TO MY BRITISH FRIENDS

 I found this in the wind but it looks like a nice enough request,

"The time has clearly come to overthrow the criminal and corrupt government that leads your poor and downtrodden land of criminal misfits who write mean mimes and use accurate words and it is now time for the Mad English, Crazy Scots  and Lunatic Welshman to revolt and toss out your government and all its minions but we'd ask a favor of you and it is simple, please don't call or refer to yourselves as Republican Armies. That's been done and we did not approve."

        – the Republican Party 

ALWAYS HAPPY TO SEE IT FLY

 Never thought true interplanetary space craft would come from the endeavors of one man. Nice to see it working again. I'm really looking forward to them broadcasting as they drop into the Martian atmosphere.

 

BECAUSE THEY COULD

The tricks that both sides played in the Cold War come back to haunt us all again as people are now really trying very hard to reignite the Cold War. They see profit and power in it and they don't care what it costs. Sadly for them there is no country on the planet that can now afford to even pretend to play at Cold War. Remember the old joke where the king's advisors kept coming to him and telling him that his spending on defense was ruining the country and causing unrest and the king's response, when the revolution comes, I'll be ready.

The people that fancy themselves as modern Bismarcks and Napoleans haven't quite yet wrapped their heads around the fact that all of the First World has spent itself into bankruptcy and has less than nothing to show for it but unrest and seething hatred. Even if they could point to a genuine threat there is literally no money anywhere to increase defense spending in any meaningful way so it won't ever be done and it would solve nothing if it did get done.

I don't think more than about 10% of the educated people in America and Europe actually understand that the things they fear so little they completely disarmed themselves over the last 30 years are boogie men that simply cannot exist. Why would Russia attack and try to conquer any territory in Europe? Yes I know people have many ready answers but I think they missed the boat to Clueville. Russia finally responded to the endless push by NATO to take over everything right up to the Russian frontier despite firm warnings that Russia would not permit this to happen. They acted openly and tried a coup de main which failed but they persisted. You know why they persisted? I'll tell you why. They are Russians. They persist.

Those clueless folks think that they "won" because NATO expanded to incorporate half a dozen more utterly useless frontier countries along borders that are essentially frozen in time (as far as the Russians are concerned they are. The rest of the world would shudder themselves to pieces from the nightmares if they realized that the last century drew lines on maps carving up old nations, empires and countries and putting the whole of Europe into a future cauldron IF NATIONALISM EVER GETS OUT OF THE BAG AGAIN.) 

It's getting out of the bag everywhere and the leaders of Europe just don't know what to do about it other than put a boot on it and hope they are more successful at squelching nationalism than they were in Germany, Italy, Poland, France, Czech Republic, Slovakia, xYugoslavio, and all the rest. They have lost their way but at least they're not out trying to pick a fight with China.

As bad as it can be in western Europe it is 10 times worse in the east where the Russians and the Allies carved up ancient nations and empires and put whole ethnic populations at the mercy of their enemies out of time. Stalin did it because he understood "divide and conquer" and if you make other people look like the enemy they will be the enemy and now he had all of eastern Europe at each other's throats over ethnic issues that were not reduced and solved but were fanned into flames, buried to smolder a couple of generations and are bursting out everywhere. Every single country in Europe has claims to land now lying inside the borders of other countries.

When I look at how vicious and petty and slimy the little crocodiles of the Bureaucratic State (BS) are and how they would gladly sell half this country into slavery if it would only bring them back into power I wonder what it must be like in Europe where there are lots of people a whole lot smarter and infinitely more cunning and vicious who are scheming and maneuvering to get back what is theirs. They are our like our bureauwarriors on steroids and I'm kind of rooting for them now.

I think the EU has run its course and it has failed. It was a Trade Group that was hijacked by the aristocrats and topdog socialists as a means to impose unity on Europe both for the power that was in it for themselves and the power a united Europe might have had if it tried and for its main purpose which was to keep the nations from going back to war as they learned how their interests, families and land had been sold down the river over the last 120 years.

Remember, this is the place that gave us things like the 100 Years War, the 30 Years War and thought nothing of killing a third of the population of Germany as often as necessary. Thankfully they let the war machines rot and the people's mindframe for making war slide into senescence and decay. Guess what introducing a permanent class of invaders is doing to revitalize all that shared hatred and contempt for others? The amusing thing, the Germans, as usual, started it and then every other country followed their idiotic example.

It will be interesting to watch if/when the Nationalists finally sweep into power whether it is Le Pen in France, AfD in Germany or Farage in England. It has already happened in Hungary and is well on its way in many of the rest of the little countries like Ruritania. It has been a long time since Yugoslavia showed the way as it dissolved into bloody war and slaughter among people who literally lived together and side by side for generations. That ethnic hatred thing can be a real bitch.

MORE THAN A FEELING

 As I watch Britain go down into the dark and turn itself into terrible shadow of what it was I wonder if anyone will come along to aid the British out of the trap they have mired themselves in and find that the answer can only be, no. England who lit out after Spain to search the world for good things and bring them home and created and exploited the whole Industrial Revolution and stomped out slavery almost single handed are now far down the slippery slope of home fed terrorism and absolute stupidity.

I can't see US doing anything about it or Poland rushing to rescue their former guarantors and the problems of England and Britain while still largely appearing to be First World problems still have their most hideous side displaying the clear imprimatur of the Third World they let into country and still let into the country in their countless millions but sadly their real problem is that the feckless idiots keep electing the slime of the earth to lead them and make policy and execute the unjust laws and pitiless regulations they impose on all the little people. (I'm pretty sure the Exile in Portales would have laughed at that one.) I used to compose the most delightful run-on sentences for his exasperation and they seldom failed.

What most people will never realize is that America was about 2 seconds behind the English until we elected Trump again. If we had lost that election all those horrible snakes running around beating people up and destroying from within would have ensured that there was never again a free and fair election in this country. You can take that to the bank. Just watch those idiots gerrymander California despite every single law and the Constitution there forbidding it......and getting away with it.

As you head for bed every night just keep in mind that evil never sleeps and the people that lost the last election really do want to see you and the rest of the 77 million that voted wrong, dead, disgraced and buried. They openly talk about it. In fact, the way they carry on kind of makes me believe that the shenanigans we pulled with Task Group Orestes for all those years was deliberate. We wanted the Soviets to know all and see with their own eyes. Well, somebody better be keeping an eye on all our little home grown terrorist cells, they are going to start going active here just in time to influence the midterms.

THE 9 BROKE THE COURTS

 Congratulations to the sitting members of the Supreme Court who allowed Justice Roberts and the wrecking crew of insane morons to break the entire Court of the United States. As I wrote earlier, I saw the Court heading for this reef some time ago and repeatedly suggested that they take a round turn on reality and start to make rules for the lower courts that any stupid fucking idiot could follow and yet they persisted in writing the stupidest decisions in the history of the court and parsing away literally every single thing of any and all meaning in order to make each ruling as useless as possible. Justice Gorsuch writes:

 The Supreme Court went out of its way, light years out of its way, to ensure that its decisions were so wrapped in the tenderest of good feelings for the law that no allowance could be made by any other court that would permit it to use any of those rulings as a club or even as a prop to guide the decisions made by any lesser court and so we are left with lower court judges just openly disdaining and ignoring the Law, the Constitution, Precedents and the Supreme Court. Good going you complete useless idiots and morons.

