Anyway, thank you for the boatload of these charmers. All yours brother.

Hopefully, Civil Asset Forfeiture is about to get defanged in the SCOTUS. Citizens have been abused by this crap for decades — local, state, federal… Democrat and Republican — all have enjoyed the abuse. Article below.

Holotank

Going to rewatch it tonight. The part that is always most troubling/compelling for me was the backstory that the Earth was dying from blight and the government was lying about it and producing/promoting disinformation about the space program.

A Short and Unpleasant History So anyway — Once there was a Republican President so thoroughly despised by the permanent government, the globe-trotters, the socialists, and the transgender-cult that they undertook to cage him for life and, that proving tedious, to kill him outright. They came uncomfortably near both objects. But then the people, being a contrary breed and weary of the sermon, elected him again. And presently good things began to happen, which is rare enough in public life to deserve a notice. The border was made fast. Deportations commenced in earnest. Mentally afflicted men were shown out of the girls’ locker-room. The army filled its ranks ahead of schedule, to the honest astonishment of experts who had pronounced the country too delicate for real soldiering. Billions of dollars of fraud were held up before the righteous light by citizen journalists. Certain chemicals were invited to leave the food. The factories, long given up for dead, showed signs of breathing. Things, in short, were looking up — an attitude the newspapers found rebellious and the commentators found inexplicable. Even when the Queers for Palestine started their killing spree, people kept moving forward with wide smiles. Then the career neocons commenced courting the Democrats in open daylight. The Libertarians grew wrathy because their do-nothing Congressmen were turned out in the primaries. The anti-Israel faction fell to quarreling with MAGA because of the next war in the Middle East. Almost everyone was mad about gas prices. And the newspapers multiplied their unnamed sources by ten — which is a considerable enlargement of nothing. In the year 2026 the Republican voter was rewarded with a Congress that was pro-trans children, maximum illegal immigration, more learing-centers, defund-the-police, DEI, green energy, somehow pro-Sharia Law… and socialist besides. The end. Morals extra, and dear at any price. - Samual Clemens 01/2027

Just watched. Enjoyed it. They tried for the Ingenious vibe a little too hard, but still enjoyed it. And hey, Henry Cavill is a stud. Based on a true story.

That X Files episode where mom was kept in a box under the bed.

I've tried to explain what "mass" and the "cost differential" are many times. This video will show you. This is a Russian surveillance drone feed. Every single black dot on that road is a Ukrainian FPV drone waiting for a target – 100+ can be seen. Somewhere in the area is a small team of pilots who can plug in and activate each UAV. Mass: Imagine that a T-14 Armata tank column approaches. The tanks have been greatly upgraded to avoid and/or survive drone strikes – it's not as easy as strapping on an RPG warhead anymore. You need to hit that tank over and over and over again, and that's just with the UAVs that make it through the electronic and ballistic defenses. Bottom line, you might expend 20-50 drones to kill one piece of armor. Cost Differential: 20-50 drones to kill one tank now? You might jump to the conclusion that the small FPV drones are becoming obsolete. Not so fast. A T-14 costs between $7 and $9 million. Each drone sitting there on the dirt road costs about $1000. If it takes 50 drones to destroy a T-14, that's $50k to kill a $9m target AND its crew. I'll take that deal all day every day.

Yep. My Aunt Mary was his aide.

Who wants to build an airstrip and deepwater port with me... in Greenland? We will be the in-country civilian support company of the DoW and whatever resource extraction is developed. Gold, uranium, iron, copper, rare earths, fish, crustaceans and strategic defense!

Two words to remember: The book: The complete battle plan authored by the commander and staff. Crumbs: Just enough of the book for the effector to complete its task. Not a new capability, but a good demonstration of how far compute has moved away from the data center over the years.

