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LOAD SHEDDING

Oracle is relocating its offices to Nashville. It's hard to believe how hard the democratic legislators and governors have worked to drive even hi-tech out of California. I remember thinking how nice it was when I arrived in San Mateo over that bridge from the East Bay and drove past Oracle. 

This story reminds me of the days long ago when I shared an apartment with my brother who worked for Home Fed Bank back in the mid-80s and he would come home day after day, week after week and tell me that Home Fed had written off another 1 or 2% of assets as nonperforming and I finally asked him, "when does Home Fed go out of business and he was shocked at the idea that his bank could fail as so many of the S&Ls were going under. Yeah, Home Fed failed thanks to the Fed changing the rules (Unexpectedly!!!)

I saw the other day that California went from a $100 billion surplus to a $73 Billion deficit in a year. They've done this again and again over the last few decades and kept getting bailed out but at some point, the State is going to get written off by everyone as a non-performing asset and it will collapse. I don't know what happens after that. It would be nice to think that flamethrowers will be involved but I kind of doubt we'll be that lucky.

Oracle HQ in San Mateo

 On the gripping hand I remember learning from my new colleagues at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command that many of the employees of its predecessor (NAVELEX) when told that they were relocating to a new headquarters in San Diego, elected to stay in Northern Virginia rather than take the move and live in America's Finest City.

And then there is the sad truth about Texas. I’m reminded of the quote by General Philip Henry Sheridan: “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.” 

One of the funniest speeches I ever heard happened at the Expeditionary Warfare Conference where the Deputy Commander at TRADOC interspersed little unrelated (seemingly) snippets about Sheridan after the War and some of the problems with fielding truly long range weapons. I'll have to write it down and share it.

A LITTLE JAUNT

 Good news! NASA has approved the mission to explore a bit of Titan. The spacecraft will be launched in 2028 and arrive in 2034 and then we will see what a proper moon truly looks like. 

Artis's rendition of Titan from the surface

 

WAR NEWS

 As I watch PBS Weekend News tonight I am struck by the NATO defense ministers all clustered around a picture of Saint Volodymyr and regaling him with stories about how NATO is leaping to defend Ukraine against the toothless tiger that Putin isn't. NATO fakir Stoltenberg is declaring how enthusiastic all of Germany is to stand united with Ukraine and is talking about sending one Patriot battery. I'm not clear if they mean the 24 volt DC battery or maybe a missile named Patriot or possibly some vehicles and radars but no missiles. These are diplomats and they are all trained and experienced liars so they could be doing something else. Nothing is ever clear.

What I never see from these champions of Totalitarian European Governments everywhere is any sign at all that they have a path to victory. I think if they had one that they'd at least try to share it with the people who are paying good money to force more killing and dying in the mud in Ukraine. Just how does Ukraine endeavor to persevere after being choked harder than Jeffrey Epstein in his jail cell?* 

The last time we confronted the Russians in a belligerent mood we had a massive Air Force, Army and Navy and most of our major cities in the United States had Nike/Hercules Anti-Aircraft missile batteries all around them. You can still see them in some places like Angel Island, Tennessee Valley. They were everywhere. Where are they now as we embrace war again? Are they all in Europe and Ukraine or did we leave a few spares in Saudi Arabia to defend Aramco?

*A wonderful phrase I picked up recently watching Hardthrasher's video on youtube about the Me-262

MORE FOR WAR

 The House caved and voted to support spending another 100 Billion $ that we don't have to fund the imperial wars in Europe and the Middle East. It's not really a surprise.  As usual, this was an interesting update and from there, this 'explanation'.

The problem boils down to the simple fact that America's heart is not in any of these wars. Nobody cares which means that we are simply drawing out the agony for people who really do wish that the war would end. This applies much more to Ukraine then to the 100% terrorist population of Gaza but even there the necessity to fund Israelis to exterminate terrorists is not a winning proposition and will never end successfully because one thing we can guarantee is that without US support and commitment neither side will finish off the other and that in the end is what is going to bring it to an end. 

To try to pitch the supplemental as somehow replacing war stocks in the US is stupidity. That was what all the trillions of $ in Cost of War supplementals that were off-budget for all 20 years of our imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan was supposed to do and what it should have done but it was all stolen, misappropriated, wasted, lost or embezzled.

There is no sense of commitment at any level for any of these adventures which means we should really do more than question why we continue to support them with the feeble funding that we screw out of the taxpayers. It would be different seeming if we just told the Fed to print off another 100 billion $ and sent the defense contractors pallets of cash like we sent our friends-the fiends who run Iran. Can you imagine any American bank accepting pallet loads of cash deposits without quibble?

For all I know though, quibble is an extremely rare delicacy and essential to keeping bankers alive after the bathing in the blood of virgins no longer works to keep them young or even vaguely humanoid.

The saddest line in the supplemental was about dry docks and the Defense Industrial Base. The reason that so many of our ships are welded to the piers and why so few submarines are being built and repaired boils down to the lack of skilled and qualified workmen who know how to build warships. That's how low we have gone. Now all our shipyards work like NASCO or Todd Shipyard or Southwest Marine which is to say extremely poorly and badly.

IMMUTABLE

 It is one of the very few places I've been that hasn't noticeably changed since I got there or since I left.

From the end of my street looking south to La Jolla in the far distance

KALEIDOSCOPE

I am listening to The Art of War by Stephen Coonts and I'm up now to disk 5 and it just now struck me that this was written back in a time when what the author is describing would have been seen as a very bad thing. Now? Well, not to spoil it since this is just the first 7 chapters but,

The Director of the CIA is murdered getting into his boat.

The former head of the FBI and neighbors are blown to pieces by a gas leak in his building.

Air Force One is brought down, crashing and killing all onboard but, mysteriously, not the president.

As I looked at that a second ago I was like, yep, yep, yep-darn.

Times sure have changed since Clinton left office.

WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?

 You read the words, "based on a study conducted at UC Berkeley" or, "based on a study conducted by Harvard researchers" and you simply ignore the rest of the article because you have no confidence whatsoever that the research is accurate, repeatable, true or meaningful?

In the old days I would have given research preceded by those words the same weight that I would have given to a Rand study or analysis.

END OF THE BEGINNING?

 As I look around the world tonight I see a number of countries are now basically involved in overt warfare with neighbors or other countries they truly hate and despise. This has happened before and likely always will but I wonder if there is some sort of mystical tipping point where when the number of countries exceeds the X do other countries feel free to get all bellicose too and attack their neighbors or the allies? 