Gee, dammit! Nobody could have seen that coming..... It's infuriating. Now what are they going to do?

I don't believe it is within their power now to fix. They could have tweaked it back into shape but they took the coward's course and triangulated the living hell out of everything to avoid a split in the Courts and what they got now is a giant gaping gash in the pulsing dying body of the Court. Now those complete idiots in Congress have to step in AND MAKE A DAMNED LAW! Can you say, ObamaCare or Big Beautiful Bill? This is probably the most profound screw up by the Courts in the history of the United States and way worse than being dead wrong on anything. These idiots have nullified all the Courts.

Look Mr Baggins, our very own Nazgul flitting around DC as harmless and useless as ever any of them were in the final story of the Rings of Power. They had great power for both good or ill and chose to just piss it all away in meaningless forays into describing fogs over water at night.

FREE ADVICE

 I see that the Democratic Machine is broke now that 90% of their funding dried up with the cancellation of all the NGOs that used to funnel all of our money into the Machine so I have a quick word of advice on how to save money for the real battles to come as they fight against civilization and the West; skip all that primary nonsense and just let the Party Leaders (Reichsleiter) select the appropriate people for each position and have the various antifa (Sturmabteilung) go out into the streets and beat up people until they see the light convince the sheep to vote for the correct candidates.

They just totally blew off the whole idea of letting the people choose their candidate last time and once is more than a habit, it's the rule. With that out of the way the people can all be whipped into a hatefilled frenzy line and they can start burning down churches, torturing people and get on with the whole business of defeating the West, civilization and of course, rethuglicans.

IN THE MENA FROM NPR

 I once semi-attended the Middle East North Africa Conference when it was held in Doha, Qatar. Back then Qatar was a typical emirate and had three hotels of any note and it was impossible to house 5000 diplomats and their spear carriers for the event so they hired several nice cruise ships to dock pier side in the port. I was along to provide waterside security for the cruise ships and met some fascinating people. 

That said, I am driving back from the University today and hear NPR dribble out a story about how Jordan is bringing back conscription and NPR being the tools they are immediately chased the Israeli rabbit down the wrong hole and blamed escalating tensions with the war mongering Israelis. It was something Netanyahu said about Greater Israel and all of NPR's little alarm bells sprang into frantic jiggle mode.

 

The Land That Never F$cking Forgets

Those who actually follow events around the world and particularly in the Middle East have noticed a couple of things the jigglers at NPR totally failed to notice. 

The entire country of Syria collapsed almost overnight a couple of months back and is rapidly returning to the Hellish State of misery Arabs and Druze seem to enjoy best. The whole country is now presided over by a President (not yet for Life, but soon) who was ISIS. Jordan's northern frontier is now bordering Hell and you better believe refugees are pouring out of Syria every single day and going to the only place that will take them.

ISIS is still unbelievably active in the east and much of Iraq so the Jordanian frontier with Iraq is not all that rosy looking either and perhaps the more observant have noticed that President Trump has a Minister of War who simply will not be blown off by contemptuous rebellious generals who fail to hear when the President says, "get the troops out of the middle east." I think we have probably evacuated the last troops from the Jordanian Border with Syria but I could be wrong and they might still be in the process of packing up and going.

Egypt and Israel got some serious written guarantees for accepting peace at Camp David but Jordan got nothing at all. There is nobody looking out for Jordan's interests other than the King. Jordan is surrounded by iffy states stuffed to bursting with the worst terrorists and vicious amoral killers outside of Africa and if they have decided to rebuild their Army it is passed time. Almost 70% of Jordan is now of Palestinian origins with 2 million of them listed as refugees and over half a million of those living in 10 refugee camps. Nobody and I mean nobody there has forgotten the events of Black September.

I wonder who the Jordanian army is drafting and if it is just the Jordanians or if it includes the refugees and assimilated Palestinians. I don't think there are many muslims left who think it is a really good idea to arm and train slaves and rebellious elements of the population in the arts of war. Most of them have at least heard about the Janissary's Auspicious Incident and of course, the Mamelukes in Egypt. Everyone knows what happened to Rome when it simply turned all the important military functions involved in maintaining an empire over to foreigners. It never ends well.

I think the King has considered the situation as it really is and it has dawned on him that the United States will never respond to a call for aid to assist in suppressing rebellious palestinians in Jordan. On the gripping hand, I think we're probably seeing the last days of the Hashemite Kingdom because the internal pressures alone are overwhelming and adding the frenzy in Syria, ISIS and the ongoing disaster in Gaza is not helping.

KEEPING THE I IN TPI

 TPI is short for Two Person Integrity and its weaponized counterpart is the No Lone Zone but with less attitude, ie, nobody carries a gun doing TPI unlike No Lone Zones which were rooms stuffed with nuclear weapons and guarded by armed guards whenever the locks and alarms were off. But, back to the subject at hand, the i in TPI and that would be me.

TPI for crypto came about because one day a few people woke up and realized that literally anybody who ever had routine access to cryptographic keys used for secure telecommunications could sell them to the Russians and nobody would ever figure it out. So yeah, we were in the cryptographic business for about 70 years before any of the clever dicks picked up on that. Once they did it was decreed that all crypto would require two person integrity when in the custodian's hands. We went from having one custodian per command to having at least 4 of them.

It required a change in the way we did business because some things were not designed from the outset for TPI and the largest among things not designed for TPI was the actual vault or crypto rooms. They only had one lock on the door and it was usually a combination lock that only the custodian had access to. The solution initially was easy enough, you let one custodian keep that combination and all the crypto would be locked inside the vault in safes which had a combination that he didn't know. Easy.

We branched out and while the one lock entry stayed common in my world, the safes started to get multiple combinations because that's the nature of things. The single access controlled by one lock to the vault or crypto room was necessary because there is an enormous amount of paperwork required to keep and maintain crypto records and the crypto itself and it is best done in the vault by the primary custodian.

Where it got tricky was in the mobile units that took cryptographic keys and keying materials into the field and stored it inside a TPI safe. Since the people going into the field varied each time, it was necessary to set the locks on that safe each time it went out on a trip and one of the trickier things to learn for some morons is how to set a safe combination. Can you guess what happens when a moron tries to set a combination and slams the safe closed and the combination set into the safe fails to open the safe? Yeah, two things happen depending on whether you have gone into the field or not. First, you need to call a locksmith. Two, you no longer have any way to secure TPI crypto without posting a 24 hour guard and impressing on said guards that that guy! is not to be allowed to access the safe unless that other guy! is with him.

If you do this in the field and it goes wrong you also have lost the ability to go to New Day on your radios and depending on the length of time left in the crypto key segment set in each radio and device, you and everyone else involved look like idiots.

I/me had my alternate custodians go over setting safe combination locks until they got it right every time and could show me that they were following the damned procedures step by step until they got to the end which also meant opening and closing the combination lock with the safe door/drawer open. As custodian for two mobile units I also made damn sure the combinations were changed before leaving for the field and wonder of wonders, that they were written down and stored appropriately.

I later worked in the Program Office/In Service Engineering Agent where the mobile surveillance systems went for upgrades and repairs and just about every one of them required one or two new safes every year because, drilled, wasn't it?

