Do you also get the sense that NASA is somehow trying to work out a way to return their delinquent spacecraft and astronauts to Earth late on a Friday night of a long weekend hoping that nobody will notice if it doesn't go well and other more important things will displace the news off the front pages on Tuesday morning?
What hideous event will occur in the next 24 hours to obscure and upstage Kamala's sudden reveal when Joe Biden takes the opportunity in his address to the nation tonight to step down as our President in her favor? Remember that phone ringing in the Oval Office at 0300?
It's possible that there is nothing more horrific than Kamala as our next President, fairly and democratically elected by the party that brought us all the KKK and slavery. What is it about them that they cannot grasp what it means to live in a Republic? Fair elections are a complete mystery to them.
A nuclear weapon detonates in the Middle East and the Red Phone in the Oval Office rings. Who answers?
You've now seen the New Secret Service in action. What are the odds one of them plugs Trump with a sudden negligent discharge? Would she have to resign or would someone have to step up and actually fire her?
As I heard that Biden resigned from his campaign for re-election on X instead of like a man on live television these scenes went through my head.
And does anyone else find it suspicious that CrowdStrike wiped out all the computers the governments use and now all the managers of the lies and deceit that are the democratic party administrators of every bureaucracy in America can safely order all of their "files" disposed of and new computers brought in because all of the old ones suddenly stopped working?
They are literally destroying all of the evidence of their crimes as we watch them.
What files are you talking about Congressman? I don't have any files Congressman. All of our files were lost in theCrowdStrike fiasco that wiped out all of our electronic files and records. I'm not sure that there is anything that can be done to rescue all those files you are asking for Congressman.
Not to worry though, the FBI is investigating and the CIA are on top of it! Nothing to see here.
I heard about the assassination attempt at around 8 O’clock and it never even occurred to any of us to turn on a TV and see what was happening. We all just looked for information with our usual online sources. That is how low our expectations for any kind of factual broadcast news have fallen and that’s a dismal state of affairs that can never be remedied.
The shooting of President Trump today is just the beginning because it is now perfectly obvious that the SS have failed to field any anti-drone capability at all. I suspect there will be no more outdoor speeches from the presidential candidates because today laid bare the massive incompetence and unpreparedness of the SS. RIFLES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DIFFICULT TO BRING TO BEAR ON PROPERLY PROTECTED OFFICIALS and if they failed to stop that how are they even going to try to stop combat drones in the hands of vicious fascists?
It doesn’t look good for America. That SS show on the stage was Gong Show level of professionalism and expertise.
I don't watch the news or discuss the news with very many people but I do wonder if any readers are getting any interesting and disturbing feedback from the idiot side of the House who have spent all these years literally believing every word that the media spoke or wrote over the last 90 years was all true right up until all of a sudden the media announces with stunned amazement that Joe Biden is a senile and demented old man who couldn't out think any 6 year old kid. How did they handle the abrupt about face from their ever so believable and honest reporters?
I would think anyone with a smidgen of integrity and honesty would come down pretty hard on all the people that have lied about Biden for all these years because senility does not sneak up on one. I watched it happen and it happened between sitting down to watch The Black Panther movie and then beginning the drive home from the theater right after and it was OBVIOUS. It was like a thunderbolt.
How do people who have now been caught so easily and effortlessly lying and misinforming the public keep their jobs given the fact that they all pissed their integrity away forever by covering for Biden and the democrats?
Reading Zero Hedge today I was struck by a future nuclear exchange with an enemy power and it occurs to me that if they really wanted to do us a major and unrecoverable injury they would make sure that no bombs fell on Washington, DC or New York, New York. They'd have to destroy the rail yards in Chicago but there is no reason to gut the whole city just to split the nation into two parts.
Our cities and our government are the least effective instruments of power that anyone can imagine and yet the venal puppets and their backroom owners think that they are the very best leaders and managers in the whole entire world.
So no, the worst thing an enemy could do to US is leave us our most densely populated cities and the clowns in Washington to micromanage the war and its recovery, following the surrender of course. The bridges over the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers would have to go.
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| The U.S. Rail network with Vancouver thrown in |
Crazy vicious lying conniving thieving human scumbag Joe Biden has made his intentions clear now. He and the real ruler of America will not step down voluntarily and with dignity and allow the Powers that Be to choose in the most undemocratic process ever, his replacement. Moreover, he is going to be an enormous roadblock to the sneaky low down murderous scum behind the throne who think they can pull off a coup d'etat by getting Kamela run over by a truck and having Joe appoint a virtual monster like Newsom as his new Vice. Shades of how we ended up with our first unelected President.
So the question is, would you get on a plane or helicopter with Joe Biden?
The next question would be, just who exactly screens any carry on materials that find their way onto Marine ONE and Air Force ONE and how many of them work for the CIA?
Do you know who is behind most coup attempts the world over?
As I review the 2 major conflicts currently running in the world I see the constant refrain from every single nutjob with no skin in the game demanding a cease-fire and peace talks. You have to wonder what planet they wandered in from because they always fail to understand how conflicts end. They assume that because some exchange of words is involved that conflicts are brought about by embracing the proper words. What they always fail to see is that conflict is finally resolved when one side or the other can no longer bear the pain of continuing.
In both Ukraine and Gaza it is quite painfully clear that the country with the upper hand has not reached the point where it feels any pain and the losing side refuses to accept the pain of losing and so remains fully engaged in bleeding to death. So, why do all the 3rd parties insist that talks can lead to peace? Is there a single example where words alone not backed up by the most explicit threat of imposing agonizing defeat ever worked to end a conflict?
In too many of the cases where conflicts were resolved over a peace talks table how often did we get yet another perfectly reasonable casus belli which would use the very words of the peace agreement to define the justification for starting the next war?
