PARTING SHOTS

What do snowflakes call anybody they see carrying a gun while wearing a white sheet?  From The Strategy Page.

REALITY ASSESSMENT

Assessment of the problem by one Marine. I don't know if it's true but he shares my thoughts about the situation fairly closely.

From a Recon Marine in Afghanistan: From the Sand Pit

It's freezing here.  I'm sitting on hard cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains, along the Dar'yoi Pamir River, watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave.  Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.

I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting.  I've actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but the scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod.  Hurts like a bastard.  The antidote tastes like transmission fluid, but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.

The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water.  That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy.

I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the hand held, and shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware.  We bash some heads for a while, and then I track and record the new movement.  It's all about intelligence.  We haven't even brought in the snipers yet.  These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for.  We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin.  But you know me; I'm a romantic.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man.  It's not even a country.  There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government.

This is an inhospitable, rock-pit shit-hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes.  There are no jobs here like we know jobs.  Afghanistan offers only two ways for a man to support his family, join the opium trade or join the army.  That's it.  Those are your options.  Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu, if that's your idea of a party.  But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.

I've been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks, and Turkmen and even a couple of Pashtu's, for over a month-and-a-half now, and this much I can say for sure: These guys, are Huns, actual, living Huns.  They LIVE to fight.  It's what they do.  It's ALL they do.  They have no respect for anything; not for themselves, their families, or for each other.  They claw at one another as a way of life.  They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor.  Just Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each other's barbarism.  Cavemen with AK-47's.  Then again, maybe I'm just a cranky young bastard.

I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice, and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours.  Oh yeah!  You like to write letters, right?  Do me a favor, write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban "smart".  They are not smart.  I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is "cunning".  The Taliban are cunning, like jackals, hyenas, and wolverines.  They are sneaky and ruthless, and when confronted, they are cowardly.  They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else.

Smart?  Bullshit!  Yeah, they're real smart,  Most can’t read, but they've spent their entire lives listening to Imams telling them about only one book (and not a very good one, as books go).  They consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil.  They're still trying to figuring out how to work a Bic lighter.  Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen.   Eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.

K, enough.  Snuffle will be up soon, so I have to get back to my hole.  Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice, but I'm good at it.

Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives.  The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen so you will watch the next commercial.  We've got this one under control.  The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here.  You have no idea what we're doing, and you really don't want to know.  We are your military, and we are only doing what you sent us here to do.

From a Jack Recon Marine in Afghanistan, Semper Fi.

"Freedom is not free, but the U.S. Marine Corps is paying most of your share".

 Send this to your friends, so that people there will know what is really going on over here.

God Bless America.

BLOODY MINDED IMBECILITY

I have read countless pundits predicting the utter overthrow of the democratic party over the last 3 weeks. The pundits all claim that Trump and the republicans swept to victory because he channels all the things that make republicans and Midwesterners (56%) swoon with joy.

Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason that Trump beat the democratic party's choice was because the party and their People selected the most vile, disgusting, reprehensible liar, scumbag and thief who was clearly all of those things. The People stayed home. Not in droves, but enough decided to sit out voting for such a deplorable almost human being for President.

Looking downstream, I agree that if the democratic party selects Ellison to run the DNC, they will fail again. If they choose a sane, non-racist who comes across as sympathetic to Americans and American workers, they will start immediately to vet and groom the next nominee. The vetting will be in depth this time and they will take the blinders off to actually see what is in front of them and plainly obvious to the electorate. They will not choose as "their" nominee another vicious, evil, old crony of the banks and Wall Street. They'll get a populist.

It's hard to believe they'll find one but I'm sure they'll try and then they'll do what they did in the recent election and put their thumb on the scale to make sure that person "wins" the nomination over all contenders. When that happens they will cream Trump if he runs again and any other potential republican candidates.

The problem the DNC will have is finding anybody "fit" to run as a convincing populist. All of the democratic leadership will be a decade into receiving social security and clearly regarded as elite mandarins who never worked a day in their lives and who are wealthy coastal types. They shot their leading partisan in the head when they elected Pelosi as the Minority Leader over a populist Midwesterner from a state that has produced more Presidents than any other state.

