TOTAL QUALITY

 I no longer play the game but I am curious to know if the players out there are still ramping up their own games to play the way the cool kids play today. Back when I did play the buzzwords were Total Quality Management, Total Quality Leadership, Lean 6 Sigma, Black Belt and anything by Deming was regarded as writ from God. Prior to that we played by a system I understood pretty well which was simply called incremental progress. We'd get better every day simply by doing better every day. In every approach though there was always one point that seemed to be missed by the inspectors, what if there is no more room for improvement? Is that when you argue about what color it should be?

There are now a couple of very successful innovators out there who are making massively good products and I'm curious how they tool up, train, and operate their production lines because an organization that can build the most popular selling car, the best reusable rocket ships, the very best satellite internet systems and transceivers almost certainly knows how to get the most out of effort and capital. Are there books written by the people who actually built that stuff? Are people using it to build chip factories in America? Has someone applied it to how to streamline the law and compliance with building for industry?

If it is a teachable skill, is anyone teaching it? Are their college courses that cover it on both an approach and practical means of engineering and business? I suppose it might be time to read Eric Berger's books on Liftoff and Reentry.  I don't see how if one is involved in building production facilities and capabilities, it could be possible to skip over Musk's accomplishments in this field.

IT WAS A TIME FOR ALLIES

 Oddly enough, it was a time for allies and when we looked around we found ourselves standing alone, again. We are not going to forget that this is all that we can get from the standard bearers of the West. I know that anyone can turn around and say of US that when it came to war in Ukraine we were not there and you are unlikely ever to find US there but that is something different. We are not allies of Ukraine and we never were. We are not interested in calling the most heavily armed nuclear power on the planet to account for dealing with troublesome neighbors who have been waging genocide on their kinsmen. WE have better things to do. One of those is to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of fanatics and when we engage on that front we find, as I said at the beginning, ourselves standing alone.

OTAN delenda est. Let the French and the Germans have it. They deserve it. 

THE DIFFERENCE

 The USA is now embarked on a course of removing its enemies and it is interestingly roughly the same path now being trodden by Russia but there is one major difference which is surprising to me. When we decide to go to war, the first thing that we do is to remove the enemy leadership and then we do. Russia had a lash at that with the Special Military Operation but they probably would have been better served by sending a couple of dozen missiles and fighter bombers downtown instead of a couple of airborne and tank divisions. Maybe they'll learn from us and invest in something like our Delta Force. They could call it spetznatz or something like that.... Oh, and they'll need a killer Air Force.

I see reports that up to 3 of our fighters have been shot down over Kuwait 'by accident' by 'Kuwaiti fire control' and I suspect we all know what that is. OTGH, we have grown to expect that sort of thing from our allies over there. If it's not one of them, it's all the rest of them.

And now we know what was in all those strategic lift aircraft missions that headed over to the middle east over the last week or two. Who knew? Meet LUCAS. 

 

THAT BUZZKILL THING

 There has been another sea change in the way that international confrontations begin and end these days and one almost hopes the bozos are too stupid to realize it. On the gripping hand, some people can learn and so for what it's worth it might be time to point out once again that there is a player that believes that the only path to victory in conflict is to root out and kill the leadership of the enemy and they do that pretty ruthlessly.

Let's just note that the Losing Side has been trying really hard to kill President Trump because they understand the simple and obvious fact that escapes 90% of the people; President Trump is the leader of this country and if anything happened to him it would quickly devolve into a rabid flock of Karens trying to kill each other with celery and nothing would ever get done again on the world stage. Almost everyone knows this.

The President Trump view of the world now pretty much confines itself to eliminating problems and as we can see with the late ruler of Iran, these things can be done in an instant.

If I was John Roberts, Zelensky, anybody in China and anybody in South or Central America I would make note of this Presidential failing. I would probably amend my behavior so I did not come to President Trump's negative attention. Maduro was showing off that 'we' could come for you and take you away, nobody the wiser and your guards lying dead behind you or we could do it the Ayatollah way. Either one works and both ways get the same effect.

What I wonder though is how many of those twits in Europe think that they have immunity? Their level of self-destruction in Europe is now reaching the levels once only achieved when they began turning on each other and clawing each other to death in Flanders. Srsly, blowing up your own energy pipelines, destroying your own nuclear power stations, loaning trillions to Zelensky and the Ukrainian mob that everybody knows will never be repaid, sending all your few remaining working weapons to Ukraine to fight Russians only to have the Ukrainians snootily return some of them telling you they are junk and don't work.....

I don't know. Sometimes when an enemy is killing his own stupid self the best thing to do is to stand aside. It's not terribly Christian but then neither is Europe and they are, after all, doing it to themselves.

It is time to sever ourselves from NATO. 

DON'T BE EVIL

 Once upon a time there was a little company with a big idea and big ideals that put itself out there for everyone to get to know and become familiar with and a lot of people liked it. Their unofficial motto at the time was, "don't be evil." They hired new management, adopted a new philosophy became unable to tell the difference between good and evil, found out they kind of liked evil and while people still use them they have about as much respect for their truth, integrity and honesty as CNN or the DNC. Nobody trusts them.

The War Department has been negotiating something foundational with Anthropic and it looked like one side was smugly wrapped in the arms of its own "don't be evil" code but the thing about appearances and reality is that reality cannot tolerate the appearance of 'suddenly defined unacceptable parameters.' If the War Department buys a product and it isn't lethal or designed to counter lethal effects or attacks or to repair awful damage than it really isn't spending the money the way the Public intended. Nobody want's a fuzzy tank or a warm wraparound friendly bomb.

It looks like Anthropic decided to go to the wall on its case against allowing some dickhead in a military uniform or any miscellaneous orange myrmidon to misuse its technology. That shows principles and integrity and so on and so forth. Good for Anthropic.

The Secretary of War has no choice now but to not only ban them from any and all Pentagon procurements,  but it also must kill every single intrusion of it into the upstream supply chain where the principles so dear to the founders and owners of Anthropic are allowed to trump the needs of the military and Defense Department. That ugly baby seal needs to be clubbed into nonexistence everywhere it tries to intrude its inflexible principles because Anthropic does not understand.

I'm sure I'm wrong it in this but I'm happy to stake the ground out. It could well be that the leaders of Anthropic are men of conviction and are unwilling to be the genesis of a new weapon or system that will get out of control. They don't want to be whoever it was that made Skybolt. Good for them. On the other hand what they refuse to accept is, 'that war makes monsters of us all.' A country cannot afford to farm out its conscience and its war-fighting to corporations.  

People and corporations and twits fail to understand that there are no rules in war. There are guidelines but they are not rules. Nobody can afford rules in war. 

This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.

Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted…

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) February 27, 2026

 No country at war can tolerate idiots jumping in to share their attitudes on 'recklessness, hastiness, ferocity or any other imbecility that they can conceive of to shape and limit the amount of force and fire power brought to bear against the enemy and so limit the war to what they and they alone think is proper.' Oh they can yell about it and demonstrate all they like but they don't get to make the decisions. We did that when we elected the Commander-in-Chief.

This is how War is done. There is no other way. What Anthropic was demanding was a say in this. They are idiots. General Washington was absolutely right. 

BIDEN'S PROXY ARMY FIGHTS PAKISTAN

 The most heavily armed and lavishly equipped military force in South West Asia is engaged in another one of those wars we all dearly wish both sides could lose. After years of taunting and tormenting each other's goats both the Taliban (ISI wing) in Pakistan and the Real Taliban in Afghanistan have gone to war with each other. I can only hope that it is as long and devastating as the war in Ukraine. It will be interesting to see fanatics waging war today with yesterday's wars weapons. 

