Vegas: The Endless Itch That Demands Scratching

h/t WRSA and Captain's Journal

So, comes out the info-tidbit that a helicopter, falsely "squawking" the transponder code for an inbound scheduled commuter jet flight, was hovering and then departing from the rooftop helipad of the hotel to the immediate west of the Mandalay Bay, with that departure just after the shooting stopped, and before police arrived either at the MB suite, or overhead in a police helicopter.

"Flight records and information obtained by Intellihub show that at least one assailant may have been extracted via helicopter for a 10:21 p.m. EXFIL from the southwest rooftop of the Delano Hotel just four minutes before Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department helicopter N911WY arrived in the vicinity for the first time since shots were fired at crowd goers attending the Route 91 Harvest Music festival"

RTWT

1) The Delano is still within the effective range of .223 weapon or weapons shooting minute-of-massive-crowd.

2) The east tower rooftop end appears to have a platform at that eastern end, allowing someone to see over the 15' tall rooftop parapet, directly at the concert crowd in question.

3) Rounds fired from that point at the crowd pass the Mandalay Bay tower in close proximity to the suite Paddock was found dead in, creating the exact false echo location problem I mentioned, with supersonic bullet cracks coming at the beaten zone of the target venue just about exactly 1 second behind the source point, from the 4+ acre wall of glass of the MB's north and southeast 43-story wing walls.
Which phenomenon, exactly as noted, including by me, only about twenty times since the incident, is something well-known, going back to military snipers like Carlos Hathcock only as early as the year 1965, and used by him that far back precisely to fool targets about from where they were being shot.

4) This gives you a second shooter (if necessary), or a primary shooter, with Paddock simply being DOA, getting cold, and waiting to be discovered, while allowing the actual shooter(s) all the time in the world to stroll over, step into their bird, and depart. If they used brass catchers, they're effectively invisible afterwards. They'd probably even have time for a second person or team, unarmed and unsuspected, to sanitize the shooting roost before departing inside the building, at their leisure.

5) You still need someone to shoot (and miss 199 times) 200 rounds at Mall Cop Campos, and then either step out, unscrew the stairwell door, rescrew it from the stair side, and depart up or down unseen and unknown; or else even easier, simply walk a few doors down the corridor on floor 32 at MB, enter another (uninvolved) room, and wait to be escorted out as a "frightened bystander" by LVMPD an hour and change later.

6) Which also tells you where the missing video camera flash drives and laptop hard drive walked away to, if they were ever present in the room during the shooting to begin with.
QED

FWIW: This is what actual facts look like: they explain things better, and they don't confuse it further by bringing up more questions than they answer.

Continued unknown: who, and why.

All of which is rampant speculation (which doesn't make it wrong per se). Just entirely unverified guessing.

Just For Informational Purposes, Of Course...

You might want to have this pdf of the above manual on a thumb drive somewhere. Just...because.

And maybe also this one too.

Nota bene that neither of these is the unreliable and jackassical Anarchist's Cookbook, which tome, owing to certain well-publicized errata, is guaranteed to get its users killed, with far more finality than a Wile E. Coyote demonstration would suggest.

The .mil's manuals, by contrast, have a reliability and trustworthiness factor of 5x5.

For bonus utility, perhaps also in dead-tree form, which requires no electrical power to utilize.

For instance, so that if you see something, you can say something, to the appropriate three-letter agencies' minions. Because you'd totally do that, as a stand-up red-blooded patriot.

Knowledge is Power. Truth is Light. Explosives are both.

Boo! - Musical Inspiration For The Day

Art Class Du Jour

This was cool. When you were in kindergarten.

This is for anyone out these who thought you could get by on this exercise with a steak knife and a tablespoon anymore.

Up your game, or you don't even get to play on the porch with the small dogs.

 

 

So get busy, and entertain us.
You don't want to risk the Flaming Bag Of Poo Award, right?
Some work for you, yes, but you get to exercise your creative impulse.
Look at it this way: it's your one day of the year when it's socially acceptable to scare hell out of the annoying urchins in the neighborhood, and get a free pass on it.

Meanwhile, I've got work to do. There's a potluck at work tonight, and it's my turn to bring the chips and dip.

I'm thinking of bringing in some hot dogs too.

After I leave a few things around the neighborhood.

And down by the commuter rail line.

Projection - And Its Cure

Projection: a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then appear as a threat from the external world. A common form of projection occurs when an individual, threatened by his own angry feelings, accuses another of harboring hostile thoughts.

In psychology, projection is a psychosis. In Democrat politics, it's a mission statement.

