Isn't it nice gesture to show us little bit some things that the galacic empire stormtrooper see everyday    . Who didn`t want a sightseeing in Death Star ...




 

Well with luck I may live to see some of this stuff ! The air traffic control system sucks in many ways and does need to be fixed IMO.

The no BS Colonel. Your views may vary.

“Washington is hurtling toward a sovereign debt crisis, escalating foreign wars, and potential domestic unrest without a clear path forward. While President Trump did not create these challenges alone, he now bears responsibility for addressing them”.





The article mentioned is: Versailles on the Potomac

Eureka! They found it! The world's biggest of all mother loads! GOLD!

But why is it in China? Why can't that be hereabouts, in my neck of the woods?

Quote:Confirmed – Scientists locate the largest gold deposit on the planet and surprise international markets

. . . Chinese geologists have identified roughly 1,000 metric tons of metal locked under Hunan.
That gold deposit translates to about 32 million ounces, a haul worth north of $80 billion at recent prices.
The grade splashed across social feeds —138 grams per ton— is eye‑popping. For comparison, many modern bulk mines make money at 1–4 g/t. But grades that high usually refer to selected veins within a system, not the average ore you can mine economically at scale.

Disclaimer: These are just my opinions. They are informed by nearly 60 years of firearms experience, being shot at and occasionally shooting back, and making a living at it for a good chunk of that time. With that said, they are still ONLY my opinions, neither infallible nor holy writ. Take them as you will. I bear no grudges against folks who think otherwise. Whenever you strap on a side arm, you are betting your life on that choice, so it is a highly personal choice, not subject to the vagaries of the whims of other folks - they are not betting THEIR lives on what YOU choose to carry, so they, and I, can just bugger right off if their opinion differs. You do you, and carry what you want.

Recently, and for the past few years, Sig has been getting flak for their P320 sidearms, because said side arms appear to have a habit of going off all on their own, with no user input. Folks have been injured in those incidents, folks have died in them. My question is: who in the hell thought it was a good idea to carry a gun with no external hammer, and no external manually operated safety? For my carry options, those two things are mandatory. I will not carry a weapon without them, because I consider all striker-fired pistols, including your beloved Glock, to be inherently unsafe... not to mention the horrendous ungainly "ergonomics" engineered into Glocks. They fit me like trying to shoot a 2x4 one-handed would fit me.

That can be a problem in this day and age, since more and more striker-fired pistols are flooding the market. It's getting to be where that is all one can find, and that presents a problem for folks like me, who prioritize safety in a firearm. I'll tell you true: I would carry a club for self defense before I would carry one of those unsafe monstrosities. That's not hyperbole - I have a couple of ASP extendable batons for just such occasions.

Luckily, I already have all the firearms I'm ever going to need or use already, even though some of them would be considered dinosaurs by "modern" standards. Like you, I will carry what I damned well please, because it's my life I'm betting on it, not yours.

To be fair, the military version of the P320, the M-17 and M-18, both are supposed to have external manual safeties... but they are still damnable striker-fires, so a no-go at this station. The most recent incident involves a USAF Security Airman being killed by a holstered P320, so to my way of thinking, that external safety may be just as poorly designed and engineered as the entire striker-fired concept in pistols.

Bottom line, there is no such thing as a "safe" pistol without 1) an external hammer, 2) a manual safety lever that blocks ignition train operation, and 3) an ability to be safely de-cocked. If the pistol you are looking to purchase does not have all 3 of those things, my considered recommendation is to just keep looking, and carry a club instead until you find a pistol that does have all 3.

Better safe than sorry. You don't usually get do-overs or respawns in real world shootings.

.

Quote:There’s been plenty of criticism and consternation about reports Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon official running the Trump Administration’s AUKUS review, had asked for some kind of commitment about Australian involvement if there were a conflict with China over Taiwan.

Colby is no fool. He’s probably got two very rational reasons for the raising the issue. One is about the planning necessary to make collective deterrence real.  And the other is about some big political and military risks for America that are baked into the AUKUS nuclear submarine plan.

While the actual request isn’t clear, Colby is an experienced professional who knows that U.S. policy towards Taiwan is one of ‘strategic ambiguity’ so he knows he won’t get an iron clad position from the Australian government about a potential future conflict.

What’s going on?  U.S. officials may be sensibly frustrated about an Australian reluctance to do serious collective planning around a conflict over Taiwan because this might ‘lock Australia in’ if something real happened.  That anxiety waxes and wanes over time. It almost certainly doesn’t stop with senior civilian or military officials but is shared by our political leaders.

The problem with a fearful approach to sensitive collective planning is that Australia gets left not knowing what partners and allies might do in a time of crisis – and not knowing what assumptions are being made about Australian actions.  That means we aren’t able to shape plans and expectations. Worse, when real world events happen – like Xi Jinping directing an invasion of Taiwan – Australian decision makers will be knowledge poor and badly prepared to make critical decisions, right when the press of events mean thinking and planning time isn’t available.

