schools, their spouse's employer and make their lives hell by, for instance, repeatedly calling in SWAT attacks on them. Everybody knows this but leaves it unsaid.

During the antfag period of the last Trump administration the tools of fascism always attended their riots and parties wearing full concealment so that the forces of order could not identify them. You see, they were worried about what the Law could do to them. They have learned better and realize now that the Law is actually helpless against that kind of attack.

The Klan used to follow a pattern of wearing hoods. Does anybody now know why they concealed their identities because it obviously was not to shield them from the Law, was it? No, they wore the masks to terrorize because that way nobody actually knew if the man they were talking to in the day was a klansman who was willing to come by later in the night and teach a vicious lesson.

Colbert's idiotic point comparing ICE and Law Enforcement to the NAZIs misses the salient point that made them different from both the klan and from the rioters. The NAZIs had no fear of anybody attacking them because they eliminated every single soul that raised a hand against them. Do you think Colbert understands that tiny little difference?

I don't either. He thinks everybody who disagrees with him or his klansmen friends is an enemy of the State. His is the very face of evil in the 21st century. 

Word of the Day: Vignorant. It can stand for both vincibly ignorant or viciously ignorant. Either works in any context. 

AN AWFUL LOT OF RUIN

 I found this at The View from Lady Lake today and it struck me as interesting.

 Was there ever a time or a place where the news was treated as a valued commodity and it was regulated as if it was a commodity such as gold? Was there a news assayer who put his mark on the product to inform the public that this was in fact 99.9% true and accurate news?

Of course the interesting thing about that is, why would anyone ever suspect that such was ever the case? What aspect of the news leads people to believe that there is no person or organization whose objective is to sway the people by presenting them only one sort of information while claiming to be representative of all the news sources? The news was all about competition for readers eyes, attentions and wallets. It instantly veered to the entertainment side of the column.

Oh sure, some of us were young when 60 minutes started up and may even have believed that they were serious journalists whose sole interest was ferreting out the truth. It only took one instance of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect to bring you up short on the idea that the news is or ever could be completely factual and free of error. That's what I liked about this clip.

 Everything we think we know about a civilization and a culture came from a couple of rooms.

THE ODD NOTE

 Mr. Pretti was shot while attending a riot orchestrated by communists and the world is agog at the violence inherent in the system. Others have noted though that at the infamous January 6 insurrection all of the people at a giant rally to violently overthrow the government controlled at the time by their own man in the White House were unarmed Americans who had the gall to point out that the election was stolen right in front of their eyes. So why did the Pretti one take a gun to the riot when all those thousands of insurrectionists left theirs home?

He clearly wanted a fight but at least unlike the thousands of Americans killed by violent illegal aliens, he was armed to the teeth. It does make me wonder what is it about those monsters that he loves so much that he was willing to kill for them?

Why does any sane person violently demand to pay for and house and keep the people murdering their friends and neighbors and their children? Who could rationally justify such a thing?

 It's not like one, like them all, but there are times....

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

WE ARE READY NOW

 This was a famous quote that never happened but I liked the painting and the attitude it expressed. This was never my own experience with Destroyers but I suppose they must be ready for something sometime.

 We have heard dire warnings of a fell winter snowstorm that is bound to kill millions if the weather prognosticators are to be believed and even though we find them slightly less believable than democrats or other communist party hacks, we got ready for anything. We are ready now.

 Let loose the tempest! Let loose the Kraken. We are ready now!

UNENCUMBERED BY REALITY

I see that diligent preventers are suggesting that all churches hire defense teams to safeguard the services from the communist revelers that break in and ruin everything whenever they feel like it. This obviously happened in Minnesota but the point was made that it could happen anywhere and that the church should be prepared. I found this interesting because I'm almost certain that every churchmen at every level and at every church is in solid agreement with the socialist revelers out there confusing their idiotic beliefs with the rights that citizens of the United States share and hold in common. There's another thing though.

How would a handful of counter-revelers keep a larger number of ignorant louts screaming socialist pieties out of the church? And besides, didn't those idiots already take over all the churches in the West with their social claptrap? It also must be said that it appears to me that churches are now so very poorly attended that they would welcome Satan's minions if it would get the attendance numbers up. And then, how do a handful of old men stop the Hitler Youth and SA so intent on gooning up the works in God's House?