You just know that liberals and progressives are going to bombard the House and Senate with demands that we do something....  I figure at least now we'll see how 3rd world savages actually do waging war with modern weapons lavishly provided by Joe Biden, General Milley and countless generals that led our forces to humiliating defeat in Afghanistan. Let's see what tribesmen do with real weapons. Bring popcorn.

BRING OUT YOUR CROMWELLS

 As one burrows deeper into the mechanics of the crimes of the Deep State Operatives at every level in every branch of government over the last 20 years it is becoming increasingly clear that they have to be exposed and jailed or killed as rapidly as possible. They have perverted every organ and office of the State and politicized a bureaucracy that was never supposed to come into existence and never should have been allowed to remain in existence after we won World War II. Unfortunately, the only way that this can happen in any shape at all is if there is another Revolution like the one that killed a king and led to the annihilation of a century of misrule. It suffered some rather awful side effects but that's the nature of Revolution and why societies used to work so hard to avoid them. Nobody is trying to avoid them now. Things are taking on the shape an increasingly menacing overthrow of the foundations of the State.

The Left wants/needs to maintain what they insist is the unpoliticized and perfectly acceptable Ownership of the People by the FBI/CIA/NSA/DNC and the Right who are concerned that every single action taken to reduce or narrow the free rein enjoyed by the totalitarian left is promptly stymied by a judicial class of idiot that really does believe it has the power and the sole power at that, to rule by decree.

If you think it's bad here you should look at how badly things are going in England and in Europe. They are lining themselves up for yet another massive blood-letting and it will, once again, come as a massive surprise and shock to the system. It's like they won't even see it coming. 

Yes, this was set off once again by reading the news and seeing the worker bees at Homeland Security thought nothing of violating the rights of everyone and then hiding it and kept it up even after regime change and house cleaning. This has to be stopped. 

🚨 HOLY CRAP! Secretary Noem just revealed @ElonMusk helped find that a few DHS staffers installed SPYWARE on her phone and computer, as well as on the devices of of other political hires

These people need to be JAILED! There HAVE to be consequences, or they’ll keep doing it!… pic.twitter.com/tjhnZyPnEP

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) February 26, 2026

TRUE HATE

True hate has to be shown. Some people show it by spitting into a bucket every time they hear that monster's name. True hate must also be demonstrated so every time that guy they hate gets up to speak in public they dump that bucket over their heads.

There is a lot more to true hate than I am willing to indulge in. That said, the optics last might were remarkable.

 

and yes, I meant might.

 

On that note, I am waiting for the plumbers to come deal with a pinhole leak in a downcomer from one of my 3rd floor radiators and in the meantime the bucket on the second floor landing is very slowly filling..... 

WHAT WE HEAR

 For me it is what I don't hear that intrigues because the level of insane hatred with this administration literally knows no bounds and the haters are always keen to manifest their contempt and hatred. The odd thing to me though is that I don't hear them anymore. The slime like the Vindmans, Snowden and Manning all appear to have been choked to death either on their own bile or the gallons of venom they produce at the simple mention of the name, Trump. I wonder what the PTB are doing to make sure that the traitors and haters no longer spill every bit of information they come across if it will damage President Trump, the military, the United States or the general welfare. It's a real conundrum. 

On the glorious hand it may be that the people that used to publish all this damaging stuff have all destroyed themselves with their incompetence in gathering, writing and publishing the news.  I used to wonder how the society would deal with a press that knows no limits and it seems they did the sane thing and just stopped subscribing or reading it and the TV and cable news numbers are unbelievable. Nobody at all watches except really really old people. 

Yeah, I'm probably one of the last who would take a few minutes while hanging out in the lobby of the old Gulf Hotel in Manama, Bahrain and read the AP, UPI and Reuters news wires as they came off the telex in the lobby. That was 42 years ago. 

Iconic photo though. That would have made the wires.

THE REALITY UNDERLYING MEXICO

 I worked right on the border with Mexico for 8 years and while Tijuana was quiet I knew that underneath was an entirely unknown country that nobody ever talked about. When the headless bodies hanging from bridges became too intrusive in our news, the news always ignored the following bodies ruthlessly and when thousands of women and children vanished on just the TJ border every year nobody ever paid any attention. 

Tourists flock to Mexico for some reason and never realize that there is a hidden government and hidden hands that permit them to live and enjoy life and that they can and will take it all away in an instant. That said, this is Mexico's fight and not ours because we dodged a bullet by electing President Trump who put an end to the outright invasion of this country by the Cartels that own and operate everything you see and know in Mexico including the Government, the Police, the Army the Federales, literally everyone is Cartel. 

You thought we had ridiculous numbers of asylum seekers before and this is just one of a dozen cartels expressing its unhappiness. Everyone now knows that the cartels and gangs can be beaten but almost no country has the will to undertake the fight. Just one so far. It will cost them as much as our own Civil War cost us and I doubt that they will be interested in paying.

 Welcome to Mexico, Host country for FIFA World Cup 2026:

Host country for FIFA World Cup 2026:

pic.twitter.com/0KvHAiqwzC

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 22, 2026

A STEP BACK

 

Ivan Ajvazovskij, "Il Golfo di Napoli".

ON CERTITUDE

 So I see that the Supreme Court has just outlawed President Trump's tariffs. There are couple of ways forward now and the first might be to just have t he drones in Congress start doing their jobs and make all those tariffs retroactive in the name of Congress and the second is to to treat the Supreme Court ruling exactly like all the gun grabbers do and that is to just ignore every single thing about it and carry on under a new name and assumed powers. Easy enough to fix, just say that these are not tariffs, they are road fees for all imports that accrue to the US Government for use of the Defense Highways roads and call it a day.

Yes, we know that Congress will do nothing and the most law abiding President in our history won't game the Court but it's the spirit that counts and it is time to send the courts a message that they will never forget. 

UPDATE

Oh look, Spot! There it is! 

THE AMUSING BUMBLEBEE

 Wouldn't it be amusing if all these signs and portents showing that we are sending waves of invisible and undetectable fighters and bombers to the middle east were all just a facade? I used to have to convince operations specialists and some more senior officers that radar displays showing only IFF returns were not terribly useful since enemy warplanes would not be transmitting IFF and maybe it would be a good idea to hold some training so I did not keep going into the Combat Information Center and finding all the displays showing only IFF sources and then had another boss who firmly believed if we added AIS to our system we could track all surface threats even if the radars did crap out. He seriously thought that we used AIS to track bad guys.....................................

the same way people seem to think they are tracking our military planes simply because they see a transponder making its way across the ocean.

I sure hope out Intel guys do a better job but they haven't impressed me much since December 7, 1941. 

REGARDING THE FALL

 I have been wondering now for some time what the Russian retaliation for all the warmongering is going to be and it suddenly hit me. They already executed the West a long time ago, or at least the Soviet Union and the Communist International did a long time ago. Nobody noticed.

