He needs to have his firecrackers taken from him!

"Nuclear weapons have been the scourge of mankind for quite a while now. Even with sane people in charge, there is always a chance of an accident. But with a nut ball and megalomaniac like Putin in charge of 6,000 nukes, now that is a big, big problem." 

Anyone else getting tired of Putin threatening us with a nuclear strike? It just happened again. War with the west. Or as this juvenile with 6,000 nukes said, "Just a few of our Satan 2 missiles could wipe out America's coasts." By the way, I love how this "man of Orthodox faith" in Russia, names his favorite missiles after Lucifer. That says quite a bit about this loose canon of a man.

Okay - I will bite. And then what, should Putin ever decide to launch. First off, it would just not be at our coasts. Since he would not want to get hit back, it would be taking out all of our Ohio Class boomer subs. It would be hitting the mainland, where our Minuteman silos are. It would be hitting the bases where our B-52, B-1, B-2 and soon our B-21 are stationed. It would be taking out our aircraft carriers. It would be hitting all the NATO bases which could strike back. 

But we would strike back. Our triad system of deterrence is still solid. Russia may hurt us deeply, but we would destroy them. Totally. And then what? What about China? China, who is after money instead of war right now, will see its customer base evaporate (literally). And then nuclear winter would happen, along with a poisoned planet. Whomever survived the initial salvo between Russia and the US, would not survive long in the aftermath.

Here is my point, and it should not be lost on the Russian people. The nuclear "no win" war, is still that. The system of MAD is still valid. If Russia's leader decides to launch a nuclear war against us or NATO, it will be the end. Putin should not be allowed to have his finger on the nuclear button. For the same reasons we do not allow children to play with firecrackers. Nothing good will ever come out of it. 

Nuclear weapons have been the scourge of mankind for quite a while now. Even with sane people in charge, there is always a chance of an accident. But with a nut ball and megalomaniac like Putin in charge of 6,000 nukes, now that is a big, big problem. 

Which of his miscues are worse?

"High crime in the cities, empty shelves, inflation, confusion at airports, container ships backed up at our ports, schools becoming failure zones, ubiquitous help wanted signs, unaffordable gas prices, and out of control border crossers. And whose fault is it?"

Thinking about how messed up things are right now. On the news yesterday, someone was asked which of Joe Biden's man-made calamities are worse. In other words, which is worse for the country. Is it the mess with our energy policy right now? I mean, gas went up again last night, for a new national average of $4.81/gal. Or is it the obscene number of people, who daily parade across our southern border? Both of these issues are causing grave damage to our country.

The person who was asked this question could not give an answer. Why? They are both so awful, it is hard to figure out which one is the worst. But what about us? The citizens, who are strapped in, and can't do anything to stop or reverse either one of these issues. We are like passengers on a jet, who is piloted by someone who has no idea of how to fly. 

Elon Musk is so worried about the near future, he is considering laying off 10% of his workforce at Tesla. Wait - Biden wants electric cars! What the what? Here is the bottom line. The transition from internal combustion to electric will not happen over night. Anyone who thinks otherwise, is worse than naïve.

Just yesterday on the local news, it was reported that some "gas price spooked" internal combustion car owners, went to a local hybrid car dealership to trade in their gas hogs. Guess what? The 12 hybrids this owner had, were gone in a heartbeat. And then anyone who wanted a hybrid was out of luck (at this dealer). Bottom line - we don't have enough electric cars (which are affordable), nor charging stations available, to handle an instant transition. By the end of the decade? Probably. Now? No way Jose'. Bottom line? We are screwed.

Rumor has it, there are tens of thousands of border crossers, just waiting in Mexico for the right opportunity to cross. Meanwhile, the current number or crossers continues to be staggering. They come in, get caught (or become "got aways"), given a cell phone, and told to keep in touch for a future court date. Some are clandestinely flown at night to cities all over the place. Some are bussed. All at our expense. None of these people have any plans on leaving. Few have any plans on "keeping in touch". How will this end? Heaven only knows. Meanwhile, the country is bulging with illegals, fentanyl, trafficking, and gangs. Well played Mr. President!

High crime in the cities, empty shelves, inflation, confusion at airports, container ships backed up at our ports, schools becoming failure zones, ubiquitous help wanted signs, tons of illegal drugs, unaffordable gas prices, and out of control border crossers. And whose fault is it? Biden says much of it is due to Trump. Or the pandemic. Or Putin. But none is due to him. Even his very odd new press secretary tells us Biden's programs are working fine. They are keeping a bad situation from getting worse. Oh, really?

