Basic Training - Range Cards

So, when we left off, you'd gotten yourself into a nice fighting position, but that's just the beginning.

Once you've dug in and improved your position somewhat, you need to begin a Range Card. It's basically a mini-map of your sector of responsibility (and sector of fire, should it come to that) with particular emphasis on obvious landmarks, dead space, and ranges from you to everything you can see.

It's your team leader's job to tell you three things when you're digging in:

1) Principle Direction Of Fire
The PDF is where you should be looking, alerting anyone else of anything notable that happens into view, and shooting at it if anything worth shooting at appears, consistent with your team's ROE (Rules Of Engagement). Your hole should be sited to cover that.

2) Your Sector Limits
How far to the left and right of your PDF you should be paying attention to, and/or shooting at, with suitable landmarks or compass bearings for both.

3) Your Final Protective Fire line
the bearing along which, if everything goes to hell, you should be shooting to put a curtain of screaming lead to prevent your team's position being overrun.

Your responsibility is to put in limit stakes (or rocks) at your end, to that you can point your weapon alongside them to the limits of your sector to either side, along with similar arrangements for your PDF and FPF, so that, even in the dark and absent NODs, you could fire a line along either and hit anything from 0-72 inches above the ground along that bearing.

Then to walk you sector, or have someone else do it, to see if there are any spots where a person could successfully hide from your fire. This is called dead space, not because they'll be dead outside it, but because you can't put any live fire into it.

If any of that is within hand grenade-throwing range (25m or so), you'll want to find ways to put something there to make it less attractive to occupy, whether that something is just noisy (to alert you), or actually painful or hazardous (to penalize attempts to occupy it without you shooting at it). Ideally, both, and in such a way that it's not obvious that whatever is put there has been deliberately placed, but rather appears natural to casual observation. Jumbled piles of sharp rocks and old brush, with jagged points and edges, are better for this than obvious human-constructed spikes, and accomplish roughly the same effect.

But mainly, you want to visually identify obvious landmarks and your sector lines, and range the distance from you to them, out to the limit of your own weapon's effectiveness or the limit of your vision, so that you know at what range any target(s) at those landmarks are at, or what ranges they're between, to use all that rifle marksmanship you learned, and deliver accurate fire on them if necessary.

Assuming your rifle is BZO'ed, everything from 0-300m will be hit on a man-sized target with the same sight setting for you, so your primary concern is the 300-600m range, where correct range settings are more important to hit accurately.

You can pace it off, or have your battle buddy do that while walking the area looking for dead space, but a modern expedient that's probably easier and more accurate would be a simple laser rangefinder available from dozens of websites, hunting suppliers, etc. if someone has a dedicated rifle for marksmanship beyond 500m, get a rangefinder that will accommodate all such possibilities.

Otherwise, one that'll handle 600m or less will suffice for 7.62mm and 5.56mm modern battle rifles at all probably ranges.

In heavier cover, 100m may be all the distance you've got, but ideally, you're somewhere inside the edge of that heavy cover, looking out at open ground. Second choice, everything's open, but your position is camouflaged and has sufficient cover.

In any event, once your hole is basically prepared, learn the ground outwards from where you are, unless you want your fighting hole to become your burial hole.

It isn't necessary to reproduce an exhaustive detailed survey map of everything you can see. What you're going for is something that will allow you, and your buddy in a shared hole, to know everything they need to know about what's out there with a quick glance, in order to land hits on target. Less may very well be more. This most everything you need to know:

You could print up a few hundred examples of any or all of the range card(s) illustrated.
Better idea: make up a dozen or two. 5"x8", if you please. They'll fit in a leg cargo pocket, or the top flap of a pack, where they belong.
(You can put the cheat sheet order of completion on the back, if you're clever.)
Print them on the heaviest card stock you can, short of actual poster board.
Laminate those suckers so they're waterproof.
Write your data on them with your grease pencil (you're carrying at least one apiece, right?), and then when you move, wipe it off for the next position. make enough for everyone on the team, plus spares, and keep them in waterproof bags as well.

Yes, you could try and memorize all this every time, but you may have to change holes for various reasons, or you may have been the guy asleep when Mr. Murphy comes calling, and are a bit hazy on details despite the adrenaline dump of waking up to fires exchanged on a two-way range. Also, recall that first standing order of Robert Rogers to the original Rangers was "Don't forget nothing." That is why we write things down.

This embiggens. Words to live by for 250 years, and counting.

And BTW, range cards work great at your ultimate retreat as well, for the same reasons. And even in your current home. You don't have to put them in plexiglass holders under the windows in the living room (the wife would probably freak, right?). But there's nothing that says you can't have a pre-made set that detailed, ready and sitting in a handy envelope in the gun safe or filing cabinet. Nothing wrong with that, in case the Free Shit Army comes calling after the next disaster, is there? ;)

It also could be that someone (what? who?) might see some value in placing a rock or ten, painted white on one side out in the distance at either regular ranges (say 100m distances), with a number in hundreds of meters facing back towards their position, for long-term occupied positions. Like a home, or whatnot. A more surreptitious approach might be to put rocks in a line outwards, with 1 rock for 100m, two together for 200m, and so on, particularly aimed at obvious avenues of approach, out to the limit of your effective fire. (Whether you seal a wad of Tannerite facing inboard towards you, for future warning purposes at the property line terminus, is between you and your conscience. So is appropriate signage, to preserve the sporting purposes of the endeavor. Just saying.)

Now you know why all the original graduates of the service academies were trained surveyors and engineers (which experience seems to have helped out Geo. Washington too), and why Sun Tzu and von Clauswitz spent a lot of time talking about the ground you fight on.

