THE EPSTEINS

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

The Evidence is Right in Front of You Charlie Brown

NAILED IT

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

A RECKONING FOR KINGS

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

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

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

SCABS AND SPLITTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A RICH TURBULENT IMAGINATION

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

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

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

1. Overthrew the government.

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

3. Learned to code.

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

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

ALMOST LYRICAL

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

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

Again, ymmv.

THANK YOU AND GET OUT

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

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

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

NOW IMAGINE THIS IS US AND CHINA

As you think about this:

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

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

— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 21, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON HISTORY IN PRESENT TIME

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

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

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

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

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

SATISFACTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEAPING TO FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS

 It is kind of amusing now to watch the news of the world and see all the European aristocrats patting themselves on their backs for successfully bringing the Special Military Operation in Ukraine to a conclusion and now arguing over whether the USA should provide all 100,000 peacekeeping troops the Europeans have decided will be required to keep the peace and also if the USA should pay 100% of the costs or 200% of the cost. 

They are all most concerned that it does not appear that anybody in the Trump administration wants or needs their valued input into just how to go about screwing the vile Mr. Putin and the equally odious Russians for causing the war and they want to have a huge say in the reparations that President Trump is going to demand that Putin pay. 

It is probably safe to say that you could not find a group of morons more loosely attached to reality than the current heads of the European Unions Defense, Political and Military arms.

These are the faces of the people that have set EU policy for the last 20 years and they mean business. Naturally, they don't mean to wage war on Russia or anything gross like that, they'll be happy to leave that sort of violent and reprehensible behavior to the Americans but they are all unanimous in declaring that they will be significant players in the imaginary peace talks they think that they will roll into and dominate much the way Obama dominated the Peace Talks when he stopped that war and won the Nobel Peace Prize in his first week in office. Socialists are like that.

If you look at the facts in the matter it is pretty clear that between them and Biden they have done about as much damage to Russia as it is possible for them all to do and it is pretty clear that they mean to take back nothing because in their minds Putin and Russia MUST BE PUNISHED! There is little doubt that they are all 100% in favor of continuing the economic embargo, trade embargo, energy embargo and stealing any Russian money they find lying around where they can get their hands on it. You know, for the peace that's in it.

They are content to do all these things for the 'justice' in it and because they will never feel any ill effects out of continuing the war against Russia. Yes friends this does put me in mind of the lines of an old old poem by Kipling because these harpies seem familiar but I'm not going there. Today, I'm reading The Road to Gandolfo again and the rulers of EU made me think of this:

Among the many truly amusing things about what I've been seeing on the news tonight were all the claims and assertions that Sweden and of course the BENELUX and maybe the British would provide peacekeepers in Ukraine and of course I wondered, 'did these idiots totally spaz and miss out on the part where Putin is adamant that there will be no NATO troops in Ukraine and slipping in enemy troops in the guise of peacekeepers is as old and stupid a trick as building a giant horse and rolling it up in front of the gates of your enemy's capital city?' It is not ever going to happen. If any PK come into being which I put at under a 1% chance, they will be from China or maybe South Africa.

I think that the first thing Mr. Putin will insist upon is everyone who stole Russia's money gives it all back with interest and also finding and punishing publicly the people who destroyed the NORDSTREAM pipelines and the people that ordered them destroyed. The kind of people that are that rabid cannot be left to run around loose biting other socialists into doing their bidding. There is too much madness at the top to let the rabid run things.

As usual there is also an underlying assumption made by all those who made and consumed the fake news about the war in Ukraine. All of them believe that Russia is on its last breaths as a nation/state and is going to topple over dead any moment now and the rest of us all know that the only reason the Russians haven't ended the war is because it always helps out the strong men governing any group to be able to point to the EXTERNAL enemies and keep the people focused on them rather than on the sacrifices demanded in the fight against them and wow, haven't the EU and NATO done a bang up job of doing that.

