I was originally gonna subtitle this “You’ll believe a man can fly” because..well….

I’ve never been in the military, I’ve never been to Afghanistan, and I’ve never tried to ‘secure’ an airport in the middle of what is in effect the Worlds Worst Neighborhood.

But, I’ve seen ‘Blackhawk Down’ a buncha times and that makes me an armchair quarterback.

The news is full of footage that has a very last-days-of-Vietnam feel to it. And there is a really, really ugly truth in it: when you’re extracting American lives and assets, and the locals are slowing you down, whose life is more valuable? Being the ‘good guys’, we stop our airlift so no one gets run over by the planes on the runway and we fire rounds over their heads or nudge them along with helicopters. How do you suppose the Russians or Chinese would handle things? Yeah, that’s what I figured too.

Im not sure why anyone who was capable of leaving on their own would have stayed to the last minute like that (unless they were crazy enough to believe President Dementia when he said it wouldn’t be exactly what it turned out to be) when the smart money was hitting the road a good while ago. Who is left? Those poor SOB’s who bought the line that the US would stand by them for their efforts (ask the Hmong how that worked out), and anyone too poor to steal a Toyota pickup and drive in virtually any other direction out of the country.

And now the US is in the unenviable position of either a) having an airlift turn into a fizzled operation that leaves planes, people, and materiel at the mercy of the Taliban, or b) go old school and drop in troops who have been tacitly told it’s okay to kill literally anything that moves onto the runway that doesn’t have wings. Antipersonnel mines, WP grenades, whatever…gloves off as long as the planes can keep taking off. And the resultant media optics will be…bad.

Prediction? C) None of the above – drop in troops, hamstring their ROE, and watch it become BlackHawk Down II: Electric Fubaroo. And blame Trump.

Oh, and there’s now a metric boatload of veterans out there clamoring “What the hell was I over there for in the first place if we’re just gonna roll over like that?”.

Interesting times.

I was going to say that I apologize for the slow posting but then I realized, I actually don’t owe you guys anything so..why apologize?

Just had some distractions lately and then this amazingly absurd heat isn’t helping.

Anyone else notice that it seems like nowadays there’s (supposedly) a shortage of everything? I mean, it seems like overnight we went from a nation that has 98 different types of breakfast cereal on the shelves to a nation where newsmedia keeps telling us that there are shortages of…well..everything.

Global infrastructure logistics failures or some such technobabble being the words du jour. Objectively, I can see a few hiccups.. The Kung Flu reduced manpower (or person-power if you think along those lines) at ports, terminals, and other transport hubs. Ok, makes sense. Some  nations closed their borders, thereby making trade more difficult. Okay, still with ya on that. And there was, naturally, unprecedented demand as people suddenly realized that toilet paper and rice might suddenly vanish. Ok, still seems legit.

So where is all this sky-is-falling media blitz coming from and, more interestingly, why? Are we being groomed to become used to ‘getting by with less’ in some sort of sneak attack on ‘consumerism’? Is it jockeying by our larger trading ‘partners’ (cough*China*cough) to flex a little and see how much the markets cringe when they raise their hand? Or is it just the delayed effect of all the other stuff I mentioned finally catching up?

Personally, I’ve not seen shortages of anything that I use except for, of course, ammo and related materiel. My neighbor has been building a garage and has had a helluva time finding lumber, trusses, etc. But in my world? No…no shortages I’ve noticed. But then again, I tend to live a fairly simple lifestyle at the moment. I buy my groceries, I get new clothes every other year, I fill my vehicle twice a month, and thats about the extent of my shopping.

Still, I’m quite curious about these supposed shortages and if there is something more sinister going on here.

Give the power company access to your smart house and….

Power companies in Texas are remotely raising temperatures inside of some customers’ homes amid the state’s ongoing energy shortage.

…….

English appears to have enrolled the thermostat, operated by the company EnergyHub, an a program known as “Smart Savers Texas,” KHOU 11 notes. The program, which customers have to opt-into, allows power companies to remotely adjust thermostats when energy demands are high.

Upon realizing the details of the program, English says he immediately unenrolled: “I wouldn’t want anybody else controlling my things for me.”

