Tuesday, June 30, 2015

A LITTLE YOUNG

My parents weren't big on counseling children. They preferred to set an example. I can't fault them. They did a good job. I'm looking 55 in the face with an 11 year old daughter. She's almost 12. I didn't see that coming when I was in my 20's or 30's. Not at all.

My parents never sat me down for any kind of talks that I recall. I think they expected what they were to rub off on me and my siblings. I think it did. For the first 6 years she was raised independent and happily showed off her own accomplishments. She remained true to that for as long as I've known her.

When one thinks about it, a child is a missile sent into the future and one has just the formative years before they leave home at 16 to shape them as we would want them to grow.

FLEA BITES IN MAINE

The human cost of vacation.


SOME MODERN HATE FLAGS

England

United States Navy

Army of Northern Virginia

Perspective seems to be nothing but a term for drawing stupid conclusions from revisionist history.

MELISSA TURLEY IS PURE EVIL SCUM

Melissa Turley as State Department scum is having its slow effect.


Good.

Monday, June 29, 2015

I've noticed more and more sites are asking me to open my door and wallet to advertisement schemes.


I looked at an ad once and didn't buy so I figure why look at all the rest of them?

MELISSA TURLEY STATE DEPARTMENT FASCIST

It looks pretty bad when our State Department acts like the KGB or the People's Republic of China. Srsly, if our State Department wants to play the hardline commie thug they need to man up.*

The real press should simply take to writing or announcing that, "today, like every previous day, the State Department lied, prevaricated and spun mistruth and fobbed the press off with complete packages of utter bullsh@t shortly before executing 400 Christians in the Arena." That could be their signature sign-off along with, "State Department announces signing of Treaty of Eternal Peace and Fiendship with Muslim dictators, terrorists and the PLO."

*There, that will have pushed every button I can think of. I just wanted to go on record that Elizabeth Turley of the U.S. State Department is a solid representative of the Obama administration and is advancing the banners of pluralism, communism, fascism and infantilism like nobody since Carter.


PITY THE POOR SPARTANS

As I drove home from our Maine vacation I had the chance to listen to the radio as various voices discussed the Greek issue. Listening to the lengths to which Athens has gone to debate what is essentially an easy binary decision has given me renewed pity for Leonides and the men who waited in vain at Thermopolye for Athens to end debate and come to their aid in defending Greece.

What I don't understand is, who would loan Greece any money at all? Why?

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

THE LONG HAND OF IRRENDTISM

Once used by Hitler to claim sovereignty over the Sudetenland it is currently used by Putin to claim justification for launching separatist movements in Crimea and Ukraine and Ossetia, Chechnya, and countless other places where Russians replaced the native born populations. This includes the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

We are provoking an easily predictable response by stationing an armored brigade in the Baltic. Let's hope that the White House planning has encompassed all the possible contingencies and Russian countermoves.

Who ya gonna call if the Russians back an ethnic Russian separatist group in any or all of the 3 Baltic States? What if the Russians shut off their oil and gas supplies? What if the Russians interdict traffic/blockade the Baltic States as we blockaded Cuba in 1962?


I will be away for awhile as I check out the sea rise level on the coast of Maine.

If you call up the map from last week you'll see us driving from Nigeria to Bulgaria through Switzerland, Spain and Syria.

TOP SECRET SCI

Sold down the river by the clowns at OPM. Thanks guys.

Could they be any more amateur?


Tuesday, June 16, 2015

THE POWER OF DRAWING

The art of drawing cities of the imagination by Francois Schuiten


It conveys up


The conviction that if you just get it right, you can fly. It conveys down.


Al Gore raging at the tide at his palace atop a peak in Darien.

Monday, June 15, 2015

ALL YOUR MEDICAL RECORDS R BELONG TO US

You know, as dire and destructive as the total complete compromise of the background investigations of every federal employee with a security clearance (roughly 14 million living Americans) is, there is also the little tiny problem that Obamacare mandated that all health records be maintained electronically and be available on-line.

