LET'S CHANGE ITS NAME BACK TO WAR DEPARTMENT

You kind of have to wonder why we have this enormous hugely expensive misnomer in our government called the Department of Defense. You would think it would involve itself with the defense of the United States but that seems to be utterly foreign to it as it aggressively seeks out wars all over the world to involve us and them in and if it cannot find any it doesn't hesitate to scare one or two up and promote another deeply uneven fight that we lose after 20 years of blood sacrifice and the pure waste of trillions of dollars.

So, what do you think? Should we scrap the whole Department of Defense concept and go back to having a War Department and Navy Department or just arm the Salvation Army since they are probably considerably more dangerous then the entire DoD?

ON THE SILENCE

 Nobody talks about some of the problems that this country is now facing. We have one of the most entitled and useless classes ever experienced in this country who seem to think that they are all above the law. OK, we have two classes with the same expectations. One is the upper level democrats and the other is the minority that commits more than 50% of all violent crime while only representing 11% of the overall population. Enough about that though.

What we also have, courtesy of both the aforementioned classes is an enormous illegal immigration problem. Some people have elected to ignore all of the downstream consequences of letting millions of impoverished ignorant no-skill people into the country to bolster the democratic party's vote farming schemes. What are the problems you ask.

1. They swell the ranks of unemployed/unemployable and foster greater crime and drug use and add to the homeless issue created by the left.

2. They will soon overwhelm all of our public infrastructure and make waiting times for hospitals, doctors, nurses, and classrooms overwhelming and even more outrageous.

3. They almost certainly won't have any form of insurance. That's going to hurt every hospital in the country and they are also going to start driving just as soon as they can steal or buy a cheap car and when they hit you, and they will, you will find out what it means and in the mean time your insurance rates are going to rise dramatically.

4. Every single public benefit that was ever created to benefit Americans will be diluted to the point of meaninglessness as it is forced to deal with the ever increasing numbers of poor and ignorant border crossers.

If you are not interested in local politics you better get interested because those people are the ones that are going to twist every single good thing you like about where you live to the purpose of feeding, educating and housing the illegals over and before feeding, housing and educating the people who were born here.

PUT THE BLAME WHERE IT BELONGS

 I see from the New York Post that Columbia has shut down the so-called Teachers College Reading and Writing project and pushed its founder and guiding light into the darkness decades too late for most children who were not taught to read by sounding out the words that were new to them. Nobody made all the teachers and schools adopt the idiotic and worse than useless approach to reading that so many did adopt and attempt to instill in all their students. No, that was on those teachers and those schools and on the parents that let them get away with that crap.

I still wonder why it took literally generations of failure before anybody managed to successfully drive a stake through the heart of this warped, stupid and counterproductive idea. 

Worst of all of course is that there are still parents, teachers and schools that will still swear that it works!

FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON

 Every time I see or hear Joe Biden our p'resident I think of what he reminds me of and he is not the only one that brings that old story to life every time. It's the same with Pelosi, Feinstein, McConnell, Fetterman and Kamala Harris. At one time these dullards must have been really sharp and on the ball since they clearly conned an awful lot of people into believing that they were way sharper and more intelligent then they are now.

On the gripping hand, we kind of know exactly how Harris got her start in politics and it clearly shows any time you put her in a room with anyone smarter than a 4 year old.

It is available to read online

THE STUPID IS STRONG IN THEM

 

IMPORTANCE OF BEING ACCURATE AND TRUTHFUL

 We all now know that the entire intelligence community does nothing but lie about everything and when that fails they just lie some more. It was one thing for the people who ran the FBI, DIA, CIA and NSA to lie about whether or not Hunter Biden's laptop was, in fact, Hunter Biden's laptop but its an entirely different matter when they spent 20 years lying to the top echelons of military and government about every single aspect of our war to displace and root out the Taliban and to contain ISIS and the entire state of the Russian Federation.

Quite literally everything they reported or said was a lie. The FBI never stopped lying about the entirely bogus and fake Russian dossier they alleged was about President Trump being some sort of Russian agent. They still believe it, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.

The CIA got the fall of the Soviet Union wrong for almost the entire Cold War and did the same about China and are STILL DOING IT.

The liars at every level in the Intelligence Community lie about Russia running out of men and war materials even as any honest observer can see that Russia's economy is booming and they have both men and war material coming out their ears. The IC wants you to believe that the Russians cannot go on the offensive to capture Kiev because they lack the means and the will but that's the sort of thing only a total idiot would say. Ukrainians are dying like flies attacking fixed layered Russian defenses maintained on the borders (roughly) of the Russian occupied lands formerly part of Ukraine and before that, part of Russia. The Russians have every bit as much need to take Kiev as we did to take Baghdad during DESERT STORM. There was no need to take it.

We are spending trillions on the intelligence community and they are so inept and useless that they could not pin down the source of the Wuhan flu. There are 4 star generals roaming around telling the world that Russia is on the point of objective military defeat by a country that seriously believes 15 more tanks will make some sort of difference in a counter-offensive that never so much as made a spoiling attack in battalion size or greater, much less launched a counter-offensive that if you are honest, would reflect in size, scale and effort, the Russian's initial attack and attempted coup de main at the outset of the conflict.

So if the Intel Community is such a lying bunch of useless idiots, why do we keep funding them? Well, it used to be said that J. Edgar Hoover had the dirt on enough dirty Senators and Congressmen that they dared not provoke him into untimely disclosures. I tend to believe that. 

When you think back to the Manchurian Candidate and the like, you don't really have to wonder too much how low grade morons and brain damaged idiots keep getting 'elected' to power and how people like them keep getting reelected year after year.

Remember how the unknown Chicago thug Obama was heading for defeat until somehow Jack Ryan's sealed divorce papers were suddenly and mysteriously made public by an LA judge?

So they are the Sword of Damocles. Who is going to force them to use it?

DAMNED PECULIAR IS WHAT IT IS

 Has anyone else noticed how none of Trump or Biden's accusers have died in multitudes of strange accidents and suicides and murders and stuff along the lines trotted out to explain all the deaths of friends, colleagues, business associates and others left in the wake of the Clintons? 

Obama is a late bloomer when it comes to strange and mysterious deaths.

A QUESTION FOR OUR TIME

 Back when I was commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy and then every time I was promoted I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It went like this:

I solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

Do I have to invade New Mexico now and is regime change a requirement?

J'AI MES REGRETS

 It has been a devastating cycle of failure compounding failure backed up by failure, supervised by failures and crafted by failure. We all had some idea that the events of that day long ago would trouble our time for the rest of our lives but I had no idea that I would regret literally every action that my country took in the days and months and years that followed the attack. It was all ruinous, unnecessary, barbaric and cruel and it just keeps getting worse and worse.

We have a sitting governor that believes she can suspend the Constitution of the United States if she declares a health emergency and now almost half the idiots go along with her ridiculous notion. The litany of failures range from Education to the Military, from Foreign Relations and Diplomacy to Energy Policy with a total unswerving intolerance for free speech and mindless belief in what they hear from what calls itself the news.