I love the idea of just saying “Shields up!” or “Activate Barn Door Protocol” and have all my locks, shutters, and access points suddenly armoured up. But, as Scotty said in Star Trek, the more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to jam up the pipes. Anytime you give someone access to your personal server, your personal phone, your personal security system, your personal life….you create a possibility of risk. Sometimes the risks are minimal and are outweighed by the rewards. But…it never seems that way when the risk actually catches up. Moral of the story: don’t give the rest of the world freakin’ access to your critical systems.

The Ninth Circus? Really? That Benitez guy is gonna be the patron saint of Ballistic-Americans at the rate he’s going. The meme AR lowers are sure to be out next week.

Assault weapons have been banned in California since 1989, according to the ruling. The law has been updated several times since it was originally passed.

According to the ruling by US District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego, the assault weapons ban violates the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms and deprives Californians from owning assault-style weapons commonly allowed in other states. Benitez issued a permanent injunction Friday so the law cannot be enforced.

“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” Benitez said in the ruling. “Firearms deemed as ‘assault weapons’ are fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.”

G. Gordon Liddy passed away.

Buffoon or patriot, man’s man or political joke, he was probably all that and more. His book ‘Will’ was probably not the best choice for inspirational reading by a 14-year-old boy, but thats about what happened. I found it to be an interesting book, somewhat inspiring, and it wasn’t until many years later I realized that all biographies have a healthy dose of…shall we say ‘fiction’…in them just by virtue of who their authors are. Nonetheless, it was certainly an entertaining book.

I wouldn’t call Liddy a role model in the classic sense, but as unhinged and showman-y as he was, there were a few things you could be 100% certain about when all his other qualities could be questioned as mere pretense and theatrics. I think he genuinely was a patriotic man, and he genuinely loved his country.

Yeah he was flawed, theatrical, blustery, self-aggrandizing, and a bunch of other things….but he did have a certain BFYTW attitude that he wasn’t scared to trot out at the powers that be. And thats always a trait worthy of respect, in my book.

So…roast up some rat over a candle, once youre done holding your hand over the flame, in remembrance.

Commander Zero passed away from unspecified causes although there are rumours of Covid-19 infection. From the NY TImes (behind a paywall, so I’m not gonna bother linking.)

Edén Pastora, a hero of the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua who was known by his nom de guerre, Commander Zero — and who later turned against his victorious comrades in arms in a long counterrevolutionary war of words and guerrilla attacks that failed to budge the socialist regime in Managua — died early Tuesday in a military hospital in that city, the capital of Nicaragua. He was 83.

A grandson, Álvaro Pastora Gutiérrez, said the cause was a heart attack. He said Mr. Pastora had been gravely ill when he was admitted to the hospital, though he did not identify the nature of the illness.

Mr. Pastora’s wife told a local newspaper that the cause was bronchopneumonia. His family had denied rumors that Mr. Pastora had contracted Covid-19. The government has been widely accused of listing pneumonia as the cause of death in Covid cases as a way to dispel reports that the pandemic was out of control in Nicaragua.

I hadn’t caught this story when it first broke back in June. Commander Zero ‘made a stunning debut’ in 1979 in a Castro-like underdog story but never followed up on it in terms of future successes. After becoming disillusioned with the victory he helped win for the Communists he picked up his rifle, went back into the jungles, and tried starting a revolution against them. He never had any great successes after his initial one and he eventually wound up as a somewhat charismatic figure popping up in the spotlight once in a while to tweak the nose of whatever government had caught his attention. Sort of a Central American Don Quixote, tilting at political windmills. I always kinda thought it’d be interesting to get a selfie with him someday just for fun. Plus, he probably could have used the money. Kinda funny…I like the HiPower and the G3, same as he did apparently, judging from the pictures.

““The first thing we revolutionaries lose is our wives. The last thing we lose is our lives. In between our women and our lives, we lose our freedom, our happiness, our means of living.” – Eden Pastora

For those who are curious, one of the qualities of any nickname is that you don’t get to choose it. Many years ago I was talking to someone about my preparedness projects and they said something along the lines of “Do they know about your secret life as Commander Zero?” and thats how that appellation came to be.

When the judge says it like it is:

“If anything like the allegations here are correct, it is luck of the draw, a minor miracle, or something like that that no one shot you. If this is in fact a repeated instance, than whoever your guardian angel is is doing a hell of a job, but I would stop relying on them so heavily.”