Some principles of warfare never, ever change.
So learn the job, before you have to do the job.

Thought For The Day

Women In The Military, Part V

h/t KDT

Turns out the biggest clowns in the Navy aren't on the flight deck, they're over
 in surface warfare: running the bridge, in CIC, and over in Flag Quarters.

Remember all those Navy ships that couldn't keep from hitting everything on the ocean, putting at risk everything in the seven seas, including dolphins and whales?

Well, color us shocked, but it turns out women drivers of ships don't do any better at that than they do when driving while applying eye liner in the fast lane on the freeway. And of course, everyone from CNO and SecNav down has been covering up the identities of the culprits, because Diversity Is Our Strength. Even if it kills us. In our sleep.




Diversity Is Our Strength. But it turns out two female navy lieutenants
can rack up a body count as big as the Lost Convoy during Blackhawk Down.

Excerpted in toto from The Other McCain blog:

"During the early weeks after the USS Fitzgerald was speared by a lumbering Philippine container ship, it was noteworthy that the captain and a couple of admirals were publically named, but not the actual officer in charge, the officer of the deck. (OOD) The other person who should have kept the Fitz out of trouble is the person in charge of the combat information center, the Tactical Action Officer. That individual is supposed to be monitoring the combat radar, which can detect a swimmer at a distance of two miles.
Not until a year later, when the final reports are made public and the guilty parties have been court-martialed, does the truth come out. The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!! The Tactical Action Officer would normally be in near constant communication with the OOD, but there is no record of any communication between them that entire shift!
Another fun fact: In the Navy that won WWII, the damage control officers were usually some of the biggest and strongest men aboard, able to close hatches, shore up damaged areas with timbers, etc. The Fitz’s damage control officer was also a woman, and she never left the bridge. She handled the aftermath of the accident remotely, without lifting a finger herself!
Look it up: The OOD was Sarah Coppock, Tactical Action Officer was Natalie Combs. . . .
When I noticed last year that they were doing all they could to keep the OOD’s name out of the headlines, I speculated to my son that it was a she. Turns out all the key people (except one officer in the CIC) were female!Indeed, I did some searching, and Lt. Coppock pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty. Lt. Combs faced a hearing last month:

In an 11-hour hearing, prosecutors painted a picture of Lt. Irian Woodley, the ship’s surface warfare coordinator, and Lt. Natalie Combs, the tactical action officer, as failing at their jobs, not using the tools at their disposal properly and not communicating adequately. They became complacent with faulty equipment and did not seek to get it fixed, and they failed to communicate with the bridge, the prosecution argued. Had they done those things, the government contended, they would have been able to avert the collision.

That two of the officers — Coppock and Combs — involved in this fatal incident were female suggests that discipline and training standards have been lowered for the sake of “gender integration,” which was a major policy push at the Pentagon during the Obama administration. It could be that senior officers, knowing their promotions may hinge on enthusiastic support for “gender integration,” are reluctant to enforce standards for the women under their command.
This was the story of Kara Hultgreen, the Navy pilot who died in a 1994 F-14 crash. Investigation showed that Hultgreen had been allowed to proceed in her training after errors that would have meant a washout for any male pilot. But the Clinton administration was pushing for female fighter pilots, which resulted in a competition between the Navy and Air Force to put women into these combat roles. It is not necessary to believe that (a) women shouldn’t be fighter pilots, in order to believe (b) lowering standards for the sake of quotas is a bad idea. Of course, you may believe both (a) and (b), but it is (b) that gets people killed.
It seems obvious that the Pentagon (and the liberal media) sought to suppress full knowledge of what happened to the Fitzgerald in the immediate aftermath of the June 2017 incident that killed seven sailors, in the same way the details of Kara Hultgreen’s death were suppressed. It took investigative reporters like Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times a lot of hard work to find out what actually happened to Hultgreen. Let’s hope other reporters will dig into what’s happening in our military with the “gender integration” agenda at the Pentagon now."

We dun tol' you a time or four, as the title might suggest, that someday, American caskets would be filled by troops because we put women in places in the military they don't belong, and would lower standards of conduct and proficiency to get them there.

The men filling seven caskets from USS Fitzgerald are but the opening fulfillment of that tragic prophecy.

 
FCC Gary Rehm Jr., 37,
GM1 Noe Hernandez, 26,
YN2 Shingo Douglass, 25
ST2 Ngoc T. Truong Huynh, 25,
PSC Xavier Martin, 24,
FC1 Carlos Sibayan, 23,
GM3 Dakota Rigsby, 19.

You can read about them from a year ago, here.

They didn't die for freedom, they died because a bunch of idiots, in Congress, the White House, and at the Pentagon, thought pushing unqualified women into job slots so a few loudmouthed dykes could get admiral stripes someday was a better idea than having qualified officers aboard who could conn a ship without hitting everything else floating in the same time zone. 

(In the ultimate cost-free meaningless gesture, the Navy promoted all seven casualties one grade apiece, posthumously. Which means jack and squat, and costs them right around $0. No word on when the Navy will start automatically awarding hazardous duty pay to every sailor serving under unqualified women officers, which would seem to be a no-brainer until proven otherwise, and would cost them actual money.)

Cheerleaders for this jackassical policy will retort that the guilty were suitably punished, and all is right with the world. We respond that sailors oughtn't be used as expendable Human Incompetency Detectors for purse-waving deck officers.

