BEGGING YOUR PARDON

 General Milley is in real trouble because he took the pardon Joe Biden offered and with that comes the acceptance that Miley’s behavior as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was criminal and certainly, Other Than Honorable and any officer can easily be separated from the service at the pay grade in which he last served honorably. For Milley that might be the rank he held 40 years ago.

SLIMY SENATOR WHITEHOUSE

 I was looking at confirmation hearings on RFK, Jr. and saw that he was maltreated by Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island. I used to live in Rhode Island and I saw a reference to a private white's only beach club that the Senator is a member of because of course he is and I saw this wonderful picture of it here.

 You see the nice big house in the background? It is bigger than it looks. I lived right behind that house and I used to deliver the Newport Daily News to the door there everyday and when I collected every month I would ring the bell on that nice mansion and an elderly lady wearing slippers, a bathrobe/housecoat that was safety pinned together in front would open the door and then wander back 5 to 10 minutes later with enough money to cover the cost of the paper. 

The mansion on the left had been turned into some really nice apartments occupied by the kind of people you'd expect....no you wouldn't, one was a Lieutenant Commander working at the Navy Base and two were photographers and a very nice graphic design lady. They were the last 4 deliveries on my paper route. Up at the other end or closer to it, was another very nice mansion, the door of which was unfailingly opened by the butler when they were in residence and he took care of paying me for the paper. I knew they were in because that's when I'd have to maneuver my bike around the Rolls in the driveway.

I always thought it was funny that this exclusive beach club was on our shore and of course we walked down there whenever we felt like it and nobody said boo because you need a car to get there unless you were finishing Cliff Walk. It was a nice place to live but this is the only part of the island that seems unchanged by the passage of 50 years. It is just about the only place I ever lived that I can say that about.

CHUMPS

 It is always amusing to see the lesser lights of the dimmer party blast themselves to smithereens with their own stupidity but honestly, sometimes it's even more enjoyable to watch President Trump give them a little push and set them off. This was entirely predictable. The media wants to make it look like the rethuglicans got too far over their skis and thus created a debacle that needs Courts to straighten out and unfuck. They think that way for a reason. They're really really stupid.

The Executive Power to run the Executive Branch is effectively unlimited. It will reach a point someday where the Executive will simply invite the Courts to butt out and get back in their own lane. As Congress sets the rules for the Courts below the Supreme Court, the Executive makes the rules for the Executive Branch. 

The dimwits and trolls that leaped to shut down Medicaid payments and things along those lines supposedly 'in accordance with the OPM directive didn't do themselves any favors. They knowingly tried to screw the President and the Executive Branch above them and they did it in a way that OUTED THEMSELVES. In short they demonstrated that they were too stupid to hold the positions they hold in the government and thus they need to be demoted and reassigned immediately. 

Honestly, it's like pulling the wings off mosquitoes at this point. Anybody can do it and it's OK but it shouldn't have to be done. These idiots are self-pruning themselves from the rolls of government as if it never occurred to them that they would be held accountable.

INCONGRUOUSLY

I find it interesting that just a week ago everyone involved in pushing DEI and sucking off that particular tit was proud of it and now you can't find a single one them with radar, sonar, hound dogs, both hands or seeing eye dog. They all seem to have vanished into the mist.

Oh well, the internet is forever so all we really have to do to track them down is look for them where they so proudly boasted of being last week and we'll still find them there unless they decided to take the public employee option and work from home. In any event, we can stop paying them today and they earned it.

ALLEGATIONS

 It reared its ugly head again as it always will now and there is no answer or solution that I can see to the problem and it is a very ugly problem. Once again a Presidential appointment was tainted by the allegations laid by some person who had no direct knowledge and no proof at all of anything she was talking about were all set to derail the nomination and appointment of the new Secretary of Defense. You remember this vile game, it was played by the left on Justice Kavanaugh and it was the same sort of thing, allegations about something that allegedly happened decades ago with no proof, no witnesses, nothing at all to back it up and suddenly the man's appointment to the Supreme Court was in jeopardy because, allegations.

I was reading today one of those things about the huge number of fully qualified Army officers that were point blank refusing command of Battalions. In the old days the only way to be a general was to have commanded a battalion along the way and now officers wanted nothing to do with it. The article explored some of the reasons for that but it all boiled down to the fact that any officer's career and pension and reputation could be destroyed by just one person making allegations without any proof or evidence. That's all it takes to be gone and a non-person in the modern military.

As a youngish Lieutenant I remember one of my Department Heads on my second ship telling me that he had turned down command of a minesweeper. Back then those were Lieutenant Commander commands and could be a plum for any officer wanting to make Captain and then Admiral. He described it as stepping into Hell because all it would take on a pathetically undermanned, underresourced ship was one sailor screwing up and it would be curtains for his career and he'd be what's known as a terminal Lieutenant Commander with no hope of promotion. That was a considered risk for advancement and he figured if he did all right and kept his nose clean he would make Commander and retire happy because there really aren't a lot of retired Limited Duty Officer Commanders who were promoted up from E1 to E8 and then to 05. They were very rare in 1986.

