More On The Straits

What's Going On With Shipping? is an excellent YouTube channel. In today's installment, Sal reviews the latest bad news from the Straits of Hormuz.

What hits me here is that the US Navy is too small for the job and the Littoral Combat Ships simply aren't fit for purpose. They have almost no firepower and are essentially bullet sponges. They were originally intended for just this kind of area, but when faced with operational realities, they've got to be kept out of the line of fire.

Second, the US is learning the lessons from the recent revolution in warfare - inexpensive drones - the hard way. The Iranian-built Shahed 136 is a long-range kamikaze drone with a 100# warhead. I'm pretty sure it's GPS-guided. It's great for attacking immobile, thin-skinned targets like energy infrastructure or docked ships. At 100 MPH, it would take forever for it to get to its target, but you need something in the air to shoot it down.

We're not privy to the kill rates for the Allies or the munitions drawdown for the Iranians, so I'm still sanguine about the end result. It's not even been 2 weeks yet. It would be great to have a magic wand to wave and make it all go away, but those are in short supply.

Lastly, some of the attacks on shipping have been done by Unmanned Surface Vehicles. Think speedboats with explosives on the bow, guided by radio from a nearby command boat. You have to get real close to the enemy to use those and the command boat is a sitting duck. It's a kamikaze mission of its own. It's the fact that the Iranians have had any success at all with these that makes the small size of the US Navy apparent. As Sal says in the video below, during Desert Storm, we didn't have these problems because our Navy was twice the size it is today and none of the hulls were those useless LCSs.

Anyway, here's the video.

It's About Detection, Not Strike

I've been pondering this.

The Straits of Hormuz

Everything revolves around getting these shipping lanes open. If we can do that and the oil starts flowing again, we can take our time whacking the IRGC and their cardboard ayatollah. No one is going to stick their necks out for Iran, not even Russia or China. Lots of countries, however, are getting their panties in a wad over the price of oil.

The Saudis are increasing the amount of oil their pipelines send to Red Sea ports, so there's that. Still, what needs to happen is the Straits have to be opened.

For all intents and purposes, there is no Iranian Navy or Air Force remaining. The Iranians have unguided artillery tubes on shore, which are practically useless at the ranges required, something like 8+ miles. Fire a couple of poorly-aimed salvos and you reveal your location. A few minutes later, you're dead, thanks to American Naval Air.

That leaves the guided stuff. What guides the guided things? Well, drones can be self-guided, so they are a problem. Other guided things like missiles need a targeting system. That is, Iran needs emitters with line of sight access to the Straits to send guidance information to the launchers. American AWACS detect the emissions and Naval Air squashes them like bugs. You might be able to use a targeting system once, but certainly not twice.

If I was playing the Iranian hand, which amounts to a pair of 7s against the American full house, Qs over 10s, and the Jews' 5 natural aces because, as Tucker Carlson tells us every day, Jews always cheat, my problem becomes one of keeping my targeting systems alive long enough for the Democrats and other intestinal parasites to wear down American will.

How many do they have? If they emitted and lost one every other day, how long could they string this out? They're certainly going to lose some non-emitting ones on a regular basis, so the Straits won't be closed forever no matter how they play this.

What they need to do is hit a ship from time to time to keep the other ships from running the Straits. Then they do what all apparently defeated nations do - they try to make the cost too high for the enemy and end with a negotiated peace. That didn't work for the Confederacy, the Japanese or the Nazis. It did work for the North Koreans.

What's missing from the news reporting I'm seeing is any kind of intelligence or accuracy.

I can't believe I just said that. Like we could expect any kind of intelligence of accuracy from the theater kids who run our media.

I would bet a great big stack of folding money that CENTCOM has this dialed in and has plenty of eyes on the area. We'll know things have calmed down when a few ships make their way through the Straits successfully.

Another option would be to simply rev up the shipping lanes and send ships through normally and force the Iranians to expend their limited resources stopping them. Sadly, we don't have the oiler fleet to do this.

What we need are a pile of sacrificial maritime lambs.

A whole mess of Liberty Ships would be useful right about now.

Theater Kids Vs. Saladin

 Here's one of the theater kids now:

Here's Tim Walz changing the topic to white men when the Somali fraud first got exposed.

He knows it works with his base. It's become one of their default modes.pic.twitter.com/jmZGsMtf2x

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) March 10, 2026

Confronted by questions about the Somalis looting Minnesota, he quickly twists it around to talk about how bad white men are.