Nobody, not even the most ardent conspiracy theorist, can believe how fast and how deep we have fallen in this short time. But not to Joe and his minions. He is buoyed about the latest jobs report. Of course, soon it will really be tough to get to work - unless you walk or bike. And much of the salaries in these new jobs, will be eaten up by our new found inflation. 

I guess it comes down to if the glass is half full or half empty. When Biden was asked that question, his answer was, "What glass?". I know Mr. President. We should have said sippy cup instead.  

  

Driving me crazy!

"Jimmy Carter. Obama. Biden. Country wreckers all. We don't need the Russians or the Chinese to take our country down. We are doing a fine job of doing it ourselves."   

OPEC has given in - finally! Gosh - that was really nice of them! To raise their production that much? Just to help us out? It will help a bit for sure, but what is the back story? Is it that the world is teetering on a worldwide recession due to sky high energy prices? And a worldwide recession will affect the Saudis also? Or is there something else in play?

Three days ago, the EU finally agreed to stop buying Russian oil by the end of the year. How big of a deal is this? The EU is one of Russia's biggest customers for its dirty oil. When that stream stops at the end of the year, the world was going to topple into real trouble. Russia said it will find other customers for its dirty oil (right...). Meanwhile, it was going to put Europe in a real pickle.

Is OPEC to the rescue going to save our summer? Going to save us from paying more for everything (since oil factors into the price of just about everything)? Maybe a skoch. We, along with the EU, will be trading some very dirty Russian oil, for some not quite as dirty OPEC oil. Wait - hold on! What about our oil? Some of the cleanest in the world? Slo Joe has no interest in using our vast oil resources. Why not? It is cleaner. It will really put a dent in the worlds petrol deficit. Why not? Because he is owned. Owned by the globalists and greenies. He does not give a damn about the consumers in America. Everything he mumbles on the podium is just lip sync. Everything is playing out right now, just as he and his owners wanted it to.

Today, for the first time ever, gas prices are $4.50/gal for regular in MN. Go over the border into WI, and they are a dime higher. In CA, maybe a buck or more higher (if you are lucky to find it that cheap). Gas prices have not been this high, since Biden's puppet master Obama was POTUS. Democrats LOVE high fuel prices! It teaches us selfish Americans a lesson. I guess it is part of that equity thing. Instead of raising all boats like Reagan taught us, Obama and Biden are sinking all boats. 

I will tell you what drives me the most crazy about this entire mess. It is a self inflicted wound. Biden did it. He can blame the pandemic, Ukraine, Russia, aliens, or whatever. But the bottom line is this - if Trump were still President (with a friendly Congress), we would be drilling like crazy. The price of oil might be higher than it was two years ago, but NOTHING like today!

Ladies and gentlemen who voted for this dolt. Is this really what you wanted? Gas so high, it strands lower income people at home? The coming food shortage? Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan has a dire warning for us all. What is coming this fall is not going to be just a storm - it will be a hurricane. He is warning his customers to brace themselves. Get prepared. 

Jimmy Carter. Obama. Biden. Country wreckers all. We don't need the Russians or the Chinese to take our country down. We are doing a fine job of doing it ourselves.   

The UN, Ukraine, and China

"If we can't change our government, and if we can't convince China to pull in Putin's leash, this is going to be a very tough decade. Maybe even - our last."   

Big, big news yesterday. HUGE news! The UN has FINALLY weighed in on the illegal and immoral war on Ukraine. It is about dang time! The Secretary General has publicly admonished the war. How evil it is. Wait - do you mean the UN is FINALLY going to dress down Russia? Kick them off the Security Council? Maybe even kick them out of the UN? Not quite.

No, the Secretary General has some serious concerns about how this war is taking time away from the UN's war on climate change? Huh? That is not in the charter! Keeping the peace however, is in the UN's charter. In fact, everything Russia has done since it illegally "took" Crimea, is against the UN's precious charter. Never mind that Putin is acting worse than Hitler. Never mind Putin has threatened the United States (numerous times) with a nuclear attack. Never mind a nuclear attack on the US or NATO would pretty much ruin the world for centuries to come. But climate change? That is a horse of a different color!

It does not take more than a 3rd grade education, to realize the UN has about as much of a chance to end this war, as a snowball has in (you know where). As most of us know, the UN has become a club of statists and globalists. Peacekeepers? Never. 