But who are the democrats who run the party? Well, I'm confidant that they're exactly the type to select Ellison to be DNC chairman and to run the ship further up on the rocks. They're wreckers, it's what they do.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

THE NEW AMERICAN THING

If I wasn't American, I'd be afraid. Very afraid.

We don't like you very much anymore.

And just why exactly would we?

53% BOUGHT THIS

The people that run this country told us that this man is an articulate man.



Obama comes across here as a complete moron. He literally has to stop to think between one syllable words because he can't string them together.

SCIENTISTS voted for this idiot. Compare him to any modern European ruler or any past president and the only one who comes close is Jimmy Carter. This man who has been president for 8 years comes across here as a complete and total idiot.

I think the video will vanish overnight.

DELIVERY

Can you imagine?

YOU are the one tasked to read all the emails hacked from clinton or podesta to search the turf for the gems of indescretion that people will actually believe. Between them they wrote over a hundred thousand.

Imagine your boss coming into your office with a truck dolly and dumping an 8 foot high stack of boxes containing the stolen emails of a twit named hillary or one named Podesta and telling you that your job now consisted of reading through this mass of shit until you find the gleaming gem that puts your party in power.

Every single day it is some kind of blessing that only leftist, progressive, liberal democrats go into the news business.

Talk about a shit job.

CHANGE

This was photoengraved on the door of our Combat Information Center. It tended to focus the young minds entering the space wonderfully. CIC was the realm of the mine hunters. The fantail was the realm of the mine sweepers. We all figured, all of us until somebody came up with a reliable useful way to push the sweep gear ahead of the ship, that we preferred using sonar to find them before we blew up.

Mind you, the 8th or 9th time the US retired the battleships.... I kept saying we could use them dragging a combined tow sweep. They could shrug off little 500 pound mines all day long and sweep mines at over 30 knots.

They're out there everyday and the unexpected can be a real downer.

ON BAGATELLES

I just commented on Daily Timewaster and it stirred memories left behind. Mostly when one leaves them behind, one has consigned them to the deep and doesn't really want to return and stir them up. It brought to mind that I'm driving a 16 year old VW that 'she' bought. I traded my 328i in for a new SUV since we had become a family of 3. It wasn't a year or two later that she took the new car and my 4 year old daughter and departed to the rich pastures of Texas. In Texas she went through 3 or 5 cars, more in Portland and God knows what damage she's done in Washington.

That VW that she bought across the street from SFO, and I was there when she signed the contract, she left with me. I doubt either of you have read Trevanian. He seems to have been a feature of long ago but I read his book Shibumi and remembered how the protaganist always kicked his volvo when he got out and if he forgot would stoop and pick up a rock and throw it the car. This is how I feel about the VW.

My father drives a 31 year old red Honda that he cherishes. The sultry and beautiful pirate I know and cherish thinks maybe I should buy a truck but I hold off. Not so much because trucks are designed by Detroit to rust away quickly in the Spring but because I'm cheap and as long as that stupid VW works, I'll keep driving it.

Forget all your fancy hotrods, when I push down the accelerator, even a tiny bit, that stupid car passes through the sound barrier. That Beemer on its best day never did that.

ON SWORDS

Ever notice how they never run out of ammunition? I just watched Mr. Wilders speech after he was convicted by 3 judges who took themselves a full 20 months to adjudiciate him of being a bad thought person. I was struck last week by Washington DC judges of no repute who have been pondering Mark Steyn's case for over 2 years and the best answer I can come up with is swords, hatchets and guns. Yes, I know the old rule used to be money, guns, and lawyers but I'm confident we can change the remedies with some good old fashioned edged weapons. You know; inventive, limited to the target and not his girlfriends unless they're lawyers too and certainly leaving family alone unless, they're lawyers.

Have you noticed how those who claim to represent the will of the people have taken to hiding behind armed guards? Just when did that happen? I mean, it's justfified but the policy that took us to this position almost demands hunting licenses for politicians and judges. Truman didn't hide from his people. Netiher did FDR or Kennedy.

