I am sick and tired of the Special Council gotcha form of public deceit we have grown accustomed to as one administration tries to use law and courts to get to the bottom of the misdeeds and thievery of the previous administration but maybe we can have the Quaestors come again and with the power of the Executive Branch simply walk into any Public Office and demand answers right there and then. None of the normal bluster and delay but a simple demand for full and complete access to the books and the records and the people who work there all of whom must answer the questions asked or be fired on the spot. It's time to bring just a bit of honesty and integrity back to Government service and we can start on January 21st, 2025.

Go Cicero!

yes yes I know, the chances of finding a modern Cicero are zilch but you gotta start somewhere.

 I see that Newsom and California simply cannot help themselves from lashing out and ruining yet another good thing. I wonder if the pigbrains boggling along behind Newsom in California have looked into any forecasts on EV sales and perhaps considered that what was once a perfectly reasonable market place is now pretty much defunct. I mean, you and I know a defunct market when we see it don't we? Why yes, Comrade, yes we do. A defunct market is one that finds it is forced to SUBSIDIZE sales with government money in order to keep it afloat. Is there still a growing market for EVs in America or Europe and is it worth maintaining in the face of outright opposition and entanglement with the ruler of the State which hosts the one and only manufacturing plant that makes the THING?

Probably not.

Perhaps the Model T will be built in a state a little friendlier to business and the older models discontinued as who knows what happens. I mean at some point they're going to have to make their own version of the VW bus and you'd want to build that anywhere but California because for all it's problems it still remains the #1 place to drive a VW bus and the fun part is getting there.....Ask me how I know.

 Reading the raconteur is something I do every now and then. It is not an every day read because it really harshes the mellow and if I wanted that I'd actually read newspapers or watch broadcast or cable news and I don't any of that.

His guidance for President Trump and the baby ducks out there is on point. It is fairly easy to make things work if consequences are not something you fear. It might be time to go a little Nero or Caligula on them because, it's not like they did any better and they lost sight of the one important thing.

 If there is any truth at all to the rumor that President Trump will order the expulsion of all trans members of the military on Day One of his second administration, the idiotic powers-that-be better be notified a little in advance so that they can issue their own warning orders to make sure that those people are locked down before they can burn, purge and destroy the ships, aircraft and computer networks they have access to now. Will this happen? I don't think so but the damage that mentally deranged people with access to high explosives, root passwords and lighters can inflict on an unsuspecting and unprepared military cannot be dismissed. A handful of people could do more damage to the United States then the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor.

 but, I see that there is some excitement and happy feels over some of President Trump's nominees for the various offices in DC. The problem that we will have once again though goes right to the heart of the people that own and operate the Deep State and they ain't us. It is nice to imagine that the new head of the Department comes in and orders things to go differently now and more in the ways spelled out in our Constitution for instance but that is not how the bureaucracies work. They know that they are the owner/operators and that the titular head is a powerless dweeb who can pontificate as much as they want and nothing will change because the pontificator has no power to fire subordinates who refuse to do the jobs they are commanded to do.

In the DoD it was once possible, even in my lifetime to fire insubordinate government functionaries and officers but not so much anymore. As I recall Bush the Younger got rid of an Air Force Secretary and general who failed to follow his orders to vastly increase the number of drones and then dropped the ball repeatedly on nuclear weapon security. That was 20 years ago and nobody has been fired or reprimanded or disciplined since and it has never happened in the Justice Department or FBI or CIA or NSA or any of the other Agencies.

I think this time I'll try to get a much closer look at the Executive Orders President Trump signs and see just how he plans to shred the enemies of civilization (bureaucrats) and keep every other damned jumped up judge from Hell from slapping a nationwide injunction on his actions. I think this time he might have a word with the Supreme Court and tell them the time has come to wrap their little fingers around the long necks of the subordinate Courts and tell them the days of imposing mandatory injunctions against legal government behavior and lawful actions has at long last, come to an end.

That will be a start.

 There were stories written long ago about my favorite seagoing brigands, the pirate submarines that allegedly interfered with shipping bound into Spain during its Civil War. That was never proven and there was never any assurance as to who those pirates were but one thing that I remember from that reading was that the mere presence of "pirate submarines" obfuscated whether or not a direct attack on shipping belonging to a major European power was being conducted by a future enemy combatant.