Thus when harpies like Ashley Judd tell you she hates Trump because of the imaginary Republican War On Women, you know what she really means is that mega-millionaires like Harvey Weinstein tried to molest her in return for her career, and rather than come out with that truth for twenty years, she'd like to spend a lifetime blaming all the members of the party that didn't do it.

When Shrillary tells you about it, she means that she's been covering for her serial rapist husband, rather than meaning that any actual Republicans are anywhere like as culpable, and that incidentally, she won't be giving Weinstein's contributions back.

The dog that doesn't bark in either case is when you wonder how many other unnamed Hollywood power-rapists Ashley Judd and hordes of her SJW-feminist colleagues continue to cover for, and how many other unacknowledged scandals Shrillary is lying about.

When Shrillary tells you that Trump refusing to accept the results of an election is a threat to democracy, she really means that when she and her moonbat followers refuse to accept the results of an election, they plan to threaten democracy.

When she tells you that Trump and the Russians colluded to steal the election, she really means that she colluded to blame the Russians in an attempt to steal the election from Trump.

When the Antifa-tards tell you they're going to bash the fascists, they really mean they're the fascists bashing anyone who disagrees with their Party line.

When lunatards tell you the math and science are proof of the White Man's oppression, they mean that they're going to undermine math and science to oppress the White Man.

When Chuck U. Schumer and Dianne Feinswine tell you that too many guns in the hands of law-abiding Americans are a threat to your freedom, they mean that they want to take guns away from law-abiding Americans in order to threaten their freedom.

When they say they don't trust you with guns, they mean you shouldn't trust them with guns.

When Emperor HopeyDopey The First, Lightbringer, Whose Tears Cure Cancer, tells you, "You didn't build that" what he really means is that he didn't build anything.

When he tells you that "the future does not belong to those who insult the prophet of islam", he means that the prophet of Islam is going to insure that you have no future.

When they tell you that "Diversity is our strength", they mean that "Diversity is the most corrosive rot known to man".

When they tell you that "the planet has a fever", they mean that they have a burning desire to burn your money to implement their draconian whackjob theories of total control.

When they tell you that we need open borders, free trade, and unlimited immigration, they mean that they need all those things to maintain their stranglehold on power, and damn the consequences for you or the entire republic.

The shortest way out of the mess is to
a) stop listening to them like they're anything but unhinged psychotic sociopaths, which they are, and
b) whatever it is they want, head in a direction close to 180 degrees opposite, and you'll invariably strike Truth, Prudence, and Wisdom, and usually Happiness and the Public Good in the shortest amount of time, and with the least effort or expenditure of resources.

Apply all of the above to welfare, no-fault divorce, gay marriage, the level of taxation, the size of government, the importance of the military, the necessity of government, or any three hundred other issues they've undertaken since at least 1912, and see if I'm not right.

And when I say Democrat, that includes the hundreds of elected double-tongued shitweasels who campaign one way, then get to Washington DC and vote with the Democrats  Socialists Communists on issue after issue, and sabotage the will of the people who elected them every day after returning to Mordor On The Potomac. Until the next election campaign. (John McCrazy, Marco Amnesty, Bitch McConjob, and Quisling Ryan, et al, call your offices...)

Political Fantasy Masterclass

h/t WRSA

Substituting One Pipe Dream For Another Dept.:

(K-Blog)… In the US the South remains a distinctive sub-nation, but I think that any serious neo-Confederate revival is, alas, a pipedream. Karlin speculates that the US could break up along ethnocultural and economic lines, like those proposed by Joel Garreau (9 nations) or Colin Woodard (11 nations). Michael H Hart proposed dividing the US into two nations along county lines, to be determined by voting patterns. Basically a red ocean full of blue islands.

I don’t think those scenarios are realistic either. But a return to the Articles of Confederation period (1781-1788) just might be. Before the United States became a unitary nation it was an alliance of sovereign states. The modern template for how this would work is the European Union. Yes, the EU has a terrible reputation in our circles, but the EU is a toothless tiger compared to the all-powerful federal government in the US, and the much-maligned Brussels bureaucracy is positively microscopic compared to the behemoth in DC.
 This way the 50 states would become fully sovereign nations, with all the powers that Germany or France or any other countries in the EU enjoy, while still keeping an attachment to the United States, which would transform itself from an independent nation to a transnational organization. The globalists and multiculturalists could have their own nations (e.g. California & New York), and the nationalists and patriots could have theirs (e.g. Texas & Kentucky)…

Brilliant.

Sarcasm Alert!

Because ignoring all the reason Brexit happened, and why Catalonia is happening, along with the entire Muslification of Europe, is a great political model to follow. Physics lesson: the rudder on aircraft carrier is positively microscopic compared to the behemoth it steers. Let's not wax poetic about how much horseshit can safely be baked into a meatloaf before the proportion becomes problematic from a taste standpoint, shall we?

