OFF TO THE RIVAL SCHOOL

 Back in a minute.

ON WAR

Every war in history started out as a Trade War.

Not every Trade War resulted in immediate Armed Conflict

Most did.

War is described as the continuation of politics by other means and we all know that politics is really nothing more than getting, maintaining and controlling access to scarce resources and politicians will literally go to any lengths in order to get what they want.

All those dreams of building up our Navy to take on China are toast now. It is and always was too late. You cannot defeat a land power like China with a naval war and you'd look pretty silly trying. Now we see if the words that Robert Heinlein tossed off in jest have any merit.* I suspect they do and one of the most interesting things in them is the way that China itself left giant gaping holes to trade through and the world will find it palatable to do so.

What holes? Well, Hong Kong is still there being Hong Kong. Taiwan is 100% Chinese or did you all forget that when you moaned about having to prepare ourselves to defend the Chinese in Taiwan from the Western Chinese? I kind of wonder what kind of blandishments and inducement Xi is preparing to make to his dear cousins in Taipei to seal the deal.

It will be interesting to see the various twists and turns it takes and people far smarter than I am have been gaming this scenario for the last 30 years ever since they wrapped up Hong Kong and saw a chance to do the same bloodless thing with the big island. I mean, people pretended for over 100 years that Hong Kong was not China. They can do it again.

*The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:"

"
 

SPOTTED AT THE LOCAL BOOK SHOP

 In the window,

I liked the arrangement but suspect the book shop is enjoying new management. 

NEW SHARDS

I wonder if there are any potters out there turning out the modern and updated versions of the ancient Greek pots featuring the various soldiers of the era. Can't you see people rushing to buy old looking urns painted with Bradley IFV and Strykers? Perhaps we can see what they would look like with updated war machines and men on them. Can you see an ancient Greek amphora with a nice looking Warthog front and center?

I'll put out a call to The Pirate Potter and see if she is interested... It could happen.

ARE THERE ANY TEETH IN ALL THAT BARKING?

 It looks like the ruling class all over the world are a bit ired by the President's decision to reflect upon them their trade policies toward US. Quite a few of them are rearing way up on their hind legs to screech about how they are going to make US rue the day!!!!! 

I suspect it's almost all theater and there isn't a single country except maybe one unexpected one that will be stupid enough to embark on an all out trade war with US because Trump does have a point. We won't lose anything if they don't buy our goods in the pitiful volumes they allow today and they'll be gutted like fish if we don't buy any of their goods in volume and in the meantime we'll be pocketing the lucre and nobody really needs a new BMW or VW since they last forever anyway.

I am really interested in what form their destructor will take when President Trump retaliates on a massive scale for the EU Commission's ongoing Censorship and Deplatforming Campaign against Musk and the rest. It's not like he doesn't have a massive dog or two of his own in this fight.

I think Gozer the Gozerian sounds like Ursula von der Leyen. I think they're all just barking a lot and will roll over and play dead as soon as nobody is looking. Kind of like what they're doing now in Ukraine as it becomes apparent to all that the rulers of the EU cannot reach out and dredge up any cannon fodder to send to Ukraine since they have run short of their own and cannot find anybody stupid enough to step up and do it for them.

UNKIND RAW POLITICS

 It occurs to me that there is a very easy way to hire the smarter employees. All an employer really has to do is spend a minute discussing political philosophy with new candidates and they will self-sort on intelligence just like that. I imagine the other side feels the same exact way so this is easily applicable to both parties and all I can say is it would be helpful if there was some secret sign that every store and business displayed to let all potential customers know what kind of service they can expect within.

I really enjoyed Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. In retrospect his vision of a future of franchise stores for everything from jails to pizza delivery all included the sacred Employee Binder which told every employee every step of every store process in order that every transaction was always the same for every customer. As I said, kind of amusing in hindsight since it is now looking like very few of our high school graduates can read anything at that level.

OTGH, one could simply ask potential employees how they feel about Elon Musk and you'd get your sort right there too. No need to be fancy.

ON TARIFFS

 Tariffs served two primary purposes throughout history. They raised revenue for the State/King and they protected domestic industries that the King/State thought were vital to the State. This is obviously dead as a door nail in any State that is sustained on nothing but 35 trillion $ in debt and has offshored almost 100% of its heavy industry and most of every other kind of industry ranging from pharmaceuticals to household goods. 

This is an interesting experiment in reinvention that I'm looking forward to watching. There is no place for our industry to go but up and only fairies believe that superpowers can be funded by external revenue cutters collecting tariffs on imported goods.

Has anyone else noticed how literally every single thing that Europeans now do is disagreeable and always amounts to an attack on freedoms and liberties that we have long enjoyed? It really is like reading the books about the slide into both World Wars where the European leaders almost deliberately took every single action that would and could only lead to an outbreak of War. They're all doing it again and it's like they cannot even see it. 

And no, I don't see their enemy as Russia so much as the nature of tyranny. Europe is rapidly becoming every bit as ugly and evil as the USSR was and with the same impact on its economy, GDP, and relations between nations. I almost wonder if they realize how close they all are to living on a knife's edge? The EU exists today only because the Germans worked their asses off to make it and lead it and now the German work ethic is essentially gone and so is much of their industrial power. They are following England and they don't have nearly as far to fall.

I hope that we have historians as honest and enthusiastic as those from the past.

HOW TO MAKE IT NOT YOUR PROBLEM

 If you glance at the map far below (last Tuesday) you can see Yanbu up there on the top right side on the Saudi coast. The last time I was there was to exchange prisoners offload some unnecessary Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys and their megaton of equipment on Ocean Unit 5. I have no idea what the Harkness did with them but we were well shed of them and we then drifted down to Jeddah to get rid of the rest of the useless supercargo.

While I was there I learned that the Saudis had actually chosen Yanbu as a critical component of the new infrastructure that the Kingdom was building to get around that little geographic trap known as the Strait of Hormuz. They were sufficiently insightful and well advised to see that having 100% of their oil exports flow through a narrow waterway controlled by the Islamic Shiite Republic of Iran was simply a disaster waiting to happen. They were losing tankers every week to missile attacks launched by Iran on ships destined for Dammam and Ras Tanura and could see that there was no end in sight which I'm sure they found particularly bothersome. One might say they did it to themselves but they had help and literally everyone else wanted Iraq to kick Iran's butt in that long dismal pointless war.

So anyway, here we have the most stable monarchy in the world, long called the most conservative stick in the mud since Noah tied off the ark at the end of the float and what were they up to back in 1984? Why yes, they were making sure that they could ship their oil products and receive any goods they wanted without having to risk the narrow waters of the Bab el Mendeb or the Strait of Hormuz. Iran still squats atop the entrance/exit to the Persian Gulf and the very unstable and psychotic Yemenis control the southern access to the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Yanbu neatly avoids both.

Now ask yourself if there are any strategic geographic traps that we have perhaps been very busy ignoring for the last 50 years or so. Are there any signs at all that we plan to do anything about them? I make mention from time to time that we don't actually have any means to sweep enemy mines laid in the approaches to our harbors or even in our harbors. You can wonder how they would get there but that would simply mean you've never been there.