Meanwhile, the descendants of Saladin aren't exactly hiding the ball.

Mahmoud Khalil last year: “We are fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”

Tonight, is invited to the NYC Mayor’s mansion to eat with Zohran Mamdani.

Wake up—do you not see what’s happening? pic.twitter.com/kqqwZ1wNrm

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 10, 2026

So what's going on here? The Somalis are doing what is good and moral for Somalis. The progs who run Minnesota left easy avenues for looting the public treasury, so the Somalis did it to enrich their clans. In their eyes, to miss that opportunity would be a sin.

Meanwhile, the progs know this is happening, but it means way less than signaling their allegiance to the Omnicause to their fellow progs.

Recently, Winston Marshall had the author Lionel Shriver on his show. I'd never heard of Lionel before, but I thought she was brilliant.

I captured the audio, made a transcript and here's one of the sections that caught me for its clear summary of what we see above, edited for clarity. Lionel has a bit of a stutter.

(Open borders) certainly becomes culturally meaningless because, (your nation is) just a way station. You're just a place. It reduces country to geography. And conventionally, we think countries are more than geography. So. I think that that this is definitely connected to pro-immigration is also connected to professed self-hatred in the West. Although I question that. I think that maybe the self-hatred they're promoting, they exempt themselves from.

What does that mean? In other words, if you hate yourself, you hate yourself, but these people hate other people in the name of hating themselves in their hair-shirtery. You know, we have this terrible history. We had slavery. We murdered the Indians in the U.S.

So, you know, we have no moral claim to this land. But, apropos of the Billie Eilish quote, they're not, giving their houses away. And so it doesn't really apply to them. I don't think that their emotional experience of promoting hatred of their own people in their own country is one of genuine self-hatred.

They love themselves. They're very proud of themselves. And it's a kind of vanity. So to call that self-hatred is wrong, it is actually a loathing for your fellow countrymen who don't agree with you. Yeah, it's false humility. Yes, it it's a complete performance, it is acting out. It is acting out guilt rather than feeling it.

So why would they loathe their fellow countrymen? Because they don't have these pure moral values. And they don't go through the theatrics of caring more about people who are disadvantaged than they do about themselves and their own group. I think the whole thing is emotionally very convoluted because all this talk of shame, these people don't act as if they're experiencing shame, the, the emotions they exude.

What we're seeing on the left is a conflict between the theater kids and the heirs of Saladin. It's not really a conflict, is it? It's more that the theater kids are the hosts and the Saladinistas are the parasites riding them. On the right, we can see what's happening, but on the left they either can't see it or deny its importance.

My conclusion is that the left doesn't understand the threat posed by the Saladinistas and just goes on its merry way signaling to each other about how full of love they are for the migrants and the marginalized. The real threat to the progs is that they might somehow be tagged as full of hate because they showed the tiniest deviation from the attitudes of the group.

I see that all the time from my Catholic leadership. In a future post, we'll wrestle with the question: Why not convert to Islam? As far as I can tell, according to my bishops, cardinals and pope, it's all upside.

Ayatollah You So

 Zero Hedge is running this one today. Iran Signals 'Fight To The End' Under New Ayatollah, As US Struggles To Define Israeli-Coordinated Endgame.

Iran on Monday is seeking to showcase its continuity and 'stability' of government after a week of heavy US-Israeli bombardment failed to produce regime change. Instead, Tehran is vowing to fight back, saying it can keep the war going for as long as needed. Analysts have pointed out Iran needs to inflict a cost on the US and Israel, fearing it will just be attacked again somewhere down the line, even if years from now. 

I have no idea what "fighting to the end" means unless it's some time next week when the last of their mobile missile launchers either expends its rocket or gets whacked by the Jews or the Jews' lapdog, America.

By the way, I've decided, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, those beacons of rational thought, that we might as well stop talking about Israel and just name the real problem in the world: the Jews. I'm pretty sure my coffee was only mediocre this morning because the Jewish mind-control rays from space missed me and hit the coffee pot instead. Darn those Jews! Is there no end to their perfidy?

Anywho, this meme is pretty accurate:

Given the Jews' assertion that they will keep taking out Ayatollahs as fast as they are minted, this one is pretty accurate, too.

LOL.

