MEMORIAL DAY

It is a day like any other. When I was young I remember the Doughboys in their uniforms for the parade. It seems so long ago and it was. Kind of like the rest I find it a little remarkable that I put in 30 years, my father put in 26 years, his father put in 30 years. We pretty much covered the wars for this century and the last. I never lost anyone. I wasn't like Lex and the others that expected to lose three or six sailors every deployment. We all came home.

My father lost a number of soldiers in Vietnam. His father was pretty much the G4 planning the Normandy Invasion and never made it out of England. When you knew the plans you were somewhat constrained in where the Army would let you go. Europe wasn't on the list.

When I was young and living in Carlisle the war came home to me. It really was exactly like that movie about the Ia Drang battle. The telegrams would come in and we would dress up smartly and pay an immediate call on the new widow and her kids. As I recall, almost all of the deaths were helicopter related, shot down or crashed.

They were all so young.

It is good to remember them. They gave everything.

never again broadcast

THAT WAS MEMORABLE

It was a day like any other. I went very far away for a haircut. Something changed that gladness and I went to my office, which isn't all that memorable. I actually sat here really trying to remember and thinking well, maybe I wrote it down. I didn't have to look.

In 40 years of writing it down and holding onto those books, I somehow failed to write down a single mean thing anybody ever said.

IT WAS SUCH A GOOD DAY

THE NEW WINTER WAR MEDAL

Exclusivily for guards only. Regular proles need not apply. The National Guard is finally released from being more numerous in DC than Afghanistan. They will, no doubt, in due time, be able to wear their new medal from their Winter War right there on the very plains of Appalachia. I am 100% certain that the office of heraldry is working day and night on the right medal for such noble service.

SOMETHING I READ TONIGHT

It triggered the long ago memories of working at a weird place. It revolved around the command pin I wore there. I was perhaps one of a 5 commanders in all of San Diego to wear the trident. I had no direct peers at SPAWAR. The half dozen men entitled perhaps to wear it there were the captains who were actual Program Managers Warfare. They were all captains or GS15/SES. Their deputies were all captains or SES. At SPAWAR I was unusual as a lowly commander wearing one, but unremarked.

I started out there on a whim in PMW 182. We were the Surface Towed Array Surveillance Sytem code. A program so black it took until the New York Times decided to let the Russians know that we could detect, track, follow, kill their submarines using nothing but their radiated sound. I think SURTASS vessels are still out there. They can listen to a million square miles of ocean and pick out things of interest. Well, maybe not the ships. It's the girls and guys working ashore with zillion dollar computers that do the discriminating. Those places used to be called ASWOCs and FNMOCs. God knows what they are now. I always thought the rating name was supreme. Yep, they were called Ocean Technicians.

While working under the Aegis of SURTASS we were a much smaller semi-black program. All that we did was in the white world but the funding from Congress was through OPN plusups from a former Marine turned Congressman from that part of PA that lost to a flood made memorable in Captains Courageous. Out of that obscure funding source, we were a black program that the old cong ran for decades in the dead black SCI world known as Office of Special Technology.

Down the hall was the old SOSUS as it closed out at the end of the Cold War. Beyond them was the green door where whatever replaced SOSUS lived. Up the hall was the Advanced Deployable System which couldn't decide if it was going with all optical arrays or shark food as they wondered who would be there to bite the bottom laid arrays because sharks and other undersea biters don't like them some electric current. Neither do other fish. They're death on electrically powered arrays in the ocean. We got shopped to PMW 157 which was Command and Control Warfare Systems and mostly featured spending $1 billion on something called GCCS which was taking over from the old system I remember but never really saw, WWMCCS. It became a little bit obvious that GCCS was an enormous boondoggle when their reps came back from Ul Adeid and said nobody at the Air War Command Center ever heard of it, used it or cared about it. It was the 'master' program that took and integrated information from over 500 other programs that kind of did fire control and intel gathering. Unlike the FDS, SOSUS and SURTASS, GCCS wasn't a black program. It was a billion dollar boondoggle in search of a problem/user. They might of had some sense of the failure of the idea if they actually went to 5th Fleet or 7th Fleet and enquired about their means of exercising control over battle groups. They'd have been shocked to learn it was mostly old time message traffic and POTS. Want to know what a POTS is? Plain Old Telephone System. Once INMARSAT went live the ability reach out to the fleet at sea went to a whole new level. I don't think it was a good thing but inevitable. One really didn't need to have at one's fingertips the ability to do oversigth and control over 600 million other programs that actually did the whole killing and control bit. They blinked when Noble Eagle bit them hard and nobody professed any need. It really hurt when OEF and OIF kicked off and they saw the super-trooper elite riding donkeys to war and started to think, maybe, they had misjudged things a little. They're still there and they still get probably as much a 1% of what Biden will send to the poor Palestinians.

