Is it too early to buy your Halloween Costume?
Bullet Points:
Sermonette contributions are noted in RED.
** Trump owns Hakeem The side that’s laughing and doesn’t give a rat’s ass usually wins. The government shutdowns are a joke. “Give me $1.5 trillion in funds to launder into the Party’s bank account” – We’ll call it medical aid for wetbacks (wink). We’ve all seen that movie.
** President Trump said Thursday that he’s still weighing the idea of giving Americans up to $2,000 in rebates derived from the revenues his tariff agenda has generated. I’d rather see the money pay down the national debt, but it would be politically popular.
** Wisdom from PaulM. The most democrat man in the world. (h/t PaulM)
** If you listen carefully, you can hear two distinct sounds — one of anxiety, the other of laughter — coming from Washington, D.C. Each is muffled but not very well. The first is of timorous Democrats promising to keep the federal government shut until Republicans add $700 billion more to the national debt. They want to hang tough, but they know they are between a rock and a hard-left place.
The second comes from President Donald Trump and Republicans stifling guffaws as they watch their opponents present them a political gift that will allow them to ax government bureaucrats faster than they’d hoped.
The shutdown began at midnight on Oct. 1, following the last tick of the clock in fiscal 2025, because Democrats refused any money if the GOP didn’t extend COVID emergency subsidies and let illegal immigrants go on Medicaid. This mess is happening because the Democratic Party is hopelessly split. Its leftists on Capitol Hill and its radical base around the country demand fights over anything and everything Trump and Republicans try to do.
** Sermonette comments from Larry Correia – Years ago, I joked that if somebody named Mohammed Allah Jihad Kaboom blew a place up, our media would say “his motives remain a mystery”, and then Britain had to go and be that absurd in real life.
**Comparative Religions from a Military Perspective – An Apt Sermonette for the Day.
** Every day is taco Tuesday. (Tampon Tim – who comes from a state where tacos are not as popular – weighed in on his oppression vicariously because nobody thought enough of him to include him in a sombrero meme. Nobody cares.)
** The New Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally (she/her), may or may not be a closeted lesbian. I’ve read different opinions on the matter. Her husband, Eamon, is a tour guide in London. Is he an actual husband or merely a ‘beard’? I don’t want to make comparisons to Big Mike Obama’s relationship with his husband, Barack. Or to the Macrons in France. It would be wrong of me to do that, and it might brand me a cynic.
** Senator (Crying) Chuck Schumer (D-NY) comes clean for once, laying it all out.
** This week, the Trump Administration eliminated or put on hold billions of dollars in federal spending. It includes nearly $8 billion in “climate change” projects, as well as $18 billion for infrastructure projects in New York and $2.1 billion for infrastructure in Chicago. I’m sure that these woke bastions can lean on rich democrats to barf up the money to keep the infrastructure improvements going. Where’s Soros? (whose name spelled backwards is still Soros) Where’s Bill Gates?
** A very woke and classically democrat love story. In Barack’s own words.
** The Department of Energy is canceling a $45.7 million grant that Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) helped secure for Plug Power, a green energy firm whose executives donated tens of thousands of dollars to his campaign, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. The Biden administration awarded the grant in March 2024 to boost Plug Power’s manufacturing capabilities at its hydrogen production facilities in New York. Trump officials explained in internal documents reviewed by the Free Beacon that they canceled the grant over serious doubts about the hydrogen power industry’s long-term financial viability. “Hydrogen technologies require high upfront capital and ongoing subsidies, creating significant exposure for federal funds with no guarantee of cost-effective returns,” they wrote. “Committing large sums of public money to hydrogen risks locking the government into supporting an industry that may never achieve scale or self-sufficiency.” Like other hydrogen power companies, Plug Power has struggled financially. In 2024, the company reported losses in excess of $2 billion, a year-over-year increase of 50 percent. Earlier this year, it announced significant layoffs due to economic factors.”
The Amazon
The Mississippi River has over 130 bridges. The Nile has nine. However, the massive Amazon River, spanning over 4,300 miles across South America, has none. It’s a question that puzzles many people. With all our modern engineering, why has no one ever spanned the world’s largest river? It’s not for a lack of trying, as some myths suggest. The truth is much more complex.
The first major hurdle is the river itself. During the dry season, the Amazon can be a few miles wide. But in the rainy season, it swells to an unbelievable 30 miles wide in some places. These massive floods not only expand the river but also completely reshape its banks. The ground is a constantly shifting mix of soft soil and sediment, making it nearly impossible to find a stable spot for a bridge foundation.