Unforced errors are the worst.

LAS VEGAS IN A NUTSHELL

 There is this story in the Daily Mail that I find amusing because my brother and I drove up to Las Vegas shortly after I was stationed in San Diego and what we enjoyed along with the sin, the gambling, and the shabby casinos of that time was that all the drinks were free and pretty waitresses kept coming around all night offering more free drinks on platters.

I had no idea the idiots in the pools were subsidizing our free drinks. I'm glad I never bothered with pools on any of my visits to Las Vegas. You know what else was free? The rooms were free too. Oh, and they gave us each a $100 to start gambling with. It was their standard deal back in 1985.

I guess it's not like that anymore....

THE VARSITY TAKING THE FIELD

 It looks like both sides are sending their best to discuss Ukraine and the future of Europe and its relationship with Russia going into the future.

Pete Hegseth apparently not going - maybe he need to prepare the military against possible black swan event https://t.co/DAS2bzYEt2 pic.twitter.com/ipucd2zEVJ

— Defense Politics Asia (@DefensePolitics) August 14, 2025

ON THE OLD WAR COLLEGES

In the military of long ago, some very clever men figured that there was a natural selection process that was shaping the future leadership of the military and navy and that at a certain point, about midway through the ranks up to general or admiral there was a time when almost all the weak and incompetent had been sent home, died or invalided out of the service. This was the perfect time to select the best remaining officers and send them to school to learn all they could about strategy and military policy and international relations and prepare them to shape and execute the grand strategies of a nation not bent on war or imperialism but likely nonetheless to find itself athwart the interests of nations that were interested in such things.

At the War Colleges, for there were two of them back then, all the students studied the great works of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Navy), Clausewitz, (both Army and Navy) and of course Thucydides. They read the books that each of those men wrote and then sat around and discussed them together to thrash out what each meant and in what state our military could be compared to the forces that were employed and discussed in each of the great works on War.*

In other words, they went back to school for a year and took the time to look at the nuts and bolts of making war successfully and then went on to Command and to staff jobs where that learning would be employed and called upon over and over through the decades. Other students were at the War Colleges from both other countries and from places like our own State Department. They got the same insights into how making war differs from staggering down to the pub of an evening and drinking a couple of gallons of beer.

There is no sign that any country in the world has adopted anything like the old War Colleges for training its permanent secretaries and under ministers who enter government service at 22 years of age and remain there for life while slowly moving up the ranks to positions of greater power and prestige. These fallow minds show up with the knowledge gleaned from a university education for undergraduates and may round it out with an advanced degree in Art History or Economics but neither one of them really prepares them for meaningful service reinforced with the background and education to further the nation's foreign policy through pressure or military means. They achieve senior positions without a clue about what their country requires in order to successfully function as a political situation morphs into a military situation.

They are pig ignorant and yet they're the ones that are made Minister of War or Minister of Defense or Foreign Minister and they are as clueless about actual war as any room found in the Palace of Versailles stuffed with French generals and admirals is about how a country prepares for and wages war successfully. They never take the time to even think about it and so they don't hesitate to slash the budget for procurement, for training, for repairs and maintenance or for research and development and introduction of new and better weapons or prepare to blunt the newer better weapons being developed by other countries.

If what I hear and read about the low state of our War Colleges is true today, I suppose we're no better now than the rest of NATO. Permitting the study of anything other than war, strategy, national defense policy at the War College is to waste and destroy the opportunity offered by a year off to study the practical application of violence on a scale that nobody else in the world even dreams exists.

If our War Colleges were still of any use at all, somebody somewhere would point to our naval requirements in the Pacific and ask, where is all the fuel for the ships and military aircraft now stored and how capable are we in supplying Battle Groups waging war at sea with fuel, stores and munitions for 8 to 12 months from existing stocks already in the Pacific? Where are the repair ships and depots to make combat repairs and return damaged ships quickly to service? Where will the enormous numbers of men come from to wage war for 12 months at a full burn rate similar to our worst days in Korea or Vietnam or World War II?

We have piddled bravely all over the world for the last 55 years without taking, in all that time, the casualties that we used to take in a single day of combat in World War II. Once we use up all the ships, submarines, aircraft and men and women in the current Pacific Fleet what are we going to do for an encore? This is that time of year that comes around every year when some people natter on about the decision Truman made to drop the Atomic Bomb and some people are always on hand to point out that we were just making the first moves to take the enormous war machine we unleashed on the Germans and turn it around and send it to fight Japan and didn't need the bomb. Well, that's not an option anymore.

When I served on active duty, our National Security Policy was to field a military large enough to fight and win 2 wars simultaneously. It got whittled down, as they do, to fight one war and hold in another war until we finished off that bad guy and could turn our full attention to enemy number 2. Again, those forces are long gone. There are always going to be people who should know better who are going to crow about how we blew the doors of Iran but let's be honest, no we didn't. And that means something more when you stop and consider that we spend about 1000 times more on defense than Iran spends on everything.

One of the sad things we are all learning as the details ooze out, is that our Intel Community is really worse than pathetic, it is incompetent and manned by thoroughly incompetent pissants. That matters because the only way any country will really attack us again is by surprise, you know, like on 9/11 and where exactly was the Intel Community back then? And do you really think it got better since 2001 or much much worse?

The American people paid through the nose for a capability that they all believe exists and it is time to clarify things so they get a more accurate picture of America's role on the World Stage. Europeans are stupid enough to blunder into a war with Russia or China but we really need to make sure that we stay smarter and more informed than they are because they have the most dismal track record for blundering into existential wars that drag in everybody else on the planet.

*Clausewitz, On War

Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

DYING TO SET A GOOD EXAMPLE

 This post is kind of like illuminating the target area with point detonating white phosphorus rounds for a few hours after the engagement ended. Maybe not so bad in a battle after dark at sea but Hell on earth. If this is true then it appears that Commerce could go after every research university that was ever funded by the fisc and demand satisfaction.  What made all these lunatic leaders of colleges and universities think it was ever even a remotely good idea to take on President Trump? 

Yesterday I heard it called the Revenge Tour and the more you find out about the violently unlawful illegal actions of the government appointees and civil service under Biden and Obama the more inclined you are to hope that revenge includes public hangings and beheading. Remember when Harvard fired Larry Summers as President? I think he probably thanks God every night that he opened his mouth one day and let the truth dribble out where his colleagues could hear it.

 

Kill shot: seizing Harvard’s patents for inventions developed with federal funds, due to Harvard’s failure to disclose them, failure to commercialize them in America before other countries, and failure to convert them into practical use. From Commerce Secretary Lutnick. Not a… pic.twitter.com/XQl9LUtYE2

— Ben B@dejo (@BenTelAviv) August 10, 2025

 I suppose if one buys into the recent orthodoxy and accepts that most university presidents are figure heads and rainmakers out there finagling the big $ out of alumni and other wealthy folks that it made sense to go with a president less known for intelligence then for their political acumen and connections but what possible reason could anyone ever offer up for making Gay president of Harvard? What was that all about? 

If it was their job to displace the university's preeminence for thought and reason they have succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams. Simply using the words, "according to a study, according to science, the science has shown" is to invite laughter from people sick of the lies and active disinformation coming out of the universities and colleges all over the world. 

