From 24 hours ago...

That's a lot of big sky iron in one place all at once. Six E-3 Sentries... (mislabeled as E-3Cs, when ours are all E-3Gs) ...at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi. That's something like roughly a third of our AWACs fleet right there.

It's out of SRBM range for most of Iran's arsenal, and I don't know what their MRBM fleet is looking like after our last round of bomb tag with the Islamic Republic.

We're gonna wind up burning up a year's worth of ballistic missile interceptor production in the next couple weeks, I bet.

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Meme Dump!

"Epic Fury"? YHGTBSM.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump announced that “major combat operations” were underway in Iran. The Department of Defense has called the strikes “Operation Epic Fury.”

Did they poll middle school Call of Duty players for the operation name? I miss the good ol' days when we named them after strippers, like Odyssey Dawn.

I sweartagawd we are only about two steps away from

Official Pentagon spokesman PubliusMaximus1488 announced that “We’ve totally mogged Iran with Operation Based Bombmaxxing. We’d like to thank the best president ever for making America great again.”

Fundamentally unserious people.‪

PS: Boy, these tweets aged like fine milk, didn't they?

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"ISI what you did there..."

Relations between the neighboring countries have deteriorated recently over Pakistan’s accusations that the Afghan government is harboring the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

So Pakistan's casus belli is that the Afghani Taliban are sheltering, arming, and training the Pakistani Taliban... which if you know anything about the history of the Taliban is some world class irony.

"Actually, Pakistan is the name of the doctor. The creature is called Pakistan's monster."

Fighting The Monster GIFfrom Fighting GIFs

Tab Clearing...

• An app that warns you when it thinks smart glasses are nearby.


• When you're finally over the effin' snow.


• Jim Grey encounters enshittification.

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Last Memes Before the Weekend!

Didn't we just leave this party?

Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, is urging embassy staff to hop any flight they can get out of the country, and pronto.

Those wishing to leave “should do so TODAY,” Mr. Huckabee wrote in the email, sent at 10:24 a.m. local time. He urged them to find a flight out of Ben-Gurion Airport to any destination for which they could book passage.

The embassy’s move “will likely result in high demand for airline seats today,” he said in the email, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. “Focus on getting a seat to anyplace from which you can then continue travel to DC, but the first priority will be getting expeditiously out of country.”

For a guy who ran on a platform of not getting us into any foreign wars, this president sure does seem to enjoy getting involved in them.

Also, remember when we "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program? Everybody from Al Jazeera to CNN does. Now we need to re-obliterate it or something, I guess.

Meanwhile, Pakistan and Afghanistan are basically in an actual shooting war now, if a largely desultory and remote controlled one thus far.

Meme Dump!

Midweek Memery!

Meme Dump!

Tab Clearing...

• A peace officer talks accountability: Acting like the good guys should...


• Recovering undersea fiber optic cable for recycling is a fascinating process.


• A fascinating blog post on the evolution of the English language: How far back in time can you understand English?

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Kicking Off the Week With Memes!

Meme Dump!

Rivalries

Got a pretty great advertisement out of the Winter Olympics this time around.

Meme Dump!

Realistic Objectives

Greg Ellifritz makes a good point here about why to keep a lock on the gate to your backyard privacy fence.

You're not trying to duplicate the security level of Fort Knox, here. Like keeping the doors on your house locked and your windows secured, you're just trying to make breaking into your place a hassle. Most casual daytime burglars don't want to deal with that level of work. If they did, they'd have jobs.

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If you could see to these memes before the weekend, that'd be great...

Meme Dump!

Like a Commie Mobile Home in Space

After Skylab and Salyut, but before the ISS and Tiangong, there was Mir, which is Russian for "Peace" but might as well have meant "Hot Mess"...

That's probably being a little harsh, but a lot of what makes the ISS possible was learned via trial and error on Mir.

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Tab Clearing...

• The Arrestee Formerly Known as Prince


• Someone better alert the Board of Peace


• There is no such thing as grand strategy

The last time we surged this much airpower to the region was in the run-up to OIF in '03 

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Midweek Meme!

Like suddenly running over an alligator in Nebraska.

Of all the days to not have a camera with me, it had to be the one when I bumped into this beauty. If I'm reading my decoder wheel right, this C1 'Vette is a 1960 model in Honduras Maroon.

I took a couple of regular snaps with my iPhone and then backed up far enough to use the "telephoto" lens for this shot, which is probably the best cell phone photo I've ever taken of a car.

You don't often see cars like this out on the road in the winter months north of the Ohio, but it was a freakishly warm and sunny February Monday and there'd been some rain to wash the salt off the road, so I understand the urge to get some wind in your hair.

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Meme Dump!

Better Days

After that brutal cold snap, this warm spell is welcome.

The average high here in Indianapolis on a mid-February day is 41℉ and here it is already 38 degrees and the sun's not even up yet. They're calling for a high of 58, some overnight rain, and then nearly seventy degrees and sunny tomorrow.

Outdoor range time!

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So it goes...

Apparently Jesse Jackson passed away yesterday.

I immediately thought of P.J. O'Rourke's comment from Parliament of Whores...

He may have, in P.J.'s words, had political ideas that sounded like Fidel Castro's Jiminy Cricket, but he sure could speechify.

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Memes for a Warmer Monday!

"Defense" Pact

In addition to artillery shells and rockets, North Korea has sent a large number of troops to fight for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Things haven't been going so well for them.

"Under a mutual defence pact with Russia, in 2024 North Korea sent about 14,000 soldiers to fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine, where more than 6,000 of them were killed, according to South Korean, Ukrainian and western sources."

"Mutual defense pact" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that paragraph, since as I recollect it, Putin's trying to defend his fist from an unprovoked attack by Ukraine's face.

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Meme Dump!