I REMEMBER THEM

 I have a picture somewhere around here of me as a little boy wearing the outfit my mother made for me back when we were living in Carlisle while my dad was off to war in Vietnam and I had to polish up and look good for the grand opening of my great Uncle John's church there in downtown. Afterwords I recall that we went to his rooms where we watched as the Parade marched through Carlisle with a sizeable group of marchers wearing the uniforms they wore during the Great War. As I look back from now I can see that those old veteran's probably used to watch a similar parade as the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic marched on their Remembrance Day.

This time of year is not the one that any sane person would pick to honor veterans of our nation's wars but it was chosen long ago by the day that the guns finally fell silent all along the endless front as the fighting of World War I finally came to an end. It is by any light a fine day to simply take a few long moments and remember the veterans and if you know some, buy them a cup of coffee and maybe a nice chocolate cream donut or a really good bagel because we they deserve it! 

And remember, all veterans are way too old and broken to garden or shovel snow. 

SNOW ON THE GROUND

 I saved this for the first snow day of this winter. As I wrote last time, she has everything well in hand. Me? I’ve been listening to snow plow driving by since midnight.

FOOLS RUSSIAN

 So the newest members of NATO did just what you knew they would, they launched a casus belli this week by blockading Konigsberg and preventing Russia from sending fuel and goods into East Prussia exterior Russia. They turned off the power and lights in European Russia and the reward for behavior like that is almost always war.

US out of NATO, US out of Europe!

These stupid vicious idiots don’t know anything about how to stay at peace with their neighbors and they’ve never given us a good reason to fight for them. I suspect that Victoria Nuland has holdovers in the Baltic Desk at State Department. Stupid like this has to be encouraged by some nitwit with no brakes and no understanding of history or diplomacy.

COMMAND IS FLEETING

 I was reading the latest from Simplicius this evening and it struck me as I was reading about the latest collapse of the battle front in Ukraine that what we are seeing played out there is a lot like what Sir Julian Corbett wrote about in his book, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. In a twist unique to this blog we're going to stand the normal order of things military on its head and see what applying maritime strategy looks like when its overlaid on military strategy. The second link above will let you download the book at Project Gutenberg  to read for yourself if you're interested. 

Corbett was one of the three naval strategists we studied back when we were young. He, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Jomini were the big 3 in addressing characteristics of naval strategy and applying them to history. One might say that a study of history was a necessary foundation for strategy but it sure doesn't look like it is anymore. 

Corbett was the one that wrote about the simple fact that appears to escape every stupid naval strategist today and most of the lamer ones of the last 100 years. 

“The object of naval warfare must always be directly or indirectly either to secure the command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it. 

The second part of the proposition should be noted with special care in order to exclude a habit of thought, which is one of the commonest sources of error in naval speculation. That error is the very general assumption that if one belligerent loses the command of the sea it passes at once to the other belligerent. The most cursory study of naval history is enough to reveal the falseness of such an assumption. It tells us that the most common situation in naval war is that neither side has the command; that the normal position is not a commanded sea, but an uncommanded sea. The mere assertion, which no one denies, that the object of naval warfare is to get command of the sea actually connotes the proposition that the command is normally in dispute.”

He continues a few paragraphs later,  

“In the first place, "Command of the Sea" is not identical in its strategical conditions with the conquest of territory. You cannot argue from the one to the other, as has been too commonly done. Such phrases as the "Conquest of water territory" and "Making the enemy's coast our frontier" had their use and meaning in the mouths of those who framed them, but they are really little but rhetorical expressions founded on false analogy, and false analogy is not a secure basis for a theory of war.”

When the command of the seas wavered it wavered pretty hard.

During the Okinawa campaign, the Japanese kamikaze attacks resulted in the sinking of 36 Allied ships and the damaging of 368 others, with an estimated 4,907 Allied sailors killed and 4,824 wounded. These figures were largely the result of widespread and persistent suicide attacks that occurred between March and June 1945, impacting numerous naval vessels supporting the invasion. Author's note: this is my first AI quote. Yay AI!

We are going to see that the common precept now for all warfare must be one of a total lack of command of the sky, command of the sea or pushing the front forward to destroy and envelop the enemy which yields total command of the land behind the front to the one occupying the territory. It simply isn't going to work like that anymore. 

I also saw a news headline that said that the US Army was buying a million drones. I do hope not. There is nothing worse than ossified doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures based on buying the wrong hardware and then gearing all of that around the purchased obsolete crap the bean counters bought.  Of course this raises two fundamental problems with breakthrough tech in modern times. 

1. The whole concept of exploiting breakthrough tech is instantly poisoned by putting it in the hands of the Civil Service and one of the military's formally established labs. I might offer it to MCTSSA but even there it is doomed to eventual corruption by bureaucrat.

2. Put the whole idea into a series of non-stop RFPs for really cool, cheap, deadly long range / short range, tactical, surveillance, bomb delivery or other drones and have industry just flood the Pentagon and services with some really cool, cheap deadly designs. The obvious problem here is that the Pentagon can't and won't buy them all so they'll end up on the world market and find their way into the hands of our enemies or even worse, democrats and liberal progressives.

As you read up on the battles and cauldrons consuming men for nothing in Ukraine it is hard to believe that military strategists and generals are right now keen to put this all behind us because they know that this is not how they plan to wage war. In their minds nothing has changed since Desert Storm and they mean to keep right on exploiting those features of the military industrial complex and expanding on Counter Insurgency Operations. 

All through the Cold War the premier threat we all accepted was a sudden and devastating attack on the nation's capital and the death or destruction of the national command authority and we knew our potential enemies had the means to get a sea launched ballistic missile over the capital in as little as 12 minutes. We developed something like the Launch on Warning of television and movie fame. We had no choice. 

The interesting thing though is that back then we knew of one other country on the planet that had that capability. Now? Well now we have anybody with a few bucks and some tech savvy who can pretty much flood the National Capital Region with dozens of drones practically at will.

Something else we used to read about back in that old war was the Look Down Shoot Down capabilities we'd need to deal with some threats. How much thought do you suppose the Air Defense mavens at the NCR have given to collateral damage from shooting down drones with high explosives over Bethesda, Arlington, Alexandria, etc? That's just on the strategic level. How are the C4I nodes of the various generals going to survive in the same but worse threat environment of today?

I know the Russian General Staff has been working on these matters for a couple of years now. I suspect our versions of the General Staff (we don't have one) haven't even looked at what it means, what it will take to stop it and how they will command the resources to eliminate the threat as needed over those areas where command of the skies or command of the seas is essential and must be unequivocal.  Hell, they're all in unpaid status and may be out fishing for all I know.

The United States since its founding has been immune to deep strike. We don't even think about it because nobody can attack us from thousands of miles away short of using ballistic missiles....except we flooded our country with enemy civilians and they can and are exploiting every loophole (loopholes the size of the Grand Canyon) to be able to instantly implement death and destruction if we go to war with their principal country. You see them smuggling in biological  materials that will destroy our crops and poison the land. They bought up land around our strategic air bases. They are ready now to wage this kind of warfare.

We read about the Russian's shadow fleet of tankers but I wonder that we don't hear about their shadow industries that have set up scores of fronts inside the USA to carry out deep strikes as needed in the future. They're out there. They always will be, now. 

 

PLAY BY THE RULES

 Next time one side plays chicken with everybody’s lives and shuts down the whole government in a snit, send every single air traffic controller home and don’t resume non-military flying until the entirely politics driven “crisis du jour” is over. I figure that will last at most one or two days.

You don't have to be smart, clever or fast, just ruthless. A lot of people don't know that.

FIGURED IT OUT

I heard that voting exploded in NYC and the mobs flocked to the polling station or sent in thousands of mail in ballots for the commie and I just figured out why it was the biggest election turnout in NYC since 1969.

 Every single democrat and all their dead relatives had to get their vote in for the other guy after Trump endorsed the scum of the earth.

