CEASELESS CHANGE

 Found tonight at Shorpy.com.  It does make you wonder. OTOH, I'm now watching Ancient Apocalypse so who knows what really happened in the past. Yes, yes, the historians at St. Mary's know.

OUR WRETCHED MEDIA

It appears that our wretched media is completely ignoring the entire revelation of what happened when the FBI and other federal agencies took over the day to day running of Twitter and banished Trump, all Trump supporters, every real physician and scientist who wrote or talked about how effective Ivermectin really was in combating the dreaded Covid symptoms and anybody who failed to hew to the democrat party line.

The MEDIA won't cover it and is hell-bent on covering it up. That's a problem and it's more of a problem than most people realize because they fail to follow the media and its enablers to the obvious end point in a society in which almost 100% of the people who identify as liberal and democrats party voters get their news and information from. They feel well informed because the listen to NPR and watch PBS and the news and they read the newspapers but as we all know, that just makes them ignorant about everything real because the job of the media is hide all the failures of government and bureaucracy and magnify the bad news about the opposition.

Thus, any of the media that claims to have facts about a moderate policy initiative or plan will get 3 of the most liberal talking heads to expound on how it's clearly an initiative or policy designed to directly and negatively impact poor, blacks, people of non-white color and women. Every single damned time. They also without fail always make a point of referencing the opposition as far right, extreme far right or just outright nazis and ignore the fact the closest thing we have to the nazi thugs of the 30's in Germany is in fact ANTIFA fascists who violently attack everybody and anybody that disagrees with communists and socialist policies that impoverish billions and keep them mired in poverty because the only thing that ever lifted people out of poverty was the Church and Capitalism and the left hates and despises both of those.

It becomes a lot more dangerous now because the left is instilling a passionate hatred of "other" in everything they do in bureaucracy, church, government and the media. HATRED. They have othered the right to the point where I think most of the people who self-identify as liberals wouldn't blink if someone in the FBI proposed rounding up all the Trump voters and putting them in re-education camps or simply putting them in gulags where they could be worked to death. 

The media and the left haven't made the point that more Americans voted for President Trump in the last election than voted for ANY other President. That's 75 million Americans they find excess to their needs and would be content to have disappear down a sewer.

Of course, they’re all mostly stupid and idiots too so they still haven't grasped onto the fact that they're not on the side with all the guns and the training and the ruthlessness. On the other hand, having watched as China and labs in China funded by Faucci and the NIH and CDC to experiment with deadly virus to increase gain of function and make the virus much more easily transmissible and deadly I have to say I'm not sanguine about the possibility that research is ongoing now to terminate who swaths of people based on their genome. It is after all, just a matter of time.

THE DOD FAFO

 We have all heard that the Army has failed to meet its recruiting goal this year by over 20,000 young men and women who won't be joining the ranks and replacing the soldiers who are getting out and enjoying the benefits of the GI Bill. That is 20,000 fewer soldiers this year followed by a like number next year and the year after that. In response the Army has opened its recruiting scope to include the lowest mental category for the first time since the Vietnam War because the Army is learning that young men and women that historically joined in large numbers from certain well targeted states are no longer interested in serving the woke morons who call Washington DC home. They don't just despise the civilian leadership, such as it is, they also despise the 4 stars and the 3 stars and probably most of the Colonels too. They have good reason to feel contempt and disgust for the leadership.

We and they know what a complete and utter fiasco and military disaster resulted when the generals and civilian leaders ordered the shutdown of the military airbase in Afghanistan and then followed up that idiocy by fleeing Iraq in terror as the taliban rolled right over those alleged Afghani soldiers we had been training for the last 20 years like they weren't even there, largely because they weren't. Soldiers killed, Americans simply abandoned to their fate, true allies of ours left out in the cold in Afghanistan at the tender non-existent mercy of the Taliban fanatics. Well done Milley, Well Done Austin. You somehow managed to reach 4 star rank and the senior most leadership positions in the Pentagon and you bungled a withdrawal from a stone age blighted area to the point where there is almost no way to recover from it in this generation or the next. 

The younger ones listen to the older ones that once wore the uniform and none of us would even breath the words, "enlist in today's Army or military." Not even under our breath. Pentagon leaders really have a few really important jobs.

1. Take care of the troops. Pay them, their families when they fall, provide medical care, treat their lives as you would the lives of your own adult kids. Don't toss them away for an empire that doesn't exist anymore.

2. Maintain and procure the weapons that they use now and will need in 20 years time so that when the war does come as it will come, they have the means to wage war without making the ultimate sacrifice in obsolete, broken or worthless weapon systems. You really screwed up the Littoral Combat Ship and there is no mistaking how every single admiral came forward (was shoved really hard) and bleated about how the LCS was an effective warship and well up to the task of waging 21st century war at sea. Everyone knows that was  and is a lie. The ships are worse than useless since their construction and development came at the cost of designing, building and fielding real surface combatants such as the DDGs or CGs that the Navy is quickly retiring before they simply fall apart (the cruisers are coming up on 40 years of service.) I don't have the numbers but ships that complex and that old spend a lot of time in shipyards and not that much time at sea. We had the same problem with the missile frigates from the end of the Cold War that gradually declined as they aged and so various weapon systems that were too difficult to maintain were simply removed. Thus, they retained the name guided missile frigates long after the missile launchers had been removed.

3.The Pentagon is where our Operational Plans originate and where they are approved and it is there that the Military and leadership have failed to maintain even the lowest standard of competence. I saw this happen in real time in Hawaii as notional units that had no equipment were treated by the planners as if they were fully manned and equipped for the missions they were assigned when there was nothing further from the truth. It appears that the planners and leaders in the Pentagon really think those units are real much like Hitler thought Patton's fake armies in England were real in 1944.

The alt media which is largely now where one finds the truth of things has pointed out that the left has captured and suborned Academia, the Bureaucracy, Hollywood, the Media and the Military. That last started happening under Clinton who was able to get a couple of powerful adjutants into the Pentagon and they started selecting the future generals and admirals who would run the armed forces. Clinton was followed by a President who manifestly did not care about what was going on in the Pentagon or Yugoslavia or anywhere else for that matter despite having once been titular head of the CIA. Under Obama the process initiated by the Clintons accelerated and worthy candidates for the rank of 3 and 4 star were passed over for more woke, democrat, leftist leaning, communists and command failures. They in turn selected the Colonels they found worthy for promotion to Brigadier and Major General. Those last two ranks used to be merit promotions while the 3 and 4 star jobs have always been a "who do you know" appointment.

The military is now broken at its most fundamental level. As with the other parts of the National identity captured by the leftists, there is no easy come back from this level of profound dishonesty, deceit and incompetence. It will take an epic disaster and given those we've suffered from in the last 20 years it will take something much worse than Pearl Harbor. The Chinese are showing the way. 71 attack aircraft made attack runs on Taiwan in conjunction with a number of Naval ships yesterday. There is very little between Taiwan and China.

I heard on the BBC tonight that the Premier of Taiwan announced today that 4 months of mandatory military service was no longer enough and that starting in 2024 all young men would be required to serve a full year on active duty in order to receive the training necessary to wage modern war and to beef up the military's numbers and  make it look bigger and scarier. Well, they let their military decline to almost nothing just as we have and we may have the whole of the Pacific Ocean between us and them, it will be the whole of 7th Fleet  that will pay the price if we actually rush to aid Taiwan when Xi decides to invade. Personally I think pigs will fly before the PTB in DC, whoever they really are, will come to the military aid of Taiwan

And if that wasn't bad enough, we have a shooting war in Ukraine where it is very much NATO vs Russia and they only people that haven't figured that out or what it implies are the same ones that reliably vote for democrats, socialists and communists plus the eco-freaking green parties.

I saw in the press over the weekend that Putin is supposedly at death's door from cancer. You ever hear the story about what happens when a man really has nothing left to lose? It seldom ends well. It's really going to suck in Europe which not only unilaterally disarmed itself and took to relying on US for all their military and geo-political muscle, they have also expended 90% of their weapon stocks/ammo by sending it Ukraine to kill Russians and have no plans to fund or make new ammo and, and this is really important, the US they are counting on has done much the same thing. Remember, we shut down the Tomahawk production lines years ago. We'll wage the next 2 wars with the ammo we have on hand at this moment. That's going to suck.