Those interested in the history of actual peacekeeping missions are welcome to look at KFOR, IFOR, SFOR and other NATO PK missions in Europe and of course all the UN Peacekeeping missions. 

It seems that a number of Europeans have missed the appeal of President Trump. It is time to wake up now and realize that the old world passed away painlessly the day he assumed office this time. Literally nobody cares what the clowns running Europe think anymore. We in America haven't cared for decades but the rest of the world is beginning to see Europe as the clowns they have become.

WE FINALLY HEAR FROM USAID

 Restore all our funding or the puppy gets it!

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, TOO

 I see reports from the always predictable world press that Ukraine claims that Russia actually fired an attack drone at Chernobyl and that this Russian drone made it through the teeth of the fierce Ukrainian air defenses and exploded on the containment vessel keeping in all that naughty radiation. There is, as usual, just the statement by the Ukrainians that this happened and the investigators that have covered themselves in glory factchecking the living hell out of everything else on the planet have all breathlessly reported that, "Ukrainian officials have announced that the Russians exploded a drone on the containment shield over the intensely radioactive remains of Chernobyl's exploded reactor." Good work press.

I'm of two minds on  this. In the first I ask myself why would Russia launch an explosive attack designed to breach the containment vessel it paid blood and money to create and the second mind that asks, why wouldn't Russia try to blow a hole in the containment vessel and send another flock of radioactive particles into the West which is so amusingly using every weapon at its disposal to launch attacks on Russia?

In a sane world there would be no question of attacking something as fiendishly dangerous as a nuclear reactor but this hasn't been a sane world since August, 1914.

You see, if the Ukrainians are the ones that are using the carnage to gain advantage and have decided that they could try a little 4D chess against Putin and the tools in the West by blowing a hole in containment and blaming Russia, I can see that. In Ukraine with the election of President Trump we have finally come to the end of the beginning and perhaps the end of it all. The election has put into place a known Power and his first actions indicate that he will end the war in Ukraine on terms convenient to US alone and never mind the EU or Ukraine. By this there is no doubt that Zelensky has now been forced into a corner from which there is no way out.

If President Putin has ordered the attack then he is also making a statement and it is quite different from Zelensky's. Russia is not afraid of continuing and by this action making it clear that its enemies in Europe have gone well beyond being a distraction and have now engaged the lively interest of a KGB man who rules the most powerful and by far most unified and coherent country in continental Europe and he invites their attention to his complete indifference to any future downwind radiation problems that may occur due to Europe's idiocy in prolonging the 'special military action' in Ukraine for years beyond when it should have ended.

At this point I also would not put an attack on the containment vessel at Chernobyl by rogue CIA agents as beyond belief. The CIA and every other Executive Agency in this country have been wildly out of control and running around destabilizing the world for the last 35 years. I think they would do anything to keep running their little schemes in the shadows because somebody is getting very wealthy at everyone else's expense and they don't care.

I don't think any sane person would attack that containment vessel but the evidence from the last time seems to show the most disinterested party would be someone in the United States or Iberian Peninsula.

UNIFORM OF THE DAY

 I was the first staff officer at NAVCENT to wear camouflage uniforms to the office but certainly not the last. In my defense I was also the caretaker and custodian of a number of 5 ton trucks and generators and they had to be cycled every month to keep them in good running condition. In practice this meant that I would do the pre-start checks on the generators and fire them up and then I'd climb into each truck in turn and drive it for a couple of laps around the outside of the Banz warehouses co-located with our base at Juffair in Bahrain. 

It was activity that didn't go well with my limited supply of khaki uniforms so on those days I showed up in the office wearing desert camouflage and the EOD and SEAL I shared the office with started to copy me. So yeah, it was me, way back in 1996. That said, it is time to put the staff officers and 100% of the flag and general officers back into the real Uniform of the Day and eliminate the practice of wearing camouflage unless duties require it.

It is also long passed the time to stop screwing around and changing the uniform every 2 years. It would be nice if the Secretary of Defense concurred and put out a SECDEC policy memo to everyone wearing the uniform.