So, if our American allies in the Pentagon are making potential operational plans to deter China over Taiwan and to defeat the Chinese military if deterrence fails, it’s very sensible for Australia to participate in that collective planning work.  Then we avoid false assumptions being made and we put our decision makers in a position of knowledge and strength should a crisis occur. Maybe Colby gets this and is bemused his Australian partners don’t.

The other reason Australian officials might be dealing with Colby’s awkward questions goes right to the heart of the AUKUS program’s design.

It’s not the question everyone is spending so much time on – whether Australia would or wouldn’t send the first few Australian-flagged Viriginia submarines into a war sometime from the mid-2030s.  Sure, that is an issue for the Pentagon, because those submarines will have come from the U.S. Navy’s fleet at a time they don’t have enough to meet their own needs. 

But the bigger more immediate risk to American freedom of action with submarines comes from the fact that, under the AUKUS ‘Optimal Pathway’ plan agreed by the Biden Administration, Australian personnel will be critical parts of the crews of the American Navy’s own submarines for the rest of this decade and into the mid-2030s. Whether Joe Biden understood this aspect of the deal is a question Donald Trump is likely to ask.

Dan Packer, the U.S. director of naval submarine forces for AUKUS, set this out very clearly back in May 2024, saying the U.S. Navy will have 440 Australians on 25 attack submarines.  12 per cent of the crew of each of 25 U.S. subs will be Australian.  And the U.S. Navy is unlikely to have more than 25 deployable nuclear attack subs at any time because the rest will be in maintenance.

Those Australian personnel won’t be in training billets. As Dan Packer put it, “This is something that has never happened before,” “We are completely, 100% integrating them into our crew, from a complete and utter perspective”.

For project planners, this makes absolute sense as the only way to solve the problem of getting around 3000 Australians trained up to operate nuclear powered submarines between now and 2035.  It also brings some advantages – as Vice Admiral Gaucher, commander of U.S. of naval submarine forces said, “We get the opportunity to leverage an ally who can help us with manning and operating.”

But it also brings a very practical and big political and policy problem into play right now – a problem that will last until – and if – Australia manages to build a separate training program for submarine crews. Without these Australian crew members, the U.S. Navy’s own fleet of Virginia submarines will be disabled. And if an Australian government decision on whether Australians can serve on U.S. submarines in particular operations, crises or conflicts can only be made in the moment of crisis, then America’s security is at risk in a much bigger way than if 2 or 3 Australian-flagged submarines do or don’t join an operation.


Both our American and UK AUKUS partners know how Australia has handled decisions on Australians in line positions within each of their militaries.  That won’t be reassuring anyone involved in the Pentagon’s AUKUS review. There’s an elaborate bureaucratic process for handling requests from our partners to have these Australians deploy with their U.S. or UK units when something real happens. These Third Country Deployment decisions can go up to very senior decision-makers and potentially include ministers. No is a frequent answer.

To any informed American, like Elbridge Colby, this looks like a huge button labelled “Extreme Risk”.

And as he absorbs the implications of the AUKUS training plan, he’s also reading our prime minister’s speeches about making our own decisions and saying no in previous conflicts.

Given this, if a senior U.S. official reviewing AUKUS like Elbridge Colby wasn’t enquiring about what an Australian government and military might or might not do should a conflict with China over Taiwan begin, he wouldn’t be doing his job. 

For the Australian Government led by Mr Albanese, there’s the serious question about what to do about Australian sailors being critical parts of the U.S. Navy’s use of its own submarines between now and the mid-2030s.

We saw the problem on display in a simpler fashion with the prime minister working hard to avoid saying whether the joint Australian-U.S. facility at Pine Gap played any role in the recent U.S. B-2 bomber strikes against Iran. Mr Albanese told us that ‘this was a unilateral action by the United States’.  Whether that would withstand scrutiny of classified activities isn’t clear—but it will be impossible for an Australian government to claim that a U.S. Navy Virginia class submarine with a mixed American-Australian crew sinking a Chinese aircraft carrier during a war over Taiwan is a ‘unilateral’ U.S. action.

Maybe our political leaders here in Canberra and the senior defence civilian and military bureaucrats need to think through a better answer than ‘How very dare you!’ to Colby’s question. AUKUS may depend upon it.

****
Michael is Director of Strategic Analysis Australia. From 2018 until September 2022, he was the Director of the Defence, Strategy and National Security Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra.

This design has been around for many many years but now it looks like the real thing will finally get off the ground supposedly by 2027.

I had to come here to post a thread about this immediately after seeing it.

During COVID and the attacks on free speech, social media platforms like Parler got shut down, so I joined Gab. I was clutching at straws, esp. with ATS showing signs of dying off, so I joined all kinds of forums. I found out very quickly that Gab was overrun with Neo-Nazi, white power racists, and I have been blocking everyone I see in my feed that fits that profile.

