As long as this is the law of the land, and it is, there can be no argument for disarming people who have an inalienable right to arm themselves and see to their own defense.
Seriously, this is how you get revolutions.
🚨🇺🇸The Senate just killed the SAVE Act, 48-50.
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) June 4, 2026
Voter ID and proof of citizenship, supported by over 80% of Americans, dead.
Four Republicans voted no: Tillis, Murkowski, McConnell, Collins.
The uniparty showed its face today...pic.twitter.com/A360Vy1Wny
After the news of the last few days and a read of too much Instapundit I wondered if there was meeting or something where various countries spoke very frankly to each other, one ruling entity to another and spelled out exactly what each would take as justifiable causes to instantly resort to open warfare. We have reached the point in history where this might be more necessary than ever before because some things are simply intolerable and yet people seem to discuss doing them all the damned time. For some recent discoveries and speculation here's a few that caught my eye.
Did Trump hire Bessent at Treasury because he was part of the Soros team that broke the Bank of England? Could he do the same thing to China now with all the power of the Treasury?
Smugglers caught bringing in 'new' lethal biological organisms and viruses. Two more just caught after showing up in Detroit International. This is on top of seemingly dozens of other virus smugglers who keep bringing people and plant killing organisms to US as if we don't have plenty of our own.
I actually think those may be the only two out there right now and while somebody could imagine China calling in our Ambassador for a full and frank discussion I just don't see it happening because to worry about what we would do to them is pure speculation. As the world's only hyperpower or superpower we don't seek change. We are the Resistance to Change and we mean it.
That said, I do think it is pretty obvious that somebody well trusted by President Trump and possibly even Mr. Putin have sat down and had a few frank discussions. It has become clear over the last year or two that somebody very powerful had a word with all the idiots running the EU and all of the idiots running the nation/slaves within it and told them to end the practice of turning a blind eye to Ukrainians or Ukrainian partisans launching attack drones out of EU territories into Russia. That Russia would retaliate and that we would do absolutely nothing at all in response because they were literally waging undeclared warfare on all of Russia.
I think both sides of the China Futility have finally drunk the bitter dregs of their long divorce and are now set on inching back together. The righting is on the wall for all to see and it beautiful in my sight. If you cannot imagine tens of thousands of young Americans dying in a stupid, pointless, meaningless war in Vietnam that no American leader in the White House, Congress or the Pentagon actually fought to win, then imagine the tens of thousands of American sailors and Marines dying to fight one group of Chinese for another group of Chinese. It isn't going to happen.
The fix for that is easy and also clearly visible. Taiwan does not now and never had needed American weapons to keep the Chinese out. All that was was theater to show that we were interested in keeping the islands communist free. Since China itself has been communist free since Chou en Lai there is little point to maintaining the charade and they can play among themselves now. Ditto Korea.
The only other player on the planet with untamed ferocity has made its position very clear without ever saying a word. It cannot allow an enemy state to develop nuclear weapons, ever. Every single one of its enemies has declared to the world that had they the power to do so they would wipe Israel off the face of the map and kill every person living there and all have an indifference to life that would astonish 99% of the Westerners that ever learned it.
So if everyone is clear on the situation, why are 'researchers' still smuggling deadly viruses into Detroit? Why do we keep catching these smugglers again and again and again? You know that they are bringing them here in order to weaponize them which in this case means making them far more contagious since they're already plenty deadly enough so why do they keep bringing them here? What the hell is going on?
The world is back on the cusp of ignorant and all out vicious war. One of the things few know is that naval developments in 1900 basically rendered Britain's command of the seas moot and made the naval arms race a game that any economically able and industrialized power could play at and win. The all big gun dreadnoughts and battle cruisers made every previous battleship and battleship navy obsolete including their own. This was how the Allied Powers all had to negotiate after the War to limit construction because they were all bankrupting themselves to build the most powerful navy. The process was intense and makes fascinating reading.
The same thing happened when people finally weaponized the drones that technology made possible about 20 years ago. People, companies, countries, nations can make ten thousand drones a day, arm them and fly them on attack profiles anywhere. There is no defense at all. None. It does not exist.
You would think somebody would be working very hard on this problem but I'm concerned that I don't see Elon Musk working on it. That right there says a lot.
This is a problem.
The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe | Denis Stetskov, From The Trenches
— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) April 21, 2026
The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM.
Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is hemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago.
