LET’S DELVE INTO HISTORY

 This latest burst of dignification amuses me again. “Let’s turn to the history of the native Americans as so richly and convincingly written and monumented by the happy peaceful pastoralists who inhabited the Americas before the dawn of recorded history.” Oh? Not recorded? Unwritten? No actual history as such? Well OK, let’s play pretend and fake it. Nope? That isn’t allowed anymore under the new rules for entirely undocumented and unwritten history? OK, we’ll just cover it up and hope this embarrassing period of making shit up doesn’t come back to bite us on the ass.

You know what can safely be said about the history of North America right up until the Spanish and The Church arrived 400 years ago? That’s right! Any damned thing you want because it doesn’t exist except as an outgrowth of some rather unusual ideas of “science.” It was all anthropology right up until the fakers got involved. You know, like dinosaurs and apemen. 

Did you see the BOLO for Dr. Richard Leakey? That’s right, Lucy’s descendants want her back and him charged with kidnapping.

The endless caving in to the demands of the sullen stupid and ignorant has to stop sometime. Why not now?

THEY'RE BLIND AND DON'T KNOW IT

 Watching DW as they moan about the AfD getting 22% of the popular vote and they are interviewing all these left wing and communists in government who moan about how the AfD party is "undermining democracy so we have to ban it." You really want to slap the snot out of them and then throw them very far out in the Atlantic.

UPON REFLECTION

 As I mulled over what I wrote yesterday it slowly dawned on me, again, that some of the players are a lot smarter than I am and certainly far more steeped in evil. What the 'traitors' on the Supreme Court did does not square with what is said that they did. In other words, they handed a MOAB to the Administration, to the FBI, HLS and other scumbags and let them play around with it at the office. 

The ruling of the Court doesn't really change a single thing on the border that Texas is doing today. It literally doesn't mean a thing. It certainly looks like it does but when you boil it down, all that the Court did by a simple majority vote from a couple of really smart (scary smart) people and the cretins appointed by the Democrats, was unite the bulk of the States and the Nation against the criminal enterprise of Biden, HLS and the other government vermin.

IN AN ELECTION YEAR.

I'm not sure about Roberts and there may be some truth to the rumors that he is owned by some mysterious and evil force very much like the one that owns the media (all of it) and most of the wealth of this country and many of the rest of the countries on the planet.

THIS IS WAR NOW

 The Supreme Court has spoken and now the State of Texas has spoken. Biden and his clowns in the Pentagon will be thinking now of sending in the 101st Airborne but at this point I'm not sure they will follow clearly illegal orders to invade Texas. However, if you want to see the Army come apart at the seems just try to order them to make war on Texas. If this is starting to look a little bit like Fort Sumter in reverse you know your history.

 

The truly sad thing about all this is that the people in Washington and the intelligentsia around the world don't know the history or the law and really do believe that they are in the right and they get to use the Army and the F-16s on the People anytime the people get uppity.

A HUGO NOTE FORLORN

 The people running the world of acceptable science fiction voted to let the chinese communist party run the Hugo Awards for the year 2023 and so they did. They ran it into the clearly foreseeable ditch that comes up whenever censors and party leaders are allowed to run the "vote" and it worked out for them about as well as it did when they torpedoed their own awards back in 2015. I and a number of other people who watched the publishers of science fiction run their own awards into the muck are all laughing at them today and they are standing around brushing the muck off and demanding to know how this happened to them when they were such fine upstanding global citizens who simply accepted that the Chinese are just like us!!!!!

The really truly funny bit? The same collection of low-to dimwits are seriously considering having Uganda host their next Hugo Award ceremony and mind you, these are the same people that are not only baffled by elevators but incapable of accepting any flaws in their reality and they really do think everywhere is just like Manhattan, NYC, NY and San Francisco, CA.

Most of us wrote them off long ago as simply too serious for us. They neatly defined their own category.

AGAIN IT IS TO LAUGH

This is old news to some but I get my news from the new york times lies and it just punctured my email to leave me face to face with the usual warped and skewed flavor of news that is presented by the various lowlifes and mutants running that asylum from reality.

Seriously, they have only the loosest attachment to reality. How do they get around? They refer to this thing as a two-person contest. Idiots.

A GOOD READ FOR BLEAK TIMES

If you haven't read about the impact of total collapse before, The Dark Herald amply and ably calls it forth in his monograph on what was good about the Black Plague. He is an everyday read around these parts.