SUNDAY ON FRIENDSHIP

I caught myself wondering what it was. For a man born in 1961, it's simple. I could toss you my wallet to pay and trust you. A friend in deed would toss you his wallet to pay. It's nothing more than trust.

THE ROYAL PALACE

In Hawaii we stopped by the last royal palace in the New World. I call it the last but who knows. It most definitely had royal flush toilets suitable for a king. As we walked through it I thought, I'd have been shut of that place in roughly 2 minutes. Out the door, through the gates and down the street looking for any ship away. There are certain perks to being the king. A clean bum is way down on the having all your enemies beheaded at dawn. It was pretty clear who their enemies were. And somehow, to this day they seem to own most of the land in Hawaii. We're I the king or the queen, they'd all be gruesomely dead. I've noticed that was actually a failure in most of the kings that made it into the 19th century. They all lost the knack for making their enemies go away forever and we're not even talking about attainder and killing them root and branch. I think they were all striving to appear to be civilized to the kind of people that overwhelmingly support Hamas and Iran.

THIS PICTURE SAYS EVERYTHING

Norhing I could write or say changes what this picture shows about the upcoming future of American Special Operations. She could be with SOAR or one of the other specops flying worlds and to be honest I don't really know if the women pilots have the right stuff. I'm not talking about matching the men who are the run of the mill specops pilots. I'm talking about the guys like Stretch. Above and beyond is supposed to be the norm for them. My experience was other but I did not fight in Afghanistan where uncommon valor was a common virtue. I can accept that I could be wrong. The problem of course is, 99% of Americans have no idea what is asked of pilots when it comes down to 'above and beyond' the call of duty. I know some guys have it. Not all by any means but enough. In spec ops, like most military ops, failure is measured in blood. That they will willingly shed theirs? I have no doubt.

I'm reminded of taking a ship into Victoria at 3 in the morning with Green Peace trying to use their helpless pink bodies in zodiacs to keep us from moooring after a thousand miles of journey with the bars closing and the Canadian pilot simply saying, "run over them, we have more than enough." He also talked about our electrician up at the top of the mast as we pulled into port replacing lightbulbs in the ship's over and above lighting aray from the mast. "They're crazy. You can get the very young to do damned near anything." It was, on reflection, a very Canadian saying. The question is, would the women run into the flames and I think that question has been answered. No. They're not stupid. It's why we lost several ships to fire that should not have been lost. 1. They don't form the core of fire fighting teams and never will. 2. They're the first to start saying that it's not worth it. May well be true. One thing you can take to the bank? Don't take my word for it. Just look. How many warships did the USN lose to out of control fires in the last 50 years. If you think I'm cherry picking the dates, choose your own. In my day the ships would have been saved by drastic action but we seem to have lost that knack. Yes, there was no setting fire boundaries and smoke boundaries with all the shipyard hoses and cords running through a hundred watertight doors. In my repair lockers the bolt cutters would have made short work of cutting them and establishing the required boundaries. Various compromises were made along the last 50 years that compromised the hard lessons of fighting shipboard fires. These sorts of thing seem like tiny incremental steps. OTOH, every single lesson learned fighting shipboard fires cost men and ships. Now? We just write them off.