And so they are. Available to any disgruntled health care employee or any Chinese or Russian hacker or your wife or husband's divorce attorney.

Thank you Pelosi. Don't you think you've done enough to us already?

FECKLESS AND FAITHLESS

The latest move of sheer madness to come out of the White House is a plan to deploy an armored brigade to the Baltic. The White House has obviously given a lot of thought to this move because there could hardly be a more provocative and fatal international move other than blockading China's continued construction and development of the various rocks and islets it has seized in the China Sea; each of which gives China another 200 mile radius economic exclusion zone and full control of the sea bed, water space and fish within the EEZ.

What action will this provoke from Putin? We've already seen how he responds to enforce Russian interests in the most spirited and martial manner possible as he clearly demonstrated in Crimea and then in western Ukraine where Russian forces still engage in daily war with the elected government of Ukraine. We can see it in the Russian treatment of the Balkans and in their ongoing destabilizing efforts in the middle east and their continued support and bolstering of Iranian nuclear ambitions and weapon systems and technology.

I wouldn't ask them to tell anyone but it would be of some comfort to know what our deployed tripwire will do in the event of a Russian incursion (partisans, revolutionaries, Irredentist Popular Front for the Liberation of ethnic Russian Baltic SSRs), etc. It's only crazy if there is no plan that encompasses and deals with any and every response it calls forth from Russia. 

What are the odds this White House has a plan? Well, they've been studying the safety of another oil pipeline from Canada now for almost 7 years without a plan to move forward. They announced that Guantanamo would be shut down within a year of them taking office over 6 years ago and yet it is still stuffed with muslim terrorists and fanatics. They were going to come up with a plan to deal with pushing a surge into Afghanistan but it took them over 18 months to go with the plan George Bush left them. They don't have a very good track record for being fast on their diplomatic feet. (Both left of course)

The President announced last week that he still has no plan to deal with ISIS/ISIL. We've been aware of the threat they pose for years and that moron still has no plan for dealing with them. The situation in Ukraine has been a shooting war for over a year and the only answer the President and the National Security Staff have come up with for that is to send Samantha Power to Ukraine to taunt Putin and deliver a nyaah nyaah speech of defiance that she and the United States are in no way prepared to back up.

One can actually hear our former friends spinning in their foreign graves or prison cells as they listen to the most faithless and feckless ally of the 20th and 21st Centuries deliver blood curdling threats like nyaah nyaah to the enemies of western civilization. Poor Reza Pahlavi, Qadafi, Mubarek and of course, Nyugen Van Thieu must be up to 85,000rpm at this point.

It's kind of illuminating how long the New York Times has been eclipsed as a serious source of news and information. If you do go to the Thieu link you can see this at the bottom of the page:
Correction: October 2, 2001, Tuesday A front-page headline yesterday on the obituary of Nguyen Van Thieu, former president of South Vietnam, misstated his place in the sequence before that country fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. He served almost until the end, but the last president was Gen. Duong Van Minh. The obituary also referred incorrectly at one point to the year of the coup he helped organize against President Ngo Dinh Diem. It was 1963, not 1965.
No doubt the newspaper of record used source material from earlier reporting at the paper of record in misremembering who the last President of South Vietnam was and when he killed Diem.

It's interesting to wonder when the United States and Europe conducted the last realistic Return of Forces to Germany (REFORGER) Exercise. How many U.S. Army M1 tanks are left on the Continent? How many fighter wings are left? How many artillery battalions remain on Europe's plain?

Do you ever wonder if the inheritors of that nasty bit of tactics known as blitzkrieg still follow the model and have well organized and equipped Shock Armies standing by for a Channel Dash? Will they signal their intentions when they turn off western Europe's gas supply in December or would that just be seen as a‎ Démarche? I suppose any actual invasion will be countered with a Protest Note lodged at the UN by our Ambassador to the UN. It won't be Power since I'm sure she'll have seen the handwriting on the wall and resigned to spend more time with her family the day before the Soviet Armies take Antwerp and months before the light worker comes up with a response plan.