Twenty… pic.twitter.com/GMQa3jRpBm
It would be a good use of your time to read the whole thing. He describes problem that has a number of perfectly acceptable solutions and fixes that would correct the problem and goes on to show that virtually none of the solutions will be implemented and that nobody will even try to implement one. It is really quite sad but predictable what happened at Apple after Jobs died there. There is literally nobody running the top 3 tiers there who cares about the customer or the product except as a method to put money in their pockets.
My own solution to this problem has been a very low level campaign of rejection. Starting even back when Mr. Jobs was alive and turning out awesome products, I wasn't buying cutting edge. My unique philosophy was that only an idiot would stand in line all night to buy the latest and greatest iphone or very best top of the line computer systems that came with a brand new OS. When my 14 year old Workbook Pro died I replaced it with a 12 year old Workbook Pro which has served me very well these last 4 years. My phone was an iPhone4 but I upgraded a couple of years ago to an iPhone 8 because the networks purged my phone's ability to connect to their networks.
The hidden underlying and unstated reason for this wholesale rejection of cutting edge tech was not the prices blowing through the roof but the disdain for 99% of the 'improvements' that were making the new stuff not better....for me. I don't need it.
This kind of reminds me of watching the Tactical Action Officer simply reach out and hit 'reject' every time the satellite navigation system updated our geographic location on the planet. Mind you, he was rejecting the navigation data that showed where we actually were on the planet and he did it over and over again.
"Why"
"We have 300 sonobuoys out there, all shown in our master plot relative to where we thought we were back when they were dropped. If we let the system change our position it will adjust all of them too."
Since we were hunting Soviet ballistic missile submarines very quietly this seemed, on the face of it, reasonable. As I thought it over though the obvious question floated to the top and wondered, 'what kind of idiot designs a navigation system that seamlessly adjusts everything on a plot just because the master reference location shifted?
Obviously, its exactly the thing a software developer would do and never think twice about. Our ability to guide sensors to target based on a relative plot would be destroyed the instant we converted it to a true plot.
Nevertheless, it used to gall me that I all of Microsoft Word 4.0 fit on a single floppy disk and that it has now grown into such a kluge of a tool that it takes over your entire computer. Fortunately for me, when Microsoft destroyed my ownership of Office I simply gave it up and went elsewhere for my software needs. That was over 30 years ago and I never looked back.
As I heard it, one of the reasons that the democrats did not get away with stealing the vote in 2024 was because Trump and his team had lawyers, guns and money standing by in every precinct to make sure that the vote was fairly and honestly held, administered, counted and reported.
I think he made that happen.
Is that same machine going to be in place for the next Presidential election or are we going straight back to precincts and cities that take 48 hours to count the vote and exercise exclusive control using democrats on the counting and reporting? I think that the Republican verifty the vote machine is the exact same shower of feces that the SAVE Act is showing us it still remains. The squishy party will go back to doing what it does so tolerantly well, viewing with alarm and doing nothing.
I see that we may be moving back into a shooting war with Iran and it strikes me that we never hear about America applying the Dark Arts to our enemies. When are we going to see the EBO* of our cyber warriors, or will we? All through the 90s we were told that our 'enemies' had the power to remotely shut down our electrical distribution and generation simply by sending 'commands' over the internet. Can we do that?
The best part of the Dark War is that I spent the last couple of years of the last millennium fighting bravely in the Y2K trenches at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command where we diligently went crazy doing every kind of regression testing you could imagine and then doing it again and again and again and tried to justify hooking up to an OTCIXS network while also using the internal network to merge our graphical data fusion, sensors, C2 and OTCIXS over a purely one way link. Our method and our approach didn't fail any arcane tests, they just got disconnected by fiat.
It was 'way too dangerous' to our national cyber security. We'd point out that there was no physical means for any data to leave our network computers because they were fully isolated; all to no avail. The connection was severed and that was that, the Nation was once again cyberly secure.
So, as we move into more explodey operations in the Gulf and Iran, is it possible that they will be proceeded or accompanied by a sort of network fire that wreaks havoc on the oil pumping, distribution and storage systems via the computers that control all that in Iran and lays them waste or do we actually have to bomb the crap out of all that?
Just asking, for a friend.
*Effects Based Operations. A cruel mirage perped by the Planning Class who brought you COAs.
Well it seems we are finally back on track to establishing penal colonies on the moon. First step of course was to set up the means to get there and then it is just a matter of time before some bright spark discovers that sending the dregs of humanity to the Moon is the answer to the question that has dogged liberals since they were dropped on their heads as babies. What do we do with the people who are truly horrible despite the fact that there is no such thing as a bad kid?
That's right, Comrade, We send them to the Moon!
