THE SCARIEST THING EVER

Those of us who experienced The Andromeda Strain, Soylent Green, and a host of other Charlton Heston movies can probably appreciate this article from The Atlantic. I say that and mean it because people who didn't see those end of the world apocalypse movies don't really understand how mankind can end itself, overnight, accidentally, without even trying. Frank Herbert wrote a scary book about this and leaves people like Atwood in the shade when they imagine a future horror that could be.

We now have people who are seriously talking about engineering a genetic kill specific to a particular predator that they dislike, a lot. They propose to kill it to death in a small place using a tool like the black plague and nothing bad ever happens when fools or governments use weapons of mass destruction to kill a housefly problem.

I was reading the latest research on global extinction events. It turns out the planet did it. All the nonsense about asteroids killing the dinosaurs, or smoking....is piffle. It looks like vulcanism did it and it did it again and again and again and I just wish global warmists would step into a busy street and look up. I'm so tired of them and the rest of people who confidently predict that if we just adopt a little bit of socialism and send just a handful of deserving scum to the gulag, life will be perfect and go on forever and ever..

Right now, at this moment, we have the power and the tech to make a gene that can be unleashed on the planet, spread around it in days and can be tailored to kill very specific entities. I'm a specific entity. The world won't even know what hit it. It will be the Spanish influenza on steroids but pointed at very specific targets.

I can think, offhand, of a dozen organizations that would do it in a heartbeat and I know people who could make it happen. If you read, have a look at John Ringo's books on zombies. I'll give you the money quote from the endnotes.

The same can be said of biotechnology. I recall a friend who worked in the Tropical and Emerging Diseases Lab, a Class Four Facility (highest contagion) located on the UGA campus and associated with the CDC who's team was attempting in the early Millenia to build a virus following the prescription of the first person to do so from scratch. They tried time and time again to replicate it and were unable. 

In 2005, five years later, a Newsweek reporter, buying materials from EBAy, did the same thing, literally, in his kitchen. (With Spanish Flu no less. He was later fired as was the editor who approved the story since they LAID OUT THE ENTIRE RECIPE!) 

That is how fast biotech advances. Moore's Law, to some extent or another, applies to all emerging technologies. One day it takes a genius, the next day anybody with the right IQ and background finds it to be child's play. 

Second point: A few years ago, at a bio conference in London, a researcher proudly stood up and showed that his lab had proven they could create an infection that would infect a vast swath of population (choose species, genus, phylum or family) but only kill ONE INDIVIDUAL based upon that individual's DNA. 

When he asked for questions one member of the audience stood up and proclaimed:
"We've known that in (university research center) for the last five years but we were never STUPID enough to speak about it in PUBLIC!" At which point things became shouty. 

By the same token, one can create a pathogen that will infect a vast population, but only target certain races. And, yes, there are clear markers to target race for values of race. It's a term of art in biology, not a term of politics. Westphailians, for example, have distinct genetic markers. Now, Westphalians are MOSTLY still found in Westphalia but the markers are found in a huge population elsewhere (especially the US.) But Negroid? Easy. Han Chinese. Very easy. Jewish. (Racially.) Blonde. (See Live Free Or Die) Etc. 'Northern European' (white) is just as easy. Choose your target or immune population. But be careful. You may not understand your population a well as you think. (The 'crazy' president of Iran is genetically turk but most of his supporters are fars which is a variant of Northern European.)

We are beginning to play with fire and those leading the charge introduced one killer after another into a gene pool with no natural predators except those enormous salt water crocodiles which the birds could see coming a million miles away.

You just know human extinction is going to be done by some dorks that just wanted to make a better world. Which, you know, brings Serenity to mind.

BOOBY TRAPS AND THIEVES

There is a story from Canada that indicates that somebody has decided to wage war on thieves. This person left a backpack on a car in front of a Winnipeg 7/11. The police and the victims are lying about what happened but reading between the lines, a truckload of stupid thieves snagged a loose backpack and drove away with it as fast as they could, at which point, it detonated. 

In the pickup were two men, 22 and 27, as well as a woman, 20, and a boy, 17. The bag exploded shortly after the truck left the convenience store’s parking lot, roughly 160 feet away.

When a mild mannered and civilized bloke like James May of Top Gear can state: Motorbike Thieves Ought to be Killed, people should listen. People are sick of the crime that goes undeterred, unpunished and never sees justice done to the perpetrators.