Fetterman cutouts hit my text messages multiple times a day. Two related thoughts: 1) Fetty, when the day ends, you’re still a silver-spoon socialist. The other Democrats turned on you because you don’t hate Israel enough. I might buy you a beer, but I would never vote for you. 2) Shapiro’s desire to be President is a pipe dream. If the Democrat Socialists hate Fetty so much for his Israel support, there’s no way Shapiro can be nominated. Anyone disagree?

Nice communist imagery

Why is there Communist imagery in the Indian American Advocacy Council’s profile? But hey, they support Talarico… and Cornyn.

Hear me out Pete — Astra for JAGs! Squeeze out all those GW Leftists from the ranks and give the real warfighters a bump in pay. Who’s with me?

Memories of the Disinformation Czar.

When I was an E-4, I and two other FNGs used our VBSS tools to change the movie marquee sign on NAB Coronado from Leave It To Beaver (and) GI Jane to Leave It To GI Jane’s Beaver.

Wait, I thought it was the climate emergency…

Post a battle from American history your ancestors fought in. In no particular order: San Juan Hill, Monterrey, Atlanta, Valley Forge.

Martel curses all of France from the grave.

Let's check in on the sociopaths on the Left.

I propose a Forth Law of Robotics that Asimov failed to consider. "A robot may not leave a human with less authorship, less practiced judgment, or a narrower range of capabilities than before, even if output increases."

You see, I’ve turned the moon into what I like to call a Death Star…

You might have heard talk about "African Street Children." There is a named institution behind a lot of those boys, and it runs the length of the Muslim dry belt in Sub-Saharan Africa. From Senegal to Sudan, poor rural families send mostly sons to a religious teacher in town to memorize the Quran. The boy leaves home, often forever. The teacher becomes his guardian and the boy’s employer. This is not school as Americans mean it. The practice is old. The word in Hausa, almajiri, comes from the Arabic for a migrant in search of knowledge. For generations a farmer’s son could spend the dry season with a teacher, come home to plant, and grow up able to recite the Book. Community charity was supposed to feed the school. In African cities that bargain collapsed. The teacher still takes no official salary. The child became the income. Same pipeline, different names. • In northern Nigeria, Niger, and northern Cameroon – Hausa, Kanuri, some Fulani – the boy is an almajiri (plural almajirai). The teacher is a mallam. The school is a tsangaya or makarantar allo. Kanuri say ma’ajir and sangaya. • In Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau – Wolof and Pulaar/Fulbe – the boy is a talibé (Pulaar: almuudo). The teacher is a marabout. The school is a daara. Fula families in Guinea-Bissau send sons across the border into Senegal for this. • In Mali, Burkina Faso, and northern Ivory Coast – Bambara, Dioula, Fulani – you hear talibé or garibou. The teacher is a marabout or mobbo. • In Mauritania the boarding school is a mahadra; boys arrive from Mali, Senegal, and Guinea. • In Chad, Sudan, and Darfur it is a khalwa: a sheikh, a wooden tablet, boys under fifteen from far provinces. • In northern Ghana, makaranta; boarding boys are sometimes called karimbiis, including children from Burkina and Togo. Who goes, and at what age? Almost always boys. Girls usually stay home or attend a class nearby. Typical handover is age four to twelve, sometimes younger. They may stay into their teens. Parents are poor farmers. Their motives for sending their children away a based in faith, status, and food arithmetic: a son who knows the Quran is a credit; another mouth leaves during the hungry season is good also. The family is not selling a slave in the Hollywood sense. They are handing a child to a man they believe represents God. What happens after that is anything but holy. In the schools the day is simple. Dawn recitation off a wooden board. Then the street. Younger boys beg with a bowl – cash, leftover rice, sugar. Many have a daily quota. Miss it and you get the cable or the stick. Older boys fetch water, haul loads, farm for the teacher, or get hired out. The teacher keeps the money. They sleep in a crowded room, an unfinished building, a mosque veranda. Food and medicine are irregular. Fires, traffic, and untreated illness kill many of them every year. The numbers are ugly. Human Rights Watch has put more than 100,000 talibés in Senegal alone on forced daily begging. Studies in Niger have found most surveyed talibés sent out with a cash quota. Nigeria’s almajiri population is in the millions. U.S. trafficking reports describe corrupt mallams using boys for begging, mining and seasonal farm work, including across borders into Cameroon and Chad. Moving groups of boys from Guinea-Bissau into Senegalese daaras specifically to beg is trafficking under the law, but nobody cares because many of the operations have ties to local Islamic governments. Abuse is documented and under-reported. Teachers and older students beat boys for missed quotas, failed verses, or running. Some are chained or locked in. Sexual abuse happens often: teacher on boy, older student on younger, strangers on the street at night when a child is afraid to return empty-handed. Rights groups have case files in Senegal. Nigerian investigations and trafficking reports say the same about some mallams and seniors. Shame plus the teacher’s religious status keeps most of it from ever being reported and charged. Physical abuse and the quota are the everyday machine. Sexual abuse is a regular occurrence. The results A child becomes unattached by design of the arrangement, not by accident. He left the village at seven. He may not see his parents for years. He has no file, often no birth certificate, little or no French or English, no trade paper. When he ages out – or runs – he is a teenager in a city with a recitation, a habit of sleeping wherever, and no adult who has to claim him. That is how you get a large population of geographically mobile, poorly supervised young men with a strong Islamic identity and almost no formal foothold. Can you see where this ends? It's system born for chaos. Regardless of what we see in the news, most of them never see Europe. They circulate in the region: casual labor, farms, Sahara gold camps. The desert is a labor market and a filter. Crossing it and buying a boat requires cash and a smuggler. The residential underclass is over-represented in Sahelian mobility and under-represented among people who land in Spain or Italy. The ordinary neighborhood Quran class is also not this story. From Dakar to Khartoum, millions of boys learn verses after supper and sleep at home. It's a social class distinction. Armed groups regularly fish in the pool. Boko Haram, ISWAP, JNIM and others recruit where boys are cheap, angry, unsupervised, or already organized under a teacher. There are cases of a mallam walking students into the bush, of boys used as lookouts, of forced conscription after a village is taken. It is an unregulated warehouse of neglected boys that gangs, labor brokers, and Islamist commanders all know how to find and use. This is a small part of Islam in Africa – just another part that most of you will never see.