I enjoyed The Ring of Charon by Roger MacBride Allen and was really delighted to find both that book and the sequel, The Shattered Sphere in a very odd used book store south and east of Zanesville. The story featured some wonderful bits from the Naked Purple Movement and their takeover of the Soviet Penal Colony on the Moon. Once the Purples hit there was no coming back.
So now it looks like, at long last, we are on our way to Penal Colonies on the Moon and I for one wonder if they'll take after the place described by Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or something else along those lines but you know, there's going to be people that find the idea of sending horrible people to the moon is a grand idea. Out of sight is out of mind.
On the gripping hand, which is closer, the moon or Chicago?
Well duuh, you can see the moon......
There is another feel good story out of the the New York Post that could use a little modifier or explanation for those who are not familiar with the term, 'process is the punishment.' On the face of it Bolt CEO fired his Human Resources Department because they were "creating problems that didn't exist." He's not wrong in his thinking, merely in his approach.
HR is the modern version of the process that used to require a record of at least 2 counseling sessions before lowering the boom on a man who was screwing things up in the workplace. What I learned as a new officer was that if it wasn't documented previously, it could not be used as justification for non-administrative punishment. With some of the knuckleheads this was not a problem. You could literally tell them not to do X any more and they'd do it before they left my office and 4 more times walking back to the workcenter.
As I used to see it, HR was the permanent recording secretary documenting the little crimes that would safely see you rid of people that you and your colleagues really did not want to work with anymore. They were the corporate version of the ship's XO.
They would mandate training on a given topic, record who was present and then when there was a failure to adhere to the mandates and your peers and work colleagues despised you, the HR department was there to chop you into pieces and walk them out of the building.
I had several issues with the HR process. The first was the obvious one that the rules only applied to the people that they didn't like. The second was that any given training on, for instance, sexual harassment, could be safely and comprehensively covered in something less than 5 minutes. It did not take an hour and need to be repeated and beaten to death.
My final issue with the HR is perhaps only one of my imagination. In that place I would just assume that the HR we're talking about was staffed entirely by people who met all the specifications for enrolling in the Witchfinder's General Assembly and frankly, I never liked those guys.
The HR was top-cover for getting rid of people that you no longer wanted to work with and getting rid of HR means you're stuck with those people because there are arcane rules about disposing firing workers you no longer like or can't tolerate. So we're back to where I was as a young junior officer being told by the XO that no, I cannot throw Fireman X over the side or shitcan him because I need to document that he was counseled and I must also have a record showing that his counseling included all the steps he must take to avoid becoming shark food. Only after repeated failures to stay off the menu could I get rid of him in strict accordance with procedures.
The upshot though was a day after that little chat the Engineer sent me note asking if I wanted to keep another particular bane of my existence who had just left my office after trying to explain how it was that he missed the last liberty boat back to the ship and was 'forced' to remain overnight on Diego Garcia. It seems his Background Investigation had finally come in and he had a rap sheet 22 pages long and had therefore fraudulently enlisted. He was on the next boat back to Diego Garcia and the next plane back to the United States.
What Mr. Breslow and his HR failed to comprehend was that his HR was supposed to work for him. I'm sure he'll be able to replace them with something ten times better but then, when we are talking about HR, we can be talking about multiplying by zero.
It speaks volumes that on seeing this I immediately concurred. Honestly, who would assassinate a candidate for Mayor in America?
As I read those words very early this morning at Chicago Boyz I was struck by the thought, this was the very first time I have ever seen somebody suggesting that a man doing nothing more than standing for public office as Mayor of some crappy little town in the United States could be assassinated for daring to stand up for himself and others in the environment created by liberal democrats.
I remember sitting in the airport in Manila as I was waiting to leave the country and reading about the discovery of this election massacre and thinking, "Wow! This sort of thing could never happen in America." I'm beginning to get the distinct feeling that I'm wrong.
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I see from the news so take that for what it's worth, that USS Nimitz is now operating in the Caribbean which, you must admit, is a strange place to find an aircraft carrier based out of Bremerton, Washington on the very point of a dignified retirement. I know, she is underway to her final homeport for decommissioning but it still seems odd to send a nuclear ship all the way around South America to commence its final act. Those who have read the Fighting Words to the top right know my connection with the ship but I liked this picture:
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| Catherine Nimitz Lay christened Nimitz on 13 May 1972. |
She was the very first person outside the family that I worked for. I slaved away all through 7th grade as one of the assistant librarians at Thomson Junior High School in Newport, RI where she was the Head Librarian. She was a fascinating lady.
