FADED REMNANT

Once again I turned to the online for inspiration and two things struck me as noteworthy at Busted Knuckles. The first had to do with an old veteran discussing his naval background with a modern sailor and sounding like a man from the dark ages because he was a Water Tender or Boiler Tech or some such and this:

What I wondered as I saw this picture was, are any of our aircrew taking pictures like this today as they fly missions over Iran and are they carefully printing them and preserving them for a time not to distant when men no longer fly front line combat aircraft in war? It seems pretty clear that we are seeing the last gasp of manned aerial combat because drones are going to make these things as obsolete as horse tenders or archers.*

*The discerning reader will know that I favor entering a war prepared and the best preparation for dealing with enemy aircraft is to destroy them when they're home, alone, at night.

IF

 If the rethuglicans were even half as evil and malignant as democrats there would be a special congressional committee looking into every aspect of every media person present at the attempted regicide of the President and the people who were there must be compelled to justify and explain why they attempted to overthrow the government by violence! 

You can see all the parallels with the January 6th Miasma.

Every media person and their significant other who were present in the Ballroom at the White House Correspondent's Dinner was a party to a violent attempt to overthrow the government in much the same way that every person who was present in the Capital on that dismal day were guilty of attempting to overthrow the government.

– First things first, the FBI needs to round up every single one of those despicable people and throw them into jail and not just any jail but into the worst nastiest jail in Washington, DC and not just in any cell but into solitary confinement and there can be no bail for monsters like them. Let them rot!

– Every single thing in their past needs to be investigated and their bank accounts frozen and every purchase going back the last 30 years needs to be eyeballed by stony eyed harridans keen to find out what it was actually for....

– None of them or their families should get even one second of time in the media to explain or justify or try to wriggle out of their loathsome crime.

– Every person they know or have some sort of relationship with needs to be investigated and needs to answer, under oath any and all questions put to them by counsel and thus the People! Failure to obey should be instantly followed up by throwing them in jail.

You see how none of that is happening? That's the country I grew up in. That's the place I want to live in and give to my children, not the monstrous State that the Democrats created in their minds and then tried to make real in the fantastic show trials of people who simply made their voices heard in a time honored American way. 

If only there was some way to communicate this sort of thing to idiot lefties and their stupid followers and get them to stop being crazy, stupid, ignorant, vicious murdering scum.

If. 

THE PERSISTENCE OF MALEVOLENCE

European history up until the 21st century was one replete with examples of men fighting against the darkness and trying to stave off the darkness and build civilization at the same time. It had its ups and downs and it worked better in some places than in others but over time Europe conquered the dark and made itself the living embodiment of peace and prosperity for the whole world to emulate and the world kept trying despite everything.

That Europe seems to be hellbent now on extinguishing the lights and turning its back on civilization and it does so in gleeful delight as it chortles itself to sleep every night telling itself that it is simply making the world a better place by turning off the lights and letting strangers take over their cities and then their politics and then their governments until it seems what was once Europe is now nothing but west India or west Pakistan with an unhealthy dose of really hateful Africans thrown in to make it more problematical to do anything, even simple things like walk down the street in broad daylight.

I wonder if they realize that this is actually them losing the Cold War to Russia all those years ago. Russia probably kicked the bucket militarily right about the time JFK and the Lunch Bunch didn't completely cave on Soviet missiles in Cuba but that didn't keep them from waging an ideological war against America and Europe that exported the very worst ideas and philosophies to ignorant youth in the West and saw them ultimately appoint the most articulate haters of the West, Capitalism and all people who did not live up to the ideals of the new soviet man, as their leading lights in film, television, education, academics, politics, philosophy and, God help us, Religion. 

Look at these monsters running Europe. The English church is run by people who would defile any church simply by stepping inside one and opening their mouth and the political class and leadership are to a man the most loathsome haters of their own people on the planet. Nobody hates the English more than the English leaders and that mindset has spread to encompass all the polities and peoples of Europe. The Irish leaders hate the Irish, the French leaders hate the French, the Norwegian leaders hate Norwegians. It's unbelievable but there is no other explanation for how all of them are dead set on destroying the civilization they created by destroying and sidelining all the people who created it.

The Russians did that. The KGB sent their agents and money to the West to infect them with this very mindrot that is tearing them apart and destroying them. It was the no-nukes people followed by the anti-imperial, anti-colonial and anti-Western, anti-intellectualism and self-loathing narcissists who led to leaders and the people who elected them who decided to simply destroy it all.

