The Hits Keep Coming
Welcome back to camp again. It’s warmed back up to above freezing here, at least during the daytime. Boy, I’ve heard of (and seen) “Hit the ground running” before, but damn. The last time anyone has seen this level of immediate action was during the ground war in Desert Storm… and they had nearly a year of Air attacks to soften the enemy up before rolling. Trump seems to be channeling Schwartzkopf’s “Shock and Awe” mindset. Oh, and let me just say “nope, still not tired of winning.”
Anyway, booze is in the slide out pantry next to the Fridge, Shrimp and Scallop Scampi for dinner tonight, pull up a chair. As always, please notice the cup at the tip jar Where we restock the bar. Also as always, thank the current contributors to the ‘keep the author lubricated’ fund!
Before I get into Trump’s actions, let’s take a look at what is going on elsewhere. cable-baltic-sea-sweden-damage. Is the NYT’s coverage of it, which starts off with “The Swedish authorities on Monday boarded a ship in connection with what they described as “gross sabotage” after an undersea communications cable in the Baltic Sea was damaged a day earlier. The ship was escorted to the coast of Sweden for an investigation, the authorities said.
“We suspect that a serious act of sabotage was committed in the Swedish economic zone yesterday,” Mats Ljungqvist, the Swedish prosecutor leading the investigation into the damage, said in a phone interview on Monday.
The NYT actually did a half way decent job of covering this, but Sal stepped up with some more coverage that I call to your attention here:
You really should read both of these, (Sal’s is fairly short) but the super compressed, all the nuances and grey taken out version, is that NATO has stepped forward with a method of identifying this stuff (intentional destruction of underwater cables) in real-time. The problem no one, including Sal, has an answer to is: “what do we do about it?”
Well, yours surly has a proposed solution: Declare the intentional destruction of underwater cables to be piracy. Yes, I’m serious.
Look, here’s the problem. Everyone in the world knows that this is the Russian/ Iranian/People’s Republic of China/North Koreans (RINKC) doing this, but no one can prove it. When accused, the nation states all deny any involvement, and say “well this was some rouge actor, not our fault, not our problem!”
It reminds me forcefully of Queen Bess’s Pirate campaign against the Spanish. England maintained deniability, while reaping the benefits. And if her people were caught, they ended up looking like those chaps above. Oh, and the ship, if taken intact, was kept by the navy that captured it.
So, let’s look at this. We catch you conducting Piracy on the high seas, whether it be off Somalia with dhows, in the Red Sea with RIBs and missiles, or in the Baltic with a Cargo ship, we try you, if found guilty, we hang you, and we keep the ship, and sell it on the open market. This solves several problems.
First, it solves a lot of the Piracy that’s still going on in the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Western Pacific. Right now, those pirates, if caught, end up either sitting in an American jail (far better living conditions than they have as free men in Somalia,) or given back to the Somalian government to deal with, who turns them free with a wink and a nod, to do it again.
There’s also the Houthis who just keep doing what they want, and we don’t attack them because “well their women and children are next to their missile launcher!”
Make it publicly clear, via video tapes broadcast all over, that “WE HANG PIRATES” and if we can’t capture you to hang you, we pave the city you launched from! Soon the number of people willing to do the deed will diminish greatly. Yes, it’s bloody minded. No more “smart missiles” trying to target the launchers, Iron bombs, lots of them, “Operation Linebacker” type stuff. This is a war, and it’s time we started treating it like it is.
Second, we have the “Russian Shadow Fleet.” A bunch of merchant vessels owned, though a long line of shell companies, by various Russian oligarchs and other scumbags that are willing to do a little sabotage and espionage on the side, in return for under the counter payoffs by Putin. I wonder how willing they will be once they start losing their ships?
Finally, one of the problems we have right now in America is that we have a serious lack of sealift capacity. In other words, we don’t have enough ships. Well… If you insist on using your ship for attacks, and one of our allies happens to catch you at it, your ship is forfeit. I’m pretty sure that NATO would be willing to sell that ship to the US, fairly cheap.