I'd recommend a reread of The Village by Bing West.

Some of the takeaway observations on the struggle in Ukraine. 

Helicopters will not survive over a modern battlefield

Tanks and APC will not survive on a modern battlefield

You will run out of artillery ammunition long before you run out of targets

You will run out of missiles long before you run out of enemy

Anything the US does not have on hand at the outbreak of war is UNAVAILABLE from ANYWHERE else in the world. Nobody is going to rearm us when we go winchester and most of the components for the more complex smart weapons come from China.

AMERICAN PATRIOTS

 The slippery slope we're embarked on is getting perilously close to the brink of war.  With the introduction of American Patriots in the Ukraine to shoot down Russians we're well beyond the point we reached at any other time in the past in terms of staggering blindly into a War everyone sees coming. The Cuban missile crisis was engendered by the fools in the Kremlin who made the point that they were very unhappy with the American Jupiter-Thor nuclear missiles based in Turkey and they thought it was fine to reciprocate by putting some Russian nuclear missiles just about as close to America. They chose poorly.

The idiocy of this administration in punching so far above its weight in both diplomatic affairs and in going up against a Power known since the Mongols for being utterly ruthless is a more than a little terrifying. Our Joint Chiefs of Staff are worthless poltroons who could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag and yet they're the ones that the fools in the White House and National Security Council are relying on for sage military advice. The most profound thing to come out of the Pentagon in the last 10 years is renaming CINCPAC to now be COMINDOPAC. Not too profound now is it?

I hear some of you saying that it's no big deal, we had Patriots in Saudi Arabia up until last year and nobody thought we were in a proxy fight with Iran. True, but then the poltroons in DC withdrew those weapon systems in the face of continuing and ongoing attacks on the Saudi oil refinery/distribution systems to poke the miserable Saudis in the eye. As you may have noticed, the Saudis remember things like that and it was no surprise when the DumDum went crawling to the Crown Prince the Prince was happy to refuse any polite requests to pump more oil. Quel surprise!

Patriot isn't something you can read a comic book tech manual on and figure it out. If the missiles go to Ukraine they're going with American soldiers to operate them which means we're are smack dab in the middle of our own shooting war with Russia. What do they call that? I think we used to refer to that as World War III.

All this is going on and in the news Deutsche Velle, the only thing they talked about at any length at all and it went on for 5-10 minutes was how the EU and UN were going to land on Elon Musk like a ton of bricks for kicking some scumbag so-called journalists off twitter. These are the same outraged people who completely ignored the previous twitter regime's open and blatant conspiracy with federal agencies to dump Trump and ban all conservative voices and even the New York Post. "War! With Russia?! Of course not you ignorant colonial. They wouldn't dare!" Well, that is pretty much how every war in the last century or two has started. One side didn't think the other side would retaliate or react in a military manner. They were wrong.

Another thing our news touched on was the American patriots who were ushered into the Capital by the Capital police and walked around admiring the people's capital. The January 6th Communist Tribunal will decide in the next couple of days if they are going to indict President Trump for some sort of crime. I'll be damned if I know what crime he is supposed to have committed but then the January 6th bunch departed from this reality about 2 years ago and never came back within visual signalling range.

I'm going to miss the Smithsonian.

ILLUMINATING

 Can you imagine how much power we’ll have available if Elon Musk decides to lead the nuclear fusion effort in this country?

RELEARNING AN OLD LESSON

 It is a very simple lesson really. A child could understand it. NO JUSTICE NO PEACE.

Soros funded district attorneys and socialist mobs like anti fascist and the complete failure to enforce the law have led to a massive increase in crime and violence. Where the failure to maintain law and using the justice system has most advanced retailers are shutting down and moving out. Pretty soon there will be places where the people can only buy goods at much greater expense from the corner stores and they won’t last long either.

Good going democrats. You ruin another 10,000 lives every single day.

FIGHT OR DEI!

THE CHAGRIN RIVER IS COLD TONIGHT

 I'm not. A reputable thermometer says it 59 in here. I'm afraid I'm one of those bloggers. It doesn't even begin to feel cold. On the gripping hand, there is no wind.

Perhaps Europe will survive the winter after all.

WAR? WHAT KIND OF WAR

 The old hippy saying was, "if nobody showed up would there be a war." We're getting close to that now, again. The United States Army failed to recruit 60,000 new men for the first time. The fleet is a tiny shadow what it was and the Air Force has, surprisingly, priced itself out of business and there are no young men to die as cannon fodder anymore. They see that on UTube and frankly, they're not impressed.

The invasions go on and will go on but there is nobody left in the West prepared to resist. Wow, we get to see history repeat again.

In many ways it was an island nation off the coast of France and it's distaff colony that saw the birth and burst of the scientific method and science and more engineery than you could shake a stout stick at. What is coming is the what happens when the hardest working people in the world overrun science and technology.

The 21st century really isn't turning out at all like I hoped. Those hard working ones? Yeah, places just exactly like Venezuela that ripped their own guts out to spill on the ground. What do you think they will do to ours?

I WENT WALKING

 It's been awhile since I stretched my legs.  Years. Deciding to go for a walk out of deepest darkest Cleveland was a surprise tonight but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Still, I managed to stop into a hotel I'd driven by a thousand times and this time, since I was already on the sidewalk, stepped in for a cup of coffee. Having left that place I was walking by THE mosque and happened to find that timing was perfect and let me meet and shake hands with the "no, I'm not the imam."  Imam.

I was put on notice that the world works just as I imagine it. My philosophy is that one is only cold if one thinks so and noone is ever really cold if there is no breeze. There was a pretty stiff breeze. The car I stepped out of has enough cold weather gear to let me and friends survive for a couple of months north of the arctic circle or lake erie or perhaps ontario but I'm just guessing at this point.

I walked 50 fucking blocks in Cleveland starving and did not pass a single place to eat. This city sucks. I really miss Hillcrest, 70 restaurants in walking distance.

LET'S SEE WHAT CURTIS HAD TO SAY

Oh, there was a good blog post but entropy killed it.

JOHN RINGO

 "When you sail in harm's way you don't take hostages."

I never did, I never would.

On the other hand, I've returned to land at sunrise with passengers who did a damned good imitation of hostages.......the bastards..

IN BETWEEN THE LINES

I'm reading instapundit and he is talking about race. A thing I know. I remember many of us in California voted yes on Prop 206. We were schmucks who actually wanted to bring to an end discriminating on the basis of race.

I tend to mock the Karens. I met them all in California.  On Sundays when I wasn't in Korea I wasn't at home either. Nope, I took the little one to Jimboree and to be honest, I enjoyed it but an awful lot of mothers dropped their sprogs off and went right next door to do pilates in front of the awesome gigantic windows between the narrow corridor of our little jimboree mall. I could watch fit girls stretch all day.

I was a shmuck. I could enjoy the view enormously and then go with my girl to get the weekend Madelines and coffee and where I would reliably tell them, "damn, I forgot my wallet and they would still fork over the Madelines and coffee because they knew I'd stop by the next day on my way to work and pay them.

I remember being a little stunned when a friend said, "so wait, they gave you food and coffee and you couldn't pay?" I always paid.

A full 15 years later, she's coming here in a couple of weeks. For all the time I've lived in this place, I don't have that sense of community I had from the widely distributed community I used to know in SOCAL. I kind of miss it. The girls would see me coming with my Sunday New York Times, a bundle of energy and have the Lady milk, coffee and packet of madelines on the counter waiting for us.

READING TODAY

 NATO is tapped out of weapons they can give to Ukraine. That's right, 100% of NATO doesn't have the means to defend itself, not that it ever did but now they admit they gave all the weapons they had to Ukraine to kill Russians with and having done that, are tapped out. It is remarkably similar to when NATO/EU wanted to bomb Libya and ran out of bombs after the first 3 days and asked America to replenish their stocks of bombs, you know, the missing bombs that they were going to use to stop to the 1st thru 96tth Tank Guard Russian divisions when they stormed across the Fulda Gap. It has to be admitted that the USN was looking at some serious losses if war came. Our SSNs better be every bit as good as the silent service claims because those Russian missiles and Backfires were going to eat our lunch.