The whole Green Movement was nothing but Russian propaganda and slowly Europeans fell for it hook line and sinker. 

This is simply suicide. 

[W]ithin Europe itself... institutions pursue the systematic dismantling of their own domestic fossil fuel capacities. 

The result is not environmental salvation. It is an engineered dependency that can only delight oil producers such as Russia. 

Households face increasingly high energy bills that contribute to widespread energy poverty. Official EU figures show that roughly 9-10% of the population, more than 40 million people, struggle to heat their homes. 

"[T]he only cases in which the masses have escaped from... grinding poverty... in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that." — Milton Friedman, economist, 1979. 

Fossil fuels are not opposed merely for their emissions; they are opposed because they underwrite prosperity, independence, and power — attributes the cultural Marxist worldview seeks to delegitimize. An affluent, independent public is harder to control. Politically, if you are poor and dependent, there is the possibility that you will keep reelecting your incompetent leaders in the hope that they will rescue you. It is in their interest just to keep dangling the promise of rescue in front of you.

How does a State go about producing enormous volumes and quantities of weapons without expanding the energy to do so? How does a State wipe out its own domestic energy capabilities while at the same time expanding its imports of foreign and enemy energy supplies? 

This is a lot like idiots not understanding that a housing shortage is quickly sorted out by deporting the millions of people living in houses that they are not entitled to because they are illegally in the country. Instead, all of Europe trips over itself to give illegal immigrants all the free housing they want and if this curtails or eliminates housing and the welfare of natives than so be it. 

I bet that none of those idiots worked out that what broke the back of feudalism was the Black Death. It was only when workers grew scarce that they began to be treated better. Continually bringing in slaves is a recipe for getting everyone who is not the elite, treated just like a slave. This is H-1B visas in America writ large.

Europeans being somewhat dimwitted haven't yet got to the chapter in that book* that discusses slave revolts and popular revolutions, but they'll get there. 

*A Distant Mirror 

CUTTING STEEL

 There is some talk that the Secretary of the Navy was fired because he did not produce a battleship in something less than one year on the job. While I find this unbelievable there is some truth to the failure of our shipbuilding business model in the United States Navy. The shipbuilding people simply cannot get out of their own way and set about building a ship because they have institutionalized the entire process and codified it and wrapped it in concrete and made it just about impossible. God could not build a warship in this country in less than 20 years.

I worked with the sweep riders of destruction in the organization called Naval Sea Systems Command and they were petrifying and ossifying to a degree you literally cannot imagine. The Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Construction and Repair took the last 60 years off to get a manicure and the only time they are ever seen is, suspiciously, after dark when they finish sucking the last blood and marrow from the bones of a good idea.

Their little brothers in the Combatant Craft Department live to make and preserve the perfect boat. Anything less than perfect or marred in any way or modified at all without permission that takes years and tens of thousands of $ to get approved, is simply not allowed. I was amazed to see that what they did was done so thoroughly that it was far easier to actually procure patrol boats offshore rather than try to build one in the United States that was not able to bypass NAVSEA CCD and lay claim to the protection of Special Operations which had its own very different and separate acquisition chain. In my own case I started out with even better protective cover but that faded away as the boats neared completion and CCD got involved.

The people working at Combatant Craft, SupShip and even NAVSEA as a whole, are not evil nor do they think of themselves as other than imperfect Gods laying a firm but guiding hand on the cowboys that just want to get the ship built, the boat to float and get on with it. They act in strict accordance with the guidelines created and maintained forever by NAVSEA. My favorite apocryphal story had to do with an article I read in the Surface Force Quarterly Engineering Bulletin about a team of experts from NAVSEA called in to determine why one of our missile hydrofoil patrol craft could not get up on its foils and hit top speed. The crew and experts had tweaked everything and it all showed in the green and yet the foil craft persisted in wallowing along at 12 knots instead of stepping up onto its foils and speeding down river at 50 knots. It turns out they had 12 tons of extraneous paperwork (NAVSEA complete Technical Manuals) onboard and the boat was simply too heavy.

 

If we really do want to build ships in this country and in particular, warships, we need to take a flame thrower to NAVSEA in all its iterations and branches and clean out about 90% of the people and processes that ossified and solidified about the time we switched from steam to gas turbines. It probably never helped that the place turned into a flower garden for nuclear power officers and chiefs who all set about forbidding all change and all deviance from specifications as both Heresy and unGodly. In short we need to do what Elon Musk did to rocket building and launching and to Twitter. A lot of people with rock solid political connections to every sitting senator and congresscritter need to be turfed out and put out to pasture.

