Weekend Data Dump

And thanks to veterans as we celebrate Veterans Day. I'm old enough to remember that Vietnam veterans faced unfair hostility from anti-war protesters. My childhood awareness was actually driven by the decision to turn GI Joe from a soldier to an "action figure" without military gear sold to equip him. We have at least avoided that treatment of veterans today despite sometimes over-the-top protests over campaigns in the Long War.

Army precision fire is expanding, as this Strategypage post on Excaliber rounds explains. How does the proliferation of precision that can be rapidly employed affect Army battle tempo? Against enemies without such precision capabilities, will the attack be able to continue in line of march rather than deploying advancing recon forces to overcome enemy screening forces?

If statues of old hateful murderers should come down, why are so many statues of Lenin still standing in the former Soviet Union? Hell, how many are standing in America, I wonder?

Iranian-backed Houthi rebels tried to hit Riyadh with a missile but the Saudi Patriot air defense system shot it down. Please don't try to tell me that if Clinton was president that Iran would be well down that road to being a responsible regional power.

I never used Facebook news feeds (and actually quit it earlier this year) and don't use Twitter, so the troll-bots and fake writers were not in my in-basket. But how many journalists influenced by them wrote articles I read? I liked it better when reporters relied on shoe leather rather than following online fake opinion that their vaunted journalism degrees couldn't distinguish from their toaster. I try to sift out the utter crap and keeping away from social media was unintentionally my best filter. Tip to Instapundit.

China protested the visit by the Indian defense minister to Indian territory (Arunachal Pradesh) in the northeast. I assume India filed that protest away in an appropriate waster basket.

Strategypage takes a tour of Mexico's corruption and drug cartel violence that is so similar to a war that I wonder if the cartels will evolve into an anti-government insurgency as long as they are fighting like an insurgency.

With an eye to Australian needs, this author notes that main battle tanks "are back in vogue." Here at The Dignified Rant, whether post-Cold War or post-Iraq War insurgency, the main battle tank has never been out of fashion. In related news, Russia is updating their heavy armor and supporting infantry vehicles, but without the money to do it right.

I've long doubted the reliability of the global temperature going back millennia and noted in tenths of a degree in some cases. The precision implied is grossly overstated. And modern measurements are no exception to the problem. We really can't trust the basic data that the science on a global scale is based on.

Liberals continue to be horrified that so many people think the media makes up harmful news about Trump. Yeah, I have no idea how or where people might get the idea that the media is not a reliable source of untainted news. I mean, good God, really?

The increasing embrace by left-wing religious leaders of global warming belief inclines me to reject organized religion (and I'm very unhappy with my new Pope, all things considered). Will this obvious effort to replace God with Carbon as the focus of faith lead global warmers to reject climate change as just another thing anti-science faithful believe in? Or will the global warmers go all in on their new faith of the church of global warming? Now go and emit no more.

Yeah, I support what Trump has and can do on policy despite his personal behavior, which I tolerate in the hope that it helps the substance more than it hurts. The jury is out on that, I suppose. And remember, every day Trump is in office whether he does something good or not is a day that Clinton isn't in office doing harm. That alone counts a lot for me, too. So Republicans in Congress should be working to help Trump achieve conservative vectors in laws lest Trump return to his liberal Democratic roots to work for liberal objectives. And if Democrats make gains in 2018 because Republicans failed to legislate before then--and the Virginia election result this last Tuesday should be a warning shot across the bow--it will be an own-goal wholly avoidable. Tip to Instapundit.

President Trump aborted a planned trip to the DMZ because of bad flying weather. I was honestly fine with no trip there since I really didn't trust that Kim Jong-Un wouldn't consider trying to kill the president the best way to avoid decisive action to prevent North Korea from getting long-range nuclear missiles.

Trump is unpopular personally, but he is just leading the parade of disappointment that the Republican and Democratic parties are part of.

The Navy successfully used HIMARS truck-mounted rockets from the deck of an amphibious ship. This is an effort to make up for the lack of 16 vertical launch cells intended for the San Antonio-class ship. But that is really too big for the Marines who want something a large helicopter or V-22 can lift. I think that the Marines should just focus on the rockets in boxes, which would work on Navy ships, too.

Tom Steyer is a friggin' idiot. A wealthy friggin' idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. I'd like to thank him for diluting the Democratic accusation about having a wealthy idiot in the White House. I swear, watching CNN inflicts collateral damage with his extensive advertising campaign about impeachment. Talk about turning the dial to 11! Does he really believe the nonsense he spouts? Between these commercials and the CNN apple-banana preening that they apparently think is clever, CNN is clearly living in a fantasy world. Please don't talk to me about Fox News bias again, thank you.

The election anniversary screaming promised was as special as I hoped. Sad. It is shocking that people actually think this is a KKK/Confederate/fascist regime. There is no baying at the moon in protest in such a regime.

As long as Putin is a pseudo-czar, is an actual Romanov czar candidate out there notwithstanding the Soviet shot at wiping them out?

The Philippines erred in backing down from building a fisherman's shelter on internationally recognized Filipino territory in the face of Chinese threats. China will occupy the sandbar near Thitu before the Philippines can change their mind. If Manila won't resist Chinese encroachment on Philippines territory, how can Manila expect America to do it for them? On the bright side, there is a report that Manila is going ahead with this construction on Thitu. Is the shelter a meaningless concession? They are different places. The shelter is on a nearby sandbar. Although I think China will occupy that sandbar without a Philippines presence. My advice to anyone in the region with land features claimed by China is to occupy and fortify them first.

