Just Saying

Comedy is wherever you find it.

Thought For The Day

let's see if I can get auto-post to work...

Harsh Truths

At least when Eve sold out, she got an apple out of the deal.

Enjoy the box wine and cats. Mind the Wall.

Ruminate, sil vous plait

Military Axiom #1: When you get a totally jackassical order from a higher-ranking jackass, carry it out to the letter.

Much ado about nothing is being made about the failure and self-destruction of the pier in Gaza.

"It's an outrage!"

"$320M dollars shot to hell!"

"They could f**k up a crowbar in a sandpile!"

And on and on.

Okay, if your blood pressure needs a little jolt now and again, you can stop there.

But you don't have to do that.

Eaton Rapids Joe has one contrarian take, and he's not wrong about any of it, but I'll go even further than that in a minute.

Look, there are a few givens today.

One of them being that neither Emperor Poopypants' nor his entire fraudulent regime could find their own asses with both hands, a map, and a rearview mirror.

Granted, with oak leaf clusters.

Proven ten times a day for three years running.

But...

Work with me for a minute or two.

What happens if we build the damned thing, and it works?

"Humanitarian" aid starts moving into Gaza. A trickle at first, but eventually, a steady flow. Which takes more pressure off of Hamas, and puts more pressure on Israel to stop doing the sensible thing by exterminating this problem for all time, and relenting, yet again, to face it again in a few months or years.

For the Common Core grads, Israel was getting rocketed and shelled from the shreds of the failed state that was Lebanon in the early 1980s. Not their bases. Their people's homes, farms, and schools. Their women and children, FFS.

Finally, having had enough, they sent the Israeli equivalent of Patton's Third Army into southern Lebanon, and cleaned house. 

First, they sent a drone broadcasting electronic "Shoot me! I'm the entire Israeli Air Force!" radar signals flying through the Syrian air defenses erected in the Bekaa Valley to guard the strongholds of a plethora of Arab terrorist camps there. Right behind that drone, they had another few recording live video of all the missile batteries, and more collecting all the frequencies and signals of their search and tracking SAM radars.

The next day, with a complete up-to-the-minute map of those sites, they flew actual planes in and wiped the board clean. With total air supremacy, they sent in tanks and APCs, and used the bodies of countless terrorists there to grease the treads of their tanks, all the way to the harbor in Beirut.

What was left of Yasser Arafat and the PLO was trapped, and screaming for help, and everyone, including their weapon suppliers, sent them back a box of FAFO medals, and their deepest sympathies on their plight.

Then, some jackasses at the U.S. State Department thought Israel killing off the thorns in their side was too one-sided, and convinced Reagan (of all presidents) to swoop in, and interpose US Marines between the two sides.

Yasser Arafat and the PLO fighters still alive were evacuated from Beirut, and taken home to Gaza. Israel sat on their side of the barbed wire, helpless and frustrated, watching the same blood enemies who'd masterminded hundreds of terrorist attacks inside and outside Israel get away yet again.

And by way of thanking us for this magnanimous act, the Marines' ground HQ at the Beirut airport was blown up by a truck bomb (as were the US and French embassies), the Marines there began taking daily shell fire and sniping, and we shelled hillsides in the Lebanese countryside with the 16-inch guns of the USS New Jersey, bombed miscellaneous targets from time to time, and got US troops killed and captured for no good end, until we finally wised up and GTFO of Dodge.

It was an expensive and pointless clusterfuck, and Arafat became the leader of Gaza, beginning to turn it into the tunneled and honeycombed terror base that has plagued Israel for the last 40 years. The only thing that changes there is which terrorist @$$holes they put in charge. Most recently Hamas.

We sent billions in aid to Gaza. We sent them pipe for water systems and wells.

They turned the pipe into homemade rockets, which have been launched at Israel nonstop, every day for decades. (If Mexico had been doing that to San Diego from Tijuana, Baja California would be Mexican-free now, as a permanently annexed US territory, and Mexico's presidential elections for the next 50 years would be held at a conference table in the White House Situation Room, with only members of the National Security Council casting votes.)

Flash forward to last October. Hamas, the current bunch of rabid monkeys in charge of Turd World Shitholia-On-The-Med, decided they were big and bad enough to f**k with an actual first world military and nation like Israel. It hasn't worked out well for them, nor should it. If everyone in Gaza were incinerated to ashes, the other billion or so Arab Muslims would piss and moan for about 15 minutes, until the red lights on the cameras were turned off, then go about their business as before. Presidents and princes from Morocco to Pakistan would weep and gnash their teeth publicly, and then each send Netanyahu a case of champagne apiece and warmest felicitations in private. Some good number would even supply him with more bombs and napalm.