As the war got out of control and more and more wounded soldiers returned to the States I read about the 'disgraceful' conditions at Walter Reed Hospital and winced because I knew from one of my officers that closed down NAS Alameda and Treasure Island that the immediate effect of appearing on the BRAC list was deterioration of the buildings and infrastructure because nobody would approve contracts to spend money on 'dead' facilities. It was a shambles.
One can only hope that this is not how the delayed decommissioning has affected USS Nimitz. Getting jerked around like that at the end of service life is bound to have been a major pain in the ass. I saw that with the MSOs, an LST and the poor Destroyers. Bean counters are never kind but they are positively vicious at the end.
Good luck and Good Night Cuba.
I get some kind of weird kick out of taking a few minutes every now and then to listen to NPR. I know, I keep hoping that one day I'll turn the radio on and hear nothing but static on their channels but they still give that kind of amusement that draws a snort from most intelligent people. Today was no different.
The moderator got another moderate to discuss those whacky rethuglicans and. how they are viciously turning on the Sainted John Thune and his lackey Cornyn and it was kind of nice to hear the two lockstep fascists excoriating the rethuglicans for being anti-democratic and so stuffed with hate that they are TEARING DEMSELVES APART!!!!! I used to wonder at how anyone could be so simple as to believe a word they hear on NPR but this kind of thing makes me think there is still some room for idiots.
It's as if the only way democrats can think about politics is always 150% lockstep and any who ever doubt or waver or vote other than as directed by the Leadership are cast into the outer darkness forthwith with no dillydallying or foot dragging.
They just cannot comprehend a party that allows for diverse opinions on every single topic and really does largely consist of a big tent in which all are welcome. They see any failure to obey as the rightful kiss of death and start cutting off heads, throwing firebombs and burning down anything that they haven't already toppled and peed on. Notice how they never set fire to universities or schools?
Republicans just see it as a time to winnow out some of the democrats who have been masquerading as republicans for too long. I don't know what it will take to get those idiots to finally approve a law that 85% of the entire country wants but they will one day and unlike the useless democrats, it's not going to involve a man with a gun shooting at politicians.
I'm looking forward to an actual Flight of the Starship tonight so the weather better hold on.
It was a fascinating time but then I say that about every time. This one though, was special. One of those things I like about real sailors is that no matter what, at the end of the day, a real sailor never gives up. Give them a chance to hoist sail and be a hero and they do it.
The NC flying boats were designed as aircraft that could fly across the Atlantic to the coastlines of Europe and be ready to patrol for German U-boats upon arrival. Too late for World War I, the NCs still took up the challenge of traversing the Atlantic by air, and in May 1919, the NC-4 made the first successful transatlantic flight, a milestone in aviation history that brought great acclaim to Naval Aviation.
Originally built as a long-range antisubmarine warfare platform, the NC flying boats were delivered too late for World War I combat and appeared to be aircraft without a mission. Yet, even before the guns fell silent on the Western Front, a bold proposal written by Commander John H. Towers caught the imagination of the Navy Department. When peace returned, it called for the U.S. Navy to regain American prestige in aviation by achieving a feat that all who flew aspired to flying across the Atlantic.
On 3 May 1919, crews of the NC-1, NC-3 and NC-4 gathered at Naval Air Station (NAS) Rockaway, Long Island, for the transatlantic attempt. In the ensuing days a series of mishaps cast a pall over the endeavor, including a fire that damaged the NC-1, and one of the NC-4's crewmen accidentally sticking his hand into one of the aircraft's whirring propellers during an engine test.
By 8 May 1919, with a four leaf clover presented to each crew member for luck, the three flying boats launched on the first leg of the their flight from Rockaway to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Only two completed the nine-hour trip, the NC-4 being forced down off Massachusetts with engine trouble and the media giving her the nickname the "Lame Duck." Once reunited at Trepassey, Newfoundland, the flying boats launched into the early evening sky on 16 May 1919, bound for the Azores Islands, the longest and most demanding leg of the transatlantic flight, covering some 1,200 nautical miles. Increasing clouds and rain caused the aircraft to separate, with NC-1 and NC-3 making forced landings. Only NC-4 successfully reached the Azores, the crew of NC-1 rescued by a Greek freighter and the crew of NC-3 actually sailing their battered craft 205 miles to the Azores.
Thus, the "Lame Duck" became the sole survivor of Seaplane Division One, and on 27 May 1919, the keel of the NC-4 flying boat sliced through the waters of the harbor in Lisbon, Portugal. The aircraft's commander, Lieutenant Commander Albert C. Read, later wrote to his wife that the successful flight represented "a continuous run of unadulterated luck," but indeed the skill and bravery of the crew combined with fortuity in making the NC-4 and her crew the first to fly the Atlantic.