And a good movie to watch is The Map of Tiny Perfect Things.

FAILURE TO OBSERVE FOLIAGE ON ACCOUNT TREES

 The author of this piece about the Alberta cold front fails to recall one other significant possible outcome other than freezing to death the next time the cold dark night saps all the power from the electrical grid and Albertans find themselves freezing to death in their homes. Yes gentle reader, there is always the mandatory evacuation of all of Alberta. I see this as the Canadian government's next step in its glorious path to social redemption and destruction of all things Canadian.

As our readers know, the Canadians have already pioneered this new Climate Gonna Kill You All forced evacuation last summer as fire roared through the well kept forests and prairies. I wonder if the United States is going to set up machine guns and clear fields of fire to keep those pesky and dangerous Canadians out. I hear they're cannibals!

RIGHT ABOUT NOW

 A few naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz would certainly add spice to the placid and peaceful earth we have all come to inhabit under the relentless and persistent leadership of Biden and Austin and not to mention the sure and steady hand of Harris. 

Admittedly, I always thought they'd see if they could do it and trap a couple of Battle Groups up in the Persian Gulf but nothing says, "Welcome to the BRICS" quite like a little peaceful mine countermeasures under a deep cerulean sky. 

On the gripping hand I suspect our Mine Countermeasures ships have enjoyed the same love, affection and careful attention to maintenance and repairs that our Amphibious ships and submarines have enjoyed at the tender hands of a merciful, talented and resourceful Supervisor of Ship Repair and Construction.

Do you at all get the sense that the people at the top ever figured out that War is a Come As You Are feature and not something you get to schedule a few years out when you're good and ready for it?

KIND OF DEFINES US TODAY

I was reading a blurb update about the decision by NASA to shove the next manned moonshot to the right in order to accomplish some needful things. Here are the ones that struck me hardest and most cruelly:

 I'm afraid that this is what struck me as the refined essence of our shiny old bureaucratic State. Weep for the NASA that used to be.

Yes, your attention is invited to the. bottom right side of the NASA webpage where Brian is listed as the "Responsible NASA Official." I wonder if he knows?

Why it's important? Nothing at all happens in a place like NASA where the first and foremost effort of every single bureaucrat is to avoid being held accountable. Poor Brian obviously lost out and God help him if there is a spelling or syntax error on the NASA webpage. He could be fired!

Someone should probably give Koerner a nudge to see if she is still alive. Nothing NASA is doing is now or in the immediate future involves "first-time capabilities or operations." This is building a rocket which we have been doing for over a century now and filling it with rocket fuel and sending it to the Moon which we started doing over 60 years ago! NASA's problems are identical to Boeing's. They took all of the Engineers out of the loop and put bureaucrats in charge of literally every single thing from picking the color of the rocket ship to approving the outward facing corporate web page. In Boeing this results in crashes and great loss of life. In NASA it results in not very much happening decade after decade after decade as it coasts on wrapped in long vanished glory.

MORE ON SECDEF

It has long been true that those who fail in any way to be missed by anyone when they are not around are usually of little or no use to anyone. I think that sums up our idiot and counter productive Defense secretary perfectly.YMMV

YOUR ACTUAL DRONE WAR

 Found this on X posted by John Ringo. A little show from 6 years ago. Interesting take on future developments.

LAUGHINGLY CONTEMPTIBLE BUT EXPECTED

 News finally picks up on fact that Secretary of Defense was admitted to hospital on or around New Years and the nose-picking Army didn't bother to inform the Press! You can imagine their shock after all those years of waiting for the tools in the Pentagon to keep the Press fully informed about every little minute detail such as the latest in Army uniform policy, the Press just knew the Army would burst out with the news instantly if the X running the Ministry of Infernal Aggression checked into the hospital for a week or two.

On the other hand it's hard not to laugh out loud. There hasn't really been any meaningful participation in government by President Biden for at least the last 13 years and Congress bleats about the malperformance of the Homeland Security Tsar and head of the Coast Guard, and of course the Secretary of Transportation just took himself off duty for a year or two to raise infants he and his husband found somewhere, no doubt by the side of one of those racist roads he is so concerned about, and nobody noticed as much of the transportation network just collapsed under the idiocy of our COVID response.