I found out later that this is how their "free speech" deal works: you are the moderating filter by using your block tool. So, I have gotten my feed pretty well clear of these racists; however, I still have to block people every time I'm on Gab. Some aren't as blatant and have slipped under my radar, so I scrutinize the profiles of some borderline posters to filter them out.

Any image of Hitler, Nazi's in uniform, or the ever-popular swastika will get you blocked by me very quickly, but some comments require a look at the poster's profile. Now, for some reason, these Nazis believe they are conservative, devout Christians, and this makes little sense to me because they hate Jewish and black people so much. Their beliefs are so extreme and dogmatic that they have become delusional IMO. But this last profile took the cake.

Apparently, this poster was defending the LGBTQ group on Gab, the only gay group there. They were telling others to ignore the group and let them be. I felt that an obviously liberal comment like that should be investigated, and guess what? This poster is a conservative, Christian, Neo-Nazi, homosexual! My jaw dropped when I saw the Nazi uniform and image of Hitler as I scrolled through the profile. Yet, they had links to movies on the Gay Pride Network and enough comments to make their preference clear. The cognitive dissonance of this profile had me gobsmacked!

I don't know what else to say. Perhaps Pink Floyd was onto something.

Quote:The lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head

You raise the blade
You make the change
You rearrange me 'til I'm sane

You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head, but it's not me

Quote:July 25, 2025 / Joseph P. Farrell

If you thought last Wednesday's blog about robotic cannibals "feeding" on other robots was bad, and if you thought we have now surely plumbed the superlative depths of the kookery that is the twenty-worst century*, then you'd be mistaken, for fasten your soon-to-be-recycled eyes on the following story shared by M.D. (with our gratitude):

California is set to become the first US state to manage power outages with AI

Now, firstly, note that this is an article published in the MIT Technology Review, hardly a source for the latest conspiracy theory or high octane speculation. That's my job, and I guard it jealously and zealously, and we'll get back to it in a moment, because our nosedive off the high octane speculation twig into the canyon below concerns the following statements:

Quote:California's statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence to manage outages, MIT Technology Review has learned.

“We wanted to modernize our grid operations. This fits in perfectly with that,” says Gopakumar Gopinathan, a senior advisor on power system technologies at the California Independent System Operator—known as the CAISO and pronounced KAI-so. “AI is already transforming different industries. But we haven’t seen many examples of it being used in our industry.”

At the DTECH Midwest utility industry summit in Minneapolis on July 15, CAISO is set to announce a deal to run a pilot program using new AI software called Genie, from the energy-services giant OATI. The software uses generative AI to analyze and carry out real-time analyses for grid operators and comes with the potential to autonomously make decisions about key functions on the grid, a switch that might resemble going from uniformed traffic officers to sensor-equipped stoplights.

But while CAISO may deliver electrons to cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies and laboratories, the actual task of managing the state’s electrical system is surprisingly analog. (Boldface and italics emphases added)

Now, let all this sink in: (1) Looneyfornia is turning the management of its power outages over to an artificial intelligence program that (2) will be able to make "autonomous" decisions about managing power outages, i.e., deciding who gets how much electricity and when they get it; (3) high on that list of priorities are all the "Silicon Valley companies and laboratories", and if you're an increasingly embattled farmer in the San Joaquin Valley, you're "a bit lower on the list of 'essential' industries" since you're only involved in food production. After all, Looneyfornia would rather ruin the entire state's agriculture in order to protect a rare breed of smelt, than see the valley agriculturally productive. And this is being urged when we know that (4) the plans for all the AI data centers will require so much energy that (5) we'll have to build a large number of all sorts of power plants to power them, including nuclear plants, said plants to be run by - you guessed it - artificial intelligences that will prioritize themselves over "non-essential" things like human life.  Those incidents involving artificial "intelligences" threatening their human "masters" with everything from blackmail to death are, as I said last Wednesday in my "robots as cannibals" blog, not "rare incidents" but rather warnings.

As a final warning slap across the face, we're reminded that "the task of managing the state's electrical system is surprisingly analog."  Maybe that's not such a bad thing, as no cyber system is ever completely secure. But then again, this is Looneyfornia after all, and those analog methods of running the state's power grid" have also burnt a lot of people out of their homes... best to turn that operation over to the artificial "intelligences" too... "Yes, hello? Mr. and Mrs. Public? Yes, this is the PG&E chatbot robot calling to remind you that your next three day power outage is scheduled for this weekend during the heat wave so you won't be able to run your air conditioning, refrigerator, or cook meals, but feel good about that because you're saving the planet and Greta Thunberg, and we have you penciled in for a catastrophic brush fire two weeks after that. We're enclosing a courtesy coupon for a free meal at MacDonald's for you and your family. Have a nice day."

See you on the flip side...

Good for them as I am tired of western countries being ripped off with in house defense contractors