Let us talk of drones and wide open borders. By launching direct attacks on Russia with our long range weapons many people have concerns that Putin and Russia might retaliate. The feeble minded immediately think that Putin will just counterattack with nuclear weapons but the one thing one can honestly say about Putin is that he can be both very direct and very subtle. I suspect most people never see the subtle parts because Putin is unusually blunt in delivering his warnings and discussions of consequences.

There is literally no defense against drones in the United States nor in Europe. Your clever clogs Russian agents or hired contractors simply buys a few dozen drones off the shelf in target country A-Z, fits them out with some very easy to import or manufacture high explosive with a really simple contact fuze and then flies them into every single aircraft parked on the ramp at the target airbase.

I wonder how far one can link the control signals for drones. I remember we used to put PRC-77s at high places in Alaska in retrans mode so they would retransmit our signals much longer distances. The signal would just hop from one radio to another. With a rig like that the agents could be flying drones into B2 hangers in Whiteman while the operators were sitting on a hotel balcony swigging vodka in St. Louis. 

The people running this country, whoever they are, seem to be a lot more concerned about what they can do to Russia than what Russians can do to us. Without fingerprints pointing very clearly back at Russia, any attack like this could easily be blamed on China, Russia, the Illuminati, disgruntled Democrats upset about the election, NorKs, white supremacists and aliens. Who can say since they're pirate drones.

I keep seeing reports about all kinds of wild drone activity around our military and naval installations and they can't all be seabats. I think that perhaps somebody has already walked the battlefield and prepped the drones. As usual with direct attacks on America, our Intelligence agencies will be able to tell us all about it in precise detail in the classified after-action report they come up with in 2031.

You know what is funny is the repeated rumors that Putin is a coward who goes to ground whenever Russia suffers a reverse. I'm pretty sure that is nonsense but the same people and drones that would turn a trillion dollars of war machines into flaming debris could also easily take out any public official who puts in an appearance anywhere in public. A man like Putin is all too aware of how the CIA has always favored decapitation strikes on its enemies and they have gotten pretty good at it since Kennedy mysteriously died of a cough or something while out for a drive in Dallas.

I kind of wonder what frangible 20mm ammo looks like as it rains down on Arlington but I don't really want to know. I also kind of wonder how much longer we are going to pretend that coming up with a real killer solution to the drone problem is a crash priority project like the original ICBM and that it needs to be developed and fully operational and fielded worldwide by summer of 2025.

That said, I think Putin will probably start with a demonstration of his unhappiness and probably hit something in Germany or France since they're essentially harmless. On the other hand he might start with Britain who also used its weapons to strike targets in Russia but there are so few meaningful targets left in Britain and who knows, he might take all those ATACMS personally and decide to go after the man who ordered them to attack. Who knows, maybe once Putin's agents kill him,  Americans will find out who was really running this country for the last 4 years.

The truth must lie in the facts.

            –– Judge Learned Hand

 I saw the shape and color which is identical to some very nice little trucks we picked up at the Blue Goose and thought, I'll take a look at the advertisement. That is when the price hit me.

Long ago I was tasked with program management for a small but vital part of the military industrial complex. I remember one of the Commodores we sort of worked with who demanded to know why we were spending over $85,000/HMMWV to equip the mobile units with mobile sensor platforms when, "the damned things don't even come with a CD Player?!!!!!" It was one of the more arcane meetings of the Transition Executive Working Group.

Seriously, they want $169,000 for an old red truck that runs on batteries. I swear last year they cost $11.00.

Did you ever wonder how you would have acted or behaved if you found yourself on the streets in the Weimar Republic in 1932? Well here's your chance! As far as I can tell, the only detectable difference between ANTIFA / BLM / Palestine supporting scumbags and your actual NAZIs is that the NAZIs believed in the value of hard work.

Why has our civilization let them take over the streets in the major cities of this country? Well sure, I know why and it is for a reason I support but still what the Weimar accomplished with their libertine sense and what we do with our freedom of speech needs to be re-calibrated. Rioters and Demonstrators who break the law need to go to jail and learn better.

