You read the words, "based on a study conducted at UC Berkeley" or, "based on a study conducted by Harvard researchers" and you simply ignore the rest of the article because you have no confidence whatsoever that the research is accurate, repeatable, true or meaningful?
In the old days I would have given research preceded by those words the same weight that I would have given to a Rand study or analysis.
As I look around the world tonight I see a number of countries are now basically involved in overt warfare with neighbors or other countries they truly hate and despise. This has happened before and likely always will but I wonder if there is some sort of mystical tipping point where when the number of countries exceeds the X do other countries feel free to get all bellicose too and attack their neighbors or the allies?
You have to admit that based on press reports many of the countries in Europe have gone barking mad and all in a froth to attack/wage war on Russia and the thing I wonder about is, Why? More than that, what do they plan to use in this attack on the petrol station with a burger joint? The diplomats (if one can refer to the idiotic fascist morons like Verhofstadt as a diplomat) are thoroughly enraged and demand that others immediately suffer and die until he is happy. He wants Europe=NATO to attack Russia. Various idiots in the rest of greatly expanded and much less useful NATO also want to carve up Putin and don't seem to be aware that he is the one holding the knife while they're just holding bags of hot air.
It's interesting in that South and Central America are flickering on the point of collapse of civilization as they know it. Brazil is back in the hands of the lunatic left, Venezuela is a mad dog and is either at war or just winding one up that no one has ever heard of when they elected to try to slice off the oily part of Guyana and it is only a matter of time until a coup topples Milei in Argentina. Oligarchs never like the likes of that guy and they figure they screwed up massively when they followed Peron and don't want to do that again even if it leads to a Chavez moment in Buenos Aires.
At home we have an enormous collection of dedicated fools and jackasses who want to fight China. I have yet to hear even one single reason why we should provoke China over any little thing and to be honest, there is no major thing out their that is soiling our relations. Nobody in America really cares about the South China Sea and by that I mean NOBODY CARES AT ALL.
As I've written before, I'd be a little more concerned if any of the warmongers actually had any kind of military legs to stand on but the only remaining powers are the rational ones acting in their own rational best interests. The odd man out may be Israel but I don't know enough about that but I will speculate,
there is a field of study that very carefully looks at trends and projects them into the future. One of the trends that affects the state of Israel is all too easy to project and it isn't pretty. Yes they got the neighbors all calmed down and the divisions between the shiite, sunni and the outright nationalists like Egypt have limited the scale of the conflict in recent decades the trend for induced war from far away has been accelerating without letup and shows every sign of doom. You saw the Iranian overt attack and now you know, if they had the capability to drop a weapon of mass destruction on Israel they wouldn't hesitate for a moment.
You see, they were once a pariah and then they got something incredibly damaging on the people that run the Democratic Party and they started to reenter the fold but then the West through them an incredible bone and jacked up Russia and China to the point that they decided to go all-in to destroy the existing Bretton-Woods World Order and Iran was one of the first to join them.
Now Iran has an air defense system that doesn't just rival America's, it exceeds it by dozens of orders of magnitude. There is nothing at all between any enemy missile or drone and any American city except vaporware.
What changed in the world since 2013 that has a significance that nobody even knows about because they don't understand it? A private company relaunched the space age and anything that can put a payload into orbit can put a warhead anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes. You better hope they don't share their technology or know-how with anyone.
It's time to consider that the old ABM treaties are dead as doornails and ponder what if anything we can do to provide missile defenses in America.
I think it’s amusing that the team that always does it also fails to notice how destructive it can really be when the other real enemy inserts its sleeper partisans into any organization and uses them to take over or take down the organization from within. The history of the 20th Century is rich with examples of organizations toppled by their own arrogance and assumption that everyone is really all the same deep down and inside.
The Catholic Church
Mainline Protestant churches
The American Library Association
NAACP
ACLU
US Military
Every single public and most private universities
The list is really endless. Just look what they did to Boeing and NASA.
The ruling elite have engineered a war between nuclear powers now and it seems that somewhere in Israel a room full of ruling elites are pondering just wtf do they do now. Much like the feckless idiots in Europe who seem to want a war with Russia or our own feckless morons who seem to want a war with China, the Israelis have got what was wished upon them. Now what? I'm curious how a nation of 6 million with endless frontier of nothing but hostile powers is going to wage any kind of meaningful war against Iran.