You have to admit that based on press reports many of the countries in Europe have gone barking mad and all in a froth to attack/wage war on Russia and the thing I wonder about is, Why? More than that, what do they plan to use in this attack on the petrol station with a burger joint? The diplomats (if one can refer to the idiotic fascist morons like Verhofstadt as a diplomat) are thoroughly enraged and demand that others immediately suffer and die until he is happy. He wants Europe=NATO to attack Russia. Various idiots in the rest of greatly expanded and much less useful NATO also want to carve up Putin and don't seem to be aware that he is the one holding the knife while they're just holding bags of hot air.

It's interesting in that South and Central America are flickering on the point of collapse of civilization as they know it. Brazil is back in the hands of the lunatic left, Venezuela is a mad dog and is either at war or just winding one up that no one has ever heard of when they elected to try to slice off the oily part of Guyana and it is only a matter of time until a coup topples Milei in Argentina. Oligarchs never like the likes of that guy and they figure they screwed up massively when they followed Peron and don't want to do that again even if it leads to a Chavez moment in Buenos Aires.

At home we have an enormous collection of dedicated fools and jackasses who want to fight China. I have yet to hear even one single reason why we should provoke China over any little thing and to be honest, there is no major thing out their that is soiling our relations. Nobody in America really cares about the South China Sea and by that I mean NOBODY CARES AT ALL.

As I've written before, I'd be a little more concerned if any of the warmongers actually had any kind of military legs to stand on but the only remaining powers are the rational ones acting in their own rational best interests. The odd man out may be Israel but I don't know enough about that but I will speculate,

there is a field of study that very carefully looks at trends and projects them into the future. One of the trends that affects the state of Israel is all too easy to project and it isn't pretty. Yes they got the neighbors all calmed down and the divisions between the shiite, sunni and the outright nationalists like Egypt have limited the scale of the conflict in recent decades the trend for induced war from far away has been accelerating without letup and shows every sign of doom. You saw the Iranian overt attack and now you know, if they had the capability to drop a weapon of mass destruction on Israel they wouldn't hesitate for a moment.

You see, they were once a pariah and then they got something incredibly damaging on the people that run the Democratic Party and they started to reenter the fold but then the West threw them an incredible bone and jacked up Russia and China to the point that they decided to go all-in to destroy the existing Bretton-Woods World Order and Iran was one of the first to join them. 

Now Iran has an air defense system that doesn't just rival America's, it exceeds it by dozens of orders of magnitude. There is nothing at all between any enemy missile or drone and any American city except vaporware. 

What changed in the world since 2013 that has a significance that nobody even knows about because they don't understand it? A private company relaunched the space age and anything that can put a payload into orbit can put a warhead anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes.  You better hope they don't share their technology or know-how with anyone.

It's time to consider that the old ABM treaties are dead as doornails and ponder what if anything we can do to provide missile defenses in America.

WITHOUT SOUL OR FEELING

 I think it’s amusing that the team that always does it also fails to notice how destructive it can really be when the other real enemy inserts its sleeper partisans into any organization and uses them to take over or take down the organization from within. The history of the 20th Century is rich with examples of organizations toppled by their own arrogance and assumption that everyone is really all the same deep down and inside.

The Catholic Church

Mainline Protestant churches

The American Library Association

NAACP

ACLU

US Military

Every single public and most private universities

The list is really endless. Just look what they did to Boeing and NASA.

WELL NOW WHAT?

 The ruling elite have engineered a war between nuclear powers now and it seems that somewhere in Israel a room full of ruling elites are pondering just wtf do they do now. Much like the feckless idiots in Europe who seem to want a war with Russia or our own feckless morons who seem to want a war with China, the Israelis have got what was wished upon them. Now what? I'm curious how a nation of 6 million with endless frontier of nothing but hostile powers is going to wage any kind of meaningful war against Iran.

Here we may see the 'sleepers' awake and not just promise to murder the Bakersfield City Council in their homes for not passing a binding resolution supporting the terrorists murderers in Hamas. We can hope that they will focus their effort on those who deserve it most. You know the people in New York City and Washington, DC, aka, the usual targets but I suspect they'll go after the infrastructure (power and water supplies and critical bridges). Everybody just saw again just how easy it is to make a steel structure collapse and we are a nation of elderly steel bridges and buildings.

We'll see how the hysteria plays out in the UN councils and in StupidLand which meets in either Strasbourg or Belgium.

Between the two of them, Iran and Russia control just how much of the worlds fossil fuels? Interesting question. We will see if the pirates can shut down the fuel deliveries out of the rest of the Gulf that didn't buy into pipelines across the Kingdom (good friend of Uncle Jo Biden) and see what the oil port of Yanbu is up to in terms of millions of tons of crude oil shipped/month. Pipelines are safe of course. They're inviolate. On the gripping hand, the Houthis started this drone attack 'malarky' when they started targeting, attacking and destroying Saudi Aramco oil production and distribution systems a few years ago. You remember our response was to question the Saudi's request for PATRIOT missile systems.

For those watching at home you are about to experience the shrieks of denial as the ruling elite suddenly understand that somehow the bad actors in the Pentagon and Intel Community since 2001 have destroyed 100% of America's forcible entry capability, gutted the Marine Expeditionary Force (also gutted almost 100% of the Amphibious lift needed to get the Marines to the scene of the crime) and of course gutted the Maritime Preposition Forces and the old POMCUS sites. NATO isn't a shadow of what it was even in 1996 as it started to discard 100% of the War Reserve materials that USAREUCOM had maintained for  generations. 

I had a friend back in San Diego who was Supply Corps captain who was called to Hawaii every year for a month or two to conduct a complete review of CINCPAC's ammunition requirements and capabilities. I never asked how bad it was because it was classified and because I didn't want to know. Years earlier as a fire control officer I watched as we cross-decked our cruise missiles from ship to ship because we didn't have nearly enough to outfit every launcher we had even back in 1985 and of course, we shut down our cruise missile production lines years ago and don't actually make any of them anymore. The clever bean counter solution to the problem was proposed and acted on. They reasoned that if they slashed the number of ships that carried cruise missiles, they could reduce both inventory and the number of cross-decked missiles.....

Americans and Westerners believe that there is this enormous latent power that we can draw upon to save ourselves with and it's not really worth convincing them that what the Congress and BRAC started at the end of the Cold War has left US much less capable than when we started World War II. Historians will know that we started to rearm shortly after great Britain but without much intensity until Pearl Harbor. All of that then latent war production is long gone. We shipped it over to China like the Globalists and ruling elite desired along with little things like our ability to make steel.

We are looking at a world at war and we have almost nothing forward deployed outside of a tripwire in Korea. We have less then 100 warships to tangle with the navies of Russia, China and Iran and how many of them have a sleeper in the crews that knows that all it takes is one little fire to destroy a nuclear submarine or a big deck amphibious ship? Used to wonder if the sleepers were Russians but now I wonder if they are Russian, Chinese, mercenary, muslims, communists/anarchists or EcoFreaks.

