Comments That Didn't Age Well

 "Come on, Russia is not going to invade Ukraine. It's fake news."

The bigger question is whether Putin is really just looking to annex a couple of majority ethnic Russian areas to build a buffer with NATO, or whether this is just a Sudetenland pretext for taking the whole ball of wax in a week or three.

"Ukraine? Nyet. Now is MYkraine!"

One is rational self-interest, and the other is naked aggression.

And as before, only time will tell.

But maybe next time, grant me a tad more analytical ability. The commenter in question wasn't so much wrong, as they were simply unlucky at guessing.

And Confirmation Bias is never your friend.

Images h/t: C.W.

Endpoint

 

Neverland, Not Tomorrowland

h/t daily timewaster 

In 1960, maybe. Not so much now.

BTW, those two kids in the pic? They're now in their 80s, if not already dead. And the peak delivery of what they were promised was less than a decade away, and it's all been downhill on that promised future since then. It's unlikely that even their great-grandkids will ever see a piece of what they were told was coming "someday". Civilization has been ebbing backwards since then, in more ways than not.

Futurists are right less often than weather men.

No jetpacks. No flying cars. No disintegrator rays or laser pistols. No space travel.

In fact, just assume everything you were ever told would happen that isn't already starting, is one big fat lie, and you'll outperform them by about 4 decimal places in your batting average.

The only thing their prognostications are useful for, is historical evidence of how they wished things were going to turn out.

Wish in one hand, and poop in the other, and see which one fills up first.

Consequences To Consequences To Consequences

 

Commander Zero has some thoughts on the inter-COVIDian crisis, and things to come. Food for thought.

RTWT.

Here are some of my own notes:

All the COVIDication of the workforce has done is

a) ring the dinner bell to outsource everything (and everyone) outsourceable.

(Commercial real estate, long-term: deader than canned tuna.)

b) People in Bangladesh cannot cook your burger, do chest compressions during your heart attack, nor change your oil or transmission.

c) If you have a job, you are employed at will.

d) If you own a business, you are employed at whim.

e) Find ways to make money that have other people making the money and delivering it to you. Diversity is asinine. Diversification is king.

f) long-term, having a large class of unemployed, under-employed, and broke, hungry, shiftless lumpenproletariat is how revolutions start. Middle classes do not revolt. This year has seen the biggest targeted wipeout of the middle class, worldwide, and shifting them to the lower class, than anything since the Great Depression. And we're still in the early innings of it, as COVID2.0 now appears to be clearing its throat.

g) That's before the blatant disenfranchising of a third of the adults in this country by the most ham-fistedly blatant electoral fraud (outside of every election in Central America, ever) in living memory.

h) make plans accordingly, for a long, cold, brutal, and quite probably bloody  decade-plus of economic winter. Possibly with a bonus helping of "heads on pikes".

Good times Are Here Again will not be played anytime soon.

And remember: Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics isn't just a snappy put-down; it's How the World Works at ground level.

And for Common Core grads, you should know that 1776 was planned and funded by the richest bunch of Establishment movers and shakers (not to mention smugglers and pirates) in the New World. You could look it up.

Coincidence, my @$$. Learn a lesson from history.

1776.2 better be too, or it's not going to go the way you hope.

And Another Thing:

The official governing body in 1776 was called Parliament.

In 2020, the Congress and Courts and the rest of the Deep State are still The King's Parliament and His Majesty's Court. And President Trump isn't their king, as they've told you for four long years.

Why is anyone surprised at this, or how things are playing out?

The Continental Congress was an unauthorized, unsanctioned, unlawful, treasonous, and seditious assembly, and every man-jack of them were eventually targeted for arrest and hanging. If you're expecting GOVERNMENT as it is presently constituted to plan or carry out anything like a revolt, you don't understand things very well.

You're going to have to find and BE the leaders you're waiting to have appear, or there ain't gonna be none of those.

Let that sink in until it fills your marrow.

That is all.

As I've Pointed Out Many Times



This is your state on libtards and Turd World banana republicans.

For years, which some precision, I've noted here and elsewhere that California's problems are overwhelmingly illegal aliens by the tens of millions, and a similar onslaught from the toothless banjo-playing kinfolk for the Other 49. Now comes official statistical back-up:

(US Census Burea via CNS) Least-Educated State: 2,471,189 California Residents 25 and Older Never Completed 9th Grade; Highest Percentage in Nation

RTWT.

Take your retarded cousins back, and tell your Chamber-of-Commerce captive US senators and congressweasels to fund the entire Border Wall, and things here will reverse as rapidly as they deteriorated (i.e. about a generation).

Fail to do it, and when (not if) we collapse financially, they'll all be going home next whether you like it or not, plus bringing their maids, busboys, dishwashers, and their 14 kids with them.

Ask Virginia how that looks up close, once it happens, as FL and TX purple up nicely over the next 20 years.

Twenty five years after US immigration was thrown wide open, CA flipped from Republican forever, to a wobbler, to a Dem lock.

You lose TX and FL too, and you won't see another [R] president again, ever.
Not even a total RINO squish. That'll be the Whig Party.

Then the most right-wing candidate forever would be someone like Bernie, Nancy Alzheimers, or Evita Guevara-Castro.

Go ahead and try to vote at that.

Cheers.

These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For

No points for guessing the life expectancy of that spiffy Honda generator in
combat once the range is hot in both directions. These things are going
to be worse in combat than Combat Barbies are, with a notably shorter
operational life expectancy. Well done, combat jedi drone masterminds.

In today's post, John Wilder (whose blog should be your regular go-to, every time he posts, just because, unless you've already found too many blogs that are smart, funny, and true, all at the same time) links to and talks about the fapulations of some folks who think Droney the Drone will be the new shizznit when it comes to warfare.

We disagree with those self-serving Military Industrial Complex self-pleasuring prognostications.

Just a wee bit.

To wit:

Those simulations have a 400% chance of selling worthless drone systems to the idiots at the Pentagon.

In combat, they’d be mostly horseshi…, er, rose fertilizer.