And because increasing the power of 50 states' petty dictators would be way better than one strong federal one, and put the governor of Rhode Island on a political par with the governor of Texas. And, as under the electoral system, the governors of the 10 or 12 largest and most populous states could tell the other 38 or 40 to suck it.

Let's take roll call:
CA - Deep Blue
TX - Pale Purple
NY - Deep Blue
FL - Purple
IL - Deep Blue
PA - Purple
OH - Purple
MI - Purple
GA- Red, with a Blue swath
NC - Red, with a Blue swath
NJ - Deep Blue
VA - Purple
38 other states - WhoTF cares?

And doubtless a captain in South Carolinian or Oregonian Navy would have his opposite number from Russia or China quaking in his boots.

Well-played.

Go Team Red State!
Yeah, that'd really put the skeer on the other side. Not.

And the Articles of Confederation should be re-tried, because all  the reasons it failed miserably (which exact level of idiocy, necessary or not, imperiled the Revolution itself, and prolonged it by years) and spectacularly the first time around can be resolved with handwaving, magical incantations, happytalk, and...look, squirrel!

We do and ought to regularly castigate the other side's Snowflake morons for a total lack of common sense, nor any idea of wee little things like language, science, math, geography, history, economics, etc., which are collectively known as "reality".

And then there are our own side's idiots, with a total lack of common sense, nor any idea of wee little things like language, science, math, geography, history, economics, etc. which are collectively known as "reality".

The left side of the bell curve is absolutely bipartisan, and stuff like this is the reason.

The only way to rework the political map is going to come after reality has its way with demographics, in a Malthusian curve kind of way.
And the divide will be, as expected, between cityfolk, and the ruralese.
And in that day, incorporated city limits will become as harsh a dividing line as any international border is now.

Magical thinkers on both sides will have a dawn of reality in an eye-opening way, some of them even noting it in time to save themselves from the yawning maw of the same Four Horsemen of ever:
War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. And as always, in that exact order.

Those who imagine they can invite one and of necessity miraculously avoid the other three are braindead ahistorical idiots of the first rank.

The sooner those two sides come to an accommodation fair to both, and realize that they cannot spend grain, nor eat money, the sooner the political scales will come back into balance.

A good start would be to simply tell citizens of the several states that once they establish residence within city limits, they lose the power of the voting franchise affecting the whole (just inside their own little enclaves, so they might enjoy the fruit of their own choices in real time), and are free to enjoy the largesse of the association, without the privilege of trying to dictate the prosperity of an area they no longer inhabit, just as all parasites do. Remora do not tell the shark where to swim, and hyena do not tell the lion pride what to hunt.
As in nature, so in civilization.

Well, There Goes That Clever Plan...

h/t Irish

Dear Fucktard Army minions,

The FBI has already declared you a terrorist organization.
When you telegraph your clever idea on the Internet, a week in advance, you sort of defeat the idea of nobody catching on to you.
Anybody doing any rioting on November the 4th will therefore be YOU, and "popular opinion" is liable to heavily favor simply leaving your shotgunned @$$#$ for the local police forensics squad, followed by the coroner's meat wagon.
You're welcome.
And thanks a pant-load for making IDing you by your M.O. 100% foolproof.
Good luck picking the buckshot out of your liver. Your special kind of stupid is gonna leave a mark.

Everybody else:
I note purely as a random observation that one cannot obtain ballistic information from buckshot or slugs from smoothbore weapons, and that there's little in the average city short of thick concrete or brick walls that provides cover against the latter. They penetrate both sides of car bodies as if they weren't even there.
And first aid for such wounds tends to be rather resource-intensive, in a shredded beef sort of fashion, and that it's hard to escape if one's knee(s) look(s) like something that fell into a wood chipper, and one subsequently bleeds out whilst writhing hither and yon.
Which tends to repel boarders, and  also disincline similar behavior amongst one's newly-demoralized colleagues.

Just saying.

Bring the stupid, Snowflakes. This will not turn out the way you imagine, but it will end your vexations in a way familiar to people not raised on sugarplum wishes and infantile tantrums.

Because Civil War There Worked So Well The Last Time Around...

(BBC) The Catalan regional parliament has voted to declare independence from Spain, just as the Spanish government appears set to impose direct rule. The move was backed 70-10 in a ballot boycotted by opposition MPs. 

 That'll go well.

Because every eighty years or so we need to replay facists vs. communists with real people as the poker chips.

Incidentally, there's also a lesson in there for those jackasses who still can't wrap their heads around the finality of Appomattox.