A TRIP OUT

Some friends suggested we pay a visit to Ikea in Pittsburgh. Here in metroparkcentralis we can get Ikea in Detroit, Pittsburgh or Columbus. I suspect I wouldn't like to know what reasons were put forward to refuse building one in Cleveland. It was a pleasant drive on a very pleasant day and the store was just as remembered. As with Socrates at the market, "how many things there are which I do not need." We made it out with a wooden spoon and two duvets. We made the mistake of eating there though, and that's not an experience I will ever repeat. I am reminded about my experiences in the Amry, Air Force and Navy cafeterias. Starting in Pensacola and perhaps ending at Patrick AFB in Florida the experiences ranged from good to not good. One of the things you come to know as a JO is the dining in dining facilities, EDF, the galley, etc. You get to eat there and then fill out a report on the meal for the skipper's close scrutiny. Good skippers stay on top of the food quality. Ikea, not so much.

I found it interesting that none of us wore masks and while perhaps 95% of the patrons and employees in Ikea were wearing masks nobody asked us to wear one and not one single Karen came up to us to berate us. OTGH, as we got home I remarked that this was likely the first time I had every spent a day out without talking to anybody new. I usually make small talk with interesting people.

To top off the day we watched the movie, The Manchurian Candidate. The new one oviously. The acting was well enough done but the movie itself was just a disaster of too much everything and the post production sound/volume team were probably stoned or drinking because it ranged all over the spectrum. As a friendly warning to others, don't eat the pulled pork sandwich at Ikea.

THE PLAY IS THE THING

With my parents surrender of the house I fell heir to the professionals notebooks on war. I'm a student of history and warfare. These books were about some wars I didn't want. These are the records of the United States Army and it's war with the south. They're a record of the very worst destruction our armies suffered. At 60, alone, in the dark, I might read them. As a young boy, I visited every single one of those battlefields. I think Tom Clancy gave best expression to it. Over there on the other side of those hlls, was Antietam. I suspect I'm one of the last left alive who knows what that means. The schools don't teach history anymore.

IT WAS ONCE PRETTY

I used to live there. Friends wonder just where I didn't live. I did live in Seattle. It was home for 9 months while the ship was in the yards which are gone now. We were in fact one of the last ships at Todd Shipyard alongside the Polar Star or Sea. The CHENG on there was nice enough to give me the cooks tour. I was very impressed. They lost a man coming into Puget Sound. A rogue wave set them on their beam ends. A man literally flew 90 feet across the bridge. 90 feet of fall. It's not something one survives.

I lived in West Seattle, over on California Street. We got off the train there a couple of years ago. No. I didn't recognize the city. At all. I lost my car there to an idiot. I walked most of that city from where I lived to the U district. I really didn't recognize it.

It is quite amazing how things change after a mere 30 years.

IT IS A SICK JOKE

I don't think they see Let us put it on our page. The lower-stage elevators on the vessel, used to move ordnance, have been a problem since construction began in 2009. The ship was launched in 2009 and commissioned in 2013. As with LCS, the Navy has been unable to fix elevators FOR THE LAST 1O YEARS. Does that begin to tell you the magnitude of how the navy has fallen? I'd be fucking embarrassed to call myself a navy man. We used to make combat damage go away on an atoll with a bread knife and duct tape and the Navy took delivery of a broke ass ship from 10 years ago with a promise to fix it someday. Every single asshole at NAVSEA should be fired and the shipyard never ever used again for anything but a toe rag.

PERFECT

I had the duty and was sitting in the Chief's mess when he died and LA news toasted him. Lightly. I cannot think of a more perfect step off the planet.

EVERY NOW AND THEN, I REMEMBER

USS UTAH was one of the battleships that went down long ago in the Japanese attack on 7 December. Chief Tomich was a man who earned the Medal of Honor on that day in 1941. Most of you never camped out on Ford Island and the BB that is moored there by the Arizona is the one tourists see. On the other side of the island lies the Utah. A silent and poignant grave. And a gale sounds about write.

SLOWLY FROM THE ROSE THE BLOOM FALLS

The end of the beginning As we suspected for the last 30 years, the "right stuff" is money. It certainly gives command a new meaning.