Aerial drones are great at detecting people. In a barren desert. Or above the Arctic Circle.
In triple canopy jungle, bayou swamp, or northern hardwood forest, their detection capabilities are less than that of a good bassett hound. And they’re not particularly difficult to kill, defeat, or degrade. Starting with shooting the operator.

If 40 Afghan jihadis had stormed the relatively pussified base defenses in Tonopah NV one day, and rampaged through the drone trailers, killing everyone in sight and blowing up the control trailers, drone warfare in A-stan would have ground to a screeching halt, stayed that way for months, and the Air Farce would have started a crash program to steal Army Rangers by the tens of thousands as base defense cops in 30 states of the U.S.

That’s asymmetrical warfare.

In Phase Two, the jihadis would target military dependents off-base in the community, at schools, malls, etc.

So how you gonna harden the entire country, simultaneously, everywhere, against that?

You’re not.
Game. Set. Match.

Land drones?

1) If the supporting troops are close enough to give cover fire, they’re close enough to receive cover fire.
Hint: the guy with the big control box in his hands gets the first sniper volley. Game Over.

2) Those little Fun Sized mini-tanks are cute. So, what’s their industrial fire rating against a wine bottle full of 87 octane and dish soap?
[Bonus Extra Credit Question:
How about when I drop that little Easter Egg from one of my COTS drones?
Or use a soda can full of home-made thermite, at $2@?
You gonna deploy Sopwith Camel drones for air cover??]

3) Drive one over.
I’ll have a couple of guys throw a wet quilt over its sensor mast as it passes by; now it’s blind.
[Paintballs work pretty well too. Just saying.]
Then anyone with ten seconds of .mil experience will run up on the blinded droid, and twist the ammo belt. Now the gun is out of action.
Then we lever it on its side, or shove a pipe bomb into the treads; now it’s mobility killed.
 Then we pop smoke, or otherwise hide what we’re doing from its controllers.
Finally, we pull the pins on the pintle, and carry off that MG, and the can of ammo.
Now I have a machinegun. Ho ho ho.

Then we firebomb it anyways, because we can.
And it cost me a $20 quilt, and $1 worth of unleaded. To kill your $15K tanklet, and steal a functional MG.

Which I’ll happily use on your side when the smoke clears.
Including the operators, the other tanklets, and those aerial drones.

How long before I bankrupt a division for the money I have in my wallet, right now?
And if your live troops are close enough to support it, we’ll take them out too.
If they’re not, they can watch us carry their MG back, and set it up to return fire.

Heads I win, tails you lose.


Use them here?

Okay, let’s play that game.
What’s the defensive capability of any police station you can name?
When I storm it with those same 40 guys, kill everyone there, steal everything I can use, and burn what I can’t, how many more police are you going to need to protect the station house, and every other one you have, 24/7/365?

Who’s going to defend the police when I shoot them off duty getting a burger?

Who’s going to defend their families when they get killed and kidnapped while Officer Friendly is out oppressing the peasants?
(You think their women and children will be off limits if mine aren’t? Sh’yeah, you should live so long. The peasantry will make wind chimes out of those kids’ skulls, for sport, by Week Two. Bet money on it. Tape recordings of their families’ dying screams will be broadcast by PA at the police station daily. Videos of their torture that would make an Apache blush will go viral. So when you have zero cops at work by Week Three, who’s going to stop me from doing the same thing to their masters holding the leash?)

How you gonna gas the MRAPs when folks blow up the fuel tankers?

What are your jack-booted thugs gonna eat when the train and highway bridges into town burn down and blow up, and the goods stop rolling?

What happens when the power lines to every police station and Thug Central keep getting cut, and the transformers shot up every night? You got bicycle-powered generators for those radios?

The Enemy ALWAYS Gets A Vote.

Unlike in canned simulations, 140 guys aren't going to sit obligingly like stunned bunnies and wait while your 20 guys with BATTLEBOTS! walk remorsely up on them and hose them down, while your SKYDRONES! have unanswered mastery of the air. And that same enemy isn't going to helpfully wear red coats and march in straight lines on open fields. They're going to hide, slide, and glide in the same outfits as innocent bystanders, until they blow up in your faces.

Pop Quiz: a) Which side has drones now, and
b) which side is slinking out of Iraq, Syria, and A-stan with its tail between its legs, because it simply cannot win against people who refuse to roll over and die?
Does Vietnam ring a bell? Beuller? Beuller?? Ferris Beuller...?

c) Everyone who figures rednecks, hillbillies, and sketchy neighborhood city-folk from the U.S. of 1B Guns and 2Trillion Rounds of Ammo, are going to be easier meat and bigger pushovers than illiterate fourth-grade dropout goatherders with rusted bolt-action rifles, signify by setting yourself on fire.

I'll wait, while those industrial military wannabe Sun Tzu geniusii answer those questions.

Tell us how many divisions the Nazis needed to garrison unarmed populations, and then tell us what the numbers would be against a population that bought more guns than the U.S., Russian, Chinese, and NATO armies have, combined, in just last year alone, and every year since they've kept stats?

If I’m a betting man, I like the odds in favor of Team Partisan.

And inside a month, we’ll be using Team Oppression’s drones against them.
Bigly.

If there are any of them left alive to fight.

In a fight in this country between the people (even an infinitesimally small fraction of them) and The Man, we run out of government minions to kill in about two volleys, on Monday.

Forget III-percenters.
This is going to be the Great Three Shot War.

“Why three shots?”
Because after three shots apiece, we were all out of bad guys.”

QED

Dreaming, Or Planning?

A lot of people are just dreaming. About any number of things.

If what you're working on is always going to be done tomorrow, you're daydreaming, not planning or working.

Time is short. You don't know it's up until it's too late.
You want a castle?
Git 'er done.

Don't Be Surprised

Today's riff-tastic starting point:

“Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.”

Looking at a prediction success rate of the above that makes weather men and stock market analysts seem like Nostradamus, if anyone can’t take that data point and extrapolate the predominant maximal stupidity and mental powers of the above-referenced groups, I cannot help you any further.