I got my start following the complete wholesale destruction of the myths of higher education back when I was working in San Diego and came across KC Johnson's fascinating Wonderland in Durham. It still exists and the top of the current page there explains some of the background. It was 2006 and my eyes were opened to the reality that white men were no longer welcome on campus in any capacity.

ON THAT AI

I wondered why I wasn't at all interested in picking up AI and trying it out and it struck me that it's like deciding to test drive a car where the steering wheel doesn't work at all and the brakes only 30% of the time and mostly when nobody is applying them and then starts ignoring your inputs altogether.

I was the Senior Watch Officer on a ship where 25% of the crew changed every single month for years and I had to write a new watch quarter and station bill every month and had no more than a day or two to get it published before we started going back to sea. It was detailed intensive work because the qualifications of the men had to match the watch station requirements more or less exactly. 

I would draft it and submit it to the yeoman in the ship's office who would then fire up his first generation laptop computer and call up the previous month's watch quarter and station bill and then change it to match what I wrote and then I would proof read it and it would be wrong. Back to the office, back to the computer, and back to me and I would proof read it and it would be wrong. Next time we had a little chat me and the yeoman and we were not going to call up the previous version and "fix it" we were going to start from scratch and simply transcribe exactly what I wrote and if there were any errors I would watch him eat the hard copy.

Admittedly I was getting right around 3 hours of sleep back then and little things could irritate me. Spending 2 or 3 times longer proof reading a work then it took to draft the damned thing was an irritation I wasn't going to put up with anymore.

So there you have it, AI is the ship's office yeoman from my dark past and I would kick it downstairs before I would spend any time with its make believe realities.

WAR TALK

 I may be wrong but I think this is the most peaceful and relaxed period of history since I entered the world. That is kind of surprising given the squibs that held power under Obama and Biden because all they wanted was war after war to distract while the NGOs funded by the Democrats drained the Treasury and while they scraped the Armed Forces clean of any remaining vestige or hint of military talent or professionalism. 

It is said that amateurs who talk of war never do it properly since the real 'pros' know that the real war belongs to the logisticians but I think it is pretty clear that war is best thought of as something that a leader prepares his country for and in this current events timeline no leader is actually doing any such thing.* All the idiots who sneered at Trump and call him a warmonger seem to forget and not forgive the fact that he didn't attack a single country during his first term and that nobody else was all that kill hungry out there on the world stage either. There was restraint.

As the hardcore Left loses its grip on power throughout Europe it looks increasingly likely that they are all up to engaging in the kind of war that the Leftist leaders and most South American leaders love. They are going to sic the decrepit and broken ruins of a military on each other in the interests of gaining time and focusing attention away from the fact that the Leftist leadership has ruined and gutted the countries they led. I can't wait for Ireland to declare War on somebody. It's just a matter of time now that the Irish have started to wake up and notice that their leaders have given their entire country away to the scum of the earth.

As I look at President Trump and his leadership installed in State, War and Treasury, I don't see a team of men looking to mix it up militarily with anybody on the planet. There is nobody that they need/want to attack for any reason. This team knows what all the boobs and fools after World War II forgot. They know that ANY regime MUST sell its resources on the Market in order to stay in Power. It doesn't matter if they're communists, islamics, socialists or the mythical capitalists, they all must sell what they make on the world market or perish. I don't know how 'Great Men' lost sight of that and came to think that if Vietnam and the rest of the Dominoes fell it would all be over for us or if Africa all turned hard core communist our industries and way of life would be doomed but all of them thought it was going to happen and worth waging a Cold War to prevent. All of them were idiots.

I know it has been a bare 6 months under the second Great Awakening but I don't really see a single sign that the focus of the leadership is to restore or regenerate American military power. I think we might possibly see a moderately competent frigate in the future but it is still 35 years late and won't be built in significant numbers because the Royal Navy is simply a foreshadowing of the run of naval power. There is a dark little secret almost nobody in the West knows.

Since they surrendered manufacturing to the East, nobody in the West has any meaningful trade fleets that need protection and those that do are out of luck because the means to deal with threats to trade have vanished into history because that is what liberal teachers insist is the nature of the new gentler modern mankind. Flags of convenience means that no government has to fight for the honor of the flag and can let anybody do anything they want to the lascars who man and run the ships flying Liberian flags. Nobody cares.

The world got a hint of what I refer to back when the leaders voluntarily cut off trade between nations and we got the so-called Supply China issue. Parts and then goods slowly dried up and went away. Then we had Ever Given block the Suez Canal for a week and the Red Sea pirates and the great slow down as the Panamanians cottoned on to the fact that a purely hydraulic system like the Panama Canal needs damned near endless amounts of rain in order to function. Those are just the everyday realities of a world that doesn't really have any real Trader Kings or Trader Empires. Those guys made trade happen because it was the Life Blood of the Empire. blah blah blah.

 

We haven't even addressed the threat to trade posed by people equipped to make it stop. I don't really think the USN decommissioned the old SOSUS network and all those zillions of maritime patrol aircraft without something better to replace them with. You know, like the SR-71 went away because it was hideously expensive to fly and operate but it didn't go away without a replacement that you don't know about. On that note, my old boss in PMW-182 had a picture on his office wall of a front page with picture from the New York Times back when they exposed the Surface Towed Array Surveillance System. Up to that point nobody knew about it and then overnight, everybody did. He had worked in that program his entire working life and was getting ready to retire.

So what does a military do to impose a, say, blockade on trade? Well one answer lies in the sentence itself and the effect can be generated and enhanced by using submarines against merchant ships and mines against all the ships. Guess how many anti-submarine frigates the US has. Go on. Guess how many maritime patrol aircraft we have....Guess how many mine countermeasures ships can currently be found in the Western Hemisphere. Go on, you'll never guess.

Here is the situation though. There are currently how many countries that trade across the sea that are at war with each other or could be at war with each other in the next 20 years? I don't really see any barring idiots like Biden and Obama's team of neocons jumping back into place at War, State and Treasury. The more warlike among us see the potential for war with China if China attacks and invades China. Others see more clearly.

My favorite, what if the EU becomes so blindly stupidly arrogant it attacks Moscow directly, what then? Well some people would say we have obligations under the NATO Treaty and perhaps this is so even if NATO is the aggressor. What would America do? Well, who is to say that President Trump doesn't scoop up another Nobel Peace Prize for convening a conference with President Putin at a golf course somewhere in Switzerland and surrendering the rest of OTAN to Russia? You know, declare Russia the winner! And promise to never attack Russia again.... War Over in 3 days and perhaps this time neither Minsk nor Birmingham need to be nuked.

On the Gripping Hand, the Junta that ruled Argentina never thought in a billion years that Maggie Thatcher would pull Britain out of its nose dive into total mediocrity and take back the pointless and stupid worthless little Falkland Islands. A completely out of hand war could blow up literally overnight. Right now I see that as more Russia retaliating for the endless attacks on Russia by destroying the transportation networks in the EU but then if they do it cybernetically and also weaken and devalue the Euro and the Pound, who would even notice or blame Russia?