Then there’s the secret hidden beneath it. In 2011, scientists confirmed the existence of the Hamza River, a massive underground aquifer flowing thousands of feet below the Amazon. This subterranean water flow further destabilizes the already soft ground.
Beyond the engineering challenges, there’s a simple economic reality. Most of the Amazon basin is sparsely populated. There are very few major roads or cities on its banks that would need connecting.
For the communities that do live along the river, boats, ferries, and other watercraft have always been the primary mode of transportation. There is no large-scale demand for a bridge that would cost billions to build and maintain.
So, the Amazon remains unbridged not because of a single obstacle, but because of a perfect storm of environmental, geological, and economic factors that make such a project impractical.
Shanghai Lay-Offs
h/t Claudio – via Ken Cao – For decades, this city symbolized China’s “miracle.” A showcase of prosperity and the busiest metro system in the country. But in 2025, the unthinkable happened. The Shanghai Metro — the most “untouchable” state-owned enterprise, with the highest ridership and strongest subsidies — quietly laid off 2,000 workers. This isn’t just about trains. It’s about the collapse of an entire model.
The Human Cost
Almost all of the layoffs hit middle-aged workers in their 40s and 50s. Stationmasters, train drivers, maintenance crews — people who had devoted their entire lives to the subway system. Their severance packages? A stationmaster with 30 years of service received RMB 430,000 (US$61,000). A driver with 25 years of experience received RMB 310,000. A technician with 20 years, RMB 235,000. (The exchange rate for the US dollar to the Chinese RMB is currently 1:7.11955) On paper, it looks decent. But in Shanghai, this payout barely buys breathing room. One worker summed it up bitterly: “If we can last three years, it’s good.” Three years. After decades of service. That’s not retirement. That’s survival.
No Way Back
And what comes after? For middle-aged workers in China, re-employment is almost impossible. Internet firms call you “too old.” Manufacturing is cutting jobs, not adding them. Foreign companies? They’re leaving. The only “opportunities” left are food delivery, ride-hailing, and courier work — jobs that pay maybe 5,000 yuan a month. Enough to cover mortgage interest, nothing more.
That severance package isn’t a parachute. It’s a slow-motion fall into poverty.
A Systemic Breakdown
Officially, the unemployment rate is 5.1%. However, private estimates suggest the actual number will be closer to 15% by 2025. For workers over 40? Re-employment rates are under 20%. Even worse, the story doesn’t stop at the Shanghai Metro. Across China, subways are financial black holes. Beijing lost 21 billion yuan in one year. Shenzhen lost 33 billion. Total debt across China’s subway companies? Over 4.7 trillion yuan. For years, the “subway miracle” was propped up by land finance — the idea that building metro lines would boost land values, and governments could sell the land to cover the costs. However, land sales declined from 8.7 trillion yuan in 2021 to 4.3 trillion yuan in 2024. The math no longer works.
The Fiscal Time Bomb
Here’s the chain reaction: Beijing squeezes local governments. Local governments squeeze state-owned companies. Companies squeeze workers. When even the Shanghai Metro — once the pride of China’s modernization — can’t hold on, it means the illusion of stability is gone.
Why It Matters
In 1998, approximately 30 million workers were laid off from state-owned enterprises. It was painful, but China still had growth engines: real estate, exports, and its entry into the WTO. Workers could at least find new opportunities. In 2025, there is no such safety net. Real estate is collapsing. New industries can’t absorb the unemployed. The layoffs in Shanghai Metro aren’t just a company crisis. They are a mirror of China’s economic unraveling.
The War Powers Act
NY Times: “President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal ‘armed conflict’ with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are ‘unlawful combatants,’ the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week.
The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times.
It adds new detail to the administration’s legal rationale for why the four U.S. military strikes the president ordered on boats in the Caribbean Sea last month, killing all people aboard them, should be seen as lawful rather than murder.
Mr. Trump’s move to formally deem his campaign against drug cartels as an active armed conflict means he is cementing his claim to extraordinary wartime powers, legal specialists said. In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials, and prosecute them in military courts.”
The cartels are banking that the US will run out of missiles before they run out of panga boats and pawns to crew them. The cost of cocaine at the producer end is not that great. I’m waiting for them to try to swarm the fleet off shore with drug boats in the hope that one or two make it to the US with their poison.
Identify the Armor
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2
Identify the Ship
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4
Hint: Pre-Drednaught, served in the Pacific
Identify the Aircraft
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Hint: Built by DeHaviland
Parting Shot
End
1 is British Crusader Mk VI
2?