To be honest, were I a dem I could see why it makes sense to vote for the commie because let's be honest, you know exactly what you're going to get good and hard if you vote for Cuomo and honestly, it takes real stupidity to vote for a man you know to be evil. 

ABOUT THOSE RIGHTS

 I have read lately that a number of government officials have elected to take refuge from the mobs by hiding out in military housing on military bases. I've never been to Fort McNair but I have been to several other bases in the National Capital Region and this might be the time to mention that if you thought our nation's elementary schools were hostile territory, free fire zones and rabidly gun free you ain't seen nothing yet because there are even fewer guns on military bases. They're simply not allowed. Military Police and them only when on duty are allowed to carry weapons. For all the rest you might as well be at school.

I spent a lot of time on military bases and schools and I'll take the army posts any day of the week but there is that quirk of assumptions. People like me of a certain age and era think that the bases and posts are much the way they were 50 years ago and I suspect that just isn't true. I'll bet the modern military post is awash with private guns and rabid little trolls ready willing and able to use them on anyone they run across on base.

Let's remember that physician Major Nidal Hasan didn't have any trouble at all shooting 30 people on Fort Hood and killing 15 of them when he gave in to his perfectly predictable anger and inclination to terrorism.

Perhaps military housing and military bases are not as safe as Homeland Security and other Federal Agencies such as the War Department imagine they are. Still, if the neighbors complain about security, blocked streets, loud generators and vehicles running 24/7 right outside their bedroom windows, who cares. They're just military families. Tell you what though, none of them are likely to care if you fly one of the flags of our Revolution except maybe to ask you where they can buy one too.

RIGHT WING FAIL

So we are watching all these formerly seemingly sane and rational organs of the right shrieking into the darkness because Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes. Formerly sane people are screaming that the Heritage Foundation must disown and burn down Tucker and his studio and throttle him in his sleep for daring to ask a foaming-at-the-mouth crazy loon questions on his show.

It's probably just as well I never listened to or read to much of these idiots who post at places like Instapundit because otherwise I'd be disturbed that their big guns are out there demanding that Tucker be condemned, thrown into the outer dark, silenced and CANCELED because they don't like what he did. Honestly, do they ever listen to themselves? 

The right wing lunatics (aka the right wing of the right wing) want to cancel a journalist because he dared to  interview somebody they hate with a burning passion dislike. Did they never sense that perhaps some of the journalists who interviewed Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Kennedy (any of them), Kissinger, et al, didn't like them but interviewing them was laying the foundations to let others know just how vile they are/were? 

Did I ever foresee idiots of the right demanding the cancellation of a journalist or anyone at all? I'd be lying if I said I never saw that coming. Still, I'm kind of alarmed at how quickly they forget. We don't cancel people. We like to maneuver them into the light and let them speak for themselves and show everyone else just how crazy they are.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

and, did you know that even before grokipedia there was 'answers by tigers' which was just as valid.

 Enjoy.

NIGHTMARES MADE REAL

I see that President Trump has ordered the United States to resume nuclear weapon testing for the first time since President Bush ended the practice in 1992. It will be nice to know if the damned things work, demonstrate that they work and perhaps reawaken a spirit long dead in the Strategic Weapons Commands that fell so low that we lost any meaningful control of nuclear weapons in our own magazines much less the growing arsenals of nuclear weapons in the Far East, Middle East and Soviet Union Russia.

There are some obvious concerns given the depth of the fall in the ranks of those who are charged with developing and controlling nuclear weapons. I have no idea how any sane person can begin to imagine whatever the Hell the Personnel Reliability Program has turned into in the hands of men like Milley and the tools that gave DEI free rein and also found that there are no grounds for refusing a clearance to anybody no matter how deviant or dishonorable they are. 

I wonder who is really watching over the nuclear weapons these days. I'd be happy to learn that the Marines were given the job because I know they don't fuck around. I think the Army and Air Force are compromised at every level from General and SES down to PFC with actual enemies of the United States and enemies of the West. The same goes for the Navy. Thanks to the abysmal failures of the FBI, Office of Personnel Management and others, the country and the armed forces are stuffed with foreign agents who owe their true allegiance to other countries. We're not talking spies here, we're talking actual enemies wearing our uniforms and serving at every level in our military.

I will begin to think we are taking steps to correct this when they re-institute the old bottom blow program and give Commanders carte blanche to administratively separate up to 10% of their people for the Good of the Service but that old thing only applied to E-3 and below and we need to purge every level without having to summon anyone to the bar of justice and bring in the lawyers because that just won't work. 

When the nations start to send signals using nuclear weapons we're back to the Cold War again. The obvious next step is to resume redeploying tactical nuclear weapons to ships and bases overseas. We won't like the color of that smoke signal.

And you thought the conflagration was all behind you and safely in the past, didn't you?  

PUNDITS BAFFLED

 I find it interesting that the war against Hamas in Gaza went on as long as it did and took such a terrible toll and ended when,

 it turns out that all it ever took to end the war was to release all the hostages and stop attacking the State of Israel. This is worth keeping around and using every single time you encounter one of the proto-hamas terrorists here in this country. All the marching, rioting, burning, looting and occupying tame schools was for nothing at all and just made everybody hate hamas and liberals even more than they did before the Seventh of October.

In an ideal or better world this would serve as a valuable lesson on terminating hostilities the easy way. In this world we're all just going to forget it ever happened. That's a shame. 

Of course, the previous lesson about BLM was also completely swept under the rug and we all pretend it meant something. Not me of course. That was hatred unleashed but with training wheels in order to get the new thug class up to speed on intimidation, violence, fund raising and propaganda.  

GEE THANKS, UKRAINE

 Thank you Ukraine for totally normalizing the production and distribution of advanced missiles worldwide that can be used to smash infrastructure and cities everywhere and not be viewed by anyone as an act of war. You have enabled any country to now lash out at any other country with everyone else's long range missiles and drones and attack any and all targets secure in the knowledge that the world only tolerates proportional responses. In the old days of course, an attack on a superpower invited retaliation along the lines of Dresden or Tokyo or even something more immature like Nagasaki.

To any veteran of the old Cold War it is obvious that President Putin and Russia are playing a game with Ukraine that is simply invisible to 99%. I have long thought the game was simply to blood the army, rebuild the actual military ethos and officer corps and to develop advanced weapons and tactics and techniques and to wage a kind of war unlike anything in the past. I still think that is what is happening even as they exterminate all of that in Ukraine and cripple NATO's war machine. But there is something changing now that makes me think that the old ways will come back to the fore.

If Russia wanted a dead and supine Ukraine they would drop every single highway bridge overnight and then destroy every power plant in the next week or two as Europe prepares for winter. They could have done this at any time but up until now I think that they were content to let the Ukrainians continue to push their men into the killing fields and exterminate them there. That changed recently when the sanctions became something right out of Brest-Litovsk or Versailles.

Once that Rubicon is crossed there is little point in continuing to fight with the gloves on and all the reason in the world to simply reach out and flatten your enemy or enemies. The sanctions that the West is insisting on imposing on Russia are the kind and type that a winner imposes by fiat on the loser and unlike Germany in 1918, there isn't a Russian alive who thinks they are losing in Ukraine. The Russians were very careful to distinguish what they were about by calling it a Special Military Operation. It's goals were to achieve a reincorporation of the ethnic Russian provinces back into Russia. That changed in March of 2024 when they announced that they were now entering a State of War because of the West's collective insistence in involving itself in and prolonging the agony of the SMO.

It is a cruel fact of history that nobody can sanction an undefeated opponent and most especially not without first declaring and waging war. The last time we tried anything like this Japan retaliated by launching all out military and naval operations against us in the Pacific. 