The Panama Canal is not as important as it was. It's not just that the world gets smaller every time another enormous ship class is built that is actually too big to fit through the canal, it is also because the idiots that operate the country and canal thought they could double their national income by doubling the size of the canal. They didn't think it through. The canal only works because of the rainfall that collects in the Gatun Lake and nobody doubled the rainfall. Every time a ship passes through the canal it takes 52 million gallons of water out of the lake. The hard limit on the canal is not the size or number of locks, it is the amount of rainfall collected by the Lake. The idiots forgot that.

I keep seeing references every day to making sure that we spend way too much money getting ready for a war with China. It is always called the coming war with China and I keep asking how these people expect us to win or fight our way to a draw with China and if they can do neither now, what exactly has to be done to let us win or fight China to a draw in the future and how much will that cost and WHY? Nobody ever answers. They all insist that we need a huge navy to fight China for Taiwan or something and I have yet to see any evidence that the Taiwanese are willing to fight for Taiwan and absent some sincere and massive weapons programs and military buildups by the Taiwanese themselves, I'm not inclined to include them in among our vital interests. We can get whatever it is you can't do without from Vietnam or Thailand.

I've never been to China but I hear they have high speed trains whizzing all over the place and their infrastructure is like brand new....well, OK, they've only had to build it this one time in the last 3000 years which has no doubt saved them a lot of money. They don't spend a lot on defense, on the army or invading other places and they haven't really invaded anybody in my lifetime or even beyond that. They have a track record for not invading other countries that goes way back. Srsly, they should be a lesson to us all in that regard.

It really is true that all politicians and their like minded scalawags do is try to make you afraid of something and then con you into giving them more money to fight against it. Look at them! They made 2 entire generations terrified of CO2!

Look at the leading clowns of Europe who want a war with Russia and are allegedly rushing to spend a trillion $ to fake making a serious military threat to Russia and then they mean to invade Ukraine peacefully and squat on the Russian frontier after Putin has made it pretty damned obvious that he doesn't want NATO troop sitting right on his front porch. I'm sure he's beginning to wonder if he really does have to nuke a city or two just to prove his sincerity since the Europeans seem remarkably obtuse. We should bow out of the NATO and leave the kids to their idiotic spats. Our best shtick may be old but it serves us best if we let them go a little crazy killing each other for a few years before we step in and help. As we noted though at the time, there is very little upside to entering a war on a continent flush with nuclear weapons and long range delivery systems. They are quite literally incapable of behaving rationally and we really don't need to be a party to madness.

MUCH OF THE UKRAINE DEBACLE IS EXPLAINED

 I suspect that the average Vlad in the Street in Kiev is going to be a little pissed off when he learns that the crack military experts that lost the war in Afghanistan were the ones that were leading, guiding and running the Ukrainian efforts to defeat Russia in a no win war. Srsly, Milley better have all kinds of documentation to show that he was acting at the real direction of President Biden when he undertook to make war on Russia through Ukrainian proxies or he is in real trouble, Immunity Decree or not. 

I think the New York Times just broke the Democratic Party for once and for all. They have to repudiate the actions of Milley and the other generals or they have to stand by waging a secret war on Russia and then they need to explain in squeaky little voices why all of the Presidential Directives and Orders on this matter were signed with an autopen. Does anybody really doubt that they were all autopen? Does anyone really think slow Joe wouldn't have mentioned/dropped by accident/blurted out that he was leading a war against Russia and Milley was in charge of it?

COURAGE

 

Try to imagine the kind of courage it took to strap into one of the seats on planes like this and take off from a carrier far out at sea, fly over the unmarked ocean 200 miles to attack either another fleet or attack targets ashore on an island somewhere in the Pacific and then fly back to your carrier as the sun set behind the clouds over a vast ocean. No GPS, no long range radio navigation, no radar. Just you and your comrades. Imagine doing it again and again and again. People who imagine they have problems today have no idea what real problems look like and they are terrified of things that these men wouldn't even have noticed.

AN UNEXPECTED SIDE EFFECT

 I got a call the other day from the person in my life who knows me better than I do and she told me that what with one thing and another and me being born so long ago and other things but mostly because it hadn't been invented back when I was a baby or toddler, I never got a measles vaccine and also never got the measles so I should be aware of that now that the media is giving the country over to the terror and fear that measles are an epidemic and will kill every unvaccinated person in minutes.... To say that I wasn't terribly concerned would be an overstatement, 

However,

I had noticed a little folder in my desk drawer yesterday when I was searching for something and noticed that it was the thing I kept all my old security badges and driver's licenses in along with my fairly new international immunization record (only 29 years old). I hauled it out while I was talking and after checking it I saw that I had been swept up in the MMR frenzy in 1996. 

It turns out that was a side effect of an edict that the Saudis had put out back then announcing to the world that nobody would be admitted to the Kingdom without proof of certain vaccines. Measles wasn't one of them but since I was driving across the causeway to Saudi Arabia about 10 times a month, the Corpsman I was talking to about it said I might as well get it and made a careful record of it along with the required ones. 

I see that it may have all been in vein for nothing. It seems that the MMR has it's actual performance issues too. Can we really trust a vaccine to do the job when you have to keep getting it over and over again? I don't know. Not going to risk some things though. If another bat flies in my window and bites me on my thumb as I'm tossing it back out I will still head over to the clinic and get the real skinny on whether or not I need to update the rabies shots I got 5 years ago. And I'll nod and go along with anybody that suggests another tetanus shot would be a good idea. Rabies and Lockjaw are way down there on my list of things to do before I die.

WHERE'S THE BLOODY DOG?

 In just about every other field of presidential endeavor President Trump starts right out of the gate with sally towards the enemy's center although he sometimes feints at the flanks. He did this instantly in Trade by announcing Tariffs on all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons against just about every naughty country and instantly the rest of the talking was all about what the tariffs were going to do to destroy trade and end the world as we know it. They were accepted by all as a given. He did the same thing with DOGE and was in the enemy's camp 2 hours after midnight of they day he came to power and draining the swamp. 

I'm curious that he is not taking the battle to the Courts. I'd like to see them on the defensive and not just trying to explain their perversion of the powers laid out in the Constitution but trying to defend it and make the case for continuing to fuck mess things up.

I'm not hearing that dog bark and I'm wondering, why?

ON THE GRIPPING HAND

 There is a bit of a kerfuffle that I find amusing and some of the signals that were put in the air have been released in their entirety so I thought I'd share them. I am, as usual, just amazed at how timely some of this is.

Another title for this might have been, "unsurprising disdain and contempt." It's remarkable how little respect anyone has now for the slime that runs the European Union and how much contempt there is for the kind of people that endlessly voted for the total and complete destruction of their countries and their entire way of life. The people born after the millennium will never know a Europe that looked just like Switzerland or Hungary do today. All they will see is the endless waves of the most dismal, destructive and violent humanity ever cast up on any shore as they vandalize and destroy a civilization that once flourished there. Yep, a repeat of what happened first the Roman Empire and then to the Byzantine Empire. 