This can happen and it has happened before. I myself was blown away a couple of months ago talking to an engineer about some crypto work and finding out that some of the die-before-changing aspects of red/black physical separation had changed 180 degrees since the last time I was involved. Things I never thought could happen back when KVM switches first appeared are now accepted best practice by DIRNSA. Who knew? 

What will it take to change NAVSEA? Well I cannot tell the whole of it but it will only work if the new SECNAV simply, for the good of the service, fires every single Flag Officer and SES civilian working at NAVSEA. Every single one and they have to be replaced with outsiders who have demonstrated the knack for telling underlings to stop fucking around with their precious processes and make things happen. Yes, this did not work out well for SeaFighter and some other concept ships but that is because those Flag Officers and SES who were bypassed were still in place 2 years later to crap all over the changes and revert to the deep channel. All of them have to go.

And if you simply look at our shipbuilding industry and capabilities with this one Query in mind...What could anyone possibly do to fuck it up even more than it is right now, your answer will be obvious, nothing. Go ahead and slash and burn to your heart's content because no injury you could possibly do to it matches the pure uselessness of the industry as it is now. And one final thing, for the love of God don't crawl into bed with anyone from the American Shipbuilding industry or the Trade in the United States. They are all demons in human form. Go and find your top level and many of your midlevel managers for the shipbuilding process WHERE THEY STILL BUILD SHIPS. Give them visas, a flame thrower and the authority to hire and fire and you will build ships again.

TIME FOR THE SWISS NAVY TO STEP UP

 This is amusing. I'm sure the world media is casting it as a problem that President Trump must now cope with. On the other hand, not our ship, not our crew, not our business. It looks like a Swiss problem from here. At some point the rest of the world is going to realize that the World Police and Team America don't work for them anymore and they're going to have to come to some sort of arrangement for handling these little problems without referring them to us.

 In the meantime, the entire Swiss Navy is headed towards the Gulf right now to kick ass!

 

WARPED REALITY

 It's the 21st century, six years after the Chinese Biological Weapons Trial was run on the world and you still believe that something in a needle that your physician sticks in your arm as a "flu shot" really is a flu vaccine and nothing else. You don't wonder how every genius on the planet was able to come up with 84 different 'vaccines' for Wuhan Flu in just a couple of months but nobody can actually come up with a flu vaccine that works.

Every now and again I have to remind myself that only 'civilized' tribes believe these fairy tales and everyone else knows its nonsense and that they're trying to steal your soul or dilute your precious bodily fluids. This ridiculous movie was prescient!

 

On the other hand, after repeated failures over the last two weeks, we finally got a waffle this morning and that has to count for something. These are nearly as hard to find in Metroparkcentralis as coconut cream pie. 

The really important thing

 Stay focused on the important things. Ignore the rest.

BACK TO THE MOST COMMON FLAW

 I enjoy reading Zero Hedge but they fall for the same fallacy we all fail to take account of despite knowing better. In this case, the analysts presume knowledge not in evidence and they make the critical error of presuming all actors are rational beings. That never really happens.

He wrote that Iran entered the blockade with about 15 million barrels in Kharg storage, roughly 51% full. At a flat production fill rate of 1.9 million barrels per day, that storage would max out in about 8 days. Even with aggressive upstream throttling, he said, the ceiling would still be hit in about 20 days. After that, wells may have to be shut in, risking permanent reservoir damage. 

That’s the point. As time passes, Tehran has to think not just about lost revenue, but about storage, field management, and what happens if production has to be curtailed under pressure.

The analyst simply presumes that those who are actually running the war against Trump know that their intransigence can destroy the means of producing the country's wealth or that they even care about it. I try not to make that kind of assumption and there is the other thing that comes from not being a rational actor. It's the Louis XIV disease we reference from time to time here.  Après moi le deluge.

The God botherers that run Iran probably don't give a damn about the oil or what comes after them. They mean to win and if they win standing on a pile of corpses a mile high, they're good with that. 

HOW PARALYSIS WORKS

 Plucky little Bahrain asked the UN Security Council to issue a Fatwa Resolution that would allow the opening of the Strait of Hormuz if anyone could find the means and the will. It went like this:

 On the face of it, a simple resolution that puts into words the way the Strait is supposed to work. Transit passage is the rough equivalent of a right that we have, like the Right to Bear Arms. Nobody argues or quibbles with a basic fundamental right like transit passage any more than they try to destroy the 2nd Amendment. Well, perhaps nobody but those who are seriously ticked off at the way the Rules Based Order only seems to ever work in favor of those who made the rules.

