There is bored…

Posted on by January 17, 2026

And then there is BORED!!!

Some people watch Netflix in their spare time. Remy Osman tracks rusty tankers transporting illicit oil through one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

From the roof of his Singapore apartment building, the British expat, who works as a food and beverage salesman, documents the passage of these shadow vessels, often sanctioned by the US and other Western countries, for his growing online audience.

Shadow fleets, also known as ghost or dark fleets, are ships that use murky tactics to transport oil for pariah states like Russia, Iran and Venezuela. Oil revenues from these fleets, consisting of aging tankers with opaque ownership, have become crucial sources of funding for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Full article, HERE from CNN.com

First, a little background. Singapore and the Malacca Straits provide two choke points for shipping in the Pacific/Indian Ocean region.

First is the Singapore Strait itself. Very narrow, only about 3 miles wide, of which less than 2 miles is usable, and a lot of ship traffic every day/night. Now the Malacca Strait looks nice and wide by comparison, but when you take 12nm off each side for ‘sovereign’ territory, it suddenly gets a LOT narrower…

This is a typical real time look at the Straits traffic as of 2000 CST last night.

Even the shadow fleet ships run their AIS going through the Straits to keep from getting run over. The spacing is very tight, approximately 2 nm between the West (northbound) and East (southbound lanes). The traffic is governed by a Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) set up by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and includes specific reporting points for ALL ships to maintain spacing and clearance. Maximum speeds in some areas are limited to 12 knots, and minimum speeds are expected for the entire transit area, while anyone with problems are mandated to make a right turn out of their lane to clear traffic.

I’m betting Osman is NOT the only person(s) monitoring the Straits…

But it is an interesting read, and does give some good info on what folks do look for. I’m also wondering who/how much he gets paid per month for his ‘reports’???

Hoo boy…

Posted on by January 16, 2026

This is NOT going to end well…

A federal judge on Friday barred federal agents in Minneapolis from arresting peaceful protesters, or using nonlethal munitions and crowd control tools against them.

The 80-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez, a Biden appointee who sits in Minneapolis, lands amid an increasingly confrontational dynamic between the Trump administration and Minnesota officials who have accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of stoking fear and violence on local streets. And it comes a week after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good.

Full article, HERE from Politico.com

Personally, I don’t think they thought this one all the way through. She figured she could slap an order out there and ‘protect’ the protesters, but IMHO, this will do nothing but ramp up LARPing by the protesters. They will get more aggressive, thinking they will now be ‘safe’ from the agents.

But what this does is to take away the agent’s non-lethal options, and if you don’t have non-lethal remedies, what’s next?

Unless the MPD steps up and starts protecting the agents, it has the potential to get REALLY ugly.

The agents will have to use their weapons to defend themselves, and they won’t be using rubber bullets…

And then what happens???

Anybody want to guess?

Something different…

Posted on by January 15, 2026

Tuesday night, a kid in Arizona scored 100 points in a HS basketball game.

It’s hard to have a better night on the basketball court than Arizona high school basketball player Adrian Stubbs did on Tuesday.

Stubbs, a guard at Phoenix Maryvale High School, became the first player in Arizona high school basketball history to score 100 points in a game in the team’s 109-25 win over Yuma Kofa High School. Stubbs scored 100 points despite sitting on the bench for the entirety of the fourth quarter.

He scored 70 points in the first half, scoring every single point for Maryvale, and then scored 30 points in the third quarter. Stubbs scored 35 points in the first quarter and said that head coach Jeremy Smith gave him the green light.

Full article, HERE from Fox News.

In full disclosure, they were playing a lower ranked team, but Stubbs entire team got behind him and fed him for the entire 3 quarters he played.

That, by itself, is unusual today, when it is usually everybody for themselves. And it is also a tribute to Stubbs in that his teammates and coach cared enough to let me get the new scoring record.

However, he is still third on the all time list! Danny Heater, HERE scored 135 points in a single game in 1960! And Nick Khatchikian, HERE, scored 102 points last year.

So there are still good folks out there who will help a teammate… Good to know, especially in this day and age…

TBT…

Posted on by January 14, 2026

From out of the dim dark past…

The Brass Nut!!!

This was the patrol squadron’s highly illegal bar in the BOQ in Iceland. MWR hated it, tried for years to get it closed down, yada, yada…

But it stayed open!

It was simply a barracks room that had been ‘remodeled’ over the years. The blue things hanging from the ceiling were our nametags off our flight suits. The nice thing was it was CHEEP!!!

If I remember correctly, beer was a quarter and a shot was fifty cents, and you could run a tab! The booze and most of the beer was top shelf stuff (there ARE advantages to having long range airplanes, just sayin). And a ‘lot’ of trading got done with folks from other locations…

The ops/ready crew had the ‘duty’ as the bartenders in the evening, and were responsible for the cleaning of the bar, keeping it stocked, and keeping the folks out of trouble, more or less… Which usually meant keeping the 57th FIS pilots/RIOs out of the bar… sigh…

The nice thing was nobody was driving anywhere, as the bar was in the barracks, so you could haul the ‘drinkers’ directly to their rooms and dump them in with no problems (unless you got a heavy one).

