NOBODY HEARD THE BUGLE CALL

 It is kind of sad that almost nobody heard the call last week that announced to all that could and would hear that the Southern Poverty Law Center was really just an enormous scam preying on the feeble minded liberals that make up the power elite of this crazy place. All they had to do to make a good living out of their own racism was fund the dimwitted remnants of the Klan and a few other losers and in that regard they are no different from the other scams that people pretend are honest and forthright. That's right, the SPLC is no different from the FBI, CIA and NSA who all exist and provide a damned good living for elites and gives them enormous power over others by convincing them that a country that spends 1/10 of what we spend on military stuff is some kind of existential threat to US.

If you think back to the Governor Whitmer kidnapping scam back in 2020, it looks like ten or twelve of the conspirators involved in the so-called plot were FBI or FBI informants and all the money and equipment was purchased by the FBI. The sheer totality of ineffective bungling by the FBI is probably best summed up by all the progressive who must despair of them because after 12 years of endless digging, the FBI has completely totally failed to find even one single crime to pin on President Trump. It's driving them all quite mad. 

I think we all have a pretty clear idea of just how fiendishly competent the SS is by now but this isn't about competence it is about altering reality enough to make a good living scaring people to death with fabrications and lies and thus maintaining control. All of the intelligence agencies are in it up to their eyeballs and so is the State Department and by now many people have some idea of just how corrupt all of those NGOs were. Mark this, not one single NGO has any record of actually doing good work. Not one.

The news carefully trumpets the facts they want their followers to hear and to believe and thus we still have endless loud denunciations of President Trump claiming he committed crimes for which there is not a shred of evidence OR THE MAN WOULD BE IN JAIL OR DEAD.

Can you believe I was once a fairly steady consumer of the news? I put a picture here a few months ago of a nice coffee/restaurant in Del Mar where every Sunday I would arrive with the Sunday New York Times and read it cover to cover and consider myself somewhat well informed minus what I picked up every working day from taking a Peek-in-the-Well on the SIPRNET in my office.*

I also subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and read most of it every day for years. One might say that I have a thirst for news of the world. Of course as I saw more and more of what went unreported and took part in a good deal of it, I lost the somewhat naive belief that there was value in reading the news and stuck to sources in the office.

I find it interesting that our whole entire vaunted news has not honestly or faithfully reported a single word of truth out of the entire Middle East in over 30 years. I would say that is some kind of record but then again, the Cold War lasted even longer and you'd never know we won it based on what the news reports. You'd think we are still in an almost hot war with Russia and on the brink of one with China.

There was an interesting little video put on X by a school student at some Charter School where he asked his high school classmates to read aloud about an 'extraordinary silhouette and something looking a little guache' and none of those high school students could read it aloud. They're all graduating in a month or two and they cannot read. That would just about meet the needs of a feudal state and their role is pretty clear in that place.

I used to wonder about how those ancient texts were preserved through the long night and who chose to keep Thucydides, Aristotle, Plato, Polybius and the others alive to us for all those generations only to see them end sometime in the near future, unread, unmissed and unnoticed. 

I asked Grok for a comparison of the New Deal with National Socialism and oddly enough it returned something completely unlike what I remember learning as a boy. I may now have to read those damned speeches that were Hell to track down and see just what the differences were between FDR's totalitarian impulses and those of the German Chancellor. On the other hand, there must be scores of scholarly works that already did that and all I have to do is track them down.

I will bet you it is not a simple trivial matter of going to the library and poking around or looking online with the expectation of getting anything like real scholarly work. On the gripping hand, I did run across a book at the Library the other week written by the man who led our delegation to Germany to try to straighten out the agonizing bits of the Treaty of Versailles. I'll see if it's still there but what are the chances anybody would buy a book written by an unknown back in 1938? 

ON THE SENSE OF THINGS

 I am getting the sense that all of us are tired of the game and are ready for our own withdrawal east Gibraltar. It looks like Europe is not gearing up to stick its crank in the fan but is nevertheless thrusting most vigorously at the fan. How every single wimp in Europe can eagerly demand action and attacks on Russia and not see that they don't begin to have the means to fight is beyond comprehension. It is, nonetheless, how they start every single war over there and thus an excellent time to step outside for a smoke.

I don't spend much time thinking about how the next war turns out because that's really not one of those easy simple questions that can be answered anymore using the logic and rational thought that once produced the likes of NATO. Back then it was a simple matter of counterbalancing forces and both sides leaning into a standoff at any price. That's not the way it looks anymore. Now it looks more like rational thought and logic have both stepped out for a smoke. 

The only reason that Ukraine's agony has gone on this long is because Europe willed it. They want it to go on and on and on and on without end because they all believe that they are doing an injury to Russia. I cannot for the life of me see why they think that. It's hard to imagine anything further from the truth. It's like they never grasped the essential fact that for a dictatorship to survive in the Age of Reason there MUST BE an outside Enemy that the people can be rallied against. All of western Europe has made itself that enemy for President Putin.

I really don't understand the idiocy of the frontline States except that they put liberal women in charge and that can have no other ending then an ocean of tears. What they understand about war and geopolitics can be written on a neutron. They act like they each have 10 armored divisions backing them up and not a handful of bad prom dates. 

They all think that someone is going to fight the Russians but I cannot figure out who they think is going to save them from the devastation. Poland it locked on its front and I think the rest of Central Europe will just sit it out. They all know something Western Europe never knew or suspected. Russia really does not want to invade them or fight them and would like to be left to their own devices for awhile.

At some point you would have thought the idiots would have picked up on the similarity between us and Russia wouldn't you?

We have, I think, reached the point where we would like to be left unbothered by their idiocy and if they have to make idiots out of themselves perhaps they could do it among themselves for awhile without resort to the Great Powers. Oh, and could we divest our elite from their own idiocy in persisting in thinking that Russia is nothing but a gas station with nukes? They have been more than holding their own in Ukraine while engaged in war with Ukraine, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lichtenstein all the other idiots in NATO and finally  Switzerland. You know who has not been detectably winning in Ukraine? That's right, all of those tossers fighting Russia.

Europe cannot unring the bell. Too many in Europe denounce America for us to go forward and believe them partners. As they have denied us transit rights and basing rights during our war operations it is now all too clear that they will hold our use of Ramstein hostage in future military operations. There is simply no wriggle room anymore in making plans based on long held assumptions about the use of bases in NATO countries. If we cannot count on them then they are worse than useless to us since we expend resources on them with no guarantees. We’d be far better off developing bases where our use and access is assured and unquestioned. We are not the monsters here.

Imagine that, shifting our actual base infrastructure into the Middle East after all these years. 

THE REALITY POKE

 It would be better if nobody asked why I woke up when listening to this but still I think it bears a listen. Start at minute 55 when Jared Dillian speaks the truth about something obvious and yet something that most people simply forget.

 

https://t.co/YVe5id12RL

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 1, 2026

Here's the rough transcript for what I wanted you to hear. 

"Corn, rice, beans are basically in the same place or lower than they were 15 years ago and we've had 50% inflation since then so they're really cheaper in real terms. So, that's the point I wanted to make......

In 2011 gas prices were $4.00 per gallon and now they're $4.00 per gallon so we've had 50% inflation so it's still cheaper in real terms." 

Some conniving traders are out there trying to panic people with the end of the world because fertilizer or some bullshit, need to be ignored for what they are, the AlGore of mistruth, lies and deceit. Yes, it is not going to be pretty in the 3rd world but it never is and most important, there is nothing you can do about it so you are well advised not to panic or obsess over it.

