KIND OF KNOT

Hot Air has a post up about the IRS thing. It's mostly useless but I did enjoy this little truth peeping bashfully through the prose:

In fact, an objective assessment of the Republicans conduct over more the course of the 14 months since this scandal broke has been relatively apolitical, especially considering that the IRS is charged with executing a partisan vendetta against conservatives. By and large, members have avoided bombast and overreach in pursuit of the facts surrounding the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups.

What I find improbable is that anybody at Hot Air thinks that Republicans and Conservatives are anything at all alike these days. One is a democrat in a bad suit with a residual sense of shame and the other believes in the Constitution. Why would even a democrat with a sense of shame be outraged that the IRS was used to hound the enemies of both Republicans and Democrats? All the democrats that I know rejoice that the all the tools of the State are being turned against the enemies of the State.

SOME FASCINATING PICTURES OF ANOTHER WORLD

Interesting photos out of history. I found them fascinating. See them all at the link.

 This is probably the same exact building used to build the F-35 today.

 First picture of Machu Pichu.

 A good American socialist gets a reward from his fellows in Germany.

 A socialist's work is never done.

Winston Churchill in 1895.

THE DINGHY OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT

There is an apocryphal story about a Secretary of State who would call each newly appointed American Ambassador into his office and point to the large globe beside his desk and ask them to point to the country they represent. Each new ambassador would struggle to find the little place he was going to call home for a few years and triumphantly point it out to the Secretary who would then spin the globe to bring the United States up and say, "No. That is the country you represent."

My typical lead in from left field. You wonder what fantastic feat of dismal diplomatic idiocy of American diplomacy was perpetuated here that made the embassy folks scramble to do something this spectacularly stupid and egregious. They are doing everything except stamping their little feet and shouting, "Ole! Look over here! Shiny!"

I was searching for the origin of the story above in case it actually said which of our Secretaries of State with gravitas was behind the origin of the old story. I couldn't find it, but I did find this, which somehow seems appropriate.

AFGHANISTAN IS NEXT

It doesn't seem that enough attention is being paid to the miserable fate our 3 friends in Afghanistan will suffer when the Army completes its withdrawal from that dismal place.

That's too bad. One of them owed me money.

WELL THIS IS EMBARRASSING

You know how even a broken clock is right twice a day? Watch and listen to the Commander-in-Chief as he baldly says something that I dearly wish the previous CINC had said right after our forces destroyed Iraq and drove Hussein from power. Obama summed up the reality of the situation on the ground, not just in Iraq, but throughout the muslim Middle East. No external force applied to their countries will ever do anything to bring these savages into the 20th century and it was, and is, a futile waste of time, money, blood, and lives to try.

The men who advised Bush that the United States had an obligation to "fix" Iraq after we won the war, should be hounded out of every little sinecure they lined up in the aftermath of a policy that was doomed from the start to fail. Honestly, nobody puts aside their sectarian differences over there. Not once in all of recorded history have they even tried.

IRS TELLS FABULOUS TALE

This is so completely expected. Anybody who knows the government, knows that they are ALL on network mail servers and the data is backed up all the time. They also have a good reason to believe that like many of the senior government officials of this administration, Lerner used personal and private email accounts to do things she knew damned well were against the law.

Nothing is ever really lost in the infoweb. We always have the endless resources of the NSA saving our data for us.

ECONOMIZE THIS!

From American Enterprise Institute Carpe Diem a very nice map showing the United States with the state names replaced by the countries that had a GDP in 2013 that matched that state. I think it is very cool. The Carpe Diem blog at the link gives a full but brief explanation and is worth a look.

THE DREAMERS

It is hard to pay attention anymore to the weather.

Just think of all the supposedly sane people out there who believe that we can "fix" the Earth if we send enough money to Washington, DC and let the capitalists use it to repair the planet. Remember the folks in DC who thought a war in Iraq and 12 years of nation building was going to "fix" Iraq? Yeah, same bunch thought the same thing about Afghanistan. The new bunch took four years to write a simple computer program that they demanded we use in order to get mandatory insurance. Now they have a plan to make the Earth better. They just need your money.