Here we may see the 'sleepers' awake and not just promise to murder the Bakersfield City Council in their homes for not passing a binding resolution supporting the terrorists murderers in Hamas. We can hope that they will focus their effort on those who deserve it most. You know the people in New York City and Washington, DC, aka, the usual targets but I suspect they'll go after the infrastructure (power and water supplies and critical bridges). Everybody just saw again just how easy it is to make a steel structure collapse and we are a nation of elderly steel bridges and buildings.
We'll see how the hysteria plays out in the UN councils and in StupidLand which meets in either Strasbourg or Belgium.
Between the two of them, Iran and Russia control just how much of the worlds fossil fuels? Interesting question. We will see if the pirates can shut down the fuel deliveries out of the rest of the Gulf that didn't buy into pipelines across the Kingdom (good friend of Uncle Jo Biden) and see what the oil port of Yanbu is up to in terms of millions of tons of crude oil shipped/month. Pipelines are safe of course. They're inviolate. On the gripping hand, the Houthis started this drone attack 'malarky' when they started targeting, attacking and destroying Saudi Aramco oil production and distribution systems a few years ago. You remember our response was to question the Saudi's request for PATRIOT missile systems.
For those watching at home you are about to experience the shrieks of denial as the ruling elite suddenly understand that somehow the bad actors in the Pentagon and Intel Community since 2001 have destroyed 100% of America's forcible entry capability, gutted the Marine Expeditionary Force (also gutted almost 100% of the Amphibious lift needed to get the Marines to the scene of the crime) and of course gutted the Maritime Preposition Forces and the old POMCUS sites. NATO isn't a shadow of what it was even in 1996 as it started to discard 100% of the War Reserve materials that USAREUCOM had maintained for generations.
I had a friend back in San Diego who was Supply Corps captain who was called to Hawaii every year for a month or two to conduct a complete review of CINCPAC's ammunition requirements and capabilities. I never asked how bad it was because it was classified and because I didn't want to know. Years earlier as a fire control officer I watched as we cross-decked our cruise missiles from ship to ship because we didn't have nearly enough to outfit every launcher we had even back in 1985 and of course, we shut down our cruise missile production lines years ago and don't actually make any of them anymore. The clever bean counter solution to the problem was proposed and acted on. They reasoned that if they slashed the number of ships that carried cruise missiles, they could reduce both inventory and the number of cross-decked missiles.....
Americans and Westerners believe that there is this enormous latent power that we can draw upon to save ourselves with and it's not really worth convincing them that what the Congress and BRAC started at the end of the Cold War has left US much less capable than when we started World War II. Historians will know that we started to rearm shortly after great Britain but without much intensity until Pearl Harbor. All of that then latent war production is long gone. We shipped it over to China like the Globalists and ruling elite desired along with little things like our ability to make steel.
We are looking at a world at war and we have almost nothing forward deployed outside of a tripwire in Korea. We have less then 100 warships to tangle with the navies of Russia, China and Iran and how many of them have a sleeper in the crews that knows that all it takes is one little fire to destroy a nuclear submarine or a big deck amphibious ship? Used to wonder if the sleepers were Russians but now I wonder if they are Russian, Chinese, mercenary, muslims, communists/anarchists or EcoFreaks.
I cannot imagine the process for conducting a background check on a person for a TS clearance today. Just what abhorrent and disgusting behavior in a person's background now would disqualify them from being granted a security clearance. Off the top of my head, nothing. Our secrets now are our enemies secrets or at least their morning reading materials with breakfast and coffee.
I wonder how soon we will hear the ruling class decide that bringing back the DRAFT is now necessary.
Interesting times.
It almost defies belief just how badly democrats and their bureaucrats in the Deep State and State Department can fuck things up in the international realm. If you thought things were bad with a war in Ukraine, war in Gaza and a wide open border invasion in the United States, you ain't seen nothing yet.
If the Iran decides to go all belligerent it will be because it decided that it could, once again, get away with it. Where in the world would they come up with the idea that Biden, Blinken and Austin are too feckless to carry off a successful deterrence or war? Really the headline says it all.