THE OVERNIGHT REVOLUTION

 I think that we will now see the end of the old order and the beginning of the new. The lack of responsibility, accountability and authority over the Courts in this country is come to an end. The days of any one judge revoking the power of the Federal Government are now over. It took us awhile to get here but it was obvious a long time ago that the day would come.

The real issue now is not one for the Courts to decide. It is time now for the limits on each branch of government to be measured against the whole cloth of the Constitution and laid definitively to rest. There will be no more lower court injunctions on the powers of either the Legislative Branch or the Executive Branch and those that wish to challenge them will need to do so through appeals up through the court system until they can be decided by the Supreme Court. In short, no more stop work orders from the dumbest and most venal members of the Bar and that is setting a very low bar these days.

BOUNDLESS ADVENTURE

 Since yesterday was a day of predicted stormy weather and looming ice and snow disaster we decided that the time was ripe for us to head to Pittsburgh and attend a meeting of the Art. The Artist had a very good time and the scary weather that was predicted was a complete no-show until very near the end of the journey there and back again. Two hours after leaving Pittsburgh we got to our highway exit and detoured one mile to get some of the best Rita's Italian Ice and custard anywhere and it was there, while waiting to put in our order in the drive through lane that the skies finally opened and commenced a downpour of ice and snow. In the 10 minutes we waited to order and take delivery the ice covered the roads.

We did it for Art and we enjoyed it. It was once quite predictable that every single time we drove to Pittsburgh it would snow or there would be rain so hard you couldn't see the road but this time our journey was untroubled by weather and to give you some idea how that worked out,

I ate that large Italian black wild cherry with vanilla custard gelati with a spoon while driving up 271 in snowy icy arctic conditions with scores of other drivers and didn't spill a drop on my shirt or in the car. Such is the mighty scale of my life that the lists of my victories are so littered with such major achievements. Your mileage may vary.

NOW IT BEGINS

 As I predicted, the idiots wearing black have decided that they have the mighty power of barring anyone in America from performing any action that they have their hate on about and so a judge today ordered that no political appointee has the power to let anyone including themselves look at anything the career civil servants don't want them to see.

Well, now we see if President Trump and his lawyers play that game or opt for the new game of lawfare.

"That's a mighty fine looking decision you got there Judge Evil but we don't think it applies to us so we plan to just ignore you from now on but if you are really serious about it then you just appeal our actions right on up to the next Court and see how that plays out because Homey doesn't play your stupid game anymore and invites you to just go shoot yourself."

"We no longer intend to allow any single Judge in this country or any other country to overturn the rule of Law and the Constitutional Powers allocated to each branch of government."

I think this is a good thing because it means that the agonizing process of slowly working through the Courts themselves to get to the real decision is now left entirely up to the Courts and if they don't want to push it to the next level then they obviously weren't serious about it or know that they were totally wrong in their decision and behavior and their own stamp marks them for the intemperate and stupid morons that they really are. And, too, the Supreme Court can obviously step in and Act as they are empowered to act by the Constitution but again, we are going to play by some new rules where the Will of the People enjoys and Equal Playing Field and Nobody just invites the People to get lost without showing due process.

RELIABLY CORRUPT

 It is nice to imagine that one of the first acts of the new Director at the FBI is to send a team of trustworthy agents to the home and offices of his predecessor to search every document and seize every information processing device and memory system and thoroughly search them for even a single classified document and then charge the SOB with as many felony charges as possible and prosecute him to the full extent of the Law and beyond, just for the fairness that's in it. And if his house and offices get a little trashed, well we all know how thoroughly we reap what we sow and Wray and the rest of his predecessors could all use a dose of what they have miserably meted out to us as Justice.

THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES

 How could the rethuglicans in Congress permit the hard left communists and freaks to take $40 billion of our tax dollars every single year and use it to fund every single posse of extreme leftists, communists, devil worshipers and other democrats and ALL of their so-called news organizations and outlets and then turn around and ask us every 5 minutes to donate money to their reelection campaigns? How? 

