Reviewing the Situation

 

 

 

Bullet Points:

** Roche Pharma to invest $50B in the USA and will build manufacturing infrastructure – O’Reilly

** Seattle sued over nude park as city considered ‘public masturbation deterrent infrastructure.’ Seattle neighbors who live near a park favored by LGBT nudists are suing the city over a rash of sex perverts who are allegedly driving to the park to masturbate publicly. It’s gotten so bad that the city of Seattle is seeking Requests for Proposals (RFPs), with initial consideration to build “public masturbation deterrent infrastructure.” There was a time when the police would arrest those involved in crimes such as this for indecent exposure, but that must be beyond their remit these days.

** Does anyone have a problem with the bread-to-meat ratio (right)?

** Reach out and touch someone.

** A student once asked renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered the first sign of civilization. The student expected answers like clay pots, fishhooks, or tools. But Mead’s answer was surprising — she said it was a healed femur. Why? Because in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You can’t hunt, can’t escape predators, can’t survive. But a healed femur means someone stayed. Someone helped. Someone cared enough to carry the injured, protect them, feed them, and wait with them through recovery. The first sign of civilization is not invention — it’s compassion.

** The new leader of the Catholic Church will inherit a financial mess that Pope Francis spent much of his reign trying to fix. One cardinal who’d been ousted over just these matters is trying to get in on the conclave to help pick the next pope, probably angling for one with a looser handle on the papal checkbook. The conclave will start next month.

** They aren’t calling him “Maryland Man” anymore; it is now “Salvadoran Asylum Seeker”. So, there is SOME limit to the Gaslighting. If they ever call him “illegal alien gang member,” it will be a sign the Apocalypse is nigh.

** Victory at sea with EdB.

** When you put a Hog in charge -This from the party that led a coup against a SITTING POTUS! How do these people’s heads not explode when they spout this BS? Do they genuinely think anyone believes a word they say? “Let me be unequivocal: No DNC officer should ever attempt to influence the outcome of a primary election, whether on behalf of an incumbent or a challenger,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said on a media call. “Voters should decide who our primary nominees are, not DNC leadership. Our role is to serve as stewards of a fair, open, and trusted process, not to tilt the scales.”‘

** I’m a sucker for Predator films. I can’t help it. Check out the trailer for the next Predator film – Badlands – Official Trailer. Female predators. Somebody told her that she needed to lose a few pounds, and it didn’t end well. (right)

** Karoline Leavitt detailed a move by the White House Office of Management and Budget to reclassify federal employees and allow them to be fired if they had engaged in corruption. The move is controversial in DC.

** At last – a burglar.

** Pakistani and Indian troops exchanged fire along the line of control separating the two countries overnight, three days after separatist gunmen killed 26 peoplein Indian-ruled Kashmir. The cross-border fire, which Indian military officials accused Pakistan of initiating, came as both countries moved to revoke visas for one another’s citizens, ordering them to leave in the coming days. Also this week, India closed a primary border crossing and terminated a 65-year-old water-sharing treaty with Pakistan. A separatist group known as the Resistance Front took credit for the Tuesday terrorist attack, which India alleged contained “Pakistani elements.” New Delhi has long accused Pakistan of arming militants to carry out terrorist attacks—charges Islamabad denies.

** The Defense Department’s latest data on obesity in the reserve components dates back to 2018, when 65% of personnel were classified as overweight or obese. ASP researchers now estimate that the figure is closer to 68%.

** ROK Unmanned Surface Vessel (h/t Claudio) – It looks interesting. I wonder how difficult it is to fight a ship like this remotely in high-sea conditions where the bandwidth has been degraded or disrupted by electronic warfare. The concept of a battery vessel cruising alongside a CVBG or a big deck amphibious battle group with cruise missiles, SMs, and defensive weapons (RAM, CWIS, SeaChicken) that is slaved in close range (could be laser coms when the bandwidth goes down) to a CV or DDG makes sense to me. It’s a big plodding battery that has enough ballast and speed punch to keep up with the battle group. A small, semi-independent, and potentially difficult-to-control patrol boat, albeit well-armed, presents a different problem altogether.

** A Chinese-owned and operated factory complex in Ohio illegally imported workers from China, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio. Last week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio released a statement saying that federal officials had seized $126 million in assets related to an investigation into illegal staffing and money laundering. “It is alleged that many of the workers were illegally smuggled into the United States, primarily through Mexico, and encouraged to travel to the Dayton area to be employed by one of the target entities and serve as a workforce at the various factories,” the office stated. One of the companies raided was Fuyao Glass America, the company featured in Obama’s prize-winning 2019 documentary, American Factory.

 

In Albania

(1945 dot com) What once was a model for post-Communist transition now teeters once again on the brink of dictatorship. Ham-handed State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) interventions have also transformed one of the most promising economies in the Balkans into a narco-state.

Enter Yuri Kim, pictured right, a career diplomat who was appointed as the U.S. ambassador to Albania in 2020, marking her first ambassadorial post. She embraced Rama, literally and figuratively, openly favoring Rama and belittling the Democratic Party and the opposition, famously telling Berisha to “eat grass.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s ideological animosity toward the center-right, Kim’s partisanship, and USAID Administrator Samantha Power’s willingness to allow Rama to turn SPAK** into a political weapon combined into a disastrous decision by the State Department to sanction Berisha and his family persona non grata and revoke their visas to the United States. To appease Kim and the State Department, the Democratic Party expelled Berisha. It did not work. As Rama grew increasingly corrupt and the Albanian Democratic Party continued to lose elections, they rallied again around Berisha, who in 2022 resumed his role as leader of the opposition.