One of the less delightful aspects to living and reading history is how one finds so many people pig ignorant of history who fail to understand at all the reason why things are the way they are and who assume that there is one singular cause for unhappiness that leads to war but that it can all be dispelled if we all just sit down together and talk about it. For them the Christmas Bombing was just another brutal act by a detached government in Washington and not the goad applied to the North Vietnamese to quickly conclude a peace treaty that would permit Americans to flee Vietnam and pretend they were not defeated there.
America was sick to death of the War and wanted out. All the other parties were perfectly willing to keep playing at America's expense of course. That is what the situation looks like right now in Ukraine and in Gaza. I think Americans are sick of it but since we don't have any skin in the game it is not up to us to once again go in and unilaterally surrender one side to the other. Short of that I'm not sure how far in the hole Ukraine will be forced before it finds a leader who can sue for peace. With Gaza nobody knows and nobody really cares. The whole idea of 'free will' and conscience died aborning in the Middle East in 637 AD. All that is left is Holy War.
By the way, those are truly horrible kinds of wars.
Having now lost their own country:
I expect the DHS will have to start ignoring an enormous number of English colonists flocking over our southern and northern borders as they try to get away from the shame of Great Britain and join America.
Poor bastards.
I am a little happy that the 21st century is beginning to look a little more like what I expected back when I was 20 thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX. That said I am hawking up a post from roughly this day 11 years year ago. Given the choices the Uniparty is getting away with presenting to us as un fait accompli I think this is much more likely now than not.
For those keen to celebrate in style, an old family recipe we used to serve at Saint Barbara's Day.
Have a good and memorable day and think about America in the quiet interludes.
I am kind of surprised that I have yet to run across the words for any DoD Sources Sought or Request for Proposals for drone defeating technology or technology demonstrators. I don't follow FedBizOps and haven't for more than a decade but I would have thought other bloggers or military types would have put up the language for any such proposals so we could get some idea just how the military plans to defeat drones non-kinetically and to be honest the only way I see to defeat a near infinite number of combat drones is with something that defeats their communication capabilities, disables their geo-location mechanisms or employs directed energy.
Kamikazes are not new and the old methods will surely defeat the unmanned alternatives put up by combatants today but I don't see our warships returning to the days where we bolted crew-served 50 cal, 20mm, 40mm and other dual purpose guns on every available surface. The manning alone would kill current naval budget estimates that have been based over the last 40 years on squeezing out the number of required sailors at virtually any cost.
I think we are looking at that old favorite of Julian Corbett's and will see nothing but Uncommanded Seas in the future. Obviously this spells the end of the Marine Air Ground Task Force embarked on amphibious ships because the only way to justify that kind of risk is with the stated understanding that the USN is going to enjoy multi-domain superiority over the surface, subsurface and airspace for at least 400 miles in all directions from such vulnerable ships. We won't see that kind of warfare again.
Yep, I did it. I picked up Red Storm Rising and read through it again. Can you picture our timid leaders risking a BLT, MEU, MAGTF, ARG, MEU-SOC, Yes, those are all probably obsolete terms for an obsolete concept: Battalion Landing Team, Marine Expeditionary Unit, Marine Air-Ground Task Force, Amphibious Ready Group and Special Ops capable MEU. These are like sailing ships, leftovers from another age of war that has now passed.
I read this from the slime at the Times and laughed.
It seems that the New York Times is simply incapable of accepting reality and will do anything to twist the facts to fit its idiotic perception of reality. In this case I cannot imagine Israel running out of ammunition. And since all but the most liberal and progressive people living there know that they are involved in an existential war they can probably take comfort in weapons that have never run out of ammunition.I mean that is literally what bayonets are all about.
I think that the folks at NASA have gotten themselves into a very peculiar cleft stick of their own devising. I'm pretty sure that this time they had some serious brains there conduct a perfectly acceptable risk assessment for the launch of the Boeing Starliner but now they have the ship safely moored at the ISS and the people who head up the nation's Space Agency are getting real jittery about the continuing cascade of little failures and have decided to second and triple guess every aspect of the mission.
Only after the safe and successful launch did the PTB consider what a disaster it will be for NASA if there is another horrible re-entry failure and every single one of them really wishes they had someone with the stellar reputation of Dr. Feynman to reassure them about the probabilities. Unfortunately men of Dr. Feynman's caliber don't work for the government anymore. More to the point, everyone has witnessed the Death of Expertise following its complete collapse to the COVID scandal and rape of the world by people interested only in extracting as much money out of stoking the fears of normal people as was inhumanly possible.
We deserve better but I'm not sure how that level of selfless dedication can ever be revived and restored.
It was interesting. At the baseball game last night one of the people in front of us wore a cap which said something about Armor of the Lord and Ephesians 6:13-16. I forgot about it and then I was reading the news at instapundit and ran across a quote from the bible and it was that exact quote. Weird. The third thing was just now, looking at the evidence of the employment of cluster munitions on beach goers elsewhere and the article had a map and the name just leaped out at me. I hadn't thought of Inkerman in probably 30 years and it was the first thing I saw here.
It's almost like everyone wants to play Crimean War II and I didn't even know it was in stores yet.
Keep in mind that the same exact people and institutions that have been repeatedly lying and assuring the Americans and the rest of world that Biden is fine, just fine, are also the very ones that have been telling us that Russia is being gutted by the Ukrainian armed forces and is on the ropes with a shattered economy and no hope of anything good (but of course remains an existential threat to the Europeans who have reacted by throwing away what few weapons and soldiers they had left) and that you can believe anything they report through their tame media, NGOs and UN organizations.
The truth isn't in them. They don't just lie about Biden, THEY LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING and now the chickens are flocking home to shit all over them with the truth about COVID, unchecked immigration, the real danger of the COVID vaccines that aren't and just about everything else the rational observers have been pointing out since 2020.