There is only one person on Earth who can bring this war to an end. If you guessed Joe Biden, WRONG ANSWER! This guy is afraid of his own shadow, and Putin knows it. No, it is Xi Jinping of China. He is the man behind the curtain, watching with a dispassionate gaze, as thousands of innocents have died. His tacit, and sometimes not so tacit, support of Russia in this war, is the fuel which keeps the war going. Should that support disappear, so would the war. So long as China is in Russia's corner, the war will go on. The killing will go on. The threat of an all out nuclear war will go on.

Could things ever get worse? Oh, yes. With Iran about ready to come out of the nuclear closet, we will have one more nut ball country to deal with. That makes Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, the cauldron of bad actors, which will become the new "Axis of Evil". But don't worry. Biden's defense authorization for next year is so parsimonious, it looks more suited for Lichtenstein, than the United States.

The "Roaring Twenties" of this century could turn out to be very, very good, or a disaster. Right now it is looking like the later. We need a change of government next January. We need the US to talk tough to China about Russia's misadventures in Ukraine. If we can't change our government, and if we can't convince China to pull in Putin's leash, this is going to be a very tough decade. Maybe even - our last.   

Wither our fighters and attackers?

"It will be interesting to see how this 6th generation plane develops. In any event, it will go nowhere if the current Administration does not up its defense authorization. Why is that? Inflation."

As some already know, yesterday my wife and I went to see the new Top Gun. It was a great movie, and I will not "spill any spoilers" in this post. But I will say this however - I have been following industry news about how the US (as well as China and Russia), are trying to develop a new and revolutionary 6th generation fighter. Huh? Wait - don't we have the F-35 and F-22 now? Planes which everyone is in awe of. So what is the deal? Simply this - soon, very soon, the F-35, the F-22, the F-18 Super Hornet, might be so "yesterday".

Here is the truth about the 6th generation fighters. They will be more stealthy, fly higher, fly sup-sonic, super-sonic, and maybe even hyper-sonic, and may be manned or unmanned. The big aerospace aircraft companies are already working on concept models. With all this technology, will these new planes be expensive? Probably - very expensive. But if our enemies come up with 6th generation technology before we do, it will seriously tilt the battlefield - and not in our favor.

This is not a spoiler, but in one of the scenes in the movie Top Gun, when an admiral was "dressing down" Maverick, the admiral said, "Your finished Maverick. Soon we won't need your kind anymore. Planes will not need pilots." Wow! Bring on the AI! An interesting article in Business Insider recently, the author of the article threw some shade on how far 6th generation development will go. Why? The huge leap in technology. There might not be enough pennies in the penny jar to cover the costs of this huge change in fighter jet abilities.

Then what happens to the 2,000 to 2,500 F-35 Lightening II fighter jets? We have sunk a LOT of money into these planes. Many problems at first, and many fixes to get them to where they are now. But will they be obsolete by 2030? Will they become just "bait" for a much faster and stealthier 6th generation fighter, flown by an enemy? Questions with no answers. And the F-22? Same unknown answer.

Some experts think we might be coming to the end of the stealth era. That technologies are being developed which are so sophisticated, they can defeat even the best of stealth. And then what? Speed only? Or much more punch and legs in stand off weapons? 

It will be interesting to see how this 6th generation plane develops. In any event, it will go nowhere if the current Administration does not up its defense authorization. Why is that? Inflation. The DOD is not immune from the scourge of inflation. Did you hear that Commander-in-Chief? Better sharpen your pencils, and fast.   

 

First 2A, and then the switch was flipped

"If we decide now we want to get rid of the 2A, it will take a Constitutional change. And that will be very hard. But it was suppose to be hard. That is why our Framers made it so."   

Last week was a tough one, once again. A school shooting. A kid, an 18 year old kid, went into an elementary school, and murdered over two dozen students and two adults. It took about fifteen nanoseconds for the gun grabber-in-chief, and this Democrat minions, to blame the NRA for this tragedy. Not the shooter. Not what caused the shooter to go off the rails - but blame the NRA. 

The picture I pasted above is there for a point. This was taken in 1967, when some 17 or 18 year old boys, were awarded certificates for years of service in the YMCA. Doing what? Being alone with elementary school age boys. After school, to play games in the gym, in a YMCA wholesome kind of way. There was never a worry about any kind of misconduct. Certainly not that any harm could come to the boys at the hands of these older teens. So what has happened from 1967 to today?