I ask you to look at the link to monster namer Samantha Power and ask yourself just one question. When did she ever spend any effort at all in advancing the interests of the United States of America?
She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as "a monster".
Power joined the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008, and was named Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council—responsible for running the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights—positions that she held from January 2009 to March 2013. In April 2012, Obama chose her to chair a newly formed Atrocities Prevention Board. During her time in office, Power's office focused on such issues as the reform of the UN; the promotion of women's rights and LGBT rights; the promotion of religious freedom and the protection of religious minorities; the protection of refugees; the campaign against human trafficking; and the promotion of human rights and democracy, including in the Middle East and North Africa, Sudan, and Burma. She is considered to be a key figure within the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya. 
With an ally like that, what could go wrong? Does the Montreux Convention ring any bells?


Sunday, June 14, 2015

DISCOUNT FLYERS


A rare form of passenger travel not seen since the days when barnstormers flew around the country. Most of the passengers* agreed that it was better than taking a cruise.


*Look at the passengers at the tip of the wing. Aren't they supposed to, in the event of an evacuation, leave their damned luggage behind?

Saturday, June 13, 2015

WHAT CHINESE HACKERS KNOW ABOUT ALL OF US

It looks like the major media are lightly stepping over the recent revelation that Chinese hackers have been rooting around in the Office of Personnel Management's files for over a year. For those that don't know what the Office of Personnel Management is, here is a brief summary:

OPM controls thousands of agents who go forth and investigate the background information provided by all employees of the United States who require a National Security Clearance in order to work for the U.S. Government. That includes all military officers and most enlisted personnel. It includes most State Department employees and Foreign Service Officers and it includes almost all of the bureaucrats working in every other job. For instance, CIA, NSA, DIA, Secret Service personnel require security clearances and background investigations as do all FBI agents and all the other agents one can think of.

OPM's databases are online and include completed copies of this form.  Go ahead and look. You know you want to see how bad it is knowing that these are not only compromised but almost certainly include the OPM agent's report of investigation and notes which are used to limit or deny clearances and deny access.

I won't be surprised to learn that all of those who completed the paperwork for Special Background Investigations are clearly denoted and their access described in fuller detail. You know, the people who require Q clearances or access to Restricted or Formerly Restricted Data. It probably even has clues for who was investigated or reinvestigated as access requirements ballooned and moved beyond Top Secret.

The terrible thing about OPM is that they were quick off the ball a decade ago and required all submissions of form SF 86 to be made electronically. ie, all of us squirted our personal information directly into OPM's computers because they refused to accept paper submission of SF 86's after 2005.

I think every single person involved in this fiasco at OPM must be fired and horsewhipped and then deported to Iran. Where was their Information Vulnerability Assessment? Where was their cyber security? Why wasn't the data encrypted given how insanely valuable it could be to an up and coming superpower? This catastrophe ranks up there with Hanssen, Ames and Walker for the damage it has caused and will cause going downstream.

This won't be solved by firing the #1 bureaucrat. This requires the wholesale demotion and firing of every person involved in safeguarding the information they acquired and retained in the leaky sieve laughingly known as the security database.

A SMUG CARTOON

I didn't know they had it in them.


Friday, June 12, 2015

FUN WITH GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCTS

From the post at AEI comes an updated map of the United States with each state renamed with the name of the country with the nearest match of GDP compared to the state. It puts a little perspective on things international.


Thursday, June 11, 2015

A NAZGUL NAMED RYAN

The unblinking arrogance of Nazgul Pelosi has been joined by a rethuglican Nazgul named Paul Ryan who has now taken to insisting that the only way you are going to find out what is in the current bills before Congress is if you vote to approve them without reading them. That simple partisan statement of Pelosi swept the democrats from control of Congress. Her sheer blind vicious imperial and arbitrary order to vote yes for Obamacare after refusing to even meet with the opposition led to a pure partisan vote on strict party lines that foisted the abortion known as Obamacare onto the American people. A bill so lame and so predictably awful and nothing but a pack of lies from one end to the other is now the law of the land and governs all health insurance in America.