"We could attempt to absolve society of its responsibilities and blame the bike makers, for not providing adequate built-in security. These are platitudes. We must deal with the problem of bike thieves at its source, by killing them. 

"It makes me shudder to write that. I, like any civilised person, am vehemently opposed to capital punishment and any other form of state-sponsored murder. 

"Justice should not admit a public’s thirst for pure revenge. But that’s not what’s happening here. I have arrived at this conclusion not through knee-jerk reaction or impotent fury, but by a pure and unadulterated process of logic. They have to be killed."
He argued that because police don't or can't do much about gangs of motorbike thieves, the only way to stop them stealing bikes is to have them killed.

It looks like the same kind of fury has found its way to Winnipeg where I have no doubt some really tired guy simply built a bomb in his basement, put it into a backpack and left it on a car in a carpark knowing that some thieves would steal it. He probably triggered it with rf signal loss or by command. He may not build another one, but other people sick of crime without punishment are probably downloading the Anarchist Cookbook from Amazon right now.

What can I say? Thieve Responibly, all that glitters is not gold.

CONTRASTS FROM OUR VISIT TO THE WEST

Some people appear larger-than-life in hindsight. I can't help but believe that these men were found larger-than-life while still alive and they certainly remain larger than life today.

Faces at Mount Rushmore

Contrast them and the rather pathetic lineup we have 'enjoyed' lately in the race to lead our country. Where the men above appeared to strive to lead us to the top, the latest political dross all seemed determined to lead us in a race to the bottom. Can you imagine people voting for a communist for President of the United States? What does that say about the state of education in America? How stupid does one have to be to prefer tyranny to a constitutional republic?

IMPRESSIVE FAKE NEWS

It's from the UK Daily Mail which, as it happens, I do look at every now and then because it's about the only paper that provides meaningful coverage to American politics. They do sometimes, get things a little wrong. In particular, they have peculiar ideas about Defense and Foreign policy as played on the international stage by a country with economic and military power and a complete indifference to anything said by any European.

This one took the biscuit.

I don't know who that Leon Pancetta fellow is, but he sounds like a dimwit. Panetta is probably outraged that the Daily Mail editors let a stupid mistake like this slip through and is calling his 'friends' at CIA to send a drone over to put a few Hellfire missiles into the editor's office window.

RELIABLY STUPID

CNN is possessed by twits, boobs and idiots. There really can't be any other explanation for Heather Long because she rather slavishly followed the reasoning behind noted imbecile economist Tyler Cowen who wrote a book and said some remarkably foolish things but then, he's an idiot economist.

Americans have become lazy, argues economist Tyler Cowen.  

They don't start businesses as much as they once did. They don't move as often as they used to. And they live in neighborhoods that are about as segregated as they were in the 1960s. 

All of this is causing the U.S. to stagnate economically and politically, Cowen says in his new book: "The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream." Growth is far slower than it was in the 1960s, 70s and 80s and productivity is way down, despite everyone claiming they are working so hard. 

"Innovation is painful. That's why we don't do more of it," Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, told CNNMoney. His book makes the case that all of the upheaval of the 1960s and 70s caused people to strive for safety and the status quo in the decades after that. 

"Just look at how people bring up children today. Often they won't even let children go outside," he says.

From the outside looking in I would say that Americans are working about as hard as they ever did except for the permanent underclass created by LBJ's War on Poverty who no longer work since they don't have to.

Americans are now more burdened by government regulations that make it damned near impossible to start a new business and impossible to effectively grow a business from small to medium to large because the taxes, fees, regulations and insurance costs are crippling after 8 years of Obama rule and the Obama Affordable Care Act.

I think the stats speak for themselves viz Americans moving. They're moving out of California and New York and Connecticut and heading for the Red states where the taxes and other burdens of enlightened liberal progressive government are frowned upon by the majority of the citizens.

The neighborhoods are where God and man have left them. The insane desire to push the unwilling into close association with other people who are not like 'them' is undervalued by people that have spent much of their lives trying to get out of the ghetto and leave the lowlife behind. In the 60's and after, liberal government practiced urban renewal by going into the slums and knocking them down and building government housing like Cabrini-Green in Chicago (now also torn down due to its inhuman living conditions, crime and blight).