To all the Natalies and Sarahs in the Navy, walk tall. The sisterhood killed your shipmates.
But hey, WGAF, right? They were just a bunch of toxicly masculine men, serving-their-country-at-bargain-wages Neanderthals, and who needs 'em?

And to every Navy douchebag from prior SecDefs and SecNavs down to so much as a PO3 who passed those unqualified @$$clowns along the pipeline, and suffered them in positions of trust and leadership for which they were dreadfully unqualified,
F### Y##!
The blood of American servicemen is on your hands.

The highest body count of US naval casualties in 2017 wasn't racked up by any nominal threat force navy, it was tallied by the perfumed princes in the Pentagon, particularly those put there by the last presidency. Well played. Can we put them all on the Terrorist Watch List now, please?!? (Waterboarding them in Gitmo optional, but also highly recommended.)

If the policy that enabled this, from the most incompetent and anti-military administration in the republic's history, could pass muster, the watchstanders could too, and they wouldn't have worked so long and so hard to smother the truth about this incident. But they can't, it doesn't, so TPTB have to slide and hide, long after the departure of Fabulous Mabus, and the incompetent flag-deck disasters he inflicted on the Navy, because those clowns are still working towards retirement.

Which is why SecDef Mattis should immediately stand down everyone in all the services promoted to O-7 and above from 20 JAN 2009-20 JAN 2017, inclusive, pending a full review, with a view towards permanently retiring the lot. Most of them are suitable only for melting down for fish sinkers. He would do more to save the nation going forward than if he fought a war and won it.

After all those collisions, the entire Seventh Fleet was docked for a review of the problem.
We have yet to hear that they solved it as they should by returning all combatant ships to male-only domains, because fighting a warship isn't a job for Disney princesses, Combat Barbie, or G.I. Jane.

Remember that the next ten times this happens. As it will.

Sunday Puttering

Brain Fart Of The Day

I don't understand writer's block.
Five (max) minutes' surfing on the 'net cures it.
Case in point:

The following rhetorical pantload of horsesh...er, sorry, rose fertilizer, is what happens when schools no longer teach critical thinking and basic logic, because their students cannot pass the physical for that class, i.e. using their head for something more than just a hat rack:

 A restaurant in Virginia booted the White House press secretary from the premises. The co-owner did so due to her standards, and much coercion from her staff.

This, in my opinion, is completely up to the discretion of the restaurant. No restaurant, or any business, should be forced to serve those they don't want in their establishment. In a perfect world, the incident would be over, and the restaurant could continue feeding its clients. Unfortunately, that won't happen.

The restaurant is being bombarded by negative reviews, and the detractors are from all over the United States. I'm sure the usual ugly remarks and threats are numerous, which can be hard on a business if it has an internet site. The sheer volume of nasty comment, or emails, can choke a server and increase the cost for business.

There are many supporters too, but if the supporters are the usual supporters for those so quick to react without thinking, their not known for their spending, or charity. They'll swear their allegiance, and then shake their head, when the restaurant closes the door.

To add insult to injury, there is another restaurant in Virginia with the same name. Their business may suffer, and if enough damage is done, they may seek the help of a personal injury attorney to reduce the losses.

I doubt the restaurant survives. Such actions, with nationwide coverage, don't end well. The co-owner, and staff, probably thought they were preserving their integrity, which is a noble action. Unfortunately their ignorance may lead to bankruptcy, and unemployment. They choose the battle, but never realized they already lost the war.

Sorry, but HELL NO.

"In a perfect world", the owner and her halfwit staff realize that absent any actions of personal misbehavior on the premises whilst dining, they treat Sarah Sanders exactly like every other customer who enters their public establishment. Because they know if they fail to adhere to that minimum standard of civility (from whose meaning-rich root, civitas, springs also the word "civilization"), the Banshees Of Comeuppance will descend on their establishment, and drive their establishment out of business, for cause, and remove their jackassical DNA from the economic gene pool, exactly the "invisible hand" predicted in 1776 by Adam Smith, the explicatory father of capitalism and its functioning.

So, for the exact same reason we have public health codes, if you're in business to serve food to customers, you serve food to customers. Period. Paragraph. End of effing book.

This was not the Democrat Harpy Pub. It was not the Politically Correct Lounge. Although, to be fair, if you're going to act like that and name your fœtid swillery "The Red Hen", you could at least do potential patrons outside the courtesy of flying the appropriate flag:

That no such obvious clue was evident puts the onus for acting with scrupulous correctness towards all paying customers not otherwise misbehaving firmly upon the swill-dispensary in question, and not the patrons.
Having failed that test of basic civility and customer service, they deserve everything they get in response, hopefully up to and including bankruptcy, business failure, unemployment, and poverty.

Dulce et decorum est.

That's called laying in the bed you made.

If you run an eatery, and you put the "rant" in "restaurant", thinking thereby that a mere license to sling hash gives you carte blanche to dictate the occupations and political opinions of your patrons, stand the f**k by for one of life's little surprises to come along, in much the same way as both gravity and sunrise do.

Business owners absolutely have the right to eject anyone from their premises. But in no world, perfect or otherwise, save for one best described by Dante in Inferno, do they have any right to remain ignorantly and blissfully free of consequences for their actions, whether wise or blisteringly stupid.

And there are no unicorn-powered welfare machines pumping out strawberry-scented banknotes to the poor here in Reality, either.

If an owner has even as little as half a wit, they make their political statements with their checkbook, not their guest policy. And when neither they nor their employees, combined, can pull off an IQ level higher than average winter temperatures in Lexington VA, slinging hash is probably the upper limit of their intellectual endeavors, and even that is probably suspect. As in, I suspect they probably follow their nominal mascot, and serve chicken$#!^ on the plates, as well as at the hostess station. I wouldn't know, and I'll never find out.

But if this is news to you, and you're blogging about it, you maybe ought to heed the sage advice of rapper Ice Cube, and check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Just saying.

Bonus: Go check out Dianny's post on the same root topic.
This Facecrack reply in one of the links was gigglesnortworthy.

My contribution:

 

Viva!

Greetings, pinche norteamericanos, from the failed state to your south!

Well, Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man is rightfully concerned that this year's Maximum Leader likely winner - Comrade Obrador (and I mean Comrade in exactly the way you might suspect) - in the Clowncarnucopia Of Fail that is Mexican politics for the last two centuries, i.e. pretty much every waking minute the country has existed as its own national (or should that be notional?) entity, is promising to take up the cause of their cruelly oppressed campesino migrantes everywhere (but especially here).

“And soon, very soon — after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world,” Obrador said, adding that immigrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.”

He then declared it as “a human right we will defend.”

Unless they defend it better than they defend their northern border, that's not really much to worry about.

Pay no attention to the fact that this year, cartels have already murdered 110 (and counting) government officials, and that anything that threatens the BILLIONS of US dollars wired back home to mamacita from her family members working in Los Estados Unidos is pretty much like threatening to cut the country's jugular with an airplane propeller rotating at speed. That's just a pure coincidence.

Peter even offered some prognostication, and some advice that's good pretty much 24/7/365:

"If Mr. Obrador follows through on his threat, the Wall won't be anything like adequate.  Minefields, barbed wire, Claymore mines and robotic weapons turrets will be more like it.  There won't be any other way to stop what will be, in effect, "human wave" attacks on the US border.

If it comes to that, I'm likely to be very grateful that we have President Trump in charge, and General Mattis as his Secretary of Defense.  At least they won't hesitate to defend this nation's sovereignty.  If Clinton had won, she'd simply roll over and surrender.

Better brace yourselves, folks.  This could turn nasty.  Oh - and if you live within a couple hundred miles of the border, stock up on firearms and ammunition while you can.  You may need them."

 

It's probably not really as bad as all that.

Like looters in riots, you only have to shoot the first one in the head.

That generally takes the wind out of everyone else's sails, and they find other options, most of them centered around not getting their heads all exploded, and staying home.

And in the modern social media age, we don't even have to kill anybody; just post a picture of one such notional border crosser, with the bullet hole SFX'ed right into place, send out the tweet, and let ripples in the electronic pond do the rest.

As Calvin said to Hobbes about the monsters under the bed,
"They lie. I lie."

And if Obrador wants to be the shortest-term president in Mexico in a century, and see what Shock and Awe regime change looks like from the pointy end, he's going about it the right way.

Of course, neither the CIA nor the Marines are shy about dropping in personally to liven things up for him right at home, if necessary. There's even some history to that effect, IIRC. Something about "the halls of Montezuma", or somesuch.

So keep yapping about bringing us "the mother of all immigrant hordes", and see how that plays out for you when the jets don't even need a carrier, they can just stage out of Miramar, Davis-Monthan, and Lackland. The guys at Whiteman can pretty much get to Guatemala and back on less than half a tank.

It's also often pointed out that Mexico City and Cancun are closer to Dallas than is Washington DC.
Word to su madre: so are the 1st Armored and 1st Cav Divisions, and opposed by the entire might of the mighty Mexican Army, both brigades, they'd be eating burritos in the capitol NLT Tuesday luncheon. Wednesday if they stopped for gas and some tourist snaps along the way.

It'd never get that bad, though. We'd just sanitize a five-mile wide corridor along the border, push everybody south of it in perpetuity, sew it silly with landmines, and sit back and call in the occasional artillery mission.

I mean, it's not like we've got an entire military that's fought two desert wars for pretty much 12 of the last 18 years, and pounded multiple countries' real estate and armies into so much kindling, mainly for practice,or something. Oh wait, we've got that.

Course, we'd probably have to sort everyone here, for national security reasons, and the detainees could look forward to long hot summers in football stadiums while the background checks were processed.

Probably be a booming market for other kids from minority 'hoods to get the newly vacant jobs at Taco Bell and Mickey Ds.

Call that toss in the air, idiotas.

But really, isn't one Alamo, one San Jacinto, and one Chapultepec enough already to last everyone for a few hundred years?

But the biggest risk isn't that some blowhard idiot in the Palacio Nacional manages to egg us into squashing their pissant failed state. It's that after we do it, some jackhole do-gooder in D.C. would want to try to fix the damned thing, as if such were even possible, rather than building The Great Wall Of Trump from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of California, with or without a miles-wide buffer and a few million land mines, just to keep everyone honest.

And then we'd be saddled with the only possible national albatross capable of making Puerto Rico or Gaza look like well-run operations by contrast.

I would relent on one condition: everyone registered to vote Democrat here has to move there for 20 years or so, to show us the glorious possibilities of socialism on a country-wide scale. Like D.C., Detroit, and Chicongo aren't proof of concept already.

I've elsewhere laid out my plans for Baja California: we keep it as a protectorate, like Hong Kong was, for, say, 200 years. The Pacific side as one long nearly 800-mile resort and vacation hotel strip that'd put Vegas and the French Riviera out of business in about a year. The Gulf Of California half as a pristine national park camping eco-preserve and whale breeding zone that'd make Greenpeace and the Sierra Club wet themselves with rapturous glee. Only native Mexicans get jobs there, anyone convicted of any crime is banished to the main country for life, and for every person employed there gainfully, Mexico remits as payment to the US one barrel of Mexican crude oil, per annum.

The profits of the zone get split 50/50 between Mexico and the US, and it's a federal territory, administered by a federally-appointed governor, under U.S. laws. If the guy doesn't make a profit every two years, he gets canned. If he does, he and his administrative team get a piece of the take. Maybe ½-1%, or something like that. You know, like every business in the Western world since about...ever. The US half of the profits get statutorily plowed back into infrastructure for the peninsula, like housing, schools, hospitals, etc. More jobs, better lives.

Violent criminals, and any drug cartel members, get the treatment that was customary during the Mexican Revolution.

It's always important to respect local precedents.

In twenty years, the rest of Mexico would be begging us to do the same thing, followed in short order by Central America. They'd vote it in. (Even faster, at that point, if we promised to treat the Democrats like cartel members, above.)

(Back before he decided to get all political, I always figured the guy to run the Baja Plan would be...wait for it...Donald Trump. Now, well...let's just note that regarding myself and nearly 63M of my friends and neighbors, GMTA. Now, he can hire the job out, if someone can get the State Department on the case to do something worthwhile for a change.) 

And the beauty of the U.S. Constitution is that there's no copyright; anyone else is free to try it, or any modified version of it, as they please. Every dope-smuggling law-breaking migrante you turn into a hard-working capitalist Bible-clinging rifle-toting homeowner and shopkeeper is one less family we'd need to build cages for at the border.

¿Comprenden, amigos?

(And before anyone asks, Canada would be even easier - but then, they're politer, and they can spell. We simply grant the Quebecois there unlimited right of return to Detroit, St. Louis, and Nawlins, in return for which their former province goes back to unilingual, we invite the rest of the country to unite with us, and we probably put 12 new stars on our flag and gain two additional territories, at which point Europe and the rest of the world can kindly Eff Off and leave North America alone, and we'll return the favor. The average IQ and per capita economy of the new uni-nation would increase, and the demographics of three of our most famously failed cities would even out, with a commensurate return to both sanity and their traditional roots, while increasing the local atmosphere, dining opportunities, and patois more than enough to compensate for any problems. It's not like Michigan, Missouri, and Louisiana aren't used to dealing with problem children already, for some time. There's no help for D.C. though, so the best thing to do would be to move the national capitol to from Washington to Ottowa or Montreal, which are both prettier and safer, and colder, which would incline those sent there to leave as rapidly as possible 8 months out of the year, and limit their predations on liberty in the rest of the nation quite handily. And it would help ensure that when things fall apart, the remnant in Formerly-great Britistan have a friendly place to land, come the day. The courts and Congress will have so much on their plates for the next 50-80 years, they'll have no spare time to oppress the native peasantry hereabouts to any meaningful level. Everyone wins.)

Otherwise, we're left with the status quo, which only proves what every dweller in suburbia knows all too well:
Your next door neighbors are a punishment from the heavens to make the company of the deadbeats and nutbags in your own family look sane and preferable by comparison.

And Teachers Weep...

From elsewhere on the Internet, some of the pointed questioning of Grand Inquisitor Special Prosecutor lackluster lawyer partisan lackwit Robert Mueller by retiring Rep. Gowdy (R-SC) was the topic under consideration, which brought the following witheringly brilliant riposte from the bleachers:

"Gowdy talks a great talk, but has he put anyone in jail yet?"

Normally, I would be loathe to shine the flashlight of disapproval on one person for saying stupid things on the Internet, because I'd never get anything else done, but would that this was the sole time I've read the exact sentiment somewhere or other on the web. So it seems to be a far more widespread problem that just one random brainfart.

Rep. Gowdy can defend himself on the merits of the situation, but as to the fundamental issue under discussion, allow me to undertake a brief explanation, along that line of inquiry.

"By some unfathomable oversight, the Founders seem to have neglected to give any Executive authority to any member of the Legislative branch, which, incredible as it may seem to you in the 21st century, also includes Rep. Gowdy.
(I know, right?)

So not only has Gowdy not put anyone in jail while in Congress, but neither has any member of Congress in the recorded history of the institution, while a member of it, going back to the founding of the republic.

As your social studies teacher may very well have told you at some point in the misty ages past, "You will see this material again."

Hopefully, that clears up any confusion on this vital matter.

If, mayhap, you can ascertain the whereabouts of MIA AG Jeffie Sessions, that answer might prove far more germane to your interests, and come nearer to solving the mystery to which you allude."

There are 535 Senators and Congressmen currently serving. There have been, in the nation's history thus far, 12,244 in total. The number of people put in jail while in office by all of them combined, to date, stands at exactly 0. Zero. Nada. Niente. Nulyevoi. Bupkus.

If any part of this is in any way news to you, you have two choices:

1) return your high school diploma to the issuing institution and demand a full tuition refund.

2a) at your next decennial reunion, punch your former social studies instructor in the mouth if they neglected to cover this topic, or
2b) grovel obsequiously, and beat yourself with a bundle of stout rods about the head and shoulders, and humbly beg forgiveness for sleeping through or failing in their class.

If this applies, take appropriate action, by all means.

I will also double down, by sharing an observation delivered to Vodkapundit himself, Steve Green, via one paratrooper SFC Thomas Teal, to him as part of attendance in the class of '87 of the Missouri Military Academy, with the distilled wisdom of a career in the military, when he suggested ever so gently to him,

"Son, don't be stupid on purpose."

Words to live by, boys and girls.

And because we care, this PSA:

Never forget America's M.I.A.s.