I've seen some people reference this attack and just causally drop in to the mix that the IRGN killers were in either the Iranian Embassy or a next door Iranian Consulate and therefore!!!!!! Causus Belli!!!!!
How quickly we forget, the USAF bombed Chinese Embassy in Belgrade but we only killed a small handful of young Chinese journalists who were sleeping in quarters in the Embassy while the USAF destroyed the building. But read the whole thing and then ponder the dimwits out there thriving as they malign the IDF for hitting civilians in their wildly out of control and disproportional attacks in Gaza. The below is from our friend at A Large Regular.
How has the entire Western World raised a mass of morons who think that somehow war is waged by only targeting men bearing weapons and just them? War is way more elemental than that which is why sane people go so far out of their way to avoid it. Our political class seem to see a profit in it though so that means that war will invariably and inevitably come for us now.
Going back to Iran at war with the IDF, you remember a little while ago I mentioned that there was a time when I only thought there there was one crazy maniac who was likely to see nukes as the go to weapon of choice and wouldn't hesitate? Yeah, that was Kim but the Mullahs are even worse than Kim and they have demonstrated an endless willingness to kill innocents on par with the USAF. They now have thousands of sleeper agents here in the United States and millions more on call. You thought the Tanker War saw a spike in oil prices? Wait until the Strait of Hormuz is completely closed and trapped in the Gulf are USN ships than now have no way out.
I think every NPR host/hostess, servile purveyor of socialism, should introduce literally every single person as "an extreme right wing" or "far right" maniac of some sort. This includes interviews with the likes of the ghost of Madeline Albright or Hillary Clinton and also people like Al Sharpton. Every other time each person is mentioned but not interviewed that person needs to be described as either a racist or a closet/classic racist. Any NAACP or Southern Poverty Law maniacs must be described as supporting white supremacy and white privilege since it is after all their shtick and how they make their living. You know, racism.
You know the howls of sheer outrage could power SPACE X orbital launchs for the next 30 years if noise alone was needed for liftoff and orbit.
There is a hateful class running this country and its media liars who regularly lie to the people every day. One thing that ought to make that crystal clear to everyone in this country and the world is a refusal by ANY PRESIDENTIAL candidate to debate the issues of the day with the candidate(s) of the other party.
If BIDEN refuses to meet in the open and debate with President Trump then the doors have blown off the scam we still call democracy in this republic. We have really become a 3rd world shithole.
This is not new but have you considered what it means to you personally?
I'd be very careful where I shop and I have concerns about the middle passage all my food makes on its way to the grocery store. The freaks will get jobs in food processing and handling and if you thought finding spit or detergent in your fast food was a real possibility or even food tainted with ptomaine and other diseases, just think about all the things that people without morals or conscience can add to the food you eat.
And here you thought that buying Tylenol was not without risk.
I wonder what form of asymmetric nuclear attack platform will be used to incinerate parts of Iran? I haven’t really looked into their version of our SSBN and have no idea if they possess long range missiles.
I also wonder if the US is positioning forces to reflect such a strike on the real axis of evil.
There is nothing so awful in the world today that it cannot be made infinitely worse by ‘decisive’ actions from the likes of Biden, Harris, Austin and Blinken.
It is probably not a good time to fly or visit DC and our whipping city.
And what irks me is that I’ve really been looking for some positive news to reflect on here.
I think it is really amusing that literally everyone knew a certain thing would turn out exactly as it did except those most fanatically devoted to bringing about its obvious demise. Here is the story that announces that the Golden Gate Park funtime at Hippie Hill won't come off because, wait for it....
That's right, all the State Sponsored pot growers and sellers went broke trying to sell pot the only way that the government of California knows. In other words they were undercut and gutted by a marketplace that doesn't admit to and rejects the entire idea of paying taxes of any kind.
You knew that's how it would end too, didn't you?
There is no detectable difference between a fanatic and an idealist who believes he is working for the good of humanity.
Rest assured, if you're not passionate about something you like, there are a thousand people who passionately hate it.
My new favorite from a commentator far away, "Say what you want about Hitler, at least he killed Hitler."
Why do so many horrible creatures go unkilled even after people know that they are evil unbound?
If a mob rounded up the top 1% of the wealthy and their families in this country and guillotined them, nobody would raise a finger to stop them. Hell, you could say that about every graduate of the Ivy League for the last 50 years.
