Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

Change Agent

Economics, Trumpism

…or, “Why are we continuing to act like the Cold War is still a thing?”

Four score years ago, the United States brought forth a new economic system, dedicated to the proposition that we would rebuild the world from the wreckage of the Second World War and stand athwart communism. For 40 years, that system worked. Germany and Japan, economically devastated, got rebuilt. In return, the United States accepted persistent trade deficits and the gradual hollowing out of our manufacturing base. The logic was coherent: we needed these allies secure and prosperous.

Then the logic expired in 1989, but we never stopped. For the past 30 years, we’ve been running the same policy for no reason at all. That’s the mistake.

See how Trump is undoing the years of economic mismanagement by the U.S. government.

If he (and his successors) can pull this off, it will be one of the most consequential (and beneficial) acts ever to grace this nation.

More Knife Stories

Guy Stuff, Marxists, Resistance, Tools

Reader Blackwing1 had some good things to say about his Leatherman CS4 Juice:

…and I must say it looks good for an everyday carry (EDC) function;  but it does lack a whole bunch of SHTF gear, which was the premise of the original post.

Unfortunately, I just can’t get past the fact that Tim Leatherman voted for Fuckface Kerry, back in the day.  So I’m reluctant to buy any LM products — and yes I know, it’s ancient news, but there it is.  (According to him, he’s not anti-gun — “I own a rifle and a shotgun” — but the fact that he was prepared to vote for Anti-Gun Fuckface really sticks in my craw.)

I was once given a Leatherman tool as a Christmas present, and I passed it on to someone else as soon as the occasion arose.

Feel free to take issue with me.

Swarming

Wars & Other Fun Games

Many years ago, back when we were still in the “win wars with boots on the ground” mindset, and when we were battling a weak or non-state enemy (e.g. Afghanistan), I suggested that ground support for the troops could be fairly cheaply (and adequately) be fulfilled by using in-theater two hundred WWII-era P-51 Mustang fighters armed with small smart bombs.  The idea of course was that such a high number could swarm the battlefield or area of interest to overcome any poorly-armed resistance.

Of course, this was before remote-controlled drones came on the scene to the extent they have, and Doug Ross gives an excellent overview of how this has changed modern warfare.

Military drones aren’t just one thing — they come in a huge range of sizes, costs, and purposes. On the low end, you’ve got $500 disposable quadcopters that soldiers fly into enemy positions. On the high end, there are $100 million surveillance drones that fly at 60,000 feet and can stay in the air for days. The key pattern is simple: the cheaper the drone, the more of them get used. The most expensive drones exist in small numbers, while the cheapest ones are built and destroyed by the hundreds of thousands. By 2026, militaries around the world have organized their drone forces into what’s called a “drone stack” — a system where different types of unmanned aircraft are layered by altitude, flight time, cost, and mission, covering everything from a single squad’s needs to an entire war zone.

Here’s an idea of the scale:

By 2025, Ukraine was building over 200,000 small attack drones per month.

So I had the right idea, but I just wasn’t thinking small enough.  Mea culpa.

Shooting Them Down

Self-Defense, Shooting Sports, Wars & Other Fun Games

Interesting stuff, this (via Insty):

I Have Seen the Future of Anti-Drone Warfare, and It’s Dirt-Cheap

I vaguely remembered reading something about the Sting a year or more ago, but I just learned today that they’re both dirt-cheap and extremely effective — mostly at shooting down Russia’s Geran-2 one-way attack drones, which are licensed copies of Iran’s Shahed that have caused us considerable trouble in Operation Epic Fury.

Ukraine needs tons of these things, because Geran is essentially a terror weapon aimed in large numbers — currently 100 to 200 per attack — at Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. Larger attack waves include anything from 300 up to just over 800 Geran-2s in one night.

So the concept behind Sting is simply enough: Make something cheap and fast to build, easy to use, yet still capable of knocking a Geran-2 out of the sky far enough out from its target for some degree of safety.

And the Ukrainians did just that.