I used to suspect that most things would go much better for all concerned if the wingnuts in the Pentagon and Norfolk and Florida just took the year off and let the people who know what they're doing simply get on with business without the constant and stupid and bothersome interruptions. I'm pretty sure nobody in OSD really noticed that Austin was MIA and nobody cared either.

I wonder what happened to the reporters of old who had informed sources in every nook and cranny of the government, sports, industry, banking, gambling and even the Families who would pick up the phone and call with news and facts. Nowadays it seems that reporters only sit in padded chairs and wait for the Departmental Spokesmoron to read from the prepared brief and walk away without answering any impertinent but germane questions.

Remember these clowns? You might call them obsessive but the rest of us thought they missed the boat, the train, the plane or anything moving faster than Joe Biden when it comes to finding real news.

 

NOT SHINY BUT VERY GOOD

 There is a group out there that I really enjoy. I don't know if I want them to enter a professional studio and make their music there and release it on an album or not. I'm thinking mostly not. They sound pretty good in the wild and that surely is good enough. 

CONSIDER THE NEWS AS PRESENTED

 I'm reading some interesting things but one that leapt out at me was that Israel was in serious danger of sparking a war with Hezbollah. When you think about it, that is simply the acceptance by the West that the State of Lebanon is no more. That is pretty much true but nobody has been willing to openly say that for decades. That was exactly what the PLO tried to do in Jordan until they screwed up and tried to assassinate the King and got themselves violently expelled. Same thing happened in Kuwait when the Palestinians celebrated Saddam's triumph over Kuwait. Within days of kicking out the Iraqis, every single Palestinian was expelled from Kuwait. 

I look with awe as the so-called Houthi rebels have practiced Sea Denial without even a shred of a Navy and now shipping lines and companies galore are simply avoiding the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and instead just opting to sail their ships around Africa. That's a big deal to some folks you'd least expect. I liked this quote from The European Institute for the Mediterranean.

 "Impact on the gross domestic product and national income: Suez Canal revenues are considered the third source of Egypt's national income behind overseas labour remittances and the tourism sector. It represents almost 5% of the GNP and 10% of GDP and is one of Egypt's most important sources of hard currency."

The Canal revenue represents a minimum of 10% of Egypt's GDP. The increase in prices of oil and other imports from the Persian Gulf is going to most negatively impact Europe (again) and will have just about zero consequences for the United States since we import very little from the Middle East and of course, it goes without saying, we export almost nothing through the Suez Canal to either the Middle East or India.

Our moron-in-chief and his sycophants are trembling at the notion of simply doing anything except ignoring the ongoing developments and so far their attempts to restore the international shipping lane appears to amount to nothing. It's really kind of pathetic seeing the US defeated at sea again by a country that doesn't even have a navy. 

It is however another splendid opportunity for the countries that are being negatively impacted by a bunch of rebel islamic-rage-fueled haters to step up to the plate and take a few swings of their own in order to settle their grievances without much of the way of support militarily or financially from the United States of America.

On the other hand, the Suez Canal has been closed many times since its grand opening so this is by no means unique. I don't think people care anymore about it this time then they did the last time. I suspect 90% of people aged 18-35 don't even know where it is.

I see further, that the media is angsty about Israel withdrawing 7000 troops from Gaza and the usual sources are all kicking in about how this is in response to US pressure to reduce the footprint in Gaza but I think the real reason might be that the IDF has finally kicked its moribund intel services into action and they are feeding them reports about Hezbollah getting ready to rain down fire on all of Israel. We'll see.

THE WAKE UP CALL

 Well it looks like the Wall Street Journal has finally figured it out.  This shouldn't come as a surprise since the facts have been available now for about 20 years and the facts in this case don't lie. It takes too long and too many parts to make modern anti-missiles or even missiles in the West. The article details some of why that is so and then blathers into the supply chains nonsense as if that was something totally new and unexpected and nobody saw that coming which is nonsense. The Army knew the wheels were coming off when they turned to industry for competition in their fuzes. They had to since the last American business making them announced that it wasn't going to make them anymore decades ago.

We were ordered by Congress to report how much of our Weapon System was made from non-American parts and specifically by the Chinese IIRC. It was a staggering amount of components and subcomponents and not really much of a surprise to us but some of the other Program Managers at SPAWAR were apparently surprised by how much of the final product originated in China.