Enter Mr. Sumdum Phuq in DC with a soft head and a soft heart for Hamas and the "poor Palestinians" who elected Hamas in the first place, and still support them, by 80:20 or better, to the current minute, and given the chance, would do another October 7th attack on Israel tomorrow, even knowing Israel would respond exactly as they have so far, all over again.

And Mr. Phuq wants to help the poor suffering terrorist lovers in Gaza, and hits upon the idea of building a pier to unload pallets of aid (which will be, to a metaphysical certainty, commandeered by Hamas in a heartbeat, given only to their most whackjob strident supporters, or sold and bartered for more guns, bullets, bombs, rockets, and Semtex, to kill more women and children in Israel. Just like every penny of aid they've received from 1967-five seconds ago has been.

And which pier will act like a bung driven into the cask of American foreign payola, creating an annual commitment to fund Hamas and their terrorism, opening the tap $1B or more, annually, until Hell freezes over.

Including the next round of attacks in this country.

That's what a working pier gets us. Which is exactly the over-the-top incompetence we expect from Mr. Fraudulent and his gang of merry misfits in the White House.

Show of hands: Who wants that?

Col. Nicholson in Bridge Over The River Kwai, building the Japs a better bridge than they could've done themselves comes to mind. Madness.

But just suppose that somewhere below the radar, in the Corps Of Engineers or Navy Seabees, there's a general or admiral who's as big a fan of Gomer Pyle and Cmdr. McHale as he is of General Patton or Admiral Halsey.

One who thinks this request for a pier calls for a really futile and stupid gesture, and his guys, like Delta House at Faber College, are just the guys to do it.

"Boys", he says, "I know this is going to be a little bit out of character for you, but I need you to do something for the good of the nation. I know you can build bridges and piers under enemy fire, like we've done in multiple hot shooting wars. And those bridges saved lives, won wars, and made America great. But what we need right now, is a pier that looks like we tried to do our best, but is actually so fornicated up, it breaks up, tears apart, blows away in a slight breeze, and sinks.

"Because if you build them a good bridge, before you know it we'll be sending a bottomless ocean of American dollars here, funding terrorism - even against ourselves - on a monumental scale, and eventually costing us rivers of American blood, both guys like you stationed here, and moms and dads and their kids back home. So we need a total piece of sh*t, that will demonstrate how jackassical the very idea is of sticking our nose in here where it don't belong. You'll catch some heat, but I'll take most of it, and I'm going to retire in a couple of years anyways, so why the hell not?"

"And the people who don't get killed, and the neighbors who won't have billions in tax dollars sucked out of their pockets, and your little brothers who won't be fighting a war here in 5 years, will all thank you someday much, much later."

"So whaddya say? Do ya feel me? Can you get out there, and screw the pooch for the Team?"

Put like that, you'd get a bridge that would be the envy of the guys who built the Titanic, the Hindenburg, and the Edsel, and give you a defense boondoggle that would make Robert McNamara cream his shorts if he were only alive to see it. It would rival the engineering expertise that gave the world the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Three Mile Island.

Which, as it turns out is exactly what we got.

Look, I'm not saying this was masterminded by the bumbling jackholes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the U.S. Capitol who think they run this country. But the guys at the bottom of the totem pole, the ones at the downhill terminus of every Pentagon project shit-rolling contest? Buddy, I'm here to tell you, you come up with a genius plan like this, and they could blow up the Hoover Dam or drop the Golden Gate Bridge, and do it so precisely it wouldn't crack so much as a window on Fisherman's Wharf nor jiggle a single dice roll on the Vegas Strip.

I'm not telling you that's what happened. But while most of the Pentagon brass could be melted down for fish sinkers, most of the NCO corps and the E-3 Mafia are 24K gold.

So just open your mind to the possibility, and don't sell them short.

The $320M "wasted" on this boondoggle mostly got log-rolled to US companies and salaries (with a non-zero portion kicked back to congressweasels in both parties, like always, since ever). It wasn't just thrown into an open furnace. And it's certainly not like what Obozo did, sending literal pallets of $100 bills to Iran to build nuclear weapons and fund terror groups without leaving any financial fingerprints. This was just a blip in the grand scheme of Pentagon graft and grift.