 Every couple of weeks I see some blogger or even those at instapundit who lament that an awful lot of good blogs that were enjoyed by many readers simply succumbed to the rot that is facebook and what was twitter and the owner/operators simply stopped writing them or shifted to the new medium. I never went down the rabbit hole of either twitter or facebook and held off any efforts to get me to engage my social network 24/7 on facebook or hammer them with tweets. Heck, I didn't really start using texting on my phone until last year.

I see something like this nightmare or this horror and see that a lot of former power bloggers have gone in for substack and youtube in a big way and they want us to subscribe and perhaps pay money for the privilege of reading and viewing their daily raving. Imagine you were crazy enough to go to the first link above and listen for a minute and then take a gander at the comments and then ask yourself, "did the devils in the democratic party learn nothing at all from the last election?" 

It is a closed loop, a self-licking ice cream cone and a feature of modern politics and international diplomacy. They only listen to THEIR side of any spiel. No effort is made to find out what the untermenschen think about their proposals or outright insanity. They must really think that everyone is just as stupid, ignorant and dimwitted as they are and that is sad. I mean, I know some of them and they don't always appear to be raving lunatics but by their politics and behavior can you perceive them as anything else?

It's always been interesting to me how the winds shift and sometimes for perhaps just a brief moment the light of actual intellect will shine on them and they will be moved enough to change. You can see that today with the likes of RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk and dozens of others but it also happened to people like the author of Little Green Footballs. He was actually quite entertaining to read after he was part of the complete internet destruction of Dan Rather and 60 Minutes. Then he slowly reverted to type after a few months and went back to sipping the sweet sweet cool-aid.

I believe that the one thing that pushed the election over the edge for President Trump was Elon Musk's purchase and reform of Twitter. Without that real time insight into EVERYTHING it is possible that people would have just written off the election as a waste of time and stayed home. It's kind of sad that things never end well for the hero. On the other hand, this isn't a movie.

 It’s reading things like this that bring to mind the courtier who told the King that the people were becoming restless and perhaps the King should trim his military spending. “Ah,”said the King, “when the revolution comes, I’ll be ready.” 

One wonders how even Chicago cannot get by on over $17 billion in spending and that’s not even including what a poor job they’re doing at it. 

 You know it's just a matter of time before the Intel Community declares that it is impossible to give President Trump's nominees the necessary security clearances. Some things about those people never change.

With the military giants we have running things in the Pentagon can we just make some fundamental assumptions about our coming war with Russia? As the readers know I think everyone who is not a member of the military or former member of the military believes somehow that despite not paying anywhere near enough to sustain such a thing, every red blooded American liberal just knows that we have military bases and ammo stocks all over the place and so stuffed to bursting they just naturally ooze bullets and avgas into the surrounding environment. We know this isn't so but they don't and I suspect even their twits in Congress think that they are sitting on a robust Army/Navy/Air Force of millions of men thirsting for blood manning the finest killing machines ever forwarded for battle.

As the tide turns and the garbage military leaders we have now are replaced by a suddenly more truthful, honest, forthcoming and better looking bunch, do you suspect that the truth will slowly leach out of the Pentagon? Yeah me neither.

Where do you think all of that artillery and artillery ammunition came from that we shipped to Ukraine? Yes I know some of you really do think that it was shipped from the Arsenal of Democracy which is somewhere down the road in Kansas or Alabama but I suspect that it was shipped from the war reserve stocks of such things that we used to have so much of in Germany. It was shipped with the predicate that it would, of course, be replaced immediately. You know that never happened. In fact boffins that care can look deep into the Budget and see the line item for replacing all those 155mm rounds and the HIMARS and even the blank spot where the ATACMS replacements are not listed.

Well I hear people wonder, if there is no enormous force backed up with megatons of arms and ammo how are we ever going to get the Russians to leave Ukraine? Wait for it,......

I think if we ask them politely to stop fighting they could be persuaded to call it a day and stop fighting without us putting so much as one of her feet on the ground in Ukraine. 

