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.

THIS IS AMUSING

 From the source of all news comes this bit which I find hilarious.

All anyone from China needs to get into the United States is a college transcript and a willingness to pay for any Graduate School to study advanced chemistry, metallurgy, rocket science, acoustics, computer theory and programming and any other thing under the sun including things like Forward Looking Infrared and all aspects of high technology.

Why go to the trouble of trying to sneak in when you can just get off the plane from Peking at SFO and catch a cab to Berkeley or Stanford?

EVERYDAY LUNACY

 Ignorant peasant girl claims world ending. Entire United Nations agrees and decides to bill you.

Ignorant Peasant Girl Shouting at United Nations about End of World

ON NATIONAL STRENGTH AND WILL

 A study of history shows that the United States rose to dominate the world after World War II due to its transcendent wealth and manufacturing and maintained its dominance even as the politics of the nation slipped to encompass outright stupidity at the very top of politics and saw the jobs and manufacturing flow out of the United States and soon followed by the wealth. Where the international currency had been dominated entirely by the dollar it isn't anymore thanks in large part to the stupid and insane policies of the Fed and the US Government as it tried to use $hegemony to trim our rivals (not our enemies, just rivals) and so we come to what is left at the end and it isn't what you think.

There is very little remaining of the military I spent 30 years in and my father spent 26 years in and his father spent 30 years serving.  The debacles go all the way back to our involvement in the dissolution of Yugoslavia and persist right through Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom and encompass all the myriad little SNAFUs along the way such as Mogadishu and the rest of Somalia and Sudan and Iran.

The officers selected to run our military services were all selected by the handful of officers approved by Bill Clinton who then went on to pick more like themselves for the 3 and 4 star commands which led to an overwhelming number of idiots, morons and incompetent boobs at the help of all 4 military services and things are only getting worse at an accelerating rate because the blinders are off now and the People can see what a travesty military service has become. General officers like Flynn and Boykin  aren't just rare these days, the very conditions to bring them out are gone because they've been stamped flat. Only officers like former LTGEN Clapper will thrive in this environment. There should not be any room at the top for liars like that.

It says something when the entire United States of America can only build one nuclear submarine at a time because it doesn't have enough qualified skilled craftsmen to build two nuclear submarines at the same time. Did nobody see that coming? The surface warships designed and built for the last 20 years have been pure crap Littoral Combat Ships which can literally perform no military duties whatsoever because not one of the mission modules they were designed to operate (supposedly) has ever been embarked and deployed. Not a single module in 20 years. Included in the crummy design category must be the Zumwalt class of extremely large gunboats and the bleeding-edge-tech aircraft carrier, USS Ford.

The Army is short more than an entire infantry division because youngsters failed to materialize out of the old South to fill the ranks of a service that has largely lent its name, image and heritage to vilifying every single aspect of Southern pride and engaged in a never ending witch hunt for some white supremacy in the Army.

It looks like all the pillars of national power and prestige have been deliberately broken and thrown down by the people and the government running this country.

I wonder where they all plan to refugee to when this country "suddenly" goes 3rd world and no longer has electrical power 24/7 and fewer and fewer working roads and nowhere near enough fuel to fire the power stations and the cars and trucks that make this country possible.

It's probably time for a long hard think about where we're heading as a country and what we can do to shape a future that is better for all of us. Perhaps there is no future in being the global superpower and we should just stop doing it. We might say the same thing about many of the roles we have found ourselves inserted into over the decades.

Maybe we could end the war on drugs? With the vast amounts of lethal concentrations of fentanyl entering the country now, it's just a matter of time until the addicts all kill themselves and what the Hell, states are busy legalizing all the fun drugs while still restricting access to things like sudafed....

End the war on poverty. We lost that one so it might be time to initiate a new war that deports the impoverished to someplace else such as California.

End all subsidies for public education at all levels from pre-school to College and let the maket forces sort out what college graduates we really need. It will probably turn out that we need about 1/20th of the ones we currently graduate from 4 year colleges.

We could collapse the entire FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA and the Homeland Security operations/intel centers and go back to the old school way where we only spy on our enemy, not everybody.

It bears some thinking about.

YOUR ATTENTION IS INVITED

 The Manhattan Contrarian does a fine job of explaining what is likely to happen when the latest witch hunt carried out by the Justice Department actually makes it to a Court of Law.

Sort of looks like yet another goon from Justice is playing fast and loose with the actual laws in another stupid attempt to get Trump.

THE FIRST CRACK IN THE DAM?

