A note on Hong Kong Triads (Heaven and Earth Societies).

There have been a number of prominent criminal justice professors from several universities, most of whom I know personally, who have declared that the Hong Kong Triads are dead – Sun Yee On, Wo Hop To, etc. They cite the changing traditions, the departure from numerology, and the lack of traditional structure under the Shan Chu (Mountain Master/Dragon Head) as proof. I had lunch with an Incense Master the other day and we discussed this.

You might ask why I did this or why he would take a meeting with me, but the truth is that I’ve known him for at least thirty years, and though we operated on different sides of the coin, it was still the same coin and it brings understanding. (like medieval knights, the English knights had a lot more in common with the French knights than they did with their own peasants)

Anyway, we chatted about the old days and people we knew, how things have changed, and so on. The police in Los Angeles are quite openly corrupt now, and the HK triad groups moved from white powder to safer and still popular cannabis products. The Mexican cartels are allowed to conduct business in ethnic Chinese neighborhoods and territories if they pay the tax.

We’re both old. Neither of us cares about this stuff.

 

Identify the Aircraft

1.

Serial production continued in the years 1935-1943, ending with the production of about 450 military aircraft of this type. By all measures,  a successful seaplane.

2.

It’s not a P-61.

 

Bullet Points:

** Illegal Aliens! The call has gone out to have them live in Mexico but I remain skeptical. (Mexico doesn’t offer free ObamaCare, a free ObamaPhone and $3K/month) What about Canada? Why can’t USGOV load them onto C-5s and fly them directly from Mexico to Ottawa?

** The FJB regime announced this week it is reducing the number of tactical aerial surveillance crafts being used along the U.S.-Mexico Border. The vehicles are used to interdict human and drug smuggling and is also a source of data for migrant got-aways. CBP officials distinguished between the Tethered Aerostat Radar Systems operated by CBP’s Air and Marine Operations vs. the tactical systems used by Border Patrol.

** Are Cargo Theft Numbers a bellwether? (h/t Claudio) much of the cargo commerce that is transported from here to there in the US and Canada moves by rail. Consider the vulnerability of rolling stock that sits in sidings. The same inner city demographics who loot stores in the cities without fear of incarceration also rip open boxcars and containers that are parked on railway sidings. It very much becomes a living, with theft gangs often shooting it out over who will rip open and steal the contents of which railway cars. You have to ask yourself how many police officers those departments are willing to throw at the problem as they find themselves de-funded. The obvious solutions are these: Authorize that deadly force is used on the inner-city thugs – or – accept higher prices on the shelves because nobody is insuring these loads anymore.

Technically it’s the jurisdiction of the deputized PRIVATE railway police.

** You can design your own Marie Antionette wig here.

** Initially introduced in the American West in the late nineteenth century for cattle ranching, barbed wire was a highly effective military obstacle. All armies deployed it during the Great War. There were more shells by 1916, but not enough sensitive fuses to explode them on impact with the wire; shells that buried into the ground before exploding often made wire entanglements worse by throwing the coils or strands into the air and twisting them into unrecognizable heaps. Only in 1917 did a sufficient number of shells and proper fuses begin consistently to clear enemy wire, but it remained a formidable obstacle through the end of the war, demanding long or heavy bombardments to clear paths for attacking troops. Most infantry assault sections carried wire cutters to snip through sections left undamaged by the artillery. This piece (above) was recovered from Vimy Ridge after the war.

 

 

Oh, so they’re calling it ‘dating’…not tricking or whoring.

 

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35 COMMENTS

  1. Open borders are for a reason.

    Bourdain, besides being a very interesting and talented guy…didn’t kill himself.

      • Well, seems even our sovereign airspace can be breached at ease under this seditious crew…while they excuse it away. Oaths matter, but only to those of good character and principles.

          • They are in a tough spot I think. Read a book by a former Clinton Secret Service agent who ultimately left because as a Christian he could no longer be party to being told to look the other way while trying to do his job. Everything we suspected went on, did. But gee, there were no shenanigans during the Trump Presidency and the SS personnel were proud to be on the detail.

      • We prioritize the well off and educated economic migrants in Canada.

        But they still turn everything into a turd for us here. It’s just a more polished turd.

  2. Helped my brother install a hot water heater in a house he is flipping in a formally nice working class neighborhood in southeast Wichita near McConnell Air Force base. We needed a couple of shark bite fittings (gods gift to plumbers). We ran to the nearby Ace hardware. Everything was under a magnet lock requiring a clerks help to get even a single plumbing part. I guess I was a bit taken back, but not completely surprised.

    • You can’t blame the store owner. If I was a retail guy, I’d lock things down. The law isn’t going to prosecute thieves and you can’t shoot them.

    • I was buying a battery for one of my cordless drills at Home Depot and was asking the manager why everything was now under lock and key. He said the year before they locked everything up their one store had more than $1 million in losses from the tool department alone. Just another example of society heading down the tubes.

  4. Too bad border states can’t issue groundpounder versions of the letters of marque – to deal with ‘internal banditry’.

    • The Federal government jealously guards that sovereign right to keep the border open and democrat voters flooding in. You could see the border with land mines and it would end illegal crossings tomorrow

  5. Corruption… “The police in Los Angeles are quite openly corrupt now”.
    I don’t live in LA & have no idea what that looks like… I think of the movie “L.A. Confidential” when I think of LA corruption.
    With the open boarders we have since the election was stolen with the cartels running the border crossings and all that money flowing around there has to be big time corruption going on down there.