The West is out of HIMARS, out of missiles, out of smart and brilliant weapons. As people gathered around a reservoir in Korea might have said, we seem to have an infinite number of infantry closing in on us. As St. Hillary would say, does it really matter if they're Chinese or Russian? She probably couldn't tell the difference anyway.

The only company I know of that makes feral is Tesla and they make cars and spaceX rockets.

One of the things I had reason to look into, because it became a concern was something called NEW. It stood for Net Explosive Weight and for some ships it was an issue when it came to getting diplomatic clearance. You could see little  countries like Qatar concerned that perhaps one of our Maritime pre-position force ships with a NEWT of 1.2 kilotons of High Explosive might not be all that welcome in Doha or even further down the coast.

How much explosive you got there captain? It's just 4 million pounds, nothing to be unduly alarmed about.

I think at this point our NATO allies have essentially armed Ukraine with the NEWT of all 3 of our pre positioning squadrons and they not only don't have anymore, they can't make it either. and, neither can we.

One of the sad things I see in the latest Russian videos of the front is that they have returned to artillery, like their and my grandfathers. If you remember the tiny little European wars of just 20 years ago what we saw was a thousand videos from the smart drones and smart weapons that literally homed in on the men in the trench and wherever three were gathered, they were killed. It's not like that now though is it? Its the  salvo fire of artillery batteries and regiments hitting targets  and if they're using smart munitions you see it only in the way they explode over trenches.

There was a term of art, not my art, SADARM.  Yeah, we had come up with an artillery round that did seek and destroy armor. SADARM. I guarded the house of my father's oldest friend when the family buried him at Arlington. At that point the thieves would read the obits and break in and steal from the family of those being buried at a given time and place handily published in the newspaper. He was an Armor officer and I would have felt better for my unprepared adventure with a weapon but I found out he was unlike me and there wasn't so much as a saber on the wall. Heck, my Navy friends had more weapons in their front hall closets than what was available at that house.

MUTATIS MUTANDIS

 I was sitting here tonight after a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with a friend who drove in from Pittsburgh and he left with as much food as we could convince him to take because otherwise, you know, leftovers are in our future for some time to come. Somehow the name Somalia came up and while I've never been there I did once get a message from our Ambassador to that place who strongly proposed that we eschew any upcoming port calls in Mogadishu because, as the ambassador relayed, "even the trees have VD." We, after consultation with the very absent Middle East Force staff who never seemed to be aboard, this their flagship, decided to go to the Seychelles where we got one whole day and then were ordered to steam at maximum power to Jeddah to embark 3 minesweeping helicopters, or in the actual event, 2 that flew, one that didn't and none of them was the slightest bit interested in pretending to sweep mines in the Red Sea.

So anyway, thinking. I will never again fly across the Pacific. I won't do it again and certainly not 2 to 4 times a month for years on end. I will never again play soccer against the French Foreign Legion or the Pakistani Army. With any luck I will never again have to be the french interpreter on Jules Verne or with 'Omani" maritime patrol aircraft in the Strait of Hormuz.

As I got up from the table tonight it was with some serious pain and there is a mystery bruise on my left thigh muscle and so I can only be grateful that I no longer represent America on the soccer fields in Djibouti and Pakistan because those really hurt, a lot.

I hope that you all enjoyed Thanksgiving with family and friends as we did. It is one of the wonderful holidays we try to capture every month with our dinarians nights out with friends where we pick a venue and invite our friends to join us either at a local (ish) eatery or maybe down by the creek at one of the Metro Parks for a picnic lunch/dinner.

RIDING DEATH'S PONY AT THE END

 Each and every form of government these days takes up one singular aspect. There is just one guy in charge. Oh sure, some have girls in charge but that kind of looks like a charade after Maggie. There was no doubt who was in charge with her. The lesser leaders, not so much. Having said that, I harken back to what I hear was an old Athenian rule. You remember them? They were the first to have a lash at democracy. They did not by any stroke of the imagination think it was what you think it was but for want of a better word, "one better man, one vote" and they held on to this idiocy for a good long time.

My favorite though was that if anybody disagreed with the vote a way was found for him to nominate some other rich bastard to pay the tax because that dude was richer and so pass along the entire onus for building a naval trireme for the Athenian Fleet out of his own pockets.

I'd like to see the likes of John Kerry and Obama pay to build, each of them, another Nimitz class carrier or 10 guided missile destroyers, apiece.

NEW LAWS FOR NEW CRIMES

The Supreme Court has decided that they should order President Trump to turn over his tax records to Congress so that they may use them as weapons against him in all future campaigns and also ensure the full employment of legal scholars and pundits. Having decided that this is the most judicious take on the whole affair I cannot see any reason at all why the next Republican President does not, as his first act, sign an Executive Order mandating that all Supreme Court justices must make public 100% of their tax returns and documentation for the previous 10 years and also mandates that all Congressman must publish online 100% of their tax returns and documentation so that we can all scrutinize it and then moan about how ethically corrupt and crooked they all are.

I really don't understand this action by the Court. It serves no legitimate purpose at all.

LOOKING FORWARD

 As the FTX scam collapses around them the legislators are trying in vain to get people focused on anything else. Good luck felons. I don’t recall it happening in the past but think the democrats have opened the door for a new level of partisan warfare, the House demanding that sitting and former senators come in and testify under oath to various House committees investigating financial fraud and insider trading. 

Once almost impossible to imagine it becomes more possible after the Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety and Suppression of all Dissent kept calling in everyone under the sun to testify including people from the Executive Branch and wanted the President to come in for a “chat.”

I don’t think the RINOs will but they may do it accidentally.

YOU SEE THE PROBLEM

 If you take even a quick look at the map below you might see the problem with the Ukrainian missile errantly  straying into Poland when it was allegedly fired at incoming Russian cruise missiles.

How did a anti-aircraft missile find itself in Poland since Poland is not really in the flight path for any Russian cruise missiles?

Russia is using its latest and best cruise missiles against targets in Ukraine and they are doing it repeatedly and the Ukrainian air defenses are allegedly improving against these attacks. The way you improve is by studying most carefully the previous attacks and working out how to defend against them with missiles and electronic counter-measures. You know who would be real interested in just how both sides are working out the teething problems of new missiles and new air defense techniques? That's right, NATO.

There is almost certainly an AWACs or later generation ECM aircraft keeping a focused eye on the airspace in and around and above Ukraine and every single thing that moves through it is tracked and monitored in real time. NATO would know instantly if the missile that killed two Poles in Poland was launched by Ukraine or Russia. That whole bit of fake outrage at Russia was just gas on the fire hoping that somebody would propose shooting at the Russians ourselves rather than leaving all that to the Ukrainians, mercenaries and hundreds of NATO 'advisors' that are 'assisting Ukraine's armed forces with exotic weapons they never saw before in their lives. You know, all those German tanks, HIMARS and Javelin missiles and all that artillery NATO sent them.

I believe that there are thousands of people in DC and other NATO capitals thirsting for a chance at a nice little war with Russia since they perceive depth as weakness. They're stupid but they are convinced that with the right trigger they can pull off another Tonkin Gulf incident and drag us kicking and screaming into a war with Russia.

THE NO GO ZONES OF THOUGHT IN WAR

 Today I read some analysis of the Significant Military Operation in Ukraine and how it appears as if Russia has lost the strategic and operational war by retreating to their side of the river in preparation for the winter war to come. The analysts don't even pretend to see the war as it really is. By that I mean they cannot even conceptualize what remaining steps have yet to be followed to the bitter end and if there is one thing I know of that part of Eurasia, they always go to the bitter end before going down to defeat. I mean this applies to both Russia and Ukraine.

The Powers that Be in both NATO and Ukraine don't give a rat's ass for the poor people of Ukraine or even Western Europe which is being rolled  back to the Dark Ages the sanctions the EU imposed on Russia but which only impact the people of Western Europe and to a limited extent, America. Nobody who lives and works in a palace cares how much electricity costs or how much gas costs since they don't pay anyway. They really don't care about inflation because it doesn't have any impact on them. Nobody cares that 2/3s of Ukraine will be without power or heat this winter and nobody cares that NATO keeps the war going there by continuing to send Ukraine "free" weapons to be used in killing Russian conscripts by a country known to be utterly corrupt.