 

Keep Calm, and Laugh At Leftards

h/t Silicon Graybeard and WRSA 

Some folks are worried about the kerfluffle over following a decades-long federal deportation policy WRT the chirren' caught sneaking into the U.S.

In a word, don't.

Relax. The EO is rope-a-dope trolling at the Master Class level.

1) Trump issues EO.
2) Court overturns it, because it violates the consent decree agreed to by the Clinton administration.
3) Trump shrugs and says, "See? I can't break the law. So either fix it yourselves, congressional sh*tweasels, or f**k off, idiots. I don't care which. Mid-terms are coming for you @$$clowns. Go do nothing somewhere else."

And the federal courts are triple-boned on this:
either they decline to review the EO, and cede their authority to the President (not going to happen),
or they overrule their prior ruling, and cede their authority back to the executive branch (not going to happen),
or they strike down the EO, and we go right back to throwing the illegal little bastards right back in the same cages into which they've been placed non-stop since the early 1990s, by three prior presidents before Trump came into office.
(That's a win-win-win hat trick, if you're keeping score at home.)

Game over, and the problem is now back in the lap of Congress, and the liberal idiot judges (but I repeat myself) who created the mess. Where it will get fixed, just about the time Social Security and Medicare become financially solvent.

Trump's EO didn't just kick this can down the road, he kicked it off the cliff, and the Leftards in Congress are merrily chasing it full-speed.

Say, just checking: you folks get that Trump doesn't just tweet out his EOs from the smallest room after a high-fiber meal at 3AM, right?
And you get that not only are 114% of the White House staffers composed of lawyers, who review these things 19 different ways, and advise him on the likely responses, but that the president has in fact been dealing with shysters far brighter than the ones inhabiting the DC fever swamps, for about 45 years, so far?

This isn't 9D chess.
Just common sense.

I mean, suffering cats, IANAL, and *I* could spot this in about 3 seconds.
If you get worried, realize that the average sh*tweasel in Congress (either house, but the Senate is generally far dopier) has the IQ, at best, of a housecat, and that President Trump has proven, thus far, to be a Jedi Master of the laser pointer , in this analogy. It's really only that complicated.






{Oh, For those of you dropping in because this got posted to Reddit, sincere greetings and welcome.
Thanks for dropping by.

For those delicate flowers and volunteer reserve officers in the Language Police, who find the discourse hereabouts a wee bit too spicy for their diet, teddy bears, crying towels, and safe-space closets with soothing muzak are available right the hell back out the door, and they probably have some fresh panties for you to change into while you're getting a grip on yourself. If you were looking for the Longfellow poetry reading, it's down the hall and across the way in the Literature Building. I heartily advise you to grow a shell, learn to function in a cold, cruel world, untwist your diaper, and get over it. BFYTW applies in so many parts of life nowadays, doesn't it?

Oh, hang on, there's a phone call for you coming in, CallerID says it's from the Afterlife; let me put it on speakerphone for ya...

Sorry, he gets like that sometimes.
Oh, and maybe you want to give Mittens Romney a call, and ask him how well that Marquis of Queensbury policy worked out for him in 2012. If you want to teach kids in Sunday School, you go right ahead. This is neither that church, nor that pew.

Best wishes. - A.}

What Cannot Continue, Won't.

h/t Irish



(This embiggens.)

Well, just spitballin', but if nothing happens, you don't have enough ammunition or hard-minded friends for what's going to follow, inevitably, whether it's soon or later.

 

And I don't care who you are or where you are, it means a lot of people in this country are going to die, from unnatural causes. 

"When you make peaceful change impossible, you make violent change inevitable." - John F. Kennedy

So Far This Week...

1)
FBI stooge Guy Fawkes was  all-but-perp-walked out of the FBI building. No doubt to lawyer up, and/or get his state's-evidence testimony in order to align with fellow stool pigeon McCabe's for the coming wave of arrests and subsequent star chamber lynchings for their part in the ongoing coup attempts.

2)
US UN ambassador Nikki Haley, flanked by the SecState (who is happily no longer DeepState tool - in every sense of the word - Tillerson), announced that America is pulling out of the UNHRC, and on the way out the door, delivered a blisteringly sharp crotch kick to the UN in general, and the "Human Rights Council" in particular, it being populated by a rogue's gallery of the worst human rights abusing nations on the planet, by calling it nothing put a "cesspool of political bias" in a speech carried around the world. That woman can land a blow, kids.
(If Mike Pence has a cold in 2020, I can think of somebody who could be slipped on the ticket's veep spot without any problem, and she's currently our UN Ambassador. Just saying.)

3)
And Not My Guy, Himself, President Trump, sent Senate Majority leader Bitch McConjob limping back to Capitol Hill bleeding from just below the belt and sitting about six inches lower in his swivel chair, due to about twenty pounds of his ponderous ass being suddenly missing:

“Why is this coming up now? I mean, it’s so obvious am I right? Mitch knows. The economy, jobs, North Korea, there’s so much great news they had to do the fake news. I’m not saying the pictures aren’t bad. They’re bad. Certainly not good. They make it look bad. You have to do something. You have to work together. It could be such a big, beautiful thing if you did that. The Democrats won’t help. We all know that. They think this is good for them. We’ll see about that. But doing something, working together, isn’t that why you’re here? It should be. And if you don’t do that and November doesn’t work out for you then I’m sorry but you shouldn’t be here. Go do nothing somewhere else.”

Somewhere in the halls of the White House, the ghosts of Calvin Coolidge, Harry S Truman, and Teddy Roosevelt are clapping, at the sight of a president telling the fat-@$$#d fat cats in Congress exactly where to head in.