YESTERDAY 38 YEARS AGO 2830 NORTH

We are at anchor after a day allegedly spent at Holiday Routine. I had the midwatch and went to bed at 0430. Up at 0745 I took the 0800-1100 Officer of the Deck watch and listened as the world went crazy. I watched as USS Enhance led MV Gas Princess, Ocean City, USS Merrill, USS Joseph Strauss and two other tankers through the Q-Route to Kuwait. 

Their helicopters reported that they were hovering over mines so we got underway, dropped a Mk-6 mine shape and continued on to USS Trenton where we waited for two hours for USS Inflict to finish refueling. The mines were later found to be fishing buoys.

We pulled alongside Trenton at @ 1500 and took on fuel and stores and got rid of 6 drums of 2190 TEP oil that aren't going to haunt me now. At CO's wish we were underway as soon as possible and went back to our anchorage area with Marine Recon divers to fish out our mine shape. The bozos in the Combat Information Center were unable to vector the ship back to the shape so we spent a fruitless 3 hours trekking around and finally delivered the Marines home dry.

Went to anchorage where it was Bob's turn in the barrel.

The good news was: yesterday I fixed the governor problem on #3 Main Engine that had baffled 5 of my senior engineers for hours. Today they fixed the #1 Main Engine after finding 4% fuel oil dilution caused by a broken rocker arm(?) It was a really good day for us engineers.

I think I'll throw in the previous couple of weeks starting tomorrow and cover my view of Operation Praying Mantis which was the last time I swept actual mines in the Gulf and we made war on Iran. 

TICKET TO RIDE

 Share my earwig.

 

FADED REMNANT

Once again I turned to the online for inspiration and two things struck me as noteworthy at Busted Knuckles. The first had to do with an old veteran discussing his naval background with a modern sailor and sounding like a man from the dark ages because he was a Water Tender or Boiler Tech or some such and this:

What I wondered as I saw this picture was, are any of our aircrew taking pictures like this today as they fly missions over Iran and are they carefully printing them and preserving them for a time not to distant when men no longer fly front line combat aircraft in war? It seems pretty clear that we are seeing the last gasp of manned aerial combat because drones are going to make these things as obsolete as horse tenders or archers.*

*The discerning reader will know that I favor entering a war prepared and the best preparation for dealing with enemy aircraft is to destroy them when they're home, alone, at night.

IF

 If the rethuglicans were even half as evil and malignant as democrats there would be a special congressional committee looking into every aspect of every media person present at the attempted regicide of the President and the people who were there must be compelled to justify and explain why they attempted to overthrow the government by violence! 

You can see all the parallels with the January 6th Miasma.

Every media person and their significant other who were present in the Ballroom at the White House Correspondent's Dinner was a party to a violent attempt to overthrow the government in much the same way that every person who was present in the Capital on that dismal day were guilty of attempting to overthrow the government.

– First things first, the FBI needs to round up every single one of those despicable people and throw them into jail and not just any jail but into the worst nastiest jail in Washington, DC and not just in any cell but into solitary confinement and there can be no bail for monsters like them. Let them rot!

– Every single thing in their past needs to be investigated and their bank accounts frozen and every purchase going back the last 30 years needs to be eyeballed by stony eyed harridans keen to find out what it was actually for....

– None of them or their families should get even one second of time in the media to explain or justify or try to wriggle out of their loathsome crime.

– Every person they know or have some sort of relationship with needs to be investigated and needs to answer, under oath any and all questions put to them by counsel and thus the People! Failure to obey should be instantly followed up by throwing them in jail.

You see how none of that is happening? That's the country I grew up in. That's the place I want to live in and give to my children, not the monstrous State that the Democrats created in their minds and then tried to make real in the fantastic show trials of people who simply made their voices heard in a time honored American way. 

If only there was some way to communicate this sort of thing to idiot lefties and their stupid followers and get them to stop being crazy, stupid, ignorant, vicious murdering scum.

If. 

THE PERSISTENCE OF MALEVOLENCE

European history up until the 21st century was one replete with examples of men fighting against the darkness and trying to stave off the darkness and build civilization at the same time. It had its ups and downs and it worked better in some places than in others but over time Europe conquered the dark and made itself the living embodiment of peace and prosperity for the whole world to emulate and the world kept trying despite everything.

That Europe seems to be hellbent now on extinguishing the lights and turning its back on civilization and it does so in gleeful delight as it chortles itself to sleep every night telling itself that it is simply making the world a better place by turning off the lights and letting strangers take over their cities and then their politics and then their governments until it seems what was once Europe is now nothing but west India or west Pakistan with an unhealthy dose of really hateful Africans thrown in to make it more problematical to do anything, even simple things like walk down the street in broad daylight.

I wonder if they realize that this is actually them losing the Cold War to Russia all those years ago. Russia probably kicked the bucket militarily right about the time JFK and the Lunch Bunch didn't completely cave on Soviet missiles in Cuba but that didn't keep them from waging an ideological war against America and Europe that exported the very worst ideas and philosophies to ignorant youth in the West and saw them ultimately appoint the most articulate haters of the West, Capitalism and all people who did not live up to the ideals of the new soviet man, as their leading lights in film, television, education, academics, politics, philosophy and, God help us, Religion. 

Look at these monsters running Europe. The English church is run by people who would defile any church simply by stepping inside one and opening their mouth and the political class and leadership are to a man the most loathsome haters of their own people on the planet. Nobody hates the English more than the English leaders and that mindset has spread to encompass all the polities and peoples of Europe. The Irish leaders hate the Irish, the French leaders hate the French, the Norwegian leaders hate Norwegians. It's unbelievable but there is no other explanation for how all of them are dead set on destroying the civilization they created by destroying and sidelining all the people who created it.

The Russians did that. The KGB sent their agents and money to the West to infect them with this very mindrot that is tearing them apart and destroying them. It was the no-nukes people followed by the anti-imperial, anti-colonial and anti-Western, anti-intellectualism and self-loathing narcissists who led to leaders and the people who elected them who decided to simply destroy it all.

The whole Green Movement was nothing but Russian propaganda and slowly Europeans fell for it hook line and sinker. 

This is simply suicide. 

[W]ithin Europe itself... institutions pursue the systematic dismantling of their own domestic fossil fuel capacities. 

The result is not environmental salvation. It is an engineered dependency that can only delight oil producers such as Russia. 

Households face increasingly high energy bills that contribute to widespread energy poverty. Official EU figures show that roughly 9-10% of the population, more than 40 million people, struggle to heat their homes. 

"[T]he only cases in which the masses have escaped from... grinding poverty... in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that." — Milton Friedman, economist, 1979. 

Fossil fuels are not opposed merely for their emissions; they are opposed because they underwrite prosperity, independence, and power — attributes the cultural Marxist worldview seeks to delegitimize. An affluent, independent public is harder to control. Politically, if you are poor and dependent, there is the possibility that you will keep reelecting your incompetent leaders in the hope that they will rescue you. It is in their interest just to keep dangling the promise of rescue in front of you.

How does a State go about producing enormous volumes and quantities of weapons without expanding the energy to do so? How does a State wipe out its own domestic energy capabilities while at the same time expanding its imports of foreign and enemy energy supplies? 