I don't think you're actually allowed to shoot them. I'm pretty sure that the spears found in some churches are purely ornamental and I don't think the swords some have will actually come off the walls so I'm not sure just how they mean to hold back the savage beasts intent on making their way in.

I wondered for years the same thing about the churches found in Egypt and Nigeria where the muslims can just kill and burn at will and the Christians stand idly by while this goes on. I read somewhere that over a thousand churches were burned in Europe in the last two years. A staggering number of 'mysterious' fires.

Notre Dame totally not arson they said

 

Do you get the sense that some people really want to spark off a religious war and it's not who you think it is? Where are the leaders of the Churches demanding that punishment follow invasion and criminal activities not sanctioned by the church? Well, I suppose that's a conundrum because the churches these days sponsor and permit just about every crime they don't actively participate in. I suppose if the churches believe it is OK for them because, higher calling, it must also be true for the rioters and goons who also believe they follow a higher purpose.

See how that worked out? Piss away every single scrap and speck of moral authority and what do you have at the end of the day. 

THE NEW CLASS

 I read an article on the USN shipbuilding program and it covered the blisters and blemishes of the past 30 years fairly well but it missed out on the essential nature of weapons procurement that have not and never will simply go away.  We used to have a whole book of terms for what this process was called but ultimately what it started out with was a simple Mission Needs Statement. What do we need given the projected operational environment and the required operational capabilities? This was the malignant fail point on most weapon system procurement that failed to materialize.

Before adopting the clamor and babble of demanding a new ship because the old ones are simply falling apart it is first necessary to state the purpose for the ship and to lay out the specific requirements it must have if it is to be viable in meeting its purpose. This is where naval procurement keeps getting jammed up because we draft completely idiotic and meaningless mission needs statements based on some impossible and unworkable dream of blooming capabilities. This used to be referred to as bleeding edge design and it was fundamentally unworkable in this or any other environment.

What exactly and specifically do you want your new surface combatant to do? What are the Required Operational Capabilities and what is the Projected Operating Environment? If you simply look at those questions you can begin to see why the LCS, the DDGX, the CGX and the CVX were all impossibly stupid shipbuilding plans. 

One wonderful example of simply closing your eyes and screaming loudly in order to just get on with it is found in the old Mine battle force ships which, oddly enough, were designed, built and deployed to sweep or hunt mines in littoral seas or right off the enemy's coastline. They had all the defensive armament at their disposal that an early model B-17 bomber had in 1942 and their POE was well inside artillery range, anti-ship missile range, and the range of  enemy aircraft and of course enemy naval units. It was simply accepted that nobody was going to punt them into a place that they could not survive in because all those threats were neutralized by other means.

That must have been the assumption for the Littoral Combat Ships but nobody ever explained that to Congress or the Fleet Commanders who were expecting replacements for the long gone guided missile frigates. Nobody was able to comprehend that the replacement ships were in fact, completely useless at any of the ROC/POE missions of the guided missile frigate or the minesweepers. As I said above, ANYBODY who read the MNS and Operational Requirements could see this was not going to work. Ditto for the DDGX with it's simply impossible weapon system and the CGX for any number of flaws. The carrier is just a flat out waffle of irresponsibility in stating the need and building to requirement. What possible need was there for magnetic launch and elevators instead of tried and true systems for both?

Is ship's force going to be able to maintain the ships by design which means the necessary schools, test equipment and parts are in place? This has to be addressed up front because it is critical to the design of the ship. Is it really addressed?

Is there a system to counter drones? If there isn't, how do they operate in that environment?

Does the design now incorporate that all of our potential adversaries are going to have high side intelligence made available to them by the Russians since we broke every bit of  the old neutrality rules by furnishing Ukraine with all the means and methods of our intelligence during the current unpleasantness? The old classified nature of simple RORSAT and ELINT location data is now in the white world and any satellite could do it. That means that even a 3rd world adversary could have up to the minute location data on all of our warships. It is really easy these days to mate a warhead with a drone package and send it to latitude and longitude and use simple cheap radar to home on target.

In short, what does the now obviously classified ROC/POE say about the requirements that must be built into any future surface navy combatant worthy of the name? We don't need any more Dainty Class frigates or Fragile Class Destroyers. That era is long gone. We are back to needing something along the lines of the Fletcher Class or any of the late war classes of destroyers and destroyer escorts we put in harm's way.