A few phrases spring to mind as I process the last 24 hours.
“The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” Thomas Wolf
"It's only fascism if it's from the Fasces region of Italy. Otherwise it's just sparkling totalitarianism: It's not fascism when they do it." Sarah Hoyt
Three things for your consideration:
1. Every single word the media and Intel Community breathes is a lie.
2. Joe Biden didn't die of "suddenly".
3. Epstein didn't kill himself.
Expected within the next 7 days:
Section. 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Yep, they're all going to appalled and shocked and horrified and dismayed that Joe Biden suddenly, inexplicably, unaccountably somehow has lost his marbles all of a sudden and will decide that Madame President needs to run things for awhile to give all the truly evil and diabolical people who have been running our country since Biden was elected time to flee to countries that don't have extradition treaties with the United States.
They're still playing 3-D chess and think they're getting away with it.
I didn't plan to watch and would have passed on the opportunity but there was the live drunk blogger and he had a clip 6 minutes into the debate and that's when I had to tune in and watch it. The performance was a shambles, even a debacle. In military terms this was the U.S. Biden lead U.S. military fleeing Afghanistan in total and complete disgrace after 20 years.
The mob have now had their eyes open but sadly they will never see it the way some of us saw it. That Biden they finally got a really good look at tonight is the same one that we have been seeing for the last 20 years although he got much worse over the last 3 or 4 years.
Nobody can possibly believe that 81 million Americans really voted for that shambling wreck. Nobody.
The various world leaders that have met this wreckage in person over the last year or two knew exactly what they were dealing with and they decided (all of them) to maintain the fiction that Biden was President and running the United States. Unfortunately, Biden has also been meeting with people who are not our friends. They too were content to maintain his cover. Just think how much we have lost as all our friends and not friends all decided to act in the most amoral ways possible and exploit the insane weakness now heading the government that leads the West.
Who blew up the Russian gas pipeline? For all we know it really was our own agents from our country acting at the orders of some out of control bureaucrat like Milley or Blinkin or some real anonymous power. On the other hand it could have been any country that hates the Germans, wants to exploit their own gas pipeline connection to Europe or an enemy of all Europeans. You do know that in any country with a real Intelligence Service it would already have all the answers.
No wonder Russia felt it could get away with the Significant Military Operation and other shenanigans and why Hamas thought it could kill, rape and kidnap at will and why Iran and Yemen think they can get away with waging direct military operations against the United States and the rest of the world.
Now Europe and our Asian allies know who is leading the government of the country that they believe has got their back if things get out of control with Putin or China. I suspect a tidal wave of conciliatory murmuring about how wonderful that nice Mr. Putin is and how clever Premier Xi is and how well groomed those beards look on the Houthis and Iranians. If I was Hamas I'd be very concerned. They were really counting on their man Joe to keep Israel from snuffing them all.
The Air Force Colonel in charge of the Osan Air Base has decreed that airpersons at that place can wear an enormous gay pride patch on their uniforms to celebrate their achievement. How remarkable is that? Osan is where I bought my copy of a banned patch we hid from our superiors as every serving officer was left twisting in the wind by every single admiral in a shameless and futile effort to save themselves from a fate almost as awful as a paper cut. Our patch, handily made and marketed by the merchants of Osan just days after the witch-hunts started and the Witchfinders General were turned loose on all of us looked something like this:
The significance of the patch was captured by the lowest words on the patch. Guys like me weren’t invited to the party and weren’t welcome. Nevertheless, we were forced to jump through hoops to prove we weren’t even in the State of Nevada much less Las Vegas.
It must be hard to accept that something you gave years of your life to is little more than very polished and near infinitely kinetic orbiting scrap. Not helped by the fact that it’s in a decaying orbit sharing space with a lot of other orbiting scrap.
It has been a very long time since NASA’s human flight group have given us anything to cheer about. I wish they had detoxed the Agency after their Shuttle debacle but they did not and the same kind of enterprising minds called the shot to launch a trouble plagued system again. It didn’t have to be this way and everyone familiar with SpaceX knows it. When SpaceX put people into a spacecraft and launch them it will be only after they are satisfied that all the bugs and troubling issues have been resolved and flight tested. Somehow NASA, Boeing and ULA lost sight of that.
I may not be the best movie reviewer. I can't recall ever sitting down for instance and writing a movie review for a movie I've liked. On the other hand, I've listed a few for many years on the About Me. They may not speak to the quality of the films but they are certainly movies I've enjoyed watching repeatedly. The movie tonight was not such a movie. In the most intense ways imaginable it sucked.
We watched Oppenheimer tonight and I found the story engaging but the qualities that make a movie watchable were almost totally absent. The sound quality was pure crap. Dialog was almost inaudible and the idiotic crescendos of sound jammed into our ears every time some movie maker sensed a dramatic moment had to endured to be believed. Who would do that to a movie?
The endless jump scenes between a never-when followed by a never-was, were a pain. I don't have any problem doing up to 6 things at once but I don't see it as my job to pay the strictest attention in order to find out if the film maker is referring to moments in time divided by years and then returning to the past or leaping back into the future. The director obviously felt it was necessary for some reason to tell the story of two very different men in two very different times. Don't ask me why because it never really became that important in the movie.
All that said, once I got used to the idea that this was going to be a long drawn out endless almost inaudible movie featuring barely audible dialog with occasional sex and nudity, I got out my ipad and wandered back in time to follow up on the old VENONA files from the NSA and to have another look at the history and backgrounds of the major players. When I found myself some hours later reading about Traveling Wave Tubes, Klystron amplifiers and magnetrons I decided enough was enough. Don't ask how atomic weapons developments roped me into another look into the development of radar.
I will say though that reading and rereading the basic information/biographic information about the people involved is kind of thought provoking. The people involved in the actual science and engineering were giants.