I'm a lot smarter than people in Washington who did things like buy GM. If you really want to save the Earth, send me your money. I promise that my planetary repairs will be five times more effective than anything out of Washington or the United Nations. I guarantee it.*

*Money back in 179 years if you're not completely satisfied with the repairs.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF LYING TO YOURSELF

There used to be a low level movement that did support immigration reform. It was back in the 80's and early 90's when Americans started to wake up and see that the fruits of America were ripe for the picking. Americans finally understood that labor was just as mobile as capital and just as willing to relocate to the farmland in California as capital was willing to relocate out of Hong Kong.

There was a move by Congress to get ahead of mob and while they allowed as how they supported immigration controls along the old lines, perhaps we should provide amnesty to the ones that slipped, unaccountably, over the southern border in the meantime. They promised us that they heard our demand to, first: secure the borders so the flood stops and only then talk about legalizing aliens.

Congress and the Administration did what they always do. They lied.

Now we see it again because everything new is old again. OK, maybe I got that backwards. Anyway, we now hear Congress (damned nearly all of them) argue that we should impose more immigration reform (as if we have been enforcing ANY of the rules for immigration). The word out of TASS and PRAVDA is that we need to do something to get ahead of the mass migration.

Immigrants flood into Texas

Thousands of immigrant youths struggle to enter Arizona

When the politicians were lying to us way back then, they promised to put in place some really meaningful border barriers that were going to reduce the "trickle" to none-at-all. The Rethuglicans said they'd support amnesty if the Administration put in place a border fence that actually controlled immigration. The Administration and Congress and the bureaucrats all lied and said, "sure."

Now they want to do it again. I understand the desire to live here. I live here. My main problem with the lame excuse for a border control is that we don't have one. The people pictured above could literally walk across the border today and nobody would lift a finger. The Administration and the federal agencies that exist for one purpose only, to control the border, stopped enforcing the laws years ago.

You see, if it is more dangerous here, they can scream the sky is falling and move to seize guns, throw dissenters into jail, spy on everyone...It's kind of what they do. They keep creating the circumstances that allow them to perpetuate their desires.

God knows they don't even make an effort on the border anymore.

TOMORROW'S HEADLINE TODAY

As I read about the devastating collapse of Iraq, I am plugging in my sympathy meter for the headlines we can all expect to see in the very near future:

AMERICAN "TOURISTS" KIDNAPPED WHILE HIKING NEAR MOSUL

AMERICAN BIKING AROUND THE WORLD KIDNAPPED NEAR TIKRIT

UNDERCOVER AMERICAN MISSIONARIES SEIZED IN FALLUJA

PUTIN AGREES TO OVERSEE ABANDONED AMERICAN EMBASSY IN BAGHDAD

What happens when all the sane people refugee out of en entire region of the planet? We get to find out. If I was any kind of foreigner living in Iraq, I'd already be gone.

The words of 3 Kuwait Navy officers I worked with many years ago, echo and linger. They said that they'd all been captured and thrown into a prison in northern Iraq because nobody senior ever gave them an order to fight or run away when the Iraqis invaded the Kuwait Navy Base. They were all extremely bitter about that and said they'd learned their lesson. "Next time, I'm not waiting! I have a car already packed, fueled and pointed south. Next time, I take my family and drive to Saudi Arabia the instant I hear of an invasion." All were emphatically nodding their heads.

We know one thing that isn't going to happen though. America is not going to intervene in Iraq for at least the next 3 years even if they use weapons of mass destruction on each other every single day between now and February 2017. Americans are sick of Iraq.

Sadly we know who is going to suffer the most in the days ahead. All those Iraqis who worked with us. Those who assisted, supported, and collected paychecks from us. You just know that somehow, unaccountably, the names and addresses of every single one of them is going to be left behind to fall into the hands of monsters who kill babies and children in the name of allah. The victims won't just be the ones that actually worked with us. We are talking about terrorists.

I think they all know it. I think they have cars fueled, packed, and pointed away and have already hit the road on their way to anyplace else on earth.

WHAT THE NSA DOES

An interesting and informative summary of all of the revelations about NSA spying revealed by Snowden.  Remember the days of long ago when people laughed out loud at paranoiacs who raved about ECHELON and OMNIVORE? The funny thing to me is that people still don't believe that the NSA spies on everybody.

