You Just Can’t Believe A Single Thing You See On The News Any More

At least that’s the way it seems to me.

Used to be…journalists were just that…journalists. They told you the facts which were generally actually the true facts…and dabbled not at all to opinion/viewpoint…except maybe an occasional commentary at the end of the news clearly identified as commentary and not news.

Nope…not any longer…today just about every media outlet has decided to become the news instead of trying to report the news…and it’s getting harder and harder to figure out from the various sources the actual facts and form your own opinion.

Sorry…but some of this is going to sound political…but in reality it’s not…so if you want to close the browser window and wait on the next more normal for this space post that will be just fine and dandy.

First up…the whole situation revolving around both our former President and our current President.

Let me say up front…that we’re not supporters of the former in his reelection attempt and would never vote for him…he’s a complete moron and narcissist and really just needs to go away. However…the current President while running doesn’t deserve to be reelected either…any fool can see from his tripping over things, falling off his bicycle, constant repetition of obviously untrue stories from his past, and his rambling…that he’s declining both mentally and physically…and he needs to step aside as well. The former really needs to step aside too…both of them should recognize that the needs of the country overcome their want to be President. Frankly…the only worst person to consider for the job than those two is the current Vice President who has also clearly demonstrated her lack of ability to do pretty much any job…it’s time for both parties to find new blood…hopefully closer to the center and believing that compromise rather than being a dirty word is the key to getting some of what you want while also giving the other guy something of what he wants and with neither of you getting everything you want.

I took out a bunch of stuff here about the ongoing legal cases…we’ve always thought that there were some issues with the charges and evidence as seen in the media. DAs always say they have ironclad evidence…that’s their job. But like some congressman claiming they have ironclad evidence of Russian collusion…and like some losing politicians saying they have ironclad evidence of election fraud, and like some defense attorneys saying they have ironclad evidence their client is innocent…it ain’t necessarily so.

The classified documents case seems the easiest one to get an actual conviction on. All of the others the defense can make a case for contesting an election’s outcome rather than trying to overturn the election illegally…there’s a lot of difference between “find me 11,000 votes” and “find some fraudulent ballots to get me 11,000 votes”. But the biggest problems are that finding an unbiased jury of his peers will be essentially impossible since just about everybody has already made up their mind one way or the other and that some of the evidence may not be so ironclad once they finally get to a trial.

Let’s see…what other idiocy do we have in the media today.

I saw an article this week where the questioner asked Mike Pence about the difference between the 2002 ejection from Congress after being convicted on corruption charges of James Traficant and whether or not a convicted FP in any of his trials should also not be allowed to be President. His response was that the voters got to decide that…for which the article roundly condemned him for this double standard. The difference…as noted in the article but not in the headline…was that Mr. Traficant was convicted of corruption charges as a serving Congressman and therefore ejected…and that the FP hasn’t been convicted of anything. Mr. Traficant could have run for election to Congress (assuming he was out of jail) and if elected whether he should have been seated would get a vote…and since ejection is essentially the same outcome as impeachment and impeachment requires something be done while in office I think it unlikely he would have not been seated if he then won reelection. Marion Barry…the former mayor of DC…was reelected and served as mayor despite his conviction and prison sentence in between his terms office on drug charges…in a Democratic stronghold like DC it’s obvious he was not going to be kicked off the ballot or help ineligible to serve because his crimes were not while he was in office…and I think that’s fair. Now to be honest…while the courts as noted above have not specifically said that an impeachment/trial were a judicial proceeding and I have no idea how they would rule on it…as a practical matter impeachment is mostly a political thing at this point and if the House were to turn the other way and the FP became the President againI have no doubt that he would be summarily impeached by the House without any “high crime or misdemeanors” being involved…he would be impeached merely because it says R behind his name and the Speaker of the House would have D behind his/her name. Frankly…I’m surprised that the R house hasn’t voted to impeach the current President…but that’s probably because they realize it’s going nowhere in the Senate just like the last 3 Presidential impeachments did.

