THE DEATH OF SLEEP

 I enjoyed the book once I figured out that it was actually a cluster of books. I like the title now for the simple reason that I think it may well be the next target of the know-nothings. They have successfully made the great mass of people and all media people terrified of simple weather and weather related phenomena. This was OK back when people were recommended to have a healthy concern for tornadoes and hurricanes and killing cold in white-out conditions and nuclear winters. However it is pretty obvious that the shills who use science to terrify the ignorant haven't yet breached the sleep barrier. No doubt they'll pick up on it soon and try to convince people that they sleep too much or some other silly thing that the ignorant will trip over themselves believing since they believe everything they hear.

And finally, we live now and forever in a Banana Republic. I didn't really think even Trump Derangement Syndrome would carry away an entire grand jury. I guess I know less about New Yorkers who live in Manhattan then I thought. When exactly did they stop living in our Republic?

THE NEWEST VICTIM OF STALINISM RUN AMOK

I sure hope the Stalinist justice department doesn’t treat this American spy like our justice department treats our patriots that were invited or duped into thinking they had an actual right to visit their nation’s capital.

THEY CALL IT LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD

 I can't embed twitter films, yet, but our friends at Powerline sure can.

AMUSING

 

Well, I thought it was amusing.

DON'T SAY DIE

 Seriously, just don't say it. Nobody actually means any of it when you actually think about it. There is no Diversity in those organizations and they are some of the most out and out racists in history with their White excluding events scattered all over America where BIPOC is the thing and no others need apply.

Does anybody really think DIE commissars want inclusion? Seriously? They all seem to go out of their way to exclude Whites and Asians in favor of blacks and mixed up people who aren't actually sure what their color is but know it aint White. And when it comes to intellectual, religious or political diversity just include out all the people you hate as a paid up life time member of the BIPOC and DIE regime.

I had to look up what the E meant in the latest term of fascism. I thought it was for Exclusion but it turns out to stand for equity. As far as I can tell, equity means one is supposed to ignore all the raping and murdering and mugging, and piling on, and beating up people while flash mobs steal every damned thing in the shop because equity demands it. Is equity some sort of God? Should I capitalize it? Just who is it who thinks they have the power to force people to accept other people with no standards of civilization at all, as fully paid up members of a civilized society?

So as you go about your day please be careful and refrain from DIE. You're way better off if you stick to civilized acceptable behavior and treat all the other people equally based on their merits and nothing else.

WHAT NEOCONS THINK IS WHAT CHINA THINKS

 With Xi's visit to Putin in Moscow we see the two allies coming closer to finalizing a deal that will see a significant part of the balance of power in the world shift from the West to the East. China's economy is in something like freefall right now but its military power is peaking as it hasn't for almost a thousand years. So, while some in the West can see that the neocon strategy viz Russia is to arm Ukrainians to fight Russians to the last dead Ukrainian and continue to shovel weapons, money and resources into the fight to drag it out and weaken Russia, China can see that the longer the West subsidizes Ukraine in a meaningless and ultimately useless fight with Russia, the West is itself drained of weapons, ammunition and money even as its banking systems teeter on the brink of insolvency and the economies never recovered from the triple whammy of killing Nordstream, Covid self-destruction and the peace dividend and the green nude eel.

As with Germany after the Anschluss, China doesn't actually have to wage or physically go to war. With the massive might of a fully militarized state and an economy that can support full rate production of all weapons and munitions it can continue as it has for the last 30 years and simply snip off bits and pieces of the areas around it. So it's fleets of fishing trawlers and ships can strip every fish from the Vietnamese EEZ and do the same in Thailand and Australia and Micronesia and the Philippines and nobody will lift a finger. It can collapse markets anywhere in Asia and it will face no reprisals. Who would go to war over fish? Who is to say what crashed the market for that particular good or this item over here?