I had a longer and more detailed list of regrets but this will suffice. It's time to throw off the shackles placed on our freedoms and return this country to what it was, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

A MODEST PROPOSAL: MAKE THEM PREY

I see that there is at last an obvious way to make the disgusting morons running the country turn around and consider just what they have wrought with all their ignorant and stupid policies. It seems that cruel things keep happening to just the right people and all that has to happen for them to see the error of their ways is right there in front of us. We merely need to encourage all the gangbangers, rapists, murderers, thieves, carjackers etc (see the complete list at Blazing Saddles) to focus their attentions on just liberal democrats and farm labor politicians and bureaucrats.

It would be a win-win!

You see we have no shortage and no end in sight of such criminals who prey on us and a lot of the more important believers in lib/prog soft on crime policies they love, never go anywhere at all without armed security provided by us.

WHAT THE IDIOT LEFT FAILS TO UNDERSTAND

 The idiots we refer to as leftists and who think of themselves as liberal and progressive universally fail to understand a simple little fact of history. It was people just exactly like them that voted for Hitler to come to power democratically and to then destroy all the reins that held government in check and create the Third Reich. They really think that voting for tyranny is the path to freedom and democracy. Every single damned one of them is an idiot.

NO THANKS, I'LL PASS

 I saw this tonight and it produced an immediate visceral response:

I no longer have any faith or trust in the American medical profession. They all lied about every single aspect of the COVID embarrassment and don't feel the slightest bit repentant about it and I don't doubt for one second that any flu vaccine I get delivered from them will contain a secondary unmentioned vaccine to stave off the COVID. Worst of all, I think that even if they knew it did, not a single one of them would balk at recommending it and totally forget about getting informed consent by simply not mentioning what was mingled in with the flu vaccine before sticking me with it.

Way to go AMA!

THE GRISLY NO GOOD DEATH OF ESPN

 I have to admit, Clay Travis writes a really great Obituary for ESPN and cable. You should hustle over to read it if you haven't already run across it today. It reads very much like the post analysis writeups for wars and battles and it also sends a mixed feeling my way. I was never that in to the sports I wasn't playing or participating in and the only time I really watched was back when I shared my office in Bahrain with the resident SEAL and the EOD guy who were both sports fanatics.

Well, not me but the writing is now on the wall for the others to see. The final nail in the coffin bores right in to the truth of things.

Every day it seems we wake up in a world made new.

DEATH OF BRICK $ MORTAR RETAIL

 I see that some clever jackass has decided to express its ire at Target clothing and set the clothes on fire. It's as if shoplifting the retail stores to death isn't enough and now people who don't like something feel free to simply set it on fire. I don't know how retail stores can survive this but I think we are going to see a return to the pre-Piggly Wiggly era of shopping. You go to the bullet proof counter in the bullet proof vestibule with your shopping list and hand it to the clerk who fills your food order and brings it back to the counter where you pay, probably in cash, for your goods and then they shove them through the bullet proof bin and you fill your own shopping bags and head out.

I remember back when I was getting my visa to head off to France in 1989 I had to hit their consulate up in LA. It was about the time that the shops on Rodeo Drive had posted notices that they were "only open by appointment' and kept their doors locked in order to keep out all the smash and grab artistes of that era.

It's interesting to me because the thug society created deserts out of their own neighborhoods during the great riots of the 70s and then did the same thing with the Rodney King riots and then the same thing with Saint Floyd riots and now they have thieved to death their local supermarkets forcing them all to go a bit further abroad to satisfy their thieving and food cravings.

It does make you wonder though how much longer a civilization that obeys no law can survive. They will no doubt end up stealing library books and then burning the libraries down for not supplying enough entertainment for nothing.

ME TOO

 

THE CIVIL SOCIETY RULES

 I wonder how many incorporated towns and cities are adopting the strategy used by both Florida and Texas to make the migrant invasion a major problem for the democrat run big cities? There is no reason that any town used as a dumping ground by INS for. hundreds of illegal aliens cannot round them up as they arrive and load them on another bus for immediate delivery to San Francisco, LA, New York, Washington DC, Portland, Seattle, St. Louis, Kansas City, Madison, Minneapolis or any of a score of other cities where they would be welcomed warmly and cherished by their Marxist brothers and sisters.

THIS IS INTERESTING

Boeing is finding that somebody drilled hundreds of extra holes in the aft pressure bulkhead of production 737 aircraft. At the same time I learn that the Department of Maximum Injustice here in the formerly United States of America has charged SpaceX with the crime of not hiring illegal aliens to work on its spacecraft or in its space operations.

It's not funny, it's very sad and pathetic.

As you remember, the Russians found that someone was drilling tiny holes in its space craft a few years ago. I think they finally ended up blaming it on an American woman astronaut.

Of course, the government would have a lot more credibility if it hadn't, you know, lied its ass off about the Wuhan Flu and its various insane and stupid countermeasures, or shut down all the roads out of Lahaine, Hawaii leaving all the residents and tourists there to burn to death in the fire that it failed to warn them was rushing down on them driven by 80 mile an hour storm winds that caused an electric transmission line to spark a fire despite known fire dangers.

JUST WONDERING IN AMUSEMENT

 I copied this from Instapundit . I thought it could be tweaked.

I’D WONDERED THIS MYSELF: After Prigozhin humiliated Putin, the question was how he survived so long.

“The very fact that Prigozhin existed after the coup completely upended our understanding of the Putin regime,” said Abbas Galyamov, a political consultant and former Putin speechwriter. “The rule was that you can’t go against Putin. For two months, everything was upside down. Prigozhin created a massive problem for Putin, he humiliated him.”

As I read that paragraph the name Hillary suddenly sprang to mind in lieu of Putin's and Trump's name in lieu of Prigozhin.

In the two months after the mutiny, Prigozhin appeared down but not out. He was filmed in Belarus telling his mercenaries that the conduct of the war in Ukraine was a “disgrace”. He was photographed on the sidelines of a Russia-Africa summit, and then appeared this week armed and in camouflage somewhere in Africa, saying he was “making Russia even greater on all continents”.

Trump somehow survived despite the 100% negative press coverage of literally every single thing he did during his first term.

Perhaps more importantly, he was never served with criminal charges after the mutiny. His companies continued to win multimillion-dollar catering contracts, and he continued to travel between Africa, Belarus and Russia on his Embraer jet until it crashed on Wednesday.

Now it switches to Hillary who is guilty of all kinds of real crimes alongside all of her State Department associates and aides who stripped classification markings off Top Secret documents and emailed them over the unclassified internet to Hillary's private account and none were so much as indicted for the crimes they committed.

“It gave the signal that it was permissible to go against Putin and everything will be OK,” Galyamov said.

I'm not sure where Hillary started killing her enemies but I suspect Vince Foster was not the first to die for the Clinton's many crimes.

Many had the sense that this would not last. The CIA director, William Burns, last month called Putin an “apostle of payback” and warned Prigozhin not to fire his food taster.

Again, Hillary's name in lieu of Putin's.

Somehow, Prigozhin spent his time in Belarus (which is basically a Russian vassal) and sometimes even safely traveling back to Russia… up until he didn’t.

I notice the Clinton's don't appear to fly much in their own private airplane unlike John Kerry and the other dolts running this country.

COLOR ME SURPRISED

 You have thoroughly pissed off the last and most senior surviving officer of the KGB who now heads all of Russia which is engaged in a war with a country that has routinely launched missile and aerial attacks on Moscow. Do you really decide to get on a plane outside of Moscow for the direct private flight to St. Petersburg and take off into the wild blue yonder inside Moscow's ADIZ?