You’ve probably seen all the handwringing from the White House and SecDef about Senator Tuberville’s hold on military promotions and how this is causing severe and ongoing problems with national security. I asked Neil about it…and he told me that it’s all a bunch of crap for numerous reasons. First up…the “unconfirmed nominees” to new top leadership in several services and at the Joint Chiefs…have already been serving as a high level deputy to the former leader and are now serving as “acting” heads…so management and leadership of the armed forces is not in question and the top leader of any of our military branches mostly worries about policy and budget and where is the service going rather than day to day management of military actions…that’s just the way the chain of command works. Second…the Senator is *not* holding up *all* promotions…he’s merely placing a hold on approval of whole slates of promotions simultaneously by what’s called “unanimous consent” and that he will *not* hold up any singular nomination that the Democratic leadership in the Senate brings to the floor…they’re free to do that and the nomination would be approved and the current “acting” leader would become the “Senate confirmed leader”…whoopee. Senator Schumer says that it’s the Republican leadership’s job to convince Senator Tuberville to release his hold…and the hold on unanimous consent has been used numerous times in the past by both parties for military promotions and assorted other unanimous consent bills, resolutions, and what have you. Senator McConnell has said…go ahead Mr. Schumer…schedule the votes on the floor. So…despite what you read in the media…this situation is not atypical…and is both another senseless political pissing contest and is not materially affecting military readiness or national security. Senator Sinema is actively trying to persuade both sides to come to some sort of compromise and is being roundly criticized in the media and by the Democrats for doing so…and again…she’s trying to do her job and get the political pissing contest set aside.

There’s an article this morning with the progressive mayor of Los Angeles decrying the sending of busing migrants from Texas to CA as “beyond politics…it’s evil” during the ongoing “unprecedented storm” in the state…that storm would be the tropical depression Hilary which if had come to Florida would have been a nothing burger…down here nothing would have closed, there would be no toilet paper and milk shortages, and there would be no panic. Yes…it’s a tropical storm…and yes that doesn’t happen much in estate…but come on people…it’s a nothing burger. And since both CA and LA (the bad one, not the good one known as Lower Alabama) have declared themselves to be sanctuaries for illegal immigrants…Texas is just trying to help them be a sanctuary. While I don’t completely agree with their decision to move migrants to blue locations…I can certainly see their point since the federal government and Congress seem completely uninterested in stemming the flow of criminal illegal immigrants flooding across the border…and this whole “undocumented persons” relabeling is just more political hogwash.

In the “I really don’t understand this” category…back on August 9 a small plane carrying the pilot and a hunter crashed into a narrow ravine in Denali National Park…there’s a picture of the scene
here. Now I’ll grant you that’s a narrow ravine…but according to the article rangers have repelled down to the aircraft more than once…and have determined that both are dead. However…they’ve also decided that recovery of the bodies is too hard…even though they down by the aircraft it’s flat enough to walk around and verify death…since they would be subject to “falling rocks” while recovering the bodies and it needs to wait until the river flow goes down or winter freezes the river before trying to recover the bodies. They decided it would be too hard to recover the wreckage with the bodies inside at this time…but I really don’t understand how if they’re standing next to the aircraft getting the bodies (or parts of them possibly) out, putting them into body bags, and pulling them to the top the same way the rangers standing next to the plane to verify death got back out…several times.

Apparently the Ukrainians have attacked and destroyed a Russian S-400 surface to air missile system in Crimea (that’s their most advanced one and the same as that which resulted in the Turkish government getting kicked out of the F-35 program)…they even provided a video of the thing blowing up
here…but I’m sure the Russians will announce later on that nothing of the sort happened and it must be one of those fake AI created videos. And some fellow from NATO said over the weekend that Ukraine would have to negotiate soon with the Russians and would have to give up territory to get peace. The Ukrainian president (can’t remember how to spell the name and too lazy to go look it up) said they would gladly swap the Russian city of Belgorod for NATO membership…and that Ukraine and only Ukraine would decide when and if negotiations would take place and that no Ukrainian territory would be ceded to the Russians. The Ukrainians also blew up a Russian Tu-22 strategic bomber (they’re being used in a conventional role to launch missiles against mostly civilian targets). The interesting part is that it was blown up by a short range helicopter like drone 400 miles from the border…so hmmmm…seems the Ukrainians have infiltrated some special forces across the border to give the Russians a taste of their own medicine. Naturally…the Russians have claimed that this is a completely unauthorized an overreaction escalation of the war they started.

Speaking of the former President…how in the world did Melania not file for divorce on Jan 21, 2021? Enquiring minds want to know.