What is it with all these spineless politicians who insist that they know better than us what is good for the country and so hide all of their acts of legislative disdain behind fortress walls of secrecy until it is damned near too late to keep them from becoming law? Hey! Ryan! Way to turn the entire republican base against incumbent rethuglicans and the whole rethuglican party. What are you going to do for an encore and so seal the ignoble fate of the republican party at the next election?

The liars who promoted the bill knowingly lied when they claimed that "if you like your doctor, you can keep him." They lied again when they said it was affordable and would cut family healthcare spending by up to 25%. They lied again when they said if you like your current health insurance plan you can keep it. In short, they lied about every single aspect of the bill they kept secret until after the democrats voted for it lock stock and barrel.

What kind of arrogance makes thugs like Paul Ryan and John Boehner think that they can expect to repeat Pelosi's ploy and emerge unscathed when Americans learn the real truth of what Obama has bargained away in return for nothing?
A cold voice answered: ‘Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.
                            ---The Return of the King

NATIONAL REVIEW SLINKS INTO DISGRACE

I took a look at the current state of Michael Mann's lawsuit against Mark Steyn, National Review, et al and left with great contempt for National Review. Steyn puts it best.
There are times when I wish I had the same kind of co-defendants I had in my free-speech wars in Canada: Maclean's, unlike National Review, is a dentist's waiting-room mag not an ideological mission, but they and I were as one in our fight not just against the Canadian Islamic Congress but against the now repealed Section 13. By contrast, National Review, for whom I wrote for a decade and a half, are offering the curious and fainthearted defense that they were never my publisher but merely an "interactive computer service provider" to which I had the access code (see page 49 of their most recent brief). They're a court filing or two from claiming they're Lufthansa and I'm Andreas Lubitz - just some crazy guy who locked himself in the NR cockpit. 
Oh, well. For all that, I've never felt more optimistic about how this case is going. If there is a "97 per cent consensus" on the science, all 97 per cent decided to steer well clear of Michael E Mann: Last fall, not a single amicus brief was filed on his behalf, not one. He claims he's "taking a stand for science", but evidently science is disinclined to take a stand for him.
On the other hand, and somewhat to my surprise, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Reporters Committee for Press Freedom, the American Society of News Editors, the Association of American Publishers, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (The Village Voice et al), NBC Universal, Bloomberg News, the publishers of USA Today, Time, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Seattle Times, The Arizona Republic and The Bergen County Record have all filed amici briefs against his attempted shredding of the First Amendment. They're in no way fans of mine, but they recognize that this is the most consequential free-speech case before the US courts since New York Times vs Sullivan, and if Mann wins it would be a catastrophic defeat for the First Amendment. That said, on global warming and "climate change", they largely agree with him. But I've also been heartened to learn how many scientists across the spectrum want nothing to do with Mann (scroll down here), and regard a defeat for him in court as a victory for genuine science.
It's funny how the science of man made global warming is collapsing all around except in the dim-witted minds of alarmists and governments hell bent on screwing the tax payer out of more money in order to fix a global climate scare that all rational beings admit simply cannot be fixed. All they talk about is slowing the rate of increase by forcing the first world to join the third world in grinding poverty and starvation but there is never any talk about reversing the global effects of solar infall variation that has, over the eons, caused the world to warm and cool. Their insane shrieks of doom fall on ears increasingly deaf to people who so obviously manipulate the data and then lie about it.