The correct historical divergence you're looking for is Rome, vs. the Dark Ages.
A pity if your karma runs over your dogma, but them's the cards you've been dealt.
There's a reason Utopia didn't spring out of the ground when the Visigoths and Vandals sacked Rome. As Casey Stengel used to note, "You could look it up."

Thanks to commenter RandyGC for reminding me of this apropos gem.

Yunfakh Min Allah - Wind Of God

Ahmad checked his watch as he listened to the American baseball game on his earpiece. It was about an hour past sunset, with growing darkness as he watched from his vantage point, and listened to the announcer describing Game 6 of the World Series. Ahmad didn't understand the details of the game, just enough to plan the mission, but he knew he had at least another hour before it would end, more than enough for his purposes. From where he was situated, he could see down into Chavez Ravine, a couple of the nearby freeways, and the panorama of lights glistening in the growing nighttime scene of downtown Los Angeles.

In various places throughout the city, his teams waited. They were all his men, though few of them knew that, and he was the only one that knew all of them. His subordinates were all cutouts, few knowing anyone but him and their 2-4 teammates.

Ahmad had arrived some time prior to the operation, but was the necessary link to get it off the ground - so to speak. He chuckled at the memory. He had been delivered to America by the Americans themselves. He was actually Pakistani, and his real name wasn't even Ahmad, but that had been the Afghani name he'd adopted as an officer in the Afghan Army, shortly before he'd been selected to lead this operation in the heart of the Great Satan. The stupid Americans, he'd thought, had flown him to the United States for training. Once his contact was in place, he'd gone out one weekend on leave, and never come back. Even in this he blended with a hundred others, most economic opportunists, but more than a few, like himself, hand-picked to infiltrate and run operations like this one. The Americans hadn't been eager to broadcast that fact, which made his further movements all the easier to undertake.

His phone buzzed; the message let him know the game was back on live TV.
On his other phone he texted the codeword inshallah, which set in motion all that followed. Within a minute or two, motorcycle pairs entered all the surrounding freeways in both directions, dumping several pounds of metal caltrops on the freeways. In short order, tires were deflated or blown out, accidents ensued, and the legendary Los Angeles rush hour traffic snarl began an inexorable descent into a biblical amount of gridlock.

Simultaneously, four small drones lifted off east of downtown. They approached from different directions, but all were to converge on Piper Technical Center, a drab block arising several stories above and apart from the downtown skyline, upon the roof of which sat a dozen LAPD helicopters, at their otherwise-safe HQ high above the surrounding streets. When the drones arrived over their targets, they began their bombing drops. Two had homemade napalm: half aviation gasoline, half liquid dish soap, blended with aluminum flakes, contained in a pint glass bottle, and with a simple wick on the outside.

Ahmad recalled their maker pleased with himself for devising a way to re-purpose a simple automobile cigarette lighter to ignite the wicks, which were threaded under rubber bands holding the bottles, placed over foil-protected legs on the drones. The operator flipped a switch, and the igniters clicked on. When the wicks ignited, the bands would burn through and the bottles would drop; when they impacted, they'd create little fireballs that would stick to whatever they splashed, creating an instant inferno. Targeting was fairly simple on a windless night, requiring only hitting within a few feet of straight down for the helicopters, from a near motionless drone.

The other two had pint-sized soda cans, containing a mixture of iron oxide (essentially simple rust powder) and elemental aluminum powder. When the igniter set off a magnesium ribbon fuse, just like the napalm the payload would freefall. Once the magnesium ignited the thermite, oxygen bound in the rust would provide the air for the combustion that would take place. Its normal use was to weld railroad rails, and in the military to destroy things like howitzers, tanks, and radios. Once ignited, it burned hot enough to do either, at a temperature of around 4,000 degrees F., and the liquid molten metal produced would burn through anything as fragile as a fuselage in seconds.

Which they did, working exactly as they had when tested in the desert some weeks earlier, and helped along by fuel tanks with aviation gasoline on the parked aircraft.
The two napalm drops splashed all over the two target helos, setting them aflame immediately, as did one of the thermite drops. The other missed, but the ensuing plume of molten metal consuming itself on the concrete threw a shower of flaming embers that would prove hard to corral, even as the other targets combusted spectacularly.

They had bought all the drones and all the payload materials for less than $10,000, over the internet, using cash cards, over a span of some months, and sent to places in several states all vacated months before they operation began. And nothing they bought, and nothing they did, was illegal per se until the payloads ignited and began dropping.

As soon as the first four drones had dropped, a second wave was launched in seconds, and approximately a minute later two more helicopters were gloriously aflame. By the time the third wave struck a minute after that, nine helicopters and some ancillary equipment were fully-involved flaming junk heaps, and though there were several units airborne throughout the city, the LAPD's Astro Division would be hard-pressed to do much for the next few months, as several millions of dollars worth of high-priced ashes consumed themselves in plain view of the stranded commuters on the 101 freeway through downtown.