As far as the movie goes, this one ranks right down there with No Country for old Men; Pontification and awards out the ying-yang and really awful in presenting a story or technical merit.
YMMV.
And remember, we only do timely movie reviews here so stay tuned!
It just wasn't that long ago that some people in the West were lamenting that the poor overwhelmed Ukrainians were running out of artillery ammunition and its stocks were running low and even the U.S. stocks of 155mm artillery were running so low that it found it necessary to replace variable time fragmenting rounds with what it still had in abundance and never planned to use because it is a grotesque weapon of war: cluster munition 155mm rounds.
I haven't heard or read a peep about this in several months now and I wonder if the problem went away simply because the problem was defined away much like Ukraine's shortage of "Absolute War Winning American and NATO Tanks!!!!!" which have also faded away. Is the need for 155mm artillery ammunition no longer acute simply because the Ukrainians have run out of 155mm tube artillery?
You could speculate about how well it's doing with regard to it's formerly unstoppable HIMARS artillery and totally devastating battlefield ballistic missiles the ATACMS. I wonder how many of the HIMARS firing units are left and I don't think the US ever really had all that many ATACMS.
One of the take-aways (don't they wish) from waging massive artillery duels across one's own territory is the ugly fact of life left behind after the troops have moved on and now the farming class of comrades gets to plow up all the unexploded ordnance (magnified a hundred times by cluster munitions). I know of an island where the Emir ordered every single soul to leave and it turns out to never return because our aircraft simply used it as a dumping target for any unexpended ordnance on their way back to sea to recover aboard our aircraft carriers after striking, or not, targets in Kuwait and Iraq during Desert Storm.
Nobody likes to walk around in an impact area even years after the fighting has stopped. I know of another place in New Jersey which still has many square miles fenced off simply because the ordnance stored there exploded with such fury over the years that it scattered unexploded munitions far and wide and it was deemed too expensive to sweep them all up.
Did the rocket science minds of the various national security staffs in NATO forget why exactly the United States military did not attack targets in China during the Korean War or why we did not interdict the supplies coming into North Vietnam beyond the token and far too late mining of places like Haiphong? Why we didn't simply sink all the Soviet ships bringing in more SAMs and weapons to fight the war in the South? Why did they think we didn't do that then but contemplate the reasonableness of directly attacking the xSoviet Union now?
I really am looking forward to the pirate submarines sinking one or two of the ships carrying weapons for Ukraine to NATO ports for further shipment to Ukraine. Why wait until you have to engage them with ABM or counter-battery fires? It is the same thing in the end, isn't it?
For those eager to know of my admiration for "pirate submarines" they were a lesser known feature of the Spanish Civil War. Who, the NYT wondered, could have pirate submarines attack the communist forces supporting the commies in Spain? Well, with the Houthi now trading in direct attacks on world shipping in the Red Sea, who is to say it isn't pirates sinking ships mid-Atlantic or in the Med?
A recent post from Moon of Alabama.* I am open to all source intelligence and I figure I can separate most of the wheat from the chaff. I am inclined to believe that our intelligence communities no longer pay any attention to things they don't learn from spies or technical means. That means that they miss out on the most glaring and obvious truths.
You pretty much get the same thing from the Gell-Mann
Amnesia effect. The phenomenon of people trusting news sources SPY agencies for topics
which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing them to be
extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable
about.
Putin has said the same thing over and over and people persist in believing that he doesn't really mean it. What does it take to make them believe?
This is the unofficial translation of Putin's latest speech. Read it and weep for another lost world.
There is a delightful book by Mary Roach that springs to mind sometimes when I hear NASA or Boeing Space talk about anything at all. It is:
I wonder if the two ancient astronauts who blasted off last week from Cape Canaveral thought about it when they packed for their week long mission in space. That mission has now been pushed another week to the right by circumstances, yes, circumstances and that leads me to wonder about space laundry facilities and just how much do you pack when NASA tells you to pack for a week in space especially when you can confidently predict, based on recent experience, a certain number of weeks of 'delays'.
When did astronauting become an old people game for retirees?
Well, all the leaders and Chief Lackeys of the G7 got to meet up close and personal with the degenerate remains of our degenerate President at their little get-together in Normandy where they got to look on the face of the man who leads the country that has Europe's back if it ever decides to tempt Putin into lashing out at them and make them consider any attack by that man on them or their countries an act of war suitable for Articles 4-6 of the NATO Treaty. I suspect they do not like what they saw in the face of that ruin of a man. He was always soulless but now there is nothing at all home in those eyes except possibly a backdoor into Hell.
I'm going to watch the news now for a week or two and see if all the clamoring for sustaining Ukraine and urging Zelensky and his thugs to use NATO weapons to attack Russians in Russian territory continue along the same demented and insane line that they were proceeding prior to their recent hook up with the face of evil.
I think even the dolts that actually own and operate Europe are coming to understand how little is left of the shattered remnants of the countries and empires that once ruled the entire world, minus Russia.
Also, it is very important to remember to only pose as above when you're sure you have a friend at the helm.
I see today that our modern Crazy Dictator-for-Life Zelensky has managed to extract at the G7 meeting in Italy, the long-promised security
arrangement and first steps to ensure Russia
pays reparations for the damages it has inflicted. Srsly, this smells every bit as badly as it did when the same offer was made to the Republic of South Vietnam or to the fools that rushed in to 'govern' Iraq when the idiot in charge made L. Paul Bremer the sole autocrat of things in Iraq. One cannot help but turn to look at the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years of constant warfare in support of an 'anything but the Taliban' government that didn't last a day after the modern idiot in chief decided to suddenly and without warning or forethought, withdraw. How many suckers stayed to the end thinking that they could just hang on and beat the Taliban by persistently refusing to accept reality?