Hard to believe that was over 40 years ago!

Here we go again…

Posted on by January 13, 2026

Little vs. Hecox oral arguments were heard yesterday by SCOTUS.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito grilled an attorney representing a biological male athlete in the case of Little v. Hecox on Tuesday about the definitions of a woman and girl.

Alito asked Kathleen R. Hartnett, who is arguing on behalf of the Idaho student in the Supreme Court case, what it meant to be a “boy or a girl or a man or a woman” when it came to equal protection purposes. Hartnett agreed that a school may have separate teams for students “classified as boys and a category of students classified as girls.” Hartnett also agreed there needed to be “an understanding of what it means to be a boy or a girl and a man or a woman.”

Full article, HERE from Fox News.

Soooo, once again there is a refusal to actually ‘state’ what the definition of a male or female is…

Sigh… Apparently these lawyers (and at least one member of SCOTUS) cannot or will not state what is and has been known for over a hundred years (Nettie Stevens’ work in 1905 discovering X and Y chromosomes), men are XY, while women are XX. Therefore there is a BIOLOGIC definition of males and females.

This isn’t and hasn’t been rocket surgery for a long time. But now, with Title IX, apparently nobody knowns nuffin’…

Gah…

A whole lot of truth…

Posted on by January 12, 2026

In this Venn diagram…

Courtesy of Dr. J.D. Haltigan, out of Miami. X link, HERE.

“Leftism has hijacked the minds of progressive females who then LARP out dangerous Gnostic heroic delusions.”

When you add in the beta males who have been beaten down, it makes even more sense…

And you will note that NOWHERE in any one of the groups is any taking responsibility for actions, and that ALL of them are manipulative. Having encountered a few of these types over the years, one thing I can say for sure is that they ‘never’ expect to pay for any of their transgressions, much less feel any remorse for anything they have done.

Kinda puts the last seven years in a different light doesn’t it???

Especially the dichotomies of Covidiocy, Jan 6/Ashley Babbett, Hamas/Iran revolution, ICE/illegals, etc…

And after four years of ‘free reign’, can they ever be brought back in line? I don’t know, other than they will never accept treatments willingly…

Sigh…

 

A little humor…

Posted on by January 11, 2026

That I think we all need right now…

This young woman is no different from the rest of us, both family happiness and heartbreak are familiar to her. She is simply looking for an answer to her questions. How do you maintain a relationship? How do you bring back the excitement of the first date?

She wrote a letter to the tech support to find her answers. She sent the letter as a joke and only remembered about it when she suddenly received an email notification with a response.

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as: Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs such as: NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and House cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail. What can I do?

Signed,
Desperate

Dear Desperate,

“First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package,  while Husband 1.0 is an operating system.

Please enter command:
I thought you loved me.html and try to download Tears 6.2 and do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Farting and Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Mother-In-Law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources.)  In addition, please, do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly.  You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend: Cooking 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.

“Good Luck!”

Why is this being ignored???

Posted on by January 11, 2026

Sorry folks, the scheduler hiccuped…

Iran is now 13 days into ‘protests’ that started over the devaluation of the currency and a water crisis in Tehran among other places. The original protest was NOT students, but shopkeepers…

Now, almost two weeks later, it is sweeping the entire country! And more and more civilians/women/students are involved…

The Iranian regime triggered an internet “kill switch” in an apparent effort to hide alleged abuses by security forces and as protests against it surged nationwide, a cybersecurity expert has claimed.

The blackout slashed internet access to a fraction of normal levels on the 13th day of the protests as rights groups, including Amensty International, accused the regime of using lethal force against protesters.

“This is Iran’s war against its own population using digital means,” NetBlocks CEO Alp Toker told Fox News Digital.

“This was a piecemeal measure that eventually encompassed the entire country, with the government willing to use this kind of measure for an extended period of time,” he said.

“There would be an attempt by the regime to cover up crimes that it may have committed, so this blackout could potentially last for days or weeks,” Toker added.

Full article, HERE from Fox News.

Apparently the ‘official’ death toll is sixty some odd in 13 days, but according to sources inside Iran, the hospitals are or were reporting over 200 dead.

One of the many pictures that has come out in addition to the fires in cities are the pictures of women/girls lighting cigarettes off pictures of Khomeini, which is a death sentence in Iran.