I have to admit it never even entered my mind when I was offered command because at that point it had not grown to anything like the basilisk it has become today but back in 1990 we also didn't have anything like "toxic leadership environment" and endless command surveys. We happily charged along never thinking that someone with their hate on would stab us in the back. OK, I was perhaps more clueless than most but it certainly never occurred to me.

Now I personally know people that would cheerfully stab you in the back if they discovered that you voted for Trump. Cheerfully, because you deserve it! 

ON POSTS

 I've been doing this for awhile and sometimes I spend a day or so writing, rereading and not posting as I think about the posts I've just drafted. The numbers seem to be increasing in all directions and I wonder why. I occasionally touch on some of the darker aspects of life and the possible futures we have in front of us and some of those drafts are bleaker than I care to share but this is getting a little ridiculous especially when I consider that I periodically go through and cull the draft population back down to a reasonable number. 

 This is ridiculous. There's been 10 in the last 5 days that are just sitting there ready to go.

WATCHING THE COLUMBIA CRAWL DOWN

 It is long passed time to read The Art of the Deal. I have it around here somewhere.

 If you know any tyrants, despots, tin-horn dictators or cartel leaders you might consider loaning them your copy.

DEFIANTLY BEATING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES

 Now that Mr Hegseth is our Secretary of Defense I imagine that one of the very first things he wants to do is to sit down with some of the permanent 06s in each of the services and ask them what shape their branch of the military is truly in. I think for a couple of the services he can ask very simply if, "they can fight their way out of wet paper bag" and get some reluctance to share with him that the bag might win.

The true state of the US Military and Navy is not that hard to assess. Each of the Services does individual assessments all the time on each unit especially as each unit works up for the deployment cycle. The goal though is to have that one unit reach peak readiness at the moment it deploys and there is really very little care or attention given to post deployment and non-deploying units. That is kind of where we are at now because when you ask the Flag and General Officers of the Services where their Service stands now on readiness I think every single one of them defaults to assuring one and all that we are enjoying excellent readiness because those units tapped for deployment next week are in good shape material and training-wise.

Of course, that's not how any country fights a War. I suspect Mr. Hegseth might pitch his question a bit differently and ask:

How many of our submarines are deployable as fully mission capable submarines on 72 hours notice?

How many of Aircraft Carriers and Air Wings are FMC on 72 hours notice?

How many Large Deck Amphibious Assault ships are FMC " "?

How many of our Destroyers are FMC in 72 hours?

He can then either ask about an extended timeline or ask when the warfighting force would be FMC and what the numbers look like for partially mission capable units and what, by the way, do our ammo stocks look like for a war longer than 3 months?

He can do the same thing with the Army and the Air Force but the one is really contingent on the good behavior and condition of the others. Simply put, the Army's divisions, brigades, battalions and companies can all be maxed out on personnel, training and readiness with all their equipment FMC but they kind of need to have long lost things that once belonged to organizations like Transportation Command such as railcars to carry an Armored Division from Fort Hood to the given seaport of embarkation. They need to have ships to embark on and they need to have cargo handling teams that know how to load and unload things like tanks and vehicles which are very different loads from shipping containers which is how 99% of things move nowadays.

It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall as that goes down and a thoroughly angry man learns that what everyone has actually been working their asses off for the last 30 years was to hide the facts from the People of the United States who think there is something really shiny and dangerous hidden away out there with our name on it. Of course, it's nothing that every Intel service on the planet doesn't know already, it's just Joe Friday and the rest of America who seem to think that the total disaster in Afghanistan was just a fluke.

THE TORRENTS

 I am moving ahead in my studies of China and found this tonight as I was reading some more Spengler.

Westerners think of a nation in organic terms: Nations begin with a common language, culture, and religion. They coalesce from tribes and clans, and then decide what sort of state they will have and what those states will do. The reverse has been true in China since its earliest beginnings, shrouded in legend and unearthed by archaeologists: The Chinese state created China, not vice versa. The core of the country is the enormous flood plain defined by the 8,000 miles of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Taming the floods and irrigating the fields made it possible for successive Chinese dynasties to assimilate peoples who still speak 200 dialects today out of six major language groups. This is not a new or original assertion: Karl Wittvogel’s 1957 book Oriental Despotism, among others, presented a similar thesis.

I bolded the core sentence that the author uses to say that China is nothing like what we think it is. 

 Right now everyone in the West believes deep down that we have both the military might and the economic muscle to compel China but any rational mind that looks at the situation will know that this simply isn't so. I am not happy that so many of the higher levels of government, military and academic keep bleating about how we must prepare to defeat or deter or counter Chinese who are doing.........

To put it in simple terms, if the wheel continues to go around then things have a chance to settle down but right now China needs those resources it is harvesting all over the world in order to keep it on its feet economically and socially. Lodging embargoes or sanctions on China because it is behaving in its own best interests for its own continued survival are bound to have negative consequences that probably exceed in size and scope anything dreamed of by the nitwits and morons pontificating about 'dealing' with China.