So the new-new-new Ayatollah is a hardliner, is he? Good for him. Even if he had a shred of command and control infrastructure remaining, even if his military leadership wasn't mostly dead and what survives wasn't in hiding, he's still got practically nothing to command.

I haven't seen the stats on rocket launches coming from Team Mullah, but I would bet they're dropping off exponentially. I saw that the Iranians discovered that anti-shipping missles from Temu don't come with a warranty, either. 50 fired, zero hits. $5B just doesn't go as far as it used to.

It doesn't matter who gets named the leader if there's nothing left to lead. Meanwhile, I've got my the fillings in my molars tuned to Radio Hebe, awaiting my instructions.

I'll Write Tomorrow

My muse has hit me, but life did, too.

I'll write tomorrow, I promise. Probably just the novel, not sure about the blog.

On Muses, Guppies and Prudence

I know I've used this one before, but it's true and it fits. Sometimes.

Q: What do you get when you have 1 male guppy and 5 female guppies?

A: 5 pregnant female guppies.

Guppies bear their young live and have sex the way God intended, not with all that writhing in the water and squirting eggs and milt willy-nilly. Nope, for guppies, it's Old Alabama and a waterbed.

Q: What do you get when you have 1 male guppy and 20 female guppies?

A: Nothing but a worn-out male guppy.

When you have too many irons in the fire, you don't get nothin' done. At least I don't. That's where I've been for the last few months. In funding terms, I've got 2 customers now, working full time. In reality, I'm engineering ten or so different webby thingies. On top of that, I'm hunting for an Alabama respite location, working my marriage through that purchase, doing various things at church, writing a novel, trying to powerlift my way to preposterous goals for a man my age, haunt Twitter-X, monitor our funds, take care of a brood of children with varying needs, fight my Irishness and its need for a drink, blog here and ... oh heck, I don't know. Wash and wax the car? Replenish the raised beds for my wife's 'maters?

Add a few more to that list. Why not? I'm that exhausted male guppy, but in my case, it's by my own choice. It's all good.

Anywho, that's what's behind my lack of ranting here. Oh well. I thought about hanging up the whole blogging thing, but it hurt to think about that.

So here I am and the muse has struck.

Tonight, I'm giving a personal testimony as a part of a meditation on prudence. Prudence is something I can't recall my Cursillo homies ever talking about, but it's at the heart of this blog.

How do you handle situations with ambiguous moral choices? What do you do when, no matter what choice you make, there will be a world of hurt coming down on everyone around you?

What do you do when your daughter comes out to you as trans? What do you do when your child has emotional disabilities and could burn down the house by accident, but needs you around? What do you do when your wife is slowly going mad and has become violent? When do you finally put your aging, demented wife in a home and stop taking care of her yourself? Confronted with multiple treatment choices for your wife with cancer, what do you help her choose? If your relative is a recovering addict, do you take him in, knowing he may end up robbing you for a hit?

God is love, don't judge just don't cut it.

So I need to give a testimony and it can't be my normal "our bishop is a moron" sort of thing. I know I rant here, but this needs to be, unlike my typical essays, Christian.

Here we go.

God made the world out of love for us. It's a highly improbable thing, this world of ours. The origin of life, the universal constants, the wild discontinuous steps in evolution, it's all crazy - crazy with love for us. It's a world of adventure, of danger, of choices, of free will.

God is love. Don't judge. Those are the things we get fed every Sunday. They're true and valuable. It's important to keep them in mind. However, there are lots of things we face that don't reduce to that kind of page out of a coloring book. Sometimes, in important ways, life is much murkier, more complicated than that.

5 years ago, give or take, my daughter came out to me as trans. It was just her and I in our kitchen. She had been a normal girl in high school with a couple of boyfriends. I caught her once in the garage, making out with a guy. We even went out to dinner with a boy she liked and his parents because he was 2 years older than she was and she wanted to date him. He was a nice guy and his parents were lovely. They respected my old school ways, which were culturally Southern even though I wasn't yet a full-on adopted son of the South.

Something happened when she was a senior. Her teachers were far-left and who knows what they taught. She decided she was lesbian late in that year and her mom, my first wife, sent her to Pride Week in San Francisco. It was almost certainly flipping me the bird. She found every way she could to hurt me. I don't think my ex had a plan other than that.

Anywho, a couple of years later, there my Russian, adopted girl was, in my kitchen telling me she was actually a man.