As he watched the second wave begin its attack on the police department's airbase, Ahmad texted the main attack to commence. Another dozen drones lifted off from all points of the compass, headed for the sellout crowd in Dodger Stadium watching the game. Each man had a section of the stadium assigned, including both outfield pavilions. All of them carried the napalm bottles. The drone bodies had been painted black so as to be far less visible to those on the ground, and with the blaze of nighttime lights illuminating the game, no one would see anything until their flaming payloads began to fall. They fell randomly, hither and yon all around the seats, bursting immediately into flaming gasoline balls, the stuff of nightmares, and sending more than 65,000 people fleeing in all directions in a stampeding panic to escape. One, by design, was dropped in front of each of the team dugouts, sending players scrambling onto the field or down the tunnels to escape the conflagrations. All of it was captured on live TV and broadcast around the world in seconds.

Originally, the plan had been to use a football game as the target, but dwindling audiences for those, and the draw of a World Series broadcast had led Ahmad and the planners to select the baseball game instead.

As soon as the first wave of drones dropped its payload, they were program recalled to a central spot, and landed in an industrial park, next to a garbage truck driven by one of two teams also organized for the purpose. Their only job was to collect the surviving drones, load them into the truck, and depart. All useable data and serial numbers had been meticulously removed long before the missions, and given their cost, the drones themselves weren't critical. But Ahmad had learned, just as some of his former colleagues, not to underestimate the thoroughness of American investigations and intelligence gathering after the fact. The less they were left to work with, the better.

His pilots each rode in on motorcycles and scooters, the better to thread their way through traffic and exfiltrate afterwards. Each had pulled up to one of several vans, or vice versa, some hours beforehand, been handed his drones and controllers, and the empty vans departed. Once they had launched their second waves and dropped, they plunked controllers into backpacks or saddlebags, and drove off, helmeted, invisible, and nondescript.

The second wave of drops went as well as the first, with several set to land amongst the main exits, surveyed beforehand, and now awash in a sea of people. Now, with no small number of flaming people, furiously trying to roll, or batter the flames out, and in a few cases, running faster, which only intensified the flames for the few seconds before they succumbed amidst hundreds of their fellows in screaming agony, and a horrible gasoline and flesh-stenched barbeque from hell. This last was mainly for effect, but the bulk of the second wave was still directed inside the stadium at alternate points not already hit, because that's where the TV cameras would be focused. And were, as millions of people across the country watched in speechless horror the spectacle before them.

Ahmad waited until a minute or so after the second wave had completed, then texted the signal for all his teams to depart, which they did. The cell monitoring the television broadcast and internet news sent him the best news of all: the response was off the charts, both on TV, and internationally. He whispered a brief thanks to Allah, then kicked his motorcycle into life, and rode off sedately into the night.

He had given the infidel Americans a Halloween to remember with dread for decades.

On Wednesday at 3AM they did the same thing over the refineries near the harbor, mainly with thermite bombs. 30 giant fuel and oil tanks, widely dispersed, had set 24 more adjoining ones on fire, in an inferno that would take two weeks to extinguish, and send the price of gasoline locally to the moon.

On Friday night, they hit crowds at Disneyland with napalm during the nighttime fireworks.

The exodus out of state began with a vengeance.

Early Sunday morning, they hit 25 separate power distribution complexes, and blacked out most of the state of California, and parts of Arizona and Nevada for a week and a half.

On Monday morning, martial law was declared in all three states.

"There." thought Ahmad.
"See how you like fighting a war in your country for a change."

Snowflake Problems - NOGAFF Award Winner

Fresh from the Bureau Of Dumbshittery, from the Minister Of Inability To Judge Proportion:

(ASSTARDISTAN) Rumors about Bush (41) groping actresses in this manner have been circulating for a while. More than a year ago, a tipster passed word about the Heather Lind incident to Deadspin. We were told that Bush had, during a photo opp, groped her and told her that his favorite magician was “David Cop-a-Feel” while fondling her. 

(Reached for comment, Bush spokesperson Jim McGrath provided the following statement: “At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures. To try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke — and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner. Some have seen it as innocent; others clearly view it as inappropriate. To anyone he has offended, President Bush apologizes most sincerely.”)

To drag in a decrepit and wheelchair-bound 93 y.o. former president to run cover for a serial rapist President and a decades-long molesting misogynist Hollywood producer who performed THEIR predations in full health, at the height of their physical and metaphysical powers, and cover for the legions of enablers for same, as though there were ANY sort of equivalence or correspondence between the two, is simply beyond the realm of rational thought.