An interesting comment here led me to recall the final days of Task Group Orestes. It makes for interesting reading for those interested.

In hindsight I suspect letting the Walker's go so long was a cold blooded decision at the top of the chain of command that let the Russians know that our reach and power was real. It might have been what stopped the Cold War from heating up too much. Nowadays there seems to be almost no adults in the room when it comes to providing honest Estimates of the Situation. People who ought to know better still refer to Russia as a gas station with nukes. They also think we bled out the Red Army in Ukraine where very much the opposite has happened and nobody at all talks about it or even mentions it. There is, effectively, no Army/Navy or Air Force in Europe except possibly Poland. That's not a lot. Thank God the Russians have absolutely no desire to own western or even Eastern Europe. It's over.

TRADE WAR DU JOUR

 I remember a long time ago when someone allegedly put sea mines in the Red Sea and a number of commercial vessels claimed that they were damaged by mines. I'd have to look into the reality of that but I was dispatched to Jeddah to embark some mine sweeping helicopters and air crew and have a poke around to see if we could turn any mines up. We swept the sea lanes from Perim Island up to near Yanbu while a sister ship was sweeping the sea lanes from Port Said down to Yanbu. We never saw them but enough about the old days.

The tiff with Yemen is more than a tiff, it is an attack on maritime trade routes by pirates and we need to revert to form and fight these modern pirates much the way we fought them in the past. We should mine all of the harbors and approaches to Yemen on both the Red Sea and North Arabian Sea and declare a no-fly exclusion zone over Yemen. Yes, we will let them trade with all their friends over their own borders so it's not like we are cutting them off from all supply, merely choking off 100% of their access to the shipping lanes and along with that, 100% access to the sky. Let them work out just how provoking that can be.

There are not a lot of people or businesses that are willing to hazard their ships to trade with Yemen. Yemen is not like Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because it has almost nothing the rest of the world wants or needs. All the world ever asked of Yemen was to stay out of the way.

The thing is though, for this to be at all effective we need to enforce both the aeronautical and maritime blockade and if you look through the records of anything or, for instance, votes in the UN over the last 20 or 40 years you won't find any of our so-called allies ever being of much use when it came to actually working the world in an attempt to make it better. When it comes to actual world peace and making a contribution they are all off sniffing bicycle seats at the train station or dreaming of invading Russia. Ask them to step up and support a nice callous bit of blockade and they go as squishy as a democrat gushing about how nice that axe murderer is...

 

HONEST AND FAIR

 It is time for the Republican majority to formally mandate and make laws covering Federal elections. The election fraud is totally out of hand and it is destroying the people's and the country's faith in the premise of fair and honest elections. Everything we see in the aftermath of each election is fraud and deceit and Congress needs to fix that. 

The only way that elections can be honest is if every voter is identified when he or she casts a ballot and that requires an ID as difficult to fake as the TSA approved ones required to get on commercial aircraft in this country. 

The only way they can be seen as honest is if the votes are all conducted in the polling places and the votes are counted and registered within no more than 6 hours of the polls closing. The ridiculous charade of California and other jurisdictions taking weeks or months to count the vote is criminal and needs to be treated that way by the law.

The only reason for the ridiculous voting machines is fraud. They are unaccountable and questioning their veracity is grounds for getting sued to tens of millions of dollars. Since they are backed by the full faith and credit of the Democratic Party they are completely worthless and should be scrapped by order of the law. All ballots need to be sorted and counted by hand and the results announced within 6 hours of the polls closing.

Fraud in elections, campaign funding and counting needs to be treated as grotesque violations of the law and those who do it and are found guilty need to go to jail for a very long time and pay enormous fines so that we can restore confidence in the elections and the electoral process.

Congress needs to finish this law, openly debate it and get every member to put forward why he or she won't agree to it and then vote on it. It needs to be done now so that those members who oppose honest and fair elections can get thrown out of office at the next midterm elections. There is no excuse for permitting ongoing continuous fraud in elections.

Honestly guys, this is another one of those questions where 80% of the people really do want honest elections and the 20% who don't are going to disgrace themselves and their peers by fighting against them. Do the right thing. Don't be the Stupid Party, again.

I'm not sure why the link doesn't work out as usual. This is from the site: Constitution Annotated.

NEW TO THE SIDEBAR

Unquestionably and undeniably true, but forgotten by just about every democrat.....

"There are three co-equal branches of government; the judiciary is not supreme."

                                                                Josh Blackman

 

ANOTHER GALLOPING HERD OF STUPID

It is not that we never learn, it's just that some people never learn. So they are going to try again...

It’s amazing that US legacy media are still treating the Turkish protests as minor news. The Erdoğan Era, which began in 2003, has seen nothing like it, and the showdown is about to get ugly. A regime change in Turkey could shake the Middle East and improve Turkey-EC relations. https://t.co/GwGPfzoQwx

— Timur Kuran (@timurkuran) March 22, 2025

One thing we have certainly learned by now about every single damned revolutionary overthrow of Islamic governments is that they ALWAYS MAKE IT WORSE. Yes the islamic fanatics will win and everyone else in Turkey and around it will lose. You can take it to the bank. It happens every single time starting with Iran and ending just a month ago with Syria.  Islamics are like the French when it comes to satisfactory revolutionary outcomes.

THE MARTIAN TEST

 I can guarantee that there will be an intelligence test for anybody that wants a trip to Mars on one of Mr. Musk's rocket ships. SpaceX will probably carry out a complete background check on all the candidates too, just to make sure. And here I can hear those wannabees muttering a few choice words but everyone knows that the first English colonies in the New World didn't work out all that well and most of the new colonists died almost immediately and the last thing colonists on a new world in tomorrow want are saboteurs, freeloaders, communists and other socialists. It's not looking good for any Europeans making it to Mars. They'll have to shoot for Venus.

ON DOD CONTRACTS

 The numbers don't lie but sometimes they don't mean anything either. If the Secretary of Defense comes out and announces that they've cut $580,000,000 in contracts at the Pentagon and a DOGE guy comes out and baldly states that one of the weird things he's finding is that it is possible to terminate a $50,000,000 contract and nobody notices or even knows what it was for, there is truth but little validity to the statements. There are a few reasons for that.

1. The Government has one Contracting Officer Representative/contract. He is the only guy who really knows all the ins and outs of it although in some companies some contracts are both well known and understood and well published so that all members of the company may be able to latch onto the contract which is called a 'vehicle' by those in the know.