Do read the rest of the article at the link.

THE ROLL UP

 I read this morning that the Senate has decided to delay approval of President Trump's Attorney General and perhaps some cabinet secretaries and I think they are so stuck in last time thinking that they failed to comprehend that President Trump was way ahead of their idiocy and intransigence this time around and to me it looks a lot like The Roll Up to Baghdad. The people he appointed Acting Directors and such are moving forward with all speed to implement his policies right now and nobody is waiting for Senate approval of his nominees. There are people sitting in those offices right now executing every single one of the policies that his Executive Orders are putting in place and idiots who think they can outflank Trump in the Senate and screw him over there by putting up roadblocks to Confirmation are just as stupid as stupid can be.

President Trump is eviscerating the entrenched racism, sexism and bigotry that previous governments thought would be a good idea along the same lines as funding research into "gain of function research in killer virus in order to allow it to spread to humans" and other well thought out things like trying to touch lightning or stop a speeding bullet with your thumb.

The Acting Director of OMB is following up gloriously to let the idiots in Congress know that there is no stopping the signal and that the message is going to get through. 

 The amusing thing is that the bureaucrats don't think that the signal or the message applies to them.

 There are people out there in the Civil Service and infinite treeline known as the federal bureaucracy that don't think that the rules or the law apply to them. They really believe the myth that it is impossible to fire a federal employee. 

I'd set up the Office of Relocated Civil Arrogant Servants too Stupid to Quit at the former Naval Base at Adak. There was room for 90,000 troops there in World War II so I'm sure there's plenty of accommodations and it has a killer view.

ACTION THIS DAY

 There is a lot of action but one act that signifies the enormous difference between this President and the 45th President is that this one took office in no mood to take any prisoners or give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

The Acting Secretary of Homeland Security has fired the incompetent Commandant of the Coast Guard.

I saw his list of Acting Leaders and wondered how much authority they each thought they would take into the Acting Leadership Office and this pretty much answers that question.  There will be no repeat of last time when President Trump was blinded to the complete lack of integrity and ethics in the senior leadership of our government agencies, departments and services. Not this time. He knows them for what the are.

REJOINDER

From now until the end of time any and all hostile questions from liberals and progressives can be answered by referring to the Biden Crime Family and how they all dodged jail on Biden's last gasp in office. I do kind of wonder how many of his pardons are all Top Secret and cannot be shown to people but nevertheless cover all the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other classified scum that have been misruling this country for the last 4 years.

Every appearance by any sane person on a TV show or with the hosts and guests at NPR, PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc can all begin by asking, "so how about all those Biden Family crime pardons, what do you think of them? What do you suppose they are all guilty of?" "Is criminality really hereditary?

I'm not one for dissembling but it is sure nice to be able to return every hostile blast with a, "what about the criminal jackass Fauci getting pardoned, what do you think he did that was so evil and wrong that he deserved an unconditional pardon from Joe Biden?"

The next 10 to 20 years will be interesting. I wonder if at some point the spluttering will stop.

Anybody seen Mumia's long awaited and undeserved pardon for killing a policeman? Me neither, I guess he wasn't black enough to merit a pardon from the predator-president who bested ole CornPop back in the days when girls were still admiring the hairs on his legs. You know, that or someone used it to blot up some spilled and melted vanilla ice cream from somewhere...

Say! You don't suppose this is going to be like elections in democratic precincts where pardons are like ballots that keep turning up weeks after its supposed to be all over, do you?

IT IS REPORTED

 How harmless that sounds to hear that something was reported. It isn't always that way because it has a number of very different meanings depending on the situation but the one I favor for this bit is simply, how do you know if the reporting is accurate or meaningful? An impeccable source reports that other formerly totally unreliable lying liars are reporting that they are dropping all their 'fact checking' activities and simply letting the market place of ideas play out its given role. 

Well I don't believe it for a minute. Facebook has always been a demon run organization and Google is even worse. I don't believe that they have decided to end the practice of censoring the speech of literally everyone they disagree with. I can hear them now saying, "I'm sure that their words are simply lost and wandering in the desert for 40 years and will show up some day to enlighten all their toxic followers but in the meantime nobody could possibly blame the dirty rotten stinking liars at Facebook and Google of censorship! No Way Bro!"

Because that's who they are.

 On another topic, did you know that Coyote Blog is back but only on X? 

CORRECTION: Turns out Coyote fired up all on its own last week and is running again here.

INSURANCE GAMES

One of the things becoming clearer to the people is that California is a diseased State that needs to be cut off the body politic and also treated as an enemy State in all other matters. The absolute refusal of anybody in the State at any level in California to address the very real ongoing and always been going on catastrophic situation with regard to domestic fire insurance needs to be addressed by the Feds because the idea that the entire rest of the nation needs to underwrite and subsidize millionaire California homeowners house insurance is just wrong at every level.