Let's call it what it is: Weinstein Derangement Syndrome.

Is it possible that a non-ambulatory WWII-veteran aircraft pilot is, in his doddering decreptitude, a manifestly innocent dirty old man?

I urge those who probably know not a single veteran in their immediate circle, to five degrees of separation, to go hang around the VFW or American Legion Post for any given Saturday night shindig, and get back to us. Or just watch Gran Torino, Grumpy Old Men, and Grumpier Old Men, then report to the class.

But for any vacuous actress to receive a fanny grope from a man so old that if he were Benjamin Franklin, he would be already nine years dead, is jackassery and Special Snowflake hyperventilating hysteria of the worst order.

Does it fall within the statutory description of "unwanted touching"? Yes.
So, by all means, Snowflake ass-shakers, run down to the District Attorney's office, and file a criminal complaint.

But you didn't do that, did you, because you knew you'd be laughed out of the f**king office, even if the District Attorney had been Gloria Allred, and the case were to be heard by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Satanmayor.

Motive? Sure.
Opportunity? Yep, your ass was definitely within his grasp.
Means? Not so much.

What would have the police charge him with? Assault With A Dead Weapon?
FFS, the jury in the trial would come out of the box, and beat the plaintiffs about the head and shoulders all the way to the city limits.

Got a story about George Herbert Walker Bush cornering interns in the White House or Oval Office and diddling them with tobacco products anythime between 1981 and 1993?? Leaving his DNA on their dresses? Fondling himself into the potted plants in front of starlets while promising them plum roles and bounteous careers in Hollywood?
No?
NONE of that, and anything remotely similar?

Okay, so STFU.

No, really, go have a vat of STFU. Then another one. If that doesn't work, try shoving a washcloth down your throat with a broomstick. If you need any help with that, call me, I'm in the book.

This nonsense also goes to proving for the 4,019th time that 99% of what gets passed off as sexual harassment is best solved by a slap on the offending hand, or a knee to the crotch.
But that's kind of hard to do on a guy in a wheelchair, (let alone one with Secret Service protection) whereas the local yellow press is on speed dial for wannabe starlets needing a career, let alone a career boost, or some quick Democrat slush fund cash to tide them over before they fully make the jump into the escort business.

But hey, you've slimed a former president in his dodderage, a guy who lost crew members in combat, got shot down by the Japs defending this country fifty years before you were born, ran the CIA, ran for President three times without so much as a whiff of scandal, got elected to the job once, masterminded the shortest and most bloodless war (for us) in U.S. history, and in between raised two governors and one subsequent President of the US, the first guy to pull off that family two-fer since John Adams. And you are...?

And you did it in service of taking the heat off of octopus-armed mega-perv Harvey Weinstein, with a hat-tip to First Enabler and Queen Sociopath Shrillary Frothing Denial Clinton to cover for her serial rapist husband.

Walk tall, bitches. Sisterhood! Represent.

The former president should send out a statement that he's been thoroughly checked for a social disease since touching you, but fortunately come away from the encounter untainted by whatever he may have contracted being in such proximity to your hootch.

And thank God you didn't go to the cops over these "incidents"; it probably would have taken them six months to run down all the fingerprints and DNA on your high-mileage assets, to see who else had been at the scene of the crime.

And if Fat Bill or Jimmy Peanut, or even Barry Soetero devolves to the same conduct should they live as long, I herewith give it the same No One Gives A Flying F**k pass.

New Rule: Nobody under the age of 80 gets to talk smack about the alleged sexual offenses of anyone beyond that age when they were committed.

So, you two bints, get off the stage. Zombie Andy Warhol called. Your fifteen minutes are up.

"And the nominees for Worst Over-The-Top Performance By A Spotlight-Seeking Frothing Harpy Entitled Snowflake are..."

Here's your shared award, Princess Bitchy McWhinypants, and Harpy Sugarcookie.

And good luck in those infomercials on Univision and the Home Shopping Network.

Assuming you aren't already passing out flyers with your phone number on the Vegas Strip.

Day 25

In response to the follow-up dribble of leads, whispers, rumblings, etc. regarding the ongoing and ceaseless fornication of the Las Vegas Shooting, the following:

1) The investigation, by express design, has been as transparent as mud since the minute the room was breached.

2) Absent serious material evidence beyond the location of the body, the only thing one can intelligently say about Paddock is that he was guilty of being found dead on the scene at the time of the breach. By whose design or purpose, including his own, is impossible to conclude, and whether or not he actually fired any shots, including the last one that went through his mind, is impossible to say, based on what's known outside the official circle.