2. The contract vehicle I am most familiar with in DoD were all IDIQ contracts. Indefinite Duration/Indefinite Quantities and they are popular for a good reason....that's right, they are a 'vehicle' that the savvy know and understand that if you can get the Contracting Officer's Rep (COR) to sign off on your proposed Statement of Work you can charge almost anything to such a contract and stay within the legal limits. In my bit of DoD everybody really did pay a Hell of a lot more than lip service to the idea of contracts and value delivered. It is nothing like the idiocy you see everywhere else in government contracting shops where I'm pretty sure it is true that nobody knows because it was all corrupt and hidden away from the light of day. People went way out of their way to hide these things in locked filing cabinets in disused lavatories in the basements where someone had helpfully removed all the lights and the stairs and put a sign up saying, "beware of the leopard."

An IDIQ contract is frequently negotiated for the maximum value possible because they are dandy vehicles for getting work done. These contracts (any damned contract) take years to put together, bid, respond to, evaluate and sign. It is damned helpful to have a way of putting money on a contract instantly to accommodate pop-up work as soon as humanly possible. In other words, a SOW could be written at a government COR's desk, handed to him, signed off and be executed as soon as the contractor's contract officer signed off on it and those guys were available 24/7.

This IDIQ relationship translates into a contract vehicle having a, for instance, 270 million dollar ceiling and a 5 year period of performance. Both can be and are extended if both the government and the contractor agree, with the terms usually remaining the same and not subject to renegotiation. One simply extends the ceiling by X$ and the POP by another year or 5.

I had contract vehicles that had 250 million dollar ceilings and were good for 5 years and we were unable to get any work done on them because the government program office we dealt with hadn't received the necessary funds. In other words, the vehicle was there ready and waiting but there was no gas. Sucks but normal. 

If some Agent of the Government decided to cancel that IDIQ contract they could, if they wanted to, claim that they saved us $250,000,000 but it wouldn't, strictly speaking, be true. There was no money on it to save or recoup.

See? More than you ever wanted to know from a layman's POV on IDIQ DOD contracts.

I'm taking news of some of these savings we keep hearing about with a certain number of very large grains of salt—roughly the size Utah.

ABOUT DEMOCRACY

 I'm pretty sure they went out of their way to tank education in every country in the West because there is no other real explanation for how one formerly democratic country after another in the West has disposed of the entire idea of free national elections and referendum. Canada joins the ranks of dismal shitholes that has opted for an unelected globalist poltroon and now shares company with all of the EU, Germany, France, Romania, Turkey and the rest of the liberal progressive West that used to contribute to the idea of peaceful democratic states getting along peacefully with their neighbors. Let's not forget that the Democrat morons in this country were perfectly happy to not have any say at all in who ran for president and vice president on their ticket last year because the actual nazi elite in charge of them tossed out demented Joe Biden at the last minute and substituted a pair of morons; both struggling to be stupider and duller than the other.

Honestly, did you ever think it would be the French behind rebuilding Festung Europa? I thought they only did it last time because the Nazis were paying them to build it all in order to keep America and the British out.

Do you suppose anybody over there has figured out that a very large majority of Americans will not lift a finger to help them out of the next crevasse they tumble themselves into? Democrats won't do anything because war requires men and democrats don't have any that join the Army and the rest of us are too smart to retake Europe for the 3rd time because, what's the point?

AND SECRETS FALL LIKE RAIN

 I was looking back about 7 years tonight and I saw an old quip about the sudden totally unexpected demise of one of the players that fell with Hillary and I was forced to wonder how many of those who held close the secrets of despicable people but who were paid with the piles of slush money from the endless NGOs funded by the most corrupt people on earth are now wondering if their unpaid silence is any more assured than was that of the late Epstein.* Their benefactors knew that they and there endless little friends in the government were buying silence and now that the money stream has vanished what will become of the silence?

I see that the low fascists of the left are out swatting the hell out of the various foot soldiers of the right and trying to get the cops to kill as many of the people they view as enemies as possible. In like vein I wonder if the number of tragic auto accidents has carried off any number of unworthy deviants and perverts who know all about the Pizza Business and other scary topics too numerous to mention and certainly never in polite company. 

One of those fascinating bits of research that worthy investigators along the lines of the esteemed DataRepublican will carry out now and into the future will be some in-depth research into just how many people were tragically smited by various flaws in the universe and so rendered unable to squeal on their late comrades in the uniparty.

I honestly didn't think Donna Brazile would have lasted this long and let's be honest, at some point the Justice Department really will have to tell us where that $6 billion that disappeared into the Clinton Foundation for Haiti actually went since we know Haiti only got about 69 cents out of it. The easiest and most effective way to get down to the sordid details will be State's Evidence and those hoping to die of old age before that happened now face a certain unexpected setback. Trump won....again.

*Buck would have had something to say about that sentence....

TRAMPLING THE GRAPES OF WRATH

 Unless there is a really speedy (utterly unheard of) clear decision (never happened yet) from the Supreme Court, I think we are going to find that the polite fiction that most Americans believe is some sort of cast-in-stone reality is going to come to an end when President Trump just invites all the little judges and their TROs to fuck off. As with their ridiculous "impeachments," the democrats have gone way too far with their ridiculous charade of 'law' and we're all tired of it.

Any serious reading of the Constitution makes it very clear that accepted historical practice is nothing but a polite fiction. The Constitution is very clear on the Powers that are allocated and in the case of the ongoing lawfare it has been a chance for everyone to see now the injustice and stupidity that has been allowed to take over the System. 

It is ripe for revolution and telling the judges and the courts to shut up and get on with executing their duties as assigned and as laid out by law and to leave to the Law and to the President those things that are inherently outside their role. Watching White House Deputy COS deal with that idiot CNN talking head was the first kick to the head of a stupid failure to execute that has dogged us since FDR dropped dead.

THE GREATNESS IN DIMINISHMENT

 Did you ever think you would see the Israelis sweep their enemies off the board in a series of lightning fast and devastating blows that actually left the PLO untouched? Me neither.

Did you ever think a President would repudiate the pardons issued to criminals by a former President? Me neither.

Did you ever think that a President would allow the Federal Court judges to run amok in such a clear and obvious fashion that no sane observer could look at it and find it tolerable in a Republic that such low-level appointees and truly low-life officials of the government each thought they had the power vested in just one American and by their own actions would negate all of their influence over policy? Well, yeah I did.

As I read this fascinating article I thought about the things that were once so powerful they were simply left unmentioned and which faded away literally overnight as useless as buggy whip factories. It is and will be harder to conceive in the future how great the power of the mass media and newspapers were to our history and policy. It is even more amazing to see how they have diminished to the point where nobody even noticed them when they were gone.

The article mentions the works and effects of Elon Musk. He bought twitter, you know. What isn't even mentioned is that one of his near peers bought that major influencer, The Washington Post and with that the sudden realization comes; Twitter's reach is nearly infinite but the Washington Post is a non-factor at every level today and if Bezos decided to sell it tomorrow there is unlikely to be anyone stupid enough to buy it. It would, like the Plain Dealer and a thousand other papers, fade away and be forgotten.

One of the sadder realizations is that with the diminishment of education in this country that there are fewer and fewer people who will document and read the documented history of the disasters like Obama and Biden and their policies as they uniquely, as American presidents, set out to destroy, diminish and demonize America. I have to wonder who that 29% of Americans are who still have positive regard for the democratic party. I hope I don't know any of them.