I have to say too, that as the idiots in the Baltic states continue to bleat about Soviet aggression because of minor violations of airspace over and around Kaliningrad it will probably come as news to the sheep that NATO increasing its fighter presence over the territory by adding one or two Dutch fighters is not really all that dramatic a sign of manifest will and a resolve to defend the Baltic states to the death. Seriously NATO, you need to send or at least be able to convincingly maintain a significant increase in combat power in the threatened area and a couple of old fighter planes is nothing.

I do kind of wonder what a ratissage by the Russians would look like coming out of the blue over the Baltics and perhaps even extending into Germany. That would be the moment of decision and can you imagine the elite ruling class of the EU springing into action to instantly retaliate and declare war? I can't. It will also demonstrate that there isn't a lot there when push comes to shove and people will notice.

Of us all I think only the United States can still mobilize and deploy modern mechanized forces and combat aircraft for immediately expanding military operations. Nobody else in NATO even has the pretense anymore that they could immediately mobilize brigade combat teams and air wings. 

Remember back in the 80s when the Soviets kept trying to tempt us by declaring that they would not be the first to use nukes? Back then they looked unstoppable and we were the ones that dithered about whether or not tactical nuclear weapons would be an immediate recourse if attacked. I wonder if any of them still work..... 

ON THE TIDE

 It is really very easy to find oneself beguiled by the history of the world as relayed by the likes of Miles Mathis. I mean one can literally sit and read for hours an entire history of the world that nobody ever talks about. I am however, all things considered, rather glad that my mind doesn't work like that and that the history I know is pretty detailed and complete and it would take something a lot more illuminating to change my mind. Still, it's an interesting world view and a nice way to pass a rainy day. 

I CAN SEE IT FROM HERE

It is easy to sense the allure of the autonomous drone fleets that will sail the world's oceans in the future to waylay the enemies of the cyber state but I don't expect to see them coming down the ways soon. 

The cybernautical has almost as rich a history with science and fantasy as the flying car and both are made of the same skillfully woven slush. The admiral in the Pentagon is snagged instantly by the scandalous savings that accrue to any fleet operator that doesn't actually have to recruit, train and pay sailors and retired sailors enormous amounts of money that the State no longer commands. It's a dream they all share.

The Fleet commander in his sun dappled headquarters at Makalapa or wherever his Supreme counterpart hangs his hat is happy to rejoice in operating fleets that don't have DUIs, normal hetersexual relations between men and women sharing quarters on small ships far out at sea and that never suffer from 'accidental' fires that seem to burn down the warship of the day whenever the crew isn't paying attention and unmindfully steering them into the paths of innocent merchant shipping. A responsive and nimble asset that he can command without fear of contradiction.

The Logistics and Maintenance commanders are Logistics and maintenance types and nobody really cares what they think about it.

I have never really seen the allure of the minimally manned warship or the totally unmanned one for that matter. Never mind that they simply don't work and hopefully never will, just think about what they imply for the future of the Navy that owns/operates them. What Navy? Contrary to popular opinion, admirals do not spring fully formed from the loins of the CNO. Admirals are/were typically made by introducing them to the sea and then giving them increasingly complex things to do, men to do it with and goals that were almost deliberately set to be unobtainable without a good deal of lying, cheating and chicanery. Where will the admirals come from to guide these ships to their rendezvous with destiny?

There is no need for division officers since there are no divisions of men. There is no need for department heads since there are no divisions. There is no need for Executive Officers since there is no berthing areas or heads that need continual inspections to keep them clean and wholesome because there are no men and there is no need for the ultimate goal of the navy officer, a Commanding Officer because they simply cannot exist in such a vacuum.

And then we come to the real reason they cannot be and that boils down to the simple fact that nobody trusts them. Admirals and most officers have a horror about arming sailors that goes way back. Sailors are really trained to use rifles and pistols and it shows whenever someone gives them one. Nobody would believe the sheer number of accidental discharges that sailors are behind. (Usually behind but sometimes they get in front of them too.) They trust machines slightly less than sailors with guns.

The 'autonomous warship' will need continuous monitoring 24 hours a day and it will go on forever. I saw where the Navy seemed to be heading with this when a Pacific Fleet 05 serving as the Mine Countermeasures Task Group Chief of Staff ashore issued orders that the two COs in the little Task Group were not to so much as change course or think about putting anything over the side until they had received his permission to do so. It's possible he was a little stressed because one of the ships had just passed its umbilical connected little robot through the ship's propellers and things were ugly and one of the small boats was drifting away because it had not been tied up properly and the other ship needed to get underway and rescue the drifting boat and perhaps effect a bit of a tow, don't you know. 

Honestly, it was both one of the funniest and saddest moments to be sitting there in the bunker next to him and his idiot staffers as this went on and on. On the other hand, I sort of got a taste of this mindset when I went aboard one of our LCS in San Diego and the Duty Officer met me and I found that she was carrying 4 different radios on her belt so that her permission could be obtained immediately by any crewman considering doing anything at all out of the ordinary.

Initiative was not so much squelched, but beaten to death. A robot fleet without a single guiding thought as it operates in the narrow seas or the shipping lanes around Singapore or Japan is going to be an absolute nightmare for somebody and you have to wonder, when it goes completely wrong who is going to be held accountable? Yeah, I know that has become a foreign and disdained concept but it still matters.

Are they going to court martial the supervisor, the guy that wrote the code, the guy that integrated the code, the technician that wired it up backwards or upside down or the contractor who accidentally painted the sensor and blinded it? You know in the end they're going to blame the maintenance and the contractor. On a bright note, that's what they're going to spend every one of those saved sailor salaries on contract maintenance and spares that will probably only exist in modules the size of gas turbines for easy trouble shooting and replacement. 

It's the new Navy way. You can always check out how well it works by looking closely at the anti-shipping and the anti-air and the anti-submarine and mine countermeasures modules they installed on all the Little Crappy Ships over the last 20 years. 

And then there are the guys that are going to see a free ammo dump, technology bonanza and windfall out swanning around and they're going to pirate it right off the bat. I mean, do you really think the security on these things will be anywhere near as good and fiendishly efficient as the security at the Louvre? Come on... 

 

IT IS TO LAUGH

 So all those filthy bureaucratic mandarins that ran government for so long and who came up with the idea of the Energy Star and a higher standard for your dishwasher so that it would use less electricity are now standing around moaning about how crappy dishwashers are today compared to the 70s and going online to beat up their neighbors for not buying Teslas. You know, to save a couple of volts and thus the planet.

Sometime in the next ten years the kids are going to round up every single bureaucrat and school teacher and every college professor and college trustee and send them to the borax and uranium mines. 

ON THE BIZARRE

 I am seeing reports from all the completely unreliable and useless news sources such as ABC, CBS and the New York Times that the Marines at Camp Pendleton were firing artillery over Interstate 5 and somehow a 155mm round exploded prematurely over the highway and rained shrapnel down on a Highway Patrol Car manned by some of California's stalwarts.

I cannot imagine anyone in the USMC ever suggesting or approving firing artillery over I-5 for any reason short of an actual invasion or bombardment off Red Beach. To say I'm doubtful is an understatement. Task and Purpose ran the story too but I think that merely reflects something long suspected is true and that they have come to the end of their utility.

The herd of make-believe news all claim that a single highway patrol car reports that shrapnel rained down on them and hit their car from a shell that exploded prematurely in flight over the highway.

I think the whole thing is bizarre given the nature of impact areas, the Marines from the 11th Regiment that I used to observe firing and the really bizarre notion that someone would let them fire artillery over MCTSSA, Las Pulgas, Red Beach or the marina and I MEF Headquarters and I'm sure the guys at ACU-5 would be unhappy. There is also all the family housing, the air strip and hangers and a host of other really good things not to fire artillery over lining the highway.

I wonder if Jussie Smollet was involved and if the highway patrol guys were bleating about cannon cockers screaming, "This is MAGA country!" as the alleged explosion allegedly happened.

