CDR SALAMANDER: What Europe Should, Could, and Would do in a Great Pacific War.

The Anglo-French SSN fleet numbers 13 boats. Using the optimistic “it takes three to make one” formula, that gives you four operational boats.

Assuming a Great Pacific War will require the USA to pull almost all its operational forces from Europe to the Pacific, there will be a significant—and smart—argument in Europe that they need to keep their forces at home to cover any threat from their east should it arise, and to secure the Atlantic that has largely been abandoned by the Americans.

As such, any fight in the Pacific would be lucky to get 50% of available operational units. That gives us… two SSN.

Not nothing, but a rounding error in a Great Pacific War. I would give it 2/3 odds that the national caveats would limit them to operations south of Singapore and east of Guam.

So, in the end, with the Great Pacific War, we should not count on much from Europe for this fight. Perhaps some security for Australian airspace and territorial seas, but that would be about it.

It gets lonely out there real fast.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Haul for savings. #CommissionEarned

CHANGE: Fed Up With Situationships, Gen Z Is Ready to Commit: The vague relationships that rule the dating scene are hard to navigate, even well after they end, and zoomers have had enough.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY IN GAVIN NEWSOM’S HOME STATE: SoCal Job Creation Drops 33%.

MARK JUDGE: The Stasi Left. “Nazi metaphors have become far too overused. To the Left, everything to the right of Chairman Mao Zedong is fascism. Such overuse of Nazi imagery is disrespectful to the unique evil of the Holocaust. It should stop. Still, a more modern and exact analogy can be applied to the modern American Left. It is the Stasi, the feared German secret police that terrorized East Germany from 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a compelling new book, A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance, scholar Alison Lewis reveals that while dictators such as Hitler or Stalin sought to crush writers and other artists because they feared the freedom they represented, the German Stasi saw them as allies. While the Nazis and their counterparts, the Stalinists, attacked a wide range of artists as ‘degenerate,’ the Stasi worked with and supported entertainers and writers. The German communists had their own versions of people like Michael Moore, Stephen Colbert, the publishing industry, and Hollywood — useful idiots who echo whatever the leaders of the party tell them.”

We have Kimmel, Colbert, etc.

CHANGE? TikTok Might Have Found an American Buyer, and It’s a Perfect Match.

I’M NOW SKEPTICAL ABOUT IT ALL:

Fact Check: Possibly True https://t.co/gAnOdsMELm

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) April 2, 2025

"The data I'm looking at is showing absentee ballots being fed into the system to keep liberal Susan Crawford ahead at a certain rate .. almost as if an algorithm was at work."

But that would be totally impossible. Right @CISAgov ? https://t.co/RIjVg6eEqL

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) April 2, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

MAYBE SHE’S JUST ALWAYS LIKE THIS? Is She Drunk? Kamala’s Latest Public Appearance Was… Yikes….

THE NEW SPACE RACE: JAXA institute studying Mars lander concept.

SPACE: Fram2 Polar Orbital Flight: First Inside Views.

TIRED YET? NOT YET? Look Who’s Folding Under Trump’s Tariff Pressure

TYLER O’NEIL: Police Report on Nashville Transgender Shooter Plays Into Left’s Narrative.

According to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, authorities didn’t release the manifesto … because there wasn’t one.

“Early in the investigation, it was suggested Hale left behind a ‘manifesto’ detailing her motives and intentions,” the police report noted. “This has elicited a great deal of interest from the public and had led to repeated demands this manifesto be released for public study and comment.”

“In this case, a manifesto didn’t exist,” the report claimed.

Oh, really?

Police were at pains to define the word “manifesto” to justify their refusal to produce the documents Hale did leave behind.

“By definition, a manifesto is a mission statement or other document written and disseminated by an individual or group to enumerate or expound upon the guiding principles and beliefs that inform their actions,” the report noted. “Regardless of length, a manifesto is a single document that outlines all the factors, intentions, and objectives of an individual act or a series of actions.”

“Hale never left behind a single document explaining why she committed the attack, why she specifically targeted The Covenant, and what she hoped to gain, if anything, with the attack,” the report added.

Yet police did discover a treasure trove of information about Hale, her motivations, and her mental state.

Police found 16 notebooks; “assorted folders and loose documents”; seven sketchbooks and composition books; a yearbook; three VHS cassette tapes; eight memory storage devices with a combined 379.6 GB of data; six cellphones; three laptops; two Google Drive data cloud accounts; and more.

