REMEMBERING THE QUADIUM BOMB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WARRIORS IN THE MIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVOLUTIONARY

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

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

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

— Camus (@newstart_2024) July 28, 2025

CHANGE

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

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

— Daniel Kodsi (@d_kodsi) July 27, 2025

A NEW WEEKEND WONDERMENT

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

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

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

When you could believe anything on the internet!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

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

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

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

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

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

RUSSIA FATIGUE

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

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

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

THE WORD DEFINES THE CONCEPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EVERYONE FORGETS

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

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

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) July 13, 2025

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

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

IT WAS PASSING STRANGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PENNY DROPS

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

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

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

NAKED SKIES AND A RETURN OF THE KING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ME AND TRAVIS MCGEE

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

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

Another summer reading adventure!

NOPE, I DON'T BELIEVE IT

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

SUDDENLY IT ALL TURNED TO .....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a) Finland

b) Latvia

c) Estonia

d) Lithuania

e) Poland

 

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

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

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

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

TRANSCENDENTAL TUCKER CARLSON

 I have to admit I fail to grok why the rightish side of the uniparty now has a problem with Tucker Carlson simply because he utterly failed to tear the throat out of Ayatollah Khamenei in his recent interview or even failed to throw Putin to the ground and stomp on his head repeatedly during his recent interview. Yes I am at a loss to explain Tucker's manifest failures as a Delta Storm Trooper unleashed on the immortal enemies of all mankind.

When did we all decide that anyone who went and took the time and trouble and effort to interview the leaders of the Other Side™became himself the anti-Christ reborn let loose upon the face of the Earth? Seriously, watching the various columnists used by the Instapundit and many other formerly mostly sane people losing their marbles because Carlson got interviews with the bad guy leadership is amazing. It isn't his job to tear down the men he interviews oddly enough, that's the sort of thing we leave to the simps from Congress in their pointless oversight interrogations. On the gripping hand, those critters used to get away with the most vile attacks on their guests but are now running into people who literally don't give a rat's patoot about telling a Congresscritter that he/she is an idiot.

I don't put Tucker Carlson at quiet the same level as La Fallaci but he is still light years ahead of the entire rest of the dismal herd of people who talk to other people online or on TV. 

Read the link to what Steyn wrote about Oriana Fallaci. It is a magnificent tribute. It will also give you a most pointed idea of what enraging the EU can do to limiting your travel and work possibilities if they hate you as much as they hated her. Are people really less afraid of what Putin or the Ayatollah can do?

WHY NOT RAILGUNS?

As you know, the USN finally gave up on developing and fielding a rail gun because after 15 years and $500 million they could not get anything close to a workable prototype much less an actual weapon. 

I know a man who could develop, test, produce and field a working naval rail gun in 5 years if the Government hired him AND got out of his way. So do you.

The problem with developing a railgun as a project is finding a man willing to devote everything he has to making it a reality and I suspect that the "Research $ Development" Team had other things on their mind than making a railgun a reality in the next 2 years. In other words, they got an acquisition team together and threw money at them and never expected a concrete result at the end of say, a 2 year period of performance and there were no penalties for failure because the money sure as Hell wasn't coming out of their pocket.

We've been down this route before and as usual it comes down to the simple fact that the man in charge and the men building it simply didn't want it bad enough. It's not like they were going to make enormous profits or anything motivational like that. It was a job that they were paid to come in and do every day with no expectation of any gain beyond continued employment. That is essentially what University research and military research boils down to these days. There's a reason that nobody is making tomorrow's weapons today anymore and it isn't because the concepts are not out there, it is just that going from concept to development and fielding is a barren field now because the key motivator is missing.

Nothing motivates like survival except greed and profit.

ON THE LAW

 I see that an Appellate Court unanimously found that Douglass Mackey was not guilty of the vile crime he was convicted of in a court in the sewer known as the eastern district of New York. After decades I still remember this as perhaps the best performance I have ever seen from an actor. If it fails to start up at 17:30 or a little after, please make it so. Listen to the whole thing if you like. As I said, it is very good. The part I mean for you to hear is about 'stealing a dime.'

Here are the words from Mackey on the case he found himself a victim of. 

The democrat purists will claim that it was nothing at all to do with our Constitutionally protected God given right to freedom of speech but you can read so you can easily see that they're lying, again. See, they'll claim it was a "conspiracy."

ON THE BORDERLINE

I sometimes screw up and leave my X thing in the "For You" instead of the "Following" mode when I check out and then I find myself exposed to the unbalanced 99% and that can be a little awkward because I usually think that the people/accounts I do follow are sane or at least amusingly unbalanced. This is just a minor bump in reality but I see that things are definitely going off the beam in both the wider world and in the more balanced one I peer into every day for just a little while to see what it going on out there. Right now people who should know better are going a little crazy.

I honestly don't know what made them think that anything associated with Epstein would ever see the light of day but a lot really thought that the high and mighty and the all-powerful movers and shakers were going to get indicted and charged and find themselves in court facing some sort of charges for giving money to what we once used to call, 'a financier.' Never even mind what services were rendered or if they were rendered just think of the naivety that would lead any right thinking American to think that this could or would ever happen.