You probably wonder what those steps left unmentioned might be. They're pretty routine easy steps that any Russian oligarch would be pleased to consider as a 'good and necessary step towards an acceptable peace in our time.' 

1. Just let Chernnobyl's current online nuclear reactors melt down like they did the last time but this time there won't be any heroic Russians stepping into lethal radiation to put the fires out and cap the reactors. This time the winter winds howling off Siberia's plains and down the Ural Mountains will blow that radio-active dust all over western Europe and Scandanavia. The Russians will blame Ukraine, Ukraine and NATO will blame Russia but at that point, as St. Hillary said, "what difference does it make?"

2. There are other nuclear power reactors that could suffer mysterious runaway chain reactions leading to meltdowns. The winds blow west so it really doesn't matter to Russia if the fallout contaminates the lands of the people who have made Russians their enemy. It's probably important to keep in mind that Russians don't care at all about what happens outside of Russia; they never did and likely never will. Popular opinion is a "western" term with little to no meaning outside the West.

3. There are a number of dams in Ukraine that could suffer catastrophic failure all of a sudden one night. At this point in the war I wouldn't set any limits on Russian retaliation in western Europe/NATO  for launching an all out economic war on Russia. A war is a war. 

As I read analysts natter on about their perception of things I am once again struck by the idiotic notation that occurred in the front piece of many of my Econ and Politics textbooks. "We assume all States to be rational actors." That's it. Think about it. What part of rational struck you when the South opened fire on Fort Sumter? What part of rational do you think caused Japan to retaliate for the economic war the United States was conducting against them that caused them to decide to launch a sneak attack on the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii? You can look at just about any war and ask that question. It is best answered with, "because they thought they could get away with it."

In the current situation the Ukrainians thought they could continue to harass and kill ethnic Russians in the east and that they could actually prevail in a war with Russia. They did NOT get lucky when NATO decided to throw in with them and arm them with 'free' weapons. What part of the EU was rational when it slit its own energy throat by not just banning the import of Russian natural gas  but by blowing up the pipelines that took years to build under the Baltic Sea?  What part of rational led the long neutral states of Scandinavia and Switzerland to launch similar economic sanctions on Russia knowing that it was going to hit them much worse?

So far as I can tell, the only rational State in this farce of a war is Russia. They had a clear objective they believed was within their means and acted on it just as they did when they took Crimea back in 2014. They were going to snip off some more Ukraine and that would be that. They failed to consider that anybody in the West would be as stupid and irrational as they all proved to be.

THESE RESONATE

 

A TRAGEDY

 We were out south in the snow flying falcons when I saw this on my phone. One of the few remaining B-17s and its crew perished when a KingCobra collided with them in an airshow in Dallas. Of the 12,731 aircraft built, approximately 4,735 were lost during the War. Only a handful survived and only a tiny handful of pilots to fly them. A sad post Veteran's Day reminder of how so many were lost in action. 

I remember when every TV station signed off at the end of the night with High Flight. We don't see it anymore since channels no longer sign off every night.

ME AND THE COBRA

 I had become accustomed to informing the bridge that we were, "at the top of the green" when they called down to Main Control and indicated that they wanted more speed out of the engines. With all four main engines online and running at the top of the green there was no more speed to be had and in the first 9 months before the crews started rotating to the ships in the Persian Gulf, it was understood that there was nothing more to give.

Top of the Green was defined as the "not to exceed" manifold pressures for the Packard main engines and it was not some arbitrary definition because we all knew that exceeding that pressure would almost instantly result in blown head gaskets and that meant the loss of an engine for the 8 hours or so it would take to repair it. It made no difference if we blew one head gasket or all of them since in any event the entire top of the engine had to come off which entailed removing all the fuel lines to the cylinder heads, removing the valve covers and ever so carefully backing out the retaining rings over each cylinder. That was the tricky part because even if done perfectly it sometimes resulted in stripping the aluminum threads in the aluminum block that held the rings and the only way to repair that was to weld the block back up and then cut new threads. The only 3 people I knew of on the west coast that could do that were my ENC, the Diesel Inspector at the Group in Seattle and Long Beach Naval Shipyard. Obviously, that was going to take a lot of time and the engine was out of commission.

When the rotations to the Gulf started one of the men who left before I did was the Commanding Officer who knew all about Top of the Green. When the Cobra (what everyone called the Mine Group chief staff officer) took over acting command to get us underway to conduct some testing of some new (ancient) Royal Navy mine sweep cutters it required extensive underway operations and the bridge kept calling down for more speed since the British said they needed to have the gear pulled at 12 knots in order to fully test the new cutters.

I was in Main Control for these events and told the bridge we had no more power to give and that we were at the top of the green at which point the Cobra himself came on the bitch box and informed me that he was speeding up from the pilot house controls. About 5 seconds later we blew all the head gaskets in 2 main engines and took manual control of propeller pitch to keep the last two engines from going offline. (Diesels don't cool/run very well on emulsified lube oil). 

Needless to say, we returned to port at about 8 knots and that was the end of testing and the Cobra headed back to Seattle.

Do you get the sense that the world right now is running at the Top of the Green? I do. I cannot believe that 81 million people actually voted for senile imbecile who is so obviously a senile imbecile. He was always an imbecile but the senile part would surely have discouraged some democrats from voting for him but it seems they came out in more than record numbers to vote for him. What the democrats/media/hollywood/et al, don't understand about the "deniers" is not that suspect the election was entirely tainted by fraud orchestrated in the major democrat controlled cities in the east and California, it's that it is all to obvious that it was since it is flat out impossible to believe 81 million Americans failed to perceive the truth about Biden's mental condition.

At Penn State we had like most schools, an undergraduate student government that did damned knows what but they were self-vested with importance and dignity on account of being in the 'government'. As I recall, in my senior year a rat was put up as a candidate for President of the USG and won the vote. He was denied office by the Administration. In that case there was no detectable difference between President Rat and whatever non-entity was given the office as a consequence of coming in second to a rat in the polls.

I would urge you to stand a responsible distance from the polling places tomorrow but hold up large signs asking "WHY VOTE FOR THE DIABOLICAL SENILE PARTY when you can get an articulate semi-honest politician instead?"

If American politics and the craziness of the left here is not enough, consider Europe which slit it's own throat and spurned Russian appeals to honor the reunification agreements and not extend the NATO border to Russia's own border. So, they destroyed the Ukraine as a result and when I write, 'they' I don't just mean the Russians. Ukraine would have been spanked and left reasonably intact but the entire EU and Switzerland decided to sanction Russia with the result that it won't just be Ukrainians freezing to death this winter due to a lack of energy and oh, by the way, somebody, British or US blew up the natural gas pipelines feeding Russian gas to northern Europe.

That's not enough of course. The Ukrainian wheat harvest is trapped in Ukraine which means many arabs in the middle east will starve. There was a route out for the wheat by sea as negotiated between Turkey and Russia and Turkey and NATO but some idiots launched a major drone attack on Russians ships from within the safe transit corridor. Why would any sane person do that knowing that the Russians would promptly retaliate?

Heinlein was prophetic decades ago when he incorporated, "The Crazy Years" into his future history. These have to be the crazy years.

THIS IS TO JOSIE

Are you still there? 

IT HAS BEEN A LONG NIGHT

Reading a hard bound book. Walking down the mountain path, picking up my very first walking stick and holding it in the palm of my hand and meeting the admiral running to the top of the mountain I was walking down. My day, in Korea. Sometimes, I just read what I wrote at the time.

Did you ever find a walking stick?

DIDO LIFE FOR RENT

 It is the most peaceful and tranquil album that I have ever owned. There was a thunderclap detonation when I got home this morning. It was an explosion but origin unknown.

I had an epiphany just now. Listening to the album. I suddenly realized why I had stopped flying. The planes I flew were small but even when I was invited to the flight deck to fly a C-130 to Dahran or a C-141 over the Grand Canyon, it was cramped. Every cockpit, every flight deck was cramped. It was the same on the C-5 with all the SINS in the way.