A Japanese billionaire best known for buying a SpaceX Starship flight around the moon will go to space first on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station, two months after a Russian actress and director visit the station.
Space tourism company Space Adventures and the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced May 13 that Yusaku Maezawa will fly to the ISS on the Soyuz MS-20 mission launching Dec. 8 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. He will be accompanied by a production assistant, Yozo Hirano, on the 12-day flight, commanded by Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM

In the strangest place I wondered tonight, why exactly is there such a huge gap in reading/learning between the races. It struck me then what the reason may well be. It doesn't hurt so much as it stuns. The social justice warriors convinced of the righteousnous of their stupid cause have no doubt decreed and enforced the rule that disadvantaged minority students have to read shit by minorities. So, when those young minds thirsting for adventure want to read Swallows and Amazons or Lord of the Rings, the enthroned enshrined teaching elite have decreed that they must read shit by Eudora Welty and other worthless trash by black authors who have no idea how to take children to other worlds like a frigate would, shining in the sunlight as it sets sail for Timbuktu. (work with me guys!) I'm sure they think a frigate can sail there if it really wants to and if it's black enough.

I was a voracious reader and with a gun to my head I wouldn't read Welty or most of the other crap foisted off on teenagers in the name of reading literateness in high school or junior high.
OTGH, I felt that way back then about reading Shakespeare in the 7th grade. I still wouldn't read his plays for any amount of money but to watch Much Ado About Nothing....that was sublime. That Brannagh guy captured the very escence of a form that had gone dead for me. He brought it back to life, like the fair Hero.

He set a high bar. They all did. After watching that 6 or 8 times, the play better be really good. Much Ado set the bar pretty high.

I think I am probably right though. I think the schools and literati have placed before the unwilling the dross and shite that makes anyone turn up their nose at reading. For me, it was my father's parents who sent me books by Fenimore Cooper. Yick. At my mothers parent's house there was the Princess of Mars, The Skylark of Space, Tarzan, every book on submarines that existed in 1937 and books on aerial combat featuring Luffberry, Rickenbacker and a host of others. Reading wasn't a chore. It was fun.

I think it's safe to say the 'karen' educators have sucked 100% of the fun out of reading. Too white, I'm sure.

IF ONE LETS GO

It is easy to see the Black Prince joshing as they ride along in a sun dappled forest with the Captal de Buche. My waking dreams are not like others.

THE TRUE BOOKS

There are a number of them but the ones that changed my world a little bit were: Donald Kingsbury and the Moon Goddess and the Son and the other was by Leon Uris who I read at a tender age because it was on my parent's shelves outside the door to my room back when I was 9. Exodus. I've read others since then but perhaps the most complete was the 12 volume history of England. It featured Charles Oman and was my introduction to a lifetime of reading history. It was while reading there that I found the introductin to future history.

Perhaps the greatest loss that will never be recovered will be the art of reading history and learning from it as we are meant to do. Nobody at all reads the dark history of earlier ages. The ones that imagine they are reading such a thing read the political tracts of an age of true foolishness. Any of the old savants could tell them that you cannot properly see history until you've read about the fall of Rome and Greece. Nevermind the made up histories of places like Africa. What the pharoahs wrote was eternal but nobody south of the Lower Nile ever developed writing or meaningful history.

It's a scammist who tries to educate you differently.

A CENTURY MUCH LIKE THE LAST ONE

I don't think they ever change all that much. Look at any period in history and there are things that always happen over and over again. Oh, you say, what about uncontrolled overseas migration? Please. What about a nation's elite cast out and working as domestic help in the manors of the lords elsewhere? Please. We'll see the latter soon enough and one could argue that it has been so with the Scandanavians for quite some time. WRT to the former, well, aren't the smart ones the ones that leave first before the mongols come and destroy everything and kill everyone? One could argue that those fleeing Mexico and Central America are behind the time. The ones that came here in the 50s and 60s, they're of the new nation. The ones who came after are slowly assimiliating to mixxle class and making new lives a lot like the original overseas migrants. Europe now? Oh, she is in trouble. The smart ones they get from the Africa are the smartest best grifters and the smartest and most driven young up and comers. They still have plenty of dross in their wake but the new guys from Africa aint like the shiite showing up from Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. Oh no. They want what they get for free but they want the promise of a new life in a world where dreams can come true. To a certain extent, so long as it doesn't displease the ruling elite who, like the czar's police, still rule the scenes behind the facade that is Europe. In a way, these new guys hitting Europe from the south are a bit like the Cubans that got here before and just after Castro sovieted the poor bastards that didn't fight back against socialism.