*All the fanciest nautical neocons bleat about the Chinese naval buildup because WAR@!!!! On the saner side of the great divide some might see it as a reasonable Chinese policy to make sure that nobody fucks with China's merchant ships and more importantly her fishing fleets, because China is doomed without them and NOBODY else is allied with China to keep China's ships unmolested around the world. In short, China is about the only country that needs a more powerful navy for the classic role of trade protection. Does anybody really think China will invade China militarily? In another 20 or 30 years Taiwan will slip peacefully into Chinese hands just the same way that Macao and Hong Kong have.

Nope, if you want to live in fear, contemplate the coming Bio War. That will keep you up at night.

INELUCTABLE

 When this happened, the fate of Japan was sealed. There was no escape and there was no hint of avoiding the sure and certain fate that awaited those that planned this attack. It may remind some of another event mentioned in the news with a similar outcome for the ones that started it. Be sure war is the path you mean to tread before you start down that path.

Prelude to the Atomic Era 80 years ago.

A SINGULAR PLACE

 If you ever find yourself in that corner near Philly, a trip to the museum at Chad's Ford is well worth the time and effort to visit. Be undaunted by the exterior because I have seldom seen art so sucked out of a building in my life as the museum building and its scenic location along the Brandywine but it is home to some of the best work of the Wyeth I like. 

Epically unattractive architecture in the museum's back yard. Fortunately, it's an art museum and has that dearth of windows that is the finest architectural feature of most such places and you don't have to look at it. Enjoy the art!

REMEMBER WHEN

 This was the first place I turned to for the headlines 15 years ago and now look at it. 

The nazi salute is just skimming the depths of the madness that the popular media has perpetuated on an increasingly uncivil mass of lunatics, idiots and morons. Look at the headlines! How detached from reality are you to believe a single word of that nonsense, and yet if your X feed goes sideways and you see the stream of conscious thought-free drivel from the wide open aperture of X, even then it is not as awful as the new Drudge makes it appear.

I understand why those who loved NPR and PBS saw little to no bias there because I know some of those people and they get all their news and information from sources that are exactly as informative and unbiased as PBS and NPR. They read the NYT and some of them read the Washington Post and they'll be damned if they'll believe any nonsense about them being uninformed or misinformed.

Some people claim that Mark Twain said no such thing but I don't think they know what they're talking about. I read it in the paper.

INCONVENIENT CONUNDRUM

I've written before my belief that many terrorists gain sudden rapid promotions by diming out their leaders to the CIA/MOSAD and letting them bomb the old leaders to Hell. I don't think I've got that wrong. There was never a leader so good or so good and terrifying that there was never a jealous hate-filled underling that just knew he could do a better job and was willing to sell out the Leader in a heartbeat.

With that said, two things occur to me. Why has nobody dimed out Zelensky and how has he stayed alive all this time? At first I thought his security measures were ironclad but it has to be something awesome which would imply it is a security detail made up of men who have never lost a father, son, brother or even a cousin they liked on the battlefield fighting in this useless and stupid war or,

The Russians, well aware of the old dictum which suggests that one should never interfere with an enemy already busy laying waste to his own country and has decided that Zelensky is just the man to keep ruining both Ukraine and by extension the buffoons ruling OTAN and the EU. As long as the war goes on everyone is distracted as the billions of Euros and Rubles and Dollars simply vanish into thin air with even less accountability than was shown in Iraq or Afghanistan and all but Russia are suffering major injuries to the businesses, industries, military and psyche.

When you think about it, any true patriot would have sussed out that the only reason Ukraine keeps fighting is because Zelensky tells them to and he only does that because powerful interests in the West want the war to go on so those billions keep right on disappearing from right out in front of you.

Do you really think Putin and Russia could not successfully find and kill Zelensky if they wanted to? Every single time he gets on a plane he lives on sufferance from Moscow.

REMEMBERING THE QUADIUM BOMB

Few people remember the War and almost nobody speaks of it today. It was easily one of the fastest and least devastating wars of all time. It rears its pleasant head this evening because it brings into focus some of the current wars and plans for some of the future wars that the neocons and others of that ilk seem to feel are necessary and desirable. One could argue that it was both the best of times and the worst of times but I won't. After all, we still had Breakfast at Tiffany's to look forward to.

One thing that was barely mentioned was how the Quadium Bomb ended the war before it properly began very much to the great disappointment of the war's author, the Prime Minister of Grand Fenwick, who had crafted a brilliant scheme to declare war on America and promptly lose it and then start sucking up all the benefits all the other countries that lost wars to the United States got as a result of their belligerence. He had in mind a quick defeat followed by hot and cold running water in the castle and perhaps a loan or grant of dollars to fix up a few things around the Duchy.

The canny observer will notice that America instantly surrendered as a result of losing the Quadium Bomb and came to Grand Fenwick to sue for peace. It was a troubling time but one thing rings like a bell, or an M-08 mine suspended in the volume in the Persian Gulf and that was that it was the very urgent desire of both belligerents to end the war as quickly as possible on terms mutually satisfactory to both. It was their earnest desire to have peace. See how this plays out in two little wars going on right now that all right thinking people care about. Yes, I speak not of the border war between Cambodia and Thailand or the festering sore of a war in Eritrea or even the whole South Sudan conflict. Nope.

The witnesses to the war in Ukraine and the one currently underway in Gaza can see a very common war time progression that starts with the attack, continues with the destruction and more attacks/defense and struggle and finishes with a rondelet of recrimination followed by the shooting of those involved in planning and carrying out the war and the profession of peace and mutual admiration that always accompany the finer surrender ceremonies. Battleships not required and it would be very small and petty  of anyone to bring a railroad car along for the actual signing.

We are still watching the full froth of struggle, attack and re-attack and of course the waste that accompanies a war where nothing much is risked and there is little to be gained. Wars like that can go on forever and frequently do. The problem today is that all the former Great Powers of the World; so long steeped in evil, villainy and stupidity, still see themselves as the final arbiters of any nation's fate and they have all decided to declare peace. Since they are not actually at war this is usually just a way to get names in papers and some air time on TV with the talking heads but in the current wars, there are neutrals and those others most devout in declaring peace and threatening Russia with war and warlike consequences and they are already perceived by just about every sane person as belligerents in both wars.

What is the problem then? Well, nobody ruling in Ukraine feels like negotiating an end to the war, much less surrendering to the foul Russians and so the war goes on. Every man in Russia knows full well that if they halt the fighting the Ukrainians and all their allies will rearm until they think they can restart the fighting and if that's the case, why sacrifice all the advantages of winning to get nothing but another war downstream in a year or two? And honestly, does anybody really think all those lovely economic sanctions on Russia will be lifted immediately or do you think it will take a couple of years and endless shuttle diplomacy and somehow roping in paying reparations to Ukraine for the war......

The same sort of ugly reality persists in Gaza. At this point even the stupidest dullest and most imbecilic Israeli has figured out that there can never be peace between Gazans and Israel and the smarter ones also know that if they lift the restrictions that exist now it will probably bring about an explosion in attacks on Israel in the West Bank and continued attacks over the wall in Gaza with never any other end in sight. They know this because every single Gazan has told them this is so.

I found it really irritating to spend a half hour watching the awful BBC in America Propaganda hour and discovering that the first 18 minutes of the broadcast was nothing except how all the poor terrorists in Gaza are starving to death and it is all the fault of the Jews. I don't recommend watching it if your goal was to find out what is going on in the world. After the propaganda we had the obligatory Russians killing Ukrainians "where will it all end?" 3 minutes of VBC news, a brief minute on flooding in China and ending with some country we never heard of beating the Spanish National women's soccer team. They said they were English and they had some of those old illegal and banned English flags in the background hanging off that dump on Downing Street but nobody has heard of spunky little England since The Guns of Navarone.