They know the State burns, the buildup of fuels is responsible for the widespread devastation from even natural fires much less the ones laid all over the place all the time by the have-nots that know they can burn down their enemy's houses and get away with murder and still they won't do anything about it or reduce the risks and damage. Well that's no reason to saddle the rest of us with higher premiums when they are not playing by the rules we all accepted. If they don't want to play by the rules then FORBID their insurance companies from offering insurance in any other states or turn it around and forbid any insurance company that offers homeowner fire policies in the other 49 states from offering any such policies in California.

This is in everybody's interests.

Epstein didn't kill himself and when do we see the formal list of the names of all the bigwigs that partied on his island pedo colony? That is also in our interest since it's long passed the time when degenerates like that should have any say in our government or policy and hiding the names just makes people suspect all of them of being degenerates.

CIVILIZATION ROUNDUP

 All you really need to know about immigration. 

Two countries in Europe have made a thorough analysis of the fiscal contribution of immigrants by country of origin, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The findings from these two countries look remarkably similar: pic.twitter.com/aWBFSTzH8U

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) January 15, 2025

DAY 2 OF SECOND ROUND TRUMP

 The President offers the rulers of Cuba $25.00 and a good cigar for the whole island and brings it into the United States as a Trump Commonwealth much like Puerto Rico but with a better electrical grid and more honest government. President Trump apologizes to the Cubans for leaving them out in the cold after the Spanish American War but says actions have consequences and it would take a study of the matter to find out just how a rethuglican senator from Colorado screwed up the conquest of Cuba and the expulsion of Spain from our Caribbean Sea.

Check back here for more news from tomorrow!

THE TIP-TOE INVASION

 As usual we are all being taunted about our inadequate and pathetic fleet and being shouted at to answer the almost vital question asked by practically nobody outside the USN and US Maritime authorities who really want to know just what we are going to do to prevent, deter or fight back when China reabsorbs China. Now they want us to be excited about something they claim are just like incredible manmade harbors we called Mulberry that were put into place in Normandy waters after our amphibious invasion there on 6 June 1944. These enormous engineering structures that took years to build and days to put in place were subjected to severe battering on the 19th of June and Mulberry A simply disappeared to all intents and purposes. Just how exactly 3 or 5 big barges are anything like a Mulberry harbor are a mystery to me.

Anybody who studies the histories of the War knows or thinks they know that Germany could have done more to defeat the allied invasion at Normandy and it took a great deal of luck, magnificent planning, undaunted courage and a certain amount of destructive stupidity to get the invasion into the success column for the allies. Some would say that the Germans were faced with a cross-channel invasion and had to basically defend and fortify the entire Atlantic coast of Europe from Spain up to Holland. I suppose that could be true but they had 4 years to get the job done and they were fairly dab at building fortifications, guns and ammunition and had plenty of labor battalions keen to help out. The poor Formosans have only had 80 years to prepare invasion fortifications and heaps of weaponry.

If that is the case than I always ask why we in America should be troubled by any prospective turbulence in Taiwan. It isn't ours, we don't actually care about whether one set of Chinese or the other set of Chinese own and operate it since again, history has shown that putative NATO allies were super quick to abandon "their Chinese" in Hong Kong and Macao to the......wait for it......Chinese.

When I think of meaningless wars such as the one now ongoing in Ukraine I would put any war fought over administrative control of Taiwan right up there with dumbest war in history. The people who live there are not some sort of out-CONUS American-Chinese, they are and all see themselves as Chinese. They have all had a chance to see that unification with the PRC is probably not as bad as any war would be and the ones who have a serious heartburn about it have all done the Canadian thing and bought Canadian citizenship and housing in British Columbia.

I've been meaning to try for a better understanding of China and finally got around to getting the translations of The Eight-sided Fortress ( The Eightfold Battle Formation ) and other Poetry of Du Fu. Our recent history is littered with famous people dropping little gems such as, 'know your enemy' into polite conversation and while this is usually sound advice it is also an excellent idea to 'know your allies' and consider where they stand as it relates to where you stand and where you think you stand. Probably 50% of the population of Formosa don't care at all and I'm pretty sure the 2.7 million communist agents in Formosa already almost all support a win for the PRC when the invasion happens or the crumbling finishes and they all end up ................ Chinese.

I think most of the memory of the old Imperial China vanished under the Communist assault and then the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution but the poetry and the soul of China is still there unchanged in over a thousand years. The people here who argue for using a vague threat of China taking China with only us to stop the barbarian hordes, is blindly and stupidly pathetic. The war we fought against a rising and militant Communism is long over and we kind of won. It was never anything like what it was sold to us as because in the end it was really just a very long war about Nationalism and anti-colonialism and the barbarians won some and we lost some but those were seldom the same fight.