It is not enough to bleat about needing ships if we don't actually have the requirements built in and program managers ready, able and empowered to build them to spec. It doesn't help at all to have shipyards so damned incompetent that literally everything they do requires enormous cost adjustments and triggers all kinds of 'economies' once the ship is in production. The shipyards in the US are dire places and it's no wonder bad designs go to them to die on the vine. Nothing flourishes in them.

USS Connole, covered in ice, entering a Boston shipyard.

 

SIDE EFFECTS

 The charger on this thing arced like it was the main bus on a switchboard and then got pulled a little further away from all that excitement until the new charger arrived in the snow mail today and we're back in business. This slowed down the rate of production but then I don't really need any excuses for that.

I was curious the other day what the other side looked like and it struck me that we now see both sides represented in the daily idiocy that is Minnesota. The lunatic left is made up of all the candy asses you can imagine from every walk of life and also incorporates the nihilistic, violent, America-hating ragers of antifa and their ilk. That said, I wondered where is the opposition to those wild and crazy lefties?

I expect you know the answer because yeah, they're the guys that work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and for the Border Patrol and even those who work for HLS. They are joined, or soon will be by the men and women of the 11th Airborne. I had to look those guys up because I only recalled the 82nd, 101st and 173rd as current active duty formations. I did not realize we had remobilized another Airborne Division.

I have to admit, I wouldn't want to jump out of planes over Alaska. Life isn't improved by shoving a 150 foot tall evergreen tree up the nether regions nor by impacting a cliff sideways and sliding thousands of feet down the mountain in the dark and I can sure think of better things to do than to drop in on a Grizzly bear enjoying his first kill of the day 20 feet away. I don't care how well armed you are, that would positively suck.

I found this at John Ringo's site on X and thought it was very funny. I imagine there are still a lot of right sleeve patches from these floating around still in the airborne divisions. 

This patch is issued to men who ran from a fight; they are labeled chickens.

If protesters attack them, they will run away. pic.twitter.com/unGRlMAGqv

— Stryder502 (@stryder502) January 19, 2026

THE NATURAL

 I saw this photo the other day and it spoke to me. It really did. As I listened I heard it say, ICE is Trump's Gazpacho. You can see it for yourself. Just listen with your photo-ear.

 

NEVER SO COLD AGAIN

 It didn't occur to me until after I'd shoveled a few paths through the foot deep snow hereabouts that it was cold out there today. It wasn't of course since I was at the idiot end of the idiot stick but my dad gave me a valuable lesson all those long years ago when he decided that our future lay in winning the Frostbiting Series at the Newport Yacht Club. 

The boats were small, about 10 feet long and it was just one person per boat so it wasn't all that crowded but you didn't notice on account of the boat's own personal swell that swept back and forth over the bottom which was roughly where one's butt was back then unless you were up on the rail and hiking out for all you were worth so the damned thing wouldn't tip over, again, and pitch you into the arctic waters of Aquidneck Bay. 

So anyway, the 30 wonderful years I spent living in California might have seen me with a shovel in my hands no more than half a dozen times and those were at my parents house in Virginia or possibly in Pennsylvania but never in sunny southern California or even in the Bay Area. I mean, I didn't even own a shovel. Nobody did! It goes without saying that the years spent in the middle east were snow free and rarely even troubled by rain but when it did come it stayed for awhile because drainage was as foreign to them as peaceful coexistence. 

Still, it might take my friends awhile to grasp the fact that I very rarely ever feel cold because I have never again come close to experiencing the cold that came with sailing a dinghy in winter storms with snow coming down by the megaton as the boat fills with water and some R#$GS! is shouting "Starboard!" at me.

So, raise your kids right and get them involved in frostbite sailing and racing at as young an age as possible. They'll thank you for it for the rest of their lives. 

SANCTIFIED

 The news here is nothing new and it merely demonstrates a current that has been running swiftly and deeply through all of the Nation's institutions and by that I mean, literally all of them. This sort of thing is going on right now in all of our Courts, all of our Law Schools, all of our Public and Private universities and colleges and through every school in the land and it applies to vast herds of public servants toiling away in the ministries of our Departments of State, Defense, Education – all of them really and it applies most enthusiastically to most of our ministries that once taught the word of God. Here it is in a nutshell. 