I find it hard to believe that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Private Military Company, is/was that unbelievably stupid. I do feel sorry though for the crew and other passengers that died.

THIS IS TRULY PAINFUL TO READ

 I was reading about the coming downfall of civilization at Conservative Treehouse just now and this is actually alarming. Our friends at google 

are deploying AI to crawl the entire world wide web for context. This is allegedly to develop better informed and rational artificial intelligence but as is made clear in the linked article, they are doing it in order to subvert and take total control and dominance over the entirety of the world wide web and censor ALL INFORMATION.

If you cannot read it, I urge you to hit the link and look at what the censors are up to.

SAD BUT TRUE

 This is Painful to admit and accept

The medical professionals all over the world disgraced themselves over Covid 19 and are getting even less reputable then Congress or snake oil salesmen.

A SILLY QUESTION

 Is there some reason that Ukraine is not using its factories and industrialized workforce to turn out 100,000 155mm shells every month? This is simple fabrication and well within the means of any industrialized country like Ukraine. The fuzes may all be point detonated or base fuzed but they could probably turn out some variable time airbursting rounds if they put their backs into it like any real country facing and existential threat to its existence.

I guess most of the money we sent/send there just goes into the pockets of the democratic party donors so thick on the ground in Ukraine and the rest of the EU.

Russia, for all the sanctions against it isn't having any trouble at all restocking, replenishing and making ever more artillery ammunition.

UNMITIGATED EVIL

I knew that the neocons were bad but their far worse than that. They are actively evil.  This shows that they are worse than evil and likely always have been. 

The war in Ukraine is all but over. There is no hope for any kind of Ukrainian victory and they have made themselves so unpleasant that nobody seriously roots for them to win anyway. All that can result from continuing the war is more destruction and more killing and the killing is pretty much one-sided these days. Nobody can attack into fixed defenses without at least a 3-1 advantage in numbers and tanks and artillery and air support and the Ukrainians don't have any of that.
 

UNFOUNDED OPTIMISM AMIDST THE RUINS

 It occurred to me as I listened to the latest on both the war in Ukraine and the disaster that swept over Maui that perhaps I am being unfair to the rotten string of Chiefs of Naval Operations that the Navy has endured for the last 20 years. Perhaps I underestimated their low cunning and guile. Perhaps they foresaw the wreckage that the neocons leave in their wake as they continuously seek every opportunity to make war on our former friends and allies and decided to castrate any potential war with China by disestablishing the Navy. It kind of makes sense since they have effectively gutted the Navy by their actions and failures and there is little doubt that the neocons and the big political donors and weapons makers are making money by the truckload fueling endless wars but I think the consensus is that any Pacific War requires a powerful navy to carry out. With no powerful navy on hand to make war it slides further and further away from their grasp and nobody can deny that the USN today is half the Navy it was in 1985.

40% of our submarines are offline for maintenance issues and our amphibious shipping takes hit after hit from the beancounters, saboteurs and shoddy shipyard work. I don't know what condition Naval Aviation is in but I have little doubt that it is in dire straits. Even at our height the Flying Hour Program was the first thing on the chopping block when it was time to economize. It probably doesn't help that F35s are making up more and more of the inventory and that there are few, if any pilots that have even so much as 1000 hours in the airframe.

The other nice side effect of making war on our friends and allies is that few of ours in the Pacific would stoop to pick up any gauntlets tossed at their feet. Nobody feels sanguine about going to war with the United States offering their firmest ever possible backing and support. They saw what happened in Iraq, in Afghanistan and they have long memories of what we did to South Vietnam when we decided we had enough and the democrat congress turned off the supply of arms and ammunition leaving the South to the mercy of the North Vietnamese.

Ukraine is finished as an American puppet state. It's out of men and tanks and APCs and cannot so much as. brush through the first line of Russian defenses and now it and the world know it. I won't be surprised if the generals take out the Ukrainian government in the next week or two and shoot them all out of hand or hang them upside down from lamp posts. Of course, the instant they start to make their move the apparatchiks will all flee to their villas in France and castles in Spain but we have become used to that.

IT WAS ALL A LIE, ALL A SCAM

 The Congress convinced itself to spend more than a trillion dollars in the effort to maintain the United States Defense Industrial Base and it was all for nothing. The military cannot repair submarines in anything like a timely manner leaving up to 40% of the submarine fleet welded to their piers and unusable in any conflict and it certainly cannot ramp up production of ships and submarines because that just doesn't work anymore despite the trillions of dollars and it cannot ramp up production of artillery, ammunition, missiles, air defense systems, Patriot missiles and batteries and is, in short left holding an enormous bag empty of any capability at all.

Not really a surprise. Various people have been pointing out how hollow all the real world achievements are given the amount spent on them. 

More than that though is that the US military idled the Tomahawk production line a decade ago because they thought they had enough missiles for any conceivable action (they never actually figured out what a war would use in terms of missiles fired and needing replacement, they just thought about how many to subdue X number of Libyas or milk factories in Somalia.)

I just heard a chat where some LTGEN had to tell DoD and possibly Congress that multiple successive war games had the United States getting whipped and whipped badly by the Chinese if there was a war. 

Heads should roll but they won't.

A CERTAIN WHIMSICAL CHARM

 I see Biden, like Obama and Kerry and the rest of the democratic herd, is funding Iran's nuclear weapon research again; this time to the tune of another $6 billion that we don't need for anything and is just lying around here getting underfoot and tripping the president. So, that said, about the whimsical charm? They missed Washington DC last time but next time? They're going to nuke it.

Oh, and for those who don't read maps, the Pentagon isn't actually in Washington DC.

OUR GLORIOUS TWO FRONT WAR STRATEGY

As a student of geopolitics, war, history and other fascinating stuff like that I remember that when I signed on with the Navy we were still affecting that we could still carry out a 2 front war. A couple years later it dropped down to our new improved 1.5 war policy which was our old stance at the start of our involvement in World War II. We would fight the Germans first even though it was the Japanese that attacked us and 'hold' in the Pacific. As strategic thinking goes, I thought that pretty clever of the top leaders in both Britain and Washington.

As the USSR faded away the whole idea of fighting a 'win-hold' war faded away too as the fleet slowly withered away to the FFGs, the Ticonderoga cruisers, the Spruance class DD and the fleet of submarines and carriers. It still looked good on paper but examined from within it had way too many cracks to paper over as seen by the almost overnight extinction of the entire Spruance class and the almost as quick scrapping of the FFGs.

The current Fleet is a handful of operational carriers, a submarine force that is reportedly sidelining 40% of the submarines for lack of maintenance, a handful of ancient Ticonderoga class cruisers, some superior of crappy looking DDG and a withering herd of truly useless Littoral Combat Ships.

When you look at the raw numbers it only gets worse. As the last 7 chiefs of naval operations wasted and frittered away naval construction by building useless LCS with endless babble about modulizing to be proficient in a single warfare area by simply swapping modules between them that would allow a single LCS to perform just one single war function so critical to war at sea. There was to be an anti-ship version, an anti-submarine version, an anti-war version and finally a mine countermeasures version. In the 20 years we've been building these things WE NEVER GOT A SINGLE MODULE.

That's troubling on many fronts but it reflects a Navy that lost its way a long time ago and has fallen off the cliff. It is essentially, unrecoverable. All that was wasted over the last 20 years can never be restored and replaced. It's all gone.