We used to have a concern about the norKs. Our concern was that the Kim's were pretty addled and pretty adamant that they were not going to pursue a separate peace with the rest of the world as the Soviet Union and the PRC did. Nope, our concern was that before they finally went down to utter collapse in the cold and dark they would use that giant military machine they spent the last 70 years creating. There are thousands of norK artillery and missiles that can easily range on the Greater Seoul Metropolitan Area from the Chorwon hills and all along the river and DMZ. We wondered if they would start with chemical weapons or high explosives only and then start to throw in the gas shells when the rubble started to bounce so they could get the ones in the vast underground subway and tunnel systems that lie under the GSMA.

I don't see China as that addled and as I said, they can get everything they want or need without resorting to violence. Everyone knows that's the prerogative of the most dangerous critter. China is now the most dangerous to its neighbors. It doesn't help us much that at some point the Powers that Be in China concluded that their nuclear arsenal was not really all that scary and decided to quadruple it overnight. Kind of makes one wonder how many nukes the ROKs have and how many the Japanese currently have.

In the meantime, China gets to watch as we divest ourselves of warships, send our ammunition to Ukraine and have at least one nuclear attack submarine that hasn't left port in over 5 years as it "waits for maintenance" at one of our dwindling number of shipyards.

THEIR RUSH TO BILLION$

 Why blacks everywhere would be foolish if they didn’t immediately establish residence in San Francisco since The writing is on the wall plain for all to see. San Francisco is going to give billions of other peoples money to blacks and, it goes without saying, to all those crazy mixed up weasels who think they’re black but really aren’t.

Act swiftly though because literally everyone is doing it.

RUSSIANS LAUGHING TO DEATH

 There was this wonderful headline this morning to wake up to. I could actually hear the Russians laughing hysterically here in Metroparkcentralis when they saw nato-looking-to-send 300,000 troops-to-the-russian-border. It would take NATO a few years to scrounge up 300,000 troops much less weapons, tanks, missiles, artillery, attack and transport helicopters and all the other necessary gear. In fact, I’ll bet NATO doesn’t actually have 300,000 troops to send because I can’t see us doing it and I can’t see Turkey doing it which just leaves the rest of the utterly defenseless, unmanned, under-equipped and useless Europeans to pull their crap together. 

Remember the German Army in the 70s and 80s when Tom Clancy wrote Red Storm Rising? Those guys were the 300,000 man trip wire and they were armed to the teeth and motivated. They’re all gone and so is every bit of material they had back then. There was a peace dividend donchaknow.

EASY LISTENING

 I heard this on NPR the other day. It's a wonderful bit of uplift.

A SPLINTER OF THE RED ARMY

 I find it amusing to watch as all of NATO minus the United States is fighting a proxy war against a tiny splinter of the Red Army in Ukraine and has basically run out of ammunition,  missiles, tanks, fighting vehicles and men. And all that without actually engaging in combat against the Russians. The Russians must be laughing themselves to death at the idea of going up against all of NATO minus the United States. It is shades of NATO's minus the United States, war against the rump state of Libya. They ran out of missiles and bombs and had to come crawling to US to resupply them.

Young Americans are not signing up for the U.S. military and certainly not for any of the NATO countries. They don't want to find themselves standing under an open sky defenseless while a rain of variable time fuzed artillery starts to bloom over their heads and that is what it will come down to. 

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO's founding document, says that any attack on a NATO member in Europe or North America “shall be considered an attack against them all.” That was written back when it was like-minded western democracies and the enemy was the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Now NATO contains a number of former members of the Warsaw Pact and has encroached right up to the Russian border despite denying that it ever would. In short, NATO lied. The young generation don't see any reason to fight and no reason at all to fight within a 'woke' pseudo-military structure like all of the NATO militaries today.

This is roughly what NATO will look like if Turkey allows Sweden to join. If Sweden does join it may well be at the expense of losing Turkey, a country which is just as autocratic and authoritarian as any other NATO member but which enjoys excellent relations with Russia from whom it bought its latest air defense systems.

A couple of observations about that map:

1. Isn't it remarkable how much Ukraine resembles what Ribbentrop called the dagger aimed at Germany's heart back before West sold out Czechoslovakia to the Germans?

2. I don't really think NATO would actually come to the defense of Hungary because the woke West hates Orban and by extension, Hungarians.