They make laughing stocks of real scientists and researchers and have thoroughly trashed the time honored process of peer review. They have also, with the help of its own lawyers, destroyed the reputation of National Review.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

GOOD GRIEF

The President without a strategy for coping with or dealing with ISIS has decided to send 450 American troops to Anbar Province, Iraq and have them train Iraqi Army personnel. We had over a 100,000 American troops over there for over a decade and a lot of them were training Iraqi troops who cannot run away fast enough when ISIS attacks and overwhelms them so quickly that they capture all our military vehicles, weapons and ammunition stocks intact and then use them in their follow-on assaults. I'm not sure what Obama thinks will happen now.

We know though, don't we? Green on Blue attacks on our soldiers once again and this time there won't be any Mattis there to explain to one and all that they had best have a plan to kill every man in the room before they enter. Frankly, I'm pretty sure some loony is trying to explain to the guys that they won't be allowed to carry weapons because they're not their to fight and they're not to shoot any Iraqis because there is no Status of Forces Agreement to protect them from being thrown into an Iraqi dungeon forever because they are subject to Iraqi law and not solely the UCMJ.

You might say a prayer for all our men over there and most especially for the 450 who are off to the Hot Gate.

Μολὼν λαβέ

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

SEE THE POWER OF STUPID

I just came across this article in Popular Mechanics. I am forced to admit that the stupid is terribly strong in this one.
Back in early April, the U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff mentioned that the service will always need good pilots "who want to come in and fly the F-22, the F-35, the X-Wing fighter." Now, Gen. Mark Welsh may not have been meant that the Air Force is building a real life X-wing. But the service and its contractors are very seriously working on another part of Luke Skywalker's fighter: laser cannons. 
According to Breaking Defense, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) officials say the service wants to arm fighter jets with laser cannons by 2022. This comes from remarks made to reporters at "DoD Lab Day" recently held at the Pentagon.
Wouldn't you think the ground based version of AAA laser weapon systems would sweep the skies of any possible laser armed aircraft?

Monday, June 8, 2015

ENCOURAGEMENT ONLY GOES SO FAR

Encouraged by the Mellow Jihadi, I delved a little deep last night into the story of America's first ace in World War II. He was a man named William R. Dunn and I wondered if there was anything about him that caused W.E.B. Griffin to name his Marine fighter pilot in his books, William Dunn. Maybe, but who but Griffin can say. 

I grew up reading the Yankee Flier in the RAF books I found on the shelves at my grandparent's house. Their sons had grown up during the war, and after, reading the stories as they were published starting in 1941. I knew something about the Americans that fought in the sky over Europe before America herself entered the war. As I read more about William R. Dunn I found this and so pass it along because it reiterates many of the stories I've read over the years about the P-39 Aircobra.