The report notes that the seven composition books and sketchbooks included 520 pages of content Hale wrote between 2009 and 2022.

In other words, the police had far more than enough evidence to determine the shooter’s motivations. Yet they would not release those materials because they “required a careful review of the material to understand Hale’s motive.”

Read the whole thing.

Incidentally, now that we have new management at the FBI, will we ever learn the motive of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooter?

SO I VAGUELY REMEMBER THIS “Nick Rockefeller” guy from law school. Who wasn’t a Rockefeller at all, as it turns out, but a conman named Spiro Pavlovich III. He faked out Harvard, too. Twice!

This is not as unusual as it sounds. A guy who started with my class at YLS turned out to be a fraud as well, and was booted after a year when he was caught, not by the law school but by the law firm he worked at as a summer associate.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: How to Write a Killer First Sentence.

A NEW POST ON MY SPACE SUBSTACK: Heart of Darkness: Astronomy and Timon of Athens.

I’ve actually had a number of subscriptions, and I really love getting subscriptions. And of course, paid subscriptions anre even better.

HOLLY MATHNERD: Systemic Misogyny: A Theorem Disproved. What my feminist professors lied about. “Turns out, the oppressors were just guys. And the cage I thought they built? Feminism handed me the blueprints — and I helped weld the bars.”

CHANGE: FAA closes investigation into SpaceX Starship Flight 7 explosion.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

More like corrupt IMO.

They know exactly what they are doing.

— Publius (@OcrazioCornPop) April 2, 2025

Previously: “Congress is now less a place to commit serious acts of lawmaking and more of a perch for launching lucrative social media side gigs and sweetheart stock trades.”

HEH:

great val interview with @ELLEmagazine from 2006 pic.twitter.com/KpheODr0Gp

— brooke is crashing tf out rn (@verybrookie) April 2, 2025

Quentin Tarantino, call your office!

WILL NO ONE RID BYTEDANCE OF THIS TURBULENT APP? TikTok Might Have Found an American Buyer, and It’s a Perfect Match.

DOOMSDAY LOOPS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR SAN FRANCISCO ANYMORE! Hollywood’s Theatrical Business At Risk Of Entering “Negative Feedback Loop”, Wall Street Analyst Warns.

Hollywood is at risk of entering a “negative feedback loop” with fewer wide movie releases and a shrinking theater footprint combining to squeeze box office revenue, a veteran media analyst says.

In his annual assessment of the theatrical sector, billed as a “memo to Hollywood,” TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz notes that he has taken a “bearish stance” on the theatrical window for some time. Results from 2024, with total grosses slipping 4% from 2023 to $8.57 billion, the number of wide releases down 6% from pre-Covid levels, and other factors have only reinforced his view.

“We have said for several years now that the outlook for a sustained recovery looks questionable, and that we don’t think the existing global theatrical footprint can be supported solely by a handful of blockbusters,” Creutz wrote in the 20-page report.

The number of screens in the U.S. has declined to about 35,000 from 41,000 before Covid struck in 2020, with exhibition also facing big challenges in 2023 and 2024 due to the strikes. That smaller footprint might help theater owners in the near term, but it could end up hastening the decline of the overall business, Creutz believes. Downsizing “risks having more films skipping theatrical and going direct to streaming services…and now you have all the ingredients for a negative feedback loop.”

Creutz emphasizes that he is “not calling for a complete collapse of the theatrical window, but we think box office is more likely to decline than rise over the next few years, particularly as major studios continue to cut back on the number of films they make in favor of concentrating their box office efforts in fewer, bigger, established IP films.”

Found via Michael Walsh who adds, “The Industry must wean itself from its green-eyeshade addiction to comic books and wokism if it is to have any chance of salvaging the theatrical model — which thanks to streaming, it probably doesn’t.“

CHANGE: Goodyear’s Retro Airship Graphics Celebrate 100 Years of Blimpin.’ The blimp, the blimp, the blimp is back, sporting throwback graphics as a matter of fact.

PERSPECTIVE:

We won 2 of 3 special elections and secured voter ID in the state of Wisconsin.

And some people are acting like with lost 0-4. lol

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) April 2, 2025

And DataRepublican from the replies: “Also, the last-minute surge was real. We have the power to make 3 of 3 happen next time.”

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: A Working Man Who Beat Snow White.

Related: Rob Long on The Good Psychopath.