3. Look at the holes in NATO where people are not happy with NATO membership:

Ireland, Serbia, Byelorussia, Finland, Sweden, Moldova. It's hard to believe that the various non-Serb republics of former Yugoslavia would send more than a tank platoon to any NATO war since they would leave the rest as home guard against a Serbian attack. Ditto Greece with regard to Turkey.

I read a Foreign Affairs journal article the other day that talked up what Putin blew by coming over all territorial aggrandizement. As I read  the article I couldn't help but wonder in just what reality did the author live since it bears no resemblance at all to the real state of the world. Russia isn't the one on the ropes despite what you may see, hear and read in the main stream media. They have engaged 100% of NATO with what amounts to less than a tithe of their military and they're not engaging in Strategic Warfare.  You will notice if and when they do. I mean seriously, all they have to do is let the Ukrainian reactors go into the red and melt down and western Europe loses in perpetuity. Remember, the wind favors the east.

From, German geography  

"Germany lies in the prevailing wind zone called the westerlies in the middle latitudes. The westerlies are wind currents that come from the west and blow into the east. On the animated map created by NASA, you can see that there are both winds coming from the east and the west. On the east side of Germany, the wind currents are coming from the Caucasus region and blow upwards through Poland and the Czech Republic into Germany. On the west, winds start from the Mediterranean Sea, go through France then into Germany. Both the eastern winds and the western winds meet up at the northern tip of Germany where they speed up at the northern Atlantic and the Baltic Sea. These winds then pass the United Kingdom and create a swirl not so far away from Iceland."

The war in Ukraine will or has consumed every material of modern warfare available in Western Europe except fighter aircraft and those have gone on the table now too as Poland sends some clapped out old Migs to Ukraine and hopes to replace them with cheap western modern fighter planes. NATO is truly that balloon picture it has resembled since the end of the Cold War. One tiny prick and it will burst.

How is it that the American press keeps telling us that Putin is dying of some unmentionable disease and ignoring the quite obvious evidence of the president's mental failings and feeble-mindedness? I watched video yesterday of Putin visiting a helicopter factory and he seemed fine to my eyes. Joe on the other hand can't walk up stairs unaided and wanders off whenever his handlers let go of him.

The Russians never shut down any of their production lines for weapon procurement while the West has shuttered all of our except the F35 and various submarines There are no more Tomahawk cruise missiles coming off the line. Same thing for bombs and artillery. There are no more M1 Abrams tanks or M2 and M3 Bradley fighting vehicles. There are no more F22 Raptors, A10 Warthogs or FA-18s. There may be more F15s and F16s out there but we are incapable of building replacement aircraft to replace anything like the loss rate if they are engaged by modern air defense systems capably handled.

We certainly hope that the idiots running NATO and the US military can refrain from pretending that they are a match for Russia. It will be very ugly if they decide they can "win" a war against Russia and the worst way to lose to Russia is to incrementally engage in a war until one day it is a full fledged shooting war.

TRUTH IS FOREIGN TO THEM

 I get a kick out of this:

"National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the drone posed no threat to anyone and was operating in international airspace.

"The United States will continue to fly and to operate wherever international law allows, and it is incumbent upon Russia to operate its military aircraft in a safe and professional manner," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Wednesday. 

Meanwhile, Russia has denied that its pilots acted unprofessionally or struck the drone's propeller. 

The Russian Defense Ministry spoke with Austin about the incident and said the drone ignored flight restrictions in the area posted by the Kremlin. There was also a report the drone was flying with no broadcasting transponder and headed toward the Russian border. "

When it is all said and done, say, in about 50 years, it will be clear that the United States was flying its drones in direct support of the Ukrainian military and passing on all the battlefield intelligence they needed to target any Russian military or commercial activities in Crimea (Russia) and in the occupied Black Sea coast portions of Ukraine. It is simply a lie to say that the Reaper was just up there over the Black Sea minding its own business, harming nobody when it was viciously and unprofessionally attacked.

Ask yourself, how would you feel about the Russians performing Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance around Pearl Harbor and Guam? I remember how America used to freak out when they found out the Soviet Union was pushing its spy ships closer to our Maritime Defense Zones and our reaction.