I see the gamechangers in DC are all hot and bothered by Ukraine. Why? They are hot and bothered by China. Why? Now they are all set to confront Russia over Niger. Why? None of them are of any strategic or national importance to the United States. Yet I'm sure that the idiots called neocons are really urging the Pentagon and Tony Blinker to DO SOMETHING!!!! "Send the Navy into the Black Sea, that'll scare the Russians!" "Send the 82 Airborne to Niger! That will teach those ignorant savages to fuck around with our uranium and our gold that their kids labor in the mines to send us and keep us rich!" "And those Chinese devils! They must be confronted and restrained from even looking at Taiwan so send the other Navy!"

But you know? We pissed all that away in the endless wars in Afghanistan which we attacked because one man was there. All should recall that the terrorists who took over the planes and destroyed the Twin Towers and killed thousands of Americans were all Saudi Arabians. Most people don't even know that. 

We pissed it all away in our endless war in Iraq. We'd won the war and achieved victory in about a week but, "NO said the neocons. We must stay and rebuild this country even if we get exposed for gifting our very good friends at Brown and Root billions of dollars to make roads, hospitals, generating plants because we must repair Iraq." Thousands more Americans dead and wounded and hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent Iraqis and at the end of the day we had absolutely nothing to show for it but the permanent hatred of America in both countries.

It was a remarkable achievement getting one of their own appointed Imperial Envoy and letting him rule in Iraq until he got tired of it and went home to write his memoirs.

I have seen a great deal of senseless destruction over the last 20 or so years and I cannot think of a single positive achievement accomplished by the government since Reagan got the Russians to believe that he could spend them into oblivion without ever having to go to war and they believed it.

The large cities are absolute crap compared to the last time I was in any of them and for your general information I did live and serve in Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Seattle, San Francisco and I used to pass through NYC back when I was a midshipman.

I believe that the education system in this country is worse than useless. They peddle lies and half truths, make little effort to get the kids to learn to read so that they cannot learn the truth by reading it themselves and then they turn the feral kids loose on the ones that still come to school genuinely interested in learning and do nothing to stop the endless violence or to protect the children.

The American Medical Community used to be as respected as the Military but that's all gone too.  99% of them pissed that all away by solemnly assuring the nation that a stupid paper or cloth mask could stop a virus and that 6 feet of social distancing would help and that everyone isolating themselves indoors alone and forbidding them to take part in one of the greatest medical benefits on the planet (getting out and going for a walk in the sunlight was TOO DANGEROUS.)

It's all looking pretty ruined from this peak. And I haven't touched on the government turning on its own people and declaring 50% them traitors or traitorous. Nor have I mentioned the total destruction of the economic foundations of our global dominance and the creation now of a peer global economic entity of equal or greater strength that is dumping the dollar and the treasury notes.

But be of good cheer! President Biden and vice president Harris are ON THE JOB!

YOU CANNOT FIGHT WHAT YOU CANNOT SEE

 I was reading this bit over at arkhaven and I was struck by the elemental truth. You cannot fight against what is unseen and the last 50 years of everything you know or think you know has been devoted to hiding the truth from you.                  

THE MUSIC HAS RETURNED

 I somehow got rid of the ringing in my ears and managed to sit and read to my CD. It was very nice and quiet. I enjoyed it immensely. It took some time for me to realize that I only own one CD of music. One of the nicest things about the net of things is that I have been reaching into it over the last decade/century/millennium and calling up the music I want to listen to. I'm not a purist and I listen to it as background while I'm reading or writing and the last time I bought anything that played music was back in 1984 when I got back from my first year in the Persian Gulf.

But still, 1 whole CD that I bought online about 2 months ago? That's ridiculous. Of course all the old CDs went away with the stereo and everything else I owned a long time ago. I just failed to notice.

I wrote earlier about no frigate like a book to take you to lands far away. I have the mightiest navy of books and the music is, after all, incidental.

IT IS HARD

It was very hard to turn my back on the city  I left it for San Diego a long time ago but I had moved there back when Herb Caen was writing his columns and the City was still raw and still attached to the American ideal of a place where it was still possible to start a family. 

I did.

TIME

 I literally got started with this with Lex, so a long time ago.

I just looked at the top number on the left and realized I've blogged over 6700 times.  Never expected that. Thank you for being my readers. It is a much longer time then I thought when I first started.

I SOMETIMES WONDERED

Back before tv and streaming and the internet what the hell did people do? Well it is becoming clearer every single day. They went all in for sex and had children. It seems that all of the civilized countries have fallen for netflix or roku and no longer get together to have exciting stimulating or even boring sex. The numbers don't lie. Most of the West isn't even close to breeding a new generation and none of them care.

That's kind of a shocker. Things will right themselves in time but I now understand how we 'rediscover' ancient cities or how Rome was abandoned. There is an ancient joke of some truth that says merely that the future belongs to those who show up for it. I read 'A Distant Mirror' long before I found girls interesting. It was on one of the 32 bookshelves in my parents house back when I was growing up. It described depopulation in a way that brings it home. 

One of the many reasons cities are struggling is that they don't attract new subjects, punish the ones they have and don't foster new generations. Replacing the population with immigrants is a road well traveled. I'm not aware of any civilization that did that that survived. Say what you will, Rome is not populated by Romans and Greece is not populated by Athenians or Spartans. The Gauls and those savages that lived on the other side of the Rhine are not there anymore. 

On the gripping hand I'm reading a book that makes reference to a destructive race that was wiped out by humans 85 million years in the future for practicing bad art.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

If I give it a chance it is possible that my life took a fairly sharp turn today. I will go through the usual suffereing to get there but there is pretty good place. As I said long ago, I write this for me and for my little pilot. My little pilot has recently joined us here in metroparkcentralis.

IT IS WHAT YOU KNOW

 I see these numbers and to be honest, I don't doubt them but wow!

"The 'Oniks' missiles are originally designed to target surface ships, with a speed exceeding 3000 km/h. As a result, they are difficult to detect and intercept," he said.

The same applies to the "X-22" missiles, which travel at speeds over 4000 km/h.

Most risible about that is the fact that just earlier they claimed to be routinely taking out Russian Kinzhal missiles which are said to travel upwards of Mach 10. 

I was the fire control officer on a frontline destroyer during the cold war. It wasn't much of a weapon system but it did work. and worked well. I look at those numbers and think back to the 'good old days'.

If you have something targeting you inbound at 3000 kph it is detected at the horizon by my fire control systems and hits the ship about 6 seconds later. Missiles moving at mach 10 are just invisible.

I really hate to say it but the USN has Harpoon missiles, subsonic sea skimmers that they are and for some reason the word toast springs to mind. I knew that when Soviet frigates were launching carrier killing missiles from the Black Sea at targets in Syria.

The USN will not win a naval war with Russia. It would do well to see who else has been buying those weapons because to be honest, it will be an ugly and short war.

OK I LAUGHED OUT LOUD WHEN I READ THIS.