THE NEXT BEST RIGHT STUFF

I'd like to learn more from the men behind the Space X phenomena. The engineers who designed and built the rockets, engines, control systems, software, test protocols and built the teams that made the Falcon what it is. They are the people with the right stuff across the board and yet they aren't known to me and they should be. I don't need the hagiography but I would like some insight because they all undertook a massive departure from spec when they came into existance to build a space rocket company to put things and people in orbit and to strike for Mars. They have already achieved a commercial fractional orbital bombardment system. Imagine if they put a bunch of anti-fa or Khan Academy teachers in their next rocket mission to land somewhere exotic!!! They could do the same with a disease and stand the whole world of free pratique on its head but somebody has to.

RUINS ALL THE WAY DOWN

Things did not go well this last year and I'm afraid it doesn't bode well for most of the legacy media, academics, scientists and other frauds. You may wonder how I can say that with a straight face and I assure you that it is straight. It's really pretty easy. I, like you, know a thing or two about science. I know the fundamental truth of all things to start with and that one is the simplest truth there ever was. 'There is no science in gaining the opinion of ignorant idiots and collectively declaring that the consensus of such opinion makes the science undeniable.' This was hammered home over the last year as everyone caved into the lunacy of wearing face masks in order to prevent the spread of a virus. That's bad. Let's look at why.

1. The CDC burned all credibility thoroughly to the ground this time even worse than when they declared it perfectly safe to bring patients suffering from the deadliest surviving disease known to mankind into the United States for treatment of ebola. There is, by the way, no treatment for ebola. 2. Having the CDC expert scientist physicians declare masks the order of the day after first declaring it a dumb idea, the entire medical profession, doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharma, teaching hospitals, and every other organ of medical knowlege went along with the CDC and nobody demurred at the advice being forced on all Americans. I don't recall a single one of those losers rearing up and stating the simple fact that masks like the ones we wear today don't stop things as small as a virus. You may follow the endless canniptions as they try to explain that virus moves as an aerosol or droplet but then, why would anybody believe them? 3. Everyone that wants to can see what real virologists wear for respiratory protection when working with deadly virus. It's fully contained breathing apparatus that has a 100% seal to the face much like a firefighters respirator. If one little virus isn't that dangerous you have to ask yourself, why? Why do they say face masks were going to work for you and me? 4. One thing known for decades to kill virus and render it more harmless is simple sunlight and yet the CDC and all the other medical professionals ordered people to stay out of the sun and die in the dark, alone.

The shoe is going to drop soon when the Maricopa County recount is complete and shows a vast/huge discrepancy between the number of ballots and the number of votes counted. We will slowly start to see how a man who seldom left the basement somehow garned 10,000,000 more votes than the popularly elected President Trump who, in his second campaign won even more votes than in the first election. That is bad news for the credibility of the:

1. County and State election officials who ignored the evidence of the eyes and simply accepted the massive fraud perpetuated by the major cities and the democrat machine that utterly buggered the vote. 2. It's not going to do anything good for the rule of Law as the Courts lose whatever grace they once had to the simple failure to follow up and act to prevent massive vote fraud from carrying an election against the will of the people. 3. It cannot damage the media too much since they have universally burned their credibility with Americans forever. You have to wonder what kind of simpleton watches the news and believes anything they hear from the media and also those who follow things like Washington Week in Review, NPR and PBS. They simply don't tell the truth but far worse than that is that they overtly lie and also lie by ommission.

Academics, teachers, professors didn't come off well in this matter either. In fact, they are some of the worst and they dynamited credibility beyond repair in most cases. The smart ones know that the masking and social distancing for a virus whose main effect was on the elderly and those with serious underlying conditions would have little to no effect on students or their instructors and yet they were the first to peel off and declare the good of society was of no use to them. The teachers union and their politicians to this day refuse to go back to work and teach the young which devestated the families with working parents who either had to stay home with children or .....

Politicians are slimy creatures and they beslimed themselves as never before. Watching the politically mandated charades in California where cops arrested a single man out paddle boarding on the open ocean for violating the stay in the dark orders of a bunch of panicked losers and then watching the cops try to chase down joggers for the crime of jogging alone in the sunlight.....Yeah.