This was pretty early in our societal madness. Far enough along for me to know that I held almost no cards at all. My HR would call me in if I asserted that girls could not become boys. Our corporate comms was all in on affirmation and inclusion. I knew enough science to know this was total, sadistic insanity.

God made biochemistry, too. Our moral code lives in that world - the world of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. All of those sciences are acts of love just as much as Jesus living as a man. Everything is predicated on that science, even the God is love part.

In that moment, 5 years ago, I could see the choice I was being offered. Agree with her or she'd kick me out of her life. At her age, parents have very little power. I was given a moral choice with no good outcomes. I told her not to do anything that couldn't be reversed. I didn't understand it all yet, but I knew some girls were getting their breasts cut off. You can't recover from that.

My Church preached affirmation, inclusion, love, acceptance and forgiveness.

She started on her testosterone treatments. When I would ask him about it during office visits, my doctor would close the door and talk in hushed tones about it. I knew why. His HR would flay him alive if they heard what he was saying. He said the whole thing was madness.

My bishop wrote an essay about "radical inclusion." From the pulpit, I heard, "God is love" and "Don't judge."

Meanwhile, there I was, holding firm. I never called my daughter by her new name, Luke. I never used he/him. I never used a name or a pronoun on those rare times we got together. I kept telling her not to go through with the surgery. She knew I didn't support her transition and saw less and less of me.

I saw her a few months ago. She really wants to have a relationship. We were very, very close when she was growing up. It hurts us both to be apart. She won't have a relationship with me if I don't call her Luke and agree she's a man.

She's had the surgery. Her breasts are gone. She's been taking testosterone long enough to have destroyed her voice, but worse, she's gone mad.

As any guy who went through puberty can tell you, testosterone is a psychotropic. You do crazy things under its influence. Suzy may have been a 3 or 4 at best, but by God, she was HOT in high school. Imagine what it does to a woman when given in doses 100x or more what her body can handle.

That last time she came over, I pushed back on her demand to call her a man. She started shaking and saying she felt threatened. We were just talking. All I could think of were all the trans shooters we've been seeing lately.

Did I do right 5 years ago when I didn't embrace and support her transition? What I did made no difference at all. She ended up with the surgery and the testosterone injections anyway. Now I don't have a relationship with her. On the other hand, had I gone along with it, I'd have been an accomplice in the Mengele-level destruction of my girl.

More importantly or not: I'd have lied about God's reality. Biochemistry is just as much a constant created by God as "God is love" and "Don't judge."

Is it blasphemy to lie about the things we know about reality? Do her feelings trump endocrinology?

Our Church is obsessed with hope this year. It's the "year of hope" or something like that.

Wanna know what gives me hope?

I believe that Jesus gave us basic metrics by which He wanted us to make our decisions. Love, charity, humility, sacrifice and more. I believe that as long as I make my decisions informed by those virtues, He will forgive me even if I make the worst decision possible.

Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. 

Maybe what I did was to fight the good fight against impossible odds. 

Maybe what I did was not recognize a battle that was already lost and fail to pick the pieces up on the far side of biochemical collapse.

Beats me. I'm just an old man who did the best he could with what he had on hand 5 years ago. That's all He asks of me.

My Unasked For Take On Iran

 Get them. Get rid of them all. I don't care what follows, just get rid of them.

I don't care if they were an immediate threat or a down-the-road threat or a never-gonna-happen threat. I don't care if the real reason we whacked them was that they misspelled "Trump."

There were only two ways this was going to go. The mullahs were going to continue to fund as well as actively pursue the killing of Jews, Americans and anyone else on our side. They may or may not have been able to create a nuclear weapon, but they were certainly going to try. That was going to continue until we stopped it, permanently.

Which made the second alternative outcome this.

I think the Pope had the best summary of the argument against whacking the mullahs.

“Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself, or in the pursuit of the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.”

There has been no harsher critic to U.S. military action in Iran than Pope Leo XIV:

“War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been… pic.twitter.com/5pg6NRWSLi

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) February 28, 2026

As usual, the Church is living in a make-believe world. Peace wasn't on the table. It wasn't a choice between peace and war. The Iranian regime was constantly killing someone, whether that was its own people, the Jews, American soldiers or anyone else that got in their way. The idea that what we had a week ago was some form of peace is a fantasy.

So get it done. Get rid of as much as we can and see what happens after that. I'm sure the plans are more detailed than that, but if all they were was "rubble don't make trouble," I'd be happy with it.

Tehran won the toss and has elected to receive.