It was a war that didn't need to happen and which should not have happened and for which the people who enabled it and funded it long after the point where it would have ended without their interference will never suffer enough for their crimes and for killing and maiming a million men and destroying industrialized Ukraine for nothing. In a just world there would be war crimes trials for the people that made this war happen and continued it long beyond the point where it had any meaning.

When I was young and still going to school and living at home, it was the first and second grade but who is counting, I remember that the television was sometimes rolled along into the kitchen doorway between the kitchen and dining room (there was no room in the kitchen) and it would sit there in the on position while we ate dinner between tornadoes and other exciting things incident on living in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The TV never made an appearance in the kitchen again until my father retired long after we had all grown up and left home.

I remark on this because it seems to be everywhere all the time and it wasn't always that way. Now I see that people who dine together at home are accused of bringing their devices to the table lest they miss out on some exciting new development while they're dining in company with the family. I laughed at the idea of this in a young family today (I don't know anything about young families today since they're darned scarce around here) but it occurs to me in retrospect why the TV made its first appearance so long ago at the dining table of the family gathering in the year 1968.

Yea, my father the Captain had just returned from Vietnam and he was at the Command and General Staff College as a student alongside such future luminaries as Colin Powell and the one and only way a young Captain who had spent a lifetime fighting in Vietnam could keep up with what was going on in a place so critical to his life was to watch the damned news and when did the damned news come on? That's right. The news comes on at Dinner Time.

Well it's not like that anymore is it?

 One of the greatest things about the internet and world wide web is that everyone can finally go to the source and see what the ground / real truth of the matter is. In this case the ground truth that is available now is pretty hard to find but it is still out there. All one needs to do is to trace back to what your enemy actually said himself.

It is now the nature of what passes for the news to put words in their enemy's throat and then crow about the very evil thing they attribute to him. When one looks for this quote directly from the man who allegedly said it one always finds that it is either made up or quoted out of context. It's really that simple. There are zillions of people who hate Trump not for what he said or what he did but because his enemies throughout the press and media and entertainment attribute things to him that he never did or said.

If you are stupid enough to care enough to debate with someone on any of the examples that instantly spring to mind you will find that they always go to their reliable source. It doesn't matter that you have asked them to go to the actual source of the quote they hate. Nope, they will instantly tell you that they got it from MSNBC or CBS and that they don't lie and only a conspiracy theorists thinks that they do.

You all are easily smarter than to argue with a convinced and dyed in the wool enemy of civilization but it has to happen somewhere or there wouldn't be the occasional conversion such as Tulsi Gabbard and JFK Jr et al. On the gripping hand, I have no idea at all what motivates retired generals to spew hatred of Trump. One of the profound lessons of our history was that it was best if the military leadership eschewed all politics. There was an oft heard rule of the Wardroom Mess in the Navy that we pretty much observed everyday for over a hundred years even after President Eisenhower, no discussion of politics, women or religion. There was literally nothing to be gained by doing so and only friction as a result of it.

There is a lot of happy talk about unification and hopeyness but I really want to see the people responsible for the disaster that was our COVID Campaign tried, convicted and sentenced to long jail terms and fines and the same for those who weaponized the FBI, CIA, NSA and all the rest against American citizens. The only deterrent to such behavior in the future is the knowledge that those who behave like that get punished and punished severely.

 I was attempting to read an article linked by the instapundit and it led me to Twitchy which then demanded that I consent to every kind of monitoring, advertising, uploading, sideloading, info sharing and mind-bending they could/can/will think of and I was curious so I tried to find out which way the slider positions they wanted me to use worked to keep their crap out of my systems and lo and behold there is no way on earth for me to determine which way moving the slider will affect the consents they want and I don't want to give them and then came this little winner.

I   think Buck would have laughed at that sentence. That's a runon for sure. I'm pretty sure he would have joined me in inviting Twitchy to get lost.

 I would be fascinated to learn who President Trump selects this time for his national security staff and hope that a few of them are students of history and war. One of the things he can do right off the bat without exciting any fanatical opposition from the sane left is to announce a complete air and sea blockade on Yemen until they stop their attacks on all shipping. We'll get played of course but I think President Trump is in a playful mood now so we'll see how that works out for Yemen and Iran. And of course if we have to shoot down any Iranian planes we'll just say it was an accident. We've done that before so there is precedent and Iran knows it.