The current world breakdown is an even more splintering kind of long war that we really better stay out of ourselves since there are no great victories in that war, only endless tragedy like what we're seeing play out on the steppes in Ukraine now. Nationalism will not survive in the places where it never really existed and it will probably fade away in some places that never knew anything except pure nation/state ethnic purity on a scale not even Hitler dreamed of. A lot of places that you thought were inviolate bastions of nationalism are, in case you missed it, tearing themselves apart in every way every day. Who are we to stop it?

Consider the former United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It was the greatest imperial power since Spain and Rome at their height. Now it is ruled by pedophiles and morons and like the rest of the former colonial power it is rapidly extinguishing itself by simply rolling over and getting raped by an endless flood of barbarians who hate every single thing about it and the people that remain there. Any soldier who fought in Normandy back 80 years ago wouldn't recognize anything about the land once known as England and Great Britain. Those who served in the CBI might recognize it and be revolted by seeing in their homeland the painful reflections they got to know working under Wavell in India.

The false states are now breaking up. The Kurds fight on against everybody in Syria, Turkey and Iraq. The Syrians have simply fallen apart with the only thing holding them together a mutual hatred for each other and a complete inability to put business before pleasure and stop killing each other and scrambling to dominate the others. What the palestinians did to Jordan and Lebanon are sad and just a predictor for what they will do everywhere else that lets them inside. The shia and sunni are an endless torment each inflicts on the other and then on all the rest of us. The Persians remember a united empire but they too fell beneath the sway of the green banners and it gutted them just as it has gutted every other islamic society. 

All of Africa is a cauldron of unrequited nationalism where every single tribe dreams of its own nation/state/homeland and maybe being ruler of the whole shebang but still never forgetting that first comes family, then clan, then tribe and nobody even breathes the words, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. 

 I think we are settling into a time with little to no interest in the great affairs of the great game and people would really like to just be left alone for awhile. There are no crowned heads and petty jealousies to tear apart whole continents, no great disciples of God or Marx who want to unite everybody under a single God and no significant military religious rebellions ready to stamp out heresies or spread them by the sword. The rapidly declining birth rate and guaranteed turmoil in the most advanced countries seem to point to a more laissez-faire world for perhaps a generation or two and then resource squabbles will drive things back to the course that history usually runs in, the deep channel of war and hatred and change for higher purposes undreamed of now.

I am sure that it will be both fascinating and extremely injurious to the psyche of civilized people because by and large most of the young people today don't really see much worth fighting and dying for and it's hard to blame them because nobody ever undertook to teach them. It will work out in the end because hate is a self-taught course and free to all.

NEWS TO COME

In another rare show of complete unanimity all the mainstream networks and newspapers will announce next week that some publisher in America just paid Joe Biden $80,000,000 for his memoirs and that Joe was even now buckling down to polish his first draft and get it out there for all of his fans to read and enjoy before he kicks the bucket in March.

ON FALLING

 Was watching Smoothie this evening and he was rabbiting on about ballistic missile defense and it occurred to me that one of the facts that discourage belief in successful anti-ballistic missile operations is a simple matter of gravity and ruggedness. The whole idea of ABMs was predicated on the idea that we would 'shoot' down nuclear armed ballistic missiles using our own brilliant missiles and things like ERINT tended to satisfy the idea that this could work out successfully because it translated enormous velocity at intercept into a magnificent explosion at altitude as the kinetic energy of impact was released. The ERINT missile didn't even have a warhead.

What can one say about a MIRV that is being shot at with ABM? Well, the whole missile made it out of the silo or off the ground more or less intact and in accordance with the targeting parameters. It is now falling on the target. That is what ballistic means in this case. The missile, the warheads or the debris of same will hit the target in spite of the ABM unless it is all converted to energy rather dramatically.

That missile was probably supersonic within 2 seconds of launch which means that it and its components are pretty rugged. So, how much damage can an ICBM shroud take from blast fragments and will that terminate the function of the nuclear warheads? If it is a MIRV with multiple warheads on the bus, how many would be damaged or soak up the damage leaving the rest unimpaired by the intercept?

I get the idea that outside of Rand and a few offices in the Pentagon nobody ever gave all that much thought to that after 1980 because nobody that was talking Star Wars back then was talking publicly about putting atomic weapons on the interceptors again. That was an idea that faded from history when the powers that be decided to leave our cities and people vulnerable to nuclear weapons as the safest course of action. We know that worked with the sane men running the Soviet Union but you notice the whole concept started to fade away almost immediately when we considered nuclear ICBM in the hands of the Kim family or muslims anywhere.

I wonder what the real world tests show on the various interception exercises we've done over the last 20 years as we've tested THAAD, Patriot and SM6 missiles against ballistic missiles and conducted engineering analyses to see whether or not the warhead would have made it safely through the fragments of the interceptor warhead detonation.

After all, the damned thing is still going to fall on the target one way or the other and if the nuke goes off it's going to be hard on the target even if it misses by a mile or two. Let's be honest, the people likely to use nuclear weapons on us in the future are not going to be pretending to use them on counter-force targets, they'll be going after the largest cities on the continent and Washington, DC. It's going to be hard on the suburbs. It might be almost as destructive for the suburbs as electing democratic party politicians at every level of government and implementing ruthless DEI.

