Trump Campaign Releases New Ad — "Who Is Laughing Now" pic.twitter.com/eDnSJVUH6S

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) June 27, 2024

CNN Host: Biden Knew ‘Every One of These Questions Was Coming’ and Still Blew the Debate

“Part of me wants to yell “you’re all SOBs. You put an impaired old man in the pilot’s seat of an airplane with 350 million passengers so you could keep your crummy jobs.” How could you? — wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) June 28, 2024

My personal text feed from Dem pols and operatives is reading like the day after Pearl Harbor… — Mike Murphy (@murphymike) June 28, 2024

Thomas L. Friedman (in NYT): He must bow out.

NYT: “God Help Us!”

“Biden stumbled over his words and lost his train of thought after a question about the national debt. He lost the debate then and there. His very presence on the stage felt like a form of elder abuse.”

Karen Myers (the wife) gleefully on facebook:

Even the people who are running the former Drudge Report as a skinsuit are freaking out…
I don’t even have to point you to a specific article — the front page is a billboard.

He is engraved in stone in the National War Memorial in Washington, DC- back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For you younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is a part of our American history. Anyone born in 1913 to about 1950, is familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known-but everybody seemed to get into it. So who was Kilroy?

In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America ,” sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy, offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article. Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had evidence of his identity.

‘Kilroy’ was a 46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. His job was to go around & check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework & got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets & put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn’t be counted twice. When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through & count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters.

One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about all the wages being paid to riveters, & asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on. The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can & brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added ‘KILROY WAS HERE’ in king-sized letters next to the check,& eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence & that became part of the Kilroy message.

Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks. Ordinarily the rivets & chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With the war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection “trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.

His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up & spread it all over Europe & the South Pacific.
Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, & every where on the long hauls to Berlin & Tokyo. To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had “been there first.”

As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.
Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always “already been” wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arc de Triomphe, & even scrawled in the dust on the moon.

As the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (& thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!
In 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, & Churchill at the Potsdam conference. Its first occupant was Stalin, who emerged & asked his aide (in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”

To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard & some of the riveters. He won the trolley car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift & set it up as a playhouse in the Kilroy yard in Halifax, Massachusetts.

And The Tradition Continues..

Love this quote posted by Don Surber…

"Leftism might actually be noble if their concern for the marginalized wasn’t simply an incidental externality to their seething hatred of the normal and the good.” —David Pivtorak on “X”

— Divine Comity – (@DivineComity) June 24, 2024

This should've been the tagline for the movie poster. pic.twitter.com/DHCudcSJDp

— David Pivtorak (@piv4law) June 15, 2024

Vladimir Putin the Terrible responded to US permission to Ukraine to employ US-supplied weapons to strike military targets deeper in Russia with a show of force designed to strike fear in American hearts.

He dispatched a Russian naval flotilla, including a nuclear submarine, to sail dramatically close to Florida while steaming in the direction of Havana.

The world’s newspapers headlined Tsar Putin’s scary, scary sabre rattling.

South Florida Sun Sentinel:

Three Russian Navy ships and a nuclear-powered submarine will arrive at the Port of Havana for an official visit next week, the Cuban armed forces said in a statement Thursday, confirming the military exercises first disclosed by U.S. officials on Wednesday.

The Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces said the Russian missile frigate Admiral Gorshkov, the nuclear sub Kazan, the oil tanker Pashin and the salvage tug Nikolai Chiker will arrive on June 12 and stay for a week.

The Cuban military said the visit by the Russian Navy ships is part of the “friendly” relations between the two countries, complies with international law and does not pose a security threat to the region because “none of the ships carry nuclear weapons.”

Take that, United States! Tremble in your boots, American warmongers!

It sounded downright alarming, alright. But a little dose of reality from Murphy Barrett responding to a question on Quora puts it all into proper perspective.

Could Russia simply blockade America’s ports to stop and search every ship heading towards Europe and seize military equipment bound for Ukraine?

You do realize that most of Russia’s Black Fleet was sunk…by land forces.

As a show of force, Russia sent a “flotilla” to putter around Cuba consisting of one frigate, a submarine that is missing part of soundproofing panels (you know, those things that keep submarines quiet), and two support ships. So that’s one surface combatant that a Coast Guard cutter could deal with, a submarine that Helen Keller could hear coming, and two support ships to nursemaid them.