ON THAT NOTE

 If the Deep State or/and Democrat Party had access to nuclear weapons at this point, they would have used them.

THEATER OF THE ABSURD

 The news is stuffed with things I don't really care about. It is nothing but a compendium of things that have happened before and will happen again and the only difference now is that the suffering of people I could care about is lessened by removal of so many communists, socialists and actual nazis from power in this country. There is still room for improvement but it happens slowly now as we move into the more familiar territory of 'incremental progress.' So be it.

The highlight of the news today, this painting long attributed to Canaletto was actually painted by

The Grand Canal Venice

his nephew Canaletto

The wonder of it all. I was staggered to learn that it was by Canaletto, but not himself. As you can see, the world of Art History moves pretty fast. You have to struggle to keep up.

FIRST SEAPOWER USE IN 21ST CENTURY

 It appears that President Trump has decided to launch significant attacks against Yemen. One might make an argument that it would be a good idea to have an appointed Chief of Naval Operations in place if one is going to engage in a naval war on the other side of the world. That said, the ideal form of naval war in this case is a simple air and sea blockade and we have rich experience in naval blockades and shooting down Iranian aircraft in that part of the world.

On the gripping hand, if we still have a carrier or assault group inside the Persian Gulf it would have been prudent to pull them out before launching a war against Iran's last proxy in the Middle East.

WHEN THE PENNY DROPS

 One of the nazis that spent years terrorizing his fellow students and nazi sympathizers at Columbia University was recently expelled and claimed it is an honor to be expelled for Palestine. It is probably the kind of thinking and thing he learned from his parent who works in the upper levels of the U.S. State Department. I'm not sure he has figured out that all those 6 figure sinecure jobs that good little nazi party apparatchiks like him used to get following graduation from the Ivy League with a degree in Socialism or Communism all got chopped and flushed away by DOGE and they are never coming back.

A DAY WITHOUT RAIN

 Unexpectedly. we here in metroparkcentralis were blessed with a second glorious false Spring sunny and warm day that allowed us to witness the slow fading away of the moon. We are not usually so blessed when it comes to stellar phenomena and in 12 years the only things we've been able to see with our own eyes in the heavens are the last total eclipse of the sun and the transit of Venus some years ago just as the sun was reaching the horizon over the Great Lake we live to the Southeast of. Tonight we got to watch the full lunar eclipse. It was very nice.

As I said, it usually rains or snows whenever a comet enters the inner system or there is a meteor shower or those pesky attack ships catch fire....well you know where. At any rate, I include some Enya for good reasons and a picture of a book I read shortly after it came out. Interestingly, Manry was also from metroparkcentralis and his little boat is still located here in the Western Reserve aviation and auto museum. 

I always liked the cover of the book because it brings to mind the original members of our flotilla. Our first was a bright red Optimist pram and the second was purchased about a month later from title holders of the Inland Navy in Kansas. It was a 13 foot long Flying Junior named Indomitable and the pram was named the Indefatigable. We drove them around the country from Kansas to Newport, RI with the bright red pram upside down in the FJ looking just like you see in the picture above.

I was thinking of the red moon we saw tonight and then of the problems one would have trying to teach celestial navigation in metroparkcentralis since it is always so cloudy and then what a pain in the butt it would be to swing an arc with a sextant in something as small as a 13 foot boat and then I figured I'd probably just use a compass and a radio direction finder if I was sailing to England in 1965. At least this time I could speak the language of the stations I was using to DF unlike the last time I did it in Mexico.

So yeah, I started sailing about 6 years after Tinkerbelle arrived in England and did it in a place even more removed from the sea. It got better though even if the later additions to the flotilla never did get longer than 14 feet. There is still one tucked away in the garage chastising me for not getting in a few hours on the water last summer. I'll have to try harder this year.

THE TRIUMPH OF CATASTROPHIC

 I got this from a post at Zerohedge and recommend that you watch the short video there from the author of this informative pitch. It starts to cover the things you probably wondered about:

Can anybody point to a case the FBI has shined in in the last 30 years?

This is the very definition of Federal Agencies and the Media

It is all they teach + "everyone does it, why not me?"

The people that run these agencies and have for years have been graduating from the same rotten institutions that hate America for decades and they have all voted democrat all their life and they marry each other so you have the prosecutors marrying the FBI and vice versa and then they appear in front of the same judges they went to school with and a wink is as good as a nod and we have the obviously broken, corrupt and defiled justice and law enforcement system that we would not tolerate in any other country foisted off on us and we're told this is as good as it gets.

THE END IS NIGH IN UKRAINE

 As any thinking being would have foreseen 3 years or 30 years ago, the war between Ukraine and Russia is coming to a close. It's not going to end the way Europe wanted it to at any price/any cost and it is not ending the way that Russia wanted it to end but it is coming to its inevitable end and the question that dogs us now is, "is there any room for the United States in NATO now that the War Is Finally Over?

The Winter War saw the pluckiest little country on earth go up against Russia and it too ended as if foreordained. Finland never had the people or the wealth to beat the Soviets and knew it but still fought it out until the very end and all that death and destruction was for nothing at all. So it is with Ukraine except Ukraine's was not a national war of survival against an overreaching and horrific ideology but the conclusion of 15 years of twisting the Bear's tail until it came off in their hands. It came off in Europe's hands too but they are going to walk away from this with nothing more than totally destroyed economies and a moribund industrial base crippled by the idiocy of the EU's energy policies led by the stupid twits in Germany.

Well over a million men dead in a terrible and pointless war with three times that many wounded and crippled and it was all for what? It certainly wasn't any kind of fight to keep and make democracy free or to preserve the Western way of life because both of those are dead and buried now in western Europe and I don't see any hope at all for their resurrection. The EU is now again simply stepping in and cancelling elections and throwing out any results they don't like as they did with the various EU Treaty votes named Amsterdam, Lisbon and Maastricht. It got so bad after France voted no that most of the EU didn't put it to the people if they wanted to join but left it to the paid hacks in government who were paid to feather their own nests at the people's expense.

One of the downsides with involving ourselves in this even at the level of foisting peace talks on the unwilling is the idea that we may be open to that it is now our job to impose peace that one party does not seek. That would be a profound mistake. There is absolutely no doubt that Western Europe and Ukraine will only maintain a peace as long as it suits them and the instant they perceive an advantage they will jump back into war with both feet and hope to surprise Russia with their obvious lies and deceit.

I wonder if more people elected to flee Ukraine then actually voted for Maastricht....The EU is not looking anything like friendly territory anymore and it is looking an awful lot more like a dictatorship than Russia does these days. Are we sure we want to be in a military alliance of loose cannons who hate free speech, free elections and the right of self-determination?

UPDATE:

Oddly enough it took less than 24 hours for the Russians to pronounce an interest in opening cease fire negotiations and for Zelensky to violently pervert the whole idea and reject even the possibility of sitting down to discuss it.....Not really a surprise to those who see this sort of thing happening more and more whenever it is obvious that one side or both lack all reason.

