From previous: Vindman was promoted to full colonel. He resigned, supposedly, because he would no longer be allowed to work in his specialty - Ukraine and Russia. Nobody resigns as a full bird because they didn't get the job they wanted. Literally NO ONE. Making full Colonel is very very difficult and a lot of good O5's don't make the cut. He needed three years at that grade to retire as an O-6, which is a SUBSTANTIAL bump in pension and perks. He was over the hump and just needed to grind it out for two years and a retirement year. Nope. He resigned because he knew that he didn't have a chinaman's chance in hell of avoiding UCMJ action if Trump wins, and in a non-DoS position, he political monkeyshines would not be viewed favorably on his annual evaluations. Ig, I'm sure the trouble making kid is working REAL HARD on ZOOM. And the parents are no doubt involved actively in the ZOOM sessions. DOing this one day a week with grandSoylent #1. All the asspain of homeschooling, with crappy mandatory curriculum. I am getting a quick lesson in what goes on in a public school first grade classroom, wherein teachers refer to students as "friends" and use words like "disregulated" when they mean "upset." All public schools should be shut down immediately, money transferred back to parents to purchase better education, and public school teachers be forced to learn to code. By way of ZOOM meeting. As an aside, for any tOSU fans out there, I apologize in advance for anything I say this week. Nebraska appreciates your assistance in saving B1G football and we have the highest respect for you. When we beat your asses.

Hi Jane: Doesn't matter if he is or isn't. If you look at the trendline going back to 2016, all of what is going on today is a culmination. Look how eager a certain ilk of politician or bureaucrat is to negatively affect people's lives through lockdowns and draconian enforcement of dubious rules like masks. These are the same people who didn't need to be told to look the other way when Antifa came to town, or to target conservative groups for negative treatment, or to beat the "fine people" narrative. I used to write it off to simple bureaucratic risk aversion, but I'm more and more inclined to see it as a pattern designed to create unrest. All of these bad feelings and the things causing them will be ascribed to DJT ("botched!", "failed!", "incompetent!") from now until November. All you have to do is vote for Biden and we can make it all go away, and you can have your life back. Take the blue pill Mr. Anderson.

LUNACY It's not lunacy at all. All of this is an informally networked strategy. No one is driving it but those who are in on it know what to do, using whatever resources are available to them. John Robb refers to it as "open-source warfare". It is designed to create fear and unhappiness in the general population, for the purpose of giving the Biden campaign something to run against. All the best community agitators know that in order to affect political change, you have to foment discontent, even to the point of manufacturing it.

LUNACY It's not lunacy at all. All of this is an informally networked strategy. No one is driving it but those who are in on it know what to do, using whatever resources are available to them. John Robb refers to it as "open-source warfare". It is designed to create fear and unhappiness in the general population, for the purpose of giving the Biden campaign something to run against. All the best community agitators know that in order to affect political change, you have to foment discontent, even to the point of manufacturing it.

Beirut blast background info from Bellingcat Open source stuff with some nice pix and a little commentary.

TK: Hmmmm. Maybe so. I can imagine that sinking ships probably produce a lot of petroleum. I suppose it could be a string of events leading to some very, very bad luck. I'm still suspicious. But that is my nature.

low fuel oil to high AN ratio is a perfect setting for orange smoke. Like 12:1? Now I'm inclined to think that maybe some knucklehead was mixing up ANFO in the wearhouse itself, or the components were stored together. Remember folks: these people invented the zero. They're smaht.

low fuel oil to high AN ratio is a perfect setting for orange smoke. Like 12:1? Now I'm inclined to think that maybe some knucklehead was mixing up ANFO in the wearhouse itself, or the components were stored together. Remember folks: these people invented the zero. They're smaht.

In happier news, it appears that reports of the B1G wimping out have been inaccurate. According to Husker Twitter sources who would know, no vote has been taken yet. The season may yet still be saved!

The tests showed it was the highest possible grade; not the sort used in fertilizer, and not even a common level of quality for mining explosives. Now THIS is interesting. I was unaware that ammonium nitrate had grades above what is used in mining. I will have to investigate this... considering the continuing outbreak of large fires and explosions in Iran, I suspect Bill of Occam might cast a glance toward Israel providing an intentional ignition source rather than some Hezbollah dipshit. That would be my best guess. Israeli (and probably U.S.) intelligence clearly have a pretty robust understanding of where the Persians are stashing their munitions.

