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