Simply looking for 'known' compatible computers was hard to do and I was looking for Microsoft computers that weren't more than 2 or 3 years old. My sister (Air Force) had a good friend involved in the Space Shuttle Program and they were literally scratching into the dirt trying to find old computers and components that were identical to the gear originally flight certified for the Shuttles to use for maintenance and replacement. If anyone had at the time stockpiled some components, they were long gone by the time her friend was ordered to find them.

I remember the old Navy well. I was in a shipyard undergoing a dry dock during the course of which a couple of old propeller shafts from one of the D type Mine Sweepers were found and shipped to us and a single guy from Columbia Machine Products up in Oregon supervised their installation and alignment. These old shafts had been pulled from the Dash, Dominant or Detector long ago when the ships were decommissioned and before they were scrapped and then stored perfectly so that even decades later they were still true/round and worked perfectly once installed.

It does kind of make you wonder how many of those Minutemen sitting in silos dotted around the country will actually fly true and hit their targets if launched. It also makes me wonder about one of my old colleagues in SPAWAR who was a USNR Supply Corps Captain who would spend his 2 weeks of Annual Training every year working in the Ammo Shop at CINPAC going over the ammunition inventory reports. I sense that our 'burn rate' for exercises and training was probably just barely being replaced by new materials every year and that there is no way in Hell to spool up the production of any large caliber or missile ammunition without DoD and the Government paying for it upfront because they have a long history of burning industry.

Welcome all to 2024! May it be peaceful and friendly all year.

SHIP COMING IN

 We spotted this last night on the Fairport Harbor camera over at Gunsmoke and Knitting. We never used search lights at night in the Navy unless we were messing around late at night and nobody was paying attention. This is a Laker entering the wildly misnamed Grand River.

K

Fairport Harbor entrance to Grand River earlier that day.

SAVAGE TARDS

When you look at the utter disaster the deservedly scorned and despised have made of education in this country I wonder that we haven't had one of the dedicated haters of humanity sickly and viciously attempt to force all the little children to write left handed just like xer. Come to think of it, I just know one of those scum is out there right now trying to force a whole kindergarten class to write left handed.

THE VORTEX OF LIES

 I was chatting with my little pilot after Christmas Dinner and he was concerned that Elon Musk had ruined Earth's orbital space more or less forever by launching Starlink satellites into orbit. I tried to reassure the young pilot that this was not the case and that the link satellites were all deliberately put into low earth orbits that would guarantee their return to earth within approximately 5 years from going online. Our pilot was absolutely convinced that I was in error! Ha.

At any rate, I did look into it this morning and found that yeah, what I'd read through a year or so ago was still true and that all the link satellites are already getting hit with drag and will fall to earth in about 5 years after launch. What troubled me though was how hard it was to root out the truth from google/duck/etc. It took 5 different search queries to even winnow down the lies and misinformation. 

I know that the web has been filled with lies since shortly after it went world wide. My first real eye opening experience was looking. up Senator John McCain shortly after he announced his run for the Presidency and I found that I had to page through something like 30 full screens of outright lies about the man on my first google search. I knew it was a foul place but I had no idea how foul it was until that moment when I realized that most people unfamiliar with the truth would simply accept everything they read off google as the absolute truth.

I used to make up for some of the flaws in the web search by using Yandex. I haven't troubled the web looking for its version of truth in years so I had failed to notice that Yandex is gone and Duck and google just are not anything like worthwhile when it comes to getting the facts and this now applies to almost every branch of science, history, current events or anything under the sun. All of it is spun and the only way to know it is to be familiar with the primary source material or to have been there.

People now talk about the "real history" of the United States or the World as if the people who have been writing it down for the last 2000 years just made it up. The current crop of fools believe that they must all have conspired together to write it in such a way as to completely erase the parts that the "new historians" are trumpeting. That they can do this almost defies belief. Did they never have to look at primary source materials in school when writing a report? Did they never read biographies and perhaps even biographies written by different authors about the same man? I think the answer is no. Asked to carry out some bit of research the trusting little fools all turn to the biased and lying internet to scrape together the facts they want to believe in and call that research and background information. This doesn't bode well for the future.

I used to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. My dad's parents gave us their copy of the entire thing plus all the year books through 1968 and my parents cleverly put it by the bathroom for light reading. Much more to the point, I also found as I got into my 20s that the World Almanac covered most of the facts that needed covering and you could always buy the previous year edition for under a dollar. Real information was never further away then the door outside the bathroom.