One of the things we now take for granted is that the Soviets had thoroughly penetrated the West at every level and in every country and it took the Long View of History and removing enemies from the list. Once they and their fellow traveling agents reached consensus they acted and they swiftly took over the State Departments/Foreign Ministries of every NATO country. They then invaded the ranks of higher education and took it over lock stock and barrel. You can see their dead hand to this day placing into power and leadership dolts who couldn't argue their way out of a wet paper bag. I mean seriously, look at the last few Presidents at Harvard, any of the Ivies and most of the rest of Academe and you can allow yourself to spit in disgust at how morons and rent seekers got such sinecures. A brief glance at things like NPR, PBS, think tanks and the various foundations such as Tides and all the rest should give you an idea of just how something as evil and stupid as NGOs funded by US were allowed to flourish unmolested for so long.

Once they had the colleges and universities they took over the Colleges of Education and owned them within a couple of months. Those people have a will to believe that makes Nazis look positively wishy-washy. They screwed up education of the young, destroyed the art of teaching, massacred reading skills and began a process of indoctrination that goes on to this day.

Along the way they did other things along these lines such as founding and operating the No Nukes movement and then the Green Peace and Green Party and then tried to get the people to demand worldwide wholesale universal disarmament and outlawing weapons of war and things like power stations. They also funded and created the entire scam now known as Climate Gate.

But they did something even more insidious then that, they took over every Church in the West and turned them into Apostles of Demons and with that they demanded the ordination of women and the gradual removal of every aspect of church doctrine and teaching that had stood the test of time, schism and war and brought about the universal flight from the mainline churches in every NATO country. What a remarkable collapse in such a short time of an Institution that had lasted for thousands of years.

I think they also took over the American Bar Association and initiated no fault divorce. The lawyers loved it because that was easy money and the rest of us simply went along. You know what that led to don't you? Yes, that's right, trust and faith in all the institutions was gone within 3 generations and the worst thing about that was that without the moral imperatives and the Faith to enter vows of marriage more and more young people simply stopped. The number of children born each year slowly declined until most NATO countries have demographics that are beyond dire. This is an extinction of the West by the West. This includes our imperial running dog pack in Asia which is suffering an even larger population collapse.

So you see, I think the Soviets already countered all the passive aggression and outright warmongering undertaken by the Leaders of the Dismal Countries of Europe over the last 4 years and they see no need for further retaliation and yes, I know, the things they did seem to have bitten them and the Warsaw Pact on the ass but you know what happens in wars..... mistakes, accidents, unforced errors, overreactions and death. It comes for all of us.

I guess one could say that their work is done here.

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

 This is as nice as I remembered it from all those years ago.

MUNICH FASCISM IS NOT A GOOD LOOK

 The fascists blathering at the Munich Security Farce Conference are making all the bloody fascists look really bad and yet, just like last time it is obvious that they don’t see it that way. They think they’re gaining credibility and points every day with, for instance, their arguments for GIVING Ukraine weapons of long range destruction in order to “make Russia feel the pain.” They don’t seem even marginally aware that this was the strategy used to flatten German cities and kill millions of innocent women and children in fire raids and other bombing attacks and they don’t ever ask themselves, did it work? We know the answer and it’s simple; thanks to fascism, the rulers felt no pain and used every means at their disposal to eliminate any weaklings who felt the pain and so no, strategic bombing was judged an absolute failure by the strategic Bombing Surveys that the United States Air Force conducted immediately after the war. All that killing and destruction was for nothing. 

And all the little fascists at Munich think it’s the answer to the Ukrainian War. Oh, that and destroying liberal democracy, silencing all dissent and throwing anyone who disagrees into jail and banning all real opposition parties. One doesn’t have to look in closets or check under the bed for totalitarian fascists anywhere in Europe, they’re all in the government or the secret government run by the EU Commissars. The really amusing thing is how they endlessly label all opposition as fascists. What were they called before Il Duce?

SNAGGING EXTRA VALUE OR NOT?

 I see that The People's Great Space Station has once again exceeded as built capacity by more than 100% so kudos to NASA and the rest for achieving better than full occupancy. I do wonder though if we get any other increased bang for the buck per orbiting astronaut or if it all comes out the same whether its just 3 people in orbit or if it's 7. At this point there are no new discoveries out of it up there and to be honest the only real surprise I expect from Low Earth Orbit is if more astronauts came down then went up.

Has anyone ever run a spread sheet that shows what the # of orbiting astronauts vs orbital productivity rates looks like? 

Speaking of that, have they done any IVF experiments in orbit? Can it be shown known if sexual reproduction happen in the absence of gravity?  Enqueuing minds need to know before we they book passage on the next great space station.

ON THE OVERTHROW

It's interesting to me that humanity has overthrown and tossed off any number of Gods, Demons, Emperors, Kings, Tyrants, Mayors and even a couple of city councilmen but the one Mighty Horror that has never known defeat or been thrown out anywhere except by external force is The Law. It really does not matter what government takes power or the totality of its assumption of power over the Executive and Legislative Branches because the direst and worst enemy the People is now found in Law Courts. Those powerless cretins and tinpot dictators will not just throw a wrench into every effort to implement the Will of the People, they will order the jailing and confiscation of everything owned by any who dare to oppose them and we have lost sight of the fact that they do not rule and they do not make law and they have no real power except what we, the People, give them.

It's time to plan the next revolution. It's time to get down to the business of declaring the Courts the Enemy of the Republic and cutting them out of the Body Politic and then rebuilding them as they were originally envisioned and believe me they were not originally intended to thwart the will of the people at every single turn and dictate that we follow orders or get thrown into their jails.

Besides, those are our jails and they're probably well designed for holding enemies of the people like Eptstein Boasburg. It's not like our damned judges have been sending the murderers and rapists to jail in any great numbers now for almost 25 years. Does anyone else remember that California was the State the initiated the simple and fair policy of 3 strikes and your out? I lived there back then and it was the law and it was actually found entirely Constitutional and Just.

And then, somehow, the California courts decided that they had the power to set aside any and all Referendums they did not like and order the expenditure of as much money as they felt like whenever they felt like it and there was nothing you could say or do to stop it. The courts had spoken.

Let's nail the Judges up there next to the other Demons, Kings and Tyrants and toss them out. 

You cannot vote this mindset out of power.

THE GREAT CIRCLE ROUTE

 Some might say that any fool can see by now that it is impossible to market a print newspaper in today's climate. The wonder is that anybody even tries. Nobody believes a word they write anymore except die-hard partisans and they have been dying off, a lot. They're old.

The major flaw with the newspaper was always there even from the beginning. It had an angle. In the old days that angle included a couple of drivers that are now long gone. The old papers had to care deeply about marketing their paper to the largest audience possible because the lion's share of the income came from advertising and the personals sections of the papers and you could charge more if your reader base was large and deep and broad. The internet poisoned the well.

The newspapers decline was sudden but it took multiple passes to achieve near universal death. Kind of like a strafing run on a column stretched along miles of road out there on the steppe. You can't kill everything on a single pass. The newspapers slowly lost the personal section to the Auto Trader and an infinite number of niche papers that then went online. That was revenue gone forever. They started losing the advertisers to google and they never came back either.

The width, depth and breadth of the reader base then became the sole driver of newspaper success and when that happened everything else was promptly sacrificed on the altars of DEI, race politics, socialist revisionist history, social justice, BLM, the purity of diversity and all the rest of the blather socialist liberals believe with all their rotten little hearts. In other words, the base slowly declined to incorporate the soy commando and the pussyhat wearing brigades who deny reality with all their strength.

A paper that writes for the likes of them does not willingly embrace reality. It goes far out of its way to avoid all contact with reality. I mean seriously, reading that the Washington Post had 14 global warming columnists/reporters....srsly? 