Last night we watched a breaker in the northern ice. I remembered when the Polar Sea or Polar Star pulled into Todd shipyard next to us and how they lost a crewman to death. The ship was hit by a rogue wave just outside the Strait of Juan de Fuca and was laid on its beam ends and he flew across 90 feet of bridge and didn't land well. Suddenly level was 90 feet straight down. About 8 stories of falling. They knew it could happen. It was why they had a cable stretched across the length of the bridge. The Harry W. Hill had no such thing. One would only fall about 10 feet before crashing into something hard.

GOOD

I followed this at the outset. It was egregious.

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/10/24/decision-on-boeing-737-max-case/

FEEL THE HATE

https://youtu.be/mNGsZ5I2juA

WHO KNEW?

I've had the CD for about 10 years. I got it at the library for a dime. Dido. She sang the music for the end of all that you loved. I had it from you tube. I heard white flag more than a time or two but I didn't have the album until a few years ago and then I had nothing I could play it on since I leave Douglas Adams on in both cars. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy makes for mostly peaceful drivers. The music .....well maybe, its been a long time since I listened to the music. 

WAKING DREAM

There was only so much food and The Lord told me to go and eat and with me mine and there was only food for the 170 that were mine and the rest starved. "Go thou," said the Lord, "and eat". I have never been commanded so before in my dreams. It brought me right awake.

The Lord doesn't usually talk to me.

THE MUSIC

 My college room mate had a stereo and 3 Genesis albums and Breakfast in America by Boston. My next college room mate had a stereo and an album by the Byrds. I finally bought a stereo as a 25 year old lieutenant. It was big. I had 3 records and a CD. Almost 40 years later I bought another stereo to replace the one that went down in flames long ago. Turns out I have exactly one music CD, Dido.

It is amusing for me. I remember pre-wedding that I would come back to my beach place and the very first thing I always did was turn on the stereo. Always. Perhaps my inner soul knew I didn't want to be alone. You know, you're allowed regrets but then when you meet the little girl now grown who is an assertive little piece of you, well, you can look back and tell Oregon to go fuck itself. Their very last letter to me this week told me that we were done and over and perhaps two guys named Moe armed with shotguns would pay a call on me.

In the meantime, listening to Dido's album is enough.

and I can deal with any Moe that shows up.

 

MARKING THE DAY

Went for a walk this evening. It was good. Came home and found a stereo on the porch and I just now put it together. Put in a  CD and listened to something old that I hadn't heard in over 15 years. I sat down, got up picked up the old journals I wrote back when I was just a young starting out officer of the naval service. Every new ship or command I would write down the names of the officers and guys that worked for me. I looked at them tonight and I could not put faces to some of the names. People I'd lived with, worked with sailed with and the name told me nothing about them or called an image to mind. That was the whole point of writing them down, to remember. On the gripping hand, many of them were unforgettable. Just last night I talked about Seaman Recruit Fontain and his buddy and pal, Pyscho Wilson. I hadn't told a real honest sea story in years.

On the other hand, as I wrote about the places, they were called to mind right away and I can smell the breeze that was in the air as I walked down that one street during late night Ramadan as families were out picnicking as they broke their fast in my old homeport, Manama.

I started writing them almost 40 years ago. They are transcendent. There were just a handful of photos but those were lost long ago. All that remains are the words and the memories.

LET US NOT FORGET

The lying liars who just lied their way into hell. Every single one of these former "intelligence" officers lied about President Trump and strained credulity to the limit. Nobody will ever again trust the liars that worked in the CIA or the domestic intelligence agencies.....you know, other than the fools who vote democrat because they KNOW Trump is a liar. I've never seen one yet who can point to a lie he spoke or wrote but they hate with passion and will refuse reason if offered it in a glass with ice. Needless to say, I no longer offer reason and simply move on and leave them to their own delusion. Heinlein et al were right, you can't fix stupid and while ignorant was once a challenge, here in America the fight is over and ignorance won.

I wanted to capture the image of the 51 calling Trump a liar from the NYT ad but it is hard to find. It calls to mind the time I smuggled guns into the Kingdom and told the CO that despite a huge cache of terrorist weapons found on the beach about 20 miles away just last week, the Kingdom would not permit our exercise participants to have weapons and thus, smuggling. While the mobile unit involved maintained the necessarily quiet nature of my efforts we had a trained police officer who was showing a young female LT something to do with weapon safety who fired a bullet into the ceiling of the coach's office about 10 minutes before I had driven over the causeway and made my way up to the Persian Gulf Fleet HQ and soccer stadium. It was one of those moments where you simply shake your head and walk away.

I don't think the liars should have that moment. They all of them lied their heads off about President Trump and they should be made to pay for that. Politics once stopped at the shore of this continent but the democrats are now expediting our descent into Hell and paving the overseas route here and they should be made to answer for that.

You can safely ask, what harm is done by their lies and yet the answer is right there in your news feed and in your face. Decent Americans of the 22% of Americans that are capable and eligible are no longer enlisting in our armed forces. We used to. Under Ronald Reagan the armed forces reached their Cold War peak. Now? Well, I wouldn't sign up in this armed force and I cannot blame anyone else for refusing either. You know the GI bill was a winner right off the top. But now, as a straight white male, would I want to sign up for college.....? The Liberal Arts schools are long gone to the toasty crunchy left and insane but MIT and CalTech are right behind them. Can you even imagine a nerd mathematician making it through the unpleasantness of woke academies today? 

I can see us falling into barbarism........ and can't you see the woke trying to explain that there are still all kinds of places to get a haircut. Me? I drive 20 miles to Burton for a haircut since there are really good Rachel sandwiches across the street and some nice shopping at a farmer's market on the way out of town and.....my Cleveland library card is still good for taking books out of their wonderful library.

ON TRUST

 It is all right there in the header photo. There is trust at just about all levels in the navy. The destroyers would trust that we got all the mines, in turn we would trust that they would deal with any air or surface navy threat. I sense that the trust is broken. Neither crew has given any room to doubt underlying incompetence in the other.

Oddly enough, that was the way it was in 1987. Little has changed. For starters, I wouldn't trust the MCM to find a mine and were I on a sweep I would expect mostly to get run over by a destroyer of my own navy or savaged by its anti-ship missiles when they lose the picture.

Ask me how I know.

MAKING IT DARKER

 The Clintons unleashed a chain reaction when they named the 4 stars that were sent to Congress for advice and consent. Each of those flag officers ruined the service they were the heads of and they also went on to ensure that all the 3 stars and potential 4 stars were Clinton men. Wesley Clark was the leader of the pack of dismal failure. He instituted the complete collapse of NATO and the post-communist relationship with the Russian Federation. If you had to pick the very worst men to lead the Army, Navy, Air Force, and even the Marines, they picked them.

The current crop were all selected by boards made up of officers selected by the same officers selected by the Clinton team and the Obama team and now we have a navy that is pretty much worthless and an army that can't fight its way out of a wet paper bag. The Marines have a boss who decided that the 911 force doesn't need a heavy entry capability and has cut the Marines down to it's original concept of the fleet marine force without actually having that many ships to embark them on because the amphibious ships burn readily in homeport and cannot safely approach the shore in any contested region. When I say that, I mean the amphibious ships are meat if they get within 200 miles of any enemy coast.

How exactly did the Russian Federation become our enemy? Why are we at war with them? Why is NATO at war with them? Think about it. Give it 5 minutes of serious thought. Set aside the wounded spirits and angst you feel at any war and just ask yourself. WHY THE FUCK ARE WE AT WAR WITH RUSSIA NOW? WHY IS NATO AT WAR WITH RUSSIA NOW?

NATO right now cannot compel the unarmed immigrants in their millions from invading their countries and neither can we.

DARK DAYS

 It was right about 1500 when the lights went out here. I was relaxed enough that it didn't disturb me at all since it used to happen much more frequently years ago and we are now prepared for the fall of darkness. It was a cold, rainy, blustery day and darkness was had by all on this block and maybe the school across the street. I didn't bother to look. It was like a prelude for what I see Europe going through this winter and no, I don't think it will be a good winter in Europe this year. They elected leaders who pretty much ganged up to slit the throats of all Europeans and they will all get to suffer in the cold and dark and wonder why they no longer have jobs since much of their production was energy intensive. There won't be much glass blowing in Europe this year or the next.