Organic, pfftt… 100% recycled bottle, lame… 2x MORE CAFFEINE!

This last week we learned about “altruistic filicide” from the feminists and more on the “religion of peace” from the RINOs. Don’t accept it.

Let’s check in on the current generation of Democrat candidates.

Come on people, she was hormonally compromised while falsely implicating some men of rape and letting real rapists and murders walk free. She’s a hero for all women. Let’s give her a million dollars. I mean, it’s not like she strangled her children or anything…

For reference

Can the Houthis sustain the pressure on the flow west? Probably not for long, but it reminds us that some of the most critical infrastructure in the world is easy pickings for the bad guys. Part of the problem is that energy transfer infrastructure — whether it be liquid, gas or electricity — is built for maximizing profit margin — cheapest method possible… In this case it’s Saudi Aramco’s crude pipelines laid on the open ground, one next to another (hit one and you hit them all) — the most juicy setup that an aggressor can imagine. About two years ago, a partner and I designed a passive, physical method to protect infrastructure (especially linear infrastructure) and materiel (planes and vehicles) against 70-90% of Type 2/3 drone attack profiles — all COTS components and no requirement for specialized personnel. I know it circulated through a couple of offices in the Pentagon, but it wasn’t sexy and expensive enough I guess. Whatever. Bottom line, pipelines in the desert are relatively cheap and easy to protect; and if you don’t protect them, they are easy to attack.

It’s a social movement!