I am loving the wood shop pron! Werd Caro. Nice work Manuel Transmission and JiB. When I finally hang up my spikes, I'm going to make furniture. Building the fittings and fixtures in my shop now. April Wilkerson is the bomb BTW. Love watching her videos. Also Stumpy Nubs. Big 10 cancels football season. There is despair in Nebraska today. This was going to be a breakout season for us. After wasting months and not coming up with a way we can have a season, these B1G assholes now choose to steal joy from the lives of ordinary people, after publishing a proposed shortened schedule. I know tOSU, Nebraska, PedoState, and Meatchicken are all game to play some ball. We need to shop around for some Big 12 or MAC opponents and do our own thing. Flammable mixtures need a spark to ignite. When a gas/air mixture is pulled into an engine cylinder, the walls are surely hotter than those warehouse walls. I only have some practical use knowledge about how Ammonium Nitrate works. Definitely not an expert, but I worked C-IED as a 1LT so I know a little. Got most of the below information from a French EOD tech... Regular AN is very stable. It's fertilizer, after all. To make it explosive you need to introduce something to make it less stable, typically Fuel Oil. 12:1 ANFO is the standard recipe for the Afghan IED, and the Midwest farmboy's stump removal assistant. It can be detonated without making it unstable, but it requires a fairly substantial primary charge. Det cord or an industrial blasting cap. This is the traditional use for mining applications, where, you don't want to be schlepping unstable ANFO down the shaft. You want a nice, controlled explosion that you can set off from way the hell away. Even in an unstable state, you need to have something that will start the chemical reaction. You can buy or make a blasting cap, but flame of any kind is an unreliable detonator. The detonation needs to be quick and hot. As far as I know, AN doesn't become less stable with time. SO simply sotring it in a hot warehouse would probably not be sufficient to destabilize it. Also in the videos of the explosion you will notice the red smoke first, which I presume is the fireworks fire, and then the blast followed by white smoke. White smoke is almost always an indicator of AN. Petroleum produces black smoke. If there was rocket fuel present, there would have been darker smoke. In my very amateur opinion, this was AN, but it was detonated either from some kind of fireworks mortar shell going off inside the warehouse, or intentionally. Considering the affiliation of a lot of the Lebanese government with the shitbirds in Iran, it wouldn't suprise me at all if this was intentional.

Dammit Italic Janet! Thanks jimmyk.

It may be a difference between a densely-populated area and a rural one. We've had pretty good luck in rural Central Virginia, but you can tell the new drivers from the old hands. We've never been shorted on anything yet (knock wood) but we have gotten some stuff we didn't order. The choices for substitutions have been...interesting.

I actually feel that same way, that the Dems will moderate if they get a sufficiently severe ass-kicking in November, Moderate how and to what? When I think back on the Democrats of my lifetime, the best of them were immoral career corruptocrats. Even of the historical Democrats, I can only see myself voting for Truman or Kennedy, maybe, and even then I would have to ignore a lot of what I know to be true about them. Your mileage may vary, but I invite you to do the same thought experiment yourself: What Democrat since 1900 would you vote for? What we have these days is a distillation of collectivist Progressivism, which has been a continual thread in Democrat political thought since the 19th century, when it was rolled out. There have just been periods when it was retrenching after being beaten down. Right now, it is on the march, but whether overt or covert, it has been there all along. ==BREAK== Good luck with everything Jane.Old Soylent is pulling for you.

Things I know: 1. I have no doubt Covid exists, and clearly comes from CHina. 2. I have no doubt that if you get it, and it is bad, it can fcuk you up or kill you. 3. I have no doubt that washing your hands and staying away from people as much as practical is probably a good way to avoid getting a virus. ANY virus. Furthermore, I have observed: 1. Not all masks are made or used equally, therefore the assertion that they prevent illness is at best unprovable. 2. Some fraction of a percent who get this will have serious problems or death. That fraction is smaller per capita than some other very nasty things we have NOT had a moral panic about. 3. The word NOVEL in front of coronavirus means that we don't understand everything about this virus, and there is new information coming out daily, much of it conflicting or difficult to verify. 4. Since every damned thing is political, much of the coronavirus experience has had a distinctly political vibe to it, rather than being the result of data and robust analysis. 5. Politicians and government-employed medical people are ill-prepared to and reluctant to make judgement calls that could result in negative news stories affecting their political viability and place at the trough. Thus they will always default to the most POLITICALLY risk-averse guess available, whether it is right or wrong, and regardless of contradictory evidence. What I have learned recently: 1. To assert any of the above points in public is a clear indication that "YoU hAtE ScIeNcE derp". 2. TO assert any of the above is a clear indication that you must be a racist, bigot, homophobe, transphobe, agoraphobe, and probably a Methodist. 3. There will be no adult conversations featuring divergent opinions, on any subject, ever again.