I thought this item was as heartfelt as it was funny:
From page 116 of Fighter Pilot, the first american ace of WWII, by William R Dunn. 
"The 53rd Fighter Group was equipped at that time(June 1943) with Bell P-39 Airacobras, which had been nicknamed "the Allison time-bomb with a Curtiss Electric fuse". I certainly felt sorry for the poor SOBs that had to fly those damned things in combat against real fighter aircraft. With their tricycle landing gear,the p-39s' were just great for taxiing. The known bad habits of all aircraft were collected together and developed into the P-39s' flying characteristics: flat spins, tail plane(stabilizer)stalls, tumbling, to mention a few of the most dangerous. The allison engine was behind the pilot, which threw the CG(center of gravity) way off, and the propeller shaft ran between the pilot's legs to the three-bladed prop in front. 
The Airacobra's engine ran rough most of the time, overheating all the time. There was always the worry that the prop shaft would seize, split apart, and castrate the unlucky pilot. If you got into a flat spin or tumble with the damned thing-and it was easily done if you weren't very careful-there was nothing to do but bail out of it.(My kid brother, who trained on P-39s in the class of 43G, bailed out of three of them-two flat spins and one tumble.) As an example, if you were practicing firing at a ground target and pulled up sharply after your pass, the tail plane would stall without warning and the rear end of the P-39 would fall out from under you with a frightening snap. If you were too low, there wasn't a chance of recovering-you went in with the kite. Trying to trim the Airacobra, even in level flight, was like sitting on the head of a pin, where you could fall off in any direction at any time. 
In the beginning of the war the RAF, short of fighter aircraft, ordered 675 P-39s from the Bell Aircraft Corporation at Buffalo, New York. Their order was soon reduced to 80 aircraft because of mechanical problems and the Airacobra's failure in action against German fighters. It was a miserable kite to fly, and a lot of good guys busted their butts in the P-39. We should have set fire to them all; however, we gave them to the Russians. No wonder they're still mad at us."  
Just read this book. I thought it was pretty good. And I got a hoot out of his page on the Airacobra. In the back of the book he goes over all the well known WWII planes, allied and axis. He flew in Korea and was in Vietnam, retiring in the early seventies. Anyone else read this book or hear about this guy?
Jumoschwanz
It was interesting to read a bit more about William R. Dunn.
Bill Dunn was born on November 16, 1916, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He enlisted in the U.S. Army on March 19, 1934, and served as an infantryman until receiving an honorable discharge on November 22, 1935. Dunn enlisted in the Canadian Army on September 7, 1939, attaining the rank of Sergeant Major before joining theRoyal Air Force on December 13, 1940. After completing RAF Flying School at Tern Hill, England, on April 16, 1941, Pilot Officer Dunn was assigned to the RAF's No. 71 Squadron, also known as the initial Eagle Squadron (so named because it was composed of expatriate American pilots in the RAF prior to the official entry of the United States into World War II) from May to August 1941, during which time he became the first American fighter ace of World War II by destroying 5 German fighters in aerial combat plus a shared probable; all while flying RAF Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire fighters. After being wounded in action on August 27, 1941, Dunn was hospitalized for 3 months and then spent another 3 months in the U.S. on leave before serving as an instructor pilot in Canada until he transferred to the U.S. Army Air Forces on June 15, 1943. 
Lieutenant Dunn served as a gunnery officer with the 53rd Fighter Group and then joined the 513th Fighter Squadron of the 406th Fighter-Bomber Group, flying the P-47 Thunderbolt, in October 1943, and deployed with the group to England in April 1944. He was credited with the destruction of his 6th and final enemy aircraft in aerial combat in June 1944. Promoted to Captain and then Major, he later completed Command & General Staff College before transferring to China, where he served as commander of Luchien and Luchow Air Bases as a Lieutenant Colonel from May 1945 to 1947, participating in the Chinese Civil War on the side of the Nationalists. His next assignment was as an advisor to the Imperial Iranian Air Force from 1947 to 1949. 
Lt Col Dunn resigned his commission on November 3, 1949, and rejoined the Air Force in an enlisted capacity on November 14, 1949, attaining the rank of Master Sergeant before receiving an appointment as an Air Force Warrant Officer on April 17, 1952. During this time, he served as an advisor to the Brazilian Air Force from 1950 to 1952. Promoted to Chief Warrant Officer, CWO Dunn served as a staff officer from 1952 to 1954, and then served as an Aircraft Controller, Interceptor Controller, Air Traffic Controller, and Wing Support Officer for the 33rd Air Division at Tinker AFB, Oklahoma, from May 1954 to February 1958. His next assignment was as a Weapons Controller with the 623rd Aircraft Control & Warning (AC&W) Squadron at Naha AB, Okinawa, from April 1958 to April 1960, and then with the 51st Fighter Interceptor Wing at Naha AB from April 1960 to July 1961. CWO Dunn next served as a staff officer with Headquarters, 29th Air Division at Richards-Gebaur AFB, Missouri, from July 1961 to May 1963, followed by service as a Weapons Controller with the 848th AC&W Squadron at Wallace AS in the Philippines from May 1963 to May 1964. He served as a Weapons Officer on the staff of Headquarters, Pacific Air Forces(PACAF) at Hickam AFB, Hawaii, from May 1964 to May 1967, and then deployed to Southeast Asia, where he served as a Weapons Force Plans Officer with the 6250th Support Squadron at Tan Son Nhut AB, South Vietnam, from May 1967 to June 1968. 
CWO Dunn's final assignment was as a Weapons Controller with Headquarters, Aerospace Defense Command at Ent AFB, Colorado, from June 1968 until his retirement from the Air Force on February 1, 1973. He was promoted to Chief Warrant Officer 4 (W-4) in 1963, but retired at his highest rank held of Lieutenant Colonel (O-5). Bill Dunn died on February 14, 1995, and was buried at the Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver, Colorado. Although only officially credited with 6 air victories in World War II, Dunn claimed 8.5 in the air, plus 4 more unconfirmed, 3 probables, 4 damaged, and 12 more destroyed on the ground while strafing enemy airfields. 
In addition to his autobiography, Fighter Pilot: The First American Ace of World War II, he wrote War Drum Echoes and other works on the Indian wars of North America.
The Air Force had a terrible problem after World War II. It had far too many officers like LtCol Dunn who had gone from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel in just two or three years. What do you do? I used to hear about Air Force Colonels who commanded an Air Base one day reappearing the next day as a sergeant stocking the commissary shelves on the same base. What a bizarre world it was.

