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.