Got a hold of some of your old JOM comments, eh? Nah. My semi-public Covid-skepticism was a triggering event for someone. I'll tell the story when it all plays out.

JiB: Online. All online. Pointy-clicky Powerpoints, and a paper or two for each class. Not optimal for actual learning. I'm told it's a block check anyway, which seems...unfortunate. Coronavirus has been useful since I can sit down in my home office and get paid to go to military school in shorts and a t-shirt while sipping coffee. Hard part is keeping on task and maintaining momentum. A little more than halfway through.

Well OL... I recently had a brush with cancel culture inside DoD. By the grace of God I will come out alright, but the rot goes all the way to the core of things we hold dear. Other than that, finishing up CGSC and getting my mind right about taking another government-sanctioned vacation to some garden spot in the ME next year.

I don't know much, but some things are apparent to me, even with my Land-Grant education... These studies usually leave out lots of very important variables, which may include the victim's past history with police contact, the crime rate in the area where the stop occurred, the cop's years on the job, and level of training. Everything that comes out of an MSM source is a study in Bad (or Bad Faith) Statistics by Journalism Majors. Everything. You might as well be formulating policy by using the back of a cereal box. This issue, plus all the attendant stupidity surrounding the coronavirus, gun control, homelessness, or any other thing where the "I bELiEvE iN sCiEnCe" cult invokes statistics, should be mocked and ignored, and the purveyors of this nonsense should be pummeled into silence.

Nobody cares Perhaps "nobody" is a little bit of overstatement. The goal for these things is to provide a thousand low-information cuts to Trump's campaign.

First?

Happy Independence Day all! I probably don't need to remind anyone here, but please remember to take a moment today to reflect on what this is all about. And then eat some fried chicken and potato salad. Some humdinger of a speech at Mt. Rushmore, eh? I am enjoying the fact that Trump came out with such a fundamentally American speech that the Left and the Press (BIRM) will now have to categorically reject. That should play well with the average American. Any of youse geniuses ever set up a grandfather clock? I got one on a steal yesterday but there's one hitch: the clockworks and everything have to be installed into the case. I'm sure I can play someone to do it, but it dimishes the "steal" aspect of the deal.

Extraneous: 1000 rounds is refill time. Check out ammoseek.com to price shop. Anyone with some insights into finding cheap 30-06? Need to feed the Garand. A Weapon of War.

I like Mattis, and I think he is a well-read man. Perhaps one of the great modern generals, although anecdotally I'm not sure that is true. I see no reason to trash honorable service to the country because of political disagreement. But... I disagree with him. First of all, Mattis fancies himself a Stoic. One of the foundational principles of Stoicism is that you accept what you cannot directly change. What makes him think that he can directly change the divisiveness in politics or the personality of DJT? OK then Stoic, STFU and endure. Second, Mattis fancies himself a historian. I can, without thinking too hard, point to at least five Presidents historically that have been far, far worse at dividing the nation and antagonizing political adversaries. Wilson, the worst of them all, literally encouraged mob violence against people who disagreed with him. In my lifetime, DJT's two predecessors were notoriously petulant children when people disagreed with them, albeit in a quieter manner. Even so, Obama, the Great Half-White Hope, was such an uniter that he sicced government agencies on half the country that disagreed with him. Mattis served with honor and looked out for his troops, and he deserves respect for doing that. But he is simply the latest victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome. He needs to quarantine himself.

Thanks to all the television experts last night. The problem is not fixed, but apparently there is going to be a new cable company coming in June or July, who will likely give her a cable box that will fix the problem. Until then the Widow Miller is going to endeavor to persist with her shelf of Joel Osteen videos and books. Thanks again fellers.