Going to hell on the short bus

It doesn't have to make any sense

THE OLD DAYS

 I was reading a book about life at sea and then cast back to the very old days. One would think it was hard to be alone on a ship at sea but so not the case. What I was reading had to do with a young officer leaning on the flag plotting table and I was suddenly carried back to my first ship, the flagship sans admiral and staff. The staff spaces were always empty. There was an entire bridge below the working ship's bridge that never had anyone there. Same thing for flag plot. It was always empty. We had one man, the Forward Headquarters Element known as FHE who was usually an Air Force Colonel from Central Command based in Florida. One very very very rarely saw him shuttling down the passageway in his West Point gray bathrobe. Yeah, his cabin was roughly equivalent to the Captain's or the Admiral's but everything worked. In over a year that guy never once complained about live steam coming out of his shower or lack of air conditioning. He and the CO dined together in their own mess. I don't think the Admiral ever once spent a whole night aboard. We'd be in OPAREA HOTEL at 0800 and he and his treasured staff would fly aboard and disembark from the real Desert Duck and then we'd be in the same corner of OPAREA HOTEL at 1530 and he and his treasured staff would fly back to their very nice houses in Bahrain.

I had a senior peer who was CHENG on the ship when it was the flagship for 6th Fleet in the Med. He told me his stateroom was just off the lower vehicle deck and yeah, I knew what he was talking about but back when it was my ship that space was a spare parts room for the M Division.

DEAR MUSLIM

You know the urge to write Muslim rageholic phrases and point them at the White House is almost irresistible.

A license to burn.

IT IS TIME

 I wrote the Leadership  link over there on the right for a reason. It might be time to reread it. I was thinking of updating it but that will take a little time. It was lessons for my little pilot who is home for now.

THE CURRENT REALITY

 Absolutely nobody who didn't own one or one like it will get it or understand it. Kind of like America today. We were so close to gaining a real civilization back in 1968 and lost it all as the dumb and vicious  overwhelmed the entire thinking class. I doubt most people can even grasp the idea of an air cooled internal combustion car engine. 

On the gripping hand, they'll still wonder where the radiator is.

OBSERVATION ON THE CURRENT WAR

 I am watching some of the videos of Colonel MacGregor discussing the war in Ukraine and it suddenly struck me that this man, a near peer of mine, never ever so much as hinted that the Ukrainians could fill the ranks of the hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainian soldiers by drafting women, or even putting women into the war zone. Here in America we have been obsessed with proudly pointing out all the things that women do in the armed forces and how they are now 'universal soldiers' allowed to fill any combat role desired including irregular warfare forces and yet not a single one of the psychotics running the war in Ukraine has proposed putting them into uniforms and sending them to the front to engage in trench warfare with the Russians or even shoot at Russian tanks with Javelin missiles.

I'm thinking they must have some reasons to be avoiding even hinting at such a thing. I wonder how our army will do the next time it clashes with a near peer in combat. 

It really is funny though. Not one single peep from any of the usual liberal/progressives in academia, the media, think tanks, politics, policy wonks, etc, about filling the sadly depleted Ukrainian ranks with women. Believe me, when t he State starts drafting 60 year old men and throwing them into combat with little or no training, they are well beyond desperate.

A KNIGHT OF SHADOWS

 From Pemaquid Point to Fairport Harbor

It was quite the journey

We'll do it again but next time we'll stop for the night

once again in Montpelier

Our hearts are out to all those who were dispossessed or flattened by the floods of central Vermont.

We didn't see that coming and thought it was just a nightmare when the news first broke.

MANMADE STARVATION LOOP

 Europe strangles wheat exports to north Africa by shutting down all Russian exports who responds by strangling Ukrainian wheat exports which leads to hundreds of thousands of extremely violent nearly starving African thugs thrusting straight into Europe where they do all the horrible things Europeans are afraid the Russians may do in Ukraine. Sometimes one can only laugh.

KARNAK PROGNOSTICATES

 Kamala dies “suddenly” from COVID and President Biden selects Newsome as his/her replacement Vice and dies days later from complications related to a serious fall. In 10, 9, 8………..

NOW THAT’S OFFENSIVE

 I see from perusing Instapundit that his war columnists are parroting the so-called Institute for the Study of War who appear to base 100% of their analysis and coverage of the war in Ukraine based solely on Ukrainian and Russian Press Releases along with entirely unbelievable Western Intelligence sources. You know, those contemptible idiots who assured us that after 20 years of battling the Taliban we had finally crushed them and could return Afghanistan to its own “democratically” elected government which didn’t even survive a day in office while our full blown rout and retreat (mad scramble to get the hell out at any cost) cost our military and intel services every scrap of respect they’d earned in 80 years.

I’m going to read now how Turkey screws over NATO and the EU over Sweden’s entry into a military alliance devoid of militaries, ammunition and meaning and who, in the meantime, allowed millions of muslim youth of strictly military age to enter their countries and demolish a thousand tear old civilization that has turned its back on every single thing that it takes to operate and maintain an industrial civilization. 

The funny thing to me of course, is that the USA did that to them and those stupid idiots persist to this day in believing that the nonexistent and defanged US military is going to be there to pull their asses out of the crack they’ve gotten themselves into. Bad news guys, our president just let the cat out of the bag and revealed that we have fewer artillery rounds then Germany (fewer then 20,000), and that’s only if you believe the beancounters at the Pentagon. You know them, the guys that keep somehow finding billion dollar accounting errors that benefit our very good friend in Ukraine. I don’t actually know anyone there and find that I don’t care any more for them than I care for Iranians, Turks, or Afghanis.

IT’S GETTING PRETTY OBVIOUS NOW

 It’s beginning to look like the end for Ukraine. It’s also becoming more apparent that everyone has been lying nonstop about every aspect of that ongoing and pointless human disaster.

It is beyond sad.

NO SIGN IN

 They didn't have to sign in but they did, the ones that mattered. I'm willing to look up just what reasons the 3 morons put into print to try to justify making a man bow down and kiss the foot of the majority. Like blowfiies, they crawled over shit to get to whatever thing they believe passes for law.

I'm kind of hating the new computer and its reluctance to simply do the things I want it to. Been here before and yea, I'll figure it out eventually.

THERE MUST ALWAYS BE AN ENEMY

 How else will Congress screw out the money to spend of loafers and toe rags?

Russia was still a viable enemy even after she took the massive hit and decline of the heady days of the Cold War and simply tripped on herself into of, Poland. None of the currant ruling class grew up in a time when the country was not faced with an existential threat and so we needed great saint greta to give us a new unbeatable foe to wage meaningless war against because when you look at the terms, just how the hell do you beat something as nebulous and bogus as climate change?

But the Vietnam War ended so long ago that the USS Ronald Reagan just docked into Vietnam for a port visit and to be honest, 100% of that juggernaut they scared the entire west with is just a paper tiger.

 I would ask how we ended up here but it is pretty clear. All of it was generated by the elites who know way better than you. We don't deserve them. Seriously, don't deserve them. We could put forward a program to land and recover people on Mars if we just burned down Harvard and Yale and trifled with killing all the people who matriculated there.

Can you believe that a country with shit infrastructure just pissed away another trillion dollars on a completely bogus war? You never even got to smell the new money did you?

IT WAS THE NYT, OBVIOUSLY

A rather long post, sent to oblivion about a 96 year old abortionist who died today. If you can't say something nice, say nothing at all. She deserves a testament and perhaps this time I'll just leave it to the NYT.

I played with the weapons given to men. I grew accustomed to their use. Proficient even. I won't waste them on her.

the things that bother me

they're out there somewhere, damn them.