On the other hand I've driven by the checkpoint there by Las Pulgas hundreds of times and watched the helos ferrying out the Landing Force Munitions load to the amphibs waiting off the coast. I know they do that to avoid having to truck an incredible amount of high explosive down I-5, through San Diego County and City to 32nd Street Naval Base to onload prior to the ship's getting underway. Those operations involving an enormous amount of explosives are happening just a few hundred yards to seaward of the highway.  That ammo had to traverse the highway to get there.

IN THE INTEREST OF THE PEOPLE

 I note this morning that the Federal Courts have announced that they are out of money and they will have to be more circumspect about the workload they take up in light of that fact. I suspect this means that the bulk of the Court will have plenty of time, money and effort to indict Trump and to frustrate his Executive decisions and to issue the TROs so dearly beloved by the legal class who have found a damned near bottomless well of money and law cases in frustrating real Americans.

I also see hints that Maduro may be headed down the Noriega rathole to Hell as he deals with the rapier held in the hands of at least one master class swordsman playing games with Venezuela. It is worth recalling that Panama was probably free and clear of the Bush/Cheney lust for war until he was stupid enough to publicly declare war on the United States. I remember that moment well. It was a really stupid thing to do. I suspect Maduro is also just exactly that stupid.

On the gripping hand, this might well be a time when the US tries a new trick in the endless fields of war and decides to topple Venezuela's ruler by using an endless succession of drones until they get their man. I await the charming story made for television audiences about the Great Ruler who gets hounded everyday of the rest of his short life by exploding drones that come closer and ever closer to taking him out. Gosh, I can feel the unbearable tension building even now..... 

The people watching the pending communist, and white and police hating takeover of the upper echelons of NYC are probably anticipating a disaster there along the lines of what happened when the NYC liberals cheered the destruction of one small rural town after another by the massive dumping there of illegal immigrants imported by them to ruin the lives and demographics of their perceived enemies. We're hoping it is every bit as bad as what was done to the rural towns in Red States. 

THIS BLOGGING STUFF IS EASY

 Yes, I'm working on it.

 

I'M GOING TO MISS KIEV

 I've never been there and I never really planned to go since there is very little I need or want from one of the most corrupt capitals outside of Africa. On the other hand it is a relic with a little bit of history and I am a bit of history buff so there is that. On the gripping hand, if Trump sells Ukraine Tomahawk missiles and they shoot even one of them at a Russian city I think Colonel Putin is going to decide that enough is enough and he'll just nuke Kiev to make the point that people that are not involved in a fight should really stay the Hell out of it unless they are looking for a fight.

I don't think anyone is crazy enough to give Ukraine nuclear weapons so they can extend the war a little more and kill some more Russians in retaliation, do you? 

I don't think there is enough bribe left on the planet to make Putin stop short of victory. The planet has reached out and tried to break, swipe, steal or destroy everything Russia has left since the collapse of the Soviet Union and there is no nuclear shield over Ukraine and people might see just why that is if they persist in wanting a war.

LEGALITY

 Should we ask our federal judges to work without pay or should they be ordered to take an unpaid furlough alongside all others formerly on the government payroll? I only ask because it seems that there is no way to get any relief from the endless tide of backbiting and pernicious judgements dribbling out of our nation's courts and one way might just be to pull an Obama and lock up the Federal Courts and all Federal Court buildings and post armed guards denying entry to EVERYBODY that tries to get in. After all, if Obama could lock up little things like Yellowstone Park and the WWII Memorial on the National Mall then we can easily lock up the courthouses and turn off the lights until the government resumes its functions again.

Just my $2. 

ON MEDIA MELTDOWN

It looks like a number of self confessed spies  working at The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, The Atlantic, Politico, The Hill, The Guardian, Reuters, the Associated Press, NPR, HuffPost, Breaking Defense and some other spy agencies have declared their total dissatisfaction with the War Department requiring them to sign a piece of paper that declares that they will not spy while in the Pentagon and are refusing to play ball. I'm not sure if they understand how amusing they are. I'm sure that's not their intent.

They appear to conflate being allowed access to a building with their First Amendment Rights and are prepared to wage war to continue their "right" to enter the Headquarters of the United States War Department. Of course, nothing actually says that they have some sort of God given right to enter or work in the Pentagon but they hope that you won't notice that sticky little point.

On the whole, I approve of what the War Department is trying to accomplish here and I'm kind of surprised at the media meltdown. All the badges and free entry mean is that the total fake and bogus "reporters" can get into the building and schmooze with their "friends and natural communist allies." That's all the credential means. 

We know that the only real reporting comes when actual reporters and investigators dig deep into the things that others are trying to hide and even then only when their editors and publishers have the guts to publish it. In looking at the long list of the nazgulpetters I don't see any that have actually been of much use in busting loose with the real facts and presenting them to the public. A few may think some are resting on their laurels but too many times those laurels were won by dipshits posing as journalists who reported that there was no famine in Ukraine.

Credentialed media are nothing more than press secretaries and mostly unpaid shills for whoever badged them. We can do better. This is what investigative journalists really imagine themselves to be and the better ones are.

ANOTHER NAME FOR THAT

 This is a little confounding since I thought he and his advisors knew better than this. This is the opening salvo in an economic war that could very easily lead to regime change which is another word for war.

 If the intent on both sides was to insist that the other side focus a little more on maintaining the current Armistice, this could be seen in no other light than that one side (China) is being pushed to the wall over Trade and, much like Japan in 1940, sees no option but to push back very forcefully because to do anything else will see the fall of Xi and grave damage to China.

I know why China is tripling the number of nuclear weapons they have in their arsenal and potentially doubling or tripling that in a year. If you think about it, you would know too. China is not anything like the USSR or Russia. It holds just two clubs and nothing else. It was the world's storehouse of manufactured goods and it has weapons of mass destruction. It does not have the best military or anything like it and it has no organic markets to make up for the loss or reduction of its international markets and it has very few resources to provide for its own economic engine. 

The vast fishing fleets hoovering up the world's fish are an essential component of Chinese food production and will be for some time. They represent just another incredibly weak link that sustains China that is vulnerable to outside action. 

Given the nature of President Trump and some of his advisors, the next step will be one that he will probably be more than willing to take and it will hurt here almost as much as it hurts China. He will simply tell all the Chinese to leave and to not come back. That is going to roll back his second greatest enemy (after the institutional media) and leave the Universities minus roughly 60% of their current student revenue.

You know the absolutely worst thing about doing that? Yeah, it would almost certainly be good for America. Democrats hate that. 

CLOCK'S TICKING

 I heard a report on the radio that the IDF has withdrawn to the Phase Line specified in the Cease Fire and that the ball is now in the court of Hamas who has 72 hours from that moment to produce all the hostages, dead and alive. I hate to sound cynical but I don't think Hamas can do it and to be honest, it requires that the faithful all be faithful and follow the orders from Doha to bring the hostages and the bodies to the turnover point not later than the deadline. There is always some lunatic that the war never ends for. One might even suppose that when it comes to terrorist gangs, there's a lot more than one lunatic for whom the war never ends.

I hope that it works. I don't see any way on earth that it will.

 UPDATE: As of the agreed date for the release of the hostages, dead and alive, 24 hostages are still missing somewhere in Gaza and as expected, the whole world seems to think that the Cease Fire deal was honored by the terrorists in Gaza.

MISSING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES

 Phib dismisses the idea of TLAMs to Ukraine and he uses some of his irreducible logic constructs to do it but overall the idea of sending our Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine is a non-starter. The part that Sal failed to point out was that providing strategic weapons to a combatant involved in a war with another combatant power is grounds for being declared a combatant and attacked at will anywhere in the world as a fellow combatant. Some might argue that Russia is already in enough trouble so why would it want to increase its adversaries but they also fail to miss that by any reasonable method of calculating, most of NATO has already declared themselves, and more importantly, crossed the line into becoming actual adversaries of the Soviet Union Russia.