We also got the Ham@$$holes we were nominally trying to help to show why that was a stupid idea, by having them mortar the thing during construction, and injure at least one worker severely. I don't know about you, but the construction workers I've met, who were getting that level of "thanks" from the people they were building something for, might be inclined to leave out nuts and bolts at critical points, pretty much every day after that, don'tcha think??

And we get Good Guy points for the appearance of looking even-handed, and take some paltry Gomer Pyle lumps for looking like incompetents. While saving the US BILLION$ for a pointless, endless commitment to fund a bunch of terrorist shits the world is better off without. Not to mention untold numbers of American lives saved, some not yet even born. Screwing the pooch like this may yet turn out to be the biggest bonanza to the US in living memory.

"Hey, we tried man, but it was just too hard to do. Too bad, so sad. Oh, and maybe next time don't poke the lion in the eye when he has metric tons of artillery and napalm. B'Bye!"

Then we f**k off smartly, and nobody asks us to attempt anything so foolish for years and years, and we aren't losing GI Joe and GI Jane by the bushel to snipers and IEDs while some idiot has them doing peacekeeping or Meals On Wheels in Gaza for the next 20 years. World-class genius, right there.

It's even just barely possible that someone old enough to remember the debacle might have learned a wee bit from Beirut 1983, and taken the right lesson(s) about such efforts to heart, even if they never announce that publicly. Wouldn't that just tickle your giggle switch?

I'm certainly not excusing the bottomless incompetence from on high we've seen in living color beyond our wildest nightmares since 2021. Just suggesting an outlook with less sourpuss, and more befitting of happy warriors. And less negative waves, Moriarty, for a change. Woof! Woof!

As a cool-down from the thought exercise, imagine if the schlubs who built out Tan Son Nhut airport in South Vietnam had buggered it up worse than Denver International and Apollo I combined.

We lose interest. Other problems crop up somewhere else. The government's squirrel-on-crack memory wanders to something closer to home, and far less destructive or divisive. The Fuck-Up Fairies responsible for the original pooch-screwing could have saved America billions of dollars in military waste in the 1960s, and saved 58,000 lives.

Never discount the beneficial power of insolent obedience.

And BTW: this whole idea was official US government policy taught to those working in countries behind the lines from 1939 onwards. The fact that the CIA only declassified it in 2008 should tell you more than a little about the rise and fall of the Soviet Empire.

I'ma take a wild guess that what worked on communist idiots over there would work on communist idiots over here equally well. And may already be in play.

YMMV, but take the greater lesson to heart.

The Last Thing God Made

 h/t CW

"Don't you know that women are the only works of art?" - Don Henley
(This pic embiggens. Try not to fall in. We dare you.)

We don't expect to find anything better to look at than this picture at CW's place, or write anything more profound than the captions we supplied. Not quite a haiku, but it'll do for now. So we're quitting while we're ahead, and knocking off until later.

Important Point

Nor will it be when you get one.

Thought For The Day

 

Chicken And Egg: Does the Slaughter follow the Downfall, or bring it about?

Open Question. I'm undecided. Discuss.

All comments on-topic and within the Comment 

guidelines over there ---V

will appear.

Options:

A) Slaughter > Downfall

B) Downfall > Slaughter

C) Won't be a Downfall

D) Won't be a Slaughter

E) Potato

F) Surprise me

Three Rules:

1) You're not arguing against me, as I have no position, nor will be posting any. You're not arguing against any other commenters. Post your thesis, and bring your supporting arguments. Then sit down. Color inside the lines, or stay on the porch. 

2) Select A-F, above. At the outset.

3) And sign your post. Unsigned anonymous efforts will never see daylight, and you're wasting your time even typing them. Own your output.

(If these concepts are difficult for you, don't worry. Auto-delete will sort you out, and zero comments won't hurt my feelings.)

Just A Reminder Today

Take a load off today. Rewatch this classic movie.

Stick With It

h/t CW @ daily timewaster

Take No Counsel Of Your Fears

h/t Peter

The post title is taken from the private notebook of a young gentleman from California, then in his early twenties, while attending the United States Military Academy at West Point, a proud graduate of the class of 1909. You may have heard of him.

The advice is as sound now as it was then.

Point: Counterpoint

 h/t WRSA

Just saying.