I was there 50 years ago, when the Shah was still in power. The women were elegant, beautiful, and smart! Well educated, and heavily involved the the Iranian way of life at all levels. Now, not so much…

This particular one has caught the Intarwebz by storm, needless to say…

And this commentary from an Iranian woman makes sense, especially if you ever visited back in the day…

WHY THE SILENCE IS SO LOUD  An Iranian woman just said what many are not understanding— and it explains a glaring contradiction.
She argues that much of the loudest “free Palestine” activism isn’t actually about universal human rights at all.
Iranian woman: “Let me tell you why all these pro-Palestine, all these pro-human rights people are silent right now. Because 90% of the people supporting Palestine are Muslims and they’re only supporting them because Palestinians are Muslim. So the one reason why they’re not supporting my people is because the country is being controlled by Islamic Republic. So the leaders are Muslim. So for them to support the Iranians would have to go against the Islamic Republic, which means they would have to go against their religion. So they’re silent. So it’s not about human rights anymore. This is about religion. Because us Iranians, we were never Muslims to begin with. Islam was forced on us. Because when the Arabs invaded our country, stole everything, assaulted our women – I don’t want to say the word but you know what they did, it was more than an assault – they forced Islam onto us. We were never Muslims to begin with. We are the descendants of Cyrus…”

In other words, they are Persian. And if you aren’t familiar with Cyrus, HERE is the Wiki.

Is this going to be regime change? I don’t know… But the mullahs do NOT want to give up control, and are apparently importing ‘muscle’ to back themselves up…

And that young lady in the picture? I hope she has an exit plan or is already gone, because if they catch her, she is dead.

Why is this not being covered? My guess is too many don’t want to ‘upset’ the Muslims in the US… So much for honest journalism. But we knew that already…

FAFO x 2…

Posted on by January 9, 2026

Well, 72 hours have passed. My comments are my own. First, I was not there, I’m not an LEO, and I’m not a lawyer (Intarwebz or otherwise). I am a shooter and instructor.

First, regardless of ‘what’ the videos show, people are going to ‘believe’ what they want to, especially those who don’t like LEOs. And all the Intarwebz experts are jumping all over the bandwagon(s)…

First of all, the officers were performing a Terry Stop, which is legal as they are certified law enforcement, HERE from LII.

First is a video by an actual lawyer who has looked at the legal issues. Note what he says about the events leading to the shooting and the participants backgrounds.

Next is the cell phone video from the officer HERE from NBC.

It is sad that the woman died, but she did it to herself. Panic? No idea… Set up? Probably by her ‘wife’ for a video of some type…

Now let’s contrast the coverage of this with the shots fired in Portland, OR by ICE at a targeted traffic stop against another SUV. How much coverage? VERY little… And most of that was how many were arrested at the Federal facility downtown.

Why? IMHO, because it was two illegals, TdA type, one male and one female. They were shot but not killed after attempting to rundown the ICE officers.

But, to me the question is, WHO benefits from all this crap? WHO is paying these people to protest? WHERE is the money coming from? Peter at BRM, HERE has questions too.

Frey, Walz, the Oregon governor Kotec should all have kept their mouths shut until more information came to light. Now they just look even stupider than normal.

There will be more details coming, which will do nothing but further cloud the issue. Unlike the last administration, I believe this one will actually do a fair job of investigating and provide a report to the public. As to why MPD isn’t getting the data? I have the gut feeling that DHS does not believe MPD will honestly review the data, based on Frey’s comments and ‘threat’ to ICE.

What do I think? Yes, it was a good shoot. I do believe at that instant, the officer was in fear for his life. I do believe his first shot was from in front, and missed the woman, penetrating the headrest next to her head. Why the second and third shots? I think he was still processing threat parameters, and continued to react to that. The entire evolution takes less than 2 seconds from start to finish. If anyone has been shot at or been in combat, or been in a shoot house scenario, yes, time seems to slow down, but your ‘reactions’ still lag reality (or at least I know mine do).

Do you think ‘you’ could have gotten out of the way quicker? Or stopped after one round?

And who benefits from this???

If you’re a writer…

Posted on by January 8, 2026

I had Fred Hughes on my YouTube channel yesterday.

We talked about writing, co-writing with another author (with examples), writing in someone else’s IP, branding, and marketing, among other things.

We each write differently, but with the same goals, get a book out and get folks to buy it!

I want to stress that there is, IMHO, no ‘right’ way to write, that is up to the individual author as to how you write.

Anyhoo, the link is HERE, if you’re bored and want to hear about how others do things…

One thing we didn’t get into, but I wish we had, was what writing short stories for anthologies ‘can’ do for you. One thing it can do, even if your name isn’t on the cover, is to get exposure to readers who don’t necessarily know you or follow you. If you wrote a good story, that can help broaden your reader base, by making those readers want to see ‘what else’ you’ve written.

Lastly, covers… I know I beat this one to death, but covers are extremely important. Does it match the genre you’re writing in? While that fancy cover may look great full sized, what does it look like as a 200×200 pixel thumbnail? That is what most people are going to see on Amazon.

A few other folks to check-

Mad Genius Club- Writers on writing. https://madgeniusclub.com/

Writer’s Dojo- Larry Correia and Steve Diamond on the business of writing. https://www.writerdojo.com/

Cedar Sanderson- She does it all, art/writing/editing/etc. https://www.cedarwrites.com/

Raconteur Press- A local start up publisher who does primarily anthologies with new writers. And doesn’t hide the accounting and pays their authors!!! https://raconteurpress.substack.com/