So, anyway we now have in place a 'security agreement' with Zelensky. I have to wonder if it has already met with the seal of approval any Treaty is required to have before it goes into effect and if it will even be submitted to the Senate. So many of these supposedly binding treaties we seem to be parties to are never submitted to the Senate for approval. You'd think people would wake up to that and grow at least a little upset at finding themselves living in a thoroughly corrupt and lawless land.
The United States Constitution provides that the president "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur" (Article II, section 2). Treaties are binding agreements between nations and become part of international law. Nowadays and since Obama was elected we have a government and media that seem to believe that a President has the sole power to bind us to international treaties unless he is a republican.
I was reading this morning that the whole Ukraine issue may be going away soon since the rate of human reproduction in Ukraine is something less than 1. This implies an absence of Ukrainians in the future. If they don't care enough to make enough Ukrainians to survive why should we worry about the borders of Ukraine?
The EU Commission and the NATO Council are made up of the most elite of elites. These ignorant but deeply entitled nobles of Europe sincerely believe that they can define and redefine anything they want to match the reality they are propping up. So, as we see leaders of Ukraine not just hint but overtly state that they mean to leave some of their new F-16 fighters based outside of Ukraine so that they are 'immune' from Russian attack, the knife's edge creeps closer to a 'sudden unexpected outbreak of War between some of NATO and all of Russia. War is always sudden and unexpected to these committed socialists who dictate the policy all Europeans are forced to live under.
A long time ago one of the things we used to give the Russians credit for was a very deep and intense intelligence and interference capability far beyond what the West could get away with. If the idiots running NATO and EU think they can get away with attacking Russia and hide behind the United States and NATO, have they asked themselves what happens when armed pirate drones appear in their skies and start to drop incendiary and explosive bombs on fuel storage and energy infrastructure? What about when they appear over airfields and just bomb any old plane they see?
I mean, who can say it's the Russians doing it? It could be the IRA or Basque Separatists, pissed off Dutch, French and German farmers; I mean the list of people who really despise what the EU is doing is getting longer every day and as the recent elections just showed, they are sick and tired of it.
I remember too how we used to think the mines of August found their way into the Red Sea overnight seemingly. It's not too hard to visualize their counterparts drifting around all over the place. I don't see any reason for Russia to avoid asymmetrical warfare if they think they can get away with it after being pushed to the brink by the brain-dead morons surrounding idiots like von der Leyen and Biden.
I think that the war cabinet in Israel held together for so long because they could all see that the end of fighting with hamas would just be the end of the beginning. Any sign at all of weakness or any eagerness to negotiate from anything except a position of towering strength would see the rest of Israel's enemies jump in and start swinging machetes.
I know our politicians don't see beyond the end of their noses and they would instantly poo-poo the idea that Israel has anything to be afraid of, after all, the United States would 'guarantee' the safety of Israel. I also don't have anymore regard for the State Department than I do for the weasels and lickspittles running the U.S. Military.
If the enemy of Israel sees any real weakness at all in Israel they will continue the attack with the next round launching from Lebanon and you will see the contrails of a hundred thousand rockets on their way to cities in Israel. The pundits and elites here will gasp in horror and proclaim that there must be an immediate cease-fire. Yes, yes, how could I know this? Well, it does seem to happen every single time anybody attacks us or Israel doesn't it?
We used to have Statesmen that could see that much of the world is interconnected below the surface and weaknesses shown in one hemisphere are quickly presumed to be universal weaknesses. Nothing our leaders have done in their putrid behavior under our Viceroy and Generals in Iraq or the pusillanimous skedaddle from Afghanistan has done much to strengthen our image as a frightful enemy best left undisturbed and truthfully, watching the Yemenis attack everything that moves in the Red Sea with complete impunity is not helping at all.
The amazing thing is that a handful of people understand what the Israelis are up against and understand that only through the most drastic methods have they culled the enemy from within their own borders. We on the other hand have let in up to 30,000,000 enemies and WE KNOW IT.
Civilizations are difficult to destroy but they can be worn away by time, internal revolt, external enemies or a combination of those. People have no idea how vulnerable their power supplies or water supplies are and won't until it stares them in the face. All that Katrina farce in New Orleans that was meant to tear down President Bush was nothing but a prop for that purpose. However, what they were trying to show us every day in their stupid vicious lying press reports on Katrina can really happen if evil men work to bring it about. It's surprisingly easy to drop a crucial bridge, cause a dam to collapse, poison an aquifer forever or cause a reactor meltdown.
I mean, look at what two guys did with nothing but matches to USS BONHOMME RICHARD and USS MIAMI.
We are not looking at the downstream effects of our actions or inactions and only seem to gut ourselves over the moment and what the next news cycle will say. People controlling the fate of the nation should be forced to think a little harder and act a lot more responsibly.
It says here that Elon Musk would have all iphones/idevices locked away in Faraday cages if Apple shifts its operating system to one based on openAI because that would present too great a security risk to be allowed to roam around in his facilities where they would be actively probing to learn more than would be allowed by prying into everything within reach.
If I was in charge of the Faraday cages I would arrange to have the devices bathed in an environment teeming with juicy unverifiable and ridiculous stories so the AI would be left to bask in a full surround field of fantasy, myth, voodoo and legend. I'd make sure that CNN was playing in all the cages.
I also think I'd have to come up with something for my phone at home. I used to leave it in my car but that was way back when and it was just a flip phone and to be honest, I parked in my garage at home so I wasn't too worried about it.
We are getting some experience with the Merlin Ap. For those who don't know, Merlin uses the Cornell bird call database and it listens very very hard using your phone's microphone for everything and it rapidly tells you what birds are calling in your neck of the woods. It's actually a very nice Ap. On the gripping hand, it gives you an idea for how 'well' and intently modern phone microphones are listening to you and everything else.