In 1984 when I signed up with the Navy we had a pretty good understanding of the actual strategic situation with the Soviet Union and one of the things we really worked quite hard to do was to avoid any hint of initiating strategic warfare against actual targets in actual downtown Moscow. We did that for a very particular reason now that I think about it. Oh what could it have been? What was it that kept us and the Soviets from just busting heads and tangling over some petty little place that still eats people......It will come to me.

You know what hasn't changed significantly in the last 40 years? Guess.* 

 You know what the funny thing here is, right? We have various supposedly intelligent groups of people who are proposing to send each other diplomatic smoke signals using 'strategic' weapons as their counters. Russia still has lots of the real deal strategic weapons and they don't have to get fancy and talk about employing them or deploying them because they can send one of those diplomatic smoke signals right back at us by simply announcing that they have decided to sell Iran half a dozen or 100 nukes in order to deter further Israeli aggression and our answer to this kind of threat would be what, exactly? 

It's like every stupid moron in the world thinks that the nukes are all off the table now because nobody ever talks about them but they are always like a fire banked against the need to repel the cold. They are always there and they are always ready to use and anybody who says different is a liar. 

*Keep in mind we are dealing with the Soviets and the numbers people use about their inventory come from the clowns in the CIA and NSA and are about as believable as English speaking salt water crocodiles. 

QUESTION DU JOUR

Why do 100% of liberal progressives back antifa to the hilt?

OBSERVATION DU JOUR

Congress still hasn’t figured out yet that anyone they summon to testify under oath about anything isn’t going to take so much as one microgram of shit from them about ANYTHING. I really enjoy watching the vicious scumbags in both the Senate and House get ripped to shreds by President Trump’s appointees. The testifiers all know that the people asking the questions wouldn’t cross the street to pee on them if they were on fire. They know they will get nothing and they know something the swine herd doesn’t. They can do their jobs despite anything the Minority tries to do to them and they don’t have to crawl before Congress to do it.

You know who they learned that from? Yep, they learned that from Obama’s Attorney General and from Biden’s. 

THEY WILL GET WHAT THEY WANT

 Antifa and the scumbags that organized, trained and funded them are going to get what they want one way or another. They want antifa scumbags shot by ICE or law enforcement so they can bust out and run amok burning down the cities and creating a chaos that everyone will blame on Bush  President Trump. They are going to have a mass shooting of a gang attack if they have to send in some gunmen to do it themselves because they KNOW that every single broadcast media in the country will instantly blame Trump and ICE and demand that ICE stand down forever and most of the damned judges will order the end of immigration enforcement.

Some people say that the antiwar movement or the FBI did this at Kent State a million years ago. I've seen plenty of stories that claim it was actually an FBI agent or provocateur who fired a pistol at or near those poor National Guardsmen and they responded, poorly.

The facts unite to demonstrate the antifa is dedicated to the downfall of this Constitutional Republic and they and their supporters in the attorney generals offices, law courts and the media are bound and determined to see them succeed.  They are the enemy but shooting them will lead to the most dire consequences.

On that note, in a phone call this morning the deep left was heard from and was concerned that relatives wouldn't make it to Sardinia or back from Portugal and Spain because the TSA might not turn up for work since they're not being paid. I told her not to worry too much since this happily dovetails with President Trump's plans for dismantling the TSA forever and returning airliner safety back over to the people who have a real concern for real airline safety and not just pathetic theater. I think the day TSA stops showing up for work is the very day they are terminated with extreme prejudice.

I guess both sides can play games. Unfortunately, one side wants a revolution and the other side would like for people to grow up. 

RECORD BREAKING FRENCH COLLAPSE

 In a completely unsurprising way the government of France appointed by President Macron collapsed just 12 hours later leaving the French once more without any meaningful government. Sadly, this is a sign of times to come for all the West who have seen the left completely lose their minds and all credibility as they deny any possible chance or attempt to work across party lines and use the most flimsy and made up excuses to jail their opposition.

This cannot go on. This is when the barricades come out and serious people contemplate using artillery in town. More to the point, this is when the car bombs and assassins begin their deadly weave into what passes for politics in an age sundered from reason. 

WHERE ARE THEY?

 For the last couple of hundred years the world has been carried away by captivating speakers. There were men on all continents and in many countries that used the simple power of their voices speaking their words to change the world and while much of it ended in misery and destruction surely some good must have come out of it and I contrast that with the lame and dismal public speakers I see running America and most European countries where English is like a native tongue and I am far from captivated by their laboring, lame and mostly bucolic addresses to their nations. Speaking frankly, they suck at public speaking and I just wonder, how did they every con people into voting for them without cheating like all Hell?

For all his many fine qualities, President Trump is damned near inarticulate and his awful speeches are punctuated in all the wrong places. He simply never learned to speak publicly. Starmer in the UK is hopelessly inept at public speaking and so too has been every one of the last 9 Prime Ministers. They all suck.

I have to admit I really enjoyed listening to Nigel Farage back when he used to tear strips off the leadership of the EU as an EU Member of Parliament but even now he too has dwindled away into lame and labored speeches that neither uplift, amuse nor entertain. They certainly aren't believable.

I suspect public speaking in a communist Hell is not even a tertiary requirement for leading the masses but I imagine that if Xi opens his mouth and speaks, as with Putin, people listen. They pay attention. They might have noticed that at least one of those two and Donald Trump don't speak lightly and do mean what they say. I suppose that's something.

Is it possible that we no longer need the great orators like Hitler and Churchill or were they overrated? I don't really think they were overrated myself but it is possible. Have you noticed that it is actually quite difficult to actually find those speeches made by Herr Hitler translated into English? I wonder why....

It is hard to imagine a Frenchman rallying the people with the power of the voice and great oratorical skill but there must have been someone other than Napoleon that could do it over the last 200 years but it sure wasn't any of the men running the place in my lifetime and I don't recall that any of the 19th or early 20th century Frenchmen were considered skilled speakers. 

Spain had Franco and there may have been something to his rallying speeches but I suspect it was mostly finding the kind of cold blooded killer one could expect to turn up in a place like Spain. I suspect that almost nobody alive recalls that if you stepped outside a Spanish city back before the EU it was like stepping back 2 centuries in time. My first visit there included taking a bus from Rota to Cadiz and back again and it was amazing how, shall we say, rural, Spain was back then. I'm sure it's much better now.

Here in our own country I see almost no sign of anybody who can speak the birds down from the trees. I used to hear the speeches of Martin Luther King but to be honest, nobody has ever come close to replacing him and his appeals to a reason that he alone seems to have seen and understood and despite the eloquence and meaning of his words, it is like they bounced off the heads of most here. That whole 'content of their character' which means so much to me was treated with enormous disdain and even hatred by just about every liberal and POC in America. Not one of the men who tried to step into his shoes ever came within shouting distance of the power of his voice, words and reason. Too bad, really.

Words may be too heady for the modern age of instant mass communication but if that was true I would not have seen the appeal of Mr. Farage and if it was true there would surely be some of the liberal persuasion who would wonder how they managed to get an inarticulate drunken idiot as their nominee in the last Presidential election. Mr. Farage has built a party from scratch in Britain that out polls both the Tory and Labor parties combined. He did that with what appears to be an innate ability to speak on his feet about the topics that matter to people. [Despite what I said above, he can still captivate and it doesn't hurt that the Tories and Labor leaders are the very worst lying and thieving scoundrels in history.] 

I can see where it could be very dangerous now to be an orator who gets up in front of crowds and attempts to bring them to share one vision but I believe that was once the sine qua non of democracies and republics. We were persuaded by reason and rhetoric and the spoken word backed up by the written words that laid out the case for change. There used to be two such men in any decent democracy or republic both standing for a competing point of view.

I wonder what happened to all that.... The current crop are so damned insipid.

