Thursday, December 31, 2020

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

May you all have a happy and safe new year and may you get to spend it with family and friends.

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

THIS WOULD BE GRAND

From voxpopoli.blogspot.com, here a story related from anonymousconservative.com/blog/ which is hilarious. Bad for democracy but still very funny.

The 6 January elector ‘ballot’ count is going to go down as the greatest troll of all time.

You may or may not know, but the Vice President gets to count the electors. That’s the one thing the Constitution makes crystal clear. Apparently the plan is for Mike Pence to roll in a Dominion voting machine (or a knock off that looks like one). He’s then going to pull out a USB drive, update the software just before the count, and use the machine to count the elector ballots.

Remember, this will be on national television. The count will not only come out fractional, but it will result in more votes than actual electors AND result in Trump winning more electors than Biden.

The chamber is expected erupt in chaos. Obviously the count will be challenged. Pence will then conduct a ‘recount,’ but he will use the machine to print the recount ballots and then hand count those. The recounted number will be similar to the original count, only changing by a couple votes, but it will result in Trump winning by even more than before.

Dems are expected to cry “fraud” and Pence will object and call for order. He will tell them that it’s too late to challenge because it’s already done. The count is finished. He will then deliberately wipe the machine’s software.

Saturday, December 26, 2020

full knowing

At this point the europeans of the west know what the onslought means to civilization. So the British and so to southern Europe. So do those faced with the African invasion of europe. There is simply no way to express it and confront it.

I did not think european (western) civilization would vanish in my lifetime.

Neither did they.

I WOKE UP THIS MORNING

like those poor bastard citizens of Rome who saw the end of civilization coming. Like Cassandra, they wanted to warn the rest of the Romans but nobody payed any attention at all as the legions and rules vanished in a morass of mediocrity and stupidty and venality.

A SERIOUS QUESTION

Who are these men? Why are they dressed and armed like that? It's way passed time to end this sort of shit and put them back in the box. After stamping on them very very hard because this in America is insane.

THE NEW LARES AND PENATES

Talking last evening with a friend after we finished playing a game the subject turned to weapons as it usually does with him. As we talk I sense that they are new to him but he has had some for many years and unlike me he even has a CCW. We talked about the ammo shortfall. As I was sitting here reading late into the night it struck me:

From wikipedia and ancient school instruction, "In Roman mythology , Lares and Penates were groups of deities, or gods, who protected the family and the Roman state. Although different in origin and purpose, the Lares and Penates were often worshipped together at household shrines."

In short, they were the ammo of the ancient world.

Friday, December 25, 2020

BELL THUNDER

I was sort of dreaming lightly about posting some photos of my girl today but as I kept on semi-dreaming I remember a man. Without getting up and pulling out my notes I cannot recall his name. He was the commodore of Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group One in the first Gulf War any of you ever heard about. He was motivated to fix the deficiencies he perceived in his sailors, their equipment and some of the things that negatively impacted EOD operations from Kuwait to Bagdhad and beyond. He created BELL THUNDER and every year, on his watch, EVERY EOD mobile unit not otherwise tasked or deployed went to San Clemente Island to LEARN the art of war. I was an umpire for his 2nd BELL THUNDER from another Group. I was dreaming and actually thinking about the most comfortable boots I ever owned in my life which made me think of this time 30 years ago. I got them from EODMU3 in Coronado and wore them for 25 years until I made the mistake of abandoning them in San Diego along with everything else. The commodore of EODG1 believed in something largely mocked in our navy. It was something called Lessons Learned. It was an actual computer program and one could write JULLS and NULLS which means "joint lessons learned and navy lessons learned." Hundreds of us spent thousands of hours writing them in the program and submitting them. Astonishingly, nobody else anywhere ever read them and there no money programmed to fix the problems. You wrote down the stuff you screwed up and wrote up the proposed solution so that next time you would be able to do it right not just McGiver it with what you had in your pockets. It was a process and it was one he was dedicated to and that was why BELL THUNDER.

