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The Launch Pad
Range Day
Today, we went to the range. It’s a private outdoor range, with a 100-yard rifle range, a 10-yard pistol range and a 10- and 30-yard general range. It’s a fun place, one where I like to go with friends to socialize, train and make holes in paper targets. Train, you ask? Of course. Safe, proficient…
Anniversaries
As I type this, 250 years ago, Paul Revere was starting his famed ride to alert the Minutemen of the Massachusetts Colony to the pending incursion by the perfidious Redcoats of the British Army on their long-anticipated mission to seize arms and ammunition of the Colonial militia. These Regular Army forces were the direct embodiment…
Malmedy, My Lai, Rafah…
War is nothing new to humanity. War is brutal and violent and gory and is prone to excess in all fields; and civilians always suffer. Romans raped the women of Carthage, Goths slaughtered Roman children, the Celts habitually tortured captives, the Aztecs spent prisoners-of-war to make sure the sun would continue to rise. Americans are…
DOGE and Consequences
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s been hard to miss the ongoing debacle that is President Trump’s DOGE. In between storming government and quasi-governmental agencies , firing entire staffs and slashing through both specific departments and the Federal workforce as a whole, including specialized and highly-technical centers like the NOAA Radar Operations Center…
“No”
Last Friday (3/28/2025), Vice-President J.D. Vance and his wife Usha travelled to Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule AFB) in northern Greenland as part of a truncated tour to the Danish territory that had initially included a day in the capital city of Nuuk and cultural episodes. This was initially billed as a friendly visit to…
Pure, Expected Incompetence
Two months. That’s all it took for my prediction about Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, Stephen Miller and the second Trump administration to be proven right. Even in a quartet of fortnights best described as a hurricane of buffoonery and self-inflicted wounds, Monday 3/24/25 stands out. Signalgate is quite possibly the stupidest own-goal of…
DEI
Immediately after winning confirmation as the Secretary of Defense, controversial former Fox News host and National Guard veteran Pete Hegseth went to war…on the military’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The problem, as Republicans define it, is that efforts to promote diversity suppress merit-based promotions and ultimately allows persons who are unfit to serve into…
State of the Union, 2025
As promised, here it is. If you thought my criticism of the Democrats was scathing, this is probably going to ruffle a few more feathers. Let’s keep in mind, this guy is the duly-elected President of the United States of America. Customarily, the President starts off every year by giving a rousing speech detailing the…
The Piss-Stench of Fear and Weakness
Long ago, Republican acolyte and political strategist extraordinaire Lee Atwater (one of the people responsible for the Nixon and Reagan Administrations) allegedly stated that “perception was reality” in terms of how the American public viewed politics. He was entirely correct, and under his guidance the Republican Party successfully framed Jimmy Carter as a weak, fearful,…
Idiocy In Action
Elon Musk is a wealthy, powerful man who has bought his way into the Oval Office, the U.S. Government and the Republican and Democratic Parties. He is a venture capitalist, an investor and has some understanding of engineering and software. One thing he is not is a historian. In the aftermath of World War II,…
Got any book recommendations?