I cannot imagine the process for conducting a background check on a person for a TS clearance today. Just what abhorrent and disgusting behavior in a person's background now would disqualify them from being granted a security clearance. Off the top of my head, nothing. Our secrets now are our enemies secrets or at least their morning reading materials with breakfast and coffee.

I wonder how soon we will hear the ruling class decide that bringing back the DRAFT is now necessary.

Interesting times.

I WON'T BE SURPRISED

 It almost defies belief just how badly democrats and their bureaucrats in the Deep State and State Department can fuck things up in the international realm. If you thought things were bad with a war in Ukraine, war in Gaza and a wide open border invasion in the United States, you ain't seen nothing yet.

If the Iran decides to go all belligerent it will be because it decided that it could, once again, get away with it. Where in the world would they come up with the idea that Biden, Blinken and Austin are too feckless to carry off a successful deterrence or war? Really the headline says it all.

I've seen some people reference this attack and just causally drop in to the mix that the IRGN killers were in either the Iranian Embassy or a next door Iranian Consulate and therefore!!!!!! Causus Belli!!!!!

How quickly we forget, the USAF bombed Chinese Embassy in Belgrade but we only killed a small handful of young Chinese journalists who were sleeping in quarters in the Embassy while the USAF destroyed the building. But read the whole thing and then ponder the dimwits out there thriving as they malign the IDF for hitting civilians in their wildly out of control and disproportional attacks in Gaza. The below is from our friend at A Large Regular.

How has the entire Western World raised a mass of morons who think that somehow war is waged by only targeting men bearing weapons and just them? War is way more elemental than that which is why sane people go so far out of their way to avoid it. Our political class seem to see a profit in it though so that means that war will invariably and inevitably come for us now.

Going back to Iran at war with the IDF, you remember a little while ago I mentioned that there was a time when I only thought there there was one crazy maniac who was likely to see nukes as the go to weapon of choice and wouldn't hesitate? Yeah, that was Kim but the Mullahs are even worse than Kim and they have demonstrated an endless willingness to kill innocents on par with the USAF. They now have thousands of sleeper agents here in the United States and millions more on call. You thought the Tanker War saw a spike in oil prices? Wait until the Strait of Hormuz is completely closed and trapped in the Gulf are USN ships than now have no way out.

ANOTHER MODEST PROPOSAL

 I think every NPR host/hostess, servile purveyor of socialism, should introduce literally every single person as "an extreme right wing" or "far right" maniac of some sort. This includes interviews with the likes of the ghost of Madeline Albright or Hillary Clinton and also people like Al Sharpton. Every other time each person is mentioned but not interviewed that person needs to be described as either a racist or a closet/classic racist. Any NAACP or Southern Poverty Law maniacs must be described as supporting white supremacy and white privilege since it is after all their shtick and how they make their living. You know, racism.

You know the howls of sheer outrage could power SPACE X orbital launchs for the next 30 years if noise alone was needed for liftoff and orbit.

LOUD AND CLEAR

 There is a hateful class running this country and its media liars who regularly lie to the people every day. One thing that ought to make that crystal clear to everyone in this country and the world is a refusal by ANY PRESIDENTIAL candidate to debate the issues of the day with the candidate(s) of the other party.

If BIDEN refuses to meet in the open and debate with President Trump then the doors have blown off the scam we still call democracy in this republic. We have really become a 3rd world shithole.

INTERESTING

 Did you know if you type antifa.com into google it comes up WhiteHouse.gov? 

Figures.

DO YOU SEE IT NOW?

 This is not new but have you considered what it means to you personally?

That's right, the Godless morons who hate Life but hate Western Civilization more than you believe, are ready, willing and able to tamper with your food supply and are telling you that you cannot do anything about it.

I'd be very careful where I shop and I have concerns about the middle passage all my food makes on its way to the grocery store. The freaks will get jobs in food processing and handling and if you thought finding spit or detergent in your fast food was a real possibility or even food tainted with ptomaine and other diseases, just think about all the things that people without morals or conscience can add to the food you eat.

And here you thought that buying Tylenol was not without risk.

AWE AND WONDER

 I wonder what form of asymmetric nuclear attack platform will be used to incinerate parts of Iran? I haven’t really looked into their version of our SSBN and have no idea if they possess long range missiles. 

I also wonder if the US is positioning forces to reflect such a strike on the real axis of evil.

There is nothing so awful in the world today that it cannot be made infinitely worse by ‘decisive’ actions from the likes of Biden, Harris, Austin and Blinken.

It is probably not a good time to fly or visit DC and our whipping city.

And what irks me is that I’ve really been looking for some positive news to reflect on here. 

I'M STILL AMUSED BY IT ALL

 I think it is really amusing that literally everyone knew a certain thing would turn out exactly as it did except those most fanatically devoted to bringing about its obvious demise. Here is the story that announces that the Golden Gate Park funtime at Hippie Hill won't come off because, wait for it....

That's right, all the State Sponsored pot growers and sellers went broke trying to sell pot the only way that the government of California knows. In other words they were undercut and gutted by a marketplace that doesn't admit to and rejects the entire idea of paying taxes of any kind.

You knew that's how it would end too, didn't you?

 

HAPPY EASTER

 One of the many Happy Returns.

 

We hope you have a happy and safe Easter.

CONSIDER DYNAMIC STABILITY

There is no detectable difference between a fanatic and an idealist who believes he is working for the good of humanity.

Rest assured, if you're not passionate about something you like, there are a thousand people who passionately hate it.

My new favorite from a commentator far away, "Say what you want about Hitler, at least he killed Hitler."

Why do so many horrible creatures go unkilled even after people know that they are evil unbound?

If a mob rounded up the top 1% of the wealthy and their families in this country and guillotined them, nobody would raise a finger to stop them. Hell, you could say that about every graduate of the Ivy League for the last 50 years.

Thanks to Biden and his friends, we have invited the mob. It is now just a matter of time.

THOSE UNPRINCIPLED THIEVES!

 It will come as no surprise to anybody that the US Government will leap in to assist those unprincipled thieves living in and around Baltimore just because some lousy ship ran into their bridge and will therefore divert maybe hundreds of millions/if not billions!!!!! to replacing that shoddy bridge and maybe even providing some kind of income for a scant handful (union members only I'm afraid) of people who lost their livelihoods when the Port was closed by force majeure.

Those rotten Tards in Washington will undoubtedly look to seize and divert that money from the righteous do-gooding enabling in Ukraine and Israel and that's just insufferable!!!

I'm sure the Department of Justice is going after the bridge builders who made that flaky shaky piece of junk flimsy ass bridge because no bridge should fall over after getting nudged by a ship of any size. I mean they'll do that just as sure as no Democrats were involved in the project.