When they first showed up in all their numbers in the Persian Gulf, these tiny handfuls of people who mostly existed as leaches in 9 or 10 men detachments embarked on carriers and big deck amphibs found that when it was time to go ashore they needed tents. They needed generators and trucks. They needed tactical radios. They needed.....well, the list was almost endless. So on his watch his Group invaded San Clemente every year. All of them from the West Coast units because that's what it took in Iraq so why not prep for the worst case. Portable armories, weapons, tents, tactical and satellite radios all of them came out of BELL THUNDER.

I found it to be a singular and remarkable achievement driven by the commander alone. Obviously his staff and units supported him but he still found the money, resources, skills to fix the shortfalls and even found the fire in which we all burn to do it for the 2 or 3 years it was necessary and we helped too.

As I've written before. I started this blog for just one thing. It was hopefully going to contribute to the enlightenment and education of a young lady I lost. I doubt she has ever read a word here but this is what it was for and since it's my blog and Christmas...

Thursday, December 24, 2020

MERRY CHRISTMAS

I think I said it at least a dozen times this day. All of them came off as a little surprised that someone would utter those words. I mean them. Have a very Merry Christmas and our best wishes for a happy new year.

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

21st CENTURY MODERN

I usually get along OK with it. I'm used to Amazon sending me crap Chinese parts for my Apple products. One does mostly get what one pays for. From here where I'm sitting I can see the books I've written and the dead beast. To be honest the dead beast has no external wounds and I kind of hate Apple for that. I went and bought one identical online. I think one does that when one truly hates the beast.

My learned friend tamed the beast. Right away in fact. It happened the first night I met Lex and the gang at the Shakespeares Pub. Win Win. Me and Lex used to pass each other on the 5 on our various ways to work in the morning. Navy gets an ugly early start. We learned from December 7. There's not a single naval unit in port in America that can fire a gun at attacking aircraft. And no, missiles are a complete nonstarter. We......remediated that sort of thing. Aint radar a wonderment.

A little girl and I helped each other and managed to send off the last laptop to laptop and computer graveyard which is currently about 7 feet from me. It's still there because even though I think the Apple store tech thoroughly demolished it, it doesn't take up much room, no power, costs nothing etc. They got away with it.

As I gear up to cross the next Ginunga Gap (James Blish) I still hate the feeling that a salesman suckered me. The computer I use is almost 20 years old and you don't even want to think about how much coal it takes to stoke the old one that is still walking Windows 7 down the internet highway because it cannot be updated. That one still has a working CD drive. I'm gonna drop test this one and see if it restores operation to my laser optical read drive.

If you still haven't read THE MARTIAN or seen the movie, why not?

Monday, December 21, 2020

MUSIC OF THE WEST

I think it a fallen throne but we did it so well for over a thousand years. Not me. I can't carry a tune in a bag but these stir the blood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRrTujHaHis

MY FIRST FAVORITE PIECE OF DOWN RANGE MUSIC

There's actually 3 if my allows me this. In my school I could borrow a casette player, borrow the tape from the library and listen to this as I studied. This again was music I sturred to. Sort of like LOVE ACTUALLY, one can't help being driven to move by the music. Last one for the week I pinkie swear. I uaed to wade through the snow at the damned Newport Naval Base where the Base commander would shut down everything on snow days. No driving allowed on base. All entrances were over bridges and NO DRIVING. There are no dining facilities on the base which meant one had to walk off in the heavy snow and back through the damned snow if one wanted to eat. Thank you Mama Leones and even HOJO's restaurant right out the back gate. If the base CO was keen to encourage us students to have a terrible urge to kill, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Probably a good thing for him that housing was located in Brenton Village. RX7s are just like VWjettas in the snow and ice. He probably knew that and thought he was safe. I had a brand new Walkman. I walked. I'm listening now to one of the two songs that I liked. When I'm done with Ode to Joy I'll cue up Paris is Calling. Born in Germany but I still like making up the words as they sing songs in a language I don't know as they play Ode to Joy. 60 years and it still hasn't gotten old.