This is a lot like idiots not understanding that a housing shortage is quickly sorted out by deporting the millions of people living in houses that they are not entitled to because they are illegally in the country. Instead, all of Europe trips over itself to give illegal immigrants all the free housing they want and if this curtails or eliminates housing and the welfare of natives than so be it. 

I bet that none of those idiots worked out that what broke the back of feudalism was the Black Death. It was only when workers grew scarce that they began to be treated better. Continually bringing in slaves is a recipe for getting everyone who is not the elite, treated just like a slave. This is H-1B visas in America writ large.

Europeans being somewhat dimwitted haven't yet got to the chapter in that book* that discusses slave revolts and popular revolutions, but they'll get there. 

*A Distant Mirror 

CUTTING STEEL

 There is some talk that the Secretary of the Navy was fired because he did not produce a battleship in something less than one year on the job. While I find this unbelievable there is some truth to the failure of our shipbuilding business model in the United States Navy. The shipbuilding people simply cannot get out of their own way and set about building a ship because they have institutionalized the entire process and codified it and wrapped it in concrete and made it just about impossible. God could not build a warship in this country in less than 20 years.

I worked with the sweep riders of destruction in the organization called Naval Sea Systems Command and they were petrifying and ossifying to a degree you literally cannot imagine. The Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Construction and Repair took the last 60 years off to get a manicure and the only time they are ever seen is, suspiciously, after dark when they finish sucking the last blood and marrow from the bones of a good idea.

Their little brothers in the Combatant Craft Department live to make and preserve the perfect boat. Anything less than perfect or marred in any way or modified at all without permission that takes years and tens of thousands of $ to get approved, is simply not allowed. I was amazed to see that what they did was done so thoroughly that it was far easier to actually procure patrol boats offshore rather than try to build one in the United States that was not able to bypass NAVSEA CCD and lay claim to the protection of Special Operations which had its own very different and separate acquisition chain. In my own case I started out with even better protective cover but that faded away as the boats neared completion and CCD got involved.

The people working at Combatant Craft, SupShip and even NAVSEA as a whole, are not evil nor do they think of themselves as other than imperfect Gods laying a firm but guiding hand on the cowboys that just want to get the ship built, the boat to float and get on with it. They act in strict accordance with the guidelines created and maintained forever by NAVSEA. My favorite apocryphal story had to do with an article I read in the Surface Force Quarterly Engineering Bulletin about a team of experts from NAVSEA called in to determine why one of our missile hydrofoil patrol craft could not get up on its foils and hit top speed. The crew and experts had tweaked everything and it all showed in the green and yet the foil craft persisted in wallowing along at 12 knots instead of stepping up onto its foils and speeding down river at 50 knots. It turns out they had 12 tons of extraneous paperwork (NAVSEA complete Technical Manuals) onboard and the boat was simply too heavy.

 

If we really do want to build ships in this country and in particular, warships, we need to take a flame thrower to NAVSEA in all its iterations and branches and clean out about 90% of the people and processes that ossified and solidified about the time we switched from steam to gas turbines. It probably never helped that the place turned into a flower garden for nuclear power officers and chiefs who all set about forbidding all change and all deviance from specifications as both Heresy and unGodly. In short we need to do what Elon Musk did to rocket building and launching and to Twitter. A lot of people with rock solid political connections to every sitting senator and congresscritter need to be turfed out and put out to pasture.

This can happen and it has happened before. I myself was blown away a couple of months ago talking to an engineer about some crypto work and finding out that some of the die-before-changing aspects of red/black physical separation had changed 180 degrees since the last time I was involved. Things I never thought could happen back when KVM switches first appeared are now accepted best practice by DIRNSA. Who knew? 

What will it take to change NAVSEA? Well I cannot tell the whole of it but it will only work if the new SECNAV simply, for the good of the service, fires every single Flag Officer and SES civilian working at NAVSEA. Every single one and they have to be replaced with outsiders who have demonstrated the knack for telling underlings to stop fucking around with their precious processes and make things happen. Yes, this did not work out well for SeaFighter and some other concept ships but that is because those Flag Officers and SES who were bypassed were still in place 2 years later to crap all over the changes and revert to the deep channel. All of them have to go.

And if you simply look at our shipbuilding industry and capabilities with this one Query in mind...What could anyone possibly do to fuck it up even more than it is right now, your answer will be obvious, nothing. Go ahead and slash and burn to your heart's content because no injury you could possibly do to it matches the pure uselessness of the industry as it is now. And one final thing, for the love of God don't crawl into bed with anyone from the American Shipbuilding industry or the Trade in the United States. They are all demons in human form. Go and find your top level and many of your midlevel managers for the shipbuilding process WHERE THEY STILL BUILD SHIPS. Give them visas, a flame thrower and the authority to hire and fire and you will build ships again.

TIME FOR THE SWISS NAVY TO STEP UP

 This is amusing. I'm sure the world media is casting it as a problem that President Trump must now cope with. On the other hand, not our ship, not our crew, not our business. It looks like a Swiss problem from here. At some point the rest of the world is going to realize that the World Police and Team America don't work for them anymore and they're going to have to come to some sort of arrangement for handling these little problems without referring them to us.

 In the meantime, the entire Swiss Navy is headed towards the Gulf right now to kick ass!

 

WARPED REALITY

 It's the 21st century, six years after the Chinese Biological Weapons Trial was run on the world and you still believe that something in a needle that your physician sticks in your arm as a "flu shot" really is a flu vaccine and nothing else. You don't wonder how every genius on the planet was able to come up with 84 different 'vaccines' for Wuhan Flu in just a couple of months but nobody can actually come up with a flu vaccine that works.

Every now and again I have to remind myself that only 'civilized' tribes believe these fairy tales and everyone else knows its nonsense and that they're trying to steal your soul or dilute your precious bodily fluids. This ridiculous movie was prescient!

 

On the other hand, after repeated failures over the last two weeks, we finally got a waffle this morning and that has to count for something. These are nearly as hard to find in Metroparkcentralis as coconut cream pie. 

The really important thing

 Stay focused on the important things. Ignore the rest.

BACK TO THE MOST COMMON FLAW

 I enjoy reading Zero Hedge but they fall for the same fallacy we all fail to take account of despite knowing better. In this case, the analysts presume knowledge not in evidence and they make the critical error of presuming all actors are rational beings. That never really happens.

He wrote that Iran entered the blockade with about 15 million barrels in Kharg storage, roughly 51% full. At a flat production fill rate of 1.9 million barrels per day, that storage would max out in about 8 days. Even with aggressive upstream throttling, he said, the ceiling would still be hit in about 20 days. After that, wells may have to be shut in, risking permanent reservoir damage. 

That’s the point. As time passes, Tehran has to think not just about lost revenue, but about storage, field management, and what happens if production has to be curtailed under pressure.

The analyst simply presumes that those who are actually running the war against Trump know that their intransigence can destroy the means of producing the country's wealth or that they even care about it. I try not to make that kind of assumption and there is the other thing that comes from not being a rational actor. It's the Louis XIV disease we reference from time to time here.  Après moi le deluge.

The God botherers that run Iran probably don't give a damn about the oil or what comes after them. They mean to win and if they win standing on a pile of corpses a mile high, they're good with that. 

HOW PARALYSIS WORKS

 Plucky little Bahrain asked the UN Security Council to issue a Fatwa Resolution that would allow the opening of the Strait of Hormuz if anyone could find the means and the will. It went like this:

 On the face of it, a simple resolution that puts into words the way the Strait is supposed to work. Transit passage is the rough equivalent of a right that we have, like the Right to Bear Arms. Nobody argues or quibbles with a basic fundamental right like transit passage any more than they try to destroy the 2nd Amendment. Well, perhaps nobody but those who are seriously ticked off at the way the Rules Based Order only seems to ever work in favor of those who made the rules.