I remember back in the Cold War, one of the nice touches was an intercept capability so refined that it could detect the difference in charge levels made by striking different keys on a keyboard miles away. For an idea how to carry things like this to ridiculous extremes you are encouraged to read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. A good book, highly recommended.
I don't need an endless ear hanging on every word or sound in my house and filing it away in the deep electronic seas of Apple's data repositories. You probably don't either.
I hear that this is being scraped from the internet by powers unknown. So here it is, the truth about climate change.
Out with friends today and had a good time. I was left at the end of the day wondering how anybody could sincerely believe that Joe Biden is running this country after seeing the moron in action at any time over the last 3 years (30) and it struck me again that they watch and read just one source of news and automatically disregard and deny every other source if they even acknowledge their existence. They see only what the mainstream media presents and disregard the rest.
It's not that they deny the evidence of their eyes, it's that they literally never see anything that contradicts their beliefs.
When you think about it, that's a rather sad way to go through life but it's who they are and what they want to be.
It came up last weekend and it was one of those moments when you realize that you totally missed noticing something that didn't happen. I think that's the nature of missing things that stop happening. I remember the first time I was hit with this was when the Chief Engineer asked the young Auxiliaries officer where he had been last night. The ship then being underway in the Persian Gulf I replied that I had been asleep. His pointed question, "you didn't notice the lights going out?" left me without a clue what he was talking about. Turns out the ship lost power when we lost the electrical load and my Emergency Diesel Generators spun up to meet the sudden loss of power demand. Well, one of them did. The other spun up and was tripped by the overspeed governor. Several times. In fact it never came online which made recovering the plant somewhat more intricate.
How do you notice the lights going out when you're asleep? Well, the fans also cut off and you can hear the intakes and fans running 24 hours a day on a warship underway. Their absence is what cues you to wake up now. It's funny though, after that first time I always woke up when we lost the electrical load underway which served me well enough when I was a chief engineer.
What has happened to stop it I do not know but the non-stop screaming by little girls at the K-4 elementary school across the street stopped. It seems to have stopped for quite some time. I got used to screaming 6 and 9 year old girls who step out of the school and hit the playground already screaming at the top of their voices. There was never any meaning, it was just high pitched screaming.
It's gone. As I look back, I think it stopped when classes and schools resumed after Covid. I just didn't notice its absence for awhile.
Reading or watching the news is a bit like reading X these days. It's not good for the soul. On the other hand, how else would one find gems like this one?
I mean these people seriously mean to convince other people that they follow and report the news and now in a feature about their truly dismal and awful performance they wonder how this non-American resident could get a visa and work in this pointless and stupid make-work job at the Washington Post. Do these idiots somehow think that all the tens of millions of illegal residents we now have in America have to get visas in order to get a job?
On the other hand, the same stupid sack of crap are now all atwitter about this new lack of diversity and want to ignore how as usual, nothing gets better by increasing or even maintaining diversity. Business, unlike Academe, Government and NGOs have a bottom line and if that is ignored in favor of myth, voodoo and legend, the business is kaput.
We can see how essential diversity is to America simply by looking at the Biden Cabinet made up of only the most truly talented and gifted members of society.
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| A Winning Cabinet for Putin!!! |
Just out of curiosity, can you name anything outside of some sports that got better after it was integrated? I'm having trouble coming up with anything myself so I could use some help here just in case I have to explain it someday.
Like several other people, I took this silly quiz that was going to reveal my inner slant on things political, economic, etc. Without further ado, here are the results from the test that I took after posting yesterday's blog last night and I just want to say that there is something either very very wrong with the test or I'm not quite the monster some people long suspected I am. I'm appalled.
I sometimes forget but there is always something to call them to mind. I thought about this last night when I was thinking about something else. There are memorials all over this country like this one that I ran into today just outside the Orthodox Church where they hold an annual Greek Festival in Tremont.
We honor their memory and we're also glad our names aren't up on a monument beside the names of others we fought alongside. I was fairly lucky that way and after my first visit to Little Creek I made a point of mentioning to the Almighty that I didn't need or want any buildings or bridges named after me and perhaps it would be best if I just never climbed into any gun turrets.
But that's not what I thought about last night. No, I remember how peeved we were back when I was still young and living with my parents in our house in Newport, Rhode Island where, after a year spent as a student at the War College, they asked him to stay another year and teach. It was a rarity I suppose to find in an Army Lieutenant Colonel a fanatical sailor who came alive with victory madness when sailing out on Narragansett Bay in Rhodes 19s or his favorite Shields. They found the right man. But my sister and brother and I were all a little ticked there during the summer that we had to share our floor and our bathroom with a lady who seemed to take 3 showers a day and who entirely covered the available counters with an enormous barrage of cosmetics.
It wasn't until many years later that my mother told me that she was widow of one of the last officers killed in Vietnam. The year was 1974 and she was a young widow with even younger children who was hoping to find a husband among the students at the War College. She was there for one particular officer and it is fascinating in hindsight to see how her circle of friends all stood by her.
I hope that things like that have not changed or fallen by the wayside. I hope that everyone had a memorable Memorial Day and was able to spend some time with family and friends and spare a moment or two to remember the ones that didn't come home.
I heard something about this yesterday and it was top of the page at the NYT at 0300 this morning as I checked out the Spelling Bee. This is what turned up in my initial baseline search:
Good for Justice Alito. I think they should hold a competitive flag flying contest at their houses and see who can come up with the best flags between now and Election Day.
I wonder what the relationship between the two looks like today. I read the title novel about 30 years ago and it was interesting but I'm not sure I'd believe a single word of social research that alleges to peer into the current relationship between the soldier and the State today. Social research back then had what I thought was no place to go but up but it still surprised me and turned into more useless garbage that its not worth peeling back to read now.