UP CLOSE and PERSONAL

THE END I'm good with time. When I think back to those mad hours holding the throttle of the zodiac in order to blow 500 gallons of spilled fuel away from my hull so the natives would look in vain for the source, I know the meaning of time. By my early training (USN) time had no meaning. To finish would take time but I didn't care about the cost. I hadn't married and hadn't had children at that point. My Chiefs were geo-bachelors or divorced and my time was their time. I knew about it but regarded it as my time.

The son-in-law of the best petty officer I ever knew in the navy needed some time off. At that point the ship was at about 33% manning. But we were inport because all of our crew was in Bahrain. I let him go without question. His first child, a girl, was born with spina bifada and I made all the time possible to him to be with his family and we simply ignored leave. He was a valuable man and we made allowances the NAVY never would. We didn't care about that stuff. We needed him.

crazy enough the powers that be (THIRDFLT) had made us a test ship for a thing and we had to get underway about 5 days later. Why our lords and masters thought they could still detail a ship to an impossible schedule was not on the reading list. They ordered it, our Group Commander bowed to it and we carried it out.

That ship, nominal crew of hundred, never more than 50 in my years still got underway on task with 19 men. They reached the end when 3rd Fleet said get underway and they were down to 9.

I could sail that ship anywhere by myself but sleep would be required. It was a sign of the times when I told the CO that we could get underway and yes even steam for 4 days with just one EOOW and I would need to sleep on watch in the wheel room above Main Control he just nodded. I really don't know how many EOOWS were allowed to sleep on watch.

Diesels are wonderful things. They can run forever if properly maintained and with fuel. As I recall, my final two orders at EOC were, strike down the water to the fresh water tanks and refill the day tanks on the mains and generators.

there were thousands of us but I have never seen another online in 20 years save for the guys that took those ships to Vietnam and Market Time.

Saturday, December 19, 2020

COMPLICIT AND IMPLICIT

There was nothing good about the Jeffrey Epstein murder at the hands of the department of justice and New York. It remains amazing to me that people simply accept the screwed up notion that "somehow that tape went missing." OTGH, it's not like NASA did a better job. They actually wiped all the tapes of American's on the moon and had to resort to the internet to get some images back. What maniac at NASA ordered the tapes wiped? We'll never know. OTH, my sister, an Air Force captain once worked in the high energy physics labs in New Mexico where the CO of the lab order the removal and destruction of millions of dollars of lab equipment because it was cluttering his environment and he needed loading dock space for something far more important. We'll never know what he was thinking but it does bear thinking about because we really need to end that mindset in our public servants and employees. Real companies refrain from such madness but I'm not convinced it will stay that way. One of the stories I heard working at large defense contractor was how the scientists sent a ton of seafood they collected back to the office where it sat on the loading dock and disintegrated. AGAIN, OTGH, I remember the idiots in New Orleans sent me automatic weapons that were simply dumped in the parking lot because they were unexpected and hadn't been shipped armory to armory. Sometimes the stupid leaves you amazed. They sat out there for a week before somebody finally took delivery and opened the crates.

I'm wondering how President Trump is going to handle the disaster this nation launched with the election of a senile doddering imbecile who never did anything in his lifetime. I honestly don't know if he will abide or counterattack the obvious fraud that went on during the election.

THIS WAS OUR WORLD NOT THAT LONG AGO

I had reason to read again about our first and seond raids on Germany. It's hard to imagine in this country where each lost soldier is accounted a hero that this was just a day's loss in a war we did our very best to stay out of in spite of our rulers intentions. We didn't jump into a war in Europe again for good reason. Nothing changes but the names of the ruling class. It took the Japanese to force us into war again. We'd had enough by then. 77 bombers shot down in one raid, where they went to blow up the wives, girlfriends, fathers and children of the armed forces.