China, Russia and France promptly vetoed the Resolution. Bahrain watered it down and tried again. This time only the dangerous countries vetoed the Resolution and the Security Council showed real leadership in the vote because:

Bahrain, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Panama, Somalia, the United Kingdom and United States all voted in favor while Columbia and Pakistan stuck to their firmly held beliefs and Abstained. 

One of the many reasons I could not work in our State Department, any Atlantic Fleet Staff or the United Nations is because I'd die trying to draw two honest breaths in a row without dying from the sheer hypocrisy of being in the same building where people say things like this:

"No one should tolerate that they are holding the global economy at gunpoint, but today, Russia and China did tolerate," U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz said Tuesday.

 If we are honest, and we are, the United States and Europe have launched an all out Economic War against Russia and have been interfering dramatically at gunpoint with every aspect of its trade with the rest of the world. The Chinese are all too aware that our actions to close the Strait of Hormuz and deny them the oil they need to keep their economy going are way worse than ruinous, they are catastrophic. It is a Two Ocean Economic War being waged on two countries that did not attack any of the economic belligerents but are suffering drastic damage from their attacks on them.

When China goes into industrial shutdown as they shutter industries to keep their essential needs fueled we will see a return of the devastation of Supply Chain disruptions and the downstream catastrophe they bring. 

You know, if someone wanted to totally destroy the world's economy from a cold standing start, this is how they would do it. A prolonged shutdown of the Strait is going to wreak global havoc and people bleating about the OPEC shutdown as some sort of counterpart just don't realize that when OPEC shut it down places like China didn't even notice because they hadn't industrialized and the rest of the world barely noticed because America and Germany were the only really industrialized countries on the planet and could make do. This affects a much larger and much more interconnected world and as far as I can see, it is all proceeding in some kind of news vacuum. 

A TKO OF A TRO

 In a stunning move today, the Supreme Court issued a Temporary Restraining Order on the New York Times, a former newspaper published in New York and restrained it from any further delivery of pseudo news until they furnish the Court with 100% of the stolen materials and memos that some authentic hero gave them in an attempt to strike a blow for DIE and all other good things like abortion.

When interviewed by Red State crack journolista, Dame Alice Trueheart, the Office of the Chief Justice disclosed to xer that he and the boys sat down in the bar you don't know about in one of the back rooms upstairs over the actual Supreme Court, and worked out that they were the Supreme Law of the Land and that NOBODY can overturn their decisions and they decided, "To Hell with it, let's just issue a TRO and put those lousy commie bastards out of business." The other X challenged Justices agreed and with that, downed a couple more White Russians and called it a day.

It was a great day for Journalism and Court Supremacy. The world rejoiced. 

IRAN DOESN'T KNOW TROUBLE YET

 That's right, I'm waiting for President Trump to say, "bring forward the women and lawyers."

Then they'll know they're screwed and it's all over except shooting the cripples.

From Ace. 

 The mind boggles.

A MINOR BEMUSEMENT

 Every Friday I enjoy the Open Road at daily timewaster and there is always at least one profound photograph that shouts at me about life and other things. One of the many reasons that I enjoy this photo is because I did this for years traveling back and forth between San Diego and San Francisco in the 90s and because I have driven all over this country and Canada again and again. 

My bus was orange and fully loaded with comfy chair, books, drinks and luggage it would tear up the Grapevine at 75 mph but it usually took Pacific Coast Highway and ventured west out of LA into Santa Monica and Malibu and then all the way up to Big Sur and beyond. I usually camped like this around Big Sur or spent the night at the BOQ in Monterrey because that's pretty nice too. I would tend to my business in Treasure Island, Coast Guard Island or Albany and then head back home. 

The funny thing was that this was completely flipped when I moved to the Bay Area and then had business every month in San Diego. Same road trip but I'd spend the night at Port Hueneme on the way down because the best time to drive the PCH is daytime.

I used to ask my European friends if they ever thought about driving this country and many years later one of them said he's been bringing his family here every year for a month of just driving around looking at America. Europe has a lot to offer but you don't find the Wild Places out of Nature there.

I grew up this way and I've always been intrigued that 99% of the people I know have never driven cross country or even like to go for very long road trips. 

REAL JOURNALISM

 Both the House of Representatives and the Senate maintain files that list the names and sexual conquests of the various scumbag politicians in office and formerly in office and the reason they do that is because in those files they document the payouts to the precious virgins that were corrupted by the evil Senators and Democrats Congressmen. So both houses of Congress voted to keep those files closed and permit no access because.