Of course, that’s all well and good in a military context, and our own .dotmil needs to hop onto this with all due dispatch, if they haven’t done so already.  (I assume they have, but whatever.)

What interests me as a civilian, however, is a solution closer to home [sic], in that these little airborne nuisances can also be used by anti-social elements to both spy on people and, in the worst case, to kamikaze themselves into a target — such as, for instance, your home or similar.  Why go to all the trouble of kitting yourself up with a suicide explosive vest or a rifle in order to inflict death and damage on (say) a church or synagogue, when you can essentially outsource the suicide bit to something you hand-built in your garage?

And in the above scenario, how would ordinary people — say, adherents of the Second Amendment — defend themselves or their communities against such nefarious electro-mechanical mosquitoes?

I’m thinking of something like this, of course:

That’s the semi-auto 12ga Browning Silver Hunter (and of course there are less-expensive options because America).  This differs from your standard home defense shotgun, say a 12ga Mossberg Maverick 88:

…in that the Hunter is not a pump action device but semi-auto (ergo  a higher rate of fire) and it has a much longer barrel (ergo  much greater accuracy at distance, ask any bird shooter).

I’m interested in this concept because it raises a couple of practical issues such as the type of ammo that would work best to bring down a drone (00 buck, or perhaps something lighter?).  Obviously, a 12ga slug would end the flight path of a drone with spectacular effect, but it has to be accurate:  far easier to spread the terminal effect with shot… but which shot?  00 buckshot is excellent, but it also kicks like hell — and getting followup blasts off quickly with said semi-auto action means a quicker target re-acquisition time is necessary.  Would 7/8 birdshot do the trick as well?  For that matter, would a 20ga shotgun be as effective as a 12ga under such circumstances?  (Almost all semi-auto shotguns are offered in both chamberings.)

I’ve owned a 20ga semi-auto shotgun in the past, and I have to say that the effect downrange is almost as effective as a 12ga (if those watermelons and milk jugs are at all indicative), but the recoil was far less problematic.

Of course I think that the Silver Hunter is just dreamy, in so many ways:

…and yes, the addition of a red-dot sighting device may certainly be of assistance (even though I think it spoils the look of the gun).

Feel free to discuss this topic in Comments, of course.

Welcome Change

Elections

As anyone who’s read this website for any length of time should know, I love the country of Chile.  In fact, of all the Third World countries I’ve ever been to or even lived in, Chile ranks #1, by miles.  I love its people, its scenery, its way of life, the women are among the sexiest I’ve ever seen and the climate is wonderful;  so despite the language difficulty, if someone were to say:  “You have to go and live in Chile”, my response would be:  “Gimme the ticket.”  I’d learn Spanish just to go and live there.

I can’t remember if I’ve told this story here before, but in case I haven’t, here goes.

You will recall that at one point, our family traveled extensively around the world (either on vacation or on business), and over three years we visited nearly two dozen countries, several repeatedly.  We knew that the travels were going to end at some point (for all sorts of reasons) so at the end of what turned out to be our final trip, we polled our three kids with the following question:

“Assuming that you could afford to live there (had a job, etc.), which are the top three countries you’d choose to live in?”

The answers were as follows:

Daughter:  1. Tokyo, 2. Paris
Son&Heir:  1. London 2. Heidelberg (Germany)
#2 Son:  1. Tokyo 2. London

All three picked Chile — specifically, Viña Del Mar — as their third choice.

My only reservation about Chile — it was one of my top choices, too — was that I got the feeling that it was just one revolution from becoming Communist.  And incidentally, that fear was also prevalent among many of the native Chileans I met on our trip there.

Which makes the most recent political news from Chile all the more exciting:

In December, former congressman José Antonio Kast found himself in a runoff against the Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara. Thankfully, Kast won in a decisive victory with nearly 60% of the vote.

But the people of Chile are ecstatic. The country has more or less been taken over by socialists and leftists for decades, and its most recent president, 40-year-old Gabriel Boric, may have been the most hardcore — and least popular — of all.