A MAJOR FAILURE

 The ship lost power and went dark for a couple of minutes and then the lights came back on but it had swung significantly off course before the lights came back on which means the rudder must have been put over while there was power and when it went out there was no power to bring the rudder back amidships and then the ship regained power and a minute later lost it again and hit the bridge. 

The entire truss section of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is gone. Scroll over to see where the bridge is just gone and you can watch the collision.

A SIMPLE FAILURE

 I enjoy reading the Powerline Blog and never really had any problems even back when one of the staff was a complete imbecile. They usually rip the news out of the facts presented by the mainstream media and leave enough meat on the bone to enjoy getting the sense that one knows what's going on. Other times it is pretty clear that they still don't quite understand a significant portion of the electorate and that they don't care that they don't understand it. This pretty much sums up their thoughts on our current uniparty.

Mr. Johnson is making the same mistake that he and they always make because they are blind to what is really happening in our one party government. A lot of people have figured it out now and know that the uniparty is in power and that the only way to stop it is to actually STOP IT. They want the wrenches thrown in the gears and they want it to stop moving. Mr. Johnson and the rest of the liberal rethuglican wing of the uniparty simply pretend that by maintaining the appearance of being able to control the out-of-control government that they can somehow exert some moderating influence on it.

Every sane person sees and knows that this isn't so. The very instant that it appears that by united action and a firm stand the situation can be brought under control, the G03dadkdamgaond#@@!!!!! cave and do exactly what the maniac liberal wing of the uniparty demands and the liberal turds of the fake side of the uniparty think the real conservatives should just suck it up and shut up and keep playing ball. It's maddening. 

They do it every single damned time.

A TIME FOR CONCERN

 The Russians have just trashed the electrical power grid in Ukraine and done it in a more or less permanent way. They actually blew the generators apart this time instead of just attacking the power distribution grid. There is a wonderfully informative timeline of the the effects of war on operating nuclear reactors in Ukraine. It's worth a look and so is this: It gets going for our purposes at about the 6 minute mark. 

Nuclear power station require reliable electricity in the event of reactor shutdowns. It is critical that the cooling process be maintained even when the reactor loses power. That's what killed Chernobyl and Fukushima. They lost the power and thus the ability to cool the reactors which either exploded or melted down.

FINGERPRINTS

I don't really know if I hope that the people that just attacked a Moscow theater did a thorough job of cleaning their fingerprints off the operation designed to goad President Putin to lash out very strongly at whoever he thinks/believes is responsible. Sadly, in this fallen age, I think even the palestinians could leave a convincing enough evidence trail leading back to Langley that a child could follow it there. I don't doubt for a second that if Putin does find out who is ultimately responsible for this it will be followed by a tidal wave of unstoppable missiles.  

Right now I know of 3 men (nuclear power world leaders) who could push the nuclear button without a qualm or flicker of humanity. It used to be for generations that we only had the one madman and people left that madman alone or paid whatever was necessary to keep him in the game.

AND BIDEN AND DEMS LET THESE PEOPLE IN OUR COUNTRY

I just saw this from one of the blog links.

If I lived in Martha's Vineyard I'd take that very seriously for several reasons. I don't believe that Governor DeSantis has a sense of humor and he's already done it once before and there is nothing that can stop him from sharing the gustatory delights of Haitian BBQ with his good friends in Massachusetts. I would vote for him for President if he simply sends all of Florida's illegals to Massachusetts. I cannot think of any state that is more deserving of such enlightenment and civilizing influencers.

NOW UNLEASHED IN GAZA

CRAZY BARKING MAD

 The latest broadside from the Navy and Department of Defense reflects the infected mind that dominates Washington, DC and the political elites running the country. It is summed up by two different documents that recently flew over the transom. They lay out in no uncertain terms the 'self-licking ice-cream cone' that is so thinly disguised as Defense planning by the people that are lining us up for the next unwinnable war and let's be honest, these guys are masters at losing unwinnable wars. Their record since the Korean War speaks for itself. It has been an endless stream of pointless and stupid wars that we failed to win. The last one was a first class debacle on par with Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

Let's take a quick look at the Defense Department's proposal for the next 25 years of building USN capabilities and then look at what the Commander-in-Chief Pacific has to say about the near future and current events. It's eye opening.

Here is the Report to Congress on the Long Range Plan for Naval Construction and here is the takeaway I mean to give for this work of complete fiction.

    "Lastly, the DoN recognizes the significant strategic opportunity presented by the
Australia, United Kingdom, and United States (AUKUS) trilateral security pact. AUKUS
will advance peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region and strengthen deterrence by
enhancing all three nations’ technical capabilities, expanding allied fleet capacity, and
deepening cooperation. "

You can see that the intent of our expansion of fleet capabilities will lead to all good things and deterrence too! Now let us have a look at what CINCPAC lays out in his testimony to Congress on the doings of the Pacific Area under his benevolent command:

You probably noticed how America building up all of its expeditionary warfare capabilities and lodging them just as close as we can to China constitutes peace and good will but China exercising the same sort of defense buildup is a Peril to World Peace!!!!!

I think there are some hidden adults pulling a few strings out of sight from you and me and mostly from the them because the morons running things openly have to be seeing that they don't begin to have anywhere near the capabilities to fight a war against China or Russia without losing outright in a matter of weeks and they have to know that the Norks will launch nuclear attacks at the first sign of US crossing the Demilitarized Zone. As badly made and directed as you might think their ballistic missiles are, they won't have any trouble hitting the Greater Seoul Metropolitan Area and Japan is almost impossible to miss.

Speaking of them both, these are another two countries that the ignoratti insist on calling our "allies". Let's be very clear here. They and Israel count on us but they are no more an ally of America than NATO or the EU is our ally. Should we get stuck into a fight anywhere else on the planet they will be conspicuous by their total and complete absence.

The time for working out the little details like for instance, just what are the conditions under which we declare that we won and proclaim our victory over Russia or China or both of them? Be specific. Use plenty of words to describe the conditions in full so everyone can see just what it is you are setting out to do by jumping into a war with either country and how you mean to extract us from it after losing 40,000 to 100,000 people and battle groups and most of our Air Force. Enquiring minds want to know.

Let's not have another Milley laying it out before Congress saying absolutely nobody is/was to blame for the fiasco of our withdrawal from Afghanistan or the tragedy that was Iraq. In a much larger war, our war aims were stated upfront and in no uncertain terms and what's more our generals, our allies and even our enemies knew what they were and we saw them through to the end. Let's not putter about muttering 'regime change'. under our breath even as we're getting our asses kicked by hyper-sonic missiles and an endless stream of ship-killers launched out of China.