Friday, December 18, 2020

I THINK I MIGHT HIT GOLF BALLS TODAY

The land is deep in snow but I saw my clubs on the floor of my closet and I have never struck a ball here in metroparkcentralis. It feels like 10 years. I remember at the close of the work/golfing day we used to hit the 17th tee at utter darkness. We still drove off thinking that somewhere, in the middle of the fairway, we would find our golf balls. Read that how you please. I had mastered the 3 wood but not so much the 1. My shots mostly landed in the forest there at the 18th hole at Admiral Baker Field. There simply isn't room across the street even for a strabbling shot with a wood. I'll have to infiltate the country clubs around here and have a lash at it. What with them being covered in snow, I can probably do it unless I wear a red coat. The marshall would probably notice that.

I FEAR THE WORLD IS BROKEN

This kind of covers the issue. https://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/ It always starts as something seemingly neglible and turns into full blown disaster. I fear this is the case especially as we hand over power to a man with a lifelong accomplishment of doing nothing. I think President Trump could have made a difference but Joe Biden is no enigma, no sleeping giant, he's a disaster looking for a place to happen.

Monday, December 14, 2020

SURE ENOUGH

They were fine for us to live on and eat and breath but you knew the koreans were going to pitch a snit when we turned the land back over to them to use as they like. They had a ready made press army to declare them all toxic waste dumps and never mind that Americans lived there for decades without harm. This puts me back in mind of the 10,000 pound anchor and chain and would to see it shoved so far up their ass it's not funny. OTGH, they are a nation of wankers. You really have no idea what lost is until you find yourself driving around a city of 35 million people lost. There are no slums, no bad neighborhoods; its a city that goes on forever. Yongsong main post, in a nice world would remain a park. Seoul needs one. So does Pusan. I can't speak for the northern bases since I never had cause to go there except to the one sharing a border with the Norks.
I like this guy. Sees real as it really is. So few in his line of work do.
“We can not win this war by killing them; we cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups.
Of course, when Obama was replaced by President Trump, we realized that a president who actually wanted the military to wipe out ISIS will wipe out ISIS–no jobs necessary.

Of course it goes without saying, blonde.

Friday, December 11, 2020

TIME

It seems that the court of last resort has spoken. It is time. From https://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-elephant-in-room.html

IN THE LAND OF DINOSAURS

A while back I had the pleasure of having my port wing mirror knocked to pieces and destroyed when my sister backed into it in her car. I did for the starboard wing mirror by brushing against a really substantial plant alongside our driveway. There I was without port or starboard wings. I went to the auto body shop recommended by the one I love and there I found a man who was older than I and I'm not sure if he could actually read any of the dozens of hugely thick automotive parts books surrounding him in his dark dismal office. He quoted me a price of $399.00 for the port mirror and $500.00 for the starboard mirror. I thanked him and left.

About a year later, in the summer, I elected to go online and buy the mirrors myself from Amazon iirc. It came to $19.99 for two mirrors and they are the full original kit. VW would be proud of them. On an otherwise lazy summer afternoon I pulled the door panels off and replaced the mirrors. My car instantly went from a value of $19.99 to at least $609.00. I don't care. It's has a six cylinder engine, accelerates like a bat out of hell, has a sun roof, doesn't leak, doesn't sink, can't handle snow or ice at all but I still like it. It still has the sold in Redwood City license plate holder, CA plates and yes,sand from Del Mar is still sliding around in the trunk and back seat. I didn't buy it but I was there when it was bought. The salesmen there couldn't help themselves and all of them came up to me to ask if everything was OK. I kept pointing to the person buying the car but they remained about as clueless as it was possible to get in 2001.

Oddly enough, the person that bought this car has gone through 8 cars in the last 20 years. If only she had known what a wonderment she left me.....

It is no match for the car I sold in order to buy the last car but it is still a nice piece of gear even if one does have to turn it upside down in order to add transmission fluid to it. Damned Germans. Only they would find it practical to build an engine that needs to have a special pump for adding transmission fluid since it only loads from beneath the engine. You can see me there in Pennsylvania, at the gas station, brand new tranny fluid container in my hand and looking hi and lo for the damned add transmission fluid to engine knob.....It isn't even mentioned in the owner's manual.