(For Reference:

 Major Missed Calls
Iron Curtain
fall of China
Korean War
Cuba
Berlin Wall
Sputnik
Missiles In Cuba
Vietnam debacle
at least three Mideast wars
Rise of OPEC
Berlin Wall coming down
Fall of Soviet Union
Invasion of Kuwait
9/11

And that’s just the major cluelessness since 1945, not even getting into the everyday weeds where they’re less informed than most).

 

So if the "experts" have no clue, what can you do?

 

Easy.

 

Most major life emergencies can best be solved with a passport, a credit card, and $20K worth of small bills in cash, in your hand.
(Concealed pistol optional.)
Everything else is second best.

But that’s still only most emergencies, not all.
For the rest, canned goods (both #10, and the olive drab kind) take rather more precedence.

A prudent person who prepares for not only the worst case imaginable, but also for the unimaginably bad case (what Mr. Sec. Rumsfeld referred to perspicaciously as unknown unknowns), will always do the best, overall. Because the main preps for SMOD versus looting at the local Food King versus an F5 tornado coming up the road are remarkably similar.

This is why your great-great-great-grand-relative and mine all still trace their ultimate ancestry to Noah & Sons Cruise Lines, LLC.

So, for anyone's general reference, a cubit is a unit of measurement 18 inches long.
And you should know a wee bit about marine architecture, in a metaphorical sense.
Because everyone laughs at the ark-builders.
Until it starts to rain.

What They Want, Versus Will Get

This from GVDL, WRSA, and originally KD.

As usual, Denninger gets things half-right.

There is intended to be a Civil War. The Leftards openly fantasize this, as they see themselves as swooping in to repeat another victory.

Except this time the South is every white person, everywhere.
(They think they'll get over because they "identify" as gay black women. It won't work any better for them than for the frog giving the scorpion a ride.)

But "we" (D. apparently has a mouse in his pocket) won't be stopping it, because "we" didn't start it, don't control the narrative, and have neither the will nor inclination to prevent gravity from working.
The chimp-out under plan is being ginned up per protocol, exactly as thousands of smaller versions have, with a monotonous cadence of hoax crimes, all beating the drum inexorably to fan the flames and direct the muster of exactly the CW intended.

The surprise will be when (and if) it comes calling.

On Day One, predictably to a mathematical certainty, they run out of cops, after two or perhaps three volleys. The cops already know this to a man, hence the distinct lack of vigor to go about it in the first place.

If no learning occurs prior, on Day Two, The Culling begins in earnest.
Instructive, at this point, is the Flight 93 Effect: i.e. in this day and age, you've got about half an hour's free reign to hatch your Clever Plan, and after that, the so-called Sheeple, having been red-pilled to the New Reality,  will come at you, if necessary with bread knives and rolled up magazines. And then you and your Clever Plan are over.

The problem for the Leftards is that Joe Average can do much better, on thirty minutes' notice, than bread knives and rolled up magazines, unless he's trapped in an aluminum tube at 40k'.

It will be ARs and Glocks and such, until all obvious targets have either changed shape, caught fire, or bled out.

Then, the survivors (and pure odds overwhelmingly favors one side, and that side is not The Diversity) will look to who started it, and The Hunt will begin in earnest.

By Friday, people will be rounded up in batches, and shot against the handiest wall, and it likely won't end until Rush Limbaugh is considered the most Liberal Man in America.

You can forget the military; they'll be hamstrung, and the wiser ones (about 98%) will either have joined the melee, or chosen to sit on their hands until the festivities are over, rather than wade amidst an internal war fray. They'll retreat to their bases, and lock the gates, with orders to merely repel boarders, and fire only defensively. And for exactly the same reason the Beijing Guards wouldn't fire on the Beijing students in Tiananmen Square.
The Chicoms had to import hicks from the sticks to do that dirty work.
Our military won't have time for that, not being prepared beforehand.
And they'll see what happens to the cops, from local to federal, and want no part of that pie for themselves. ("Only a fool fights in a burning house.")

{In fact, see if you don't find young and middle-aged guys headed home in their work out gear, and find piles of empty police uniforms in the police station parking lots, when most of them just go home to protect their own families.}

Besides, the military will generally have their hands full assuring six other world powers that the nukes are secure (nations that have them get itchy about that point, to a metaphysical certainty), and those other nations should fuck right off and stay out of this hemisphere, and not stick their nose into the bear fight, lest it get blown off with a response in the megaton range, by way of warning shot.
For the same reasons, there will be a rush to the Mexican Border, but it will be an exodus headed south, not north.

How long The Hunt lasts is an open question, as is how far the decline.
Some areas may last for weeks, some others for only a few hours.
The "Civil War" is liable to resemble more closely the Rodney King Riots, rather than the Unpleasantness of the 1860s. Ain't nobody got time for that, and in any event, there'll be no one left to whack after a few days or weeks, the rest either dead or in hiding or exile, with bounties on their heads.

You think the Left will suddenly show backbone?
Look at an Antifa event: one Moldylocks face punch, and it's over.
The "brave" ones only attack with police escort and at 10:1 odds.
Toe to toe, they scurry like roaches, and when heads start exploding and guts opened up right and left, they'll set Olympic track records getting back to the safety of mommy's basement, if they can make it there unscathed. And those are their "tough" customers.

Hospitals and churches won't be a safe zone sanctuary, and there'll be no Geneva conventions: people will be pulled out by the hair and shot on the steps, when and where found.

Media outlets will be gutted free-fire zones: radio, TV, newspapers. Open season on "journalists", and no bag limit. Mark my words. This ain't going to be Vietnam or GWI or GWII: "PRESS" creds on your vehicle or person will be a death sentence. "The Revolution will not be televised."
You may get some Liveleak and youTube hashed up cell video, but it will look like shakey-cam outtakes from The Blair Witch Project or War Of The Worlds, and liable to get you shot in the face for doing it, so it will not be a wise move to be the guy holding out a cell phone camera like some talisman of protection, unless it's got an NIJ rating sufficient to stop .30 cal incoming.