Many folks in my generation remember bringing hunting rifles to school in the back of their pickup trucks. So they could hunt after school. Others remember having a shooting range in the basement of the junior high or high school. Guns were not the problem, or a problem back then. Gun safety was taught, so as young men grew, they could handle fire arms the right way.

Today, for reasons which escape me, the switch has been flipped. School shootings, and the threats of school shootings, have become a stain on our national character. Not only do we not know how to stop it, many are flummoxed as to why it is happening. Killing of our most precious, our young innocent children, is a crime so heinous, it is hard to even discuss.

Right now, we don't even have the national resolve to harden our schools. To make them safe from all dangers, including this new phenomenon of older kids killing younger kids with fire arms. The chattering class on the left, does not want cops with side arms present in schools. They also don't want trained and armed teachers in the schools. Thus many of our schools have become killing fields, just waiting to happen. Like what happened in Uvalde, Texas. Or Sandy Hook. Or Columbine.

Getting rid of, or watering down our Second Amendment, will not fix this problem. It will only punish innocent and law abiding gun owners. Until we get serious about finding the reasons on why the "switch can be flipped" on some of our young people, we are on a fool's errand. As our VP always says, "We need to find the root cause to this issue." On that point, I agree with her. 

One final point about our Second Amendment. Love it or hate it, the Framers put it into our Constitution for a reason. The additive "shall not be infringed" was also put in there for a reason. It was our checkpoint against tyranny. Period. Not hunting. Not target shooting. It was a checkpoint against tyranny.

If we decide now we want to get rid of the 2A, it will take a Constitutional change. And that will be very hard. But it was suppose to be hard. That is why our Framers made it so.   

Time to get smart(er)

"When the rains come (like this year in MN), the grass explodes in bright green, and the flowers and crops start to grow. However, when the rains don't come, we have big problems. Time to get smart folks. We need to tell our leaders to get smarter - and fast." 

Get Smart. Who could forget this wacky TV show starting Steve Carroll as Agent Smart, and Barb Feldon as the sexy (and very funny), Agent 99. But that was a TV show. A comedy. What I want to address this morning is anything but funny. For those who live in the desert southwest, this subject could be a game changer. And time is running out for them - fast.

The drought in the desert southwest is the worst in recorded history. In fact, this mega-drought (according to some geologists and hydrologists), could be the worst in the past 1,200 years. Let that sink in for a minute. If this assumption is even somewhere close to truth, the folks living in that rapidly developing area of the desert southwest could be in deep, deep trouble.

Is it too late to save the desert southwest? Maybe. Or, we could do a Manhattan Project type of effort to save the day. We have the technology, as do other arid countries, to turn deserts green. But the effort to do it will be massive - and expensive. To not do anything however, means ceding part of our country back to nature. Great venues to visit, but unlivable due to lack of water. 

We have many different ways to make fresh water. We can construct desalination plants. They are very expensive. And yes, there are externalities of production which make many of them qualify for NIMBY. But that being said, we can still improve on them. Make them less toxic for the ocean environment. But we need to hurry.

Runoff. It rained again this morning. We have way too much rain right now in Minnesota. What are we doing with all that extra water? Getting into the streams and tributaries as fast as possible, so it can get into the Mississippi and flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Rather than trying to capture that excess water, we would rather dump it into the ocean, which is doing fine right now with water levels.

We also have machines right now which can extract water out of humid air. True, these are currently small scale. But to make these larger, where we can trap unwanted excess humidity, would be a boon for all of us. Again, we need to hurry. 

Our President always talks about improving our infrastructure, but the important things never seem to get done. Our electric grid is still a mess. Has been for decades. What has been done on our grid? Close to zip. Water is the same way. We need to treat water as a commodity. The days of free water might be coming to an end. We can make water, and then sell it. Water is now, and always has been, a precious resource. We need to treat it as such.

Get smart, get smarter. If we want to save the desert southwest, the time for action was yesterday. However, we can still try. I have lived through a major drought when I was overseas. I hated it. There was no plan "B" for more water. If it did not rain, and fill the reservoirs, you were in trouble. One minute showers every three days (in the tropics), and drinkable water only if you boiled it. Like I said - I hated it. 

When the rains come (like this year in MN), the grass explodes in bright green, and the flowers and crops start to grow. However, when the rains don't come, we have big problems. Time to get smart folks. We need to tell our leaders to get smarter - and fast.