I still play the NYT games every day because I have, through my libraries, a free pass that lets me get my wordle on and crush the spelling bee every day for free. This does mean though that I occasionally see the headlines of the NYT as I wend my way to the Games section online. They are almost never anything about the real world and in fact ignore the real world to the maximum possible extent and that includes them stamping their little feet, fingers in ears and screeching whenever the President fails to do as commanded by the Socialist moralizers. This is coming from a guy who used to spend most Sundays sitting in the dappled shade of a nice little coffee house in Del Mar with the entire NYT in front of him slurping coffee and reading every section except fashion and stocks.

Has changed very little in 30 years

 

In the pre-internet days the only papers worth reading were the NYT because it was the only one that followed world news at all and it did a fairly credible job of it up until about 1999. It's counterpart that I did enjoy was only really available overseas because as I recall the International Herald Tribune was a slacker in the distribution department. As you know that was a paper operated by the WP and NYT in concert and they used to make fairly decent readable music back then but I only ever found it overseas and that's a long way to go for a morning paper.

We're in the final days of the print news but it is curious to see that what remains still relies on that fixture that makes them both necessary and attractive, they have to appeal to a wide, deep and broad reader base or they are nothing at all. Most newspapers forgot all about that as the professionals jumped ship during the advertising and personals collapse. What was left was just the ideologues and they are as blind to market forces as a sea slug. They cannot see or accept that they must appeal to the broadest base or they lose their jobs. 

All that said, I do miss The Drudge Report of olde. It was edited by a news man that pointed his readers at expositions that appealed to a broad spectrum of readers unlike the current sea slug who will only curate news from socialist think tanks and people pretty far out on the spectrum. I suspect even sea slugs are better informed from not reading the Drudge in its current form.  

I find the appeal of X increases as I only read the people that I follow. I find that a little worrying. I'm turning into one of those people...... 

You need to read the whole link below to appreciate what it is to fail as a media. 

You’re screaming “zero arrests???” like a toddler who didn’t get the pony he was promised, while completely ignoring that the arrests that actually mattered already happened under the evidence chain Trump himself helped start.

Let’s spell this out in letters big enough for your… https://t.co/LGATCm6UAz

— LHGrey™️ (@grey4626) February 10, 2026

KNOW YOUR PLACE

 It’s probably a good thing that Washington DC is on a stretch of tidal estuary because otherwise they’d probably be drinking Potomac sewage water right now and not know any better until half of them came down with dysentery and died. This is just pathetic.

ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS

 The screw ups that I know about after just a few months on my first ship:

- Hull Technicians left (forgot) an Oxy-Acetylene rig on the pallet conveyor and when the mess decks people energized the conveyor, the rig dropped into the well at the bottom of the very greasy pit and somehow the next pallet in the chain didn't strike off the head of the O2 bottle so there was no huge explosion and fire.

- The Chief Electrician used a metal comb to bypass the interlocks on the 16,000 pound weapons and cargo elevator while it was being used to strike down stores during an underway replenishment in the North Arabian Sea. The Elevator over-traveled the top deck (Damage Control Deck on an LPD) which broke the suspension cables or snapped the 19 inch steel eyebolts holding them to the car and the car dropped about 8 feet before the diamond knurl elevator safeties tripped and locked it in place for the next 8 months I was onboard. Next stop on the way down was the bottom 6 decks below and the stuffed Landing Force Magazine which actually was full of 5 inch ammo for the Middle East Force but not for us. 

- A Gunner's Mate was conducting preventive maintenance on a Super Rabid Blooming Overhead Chaff system inport Dahran, Saudi Arabia. I'm pretty sure the maintenance card dictates the physical unloading of all SRBOC rounds prior to conducting fire circuit testing because weren't we all surprised when a 5" chaff round blew up on top of a warehouse next to the ship.

- A very unusual crew of HM-14 pilots towed their acoustic mine sweeping cable over what was probably the only actual reef in the Red Sea and then had the nerve to complain that the coxswain had "run over it with the propeller" which caused those 30 foot long straight as a ruler gouged tears in the casing.

- A supply clerk from the same squadron decided to end the problem of a sweaty pipe that was getting some of his cardboard boxes wet by closing the pesky valve. I'm not sure if he ever knew that the valve he closed was the one that lined up firemain cooling to the #2 Emergency Diesel Generator which surely burned up the next time it went into auto-start and run during a power outage.

I went to the Guided Missile School at Dam Neck, VA where they really wanted us to know and take to heart that under no circumstances should you or anyone else conduct missile firing checks with the high voltage ignition cables connected between the Harpoon Guided Missile Control panel and the missiles. I mean they told us about a missile that wandered into a Belgian village one day and caused havoc and about another that was last seen heading in the direction of St. Croix. In fact, they told us that only an idiot would leave the key lying around or have those cables anywhere but in the Weapons Department Safe. I was therefore somewhat surprised that the Gulf of Sidra Harpoon employments were actually as successful as they were although I did hear they had to chase down the off-watch Tactical Action Officer and shake the key out of him before they could fire.

- I think we have all seen the pictures of the sad looking torpedo in the dumpster on the pier next to the Frigate that was just "firing air slugs in port" when it turns out there was a torpedo sleeping in the tube that nobody knew about or remembered and those stories were a dime a dozen. I heard one frigate was going to paint both a dumpster and a staff car on their bridge wing to signify their torpedomen's successful engagement of targets of opportunity.  

- There was also a positive slew of accidental discharges of the 76mm guns on our guided missile frigates. It seems that sometimes when the weapons were fired properly and then returned to a proper centerline stow position pointing dead aft, the gun would cause its own self to load and fire just one more round right through the ship's smokestack and unoffending little Phalanx Close in Weapon System which made a hole in the one and blew apart the other. I recall walking down the pier to the Main Brace at 32nd Street one fine evening and an FFG was coming in to moor alongside another of that class that had painted a giant smiley face target on their stack as a sort of doink in the eye for the newly arriving ship that had just blown its stack and CIWS off. Gunner's Mates can be pretty brutal.

As I look back it is a wonder that we did so well and confined most of the real damage to the enemy. I could however tell dozens more tales of patrol boats and night patrols and floodings and accidental didn't really happen because nobody saw it kind of collisions but there really are so many and my fingers are so tired. Maybe another day. 

ON QUAKES

 I read today that the penny finally dropped and that the man leading the charge into the future has shifted targets and is focusing now on building a new home for mankind on the Moon. I can't see anything wrong with that because to put it mildly, Mars was a long shot at best. Looking at Musk's plans for building a mass driver and putting gigawatts of solar power plants in orbit as a start is fascinating for a number of reasons but it is obvious that far more money and investment can be found near earth than in the outer worlds.

I'm still not clear on who is paying for all this stuff that Musk apparently builds but somebody must be buying it or leasing it because he appears to have plenty of money to burn. Of more than a hundred family members I know only one of them has a Starlink. He also lives off the grid and is even now heading for a place in Florida that will take him and his low impact lifestyle. He's a digital nomad. 

Still, I'm impressed, I get to see mankind start to build a new life in space close at hand. I just wonder where are they going to find all the slaves out there that the universe down here on earth seems to think built the entire new world all by themselves the last time. On the gripping hand, the last time the old world sent pioneers to take new worlds, they were the ruthless warriors that had taken their country back from hundreds of years of muslim occupation. I trust that this will not be a requirement for the spaceX pioneers or we won't see any English, Scots, German or Spanish at all in the new world this time around.