WOEING

 I do wonder how many of Boeing's problems/idiocy could be fixed almost overnight if they put in charge the men who designed and built the XB-37 Experimental space ship. They have been working flawlessly (as far as we know) for the last 15 years. I think putting those guys in charge of Boeing (all of it from the top down as CEO, GM, etc) would go a long way toward fixing what is wrong in all of Boeing.

Now that is predicated on the reported fleet of two being the whole number purchased. If it turns out the Air Force purchased 17 of them, 4 of them blew up at Vandenberg and the rest were lost in space, then all bets are off.

They are by all accounts I have seen, some fine machines.

LAND FOR PEACE

 The current unpleasantness reflects a general inability of people today to remember the past. Most people from back then made a serious effort to put the past behind their children, everyone except the Germans and the Japanese. The real understanding of land for peace is never ever addressed. People never even mention it as it applies to places like Europe where the land has been traded back and forth so many times not for peace but as concessions wrung from a defeated country and populace that almost nobody remembers it anymore and certainly nobody educated in America over the last 70 years. 

When you get right down to it, it was bloody awful and it was as alive to the people back then as the current slurry of sliminess that is Gaza is to idiots today. Germany didn't 'trade land for peace', it was torn asunder by the allies and put into separate zones of occupation headed by the British, Soviet, French and United States and every time anyone in Europe stands up to propose taking away someone else's land and giving it away to buy peace there is a giant hedgehog standing behind him ready to leap up his ass. That hedgehog is named Germany.

If people want to get all sentimental about who owns what land in Europe and how it is perfectly reasonable to demand that Russia fork back over the land that it seized by mere force of arms then how much more reasonable is it that all of Europe's borders revert to the 1918 borders of Germany and the rest of the countries around it? It seems only fair, Im Westen nichts Neues? 

The world really likes to forget that nations evolve and evolution is a messy thing when left to itself and doubly so when mankind gets involved. We don't so much evolve things as we extinct them but we tried to limit the extinction of peoples in recent times and it seems like a chilling reversion to norm to have all these ignorant people dancing and jousting in the streets demanding the return of something lost in combat and later at the peace talks. Sometimes what is done is best left alone and the time to have a beef about it is right up front when you got your self-righteous mad on and the people support extinguishing the flower of a generation of young men for some pointless little land squabble that sees them get nothing more out of it than a plot 6 feet by 3...

AN UNCHARITABLE THOUGHT

 Do you wonder if the United States and the USSR had a sit down meeting with drinks and cigars sometime back around 1991 and both agreed that they would make no more war and make no more overtures leading to any wars and they would both shed their feeble partners in Europe with the goal of making the world safer for oligarchs?  The USSR spun off all the useless debris of the Cold War almost overnight and went from recognized super power to homey ole Russia while the US shed almost every last bit of the force it had kept in Europe and at home in the face of a full blown Soviet super power and nobody noticed.

Oh sure we called it a peace dividend but the real upshot was that the 2 superpowers had looked at the world and decided that none of it was worth fighting over and barely worth keeping and agreed to let the chips fall where they may. With that was the renaissance of the horrible InHoly Roman Empire as dreamed of by German and French philosophers for 300 hundred years and lo, they came upon the world stage and decided that their purpose was to bring back the great powers and spark some conflicts and get more God knows what....

They decided to reinvigorate all their populations by bringing in the very worst and most violent unsocialized people on the planet and not integrate them into their societies but simply turn them loose to wreak havoc on the lesser people so that the little people would call for more and more totalitarian means to control the new and more violent people but who then end up getting crushed by the usual scum that always rise to the top in Europe and now they have decided that brinksmanship is the name of the game and they want to play the two superpowers off each other for some concessions to Europe.

I really cannot imagine what drives those people in Europe. We have our democrat idiots but that appears to be all that they have in Europe plus the insanely violent and destructive islamics and africans. We at least have some chance to rein in the democrats but the Europeans just let the very worst people in the world get on top and "control" the situation by applying more vicious unprincipled violence against their own people and the majority of them seem to be content with that. But we could say that about the French under Bonaparte, Germans under Hitler, Spain under Franco and the Italians under Mussolini. They are really not at all like us.

Europe used to be a nice place to visit but to be honest, I don't have any desire to go again.

AT THE END OF THIS, THEY GIVE THAT MAN A GUN

 

UKRAINE: JD Vance called out Zelensky for forcing Ukraine to hunt down and detain conscripts, sending them to die at the front—all because Zelensky refuses to pursue diplomacy. pic.twitter.com/T7nEvSwM4O

— World Hall Of Fun (@WorldHallOfFun) March 8, 2025

 Do you really think they put these men into the line alongside their officers and NCOs and give them weapons and ammunition? How does that work out?

IN THE TRIFLES

I found this quote from a person who guests with Bill Mahar on something to be quite interesting and a little thought provoking:

Alyssa Farah Griffin: "The arts obviously skew left of center. How much in beltway media the story of the Kennedy Center takeover has become a big story so out of touch with the middle of this country."

The Arts skew left not because the artists and art is left but because the people who control !100% of the public monies spent on art are complete leftards and idiots and the only people who then get any money in the arts are people who are leftards or doing a damn good impression because the left is shameless in funding only its adherents and punishing to death those that don't agree. 

This is perhaps the only thing they learned from the French Revolution and they never realized what happened to the Jacobins or of the White Terror or what happened to France itself after the leftards were permitted to run loose and the truly amusing thing is that Marat and Robespierre are perhaps 2000 X farther to the right then any PBS or NPR person broadcasting today— and they don't know it. 

Every singe Foundation is hard left. The Tides and the Ford Foundation are outright communists and every board member is dyed in the wool full frontal socialist who would not hesitate to condemn the unvaccinated to death or to starve in concentration camps and these people universally think of themselves as the 'good' people.

On that note, an awful lot of the very best 'good' people were recently fired from their sinecures in the federal government and are without a job or means of support. I wonder what the real suicide rate is these days in the District and the counties surrounding it. It wasn't just a handful let go it was an awful lot of them and they are the very definition of living beyond their means and spend to excess. On the gripping hand they are so literally full of themselves that many of them simply haven't accepted it yet or they think they can survive 4 years in the wilderness and come back into power and property when they inevitably take back the government. They also assume their victory and return is inevitable despite taking the 20% side of every single issue currently on the table.

These are the first of the Iron Laws:

It is not enough to drive them out, it must be made impossible for them to get back in because the final Bureaucratic Law hurts most. On that note, have you heard that Department of Homeland Security has declined to negotiate with the TSA Union because it akshully turns out that there are more TSA doing Union Duties then there are TSA minions doing personnel, baggage and luggage screening in all the nation's airports. Oh Bog!

EVEN MORE NOW

 I cannot believe that the Europeans did not see what was coming. He hasn't changed at all. The only thing different this time is that he has learned that the bureaucracy is made up of only liars, cheaters and thieves so he took action to sideline them right out of the gate. Other than that, you could safely say that nothing at all changed in 4 years.