My young pilot also thinks that a lot of the debris in orbit is caused by accidental collisions of satellites and I can see why the naive might believe something like that because they really have no idea how small things are in a volume so large. I tried to find some data on accidental collisions and the only one I found at all believable involved a Russian dead satellite/part and an Iridium Satellite.  I can't believe anything about a putative dead Soviet satellite and I would have thought Iridium would have been very careful about the orbital mechanics for one of those satellites. On the other hand, I do know that we conducted anti-satellite tests and destroyed satellites in orbit and so did the USSR and China. There is a lot of crap up there that came from smashing satellites together but all the rest of what I saw online was hype and scam right up there with global warming scaremongering.

I started out, literally, on the Secret Internet Protocol in 1996. When I reported to work in Bahrain I did not own a computer and had no plans to own one. I did not own a modem or plan to. When I arrived in Bahrain I found that on. my desk, on every staff member's desk there was a SIPRNET computer and each was fully connected to that network. I pretty much remained on that network until I retired 15 years later. I accepted all of what I found on that network to be as accurate as people could make it. If there were errors they were not deliberate errors although some things could clearly be ascribed to as false intelligence. For the most part, what I read was what was real. It's nothing like that on the world wide web and hasn't been since shortly after it went live and people got beyond TELNET and FETCH and BBS.

I would say that this constitutes an enormous problem for civilization. I knew that the enemies of civilization had swept the schools, the teaching profession, the universities, the news and information networks on television, cable and the radio but I thought that there was still an excellent chance of finding the truth about things more or less as easily as it was to find the lies. This is not the case.

I read L. Sprague de Camp's wonderful story, Lest Darkness Fall back when I was going to school in Huntsville and it struck a chord. I knew enough about the history of that timeline to follow along as he departed from our History and started writing another. I don't know anybody under the age of 50 today who could do that. People don't seem to know any history at all. I guess its the same with science, math, government, geography and all the other things I spent my youth learning and keeping up with.

It's hard to believe that the story was written 1939.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Joy and good tidings to all, from all of us.

IT IS TIME

 I wonder if there are any normal red blooded American men left in Colorado....

ON THE DOWNFALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

 One of the ignored facets of wide open borders and endless waves of migrant military age muslim men is that the enemy's entire guerilla force is already deeply embedded in the countries in the West and they can pretty much operate at will and with almost total impunity. There is almost no crime that they can commit that will see them deported from idiotic shitholes like France, Germany, Great Britain or any other country in the EU. Worst of all, they all know it now.

Aligning your country's navy with the defeat of endless islamic pirates in the Bab-el-Mendeb and the Horn of Africa is a total nonstarter for even the dimly self-aware politicians in charge of the West and they realize, somehow, that poking the pirates with a sharp stick will result in immediate retaliatory strikes against their people, their mass transit systems and their infrastructure including the power grid; all of which are completely defenseless against any kind of attack.

It's kind of sad that people don't realize this yet. On the gripping hand, I'm convinced that we're now down to less than 2% of the population being aware of anything at all. You literally see this in the Blue cities now overrun with endless and increasingly violent crime and the response of law and justice system is to do absolutely nothing which begets even more violence and crime and still the system does nothing. It cannot go on.

TURNABOUT

 Next time we dip into the well of madness and insanity (modern science by consensus) we are going to practice a different method of reducing viral infections. All masked people must get triple vaccinated, stay at home and never under any circumstances, go outside. For a year.

JUST SAY NO

 If you had any doubts about the outcome of decivilizing this country and its effects on military readiness and capabilities here' your answer and it isn't pretty. This is just one snippet. Go to the link and read the rest of the article. It describes an epic tragedy that needs the a writer and soldier like Thucydides to explain what is going to happen when this army does go to war. They won't make it out of the barracks.

I have a pretty good idea, just looking at them, just how invaluable they would be in any job in the Army, much less one that required actual exertion, attention to detail and support.

 

Hey kids, don't join the military. It's way more lethal than you could ever even imagine.

TROUBLE AT THE MILL

The DNC announced today that it is voiding its support for kleptocrat dementia supreme leader Biden and offering the Führership of the Socialist Workers Party to Kamala Harris, the Presidential Vice. In other news: