Infamy Lives

This shot of Pearl Harbor is from October 1941, less than two months before the fateful attack. (Millenials and Common Core grads, Google "WWII". Trust me, it's a thing.)

Somebody who was only 17 that morning would be 95 today. The average age of those serving was 26, which tallies to 104 years of age now. IOW, dead. Nearly everyone from that conflict has already passed away. If you meet anyone who served then, anywhere, show some respect for your betters. They earned it, before you were born.

Then ponder that the US Navy and Army, now, are about as weak and small as they were on that day. Also twice as hamstrung, and fourfold more aimless and clueless. On a bigger, badder world stage, with even fewer allies, and a media totally captured by enemy agents and influence.

Ponder what that portends in coming days and years. Both for yourself, and 300M of your friends and neighbors.

Idiot Savants

From Comments

The upcoming generation of morons who embrace the high-tech battery-powered whiz-kid horseshit by itself are going to pay a heavy toll when it shits the bed in combat, either from primary or logistical failure, and they're left with aught but high-priced clubs.

In riflery, just as in auto racing, the true professionals learn the old ways, because the lessons have been paid for in actual blood.

Hunger And Starvation Are Powerful Teaching Tools...

h/t Moonbattery

Pretty sure the exiled white farmers' answer is:
"Not happening. Go %#@! yourselves."

...plus, for the really egregious world-class @$$holes, like the Special Ones in Zimbabwe, the after-effects are fun to watch.

Like realizing that due to their own utter incompetence and endemic kleptocracy, they are the one place where Diversity really was their Strength.

(REALITYVILLE) Crisis-torn Zimbabwe is on the brink of “manmade starvation” with most households unable to obtain enough food to meet basic standards, a UN envoy has said.

This comes 17 years after Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwean government seized large swathes of land from white farmers in the country, triggering a rapid downturn in the country’s economy.

“The people of Zimbabwe are slowly getting to a point of suffering a manmade starvation,” said Hilal Elver, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.

“More than 60% of the population of a country once seen as the breadbasket of Africa is now considered food insecure, with most households unable to obtain enough food to meet basic needs due to hyperinflation,” said Elver.

How did the “breadbasket of Africa” reach the point of “manmade starvation“?

News24 reports that Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party launched the controversial land reforms in 2000, forcibly seizing white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks. Mugabe said the reforms were meant to correct colonial land ownership imbalances.

At least 4,000 white commercial farmers were evicted from their farms.

RTWT

Boo frickin' hoo, communist fucktards. If you want food, I'll send you my trash bags to rifle through; I may have left some pizza crusts in there.

And maybe, as your bellies bloat and your vision dims, you can ponder the white farmers you killed, whose families you raped, and whose land you stole outright, because you never learned to read well enough to understand the parable of the Golden Goose, and your surviving population will stop going for lying leaders telling them that if they just cut the Goose open, they'll be rich too.

The people that they robbed and exiled?

For some values of "people" it's always fun to watch gravity working, in a Wile E. Coyote sort of utter predictability.

Coming soon: the SAfrican version. Bloodthirsty Ramaphosa, having an IQ in the mid 50s, wants to repeat the exact same failed confiscatory policies there too, because White Man Bad.

If white farmers ever return to either place, it should be at the head of armored columns, pushing the same terms Phil Sheridan gave American Indians.

Last Ebola Update of 2019

We called this one last month: The outbreak, while still active, has virtually been stopped dead in its tracks.
In the last month, there have been only 13 additional deaths (in a month!), and the number of confirmed EVD cases has gone down. (IOW, some cases they thought were Ebola, turned out not to be.)

Caveats:
1) It's Africa: they could f**k up a crowbar in a sandpile, and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory left unsupervised. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

2) There are a couple of areas of active outbreak where the armed nitwits there have driven  away all aid, clinic, contact tracking, and vaccination efforts. This is roughly the equivalent of having a gunfight inside a nuclear power plant. In both cases, everything could blow up catastrophically.

But based on how it looks, this one's going to go away, eventually.
Think happy thoughts.

This is what happens when it hits people too poor to get away, and we have a highly effective vaccine.

So far, so good.

Until next time.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One...

h/t Kenny

(FORT FULLASHIT) In recent years, soldiers have seen a flurry of upgrades and new weapons, ammunition and optics added to their arsenal at a rate that outpaces previous decades of development in these areas.

Soldiers into their second enlistment today have a distinctly different weapons draw than they or their leaders did just a few years ago.

Those changes cover the full spectrum of small arms, both individual and crew-served weapons, mostly making existing systems lighter and more functional and adding new punch to the firepower of infantry squads, platoons and companies.

O yeah. They're all tactically operating tactically, in a high-speed low-drag transformational circle jerk of biblical proportions.

Oh please.

The only way to increase infantry lethality starts and ends with teaching infantry to master their f**king weapons, and the only way you do that is lots of trigger time with quality instruction and feedback, and learning to do it cold, wet, hungry, tired, and with insufficient supplies of everything but bad guys, who are shooting back at you. You can't do it with simulators, comic books, and videos, let alone sales brochures.

And if you're not doing serious hit-the-target training at all (like Big Green hasn't done for 70 years) you're just going to miss faster with more expensive toys, and be "Shocked! Shocked I say!" when some fourth grade dropout with a vintage mid-century bangstick from the 1950s and home-made web gear greases your platoon and activates your SGLI, because he didn't get the memo you had cooler toys.