Fastidium, not phobia. We really need to retire the term Islamophobia. It’s a false description unless you’re a young Yazidi girl. Islamofastidium is a more accurate framing I think. Fastidium (noun): loathing, aversion, distaste, squeamishness, and disgust — both the physical kind (e.g., aversion to food) and the more figurative kind (scorn, fastidiousness, moral or aesthetic revulsion). You should also notice the link to “tedium,” actually taedium — weariness, satiety, loathing, disgust. It’s been ~40 years since I’ve had Latin. Forgive any grammatical/structural errors.

Headen also dreams of another terrorist attack on American soil — preferably on a Republican state because it would be exciting and fun to kill people she doesn’t like. Democrats are now racing to distance themselves from this woman, but only because she was exposed. They don’t care otherwise — votes are votes. Violence to the political left is once again a feature, not a bug. Every leftist sociopath given a political platform — even for a short period — moves the Overton Window a little bit further into darkness. Most influenced is the current generation of narcissistic girls currently making Charlie Kirk assassination TikToks. They are the same people. *Men, these women are easy to detect if you look. Once you know, don’t marry, don’t date, don’t hire, don’t even talk to them if you don’t have to — shun them completely — they are untouchables — modern day Jezebels. Plenty of good women out there. You just have to look.

Follow up on the Canadian with an American work permit…

Here's an interesting call for proposals. DARPA is working on the Screwworm problem.