The Yale Daily News reviewed more than 7,000 Federal Election Commission filings from 2025 listing Yale as the employer: “Of 1,099 filings that included ‘professor’ in their occupation, 97.6 percent of the donations went to Democrats, while the remaining 2.4 percent went to independent candidates or groups,” the student newspaper reported Jan. 14.” 

The study reinforces the recent Buckley Institute report, which found that, of the 43 departments surveyed, 27 entire departments contained zero Republican professors. 

Even if the study missed a couple of donations, the radical imbalance is a reflection of the lack of diversity at the school. It is not a perfect point of comparison. There can be a conservative or libertarian faculty member who does not make donations and does not register with any party.

Young adults attending these places are not educated, they are indoctrinated and none of them sense it happening at all. It applies to every aspect of higher education and even high school education and I have seen what passes for the word of God from popes, bishops and priests at every level and it is quite far removed from the Gospel I was taught. It isn't me who changed and it sure wasn't the Gospel. What happened was all those ministers, teachers and professors have now been baptized and submerged in the cant of the the West-hating Liberal demons that took over every level of education over the last 3 or 4 generations and having breathed it in for so long simply no longer hear the voice of reason. You see their followers now whenever you turn on the television of videos of the demonstrators out there raging as the voice of the liberalism and demanding death for the agents trying to enforce the law.

The people who created those vile unreasoning angry and spoiled terrorists are their teachers and their professors and some of them, their friends. Not one single one of them ever heard of the Enlightenment and not one could engage in a spirited debate citing the arguments and language of Locke, Rousseau, Aristotle, Plato or Voltaire. All they know is profound hatred and if you asked them why, they could no more explain it than a 5 year old.

You would almost have to be a fool to send child to college these days unless you too were a liberal.

 

SLOWLY AND THEN ALL AT ONCE

This is probably the most important observation of the day. It is worth noting.

REMINDER. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official,… pic.twitter.com/xoWDjOctLe

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 13, 2026

 

ONE TINY LITTLE PROBLEM HOUSTON

 We have some people who claim that to err is human and to forgive is divine. Guess where that sort of thing falls in the muslim pantheon? I believe that the regime in Iran is bolstered by its true believers, all of whom have all the guns and ammo and who all believe that to raise a hand against the regime is akin to apostasy and they will happily treat it as such until they are killed. The question is, does the hatred of the one side outweigh the heavily armed religious zealotry fueled hatred on the other side?

Once again, the people there are nothing like you or me despite some appearances. The regime will go on killing until they are stopped dead, literally. This isn't like the overthrows of the east in Europe or the silliness of the Arab Spring and North Africa, this is their version of angels fighting demons.

I've been waiting for this since 1980. It has been a long time coming. Now we see how much the Taliban snip off and how much the Pakistanis try to snip off and how tame the Iraqis are after all those years of bleeding to death at the hands of the fundamentalists fueled and armed by Iran.

I'll be curious to see how far each side goes to exterminate and stamp out the other. If you thought the Church had a hasty way with Heresy, you ain't seen nothing yet. 

THE TRUMPETS IN THE NORTH

 You don't suppose that there is a People's Front for the Liberation of Greenland that is right now begging this administration for aid and to come to their assistance and throw off the cruel colonial yoke imposed by those nazis in Denmark and so foully supported by the EU, do you?

I mean just about every other colonial territory rebelled against their cruel masters and perhaps the cold just slowed things down in Greenland.

It could happen! 

SCOTT ADAMS

Another good man stepped into the clearing at the end of the path today. He was the only voice I listened to in all the years we have had podcasting and vlogging and while I wasn't a regular listener I caught many of his shows while I was doing something else but could still give my attention to what he said. In his way he was as revolutionary as Ronald Reagan and just about as convincing. He was a man who did his own research and came to give a show every single day despite his own personal circumstances. He was the voice in the wilderness demanding an end to BLM and to DEI and I'm glad he made it far enough to see them both dumped on the ash pile of history. So long, Scott Adams, thanks for letting me get to know you.

ON MOBILE DEFENSE FORCES

One of the unconsidered aspects to flooding the warzone with heavily armed lawmen that enjoy total immunity from local and State crazed zealots is that it gives the orcs an everyday target to focus their hate and insanity on instead of attacking the peaceful infrastructure of modern life. The lunatics are so busy throwing themselves at ICE that they aren't burning down the inner cities in protest or attacking local police who are NOT shielded by federal law when responding to terrorists who enjoy the favor of the elites who own and operate the mob.