JUST NOTE THE CONTRAST

 We have Space X and we have NASA. This was NASA yesterday.

"NASA said today in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky."

NASA said that the reason behind permanently scrubbing the flight is safety and time. “Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system that we determined to pose an unacceptable risk to the pilot’s safety, and the safety of personnel on the ground, during ground tests,” Bradley Flick, the director of NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in the call. “Mitigation of that failure would take the project well beyond its planned end at the end of this fiscal year, so NASA has decided to end the project on time without taking the vehicle to flight.” 

Do go and read the article and then set a minute aside to laugh. NASA was once the agency that sparked an American on the Moon after various test phases in short order. It could no more do that today then it could select an all white male flight crew. It's way worse than broken.

ONCE UPOIN A TIME, WE ALL DATED THERE

 I see from the lower reaches a so-called bit of the news about you know, the thing.  Yes, I did once upon a time sit in the swank lobby of palace hotels back in the dark ages and read the printed teletype copy of the news as it literally came over the wire. Long ago.

It's hard not to laugh at this:

"Officials in Washington state and Vermont looked at the housing crisis in San Francisco this year and took action to prevent the same thing happening in their states: They effectively banned single-family zoning.

Those new laws are part of a wave of municipal and state efforts to guard against the worst effects of the crunch already on display in California's fourth-largest city as housing costs ballooned nationwide since the pandemic.

The solutions to skyrocketing housing costs all take time to have an effect. But officials are considering everything from mandating that cities zone for greater residential density to allowing duplexes to be built nearly anywhere statewide.

They know that if they don't do something, they could end up like San Francisco and California in general, with rents and home prices that are unaffordable for many residents and intractable waves of homelessness — fueled by drug use and mental health issues in addition to lack of housing — that place a crushing burden on city services and steer residents and businesses away from downtown."

What they ignore to death and fail to see is that people don't raise families in the heart of hate for children. Almost nobody would care to raise a family in the actual living heart of darkness and the best the wokesters can come up with is that people who won't are ANTI.

I watched and laughed as a former brother-in-law attempted to raise a baby boy in a Santa Monica hard-wood floored second story unit in a condo that they bought for about a $million. Their downstairs neighbor was a zen yogi nazi who hated the sound of their feet much less than she hated and wanted dead little conception.

SOME MOVEMENT

 I snapped this the other day while on a local road here in metroparkcentralis. As Holmes would have said, the game is afoot.

PRELUDE TO WAR AND COMBAT OPERATIONS

 I was conversing with a friend this evening and we got to talking about the current unpleasantness and the charade that is being put on over there by some fairly masterful and sly strategists and I was reminded of the old days when I knew about wars and things like that.

My first ship was permanently stationed in the Middle East and based out of Bahrain. It was a fascinating year and I enjoyed it immensely and learned a lot. When we got underway in the Persian Gulf we shifted from Sea and Anchor Detail to Condition III Wartime Steaming and 50% of the ship's weapons were manned and ready until we returned to port. In effect that meant that both Close-in-Weapon Systems were up in manual control, Electronic Warfare was up and active as one can be with a SLQ-32 detection system and a WLR1 detection system and one of the 3"50 dual mounts was manned and ready to open fire.

The only time I recall having the machine guns up and ready was when were were sweeping mines in the Red Sea and whenever we transited the Strait of Hormuz. That was also when the fire control men made a real effort to make sure the CIWS facing Iran was fully operational.

I said all that to contrast with the performance of my second ship during the height of the Cold War when it would have taken a special act of God and up to 24 hours to get a single weapon system on that ship in a position to fire while inport anywhere and a major muscle movement to do that thing while underway at Condition III Anti-Submarine Warfare which was how we steamed during ASW Operations in the north Pacific.

In contrast the various ships serving as our escort in the handful of times we had an escort in the Persian Gulf at the height of the Tanker War between Iran and Iraq could and did throw a white missile to rail and maneuver to unmask batteries for various air contacts that failed to heed warnings to sheer off. In the meantime their fire control radars were illuminating the hell out of the contact of interest.

This sort of thing could not happen in the southern California Operations Area largely because our jets hate to be locked up with a continuous wave or pulse doppler fire control radar and the Aegis system would randomly open and close garage doors all over San Diego county if it was activated too close to the coast. 

I thought about us in relation to the Navy that was surprised at Pearl Harbor on 7 December, a beautiful Sunday morning and how despite all that peacetime behavior they still managed to get armed up and inflict some damage on their attackers. That wasn't going to happen in 1985 or 1989 or anytime on that destroyer.

After I left my second ship I went to a considerably more dangerous ship and we took ship protection a great deal more seriously than just about anybody and we were dangerous but nowhere near as dangerous as the SPECWAR guys embarked on Barges Hercules and Wimbrown VII. They would and did shoot at anything and the boats were dangerous too. I would not have cared to have any of the little birds hunting me in the dark. For those who are interested, the link is pretty interesting.

The United States and NATO are acting as belligerents in a war between Russia and another European country. As far as I know, not one of them has taken any steps whatsoever to increase readiness across the board to stave off air and missile attacks or your run of the mill state sponsored terrorists the world is stuffed with. That tells me that not only are the bases, planes and ships in Europe at considerable risk of surprise attack, so is some really fundamental infrastructure which is all but impossible to really safeguard. You wonder what that is but just think what happens if anyone targets the no-longer robust energy generation and distribution systems over there, or here for that matter.

Co-belligerents are not given some special grace and waiver from attack by the enemy and let's be honest, the US Government and all of NATO have out and out declared Russia to be our enemy.

You would think someone in a position to do something about this would speak up. Unfortunately I don't think we have a single solitary man in the chain of command who is competent, foresighted and capable of acting responsibly. 

One of the things people like me who read about and study history and war is how easily and suddenly nations find themselves locked into a war that they didn't see coming. Well, one side never saw it coming but the other side had a plan and they executed the plan and if it didn't work out as expected........well, it was still a war.

We all better hope that Putin is a hell of a lot more stable than all the idiots in the West give him credit for because a madman or one who sees only going down in defeat is not unwilling to take the whole world down with him. We sort of thought that way about all the Kims in North Korea.

LITTLE IS WHAT IT APPEARS

 There were several interesting bits of scruff today from the websites of fellow travelers.

I liked this one because it really strikes a chord. What better way to vanish with your wealth.

And then there is one from the rough:

What if the whole Wagner is overthrowing Putin was all a delicious scam arranged weeks ago by all the parties and if the result of that scam is the entire enlivened, rested and ready Wagner group is now back on the road leading to Kiev?

And the last one from  Fred on Everything

"I keep hearing blacks saying how we need and open and honest conversation about race, and oppression, and the lingering effects of slavery. Well, I guess. I’ve sort of thought that too. Of course, I could guess who they wanted to do all the talking. But I have to concede, if I plumb the depths of my soul, that slavery does have lingering effects and, yes, that they are ghastly. Because of this legacy, I am very sorry about slavery."

Comrades, we are not allowed to plumb the depths of our soles(sic) because we're too shallow to know all the things kids learn in schools these days about race and sex and if their instruction is as reasoned, comprehensive and precise in other things like history and math, we don't know sh#t.

VICTORY

 I note with amusement that some people really do believe what they read and hear from the always unreliable sources (the media and our government and other western governments) and so they have now begun caroling about the imminent justified and total defeat of Putin because crazy mercenary boss not hung, drawn and quartered after standing down his coup attempt.