What happens after that is when things get interesting, in a Chinese curse sort of way, and my crystal ball is hazy by that point.

Then we'll see who's organized, and legitimized, or whether we enter the warlord and dictator period of history.

And whether it starts next month or twenty years from now - if it ever does - is still a wide-open question.

But the Left definitely thinks they want one to start, and are openly salivating at the prospect.
Like all mad dogs.


But mad dogs always get shot. Always.

Then you go after their owners.

The Triggering: Back To The Future

Just some appropriate music...

Chris Hernandez has a great new post up:

"October 28^th, 2046. A day I’ll never forget. 

It started just like any other day. I was at the station, watching President Ocortez on TV as she sentenced a criminal to death for denying that women experience erectile dysfunction, when the call came through. 10-37, Triggering In Progress at the memorial! I dropped my tofu and latte, sprinted to my patrol Prius, and blazed out of the parking lot at my max speed of 22 miles per hour."

RTWT.

Now.
All of it.
Oh, and before I forget: Class II Keyboard Alert.

Dear 2019: Bring It.

h/t Daily Timewaster

The future is always a foreign country, and nobody so far has come back to tell us what it looks like in any great detail.

Anything may happen, but as far as the choice lies in my hands, I'm doing my level best to go out in one of two ways:

I'm either going to die of old age, in a brass bed, surrounded by the living remnants of my tribe;
Or in a bed of hot brass, of old ideals, surrounded by the former members of someone else's.

I'm getting less picky about which, with each passing day.

I'm Here, At This Point

Go read this spot-on rant today at Gun Free Zone .

"I don’t want to divide up the country.  I don’t want to occupy New York City or San Francisco.  I just want to take the minority of outraged Radicals and build a monument to freedom with their skulls."

If someone posted that next Wednesday at noon was National Housecleaning Day, and gunfire broke out at that point within earshot, I can't tell you I wouldn't join in the festivities.

I can tell you that for anyone who joined in, everything after the first shot is essentially free, (you can only hang a man once, after all) and the things that would stop anyone at that point would be only their own death, a lack of ammunition, or a dearth of further targets, and nothing less.

With CA, AZ, GA, and FL, we're watching Democrat BAMN tactics subvert multiple federal and state elections, openly, brazenly, and entirely free of any sort of fear of consequences or repercussions.



They aren't even bothering to try and hide it. h/t Xenophilic blog

At that point, this is no longer even a country, just a banana republic, and the answer to that is lead travelling at muzzle velocity, not only philosophically to a moral certitude, but every time things devolve to that point in world history to date.

The Democrat Party is willing to burn America down in order to steal it, and they are now the open enemy of the state and the people, and they're going to get their reply ballistically, not rhetorically. Once you're kissed in the forehead that way, there is no further reply. Nature is brilliantly subtle like that.

Nothing less will suffice any longer, unless I read tomorrow that entire counties of their operatives have been rounded up in mass arrests for federal prosecution for election tampering, and are being tried in batches at the local stadium.

The only open question now is timing.

I'm not telling anybody to open that party, but I'm telling you that party's getting opened, and once the genie's out of the bottle, all bets about how long, how widespread, and how bloody are rampant speculation based more on hope than reality.

We had a country.

One side has consistently refused to live under the rules of that country.

They are about to reap the consequences of that course of action, in a Darwin Award-winning manner, and it's liable to be the Third Punic War for them, their families, and anyone carrying water for them, before the dust settles, whether it happens in dribs and drabs, or all at once from coast to coast.

But the match and the fuse are about to have a fateful meeting.

---

Before we get there, though, TLDavis has a suggestion.

My thoughts on that:

Before we get to “massive social unrest”, what does it take for people to start dropping wrenches in the gears of everyday life?

Think about it:

How many stop lights a day can crews replace?
What happens to traffic when all the ones within two miles of Douchebag Central get shot out, one at a time, and every intersection in all directions is now a 4-way stop?

How many suspicious packages can the Bomb Squad handle simultaneously?
What about if left on major arteries into downtown?
At rush hour?
What happens if one of them goes off first, to show they’re not all just for looks?

What if a few barrels of chemicals and hazmat get spilled, “accidentally”?
On major highways? Or at bridges and tunnels and other natural chokepoints?

What happens when some thoughtful souls all decide to shove 5# of rags into every toilet in a public building?
Or just dump a coffee can or two of Readycrete there?
Or, both?
And pull the fire alarms on their way out?

And then do the same thing at the local university?
What happens when you dump 10K college kids out of classes all at once?

Who do you call when persons unknown shoot a length of wire across all the high tension power lines a block away in each direction?
Or saws through the poles an inch a day, until one day a gust of wind kicks up, and fate takes a hand?
What happens when all the locks are epoxied closed on a long weekend?
At the Welfare Office?
You’re going to protect every public building, everywhere, 24/7/365/forevermore?

How many pounds of Bondo and limburger cheese or expanding foam does it take to kill an ATM?
What happens when you hit every ATM for miles?
What if you do the same thing to city parking meters?

How hard is it to jark a card key reader so no one can get into the parking lot?
Or disable the swing arm gates?

What happens when people start dropping tire-killing caltrops around whenever the mood strikes?
What if they were painted black, and left at the driveways to the police stations?
Or the city maintenance vehicle yards?

What if people started setting up random sandbag and cone “detours” around town, just to f**k with traffic flow?

We haven’t even gotten to the WWII resistance tactics of screwing with signs, street addresses, etc.

So when everything comes to a halt, and the Krooked Korruptocrats can’t even get to work, and don’t have time to steal an election, and the city or cities in question are in total chaos, and you have no one to arrest, or investigate, or question, and there hasn’t been a single casualty, or a single bullet fired, then what?

What happens when Phase II becomes taking the pain to private enterprise?
Especially those corporate entities that have funded the Communists and TPTB?
And the NGOs and “community organization” douchenozzles trying to replace you demographically?

And nobody’s had to wait for “massive social unrest”.