For those that never watched Top Gear, you missed a great show. One of the amusing bits was how whenever one of the trio broke down the others would sometimes mock him for awhile and then drive away and head to the hotel bar. I can only imagine what it was like to watch as one of your wing men landed on the ocean and you continued on. Now I'm going to have to find the book one of these guys must have written and see what happened.
Every time you turn around the idiots in the legislature have passed yet another law designed to limit your inalienable right to possess and carry a firearm and every single damned one of them knows that the Supreme Court has addressed this issue countless times and found that legislatures doing this are in the wrong. They say so. They write it down so you don't forget. The legislatures still do it.
Here's a simple solution to this imbecilic trait that sends gun owners to the Courts to seek redress every time the legislaturds go all tyrannical; every legislator who voted for the law will, in every court case that challenges and contests yet another arbitrary unconstitutional anti-gun law be personally liable for a $50,000 per plaintiff penalty to be paid promptly or the legislator goes to prison until it is paid.
Enough of this pussyfooting around with these gun grabbers. Make them liable for their personal stupidity and make them pay for inflicting it on the rest of us. This is not one where they get to dip into the treasury to pay us, it is to come right out of their personal bank accounts. Sell their houses if they need to come up with the money. And they will.
The more I read about AI, the companies behind the construction and fielding of AI and the hallucinations and outright lies and the lengths to which one has to go to pin an AI down to the actual truth of things, the more inclined I am to thinking we need to make sure that the Encyclopedia Britannica is always published in hardback and updated annually by the old system of publishing a new collective volume every year. The old versions must all be retained and safely stored.
The things people know now are largely completely unknown to Gen X and below. They don't know and they don't care and yet these are the essential truths underlying our reality and cannot be ignored for long because that was what DEI was all about and we know how that worked out. History demands controls and it should not be continually rewritten to satisfy the lowest common denominator or the other idiots with academic titles and degrees.
Vernor Vinge captured the future path of AI pretty closely when he wrote Rainbows End. I don't recommend the book to read but the subplot described the plan to equip AI with the knowledge of everything ever written down by feeding it every book ever written and to that end the evil corporation bought all the biggest/best libraries in the world and took the books and dumped them into book shredders so that the optical scanners could store them electronically in the AI database.
It looks like there may be no end to the pussyfooted wars of the 21st century which leaves only room for the large steps involved in creating darkness and oceans of blood. I think we'll skip the bloodletting the maximum extent possible but I suspect pretty soon the lights are going to go off and stay off in Iran and once that happens it is a certainty that the same will happen in Ukraine. If we're sick and tired of Ukraine, think how Russia feels and if we are fed up with the 'resistance' of multiple cells of viciousness, well, we cornered the market on viciousness a very long time ago and there's no reason we can't haul it back out of the closet and go forth again with the intent to destroy everything in our path.
I get a kick out of how we are not fighting a fighting war while looking around for others to jump in and take part and do their 'fair share.' I think President Trump has made his point about the utter uselessness of NATO and it is now readily apparent to everyone that there simply is no NATO force at all if one excludes the United States. There is NOTHING AT ALL THERE.
If it is obvious to all of us now, imagine how blindingly obvious it has been to Russia since the long slide to powerlessness began in 1988. All of those armored divisions are long gone and so too are all of the artillery tubes, mechanized infantry, armed helicopters and thousands of fighter bombers poised on their frontier. There is a great void into which Poland has been tentatively sticking its generative member very very quietly and instantly putting it down again.
They have learned overnight what it is to be a 'frontline' State on the NATO Front and find that absolutely nobody at all has your back. Even if Britain and France were barking mad they would never go to war to support a central European power again. They lost EVERYTHING the last time they did that and they won't do it again. I think the Germans figured that out right about the time Ronald Reagan started talking about rearming and rebuilding a credible NATO force. They knew deep down that France and the Low Countries would simply abandon them and stymie US efforts to return forces to Europe. That's when the Greens won it all.
It was a very nice long weekend jaunt for me as I traveled into the heart of darkness to visit with family in the National Capital Region. We didn't cross back over the Potomac after making the crossing southbound in Hancock but we did stop for gas at Fort Myer....
So I read today that Nevada is entering a new Dark Age. It's really kind of funny because anybody with the power to read the news could have and did forecast this moment way back in 2000. The writing wasn't just on the wall it was splattered everywhere. Power grids around the world look a little like the coliseum after Brian finished.
A Nevada utility just told 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents that it’s redirecting 75% of their electricity supply to data centers — and they have less than a year to find a new power source. It’s one of the starkest examples yet of the AI boom’s impact on everyday Americans.