3) We know Paddock was the only person found in the suite, but we have no idea if any others, nor who, nor how many, may have shared that suite, before, during, or after the shooting, and for up to 5-10 minutes after all shooting inside the room had ceased. I doubt by the day that such knowledge gap is either unintentional or circumstantial. I suspect, based on the preceding, that what is known is something which must be concealed, for any clowncarnucopia range of reasons, some good and prudent, and most malign and derelict, and that therefore TPTB are taking all possible measures to do exactly that.

4) All official statements have had the odor of fish and the taint of stupidity since first burped out.
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." - Ian Fleming

5) Leaks fall automatically into two types: accidental/unwanted, and deliberate.
And most are of dubious reliability when one cannot know whether they were undesired vs. carefully planned and choreographed.

I detest conspiracies, and theories of same, generally because Occam's Razor leaves them on the cutting room floor, but everything about this, in the relatively brief timespan since the incident beginning at midnight the morning after, screams cover-up and blown operation, rather than a straightforward monstrous crime and investigation. Official incompetence or deliberate obfuscation by the follow-up investigation is the icing on the cake at every turn, and shows no sign of abating anytime in the foreseeable future. And looks, to everyone but the guys inside, exactly like the cow in Top Secret!, or the horse on Craig Ferguson's Late Late Show. And about as convincing as either.

Le Meuoooooooox!

Lying is always a two-fold sin, not only via the injury in telling another person or persons something you know isn't "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," but also a compounding of that transgression with an insult, by announcing with the act of telling the lie, that you think the party to whom you tell it is too stupid to detect the falsehood.

And, exactly on the witness stand or in a relationship, once you know you were lied to, you realize you can no longer depend on anything that preceeded or followed the lie. In jury instructions, this is precisely what "falsus in unum, falsus in omnium" means. Dishonesty is exactly like actual bullsh*t in that respect: there is no amount which one may safely bake into the cake if you expect other people to willingly swallow it, once they know it's there.

When it's done as brazenly and clumsily as it has been in this case, it also announces, in turn, the monumental and manifest lack of intelligence, sense, or perception on the part of those who'd tell them.

It's one thing to be told whoppers by a clever man, with the attendant stage wink, to let you know he knows you know he's lying to you; but when they are delivered flat-footed with a deer-in-the-headlights eye-glaze, you know the teller is too stupid to know how stupid he sounds telling them, and earnestly thinks you believe them, and cannot conceive how you would not.

There's a reason there are no blind eye doctors.

Leyte Gulf

Our last trip down History Lane today is the Battle of Leyte Gulf, itself actually a series of battles around the Philippine Islands, by the naval forces covering the Army landings on Leyte of 20 October, and Gen. MacArthur's promised return to the islands. Counting all the various task forces and combatants over its unfolding course, it was the largest naval battle in history.

In a series of multiple and widely-separated engagements from the 23-26 of October 1944, including the last time battleships fired salvos at other battleships, the US Navy traded the loss of 6 American ships for the destruction of 28 Japanese ships, essentially wiping the IJN off the board as anything to consider for the balance of the war, less than three years after the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor.

To do the whole any sort of justice in a humble blog post is beyond possibility, except to note the tens of thousands of combatants engaged in the great struggle there.

Coming only four months after the June carriers v. carriers engagement nicknamed the Marianas Turkey Shoot, wherein Japan lost three carriers and over 500 aircraft, the multi-day Battle of Leyte Gulf ensured the eventual success of the Philippines' liberation, and paved the way for the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa the next year, and consigned the Japanese Home Islands to months of endless B-29 bomber raids, firebombing Tokyo and turning most of the country's cities to ashes, culminating in the atomic bomb drops at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following August.

It thus provides a last chapter to one noteworthy day of military history, and a fitting lesson that whenever possible, it's probably best not to poke a more powerful country in the eye unless you'd like your head ripped off.

Probably Did It Right After He Shot Himself...

h/t Irish

Only 24 days after recovering it, investigators have discovered that Stephen Paddock's laptop computer had its hard drive removed.

(Behind The Looking Glass) A laptop computer recovered from the Las Vegas hotel room where Stephen Paddock launched the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was missing its hard drive, depriving investigators of a potential key source of information on why he killed and maimed so many people, ABC News has learned.

Which leads to questions of:
1) When did that happen? (Obviously, as I noted in the title above, he took it out after he shot himself in the head...)
2) What good is a laptop with no hard drive? Would it even boot up at that point?
3) If not (as I suspect) then why keep the laptop around, instead of just dumping it in a trash bin too?
4) So, he had a laptop with no hard drive, and cameras with no memory drives, because...um...because he...oh, hell, he was clearly driven crazy by...by...Underpants Gnomes!
5) Underpants Gnomes explain all the facts of this incident, therefore they must have been there.