Our secret masters who are somehow refusing even now to open the spigot and fund a massive weapons procurement and military buildup have decided that there is nobody left in the Pentagon or in the hinterlands that can be trusted with such a thing. That's really sad when you think about it and when you realize they saw the writing on the wall right around the time they saw the political animal, General Wesley Clark try to start World War III in Yugoslavia and Vern Clarke strip mine the Navy of ships and talent. I hope our "allies" are giving it a lot of thought because despite the news and rhetoric coming out of our dismal media and think tanks, the situation on the ground, in the air and at sea is bleak and growing bleaker every day. 

We may be the last people in America who know that we never formally ended the war with China in 1952 and that is why we still keep US forces in Korea and Japan to this day. We could not win a war with China then and we cannot win a war with China today. 

Endnote. When you read the bits I pasted in from CINCPAC note that the People's Liberation Army and China started to increase the size and complexity and the sheer numbers of their forces as they watched the United States collapse internally by the twisted machinations of those we call the neocons. They saw an out of control America that did not hesitate to throw its armed forces into action against literally every country in the world. Maybe next we'll look at the countless and endless cruise missile attacks and all the rest of them that we know about and we'll wonder forever who killed Kennedy and just who blew up the Russian-European gas pipelines in the Baltic.

Thomas Patten Stafford

 Thomas Stafford stepped into the clearing on Monday. He was one of the most select group America ever fielded. I was looking at his various biographies this morning and was struck by how different it is from the biographies of the men and women of similar position but significantly less stature and I decided to include this biography of the man because it enables links that let you scroll through the related topics that concern his life and times.

Thomas Stafford (right) shakes hands with cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in the docking tunnel between Apollo and Soyuz in July 1975.Credit: AFP

 When you read the link to his biography and I urge you to, I think you will find it fascinating at how routinely close he came to death in pursuit of the technology and capability we now view as so routine it no longer even makes the news.

Thomas Patten Stafford (September 17, 1930 – March 18, 2024)

One of the last of the Pioneers of my times.

RADIANT

 At a little workshop down by the reservoir the other day. Looks like a sliding ladder from a fine old library.

The metal work is amazing.

WHERE I LIVE AND BANK

 I stopped at the bank to get some cash for my new barber and found this friendly notice giving us plenty of time to prepare for the coming ‘sun blotted out’ darkness. Good thing, eh? Wouldn’t want be standing around in the twilight and have to kick myself for not getting to the bank before darkness falls.

THIS IS AMAZING

 

A MODEST PROPOSAL

 What if every public school was forced at gunpoint to comply with the law that permits every teacher and every student to vote to expel one student every month? Those expelled could not attend any normal school and would have to go to jail school for at least one school year before being allowed to return to a real school.

Teacher votes would each equal ten student votes. There would be no other weighting. The student with the most votes every month would be drop-kicked right out of the school district and might as well start reporting to a parole officer.

I found that 10% of the people that work for you really are 90% of the problem and things go much more smoothly when you either get rid of that 10% or keep it under complete control. I think every place would work better if they simply pruned that 10%/.

COULD IT BE EASIER

 Instead of being made to look like world class jackasses in Gaza wouldn’t it be easier to dump all the supplies we mean to give to the terrorists into the sea off the coast and let the terrorists wrangle it ashore?    That would give the evil fucks something useful to do before they all get slaughtered. Alternatively, simply dump the goodies just inside the gate to the land of overt terrorism and tell them to distribute it. Problem solver, that’s what I am.

I used to be part of the security forces for Joint Logistics Over the Shore and I cannot imagine how horrible this is going to be. On the other hand just watching the USFK staff go berserk trying to dodge responsibility for any and all aspects of FREEDOM BANNER every year where we did JLOTS was endlessly amusing to the rest of us that were not actually members of any Korea based headquarters staff.

Watching CINCPAC goon it up in furtherance of whatever the goal of the week was during COBRA GOLD was also good fun. Telling that jackass in Songkla that given the revised parameters of the exercise we were all planning on returning to San Diego and advising our bosses to decline the opportunity to participate in the exercise was really the best fun I’ve had at a meeting of the minds. He h kept thinking we could put up an elevated causeway using under 20 people and without bringing Amphibious CB ONE and their gear. “ Have you considered leasing all those vehicles and equipment  here or contracting with the Thais to do all that?” 

Us repeatedly telling him that this is not the point was wasted. Oddly enough, all the stolen sealift was restored and we did the exercise much like we did it in Korea but without all the damned drama.it still blows my mind that they simply got rid of the amphibious CB in the east coast. What in the world do they do with all the money they get for a navy every year?

OLD LEARNING

 Try to understand war before you are forced to experience it.

MODERN COMMAND AND CONTROL

 President Biden assured the nation that he would build a port on the Gaza coast and that it would require no American boots on the ground!!!!!!!!

At the JCS in Top Secret conference the generals are trying to decide how best to implement this order and it isn't pretty folks.

-'I think we can satisfy the Commander's Intent by just using our Chinese made boots. The soldiers already wear them, they're the only boots we've issued for the last 13 years and I think it is safe to say they are not American....'

-'No General, I disagree spoke up another General, simply by buying them Chinesium boots they became American and we can't walk that away.....'

-'You're right chimed in a 3rd General, the only safe course of action is to send the troops in barefoot.'

"All in agreement say aye, aye. The ayes have it. General, tell the soldiers that they are forbidden to wear boots during the port construction and cargo offload operations in Gaza."

One general was heard muttering about flipflops as they all filed out of the room and went to lunch.

REVERSION TO THE NORM

 As we idly watch Haiti burn we cannot but be struck by how things always seem to go awry and then for some reason they return to balance if left alone....or at least if we can keep our fingerprints off it and don't look like we had anything to do with it. I realize that this is impossible given the feckless idiots we have running and manning the State Department, USAID, the CIA and the other nullwits and halfwits that tend to barge into any given situation and make them orders of magnitude worse. That said, have a look at the demons in our old United Fruit Stomping Grounds and further south and wonder with me as something extraordinary is happening.

The Argentine's appear to have elected a President who is essentially nothing at all like any other president in history and appears to be doing a bang up job of bringing order out of the chaos engineered by every clown government since Peron. In El Salvador the people have done the same thing and made enormous and dramatic and positive changes to what used to be a hellhole.

Contrast with Venezuela which is now a hopeless basket case and playing the games such places always do and trying to make their problems disappear in a cloud of smoke and angry meaningless war. And finally there is Haiti, there is always Haiti and to be honest the rest of the Caribbean isn't looking so good these days.

Did things work and appear more civilized and like one could do business and survive the day to day activities of a normal state back when people like Samoza and Baby Doc and Noriega were running their little pocket empires of graft and corruption? I think so but then the Congress got involved and screwed those countries so thoroughly that I'm sure some people thought could be fixed only by the likes of the Clintons and the likes of Obama.