That said, what has the State done to the mind of the warrior elite as its social policies and prattlings have divorced them further and further from the cares and interests of men who set themselves on the path of danger at a young age and then stayed in and accepted the rigors of that life only to find that their own Secretary of Defense decided to overturn the law and spend appropriated money in specific ways that defied the rules because nestling gays and pregnant lesbians was more important to Lloyd Austin then the promotions of every single officer that required the advice and consent of the Congress to get that promotion. He maintained his stand right to the end and never once blinked which left it to others to find some way to let RFK Jr climb down.
It turns out that officers knew for decades that the water they were making their soldiers, sailors and Marines AND THEIR FAMILIES drink and use was toxic in both Pearl Harbor and Camp Lejeune and they are still toxic and likely will be for hundreds of years. They're not unique either since it seems the fire fighting agents we used to put out fires and train with are also quite toxic and have contaminated the ground water everywhere they were used.
All those zillions of DoD officials supposedly concerned with keeping the natives from getting restless have mostly wasted their time and our money doing the opposite if they have done anything at all. How long before the next episode of workplace violence given that we now know that actual no-shit terrorists are casing the bases and have little trouble getting on and off base and does it help that so much of base housing is not even on a base or in anyway protected?
I don't think any of the smart ones use social media at all anymore. Any use of it today is toxic to careers since it can only end up at some point being critical of the people running things so I don't think any of the smart ones even bother. What happens when you simply bottle up your discontent? I think all the truly smart ones see this and move on and leave the service behind to those who are less intelligent or less caring. It might be time to reread the classic Once an Eagle.
Islamic Republic of Iran President and Foreign Minister both dead in helicopter crash after flying for some unexplained reason over some desolate territory in the middle of nowhere from one pointless place to another pointless place in a 45 year old helicopter dating back almost to the Vietnam War. As the Sailing Coach at the Naval Academy back after the end of the War in Vietnam used to say of the boat in distant last place, "your position has been established" and it meant they could safely head back to the raft to swap boats for the next race. Raisi's next race will be in Hell.
At some point someone somewhere is going to ask what was the President of Iran doing with the Foreign Minister.
I was looking to confirm the news with a legitimate news service but all I could find were these old liars and has-beens. Thanks google et al. I mean, you realize at this point I would believe Fars before I would believe anything from the news services listed below.
Have you ever noticed how we never get even one single biased report or story about the horrible atrocities being committed by the Russian occupiers of Ukraine? I wonder why that is. You'd think the savage warriors for peace in what passes for the media these days would be stuffed with stories about the ongoing brutality of the Russian occupation of former Ukraine but I've never seen a peep. On the other hand they also never ever mention the border crisis between Armenia and Azerbaijan which has been dragging on now since the end of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. Of course there is nothing to see here either since most Armenians in Armenia are Christians (97%) and are members of the Armenian Apostolic Church, which is one of the oldest Christian churches. It was founded in the 1st century AD, and in 301 AD became the first branch of Christianity to become a state religion.
Isn't it interesting that the Azerbaijanis, Turks and leadership of Ukraine hate Christianity and have taken active measures to destroy and disrupt the Christian Church in every area they exert control over.
You might even think it was a religious war, a Crusade if you will or perhaps, more accurately, a Jihad that the muslims are winning hands down because nowhere does the Church or the State fight back. I'm not a Churchian but it's like there are very few of them left and fewer everyday. I don't think the world is going to like living in the next Caliphate. Seriously, you'd think people in and running the media would have noticed something like this that's been going on for the last 1400 years.
People have no idea how useful and therapeutic a stash of zip ties can be when they're carried along in the car. They come in useful for all kinds of things and can you imagine how effective they would be clearing the road of annoying nuisances that never learned how dangerous it is to play in the street? Those radicals that think they're unstoppable because they secured their arms in PVC pipes and connected themselves to their mates can all discover how uniquely refreshing it can be to rediscover breathing once some kind passerby snips them off and its not like they can block people from just coming up and dropping one over their heads while they're screaming death to America or whatever it is they're so willing to give their lives for. I'm sure counter-activists drive away happy knowing that they have brought some joy to the freak's dismal and humdrum lives.
I have to admit that I am really impressed that the CIA hasn't gone all in on killing various people around the world with their weaponized drones. I would have thought for sure by now that they'd have offed President Trump with a mystery drone appearing out of nowhere at one of his rallies but they seem to be holding off for some reason. Maybe they want to wait until the election is too close to find an alternative to President Trump. On the other hand that would probably mean that they have already arranged a little accident for Governor Ron DeSantis because he is obviously the People's next choice.
Happy Armed Forces Day!, whatever the Hell that means. To us and those like us and there are fewer and fewer of us every day.
It just occurs to me as I read the various blogs this morning that the last time I was actually in a woman led organization my mother was the Den Mother. I see that college kids today are more and more being led by the hysterical distaff anti-American haters that dominate university life thanks to the sinking enrollment numbers of young men and the huge increases in the university bureaucracy that feeds off the money their parents and the U.S. government bring to school.
It doesn't seem to bring out the best in people and to be honest, watching young people lose their shit over the perfectly reasonable retaliation for a direct and vicious attack is a major loss of confidence in just what universities were supposed to be about. On the other hand, it was the young men of the Oxford Union that failed the test proposed in King and Country debate. Not everyone can play the victim.
It feels a little odd to suddenly realize that over countless jobs during the last 50 years or so that in not one of them did I find myself working for or reporting to a woman.
The results that google shares with me in response to even the most directed search for information that I KNOW is out there and current bears no relationship to the information that I am seeking. This aspect has been getting worse and worse and I periodically shift my search tool away from google and over to duckduck. The problem I have with that since I blog with a google product and many of my co-bloggers do too, is that the google program locks me out of commenting on their blogs. I literally cannot comment on most of them and can only comment as anonymous on the few that google still lets me comment on.