 I haven't been able to keep up with the news of the world of late so must have missed the notification when it came out about the withdrawal of one of the rushed into production fake vaccines. It appears that the Johnson and Johnson not-quite-a-vaccine has been withdrawn from use in the United States because it can cause fatal blood clots in women. I wonder how much longer before the blinders come off and the people in charge accept that they rushed into production a never tested batch of drugs and tried to limit all liability in their rush to prevent a fairly harmless disease.

They'll never admit that the conspiracy theory bunch were right to question or even refuse to believe the lies told about the so-called vaccines. It kind of stands out though when the alleged vaccine doesn't provide protection from the disease and doesn't prevent its spread and that all the usual health tracking information systems that used to be used as a guide to the effectiveness or deadliness of the medication itself has been so thoroughly corrupted it has lost any meaning.

AFTER RATHER MOMENT

What can I say? It's instantly funny and describes modern news perfectly, face down, blind drunk, indolent, overdressed and poorly worded.

A Metaphor for CBS News

AMUSING LITTLE TROLL

 In a remarkably amusing little contretemps, law trolls are suing the defense department, army, navy, Air Force, marine and homeland security boobs demanding that they promptly offer up the no doubt voluminous files each has on white supremacy. Since what they’re demanding to see only exists in the diseased imagining of the liberal progs, they’re unlikely to find the response to their insane and rabid demands at all satisfying.

I think it’s fascinating that I typed this all in lower case and somehow my iPad decided to capitalize Air Force but none of the other armed services. It’s an interesting contrast between the armed forces with force in their name and those without force in their names. 😎

It also spelled ipad the way it likes to spell.

THE WAR AS IT REALLY IS

 I'm sure few if any of my readers, either one of them, really believes a single word out of the same Pentagon losers that brought us the rout in Kabul and the equally dismal rout in Sudan as they talk about how the Ukrainian's armed with shiny new NATO tanks and IFV are crushing the Russians and driving them out of their positions in Ukraine. I had just finished reading the pleasantly deceptive soothing nonsense some former British tank commander had to say about how the Ukrainians with their spiffy new tanks kicked ass in the battles yesterday.

After that I decided to look at how it is really going in Ukraine and let's just set aside the diversion that is the failure of a dam in Ukraine that hurts the Russians far more than it inconveniences the only thing that matters to the thugs running Ukraine. They care about money, their bank accounts in Switzerland and that's about it. Unlike the idiots in Kabul, I'm sure they have very fast, very secure transportation already lined up and waiting to get them to Switzerland before the people tear them limb from limb for what they've done to Ukraine with NATO's help.

If you're interested in what is really happening in Ukraine now viz the War you could do much worse than point your browsers at: Siimpilcius.

As he points out, the reality is that nobody has fought a peer hi-tech war since NAZI Germany was crushed in 1945. For those who didn't study the war in the Pacific at all, it was pretty much over following the battle of Midway except for convincing the dead to lie down and stay down. With the Germans it remained dicey up until the Battle of the Bulge in the West although by that point the Russians were well on their way to destroying Germany.

I read the article and it took me back to reading Julian Corbett and his vision of the "uncommanded sea" which is what he used to describe a condition where no power actually exerted sea control and dominance. We are seeing that in Ukraine with mostly air denial weapon systems and then the fields of mines, artillery, ATGMs everywhere and one side running out of manpower, munitions and will. 

I wonder who in NATO will come up with the idea of striking invisibly in the night at one of the nuclear power plants and causing Chernobyl II even if it means years of radioactive fallout sprinkling all of Western Europe. They probably figure it worked out just fine when they wiped out the Russian gas lines to Europe in a secret mission nobody is at all curious about and what do they care if the excess people they whine about in the West all start to die of radiation poisoning?  It's not like the elite Davos attendees are going to be there and surely it will bring an end to the farmer's complaints that the government is taking land out of production for netzero goals that are idiotic and pointless. After all, if the population goes down and the land is too radioactive to farm, win win for oligarchs, right?

ON COVID

 It hasn't gone anywhere. It's still out there and it is still just as virile and dangerous as it ever was. Oddly, now that we have had our entire economy shattered by the governments' reaction to this pandemic fraud and thousands of lives disrupted and torn asunder, tens of thousands of private businesses ruined to death by being shuttered by order of Big Government and fascist Health Departments, nobody hears about it anymore. It just seems to have wandered away.

If there was a time for hunting down and tarring and feathering those responsible, this would be as good a time as any. Oh, and let us not forget their big ally in lying about every aspect of this fraud, the media. They should probably all get shoved in front of trains by those people that seem to get away with that sort of behavior all over America. I'm trying to recall what made those people so unique. I'm sure it will come to me.

ARM YOUR DRIVERS

 Whenever I read or hear about highly trained security specialists this video always comes to mind. 