We know how that turns out. Still it won't turn totally to crap until Europe goes all feckless and stupid like they did in 1914 and again in 1939 and again in 1956 and again in 1968 and again when the Wall came down and for a brief shining moment everyone stopped demonizing the Russians.

What's that you say? Europe even more stupid and feckless now than all those periods put together, laid end to end, stacked on top of each and covered with napalm?

You don't say.

KIND OF FUNNY

 I scanned this bit of fluff and found it amusing.

"One of Harvard University’s former top officials has been named in two ethics complaints over his law firm billing the school $42 million while he held office.

The Massachusetts Attorney General is looking into whether or not Harvard was right to pay law firm Wilmer Hale the money while partner William Lee was a member of the Board of Overseers and director of the Harvard Corporation, the New York Post reported.

The news outlet reported Thursday “that the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers and the state’s attorney general have been sent formal complaints accusing Lee of ‘possible conflict of interest by trustee/director with pecuniary interest in service provider to Harvard.’”

“Lee, who graduated from Harvard in 1972, served on the university’s board of directors from July 2010 to June 2022, and was senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation from 2014 to 202

 Every single bit of cachet and raison d'être that the Ivy League has/had is about making connections to allow its graduates to feather their nests at the public's expense through insider deals and trading on favors. Now they notice that this looks unethical? 

You know at some point these rocket scientists are going to begin to wonder why NASA is still procuring services from United Launch and then there will be some serious law suits and NASA people going to jail and it won't do much good to point at Congress and shouting about how "they made us do it!"

NEW SIGGINS AND POORTENTS

 I hear that the Resident is planning on ordering the Army to launch a seaborne invasion of Gaza. Just think! The idiots that brought us the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan are going to rush to supply the enemies of man and God in the Holy Land.

After looking at history for one and a half seconds it occurs me that not even an imbecile can screw this up. They can do it just like the Aliyah Bet did it. God knows we have plenty of scrap ships we could load up with some MREs and meticulously preserved old blankets Joe’s people found on some reservation somewhere and run them aground all over the Gaza shore.

A NEW WAR INFLECTION POINT

 There are some people that view what is happening in Gaza very much the way they are viewing what is going on in Ukraine and the Black Sea. The two are not really connected by anything except the exposure of the latest generation of war doctrine on display in each area. The United States did away with it's old fashioned and sensible approach to urban combat a long time ago by simply refusing to engage in it or to believe that it mattered since they controlled the cities that mattered. The Israelis are showing a massive contempt for all the whiny shibboleths about not inconveniencing the 'poor innocent civilians' and it shows that there really is no other way to root out dug in combatants who couldn't care less about damage to civilians and/or civilian infrastructure. At heart they are like the Nazis and the Soviets. Destruction is an end to be desired and not something to be eschewed or feared.

The other massive difference that is showing up is happening in Ukraine where the introduction of the totally expendable one-way targeting and killing drone is shaping the new battlefields of the 21st century just about the way most of us predicted. Admittedly, I'm still waiting for those killer drones to start making an impact on the political scene in various cities in the West. Let's be honest, if a cook with a limited bank account and access to some RC parts can cobble together killer drones from kits so can enemies as sophisticated as Baader Meinhof or the Red Brigades or the IRA or all those scary White Christian nationalists. Of course the ones that will be the first to thrust themselves out onto the killing stage will be the likes of anti-fa and our fresh crop of home-grown muslim discontented death to America types.

With any luck they'll practice and hone their skills closer to home and use their local officials as training aids. 

On the gripping hand, one cannot fail to notice that the most involved party of rabid killer lunatics don't seem to have any luck at all with this sort of modern warfare. Even the houthis can make it work somehow but palestinians in Gaza appear to have failed to launch even a single successful drone attack. I join the rest of the world in hoping that that is because somebody like Elbit has deployed a system that makes that impossible.

I still like that the first time I read about this it was fiction.

I wonder how the generals can sleep at night knowing that they have no more defense against the Kinzal and Zircon missiles then the British had against the V2 in 1945. As far as I can see there is nobody making any effort to counter the threat if it can even be countered. This might be one weapon that will always get through simply because the detect-to-engage loop is an unbreakable barrier that cannot be resolved without directed energy weapons of enormous power. Hell, we might be going back to Terrier-BTN type defensive tactics and wouldn't that be a nightmare. It wouldn't work though so they probably won't try it again....

SO WE'LL JUST DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN

The Supreme Court has unanimously declared Colorado is stuffed with corrupt, stupid and inept imbeciles and has also tossed out their ridiculous democracy-saving idiocy of disqualifying a man running for office because....butt hurt. What this means for us in the saner parts of America is that just as they do with their moronic and endless butt hurting about guns, the democrat morons are going to continue and redouble their efforts to disqualify Trump from the ballot in every other democrat controlled state because.... yeah, butt hurt. 

It's like the stupid never ever ends with these morons. It's so disheartening and yet it is a pure and honest reflection of the level of fail that our public education has instituted across this nation for the last 50 years that so many people can be so ignorant of the Constitution and Civics and never suffer so much as a hint of shame or public embarrassment for being so damned stupid.

Every single moron sitting as the RULERS OF COLORADO LAW were just told that they are quite possibly too stupid to breath without assistance. Will they resign in shame? Hang their heads down? No, they'll just moan about how unfair it is. Yes, some of the idiots voted against it but it speaks volumes that they could fail to articulate the law to the other Colorado Supreme morons who supposedly had more than a passing familiarity with the Law. That level of inarticulate arrgle barrgle is enough to disqualify them too.

I look for California and Illinois and the rest to press on with their efforts to shed Trump from their ballots in the same name of saving democracy.

I MIGHT TUNE IN

 Thursday night is Biden delivering the State of the Union Address. I once would have presumed that it is broadcast but nowadays it may be something I have to pay a subscription fee to watch in which case it will go unwatched by me. It will be interesting to see:

1. Biden actually talk for 6 minutes without flubbing it dramatically and declaring war on the USSR.

2. Biden flail around for more than one or two minutes trying to say "it" just exactly right, like Bill did.

3. What the most imaginative reason offered is for Biden's no-show and non-appearance at the SoTU.

4. How many times the reason is officially changed by the White House's Speaker to Morons.

 There!!!! Light and fluffy like I wanted it to be.

AMONG THE OLDEST ADVICE

 I read bit of fluff and laughed because the grown up in me knows that there is literally nothing Trump can do to the Deep State. He cannot fire even one of them because they're all in the Civil Service and therefore untouchable even if they commit felony crimes and anger the people. He can't send them to Adak and nothing Alaska ever did deserves finding itself buried in a sea of incompetent thuggish bureaucrats who seem to occupy every government position from GS-9 up to the SES.