What part of KGB man Putin do they not understand? He will do whatever it takes to win. He negotiated a settlement and withdrawal of coup attempt and banished the so-called leader of the coup to exile. The crowd goes nuts and cheers the loss of face and inevitable ruin of Putin@!!@@!!!!!

Anybody with any understanding of how this world works knows that Yevgeny Prigozhin will soon attempt aerial flight from some high building and fail. That's how Putin and the restored KGB works. They simply defenestrate the losers who had the gall to challenge the regime. Interestingly, China is starting to do the same thing with their unwilling air passengers who leap from tall buildings like, for instance, the Wuhan Chemical Warfare Lab funded by Faucci and our Oligarchs to craft upgraded viral agents to start culling the world's population.

From my side bar over there on the right:

A Great Victory

“You may triumph on the fields of Pelennor for a day, but against the Power that has now arisen there is no victory!“

When you think about it, the Wise in conclave, decided that the thing to do after this great but meaningless victory was to advance deep into enemy territory and fight a battle that they knew they could not win.

When you look back at the SMO you will find a total absence of Ukrainian victories and yet we watch the wise in conclave continue to poor money they don't have, ammunition they're running out of and weapons they don't care about into a fight which nets them NOTHING AT ALL. What are the people of the West fighting for in Ukraine?

Nobody ever asks that last vital question about our interests in Ukraine. What are they? Why should we care if a totally corrupt state gets trashed by the country that warned them again and again to cease and desist and has a thousand year long history of sincerity when they threaten other people and countries?

TREPANNED FOR THE STATE

Things appear to be a little more chaotic than usual in the East but as with a lot of Ruin left in this Republic, there's a lot of Crazy still remaining in the East. It is reported that the Wagner military group is enroute to Moscow to dethrone the Russian General Staff. It looks a  little contrived and as I read through the various 'reports' over the last hour or two I was struck by how deeply stupid and ignorant most people are. 

There is supposedly a 50 kilometer long column of Wagner mercenaries marching on Moscow from southwestern Russia. It's a fairly industrial built up area so you would think there would be endless videos of this huge movement or even fakes of such a movement such as by for instance, substituting the movement of Russian armed forces and simply changing the names to say Wagner troops on the move, but no. There is nothing but words.

I also think who has the real brains now when it comes to military affairs and it really isn't the media and it isn't any country in the putative West. The people playing 3-D chess are all Russians at the moment and they have learned that they can fake out our entire media and 'Justice' system simply by opening their cornflakes in the morning and having breakfast.

I don't know what's going on but it's worth speculating. From the cheap seats:

    The Russians have decided to adopt a shaky image to present to the world of a regime and State in turmoil so that the idiots of the West and the poor bastards in Ukraine decide to 'strike while the iron is hot and there is turmoil and confusion in the enemy ranks.'

    Any mercenary column doing a road march against Moscow is going to get torn to pieces from the air. Air defense systems require a certain amount of stability and the Wagners can't have too many to start with. 

    It looks on the face that I'm wrong and there is a serious threat to Moscow and Putin posed by Wagner so what would Putin Do? That's right, the first use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki will be Russian nukes used on Russians on Russian soil and voila, the atomic genie escapes. One would arguably have to be a lunatic to continue to bleat about making war on a nuclear armed Russia and telling the sheep that there is no possibility of such a special military NATO operation going nuclear.....

At some point, the sheep will look up.

NUKE UKRAINE TO SAVE MANKIND

I have to admit I did not expect to hear such words in my lifetime following the end of the Cold War. I kind of thought we had mostly stuffed the nuclear genie back into the bottle and we could all, as Rodney King moaned, just get along. It's not looking so good as Europe fights the first peer vs peer war since World War II and things are not going well for the planet.  The following from simplicius substack.

 

Those ignorant twits who think that mankind is responsible for global warming can rejoice in their black little hearts if the Russians do decide to nuke Ukraine since it could see the sudden onset of Fimbulwinter and result in drastic global cooling with perhaps an early reversion to the Ice Age we just climbed out of 10,000 years ago. Of course the more sane people of earth look at cubic miles of earth pumped into the atmosphere by the odd volcano and laugh at the idea of man-made nuclear winters. Still, one doesn't like to see one of Putin's principle military advisors write an editorial for publication that suggests that an appropriate Red Line against further NATO stupidity in Ukraine would be to simply nuke the place. Again, Russia, much like Germany in World War I enjoys the advantage of weather moving from the east to the west and so could expect to watch the fallout stretch out and embrace all the idiots who decided to wage a proxy war IN EUROPE!!!! against Russia.

It does make you wonder doesn't it? What would actually happen in the throne rooms around the West if their was a reported nuclear detonation in Kiev and other cities in Ukraine at say, 0200? I don't think the United States would be able to wake up the President and since he is really the only man with the authority to actually launch nukes we should be OK. If he can't even mumble corn pop then I doubt he could communicate the launch authentication codes. Unfortunately there are 3 nuclear powers in NATO and I don't think either Rishi or Macron has even the tiniest understanding of war since they haven't actually done it since 1982 and all of those people are dead now.

It could be very energetic and glittery for awhile and maybe we get to see what a total and complete lack of ballistic missile defense means. I mean, after all, it is now obvious that Moscow has a ballistic missile defense but the rest of the world? Not so much. We had all those treaties you know.....all of which have been abrogated and abandoned over the last 20 years or so.  DC would not be a good place to be right now.

INTERESTING LITTLE PROXY WAR YOU GOT THERE

 I was just reading a bit at The Blade of Perseus and I found these words fascinating:

Given such U.S. largess, Ukraine currently enjoys the third-largest defense budget in the world, behind only the United States itself and China in annual outlays. That gargantuan expenditure is a result almost exclusively of American massive arms shipments and other NATO countries’arms transfers, all based on a commitment to help Ukraine repel Russian aggression. Officials in Russia, Ukraine, and the United States have all agreed that the war is a high-stakes proxy conflict between nuclear Russia and nuclear NATO.

Think about that. This is a scholar writing about a current ongoing war in Europe between a nuclear armed super-power and all of NATO and he is referring to it as a Proxy War. I beg to disagree. This is a Special Military Operation between NATO and the former Soviet Union and for those who elect to believe that the Soviet Union is no more, sucks to be so ignorant. As with the vanishing into history of the Russian Empire which was replaced by the Soviet Union, so too was the Soviet Union only made to appear to disappear when no such thing happened. This was one of the many things I really enjoyed about one of the stories within the Story of The Moon Goddess and the Son.

Has anybody in NATO taken the trouble yet to sit down and write out what the necessary conditions for Victory will entail in this War or its ending in some other way? They can't be imaging that the rest of the world is lapping up the pablum of the mainstream media and believe that Putin really will be ousted and somehow the end will follow a 'regime change' in Russia, can they? 

For Russia the terms of war appear to be military operations are OK for the next 20 years and they're prepared to follow the trail America blzed in both Iraq and Afghanistan for long unending and undemanding wars.

Those familiar with the genesis of World War I will see in this "proxy war" pretty much the same rotten seed that started most European post Vatican States war: Irredentism. It's funny, that word is so unspeakable that blogger spell check tells me that I have spelled it wrong.