Thanks to Biden and his friends, we have invited the mob. It is now just a matter of time.
It will come as no surprise to anybody that the US Government will leap in to assist those unprincipled thieves living in and around Baltimore just because some lousy ship ran into their bridge and will therefore divert maybe hundreds of millions/if not billions!!!!! to replacing that shoddy bridge and maybe even providing some kind of income for a scant handful (union members only I'm afraid) of people who lost their livelihoods when the Port was closed by force majeure.
Those rotten Tards in Washington will undoubtedly look to seize and divert that money from the righteous do-gooding enabling in Ukraine and Israel and that's just insufferable!!!
I'm sure the Department of Justice is going after the bridge builders who made that flaky shaky piece of junk flimsy ass bridge because no bridge should fall over after getting nudged by a ship of any size. I mean they'll do that just as sure as no Democrats were involved in the project.
The ship lost power and went dark for a couple of minutes and then the lights came back on but it had swung significantly off course before the lights came back on which means the rudder must have been put over while there was power and when it went out there was no power to bring the rudder back amidships and then the ship regained power and a minute later lost it again and hit the bridge.
The entire truss section of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is gone. Scroll over to see where the bridge is just gone and you can watch the collision.
I enjoy reading the Powerline Blog and never really had any problems even back when one of the staff was a complete imbecile. They usually rip the news out of the facts presented by the mainstream media and leave enough meat on the bone to enjoy getting the sense that one knows what's going on. Other times it is pretty clear that they still don't quite understand a significant portion of the electorate and that they don't care that they don't understand it. This pretty much sums up their thoughts on our current uniparty.
Every sane person sees and knows that this isn't so. The very instant that it appears that by united action and a firm stand the situation can be brought under control, the G03dadkdamgaond#@@!!!!! cave and do exactly what the maniac liberal wing of the uniparty demands and the liberal turds of the fake side of the uniparty think the real conservatives should just suck it up and shut up and keep playing ball. It's maddening.
They do it every single damned time.
The Russians have just trashed the electrical power grid in Ukraine and done it in a more or less permanent way. They actually blew the generators apart this time instead of just attacking the power distribution grid. There is a wonderfully informative timeline of the the effects of war on operating nuclear reactors in Ukraine. It's worth a look and so is this: It gets going for our purposes at about the 6 minute mark.
Nuclear power station require reliable electricity in the event of reactor shutdowns. It is critical that the cooling process be maintained even when the reactor loses power. That's what killed Chernobyl and Fukushima. They lost the power and thus the ability to cool the reactors which either exploded or melted down.
I don't really know if I hope that the people that just attacked a Moscow theater did a thorough job of cleaning their fingerprints off the operation designed to goad President Putin to lash out very strongly at whoever he thinks/believes is responsible. Sadly, in this fallen age, I think even the palestinians could leave a convincing enough evidence trail leading back to Langley that a child could follow it there. I don't doubt for a second that if Putin does find out who is ultimately responsible for this it will be followed by a tidal wave of unstoppable missiles.
Right now I know of 3 men (nuclear power world leaders) who could push the nuclear button without a qualm or flicker of humanity. It used to be for generations that we only had the one madman and people left that madman alone or paid whatever was necessary to keep him in the game.
The latest broadside from the Navy and Department of Defense reflects the infected mind that dominates Washington, DC and the political elites running the country. It is summed up by two different documents that recently flew over the transom. They lay out in no uncertain terms the 'self-licking ice-cream cone' that is so thinly disguised as Defense planning by the people that are lining us up for the next unwinnable war and let's be honest, these guys are masters at losing unwinnable wars. Their record since the Korean War speaks for itself. It has been an endless stream of pointless and stupid wars that we failed to win. The last one was a first class debacle on par with Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Let's take a quick look at the Defense Department's proposal for the next 25 years of building USN capabilities and then look at what the Commander-in-Chief Pacific has to say about the near future and current events. It's eye opening.
Here is the Report to Congress on the Long Range Plan for Naval Construction and here is the takeaway I mean to give for this work of complete fiction.