A COMMON PROBLEM

From Traditional Vibe.


Me too.

Friday, June 5, 2015

MAKE YOUR OWN AR-15 RIFLE

If you're interested it looks like anybody can now make them at home. There is an interesting piece at Wired.com that lays out the best and worst ways to make rifles at home.

$1500 for the computer milling machine and then the cost of all the spare parts required to assemble the rest of the gun around the recently created/milled lower receiver. How cool is that?


Thursday, June 4, 2015

OBAMA'S TRANSPARENCY CULT

I don't think that word transparency means what he thinks it means. Not at all what he thinks it means.  Thanks again to wikileaks we the deserving are getting a chance to peer behind the curtain and catch a glimpse of the little cretin running the greatest show on earth. It isn't pretty. A public trade union spokes-being had this to say:
“The irony of the text containing repeated references to transparency, and an entire annex on transparency requiring governments to provide information useful to business, being negotiated in secret from the population exposes in whose interests these agreements are being made,” she said.
Another dedicated public spokes-being had this to say:
Nick Dearden, director of the charity Global Justice Now, formerly the World Development Movement, said: “These leaks reinforce the concerns of campaigners about the threat that TISA poses to vital public services. There is no mandate for such a far-reaching programme of liberalisation in services. It’s a dark day for democracy when we are dependent on leaks like this for the general public to be informed of the radical restructuring of regulatory frameworks that our governments are proposing.”
It is, of course, just members of groups like those referenced above who are out leaking their heads off whenever they get the chance. In some ways they're like the old communists hiding in the State Department and DoD who could not resist sending reams of classified info to the communists in the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela. They just can't help themselves. 
The TPP has been particularly controversial because of the level of secrecy around it – trade agreements by their nature are negotiated behind closed doors, but restrictions on the TPP are such that elected representatives aren’t allowed to express any specific reservations about its content to their constituents. Moreover, advisers specifically included in the conversation to represent the public say they aren’t being allowed to read the entire document. “Today’s consultations are, in many ways, much more restrictive than those under past administrations,” veteran trade advisor Michael Wessel wrote in Politico last month. 
Which just made the CNN poll showing more Americans favored GW Bush than favor Obama; priceless.

It is kind of sad and pathetic that the Rethuglicans are now the party urging a vote on a trade bill nobody is allowed to read before voting for or against it. When the hell did they become democrats? How is it that democracy is now defined by both national parties as a process of keeping the electorate completely and utterly ignorant of pending legislation and passing it in the dead of night by ramming it through on strict party lines? How can anybody lobby their representative or senators on the bill if NOBODY is allowed to know what it says before the vote in Congress?