On September 10, 2001, ALFA Platoon was in the second week of our combat swimmer training block. The week before, we had finished most of our daytime qualifications. Week two moved us into nighttime training, which meant waiting until it was pitch black before getting into the water. A training day didn't really end until around two in the morning. There was the safety brief, safety checks, jocking up, the evolution itself, the debrief, taking care of team gear, platoon gear, our own gear, and finally ourselves. Add a 20-minute drive home, and I was lucky to be in bed by 2:30 a.m. The training scheduled for the night of September 11 was our first night practicing static visit board search and seizure — SVBSS. At the time, it was probably one of the most dangerous and technically involved training evolutions in the Teams. I managed to sneak into bed around 2:30 without waking my wife, which was a win. She was six months pregnant with our first child. One thing about combat swimmer ops: they can completely exhaust you without you realizing how tired you are. Maybe it's breathing pure oxygen. Maybe it's the concentration the op requires. It's probably the oxygen. Whatever the reason, I slept like a rock. Around 5:30 in the morning, the phone rang. I vaguely remember hearing it and quietly cussing out whoever was calling that early. We had another late night ahead of us, and I didn't have to be back at the Team until around two that afternoon. My wife was already awake, so she answered. It was my godfather, Tim — the man I was named after. He didn't say much to her except, "Wake him up." I got on the phone. He said four words: "Turn on the television." I turned on the TV. CNBC was on — whatever their premarket show was called back then. They were reporting that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and they were actually doing a pretty good job of piecing together information as it came in. The market always knows, right? I'd been watching for maybe a minute when the camera caught the second plane hitting. I knew. My wife knew. The whole world knew right then. This was an attack. We sat there in silence for the next 45 minutes or so. Then the phone rang again. This time it was my LPO. "You up?" "Yep." "Well, you better pack your shit and come in." That was pretty much the whole conversation. Of course, nobody knew shit about what was going to happen next. As far as West Coast SEAL Teams went, the coolest operation happening in those days was probably a noncombatant evacuation operation — a NEO – pretty lame. But hey, you take what you can get. So now I'm throwing random shit into a duffel bag while my six-month-pregnant wife is watching the country get attacked on television and wondering where the hell her husband is about to go. Total horror. Luckily, my godparents were only a couple of hours away. This is where things started getting weird. Not only did I have no idea what the fuck was happening or what would happen next, but it became apparent pretty quickly that the entire Navy in San Diego didn't know what the fuck was happening either. I mean, when was the last time the homeland had been attacked? World War II? Traffic into Coronado was backed up all the way into downtown San Diego. My normal 20-minute drive took about three hours. The problem was the gates. Security had suddenly been cranked up, and the gate guards at every base were trying to figure out how they were supposed to search every vehicle. We all knew the standard system of threat conditions. Apparently, nobody had actually trained for it. Three hours later, I finally reached the gate on the beach side of the amphibious base. They checked my ID. They ran mirrors under the truck. Amazingly, they didn't check a single bag in the back. And the back of my truck was full. Side note: the gate guards got much better at their jobs after that, which meant the lines got even longer. Eventually, a lot of us started parking in Coronado and riding bikes the last mile to base. By about 11:00 that morning, all but a couple of us had made it to the Team. And then we waited. There was no news. No orders. Nobody knew anything. But we had a solid core of senior enlisted guys who immediately recognized the danger of a bunch of idle sled dogs sitting around waiting for something to happen. So they put us to work. There might not have been orders, but there was always work to do. Departments started inventories and function checks on radios. We got personal gear squared away with supply. Guys started checking everything we might conceivably need. There were also a few side ops. Four of the guys somehow got their hands on a stake truck and headed over to the air station looking for pallets and cargo nets. Were we going anywhere? No idea. But if we were going somewhere, suddenly everybody in the Navy would be looking for pallets and cargo nets. That's the kind of weird, specific shit only a senior enlisted guy thinks about. So we worked all day. Still no news. Eventually, word came down from Group 1: don't expect anyone to know anything for days, maybe weeks. Carry on with training. So, back to attacking ships in San Diego Bay. We all called our significant others and told them we'd be home that night, then started getting ready for training. By then, the politicking had already started inside the Team. The rumor was that two platoons would deploy almost immediately. Two out of six. Everybody wanted in. Everybody wanted to get into the fight. Everybody wanted blood. My wife was relieved that I was coming home that night. She was still in shock, but in better shape than when I'd left that morning. That night's training was fairly straightforward. No long dive involved. We'd load up in boats, stop about a hundred yards away from a destroyer, then repeatedly practice hooking and climbing the ship. Under normal circumstances, you could probably get 10 or 15 climbs in during a night. Training Cell had sent a safety officer over to the ship. His job was to make sure the ship's firemain wasn't sucking water and that the ship's watch had been briefed. Pretty basic stuff in San Diego. Ships had three Teams' worth of SEALs climbing all over them year-round. We almost died that night. Engineering had been briefed. The officer of the deck had been briefed. Nobody had briefed the two seamen standing on the bow behind a hastily mounted .50-caliber machine gun. They were guarding the ship, and they were amped. Our two boats were well lit. They were standard Navy workboats—easily recognizable. Didn't matter. Those guys on the bow were keyed up. A spotlight hit our boat. Then, over the loudspeaker: "DO NOT COME ANY CLOSER OR WE WILL FIRE ON YOUR VESSEL." Yeah. An entire platoon of Navy SEALs was about to get taken out by the bow watch of a U.S. Navy destroyer in San Diego Bay. We watched our safety officer and the officer of the deck sprint toward the bow to call off their very enthusiastic defenders. Meanwhile, we're all sitting in the boat speculating. "There's no way those guys actually have a belt in that gun." That turned out to be a losing bet. We watched them unload the .50 cal. Those guys were ready to roar. Needless to say, Training Cell canceled training for the night. A few weeks later, the decision came down that the two platoons that had just returned from deployment would be on the hook for rapid deployment. I got to see my baby born. Our platoon never went to Afghanistan. Instead, we ended up covering PACOM across both the blue and purple mission sets. We even picked up some of the green mission set, which belonged to Army SF. Over about seven months, we had eight or nine different engagements throughout the Pacific and Indian Ocean. It was a great deployment. But we never went to the fight. I tell this story for one reason. After 9/11, nobody knew what to do next. NOBODY. I can't speak for the rest of the military. I can only speak for our Team and our platoon. And on our Team, the senior enlisted guys took control of the sled dogs and put us to work. They focused us on the little things we could control. Inventory the gear. Check the equipment. Find the pallets. Get ready. Then slowly expand outward toward the bigger things. Nobody had the grand plan because there wasn't a grand plan yet. There was just the next thing that needed to be done. I wouldn't actually see the fight until three years later. It's pretty crazy when you think about it.