China, Russia and France promptly vetoed the Resolution. Bahrain watered it down and tried again. This time only the dangerous countries vetoed the Resolution and the Security Council showed real leadership in the vote because:

Bahrain, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Panama, Somalia, the United Kingdom and United States all voted in favor while Columbia and Pakistan stuck to their firmly held beliefs and Abstained. 

One of the many reasons I could not work in our State Department, any Atlantic Fleet Staff or the United Nations is because I'd die trying to draw two honest breaths in a row without dying from the sheer hypocrisy of being in the same building where people say things like this:

"No one should tolerate that they are holding the global economy at gunpoint, but today, Russia and China did tolerate," U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz said Tuesday.

 If we are honest, and we are, the United States and Europe have launched an all out Economic War against Russia and have been interfering dramatically at gunpoint with every aspect of its trade with the rest of the world. The Chinese are all too aware that our actions to close the Strait of Hormuz and deny them the oil they need to keep their economy going are way worse than ruinous, they are catastrophic. It is a Two Ocean Economic War being waged on two countries that did not attack any of the economic belligerents but are suffering drastic damage from their attacks on them.

When China goes into industrial shutdown as they shutter industries to keep their essential needs fueled we will see a return of the devastation of Supply Chain disruptions and the downstream catastrophe they bring. 

You know, if someone wanted to totally destroy the world's economy from a cold standing start, this is how they would do it. A prolonged shutdown of the Strait is going to wreak global havoc and people bleating about the OPEC shutdown as some sort of counterpart just don't realize that when OPEC shut it down places like China didn't even notice because they hadn't industrialized and the rest of the world barely noticed because America and Germany were the only really industrialized countries on the planet and could make do. This affects a much larger and much more interconnected world and as far as I can see, it is all proceeding in some kind of news vacuum. 

A TKO OF A TRO

 In a stunning move today, the Supreme Court issued a Temporary Restraining Order on the New York Times, a former newspaper published in New York and restrained it from any further delivery of pseudo news until they furnish the Court with 100% of the stolen materials and memos that some authentic hero gave them in an attempt to strike a blow for DIE and all other good things like abortion.

When interviewed by Red State crack journolista, Dame Alice Trueheart, the Office of the Chief Justice disclosed to xer that he and the boys sat down in the bar you don't know about in one of the back rooms upstairs over the actual Supreme Court, and worked out that they were the Supreme Law of the Land and that NOBODY can overturn their decisions and they decided, "To Hell with it, let's just issue a TRO and put those lousy commie bastards out of business." The other X challenged Justices agreed and with that, downed a couple more White Russians and called it a day.

It was a great day for Journalism and Court Supremacy. The world rejoiced. 

IRAN DOESN'T KNOW TROUBLE YET

 That's right, I'm waiting for President Trump to say, "bring forward the women and lawyers."

Then they'll know they're screwed and it's all over except shooting the cripples.

From Ace. 

 The mind boggles.

A MINOR BEMUSEMENT

 Every Friday I enjoy the Open Road at daily timewaster and there is always at least one profound photograph that shouts at me about life and other things. One of the many reasons that I enjoy this photo is because I did this for years traveling back and forth between San Diego and San Francisco in the 90s and because I have driven all over this country and Canada again and again. 

My bus was orange and fully loaded with comfy chair, books, drinks and luggage it would tear up the Grapevine at 75 mph but it usually took Pacific Coast Highway and ventured west out of LA into Santa Monica and Malibu and then all the way up to Big Sur and beyond. I usually camped like this around Big Sur or spent the night at the BOQ in Monterrey because that's pretty nice too. I would tend to my business in Treasure Island, Coast Guard Island or Albany and then head back home. 

The funny thing was that this was completely flipped when I moved to the Bay Area and then had business every month in San Diego. Same road trip but I'd spend the night at Port Hueneme on the way down because the best time to drive the PCH is daytime.

I used to ask my European friends if they ever thought about driving this country and many years later one of them said he's been bringing his family here every year for a month of just driving around looking at America. Europe has a lot to offer but you don't find the Wild Places out of Nature there.

I grew up this way and I've always been intrigued that 99% of the people I know have never driven cross country or even like to go for very long road trips. 

REAL JOURNALISM

 Both the House of Representatives and the Senate maintain files that list the names and sexual conquests of the various scumbag politicians in office and formerly in office and the reason they do that is because in those files they document the payouts to the precious virgins that were corrupted by the evil Senators and Democrats Congressmen. So both houses of Congress voted to keep those files closed and permit no access because.

Why haven't these files been hacked and the full details turned over to the media that would be happy to publish them so we could all get rid of these villainous poltroons and their mistresses who are somehow entitled to use our money to pay for their sexual pleasures in office? 

Seriously, how could a Republic actually tolerate this sort of thing for even one second? How is it that not one single good man of conscience has made those files public?

ECOUTEZ, THE SIGNALS ARE IN THE AIR

 Anybody who has studied the origins of the First and Second World War can clearly point to all the signals that both sides sent prior to embarking on hostilities and in hindsight it is clear that nobody on the other side was listening or comprehending what they were hearing. In short, it's just like a normal day of politics except in these cases as nations slide into war, it is more important to listen to the actual words that your opponent is sharing. They're not asking for a rebate, a new election or for you to hold the elevator. They are imparting deadly information and hoping that you are listening.

 

 Regrettably, nobody in Europe is listening, again.

 

NEXT STOP BUDAPEST

Spain admits 500,000 Algerian terrorists to Budapest in a lightning act of Socialist redemption and unbecoming humility. They really are hellbent on slitting their throats and the throats of every other European. It does make you wonder how they think it will end.

On Tuesday, the Spanish government finalized a migrant amnesty measure that will “regularize” more than 500,000 migrants. In January, it approved a royal decree allowing unauthorized immigrants who arrived before December 31, 2025, to have lived in the country for at least five months, and have no criminal record to apply for legal status. According to Fox News, those who qualify will receive one-year residency and work permits, with possible pathways to citizenship. 

The Associated Press reported that this measure “was fast-tracked via a decree that amends immigration laws. By doing it that way, the government was able to bypass parliament, where a previous amnesty attempt stalled and where it lacks a majority.”

On a related note, studies show that when civilized countries admit barbarian hordes, it does not end well for the little people. Did you know that the mean salary in all of Western Europe is about what an average person in Alabama gets paid? Oh well, I hear the ones that do work only work a couple of hours a day and then they're on holiday, break or taking a siesta. What the Hell is going on that every new generation of European seeks to find some new fantastic way to destroy Europe?

Since both Spain and Hungary are members of the EU, their subjects are allowed free passage to move to, live and work anywhere in the Reich. I hear Budapest was a lovely city.

WAR MACHINE AT NO LOAD, IDLE

In watching this it appears that UK is nothing but a termite eaten paper tiger with the effective military heft of Lesotho.  The Deputy Chief of the UK Defense Staff just told his interrogators that the UK could not deploy anything more than a couple of experts with briefcases if the need ever arose on the Continent for a Battle Group, Armored Brigade or Division of the army of the UK. In short, they are at best a low grade regime protection force and at worst they are the model of the NKVD and KGB brought to new life on the shores of England to repress and suppress the English while they get on with:

– Not guarding the borders and keeping the invaders out.