In fact, they’ve instigated it.

And you haven’t blown up the power lines into the whole city.
Just the ones going to City Hall.
Or the Vote Stealing Office.
Or the Welfare Desk.

Civilization is a fragile thing.
The myriad and multitudinous ways it can be screwed with make any defense recockulously impossible.
That sword cuts both ways.

Ponder what happens if you let the bastards know that burning up the social contract has consequences in both directions.
Just that.
They’ll get the message.
Via megaphone.

And long before we get to blood in the streets, and at no cost to your economic livelihood.

Snipers are always more economical than artillery or carpet-bombing.

有趣的时代

From elsewhere in the blogosphere, regarding this post:

"Mr. Aesop you make a number of good points. What are your thoughts if the republicans put a stomping on the left next month and conversely if the democrats give the republicans a drubbing? My uninformed guess is that both alternatives will embolden the left."

My 2¢:

The Kavanaugh debacle cost the Dems any chance of taking the Senate this November.

Barring a financial meltdown, or the president in a kiddie porn video, Trump is re-elected in 2020 in a walkaway.

All that leaves is the House.

The conventional wisdom and polling data say the Dems are going to pick up 10 House seats for sure next month, but whether they can flip the majority (23+ seats) is still an open question.

If they do, it's all impeachment and investigation, all the time.
Which will almost certainly lose them the House again in 2020.
(And FWIW, I consider trying to undo 2016 by impeaching Pres. Trump, like trying to undo the 2nd Amendment, to be an actual revolution-inducing act, in a kill-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out way. And not metaphorically. YMMV.)

If they don't get the House in the mid-terms, they've already turned the crazy up to "11", and they have nowhere left to go there, except actual, regular, political violence. I expect them to do that, because
a) they're really that stupid
b) they have no other choice
c) they lack the common sense or insight to recognize the result of that course of action beforehand, and lack the self control among their idiot minions to stop it anyway even if they wanted to.

That will be an extinction event for them, because the Right will declare open season on them, and the Moderates will sit back and watch approvingly.

Because once you yell "Play ball!" on killing your political opponents as a viable course of action, Americans have a long and distinguished history of shoving that bat right up your ass. And then, going after your family for good measure.

And both sides know that after the first killing, all the rest are effectively free, so this promises to be a short but ugly spasm of violence. To start.

After that, any bets or prognostications enter a fogbank of epic proportions, because once you uncork that genie, things will get out of hand and we'll all be lucky to live through this, as Fred Thompson warned us.

That's it in a nutshell.

The Leftards have lost their minds.
Before they can regain their senses, you're going to have to get their attention first.
The only thing that will do that, amounts to large numbers (Antietam/Gettysburg-large, not 9/11-large) of them stacked up like cordwood, or hanging from lamp posts.

And those who receive exactly that will be the most confused and surprised at the sudden change of fortune.

But I think we've gone beyond the point where anything lesser will avail.

They don't have the sense to back off, and they have too much momentum to back down. Even if the lemmings at the front of the pack stop, the ones in the back will just slam into the herd until they all go over the cliff anyways.

Plan for that, but hope I'm totally wrong, and the Lefttards suddenly discover how to suck it up and deal with reality.

(Personally, if I miss this by a country mile - in a good way - I couldn't be happier.)

Your wild-ass guesses, no matter how outlandish, are welcome in Comments.
Zombies and space aliens are off limits, but pretty much anything else can be argued into play.






(Oh, the Masthead Title? Chinese curse: "May you live in ___________ _____.")

These Aren't The Drones You're Wishing For...

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man and CDR Salamander

We've talked about drone attacks before hereabouts.
Did we ever.
So have a lot of others.

Capabilities have mushroomed, and prices drop. This is how tech goes from evolutionary to revolutionary. For all values of that last word.

The day of the drone assassin has arrived.

In November of 2017, The Daily Beast broke the story of the first illegally weaponized drone found in Mexico. It was a relatively primitive version that sported a homemade shrapnel bomb and was found in the back of a vehicle belonging to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), in the state of Guanajuato.

Then, about a month ago, evidence surfaced that CJNG had already advanced their drone designs considerably.

On July 10, the house of a Mexican public safety officer was targeted in a drone attack in Tecate, Baja California—a border city in the larger Tijuana-San Diego municipality that falls within CJNG’s established territory.

According to a new report co-authored by Dr. Robert Bunker, of the U.S. Army War College, the Tecate drone managed to drop its payload ISIS-style on the officer’s residence. Although the attack was apparently meant as a warning—since the grenades still had their safety pins intact—it also showed a clear step up in cartel-drone enhancement, including a second unmanned aircraft that conducted reconnaissance on site.

“Of the two drones, the Tecate one has far better lethality than the one in Guanajuato—we are comparing military grade grenades versus an IED,” Bunker told The Daily Beast.

“This is still an evolving global threat,” Bunker said. “The next firebreak, now that earlier ones have recently been broken in Mexico and Venezuela... would be weaponized drone incidents taking place in either Western Europe or in the United States. You can’t get much closer to the U.S. than Tecate, Mexico for an incident like this.”

There's still the occasional Baghdad Bob "expert" certain that this isn't happening (even as events and people who study this for a living tell them it already has), but some people go through life as Mayor Vaughn in Amity, denying reality while townfolk keep washing up in pieces on the beach.

Nobody's telling you to panic, or try knee-jerk bans. That horse left the barn decades ago.

FFS, my former artillery platoon commander transferred to the 1st RPV Platoon (Provisional) in 1985, over thirty years ago, when military drones were off-the-shelf homebuilts, and Israel had cobbled the tech together (along with the IAF) to wipe out every SAM site in the Bekaa Valley two years before that, with no friendly losses. In both cases, they recruited guys with civilian RC experience, and stood up units that relied on ancient engines and Styrofoam to build militarily significant machines with technology three generations earlier than what kids can have Amazon ship to their doorstep now.

Twenty years ago, we were using camera-armed drones to fly film shots that blended seamlessly with ground shots to fly a camera perspective down from 5000' to right in a window of a given house and down the hall.