    The other place I notice the effects is watching the President of the United States Of America and what they person does after he’s out the office. Harry Truman bought train tickets and went home to the small house they had. Obama (a Chicago machine politician) who only had their house in Chicago now has a mansion in DC, a mansion on the Atlantic in Massachusetts and still another on the beach in Hawaii (on Oahu).
    The Clintons… I suspect money-on-the-side is a day to day given for them. Right after Hillary (the Uni-Party) lost the Presidential election they closed down the international branch of the Clinton Foundation, it looked to me like they didn’t have anything to sell anymore…
    I remember noticing “back in the day & not that far back” that after a 6 year term as President of Mexico whoever left the office was set for life, I really didn’t think that would happen with the US. I guess I was wrong!
    Even the children of the powerful elected officials are given huge (well paid) jobs on the boards of different companies, they could have the smarts & experience to do the jobs… but I’ll bet they got that job because of who they know and have immediate access to!

    I guess the corruption won’t be enough for me to see until I have to slip the desk clerk at the DMV a little cash to get my paperwork taken care of…

    • And PDJT actually lost money because he was – as The Founders envisioned – tending to matters of import, whereas these clowns feather their nests on our time and nickel.

    • The police hit drug locations and give the criminals a choice. (1) Go to jail, (2) don’t go to jail and the police take the drugs and the money and market the dope themselves. All too frequently.

    • I’m currently reading Mike Royko’s book “Boss” about Mayor Daley of Chicago. Lots of what when on then is still happening in the Blue Utopias, it just has better cover. NGOs make great conduits for graft and add the international angle (USAID and all the rest). The latest FBI op going after conservative Catholics (not to be confused with Nancy or “the Big Guy”) is indicative of the moral corruption of our elites.

  6. Barbed wire
    The period when the population was moving West and homesteading was early use of barbed wire. The open range users hated it. Had the homesteaders not been able to defend themselves (a good 2nd Amendment argument) the West as we know it now wouldn’t have happened.

    Ft Leonard Wood Combat Engineer school had one week devoted to barbed and concertina wire.
    Two hours in the instructor pulls me aside.
    “Son, you have experience doing this. I’m making you an assistant instructor”.
    “Yes Sargent, so when someone over tightens and the wire breaks, it will wrap around my legs instead of yours?”
    “I KNEW you are experienced”.

    • That scene at the beginning of Seabiscuit where Chris Cooper rides up to a new wire fencelone, dismounts and walks over and rubs the barb with his thumb like, “End of an era”, then rides off along the line because it is no longer open range.

    • In a training situation, you never want to be made the assistant instructor or platoon leader. I know that you understand that. Many didn’t/don’t. It’s like running in the #1 slot – never where you want to be. Content yourself with the relative anonymity of #3 or #4. It makes for a much more pleasant training experience.

      I went through the navy’s EOD training which convinced me that I wouldn’t want to deal with EOD in any genuine combat situation. I applaud your service as an Army Combat Engineer. On D-Day, their survival was measured in minutes. As they pushed through the Atlantic Wall, it was measured in hours. Eventually, it hit days. It’s a lot like being a Sea Bee on a bulldozer, trying to knock out a runway when half of it is still held by the enemy. Sea Bees in Vietnam had a hot time too.

      • The company I served in, the 814th Engineer Company, was originally the 122nd formed during WWII. The movie, “The Longest Day”, depicts a scene where engineers blow a breach in a seawall. Per the unit history, those engineers were from the 122nd. The 814th is still in service as a multi-bridge company now at Ft. Polk.

        EOD held no interest for me having worked along side them on occasions. Bluntly, what they do scares the shit out of me. A cousin was a Sea Bee, post Vietnam, and we talk smack when we get together. He went on to a 25+ year LEO career and is now a municipal judge. 12/7/2017 Aztec, NM school shooting was stopped when he, then a deputy, and a city policeman arrived, broke a window, and went in and got the shooter. Said shooter heard them coming and offed himself.

        • EOD troops scared hell out of me, too. I watched an EOD guy kick a dud hand grenade once. Once. I didn’t stick around to see if he’d do it the second time.

          • My late son, the Medic, had to piece together an EOD at Dugway Proving Grounds who screwed around with an artillery shell fuse and managed to remove most of his face and both arms below the elbows. That said, the ones I worked with were total professionals and careful to a fault. Good, because they were handling SDAMs.

    • During my college years (1980-ish, post Army hitch) I got summer job on a ranch in the dry hills west of Red Bluff, CA. The other ranch hand was a Vietnam vet with a partially disabled left arm. An enemy round had smashed through the buttstock of his M16 before hitting his arm. Bits of nylon and plastic would still surface now and then.

      The two of us were given the job of installing about 1/4 mile of four wire fence using metal stake posts. The ranch owners got some sort of “deal” on the barbed wire. I don’t recall now what they called it. It wasn’t razor wire, but the barbs were very sharp. Just brushing lightly against them would draw blood. We were both experienced so there were no snapped wires or major mishaps. However when we were done, we were both poster boys for “Fight in a phone booth with a pissed off Bobcat.

    • When you’re assured of a skin-color get out jail free card, it makes professional cargo thievery an attractive business to get into. No overhead and an endless supply of train cars on the sidings.

      • More and more of the same.
        One less discussed reason we have so many smart TVs these days is that it is a cover for requiring a code from the receipt to activate most of them, so stolen ones either don’t work or have minimal functionality.
        This is entirely due to widespread theft, either in transit or in store. I assume there are efforts underway to break those codes…
        I bet this is part of the reason that LA/ Long Beach is losing business to other ports…

  9. I said back before the midterms that if the repubs took back the house and didn’t impeach that DB Mayorkis within the first two weeks, then they are worthless. So far they haven’t even broached the subject. LA Confidential is a classic movie, the book is even better.

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