I may have to look for an alternative to google and I'm not sure that Wordpress is the way for me to go.
The Republic of the United States appears to have fallen. It is by almost any definition the exact opposite of what the Founders intended when they sat down together and thrashed out the Constitution for governing this new nation they were creating on our side of the Atlantic Ocean. Even the simplest and most obvious issues are turned into meaningless and endless debates and those guilty of violating both the spirit and intent of the Constitution always get away with it.
So, if you were had to sit down and write a new Constitution for the United States today, how would you do it? Would you make the passage of laws contingent on getting a 2/3rds majority vote? Would you set up unelected men and women with the power to overturn the laws voted on and approved by a 2/3rds legislature?
Would you permit bureaucrats to make any rules without the definitive action by the legislature to enact those specific rules into law?
Would anything like a draft be legal? Would it allow the same state to compel young women to have children if the legislature decided that was important and in the interests of the survival of the state?
Could states opt out and how would they pay for any infrastructure left behind? Would they? What if they said they didn't want it but charged the Federal government to come in and tear it down?
Could we go back to no income tax as the Founders wished and leave it to the government to raise revenues via tariffs and fees? Would a standing army or national police force be authorized or would it be forbidden?
I think it would be interesting to have a practice convention first before holding a real Constitutional Convention again. It might be interesting to see if it could be done along the lines of the Lunar Republic's from Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". People could propose clauses online and if the majority vote for them, they're in!
I see that our idiot governor Newsom was challenged by some clown in what passes for the news media who asked him just exactly how the state of California spent $24 billion on fixing the homeless problem only to see it significantly worsen over the last 4 years. He didn't do well on his answer but it made me think that he's damn near feral in his appreciation for human values so I'm waiting for some enterprising newshen to find out that all of a sudden the homeless are disappearing from California's cities.
Democrats are tyrants and evil so I'm not sure if the disappeared are going to be found floating 200 miles out at sea, buried in shallow graves in the desert or put on buses to Texas but anyone as depraved as Newsom and California democrats must surely have 'discovered' that if they shipped the homeless somewhere else that they would be SOEPs* and kicking the can down the road a little is just one way to not do anything about the problem. The best way short of actually fixing the problem? Make it someone else's problem.
I'm trying to work out how stupid they will be about a technique that works damn well for Republicans but can only boomerang faster then #me did when democrats try to use it to their advantage. It's one thing to send illegal aliens to Blue states and towns that have formally declared themselves sanctuaries for illegal aliens but not so clever when you're just dumping the dregs of American humanity on unwilling people. I'll be curious to see where they turn up.
*Someone else's problem.
You know, when you think about the study of War there was only really one important aspect of the War Between the States that deserved great study by military planners. How did a virtually unarmed, unindustrialized country actually manage to fight an industrial powerhouse to a virtual standstill for 4 long years of near total war? This would seem to be the focus of every study of that war and it doesn't appear to have been studied at all by recent graduates of our war fighting academies and schools for higher military study. Maybe we all made a terrible mistake sending our future generals and admirals off to get MBAs at Harvard and Penn and should have had them concentrate on how to fight and win wars.
When the world appears to be flying apart it is sometimes difficult to focus on the one real thing, the vital thing. The Civil War went on for so long because the Union failed to concentrate all of its efforts on destroying the Army of Northern Virginia. It nibbled around every single edge, destroyed vast swaths of territory, killed tens of thousands and yet Robert E. Lee maintained the Army of Northern Virginia in the field without much in the way of difficulty for the entire 4 years of the war and it didn't finally surrender until Appomatax. Did you know that only about 164 men were killed in the Battle of Appomattox Court House where Lee surrendered?
How did the Army of the United States of America lose every war since Korea?
You might think that at some point the Army would be interested in learning how they reached this sorry state of affairs and put in place some effective measures to counter it but they haven't. On the whole history has shown us that the side most determined to prevail will prevail. The side that does not place any limits on waging war will prevail against the side fighting a limited war. The side infected with innovation and the means to bring about radical and fundamental tactical impacts will prevail over the side that takes 20 to 30 years to fields a 'new' weapon.
On the gripping hand, you can have the most brilliant generals of all time leading your army but if the political hand is set against victory there can be no winning. Politics has been allowed to strangle every army since 1945. It has done the same thing to the Navy, Air Force and Marines. I almost want to see the Army of the 1990s and post 2000 making war. Despite knowing better they will set up Tactical and Strategic Operations Centers and they will provide endless opportunities for rapid promotion through the officer ranks. Unfortunately the tactics may improve but the Washington generals are the ones that will 'run' the war every bit as brilliantly as they staged the defeat and disgrace in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Nothing exposed the destruction of the Armed Forces like reading about President Johnson and his coterie of advisors spending the years of the Vietnam War sitting around after lunch on Tuesdays and drawing up and refining the targets in Vietnam for the next week and laying down the law on the Rules of Engagement. You can give yourself an ulcer reading about it even today.
It didn't have to be that way.
Our local library had a sale this past weekend and I was there. It was OK but they have had way better books sales but I still didn't come away empty handed. Nearly, but not quite. I had a half dozen items and then I had to stop and think about these two which it turns out were probably the most fascinating. One was old and the other was about events even older.
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| Amalfi in 1916 |
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| The Colosseum from Palatine Hill |
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| The Riviera |
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| The Bridge and Castle Sant' Angelo (fomerly Hadrian's Tomb) |
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| Panorama of Rome from Saint Peter's Dome |
They gave away the magazine for nothing and it captures life in the country of our ally in World War I. The ads are simply wonderful. I was surprised that there were no ads for wireless but it was still the realm of radio engineers. KDKA didn't hit the air waves until 1920.
The book is one of Catton's best books on the Civil War and it was nearly priceless at $1.00.
Nobody seems to be interested in history anymore but just look at the magnitude of the changes in 100 years.