Why haven't these files been hacked and the full details turned over to the media that would be happy to publish them so we could all get rid of these villainous poltroons and their mistresses who are somehow entitled to use our money to pay for their sexual pleasures in office? 

Seriously, how could a Republic actually tolerate this sort of thing for even one second? How is it that not one single good man of conscience has made those files public?

ECOUTEZ, THE SIGNALS ARE IN THE AIR

 Anybody who has studied the origins of the First and Second World War can clearly point to all the signals that both sides sent prior to embarking on hostilities and in hindsight it is clear that nobody on the other side was listening or comprehending what they were hearing. In short, it's just like a normal day of politics except in these cases as nations slide into war, it is more important to listen to the actual words that your opponent is sharing. They're not asking for a rebate, a new election or for you to hold the elevator. They are imparting deadly information and hoping that you are listening.

 

 Regrettably, nobody in Europe is listening, again.

 

NEXT STOP BUDAPEST

Spain admits 500,000 Algerian terrorists to Budapest in a lightning act of Socialist redemption and unbecoming humility. They really are hellbent on slitting their throats and the throats of every other European. It does make you wonder how they think it will end.

On Tuesday, the Spanish government finalized a migrant amnesty measure that will “regularize” more than 500,000 migrants. In January, it approved a royal decree allowing unauthorized immigrants who arrived before December 31, 2025, to have lived in the country for at least five months, and have no criminal record to apply for legal status. According to Fox News, those who qualify will receive one-year residency and work permits, with possible pathways to citizenship. 

The Associated Press reported that this measure “was fast-tracked via a decree that amends immigration laws. By doing it that way, the government was able to bypass parliament, where a previous amnesty attempt stalled and where it lacks a majority.”

On a related note, studies show that when civilized countries admit barbarian hordes, it does not end well for the little people. Did you know that the mean salary in all of Western Europe is about what an average person in Alabama gets paid? Oh well, I hear the ones that do work only work a couple of hours a day and then they're on holiday, break or taking a siesta. What the Hell is going on that every new generation of European seeks to find some new fantastic way to destroy Europe?

Since both Spain and Hungary are members of the EU, their subjects are allowed free passage to move to, live and work anywhere in the Reich. I hear Budapest was a lovely city.

WAR MACHINE AT NO LOAD, IDLE

In watching this it appears that UK is nothing but a termite eaten paper tiger with the effective military heft of Lesotho.  The Deputy Chief of the UK Defense Staff just told his interrogators that the UK could not deploy anything more than a couple of experts with briefcases if the need ever arose on the Continent for a Battle Group, Armored Brigade or Division of the army of the UK. In short, they are at best a low grade regime protection force and at worst they are the model of the NKVD and KGB brought to new life on the shores of England to repress and suppress the English while they get on with:

– Not guarding the borders and keeping the invaders out.

– Not protecting the country from terrorists.

– Not maintaining a standing military force capable of supporting its allies anywhere else.

– Not protecting the sovereignty of the debris left over from the British Empire. 

The armed forces of the Crown are now little more than a force of thugs kept close at hand to protect the government from the people if they ever figure out what the governments have been doing to them over the last 40 years. 

Can't tell if that's the Defense Chief with finger up nose.

 

At the end of the day, people have to ask themselves and their government, "just what is it for?" 

THE WRECKONING

 If you can believe him, this is the beginning of the rehabilitation of Eric Swalwell. I don't believe California politicians are actually capable of the truth so that's my starting point on this:

 I will believe it when I see it. I find it interesting that X failed to perfectly render this tweet using its standard embed technology. It mysteriously renders it fake looking so I went with a nice honest screen capture.

OK, THAT'S HYPERBOLIC

 It appears that our President has ponied up a declaration that indicates that the United States Navy will impose a full blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. That would be interpreted just about anywhere as us putting in place a naval blockade against the shipping of our allies in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.  This is ridiculous on the face of it.  

Now we're going to impound ships inside the Gulf and put them where? We are going to intercept ships inbound in the North Arabian Sea and park them where? If they refuse to heave to are we really going to fire on neutral shipping? In case you are unaware, that is not our way. Hell, we didn't interdict any shipping going into North Vietnam ports during the entirety of the war there. 

I cannot imagine how the President climbs down from this kind of statement.  

Earlier today, Donald Trump warned that US forces will immediately 'begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz', hours after peace talks with Iran held in Pakistan broke down. 