– Not protecting the country from terrorists.

– Not maintaining a standing military force capable of supporting its allies anywhere else.

– Not protecting the sovereignty of the debris left over from the British Empire. 

The armed forces of the Crown are now little more than a force of thugs kept close at hand to protect the government from the people if they ever figure out what the governments have been doing to them over the last 40 years. 

Can't tell if that's the Defense Chief with finger up nose.

 

At the end of the day, people have to ask themselves and their government, "just what is it for?" 

THE WRECKONING

 If you can believe him, this is the beginning of the rehabilitation of Eric Swalwell. I don't believe California politicians are actually capable of the truth so that's my starting point on this:

 I will believe it when I see it. I find it interesting that X failed to perfectly render this tweet using its standard embed technology. It mysteriously renders it fake looking so I went with a nice honest screen capture.

OK, THAT'S HYPERBOLIC

 It appears that our President has ponied up a declaration that indicates that the United States Navy will impose a full blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. That would be interpreted just about anywhere as us putting in place a naval blockade against the shipping of our allies in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.  This is ridiculous on the face of it.  

Now we're going to impound ships inside the Gulf and put them where? We are going to intercept ships inbound in the North Arabian Sea and park them where? If they refuse to heave to are we really going to fire on neutral shipping? In case you are unaware, that is not our way. Hell, we didn't interdict any shipping going into North Vietnam ports during the entirety of the war there. 

I cannot imagine how the President climbs down from this kind of statement.  

Earlier today, Donald Trump warned that US forces will immediately 'begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz', hours after peace talks with Iran held in Pakistan broke down. 

The US President added in his Truth Social post announcing the bombshell move: 'I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran. 

He later claimed that NATO forces, including the UK, will be sending minesweepers to assist the US' military operation in the waterway - a statement that Britain has since denied.

 This is going to be epic. 

A NEW VENTURE BY THE DIMWITS

 It appears that the idiots running Britain for the idiots that elected them to run Britain have decided that perhaps giving Diego Garcia to a bunch of people in the bag with China with absolutely no connection to the atolls and then leasing them back to Britain for 35 billion pounds is now off the table. That's what they're saying now but I have learned that the Dimwits can reverse on a dime and give back 9 cents change.

At any rate, it does not appear that we will have to ask a couple of Marines to walk over and haul down the British flag on Diego Garcia after all.

Yet. 

MYTH LEGEND AND VOODOO

To watch the decline of England is painful. To see a country that once had hundreds of warships and a world spanning empire degrade into a state of being no more than Minnesota is history in front of our eyes. I used to wonder as I read history how could people react to the rollback as empires faded visibly from their world and now we can see it today in both the West and the East.

One of the downsides to a collapse driven by ideology is how insidious and unstoppable a pathological ideology can be as it undermines every single aspect of the empire and State from within. England was not defeated by an enemy it could fight over a gunsight but by losing its institutions (all of them) to revolutionaries who despised everything about the State and yet managed to get hold of the levers and run it all into a ditch from which there is no recovery.

We watched as England struggled to get even one warship underway in response to a direct attack on one of its bases and it took them more than a month to get the damned thing underway. After a week on station it has withdrawn due to a 'maintenance issue' with its ability to make water. I suspect that one of the reasons for this failure to make water is not intestinal fortitude but the Royal Navy's reliance on personnel drawn from the ranks of the ideological and pathological insane haters that pollute all society these days. All it takes is one 'green warrior' or BLM or white hating fool and the water stops flowing. 

Back when I was on my first ship which was based in Bahrain, we spent a month in Karachi and got some minor repair work done as a test of the ability of Karachi to repair USN warships. It was not a good showing by any measure and as we left port we had special representatives come aboard while we were proceeding down the river towards the North Arabian Sea and they went through every inch of the ship with drug detector dogs and MPs searching for drugs because drugs are freely available in places like Karachi. We all had a fine time and importantly, we conducted a full command urinalysis looking to see who had been foolish enough to partake of drugs during our month in Karachi. As I recall, we turned up 2 men.

The unamusing bit was that we did drug sweep again two days later and we caught 11 in just Engineering Department alone. That was 11 men that went to Captain's Mast and got punished for drug abuse and also key personnel who the Engineer would no longer permit to enter the engine rooms under any circumstances and certainly not to stand watch. Everybody had to work harder but we all knew the Engineer would not let those men stand watch on the evaporators or the boilers or the switchboards. We could no longer trust them.

England may be finding out, as we are, that it is one thing to bring in recruits to an established military and induct them into all the traditions and ethics of serving their country in a vital military role but if those inductees are not really body and soul men of good will then you cannot trust them. You can never trust them. This and this alone is why the 3rd World is the way it is. There is a total lack of trust.

The liberals in the West have brought down a rain of fire and ruin on the sacred bonds of trust because they assure their believers that they are 'doing the right thing' and that there are therefore no consequences for doing the right thing even if it means breaking the law. So far, the Courts, another liberal owned former institution of the government, are backing them up. Everyone, all their lives is telling them to do the right thing even if it means breaking the law and the little fools rush right in and set fire to the world, or the ship, as the case may be.

The only way to start bringing things back into alignment is to punish those at the top most severely for breaking our trust and carrying out attacks that cause both grave and serious damage to the Nation because right now absolutely nobody under the age of 50 really believes that the State will punish them if they simply act out of conviction because they are doing the 'right thing.' Nothing I've seen indicates that they are wrong in their belief.

I think it is too late to disabuse them of this pernicious idea so the next few decades will be pretty agonizing for many people as they go from a formerly Industrial/Post Industrial Age Society to the Dark Ages with rolling blackouts and the collapse of law and order.

On that note I'll return to my favorite topics, Pirate Submarines!!! I hear from NPR that both the UK and Norway are alarmed at finding up to 3 Russian submarines conducting survey work near their infrastructure in the North Sea. You think its bad now but what if Russia collapses the oil production/distribution of energy from the North Sea? They could do that.

The UK was further humiliated by Russia which sent one of its tanker fleet through the English Channel but this time with a naval escort. It sailed right down the English coast and the English could do nothing. Mind you, what they said they were going to do in this event was to board the ship and behave like pirates which is their right under the Rules Based Order they helped create but the thing about waging economic war against another State is that all too often in history it turns into a real no kidding shooting war. Since the UK have no operational warships they decided to hold off on their pirate activities and let the ships pass unmolested.

Wow, a return to 17th - 19th centuries with countries forced to send warships along with their merchants to protect them from pirates! What is the world coming to?

I see that the folks on Islas Malvinas are brushing up on their Spanish. The rollback continues.

THE REAL END OF NATO

 It actually happened a number of years ago. Europe was the first to notice its end but it is taking our American defense contractors a little longer to come off the gravy train and start doing honest work and in this they are of considerable help to the various congressional campaign funds. Everyone recognized (except Congress) that the collapse of the USSR meant that the entire raison d'etre for OTAN just went away overnight. It was done, it was over, we won.

For the dimwitted and here we must thank Congress because few living things are as dimwitted as all of Congress, the next spiral of NATO circling the drain, as it were, was the war in Ukraine which saw all of Russia take on little corrupt Ukraine and fight itself to a complete standstill. I have articulated why I think Russia has been happy with this situation but others may see it differently. At any rate, Ukraine with a lot of the European Union's money, Germany, France and England's money and weapons, has managed to fight the Russian stalk to a draw and push weapons innovations far beyond even the magnificent invention of the Dreadnought which overnight rendered obsolete every other navy in the world.