Is the FCC going to go after every one of the scumbags who did this and nail them for interference in elections over the last 50 years or are we going to allow this one to pass too?

Every single sitting and former member of the House and Senate Republican Party owes all of us a formal apology followed by a ritual disemboweling on the steps of the Capital. This is not mere stupidity run amok, this is every single one of those scumbags thinking they could pull the wool over our eyes forever and get away with it and damned if they haven't one more time because they know we won't deal with them as we should. We leave the murder and mayhem to the democrats and that's all we can hope for now if we want justice. The lunatics let go from running the bureaucracy are now out on the street without a dime and are suddenly contemplating how they're going to get even and discovering the 10 day waiting period is a monstrous and unconstitutional infringement on their rights!

You know, it might be a good idea to consider your situational awareness a bit more carefully in the coming weeks since the democrats and other weak-minded terrorists always lash out against the most harmless looking creatures. Carry a big stick or something when you go out.

I hear people talk about the numbers coming out of DOGE and the incontestably evil USAID and they mutter loudly that it's like less than 1% man and that all means nothing. DOGE is working it's way through them all and I suspect each and every other bureaucratic swamp is more corrupt and massive than even the most woke at USAID ever imagined. They're going to turn up $trillions in HHS that was simply funneled straight into the bank account of the most evil thieves. The prisons in El Salvador will need to double in size every month to hold all the villains that have been ripping us off to the tune of trillions and trillions of dollars and we haven't even started auditing the Defense contractors.

Have you noticed that about the only politicians on the right that do anything for America are the ones routinely slandered by the left?

LEARNING IS HARD

Here in metroparkcentralis they are closing some of the schools on account of flu outbreaks. I laughed when I heard this because it sure sounds like the people in charge of educating don't ever learn anything. As I was thinking what a disaster the schools reaction to the covid was I thought back to my days long ago when we were still either rushing out of the class to take up positions along the walls for an atomic bomb nearby or hiding under our desks for the same kind of attack and it occurs to me now that I never questioned that if by some wonderful fluke we survived the bomb, school would resume the next day and teachers would demand to know why you didn't turn in your homework.

On the other hand, my aged parents were hit with the NORO virus last week while my sister was visiting them. It evidently slashed its way throughout their complex laying low many of the retired folks living there.

ON ROAD KILL

There has been an enormous explosion in drone technology and a massive decrease in cost since we are now talking about one-way attack drones. While my first thought on the subject 15 years ago was that they would inevitably be used by terrorists and other democrats against politicians they don't like, it occurs to me after reading an article on how leftist all 'tech-bros' are that there is another perfectly acceptable use for one-way attack drones and that would be to use them against antifa terrorists and the idiots from blm and Mexico that like to play in the street and block traffic. By all accounts attack drones are ubiquitous and impossible to stop or track down so it seems they would make the perfect modern alternative to what street rioters need the most; a whiff of canister and grape shot.

When you think about it, point detonating fuzes aren't that hard to make.

And you know, I think if I troubled to look I would find scores of open-source plans for building your own attack drones helpfully put online by all those thoroughly evil souls trying to keep the wars in Gaza and Ukraine going on forever. On the other hand, they were probably paid to do that by someone at USAID so perhaps the funding for that has finally dried up.

MOMENTS FROM THE DAY

 There I am listening to my mother describing Admiral Rickover as that really nice old man because she happens to be very old friends with Admiral Rickover's hospice nurse who described him as just the nicest man and then my mother describes going to deliver a lesson at the house of another Admiral at Newport and finding him out in the yard dressed for yard work and raking leaves and says he greeted her, came into the house with her, shucked his shoes, put on some inside shoes, washed his hands and made a cup of tea which he carried into the room where all the ladies were meeting and in the nicest way asked if he could join them. She related this to my father who was teaching at the War College and who routinely described that admiral as a savage beast unfit for human company and told us how all his subordinates quaked in fear at his slightest frown.