These days we practice a different form of urban renewal which sees educated liberal progressives move into minority neighborhoods and 'gentrify' them by expelling the blacks who formerly lived in that neighborhood and called it home. The hispanics are practicing the same exact form of 'urban renewal' and also expelling the blacks from their former neighborhoods. It seems that Americans like to live with people like themselves and put a very serious economic value on doing so despite all the liberal paeans of praise for living together in peace and harmony with all of God's children. All people know that some of those kids are really mean and vicious and you don't want to live next to them.

It's interesting that this moronic jackass economist has accurately captured the effects of too much regulation and government interference in the private economy of business in America and quite rightly points out that it has led to economic and political stagnation. It's more perception than I would have credited him with. OTOH, he gets the cause of this wrong because he wears blinders and has 20/4000 vision in both eyes. He thinks all that stagnation and malaise is down to our lack of innovation and laziness and ignores the impact government and bureaucrats have had on innovation, business and growth by penalizing and taxing it to death.

He is the exact kind of social justice progressive idiot  ignoramus who thinks All Americans need inner city rail, a ban on private ownership of cars, free college for everybody, an end to suburbs and more government regulation until conditions improve even if that drives taxes out of sight and leads to foreclosures and shuttered businesses because if the damned people weren't so lazy none of that would happen as we stride into the Progressive Socialist Paradise Utopia that awaits us and allows us to join our socialist brothers and sisters in perfection like Sweden and Norway and basque in our virtue, enlightenment and cornucopia of plenty.

His final comment is also beyond his meager comprehension. Urban Americans and many suburban Americans have trouble letting their children out to play anymore or to ride their bikes all over the place because government trolls and libprog Big Brothers and Big Sisters have stepped in and declared ANY parent who lets a child walk to school alone or ride a bike to school alone or play outside out of direct line-of-sight of a parent or guardian, is breaking the law and the child WILL be seized by fascist assholes child protective services and trundled away while the parent is charged with a crime and has to hire a lawyer and go to court and fight to get their children back from the state.

It goes without saying that Heather totally missed the other side of the issue in her wild enthusiasm for Tyler Cowen's point of view, but this is typical for CNN.

NO OFFENSE

I'm watching Jadotville and this is a running critque.

Sid "Vicious" Johnsten sent me with the Engineering Department Master Chief to rescue our two  n'eer do wells. We went to the office of the head of the Bahrain Self Defense Commander who was, perhaps, pleased to see us.

He stood up behind his desk when we came in and shook hands energetically with Master Chief Meisbrugger and said how pleased he was to meet the man who wears the stars. The Master Chief and I were both in uniform. I was the ship's legal officer, Master Chief Meisbrugger was the man with the stars.

The general pointed out what we already knew. Our two idiots had been latched with their hands in front and both of them decided to leap out of the BDSF jeep after they were apprehended doing wrong things in front of the InterContinental Hotel. They opted to leap from the jeep. They got a lot broken. Broken arms, broken jaw, etc.

The officer in charge of the Bahrain Defense Force told the Master Chief and me, that they had suffered enough and he gave them back to us gratis, so we could ship them home via the Navy Hospital in Rota.

It's hard to believe but neither of them were taken to Mast. They just went away one day and never came back. It used to be like that. It was a better navy back then. We took it as given that 10% of your people really were 90% of your problem and we took it for action. We didn't set out to hurt them, we just got rid of them. Bottom Blow was an unbelievable option.

Can you imagine if you could still do that today?

IT HAS TO BE SAID

For many years Congress flew in the face of military opposition and funded an Alternative Engine for the F-35 fighter plane. They did so because history has shown that the OEM always screws up the engine and delivers an unreliable or underpowered pantywaist of an engine. Well, they knew when they let it die on the Obama barricades they refused to climb that it would come back and bite somebody on the ass.

It takes an interesting departure from controlled flight without, you know, an engine. Fortunately, we are assured by the engine manufacturer that only 10% of the engines fail.

Pratt & Whitney spokesman Matthew Bates said in an e-mail that its quality management “is designed to ensure safe, reliable products” and the company “is investing significant resources in advanced quality inspection techniques and continuous improvement in our supply base, which has lead to year-over-year improvement.”

The reliability of installed engines is exceeding 90 percent “which is well ahead of 2020 requirements,” he said.

Gives one pause doesn't it. I don't imagine F-35s glide all that much more efficiently than space shuttles.