The US President added in his Truth Social post announcing the bombshell move: 'I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. 

He later claimed that NATO forces, including the UK, will be sending minesweepers to assist the US' military operation in the waterway - a statement that Britain has since denied.

 This is going to be epic. 

A NEW VENTURE BY THE DIMWITS

 It appears that the idiots running Britain for the idiots that elected them to run Britain have decided that perhaps giving Diego Garcia to a bunch of people in the bag with China with absolutely no connection to the atolls and then leasing them back to Britain for 35 billion pounds is now off the table. That's what they're saying now but I have learned that the Dimwits can reverse on a dime and give back 9 cents change.

At any rate, it does not appear that we will have to ask a couple of Marines to walk over and haul down the British flag on Diego Garcia after all.

Yet. 

MYTH LEGEND AND VOODOO

To watch the decline of England is painful. To see a country that once had hundreds of warships and a world spanning empire degrade into a state of being no more than Minnesota is history in front of our eyes. I used to wonder as I read history how could people react to the rollback as empires faded visibly from their world and now we can see it today in both the West and the East.

One of the downsides to a collapse driven by ideology is how insidious and unstoppable a pathological ideology can be as it undermines every single aspect of the empire and State from within. England was not defeated by an enemy it could fight over a gunsight but by losing its institutions (all of them) to revolutionaries who despised everything about the State and yet managed to get hold of the levers and run it all into a ditch from which there is no recovery.

We watched as England struggled to get even one warship underway in response to a direct attack on one of its bases and it took them more than a month to get the damned thing underway. After a week on station it has withdrawn due to a 'maintenance issue' with its ability to make water. I suspect that one of the reasons for this failure to make water is not intestinal fortitude but the Royal Navy's reliance on personnel drawn from the ranks of the ideological and pathological insane haters that pollute all society these days. All it takes is one 'green warrior' or BLM or white hating fool and the water stops flowing. 

Back when I was on my first ship which was based in Bahrain, we spent a month in Karachi and got some minor repair work done as a test of the ability of Karachi to repair USN warships. It was not a good showing by any measure and as we left port we had special representatives come aboard while we were proceeding down the river towards the North Arabian Sea and they went through every inch of the ship with drug detector dogs and MPs searching for drugs because drugs are freely available in places like Karachi. We all had a fine time and importantly, we conducted a full command urinalysis looking to see who had been foolish enough to partake of drugs during our month in Karachi. As I recall, we turned up 2 men.

The unamusing bit was that we did drug sweep again two days later and we caught 11 in just Engineering Department alone. That was 11 men that went to Captain's Mast and got punished for drug abuse and also key personnel who the Engineer would no longer permit to enter the engine rooms under any circumstances and certainly not to stand watch. Everybody had to work harder but we all knew the Engineer would not let those men stand watch on the evaporators or the boilers or the switchboards. We could no longer trust them.

England may be finding out, as we are, that it is one thing to bring in recruits to an established military and induct them into all the traditions and ethics of serving their country in a vital military role but if those inductees are not really body and soul men of good will then you cannot trust them. You can never trust them. This and this alone is why the 3rd World is the way it is. There is a total lack of trust.

The liberals in the West have brought down a rain of fire and ruin on the sacred bonds of trust because they assure their believers that they are 'doing the right thing' and that there are therefore no consequences for doing the right thing even if it means breaking the law. So far, the Courts, another liberal owned former institution of the government, are backing them up. Everyone, all their lives is telling them to do the right thing even if it means breaking the law and the little fools rush right in and set fire to the world, or the ship, as the case may be.

The only way to start bringing things back into alignment is to punish those at the top most severely for breaking our trust and carrying out attacks that cause both grave and serious damage to the Nation because right now absolutely nobody under the age of 50 really believes that the State will punish them if they simply act out of conviction because they are doing the 'right thing.' Nothing I've seen indicates that they are wrong in their belief.

I think it is too late to disabuse them of this pernicious idea so the next few decades will be pretty agonizing for many people as they go from a formerly Industrial/Post Industrial Age Society to the Dark Ages with rolling blackouts and the collapse of law and order.

On that note I'll return to my favorite topics, Pirate Submarines!!! I hear from NPR that both the UK and Norway are alarmed at finding up to 3 Russian submarines conducting survey work near their infrastructure in the North Sea. You think its bad now but what if Russia collapses the oil production/distribution of energy from the North Sea? They could do that.