To return to our starting point, is there any doubt at all that if the underdog Ukrainians or Hamas had a quadium bomb that they would use it?

It might be time to track down those old delightful movies and watch them again. I remember Tully well from the Mouse that Roared but I have to reach back a fair ways to remember the Mouse On the Moon.

WARRIORS IN THE MIST

 People think that the West can generate this kind of combat power again tomorrow if they just hold their breath until they turn blue. It can't anymore because it built on a shoddy, rusted, neglected foundation called conscription and that only works if it is ruthlessly applied with an even hand. Unlike America, OTAN doesn't have a huge pool of euro patriots that are going to sign up to fight knowing that while they’re all gone fighting and dying the country they left behind is given over entirely to freeloading grifters, pedophiles and rapists who cannot be conscripted because, honestly, having that lot backing you up in combat is a lot like going deer hunting with an accordion and a full orchestra.

Here we have people dying to create the mythical fleet that never was (700 ships, it will never die) so we can then turn around and launch a war against mainland China.

These new hawks simply boggle the mind. Look at them. Up until this week every single one of them thought that Asia was united against China and never dreamed that Thailand and Cambodia would go to war over a myth.

As you look at this old treasure map from sir John Hackett's book on the third world war consider, this German force was made up just from Germans in west Germany and you’ll note the complete and total absence of the French. It's kind of amusing though that now NATO has powerhouses like Poland and ...... to make up for the dedicated non-appearance of the French and the near total absence from Europe of the United States armored brigades.

I really don't think we could pull off even a single division return of forces to Germany tomorrow and certainly not in anything less than 3 or 4 months. Just look at the idiotic pier the Army build in Gaza that lasted all of a week or two and took months to build and delivered about 80 truck loads of stuff.

The leadership is not being honest or forthcoming about the military capabilities that we have. They are like an E-4 missile tech that will tell you all about how the enemy missiles are useless because his air defense system will shoot them all down. That poor snoob thinks that this is so and there is no use pointing out that there are just the 3 launchers, 2 million square miles to cover and only 300 missiles available to use against the estimated 58,000 enemy missiles, aircraft and drones.

It would be nice if our politicians would stop talking about 'dire consequences' if people don't accept our bluff about using force. 

This will never get old and fade away. It was the defining moment in the USA and EU relationship. Brought to you by the Chancellor of Germany.

I can hear her words, "So, we're all agreed, the United States will fight and die for Europe and this clown has his orders and can leave now."

REVOLUTIONARY

 I get a kick out of Orban and the Hungarians. They have figured out what is going on and none of them hold back their opinion of the EU. It is one enormous scam that just gets worse and worse every year. Remember years ago when they were going to have a balanced EU budget and if that meant starving the Greeks and Italians, well, sobeit? Yeah, they don't either. But look at the remarks below and ask yourself, how is the EU Commission going to find all that money without just printing it off themselves? If all currency is hyper-inflated, is any of it? The $, Euro, Yuan and Ruble look like very soggy cold toast.

'Trump Ate von der Leyen for Breakfast,' Says Hungary's Orban on US-EU Trade Deal

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban didn’t hold back in his reaction to the new U.S.–EU trade agreement announced by Donald Trump and Ursula von der Leyen. Orban said Trump "ate Von der Leyen… pic.twitter.com/RPXqb3WLOV

— Camus (@newstart_2024) July 28, 2025

CHANGE

 What exactly would be different if they swapped out those banners for swastikas? Either way I see nothing but jack boots and concentration camps for people who don't toe the line.

https://t.co/emQXSkCbS7 pic.twitter.com/1ukJDI9R8q

— Daniel Kodsi (@d_kodsi) July 27, 2025

A NEW WEEKEND WONDERMENT

 I found this remarkable little thing while I was looking into the scandals that laid waste to San Diego's finances over the last 25 years. I thought I'd see what it looked like here.

 I figure I'm fully qualified since I really don't make any profit and this seems to be the rule:

Simply look at the evidence offered to assure yourself that this is so!

When you could believe anything on the internet!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

 It is probably time to consider that no civilized society can survive if everything must withstand the scrutiny of the most infected and diseased minds now resident in the Law and found in just about every judges' chambers in the Land. We have to find a new way to hold government to the strictures embodied in the Constitution and move beyond the idea that an unaccountable judge is the Law of the Land who has all the power to overturn every Legislative and Executive Authority at a whim and without any consequences for his or her stupid insane actions.

No country on earth could stand if all 9 justices on the Supreme Court were of the same low quality and stupidity as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, so just how is it that this moron ended up on the Court for the entire duration of her life? Oh yes, we heard that when Joe Biden went looking to replace Justice Breyer his only two criteria were that it must be a black woman and that was the sum total of the requirement for his nominee to the Supreme Court.

Banana Republics are more discriminating and expect more from their highest court officials and sadly, all too often this low bar of accomplishment is all that is required of any Democratic nominee for Judge. It is fine to be difficult and fractious so long as there is a mechanism available to the People to end the tenure of stupid activist judges and courts and no comrade, having the degenerates in Congress hold a show trial and impeach them is a non-starter.

In a way this is very similar to what has gone wrong in the military over the last 30 years or so. The gibbering yes men who slobber over the amazing perspicuity of our stupidest and worst generals and admirals are in turn selected by those same morons to be admirals and generals and there is ZERO accountability once they put on the star. You can see this is so by the simple fact that nobody was punished for the debacle in Afghanistan or Iraq or any of the idiot games we played in Africa or for the worst shipbuilding planning and design since the coastal defense battleships of the 1870s.

It is time for the various public policy Foundations to pull their heads out of their fundament and start discussing how a 21st century State can bring about sensible Public Policy that will inflict order on the Courts and Judges because it is all too apparent that neither the Courts nor Congress are interested in stepping up to the plate.

RUSSIA FATIGUE

 Would you please stop with the Russia Russia Russia? We heard it all before and unless I see perp walks and indictments, just move in the dark and arrest people after midnight and haul their lying asses down to jail and lock them up without bail as if they were a January 6 idiot and stop the endless nattering of Russia Russia Russia. We already knew it was all a hoax, we don't need anybody telling us that and all we want is for those who did it to be indicted, tried and sent to prison for a decade or two.

We don't care about your word salads. Real concrete action may surprise us but I have to confess, the Rethuglicans are long on endless whining, begging and complaining and really short on action. It's a sad fact that if Brennan broke down and broadcast video of himself crucifying children on Epstein's Island we'd all be wildly bored to tears as the damned rethuglicans and DOJ do absolutely nothing about it.

We know that Hillary and her entire team literally destroyed the evidence right in front of the FBI and nothing happened. We really don't believe the stupid party when they tell us, 'they gottem now!' Nope, we are tired of endless press conferences and won't believe they matter until I see the top levels of the FBI arrested and hauled off to jail for fingerprinting and a night in the lockup and even then I know that the uniparty will drop all the charges and that somehow all the evidence will get "lost," again.