I saw the car door of our dear leader the other night on a news clip. That door was almost one foot thick armor. M60 tanks didn't do a foot of armor. No wonder that limo keeps bottoming out. I thought it was him.

JOHN GLENN

Has stepped into the clearing at the end of the path. He was the last of America's first. All of them shared a sense of humor. The world is lesser for their passing.

TO FORGET IS DIVINE

I no longer care. I haven't for years. I remember what I want and couldn't care less about what is written in the Washington Post. This is me, caring about stuff. Mind you, you have to glance at the article or you'll be lost by this post.

Departure from Southampton enroute to Edinburg

SPARES

She said there were spares. Haystacks and Buckeyes.

Buckeyes are their name in Ohio. Elsewhere we knew them by a different handle. They were peanut butter balls. Still and all,

slurp.

POCKETS

Just so.

THE PHONES, THEY DON'T WORK

I read this article and the taste was right back in my mouth from the other days. I learned a lesson as a young LCDR on a 3 star staff and that was to never answer the phone. You don't answer yours, you sure as hell don't answer your bosses phone and you just don't answer the phone.

They can't task you if they can't talk to you.

Phones are bad. Very bad.

We took a phone to Failaka Island once. It was a desert isle, and no phone service, so we used INMARSAT and our radiomen were the only ones that used it and they used it to establish an HF Term with Guam, if I recall correctly. I answered that phone one day. It was the Chief of Staff on the other end, in San Diego, demanding that we stop using the INMARSAT since it was costing him something like $9/minute. He was pretty irate.

I didn't tell him that the radio dudes were calling Guam Tech Control and then putting them on hold while they ran back to fiddle with the HF radios in the surveillance system. It was too cruel. I just assured him that we were not calling our wives, sweethearts, girlfriends or significant others and put him on hold.

One really can get into all kinds of trouble on desert islands. Don't answer the phone.

Never before have so few been supervised by so many. Each time I went to the Middle East the staff had grown by a factor 10X. It was really sad. In the olden days the Middle East Force staff was the admiral and about 10 guys. In my days on the Sweeps it was a shipful. By the time I went back as a NAVCENT staffer dude we filled up a small building. When I was there last in 2005 it was 16 buildings of staff weenies.

When the COS used to call me at home, I stopped answering the phone. I'm not stupid.

I'm the guy between LT Ray Malskis and HMCS Canzionni on Failaka Island long ago

WHO KNEW?

I see the potter's wheel and the kiln but who knew?

H/T Theo

MR. MATTIS

I have read about the Warrior Monk for a number of years now. He is one of the few, the proud and the elite. Having Trump name this man to be his Secretary of Defense just makes my day. Knowing his philosophy I expect his first day in office will be one that sends countless executives and lesser men to the Emergency Room with heart attacks and thromboses and lesser related ills. He believes in what he says and he does what he believes is right. I'd be very surprised if he didn't promptly fire 100 SES and flag officers upon taking up the reins of power at the Pentagon. There is so much dead wood in the navy alone that he could easily fire them all and end up with a handful of commodores running a better Navy than what we have now.

I'm over the press and his fans who repeatedly refer to him as Mad Dog Mattis. This man is probably the best and most prepared mind we ever had as SECDEF. He is no mad dog and yet you know the media and the left will portray him as such for as long as they can get away with it. I can just see their antics when he eliminates the office of diversity at Defense. There are thousands of jobs that contribute zilch to the military affairs or culture and he'll kill them all.

Mr. Mattis, if you need a retired navy guy in any capacity, let me know. I know some. :)

From Maggies Farm



I liked it.

SOUNDS DANGEROUS

It appears that people who genuflect when they say the Name (Hillary) have taken to wearing safety pins as a sign of solidarity and to show that they are a safe void. I'm not sure about this. The one thing this lost lot of vagabonds has shown is an intolerance for danger. How can they bear to actually grasp a sharp object and bring it within reach of their clothing?

As a sign of my solidarity with the cause I've decided to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on NETFLIX and DAMN the torpedoes and splodey stuff.