If you can do that with a motion picture camera, it's obvious to anyone with two brain cells and stray voltage that you can do the same thing with a few pounds of high explosive.

And as usual, the profit motive (in this case drug money) and paramilitary desires for the perfect bomb have crossed the streams, and they're only getting better at it every day.
The progress from the drones seized in November, and the attack in July with a better version, was 9 months. Think where they'll be 9 months from now.

The question isn't whether it's going to happen, it's what's going to be done about it.
Airplanes started WWI with guys on opposite sides waving at each other, until one day some took along a pistol, then a rifle, then someone figured out how to rig a machinegun to fire through the propellers, and in under two years, shooting each other down went from ancillary effort to the entire point of the exercise. And in only thirty years (and two helpful world wars), that technology progressed from stick and fabric kites, to supersonic.

We're humans; this is what we do.

Making objects into tools, and tools into weapons is in our DNA.
Ask Abel.

Great News, Bad News

The Great News:

Thirty-five days out from the mid-terms, Gateway Pundit has issued this call:

Election 2018
Here is our prediction for the mid-terms:  Republicans will pick up at least 5 and possibly 6 or 7 or more seats in the Senate and Republicans will maintain leadership in the House.  Below is our support for this prediction.

TL;DR: Because Trump, bigly.

RTWT.

The Kavanaugh confirmation shenanigans are catalyzing this, as two senate candidates, including one sitting senator, have plummeted 10 points overnight with word they'd oppose President Trump's mud-smeared SCOTUS nominee. Not only are the Deplorables not buying the b.s., neither apparently is anyone else.

Well-played, Fineswine et al. Wiping yourselves out in the Senate would be a great way to go out.

It's just one prediction, and worth exactly what you paid for it, but it's encouraging.
We can only hope GP is as correct next month as they were in 2016.

The Bad News:

The forecast starting November 7th is for a deluge of Liberal Tears.
We're talking rain amounts closer to the Amazon rainforest than to Seattle.
Expect diaper-sagging amounts of pants-wetting, coupled with poo flinging, breath-holding, and full-on Wal-Mart toddler levels of public tantrums.

"NOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooo....!!!"

Getting another steel-toed boot right to the battery housing group is going to knock the bubbles on the Leftard bubbleheads so far out of whack they may never level out.

And two years is three lifetimes in politics, but at that point, the only thing that might stop a bigger win for Trump in 2020 would be an act of god.

So why Bad News?

These aren't adults we're working with on the other side (as they keep proving).

These are toddlers with car keys and iPhones.
They'll totally lose their shit.

In ways that are ugly, and far beyond just hilarious.

Or, they could all go to their safe rooms with a blankie, their teddy bear, and some JuicyJuice, and have a good thumb-sucking cry for a few months. No telling.

It also means the last gasp of a sea change in Congress will evaporate for the Deep State.

The worst thing to finish off is a cornered, wounded animal.
If Sessions gets eased out later this year in favor of someone who'll, y'know, actually do the gorram job of Attorney General, the next batch of subpoenas, indictments, and round-ups may go out along with the annual Christmas cards this year. 

Short of setting themselves on fire on live TV, I can't imagine what more CNN and MSNBC will do if a Red Tsunami comes to pass, but I can hope. The first can of high octane body wash is my treat. Because I'm a giver. And it would be worth it to see Sarah Sanders yank Jim Acosta's press pass, and give his seat to someone from The National Enquirer, and then tell Jake Tapper to tap out.

So if this isn't a normal mid-term, keep your rain gear handy.
Along with your kevlar, and a hard hat.

This might be just wishful thinking, and we'll get exactly the sh*tshow we've been expecting all along.
Or...not.

Stay frosty, and plan for all contingencies.

Including streamers, balloons, and cake.
There's always  room for cake.

"I Made A Snowman"

h/t Free North Carolina

This didn't actually happen. But it could, which is far worse.

If somebody like P.J. O'Rourke had written this, it would go viral, and anchor a satirical comedy bestseller.

But it's just the friend of a guy at his blog.

And it should still go viral.

Hillarious, rage-inducing, and satirical truthiness with the precision of a laser beam.

It's the reason satire sites like The Onion are struggling, because it becomes impossible to parody the idiocy and shenanigans going on in society when the perpetrators are crazier than a dumpster full of sewer rats, and whose every daily antic is more insane than the wildest flights of satiric imagination.

I give you, in its entirety, Free North Carolina's

"I Made A Snowman"

8:00 - I made a snowman.

8:10 - A feminist passed by and asked me why I didn't make a snow woman.

8:15 - So, I made a snow woman.

8:17 - My feminist neighbor complained about the snow woman's voluptuous
chest saying it objectified snow women everywhere.

8:20 - The gay couple living nearby threw a hissy fit and moaned it could
have been two snow men instead.

8:22 - The transgender man..woman...person asked why I didn't just make one
snow person with detachable parts.

8:25 - The vegans at the end of the lane complained about the carrot nose,
as veggies are food and not to decorate snow figures with.

8:28 - I am being called a racist because the snow couple is white.

8:31 - The Muslim gent across the road demands the snow woman wear a burqa.

8:40 - The Police arrive saying someone has been offended.

8:42 - The feminist neighbor complained again that the broomstick of the
snow woman needs to be removed because it depicted women in a domestic
role.

8:43 - The council equality officer arrived and threatened me with eviction.

8:45 - TV news crew from the ABC shows up. I am asked if I know the
difference between snowmen and snow-women? I reply, "Snowballs" and am now called a sexist.

9:00 - I'm on the News as a suspected terrorist, racist, homophobic,
sensibility offender, bent on stirring up trouble during difficult
weather.

9:10 - I am asked if I have any accomplices. My children are taken by social
services.

9:29 - Far left protesters offended by everything are marching down the
street demanding for me to be beheaded.

Moral: There is no moral to this story. It's just a view of the world in
which we live today, and it is only getting worse.