THE WORD DEFINES THE CONCEPT

 I was looking at a now withdrawn announcement from some Army official who was crowing about a recently conducted drop test where the US Army after God only knows how much development, reviewing and testing, armed a drone with a hand grenade and dropped it somewhere proving once again that gravity is an absolute victor in the war against airborne. It all kind of missed the whole intent, purpose and carnage of a war being waged in Europe right now. Yep, they got confused.

Two of the words that matter a lot when designing a killing machine are Payload and Warhead. They are not the same thing. A bomber has a payload and the entire thing is built to drop the payload and come back. A missile or artillery projectile has a warhead and not one spec of the item is designed to return to the launcher. If your design teams are confused about what they're building what you get is a payload system that costs up to 40 times what a simple projectile costs.

This was lost by the various military idiots as they tried to emulate that fallen rock idol of long range cannoneering, Saddam Hussein and Project Bablyon.

The USN got into the mix with just about the same results although there is no evidence that they or anyone else had the lead engineers executed. They were designing an artillery system for their newest bleeding edge land attack destroyer and after decades of research $ development (R$D) they ended up with a gun system that fired little projectiles with tiny warheads a long way way for roughly the same cost as existing Tomahawk missiles with much better warheads. It was another clear case of design specs leading the research teams deep deep into the woods where they build a secret and deep hole in the ground and burned money in it every night for literally years.....

The problems, as I see them with the military developing the attack drones of the future is that they keep turning to both the wrong people and to the wrong facilities. They keep going to aviation experts and they keep going to the military/navy research labs. What they need to find is the guys and teams that developed the sonobuoys.* The buoys were sensors that were designed to be launched out of aircraft, splash into the ocean which would activate their batteries and depending on the buoy, drop hydrophones and other cool things deeper into the water in order to find and track submarines. They were 100% expendable and designed that way from the ground up. We used millions of them in the Cold War.

What the military needs and is unlikely to get is for the Project Leaders and Teams to understand that the weaponized drone is only going to be successful if it is dirt cheap and designed to show up at the launcher in pallets loaded on multiple tractor trailers. It will not work if it requires field servicing, special schools to operate and maintain it or the expectation that it will ever return.

We're not going to get that of course. We're going to get a nifty $7,000,000/drone system of systems that can be retasked by specialized crews with modules that will let it fly detection and surveillance, fly special mission packages containing Top Secret ISAR and MASINT modules and a fully configurable warhead in multiple packages. Oh, and it will of course, be under the sole control of the targeteers back at the Air Force Base in Nevada or maybe Al Udeid. 

I do wonder if the Army and Marine Corp doctrine has studied any part of the war in Ukraine and worked out how the flow of battle in both the attack and defense is going to be changed by the wide acceptance of thousands of kamikazi drones dominating every inch of the battlefield from the C4I nodes in the deep rear areas to the Forward Edge of Battle. 

These are the sorts of things I really enjoyed talking about with the Old Man who finished his time in the Army as the Director of Weapon Systems and who, a very long time ago, was part of the Hellfire Program Office in the Pentagon when that missile was undergoing development and fielding.

BTW, I do know how to deal with them defensively and so does anyone else who actually thinks about it but I very much doubt that we will ever see that level of integration between the IC and the producers of large smoking holes in the ground. Those days are way behind us now.

*If you read the silly article you see the headline writer has not the slightest idea what the article was about. This sort of conveys, in nutshell, the problem that designers have when the specifications are gooned up and nobody is willing to say so.

EVERYONE FORGETS

 Sadly our countries are stuffed with useless college graduates who could not tell you who stormed the Bastille or who the Brown Shirts were in history and yet they all think they are educated. The story below highlights a simple fact almost nobody remembers.

Rotherham Man who threatened Muslims with social ostracisation if they cooperated with South Yorkshire Police’s inquiries into the grooming gangs has been awarded an MBE for “services to integration” and “cohesion”. https://t.co/D2ODlBfzdC

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) July 13, 2025

 In a disorganized revolution, the revolutionaries descend on the police and kill them or drive them away never to return. In organized responsible revolutions like we saw in pre-War Germany and Italy, the revolutionaries become the police power and then they oppress and squash dissent. They are the face of the State and usually the Power. [Hitler made clear who the real power was in the Night of Long Knives.]*

You read about the changing of the Ages and it is still hard to reconcile that this is what we are seeing these days. Antifa is funded by just one political party and it serves one purpose. It would be nice to think we could find its Ernst Rohm and get rid of him as easily…

IT WAS PASSING STRANGE

 I saw this the other day and it made me think. What was it?

I finished up my first tour on the Middle East Force flagship and headed to the Guided Missile School in Dam Neck, Virginia and following that, in a singular act of mercy and charity not realized at the time, I took my brother and my worldly goods from Arlington, VA to my new duty station on what I thought at the time had to be the worst destroyer in the navy. I may have been wrong but I was much younger then.

We drove cross country to Oklahoma in June, spent the day/night in the pool at the hotel and then headed to Albuquerque, New Mexico where we spent a day and a night with my sister and her husband and dropped off some cribs we brought for the twins they were expecting imminently and then we pressed on to California.

We crossed the border into Needles after midnight under clear skies and a giant full moon and as we crossed the desert we saw something we never saw before. The desert was alive with headlights racing over the dunes and there were pools of light and merriment surrounding RVs parked all over for mile after mile. It was fascinating.

We arrived in San Diego where poor planning meant a room for one night only so after we got up we searched out another place to stay before I checked aboard the ship and we found ourselves driving up around Torrey Pines in search of the Naval Air Station at Miramar and we saw our first hang glider and followed it to the glider port there by UCSD and as we were watching with some interest as lunatics threw  themselves off a very high ocean bluff over the ocean we heard this old geezer standing next to us with a telephoto lens the size of New Jersey exclaim, "They aren't wearing any clothes down there!" My brother and I looked and with that we discovered Black's Beach on our very first day.

I checked aboard the destroyer and 3 days later I was my way to the North Pole and my brother was flying his sun burned nether regions home to Virginia and a girl friend who was going to ask him about those blisters on his ass.

It was 1985 and what was there to not like in California? The governor was Republican, the State was beautiful beyond your ken unless you lived there and it was bug free with damned near perfect weather. I bounced back and forth between the Bay Area and San Diego with interludes in the Middle East and Korea and the Far East and lived in Chula Vista, downtown San Diego, Solana Beach, Encinitas, Emeryville and Oakland.

It ended when I was asked to house sit for my sister while she went to Norway for a year with her family and I left without really looking back. My stay was longer there than anywhere but we were raised to roam and I left with no regrets. As I look back that's kind of hard to believe after arriving there with a brother who left only to come back, settle down, finally, stay, marry, raise a family and these are things I did as well for awhile. It was a nice place.

THE PENNY DROPS

 People starting to realize that the so-called Epstein files have spent years in the hands of the very same people that brought us the Russia Hoax and the voluminous Fusion GPS documents and Steele dossier that 'proved' the conspiracy between Putin and Trump. At this point the documents only contain the things that Garland and the rest of the IC want it to contain and perhaps less than 1% of it is 'real'. All the terrabytes of video evidence is long gone and has anyone heard from any of the kids that seem to have completely disappeared?

And you thought only the Church could make the evidence literally disappear overnight..... 