The UK was further humiliated by Russia which sent one of its tanker fleet through the English Channel but this time with a naval escort. It sailed right down the English coast and the English could do nothing. Mind you, what they said they were going to do in this event was to board the ship and behave like pirates which is their right under the Rules Based Order they helped create but the thing about waging economic war against another State is that all too often in history it turns into a real no kidding shooting war. Since the UK have no operational warships they decided to hold off on their pirate activities and let the ships pass unmolested.

Wow, a return to 17th - 19th centuries with countries forced to send warships along with their merchants to protect them from pirates! What is the world coming to?

I see that the folks on Islas Malvinas are brushing up on their Spanish. The rollback continues.

THE REAL END OF NATO

 It actually happened a number of years ago. Europe was the first to notice its end but it is taking our American defense contractors a little longer to come off the gravy train and start doing honest work and in this they are of considerable help to the various congressional campaign funds. Everyone recognized (except Congress) that the collapse of the USSR meant that the entire raison d'etre for OTAN just went away overnight. It was done, it was over, we won.

For the dimwitted and here we must thank Congress because few living things are as dimwitted as all of Congress, the next spiral of NATO circling the drain, as it were, was the war in Ukraine which saw all of Russia take on little corrupt Ukraine and fight itself to a complete standstill. I have articulated why I think Russia has been happy with this situation but others may see it differently. At any rate, Ukraine with a lot of the European Union's money, Germany, France and England's money and weapons, has managed to fight the Russian stalk to a draw and push weapons innovations far beyond even the magnificent invention of the Dreadnought which overnight rendered obsolete every other navy in the world.

NATO. has been circling the drain now for over 30 years and it is unrealistic to presume that people may not have noticed. 

NATO came about to keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the Americans in Europe. Europe has moved past the first 2 conditions and we have moved away from the final condition. We no longer want to be a part of Europe's defense or their idiotic wars. Based on their current trajectory, Europe will be at war within the next 10 years. As usual, it will come as a terrible surprise to them.

The downside to terminating a defunct defense umbrella is that it may encourage some to go about creating that thing they have secretly left to America all these years because they all know in the dim and murky place where they ponder the tiny bits of reality they can grasp, that it is a really bad idea to let the Italians, Germans, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks start building WMD in order to 'stay safe.' 

On the other hand, now everyone knows that killer drones are not just science fiction anymore and that a solution must be embraced. Yes yes, I know. We all know. The damned Europeans will announce an international summit at, maybe, Geneva and they will all get together, universally condemn drones and BAN THEM. Yes, they will ban all drones and declare them illegal.

No, they will not fund or carry out any research on weapons to destroy drones because, as any fool can plainly see, they have been BANNED!

I thoroughly enjoyed all of my trips to Europe but something that was apparent even on the first trip back in 1984 was that they are very unserious people when it comes to war. I realize that this is because they had all recently had a conference somewhere and BANNED WAR so they no longer felt the need to be serious about it but their enemies have not forgotten and they have let in millions of people who hate them with a passion. The thing is though, I expect those enemies to assimilate just enough so that the ones in Germany will hate the ones in France and vice versa and so on throughout the Unholy Empire and so even after it falls to islam, they will duke it out with each other in Europe in the same joyful sharing way they wasted Lebanon.

Let's not be there for that. 

THINGS ARE GETTING SILLY NOW

 Supposedly all kinds of idiots are given access to microphones and pens and allowed to make up any damned thing they want to and get it published in our media. I just laughed at this headline and wondered at the extraordinary lengths people's imaginations will take them whenever they have access to blank newspaper.

 

How about if instead we just issue every aviator and pilot a fitbit that they can turn on when they get shot down over enemy territory or the open sea? All they have to do, according to the Ministry of Truth, is turn the damned thing on and their position is instantly pinpointed by the entire world!

 

 

PERFIDIOUS ALBION

It is almost like they cannot help themselves and they just have to whip off their shoes so they can tie and knot the laces around their neck very tightly. On the other hand, it is kind of amusing. What do you call a country that is not an ally and yet insists on stabbing you in the back? Enemy springs to mind.

‼️🇺🇸🇬🇧 The United Kingdom will refuse to allow the United States to use RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for strikes on Iran targeting bridges, power plants, or civilian sites, citing risks to civilians and potential war crimes, senior officials tell The i Paper. pic.twitter.com/MsJd1AD7A8

— Defense Intelligence (@DI313_) April 7, 2026

 There is an obvious solution to a situation like this. The American Base Commander at Diego Garcia gets orders to implement contingency plans and takes over the entire atoll, rounds up the British and their minions and puts them on a plane to Kenya with some well meant advice to, "never come back!"