So, win, win, win. Oh, there will be a bunch of UN types that “view with alarm” and “The Squad” will lose their ever-loving minds, probably because some of their families are involved in the piracy, but ya know? I just don’t care. It’s really simple, don’t take or attack ships that aren’t yours, don’t try to do sabotage of stuff that ain’t yours, you don’t get hung, you don’t lose your ship.
Now let’s look at some of the “take no prisoners, shock and awe” that Trump has pulled off. First I want to wave a cheerful “buh bye” to the twelve or more “DOJ officials who played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump” as CNBC put it here: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/doj-fires-officials-involved-in-trump-prosecutions.html
Of course, the Leftists are losing their ever-loving minds, (again) but let’s make something clear here. Yes, it’s “unprecedented” as a former US Attorney General was ranting. So is going after a former President and future candidate for the office with trumped up charges. Their actions were, to use the phrase popularized by George “Rape Rape” Martin “Playing the Game of Thrones.” Well, as the books and series put it “when you play the game of thrones, you either win, or you die.” Fortunately, we’re a little more civilized, we aren’t going to try you for treason, or anything like that. But seriously, can YOU trust someone who went on record as being “willing to do anything at all to put your ass behind bars,” to then work for you???
The good Senator Cruz is helping President Trump with one of his campaign promises, https://www.cruz.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sen-cruz-colleagues-introduce-no-tax-on-tips-act. Now this was attempted once before by some Democrats, as I recall, but was shot down by other Democrats, who wanted the money that they get from taxes more than they wanted to help the folks in the service industries. Now that it’s being proposed by a Republican though, ALL of the Democrats, and the press are against it, claiming that it’s “an attack on Social Security.”
Sigh.
First off, Income tax,(FWT) and Social Security taxes (FICA) are two different things. Second off, Social Security payment rate for people now drawing it, has no relation to the amount of money that the government takes in. It SHOULD, but it doesn’t, which is why the system is going broke…
Well that and because back during El B.J’s term in office, that never to be sufficiently despised bastard figured out how to take money out of the “lock box” that Social Security was supposed to be; to fund his “Great Society” and his “War on Poverty.” We can see how successful that was, right?
See SS was supposed to only be something you could draw on, if you paid into. The system counted on enough people dying before they could draw it out to keep the pyramid scheme working. Then came El Blow Job, who decided to pay all sorts of people who had never paid into it, and to take money out, replacing it with IOUs. All of which is a post all of its own.
Wanting to tax your tips as a waitress? Remember which party is doing this, the next time the Dems claim to be “for the working folk.”
We also have Trump’s freeze on all expenditures, both internal and external, which seems like a very good idea to me. When you’re hemorrhaging, the first thing is to STOP the BLEEDING. Getting the bone set, all of that doesn’t matter if you’re bleeding out. This country is hemorrhaging money.
We don’t spend money like a drunken sailor, I know, I have BEEN a Drunken Sailor. I stopped spending it when I ran out of money! We spend money like a Dependapotomus! (Military slang for a bon-bon eating, no job working, fat ass dependent, who married for Tricare and a paycheck.) They don’t quit spending when they run out of money, they start taking out loans against their deployed husband’s future pay! (Ask me how I know!)
So, putting a pause in place while we figure out where the money is going, and see if there’s stuff that we can get rid of, is about like taking a look at your expenditures and finding out you have subscriptions to fourteen pay per view sites you don’t use, while you are having problems buying baby formula. It’s just good business.
Vance went head-to-head with CBS host Margaret Brennan, (See B.S. talking head) She has a huge issue with a similar pause on immigration and bringing in “Refugees.” He pointed out that Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi came in on that program, and immediately started planning a mass casualty attack on election day. She claimed “well, that’s different, and we can’t paint all of the refugees with that brush.” He pointed out that it only takes one, and maybe it’s time to take a better look at these guys that the UN says are good, perfectly safe, you should let them in! (Remember, this is the UN that had Iran as the chair of the Committee on Human Rights!)
Then there was the little brush up with Columbia over the weekend. Now “Politico” wants to paint Columbia as “one of our best allies in the region” and came down on Trump for using the big stick to make them take their own people back. First off, let’s consider this for a second:
The left thinks it’s horrible to require a Sovereign nation to repatriate its people illegally in another country. Think about that, take as long as you need.