Here’s an article…which claims that the Chinese have increased their antisubmarine warfare capabilities and that the US submarine force will be required to use jammers and noise makers to confuse the Chinese should we ever get into a shooting war with them in the South and East China seas due to their surveillance systems and the “capable low frequency active sonars” on new Chinese corvettes. I asked Neil…and while he’s been out of the submarine biz since the mid 1990s…physics hasn’t really changed and current US submarines are essentially quieter than background noise…and while the shallower waters and smaller overall area compared to say the Pacific Ocean do present somewhat of a more difficult problem…we’re still talking about areas that are hundreds of miles in size and with depths averaging around 1000 feet or 2500 feet depending on whether it’s the East or South China Sea. The cited surveillance systems are really low frequency detection systems…that’s what gives them longer detection capability…and because of that none of them really localize a submarine…they tell you “there’s one that direction and the center of the ellipse it was in 3 hours ago is (for example_ 200 miles away…but the ellipse might be 40 miles wide and 150 miles long so it’s really not much of a help other than where generally to send your ASW forces to look for it. The “low frequency active sonars”…well, they’re better than the older ones but at best they’re a generation behind what US ASW forces have and one of the drawbacks of an active sonar is that the submarine can hear it at least twice the range at which it can possibly detect the submarine…and the relatively shallower water (compared to open ocean) and assorted shoal areas make reverberation a much bigger problem and have a pretty big impact on active sonar performance. Physics hasn’t changed in the past 30ish years…and while software algorithms have improved…physics is always going to win. So…yes, it would be more challenging to fight the Chinese with submarines in those seas than it would be out in the central Pacific…but it’s certainly not the bugaboo the article claims it is…but then the primary purpose of articles like these is to influence Congress to buy more of the newest submarines I guess. As to using noisemakers or jammers…yeah, a submarine would use a jammer to decoy an enemy weapon after it was launched while going the other direction…generally the way submarines keep from getting killed by a torpedo is to use their speed to stay away from it until it runs out of gas. And conceivably one could use a mobile submarine simulator (basically what submarines practice shooting exercise torpedoes against in peacetime) to say have it approach an enemy fleet from the north to attract attention while the submarine itself sneaks in from the southeast…every one of those that a submarine carries decreases the amount of actual weapons it can carry by one…and the relatively short running time of those simulators and the distance it needs to be launched from where the submarine actually wants to approach for a real weapons launch…make it a hard thing for a single submarine to carry out such an attack…and coordinated Wolfpack submarine operations have not generally been something the US forces use and if they had been brought back into vogue one would have seen articles about it in the media or Navy related publications. Frankly…I would think that in the vast majority of situations based on Neil’s admittedly out of date knowledge a US submarine would get to the torpedo or missile launch point undetected and unless there was an ASW asset right in the area would generally either kill the enemy ship or launch the land attack missiles…and then would immediately head away from the launch point…and after an hour or so the circle of probable positions would be hundreds of square miles increasing every hour. Would we lose some submarines in such a shooting war…we probably would but at this point I don’t see how we would still not have the advantage in submarine warfare. Carriers might be a little more susceptible to attack by their ship killer ballistic missiles…but carrier task forces do practice operating without using radio, radar, or other electronic emissions and that does make targeting more difficult…but they’re an easier target to find and localize than a submarine that one can’t see or hear from a satellite.

Finally…there’s this an article this morning about the FedEx driver who was shot at in Mississippi more than 18 months ago. The judge declared a mistrial in the case against the two men who shot at him last week because of prosecutorial/police misconduct…and the case will be re-tried. However…the driver in question has been off work at full salary for in excess of 18 months because of ‘trauma’ and has been receiving FedEx paid for therapy. The therapist pronounced him fit to return to work…his response was that “nobody but me can decide when I can go back to work” and he demanded that FedEx provide him a work from home position at his same salary. FedEx doesn’t have these and said “you can come back to work full time as a driver…or you can take this part time warehouse only position”. He declined to do either so FedEx provided him paperwork saying he was terminated (i.e., quit) because he failed to show up for work. He filed a $5 million suit against them for discrimination…which the judge dismissed…so now he’s filling a $10 million suit. I sympathize with the guy for getting shot at…and think the perps will eventually get convicted and imprisoned…but come on…after 18 months of not working and getting full pay and with a therapist that medically (and hence legally and morally as well in my opinion) clearing him to go back to work…to not show up for the job you have and refuse a job that doesn’t require you to relive the trauma of delivering packages…at this point you’re not a victim, you’re a malingerer looking for a payday.

Interesting things found on the net.

UkeImYourFather