Whatever is left is hopelessly compromised and at this point mostly lies made up Strzok, Mueller, Comey, Brennan, Wray and the rest of that pack of slime.

NAKED SKIES AND A RETURN OF THE KING

 The people of Europe still labor under the delusion that they can make war on Russia and the Russians cannot do anything about it because, "nyaaah, nyaahh," we got OTAN and Russia is terrified of all of us. They are such wonderful fantasists. It's hard to believe they wrote 1984...Oh, wait, that wasn't a European, that was a Brit. 

I was just reading something that reminded me and that's so easy to do, of the pirate submarines of yore and it was about the German Chancellor, odd how that comes up when Europeans go insane, who stands accused of not caring about the German population and let's be honest, who does and the question that popped into my mind was what would happen if the long range killer anti-personnel drones we see on the battlefields in Ukraine suddenly found their way into the skies over Berlin, London and Brussels?

If you do it right I bet you could manufacture a very fine drone out of cheap Chinesium parts found at any electronics shop and launch them into the air from practically anywhere within a mile or two of the Reichstag Chancery and that thing in Brussels where all the EuroFascists meet to discuss sicking more police on the people for smoking, breathing, writing, farming, farting, etc.

There is no skywatch over any of those places that could detect or track drones and there is no way I know of to track them back to the crew that launches them unless that crew is caught in the act. If I was, say, an unarmed cop on the beat in London and saw something like that I might take a minute or two to blow my whistle to call up some armed thugs to come investigate and it might take longer than that since I understand the armed police are all out rounding up everybody with knives or narwhal tusks or whatever it is that they have left the people with to defend themselves against the islamic state terrorists they let in to take over the country.

It would go much the same in Paris and Brussels although those guys carry some serious firepower. Here's the upshot though, when is the last time you ever heard of a police shootout in Paris or Brussels? I never have. I don't think they give their cops ammo or they have to carry their one bullet, Barney Fife style in their shirt pocket under the stab vests and bullet proof armor all cops seem to have to wear these days.

I expect drones to be pretty damned ubiquitous in the next 5 years and a number of places will probably have Death Penalties on the books for owning or operating an unlicensed drone in six years. In short, these are the heady days very much like it was at the turn of the 20th century when any fools could build a plane in their bicycle shop and fly it anywhere they wanted whenever they wanted and however they wanted and the State had not yet wrapped its head around licensing and penalties.

You know what changed in that moment that the allied powers decided to change governments in Russia all those years ago? They put themselves first on the target list. It is possible now to actually destroy the leaders of the countries that make war. If you don't catch them in the office with 40 pounds of SEMTEX/drone, you can catch them at home after dinner. Either way, it's going to be very hard on the leaders of the State that rush to war now with glad cries about smiting the barbarians. Very hard indeed.

ME AND TRAVIS MCGEE

 I picked up an old friend tonight and started rereading a book I last read back in 1980 when we were both much younger. I read them all back then because I had the time, inclination and they all happened to be at the town library I walked past every single day on my way back from classes. What could be more convenient then that?

If you like good story telling and some elegant language shoe-horned into a series of mystery thriller books about an engaging salvage man, these are the right books. John D. MacDonald wrote a bunch of them and I am pretty sure I haven't reread them over the years not because they weren't good but because sometimes the ending was just too hard to take.

Another summer reading adventure!

NOPE, I DON'T BELIEVE IT

 I don't believe for one second that Ghislaine Maxwell killed herself anymore than I believe that Epstein killed himself or that her father Robert Maxwell fell off his yacht and drowned. Nope.

SUDDENLY IT ALL TURNED TO .....

 I wonder what is really going on in the Ukraine Fights to the Death™ business because it looks less and less like the Free World helping out the losers in a bad war between the fascists and the Russians and looks more like the Free World took the wrong turn somewhere along the way. This sort of thing convinces me of the insincerity of certain heretofore responsible seeming writers:

People have friends, countries have interests. I could and will tell you what I think is happening but it sounds so cynical I'm afraid that I'm the one with the bent perspective on reality. I think the world has once again lost sight of 'ruler credibility' and it is going to hurt this time as much as it has in the past.

There are two things you can honestly say about the war in Ukraine and that nobody would disagree with either statement. In the first, any temporary ceasefire will be used by all of the EU to rearm and strengthen Ukraine so it will be better positioned when it opens up the conflict again and second, that Russia fully understands that this is the case and sees no reason to go along with this puerile stupid reason to have any kind of temporary ceasefire.

More to the point, the writers above increasingly seem to be coming down in full support of providing long range weapons to Ukraine without any prior restraints on their use in the SMO. They all accept that Ukraine should and must have the capability to attack any targets anywhere in Russia. I believe that they think that their thinking in this regard is simply an outgrowth of every other Proxy War fought in the past but they are missing the key difference in Proxy War vs Actual full War. 

If the First World sells weapons to a First World belligerent that it then uses on another First World belligerent then there really is zero difference between all participating First World countries engaging in War as co-belligerents. It is very much akin to unrestricted U-boat warfare loosening the last fragile bonds keeping America out of the War against Germany and everyone on both sides knew it. Yes, the US was by definition a co-belligerent against the Reich long before it declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor.

If the EU continues with the notion that the Russians will never dare attack them because "OTAN" then where does that leave them when Russia retaliates against them for using Ukraine to attack Russia? There is right now not enough military might left in Europe to even begin to open a Second Front on Russia in retaliation and you have to ask yourself, OK, Article 5 is now in effect and an attack on one/or all of them by Russia means retaliation....... Well you sold the bulk of your long range artillery and missiles to Ukraine, what are you going to use to attack Russia now? More than that though,

You now look at the various Front Line Countries in OTAN and you pitch that you are going to launch your assault waves, your bombers, your meat attacks through,

a) Finland

b) Latvia

c) Estonia

d) Lithuania

e) Poland

 

To be honest, the last two front lines states really only share a land border with Königsberg which is known today as Kaliningrad and which is very much a part of Russia in much the same way that all of what was once Prussia except it's old capital city are a part of Poland. History in Europe is very messy. You really don't want to see nationalism break out there ever again but given the way everyone over there is doing the whole Wiemar thing, it is just a matter of time now.

I don't really understand the simple minds that think that a non-powerful State can force others to do its will particularly when what it wants flies in the face of reason and history. Israel now knows at its core that it can never have an amicable neighbor in Gaza as long as Hamas rules there just as the people in Europe finally figured out that the only way to keep the Germans down was to permanently dismember it and keep the USA involved in keeping Germany demilitarized. There can be no meaningful ceasefire. Guess what?

I might sit down and read Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August once more. We are coming up on that month again and one of the interesting distinctions in her work is that she laid out the step by step stupid irrational imbecilic behavior of the various European rulers and monarchs in leading the whole of Civilization into the Dark. We can literally watch this happening again in real time.

I see that France has declared it is accepting asylum applications from all 2 million Palestinian terrorists living in Gaza which means that every single EU member is accepting all 2 million Palestinian terrorists as fresh new citizens and it won't take them more than 4 to 8 years to learn what every single Arab country learned over the last 60 years, Palestinians are irredeemably and only terrorists. You can look at their history and behavior in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Kuwait, and Libya to see what they really are. There is a reason that the border wall between Egypt and Gaza is of unrivaled height and severity.