I've been assured that the moon quakes are really quite mild and you hardly notice them at all from here. 

IT IS EXISTENTIAL WAR

 People are either unwilling or unable to accept just how awful democrats are. They need to wake up and they need to fight back. This is not a book about history, this is watching history come roaring at you like a runaway train and just standing there on the tracks not moving.

A state that just had a Republican Governor less than a month ago will now only have 1 out of 11 Congressional seats held by a Republican after Democrat gerrymandering.

Every red state needs to fight fire with fire.

Wake up to the war we’re in. https://t.co/aV7GiwaImO

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) February 6, 2026

 We see the rulers in Spain announce the enfranchisement of 500,000 islamic african slavers living in Spain and now the French ruling elite are proposing to do the same thing in France. This does not end well for civilization.

One of the more amusing ideas I have is for the next phony war. It is pretty obvious that Europe does not have the will, the means or the intent to rearm and present itself as a unitary power on the continent but that was always so and I don't really see the harm in it. They got to pretend that they were ever so much larger than they really are because we shaped a NATO for them to fill in around the edges and they did that for awhile until it became unfashionable and we all know that Europeans are nothing but slaves to fashion so we carried on until one day we all pretty much decided not to do it anymore. Europe can do it's own thing again without our help, army or air force. 

As the article led me to a place I've been many times before I was sidetracked by the nature of the man ruling Russia who is very different from the beings that own and operate western Europe. I see no reason for Russia to ever invade Europe and indeed, they never have so an invasion would be totally new and different but then I went to the Old School of Europe and it occurred to me that all of Europe has gone out of its way to deal Sovereign Injuries to Russia and nothing has been done about it but things are changing.

What if President Putin offered some real inducements to Turkey to snip off some prime European territory they've always wanted and which used to belong to the Ottomans and thus are properly islamic and Turkish? The rest of Cypress? Malta?

What if he made the same kind of deal with Hungary and Poland and suggested that they were screwed by the westerners who tore apart their ancient lands and gave them to a pack of no good thieving upstarts and offered them discounted oil and perhaps a few nuclear weapons? I mean, we all did see that the last remaining bilateral nuclear pact the US shared with Russia died and withered away last week so what is to keep alive the dreams of the people who proposed and signed, some at gunpoint, the non-proliferation treaties? It's not like anybody was ever punished for independently building their own nuclear weapons and everyone knows it.

Russia doesn't have to invade Europe, all it really has to do is raise my old friend irredentism and the world will shudder anew at the horrors Europeans inflict on each other all in the name of peace and harmony.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

 Does anyone else sense the wrongness here? What exact reason is given for risking the lives of three men and a woman in something as pointless as a manned loop around the moon? The only new thing in all of this is that a woman is going to the near vicinity of the moon for the first time and that seems to be the sum total of the missions scientific purpose/achievement and let's be honest, sending pioneering women along for the ride has not proven all that wildly successful the past.

I can see the point if it was landing on the moon. That way leads to science but repeating a simple trick we've done successfully 9 times seems utterly unnecessary.  We are risking lives of people who are in all senses of the word, passengers and there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. I see the risk but not the reward.

When I think of going backwards 40 years in science and engineering why does NASA spring to mind? 

TRUMP TAKES DIEGO GARCIA FOR THE WIN

 Neatly sidestepping all the usual top-tier pedophile British angst at doing the wrong thing for all the wrong reasons, President Trump saves the day and takes Diego Garcia with the stroke of a pen and an Executive Order declaring himself King of Day'Gar!

It may take a couple of weeks or maybe even a month. 

In a concession to the thieves in Mauritius, he gives them Northern Ireland in return for their lost dreams of ruling the largest naval base in the Indian Ocean. What could be fairer? 

ABOUT THAT UPS

 There is a thing left over from the 90s that may still raise its fuzzy little head from time to time and I wondered about it the other day when I was asked if we had an UPS. My first experience with the uninterruptible power supply concept was found in the dark in the Navy's Battle Lanterns of great and unforgiving darkness. When a ship loses power unexpectedly it gets very very dark and so they have these lanterns that automatically energize when the circuit feeding them power dies. They have batteries in them and there is a preventive maintenance check to ensure the lights are tested routinely and batteries replaced as required. What one usually finds in the less visited places on a ship is that when the power goes away the lights do not come on.

So we had the UPS back in the day to give our sailors just enough time to safely power down the surveillance systems so they did not suffer any damage due to a sudden unplanned loss of power. We stressed in training that it was just enough time to shut the damned thing down and not to mess around if we wanted the systems to restore properly when the power came back. You can guess how that played out in the event.

I was wondering though, after Fukushima and other disasters, what does the UPS look like for a huge Data Center or an AI? There was a wonderful description of the death of the last AI in The Postman. I thought it was one of his better books but then I liked all of his books except for everything after Earth. I imagine a Data Center UPS would be about the size of New Hampshire and provide enough power for about 5 minutes. I'm thinking the AI is doomed.

LIVING IN THE NEW REICH

 If the people in the Reich have learned but one lesson from both World War I and World War II it is to never ever go to the wall again for a threatened or invaded country. They kicked off the first bloodletting, dynasty-toppling and world destroying war by thinking that Serbia mattered. They idiotically kicked off the second round of full blown stupidity by thinking Poland mattered. Any scholar or schoolboy looking at any historical atlas of Europe would be the first to tell them, NO. Neither matters and never did.

So in the new Reich the people, as fat, dumb and happy as they were, couldn't help but notice that by simply disarming themselves and cheering on the far away superpower that they were spared all the ruination of war and also and importantly, the ruination of their economies by wasting any money at all on buying war machines, raising and training armies and suppressing the desires of the even stupider people to put those armies and war machines to some use, maybe in Africa or Asia.....

They got it. They figured it out. It is kind of pointless and more than a little stupid to condemn them for refusing to pony up the big $ to build a huge military again. You see, they couldn't help but notice that the boogeyman never came. In fact, there is just about no evidence at all that the boogeyman ever planned to come. They notice that the Red Army that so terrorized their grandfathers is advancing in Ukraine at roughly the rate of one farm field per week on their very best week and more like one farm field per month. That's not much of a war machine.

It's a great killing machine, no mistake. It serves that purpose as well as any but as a war machine like the Red Army and any of the Guards Armies that fought the NAZIs to the death in the East, it aint even a pimple on the ass of an elephant. 

In short, they were actually wise to ignore US and just let their armies and navies slowly vanish into the past. None of them want to fight and there's every sign that 99% of them simply won't fight, ever. They won't fight for anything. Sadly, this means they lost everything.

History isn't hard or fair, it simply records the results and the results are coming in now for a whole continent that decided that there was nothing worth fighting for. Well, let us amend that to restate it and say, nothing that Western Europe and Scandinavia will fight for. 

On the Gripping Hand, History is not dead and neither is Nationalism and with Nationalism comes all kinds of wonderful history so we have that to look forward to! 

Speed up the History! 

ODDLY AMUSING BUT....

 Well it sounds like the Epstein Files have tsunamied ashore and everyone is now heaving a vast sigh of relief. "It is finally over. Now Justice can be done!" I imagine the idea of wading through 3 million heavily redacted pages of idiocy trying to find even a single case where some older geezer enjoyed dalliance with some teenager and I wish them luck. Things like this actually happen every single day and yet a small number of insane loudmouths have turned this one single instance into the belch-of-a-generation and I'm sorry, raised on the triumph of the Left over Richard Nixon over a tiny little burglary and I find it all quite boring.