ALT FRACKING

Grow your own weed.

Finally, at the state level, they get the War on Drugs and treat it like OPEC.

LOATHSOME AND STUPID AND LED BY THE NOSERING

As we watch the democrats fray democracy we are amused by them voting between a fascist criminal elite whossname and an out and out communist. So anyway, we thought this picture was revealing.

Sieg Heil

What does it say about an American that they would choose one over the other?

AIDED TO DEATH

There will be a tragic outcome from the Clinton's last crime. The crime was as blatant and open as any of the other crimes but this time there is true criminal intent dripping from every oozing sore and the lapdog media that has a taste for Clinton gore has been unable to lap it all up and vanish it from the new media and the rest of the people.

Read the article at the American Spectator by McKay. It's insightful. It describes the nature of the downstream effects from letting Clinton go on or even drop out. With clear evidence that the President was involved in sending secrets to Hillary's private little hell of a server and email system, it now involves the White House.

It also involves any number of lesser lights of the democrat machine whose names appear as senders and receivers of hillary mail. Senders and receivers of highly classified government secrets who many think of as the rising generation of future leaders of the ancient and royal Democratic Party with its Ancien Regime tottering into the polls urging their fellow kleptocrats to vote communist or vote socialist.

Hillary isn't just taking down her own presidential ambitions, she is destroying the presidential ambitions and future political aspirations of dozens of party officials who thought they had a chance to be contenders! Literally scores of people are vulnerable to the same arguments that destroyed Hillary's credibility. They all broke faith with the country and can be expected to suffer for it. I wonder if Hillary has food tasters, suffers from severe indigestion and I wouldn't fly with her either.

I don't think Hillary will ever know who passes the cup to her

NOT ME. NO WAY

Would you fly anywhere with Bernie Sanders right now or in the foreseeable future or do you reckon he's going to suffer from a terrible, swift, fatal, accident any minute now? I mean, right now, somewhere in DNC headquarters, an obit is being written.

MAKING THINGS HARDER THAN THEY HAVE TO BE

I daresay the admirals in Norfolk and Bahrain are asking today just who approved this and what kind of risk assessment was used when generating the Frago to transit two boats from Kuwait to Bahrain. I'm equally sure that they'll want to know who was providing the adult leadership.

Only Riverine boats and sailors could get so hopelessly lost and run out of gas in Command Boats

I know these boats have satellite radios. I know it because all of our boats have satellite radios. We've been continuously operating patrol boats in that area since 2001.

What I hate the most about this inept and stupidly executed plan is that it just made doing everything all that much harder because now every level of command has to convince the level above that it is not just complying with reasonable risk management strategy, it now has to go into infinite detail about how it has analyzed every possible risk to future missions and how each risk is mitigated or avoided by active staff planning.

I used to work with these people. In fact, I used to work with these people at every level of staff and command for over 20 years and I never heard a more succinct and astute analysis of the dimwittedness of some of them who struggle every day to "Make things harder than they have to be."*

So, congratulations you f@cksticks** at CTG56, you continued a horrible tradition by making things harder than they have to be. If I recall correctly, the last time we had anything like this happen it was the Commodore himself who ordered that all truck movements had to have dismounted road guides to make sure they didn't run over anything. Yes, you guessed it, that stupid insane policy continued right up until one of the truck drivers ran over his road guide with a 5 ton truck.

In addition to the now mandatory retraining and certification of all boat OICs, we'll see requirements heaped onto every task to ensure that they are now idiot proofed through the concentrated application of staff planning, paperwork and close personal oversight. You thought Operational Risk Management paperwork was a pain in the ass? You ain't seen nothing.

No, I won't be surprised if the after action report lays the blame at the feet of someone who thought miles and kilometers were the same thing and couldn't convert or even understand the difference between miles and kilometers.

*Said all the time by my predecessor at Operations in Group ONE as we began Operation Iraqi Freedom.
**Commonly used by CDR Joe G., the first N36 I worked with when establishing Task Group 56 for our guys in '96.

MOSTLY HARMLESS

Surprising numbers of otherwise almost intelligent people sometimes forget that civilization is only possible because civilized people have agreed to play by the rules. There are uncivilized people and what separates them from us is that they know only one rule. It is the law of the jungle. Might Makes Right.