The case is extreme, but the pattern is not. Across the country, data center electricity demand is reshaping the grid, driving up rates, and pushing a growing number of homeowners toward solar and battery systems — not as complementary power, but as essential infrastructure.
You remember, everyone was going to plug their trucks and cars into the grid 24 hours a day to get a full recharge of the battery and it was simply going to be absorbed by a power grid that was already stretched to capacity.
The inability to cope with reality is still kind of startling. People educated by our public schools are now making the policy that we and our children will be forced to live with and I'll be honest, the kids coming out of our schools are barely literate and a little frightening if you know what I'm talking about. This is how they think and it is beyond reason. In fact, reason is not permitted to take off its hat or sit down before being driven off by men with clubs and guns.
I sure hope that they put this electric power plant into layup but that costs money and it takes skill that few have anymore so I doubt they even tried as they complied with Obama's EPA directive to shut down all coal fired power plants. The local university has one like it but it was also shut down about the same time as the one below. I still drive by them all the time and the shells remain but it takes no time at all for steam machinery to degrade to uselessness if not maintained properly. Just a little rust and it's all over.
The man running for Mayor in Los Angeles won't win but he is very cleverly exploiting some new technology that I believe will sweep the nation from now on and even if the various legislatures and other corrupt anti-democratic forces ban and outlaw it, it will just go underground and still enjoy wide circulation. It is unstoppable. It is what brought down the USSR. In the long run, it won't fail to do what it sets out to do.
Doesn't mean that Spencer Pratt is going to win in LA despite dozens of killer spots like this:
— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) May 12, 2026
The real innovative dawn is the one slowly breaking in the minds of former liberals and even some of the die-hard fanatical liberals. It is finally dawning on them that they/you cannot turn to the State/City/County for the things that Civilization itself demands and must provide it yourself.
– Your children get no benefit from Public Schools and you better educate them yourself.
– Fire protection and insurance is no longer assured no matter where you live or taxes paid so you better invest in innovative engineered home defenses against fire because nobody else will.
– The State is under NO obligation to protect you or yours so you better be able to do it yourself without their 'aid'.
– Right now and just for this moment you enjoy unrivaled Freedom of Speech and Thought but the State can and will take this away from you. They have done it before and the instant they can do it again they most assuredly will. You better figure out how to stop it or make yourself anonymous and nobody really listens to anonymous.
– Consider innovations in medicine. Doctors are burning out and leaving the practice in droves because it is not medicine anymore and simply nothing but business. Find out if you can still see GPs in your neighborhood who are simply willing to hang up a shingle and advertise their services. I remember medicine from back when this was the case for almost everyone in America and I cannot say that the practice of medicine and medical outcomes got better because they forced this practice to end.
– Think innovatively. There's money in it if you work at it.
I don't often get the chance to use that expression anymore but it seems appropriate. The PCU Cleveland which will be commissioned USS Cleveland, arrived in port on May 9th while we were in Pittsburgh and it will remain here for commissioning on 16 May, 2026 so today we decided to see if we could invite ourselves aboard for a tour. They were very obliging. It was kind of impressive in the way that I found warships in the Royal Navy to be impressive. It was spotless. It is brand new but the ship was absolutely pristine.
There is a guy over there now scratching his head and wondering where his drill is. I know. That was about the only thing out of place in a tour that lasted over 30 minutes and took in the flight deck, hangar, bow and pilothouse. It is true that they have different names for everything but we know what they really are.
I was really impressed by the crew who were all bright, cheerful and pleasant. At the Entry Control Point I asked one of the ship's Chief Petty Officers if he would hold onto my pocket knife and he was more than happy to. It turns out that they also were more than willing to store things like that at the actual scanner so nobody lost anything they might have had in their pockets. I cannot tell you how rare that is.
It was a very interesting and pleasant way to spend a couple of hours on a beautiful sunny afternoon and it has been a long time since I stood on the deck of a USN ship. I found it interesting in retrospect that while standing on the bow I unconsciously stepped into the wind shadow of the gun mount and noted too that the ship, despite the 40 knot winds we had yesterday, is singled up at the pier.
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| PCU CLEVELAND as it prepares for commissioning in Cleveland |
I got used to oceans of good food places living in Southern California for 30 years. In my last place I could walk to any of 70 nice restaurants and other nice places to eat or get food but not so much here in Metroparkcentralis. This is a photo from the one and only worthwhile Chinese restaurant and it closed its doors 3 years ago and there is still no place on this side of the Rocky River that is its equal. Oddly enough it was owned and operated by a lady lawyer for decades.