"Lastly, the DoN recognizes the significant strategic opportunity presented by the
Australia, United Kingdom, and United States (AUKUS) trilateral security pact. AUKUS
will advance peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region and strengthen deterrence by
enhancing all three nations’ technical capabilities, expanding allied fleet capacity, and
deepening cooperation. "
You can see that the intent of our expansion of fleet capabilities will lead to all good things and deterrence too! Now let us have a look at what CINCPAC lays out in his testimony to Congress on the doings of the Pacific Area under his benevolent command:
You probably noticed how America building up all of its expeditionary warfare capabilities and lodging them just as close as we can to China constitutes peace and good will but China exercising the same sort of defense buildup is a Peril to World Peace!!!!!
I think there are some hidden adults pulling a few strings out of sight from you and me and mostly from the them because the morons running things openly have to be seeing that they don't begin to have anywhere near the capabilities to fight a war against China or Russia without losing outright in a matter of weeks and they have to know that the Norks will launch nuclear attacks at the first sign of US crossing the Demilitarized Zone. As badly made and directed as you might think their ballistic missiles are, they won't have any trouble hitting the Greater Seoul Metropolitan Area and Japan is almost impossible to miss.
Speaking of them both, these are another two countries that the ignoratti insist on calling our "allies". Let's be very clear here. They and Israel count on us but they are no more an ally of America than NATO or the EU is our ally. Should we get stuck into a fight anywhere else on the planet they will be conspicuous by their total and complete absence.
The time for working out the little details like for instance, just what are the conditions under which we declare that we won and proclaim our victory over Russia or China or both of them? Be specific. Use plenty of words to describe the conditions in full so everyone can see just what it is you are setting out to do by jumping into a war with either country and how you mean to extract us from it after losing 40,000 to 100,000 people and battle groups and most of our Air Force. Enquiring minds want to know.
Let's not have another Milley laying it out before Congress saying absolutely nobody is/was to blame for the fiasco of our withdrawal from Afghanistan or the tragedy that was Iraq. In a much larger war, our war aims were stated upfront and in no uncertain terms and what's more our generals, our allies and even our enemies knew what they were and we saw them through to the end. Let's not putter about muttering 'regime change'. under our breath even as we're getting our asses kicked by hyper-sonic missiles and an endless stream of ship-killers launched out of China.
Our secret masters who are somehow refusing even now to open the spigot and fund a massive weapons procurement and military buildup have decided that there is nobody left in the Pentagon or in the hinterlands that can be trusted with such a thing. That's really sad when you think about it and when you realize they saw the writing on the wall right around the time they saw the political animal, General Wesley Clark try to start World War III in Yugoslavia and Vern Clarke strip mine the Navy of ships and talent. I hope our "allies" are giving it a lot of thought because despite the news and rhetoric coming out of our dismal media and think tanks, the situation on the ground, in the air and at sea is bleak and growing bleaker every day.
We may be the last people in America who know that we never formally ended the war with China in 1952 and that is why we still keep US forces in Korea and Japan to this day. We could not win a war with China then and we cannot win a war with China today.
Endnote. When you read the bits I pasted in from CINCPAC note that the People's Liberation Army and China started to increase the size and complexity and the sheer numbers of their forces as they watched the United States collapse internally by the twisted machinations of those we call the neocons. They saw an out of control America that did not hesitate to throw its armed forces into action against literally every country in the world. Maybe next we'll look at the countless and endless cruise missile attacks and all the rest of them that we know about and we'll wonder forever who killed Kennedy and just who blew up the Russian-European gas pipelines in the Baltic.
Thomas Stafford stepped into the clearing on Monday. He was one of the most select group America ever fielded. I was looking at his various biographies this morning and was struck by how different it is from the biographies of the men and women of similar position but significantly less stature and I decided to include this biography of the man because it enables links that let you scroll through the related topics that concern his life and times.
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Thomas Stafford (right) shakes hands with cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in the docking tunnel between Apollo and Soyuz in July 1975.Credit: AFP |
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| Thomas Patten Stafford (September 17, 1930 – March 18, 2024) |
One of the last of the Pioneers of my times.
At a little workshop down by the reservoir the other day. Looks like a sliding ladder from a fine old library.
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I stopped at the bank to get some cash for my new barber and found this friendly notice giving us plenty of time to prepare for the coming ‘sun blotted out’ darkness. Good thing, eh? Wouldn’t want be standing around in the twilight and have to kick myself for not getting to the bank before darkness falls.