LAMELY THEY ARE

 For all the smoke and fury it is interesting to me that nobody points out that every single time one opens a relief valve on a given system, the pressure will drop. Eventually it will drop to zero such as when hundreds of fire hydrants are being tapped to fight enormous wild fires over vast areas. Nobody on earth could keep a system strained to that degree producing high pressure water. My differences with bad government also let me embrace reality and the only thing that could control wildfires is brush removal and serious fire breaks and California government pointedly refuses to do either or even allow you to do it. That’s the true offensive part of burning California.

BACKSLIDERS AND COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES

You know the internet that I read parts of has many examples of the Question. There is the one that asks about the Country and how we reached this place we are in now where if you look at it you really do have to ask yourself, if someone had deliberately set out to destroy the education system, prosperity, employment opportunities and the economy and wreck our aircraft building industry, what else could they possibly do to make it worse given all they've done to date?

You can pretty much ask the same Question of California: destroy the agricultural economy, roll back the dams and reservoirs, go woke with extreme prejudice and hatred for white everything, forbid the clearing of brush from around houses and property, get the insurance companies to simply cancel all insurance policies because insurance is not a suicide pact and everybody except Californians know that and the usual destruction of jobs, education, opportunity, way of life and importing millions of no-skill immigrants and terrorists all of whom know how to make a fire and you wonder, what else could Californians and their elected officials do to make it even more destructive and horrible in California? Yeah, I know, unleash another plague or two on them and that should do the trick.

The problem as I see it is that only about 1% of Californians have opened their eyes and begun to see the truth all around them and they're mostly wiped out and leaving the state where most of them will do their damnedest to make what happened in California happen in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Alabama. I mean just look what they did to San Francisco, Oakland, LA, Santa Monica....

See, I remember reading Latitude 38 for many years when I lived in SOCAL and I thought the state had gone thoroughly insane back then in 1988. I had only a little concern that it could get worse. Wow was I wrong. It might be time to read those books by Kurt Schlicter.

The funny thing? Reread The Grapes of Wrath and wonder at the people who did all those horrible things to the Okies, now ruling the State with ambitions to rule them all. Kind of makes you wonder if any of Bradbury's Firemen are out there running around full time now in coastal California where the 5% think nobody can get at them because of the magic they find in living west of the 5.

Wait for Santa Ana winds boys and make ready your fires. Those are the people that did this to California. It really is surprising to me that none of the twits thought that the people would fight back in the only ways left to them. Of course, revolution is always a bit of a surprise to the ruling class. It is kind of funny though with the rulers telling the poor burnt out people that the fires that got out of control were set by lost hunters who were trying to get rescued. NOBODY ever points out that sometimes there is a whole fire line where some people have kindled dozens of fires all along a front to let the wind driven flames tear apart the communities located on the wrong side of the 5. Nobody cared about anybody east of the 5 and it always showed.

In the past whenever the ruling elite felt threatened they called out the thugs to protect them. They have dried up that near endless well of people willing to beat on other people for them and now all that is left is a muzzled and muted law enforcement bunch that really don't contribute anything at all to public safety anymore so it will be, as they say, interesting times.

THE COMING WAR

 I have always believed that war is a come as you are affair and that there is no substitute for what we used to call the Fleet-in-Being. If we didn't have all the line of battle ships and craft we needed to fight off the likeliest adversary then we would likely not have the time to build them or train crews to operate them and the same pretty much goes for all the weapon systems and ammo stockpiles. You better start your next war with a massive surplus of all that before you let your mouth and State Department imbeciles talk you into a war that you cannot win.

Well I don't think it will surprise anybody to learn that we simply don't have any of that any more and despite the shrieking you hear from over by the Pentagon it has been like this since roughly 2005 when the War ended and the spatter of all those idiot Victory-thru-Powerpoint slides started to fade into the rear view mirror. The Navy had spent the previous 2 decades building utterly worthless ships that simply have no role in any kind of warfare. The aviation crowd had gone big on replacing the long range aviation assets we had in an integrated and deadly air wing and turned it into a sort of one fighter boutique shop where one plane could drop a bomb, dogfight a dog, tank a buddy to go the extra mile but no more than that, and land on carriers. It was an amazing letdown from the carrier air wings we had before Tailhook started the long and painful decline of naval aviation.

I don't think the Army is in any better shape and since I mention it, this is the Army that could not meet its minimum recruiting goals for years, lowered its standards to the 'see lightning/hear thunder' category and offered stupid people the chance to go to Pre-Boot Camp so they could meet the rigors of modern combat with the sort of intelligence one finds in a petri dish. Unable to meet their recruiting goals the Army simply wrote off a whole infantry division as excess to needs since they couldn't begin to fill its billets and since they don't have the weapons or ammo anyway it kind of saved all the hassle of trying to find them. A lot of the missing gear was last seen some say parked in neat rows in Afghanistan but some say it shipped to Ukraine along with 3 fusion reactors, 12 submarines and most of the Navy's expeditionary warfare capability. The Marine portion of that almost extinct capability can now safely fit in the local Hyatt-Regency Hotel without causing the local fire marshal any distress.