The old Nation/States still underpin most of Eastern Europe which is why Hungary and Poland and the rest are less then interested in following Western European nation states into the sewer of mass migration and attendant destruction of the very qualities that made England=English and French=French and Scandinavian=all blonde volleyball teams I'd prefer to watch. You see it very clearly with the breakup along purely ethnic lines of Yugoslavia and again in Czechoslovakia. While they've lost the ball and the future of the development of what made them, the Eastern Europeans have not and that includes the Russians who see the mistreatment of ethnic Russians as very bad for business. It's something the newer members of NATO may bring to the attention of old NATO as the Baltic Republics try to imagine any kind of future without the resident Russian population that Stalin larded into them after his expansion of Soviet Republics.

The easterners may well better remember than us and NATO that it was us and old NATO that sold them to Stalin in exchange for peace in our time. It might be that that peace was fleeting and is gone now. Keep pressing Russia and you can hardly be surprised if they press back.

We are all well advised to seek out news from all sources at this point (always) because what we see in the western news bears no relationship whatsoever to what the rest of the world is seeing. It's kind of like the media in the US unfailingly devoting hours of coverage every night to Trump and his handful of classified documents and utterly ignoring that Biden and Hillary Clinton had far more classified material under far less protection for decades longer and yet were never indicted much less prosecuted. 

With the recent exposure of another nuclear power station to the tender mercies of war it really is time to reflect on how much longer we want this war to continue because when you sit down for one minute and just think about ending the war all it takes is for NATO to stop arming the Ukrainians with literally every remaining piece of weaponry and ammunition they have. In other words, the War could end tomorrow if a real President stood in the White House and simply told the world, "no more."

ARE ALL LAW MAKERS IGNORANT BOOBS?

 The news today has a story about the fools in New Jersey who passed a law mandating the use of micro-printing for all guns sold in the State. Evidently the thinking, if that's what it could be called, is that the scene of any gun crime will be littered with micro-stamped bullets that will lead the police to the person who bought the gun.

I think most guns used in most crimes are stolen and very few are actually owned anymore by the person who bought them. I think that micro-stamping individual characteristics on each gun won't help much and probably not at all after shooters start scattering the scene of the crime with bullet casings they scooped up at various pistol ranges. 

I used to shoot at the San Diego police range in San Diego all the time and at Duffy Town and yes we always made an effort to recover the spent brass but one could always find stray casings from previous shooters. I imagine shooters in New Jersey routinely do the same thing whenever they head out to the range.

On the gripping hand? There are something like 400,000,000 firearms in the possession of various people living in America. Micro-stamping isn't a retroactive possibility even if it ever becomes a reality. Right now the technology to do it doesn't exist.

EYE ON THE BALL

 I read a throw-away article tonight about our friends in in our nascent Space Force and there were several things that leapt out and caught my attention in fairly short order. I realize that the start of this may sound biased or prejudiced and it isn't meant to be taken that way. I have a few questions and a few comments that I don't think would go awry asked in any company including senior personnel from Space Force.

The first thing that struck me was their uniforms. Why is the Space Force wearing ground combat camouflage uniforms in a purely office environment? The WAR is over people. It's time to dress up again like a real military force and not a banana republic of stuffed cammo uniforms and seriously when/if you do go back to wearing the real uniform you'd do well to confine the wearing of ribbons and medals to those earned in the Space Force because frankly, you don't have a lot of accomplishments/any accomplishments that merit bragging. 

Lieutenant General Deputy Chief of Operations and others

They appear to have an infinite number of general officers for a force that consists of under 9,000 uniformed personnel and has no space craft, no launchers, no interceptors, no new labs and really a very questionable job that may or may not need doing via this insertion. In comparison, an Army 2 star commands a full division and a 3 star general commands Army Forces Central Command as his Navy peer, also a 3 star, commands Naval Forces Central Command and back in the day was dual hatted as Commander, Fifth Fleet and could have up to 3 carrier battle groups under his flag. Too many senior officers is a killing burden for any command at every single level of command.

Space Force is far from unique in military history and their heritage organization knows it very well and so does the Army and the Navy. The Army grew this incredible organization from nothing at all in 1910 to the vast Army Air Forces that split off from the Army after World War II and were in just about every way shape and form the complete reboot of the Army itself and their numbers and materials under their control justified a 4 star command structure similar to that of the Army and Navy. All services have ballooned their staffs and flag officer billets beyond any sane number.

But, back to the role of organizing a new force structure. The Navy developed its own version of a completely separate Navy within the Navy that did/does Navy things but under a very different operational and training environment. Again, they had the diesel submarine heritage but going nuclear marked a gigantic change in how the Navy was organized and Nuclear Power was essentially split off from the Navy standard way of doing things right from the beginning and it still is to this day. One might argue that they and the Marines also wrangled with organizing, manning, equipping, training and supplying their own operational air forces because they are very different from the Air Force.

I watched a 2 star and his brand new staff of senior captains detailed to the wasteland in order to create the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command leap into a swirl of action to gut and redefine portions of the Navy that had/have been in existence since World War II. They were clever enough and well enough supplied with senior officers from the Construction Forces and the Explosive Ordnance community that they left well enough alone but they threw themselves into completely remaking the various cats and dogs that fell into the shadows after the Vietnam War and didn't have any senior line officers to reign in the fantastic and bizarre notions of a thoroughly overmanned, unnecessary staff element 3000-5000 miles from where they did business. It was a long painful disaster that bottomed out about 7 years ago.

Whenever a new paradigm comes along and a new challenge is presented then the staff leaps into action and pursues the almighty $ with wild abandon but they are somewhat constrained in the real world by people above the level of uniformed officers who want to see the Required Operational Capabilities and the Projected Operating Environment. I'd kind of like to see what they came up with for Space Force. Is it meant to be anything more than the contracting coordinator for all the armed services various space communications and spy satellites and if it is to be more, how much more? Where do they grow the expertise over time and gain the development of subordinates to do anything more than contracting and designing uniforms for themselves?

You get a young surface warfare officer and he used to be put to work as a division officer on a ship that went to sea or if he was very unlucky, spent a year or 5 in the shipyards undergoing maintenance but the jobs of a division officer and a watch officer prepared him to be an effective department head, executive officer and with some learning, a ship's commanding officer and maybe a squadron commander and then perhaps even an Admiral. It was much the same for all the parts of the Navy and is the same for the Army and Marine Corps. I'm not sure about the Air Force.

One of the things that tells me that the poor Space Force is already buggered is the lack of input on where it will actually place its terrestrial roots and start to dominate space. It has been 3 years and they can't make the decision and move out on something as simple as declaring their Headquarters will be in Huntsville, Alabama alongside Marshall Space Flight Center and the Ballistic Defense Missile Command or in Tampa with the other big boys like Central Command and Special Operations Command or if they will stay holed up in a pointless mountain in Colorado or a hole in the ground on the Great Plains.  

Let's be honest, that was a decision that any reasonable Commander should have made within a week of appointment. Letting it drift into play means that Congress got involved and started logrolling like crazy and it all could have been avoided by making a prompt decision. Even if such a decision could be found wrong later in time, it doesn't really matter because I'm having trouble imagining how you could make a bad decision on this issue because it really doesn't matter. The power center will always be DC and everyone knows it.

Now is the time to keep a good watch out and see what they're up to beyond redesigning uniforms.