I'm pretty sure that all turtle-faced Bitch heard ringing in his ears were the magical words "You're FIRED!"

Let me know if you're tired of winning yet.

Me, I'm going back for a heaping plate of seconds.

It doesn't matter which way the mid-terms go. They're going to be epic, either way.

A Modest Proposal

Get used to that cage, Julio.

Following their previously distributed talking points like any well-rehearsed rent-a-mob, the Usual Suspects, from The Wookette to ABCNNBCBS are all in full throat about the chirren!!!!! being >gasp!< SEPARATED FROM THEIR PARENTS AFTER APPREHENSION TRYING TO ENTER THE U.S. ILLEGALLY!  >double-clutch pearls!!<<

The Absolute Horror, or something.

These are same folks who had no problem whatsoever with ICE pointing machineguns at Elian Gonzales to rip him from his relatives here in Florida, and restore him to the blessings of growing up under communism, administered via Fidel's bootheel on his neck.

And of course, they have no problem ripping kids out of wombs by the score every hour since Roe v. Wade. (So, maybe if we just told ICE to start shooting the little bastards, or jamming screwdrivers into their ears and scrambling their brains, we could just call it "late-term abortion", and DiFi, Schumer, Pelosi, et al could go back to STFU status again.)

And they seem to have forgotten how many adult deportees turn out to be serial child molesters, and why maybe pulling young kids out of the big holding pen with those sort of folks might be a pretty frickin' good idea.

Then again, the Leftards' silence over decades' long rape culture dug in like a tick in Rottenham, or Buggerdamned, or some such pestilential village in the Empire of Pedophilia that is Britistan, seems to have induced in them laryngitis to this point, so not much surprise there.

But let's just leave it at this: if madre y padre were so damned concerned about los niños, there was a simple, humane, and dare we say it, legal solution to all their problems.
They could have just stayed their indigent, illiterate, criminal asses in Mehico, and saved us having to round them up and ship the whole clan TFO of Los Estados Unidos.

Make America Great Again: by shipping those fuckers back where they belong.
Starting with the second deportation, the method of repatriation used by ICE in all cases should be by trebuchet.

Then after they're returned to the land of their forefathers at a few hundred FPS, they'll probably still have one unshattered femur left to limp back home, and stay there.

I'm not terribly worried about a day without a Mexican; we had a hundred and fifty years without a Mexican, and it was called America.
And it would be a lot catchier title if we renamed it  Another Day Without Setting $318M Of Your Taxes On Fire, and made it a 24/7/365/forever national celebration.

Frankly, they're lucky we don't cut the crap, and simply authorize ICE to substitute land mines for the wall, until it's built. Then they could just deport everyone missing a leg as presumptively here illegally.

You'll notice there's not a lot of Norks running through minefields to get to South Korea.
And we've got a metric f**kton of the things just sitting in storage, so we might as well put them to some good use.

And while we're up, let's do one more thing: announce that henceforth, anyone ever deported for entering the US illegally will be banned for life from ever visiting the US on a visa, or ever emigrating here legally, and refused any amnesty for cause, even if it's someday offered to those already here. Caught once, banned for life. Caught here a second time: Fly Air Trebuchet home. Easy peasy.

Meanwhile, some appointed-for-life 65 IQ federal fuckwit judge has ordered all the children released from ICE detention (it's surely not all his own fault he's such a thoroughgoing jackass, he probably started out as a lawyer to begin with). The AG should ask him if he'd like fries with that. And then laugh at him.

He/she/it should also be told to go enforce his order, and then arrested for interfering with federal agents if he tries. And impeached for cause while we're waiting to see how that works out. For blatant insanity, if nothing better suggests itself to the Senate.

Since the federal judiciary has no problem ignoring Americans' rights when it suits them, let's ignore theirs, and see how they like it.

What are they going to do then, print out another DoJ IG investigation?

Because if the feds stop deporting them, the folks who live on the border are liable to simply start practicing the Three S Policy, without so much as a "by your leave..."

And won't that be special?

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Weather Report

Those of you with UHD monitors should know that the above video is the kind of thing for which you bought it.

The Weather Channel and Discovery should be throwing baskets of money at Mike Olbinski and his musician Peter Nanasi, and telling them to just do nothing else but crank out this kind of stuff year around, instead of as a side gig between weddings, and they'll buy it for station breaks, filler, and program transitions forever. He's already got an Emmy. AMPAS should have him up for short subject Oscars pretty much annually until they give him one.

He's got a Vimeo channel too, if you want it in better res.

This kind of thing is why we make cameras and soundtracks.

He's about due for putting another one out for this year. I can hardly stand the wait.

What's At Stake

It's time for Vito, Michael, and Tom Hagen to face the
music, and start doing the time. If anybody wants to go
on a fishing trip with Fredo instead, that'd be okay too.
And tell Connie the party's over.                                   

I'm a big believer in mood music. Here you go, folks; play this while you read.

(The Federalist) In 2015, President Obama told America he only learned that his secretary of state Hillary Clinton was illegally using a private email server to conduct public business after The New York Times published a story saying so. Today’s release of a Department of Justice inspector general report shows that was a lie.
“FBI analysts and Prosecutor 2 told us that former President Barack Obama was one of the 13 individuals with whom Clinton had direct contact using her clintonemail.com account,” the report says in a footnote on page 89. “Obama, like other high level government officials, used a pseudonym for his username on his official government email account.”

Yeah, so what? Obozo wasn't under oath at the press conference.