Meanwhile, the US Navy is the largest navy in the world (fuck China, we’re counting combatants, not just every thing that can float including canoes), the US Navy is also the second largest air force in the world (after the US Air Force), and frankly nobody who fucks with our boats gets away with it, as the Houthis most recently found out, and the Japanese found out hardest.

Hell, Iran fucked with our boats once, and we wiped out half of their navy, in eight hours, and only stopped because the US Admiralty thought that we probably shouldn’t wipe the whole thing out because…reasons, I guess.

I mean, if Putin somehow lost what little sanity he has left, and decided to fuck with our boats, the only problem the US Navy would have bitch-whipping him all the way back to Moscow would be to explain how in fuck all the lady sailors managed to actually pop motto-boners. Anatomically improbable, yes, but goddamn is the Navy gonna have a field day protecting the environment and creating new coral reefs.

————————

Many decades ago, when I was young and working on war game design at the late great Simulations Publications in New York in the late 1970s, there was news of a Soviet naval build-up, and SPI began contemplating a new Soviet Navy versus NATO and US Navy game.

At the weekly designers conference, all the keen military history buffs sat around the big table discussing current and future projects. And the new major “Naval War with the Russians” proposal came up.

One of the older grognards interrupted, inquiring aloud: When exactly was the last time the Russians ever won a naval action?

Present were over a dozen knowledgeable experts in military history, and we all were flummoxed. “Uh, how about the Battle of Navarino (20 October 1827 during the Greek War of Independence)?” asked a true savant.

No, someone else reminded us: the Russians were only a small part of a mostly British and French Allied fleet under British command.

We were left wondering if it would be possible to count John Paul Jones victories against the Turks under Catherine the Great in 1787. And the proposed game died buried under gales of laughter at the idea of the Russian Navy trying to take on the US Navy.

(as usual, click on photo to enlarge)

LeBron James breaking the NBA scoring record last year. The lone phoneless gent at the front is octogenarian Phil Knight.

HT: the Anonymous Professor.

The New Yorker recounts the complicated history of a preposterously valuable timepiece.

[S]ometime around 2007, in the early days of social media, a new kind of watch obsessive materialized, equipped with native computer skills and an appreciation for the places where pop culture and the luxury market intersect. In those pre-Instagram years, fanboy wonks traded watch esoterica online: an image of Picasso wearing a lost Jaeger-LeCoultre; Castro with two trendy Rolexes strapped to one arm; Brando, on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” “flexing,” as watch geeks say, a Rolex GMT-Master without its timing bezel, a modification he made to better inhabit the role of Kurtz; and—the Google image-search find of them all—two frames of an uncredited snapshot of Lennon and his Patek.

“I’m not a watch guy,” Sean Lennon said. “I’d be terrified to wear anything of my dad’s. I never even played one of his guitars.”

Since its discovery, around 2011, the image has appeared online again and again, fuelling a speculative frenzy about what the watch—which cost around twenty-five thousand dollars at Tiffany in 1980—might bring at auction today, with estimates ranging from ten million to forty million dollars. (Bloomberg’s Subdial Watch Index tracks the value of a bundle of watches produced by Rolex, Patek, and Audemars Piguet, like an E.T.F.; the Boston Consulting Group reported that, between 2018 and 2023, a similar selection outperformed the S. & P. 500 by twelve per cent. In 2017, Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona broke records by selling at auction for $17.8 million.) But all the clickbait posts about the Lennon Patek, as it had come to be known, were regurgitations that contained few facts. There was never a mention of who took the photo, where it was taken, or even where the watch might be.

During the long, dull days of the pandemic, I decided to see what I could find out. Several years went by, as I traced the journey of the watch from where it was stowed after Lennon’s death—a locked room in his Dakota apartment—to when it was stolen, apparently in 2005. From there, it moved around Europe and the watch departments of two auction houses, before becoming the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, in Switzerland, to determine whether the watch’s rightful owner is Ono or an unnamed man a Swiss court judgment refers to as Mr. A, who claims to have bought the watch legally in 2014.

Having reached its final appeal—Ono has so far prevailed—the case is now in the hands of the Tribunal Fédéral, Switzerland’s Supreme Court, which is expected to render a verdict later this year. Meanwhile, the watch continues to sit in an undisclosed location in Geneva, a city that specializes in the safe, secret storage of lost treasures.

RTWT