I see that once again those people's counterparts are signing up apparently in droves for individual flying lessons in Russia and throwing themselves out of tall buildings. You see how that happens right? That is old school justice being meted out to those who failed. It used to be like that here too but mostly the untouchable here live forever but for them it becomes a sort of Hell on Earth because they fade away and all the influence and power they once had at their fingertips just slips away and they become the evil shadows of the magnificent malignant evil they once were. You know them, the Clintons, Soros, Obama and in fact, ALL of the old movers and shakers of the Democratic Establishment. The same thing happens on the right side but they have so much less far to fall and generally slip away entirely within a year of their downfall.

I am surprised that the old Government "Run Them Over with a Car" division has apparently ended that practice and other than Kennedy I don't think they moved into the "Kill them in a Plane Crash" division as practiced in your swankier African States and Pakistan. There haven't been all that many, "Body Guard Snapped and Killed Them All" for some time and the last couple of times I think that was just the top level in India and maybe in Thailand. Flying Lessons never really caught on here for some unknown reason but these days we can reliably count on the good old, "Dropped Dead of Suddenly" division to clear up most of the more malignant mouthy versions of demons on Earth.

The kind of effort put in for the Show Trials of the Century to nail obvious scumbags like Comey and Brennan and frankly everybody else that served in the Clinton, Obama, Biden or first Trump cabinet is just too horrible to think about, but we will. 100% obviously, it would all come to nought since there is not a single jury in the history of the world that would unanimously find any of the Top Level Scumbags guilty. It would be one hung jury after another of dashed hopes and the sudden slow dawning realization that Justice really is an impossibility at that level and won't happen this side of Hell.

I can live with all that.

People forget the simplest things these days. High on the list of things that must be kept in mind is that it really is not our job to punish the guilty in every case. Nobody thinks we got all the top Nazis or even levied justice on those that were unbelievably evil but that also applies to all the evil Japanese that escaped the war with their lives, if not unscathed. This is why a lot of people cling to the idea of an afterlife. The better people look forward to seeing all their loved ones again but there are some who live for hate. I don't want to be that kind of person.

It is just about impossible to watch the news but I find it can be quite damaging for me to keep going back and dipping into the wells of information that I have used up to this point because some of them take on all the aspects of the broadcast and cable news channels. I don't need that.

I am thankful that I have a blogroll of interesting places by interesting people who post interesting things and that each of them has a blogroll of perfectly good sites that I browse through from time to time. They make for amusing, insightful and interesting reading and offer up the food for thought I enjoy.

I have to admit, I am enjoying the budding Trade War™ as the tariffs always appear like a distant mirage and then they are suddenly right in front of us and then there they are back on the horizon. I don't think there has ever been a master who played the news cycle as precisely and beautifully as Donald Trump. He can with a brief comment take the entire days production of HATE NEWS ABOUT HIM and turn it off because he just shifted the ground/continent right out from under the feet of the news boffins. Remember Wag the Dog? They had to start a war to get the news under control but Trump can literally step out of his office, call some idiot an old idiot and that's it, that's the news.

I do sometimes wonder who was behind getting all of Western Europe's leaders to set about destroying their own countries. I think that madness is now far beyond anyone's ability to repair short of the really old methods and let's be honest, modern Europeans are nothing but twatwaffles at this point. There isn't a real man alive anywhere on the continent west of Vienna. It's like all the real patriots died in the World Wars or left. It's kind of a shame because I really enjoyed my visits there and walking in and around the things their ancestors left behind from centuries and millennia before they vanished. I'm not tempted to go back. Whoever is responsible for getting England, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland to destroy themselves almost overnight should definitely be the entire focus of all those divisions I mentioned above. Somebody that evil really needs to be destroyed.

STILL WORKING ON IT

 I am at the rewrite stage again. See, I'll bet nobody ever thought I drafted and edited copy before I published it but you are only right half the time. Of late, more editing is called for.

ON THE IMBECILITY OF AI

 I really am convinced that AI today is essentially exactly like asking 46 Washington Post and 52 New York Times reporters to give you all the information that they have published about X. X is any topic at all. 

What kind of an idiot would place any value on that answer?

FOR THE DEVASTATION

The fountain was a gift to the people of St Albans. It took awhile to come about after the war because of the devastation the war caused to the area:

Most Vermont towns have a monument in memory of the soldiers who participated in the Civil War. Decades after the war, the upland hillsides of the state were littered with the cellar holes of long-gone farmhouses from farms that had been abandoned because all the family's sons had been killed in the Civil War.

It was a tribute for the sacrifices made in the War and sometimes whole months pass when I don't wonder what the country would be like if the War Between the States had not happened. Every time I go to Maine I look at the endless stone/rock walls lining the roads that outline a patch of dense forest and think that it was land that went back to nature after a century or two of backbreaking effort to make it a farm and that it likely went to ruin as a result of the Civil War. One way or another, the young men of Maine did not come back to the fields and fisheries, and Maine slipped slowly behind even as the Reconstruction raged throughout the South.

If you do go to or pass through St Albans, keep in mind that they roll up the sidewalks promptly at 1700 and not a second later. In the summer that means another 4 to 5 hours of daylight without a damned thing to do there except read a book. You'd have to bring your own.