IT CAN BE DONE

 We headed east to the nation's capital recently to celebrate a 90th birthday and a couple of others and the drive out and back was everything one could hope for and expect. We went our normal path to Hancock and then wended our way south to the most western crossing of the Potomac all so we could avoid even a single horrible moment on the Cabin John and capital beltway. It was a nice entry into the Shenandoah Valley and we enjoyed it a lot. The drive back was a return up the same route and all in all it was a very nice days drive in each direction and left us feeling rested and relaxed. I cannot imagine having anything remotely as nice if we had driven ourselves to the airport here and flown to Dulles or National. It used to be a nice way to travel but the bloom left that particular rose decades ago for me.

It was a family get together of the senior members to celebrate birthdays and then go about our separate ways. It was fun, enjoyable, memorable and relaxing. It also meant what with the driving and all that I took time off from keeping up with the news and world events and perhaps that was the most restful part of the whole trip. As I look at the news and events around the world I sense a kinship with H.L. Mencken I entirely failed to ever notice before.

So that's up next then! I have most of what he has written and now I'll read it and reread the rest of it. I mean, the news of the world is just the most dismal unending stream of people doing the wrong things, splitting and dividing like their lives depend on it and generally a sense that 20% of the people really do seem to strive everyday to make the world end in fire. I prefer to read about that in books, not the news.

UNIFORM REDEMPTION

 This was something else they did that was always wrong and they got away with it for almost 20 years. It took a Major to point out that flag officers and generals do not wear camouflage uniforms ever unless they are carrying weapons. For over 20 years the clowns running the show have appeared in field uniforms as if they are nothing more than privates or seamen and have even spent more than a decade trying to hide their actual rank insignia on the uniforms. They were all wearing cammo in the Pentagon and on ships at sea. It was disgraceful and it still is. I really hope this was part of the message, "put away the toy soldier costumes and wear the uniform that fully shows your background, history and experience."

This is what officers that are not repairing tanks out in the field wear to work.

 

It's no wonder everyone thinks you're fat out of shape privates, you dressed like one

ON THE MESSAGE

 Interesting that some people find it hard to understand why Secretary Hegseth ordered all the Flag and General Officers to attend him personally when he delivered a strange new policy announcement that affects the alignment and orientation of every single American soldier sailor, airman and Marine on the planet. In a phrase almost as old as television, the medium is the message.

Every single admiral and general got the message loud and clear and pronounced themselves clear in understanding it. They are literally at the beck and call of the man who summoned them and when he ordered them to appear to hear him lay out the new rules, it carried the weight of centuries that dictated that they would appear as ordered at the proper place at the proper time and in the proper uniform or they were disobedient curs that needed to whipped out of the military. 

Every single man or woman wearing our nation's military uniform serves at the pleasure of the Secretary of Defense and can be dismissed at will. This act made it crystal clear who was in charge and who was giving the orders and if anyone there refused to see and understand that, I would be very surprised. The Secretary orders and they obey.

NAVAL GAZING

 I have to admit to being just a little curious but lazy. Back when I was a 22 year old Naval officer I used to take the existing Order of Battle as we knew it just from Janes Fighting Ships and the Soviet Navy and we would wargame the clash of fleets and strategies to see what winning would take and what losing would look like. I found the results somewhat grim because while we didn't really expect anything like 100% of the Soviet stuff to work or even come close, they had a millions of tons of it and it was all pointed at us and by us I mean the USN, not so much NATO. As a young Fire Control Officer on a Destroyer I found Red Storm Rising to be a fascinating book. 

I wonder if anyone has actually done that sort of thing today and used open sources on what is known about the USN and its current state and its logistic support infrastructure both in NATO and in the Pacific and wargamed the strategy and the tactics of us whipping the Chinese fully armed by the complete wholesale transfer of every single Russian weapon to China? 

I look at the bean counters and 'cutbacks' that have eliminated 100% of the fuel oil storage in Hawaii and also 100% of the old Ammo ships, Oilers, Combat Stores, Food ships and the hundreds of other logistic ships, bases and supplies we laid in to fight a long heady war in the Pacific and wonder what the war looks like going up against a China armed with the highest and most dangerous tier of Russian weapons and targeting systems because, let's be honest, fair is fair and the Soviets Russians are going to trip over themselves sending hypersonic missiles and relaying targeting data to China the instant hostilities commence.

I'm also kind of curious what the strategy looks like for defeating China and ending the war there. We have not, after all, concluded the current 75 year old War between our two countries with a peace treaty. It is the kind of thing any sane person would have thought as using as leverage before simply deciding to unilaterally admit China to the World Trade Organization without any conditions or, tradesies. Honestly, even 7 year olds are better negotiators than that.

SPOTTED TODAY

 I caught this leaving the Army Navy Club this afternoon.

The banner reads, “Hegseth, PT the generals”. 

WORKING ALOFT

 

Bide awhile, I'll be back in a minute or two.

GETTING WORK EXPERIENCE

 I know some young people interested in being President one day and they tell me they are having a very hard time finding any jobs available at McDonalds and they wonder if working at Wendy's counts? As I look at the resumes of democratic machine politicians reaching for the highest office in the land I am struck by what a dismal and useless lump they are and how little they actually have done with their lives other than show jobs in the NGOs funded by our money diverted by their friends and relatives to give them luxury jobs, titles and lifestyles. 

It really looks like some people in the UN tried to sabotage President Trump's moment in front of that world body and while it was just as amusing as they could have imagined in their warmest and fuzziest dreams, it was amusing for us and probably their worst nightmare as President Trump went on to talk off the cuff for the next 55 minutes after they shut down the teleprompter. You can imagine how this would have worked on poor Biden who would have simply melted into a puddle and been scooped away from the cameras but for Trump it was his masterpiece. Nobody is going to forget it.

One of the more amusing things I got out of it was that only a handful of State Department people are going to have to ooze out of the bushes and sooth ruffled feathers because I'm pretty sure President Trump, Secretary Rubio and the more advanced ambassadors have been keeping the nature of our new resilient foreign policy very clear and right in front of the foreign governments and heads of state we typically deal with. They didn't hear anything from Mr. Trump that they did not already hear if they had been listening to our Country Teams and those at State who are actually onboard with our current foreign policies.

Still, I laughed as the escalator stopped moving and Mrs. Trump moved out of the fire sac like a pro and took point on the steps. I also laughed recalling that ridiculous fake loop about the man and woman trapped on the escalator when it stopped moving. I haven't seen it in more than 10 years.

 

TERMINATOR

 It looks like the drone fire has now spread to western Europe and it will probably start sweeping over some of the airports here as anarchists have worked out that they can bring air traffic to a standstill simply by launching autonomous drones into the airspace under approach and departure control at airports around Europe. That's it. The signal that spreads from beacon to beacon that lets antifa and anarchists know that they can literally take the upper hand anytime they want to and nobody can stop it.

Copenhagen Airport is closed for operations because of drones in the air.

Northern Europes most busy airport. pic.twitter.com/XEIzxkLbvG

— auonsson (@auonsson) September 22, 2025

 

THAT ELDRITCH POWER

You have to wonder if democracies have some sort of mandatory sorting system that only lets them vote for complete idiots to lead them because when you read about the nonsense that serious people are reacting to as if it has grave meaning and graver implications, you wonder. Here is a secret power that is freely available to anybody online: Simplicius's Garden of Knowledge. You really need to read the latest post featuring Robert Kagan who is the controlling evil behind Victoria Nuland and neocon of the Final Impulse.

I had originally linked to the Garden's discussion of air power dreams of idiocy. I then got hooked reading Robert Kagan on justified reasons for Russia to launch immediate and legal attacks on all NATO members supplying weapons to Ukraine. If you think you understand the kind of mind that once controlled our foreign policy you really don't. Keep it in mind because Kagan was the genesis of our foreign policy under Obama, Clinton and Biden. It is difficult to imagine people this evil who are also so convinced that they are on God's side and who will literally stop at nothing to achieve their own ends.

Go read the articles and the rest. Always keep in mind that this is just one source of information and it needs to be balanced with other sources. There is no one source that will give anyone the complete picture of what is actually going on in Europe and Ukraine. 