NATO. has been circling the drain now for over 30 years and it is unrealistic to presume that people may not have noticed. 

NATO came about to keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the Americans in Europe. Europe has moved past the first 2 conditions and we have moved away from the final condition. We no longer want to be a part of Europe's defense or their idiotic wars. Based on their current trajectory, Europe will be at war within the next 10 years. As usual, it will come as a terrible surprise to them.

The downside to terminating a defunct defense umbrella is that it may encourage some to go about creating that thing they have secretly left to America all these years because they all know in the dim and murky place where they ponder the tiny bits of reality they can grasp, that it is a really bad idea to let the Italians, Germans, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks start building WMD in order to 'stay safe.' 

On the other hand, now everyone knows that killer drones are not just science fiction anymore and that a solution must be embraced. Yes yes, I know. We all know. The damned Europeans will announce an international summit at, maybe, Geneva and they will all get together, universally condemn drones and BAN THEM. Yes, they will ban all drones and declare them illegal.

No, they will not fund or carry out any research on weapons to destroy drones because, as any fool can plainly see, they have been BANNED!

I thoroughly enjoyed all of my trips to Europe but something that was apparent even on the first trip back in 1984 was that they are very unserious people when it comes to war. I realize that this is because they had all recently had a conference somewhere and BANNED WAR so they no longer felt the need to be serious about it but their enemies have not forgotten and they have let in millions of people who hate them with a passion. The thing is though, I expect those enemies to assimilate just enough so that the ones in Germany will hate the ones in France and vice versa and so on throughout the Unholy Empire and so even after it falls to islam, they will duke it out with each other in Europe in the same joyful sharing way they wasted Lebanon.

Let's not be there for that. 

THINGS ARE GETTING SILLY NOW

 Supposedly all kinds of idiots are given access to microphones and pens and allowed to make up any damned thing they want to and get it published in our media. I just laughed at this headline and wondered at the extraordinary lengths people's imaginations will take them whenever they have access to blank newspaper.

 

How about if instead we just issue every aviator and pilot a fitbit that they can turn on when they get shot down over enemy territory or the open sea? All they have to do, according to the Ministry of Truth, is turn the damned thing on and their position is instantly pinpointed by the entire world!

 

 

PERFIDIOUS ALBION

It is almost like they cannot help themselves and they just have to whip off their shoes so they can tie and knot the laces around their neck very tightly. On the other hand, it is kind of amusing. What do you call a country that is not an ally and yet insists on stabbing you in the back? Enemy springs to mind.

‼️🇺🇸🇬🇧 The United Kingdom will refuse to allow the United States to use RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for strikes on Iran targeting bridges, power plants, or civilian sites, citing risks to civilians and potential war crimes, senior officials tell The i Paper. pic.twitter.com/MsJd1AD7A8

— Defense Intelligence (@DI313_) April 7, 2026

 There is an obvious solution to a situation like this. The American Base Commander at Diego Garcia gets orders to implement contingency plans and takes over the entire atoll, rounds up the British and their minions and puts them on a plane to Kenya with some well meant advice to, "never come back!"

This way we get the Indian Ocean base that we need, Britain gets shed of a dilemma it thrust itself into with the wild abandon of a teenager shedding his clothes with a girl for the very first time and everyone gets to nod sagely and suggest that a diplomatic solution is perhaps the best thing in these circumstances.

On the gripping hand, I wonder how much/many SEALs have been flown in to Mildenhall AFB over the last 4 weeks in preparation for this moment of inevitable betrayal.

 Will they be able to topple the government or will they settle for keeping the British off our bases in Blighty?

//TFIC 

Oh, and should this come to pass, the North Atlantic Treaty is dead. Secretary Rubio will start pointing out to Poland and Hungary all the benefits from reestablishing ties with Gazprom and Eastern Europe's economies will take off as Western Europe slips into the dustbin of history. I think I'll laugh if Presidents Putin and Trump have a summit and decide to enter into a new Arctic Treaty Organization and exploit all the vulnerabilities that Europe has opened itself to by behaving like principled spoiled islamic idiots.

I have to admit, I thought it would be another 10 years before Britain joined France and declared jihad against America. 

ON FORWARD BASE INFRASTRUCTURE

 Keep in mind that 100% of the base infrastructure that we built in the Middle East over the last 40 years served one purpose and that was to provide C4I for our forces in the long war against Iraq and Iran. With the upcoming demise of Iran there will be no need for the enormous infrastructure and the Middle East Force can return to being a pair of frigate/destroyer type ships and perhaps a flag ship although that sounds positively medieval in the 21st century. CENTCOM remains at MacDill.

We really don't need that vast 3 star ensemble in Bahrain. The old Middle East Force worked just fine as a 2 star command with a few dozen staff back in 1985 and there is no reason it cannot return to that size and shape when we're done with Iran. The Combined Air Ops Center in Qatar can shut down and the various players can go home and absolutely everything we operate in Saudi Arabia can be shut down. 

I'm reminded of C6F who had a scroll running on their homepage for years that showed that back in 1949 Sixth Fleet staff were tasked with oversight for 12,000 aircraft movements and 2000 ship/vessel movements per day and the staff consisted of a couple of dozen officers. In 2000 the Sixth Fleet staff provided C2 for 40 aircraft and 2 ship movements per day and that staff had grown to over 7,000.

All of NATO has demonstrated that it no longer serves any useful purpose and we can go ahead and expand our reductions to all of Western Europe and there really is no need to build unprotected infrastructure in the new frontline countries of Eastern Europe. All of that stuff can be shelved or disposed of and the money saved returned to the people or to to develop serious infinite repeaters that can destroy drones at all altitudes ranging from 1 foot to 90,000.

The money to design and build a Bolo has to come from somewhere.......*

And we're going to need them everywhere as people catch on to just how terribly lethal drones are, how anonymous they can be and how they can appear out of nowhere to attack every kind of infrastructure ranging from oil and gas lines, production fields, shipping and transportation and of course every level of government. 

Russia really opened a can of worms when they went after Ukraine. The world has no idea how everything they know/knew about warfare and getting even changed over night. 

 

*the discerning reader will closely examine the link. 

HAPPY EASTER

 One of our favorites that I boosted from Gunsmoke and Knitting.

 

ENTRE NOUS

 I am sensing a very different pattern to the array of news from this war. Nobody is sitting pretty this time with their own Wolf Blitzer reporting from Tehran and what news does filter out of organs of disinformation, shading and flat out fabrication don't seem to have anything but rumors and innuendo to report.

On the other hand, this is the war that Russia and Putin wish that they had waged against Ukraine. Do the decapitation and do it long and hard and then drop a couple of airborne divisions on the capital and send Wagner up the middle. Ukraine does not have the regional warlord infrastructure that littered Afghanistan and Iran. With an absolute command of the ether Russia could have tracked down and destroyed every replacement Zelensky and every new and acting head of the military components and field commanders. For all their fearsome reputation as significant actors in deep penetration and cyber warfare, they don't seem to be in the same league as US and Israel. I'm surprised by that.

I have to admit, I'm also surprised by the relative absence of Iran's favorite warriors in this conflict. Sure their terrorist commandos have been gutted and destroyed in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen but I was sure they had lots of true believers here in America ready to act. Post war analysis will be fascinating.  As it is I've been impressed by just about everything and really impressed by the Combat Search and Rescue guys.