I'll tell you what: Obozo was a sworn federal official and Harvard Law School graduate who knowingly aided and abetted a federal crime by the then-Sec. of State, Felonia von Pantsuit, and this criminal conspiracy was known to the sitting Director of the FBI at the time, James Weasel Comey, as well as most of the federal agents fake-"investigating" (read whitewashing) the Clinton e-mail scandal. That's a criminal conspiracy. It was impeachable at the time, and it's federally felonious criminal conduct, which is still prosecutable under federal law, right now, for all of them. 

We have impeached sitting presidents for less than that, and sent average people doing only that much to long stretches in the federal penitentiary system.

Forget those ham-fisted birth certificate forgery frauds, and 23 fake social security numbers. Forget Fast and Furious and ten dozen other open and ignored scandals in Obama's corrupt criminal administration.

Just that little stunt means that this morning, President Trump now has three choices:

One
Find feckless incompetent MIA AG Jeffie Sessions hiding somewhere behind the draperies at the DoJ, defibrillate back him into life, fire everybody from the Obama administration in the Senior Executive Service level and above at the FBI, and at the Department of Justice, and tell Sessions to direct the US Attorney for Washington DC to indict Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton, and James Comey for that exact criminal conspiracy, and all associated crimes, along with their 50 to 200 known minions participating in that, and about 2000 other federal felonies committed in just the last two years of the criminal crime syndicate enterprise known as the Obama administration. (And the similar treasonous cartel operations of the Clinton Foundation. Oh, and seize the latter's assets under RICO. Chelsea can get a job at Starbuck's while she's looking for a good lawyer.)

Abuse of power, suborning perjury, and all the other machinations of the attempted coup pre- and post-the 2016 election, which ended their scheme so disastrously.

Hound those crocked m*****f*****s to the ends of the earth, and pin everything on them that will stick, and get them sentenced to so long in federal prison that they'll never see daylight  the rest of their natural lives, unless it's pumped into their subterranean crypts.

Fire Mueller, end his crooked clown-show fake-news witch hunt, and tell him he'd better think about lawyering up himself, as a former head of the FBI who was probably in on the Clinton scam at the time as well.

And get rid of the Constitution-shredding FISA courts, once and for all. Repeal the Patriot Act, in toto. It was a colossal mistake when it was first suggested, and it's proven to be exactly the power-grab end-run around the Constitution everyone warned about nearly twenty years ago, and every day since. We have a Patriot Act: it's called the Constitution and federal law. Let's try using that, if only for the recent novelty of the idea. (And BTW, if Kennedy retires from SCOTUS, put Andrew Napolitano on the court; when Bader Ginsburg finally strokes out, replace her with Alan Dershowitz. Mr. Chief Justice Roberts will find himself writing a lot of 7-2 and 6-3 opinions until Kooky Kagan and Satanmayor go away.)

Then suspend every agent at the FBI, purge the agency of every tainted one (or cut to the chase, and just assume that 98% of them give the other 2% a bad name, and fire them all), and put an honest and honest-to-god gun-toting thug-shooting cop in charge of the Bureau.
No political-animal police chiefs, but someone who's killed bank robbers in the line of duty, and is so clean he squeaks when he walks; nothing less.
If Congress won't sit still for that kind of appointment, disband the entire bureau, and turn over all functions to the US Marshal's office. (Move Explosives from BATFE to there as well, hand alcohol, tobacco, and firearms to the Commerce department as a non-enforcement paperwork compliance activity, and disband BATFE as well, while you're up.) Expand the Marshals commensurately, and ban for life any transfer or application of any former employee of the defunct FBI, unless they can pass a proctological background investigation of sufficient discomfort and thoroughness to guarantee Vatican sainthood and functional virginity to anyone who can survive the ordeal. To the 2% of former agents worth the trouble.

And gently hint to CIA that anything they've done on American soil, including this failed coup, is going to result in a lot of sudden heart attacks, light airplane crashes, and hunting and fishing trip accidents, unless a few hundred to a few thousand people resign and retire to go run worm stands, taco carts, or renting bicycles in the Bahamas. Oh, and if there's so much as one tell-all book deal or magazine article, then everyone on the list gets it in the neck. And their families. Live by the Borgia family rules, die by the Borgia family rules. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

If you're going to drain the swamp, then by God, you effing drain it!

Two
If Sessions can't or won't undertake that overhaul, fire him, and appoint someone, even as Acting AG, who will do all of that, like a pitbull on crack.

(And then send a quick love note to SecDef Jimmy Mattis that if he doesn't get the DoD and the last eight years' worth of cheesedick Pentagon general's and admiral's effluvia back in one bag in a big hurry, the same thing will be happening to his department next. The other Cabinet agencies will take the hint quickly after that.)

Three
Do nothing.
Raise the Chiquita Banana Republic flag over the White House, tell the peasants to eat cake, and announce to the world, whether anything is said officially or not, that the United States is now just another kakistocracy, run by corrupt thugs and incompetent buffoons for their own pleasure, who view the rule of law as a quaint old-fashioned custom, and then stand the f**k by for the bloodbath reckoning that'll be coming, every day from now until Hell freezes over.


Nota bene there's no Option Four on that list.

Which one you see in the next week, two weeks at the most, should influence your ammunition and supply purchases for the rest of the next two years. Anything after that point is the mercy of a benevolent deity, and/or the judgment of a righteous one, when - not if - it happens.

The Deep State couldn't be any more obvious about this if they took out full page ads on the front page of the NYSlimes. "Pay heed, peasants."

You all can do as you please with this information. I'll be getting in some range time.
Then it'll be time to get the boat ready for the fishing trip.