It is still hard for me to accept that nobody within 300 miles knows how to make and serve proper authentic Socal cuisine with the proper Mexican and Chinese fakery that makes take-away food from those places so damned good. This place doesn't even have proper food trucks!
Oh well, off to Pittsburgh in the morning for the art that's in it and maybe, a Rita's Italian for some custard and ice gelati.
When applying pressure internationally it is vital to always keep in mind who you are dealing with. Sad to say, in spite of spending decades in the Middle East, I forgot who we were dealing with and so it should not have come as a surprise to learn that the Iranians, having no place else to store the oil, have started dumping it into the Persian Gulf. During the late Tanker War nobody over there so much as blinked has millions of tons of crude found its way out of damaged tankers and into the waters of the Gulf and decades later walking on the beaches could give you black tarred feet. The oil sludge sits just under the sand.
Remember, this is an industry that spent a hundred years flaring off natural gas because there was 'no market' for it. They do not see waste or inefficiency the way that normal people do.
It really makes one laugh to read about how Europe is waking up to its actual military defense requirements and eagerly rushing to produce a million arrows a year in the face of rising demand for machine gun ammo. I see that after years of poking and prodding German industry is scaling up its 155mm artillery ammunition production to meet a requirement that was vaporized by drones over the last 2 years. Man, if you thought artillery counterbattery fires was a real thing (and I do) then you would have to laugh to see Rheinmetall crow about turning out even more 155mm shells than even all of the United States.
Why would we be laughing? Well, how many actual 155mm artillery guns are left in all of NATO not counting the United States? The days when I could glance at the entire Order of Battle of any NATO or Warsaw Pact member are in the long ago past but I dare say that all of NATO less Poland have fewer then 150 working artillery pieces and the number left in Ukraine can be counted on the fingers of both hands. Nobody likes incoming and they make a real effort to kill the redlegs when they can and using drones to bring down a rain of fire on artillery positions is probably something that makes every infantryman smile as he falls asleep at night.
Once again we see people gearing up with the wrong stuff to fight a war that no longer exists in the modern world and which was crippled to death by lawyers in the 3rd world fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The days of cannon as the Ultima Ratio Regum have gone, never to return. It would have been far better if Rheinmetall had built a magnificent 25 man portable factory for making a thousand fiber optic drones a day and then set up 25 of them around the country to produce a damned near infinite number of drones. They'd have also done better to set up factories like that to produce autonomous drone killers.
Of course, they build what they are paid to build and nobody in European NATO is thinking clearly now and by the evidence, haven't been since Ronald Reagan was King.
It is kind of sad that almost nobody heard the call last week that announced to all that could and would hear that the Southern Poverty Law Center was really just an enormous scam preying on the feeble minded liberals that make up the power elite of this crazy place. All they had to do to make a good living out of their own racism was fund the dimwitted remnants of the Klan and a few other losers and in that regard they are no different from the other scams that people pretend are honest and forthright. That's right, the SPLC is no different from the FBI, CIA and NSA who all exist and provide a damned good living for elites and gives them enormous power over others by convincing them that a country that spends 1/10 of what we spend on military stuff is some kind of existential threat to US.
If you think back to the Governor Whitmer kidnapping scam back in 2020, it looks like ten or twelve of the conspirators involved in the so-called plot were FBI or FBI informants and all the money and equipment was purchased by the FBI. The sheer totality of ineffective bungling by the FBI is probably best summed up by all the progressive who must despair of them because after 12 years of endless digging, the FBI has completely totally failed to find even one single crime to pin on President Trump. It's driving them all quite mad.
I think we all have a pretty clear idea of just how fiendishly competent the SS is by now but this isn't about competence it is about altering reality enough to make a good living scaring people to death with fabrications and lies and thus maintaining control. All of the intelligence agencies are in it up to their eyeballs and so is the State Department and by now many people have some idea of just how corrupt all of those NGOs were. Mark this, not one single NGO has any record of actually doing good work. Not one.
The news carefully trumpets the facts they want their followers to hear and to believe and thus we still have endless loud denunciations of President Trump claiming he committed crimes for which there is not a shred of evidence OR THE MAN WOULD BE IN JAIL OR DEAD.
Can you believe I was once a fairly steady consumer of the news? I put a picture here a few months ago of a nice coffee/restaurant in Del Mar where every Sunday I would arrive with the Sunday New York Times and read it cover to cover and consider myself somewhat well informed minus what I picked up every working day from taking a Peek-in-the-Well on the SIPRNET in my office.*
I also subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and read most of it every day for years. One might say that I have a thirst for news of the world. Of course as I saw more and more of what went unreported and took part in a good deal of it, I lost the somewhat naive belief that there was value in reading the news and stuck to sources in the office.
