Western Droughts: Good News Bad News

Of course it is terrible that the water supply for humans in the western part of the USA is drying up and insufficient to sustain human life. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that since all those reservoirs are drained, California gun owners will be able to recover all those “assault” weapons they lost in boating accidents over the years.

Something to look at

More wild orchids from Shenandoah National Park.

And another panorama.

Something to look at

I’m putting these in a new tab at the top so people can find and download them.

Something to look at.

Just more hi res scenery from Shenandoah National Park, last week from my hiking.

There is no Military “Purge”

Over at Brock’s site, there is a post about the military purge that some people thought was happening in the Obama administration and that the Biden Administration is continuing.

Of course, this is a subject near and dear to my heart. I totally understand that in our society today we are dependent on others to tell us what is going on around us because it just isn’t possible for everyone to personally be everywhere and witness it themselves. So this is not a criticism of anyone who believes this and other similar conspiracies. I can tell you for a fact, there was no “purge” in the military.

1. The political leaders just don’t care about each individual officer’s promotion. In a military of over 2 million people, the system runs on statistical information, not on a by-name basis. So as long as enough of the right sexes and skin colors are getting promoted, the system doesn’t care which individuals make it to the top.
2. The system is unable to tell the difference between a strategic genius and a guy who just puts on a good show. Even in war, idiot generals can bumble along to victory due to factors that are outside their control and for the same reasons, great generals can be fired for failures that were beyond their control.
3. Military officers are inherently very liberal. They reflect the society they come from and from college educated people, that means liberal. Add to that a lifetime of service where they have dictatorial control over others to include government housing, medicine, child care, K-12 education of children, and even accounting for what you do on your time off and you see that communism is baked into the pie. So there is no need to ever purge anyone because the people who are there are already ideologically the “right” people.
4. In any group of 2 million people, there will be a constant stream of retirements, thousands every month. In each of those groups, there will be disgruntled people who disagree with the conditions of their retirements. Boo-Freaking-Hoo. That is life. The military doesn’t need 2 million generals and admirals who serve life-time appointments. So a whole bunch of people have to move along and find something else to do with their lives.

As I have mentioned here before, I am a retired military officer and worked in the Pentagon all throughout the Obama administration. There was no purge. There is no purge. If you ask any military officers (and I have asked) if they fear a purge or see any signs of one on ideological basis they will tell you there is no sign of this going on.

What you will see in the military and that some officers do fear are the following:

a. Hyper “equal” opportunity. White officers know that their own promotion potential just got the brakes applied in order to make more potential for minorities, women and gays. They also know that they are not allowed to complain about it because that is racist and will make them ineligible for further advancement. Everyone in the military wants advancement. This is nothing new. Every democratic administration treats the military like a jobs program and slush fund.

b. The democrats are in charge and they are hyper activists for communism in the USA which includes all of the communist party platform ideas including the global plan to weaken Western democracies by undermining all of their institutions (like justice, Christianity, education, government, and the military services). Everyone in the military knows what this looks like and knows they need to STFU and color.

c. All good military officers know when to say things are “more just”, so there is never any need to purge them.

Out in the wilds.

I went hiking and saw a few picture-worthy things.

The orchids were just a few of the ones I saw. I didn’t realize they even grew here.

At least my vines still like me

Despite cutting these grape vines back to the stumps this winter, they all returned and look like they have forgiven me and intend to thrive.

Joe Biden is the President of the USA.

No matter how much fraud was involved in getting us here.

Joe Biden is sleeping in the White House and the staff treat him as if he is in charge.

There is no set of court cases future or past that will overturn the election. The election was all official and by-the-book.

The secret is that popular elections are NOT the “book”.

The way this works is that the States, as certified by their legislatures, send electors to the Electoral College. They did that. How many fraudulent votes took place leading up to that are irrelevant. The ONLY part of the process that counts is the states certifying that the result is what they wanted. The elections with tens of millions of voters was never anything more than window dressing.

The second part of the process is the meeting of the electoral college to count the votes and that was done, according to the law. Their votes matter. Yours do not. Your votes NEVER mattered. The whole point of the electoral college to to ensure that your vote will never matter. We do not and never have popularly elected presidents in the USA.

There was never going to be “enough votes to overcome the fraud” because the fix was in. The people who run our system (Democrats and Republicans alike) were never going to permit Trump to win a second term. Regardless of that, Biden is the lawfully elected president and Ms. Rice is running the country and making his lips move at all the right times. That is how our system works and we are powerless to change it because the people who are in power do not want it changed.

For good or ill, we had Trump for 4 years. There will never be another Trump. Even the few politicians still trying to ride his coat tails are not genuine. They just know that there are millions of Trump voters and financial backers that they can milk.

The Governor’s race in Virginia is typical of this. The recent “winner” of the Republican primary is the guy with the money and political connections who was running a campaign of “fill every mailbox twice a week” with glossy expensive mailers showing pictures of his perfect family and big gleaming white teeth. The guy doesn’t seem to realize that he is running in a state that the Democrats are not going to give up and how many votes he gets doesn’t matter. It is well past time for Republicans to stop pretending that we actually live in a democracy with democratically elected officials and only lawful votes counting. If the people who are losing elections can’t be counted on to cry foul, why did they bother to show up? Is it really just all about milking the donors and paying off the professional election staff?

Movie Review: Without Remorse

So. Amazon puts together a movie “based” on a novel by Tom Clancy to tell the back story of lead character John Clark, AKA John Kelly. What a crapfest.