PEAK DISDAIN

The United States has reached the limit of its endurance with its European satraps in the disarmed and ineffective wing of NATO. I don't think any rational student of foreign policy and war could watch the Europeans in the EU bait and attack Russia for the last 4 years and not worry that they have lost all sight of objective reality. Their disdain and contempt for Russia and President Putin knows no limits and is very much like the disdain and contempt for President Trump and the United States under its current majority party rule. They hate US and Russia and we don't care.

Militarily, European military forces are not even a pimple on the butt of either the United States or Russia. Those who believe in the fantasy of numbers point to the number of aircraft or tanks or soldiers that Europe has and imagine that the numbers alone mean that they are on par with the US or even Russia because there is "so much." The problem being, none of it is real and the numbers lie and on top of that the will to employ force at the national level is dead and buried in Western Europe.

Every war you can recall to mind in Europe was fought for nationalist reasons and it is really hard to get men to fight for a "better standard of living for our islamic and african refugees." The idiots running Europe into the ground over the last 50 years have done everything in their power to torch nationalism and make sure it never rises again. What they've done is just exactly what the old European Empires did when they set out to destroy nationalists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Napoleonic Empire, British Empire, 3rd Reich, and the Warsaw Pact. Everyone knows how that worked out each time.

Let us look at recent history and the actual form nationalism takes in Europe and elsewhere. Once upon a time the collapse of one empire led to the formation of a mini-empire called Yugoslavia which was made up of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, etc. When it was destroyed by its indebtedness and torn apart by rival ethnic nationalism it was the leading edge of nationalist dissent in Europe but it was way out on the fringe and everyone in Western Europe pretended it wasn't really part of Europe, really. They never think back to who fired the shot that allegedly led to World War I.

It won't surprise anyone who reads here to learn that using Yugoslavia for inspiration the CzechoSlovakian State decided to split on purely ethnic/nationalist lines and a number of other states in Europe experienced a resurgence in real nationalism from peoples long thought to be fully integrated into the miasma that is Spain or the intricate partitions of ethnarchies all along the old Soviet Frontier.

 These people are relentless and they are slowly winning because the ruling class forgot that without the Primary Nationalist Front to hold everyone together it became easier for each ethnic minority to claim it was owed not just a slice of the pie, but also their homeland and its slice of the pie. You can see these devils ranging everywhere such as around Kurdistan (which does not and never existed but bedevils Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran.) 

You also get the Alliance for Germany which merely wants to have all the foreigners kicked out of Germany and for the German government to stop giving German money to the immigrants and also to stop giving it Italy and Spain and all the less productive member states of the EU. The ruling class has one universal response to this which is to stamp it all out of existence and jail the leaders of such nationalist parties everywhere they arise. I can't wait to see what they hang on Nigel Farage.

All of this simply covers the polite face of nationalism in Europe but doesn't begin to address the old issues that nothing short of extermination or removal seems to address. All these old tribes also want their land back. People everywhere are quietly interested in going home but they don't want to live under the governments that currently rule these lands, they want their own governments to run them. Every time you turn around in Ukraine you find another proposal for slicing up more of Ukraine and giving it back to Poland or Hungary or......And you thought it was just the Russians that wanted their land back.

The original intent of the ruling class that understood the underlying basis of upstart nationalism was to prevent just this. It was not to stamp out their own national identities but to curtail and dismember the radical movements that wanted, for instance, Prussia back. (Honestly, nobody anywhere wants Prussia back in German hands.) The thing is, the borders shifted so much after World War II that all countries are affected and yet all of them took the idiotic path of stamping out nationalism and importing foreign workers because they tied nationalism to naziism in their diseased minds and so anything the nazis praised was, ipso facto a bad or evil thing. Remember how the nazis wanted great big families?

My fellows and I have just about had it with European idiocy and disdain. We can see them all heading right back into the same rat war they get into every 20 to 40 years and we don't want to be any part of it. This is not a West against the East War or an anti-communist war, it is the collapse of an entire civilization on one continent that ruled the world. I keep thinking it will be like the fervent nationalist time of 1848 but it could also look a lot more like Spain in 1936.

Right now we tend to think of Europeans as sheep. No bark, no bite. They didn't used to be like that but they have been socialized into being essentially harmless. You have only to look at the extraordinary number of foreigners running their governments to realize how far down the pole they have managed to slide. What happens when they realize that they are far more broke then the United States is and all the benefits of living with your parents until you are 45 go away?

It would be interesting if our break with NATO did nothing but take the form of De Gualle's politique de grandeur and we simply announce that we are withdrawing from the NATO integrated military command and withdrawing all of our armed forces to North America and turning over all of our bases and installations to the owning governments. As they used to say of France; still a NATO member, just not a military member of a military alliance. We can do that too.  

You see one of the problems everyone else has is articulating what specific benefits the United States gets from being a member of NATO. Right off the bat I cannot see any. In fact, from here, everything argues that it long past time for America to leave Europe to its own devices because right now they appear to be insane and vicious to an unexpected degree. They prefer their rulers and their rulers prefer the extinction of Israel to any other thing. They probably forgot that this has already happened before, any number of times, and yet they persist.

A few people wonder that we seem to have entered into a war with Iran, a much more dangerous power than Iraq and yet for some reason we did not spend 6 months building up an enormous and ceremonial alliance and deploying hundreds of thousands of troops to staging areas near by and we made no effort as we did in Iraq to sweet talk our putative allies into aiding us in that war called Desert Storm where our very good friends and NATO allies in Turkey refused to permit the 4th ID to deploy through and to sit on the Iraqi frontier and draw off some of Saddam Hussein's armies from Kuwait. It was a buildup that saw us concentrate the bulk of our naval power in the region before launching the counterattack and yet NONE OF THAT HAPPENED IN IRAN.

I have a theory about that. I think that the last real Intelligence Agency in the World showed its cards to President Trump and the Head of that State told him that if aid was not immediately forthcoming to assist with the destruction of Iran's incredible missile threat, they would have no choice but to use nukes. There are just two places left in the West where the hard men rule and neither of them shirked the necessity to act immediately and decisively.

I guarantee that the relevant leaders told the National Command Authority that we had the power to break Iran but there was no way on earth to fix what we broke and there was also no way on earth to establish free and unfettered commerce through the SOH given the nature of the geography and the sheer number of platforms available to attack some of the most defenseless ships in the world. The response must have been something along the lines of, 'that will do very well, it solves a number of pressing issues in urgent need of resolution.' Europe is finding out that their issues are simply no longer our issues. That's not really congruent with having and maintaining a military alliance.

IRRITATED TO DEATH

 There is the usual presumption that justices of the supreme court don't want to die in office and want to retire and enjoy the good life and also make sure the President of their party gets to choose a successor like them, unlike the poor unfortunate RBG who had the misfortune to drop dead during President Trump's first term. I have seen many comments about this in my reading. 

There is an alternative though:

 

 

Have the stupidest Supreme Court Justice in all history gibberish them all to death. I would go mad if I had to listen to that profoundly stupid arrogant jackass talk for more than 10 minutes.

GOD SPEED ARTEMIS

 The last launch of the fully invoked DEI lunacy went off without a hitch this evening and according to the knowledgeable Space Viewers, it was about as boringly nominal as a Falcon 9 launch but quieter. I think that is probably the very best thing one could ever wish or hope for in a manned space launch.