Our Representatives were supposed to keep on eye on the spies in our name

THANK YOU VIRGINIA

I forgot to say that earlier.

B-52 BREAKUP 53 YEARS AGO

If you are interested in the details of how two hydrogen bombs nearly detonated after they fell to earth when the B-52 on which they were embarked broke up in the sky over North Carolina, you should read the George Washington University NSA archive here. There's also a film!

One of the two Mk39 thermonuclear weapons that landed when a B-52 bomber broke up over Goldsboro, North Carolina in January 1961. This was the weapon that came closest to detonation.

It's fascinating reading. It also boggles the mind that a B-52 bomber broke up and crashed 53 years ago and we still have them as front line bombers. It makes you wonder, doesn't it? We were supposed to have B-58s, lots of B-1 and more B-2 bombers. Think about it. The B-52 has been flying strategic missions since BEFORE we put a man on the moon.

OUR AMUSING HIMALAYIST

Passing along some of the things from reputable news sources so you don't have to.

I liked page 2. Page 1 is at the link above.

BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID

CHICK TASK FORCE

Sometimes I wonder,

Law enforcement and the DEA seized 1,500 bricks of heroin (75,000 stamped bags), 16 firearms, more than $100,000 in cash and jewelry, two luxury vehicles, Cuban cigars and a live chicken.

 At this point though, I'm just surprised the chicken survived a raid by a Police Task Force.

CANTOR'S ELECTORATE GIVES HIM THE FINGER

He was prematurely counting on these guys

Brand New Democrats Signal Approval for House Majority Leader Cantor

to vote for him after he thoroughly despised, trashed and discarded the people who sent him to Congress as their Representative.

I keep hearing the media elites telling us that the Taxed Enough Already Party is dead. I know that word doesn't mean what they think it does.

The only people more disconnected from reality than the White House, the Senate, Congress and the Media, are people who really think anybody gives a crap about Rethuglicans. A lot of media and inner beltway types think that being fed up with Congress is no reason not to keep sending the same losers back to office. If you consider that our Executive and the Executive Branch Agencies and bureaucrats, and the Courts, are ruling by decree with ZERO input from Congress, does it really matter if the toads who got us here return to office?

Standing by for a judge to invalidate the election or for the winner to be shot to death by police during another one of their typical "no knock, warrantless executions" where they accidentally target the wrong house and shoot everything inside to death, accidentally.

ANYTHING YOU WANT

A wonderful world where citizens get to say Enough. Good luck with that.

Because, we plan to catch him on the flip side.

OK, I never really listened to the flip side of this one. It was my intro every week as the prelude to Hill Street Blues which was followed by a show of interest to us Navy and Marine students who watched the Falklands War on Nightline, shortly after it's debut. We had to fortify ourselves for the music and the War with a little

War is rigorous and requires extra measures.

I GUESS I'M A CENTRIST

It might be possible that others disagree that I am a middle of the road kind of guy but then, I grade the road. This means I get to put the flags on either side that define the left and right side of the road. My road is probably the simplest road you ever saw.

The yellow lines represent the Constitution. The over-sprays you can see in the larger view show the Constitution as written and amended by the People over the last 224 years. The black top surface represents the rule of law which interprets the bright yellow lines to shape and mold the road to allow transit into the future. The edges represent the existing boundaries of acceptable behavior within the Constitutional framework. The rough on both sides pretty much describes a single all encompassing reality of those who press the limits and won't stay between the lines.

What I find most discouraging these days is that my position is pretty much right down the middle on the yellow lines but the media define my position as being over there on the far right side in the rough. It's how they define anybody who thinks that the Constitution actually has any meaning in modern society. It's how they have defined the middle of the road since the beginning.

It is NOT obvious that the country has swung through phases of liberal elitism. When I look at the road to the right of the center-line, I see what the Republican party did over the generations working within the Law and the Constitution. That blacktop represents the Civil Rights Act and other Amendments, the Emancipation Act and the opposition to WAR. The left side of the center-line is the endless pushing for the expansion of rights not enumerated or listed in the Constitution. Most of these were acts of Judicial Misrule but a few also became amendments to the Constitution. I believe that a lot of that surface was roadbuilding by Judges finding penumbras within the Constitution which have never been ratified by the people. These were the Jim Crow laws, Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe v. Wade. There was no referendum, there was only coercion by judicial fiat. That is where the Left reigns.

