Oh, That’s Cute

 

The Day the World Stood Still

Jim Acosta, who was CNN’s Voice of Treason during the first Trump presidency, gave our favorite president an unintended compliment.

Oh, Jesus Christ, it is—it’s my worst nightmare. I thought we were rid of this clown four years ago. But no, they’ve come back with a vengeance. Fortunately, the DC restaurant scene is set up where, you know, the, the MAGA people have their restaurants and their places they like to go, and they’re not the places I like to go. So I won’t say where those places are because I don’t want them to show up there, but so far so good, it’s okay.

Donald John Trump’s second presidency is an awesome adventure into an America worthy of the 21st century.

Today is the first anniversary of Trump’s second inauguration. Let us review.

He shut the border down like a prison door, keeping the illegal immigrants out. The illegal alien population dropped by more than 2 million through self-deportation and with a little help from my friends at ICE. Trump’s law enforcement has found 129,000 unaccompanied children that Biden somehow misplaced. Illegal aliens sex trafficked many of these children.

Trump has brokered peace in eight wars and border disputes. He used diplomacy to pull the rabbit of peace out of his hat in Gaza. He used B-2s to end the 12 Day War between Israel and Iran. He promised to build a bridge to end the Armenia-Azerbaijan War.

He arrested Maduro, the illegitimate president of Venezuela, and showed the world that Temu radar (that’s its actual name) from Red China is worthless, Cuban bodyguards cannot save you, and Russian missiles make terrific fireworks when Americans blow them up before they can launch.

At last count, Trump had commitments from foreign countries to invest $7.6 trillion in U.S. companies.

He inherited an economy that was down 0.3% in the first quarter. It grew by 3.8% in the second quarter and 4.3 % in the third quarter. The government will release the fourth-quarter numbers at 8:30 AM Eastern on February 20.

Trump lowered inflation to 2.7%. Employment for born-in-the-USA Americans rose, but fell for foreign-born workers.

They had Trump, and they should have let him fade into history in disgrace (in John Belushi’s voice) BUT NOOOOO! Obama had to make an example of Trump by impeaching him again, raiding his home, suing him for taking a loan and repaying it, indicting him, and getting a mugshot of him.

None of it worked. It all backfired. It rallied beleaguered MAGA and Republicans behind President Trump.

The world has changed dramatically over the past year, driven by the 47th president. Splitting his two terms was a big mistake. We should thank America’s Elitists for proving that cheaters never win.

 

We’re Doomed

 

Bullet Points:

** I wonder whether any of my recorded calls were used for training and quality control?

** Your word of the day.

** Less than 44 hours after German soldiers landed in Greenland “to demonstrate presence” in the face of President Trump’s threats, they were ordered to leave Greenland. The instruction was given without explanation. The soldiers left secretly. The remaining Scandinavian Countries are waiting for NATO to tell them what to do, and the Brits are waiting for Muslims to tell them what to do.

** Greek Fire is discussed here.

** From Larry Correia: You guys remember a year ago when USAID was getting exposed, and the democrats screamed how republicans are hypocrites because we’re not cutting the bloated, corrupt Military Industrial Complex? And now Hegseth announced they are investigating the bloated, corrupt 8(a) program within the Military Industrial Complex, democrats are screaming about how that’s bad too? I’m starting to suspect democrats might not be honest people.

** Knights Templar.

** If Lord High Executioner Beans passed and we decided to give him a Viking funeral at VM, it would go like this.

** Encountering the woke.

** Stringshot (h/t) says there’s gold in them thar hills. This blog has a strong contingent of Colorado denizens who live on the Wyoming border (sorta). Get rich quick opportunity – Cowboy Daily.

** Singing in the rain – in Arizona.

** Mongol Style.

 

 

A Conversation with Robert E. Lee

I was at the Battle of Gettysburg, and an incident there largely changed my views of the Southern people. I had been the most bitter anti-Southern man and fought and cursed the Confederacy. I could see nothing good in any of them. The last day of the fight, I was badly wounded, a ball shattering my left leg. I lay near Cemetery Ridge, and as General Lee ordered his retreat, he and his officers rode near me. I recognized him, and though faint from exposure and loss of blood, I raised up my hands, looked Lee in the face, and shouted, “Hurrah for the Union!”

The General heard me, looked, stopped his horse, dismounted, and came toward me. I confess that I thought he meant to kill me. But as he came up, he looked down at me with such a sad expression upon his face that all fear left me, and I wondered what he was about. He extended his hand to me and, grasping it firmly and looking right into my eyes, said: “My son, I hope you will soon be well.”

If I live a thousand years, I shall never forget the expression on General Lee’s face. There he was, defeated, retiring from a field that had cost him and his cause almost their last hope, and yet he stopped to say words like those to a wounded soldier of the opposition who had taunted him as he passed by. As soon as the General had left me, I cried myself to sleep thereupon the bloody ground.—Gamaliel Bradford, Jr., in the Atlantic Monthly.

 

Thoughts on Aircraft Carriers – large and small

As with all military ships in a shooting war, more is better because you’re likely to lose some. I’m not a brown shoe sailor. But I’m willing to throw my cracker in the soup. Mike_C asked about manning large vs. small flat-tops (CVN vs. LHA/LPH, etc.).  Since we build aircraft carriers to host air wings, the larger question is the aircraft mix and whether the aircraft carrier can host the strike package we wish to send to put ordnance on target. What will the Navy’s sixth-generation fighter look like, and what sort of runway will it need? I think that we’re past saying that one size fits all (F-35) and that the Navy needs to decide what sort of aircraft it needs, irrespective of the US Air Force. In many ways, it’s apples/oranges. Stealth coatings on aircraft, as they are commonly used, are very difficult to maintain in a maritime environment. Likewise, the Navy will want folding wings, 2 engine reliability, and so forth.