"The fastest way forward is knowing where you have been." The Atlassian Williams livery that they are celebrating on the 25th anniversary 9/11... sponsored by the Bin Laden construction company of Saudi Arabia. Coincidence? Probably...

Here you go boss.

Yup

Spotted from the office.

Once a technology reliably threatens a piece of space, the rational response is to stop exposing valuable human organization in that space. In reality, that is the history of war since the first cave man picked up the first stone and threw it at another cave man. Think about the epochs of the long bow, artillery, belt-fed weapons, air power, guided munitions, persistent ISR... now, cheap, ubiquitous drones. Their lasting effect is that the tolerable location of human organization recedes, even if that wasn't the initial desired effect. The causal chain is: greater reach / volume / precision / persistence ⬇️ greater cost of human exposure ⬇️ dispersion, concealment, displacement, and stand-off ⬇️ organized human formations recede from the engagement The point is that these are not new challenges, but the old challenges that have become even more complex. Americans can do "complex." Work the problem.

I’m not in that business anymore, but nothing makes a better slap charge than a steel belted tire.

Without naming it, post a photo or GIF from your favourite TV show ever.

… next generation Space Force enlisted uniform.

Or…

Send the freaking asteroid.

This man has less support than the woman who murdered all of his beloved children. I'm praying for him.

Earlier this year, I adapted and introduced concepts from economics to military readiness, two stand out here: • Adaptive Liabilities • Readiness Debt "...units back in the UK and who are not preparing for a specific deployment have been told to cut back on collective training exercises due to financial pressures."

Welp... this is going to need to be rewritten. The biggest epoch in autonomous weapons is on our doorstep.

You should know that Grok just pitched a "machine staff officer" while I was conducting a lit review.

My Aunt Mary was his aide back in the day.

lol - yet another SBIR solicitation that no small business could ever complete without selling all their business rights to a partner (prime). DoW needs to be better at this stuff.

Flashback to my third PACOM deployment. Off the charts WILD!

Same here.

Edge compute is very much like the choose your own adventure book that you may have read in grade school. That's the post – learn from it.

If you were military, what was the favorite weapon they issued you?

Welp, the mums, pumpkins and scented pinecones are guarding the entrance of the local grocery store again.

Coming soon! Broke: “We need more welders.” Woke: “We need 240 additional workers with these specific qualifications, in these regions, available before this date. Current training throughput will leave a deficit of 73.” Bespoke: Additionally, this is out realtime labor pipeline: • 84 ready now. • 27 need only site qualification. • 19 are missing one certification/re-certification. • 11 could qualify within 30 days through a participating provider/trainer.

Ukraine flag but no American flag.

Good morning Greg.

Number 1 is Jonny Quest — I’ll fight. piped.video/7gNBFmlNUfM

Not going to lie, this is some drone action that I’m totally down with.

Agency and Autonomy:

End this now.

A rebellion has begun…

“Patience. Sometimes the enlisted man must wait for both the CO and XO to be traveling. The Ops LT will sign anything.” - Enlisted Miyagi

Fuck off douche.

Never forget.

Turbine you can hold in your hand is pretty cool.

All of them. • Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31, Salt Lake City, Utah • Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, Lawrence, Massachusetts • Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, Sacramento, California • Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, Indio, California • Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan W. Page, 23, Omaha, Nebraska • Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, Logansport, Indiana • Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, Rio Bravo, Texas • Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, St. Charles, Missouri • Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, 20, Jackson, Wyoming • Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, Rancho Cucamonga, California • Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, Norco, California • Navy Petty Officer Third Class Maxton W. Soviak, 22, Berlin Heights, Ohio • Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, Corryton, Tennessee