So, fix the door and check the oil in the morning.

Try this one for reading enjoyment. I liked it. If you like it, it continues in 'Tracking' but you'll probably have to ask me to send it to you. It was never published or vanished soon after.

Thursday, December 10, 2020

BOOK IDEA

It seems somehow appropriate today to recommend a book for your reading pleasure. It is an excellent time travel book by master story teller James P. Hogan.

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

DAMNED BY THE FACKS

Yeah, I wrote it that way for a reason. https://www.city-journal.org/achievement-gap-explains-demographic-disparities

Business and government paint themselves blue to get qualified minorities but they make it so hard. All of the below is quoted from the link.
Black students never catch up to their white and Asian peers. There aren’t many white-collar professions where possessing partial mastery of basic reading and math will qualify one for employment. The SAT measures a more selective group of students than the NAEP, but even within that smaller pool of college-intending high school students, the gaps remain wide. On the math SAT, the average score of blacks in 2015 was 428 (on an 800-point scale); for whites, it was 534, and for Asians it was 598—a difference of nearly a standard deviation between blacks and whites, and well over a standard deviation between blacks and Asians. The tails of the distribution were even more imbalanced, according to the Brookings Institution. Blacks made up 2 percent of all test takers with a math SAT between 750 and 800. Sixty percent of those high scorers were Asian, and 33 percent were white. Blacks were 35 percent of all test takers with scores between 300 and 350. Whites were 21 percent of such low scorers, and Asians 6 percent. In 2005, the Journal of Blacks in Education estimated that there were only 244 black students in the U.S. with a math SAT above 750. Brookings used an estimation procedure that maximized the number of high-scoring black students and came up with, at most, 1,000 blacks nationwide with scores of 750 and above. Whether the number is 250 or 1,000, it means that the STEM fields, medical research, and the ever-more mathematical world of finance cannot all have a 13 percent black participation rate, at least if meritocratic standards remain in place. The SAT gap is replicated in graduate-level standardized tests. Between 2014 and 2017, the average score on the quantitative section of the Graduate Record Exams (GRE) was 150.05 out of 170. The Asian average was 154.1; the white average, 151; and the black average, 144. MIT’s entering engineering class in fall 2017 had an average GRE quantitative score of 167; students in the University of California, Berkeley, civil and environmental engineering program averaged 160, as did graduate students in USC’s engineering program. Even if the curve for blacks on the quantitative GRE is normally distributed in a bell curve, unlike for the math SATs, there will still be fewer blacks with higher-end scores than whites and Asians, given that the average black quantitative score is so much lower. The organizers of the various STEM antiracism protests, such as #ShutDownSTEM, #ShutDownAcademia, and #BlackInTheIvory, argue that bias drives the lack of black representation in quantitative STEM fields. Brian Nord, a visiting astronomer at the University of Chicago and organizer of Strike for Black Lives, wrote in a manifesto: “To say that I, as a Black man in America—as one of the few Black physicists in nearly all of my scientific collaborations, as one of the few Black physicists of my generation—am stressed, is an understatement that speaks to your lack of understanding about what is happening right now.” But there are simply not enough black STEM Ph.D.s to go around. In 2017, blacks made up 1.2 percent of all doctorates awarded in physics to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, according to the annual Survey of Earned Doctorates from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. Blacks earned 0.9 percent of all mathematics and statistics doctorates, 1 percent of all doctorates in computer science, 2 percent of all doctorates in chemistry, and 1.7 percent of all doctorates awarded in engineering disciplines. There were no black Ph.D. graduates in medical physics, atmospheric physics, chemical and physical oceanography, plasma/high-temperature physics, logic, number theory, robotics, or structural engineering. How academic STEM departments and Silicon Valley tech firms are going to fulfill their diversity pledges in light of that dearth of supply is a mystery. Yet in July 2020, MIT’s president blamed his own institution for not making headway on “racial equity and inclusion,” despite years of quota-izing effort. Virtually every other college leader has issued the same self-indictment.