Yeah, responsibility for your actions is a bitch, eh? Tip to Instapundit.

A self-driving mini-bus crashed two hours after starting out a test, but there were no injuries. No word if the robotic mini-bus cried out "Allahu akbar!" before the crash.

How many Democratic members of "the resistance," which evokes imagery of plucky French freedom fighters at war with Nazi occupiers, mocked Americans who joined "militias" to prevent their government from becoming a dictatorship?

Lithuania wants NATO air defense missiles in the Baltics or in Poland. Russia is opposed, of course. I'd rather have the missiles in northeast Poland because anything in Estonia or Latvia and possibly Lithuania, would be overrun in a Russian invasion.

If Louisiana's Roy Moore did molest a child, he should be out of the Senate race. Period. But I have no idea if the accusations are true or just exploiting the Hollywood sexual exploitation revelations environment. A false accusation is just as horrible, and again I have no idea if that could be proven one way or the other. Given the power of false accusations, I'm inclined to say nobody should withdraw on allegations--if they are false (which we can't know). That's a bad precedent to set and don't tell me that no political operative would falsely round up accusers if the default response is established as resigning. So I'd rather let the election go through--and let Moore address the allegations and persuade voters to give him the benefit of the doubt (or fail)--and let the Senate deal with whether the accusations are true after. One can remove a sitting senator if guilty. One can't put him in office if he withdraws before the election and is later shown innocent. And I say this as someone who does not like Moore. I would hope that after that really bad interview Moore's closest friends and advisers should quietly talk to him and get him to withdraw. A final thought. Given the timing, which does give Republicans time to replace a candidate, I imagine, I don't think the accusations are political. A real political hit would have been less than a week before the election, I imagine. Although perhaps I'm not considering non-election day voting in that assumption, which is increasingly important.

The son of that bucket of chum Osama bin Laden called on Moslems to take revenge on Americans for the SEAL Team 6 killing of that bacon-breathed piece of sh*t. Funny how the jihadi scum didn't differentiate between all Moslems and adherents to the jihadi strain of Islam that doesn't really reflect "true" Islam. Which is a reminder that the winner of the Islamic civil war gets to define what "true" Islam believes. Let's help moderate modern Moslems define Islam.

Victimhood is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It's gotten to the point that I assume accusations of bias incidents are fake. The fact that our nation reacts with horror--as the Air Force general did to that alleged Air Force prep school "incident"--to mere accusations should show how much progress we've made in advancing the ideals of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. If overt bias actions are so common, why make them up? And honestly, given the ease of expressing hate from the comfort of your couch online with the safety of distance and anonymity, I'm somewhat shocked anybody would go to the effort to express hate with activity.

The Air Force is short 2,000 pilots which appears to be a 10% shortfall. Or maybe just represents 10% of the number of pilots the Air Force has. It is unclear. The Air Force leadership dominated by pilots has in the past resisted unmanned aircraft (and even resisted human pilots not officers). This shortage will do more to advance robotic aircraft than any arguments on merit. Although at some level I'd like to have a human pilot in the loop. Isn't there a way to augment human judgment about what is fuzzy with robotic speed and uniformity? Or the reverse?

More on the release of the Osama bin Laden files captured in the raid that killed the scumbag monster. As a commenter notes,  one hopes our analysts read this stuff--and passed the knowledge on to our decision-makers.

I was going to mock the young woman "claiming racism for being unable to get french fries at Taco Bell," but the woman is actually complaining about how she was treated at the drive-through when she asked for fries. Sure, she made a mistake. But the treatment by staff was the cause of the accusation and not the lack of fries. Never trust the headlines without looking at the source. The issue is only briefly mentioned but it is there to see if you look. Tip to Instapundit.

Yes, American ground forces in South Korea are dwarfed by both the North Korean and South Korean armies--on the time frame of a week I imagine we could count on two Army maneuver brigades and a Marine regiment--but the idea that the poorly trained and poorly equipped North Korean army could defeat the American-supported South Korean army is farfetched and relies on massive North Korean use of chemical and possibly nuclear weapons that cause the South Korean army to collapse and allow a nearly unopposed road march south by the North Koreans. Also, the article says North Korea is estimated to have up to 60 nuclear weapons. But I don't believe that is true. If North Korea had up to 60 nukes capable of being used there would be no talk of a strike on North Korea. I think North Korea has enough nuclear material to build 60 nuclear warheads. That's different.

This view of opinions as not relying on facts is somewhat depressing yet I imagine it is more true than false. But I'm not sure if that experiment noted at the beginning can be used to draw the conclusion that people don't change views based on facts. But it seems true for views that ore firmly set--as opposed to affecting forming views. But I'm suspicious of social science experiments that rely on a proxy for what the researchers want to measure. So often they seem to want to measure just how evil or stupid conservatives are. The results and methodology often just seem to reflect the researcher's bias. Also, it is rather amusing given the topic that the author seems to think that opposing Obamacare rather than supporting it is a sign in support of a lack of reasoning on facts! In the end, it just seems like another entry into the why the other (conservative) side is stupid genre. But perhaps I'm immune to reason. Still, it does explain the enduring appeal of communism despite a century of mass murder and death, poverty, and oppression as its signature achievements.

Once again, "feminism" is just the women's auxiliary of liberalism. Merely believing in equality between men and women--as I do--is no longer enough.

British SSBN problems with a bonus note of the US Polaris problem I noted not too long ago in relation to wondering how maintained Russia's nuclear arsenal is. Also, note that Britain is having problems affording submarine nukes when North Korea is committing the money to building them (admittedly on crappy old conventional subs).