“Our drivers are military, law enforcement, those who have been in the private security world for over five years. That’s the minimum we require,” he said. “They can see a situation brewing before it happens.”

 

 So I get a kick out of this story from Atlanta.  If the driver doesn't shoot himself or the passenger, some thug with a gun will find this an expedient way to get another weapon without all the boring paperwork the Feds require for handgun purchases.

FREE ASSOCIATION

 The final horrible death of 'free association' is kind of amusing in its grisly girly way.  It seems there is a women's spa in the socialist people's rethuglic of Washington that wanted to restrict entry to biological women only this is unthinkable and tramples all over the rights of weirdos making up the local state human rights commission's most protected subspecies of lunatics and so the idea of allowing any gender to exist without all 999 other genders in a space of open nudity is forbidden by law.

It's a silly case but the men of my generation, here and there, must be laughing a bit at the idea of yet another icon of the women's movement being taken apart with the same insanity that was used to destroy all the men's only associations back in the seventies. What comes around, goes around.

On the other hand, I happen to believe fairly strongly in free association and exclusion for any damned reason at all and if you don't like it that's perfectly fine since you're not welcome there. I can't help but notice that exclusive groups of people rich enough are never trifled with on the basis of their associations and exclusions.

THIS IS DAMNING TWO

 My first attempt at this went sadly awry so here it is again using screenshots which hopefully won't vanish like the first attempt.

How does any government official stand up in a court of law and answer these questions without lying or making a complete fool of himself and a mockery of the Constitution?

THE ALL POWERFUL STUPID IS STRONG

 I am up late reading. It's what I do. I was reading this interesting tidbit and came across this:

 

"Meanwhile as welcome as Western support to Kyiv has been in supplying arms and ammunition in halting Russia in its tracks, the vast and bewildering variety of tanks, helicopters, missiles, drones and artillery sent to Ukraine has highlighted cracks in NATOs standardisation and generated lessons for future joint defence procurement, said Stacy Cummings, GM Manager at NATO’s Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA). In particular, she revealed that incompatibilities in NATO standard artillery ammunition had been a wake-up call for interoperability. “That was probably a bit shocking for the nations that were donating ammunition to Ukraine to find out if they didn't donate the system and ammunition at the same time, the donating ammunition wasn't usable in the system”.   

She advised: “What I think is a major lesson learned out of Ukraine is that we in NATO need to look across the different types of systems that we're supporting and figure out ways to come together to trust each other's development to be able to buy military off-the-shelf equipment, that our allies and our neighbours has already designed, developed and tested. She added “This would go a step further, which is to look at legacy systems that have been donated, and not to replace them with more legacy systems, but to come together to design and develop the next generation of weapon systems in order to support NATO, with fewer variants with fewer differences, so that we can become more affordable,"

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 So we've basically been partners in a military and political alliance with a single enemy for only the last 74 YEARS!!!!!!! and we still haven't reached the point where we have any common anti-tank weapons/ammo, artillery/ammo, missile launchers/missiles and we're still just figuring that out now as we spew arms and weapon systems all over Ukraine?

That shows are remarkable, one might almost say, French, disregard for combat realities. I see the European Space Agency is grounded temporarily because, like NASA, they continue to persist in funding the deep pocket contractors who build incredibly expensive/mostly useless systems long after the need for them has passed away and cheaper and far more efficient/effective systems are available at  less than half the cost.

I wonder what any decent newspaperman would find if he poked his nose into the defense plants rearming Russia and compared them to the wastelands that are NATO rearmament.

SORT OF IRRATIONAL

 I see from the Russian News that the United States Air Force declined permission for one of it's Air Force Bases in Nevada to pay for a drag show on base. 

"The Pentagon has called off a drag show which was scheduled to take place at an Air Force base in Nevada to mark the beginning of Pride Month on June 1, according to a Wednesday report by NBC News, citing US Defense Force officials.

The event, which had been signed-off on by US Air Force leadership, was subsequently scrapped on the orders of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who informed the organizers that it was not Pentagon policy to approve funding for drag shows to take place on Air Force installations.

They would be instead permitted to hold the event off-base if they chose to do so, an Air Force spokesperson said. It was set to be the third annual drag show performance held at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in recognition of LGBT+ members of the US armed services."

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I find this kind of amusing since I was an attendee at one of the very last lingerie shows at the Officer's Club at NAS Oceana a long time ago when I was attending the Guided Missile School down the road. Can you imagine the size and shapes of cows the Pentagon and military leadership would have if someone actually proposed bringing back attractive women to put on a nice lingerie show today at any military installation in the world? They used to have some really fine happy hour entertainment back in the day.