THE WILDERNESS YEARS

                                                               Ice Wall at the Harbor Entrance

Not much ocean-going trade here in the North. The region is taking a pause while it waits for global warming to resume its fearsome pace and accelerate the withdrawal of the ice to the north. It would be nice to see the President assign some officer counterpart to Doge who will investigate all the scientific frauds that have been foisted off on an all to credulous public with an idea towards throwing some of the corrupt fraudsters and liars into jail for a good long time for massacring science in the perpetuation of scientific fraud and more billions of dollars going into bad pharma and global warmist's pockets.

JUST NORMAL ROTATION, COMRADE

 I would kind of like to see President Trump direct the DoD to rotate our forces in Europe home to the United States and I mean all of our forces in Europe. Just pick up all the gear and missiles and ammo and head back to the United States. It would serve ably as a demonstration of our military sealift capabilities to see them engage in a full blown movement of forces from and to Europe.

I would start by pulling every soldier, sailor, airman and marine and all the gear they have maintained there in readiness for parades or demonstrations or whatever it is NATO does. I don't actually know since I never served there or on a NATO staff of any kind. Naturally we would leave a few Marines to guard our embassies.

We would have to inform all of our dear European allies of the move but reassure them by telling them that we were merely taking the cruddy old worn out stuff home to make room for all the shiny new stuff we are going to send in to replace it at roughly the same time Hell freezes over.

There is no need to hurry since we've all been assured by every single one of our dear NATO allies that they have the power and might and wherewithal to go toe to toe with Putin any day of the week and twice on Sunday and they don't need to hear any backchat from us about the inadvisability or the actual impossibility of that, thank you! I think we can have the withdrawal debacle in full stride by August and most of the forces home by Christmas and then we'll polish it up and send it back in a couple of years or so unless circumstances change and there is no need for us to pretend that the USSR still exists as a threat to Europe.

It will reveal some MASSIVE shortcomings in little things like the complete absence of all that old infrastructure and shipping we used to have lying around capable of moving whole divisions to Europe on 96 hours notice. That will be illuminating.

THE EPSTEINS

I must admit, it is getting entirely predictable. Does anybody take it seriously anymore? 

The Evidence is Right in Front of You Charlie Brown

NAILED IT

 You may remember that I wondered a few months ago if we would once again be able to employ Quaestors in the service of the People and lo, we have Doge and our much more resilient (I hope) Cicero.

A RECKONING FOR KINGS

 It is enough for me, for now, to see the ending of the bureaucratic state. It has never been done from the top down in all of history. You could see efforts by the Greeks, Romans and various feudal states and nothing at all from China but the top down evisceration of the State hasn’t really been a thing since Oliver Cromwell had a go at it and his did not end at all well.

In our case it does not from one side look like the ancien regime within the regime stands a chance but they were surprised by the onslaught because nothing like DOGE has been tried before. As they recoil and ready the infernal state it is not time to regroup but to parachute in a second wave to take out the long buried strongholds of the Deep State and that means returning the Judicial Branch of the State to its own place. They all act as one as if they are both above the Law and the final arbiters of the Constitution. They lost sight of We The People.

I expect Lawfare like never seen before on this continent. It is the necessary second act in this drama of restoring the Republic.

SCABS AND SPLITTERS

 I am weary of all the countries around the world that want to wrestle us into submission by claiming that they are great allies of ours and yet have not demonstrably proved it anytime in the last 50 years. "Oh," they exclaim, loudly, repeatedly, "we are great NATO allies and have to stick together in order to defeat our common enemy de jour." The ones in Asia are somewhat less irritating because we don't really have any allies over there that I know about other than the ROK and they manifest a great willingness to actually stand up on their own two feet and do the work that needs doing unlike the losers in NATO.

There were several votes in the UN today along strict party lines, The United States of America deftly balanced with no support at all from the usual NATO losers got not one single NATO ally to go on record supporting the latest UN Security Council resolution sponsored by the United States. Not one of them voted for it. 

Well you might ask, what was the damned thing anyway? Good question.  Simply put, "the Council implored a swift end to the conflict and urged a lasting peace between Ukraine and the Russian Federation and the United States representative said that the Council stands on “the precipice of history with a solemn task – creating conditions to end the bloodiest war on the European continent” since the organ was created in June 1945. Noting that her country’s draft text is “a symbolic, simple first step towards peace”, she added that it is not a peace deal. Rather, it represents a path to peace, and she urged all Council members to join the United States in vanquishing the scourge of this war."

The blue members of the UN Security Council voted to give peace a chance. All the red countries abstained in a snit.

    Algeria China Russia
    Denmark Slovenia France United Kingdom Greece
    Guyana Pakistan Panama Republic of Korea Sierra Leone Somalia

We literally cannot get our putative NATO allies to put their pants on and come to work and support the United States on anything at all but every time I turn around there they are demanding to be taken seriously because they claim us as allies. Idiots in the media have been letting them get away with this since long before we and the USSR signed the INF Treaties and START trying to curb European enthusiasm for surrendering immediately to communism.

There is a reason as old as NATO for why nobody on this part of the North American continent takes European leaders seriously when it comes to Russia. They have proven over and over again that they are too stupid to deal honestly with the Russians and the Russians have really come to resent it. We're starting to resent it too.

A RICH TURBULENT IMAGINATION

 I was there at the beginning when the Navy Marine Corps Internet rolled out at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command and it had some pretty rocky teething problems that lasted a few years but the one I really enjoyed was when the idiots would take down the entire NMCI by hitting a flame spray message "Reply to All".

It didn't happen with the first one but within 30 seconds enough people hit, "reply to all" telling everyone else to stop using "reply to all" that the entire system froze solid and had to be rebooted somewhere else on the planet by guys that weren't paying attention or had taken the day off in Plano, Texas. The second or third time it happened my colleagues and I would look at each other, nod, and all go to lunch.

I wonder if there is a, "reply to all" function for this one.

1. Overthrew the government.

2. Set fire to attack ships off the shoulder of Orion.

3. Learned to code.

4. Ran a very successful lemonade sale to raise money to buy a new B21 Bomber.

5. Invaded Mexico (more of a lunch-time ratissage).

ALMOST LYRICAL

 I use Proton VPN now and have for some time. It's a nice free service and one of the things I like about it is how it selects the fastest server to connect me to the web. There is a problem with that sometimes because it runs into permissions issues that don't affect me here in metroparkcentralis but are, for instance, a hassle in Texas and verbotten in Germany but on the other hand I get something like a blessing.

I really loathe what youtube did with advertising. I don't watch them, ever. Now when I'm up on a Japanese or German network server and get a yen to link to youtube to see what my attention is being invited to, the ads are made for Japanese and Germans and they are very restful and relaxing. I have no idea what they're saying and most of the time cannot figure out what they're advertising but since I don't care this is all a win/win!

Again, ymmv.