Here at home the heat comes from gas. I could and did go on downstairs and put on a pot of coffee. Several years ago I found some single AA battery flashlights that are perfect for sudden darkness. They're in every room. As I recall, I bought 4 of them at a time for $5.00 at amazon. I bought a bunch. All of them still work just fine and we have lanterns and candles if we really want to keep on reading real books as opposed to a dozen mostly fully charged kindles. My kindles are not "connected". I buy the books, download them and then disconnect. It saves the batteries and it keeps amazon et al from goobering the software to keep me from enjoying my books. The goobering has affected the ipads and iphones though since they are connected.

I had a look just now at one of the last generation of kindles I bought. Unlike the earlier versions, the new ones no longer have the microSD slot. It doesn't matter. The old kindles all work just fine. I only bought so many because I literally could not resist buying a mini-ipad for $25.00 apiece. Srsly, they do everything an ipad that I use does and it cost me $25.00.  I bought another new one this week and it cost $44.00 and yet I heard the person I bought it from complaining that it cost too much. Srsly?!

I'm watching the latest hi-tech war and sometimes even listening to the morons on tv news talk about the things that Russia is doing in its defense and I contrast it with the same noises made when America was blowing the hell out of, well, you name it: Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Beirut, Iran and other places all over the world hit by drones courtesy of Obama, Bush and the dummy. I am kind of curious about what would happen if a nuke exploded over the Black Sea at a height above ground that did no direct damage but did employ the EMP we have been hearing about forever. I wonder if Starlink is EMP hardened? They're not long term satellites and in LEO they may even be orbiting below the Van Allen belt and deliberately have been left unshielded since the solar wind was not going to eat them alive. Perhaps we'll see.

It may well be time to enjoy once again, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" We will look for the bright side of life!

REMEMBER WHO FAILED US ALL

It’s not hard for some of us to keep our eye on the ball. Others need periodic reminders.

TIMELESS

 I just saw this at Vox Day and he’s right. It still defines Europe then and now. Nothing changed over the last 70 years.

ON ALTHOUSE

 I read a lot. A lot of it these days is online but I enjoy reading. I noted this tiny sentence at  the blog of Ann Althouse  today and thought it was both trivial and amusing. She writes,

"The old gatekeepers are not in charge, and a person with a product people want can break through. That's very cool, I think, even though I have zero interest in reading Hoover's books. The last novel I read was "Slaughterhouse-Five.""

I happen to think that's hilarious. The cruel rulers of the schools extant when we were young liked to inflict horrible things like Vonnegut and Bradbury on young readers in the hope of turning them into illiterate proletarians for life who would never willingly pick up another book to read for the rest of their short brutish lives.

I WONDER IF RUSSIA'S NUKES WORK AT ALL

 I mean, when was the last time any military minion had to prove the nukes worked or even exist anymore? It was all a long time ago and in a very different environment. As we know here in the West, what doesn't get cycled and greased doesn't work on demand.

Did they even try to modify their modern rockets and missiles for tactical delivery over the last 50 years or did their scientists, engineers and bureaucrats merely "report that they had done the work?"

It's not an idle question. Even our vaunted Air Force mismanaged nuclear weapons on a massive scale after the Cold War ended and they stood down the Strategic Air Command and turned the oversight and management of our nuclear arsenal to idiots, morons and yes men who lost God only knows how many nuclear weapons.

The men charged with the development, production, storage, use and oversight of our nuclear arsenal were typical of the generation of scientists, engineers and management that put men on the moon in 1969. All those men are gone and the processes so long disused are all but forgotten now. You only have to look at the dismal Boeing Company and all of its divisions. It's vaunted aircraft division used to produce the best and most reliable commercial aircraft in the world and then Management decided to retire to Chicago and the money men running the company no longer had any input from their designers, pilots, mechanics, engineers, etc and it was soon reflected in the disastrous new 737. The 787 suffers from a design flaw that leads to solar radiation despoiling the paint on the tops of the aircraft that they now have to hold on with duct tape. It's not a surprise given that some call it speed tape.

Their space division is just a calamity and a disaster that will almost certainly happen if Artemis ever does launch. It's 5 years and billion of $ over cost and just got rolled back to the hanger for the 3rd or 4th time. NASA administrators have nonetheless not changed the planned deployment of the catastrophe and they will give Artemis one unmanned test flight around the moon on it's first mission and the second will be a manned mission to the moon. I think they are mad.

People are really sneering at the poor Russian military which is losing to 'plucky' little Ukraine. The Russians are not fighting Ukraine and haven't since the invasion. NATO has dumped enormous numbers of weapons into Ukraine and its new technical hands (hi-tech mercenaries from NATO forces). And let us not forget the utter fiasco of our running away from Afghanistan which was completely overrun by the Taliban even before the Army finished running away.

As I've said before, I'm glad my family no longer lives in the strategic targets of the Cold War. I mean, you don't really think the Russians would nuke McLean, VA do you? Half the people working there in the CIA Headquarters are Russian and Chinese agents.

PUTIN'S ORDERS TO RUSSIAN MILITARY

 "Make absolutely sure that when we retaliate against the West after they attack us with nuclear weapons that no harm comes to President Biden. He is by himself the equivalent of another 3000 megatons of nuclear death to Americans and Europeans."

THE EUROCRATS SHOULD BE AFRAID OF HER

I just saw this at Powerline in the comments to the Week in Pictures. The contrast between the dim bulbs fronting for our ruling class is almost indescribable.  

ON RUSSIA

 At this moment as we see Russia and Putin trying to end the war in Ukraine we have to ask ourselves as we watch the gas bubble up from the ruptured NORD Stream pipelines, WHAT EXACTLY IS THE FULLY SANCTIONED RUSSIA GOING TO LOSE if they simply decide to nuke Ukraine?

The old West is following the imbecile's lead as directed/led by the hand by Victoria Nuland. She is literally the death of the West.

NAILED IT

Simply copied out in its entirety. It hits the nail squarely.

 

FBI’S TERMINATION LETTER TO DISGRACED FORMER AGENT PETER STRZOK RELEASED AND IT’S SMOKIN:’

Strzok’s hatred of former President Donald J. Trump and obsession with the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory that the ex-POTUS was in cahoots with the Kremlin clearly affected his judgement, resulting in anti-Trump text messages that were deeply embarrassing to the nation’s foremost law enforcement agency, leading to his firing in 2018, a steamy, adulterous affair with FBI attorney Lisa Page also didn’t help.

The firing letter which was written by David Bowdich who was the bureau’s deputy director at the time was released as a part of the FBI’s response to Strzok’s federal lawsuit alleging that his privacy rights were violated and that he was wrongfully terminated.

“While there is no doubt your 21 years of service to the organization cannot and should not be erased, it is difficult to fathom the repeated, sustained errors of judgment you made while serving as the lead agent in two of the most high profile investigations in the country,” Bowdich wrote in the letter which was dated August 8, 2018. “Though the Office of the Inspector General found no evidence of bias impacted any of your or the FBI’s investigative actions or decisions, your sustained pattern of bad judgment in the use of an FBI device has called into question for many of the decisions made during both the Clinton e-mail investigation and the initial states of the Russian Collusion investigation.”

“In short, your repeated selfishness has called into question the credibility of the entire FBI.”

“In my 23 years in the FBI, I have not seen a more impactful series of missteps which called into question the entire organization and more thoroughly damaged the reputation of the organization,” Bowdich wrote. “In our role as FBI employees we sometimes make unpopular decisions, but the public should be able to examine our work and not have to question motives.”

Earlier: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.

Were I again called to jury duty I would have to tell the court that I woudn't believe a single word offered in evidence by any representative of the FBI or Law Enforcement. They thoroughly poisoned that well. The FBI has done nothing in the last decade to even attempt to regain credibility. Sadly, neither have the police.

As a student of history all my life I know that this is actually how civilizations fall. When "no man's word can be trusted". I first read that in Thucydides. It was just how Athens fell and every republic after that.

LIKE

 Music and dance

I really like this. However, every time I see it I hear this tiny plaintive voice telling us what she wants for her birthday. She was 4. She really wanted a haircut. 