This sort of nonsense, imaginary though it is, is ripped straight from the headlines.
It is the kind of thing that only ends when one side or the other is heaped up in mounds of bodies.

Actual corpses, as far as the eye can see, with cities in smoldering heaps of ashes.

As CA frequently notes at WRSA, "This is where we are. Imagine where we'll be..."

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

h/t Silicon Graybeard

Great space tech post at SiG's site. RTWT.

That graph is the picture.
Here's the thousand words.

Space-X, in six years, has CRUSHED everyone else, pushing China, Japan, and most of everyone else but a small Russian ability, and the ESA, completely out of the orbital launch market.

Like to nearly the "Game Over" stage, for all commercial intents.

I did not realize that until I saw the graph.
(This, folks, is why we read other people, because it makes us smarter. I mention that in case you only had a Common Core education.)

And the only reason they haven't done the same for manned launches is because NASA won't certify their vehicles for manned launches. IOW, NASA is subsidizing the Russian monopoly on manned launches in preference to home-grown absolute capabilities. This would be like the FAA telling Delta they could only fly cargo. (And whoever that sumbitch responsible is at NASA, he needs firing. If he's civil service, I'm sure he can be de-rated down to janitorial staff at that Australian space monitoring station, for life. More on Oz in a moment.)

What NASA is doing is the worst aspect of Democrat-pushed crony capitalism.
What Space-X is doing is how monopolies monopolize constrained only by the invisible hand of the free market, and why monopolies per se aren't necessarily a bad thing.
The same thing happened with railroads, and over time, they not only consolidated, but also lowered the cost of transporting goods and people from Point A to Point B, which benefitted everybody.

Not least of which, people named Vanderbilt, Carnegie, et al.

People (rightfully) give Elon Musk a lot of $#!^ for sucking off the government's teat when it comes to the Tesla, which he makes at a loss every time he sells one, and wouldn't exist at all without massive government subsidies. (Thanks Pres. Obozo: You built that!)

If Musk would leave the cars alone, and focus entirely on the rocket business, and the NASAtards would GTFO of his way, we'd be colonizing Mars and the Moon before I die, and turning a profit at it.

I noted a few days ago that we put men on the moon in less than a decade after Pres. Kennedy said we would. And we did it with transistor technology, before microchips. So in light of that, I don't think asking for a paying moon colony by 2050 is too much to ask.

Even if it's only to provide a penal colony, and a place to repatriate the Moonbats back to their native land when they reach Peak Stupid, and can't help themselves but transgress.

Don't laugh; look what the British Empire did with their reprobates.
Oz hasn't turned out too badly, now has it?

It may even turn out that by 2200 or so, when we launch NCC-1701, that Khan was actually the great-great-great-great grandson of the current mayor of London.
Wouldn't that be a hoot!

Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!

Odds are 2000:1 in favor that we can successfully clone Shatner by then, and the circle will be complete.

I Say Fruit, Not Hildebeast, Is On The Menu...

Boo! Happy Halloween!

Some folks think the (D)s are so insane, they run two-time loser and serial felon Shrillary again in 2020.
I doubt it, and suspect that since her freshness date was up in 1993, and the last campaign nearly killed her, she's never coming back again.

I could, of course, be wrong, but that's where I'd put my chips.

If both Trump and the economy are as healthy in 2020 as they are now, the Democrats know they haven't got a snowball's chance in hell of beating him, so they nominate some flaming whacktard as a Mondale-esque sacrificial lamb in two years.

They do this to push the discussion far to the left.

Then, when he's gone in 2024, they put up someone a whisker less radical, and the media paints it for the low-information voters as a massive shift to the middle.
This also gives them six years instead of two to regroup and get their collective crap in one bag.

The don't want an old white woman, sooner or later on.

They want someone brown, a woman, a globull warmist.
Ideally, all of the above.

In short, they're looking for some pliable talentless hack, and they've got six years to find the talent and groom them. What they want, is an Unripe Pomegranate.

Fleet Weak 2017

h/t Mike

Not too far from truth if we keep it up. Bonus: Still more seaworthy than the 7th Fleet.

Mike at Cold Fury looks at how our military stands regarding readiness, and looks at the lies we tell ourselves about the nation.

"America is the richest nation in the world. America is the most free nation in the world. The American military is the strongest in the world, is effectively invincible, and will always be so. Slashing its budget can therefore do no real harm, and there is no chance of anyone daring to take advantage of any erroneous perception of decline and weakness on our part."

We are the richest nation in the world, any way you'd care to measure that.
But we've spent ourselves deep in a hole, and mortgaged our present and future.
Debt is slavery, and chaining us to everyone else won't save anyone when we all start to slide into the hole.

We are the freest country in the world, by any measure whatsoever.
I've seen the competition, and you can have them.
But we're far less free than we were twenty, let alone seventy years ago and more.
And we keep heading the wrong way on that, every day.

And we do have the most powerful military in the world, period.
We spend more per annum than the next dozen armies.
But we are not therefore invincible.
We have been shrinking by leaps and bounds under the studied neglect of four presidents, and the distance between our potential enemies and ourselves has closed apace.

In 1990, we were King Kong, alone atop the Empire State Building, and no one in the world dared touch us.
We now have all the admirals and generals we had then, every single one, but only 1/3 as many E-7s, E-5s, or E-3s as we did then.

We now have an army and navy nearly as small as what we had on hand around the Great Depression.

And the armed might we wielded as recently as 1990 was barely a patch on the machine we dismantled in 1946, after doing the heavy lifting to win two world wars.

That's what happens when you cut defense spending precipitously, plow the money into stock bubbles, housing welfare, etc., and in the process crash the economy hard twice.
And after all that quantitative easing, we're headed for a brutal third crash that will make 1929 look like a church picnic.

And between the two bubbles, we squandered a serviceable but barely adequate military on adventurism and asinine you-break-it, you-bought-it "nation building" in two of the most illiterate and utterly worthless sh*tholes on the face of the earth.

We traded a family cow's worth of military power for the magic beans of Middle Eastern democracy, and we don't even have a beanstalk to show for it afterwards. Just a dead giant.