I most object, of all things, to conflating people who believe that the Constitution means what it says, with the liberal's position that anybody who believes in what the yellow lines represent is somehow an extremist. When Did That Happen?

The odd thing about the road pictured above is that you cannot really differentiate between those over the road's limits; left or right, from each other. They both look the same to me. Liberals, who are also the ones that rule the media and universities, elect to see some sort of difference between the wilderness on the left and right side of the road.

If you look way into the distance though, you see what always happens when the people decide that they've had enough of the rule-by-decree that epitomizes the left. Yes yes, I hear you saying that it could equally bend to the left. So it could. That is why those of us who prefer the Constitution prefer Constitutional rule and the rule of law as the route to the future vs a constant set of revolutions where elites get torn down and massacred.

Revolution needs to be avoided but it doesn't help that the left equates all who believe in the yellow dotted lines with complete, total, right-wing, fanatics. They invite over-reaction from people who feel forced to use extraordinary means to keep the road going straight.* Those who populate the desert to the right, do so in an unheralded way. They don't propose ANY laws or amendments. When the NAZIs occupied that ground they called themselves SOCIALISTS. Just who are the SOCIALISTS today?

Give our desert dwellers of the left time and you will meet them. We're not going to like it though. Mostly, these lone fanatics exist in places where the left has swept aside all the historical precepts and enshrined Rule-By-Decree. They are places without any meaningful Constitutional basis. The left successfully destroyed all limits on their own rules. They don't tolerate dissent in word, deed or in the courts.

*And you know what? That isn't a slur or a slight. Personal never bothered me. I don't care and never did. Trashing the law with nought but judges means that one day you'll wake up and find the age of consent is 5. You didn't vote for that. That is why you see the road take off to the right in the bigger picture. That is why there is always a pushback from those who believe that the PEOPLE MAKE THE LAW, not Harvard and Yale judges. When the PEOPLE are squeezed out of the process by judges who make their own laws, they really only have one place to go.

PRIVILEGE

It comes late by design.

Who exactly attacked the beaches at Normandy?

Designed by men who believed in affirmative action.

Does it make you wonder?

DESCENT INTO TOMORROW

There is an interesting lesson that we are about to see unveiled in Utah where a cop who declined to work the Gay Pride Festival has been placed on administrative leave pending dismissal from the Force.

Police routinely shoot unarmed innocent civilians just about every time cops open fire. The ones they don't kill, they wound. Less than 1% of the police involved are ever fired much less held accountable for these random murders.

Evidently the police are more willing to tolerate cops who kill innocent unarmed people they find peacefully in their homes when they smash in the wrong door, than a cop who flunked the test of Political Correctness. I could buy an argument that Police must follow orders, but if that's the case, are the police who kill innocent unarmed people following orders?

When did it become the rule that the police have a paramount right to kill people for no reason?
All cops are OK with killing you if that makes it safe for them. We should do something about that. In any society that enjoys the rule of law, this sort of thing would not happen twice.

THE FRIEND OF KERRY AND OBAMA REVEALED

I hear the the Administration is now claiming that the 5 Taliban released in exchange for the man who wore our uniform in Afghanistan were mere unimportant flunkies. Not this one though.

THE POLE STAR ALWAYS POINTS NORTH

How bad must it be in Latin America that their children are flooding over the border into the United States? The US economy has been shrinking for about 7 years. Despite some of the most pathetic lies in our history about the economy improving, the real evidence suggests that it has not improved at all. Typically when the US economy catches a cold, the rest of the Americas get pneumonia.

I suspect that most of the kids who crossed the border came with the means to reach their aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins or their churches where they expect to be welcomed with open arms. I expect that their condition is no worse today than it was when immigrants flooded our shores from Europe for more than 3 centuries. There wasn't much of a social network to provide even minimum food or shelter then but still they came. Most of them were convinced that if they could make it here they would be better off than if they had stayed at home.