I think the President can probably end the war in Ukraine by simply stepping up and announcing the Zelensky memorial Nobel Peace Prize and by calling in that little weasel and telling him that the current front-line is the new eastern border of Ukraine, that Ukraine is effectively cut off entirely from every form of weapon and ammunition the US provides and that the War is Over. One of the things us sane people know for a fact is that Putin does not want anything out of Ukraine except what was agreed previously by all the Powers and he wants NATO to stay the fuck out.

I think President Trump might also send in some forensic auditors to find out just exactly who the Ukrainians have been bribing with the billions of dollars we gave them and how many of our people they bought and then prosecuting the hell out of all of them and wrecking their lives forever. A million dead men killed in a particularly stupid and savage war need some justice.

I honestly don't think that President Trump will do much to reconstitute the old Cold War Army/Navy and Air Force because it is not needed or wanted and if we leave something like that lying around again the damned neocons will undoubtedly find some war to plug it into just to make a little profit. No, there is no great concern about China taking China since all have been in basic agreement since before reunification of Hong Kong that there is One China. It has always been a matter of time for when it pulls itself back together and guess what peeps? China doesn't want Indochina and it doesn't want Thailand, Singapore or South Korea. What it wants is oil, gas and its supply lines to Africa and Australia intact and barring a complete domestic collapse the only country that China is a threat to lies to its north. There is no reason on earth for the United States to go to war over any resources lying on the bottom of the China Sea. It's not our Sea and they are not our resources. If ASEAN want to fight for them, let them build their own power and use it to scare China into sharing. Our Navy doesn't work for the Philippines or even Japan.

I have no real solutions to cleaning the fouled houses of the Bureaucracies, Intelligence Agencies and Military. Those were seeded with utterly corrupt left wing fanatics who have spent the last 30 years self-selecting themselves and their ilk for promotion and they now control every level of the Bureaucracy and military. Every general, every admiral is a product of selection boards that met and considered officers for promotion without regard to merit but with only a measured and critical eye as to how steeped in the new evil they were. The ones wearing stars now are all of the evil variety. You can take it to the bank. Ditto the Senior Executive Service, Senior Foreign Service and every Agency based in DC.

Those people are long overdue for transfer to their new offices in Lawrence, Kansas, Montgomery, Alabama, and other idyllic spots like that.  Hell, you can put them all up in Oahu for all of me. That would be far enough away unless we throw in Guam and American Samoa. That supreme idealism that sees so many young and upcoming patriots thirst to lap up the public service spirit is mostly based on getting their butts to Washington, DC and I suspect it will fall off in direct proportion to how far away they are from their goal.

We're going to need a good man running the Senate but I'm afraid we'll get another squish. The uniParty is always in control even when it looks like the more evil side has fallen on its sword. Still, there are a number of things a President can do despite the uniParty and the squishiness of our Congressional servants.

When you think about these the United States and you consider the last batch of candidates do you think what we were offered comes anywhere close to our best and brightest? Feel free to hate the men but the people I saw supporting the Trump campaign were some of our better and brighter people. I cannot say that about the Dems.

I live in the midwest now in a town stuffed with doctors and lawyers and professionals of every type and any one of them on a bad day is a better American than what was offered us by the uniparty this time or the last time or the time before that. What is it going to take before real Americans start standing up and taking back the Parties from the pirates and thieves running them now?

 I'm sure we're all fascinated in learning what happened to the missing 17 million democrat voters that seem to have vanished from the Earth after they pulled the lever for Biden. I've heard the Rapture came along and we missed it. I heard they were abducted by aliens. I've heard they were turned into pet food in secret factories in China. I'm kind of surprised that the entire world is not wondering where all those morons went. It is significantly more people missing then from Covid or from the war in Ukraine or even shot in Chicago last week although nobody really cares about that all that much.

Where did they go?

 Surprised by the lack of tears this morning at the local coffee shop. Did overhear a conversation next to me from two democrat party organizers who were lamenting the results but the really amusing part was listening to the two of them attempting to wrestle with the why? republicans voted the way they did and coming up with dunderhead reasons. I was tempted to suggest that the drop back and punt and just ask a republican but no, that isn't why I go to coffee shops.