But we burned out the troops, burned up their airplanes, wore out their weapons, and mothballed our rusted navy, because affirmative-action generals like Colon Powell never read Alfred Thayer Mahan.

What you see now is what happens when you entrust leadership to idiots, in an organization dedicated to the Peter Principle as a promotion tool.

Militaries cost money and brains, and both Congress and the Pentagon have been short on both for decades. And there's no easy fix for that, either place.

But the tests will come, ready or not.
The only good news is that the country has a president up for the job for the first time in 40 years.
But that's a thin nail to hang our hat on.

Self Driving Cars

If you're interested in technology, Silicon Graybeard has a fascinating set of articles (with more promised!) on self-driving cars, and the sensor problem.
Here.
And here.

The articles, and the comments, are always worthwhile, and I'm looking forward to the future installments.
(Word to the editorial boards at Popular Science and Popular Mechanics: this is what you should be like 24/7/365/forever, instead of shilling for silly ideas and brochure pipe-dream press releases. Just saying.)

While I'm curious, and following the trend, I think it's ultimately futile, and will always remain more of a Jetsons nightmare than it will ever be a Starfleet reality, at least in my lifetime, or that of your kids.

These, with good reason, are the poster children for bad engineering ideas:

 

It's what you get when you do something because you think you can, instead of asking whether you should.

Yet again, Michael Crichton for the win.

In comments there, relating to sorting out the signals from thousands of moving vehicles all trying to use the same bandwith for navigation radar, I offered the example of overloading a cellphone service area.

I believe someone was yanking your chain, because there's no scenario I can calculate that can put that much power into a receiver antenna more than a foot or two away. If a million people transmitted on their cellphones to a receiver 300' feet away, their powers combined might approach a level that could overload a receiver, but I doubt it. It wouldn't physically damage it.

Something else broke. Now, could they handle a million calls? Nope. The base station "getting confused" isn't killing the hardware.

The problem you're worrying about happens around you every day, and is managed by the way the systems are designed.

Ever flown commercial into LAX? Of course you have. Every airplane on approach is using a weather radar that's managing the same frequency problem. It can be done.

No one was yanking my chain; we overloaded the local ability of the network to process calls. I'm not saying anything happened to the hardware physically, just too many pigs trying to suckle on too few teats. It's better now than it was a decade ago, but anyone in a disaster knows what happens when everyone hits the network at once.
Which is exactly what driving rush hour is, every day, forever: every driver trying to drive at once. And for a bonus, on their gorram cellphones ;) !

"No service" is fine when you're just standing there.
Not so fine when you're moving in traffic at 65MPH.

And there may be the capability at LAX for a finite set of highly-managed/tracked objects moving along fixed routes between waypoints, but the problem isn't 100-200 planes an hour moving towards a fixed target in two straight lines, inbound and outbound, and it requires God Alone Knows how many people besides the pilots to make it work - when it mostly does. No one's even suggesting we automate it "because we can". (At least, no one with a whit of common sense.)
We won't even talk about the skills gap between the average CATP and the average holder of a non-commercial driving license in a non-automated system, because the annual death toll for the last twenty years tells that tell with precision. Air travel is annoyingly boring, because, at least for commercial American carriers, the risk of not arriving alive is as close to zero as it's likely to ever get. The risk for getting to the Qwikiemart two miles down the road in your jalopie is astronomically higher.

So I'm just saying that taking a system that "works" because of the intense efforts of thousands of highly skilled CATPs, and hundreds of air traffic controllers, and generations of safety improvements paid for in blood, isn't the best exemplar of how the problem with automating every private vehicle over every foot of travel over every road in America, or anywhere else, is going to go.

Now let's imagine every passenger passing through LAX was flying every which way simultaneously, in a single-person plane.
LAX, the system, and most of the fliers, would crash.
The area within three miles of the airport in all directions would be a scorched and pock-marked impact area.
And that's what a system dealing with ground vehicle traffic is supposed to be going to handle, with functional flawlessness.
Color me a wee bit skeptical.

A mapmaker can handle border conflicts using only five colors.

But...there's only 190 or so countries, and they aren't trying to drive past each other at 70MPH!

Any urban freeway system, plus the street grid, would require a solution set that'd make rooms full of programmers and engineers eat a pistol just to attempt.

Anyone who's ever been in a simple straightforward ride at Disneyland/Disneyworld, and had it pack up and crap out while they're on it, with a short, fixed route on a track, knows the problems with doing the whole thing in the real world completely wirelessly automated are damn near insurmountable, for any definition of terms. Or else Disney, with a far higher financial investment in flawless performance at every park would have done it already seven days a week, and they wouldn't have killed a dozen or so people and injured dozens more over the years.

So I can believe the hype, or my lying eyes.

Am I interested?
Sure.
Do I want research to continue?
Of course.
Do I think they could get traffic deaths down from 10K/yr?
I hope so.
Do I think they'll ever make a fully automated driving system that isn't a nightmare of biblical proportions in my lifetime?
Not bloody likely.

Someone telling me they can manage 150M vehicles driving around is on a par with someone telling me he can predict the shape of clouds to the molecular level, in advance, when they can't even predict the weather.

But I'm open to evidence of progress, even though it mainly just reveals the lack of respect for the level of complexity in the real world.

Real life is analog. Or fractals cubed moving in the fourth dimension of time. But never, ever is it digital.

The only way to make it so is to simplify the problem, by restricting the choices. The model for that is taking the African veldt biopsphere, and turning it into the zoo.

Zebras and wildebeests sit still for that.

"One of these things is not like the other..."

Drivers will burn your world down for trying it with them.
And then they'll back up over you a couple of more times, just to make sure they got the job done.

 

Anybody - futurist, scientist, engineer, or peyote-smoking medicine man - who thinks otherwise has never been in an Italian traffic roundabout, a Tijuana taxi, a Manila jitney, a bus on Okinawa, or L.A. traffic any day of the week. And they don't know what they don't know.

 

That inevitably leads to the most catastrophic failures ever witnessed.