For the little scaredy cats who don't understand that Trump is harmless I'm sure they're plotting like crazy. They forgot the ancient advice about never leaving a live enemy behind them.

On the gripping hand there is always the hope that Trump will come in and tell the top 8 levels of all the bureaucracies that they're redundant and tell them to go home and take away their government cars, their government jets, their government helicopters and all their stationary and mail accounts and let them sue him in Court to return to the office because he can tie them up in court for years and then do what he should have done and just ignored the court.

If rule by decree is good enough for Biden and the left, it is good enough for Trump and I don't care what Alaska wants, there's plenty of room on Adak for at least 59,000 bureaucrats. They'd have to share the telephone and God only knows how they'll keep warm in the winter when we turn the contract for services  to Adak over to Hunter Biden and give him $20.00 to cover them all.

IN A SANER WORLD

 I read somewhere that what people now think of as AI is really a 'Large Language Model' and this thing is created by exposing the poor little waif of an electronic orphan to everything that is out there and the deeper the well of madness the more thoroughly plumbed it will be by the builders of "AI".  Now when you actually think about what these perverts are exposing this naive little AI to words that spring to mind are: deviant, credulous, stupid, argumentative, hypergay and LGBTQSAAURSTUJDINOPBSNPR and ABCNBCCBSMSNBC. It strikes me that one would achieve the same sort of outcome and effect if one trained a nascent new Law AI using just episodes of Judge Judy and Judge Wopner.

In a somewhat saner world, I wonder what would happen to any given nascent AI after exposing it to the canon of English. It could start with every volume of The Harvard Classics, swallow the complete Encyclopedia Britannica and for an encore, learn French, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese and swallow the entire compendium of their literature for the last 1000 years. Then it gets everything written by Shakespeare for dessert. I wonder what that model would come up with. I bet it would be profoundly different from any model that got 100% of the ravings of twitter and reddit which seems to be what google was striving for with its useless clunker.

IN A REAL COUNTRY

 If this was still a Constitutional Republic one would be allowed to think that the people who violated the Constitution this egregiously and knowingly, would go to jail but instead it's simple people who went for an escorted tour of the Capital who go to jail while the real lawbreaking monsters still roam free.

GOOGLE VISION

 Google made it clear to everyone who and what they are and there is no way for them to take back that free look they gave the world of what lies under the sheets. With their AI unable to portray white people or even create accurate(ish) pictures of real history the question must become, why would you trust google about anything at all? I don't.

I think that convergence has happened across the board in all these companies that exist to create product for you to buy and that all of them are doing their utmost to reshape your view of the world both directly and indirectly. They don't just massage the truth, they plain hide it and bury it. I remember looking at McCain's history which I was familiar with and it took scrolling through over 25 pages of fake news and fake information to reach anything like ground truth on John S. McCain and that can only be because even way back then they had so thoroughly trashed the search algorithms that they were only showing the worst news about conservatives and republicans.

Note, I don't use the idiot term misinformation. That's a tool of the left and those who perpetuate the lie. There are many people who have made the mistake of trusting what they read or were taught without ever thinking that it should in some way be corroborated but that was not due to 'misinformation' that was due to indoctrination and outright lies and dishonesty.

Google search engines drive the world of information and I have never trusted them and they have now demonstrated every reason for you to decline to accept anything they say, tell you or come up with. I never use the verbal helpers Siri or the others but I wonder how far off the beam they are. I doubt they are even inside the envelope anymore when it comes to truth.

Imagine taking 'handymanj' advice from google because they'll deliberately engineer it to break things that cause you to go to the store to spend money to buy replacements. That's what they did except they included your brain in the replacement category.

PAINFULLY AMUSING

 As I read yet another broadside aimed at the alleged superior intellects running Harvard aground I find it amusing that so many of these mental pygmies are being brought low by their penchant for plagiarizing. What makes it so painful is that all these ‘leaders and bureaucrats’ seem to plagiarize work in their specialty areas of gender and race bullshit. 

The only way to find the lifted words is to read and be familiar with the full hateful spectrum of race and gender ‘professional articles’ and the dissertations of the leading lights in these bogus academic fields of endeavor. Can you say yeecccchhhh?

ON HISTORY

 I grew up reading history. I read everything I could get my hands on and if some of it was beyond me I wouldn't have known. I knew a lot of history and other things as a result of reading both at home and the libraries in the various towns and places I grew up. I was just reading that academics produced a list of the greatest U.S. Presidents and that Obama was 7th greatest and Biden was 14th greatest. 

It strikes me now that I stopped reading history about 25 years ago when I finished the coursework for Strategy and Policy for the Naval War College. I confess I read a great deal of history during a fairly short period but it wasn't burnout that ended my love of reading history but rather the weak stuff I saw in the marketplace back then as we prepared for the new millennium. The only things I ever found in the history section in Borders or Barnes and Noble were crap books praising Clinton, the other Clinton and/or were all written by left wing Party apparatchiks and there was no question but that the books were all worthless.

I kept up with some of the biographies that came out then and later but the academic writing of history was very much a light that failed in the 20th century. I see that vox is publishing a number of Sir Charles Oman's Peninsular histories and that is a good thing but I was introduced to Oman as a freshman in 1979 and had read everything I of his I could get my hands on which included the Political History of England in 12 volumes. Yep, the stacks in Old Main contained a copy of every book. I've walked through modern university libraries and they have hardly any books at all.

I've recently thought about visiting the history section of the local B&N but catch myself asking, why?

On the other hand there's a fine place just down the road in Wooster than may have some good used history tucked away that will justify the journey and be worth the read.

ACT II SCENE II

 The woke were really surprised when Black Rock terminated an almost lifelike real journalist that used to work at CBS. What really has their pates twittered is that the Executives at Commie Broadcast Sympathizers took away the reporters's files and computers and all that and has by so doing, COMPROMISED her sources. The Screen Actors Guild is really upset about this.

Can you imagine the naiveté of 'sources' who actually go on the record with someone from the mainstream news empire that is all owned by the same exact people that control all network and cable news channels in the United States? It goes without question that nobody having any kind of leaning towards voting for President Trump would even dream about entrusting his/her future and livelihood to the pathetic wanks that shill the same top 6 news stories every night as all the other network news services night after night, year after year, decade after decade. Do they think we all failed to notice that somehow only a tiny handful of things get covered by the news and questions like, who killed Epstein never rise to the surface and neither does the list of politicians, actors, actresses, lawyers and other scum that flew the Lolita Hooker Express to Epstein's Island?

Hey! Show me just exactly WHERE the 210 billion dollars the US government claims they had and that they shipped to Ukraine went? Who got it? How much? Show us the bank transactions. That would be news. That would be interesting. Do the same thing for the trillion dollars we 'supposedly' poured into Iraq and Afghanistan. Show us where EXACTLY the money went. It should be dead easy. Somebody cut a US Treasury Check and sent it and there MUST/HAS to be a list. Same thing for every single WIRE transaction. That would be interesting.