This is well into the, "play stupid games for stupid prizes" phase of getting yourself into a shooting war and you standing around after it blows up in your face wondering, "what did I do? What did I do?"

CHINA'S DEPOPULATION BOMB

 The talking heads here in the West seem to conflate China's new destiny as some sort of disaster for China. They are thinking like Westerners and I don't think they see this quite the same way that the government of China does. Unlike most of West Europe and Japan, China does not find itself inexplicably heading to extinction due to a failure to reproduce. The government in China looked at the future course of history if nothing was done and enacted some fairly drastic measures to make sure that Malthusian nightmare would not come to pass. They may not plan well but at least they had a plan.

Here in the West we seem to be heading toward extinction at an accelerating rate if, again, you actually believed the talking heads know what they're talking about or aren't just lying. Here there was no 'government' plan to quell growth but some people did have a plan. They wanted a more perfect world; one without man and so they took over the education of the educators, the teachers of the young, the young minds and the young radicals and pointed them all at the horrors of the future with global temps spiking up in the fusion range and now that the possibility of thermo-nuclear war was firmly behind us have kickstarted a brand new one out of nothing at all and you don't even know who they are.

I do. We do.

Every single western government policy and plan is predicated on making fewer humans in the future and they'll use any means at all to get that future. War, disease, famine. Look at them. Let's turn off the gas in the winter and hope people freeze to death. Let's shut down electrical generation plants we absolutely need for an industrial economy and hope that people without jobs don't die. Let's start a war with Russia and scare them into thinking it's an attempt at extinction.

The nice thing some people noticed some time ago is that the future belongs to the people who show up for it. 

Some interesting reading dating all the way back to 1987 written by John Maddox Roberts and Yoji Kondo.

 

CONSIDERING COMPULSION

 Watching the events today as the rioters clashed with the security forces I was struck by one very significant difference between that country and this one. In that country military service is compelled and every male is drafted into a minimum term of service. At their root, all the demonstrators rioters know that their day will come when they will find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with the security forces to keep the riot under control. In that kind of environment the riots never really get within an order of magnitude with what we suffer from here in the United States. The rioters hate the pigs police and security forces and know that they will never be in a position to side against the rioters.

Kind of makes me rethink mandatory compelled military service.

On the gripping hand, on my first jaunt to Korea saw the height of the riot season and while Korea had compulsory service from all males, the men had the option. IIRC it was one year in the military or 2 in the security police. Any demonstrator would know, intellectually, that they might never stand in the ranks since they could always just join the military and live on the border for a year. I may have the terms of service wrong but it is the character not the details that matter.

On the gripping hand, the nail that stands too tall in a mono-culture gets hit the hardest. They don't have the ferocity and idiocy that antifa terrorists demonstrate reflexively whenever they get in a push comes to shove situation.

None of it would work in modern America. Who wants 80% of the lazy, fat, drugged, weird, 18 year youths of America in the military? Not the military. Even in the olden days there were sailors in the security force that I would never issue a weapon too under any circumstances. Everyone knows those guys.

Who would round up and induct and ensure some tiny measure of fairness when it came time to draft men? It would be one of those terrifying dilemma that afflict the left. They of course would want to make sure that all liberals and lefties were excused from service and then the smarter ones would begin to mull over what it means when the only people in the armed forces and security forces and the police are, well, conservatives or people who don't stand with the left. Yes, their heads would explode as they tried to work that one out.....again. Don't worry, last time they figured it out everyone agreed that there was no further need for a draft and it wasn't universal since only about 1% were inducted.

I don't think anything will work. The left has destroyed and gutted all the little means and measures adopted over the centuries to unify a civilization on this continent. Everything from the schools and colleges up to the Boy Scouts has been taken over, filled with shit and then despised by everybody. I mean quilting clubs excluded members based on their political leanings and the entire left rejoiced in canceling everyone they didn't like when they ran things like twitter.

It's too bad. I thought it was a great place to grow over the last 60 some years and I grew up all over it.