And this just because I like it and it came on next. It's always evocative. 

Goodness

CLOSER NOW

 I think the second nuclear war is getting closer and just like every war that preceded it a lot of stunned Europeans are going to glance up from their riots and ask, wait, how did this happen?

TWO TO FOUR TIMES A MONTH

 I used to get on a 747 and fly across the Pacific 2 or 4 times a month for 18 years. I don't really miss the journey but seeing I can't believe how much Korea changed over the course of those 18 years. I think it was for the better, this was the music their mileage may differ. They joined us in the 21st century but I suspect they left a lot of what made them behind. On the gripping hand, a lot of that was Japan and I know they were happy to leave that behind. People alive today have no idea what a destructive force Japan was in Asia. The Koreans remember.

IN TRUTH

I really miss San Diego, Encinitas, Carlsbad. A lot. I miss El Camino Real more than you would know. Robertos was there and so was Pick up Stix. Fast wonderful Mexican food and delicious Chinese fast food not at all like anything you could buy in China. I'd say I live in a food desert but I've been there, done that. While this place is arid, it's not a desert. On the other hand, the virus killed off the places of good take-away. We get sushi at Heinens. On the gripping hand, I have most marvelous chef. Life is good.

EVER WONDER?

Why don't Italians speak latin?

GREAT ZIMBABWE

 I was led off tonight in my reading by a reference to Great Zimbabwe and a whole host of wonderful things Africans and their spirit advisors believe about the place. It seems that it was a city that rivaled London in population back around 2000 years ago and was quite the trade emporium. On the other hand I take any stories about prehistoric peoples that never learned to write a written language with the a grain of salt roughly the size of Gibraltar. You have bee hives with more bees in them than many towns or cities but without a written language they remain mute to history. Making up stuff is what fantasists and writers do but it is not history. It is off putting to have some writer lay claim to some sort of civilization that, on the first hand, never discovered any way to record history. Say what we will, true civilizations were writing and recording in the written word over 5000 years ago.

I can watch the occasional show on the history of some nomadic people and listen to the narrator tell the amazing story of their ancestors based on oral tradition. I'm not really a believer of oral tradition. Like many of you I've had way too many garbled messages relayed to me from trusted sources that were, when all is said and done, garbled to a fare thee well. On the gripping hand, I don't have more than a few words from relatives beyond my grandparents. My mother can tell me some things about her great in-laws and great grandparents and there are photos of them on the 600 acre farm they used to own inside the Washington DC beltway but there is nothing of them in writing that has fallen into my hands. I do like the story about how he and his brothers beat the hell out of a lawyer they hated coming out of court one day. My great grandfather was the constable of the county in Maryland where it happened and one of his brothers was killed in a shoot-out somewhere out West where he was a deputy. I have written four volumes of my own history. I'm not sure it will survive but it was there for a brief and shining moment for anyone to read or record.

As you can read, I'm talking about memories within living memory of some people (not really me). I find it impossible to believe tribal myths or anything of pre-historic sub-Saharan Africa before it was investigated by the ones with a written language. I don't think the Egyptians count since they apparently, in 4000 years of written history never went further abroad then Sudan and perhaps Ethiopia. 4000 years hugging the Nile River and basking in total ignorance of the rest of the world. Kind of hard to believe really.

I enjoyed the Dirk Pitt books by Clive Cussler. He had the people of those days sailing treasure and mystery all the way to Texas 2000 years ago. It would be nice to think it happened but the stories that do bear the test of time because they were written down, don't bear out any voyages of exploration outside the Phoenicians and I haven't read any of what they might have written about their voyages thru the Mediterranean and the founding of Carthage. All that I have read of that era was by the Romans or the Greeks. If you have never read Thucydides you missed out on how the world really works. Spoiler, the world works by leveraging the stupidest people in the world into power and then letting them do what the stupidest people in the world like to do. ie, Biden. Oddly enough, it really only takes one single solitary stupid world leader to fuck over the world for all the rest of us. Just one stupid SOB is the equivalent of 2000 megatons of nuclear death delivered wholesale.

On the other hand, my reading tonight did strike a bell and I decided to reread Wilbur Smith's The Angels Weep and the rest of the series. I last/first read them in college during a summer and while I never read any of his other books, those were worth the time.

TACTICAL

 I think we will start with air bursts. I don't think the fireball will touch the ground.

JUSTICE REARS ITS UGLY HEAD

 Some police officers stopped a young woman and put her in a car they left parked on the railroad tracks.  If there was justice , all three of the police involved would have their hands cuffed behind their back and be placed in another police car from that jurisdiction of Hell and have another train hit them at the same speed while they experienced the terror of knowing that they were going to die, torn to pieces and scattered over a couple of acres.

Putting the one cop on Admin leave while "investigating" a  clear and obvious attempted murder under color of authority is rich. What really sucks about what is called law enforcement in this country is that even if these murderers are sacked, they can still walk into another jurisdiction as sworn officers and be hired as cops again, in your town, in my town.

They deserve to spend 10-23 years in jail at a minimum. They all did it. They all left a young woman they locked in a car on the tracks to die and made no effort to save her.

She survived and all her lawyer has to do now is go to court, show the video and lay claim to the entire town and county as reparations for an evil and horrific crime at the hands of the sworn officers of the law.

I KNOW IT LOOKS LIKE EMCON

 I have been both reading and writing here and there since my last post and for many of the posts before that one. Blogger is being a pain which disturbs the muse a little bit but I also find that I'm likely repeating the words of others and that was never the intent of this blog. It was in its original intent to communicate with my little pilot and after a number of years the other channels are finally open. Hallelujah!!!. 

That said, blogger is being a pain these days in every aspect. It's like they're trying to cut back on the number of free thinkers using their resources to communicate our thoughts outside the bounds of accepted and censored speech. I haven't made the jump to Trump's new locale or Gab or even substack as yet. I may in the future as the politics heat up a little more. I find that I can get what I can consider reliable news and information from the usual sources on the right plus the ones I don't list but go to every day: Instapundit and Daily Mail UK and voxday.

By the accounts I read every day it looks like the world is descending into a darkness it may not climb out of intact. Just how did the West's leaders all decide that the thing to do in a no account Balkan pissing contest was to slit their own throats in so far as Energy, Food, Fertilizer, Minerals and gut their industries to the very breaking point and beyond? How did America seemingly elect an idiot who was always an idiot but is now a senile idiot repudiated by his own White House staff every single time he speaks in public and declares that the US will support Taiwan militarily in the event of a Chinese invasion and that the COVID pandemic is OVER and that he can with the swipe of drool and a pen sign away a trillion $ in student loans and lay them on the backs of the working class who never went to college? 

What happened? Well I know. The communists won the long march thru the institutions and they own/control higher education, K-12 education, libraries, most foundations, NPR, PBS, all other broadcast media, the NYT and most newspapers and now they have slowly been replaced in each by the deviants who believe child grooming is the path to the future of America and the World.

Why does the FBI and the DOJ do nothing about the people that actually banged the underage girls at Epstein's island resort? Why do they do nothing about Hunter's laptop? Why do they persist in this stupid vendetta against Trump. Investigated now by everyone who loathes, hates and despises him for 7 years and impeached twice and the STUPID FUCKTARDS have been unable to pin anything on him but they hate him twice as much as they did yesterday and half as much as they will tomorrow.

Things are falling apart in the Blue cities and nobody seems to care or notice. The border isn't there anymore and the libtards react as if somebody dropped a live rattle snake in their lap when a tiny handful of illegals show up in Martha's Vineyard. 

 Go volunteer to be an election worker and supervise the vote. It's important.

SENSE THE IRONY

 The FBI tracked down the CEO of MyPillow in an Arby's drive thru while he was enroute home from a hunting trip and showed a search warrant authorizing them to seize his cellphone. He was permitted to call his  lawyer who told him to comply even though.....well, read the story.

Two lessons and thus the irony.

1. The FBI tracked him by his cell phone

2. You should always carry 2 cellphones in your car or at home. I mean, what else do you do with the old cell phone?

EUROPEANS BEING STUPID BEYOND REASON, AGAIN

 Ignorant stupid dangerous idiots. God! Just leave it to the Germans. They have been destroying civilization for 700 years.