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

READ THE LATEST FATWA

There is a bit of a dustup going on at the Northwestern University gulag and it is interesting to me on several fronts. It concerns an outright attack on intellectual freedom, freedom of speech and what used to pass for civility. A wannabe member of the senior cult clergy had this to say about what was written by a professor in response to her own concerns about the use of the cult religion in the persecution and a sordid attempt to fire another professor at the gulag using Title IX as their weapon.
But Kipnis' op-ed was alarmingly inaccurate. And immediately after its publication, several individuals reached out to her directly to correct the myriad misrepresentations of fact that she harmfully published as gospel. Kipnis acknowledged these emails, but refused to correct the record, suggesting instead that folks simply agree to disagree. That's a strange response, a bit like telling a math tutor that you "agree to disagree," or a civil engineer who's concerned about the integrity of your bridge, or... you get the point. When someone in a position to know reaches out to let you know that you're off base, one tends to think the appropriate response is anything but Kipnis'.
...because faith is their only guide and the cult is their only true path to salvation and so deviationists will be placed on their knees and dealt with in a manner consistent with all tyrannies that despise intellectuals and disbelievers.

How the hell did America end up with gulags?

Monday, June 1, 2015

THE FIGHT FOR LIBERTY GOES ON

In a totally expected showdown Sunday night, Senator Paul stood firm and by his own unique action saw to it that some of the more egregious provisions of the vile Patriot Act were sunsetted and left to rot in the field of domestic surveillance and unchecked tyranny.

The White House backs the House bill. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement: "The Senate took an important - if late - step forward tonight. We call on the Senate to ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible. On a matter as critical as our national security, individual senators must put aside their partisan motivations and act swiftly." 
But the Senate adjourned without final action on the bill after Paul asserted his prerogative under Senate rules to delay a final vote for a couple of days. And a couple of hours later, the midnight deadline came and went. 
"This is what we fought the revolution over, are we going to so blithely give up our freedom? ... I'm not going to take it anymore," Paul declared on the Senate floor hours earlier, as supporters wearing red "Stand With Rand" T-shirts packed the spectator gallery.
Don't we not get a kick out of this White House spokesman declaring that this was an irresponsible lapse of authorities even as it kicks to death the Constitution's separation of powers and continues to rule by Executive Decree and dream up and enforce regulations of Executive Branch agencies which then have the force of law even though Congress has passed no such laws? Where is the White House on the critical national security implications of a wide open border which millions of undocumented people/terrorists cross every year? When will the Executive Branch and the President enforce the laws of the land? You know, in the name of national security.

I like Mr. Paul. I wish we had a Senate full of members like him and fewer like John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and almost all the rest.

SILK ROAD

I get a kick out of this series of quotes from Ars:
On May 29, 2015, Ulbricht returned to the Manhattan federal courthouse for sentencing. When he had a chance to speak this time around, he took it. 
"I wish I could go back and convince myself to take a different path," he said. "If given the chance, I would never break the law again." 
But Judge Katherine Forrest wasn't buying it. "Silk Road's creation showed that you thought you were better than the law," she said. She then sentenced him to life in prison, which he will serve completely unless freed on appeal; the federal prison system offers no parole options.
I find it amusing that so much time, money and effort went into finding and punishing this man for starting a service that many people found useful but zero effort has gone into investigating while the Justice Department has done nothing at all with regard to the criminal violations of the law carried out by employees of the IRS, the head of the IRS, the email server used by Hilary Clinton and her cronies to get around public law on retention of government records or the massively obvious use of the Clinton Foundation for bribes used to sway both Hillary and the State Department to take actions in accordance with the desires of the foreign governments that kept sending millions of $ to Clinton via the putrid Clinton Foundation. And let's not forget all the violations of public funding used by the president who took off all the locks on campaign donations and thereby took hundreds of millions of $ in donations from foreigners and crooks in violation of campaign financing laws.

What do you think the chances are that Hillary will break the law again if elected president?