THANK YOU AND GET OUT

 General Brown and Admiral Franchetti lasted almost a full month longer than I thought either one of them would. I know only bad things about General Brown and less than nothing about Admiral Franchetti but I'll be honest enough to say with some conviction that there is no way on earth that either officer came anywhere near being the best or nearly the best officer in their services and missed that goal by miles. General Brown appears to be a racist right down to the core of his being and I honestly don't know how Admiral Franchetti ended up as Chief of Naval Operations.

To enlighten the unenlightened I will simply say that any knowledgeable person can simply look at the qualities of the men who led the Air Force and Navy through World War II up to Vietnam and beyond and even the officers who led our efforts in Desert Shield and Desert Storm and say with some honesty that neither Brown nor Franchetti manifested any of those traits of command, leadership or integrity.

I would not be surprised if Secretary Hegseth reaches down to haul up a Battle Group Commander or Fleet Commander to serve as CNO. President Trump and his team have hopefully found a competent warfighter familiar with what passes for our national defense industry who can take over as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

NOW IMAGINE THIS IS US AND CHINA

As you think about this:

In this thread I'll respond to some of what I've seen out there. Let's start with Niall:

1) On the general background, yes, you have been more right than wrong on a lot of the details of the conflict. Which is why I'm surprised to hear you call the administration's posture… https://t.co/w7OQemI3R7

— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 21, 2025

What the thread is demonstrating to all of us who continue to read about how the United States must prepare for war with China, is just how ridiculous that notion really is today. As with the Ukrainian position in their war with Russia, there are not now and never will be any situation in which Ukraine defeats Russia. It is impossible, not just inconceivable and yet there are zillions of people roaming the halls searching for some way to have Ukraine come out victorious in the peace talks.

History is replete with examples of countries getting screwed at the peace talks after the war or making out like bandits at the peace talks after the war. One can look at Germany and World War I for an example of the first case and at France after Napoleon was defeated the first time as an example of the second kind. Unfortunately for France, the Allies had to defeat Napoleon again and the Second Treaty of Paris in 1815 was nowhere near as generous as the first Treaty of Paris in 1814.

The upshot though was that World War I ended not in the military defeat of Germany on the battlefield but from crushing the people with starvation and this led to the next war. In Europe in 1815 the statesman and the crowned heads were smart enough to see that what had recently transpired in France was going to happen to all of them and they took some steps to mitigate it to the best extent they could via the Congress of Vienna. It was a critical time for the West and we live with the fallout to this day. After defeating Germany a second time the terms were much much worse and we created NATO not so much to keep the Russians out as to keep the damned Germans down. Look at the initial agreement for the NATO Treaty and what it had to say about Germany.

The current talks have merit, to the extent that they mean anything to the rest of Europe, only if they address what is at the very core of the war in Ukraine. Irredentism underlies European history as it does nowhere else on earth. Europe is a tapestry of nation/states that range from the tiny ethnic states to awful conglomerations like the former Yugoslavia and we all saw how that played out. It is important to note that European learned nothing from that and then decided ethnic conflict among just European tribes wasn't enough so they brought in zillions of muslims and migrants from every tiny hate-filled torn-to-pieces state and country on earth. Good going guys, we know how this plays out.

To return to the topic though, if we do embroil ourselves in another war featuring China, just how do the various players so keen to foment one, plan to get out of it since we no longer have the option of sending an expeditionary force to Peking and forcing the Empress to run away and then give us what we want?

Now if you want scary, consider that men just like Soros are working with everything they have at their command to turn China against Russia because they'll make more money off that war than any war in history. On the gripping hand, some people think that the renewed Chinese fascination with long range nuclear tipped rockets owes some of its basis to their fears of the United States, me, I think they know that if they invade Siberia they're going to enjoy a brief rain of fire and will try to prevent that by promising MAD and when you think about it in that light, isn't mutual assured destruction just about the stupidest defense policy you could ever dream up in your worst fantasies?

Ever wonder what the great families dream of? All of them throughout history have devoted themselves not to the world as it is but to the idea of the world that they will leave for their grandchildren and great grandchildren to rule after them. They think in terms of generations to come whereas politicians only believe in the now. I'm not sure which is worse.

ON HISTORY IN PRESENT TIME

If you ever sat there after reading the lines and wondered, what did it feel like to stand upon a foreign and very dangerous shore and hear your captain give the order to "burn the ships" well, now you know.

It really is a lot of fun to watch history in the making as the President finally takes command of the Executive Branch and starts to bring it into line with the actual Constitution. It has taken much longer than most people realize to start to destroy the State that crept and then leapt into being with FDR and his fellow travelers. 

I'll tell you who was 'not onboard' with the order to burn the ships. That's right, the sailors like me who owned those ships and also planned to sail home on those ships regardless of what happened to ole Hernán Cortés and his merry band of soldiers and priests. I picture their modern counterparts still in the government sitting there in their offices (just the tiny handful that aren't 'working' from home) and shaking their heads in misery as they watch their sinecures and lifetime employment going up in flames.

 I suspect that hate as a motivator isn’t quite the thing to rebuild civil society on but it looks it is all many people have left to give so the journey may be a little bumpy. On the gripping hand, there is the path down which Stalin went but I don’t really see us sending the haters off to spend the rest of their miserable lives digging a new White Sea Canal. Anyway, canals never really worked on this continent.

A new government, but smaller and more responsible to the people.

SATISFACTION

 Mr. Patel was just confirmed by the Senate as our new Director of the FBI and I must say that I am looking forward with some pleasure to reading in the days ahead that he has identified another Enemy of the State, Accused that Enemy of Crimes and has moved to have that Enemy of the State arrested and put into pre-trial detention alongside the remaining January 6th hostages. Now that I think about it, maybe in a real prison system run by real judges and not the tools of the Democratic Rebellion Part II.

He can start with the entire Democratic Caucus in both House and Senate and then go after all the Judges who suffer greatly from conflicts of interest but don't let that slow them down at all as they steamroll justice at the fastest rate since Beria led the NKVD.

 "Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime"

In our case it will probably simply boil down to the process is the punishment. Let it be so. 

On another note, I enjoyed reading the link at wikipedia for our new FBI Director and I wonder who will amend it and how as the days go forward. It is one thing to sneer at a man as a conspiracy theorist but that generally ends when, like Beria, he wields the full investigative power of the State and can just tear into those little controversies that democrats don't think matter all that much because, hey! democrats..... It's going to be interesting to see how those conspiracies get treated in future as the deniers will try to claim that no, no, they thought it was all a fantasy because the polka-dots were a more mauvish shade of pinky russet and ignore all the bodies turning up in cement overshoes.

I personally think that it is long passed the time to investigate all the destruction of evidence and crimes associated with getting Hillary Clinton and all her minions off without any charges despite the mountains of evidence. That includes investigating the FBI itself for all of its criminal activity in perverting the course of justice and election interference.

The number of people that I would not share a plane with is growing every single day. I'm just glad I don't have to fly anymore.