QED

So, c'mon now.
He meticulously planned the shooting, removed his hard drive well in advance, but hadn't barricaded his doors with furniture, and stopped shooting at thousands of helpless targets hundreds of yards away, despite having hundreds to thousands of unfired rounds remaining, because an unarmed security guard showed up, who he unaccountably missed with 200 rounds despite a range to target measured in inches.
And after becoming bored with unleashing biblical levels of carnage, he stopped shooting, well before any police arrived, and quietly ate his pistol.

Sh'yeah, that's totally how this went down.

Welcome To My Nightmare

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man

Well, color me unshocked:
A couple of weeks back, Peter noted that hobby drones could and would be weaponized.

I agreed.
No shortage of jet-fuel geniuses were certain that it couldn't happen, because reasons, and "the payload capacity can be measured in grams".

Well, so can an 800 pound gorilla, Genius.

Now comes news that we're there.
Now.
$#!^, meet fan:

(CARTELISTAN) Mexican police discovered four men carting a kamikaze drone equipped with an IED and a remote detonator last week, in what analysts say is an example of cartels figuring out how to weaponizing UAVs.
The disturbing development is a manifestation of something top American security chiefs warned Congress about earlier this year, when they said they feared terrorists would begin to use drones to attack targets within the U.S.
Drug cartels had already been turning to drones to smuggle their product into the U.S., and had begun using IEDs in their turf struggles — but now at least cartel appears to have put the two technologies together, according to Mexican reports analyzed by Small Wars Journal.

The drone-IED combination was found in central Mexico, by federal police who did a traffic stop on a stolen pickup truck with four men in it.
Police found an AK-47, ammunition, phones and what the Small Wars Journal authors said appears to be a 3DR Solo Quadcopter, which retails for about $250 online. Taped to the drone was an IED, which could be trigger by remote detonator.

As Peter further noted in today's post:

The hobby drone referred to at that link, the 3DR Solo Quadcopter, costs only $199 from online retailers such as Amazon.com.  It can carry a payload of 1.1 pounds, according to its user manual - and Mexican drug cartels were obviously using that capability to the full.

1.1 pounds.
The weight of a US M67 frag grenade, with the pin pulled, helpfully snuggled into a cut open half of a soda can.

Rig a tip over/release mechanism, drop from 390' AGL up and it detonates on impact. A bit higher gets you an airburst.

A few of those, and you can beat the Vegas shooter's tally in seconds.

We won't even talk about some whackjob terrorist waiting for a press conference on the South Lawn of the White House. Or some future Inauguration on the Capitol steps. The Secret Service has to be sweating bullets the size of goose eggs about now just thinking about that security nightmare.

Do one with 1# of thermite and a fuze, and exactly as I noted in comments at the earlier post and you can take out a fully-fueled jetliner queued up for takeoff.

Or a space rocket launch.

Or an armed strategic bomber back on nuclear alert (like we're phasing back in, right this minute).

Do the same thing over a fuel tank, and you get one helluva fire.

Do half a dozen in the Wilmington/San Pedro refinery farms south of L.A., and you start more fires in five minutes than the entire county could put out in five days.

Freeways at rush hour? Times 10 or 20 locations at interchanges?

How about someone taking out a few power distribution station transformers, and wiping an electrical grid off the map?

Do it at the Sabine Pass LNG terminal (or wait for Long Beach CA or Cove Point MD LNG terminals to open up in a couple of years), and you unleash the equivalent of an atomic blast.

For the cost of $200 of drone, and $50 of chemical components, using a cell phone trigger that's been in use in SWAsia since before 2002. And now found in Mexico. (Found by accident, and unlikely to be the only one; it's just the first one we know about.)

We won't even talk about what a pound or so of C-4 would do. Let alone several dozens of them. (World Series? Superbowl? Malls at Christmas? Wall Street at the opening bell? A handful of FAA Center air traffic control buildings, simultaneously? The imagination boggles.)

So where's the genius that assured us a coupla weeks back that the carrying capacity on these things was measured in grams?
Yeah, turns out that would be 500 grams, to be precise.

Every invention in human history has been weaponized, in about 0.2 seconds. Hobby drones are no different.

And as fast as Amazon can think of using them to deliver a package, and we can think of the reasons why that might be a bad idea, Dirkadirka Imawannajihad on Bakalakadaka Street can think of a few hundred reasons why it's perfectly suited to his purpose.

Duh.

And the new price of a precision-guided munition has been dropped to $200, available on Amazon.

As sold.

As weaponized by Mexican cartels.

Sleep tight.