I find it interesting that our whole entire vaunted news has not honestly or faithfully reported a single word of truth out of the entire Middle East in over 30 years. I would say that is some kind of record but then again, the Cold War lasted even longer and you'd never know we won it based on what the news reports. You'd think we are still in an almost hot war with Russia and on the brink of one with China.
There was an interesting little video put on X by a school student at some Charter School where he asked his high school classmates to read aloud about an 'extraordinary silhouette and something looking a little guache' and none of those high school students could read it aloud. They're all graduating in a month or two and they cannot read. That would just about meet the needs of a feudal state and their role is pretty clear in that place.
I used to wonder about how those ancient texts were preserved through the long night and who chose to keep Thucydides, Aristotle, Plato, Polybius and the others alive to us for all those generations only to see them end sometime in the near future, unread, unmissed and unnoticed.
I asked Grok for a comparison of the New Deal with National Socialism and oddly enough it returned something completely unlike what I remember learning as a boy. I may now have to read those damned speeches that were Hell to track down and see just what the differences were between FDR's totalitarian impulses and those of the German Chancellor. On the other hand, there must be scores of scholarly works that already did that and all I have to do is track them down.
I will bet you it is not a simple trivial matter of going to the library and poking around or looking online with the expectation of getting anything like real scholarly work. On the gripping hand, I did run across a book at the Library the other week written by the man who led our delegation to Germany to try to straighten out the agonizing bits of the Treaty of Versailles. I'll see if it's still there but what are the chances anybody would buy a book written by an unknown back in 1938?
I am getting the sense that all of us are tired of the game and are ready for our own withdrawal east Gibraltar. It looks like Europe is not gearing up to stick its crank in the fan but is nevertheless thrusting most vigorously at the fan. How every single wimp in Europe can eagerly demand action and attacks on Russia and not see that they don't begin to have the means to fight is beyond comprehension. It is, nonetheless, how they start every single war over there and thus an excellent time to step outside for a smoke.
I don't spend much time thinking about how the next war turns out because that's really not one of those easy simple questions that can be answered anymore using the logic and rational thought that once produced the likes of NATO. Back then it was a simple matter of counterbalancing forces and both sides leaning into a standoff at any price. That's not the way it looks anymore. Now it looks more like rational thought and logic have both stepped out for a smoke.
The only reason that Ukraine's agony has gone on this long is because Europe willed it. They want it to go on and on and on and on without end because they all believe that they are doing an injury to Russia. I cannot for the life of me see why they think that. It's hard to imagine anything further from the truth. It's like they never grasped the essential fact that for a dictatorship to survive in the Age of Reason there MUST BE an outside Enemy that the people can be rallied against. All of western Europe has made itself that enemy for President Putin.
I really don't understand the idiocy of the frontline States except that they put liberal women in charge and that can have no other ending then an ocean of tears. What they understand about war and geopolitics can be written on a neutron. They act like they each have 10 armored divisions backing them up and not a handful of bad prom dates.
They all think that someone is going to fight the Russians but I cannot figure out who they think is going to save them from the devastation. Poland it locked on its front and I think the rest of Central Europe will just sit it out. They all know something Western Europe never knew or suspected. Russia really does not want to invade them or fight them and would like to be left to their own devices for awhile.
At some point you would have thought the idiots would have picked up on the similarity between us and Russia wouldn't you?
We have, I think, reached the point where we would like to be left unbothered by their idiocy and if they have to make idiots out of themselves perhaps they could do it among themselves for awhile without resort to the Great Powers. Oh, and could we divest our elite from their own idiocy in persisting in thinking that Russia is nothing but a gas station with nukes? They have been more than holding their own in Ukraine while engaged in war with Ukraine, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lichtenstein all the other idiots in NATO and finally Switzerland. You know who has not been detectably winning in Ukraine? That's right, all of those tossers fighting Russia.
Europe cannot unring the bell. Too many in Europe denounce America for us to go forward and believe them partners. As they have denied us transit rights and basing rights during our war operations it is now all too clear that they will hold our use of Ramstein hostage in future military operations. There is simply no wriggle room anymore in making plans based on long held assumptions about the use of bases in NATO countries. If we cannot count on them then they are worse than useless to us since we expend resources on them with no guarantees. We’d be far better off developing bases where our use and access is assured and unquestioned. We are not the monsters here.
Imagine that, shifting our actual base infrastructure into the Middle East after all these years.