And yet, if you look at the news you will find overwhelming numbers of people who think that Charlie Kirk was an evil monster. I see the references on instapundit to the memorial service and how a unified Left calls the entire thing a fiesta of hate speech and hate and I wonder, what were they watching?

I cannot believe that people actually watch the news or read the newspapers in the West for real information about what is happening anywhere. 

A RARE KIND OF A DAY

 Went out to the country yesterday to see a man about replacing some clapped out 100 year old windows I just happened to have brought with me in the car. It was almost an undercover operation with my host and guide saying, "there, turn up that lane and drive slowly towards the house." We did, and a young man with 6 kids and a beard came out of the house to join us at his workshop where we discussed replacing ancient windows with ones just like them made out of whatever worked and negotiated a price of about $100.00 and pickup date and then we went to a giant produce auction where farmers came in from the surrounding county and townships to sell produce to eager buyers. It was a hoot. 

It was on the drive back to his place from the auction that I learned that this old coot (a couple years older than me)  and his wife, have a barn dating back to the Civil War on their 40 acres farm and in that barn are a Model A and two Model Ts. Oh sure, he has 6 tractors and any number of other farm implements in there too and he and his wife race each to the riding mowers to mow the grass around the house and the pool and the orchard.....

We stopped to drop something off at a friend's farm and watched as a zillion little kids and some older kids gathered up the horses and climbed onto the flatbed to trundle down the road a piece to their 12 acre pumpkin patch where they all jumped off and started to load pumpkins and get them ready to send to market. It was a scene right out of those books you read 70 years ago stuffed with cherubic children having a sensible good time. 

The funny thing of course, our friend down there isn't really a farmer, he's a chemical engineer and professor and also works on and off as a consultant to some companies hereabouts. I had thought Victor Davis Hanson was unique but there are a lot of men like him still around.

Things like this never happened to me in California. 

SIGN OF A BROKEN CLAN

 I see repeated references to antifa as some sort of far left organization and I disagree because I have never seen a single democrat renounce or condemn the group or any of its actions. The entire liberal order in the United States supports antifa and is crushed that President Trump is preparing to add it to the rolls as a terrorist organization and unleash all of Law Enforcement on rounding up, prosecuting and jailing its membership and it supporters. They are not outliers of the far left, they are standard bearers of leftism.

I don't know what it would take to make Americans sit up and notice that we have a thriving terrorist army on par with the PLO, Hamas or Isis in our midst and demand action to annihilate them the same way we would any local branch of the Dravidian Church or any group meeting in Waco or outbreak of the SLA.* There is no reason to tolerate them. They openly proclaim their hatred and willingness to kill others. Let them serve as a lesson to themselves and others.

You know what sets the left apart from the rest of us? I'll tell you, they don't hesitate to dehumanize and vilify anybody and everybody who fails to agree with them. Once they've pushed someone into the 'other than human' category they turn gleefully to killing him or encouraging others to kill. You know what that is? That isn't right.

*Gentle reader, there was just a trace of sarcasm in that sentence. 

ARGUABLY, A MOMENT IN TIME

 As I see more and more examples of the media offloading some of the troubled step-children of a bygone era and using the innovative idea that their speech is offensive or actionable or the costs of producing their shows is too much to bear, I am struck by the idea that the media moguls and the behind the scenes movers and shakers of TV Land have decided that the time has finally come to make some kind of a stand and try to reclaim that 50% slice of the people that their current shows and hosts invited to fuck off and die. I know, it doesn't sound like them but perhaps they're looking at their future revenues without any viewers from the majority block of voters and calculating that that is just too much write off.

Will it actually change anything or make TV more watchable or entertaining, well I'm not the best judge of that but history does tend to show that people will leap at any excuse to stop the bleeding once they finally wake up and realize that they are in fact, bleeding out. As I look at old clips of the Johnny Carson Tonight Show I laugh out loud but I don't recall ever being the slightest bit amused or entertained by any of the TV hosts that came after him except Jay Leno.

 

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Here is the news from our China today and it isn't pretty. They’re not seriously expecting us to waste all of 7th fleet in their defense, are they? This whole issue is life and death and yet it bounces right off both the Chinese and those who continuously advocate for us to beef up our war machine in the Pacific so we can fight China to the death to prevent China from taking back part of China. Those people just seem to think that everyone in Formosa is a keen anti-communist die-hard willing to lay waste to a pastoral island in order to fight free of the bonds of communist tyranny and just never get around to seeing that in Asia the Red Menace is as dead and buried as anything in Asia can get. It's over. 

A US federal jury on Aug. 20 found US Navy sailor Wei Jinchao, also known as Patrick Wei, guilty of espionage for selling classified defense information to Chinese intelligence operatives for US$12,000. The case against the 25-year-old again highlights a troubling trend of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recruiting ethnic Chinese abroad.

Wei, who is facing a sentence of life in prison, was born in China and became a naturalized US citizen. While he was convicted on six counts related to espionage, he was not found guilty of naturalization fraud.

The vulnerability of Chinese abroad stems from familial and ancestral ties in China — bonds the CCP exploits through coercion, inducement and blackmail to pressure people into cooperating with Beijing. The same tactics are deployed against exiled dissidents.

 You do have to wonder at the insanity of recruiting people who were born enemies of the country into our armed forces and yet we've been doing it for years. I remember 40 years ago seeing a notice on a public bulletin board in a Navy office a giant poster advising people born in China, Vietnam, Russia or any SSR, and a dozen other countries to "know their rights to a top secret security clearance in spite of meeting the definition of "enemy alien" all their lives in America. That was mind boggling stupid and then you see that half the executive secretaries in the Pentagon were actually Cuban or Venezuelan spies and East German and Russian spies and the Cold War makes such little sense you wonder why anybody even bothered to show up for work.

 Wei, who is to be sentenced on Dec. 1, faces a lifetime behind bars in the US, and yet in Taiwan, CCP spies are frequently met with little more than a slap on the wrist — a discrepancy that is troubling and disheartening.

So over in Taiwan the spies get a slap on the wrist and walk away and here they also get a slap on the wrist and walk away. It is Task Group Orestes all over again. The odd bit is listening now to the Poles and Europeans beat the war drums because they claim some drones flew over their territory and it demands nothing less than total war! 

You wonder, do they never sit down like rational people and ask, what is it going to cost when we get about half way through the 7 year war with Russia and most of our major cities and power stations are gutted and hundreds of thousands of citizens are dead and all because some lunatic claims a drone flew over? Srsly? 

I think if I was island Chinese I might start laying out my investment strategy and see about relocating to British Columbia along with all the other offshore Chinese. Taiwan is going to revert rather painlessly to China in the coming years and maybe sooner than one thinks because most sane hegemons prefer to deal with rational opponents and they are not going to find anything like that from the democrat ranks for another 100 years.

I assume the only damage that would result would be the end of TSMC. 

WHERE'S THE RAGE?

 It is a rhetorical question because absent some rethuglican or virtue the only thing democrats rage about is the fake climate scam but still I wonder that nobody seems to be at all concerned that the New York Governor just endorsed a communist for Mayor of New York City. This indicates that the entire Democratic machine in New York is in the bag for a communist who is hellbent on destroying civilization in New York City and nobody at all seems to mind. Literally anybody who can read knows that socialism/communism does not work for the people it is imposed on and yet every democrat just decided its perfect for New York City. Why?

I know why the machine politicians want it because it is a license to steal tax money from the people without even the slightest chance of getting caught and sentenced to jail but why are the run of the mill idiots in New York all for communism? What are they going to get out of it? Based on results in every other place that tried it on, they are going to get fleeced, robbed, and murdered in greater numbers than ever while literally everything around them falls to pieces and sinks into ruin and decay. Why do they want that? What shining city on a hill practicing communism or socialism can they point to as a beacon to light the way for their decision to turn their backs on civil government? London? Paris? Moscow? Caracas? Havana?