It's important to understand that the terrorists recently arrived from muslim lands only know the law of the jungle. This girl doesn't believe it. You know another word for 'mostly harmless'?

Prey

FOR HER EYES ONLY

The fun thing about the political season is that it keeps coming around every year. The DNC, who allowed Bernie to run like one of them, has pulled his access to their donor files because, politics.  If looks could kill they probably will because the one candidate has the stare of a basilisk and the other looks like one. Bernie is suing his good friends in the Aligned Party and leading the rest of the Socialist Party out on a quick-strike in the Courts. I'm not sure why the DNC ever let him play in their sandbox in the first place. It's kind of a stupid thing to do when you think about it.

I demand that we get along! Give me Your Money!! NOW!!!

FLIGHT TRACKER

Interesting that there are still commercial airliners flying over Syria from Turkey. After the tragedy in Ukraine and the sudden European realization that it is madness to send commercial airliners over a war zone with modern Russian anti-aircraft missile systems deployed, I would have thought United Arab Emirates Airlines and Qatari Air would have elected to fly around Syria. It's like running with scissors. Not even a senseless foreseeable tragedy will get kids to stop.

I'm not flying over Syria and particularly not on a southerly heading out of Turkish airspace.

THE HOOFBEATS OF AN AIR APOCALYPSE

The consequences of an unprovoked attack on an aircraft usually result in some fairly drastic changes to air operations. I don't think Turkey really gave it any thought when they shot down a Russian aircraft going about its business in Syria. The Russians know that the stateless enemy in Syria has no meaningful air force but now Russia has been forced into deploying weapons designed to destroy NATO stealth aircraft at ranges of up to 250 kilometers. It's a fascinating mobile air defense system complemented by a Russian Air Defense cruiser off the Turkish coast.

I would like to congratulate Turkey and all their friends at the Combined Air Ops Center on bringing about the deployment of a missile system that will haunt the rest of their days in Syria. Every single aircraft that flies in that part of the world can fully expect to have that beast's fire control radars lock on at maximum range and remain locked on for the duration. Every military aircraft equipped with a threat warning receiver is going to freak out when that happens and they will never know if there is a missile riding the beam heading their way until it gets there.*

The intensity goes way up at the 3 minute mark. These were F16s engaged by Russian export version air defense systems in Iraq back in 1991. Thanks to Turkey, Russia will deploy their most modern air defense systems to Syria and turn every single NATO sortie over eastern Turkey and Syria or the eastern Mediterranean into a thrill ride. Way to go Turkey! 

*Yes, yes, we know. Beamriders are practically extinct and have been for decades but we're talking about Russia! Those little Russian land attack missiles last month were quite the surprise.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE EAGLES GONE

H/T theo,

MELLOWING THE HARSH

While perusing Watts Up With That I got to wondering how many other blowhards had predicted the irreversible tragic end of life on earth if global warming wasn't halted by 2012. I realize we're all now doomed to a horrible grisly death but it looks like any number of apparatchiks have been proven to be nothing but opportunist alarmists, liars and data fiddlers. You know the anti-free speech folks always cite the 'crime' of shouting Fire! in a crowded theater as behavior that must be punished with jail. How about we do the same to the global warmists who keep shouting Fire! and demanding a handout for pointing out the untreatable, intractable, irreversible tragedy of climate.

INTERESTING QUESTION

Found at Traditional Vibe.

RAVING MAD IN CALIFORNIA

I see that the People's Democratic Republic of Californiastan are legislating again in their ongoing endeavor to make the Republic safe for illegal aliens, public sector unions and elected politicians. They've come up with a crafty plan to ensure continued Title IX employment for life at every level of education in both the private and public arenas. All this in response to claims that not enough is currently being done about campus sexual assault accusations. "Yes-means-yes policies already define sexual consent in a way that will lead to more students being accused of sexual misconduct for non-criminal activities."

Two more bills currently in the California state legislature would aim to address the issue. One would require all of the state's universities – public and private – to disclose what disciplinary actions were taken against students accused of sexual assault. Another bill would require universities to indicate on transcripts when a student cannot re-enroll due to a suspension or expulsion.

I don't know why these people run in fear of the Feds and their iron barbed whips. If I was the campus administrator or university president I would dignify every accusation with the same response and have my people call the local police with jurisdiction and have them investigate each allegation. How can justice be better than that? We are all in search of justice, aren't we?