MY FIRST TIME

As I recall, the first time I was written up for a violation of the UCMJ was for forcing a safeguard. We had kicked out the LCM8 landing craft from the well deck when we entered Karachi to replace all the wood in the well deck. After a month of replacement and other stuff we left Karachi and headed into the north Arabian Sea and the LCM8's followed us down the river and reentered the ship off the coast. One of the necessary things following all of that was to test the zinc chromate levels in the engines. My sailors found that the Deck Department had placed locks on the engine rooms preventing access and so couldn't perform the preventive maintenance checks that were called for. When they asked me for assistance I sent one of them to the Deck office to ask for the locks to be removed. He came back and said they refused. As a result my Chief and I cut the locks off with some bolt cutters we just happened to have in the boat shop. I was charged with a Mast offense for doing it. As the ship's legal officer I found it somewhat novel to prefer charges against myself but I got to experience it about 4 more times before it all ended. Turns out, on that ship, under that Commanding Officer, no officer could be charged with forcing a safeguard when some other entity locked him out out his spaces and those 8 boat engine rooms were my spaces.

brought to mind by this bar owner charged with trespassing in his own bar after the canadian police changed the locks on his bar.https://fee.org/articles/canadian-restaurant-owner-charged-with-trespassing-after-reopening-in-defiance-of-lockdown-orders/

CHUCK YEAGER

Another good man has stepped into the clearing at the end of the path. He was one made memorable by his wit and courage and skill.

WAITING ON MCCAIN

Are you waiting on Biden to appoint both McCain and Romney to his cabinet?

Me too.

THE FASCINATING AFTERMATH OF THE ATTACK

There are actually 3 videos of the salvage operations to recover the battleships in Pearl Harbor but I'll only embed one. It will take you to the rest and if you have the time they are absolutely riveting. I last ran across something like this when it was in book form in a huge used book store in San Diego. The books were shelved together and discussed the salvage in Pearl Harbor, work in Ulithi and the mine clearance and salvage of all the wrecks in the Suez Canal after the varioius wars.


Sometimes I wish I'd bought them but all things considered they would have been left behind with the other thousand books so it really doesn't matter that I let them slide through my fingers.

Monday, December 7, 2020

THE DAY WE REMEMBER

It started as many days do in Hawaii. It was a beautiful day for a come as you-are-war to begin. It was the beginning of a war that would see 12,000,000 Americans in uniform fighting all over the planet against the kind of tyranny we see moving closer and closer to home today. Some people memorialize the ships that we lost that day. I prefer to see the men we lost and the men that stepped up to fight in the war begun by the Empire of Japan on this fateful day in 1941. By and large they were soul of America, the common man that labored in the fields or industry and turned their talents to war on a massive scale.



The scary thing is how easily it will happen again the next time. The time of maximum danger for our navy is not when it is at sea but when it is inport. It really doesn't matter if it's a foreign port or home port since they both have their dangers and some of them are now unspeakable. There are 3 investigations underway into the fire that destroyed USS Bonhomme Richard in its homeport of San Diego. As with the USS Miami, it takes one person, just one man to do catastrophic damage to a warship inport when it is least expected. What once might have passed as negligence is now nothing but arson and a direct attack by other means on the nation and its armed forces.



There are other tiny little problems with security in our ports and other ports but those are for another day. It will be interesting to see what the future brings in terms of inport readiness for war and the effects that will have on little things like television reception within the nearest 40 miles. I'm a little concerend that we've gone from direct and indirect observation of our enemies and our approaches to something else. If it is unbounded faith in the NSA and CIA I suspect our hopes will be dashed, again.