Funny how different reality looks when you shift the lens through which it is perceived.

ON THE HAND INVISIBLE

One of the obvious-in-retrospect things that happened in the last couple of months was that a large number of people quietly came together in a very private setting where none stood out for their presence and they had themselves a sit-down strategy and policy meeting for how they would all act, in concert, on the first day and in the first hour of the new Presidency. As you look at the results it is obvious.

President Trump put Acting Leaders in place at the very top of most of the die-hard bureaucracies and they acted immediately and serially and in parallel to dismiss the incompetent upper levels and start getting rid of the crooked and incompetents throughout each organization. The President started it with his Executive Order on Acting Leaders and they ran with it and while they were rolling up the kills on people like Fagan and some of the more corrupt FBI, SS and Intel Community types, Elon appears to have been deep in the background or, at the forefront of the campaign that took over the Office of Personnel and Management lock stock and barrel in the first hour of the new administration. I wonder if he's left the building since he took it over......

This was no ragtag feel their way slowly into their new powers and duties scramble, this was men and women, informed by some really sharp lawyers with all their writs ready and targets lists in their hands as they assumed their duties while waiting for the Senate to do its job and confirm the President's desired office holders. I really get a kick out of how this is played out. 

The real activity was of course, playing out in the dark and in the various computer networks that actually control the ebb and flow of money, influence and power and while everyone was looking at the skimpily dressed showgirls twirling batons, DOGE took away ALL THE POWER OF THE STATE from the smug arrogant bastards that thought they had us by the balls since they controlled the levers and passwords to the promised land.

As Elon says, they missed a bet and that whole working from home notion is really pretty silly when the real owners show up at the office building and find it dead easy to take control from people that aren't there to put a fight. The flow of our money to our actual enemies is over. That doesn't mean that they aren't going to continue swimming in Olympic pools of $20 and $100 bills because every government and most high power cartels and businesses are already churning out trillions of $ every month in fake US Currency and they have been for the last 45 years.

The author of an Invisible Hand was noted economist Adam Smith. He and the other Smith used a principle of enlightened self-interest to describe a perfect system but my title has more to do with what just happened in the United States, a coup de main which is described a swift attack that relies on speed and surprise and in this case it was used by the actual government of the United States against the fake government of the United States and oh was it a surprise. It does make you think though. 

The media is 99.6% controlled by a handful of billionaires and follows their orders to the letter and has an unrivaled reputation for FAILING TO ACTUALLY DO ANY IN DEPTH INVESTIGATION because these sorts of things always turn up the odd connected pedophile who is the friend and banker to all the most wealthy and exclusive democrats and neocons and the billionaires really don't want anyone asking about that but that means that there was NOBODY on the side of the devils out trying to investigate what suddenly took a lot of the most powerful movers and shakers out of the limelight together for a long weekend at some swank conference hotel in downtown Manhattan or possibly even Mar-a-Lago while the easily fooled were misdirected by the sudden new glimpses into the Trumps by a photogenic youngster and missed what was really happening in the other rooms.

There seems to have been quite a few invisible hands working together out there for awhile now. I hope they keep it up for the next 8 to 12 years.

FLUID AND FLUENT ENGLISH

 Contrast this performance off the cuff with the arglebargle of the former VP.

I find it hard to believe this needs to be said, but since Democrats vehemently deny it, it needs to be said pic.twitter.com/2OENW8Hu0B

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 31, 2025

ACQUISITION COSTS

 As they used to explain to us back in basic navy school, it isn't the initial acquisition cost that hurts, it's the maintenance costs. It would have been somewhat clearer if they used a graphic.

I don't know about you, but my wanderings through the internet are now accompanied everywhere by little ads from Temu like the screen shot above. I've never bought anything there or even looked but I thought the juxtaposition in this one was amusing.