The procurers getting girls for older guys has been going on since the Origin of the Species and frankly only an idiot is surprised by it or thinks it is the End of the Universe. The other thing that is quite obvious by now to even the stupid and the emotocrats is that this was a fairly lively intelligence operation designed at blackmail and subornation of "elites" and most likely run by one of the Big 5 Intelligence Agencies either from here or from abroad and in no case will it ever rise to the point of indicting or convicting those responsible or those that dallied.

Perhaps we can now never ever hear of this stupid thing again. Poe was not the first and certainly not the best at creating horror stories that linger in memory. This whole thing was never anything but a story. The true evil slouched away long ago and will never be found and the dumb louts left holding the bag have suffered enough. 

A TEENY TINY CHANCE

 As one observes the world today it is possible, remotely possible, that there are some out there who are beginning to think that the only chance they have of living free of the dictators that rule the world is to develop and test their own atomic weaponry. The need for any sort of fancy ballistic delivery system is obviated in the world of "just call DHL" to move it but the act of gathering fissionables is sometimes a little less covert and obvious than one could wish.

There's a whole other school of thought that simply poo-poohs that idea and suggests that a pair of countries now under damned near universal embargoes from the rulers of the world may find some measure of economic trade and wealth by serving as purveyors of the finest kind atomic and thermo-nuclear weaponry. 

Do you suppose that there are some people out there that would be shocked if Pakistan or France sold off a few of their surplus nukes? I'm sure that they think that there is some sort of law against that sort of thing. That's how they always think. 

*Yes, I know, you thought I was going to say the Norks and the Russians but they already did it. 

ON TERROR

 I see that Colbert was his usual vignorant self on his show the other night and it's no surprise. Vignorance like that earns its own place with its adherents but this should be refuted. Stephen Colbert: “Do not compare ICE or Border Patrol agents to the Nazis. That’s an unfair comparison. The Nazis were willing to show their faces.”

Every sane person knows that the vignorant will, once they identify the forces of order, try to destroy them. They will dox them, attack their homes, their families, their children, their children's schools, their spouse's employer and make their lives hell by, for instance, repeatedly calling in SWAT attacks on them. Everybody knows this but leaves it unsaid.

During the antfag period of the last Trump administration the tools of fascism always attended their riots and parties wearing full concealment so that the forces of order could not identify them. You see, they were worried about what the Law could do to them. They have learned better and realize now that the Law is actually helpless against that kind of attack.

The Klan used to follow a pattern of wearing hoods. Does anybody now know why they concealed their identities because it obviously was not to shield them from the Law, was it? No, they wore the masks to terrorize because that way nobody actually knew if the man they were talking to in the day was a klansman who was willing to come by later in the night and teach a vicious lesson.

Colbert's idiotic point comparing ICE and Law Enforcement to the NAZIs misses the salient point that made them different from both the klan and from the rioters. The NAZIs had no fear of anybody attacking them because they eliminated every single soul that raised a hand against them. Do you think Colbert understands that tiny little difference?

I don't either. He thinks everybody who disagrees with him or his klansmen friends is an enemy of the State. His is the very face of evil in the 21st century. 

Word of the Day: Vignorant. It can stand for both vincibly ignorant or viciously ignorant. Either works in any context. 

AN AWFUL LOT OF RUIN

 I found this at The View from Lady Lake today and it struck me as interesting.

 Was there ever a time or a place where the news was treated as a valued commodity and it was regulated as if it was a commodity such as gold? Was there a news assayer who put his mark on the product to inform the public that this was in fact 99.9% true and accurate news?

Of course the interesting thing about that is, why would anyone ever suspect that such was ever the case? What aspect of the news leads people to believe that there is no person or organization whose objective is to sway the people by presenting them only one sort of information while claiming to be representative of all the news sources? The news was all about competition for readers eyes, attentions and wallets. It instantly veered to the entertainment side of the column.

Oh sure, some of us were young when 60 minutes started up and may even have believed that they were serious journalists whose sole interest was ferreting out the truth. It only took one instance of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect to bring you up short on the idea that the news is or ever could be completely factual and free of error. That's what I liked about this clip.

 Everything we think we know about a civilization and a culture came from a couple of rooms.

THE ODD NOTE

 Mr. Pretti was shot while attending a riot orchestrated by communists and the world is agog at the violence inherent in the system. Others have noted though that at the infamous January 6 insurrection all of the people at a giant rally to violently overthrow the government controlled at the time by their own man in the White House were unarmed Americans who had the gall to point out that the election was stolen right in front of their eyes. So why did the Pretti one take a gun to the riot when all those thousands of insurrectionists left theirs home?

He clearly wanted a fight but at least unlike the thousands of Americans killed by violent illegal aliens, he was armed to the teeth. It does make me wonder what is it about those monsters that he loves so much that he was willing to kill for them?

Why does any sane person violently demand to pay for and house and keep the people murdering their friends and neighbors and their children? Who could rationally justify such a thing?

 It's not like one, like them all, but there are times....

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

WE ARE READY NOW

 This was a famous quote that never happened but I liked the painting and the attitude it expressed. This was never my own experience with Destroyers but I suppose they must be ready for something sometime.

 We have heard dire warnings of a fell winter snowstorm that is bound to kill millions if the weather prognosticators are to be believed and even though we find them slightly less believable than democrats or other communist party hacks, we got ready for anything. We are ready now.

 Let loose the tempest! Let loose the Kraken. We are ready now!

UNENCUMBERED BY REALITY

I see that diligent preventers are suggesting that all churches hire defense teams to safeguard the services from the communist revelers that break in and ruin everything whenever they feel like it. This obviously happened in Minnesota but the point was made that it could happen anywhere and that the church should be prepared. I found this interesting because I'm almost certain that every churchmen at every level and at every church is in solid agreement with the socialist revelers out there confusing their idiotic beliefs with the rights that citizens of the United States share and hold in common. There's another thing though.

How would a handful of counter-revelers keep a larger number of ignorant louts screaming socialist pieties out of the church? And besides, didn't those idiots already take over all the churches in the West with their social claptrap? It also must be said that it appears to me that churches are now so very poorly attended that they would welcome Satan's minions if it would get the attendance numbers up. And then, how do a handful of old men stop the Hitler Youth and SA so intent on gooning up the works in God's House?

I don't think you're actually allowed to shoot them. I'm pretty sure that the spears found in some churches are purely ornamental and I don't think the swords some have will actually come off the walls so I'm not sure just how they mean to hold back the savage beasts intent on making their way in.

I wondered for years the same thing about the churches found in Egypt and Nigeria where the muslims can just kill and burn at will and the Christians stand idly by while this goes on. I read somewhere that over a thousand churches were burned in Europe in the last two years. A staggering number of 'mysterious' fires.

Notre Dame totally not arson they said

 

Do you get the sense that some people really want to spark off a religious war and it's not who you think it is? Where are the leaders of the Churches demanding that punishment follow invasion and criminal activities not sanctioned by the church? Well, I suppose that's a conundrum because the churches these days sponsor and permit just about every crime they don't actively participate in. I suppose if the churches believe it is OK for them because, higher calling, it must also be true for the rioters and goons who also believe they follow a higher purpose.

See how that worked out? Piss away every single scrap and speck of moral authority and what do you have at the end of the day. 