This was amusing from A Large Regular: 

"... If you doubt that a butterfly flapping his wings in Texas can cause a storm in Asia just remember this all started by Obama making jokes at Trump's expense and Biden not inviting Elon to an EV summit at the White House. Neither picked this fight and were both Democrats at the time..."

And now I'm off to see if it is possible to buy in this benighted former swing state a rat trap of the size and killing power that were so freely available to me back when I lived in Encinitas but don't seem real anymore. I've had a rat that muscled past the bars and locks and is roaming the basement eat the kibble right off the killing charge plate 3 times without so much as twitching. I need something with 50,000 volts.

 I keep seeing in the places I look for this kind of news an almost total absence about any meaningful weapons research that the United States is carrying out on anti-drone warfare. It is kind of important now and growing more important every day and yet we haven't even begun to codify the law on the use/employment of anti-drone technology and tactics around our vital national interests. Any stranger can fly a drone over any military base or government building in this country and it is no harm/no foul. (Don't try to fly a kite on the beach at NASNI or in the shipping channel between NASNI and Point Loma because the base cops et al really hate that). OTGH, they can't do anything about it but insist that you stop doing it since they lack the means to stop you.

Should Trump win I don't doubt but that there will be a huge explosion in drones directed at the White House but that isn't even the most critical installation, not by a million miles. It is after all, just a house. Nobody really thinks Governing takes place there anymore and certainly not after all those rats scum and other generals erupted out of the Trump administration. It is even more true given the obvious fact that the current president is just barely adequate as a figure head and hasn't had a geo-political  or military thought straight in his head since 1976.

The infrastructure of the country is vulnerable everywhere. Think of true partisan warfare along the lines of what was going on against the German army in places ranging from Stalingrad all the way down to Rome. The Germans were left with bloody reprisals which obviously won't work here. The partisans are already out there ready to go.

Antifa fascists were just warming up 6 years ago. They are getting much much more dangerous and one splendid reason for that is that as usual, we have given Russia and like minded anti-globalists every reason to hate and fear us and they can thus see no end to the goodness of giving a little fiscal support to our internal domestic enemies of civilization so that they can strike out at America with impunity. Good job Soros and democrats everywhere and those feeble minded progressive/liberal morons that dwell in Suburbia in great numbers.

You literally don't have to go to far out of your way to think how this plays out if the Bad Guys win. Imagine the chagrin of all liberals everywhere if somebody simply went around in one night and cut down and made off with every single EV charging cable. I hear that there is a lot of copper in them and it seems nobody, especially the police everywhere, takes much interest in scrap metal like that showing up at scrap yards in the perfectly ordinary way where the scrap merchants simply weight it and pay the thieves owners who are selling it. 

It will be fascinating because the people I know have poor impulse control already are about to be goaded into madness by the media. And keep in mind that the people who hunted down and killed P'nut are out there and they're both excitable and gullible.

 I read a headline like the one copied below and I almost immediately think back to the days of racing small boats at Annapolis and their coach out on the water with us in a Boston Whaler riding up to the various losers in last place in any one of the 9 or 10 races of the day and shouting loudly at them using a loud hailer for maximum effect that, "Your position has been established." It was the signal for that set of losers to head back to the starting line so we could start the next race rather than let them finish.

I suppose if you work for the State Department it is safe to say of you if you ever find yourself working in Mogadishu at our embassy there that, your position has been established. You probably won't be rising to the top at any time in the future.

 I keep running across things like this on Instapundit and I wondered to myself if anybody actually watches Bill Maher. I never did and don't know anyone who ever watched him and I think he's just an invention of the Left who got away with creating phake celebrities for decades after they discovered the Kradashians.

On the other hand I never really thought anybody read People Magazine until I used to find well thumbed copies of it stuffed into the soundproofing in After Steering.

 As I've said before, you can learn a lot from reading Spengler. He's on X and still writing for Asia Times.

I don't think there's even the remotest chance that the named parties will refrain for even an instant from being psychopaths. It's what they are.