They are the latest pioneers to go in search of:

a. A new route to the Indies.

b. Lost Cities of Gold

c. Converts to the old Religion

d. Cure for male pattern baldness

 

Be blessed in your travels and your safe return. 

TWISTING IN THE WIND

 The Europeans may find out what it means to so thoroughly piss off the last KGB man in the world. There is all kinds of room for mischief in the middle east now that we have taken the lid off and the rats are scurrying around and it wouldn't surprise me if Putin found a way to capitalize on the oil and gas shortage that now wraps the entire world in its cold clammy embrace.

I think some people and countries that lost sight of the real meaning of diplomacy and statesmanship are about to relearn an important lesson. Every single factor in the world today unites to impel Russia to screw over Europe to the maximum extent possible and they are just the tricky devils to do it. Yes, Europeans would be delighted to pay billions to Iran for reopening the Strait but there is no reason for Russia to accommodate this desire. 

I wonder what part will split along the fault lines that must be there already underlying Iranian sovereignty. Perhaps a tinge of Baluchi, who knows. The new People's Democratic Republic of Baluchia lying there along the Strait is going to welcome the pirate submarines and endless drones of the 21st Century. It seems there is always some frisson of nationalism or old tribal hatred that can be inflamed by anybody with a match and the will to find out if it will catch fire.

Who knows, the Iranians may be willing to let their supertankers use the Strait but deny passage to all their GCC enemies who failed the allah test. What a fascinating time to live in America!

I may have to pick up Mark Steyn's books and read them now.

IT FEELS LIKE A MOVIE

 I keep seeing our President doing things that would have been well done 70 years ago or 50 years ago or even 10 years ago and I am enjoying it. I don't think most people realize how he was slow-rolled by the bureaucrats in his first term by every Agency, every Department and how they frustrated every single move he tried to make in his first term. He literally could not get the State Department, the Defense Department or the Intel Agencies to do what they were ordered to do. They point blank refused to follow orders. What we are seeing today is what happens when the elected head of state gives the orders and the people charged with obeying those orders or resigning promptly, are actually following those orders in a full blooded American way and not refusing or slow-rolling them to death.

Every single one of those bureaucrats from the first Trump administration that failed to conduct themselves as honorable men should answer for their actions and yeah, I'm talking here about men like Pompeo, Barr and Mattis. They were like a disease that only kills Republics. The guys that did all that negotiating with the mullahs during the Obama, Biden, Carter and Bush administrations must be kicking themselves.

 

 I am enjoying watching the President do to Europe what it has been doing to us since the European Common Market came into being. I don't see it as us playing hardball, I see it as us not playing at all anymore. The moaners who think it will all end in tears are welcome to their feelings but they should understand that I am not opposed to it all ending in tears. The spiteful little children will find themselves in that state when the adults are in charge and right now, they are.

It would be fascinating to see what the servants of the West are doing and saying as they beg, plead and grovel in the Oval Office for some love and some understanding because they have a little 'muslim' problem at home that they have to kowtow to but some of us still know where and how the word kowtow came into our lexicon and we don't see any reason to go along with it or to encourage it in others. 

You know who else is enjoying all this? 

Yep, that would be the head of the other super power with enormous energy reserves. That 'gas station with nukes.'

PLANNING

In about 2 days we plan to launch 4 people towards the moon. It is kind of mind boggling how screwed up NASA became in just 40 years. Imagine what went horribly wrong time after time in the War Department, Department of the Navy, Bureau of Indian Affairs and other agencies that have been around much longer than NASA. It's a wonder that we survive.  

As far as I can tell, we haven't seen a single piece of successful space hardware other than the folks at SpaceX and they only got to where they are now by experimenting to destruction with every single iteration of their hardware. The NASA astronauts are launching on a rocket like no other built in the world after several failures of some extraordinarily simple things that real rocket designers and operators would have ironed out decades ago. Oh, that's right, they did that 60 years ago and then they got sucked into the full blown decline of NASA.

Speaking of planning, 5 days from now is probably right about the time that lights go out in New Zealand and perhaps much of Australia. It seems nobody ever thought it might be a good idea to build in some extraordinary resilience into their national energy planning and supplies and maybe stockpile a lot of fuel for emergency use like, for instance, the oil stops coming.

Silly bears. 

On the gripping hand, it is never as dire as people want you to think.

On the other hand this is almost surely a government projection by the least competent and most evil government in the West and it probably means 50 days if they start immediate rationing and only let fire trucks and ambulances use any fuel and only hospitals and government offices have electricity. They are just crazy with the truth down there.
 

EVERYONE SAW IT COMING

 We have finally reached the point where political awareness catches up with the military awareness of 25 years ago and what we have before us now is a situation unchanged in 25 years. Literally every military person with a brain has been pointing out, observing, noting in considerable obnoxious detail that our air bases and infrastructure have zero air defense weaponry deployed to prevent overflight, attack or simple wholesale destruction of our aircraft and bases and nobody did a thing about it. We are now well into the Find Out stage that Russia is in and we have no more means to counter rogue drones or all out drone attacks than Russia does.

A long time ago, faced with a tank gap on the future battlefields of Europe some genius came up with the idea of the A-10 and more importantly, got the Air Force to present it to Congress and sold it so well it actually came into existence with all the planes, spares, logistics, training and everything else needed to field a full blown serious Program of Record and we were left with a solution to many problems. The Army did the same thing with the Hellfire missiles, the Bradley, the TOW and the Javelin. Serious people looked at the threats and developed means to deal with them.

What happened to those guys who looked at Base Defense and Infrastructure defense and led them to throw away any and all effort to design, engineer, build and field a weapon that could destroy any slow moving air targets in enormous numbers over bases in Louisiana and Saudi Arabia? Where did the crazy people win and simply shelve this necessary component of 21st century warfare and nobody did anything?

I was pretty sure that by now we'd have lasers and gauss cannon* to destroy any air threats but we have nothing but the most expensive missiles mankind can build to use against $500.00 drones made by the thousands. This should have been the First Priority of a Program Office dedicated to nothing but a solution to the problem posed by drones and we have nothing.

I'd look on FedBusOps to see if there are any RFPs out there for anybody to furnish a technical solution but I suspect that the answer is that there is nobody who bothered to hit the system with such a request or even a Sources Sought.

If they think it is bad and looks dire now, wait until the drones get personal and use face recognition to home in on selected people or simply hit a person's house again and again and again and again because it's not like that house is moving anywhere.

The man on the street now has the means and the will to kill the oligarchs. They should really be afraid starting right about now. 

Everyone saw it coming, but nobody did anything about it. 

*a very cool idea for treating a magnetic field like a laser and being able to point a 10,000G laser beam at a target and basically sweep it with an intense magnetic field. Admittedly my targets back then were magnetic storage media and computers..... 

HUMOR

 

The internet gets more amusing every day which is a good thing because when I look out over it some mornings it is filled with one awful story after another. Therefore, I have decided to join friends and go see Hail Mary. I think I only conned a ship through the strait twice and it never really felt all that bendy. On the other hand, ships move extremely slowly compared to most cars and you can start a long turn that lasts for miles with a single helm order.

I have been silent about this for a long time, but I can no longer keep quiet about it in good conscience.

The "Strait" of Hormuz isn't straight at all. It's super crooked. You can see in the helpful graphic I put together below.

The elites don't want you to know this. pic.twitter.com/ICVFRuVPNP

— Wasson Watch Co. (@WassonWatch) March 28, 2026