It should be noted that Tom Clancy died in 2013 so he should not be held accountable for this crapfest. As Former President Barack Obama once said, “you didn’t build that” and was totally right. The current curators of Clancy’s estate didn’t write those books and have no interest in preserving the integrity of those products, only milking them for their own near-term gain.

One of the things that made Clancy a master story teller is that ALL of his books were well researched. All of his characters were believable. All of his plots existed in the real world with real world limitations on luck, physics, human dynamics and morality. None of that is in this movie version.

In effect, the only thing this movie has in common with the book is the name of the title and the lead character. That and the name “Tom Clancy” in bold leading into it.

Let us enumerate the fatal flaws in this crapfest:

1. The second lead character is Seal Team LCDR. Wiry thin black female cheaper-younger Grace Jones, who just happens to be named “Greer” to link her to the CIA chief who died in Clear and Present Danger. At this point, there are no Navy SEAL females and certainly none who have risen to the rank of LCDR. There is nothing about this character that is believable from her career track to her hand to hand fight scenes to her seemingly unrestricted access to the SECDEF to her personally leading “away” missions. Just another “GI Jane” created in the fertile imaginations of Hollywood who cling to the fantasy that every girl is a princess, even a Navy SEAL princess. Breaking the final glass ceiling. This is such a glaring “in your face” snub at America and the military in favor of feminism that this alone makes the rest of the movie unwatchable. Tom Clancy would never have written this character because it is simply not believable.
2. And yet there is a number 2. Once again, to Hollywood, the real villains are not the Russians, Moslems, or Drug Cartels. It’s White Male conservatives in Washington DC who would push the USA into WW3 and kill millions of people in the name of “national unity”. Not even the villain has believable motives. They should have stuck to making him just corrupt and wanting to put his son on the board of directors for a Syrian oil company. At least a profit motive is believable.
3. If you are going to send a Special Operations team into Russia to snatch someone, you should probably send a team of guys who LOOK LIKE RUSSIANS, SPEAK RUSSIAN, WEAR RUSSIAN CLOTHING, AND DON’T SNEAK DOWN RUSSIAN STREETS LIKE AN AMERICAN INFANTRY SQUAD.
4. If you are going to send a special operations team into a foreign land on a mission, use a real team who has worked together before and knows each other, not a collection of strangers plus a loose cannon operator who you KNOW is going to go off on his own and ignore the mission objectives for personal reasons.
5. Where does the CIA get people who are willing to “take one for the team” just to enhance the career goals of some old white guy? In this movie, they found two such people. The Russian guy who knew he was going to be killed and left behind in Kelly’s house and the Russian/CIA guy with the bomb vest in Russia. It would make more sense if those two people didn’t know they were pawns in a larger scheme.
6. Even a reasonably smart villain would not do all the things leading up to this to start a war with Russia. Killing SEAL operators wouldn’t do it. It’s an unreasonably complicated AND DANGEROUS step to get what you want. All you have to do is, oh let me just throw something out there hypothetically, send 2 aging American ships into the Black sea and DARE Russia to do something about it. Then respond indignantly when they do. The SECDEF has lots of ways to do this if that is what he wants to do. But that wouldn’t fill screen time with 2 hours of random violence, gunfights and explosions. In the end, it seems that was the only story Amazon writers were trying to tell with this movie. That and “Girls can be SEALS too”.

Litigation Against the Army

This story tells us that the Supreme Court rejected hearing a case to let litigation against the Army go forward and that Judge Thomas dissented.

In my opinion, Thomas is wrong to dissent because the existing law and precedent do not apply to this test case. The test case is that a cadet at West Point was raped and then wishes to sue the government for her “loss”.

The original precedent is that you cannot sue the military for acts that arise out of military service. There is no argument that you can make to suggest that the U.S. Army is in any way responsible for the deliberate and criminal acts of one of it’s members against another member. Thus, the cadet who was raped, could have sued under the existing precedent, and she should have lost her case on the merits.

The victim’s claim is that the academy’s leadership tolerated a culture that was hostile toward women and failed to provide adequate support for cadets who are assaulted, among other things.

This is on it’s face absurd. The US military academy has for decades had programs to be supportive of women in the ranks and punitive towards leadership that was hostile to anyone but Republicans and Trump supporters (not the same thing). On the merits, this case will lose. Their only hope is to get a jury to side with the plaintiff on the emotional value of her life being ruined by rape and someone (someone with deep pockets) should pay.

The victim’s claim is simply a boiler plate claim that all rape victims use to gouge a settlement out of third parties who had nothing to do with the crime. The claim likely seeks damages for emotional distress and PTSD since no real physical harm was caused. I’m just guessing that because if violent trauma were a part of the case, it would be in the story since that sort of thing is more marketable than talking about what Thomas thinks.

The original precedent is to shield the services from being sued for combat and training accidents, acknowledging that military events are inherently dangerous and that accepting the price of that danger goes with the uniform and that is why service members are more highly regarded in society than school teachers and why firemen are more highly regarded than DMV employees. The US Army should not even attempt to defend this case on this basis since that would be a defacto proclamation that Rape and “rape culture” are inherent risks of military life. Say good bye to half your female recruits after that. (the other half are already “disfigured” enough that they are immune from rape).

Since Trump is no longer President, the story tells us further that the Biden administration is opposed to the case going forward because the precedent is already established. If Trump had said that, it would be evidence of Trump supporting “rape culture” in the military.

The real challenge facing the Supreme Court with this case would be to overturn decades of holding innocent third parties responsible for deliberate criminal acts of others. This case could have established THAT precedent.

Opportunity lost.