**SPAK in Albania refers to the Special Anti-Corruption and Organized Crime Structure, an independent institution established to combat corruption and organized crime. This structure comprises the Special Anti-Corruption and Organized Crime Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), which serves as the SPO’s judicial police force. 

There are three parallels to what the State Department, the Obama, and Biden administrations have done for Albania, all of which come to a head today. The first is Zimbabwe, where, for ideological reasons, the Carter administration initially supported Robert Mugabe, long after it became clear that his leftist rhetoric had more to do with consolidating a dictatorship than with promoting social justice.

Just as Erdoğan likened democracy to a streetcar—you ride it as far as you need and then step off, so too does Rama now prepare to step off the pretense that he respects democracy.

There is an irony that while the State Department continues to target Berisha and other pro-American politicians for alleged corruption, evidence suggests that the corruption lies with Rama and those Americans whom he has compromised. In February 2024, a New York court convicted Charles McGonigal, former special agent in charge of the FBI’s counterintelligence division in New York, of taking $225,000 from an Albanian agent to help promote business with Rama and his proxies. Many Albanians hope that the Trump administration will also audit USAID payments to SPAK as well as Kim’s tenure in the embassy, if only to resolve suspicion and conspiracy theories surrounding both.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio should recognize that Rama’s goals in throwing legal challenges at Berisha have less to do with clean government and more with delivering a knock-out blow to the 80-year-old Berisha and, through him, the center right. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has forced groups like the National Democratic Institute and the International Republic Institute to stop monitoring elections. Fair enough, but this does not mean that the State Department should not. The question for Rubio is whether he will rely on his Albania team and those put in place by the agenda-driven Kim, or whether he will temporarily assign more neutral diplomats to monitor the polls. Rubio must also recognize that Blinken’s sanctions against Berisha were as politically driven and mendacious as his lifting of sanctions against the Houthis.

Albania may be small, but Albanians are one of the most pro-American peoples. The United States should not betray them. The danger of picking sides is twofold. First, it betrays democracy when the State Department employs underhanded tactics to tilt the scales; second, because those who whisper sweet nothings to American ambassadors do so to their advantage, not because they genuinely care about the United States and its national interests. The clock is ticking; Rubio must act now.

^^^

These are excerpts from the article that provide a general overview of the key points. If you’re interested, you should read the whole thing.

I will admit that Albania is a very sticky wicket. I’ve been evaluating the situation in Albania with an eye toward further development of their natural gas (methane) fields, and the upcoming election on May 11 may make my decision easy (to avoid Albania). The significant threat from the Albanian mafia can only be offset by a bigger bully – The Albanian Army standing at your back. And shifting political winds make all that very unreliable.

 

 

The Song Remains the Same

It was the fifth century before Christ, and Athens was tearing itself apart. The Peloponnesian War had dragged on for decades, leaving behind a trail of blood, broken promises, and bankrupt coffers and amid the clamor of hoplite boots and the orations of increasingly desperate statesmen, a playwright named Aristophanes decided to ask: what if women, sick of this masculine madness, refused to sleep with their husbands until the war ended? Thus was born Lysistrata, a comedy so outrageous, so bawdy, and so piercing in its satire that it has echoed through two millennia with the thud of crossed legs and clenched jaws.

The plot, such as it is, is elegantly simple and brilliantly absurd. Lysistrata, a formidable Athenian woman with a mind as sharp as a Spartan’s spear, convinces the women of Greece to withhold all sexual privileges from their menfolk until peace is declared. What follows is a farce of monumental proportions: desperate men lurch about the stage with grotesquely exaggerated erections, old women defend the Acropolis like Amazons with handbags, and the battle of the sexes becomes a proxy for a more profound, more desperate plea—that reason might succeed where rhetoric had failed. Beneath the innuendo and hilarity lies a howl of exasperation, a satirical scream from a people wearied by war and watching the ideals of Periclean democracy crumble into oligarchic incompetence and imperial overreach.

Modern interpreters, eager to retrofit contemporary virtues onto ancient texts, have occasionally tried to hail Aristophanes as a trailblazing feminist. However, the consensus among scholars is a resounding ‘no’. Historian Sarah B. Pomeroy notes that while Lysistrata features strong female characters, they operate within a satirical framework that ultimately reinforces, rather than challenges, traditional gender roles. Classicist Jeffrey Henderson concurs, describing Aristophanes not as a progressive but as a conservative prankster, more interested in lampooning his fellow citizens than elevating the status of women. The women in Lysistrata are not revolutionaries; they are comic foils—powerful for a moment, but always returned safely to their proper household domain by curtain fall.

Still, for all that, the play leaves us with one immortal conclusion: even back in ancient Athens, where women had very little freedom, one of the most effective ways to control men was to say—“Not tonight, dear.”

 

Final Rant of the Day

 The political left has been wailing about the unfairly high cost of college for years, while at the same time causing most of those increased costs because even someone with a Jasmine Crockett-level IQ could tell you that when you hand out school loans like free cocaine at one of Hunter’s hookers-and-blow parties, you’re incentivizing universities to jack up costs.

 

Identify the Aircraft

1

It resembles the earlier MiG-21. But it’s not. Because it’s a difficult ID, I’ll provide you with more information. It was part of Uragan-1, a first-generation Soviet automatic air defence interception system then under development. The ground-based system was expected to remotely guide the interceptor aircraft up to & including weapon release, then return the plane to base & landing. The pilot was simply on board as a backup in case of a failure in the remote-control system.

 

2

 

3

Used as a trainer aircraft by Russia

 

Identify the Armor

4

A short production run of 280 tanks – so you have a hint. Thyssen-Henschel of Germany designed it for the end user to suit the wide temperature and altitude ranges found in its home country. The weight was restricted to 30 tons due to the local infrastructure limitations.

 

Parting Shot

 

End