Tag: Forever Wars

Volatilized Radioactive Cloud

photog Current Events, Trump , ,

Reading the reports last night, the United States of America attacked three Iranian nuclear material production facilities with a combination of Tomahawk missiles and GBU-57 series MOP’s (Massive Ordnance Penetrators).  Depending on which side you get your news from either all of the targets were completely destroyed or no damage at all was done.  Okay, that seems to cover the full range of possibilities.

The part I’m unsure of is whether we are now in a state of active war with Iran.  Iran thinks so.  Probably Israel hopes so.  But President Trump doesn’t feel that way.  He says hostilities are limited to the already completed attacks and so we should all just move on.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say there will be “reverberations.”

But maybe Trump knows more about the situation than I do.  I guess I have to hope (fervently) that he knows a whole lot more than I do and that this deeper knowledge led him to approve the attacks without fearing dire retaliation.  Yes, that is the hope at this point.

But I’ve got to say I’m quite worried that this will ramp up terrorist attacks by Iranian and Iranian-proxy groups.  We know that for the last four years foreigners have entered our southern border with impunity.  Would it surprise anyone if this included Iranian sleeper cells whose training would allow them to kill a large number of Americans in terrorist attacks almost anywhere in the United States?

And if there are attacks with large numbers of casualties will this lead to a full-blown war with Iran?  Will our sons be sent to the desert to fight?  Again?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions.  That’s why we hired Donald Trump.  He said no more “forever wars.”  And for better or worse he’s going to be held to that statement.  So, Mr. President, get on with your big beautiful bill and your deportations and your energy agenda and all that but don’t think for a minute we want another George W Bush or even a Joe Biden.  No more body bags, no more lives wasted sitting in tanks in a Mid-East desert for twenty years.  We could get that from the Democrats without even trying.

Well, that’s my two cents.  Maybe some folks want to cut him some slack because Iran has been a thorn in our side since 1979 and blowing up their stuff seems like payback.  Well, if that’s the game then nuke them and be done with it.  Give them both barrels and put an end to it.  But I’m pretty sure that would be just the beginning.  We’d end up with a harvest of mushroom clouds stretching right around the world from Moscow to Beijing and Washington to San Francisco.  And even the Neo-con psychos would probably agree that would be a “suboptimal outcome.”

Alright.  Let’s wait and see.  Back to my chores and summer fun.  Back to my writing and photos.  I have to process a bunch of shots I took at a truck show.  If I’m not a volatilized radioactive cloud by tomorrow I’ll have those pictures ready by next week.

Let Me See What’s Going on 31MAR2025

photog Current Events, Trump , , ,

Well, first of all, Europe has gone all in on lawfare to prevent their own people from electing candidates on the Right.  I guess I can paraphrase this as. “If you can’t beat them at the ballot box just round them up and jail them.”

“Monday’s court sentence declares Le Pen ineligible to stand for president in 2027 and gave her a four-year prison sentence – half of it suspended – for embezzlement of European parliament funds.

Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the League party Matteo Salvini called the court’s ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels”.

“A bad film that we are also seeing in other countries like Romania,” wrote Salvini on social media.

“We don’t let ourselves be intimidated, we don’t stop: full speed ahead my friend!”

Romania’s electoral bureau in early March rejected the candidacy of far-right politician Calin Georgescu for the re-run of presidential elections in May.

The fierce EU and NATO critic shot to prominence last November, when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting before the constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion.

Georgescu, who denies any links to Moscow, has slammed the vote annulment as a “formalised coup d’état” and the subsequent banning as “a direct blow to the heart of democracy.”

So that’s interesting.  It’s kind of what they tried against Trump only their people are so cowed that it’s successful.  I guess the question I’ll ask is are their people such slaves that they’ll put up with that forever?  I guess we’ll find out.

The other big “international” development is that the New York Times admitted that the United States military has boots on the ground in Ukraine.  And in fact, the CIA is coordinating missile attacks on the Russian homeland.

Ultimately, the U.S. military and C.I.A. were allowed to help with strikes into Russia.

The hardest red line was the Russian border. But in spring 2024, to protect the northern city of Kharkiv against a Russian assault, the administration authorized the creation of an “ops box” — a zone of Russian territory within which U.S. officers in Wiesbaden could provide the Ukrainians with precise coordinates. The box’s first iteration extended across a wide swath of Ukraine’s northern border. The box was expanded after North Korea sent troops to help fight the Ukrainians’ incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. The U.S. military was later allowed to enable missile strikes in an area of southern Russia where the Russians staged forces and equipment for their offensive in eastern Ukraine.

Longstanding policy barred the C.I.A. from providing intelligence on targets on Russian soil. But the C.I.A. could request “variances,” carve-outs to support strikes for specific objectives. Intelligence had identified a vast munitions depot in Toropets, 290 miles north of the Ukrainian border. On Sept. 18, 2024, a swarm of drones slammed into the munitions depot. The blast, as powerful as a small earthquake, opened a crater the width of a football field. Later, the C.I.A. was allowed to enable Ukrainian drone strikes in southern Russia to try to slow advances in eastern Ukraine.

So, we’ve been playing chicken with the Russians for several years in Ukraine.  Is this still going on?  Why?  Have we officially lost any personnel to the war officially?  Unofficially?  Is there any reason why we should?

