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.

DELTA SHUTTLE TO NEW YORK CITY

 Is there any detectable difference between Mamdami and Maduro? It might be time to review the political party limits in this country and decide once and for all to exile any and all people who think that they have the right to impose communism on anyone in the Republic in which we live. Just reading that Mamdami and his regime intend to seize private property and treat it as a public good without compensation is irritating to say the least.

NOW THEY KNOW

 If we want illegal immigrants from South America, we'll go get them ourselves. Just sayin.

ON ON

 I liked this when it came out. I think it aged well.

 

THE 30 YEAR BACKSTAB

 I think it is safe to say that the US Navy today is just a shadow of what it was and the rival that that Navy was designed to deter, and if necessary, to wage war against, is just a shadow of what the Chinese navy is today and the Chinese navy is still growing at an extraordinary pace. Some people are really alarmed at the ratio of force available for a fight with China and to be honest, it doesn't look at all good. In fact, it looks impossible and the skinny bit nobody is allowed to notice is that this was by design.

Do you really think we forgot how to design and build warships all of a sudden? Do you wonder that the DDGs seem to be really fine warships and you can say exactly the same about all 3 of our submarine classes?  There is no better submarine fleet in the world even if it gets smaller every week. No, this is not a numbers comparison. This is a look at a slice of history that simply fell off the table when we won the Cold War and it got kicked under the table and something dragged it away.

A real navy is a costly thing and the costs are not really understood by anybody especially bean counters who look at the costs they know about and dread paying the bill and think of all kinds of imaginative ways to cut expenses. 

– Cut the shore maintenance staff and facilities to the bone and beyond to save manpower $.

– Farm out depot level maintenance and intermediate maintenance to contractors and let them pay for it.

– Scrap every warship that is simply not needed now or in the projected future that has no real enemy in it.

– Cut fleet manpower costs to the bone by reducing crew sizes to the bone and beyond and farm out maintenance to the lowest bidder for every aspect of maintenance once done by the sailors.

– Scrap the shore infrastructure and training commands that educated every officer and enlisted rating in the skills necessary to be successful in maintaining, repairing and operating the finest equipment we had.

– Reduce costs by reducing complexity and redundancy on all warships and submarines.

–Sell or discard all fleet activities that are not essential to a greatly reduced navy including drydocks. 

They did all that starting in the mid 90s after they demolished the aviation community with Tailhook 91. They then defanged the frigates and removed their missile launchers rather than maintaining or repairing them and then scrapped them without replacement. This is where they got tricky. They elected to stop building the Nimitz class aircraft carrier and decided that the vaporware power point presentations on things such as electro-magnetic catapults and electro-magnetic elevators were the way of the future and built the USS FORD. 

The costs ballooned astronomically so they gutted the follow-on Cruiser replacement program that was designing the replacement for the 30 year old Ticonderoga Class cruisers. They designed a 'modular' ship to do multiple missions but only one at a time which has to be the most stupid naval innovation in all of history. They designed and built a land attack ship that fired ammunition that cost significantly more than a brand new cruise missile and was not as accurate or deadly. In short, they did everything they could think of to reduce and render impotent the United States Navy. Still, they did leave the DDGs alone.

When you look at the history of this almost 250 year old country one thing that strikes you right away is that this country doesn't really have any more need for a navy now than Canada does and Canada gets by with just 3 or 4 ships that may or may not work and half a dozen or so submarines that don't and they do just fine. 

I see you rubbing your heads and asking why? Why don't we or Canada need a Navy right now or even in the future? Well comrades, the answer is simple enough. A navy is necessary for commerce protection and power projection. We have less than a handful of merchant ships and our trade balance has been so whacked out of balance for the last 60 years that having pirates and commerce raiders slash our imports down to nothing really would benefit us enormously. 

What about our exports? Well, we export things that people really want and we don't really have to provide protection for it if we don't want to. We export food and energy to China (remember, they're supposed to be the enemy in some people's heads) and we export cars and trucks to Canada and Mexico and we used to export airplanes and software and some machinery. But the lifeblood of trade that once spanned the world and originated in American ports was squeezed out a long long time ago and the world moved on. We don't need a giant navy to protect our commerce and we never did.

So if you are like me and you despised all those crappy 4 star admirals that brought our Navy to this low estate does it change your mind a little if you consider that each one of them craftily sought to pull this arrow from our quiver so that the idiots and warmongers elites that come along every 30 years looking for a new war to dip their beaks into will find that whoah!!!!! you cannot project power without a huge navy?

Yeah and for that matter, consider the forces available to deploy overseas and wonder that people still believe in it. It's OK because this is a time when war is changing its suit and all the old rags no longer serve much purpose. In other words, we got lucky. We really don't need a standing army either.

Consider the warmongers who demand that we build up our fleet for NO OTHER REASON than to fight China and keep Taiwan away from the dirty rotten Chinese.... I never bought their arguments and would laughingly observe that Taiwan is the unsinkable carrier and that if they were sincere about not wanting to be taken over by the Chinese they could spend THEIR money buying ship killing missile by the hundreds of thousand and hiding them behind every bush and tree on the island and do the same with anti-aircraft missiles and radars. There is no call for us to fight their war and no need. They are an energetic self-actualizing people who can plan their own defense, afford to buy and deploy it and fight their own wars.

So yeah, I'm reconsidering the very low opinion of the admirals that destroyed a navy over the last 30 years and now I'm beginning to think they were rare men of vision who just had to lie about everything in order to get things going their way. On the gripping hand, a country is rarely well served by senior officers who lie to everybody about everything. I cannot actually recall a single country that was served well by lying deceitful officers but it's a new world so so we keep telling ourselves. 

Consider naval operations today. That still enormous expensive and complex Navy is now wasting little tiny drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of America and got its ass handed to it in the Red Sea by a little pirate nation of vicious beasts without a single ship to their name. It's long passed time to rethink how a 21st century superpower wages war and it should be high on the list that the first thing to do in all such eventualities is to eliminate with extreme prejudice the enemy leaders who are making war on us. We have the means and methods and it time now to put into practice a kinder and gentler format for our wars.

Oh and by the way, if you thought the independence wars and nationalism wars of the last century are over, you got another think coming. The really important thing to always keep at the forefront of your mind is that it is NOT OUR JOB TO FIGHT THEM. The outcomes of those wars are simply unimportant as long as they don't come here to roost.

I don't know if promises were made to Taiwan after World War II or in return for favors but it doesn't matter. We are not bound by the words or actions of long dead politicians who curried favor and money from deep pockets overseas and they probably understand that full well. Nations don't have friends/permanent allies, they have interests. Our interests right now and for the foreseeable future do not include making war on anybody. 

This will change when the next bright blue politician sits in the White House but you know what? That's right, look at that quiver over there and not a single arrow remaining in it.....except for the untouchables and it would take a real idiot to face people down and threaten them with the last remaining weapons in our arsenal. There will always be nukes although I do wonder fairly often if any of them would actually explode if used.