This way we get the Indian Ocean base that we need, Britain gets shed of a dilemma it thrust itself into with the wild abandon of a teenager shedding his clothes with a girl for the very first time and everyone gets to nod sagely and suggest that a diplomatic solution is perhaps the best thing in these circumstances.

On the gripping hand, I wonder how much/many SEALs have been flown in to Mildenhall AFB over the last 4 weeks in preparation for this moment of inevitable betrayal.

 Will they be able to topple the government or will they settle for keeping the British off our bases in Blighty?

//TFIC 

Oh, and should this come to pass, the North Atlantic Treaty is dead. Secretary Rubio will start pointing out to Poland and Hungary all the benefits from reestablishing ties with Gazprom and Eastern Europe's economies will take off as Western Europe slips into the dustbin of history. I think I'll laugh if Presidents Putin and Trump have a summit and decide to enter into a new Arctic Treaty Organization and exploit all the vulnerabilities that Europe has opened itself to by behaving like principled spoiled islamic idiots.

I have to admit, I thought it would be another 10 years before Britain joined France and declared jihad against America. 

ON FORWARD BASE INFRASTRUCTURE

 Keep in mind that 100% of the base infrastructure that we built in the Middle East over the last 40 years served one purpose and that was to provide C4I for our forces in the long war against Iraq and Iran. With the upcoming demise of Iran there will be no need for the enormous infrastructure and the Middle East Force can return to being a pair of frigate/destroyer type ships and perhaps a flag ship although that sounds positively medieval in the 21st century. CENTCOM remains at MacDill.

We really don't need that vast 3 star ensemble in Bahrain. The old Middle East Force worked just fine as a 2 star command with a few dozen staff back in 1985 and there is no reason it cannot return to that size and shape when we're done with Iran. The Combined Air Ops Center in Qatar can shut down and the various players can go home and absolutely everything we operate in Saudi Arabia can be shut down. 

I'm reminded of C6F who had a scroll running on their homepage for years that showed that back in 1949 Sixth Fleet staff were tasked with oversight for 12,000 aircraft movements and 2000 ship/vessel movements per day and the staff consisted of a couple of dozen officers. In 2000 the Sixth Fleet staff provided C2 for 40 aircraft and 2 ship movements per day and that staff had grown to over 7,000.

All of NATO has demonstrated that it no longer serves any useful purpose and we can go ahead and expand our reductions to all of Western Europe and there really is no need to build unprotected infrastructure in the new frontline countries of Eastern Europe. All of that stuff can be shelved or disposed of and the money saved returned to the people or to to develop serious infinite repeaters that can destroy drones at all altitudes ranging from 1 foot to 90,000.

The money to design and build a Bolo has to come from somewhere.......*

And we're going to need them everywhere as people catch on to just how terribly lethal drones are, how anonymous they can be and how they can appear out of nowhere to attack every kind of infrastructure ranging from oil and gas lines, production fields, shipping and transportation and of course every level of government. 

Russia really opened a can of worms when they went after Ukraine. The world has no idea how everything they know/knew about warfare and getting even changed over night. 

 

*the discerning reader will closely examine the link. 

HAPPY EASTER

 One of our favorites that I boosted from Gunsmoke and Knitting.

 

ENTRE NOUS

 I am sensing a very different pattern to the array of news from this war. Nobody is sitting pretty this time with their own Wolf Blitzer reporting from Tehran and what news does filter out of organs of disinformation, shading and flat out fabrication don't seem to have anything but rumors and innuendo to report.

On the other hand, this is the war that Russia and Putin wish that they had waged against Ukraine. Do the decapitation and do it long and hard and then drop a couple of airborne divisions on the capital and send Wagner up the middle. Ukraine does not have the regional warlord infrastructure that littered Afghanistan and Iran. With an absolute command of the ether Russia could have tracked down and destroyed every replacement Zelensky and every new and acting head of the military components and field commanders. For all their fearsome reputation as significant actors in deep penetration and cyber warfare, they don't seem to be in the same league as US and Israel. I'm surprised by that.

I have to admit, I'm also surprised by the relative absence of Iran's favorite warriors in this conflict. Sure their terrorist commandos have been gutted and destroyed in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen but I was sure they had lots of true believers here in America ready to act. Post war analysis will be fascinating.  As it is I've been impressed by just about everything and really impressed by the Combat Search and Rescue guys.