THE NEW CLASS

 I read an article on the USN shipbuilding program and it covered the blisters and blemishes of the past 30 years fairly well but it missed out on the essential nature of weapons procurement that have not and never will simply go away.  We used to have a whole book of terms for what this process was called but ultimately what it started out with was a simple Mission Needs Statement. What do we need given the projected operational environment and the required operational capabilities? This was the malignant fail point on most weapon system procurement that failed to materialize.

Before adopting the clamor and babble of demanding a new ship because the old ones are simply falling apart it is first necessary to state the purpose for the ship and to lay out the specific requirements it must have if it is to be viable in meeting its purpose. This is where naval procurement keeps getting jammed up because we draft completely idiotic and meaningless mission needs statements based on some impossible and unworkable dream of blooming capabilities. This used to be referred to as bleeding edge design and it was fundamentally unworkable in this or any other environment.

What exactly and specifically do you want your new surface combatant to do? What are the Required Operational Capabilities and what is the Projected Operating Environment? If you simply look at those questions you can begin to see why the LCS, the DDGX, the CGX and the CVX were all impossibly stupid shipbuilding plans. 

One wonderful example of simply closing your eyes and screaming loudly in order to just get on with it is found in the old Mine battle force ships which, oddly enough, were designed, built and deployed to sweep or hunt mines in littoral seas or right off the enemy's coastline. They had all the defensive armament at their disposal that an early model B-17 bomber had in 1942 and their POE was well inside artillery range, anti-ship missile range, and the range of  enemy aircraft and of course enemy naval units. It was simply accepted that nobody was going to punt them into a place that they could not survive in because all those threats were neutralized by other means.

That must have been the assumption for the Littoral Combat Ships but nobody ever explained that to Congress or the Fleet Commanders who were expecting replacements for the long gone guided missile frigates. Nobody was able to comprehend that the replacement ships were in fact, completely useless at any of the ROC/POE missions of the guided missile frigate or the minesweepers. As I said above, ANYBODY who read the MNS and Operational Requirements could see this was not going to work. Ditto for the DDGX with it's simply impossible weapon system and the CGX for any number of flaws. The carrier is just a flat out waffle of irresponsibility in stating the need and building to requirement. What possible need was there for magnetic launch and elevators instead of tried and true systems for both?

Is ship's force going to be able to maintain the ships by design which means the necessary schools, test equipment and parts are in place? This has to be addressed up front because it is critical to the design of the ship. Is it really addressed?

Is there a system to counter drones? If there isn't, how do they operate in that environment?

Does the design now incorporate that all of our potential adversaries are going to have high side intelligence made available to them by the Russians since we broke every bit of  the old neutrality rules by furnishing Ukraine with all the means and methods of our intelligence during the current unpleasantness? The old classified nature of simple RORSAT and ELINT location data is now in the white world and any satellite could do it. That means that even a 3rd world adversary could have up to the minute location data on all of our warships. It is really easy these days to mate a warhead with a drone package and send it to latitude and longitude and use simple cheap radar to home on target.

In short, what does the now obviously classified ROC/POE say about the requirements that must be built into any future surface navy combatant worthy of the name? We don't need any more Dainty Class frigates or Fragile Class Destroyers. That era is long gone. We are back to needing something along the lines of the Fletcher Class or any of the late war classes of destroyers and destroyer escorts we put in harm's way.

It is not enough to bleat about needing ships if we don't actually have the requirements built in and program managers ready, able and empowered to build them to spec. It doesn't help at all to have shipyards so damned incompetent that literally everything they do requires enormous cost adjustments and triggers all kinds of 'economies' once the ship is in production. The shipyards in the US are dire places and it's no wonder bad designs go to them to die on the vine. Nothing flourishes in them.

USS Connole, covered in ice, entering a Boston shipyard.

 

SIDE EFFECTS

 The charger on this thing arced like it was the main bus on a switchboard and then got pulled a little further away from all that excitement until the new charger arrived in the snow mail today and we're back in business. This slowed down the rate of production but then I don't really need any excuses for that.

I was curious the other day what the other side looked like and it struck me that we now see both sides represented in the daily idiocy that is Minnesota. The lunatic left is made up of all the candy asses you can imagine from every walk of life and also incorporates the nihilistic, violent, America-hating ragers of antifa and their ilk. That said, I wondered where is the opposition to those wild and crazy lefties?

I expect you know the answer because yeah, they're the guys that work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and for the Border Patrol and even those who work for HLS. They are joined, or soon will be by the men and women of the 11th Airborne. I had to look those guys up because I only recalled the 82nd, 101st and 173rd as current active duty formations. I did not realize we had remobilized another Airborne Division.

I have to admit, I wouldn't want to jump out of planes over Alaska. Life isn't improved by shoving a 150 foot tall evergreen tree up the nether regions nor by impacting a cliff sideways and sliding thousands of feet down the mountain in the dark and I can sure think of better things to do than to drop in on a Grizzly bear enjoying his first kill of the day 20 feet away. I don't care how well armed you are, that would positively suck.

I found this at John Ringo's site on X and thought it was very funny. I imagine there are still a lot of right sleeve patches from these floating around still in the airborne divisions. 

This patch is issued to men who ran from a fight; they are labeled chickens.

If protesters attack them, they will run away. pic.twitter.com/unGRlMAGqv

— Stryder502 (@stryder502) January 19, 2026

THE NATURAL

 I saw this photo the other day and it spoke to me. It really did. As I listened I heard it say, ICE is Trump's Gazpacho. You can see it for yourself. Just listen with your photo-ear.

 

NEVER SO COLD AGAIN

 It didn't occur to me until after I'd shoveled a few paths through the foot deep snow hereabouts that it was cold out there today. It wasn't of course since I was at the idiot end of the idiot stick but my dad gave me a valuable lesson all those long years ago when he decided that our future lay in winning the Frostbiting Series at the Newport Yacht Club. 

The boats were small, about 10 feet long and it was just one person per boat so it wasn't all that crowded but you didn't notice on account of the boat's own personal swell that swept back and forth over the bottom which was roughly where one's butt was back then unless you were up on the rail and hiking out for all you were worth so the damned thing wouldn't tip over, again, and pitch you into the arctic waters of Aquidneck Bay. 

So anyway, the 30 wonderful years I spent living in California might have seen me with a shovel in my hands no more than half a dozen times and those were at my parents house in Virginia or possibly in Pennsylvania but never in sunny southern California or even in the Bay Area. I mean, I didn't even own a shovel. Nobody did! It goes without saying that the years spent in the middle east were snow free and rarely even troubled by rain but when it did come it stayed for awhile because drainage was as foreign to them as peaceful coexistence. 

Still, it might take my friends awhile to grasp the fact that I very rarely ever feel cold because I have never again come close to experiencing the cold that came with sailing a dinghy in winter storms with snow coming down by the megaton as the boat fills with water and some R#$GS! is shouting "Starboard!" at me.

So, raise your kids right and get them involved in frostbite sailing and racing at as young an age as possible. They'll thank you for it for the rest of their lives. 

SANCTIFIED

 The news here is nothing new and it merely demonstrates a current that has been running swiftly and deeply through all of the Nation's institutions and by that I mean, literally all of them. This sort of thing is going on right now in all of our Courts, all of our Law Schools, all of our Public and Private universities and colleges and through every school in the land and it applies to vast herds of public servants toiling away in the ministries of our Departments of State, Defense, Education – all of them really and it applies most enthusiastically to most of our ministries that once taught the word of God. Here it is in a nutshell. 