What the hell is it with Germans and Europeans who compound stupidity and mindless insane policy every time we turn our back on them? Continental wide European war starting again in 4, 3, 2, 1

THE LOST

 One of the things I lost in the bonfire of my life was my copy of Kant's book. I could replace it easily enough but for many years I had used the title page, author page, publisher's page as a place to jot down my own philosophy as it came to me. These started to accumulate on the train from DC to URI. I might ask Chaplain Harvey if he kept them and would send them to me as he has done with many old things I cast off when I was in despair.

What are the odds that any religious being would keep my copy of On the Beautiful and the Sublime? 

I sense a very definite NO out of Texas.

ENGLAND HAS A KING AGAIN

 If I was Europe, I'd be afraid now.

ON THINGS

 The feds ran amok at Mar a Lago to haul out the former Presidents stuff. I was having a conversation wtih a retired flag officer and it called to mind the other ones that I knew well. After the 3rd Fleet commander retired he kept on coming back to  the headquarters there on Point Loma and going into the office they kept for him for a number of months, He was my old XO and one of the best officers I ever knew. i learned that like my father, he kept coming in to the office and was simply going through his files. Almost all of them were classified, some were SCI compartmented information and it took the only man allowed to read the file to shred it or return it. My dad spent months after retired from his final job going through the filing cabinets in his basement office and shredding all the ones that were proprietary. VADM Costello was essentially doing the same thing for months after he retired.

That President Trump took documents out of the office that needed to be destroyed, I don't question. At that point each needed to be examined by the holder and either refiled or destroyed. Anybody with even a grain of sense knows how that works and that it takes time.

I know, I can hear the twit saying, "well they weren't his files and he should have left them" and yet the answer is pretty basic. "They were his files."

I just want to say that the same thing does not apply to the Secretary of State. The top secret stuff she had off the nsanet was never hers, didn't belong to her and should not have been in her house. Presidents, for all that they always appear to have  a clean desk have to actually SIGN document for them to take effect.

GERMANY CALLED TODAY

 They said they wanted back their weapons. This was a stupid article and not well written. I am almost forced to dig up a copy now of Red Storm Rising and I owe my girl a copy of Das Boot but how do people just put out nonsense like this?

As we are seeing today, without US you only get one chance to stay free and independent. And we also shipped most of our weapons to Ukraine and aren't building anymore because. All those countries like France who used to rely on the bedrock of the US military fighting for their freedom should start to think about what post-Trump really means for them and invest in all those hateful weapons dealers industries. This hasn't been the 20th century for over 22 years and there is nobody in America that would shed a single red corpuscle to bail any country in Europe out of the deep hole it has dug with such smugness and pronounced hatred for America for the last 80 years.

The last time I looked the 173rd Airborne was in Aviano but that was 13 years ago. They might well have left. But that's OK Europe because there will never be another war in Europe.

INDIA CALLED TODAY AND TOLD ME TO FUCK OFF

 I have actually found it rare to piss off  the India call center so thoroughly that he screams at me to hang up. So, it was by all measures, a good day.

RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA

 Sorry, that was from a movie I watched

What is going on in Europe? When did all Europeans turn totally stupid?

They actually write serious article now slamming Russia for NordvStream slowdowns delivering gas to Europe while at the same exact time hectoring those belligerent Russian bastards for being all bastardy and stuff and then turn right back around to complain about the Russians withholding fuel from poor shivering Europe. I remember when the Btis totally lost their  minds after CORPORATE but now all of Europe has wandered into the land dazed and confused and without a clue how stupid they sound.

Putin totally has them by their dangly bits but Europeans seem not to notice. It might have something to do with all the women in government in Europe. Yes, you know you thought the same thing, You know you did. You wondered what kind of idiotic jackasses could bring about 1914 again with the special level of stupid malevolence and twisted evil hate.

 Now you know.

As you read on you will see the young lady under who's picture lie the words, The German State is prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian. We have done it before and will do it again!!!

European officials blame Russia for Nord Stream troubles

Moscow’s ‘cynicism,’ not EU sanctions, is to blame for the pipeline drying up, they say

© Getty Images / Stefan Sauer

Russia is deliberately sabotaging the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline to spite the EU, European officials have claimed, questioning Moscow’s explanation for an indefinite delay in restoring service.

State-owned energy giant Gazprom informed its European customers on Saturday that it could not safely resume operations until it had fixed “oil leaks” discovered in a major turbine during a maintenance operation.

Nord Stream was set to come back online just after midnight Saturday morning after three days of maintenance. The leaks, reportedly affecting “cables connected to speed meters of a rotor,” were discovered during a technical inspection with the turbine’s German manufacturer Siemens. Moscow had earlier warned that the pipeline’s operation was threatened by sanctions, which had created a shortage of spare parts.

However, Siemens argued the company had alternate turbines at the compressor station where the leak had been discovered and could use one of those in case of a real emergency. “Such leaks do not normally affect the operation of a turbine and can be sealed on site,” they claimed.

Read more

Germany will back Ukraine ‘no matter what voters think’ – FM

European Commission spokesman Charles Michel condemned what he called Russia’s “use of gas as a weapon,” declaring it would not “change the resolve of the EU” as the bloc works toward “energy independence.”

Commission press service chief Eric Mamer slammed the “fallacious pretenses” he claimed Gazprom had used to shut down the pipeline, holding it up as proof of both their “cynicism” and their “unreliability as a supplier” and suggesting Moscow “prefer[red] to flare gas instead of honoring contracts.” 

German parliamentary foreign affairs committee chair Michael Roth denounced the shutdown as “part of Russia’s psychological war against us” and accused President Vladimir Putin of “violat[ing] contracts without scruples….even at the expense of his own economic interests.” 

German gas regulator Bundesnetzagentur’s president Klaus Mueller warned Germans that it was “down to each and everyone” to conserve resources in the absence of Russian gas.

The G7 countries agreed on Friday to a price cap for Russian oil, vowing not to provide insurance or other forms of financing to any ship carrying Russian oil above that price, which has yet to be decided, but which participants hope to have put in place by February. Despite several rounds of harsh sanctions, Moscow has made £600 million more from oil sales in June than it did the previous month thanks to soaring energy prices threatening to plunge all of Europe into a depression.

A second natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, was completed earlier this year and could alleviate much of the suffering caused by the slowdown at Nord Stream 1, but it has never been put into service due to sanctions.

J R R R

 I think Amazon did this, I couldn't possibly comment,

Black elves, black hobbitses, and black dwarfs. Checkmate, racists!

HEY YOU

 Go see Bullet Train. We think you'd like it.

GOT THE SIDE, READ 2010

I miss Lex but there was a wonderful person there too.

The air show is this weekend.  I remember Lex.

Yeah, I'm looking back at the 2010 blog there on the side bar and yeah, I hear the jets turning over the city.

JUST IMAGE

 I was going to title this Just Imagine but changed my mind. However, just imagine you could pick any of 100,000,000 raving leftist loonies to be the national image of your party and you decided to pick this moron. How would that feel? What does this idiot convey? Why choose some idiot so out of touch with Americans that they would be justified in thinking you think all of them are stupid morons? Damn these questions!!!! Am I supposed to speak for all that? Well, yeah, this is the moron and stupid idiot they chose to be the face of the White House that brought us the debacle in Afghanistan and our southern border and gasoline and diesel prices lifting off. This idiot.

Why do Americans put up with this level of stupid and disdain in our public servants?

INTERSTATE DISASTERS AND STUFF

For over 40 years I have kept books in the trunk of my car. Just a handful that I can try to reread. I liked Anton Myer's Once an Eagle so it's there. I can read all 1200 pages (or skip lightly) over again in the daylight. Ditto Earth by David Brin (unlikely) I totally didn't get it the first time. But, there are many others! Running to thousands of pages, and kindles with a thousand books on them.... I'm ready.

I am prepared to spend up to a week on the side of the road while the nebs nebbish and the police measure angles with a spectrometer and a whistle.

 Perhaps it is time to republish the Rules of the Universe. 

My favorite one is:

if you are ready, the universe isn't. It abides. It lurks. It waits....until you are unready.