All that gee whiz Buck Rogers bullshit is going to totally shit the bed five minutes after it deploys with a real-world battalion with a bunch of guys with GEDs, rather than a hand-picked squad of poster soldiers chosen for PR at the R&D HQ.

Try to remember that Pentagon Wars was far more a documentary than a black comedy, Then remember how every weapons selection since 1945 has worked out for grunts, vs. for the weapons salesmen.

Tell me about the time they "improved" the M-2 .50 cal.
And the .45.
And the bazooka.
And...
And...
And...

Then finally, remember that the least important and decisive weapons on the battlefield (since 1914, and except to the guys carrying them) have been the ones carried by the infantry.
If you want to hook up the grunts, start by ensuring you'll never be sending them anyplace not absolutely vital, and that by the time they get there, it'll be to garrison the charred remains of what used to be anyone who decides to oppose us.

Then take the entire JAG and AG Corps, top to bottom, and stake them out on a live fire range, and let the combat troops do FPF training on them until you need DNA evidence to prove they were ever human beings, and promise the troops that in the future, if they deploy, it'll be "weapons free, and God help the enemy" instead of prosecuting them for doing their job, like the last batch of military guys POTUS had to pardon.

Then find 200 generals who'll sacrifice their stars to make the point that their job is to train warriors, not to hire non-hacker Diversity Beans who can't do the job when TSHTF, and will flat out fire people for failing to cut the mustard. (Even Mad Dog Mattis as SecDef couldn't pull that one off.)

Do that, and you could deploy what you'll get with muzzle-loading black powder flintlocks and rusty pikes and they'd conquer the world.
Fail to do it, and you could give them phased plasma rifles in the 40W range, and they'll still lose.

Don't believe me though. Ask the Taliban in Trashcanistan who won every war there since Alexander the Great.

The Army should STFU until they buy something that works, 24/7/365/anywhere/anytime, prove it by training the hell out of it for 20 years, until they wear out the first buy entirely, and decide it's so good they want MOAR!, and so beloved by the troops they'd throw away food and porn if they had to, just to hump it into combat.

And stop buying sales brochure b.s., which gets you the new Edsel class aircraft carrier, the F-35 Thunderjug, and "Diversity is our strength" kool-aid drinkers who hire soldierettes who can't throw a frag far enough not to eat their own shrapnel, transvestites who can't figure out which latrine to use, and can't-cunt officerettes who keep crashing their destroyers into cargo ships so slow they wave barnacles and jellyfish to go around them when steaming upwind.

The article is boob bait for the bubbas from the fap-fantasies of some PR second john in a Pentagon basement jerk-off shop.


( So, I guess I'm back... )

Seasonal Ear Worms

I expect to get back at it tomorrow, but expect once a day or so, possibly more, I'll be throwing out music each day, not just on Sunday, apropos of the season. Possibly attached to other posts, possibly on their own, as the mood strikes.

Sunday Music: Linus and Lucy

Happy December, with Vince Guaraldi's classic theme, jazz that some thought was way over the heads of kids in 1965, when it debuted. Turns out they were underestimating kids way back then. The soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas was voted into the Grammy Hall Of Fame, and is on the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry list of the most significant American recordings of all time.

Light Posting Notice



Named Isis (courtesy of an old Star Trek episode), but never
 called that (she wouldn't have come anyways), if there's a cat
 afterlife, she's probably expecting to be waited on hand and
 foot there too.

The cat I didn't want has become the cat I didn't want to lose, but she came and went at her own whim at both ends. I got her when a neighbor abandoned her, declawed and defenseless, in the complex parking lot, and moved to Utah. But cats can spot a sucker a mile off, and I was adopted once I figured out her predicament. In return for both studied indifference and loads of undeserved affection, along with an endless stream of litter box nuggets, all she demanded since she adopted me was constant feeding, perpetual attention, and regular replenishment of fresh sand. Wherever I went, there she was, and her favorite was to sit at my feet rumble-purring for hours, with occasional trips to the lap for more attention, interrupted only for food and naps. After eight years of living high on the hog with the run of the mansion, she was feeling poorly the last couple of weeks (the vet suspected cancer, but couldn't confirm it), and so I was tending to her when home most of the month. After working the last three nights straight, when I got home she looked this morning like today would be her last, and so it was. True to form, she made a bit of a mess, but perked up when I got home, drank some water a few times, and regularly switched her tail when I talked to her, until the last couple of hours, and died as I held her a short while ago. Which at least solves the problem of her suffering. Mine, not so much, so she remains to the end a bit of a bother. She would have purred about that, and looked at me like butter wouldn't have melted in her mouth with her usual "What? Who, me?" look.

I have some things to take care of, so other than tomorrow's weekly post, I'll be offline for some while, and get back to this in a couple more days, when I'm feeling like it.

I was done with having a cat after the last one died, but that didn't stop this one from showing up uninvited, so who knows? In the short term, at least there'll be less cat hair on everything to contend with. I would also note this isn't a bleg for any sympathy (though any wishes are appreciated), but merely to explain my absence for a day or three, in advance.

Masterpiece

Five minutes of television comedy history that always lightens my spirits.
Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the blessings of the day.