Saturday, December 5, 2020

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

I was reminded today of how the governments used to clear the mobs from the street back in the good old days. They started out with soldiers and then found that mounted charges with cavalry worked much more efficiently and the horses got a good workout and it got the lazy scrotes out of the barracks so it was win win. Then an enterprising young man of artillery came up with the novel idea of using cannons. Life was different after that. We got the Levee en masse, the column came back after millenia of disuse and then the line conquered all as the reach and accuracy of rifles and muskets began to dominate the battlefield for a full century without the horse boys noticing. It's almost hard to believe that a number of countries in Europe and even the United States had extensive formations of cavalry at the outbreak of World War II. Any sane observer would have thought them doomed after 1914 but then nobody ever said they were smart.

To be honest, I tend to feel the same way about helicopters over the battlefield in this day and age. Against savages they still take losses. Against a peer or near peer they will be slaughtered. What do you think?

Friday, December 4, 2020

BALLISTIC ROUNDING ERROR

One of the most common tactics used by the military and politicians is to make you afraid of something. At the beginning of time, my time, it was the missile gap and how the Russians had more and better than we did and something must be DONE!!!! Well we saw it again when the Air Force came out with the 'results' of a friendly bilateral exercise conducted with the Indian Air Force a decade ago and claimed that the Indian pilots flying their indian planes were practically wiping the floor with our F-15s and F-16s and would kill the F-22s as well. It was all a complete fabrication to make you afraid and force you to dig deeper into your wallets to fork over more money for Defense.

They're doing it again but this time with China. For decades people like Bush and Obama let them militarize little tiny atolls and reefs in the South China Sea and turn them into dry land carrier battle groups stuffed with ship-killing missiles, air defenses and even fighter bases. Now the Commander-in-Chief Pacific is telling us that the evil masterminds in China have perfected a ballistic missile capable of killing our aircraft carriers in the China Sea and demonstrated it against a moving ship during one of their wargames. It's hard to be certain where to start with this sort of fear mongering.

Let's start with the concept of bringing two objects together. You can do it when you clap your hands. It takes a rare one who cannot master this means of bringing two things together. The next step might involve parking a car in a garage. Some people can, some can't. The next step up might be using one missile to shoot down another. This is a bit harder since they tend to move very fast. Some countries can do it and do it well and others consider it hopeless. For the final step imagine bringing a ballistic missile warhead into contact with the hull of a moving ship a thousand miles away. How could you do this? Well, far and away the easiest way to do it is to tell the moving ship to be at coordinates XXX XXX XXXX at Y time to await its fiery doom from the high speed descent of the deorbiting bomb.

The harder way of course is to detect the ship a thousand miles away, track it and target it. I'll be honest, ships escorting carriers have the damnedest time tracking carriers since they can/will/do head into the wind to launch and recover aircraft at any damned time they feel like it leaving everybody heading on a new course at less than the drop of a hat. Happens a hundred times a day. Just ask anybody who had to keep in station with the carriers.

I'm not sure the Chinese are up to that kind of bringing things together. Yet. I remember back when we were doing anti-ICBM tests and people objected loudly to the fact that the missiles were equipped with transponders to tell the interceptors where they were. When asked why this was necessary it was fairly simple to say to them, 'well, we haven't gotten around to building and deploying the necessary radars for this yet.' The radars and computers work fine but why build them if you don't know if the intercept tech to bring together two objects moving at a combined speed of 20,000mph doesn't work?

It will be fascinating to see all of this submerge back into the weapons acquisitions swamp when the democrats take over Defense of the Realm again and invite the good Chinese to go screw themselves and then object to selling them any weapons or more ammunition/missiles. The one thing one can say about the democrats is that they are predictable. Screw over allies, check. Cuddle up to tyrants, check. Screw up defense to the point where it is almost hopeless, check.

THE SIGNAL IN THE AIR

The mental disablement Joe Biden has always suffered from even way back in the 80's when he was plagiarizing speeches from British politicians is now even more obvious and it is probably beginning to come into focus even for the morons who voted for him. You know those people, they think they're our intellectual superiors but even they must be tripping over the truth by now that they elected a moron who cannot think in a box much less on his feet. This is the guy they want to turn leadership of the free world over to for the next four years.


So, right now the signal in the air is: "You Idiots!"