So, let me warn you that as you peruse the fake news media today that you’ll probably see a lot of headlines about how Kast is “far-right” or “ultra-conservative” or a big fan of the country’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet. First of all, Kast has praised Pinochet’s economic reforms — he was a big capitalist, free market kind of guy who saved the country from full-on Communism — but Kast has also condemned him for his human rights abuses and all the bad stuff he did. It’s not like he has posters of him hanging on his office walls. Sheesh.

Second, Kast has been called “Chile’s Trump,” and that right there is enough to make the MSM lose its collective mind.

Kast campaigned on being tough on crime and restoring law and order to the South American nation. That includes deploying the military to cities with high crimes, strengthening the country’s borders, mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, putting the interests of native Chileans first, and getting tough with cartels and terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua.

Sounds like Chile, at last, is in the right [sic] hands, even though it seems unlikely that ChilePres Kast is going to revive Air Pinochet, which is rather sad.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see what it costs to fly to Chile… wait, less than $900 return?  Whoa.

Oh, and one last story.

When we arrived in Santiago and checked into our hotel (Four Points Sheraton), we got a call from the kids’ room:  “We’re hungry;  can we get room service?”

Well, a week prior to that we’d been in Zurich, where room service required a credit check.  So with great trepidation I scanned the Four Points’ room service menu, converted the CLP$ (peso) into USD$, and said:

“You can order everything off the menu.”
“You mean anything?”
“No, I mean everything.”

I don’t remember what anything cost, but it was about 20% of what the same thing would have cost in a U.S. hotel, and about 1% of what it cost us in Zurich.  (I’m not exaggerating.)

So yeah;  add “affordable” to your travel plans.

I am seriously considering this idea, funds permitting.

Note:  It appears that Chile no longer charges U.S. citizens an entry fee of $160 per person, nor does the U.S. do likewise for Chileans entering the U.S.  This was the only fly in the ointment on our trip there, and thankfully it is no more.

Turning Blue

Anti-Gun Nannies, The Gun Thing

Gotta say that I never thought I’d see the day when Virginia turned into Illinois:

A bill banning AR-15s and other popular semiautomatic rifles, as well as magazines holding more than 15 rounds of ammunition, cleared the Virginia legislature Monday and is headed to Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s (D) desk.

The legislation, SB 749, states that “importing, selling, purchasing, or transferring a prohibited firearm would be a Class 1 misdemeanor,” Ammoland News noted.

It also “restricts the sale or transfer of certain large-capacity magazines defined in the statute.”

WRIC reported that SB 749 also bans a number of semiautomatic shotguns and certain semiautomatic, centerfire pistols.

SB 749 takes effect July 1, 2026.

So to sum up:  the party of Thomas Jefferson has passed an un-Constitutional gun control law in Jefferson’s home state.

Note that this does not effect existing owners of said Eeeevil Implements Of Death:

If you have an assault rifle, you can keep it. If you have an assault pistol, if you have one of these pistols with a silencer on it and a pistol grip in the front. A really big, big pistol…you want to have one with a telescope on it or lasers or whatever else you want, that’s okay. You just can’t buy a new one and you can’t sell it to anybody. If you want to have a magazine with more than 15 bullets, you can keep that, too. You just can’t buy a new one. — Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell

…but I bet that whatever the numbers of those AR owners are at present, there are going to be quite a few more before July 1, 2026.

And in the future, there’s going to be some serious traffic congestion every time there’s a gun show in West Virginia or North Carolina.

Hey, it’s the Will Of The People, right?  After all, Virginians voted this bunch of scumbags into office.

Other gun-friendly states need to take note, especially the ones recently infested with refugees from California, Illinois and New York.

Normally, I say something very rude at this point, but I’m off to the range.  I think I’ll shoot off some “high-capacity” mags with my AR-15, just for the hell of it.

As y’all know, it was with considerable misgivings that I got the poodleshooter;  but as more and more people seem to want to ban them, I’m kinda glad that I did. if for no other reason than:

Ammo’s cheap, too.