ON CERTITUDE

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

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

UPDATE

Oh look, Spot! There it is! 

THE AMUSING BUMBLEBEE

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

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

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

REGARDING THE FALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

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

MUNICH FASCISM IS NOT A GOOD LOOK

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

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

SNAGGING EXTRA VALUE OR NOT?

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

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

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

ON THE OVERTHROW

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

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

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

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

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

You cannot vote this mindset out of power.

THE GREAT CIRCLE ROUTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has changed very little in 30 years

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— LHGrey™️ (@grey4626) February 10, 2026

KNOW YOUR PLACE

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

ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON QUAKES

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

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

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

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

IT IS EXISTENTIAL WAR

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

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

Every red state needs to fight fire with fire.

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

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) February 6, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

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

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

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

TRUMP TAKES DIEGO GARCIA FOR THE WIN

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

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

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

ABOUT THAT UPS

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

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

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

LIVING IN THE NEW REICH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speed up the History! 

ODDLY AMUSING BUT....

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

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

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