3 is HNLMS Tromp, Dutch first frigate of the Tromp class. Two built
4?
5 look like a De Havilland D.H.104 Sea Devon
Regarding plinking panga boats south oh here: can anyone ID the munition used to eliminate the most recent boat? The dispersal pattern intrigues me……
AGM-114P/P+ Hellfire II (For UAS) Produced: 2003–2012
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Range: 12,000 yd (11,000 m)
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Guidance: Semi-active laser homing. Delayed and programmable fuzing in for hardened targets
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Warhead: Shaped Charge or Blast Fragmentation – P-2A adds steel fragmentation sleeve
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Designed for UAV altitudes
Looked kinda like a CBU-87B spread too…
It does. Definitely a shrapnel sleeve.
1 – British Crusader Mk VI
2 – MSFV Textron M1117
3 – DUTCH Tromp Class HNLMS Tromp
4 – RUSSIAN NH 84782 POBIEDA
5 – Royal Canadian Navy De Havilland CS2F-1 Tracker – Built under license from Grumman8
Excellent
I do like some of my tax money sent back to be a little extra pocket change but do agree that the money should be used to pay down the debt.
If it is to be returned it should only go to those that paid more than that in tax last year
It’s buying votes, so you know that the amount people paid in won’t be calculated when cutting a check – if they’re ever cut.
And that precisely is why it should be used to pay down the debt!
The IRS will figure a way to tax any refund, in the end WTP will end up owing more than the refund if one’s tax bracket gets bumped up…so best it went straight to paying down the debt so the Federal Government can’t steal more of what isn’t theirs (in theory).
X2 – Of course, it will be taxable.
Why not? It’s what the Dems do, buying votes. At least Trump will be doing it directly rather than through various NGOs that get their cut of the money.
Power politics, Beans.
Injecting all that free COVID money into the consumer economy triggered inflation …
Currying favor with voters will likely outweigh concerns about inflation. My sense is that if a check comes, it will come closer to the mid-term elections.
In the nineties, I paid too much for reinforcement bar, and structural steel, or have projects shut down. The steel was going to China, which was in a “boom” of building to attract the foreign investors they anticipated. It was a sellers market. Either you stood in line for the supply at the high price, or have nothing to work with.
Last I heard, there are miles of unused roads, large buildings standing empty, and a justified wariness of doing business with China. Bleak is a good description, and as usual, the citizens are paying for the folly of their government.
Not all of their high-rise structures use bamboo as rebar, but I saw it being used with my own eyes. So long as there isn’t anything seismic going on, it might hold.
1. Crusader MIV Stolen from RCC
2. MRAP up armored
3. HLMNS Tromp Stolen from RCC
4. Historical Navy guy will have to find this one
5. DeHavilland CP-121 Tracker
#2 is an M-1117 as identified above.
“The cartels are banking that the US will run out of missiles before they run out of panga boats and pawns to crew them. ” Running out of missiles is an interesting idea. I first ran into this concept back when Reagan was talking up the “Star Wars” missile defense system. The obvious answer was to “flood the zone” with ICBMs coming in. No system is going to get 100% of the incoming nukes, and defense is always more expensive than offense because of the complexity. In this case, the drug running boats are cheap, and they don’t care about the crew at all. As you say, they could load up a fleet of cocaine boats and just overwhelm the system, they seem willing to accept any cost to keep the drugs flowing. Run 20 boats and to get five through? I think they’d do that.
It’s a matter of numbers, and we’ve unclassified it to showcase it.
“Everyone is a conservative about he knows best” – Robert Conquest, paraphrased.
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I have no doubt at all that the people supplying the boats and drugs will cheerfully sacrifice other people’s lives without blinking – but they do think of themselves as businessmen, not Evil Overlords. When the business model is “occasional interceptions with loss of shipment (and even then we may just buy it back out the back door of the evidence room), and have to buy the boat back at government auction”, the calculus is a wee bit different than “must keep buying new boats because the shipment and boat were destroyed”… especially as the boat drivers are no longer weighing a short prison term or a slap on the wrist vs the paycheck, but their life vs. the paycheck. (That tends to drive the paycheck price up, or drops supply of willing boat drivers.)
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The point of the exercise isn’t to stop them through firepower alone, but to make it unprofitable for them to continue doing this at large scale.
That’s assuming you use missiles and not AC130s?
The bad guys can thwart AC130s by operating in daylight hours. The cartels also have MANPADS, which they haven’t deployed yet. Whispering that on a telephone call between JoseA and JoseB will definitely ground the AC130s.