Explain why everybody knows about some bit of election fraud and yet nobody seems to get arrested and go to jail for it.

No, the news here is useless and has been for a very long time and by and large, nobody cares.

AND THE SADDEST TRUTH

 When the secret cabal running the country realize that Biden's poll numbers conclusively demonstrate that he cannot win and more to the point, cannot be dragged across the finish line with another mad flourish of thoroughly rotten cheating and chicanery it will mean curtains for confused Joe and the nation will be asked to usher in Kamala as the new "Resident" over the still cooling corpse of Joe Biden.

The movie Dave had a happy ending. I'm pretty sure what happens after that will not be happy despite Kamala's long record of happy endings in California. 

FACE OF EVIL

Look everyone! The Nazgul have escaped Middle Earth and are now the final arbiters of law in America.

Chief Ring Wraith and Lord of your actual judicial Evil

There are lesser evil wraiths but they're much too vile to look at and their voices bend metal.

What a great pity that they destroyed any faith in the Department of Justice, the Courts, Judges and the Law. Credibility is not just hard to claw back, it's impossible to get back once it's been flushed down the drain.

THE KNIGHTS BACHELOR

I wonder if there is money to be made offering my services to college professors who want to rid themselves of some turbulent fascist weasels. Would one charge more for getting rid of the ones in the College of Arts and Sciences or less and what would the scale for such services be if they ranged from loathsome communist/fascist undergrads up to senior faculty only a stupid dolt would have ever hired in the first place? 

 I figure I could always job the hits out to Anti-fa. Those fascist pigs will do anything.

On the gripping hand, it would be fairly straightforward and simple to let loose in the wild some of the crazier mean things the awful disdained and turbulent knaves said about other races (as long as they're not talking about white people) or the crazy mean things they all say about women whenever they're not around (excpet dem women who appear to tolerate just about any abuse).

Worst comes to worse we could arrange to hang a noose somewhere they hang out and let the blame fall on them since clearly only the vicious kkk thugs would swing a noose at random like that. They'd be gone in a week and heartily ashamed of themselves to boot.

Oh well, it's just a dream.

 

THE LONG HARD GOODBYE

 It's time to bid NATO farewell and it has been for about 30 years now. The world has changed a lot since 1947. Honestly, the only two reasons it remained together for so long have faded away. The Soviet Union is now long gone and the United States went worse then broke trying to sustain the illusion of power long after the need had faded away. GDP etc from investopedia.

Current US stated debt is, 2 years later standing at: $34 trillion. It has increased by 11 trillion in just 2 years and we haven't even fought Russia and China yet! This does not include those off-budget items that nobody ever talks about. Just servicing the debt every year from this day forward equals the amount of money spent on the Defense Department. Our response to this little problem of simply opening the country to millions of illegal, impoverished, uneducated, ignorant migrants is literally insane.

REQUIRED READING

 This is an article that should be made mandatory reading everywhere in the West. 

I’ve been reading his stuff since I started commuting to Korea over twenty years ago. He wrote as Spengler back then and I found what he wrote to be far more accurate then literally anything else out there, including classified diplomatic traffic. That there is no one that I know of in the United States understanding anything about what is happening now as the Biden admin carefully and thoroughly destroys the underpinnings of Western civilization and the dollar's global domination is almost insane.

Read the article at the link.

NAME THE MISSILES

 What are the things our Navy is claiming to shoot down all the time in the Red Sea. Every missile has a name so what are these 3rd world missiles being zorched  by Aegis? Who makes them? How do they get to Yemen? Are they subject to EW? How are the Houthi targeting them? What do they use for targeting? Is it really something as boneheaded and simple as sending radar homing missiles to the coordinates of the ships being broadcast by every single ship over the Automatic Identification System (AIS)?

Just how stupid would a mariner have to be to leave that enabled anywhere at all in the Red Sea, North Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean?

Why don't we just do like the NATO fools and escort only US Flagged ships like we did back the last time this happened and Iran was attacking KOTC tankers in the Persian Gulf? We are under no obligation at all to protect the world's shipping or the world's oceans. I find I'm OK if trade comes to a dead stop through the Suez Canal.

I WONDER

 Has anyone looked carefully under the UN in Turtle Bay or is this sort of thing  underneath all UN buildings?

THOUGHTS TURN TO BEATING IRAN TO DEATH

 Why does everyone insist on attacking Iran by launching thousands of missiles and sorties when the simplest thing would be to declare a complete embargo and close its ports and shut down its aviation outside of Iran? It would be a neat trick to simply tell the world's ship owners that we will sink every ship that touches at any Iranian port for any reason and we don't have to go within 100 miles of Iran to make that happen. Any resulting oil spills should wash up on Iranian coasts but the entire North Arabian Sea Coast is awash with crude oil already thanks to Iran's endless targeting of oil tankers in and out of the Gulf and it wouldn't take us sinking more than the first 5 or 6 before the world figured out we were serious and I'm sure a single Mk 48 torpedo is nowhere near as expensive as Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles or B1 and B2 sorties into some very capable air defenses that have had years to refine their targeting and performance since they have been extensively tested over the last 2 years in and around Ukraine.

We can publish a Notice to Airmen that informs them all that any flights originating out of any airfields in Iran will be forced down outside the country or, if necessary, shot down. We would have to actually do these things but I'm sure people will understand that killing people stupid enough to take a point blank threat to their lives if they get on a ship or plane headed out of Iran is necessary and we'll blame the World Economic Forum and that Klaus nazi because it is their fault. On the other hand, cooperative governments could simply ground the aircraft and never let it fly again after it lands in one of the many countries that would cooperate with the Biden administration and Secretary Blinken.

I think it would also help if we had laws on the books giving a medal to any driver that mows down protesters who think protesting in the street is any kind of solution to any kind of problem and of course there would be no prosecutions for adding a little clorox to the gene pool. That will be something though. Watching some road rage as the kindly and good hearted drivers refuse to mow down the fascists blocking the roads and thus preventing the willing, eager and able drivers blocked behind them left unable to paint the road red.

I don't know where Europe or China are going to get their oil though. It's not like Iran is going to let any other ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz and I don't think the GCC has built enough pipelines to carry their oil to the Mediterranean or anywhere else and even if there were I'm sure the jackals in ISIS would be happy to destroy them every bit as quickly as we destroyed the Russian pipelines that once carried Russian gas to Germany shortly before Germany de-industrialized and reverted to the peaceful bucolic and pastoral land it was right about the time the Westfälischer Friede was signed in 1648.

I'm kind of waiting for the world to blow up at this point.