Cops didn't come off very well either although probably better here than in the great nazi north where the Canadian cops are battering down church doors to get at the worshippers and drag them off to spend the night in jail for violating the BS orders of ignorant idiots.

It didn't have to be the law that took this hit and in some places it didn't take any hits at all. In the sane states and localities that simply blew off the CDC and the mandates from on high about staying alone in the dark and wearing masks 24/7 the people and the law did OK. It's in the rest of America that locked the people down for over a year without them ever doing anything to earn such a judicial verdict that brought about the flouting of the law and with it the burning of the bluer and stupider and more credulous cities.

So a virus just a little bit more dangerous than the ordinary flu to 98% of Americans resulted in a destroyed economy and the election of a fraud by a host of frauds and the destruction of any respect for the medical profession which remained silent and the CDC which lied and lied and lied and the teachers and educators who failed and the politicians and media who led the witchunts that led us to this point.

Good going guys. If you ever want to look up how civilizations die, just look at the actions of those above and see how the death of credibility leads to the death of every aspect of western civilization. What lay at the very heart of western civilization was trust and it just got pissed away.

A WISH AND A PRAYER

As the Biden term goes on I find myself hoping that America is as tough as both that airplane and that building it landed on. Both of them appear to have survived what should have been catastrophic damage but then it might be that things only appear that way. Given the sheer numbers of aircraft we had when this happened and the enormous number of buildings we had lying around it would not suprise me to learn that both were scrapped after they pulled the plane off the roof.

Some people are a little concerned about the gasoline shortage caused by a silly cyberattack on a pipeline. I don't watch any news anymore but has anybody expressed concern as the impact of the loss of one pipeline has shown Americans a vulnerability it little knew existed and perhaps mentioned that the Democrats endless interference with the construction of real infrastrucure may end up hurting a lot more people than they think? Keystone pipeline springs to mind but so do many other projects that got short shrift from the people who are jacking us into stagflation so fast our heads will spin.

The democrats and Congress and the Fed have ruined the economy beyond the dreams of Marx, Lenin and Stalin combined. The idiot boffins running Foggy Bottom have smashed a peace in the middle east that was negotiated successfully by the last administration and now they get to watch as their peaceful partners shoot literally thousands of missiles into Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the rest of Israel while continuing to send the PLO hundreds of millions of dollars. China is on the warpath and it is quickly becoming apparent to all that the United States can no longer dominate the Pacific as it has for the last 70 years. There is no winning a war with China. We never won the current one that is still 'active' in Korea. We have an armistice. People have forgotten what an armistice is, what it actually means.

ALL MORONS TO THE LEFT

It is a standard saying that the media and its political party have no enemies on the left. There is no stupid dumb thing that they won't cheer into being with their over-the-top praise for criminals, dumbshits, morons and other socialists. One of the less attractive things to catch my eye this week was an article that registered as being written by senior reporter for The Hill which is some sort of swamp pushing collection of idiots. I particularly enjoyed reading this article by Alexander Bolton.

Donald Trump’s hearty endorsement of pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by September has undercut efforts by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other key Republicans to question President Biden’s strategy.

More broadly, the former president has focused the nation’s attention on China as the United States’s premier national security concern, putting pressure on Senate Republicans to support legislation Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to move to respond to Beijing’s growing influence and power.

McConnell is the most powerful Republican leader in Washington, but he doesn’t have the same unrivaled platform that he did when he was in the same position — head of the minority opposition in Washington — at the start of former President Obama’s tenure.

McConnell has seized on Biden’s announcement that he will withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan as a prime example of him talking like a centrist but governing from the left.

The GOP leader has warned that Biden has ordered “a hasty total withdrawal from Afghanistan” that will “leave coalition partners and vulnerable Afghans high and dry.”

Al Cross, a professor of journalism at the University of Kentucky and a longtime commentator on Kentucky politics, said McConnell is trying to set it up so that he can pounce on Biden if militant extremists seize full control of Afghanistan or if terrorist groups use it again as a base to launch attacks against the United States.