The Yale Daily News reviewed more than 7,000 Federal Election Commission filings from 2025 listing Yale as the employer: “Of 1,099 filings that included ‘professor’ in their occupation, 97.6 percent of the donations went to Democrats, while the remaining 2.4 percent went to independent candidates or groups,” the student newspaper reported Jan. 14.” 

The study reinforces the recent Buckley Institute report, which found that, of the 43 departments surveyed, 27 entire departments contained zero Republican professors. 

Even if the study missed a couple of donations, the radical imbalance is a reflection of the lack of diversity at the school. It is not a perfect point of comparison. There can be a conservative or libertarian faculty member who does not make donations and does not register with any party.

Young adults attending these places are not educated, they are indoctrinated and none of them sense it happening at all. It applies to every aspect of higher education and even high school education and I have seen what passes for the word of God from popes, bishops and priests at every level and it is quite far removed from the Gospel I was taught. It isn't me who changed and it sure wasn't the Gospel. What happened was all those ministers, teachers and professors have now been baptized and submerged in the cant of the the West-hating Liberal demons that took over every level of education over the last 3 or 4 generations and having breathed it in for so long simply no longer hear the voice of reason. You see their followers now whenever you turn on the television of videos of the demonstrators out there raging as the voice of the liberalism and demanding death for the agents trying to enforce the law.

The people who created those vile unreasoning angry and spoiled terrorists are their teachers and their professors and some of them, their friends. Not one single one of them ever heard of the Enlightenment and not one could engage in a spirited debate citing the arguments and language of Locke, Rousseau, Aristotle, Plato or Voltaire. All they know is profound hatred and if you asked them why, they could no more explain it than a 5 year old.

You would almost have to be a fool to send child to college these days unless you too were a liberal.

 

SLOWLY AND THEN ALL AT ONCE

This is probably the most important observation of the day. It is worth noting.

REMINDER. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official,… pic.twitter.com/xoWDjOctLe

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 13, 2026

 

ONE TINY LITTLE PROBLEM HOUSTON

 We have some people who claim that to err is human and to forgive is divine. Guess where that sort of thing falls in the muslim pantheon? I believe that the regime in Iran is bolstered by its true believers, all of whom have all the guns and ammo and who all believe that to raise a hand against the regime is akin to apostasy and they will happily treat it as such until they are killed. The question is, does the hatred of the one side outweigh the heavily armed religious zealotry fueled hatred on the other side?

Once again, the people there are nothing like you or me despite some appearances. The regime will go on killing until they are stopped dead, literally. This isn't like the overthrows of the east in Europe or the silliness of the Arab Spring and North Africa, this is their version of angels fighting demons.

I've been waiting for this since 1980. It has been a long time coming. Now we see how much the Taliban snip off and how much the Pakistanis try to snip off and how tame the Iraqis are after all those years of bleeding to death at the hands of the fundamentalists fueled and armed by Iran.

I'll be curious to see how far each side goes to exterminate and stamp out the other. If you thought the Church had a hasty way with Heresy, you ain't seen nothing yet. 

THE TRUMPETS IN THE NORTH

 You don't suppose that there is a People's Front for the Liberation of Greenland that is right now begging this administration for aid and to come to their assistance and throw off the cruel colonial yoke imposed by those nazis in Denmark and so foully supported by the EU, do you?

I mean just about every other colonial territory rebelled against their cruel masters and perhaps the cold just slowed things down in Greenland.

It could happen! 

SCOTT ADAMS

Another good man stepped into the clearing at the end of the path today. He was the only voice I listened to in all the years we have had podcasting and vlogging and while I wasn't a regular listener I caught many of his shows while I was doing something else but could still give my attention to what he said. In his way he was as revolutionary as Ronald Reagan and just about as convincing. He was a man who did his own research and came to give a show every single day despite his own personal circumstances. He was the voice in the wilderness demanding an end to BLM and to DEI and I'm glad he made it far enough to see them both dumped on the ash pile of history. So long, Scott Adams, thanks for letting me get to know you.

ON MOBILE DEFENSE FORCES

One of the unconsidered aspects to flooding the warzone with heavily armed lawmen that enjoy total immunity from local and State crazed zealots is that it gives the orcs an everyday target to focus their hate and insanity on instead of attacking the peaceful infrastructure of modern life. The lunatics are so busy throwing themselves at ICE that they aren't burning down the inner cities in protest or attacking local police who are NOT shielded by federal law when responding to terrorists who enjoy the favor of the elites who own and operate the mob. 

ATTACKING THE HORSES

 I thought that the orcs were rediscovering caltrops when I saw this article at Townhall. On closer examination it seems to refer to some other method for crippling the noble steeds of ICE and one that apparently ired the powers of X enough to banish it. It's still new getting used to the idea that there exists again a responsible method of mass communication and enlightenment.

EUROPEAN GIRLS ARE EASY

I know it's hard to believe but it is true. Just look at them all rogering up to attack the United States if we move into Greenland. It's clear that they all figured out that they need Greenland way more than they need the United States. What makes this really amusing is that they don't even see that President Trump is pulling the veil back from the eyes of all the Americans who thought that Europeans really really liked us and were just like us. They see Europeans frothing at the mouth in their desperate need to attack us the instant we do anything they dislike. Oops.

I guess that makes us worse than the Russians. I mean they kept sending hundreds of billions of Euros to Russia for the first 3 years of the Russian Special Military Operation in Western Russia because it was okay to buy their gas and oil as long as they hates them on TV.

Do I think that this is all just a teaching moment orchestrated by Donald Trump? Yea, pretty much. The thing I'm seeing about President Trump is if you simply accept what he says at full face value, he pretty much means what he says. He is as willing to negotiate for Greenland as we were to buy Alaska, the Louisiana Purchase and the Gadsden Purchase or even the cheap sweep gained by Adams-Onis.  Buying new bits of America is pretty much how we did it. Did everyone think that method had an expiration date?

SAMIZDAT BRITAIN

 Didn’t see that coming. 

This is the team at @Ofcom that wants to ban X. Who would have thought.

“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” - Orwell, 1984 https://t.co/eVp1SaAGfp pic.twitter.com/HLDtSqpUiI

— Dries Van Langenhove (@DVanLangenhove) January 10, 2026

CRAZY IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

 I see that some people are greatly upset the well known communist about town Mamdami is appointing vicious crazy mad crybabies to his various offices and the usual rubes are tripping over themselves to express their outrage. It's like they never read the Communist Handbook and don't understand that the head crazy communist always appoints crazier ones to do all the dirty work and then eliminates them when they've done their damage and the mob becomes too frenzied.

You know what he does then, don't you? That's right, he finds a stone cold killer who is crazier and makes him the new guy. Let's not let him set the agenda.

He is liberal, fanatic and a communist who never held a job. Focus on him. He will commit real actual crimes and the LAW that works for us needs to indict him EVERY SINGLE TIME HE DOES and go all the way to trial EVERY SINGLE TIME. 

Donald Trump is fairly unique in being able to maintain course and speed under continuous fire from every legal beagle in the country + some and carry on with his plans. I don't think Mamdami is even close to that kind of focus and level of effort. It will also help if every single one of his crooked cronies is immediately indicted EVERY SINGLE TIME THEY COMMIT A CRIME.

It is now lawfare time and it is well passed time for the democrats to see that we can play that game too. 

AT TIMES LIKE THIS

Called to mind today. 

Dover Beach

By Matthew Arnold

 

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.