There is a lot to be said about cities being the engine of the state but there is also the simple truth that they are the places where all goodness and decency goes to die. The actual industry left the cities long ago and isn't coming back and the industries that still prop up New York are largely financial and they can be done equally well anywhere else on the planet. Equally true though is an urban mindset common mostly only in NYC that it's 2:00 AM and you want a Philly cheese steak and you want it now and with relish and somewhere in NYC you can get one. It's funny that people think this is common to all cities but I seldom saw a city emptier or more deserted than downtown San Francisco after 2:00 AM. 

If that is the ridge pole holding up the magical mystery of living in the big city, well I missed seeing it when I lived in San Francisco, San Diego, Manama, or while staying in London, Seoul and Paris. Hell, I couldn't even get a sandwich anywhere in France after lunchtime, never mind after 9:30PM. I wonder what still works in NYC there and works nowhere else that would tempt sane people to stay? How many denizens take in plays, visit the museums or ride the Staten Island Ferry?

People talk about the broken window theory of policing and understand it fairly well. Do they know the communist corollary to the broken window theory? I'll tell you though I'm sure you know. The communists pass a law mandating instant repair of all broken windows or the business is subjected to a massive fine for every day the window remains broken. The city pays or simply encourages the thugs to go around breaking windows every night. The city councilmen all own every single window repair shop in the city.

That's what the democrats signed up for thanks to Hochul and the rest of the evil fools in Albany and everywhere else in New York. I'm kind of surprised that nobody is at all upset about it.

A DANDY LITTLE WAR

From late breaking reports this afternoon it appears that the Armed Forces have carried out a second attack on the narc navy and destroyed a second boatload of bad guys. It looks like President Trump is putting Reciprocity into play and taking out the first of the international drug cartels and letting the means serve as a lesson and a warning to the Mexican and Columbian gang leaders who thought that our game was strictly one of catch and release law enforcement. I don't think President Trump plays that game. On the other hand, our guys don't really play well against terrorists operating with a free rein and the backing of our Courts and Sanctuarians. (A blogging day just isn't complete without another perfectly good made up word!)

It will be interesting to observe as National Technical Means pinpoint and destroy the Enemies of Civilization and perhaps observe as those pinpoint attacks move further and further north over time. This is usually the sort of attack one undertakes after close consultations with one's allies but looking at the map I see an uncommanded sea and few allies.  

What we've seen of the cartel's violence in Mexico might worry some people not already exposed to such violence and make them concerned that it could spread to cover....oh, never mind. I am interested to see just what kind of actions are freed up by not having to gain any support for one's operations from 'allies' so thoroughly penetrated by the cartels that there is no daylight between the governments and cartels. It is usually an enormous pain the butt to deal with 'allies' and I'm glad I was able to leave that sort of thing to the SACLANT crew that loves NATO more than anything.

For the boating community in the region I'd be wary and warier still if I saw this flying from any other shipping in the area. It has a very specific meaning that everyone should be familiar with.

You are standing into danger

 

LA DREAMS OF AVARICE

I just caught a brief update on LA winning the Olympic venue bid for the summer of '28 Olympic Games and it is another bright shining moment for LA if one can describe raw sewage as bright and shining but it is actually kind of right down the alley of the parasites who now serve as the spectacle that feeds upon itself. I just learned that the bidders have a plan to build NO new venues or accommodations for the Summer Games and will 'wing it' with the likes of the most incompetent and stupid people on the planet running things. 

I have always loathed the International Olympic Committee and viewed it as nothing more than a sinecure for the descendants of the royalty that was squeezed out of the Holy Roman Empire when they lost World War II and World War I and the Napoleonic Wars (all of them) and found jobs befitting their station in life running a scheme that involves entitled greed, child molestation and institutionalized corruption. Good on you IOC for picking LA as the Winna!

I lived in San Diego County for about 30 years off and on and I told my flight scheduler with total sincerity that I would kill him if he ever routed me through LAX again. Mind you, this was even before I started commuting to the Far East every month and discovered that Hell was just the anteroom for the Tom Bradley International Terminal of LAX and just what a foul, disorganized and thoroughly rotten shithole it is. This becomes really apparent to anyone flying home from Inchon or Narita because there really is no comparison. Those two airports are/were 9 or 10 on the scale (let's not count Dubai on any scale since it stands alone) and LAX would come in on the same scale at about -49.

Yet knowing this is all so, the IOC oxygen thieves selected LA. I don't really know the particulars or the details and perhaps LA was the last city in the world to submit a bid since the economics of hosting the games has been pointing one way since the Fall of Troy but even so, they'd have done better to pick some actual 3rd World Hell Hole since some lives there would have improved with even a tiny infusion of international cash but with LA there is no upside and even if there was they would burn it down. As I recall a recent self inflicted bullet wound to the brain occurred when LA decided to boost the minimum wage for all hotel employees and the hotels welshed on arrangements to provide rooms for Olympics.

On the other hand, just how are the money-men and the moguls who rule going to extract their billions from an LA Olympics that doesn't feature rampant corruption construction scams? How will the political toadies make their real constituents wealthy from stealing misappropriating all those hundreds of millions of dollars? Yes, yes, I know, they're going to do it the old fashioned way and make Uncle Sam and you and me pay for everything, all at the last minute to avoid international humiliation.

Guess what LA? Not going to happen. On the gripping hand, can it truly be worse than Paris? Nobody is going to swim in the Los Angeles River.

On the other hand, a successful mogul can sell any stupid insane idea to idiots

 

TO OWN THE STATE

 The United States is currently standing on a weak and crumbling foundation and the institution cannot survive unless drastic changes are imposed on it. Right now the entire government is riddled with people who hate America and hate their fellow Americans with a passion few can believe although some have started to notice it a little more after the murder of Charlie Kirk. The people who hate you and me let their enthusiasm for killing all of us show and we noticed.

Unfortunately they now have 3 Supreme Court Justices who think like they do and consistently vote that way and they will for the rest of their lives. They hate everything about America and it shows. They have control of about half of Congress and it shows every time there is a vote on something as simple as "required to show ID in order to cast a vote," or "end to all mail-in ballots except for overseas military" and "control the border to prevent entry of 19 million unvetted terrorists and freeloaders."

They control the Law Schools—all of them. They control the media—all of it. They control the schools and universities—99%. They are the very top levels of the FBI, CIA, NSA, State Department, War Department and every other department and they own or control every means of mass communication except for one tiny single letter outlet that is still free—for now. They got that control because all of the above try to hire only graduates they approve of from the Ivy League and that's who is running America.

And yet everything that we must cement into place now rests on the shoulders of two men who have to stay alive and healthy for the next 11 years or it all goes down the drain.  This time President Trump knows that they are his, and our enemies and is proceeding accordingly.  Unfortunately, they know that and they will do literally everything they can to kill him. And because they control the flow of all appointments and hiring within the government and have for almost 30 years, the people we have to rely on within the FBI and the Secret Service and other places are about as faithful and reliable as a cobra.

I see from the various shadows of news I read that it looks like America is shifting its defense policy to a much more sane strategy of safeguarding the Western Hemisphere for awhile and of course the liberals and war-hawks cannot stand that idea and bleat about China. I think the left is slowly waking to the sudden realization that 280 million Americans don't give a rat's patoot about China or Ukraine or Europe for that matter and would not be the slightest bit interested in sending people to fight and die for either of them and you know what's best of all, all those institutions the Left have controlled for generations have convinced Americans that they don't need Europe or China and ANYTHING is better than war. It doesn't hurt that we don't begin to have a military that could fight for more than a week in Asia or two weeks in Europe assuming it could get to either place.

I'm hitting the road in the morning for the day but perhaps I'll have time to pull together a fascinating bit I watched on Utube last week about Development in Africa. Interesting times. It really is like the Dawn of Flight era.