From what I can see of Europe’s approach to “democracy” I don’t see any meaningful difference between Russia, Ukraine, France or Romania.  None of them are really democracies in any real sense.  So why are we choosing winners and losers there?  They’re supposed to be grown-ups.  Why can’t they sort out their own messes?  Why should American money and blood be involved in any way?

From what I can see we have no more place telling the Russians or the English how to run their lives than we do the Afghans or the Chinese.  They’re not us.  We’re not them.  If they don’t shoot at us, they can do whatever they damn please.  They can even say mean things about us.  Now as far as buying whatever crap they make in their country, as long as we have the same tariffs on them as they have on us, have at it.  The crap we get from China is no better or worse than the crap we get from Mexico or Canada.  It’s all still crap.  If they want to make their crap here and pay Americans to make it, well, that’s another story.  Now we’ve got something to talk about.  If Toyota builds a plant in Tennessee, then God bless Toyota.  They’re my kind of foreigners.  We can do business and we can even be friends!

I hope Donald Trump understands that blowing people up to “make the world safe for democracy” is just a globalist bumper sticker.  Minding our own business to make America safe for Americans is a policy that can help make America great again.

Just my two cents today.

Sawdust and Forever Wars

photog Current Events, Science , ,

Well, the boys from the road crew were back today and finished off the job, but good.  A tractor trailer was blocking my driveway and the trailer was an open topped box that was rapidly filled by an enormous wood chipper that ate whole sections of tree trunks that were ten feet around.  The noise that came off of this thing was considerable and the hounds were incensed.  The chipper finished off the big white pine in less than an hour and that included all the scraps that they had trimmed off the trunk.

Then they moved on and took care of the two ash trees.  These were smaller but the hardness of the wood gave the machine a different sonic tone as it spat the sawdust into the trailer.  And the wood was a lighter, cleaner looking stream as it flowed into the box.  And soon they were gone too.  Of course, gone didn’t include the debris that the crew left far and wide.  Between sawdust, small branches and pine needles I’ll be cleaning up the tree bits for the whole of the spring.

But I’ll have to say I’m impressed by the state of the art in robotic forestry.  It sort of reminded me of a Dr. Seuss book where some absurdly complicated string of machines reprocesses some thing into a completely different substance.  The only thing missing were the absurdly bright primary and secondary colors along with Thing One and Thing Two running the machinery.  And come to think of it, the foreman did look a little like the guy who didn’t want to eat the Green Eggs and Ham.

Well, after they finished, I went to work and when I got back home the temperature had dropped down into the forties and it was once again raining cats and dogs.  You know I’m pretty sick and tired of the rain.  Last year it rained endlessly from April to the end of June.  I dream of kidnapping Camera Girl and dragging her to Southern Utah.  When I was there, there was a little snow but the ground looked like a desert and at this point that would be A-OK with me.  But the lure of the grandkids is too powerful for her.

So, I heard a little while ago that Israel counterattacked in Iran and some other places.  Well, that’s a little disturbing.  The way Joe Biden has been talking I think maybe they’re ready for some really bad things.  I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.  I guess I’m just sick and tired of the forever wars.  Maybe I’m so tired of it I’m willing to see it all blow up now.    Just fire them all and let God sort it all out.  It sounds right.

But then I think of the kids and the grandkids and of course I don’t want that to happen to them.  So apparently, I’ll have to let the morons we have running our foreign policy continue on with their insane games and their demented strategies.  Ukraine, Iran, Israel, Syria, China.  All that crap.

Humans are the most remarkably clever animals. Look at those machines I saw working today. Reducing those trees to dust was an acceleration over nature of many orders of magnitude. They reduced the work of twenty or fifty years of natural processes to machine minutes. We are that paragon of animals that Shakespeare mentions. But simultaneously we are led by gibbering idiots. They could reduce the whole human race to dust in minutes. So, there it is.

Britain Wants a Citizen Army?

photog Current Events , ,

Neil Oliver reacts to a call by the British military for conscription to be revived in anticipation of war with Russia or Iran or whoever else they think needs killing.

Well, well.  I guess this is our wake up call to what we’ll be seeing soon.  I think Mr. Oliver has it about right.  Why would anyone agree to a government that wants to drag our kids off to die in a war that has no more sense to it than did World War I?  Seeing the abomination going on in Ukraine should be proof enough that unless someone invades this country (like they currently are!) we have no reason to send to our sons off to die.  I volunteer Hunter Biden and whatever spawn the rest of the Democrats and Neo-cons have hatched out.

We may be sub-humans to the denizens of Washington but our lives are way too precious to lose them mucking about in frozen trenches on the steppes or anywhere else that those idiots want to start a new war.  Luckily there’s an election coming up just in time to make all the eighteen year-olds think twice before pulling the lever for Psycho Joe.

ArthurinCali Has an Article Over at His Site About Forever Wars

photog Current Events ,

Being a retired service member he gives his personal reflections on US defense policies and their impact on the people out there on the front lines.

At present, the military cannot fill its coffers with required personnel due to lack of interest in serving and too many disqualifying factors. Obesity, drug use and criminal records cancel out 75% of eligible young adults to even join. That is 24 million out of 34 million from the 17–24-year-old range. Of those who do qualify, why would they join? The stated purpose of the US military to defend the nation is dubious at this point.  What is there to defend except the stock value of defense companies and a politician’s re-election chances?

Interesting read.