NYCity Senator; “Not my senator” – personal friends formally from Rochester. In the depths of my personally envisioned ” Crystal Mausoleum” will lie in state, Uniparty rep. Sheister Schummer. Engraved above the entrance to the Columbarium is Rev. Shullers renowned book title, ” Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do.” From Buffallo to Albany not a soul can be found that actually voted for the Cryer, nor would stand for such an edifice to ruin such placid paisajes. The 700k populace Bronx district can re- elect Jiffy Jeffry to wa$h enough laundry to fund another “working families party program” that incidentally includes a New England Cathedral. In Bernies words…” Why Not?”
#2 Armor; Novice questions relating to the Guardians, Oshkosh’s, and armored Humvees. How many have returned from the sand box and would be available to keep the peace in 2026′? Beings no hi lux technical’s are available, what kind of force could our Green and blue be confronting? I’m truly being sincer, but if necessary indirect and humorous answers respectfully accepted.
As you’re aware, GFW2, they over-armored, particularly the HUMVEEs, without compensating suspension. A lot were old/well-used. It’s sobering to recall that I can remember when they were first made available, and the Navy and USMC were still driving Jeeps. That may make me sound old and well-used, ridden hard, etc. Finding a balance between mobility and protection is still a problem. I’ve been talking to the Iraqis, who still use old Russian junk and are considering a purchase of Strykers from the US. There again the question of protection, kinetic projection, mobility, cost and so forth have to be weighed in the balance.
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When the Russians sent their horde into Ukraine, they had a high confidence that their made-in-China military tires would take them to Kiev. (for want of a nail, etc) Approximately 90% of their vehicles experienced catastrophic tire failure. Thanks, Pres. Xi.
Still getting schooled here. If you’ve shown the m1126 before I wasn’t paying attention. Looks applicable for larger units dealing current events. Sincere thanks.
The drug cartels. Letters of marque and reprisal, anyone?
As you know, RHT447, I’m a big one for allowing citizens in on the fun. The problem with seizing a drug boat is that it’s hauling narcotics, not gold and ambergris. The boats themselves are merely shells with overused outboard motors, designed for one-time use. If we were allowed to make war on the Red Chinese, to seize their cargo ships in search of fentanyl precursors, it would be worth it. But I don’t see that sort of permission coming down the pike.
“ambergris”…had to that one up, never heard that term for ‘it’. I am fully ‘enlightened’ now.
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In nautical terms, that’s a whale of a tale?
Yep, one more thing that the Endangered Species Act and the CITES treaty expanded to make illegal when it didn’t need to be… which leads to Fish & Wildlife working with Customs on things being smuggled out of the country. (After all, if you sell it in Monaco, you get to keep a small fortune less taxes and bribes.)
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Fortunately, when it turns up, it’s not nearly as frantic to figure out how to deal with it as, say, 200 baby turtles stuffed in a pair of boots.
I had a couple of cases in which American bear gall bladders were being smuggled to Asia. By weight, they were more valuable than heroin. Bears were killed just for the bladders, which Asian males use to achieve tumescence. The targets were also drug smugglers. Imagine my surprise when I enede up with bear bladders instead of narcotics. The sentences were significant for bear parts. I knew of others who ended up seizing rhino horn.
Pay-per-view internet videos. Those with the letter of marque get paid.
Auction off letters of marque, like a hunting preserve.
These are great ideas!
Fans supporting their favoring LOM team. Buy the team trinkets, etc. More money.
“Comparative Religions”
and the Space Force?
Boron, space force perhaps comparative to the underground churches in communist countries, and now even Central America.
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https://apnews.com/article/nicaragua-religion-religious-freedom-evangelical-churches-7710b23b748dfc9b2d7975cd8dd81b35
Yes, the Spaced-Out and the Puddle Pirates were left out of it. Maybe somebody who knows more about it than I do is confident they’re bound for Hell?
Tax rebate – use the money to pay combat accountants to go after the big money, then use that money to pay down the debt.
They’re doing that – FINCen has been very active lately.
China
With all their financial woes, is there a likely hood of a breakup similar to the Soviet Union?
They have wanted to do that for decades, but the People’s Liberation Army threatened to invade and kill them if they did. Shanghai hasn’t wanted to be part of the PRC any more than Hong Kong wanted it. They didn’t need the PRC for financial independence. PRC is a Beijing-only institution in terms of where the money goes and where the bureaucrats live. When Beijing people visit outside of the ring roads they’re treated with varying degrees of contempt. These sentiments were OPENLY expressed to me, an American (Devil) in my time in China.