 

The New World Order and Canada

Does Canada actually think that China and Russia would make good friends? If so, they need to leave NATO because they’re on the “other side” now. It’s not as though they haven’t been drifting into that orbit for a long time. Maybe it’s good that they ripped the band-aid off and declared themselves.

NATO is interesting anyway – why do 400 million Europeans need 300 million Americans to defend themselves against 100 Russians? It’s a question worth asking the people of the Eurozone. Of course, China is another problem, and NATO wasn’t formed to address Red China.

 

Signals

Don Troiani Historical Artist  A detail from “Signaling the assault on Fort McAllister – December 13, 1864”. Sherman is shown here on the roof of the rice mill. The mill no longer exists, so my esteemed friend, author/historian David Evans, actually flew a helicopter over the original location and at the same height to take pictures for me of the Fort in the background. This allowed me to get the exact same view the officers on the mill would have seen at the time. I think this was done for an Army Signal Corps Association. A description of this event is below. A local collector friend was a dead ringer for General Sherman, so he got the posing job.

Captain James McClintock peered through the eyepiece of his powerful telescope. Private Sam Magner stood on the makeshift cupola beside him, methodically waving a white flag with a red square center. Overhead, “Old Glory” hung limply from its staff.

It was December 13, 1864. McClintock’s signal detachment had spent the last three days perched on the roof of Dr. John Cheves’ rice mill, looking across the salt marshes toward the sea. Hour after hour, in plain sight of Fort McAllister, a formidable Confederate earthwork on the opposite side of an ox-bow bend in the Ogeechee River, their bright flag fluttered left to right, right to left. At night, they sent colorful rockets streaking across the sky at regular intervals, while McClintock strained his eyes, his nerves, and his luck, looking for any sign of the United States Navy.

Four weeks earlier, Major General William T. Sherman had burned Atlanta and marched for the sea. Leaving a swath of smoldering ruin and wreckage in their wake, his 62,000 men had reached the Georgia coast critically short of supplies. “Our men are now living almost entirely on rice,” wrote one officer, “we have no meat and no crackers, but little coffee and very little sugar . . . Our horses and mules are living on rice straw . . . ” The army desperately needed the navy to bring them food and forage, but Fort McAllister’s heavy guns barred the way.

Late that morning, Sherman climbed to the rice mill roof. Wearing a single brass spur under his mud-spattered trousers, a faded military coat with no sign of rank, and a battered black slouch hat, he asked McClintock, “Have you seen anything yet of the fleet?”

“Nothing definite, general.”

“I don’t believe they are looking for us,” Sherman growled. Convinced the situation needed his “personal attention,” he had already sent Brigadier General William B. Hazen’s division of the XV Corps across the Ogeechee with orders to take Fort McAllister. “Upon his action,” Sherman declared, “depended the safety of the whole army, and the success of the campaign.”

Now, he stood near the cupola, impatiently waiting for Hazen to get into position. Two dozen officers, including one-armed Oliver O. Howard, commanding the Army of the Tennessee, gathered around him. Lack of space soon compelled some to move to the top of an adjoining shed. Others crowded into the rice mill’s attic, knocking holes in the slate-shingled roof so they could see. Every five minutes, the two-story building shook as a section of DeGress’ Illinois battery hurled a 20-pounder Parrott shell across the Ogeechee at Fort McAllister, two and a half miles away, hoping the thunderous barrage would attract the attention of a roving Union warship.

Slowly, time ticked past. Sherman nervously paced back and forth, occasionally casting an anxious glance at the sinking sun as it tinted the evening sky with what one officer called “the last rays of one of the loveliest sunsets I ever looked upon.” All the while, McClintock’s restless flag fluttered, fluttered, left to right, right to left.

About 4:30 p.m., Sherman’s chief signal officer, Captain Samuel Bachtell, quietly called attention to a faint smudge of black smoke curling above the treetops. Instantly, every glass on the rice mill roof turned downstream.

“Look! Howard, there is the gunboat!” Sherman exclaimed. Was it Union or Confederate? In the fast-fading twilight, Private Magner’s red and white flag fluttered with renewed energy. For the next twenty minutes, not a word was spoken. Then, someone announced, “A signal from the gunboat.”

Actually, it was the tugboat U.S.S. Dandelion. Standing on deck, Signal Corps Lieutenant George Fisher glimpsed a flag hanging above the rice mill and several figures on the broken roof, “one of whom,” he noted, grabbed the end of the flag and “drew its folds out so that I could see our own glorious Stars and Stripes.” His flagman signaled – left to right, right to left. After receiving an answering “11-5,” Fisher’s flag fluttered again.

At the rice mill, Captain McClintock read the message loud enough for everyone to hear: “Who are you? Fisher, Lieutenant.”

“McClintock, General Howard’s signal officer,” wig-wagged the reply.

Turning to Sherman, sitting on the ridge-pole of the rice mill roof, McClintock said, “General, communication is now open with that vessel.” Within minutes, the navy promised to supply “any assistance,” Hazen’s infantry stormed Fort McAllister, and Sherman ended his epic march in triumph, with the help of the dedicated and daring officers and men of the Signal Corps.

 

Identify the Small Arm

1

 

2

 

Identify the Vehicle

3

There aren’t many around anymore, but many were built and deployed.

 

4

ID the aircraft too for bonus points.

 

 

Parting Shot

h/t Stringshot

 

 

 

End