But this is the old war comrade and the new war bears very little resemblance to this old dog and pony show. People started writing books about 5th generation warfare a long while ago. Nobody in power reads them and let's be honest, none of them ever will and you know why? There is no money in 5th generation warfare for the giant defense contractors and their supporters and for all the congresscritters that float their boats and stock portfolios on their continued acquisition of pathetic scrappy hardware with procurement dollars unmatched by any Operations and Maintenance dollars so all that shiny new stuff turns into rust covered bayfill clogging the waterfronts at the few remaining naval bases we have.

Half the submarines cannot get underway and the same goes for all the rest. The drydocks they need were all sold away by admirals keen to trim the budgets and get on board with the Base Realignment and Closure crowd and so ships wait for years to get into a drydock and get their engines and reactors serviced and their weapons and sensors repaired or upgraded. It got so bad starting 20 years ago that the Navy went back to Classifying all the Reports of the Board of Inspection and Survey of the ships, submarines etc of the fleet. It because painfully obvious that the ships were turning to shit and that nothing was being done about it and that was clear when the required maintenance dollars and time simply never even showed up in the President's Budget and it wasn't sexy enough to get shoved in as Pork and then the Pork went away. "Don't worry kids, it's back in now so the ships will get the pink paint jobs they need in order to comply with fleet directives to look good."

Well you ask, what is this 5th Generation Warfare you just made up? It's really pretty simple. It baldly states that there is no reason to go all kinetic and lay waste to the fleets and aircraft because some simple and really comprehensive cyber attacks will simply destroy or disable anything attached to the computer networks. You know what? Everything is connected these days and when the bad guys turn off all the power by attacking the network controlling the electric grid in this country they can not just take it down for a day or two, if they bypass certain safety interlocks they can send a devastating cascade of blackout and brownouts down the line that will knock out the power generation facilities for months.

When people bleat about some mythical need to rebuild the fleet and military to counter Chinese being Chinese in China and around China they never really consider the most fundamental question of all time. How EXACTLY are they going to win a war with China? Let's be honest, the last time we won a war we bombed the enemy's cities into ruins, laid a blockade on them that strangled all imports and most essentially strangled all food imports so the people starved and were in such bad shape they kept starving for years after we relaxed the blockades and we carried out massive regime changes right down to the policeman in the street.

Do you think we have the WILL to do that to China? I guarantee we don't have the means to do it so it isn't really an issue. Thanks to the nitwits running this country and the greater darkness that is the West none of the countries in NATO or the EU are capable of taking on the equivalent of Baden Powell's boy scouts with any chance of success. On top of not having the gear or the men to fight with the countries all lack the WILL. The foolish british snobs and elites that declared that they would not fight for king or country are now thick on the ground at every level in every city in the West and remember, it's a come as you are war and they don't have any war materials at all. Seriously they're in worse condition then Canada or the Netherlands. Unready, unable and unwilling, is no way to fight a war.

The forces of darkness and evil have arranged it this way. Men like Soros have labored for this end for decades and spent their fortunes to make the conditions that prevail across the West today and nobody can wake up the people to the effect or get them to care. They cannot even get them to care that their countries are vanishing into the 3rd World Hell and that their own daughters aren't going to make it out alive. All these stupid and indoctrinated people really truly believe that those other chaps are all just like us and you cannot even get them to examine the evidence that reveals that they are not.

If you import the 3rd World you become the 3rd World. This is not some sort of harmless prank like colonizing stone age areas of the world and bringing them into the light, the word of God and the Industrial Revolution, this is working the other way now and it is leading to rape gangs and their enablers running the governments of the US and UK and where the hell is the list of all the scum that stayed at Epstein's Island? Why are so many conservatives turned into total squishes after they report to Congress or Washington for duty? What the Hell happened to turn the FBI into the KGB?

People see elements of the coming cyber war and they all now know that nation/states out there have the capability, ability and means to simply turn off the power grid and leave the entire continent shivering in the cold. Do they do anything about it? Have the utilities launched any actual for real processes for disconnecting the entire grid from the networks? Is there a quick disconnect switch anywhere that has been tested? Does anybody actually read through every line of code that controls and stabilizes the power network and grid?

I took note locally of a couple of things that happened in just the last 2 years around here. One that struck me was how, thanks to the morons who believe they can save the world from global warming, the local university has greatly revised it's stand-alone power plant. The thing about that of course is that it didn't just provide power and heat to the universities, it also provided power to 2 major hospitals and trauma centers. One of the local cities up the road on the coast also shut down it's own power plant and shifted over to the 'national' grid. Their plant may be in layup but it also might be just so much scrap metal rusting in place. Don't worry though little town, from your beach you can easily see the cooling towers of a couple of nuclear reactors.....