Then there’s the fact that Columbia is not our friend. Never has been. America has a few friends, but none of them live south of Texas, with the arguable exception of Brazil, and I’m not so sure about them.
Part of this is, no doubt, our fault. The US has stuck their hands into the political future of Central and South America for literally centuries. Sometimes for damn good reason (take American businessmen hostage, don’t be surprised if someone like Sargent (at the time) Chesty Puller knocks on your door with a rifle butt. Sometimes, for no good reason at all.
That said, for a multitude of reasons, Columbia isn’t our friend, and doing nothing but kissing their ass for four years hasn’t made it any better. The fact that Donnie showed, very clearly, that “there’s a new sheriff in town, and he ain’t takin no shit,” and did it in his first week in office, is, in my opinion, a very good thing.
JOHN GARAMENDI (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee’s Readiness panel is losing his shit that the Military is using their birds to relocate these illegals back to their nation.
“Garamendi sent a letter late last week to then-acting Defense Secretary ROBERT SALESSES about the Pentagon’s legal authority to support deportations and the impact of diverting military forces from other missions. He argued that “DOD appears to have rushed the process to provide additional military assets” to the U.S.-Mexico border after Trump reentered the White House.” According to another Politico article https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2025/01/27/the-other-big-us-colombia-challenge-00195922 It seems he’s suddenly concerned about the wear and tear on USAF aircraft.
Hey John, consider it a training flight, the boys gotta get in their flight hours in order to keep proficiency, what does it matter where they’re flying to?
As a whole, nations, especially nations that don’t like you, don’t react to appeasement by doing what you ask. If you give the Vikings money to go away, you’ll see them again. If you greet their demands for money with arrows to the throat, the next time they show up it will be to trade, instead of raid. Biden’s handlers didn’t understand that, or didn’t care.
Trump does.
Advantage, Trump.
China has announced that their relationship with Columbia “has never been stronger.” Well they’re welcome to it. Columbia should be careful though, China is even less considerate of their “friends” than we are. Several nations have discovered that borrowing from China, and being her “friend” is about like borrowing from “Vinnie the Bat.” You don’t keep up the Vig, Vinnie comes around and breaks your knees, just as a reminder, oh and next week’s vig is due tomorrow, you don’t pay that, I break your hands too, then I take over your store, and run it my way, capishe?
In other news, /pennsylvania-woman-facing-up-to-17-years-in-prison-over-falsely-accusing-man-of-rape Seems to me, she should get whatever the max sentence is for what she was accusing him of. Lets see, she accused him of rape and kidnapping… Isn’t kidnapping a life sentence?
A buddy of mine, who writes under “Old NFO” had this piece /another-own-goal? About Newsom’s fuckups. Seems he disbanded a California State Guard volunteer wildfire team, that was costing the state NO MONEY, unless they were actually mobilized. All of the gear, training, etc. was DONATED. But that jackass, for reasons unknown, shut down the program. Go read the article, it’s enlightening.
He also has one on the USAF trying to find a way to keep DEI in the face of orders from the Commander In Chief to end it.
It’s also worth reading. Tell him I sent you.
Texas has decided to take aim at election fraud that has been ignored at the county level, https://texasscorecard.com/state/legislation-filed-to-give-texas-attorney-general-additional-prosecutorial-powers/ the key takeaway here is “It also amends the election code by changing the attorney general’s role from discretionary, “may prosecute,” to mandatory, “shall prosecute,” for election-related offenses.”
The Bad Cat hit a couple homeruns this week:
On how the Swamp is trying to avoid being drained, and how to break it off inside them, and
On the medical industry dedicated to sterilizing and destroying children. Both are worth reading. Again, tell him I sent you.
Oh, and one final thing, it seems that the Norovirus is out in force right now. The Seattle birdcage liner actually published something worthwhile, how-to-clean-before-during-and-after-norovirus/
Please trust me on this, I’ve had this disease, you don’t want it. It’s fucking miserable. It put me in the hospital for over a week. Spend the time cleaning, it’s far better than getting this damn thing.
And with that, I’m going to get off here and get something done.
QOTD "National security begins with border security." – Donald Trump
Yours in Service,
William Lehman