“He’s setting a marker to say ‘I told you so’ when Afghanistan goes to hell,” he said. “He makes these little down payments on political investments that may turn out or may not.”

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.), McConnell’s potential successor, says Biden’s decision is “a big mistake” and “not the right move.”

“I know there’s a lot of pressure from the left in this country to get out of Afghanistan, but we have a lot invested there over a long period of time and the one thing we don’t want to do is create the conditions there that are favorable for terrorist organizations to train and prepare and plan attacks against the United States,” he said in an interview with podcast host David Brody.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), another member of McConnell’s leadership circle who could be Senate GOP leader someday, has also criticized Biden’s decision, warning Afghanistan’s security situation could deteriorate quickly.

“It’s not very encouraging. It sounds to me like the Taliban has the upper hand and the challenge is going to be to continue to remember the lesson of 9/11, that a power vacuum gets filled by the bad guys,” he said after senators received a briefing on Biden’s decision. “It’s hard to know exactly what the plan is. It sounds like it’s going to be, ‘Hope for the best.’ ”

But Trump has undercut the messaging from Senate Republican leaders, opening the way for other Republicans to express support for Biden’s decision or at least publicly question the wisdom of keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the fall.

It's not funny how those with no skin in the game always call for dragging out a quagmire and wish to continue to pour lives, limbs, hopes and dreams into a failed geo-political mistake. President Trump saw these ridiculous wastes as exactly that and ordered them to end. He and I thought he'd have another full term in office to hammer home the idea that Pax America no longer extends over the thugs ruling in desolate hellholes under their thuggish leadership. No more propping up one bunch of terrorists over another bunch of terrorists especially when they all hold the most profound ideas in common.

I would have thought a political reporter would understand that the man with the coat tails in the Republican party is not the dismal naysaying losers in the GOP Congressional leadership. It resides as it has for the last 4 years with President Trump who still won more votes than any other candidate in history.

ON VIKINGS

I just heard Vikings descibed as the sea gulls of their time. There is a lot of truth to that. if you have never seen the movie,

THIS USED TO BE AMERICA

From American Digest.

THE DEATH OF SCIENCE

This article posted on Instapundit almost makes me believe that the Amazon basin has turned into a net emitter of carbon dioxide but then I saw who actually printed it and to be honest there is now just about zero % chance that I will believe anything printed/published by a nature of climate science journal. They have all hopelessly compromised their integrity by publishing oceans of fake science in the name of global warming that morphed into climate change hysteria as the evidence of actual global warming seemed to vanish in the haze of make-believe as validated by actual science delivered all uncorrected by satellite data and the general, 'shot themselves in the balls' take no prisoners attitude they entered the debate with 25 years ago under Al Gore's banner, he being a noted scientist with the latest and best up-to-date data available to mankind and science.

Shocking Discovery Reveals The Amazon Has 'Flipped' to Become a Major Emitter AFP3 MAY 2021 The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the last decade than it absorbed, according to a stunning report that shows humanity can no longer depend on the world's largest tropical forest to help absorb human-made carbon pollution.

From 2010 through 2019, Brazil's Amazon basin gave off 16.6 billion tonnes of CO2, while drawing down only 13.9 billion tonnes, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The study looked at the volume of CO2 absorbed and stored as the forest grows, versus the amounts released back into the atmosphere as it has been burned down or destroyed.

"We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter," said co-author Jean-Pierre Wigneron, a scientist at France's National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA).

"We don't know at what point the changeover could become irreversible," he told AFP in an interview.

The study also showed that deforestation - through fires and clear-cutting - increased nearly four-fold in 2019 compared to either of the two previous years, from about 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) to 3.9 million hectares, an area the size of the Netherlands.

"Brazil saw a sharp decline in the application of environmental protection policies after the change of government in 2019," the INRA said in a statement.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was sworn into office on January 1, 2019.

Yep, sure enough. All it takes to end the entire world is to have someplace somewhere elect a man who doesn't believe in the massive fraud now known as climate change. They never seem to fail to notice that their stick is always the same club used in the same old way to beat any non-believer who simply says, "prove it." The only authority I find more disgraceful than the CMU in East Anglia and Penn State's Mann is any French authority opining or observing about anything at all.