Fukishima really went to Hell when they lost power and the grid went down and then the tsunami knocked out most of their standby backup generators and a reactor without power is nearly infinitely dangerous. So we have a couple  reactors about 25 miles from here plus the other 2 about 50 miles in the other direction. I wonder if they have quick disconnects to a suddenly gone rogue network and collapsing power grid and how often they test the trips....

If you read this far you see where I talked about 5th generation warfare as if it is real. Well guess what? It is.

That said, we have let in so many enemy agents and terrorists that we simply cannot deal with them at all short of spending years finding them, rounding them up and sending them home but in the meantime if the mother country calls these are also the guys that are going to get in their trucks and vans and drive over to the vicinity of the perimeter fence of various installations and bases and fly their drones into those priceless aircraft we used to think of as national assets and we won't be using them for anything at all. They won't have too much trouble arranging for similar things to inconvenience a navy that has made itself at home in ports on the wrong side of the most vulnerable infrastructure on the planet. You know what I mean, you saw it happen in Baltimore when a ship collided with and dropped the bridge and bottled up the port for weeks. San Diego naval base is on the wrong side of the Coronado Bay Bridge and Norfolk and Little Creek are on the wrong side of the Bay Bridge. 

Oddly enough, the USN does not have a single mine sweeping ship in the United States. The tiny handful that remain are in Japan and Bahrain and there are no others closer than NATO Europe and the odds aren't good that they can cross the Atlantic. I can't recall a single visit by a NATO country Mine Countermeasures Ship or Squadron, ever happening in the United States or Canada.

But all that is kind of moot anyway dear reader because all that is necessary to stop the whole battle group in its tracks is to damage or sink the handful of oilers and supply ships that sustain those warships whenever they leave port. Since the USN for some foul reason now hustles all of its newly decommissioned ships to the breakers for immediate scrapping we don't even have backups that might be brought on-line in a few weeks or months. Nope, they all went to Texas and other ports to be scrapped as soon as humanly possible after they were retired. 

You know when I joined the Navy we still had hundreds of ships, some of them dating back to World War II that were anchored out in the James River and Suisun Bay and other places where they could be brought back to life if needed. The battleships were such ships.

Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet in 1975

 

If If you worked diligently, studied very hard and applied yourself every single day for many years you could not have more thoroughly destroyed and disarmed the West then it is now today and yet all these buffoons and professionals carry on and act as if 8th century tribesmen did not defeat and run out of town the very last Western military force left standing in the 21st century. 

I find that one of the nice things about all this is that bringing back the draft is futile at this point. However ugly it gets we simply cannot build the weapons to arm the unwilling, unfit, drugged and stupid men we plan to throw at the next enemy coming down the pike. You see, we sent all that manufacturing capability to China along with the pharmaceutical, electronics, and heavy industry. Why it's almost like some fiendish interlocking plan..... I simply stood up 3 more security squadrons in the last century and it took the entire USN more than 3 years to produce the men, the weapons to arm them with and longer than that to procure and deliver the boats and other gear.

MOBILIZATION ORDER BY EMPEROR HAILE SELASSIE-ABYSSINIA in 1935

Everyone will now be mobilized and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and to cook. Those without wives will take a woman without a husband. Women with small babies need not go. The blind, those who cannot walk or for any reason cannot carry a spear are exempted. Anyone found at home after receipt of this order will be hanged.

You know it's not all that dire but on the gripping hand, consider that the Italians were so overwhelmed by those guys with spears (and the others with better weapons) that they felt compelled to use poison gas on the Ethiopian army and people. The last note heard on earth is going to be one of the weapons of mass destruction because the class of people ruling the West today are more than willing to take down the whole world and the men of the East and the barbarians don't care.

IF YOU BUILD IT

 I ran across this on the cover of an Architecture magazine in the Architecture library at Penn State about 45 years ago. It was like Dover Beach in a sense and it took me many years to run it down since I didn't make note of who had painted it and it was decades before the internet and besides it's not like I was fanatically searching for it. I have it now and have had it for many years. I wrote away to the Toledo Museum of Art for my first copy and had it framed and then I drove to Toledo to get a replacement copy decades later. It's like a touch stone for me along with Dover Beach. When there is nothing but grim reading and dire predictions I take a moment to put myself in the painting and think how cool it would be to see it for real.

The news these days is repellently dark and January 20th cannot come soon enough.

Looking at it just now I wonder what it would look like if I turned AI loose on generating a more lifelike version with near infinite detail. If so it would be my first use of AI.

TASTE THE UNREALITY

This is from Instapundit today and as you can see there is something wrong, very wrong with it.

Just what kind of idiots think that someone, somewhere on Earth was tracking carbon dioxide worldwide in 1800? The delusional people will believe in anything because that is their nature but the rest of us need to point out when the idiots have run amok again with their fake science nonsense.