Words Of Wisdom From Tio Augusto

Pay It Forward

Question Of The Hour

 h/t Anonymous

Considerations

 

Consider me this:

An economy tottering on the edge of the abyss, run by blind drunken fools, yanking levers and pushing buttons, with no idea what anything does. Inflation that has eclipsed Jimmy Carter. Already. Money worth next to nothing. Economidiots who can't grasp the relation of one thing to the other. Your earnings and savings spiraling into the ground.

A pure banana republic, with all the trimmings, trying desperately to prop itself up 24/7/365, with the most incompetent bumbling assclown in world history nominally running the con.

The government openly defying the Supreme Court, while egging the mob to actively undertake its violent destruction.

The total destruction of the average person's ability to travel as they please, and the total destruction of the energy independence we enjoyed just three short years ago, in service of a fairytale about anthropogenic globull warming that's been debunked more times than Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and imaginary fake moon landings.

A burgeoning surveillance state that extends to every detail of your life, every waking minute, to every corner of the globe.

A bureaucracy that extends its nose into every nook and cranny of your life, 24/7/365/forever, and grows like a cancer on PCP.

A lamestream corporate media machine that cheers all of this on, and berates and beats the citizenry about the head and shoulders with manufactured faux news and fake crises around the clock, around the dial, and around the world, in an unrelenting stream of panic-induced frenzy, not just knowingly, but slobbering and drooling for that effect.

Look at what half the country did for two years, when a conservative president, with nominal single-party control of both houses of congress, held the reins of power. (Ignore what an unbelievably huge missed opportunity for freedom that was, but for the Uniparty RINO Establishment.)

Look what they've done so far, deliberately, after a fraudulent election visible from space, and not yet 18 months into holding the reins of power. To the Constitution. Civil rights. The rule of law. Public order. The military. The medical establishment. The territorial integrity of the country. The legitimacy of elections and peaceful transfers of power. The militarization of the police, while simultaneously undercutting any legitimate law enforcement anywhere, anytime, against any member of any pseudo-victim class. The violent overthrow and subsequent ass-raping of actual science and biological fact, in favor of naked advocacy and junk science. The endless gaslighting and demonization of the other half of the country. And the rank hypocrisy at their own tactics and attacks, going back decades.

A foreign power seeking to destroy the republic utterly could not have succeeded this well in their wildest dreams, and their attempts would have looked no less like what we've actually gotten than what we've actually gotten - from our own so-called "leaders".

Then consider every brick in the foundations of civilization they have ripped out and smashed into dust, and the levers of division they've jammed so deeply into the edifice of the republic that it cannot possibly long endure.

Now, in light of this long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evincing an obvious desire to reduce The People under absolute despotism, unto a state of abject slavery,

How does this ever end in anything other than gunfire, bloodshed, and violence on a biblical scale, with rivers of blood, and mountains of bleached skulls afterwards?

Know well that once that kicks off, the only imperative is to WIN.

No rules, no game wardens, and screw the bag limit. Heads on pikes, and cheerfully dashing babies' heads against rocks kind of behavior.

Consider, therefore, the best use of your time, between this moment, and that day.

If The Shoe Fits Dept.

 

The Little Things

 h/t Wilder

It's This Simple

 h/t John Wilder

They imagine if they just put it in "the rules" that only they can buy property and have money, you'll never win against them at Monopoly.

They forget that you can bring a crowbar to Game Night, and suddenly, their rules don't work anymore.

They think they can win at COVID Club just by making the Vaxx mandatory.

And then you show up as Tyler Durden, and after a few barrels of ANFO, it turns out that isn't going to work out so much the way they imagined.

And every single time, they realize, far too late, that the game is actually called Leave Us The F**k Alone ©.

This Is The Way

 h/t CA

So many lessons there from philosopher-king L. Frank Baum:

1) The easy way is the wrong way.

2) Build your team.

3) Your enemies will fuck with you every chance they get.

4) Distant Higher Authority is usually worthless.

5) Keep working the problem.

6) You don't fight for abstractions, you fight for your friends.

7) Never give up.

8) The only way to win is by taking out your enemies for good.

9) You can always do more than you think you can.

It's almost like they took this book, and used it to train Navy frogmen, or something.

And that, Gentle Reader, is how we took you from the Mandalorian, to the Wizard Of Oz, to Navy SEALs, in just one post and illustrative meme.