I imagine that the news people are serving up wonderful stories now about the favelas of Rio de Janeiro as the World Cup looms there and the incineration of the economies of places like Venezuela. They may be glossing over what is happening in Mexico in the hope that their same inadequate explanations about how well Mexico is doing economically are greeted with the same suspension of disbelief engendered in us by the imaginative fabrications they come up with to explain how well the US economy is doing. Besides, they'll observe, it's Bush's fault and Obamacare is a huge success and never mind that 20% who signed up so far probably don't have insurance because of glitches and that 40% or more of the rest simply documented their eligibility for Medicare.

I think there are probably a few unChristian Americans who are thinking that the kids should all be returned to sender. That will probably happen with a few of the ones that don't get the warm family embrace they were expecting. Others will suggest that they are undesirables who should be packed off to places like Detroit. I disagree.

They need to go to the places in this country that have spread the widest social safety net. They should be dropped off in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Santa Monica, Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, Atlanta, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Birmingham, Tucson, Little Rock, Miami, Orlando, Burlington, Portland, Baltimore, New Haven, Boston and Charleston, S.C.

Those are the cities who solidly support every Democratic Party initiative and reliably vote for them every single time. I'm sure they'll extend a helping hand to new immigrants without English or any discernible skills but who are willing to work for almost any low wage in jobs on or off the books.

The kids are going to gravitate to the major cities because there is very little support available in the little cities and mostly what's going to happen is that they are going to change the cities long before the cities change them because the big cities no longer serve as the core of what was once the essence of being American. The big old cities exist now almost purely for all out racial and class warfare.

I spent a little time working the southern border. There is nothing there that would have kept me out or from returning as many times as it took to establish residency here if I born in Latin America. At least here in America one has a chance to become a kulak if not something better. This is still the land of opportunity. That's not the case south of the border.

I don't really expect it to go on too much longer here. We've been seeing politicians and the Justice Department dismiss the rule of law as meaningless and asking, "what difference does it make now?" I happen to think that the rule of law was the only thing that separated a great country from pestilential 3rd world shit-holes. First there had to be respect for the law and second, the law must not bring itself into disgrace, abuse and oblivion. Our politicians, bureaucrats and judges have managed a trifecta of evil and destroyed all respect for the law.

D DAY IN FRANCE

It was the end of the Third Reich.

Even the kids knew it.

ANOTHER COOL MAP

From the Land of Maps

The last time each country was conquered:

THE QUIPSTER AS A JOKER

A good man with a joke or two.

DAY IN COURT

I guess all we can do with judges like this, is shoot them. America is increasingly burdened by an awful lot of people with what amount to patents of nobility who cannot be held accountable by the law and the mechanisms that punish misbehavior and crime. It started to go bad a long time ago but I think it has been accelerating ever since the nation hired a lawyer and his team of investigators to determine who had 'outed' CIA person Plame. Two and a half years of scurrilous investigating by the team cost us $2.58 million which seems like a bargain. On the other hand, they knew when they started the investigation that Novak's source has been Richard Armitage.

All that fuss and bother about a State Department hack accidentally revealing the identity of a CIA analyst who worked in CIA headquarters in Langley. Contrast that with the recent disclosure and photo of the CIA Station Chief in Afghanistan who was outed by the State Department or the White House. The silence is deafening.

I think it is time revisit all these grants of blanket immunity that judges, prosecutors and police have bestowed upon themselves. Nobody died and made them kings.

PASSING FOR NEWS

When I was young I believed that the Washington Post and New York Times were papers of record and that they could be relied upon to deliver facts, then I turned six. Anyway, I culled this from the Washington Post.

For many, Rice remains best known for her role in the controversy surrounding the deadly 2012 attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

Days after the assault, she was dispatched to five Sunday talk shows to make the case that the onslaught on a U.S. compound was spontaneous and spurred by anger over an anti-Islam video — a CIA-crafted talking point that turned out to be wrong.

The author of this hagiography simply announces that it was the CIA who crafted Rice's talking points and notably, got it wrong. Do even morons believe that the CIA generated the stupid and pathetic lie about some lame movie causing an armed attack on our consulate and the murder of 4 Americans?

Two things concern me about this. Is Rice stupid and gullible enough to believe the fantasies she spun on the talk shows and if she knowingly spouted those lies, how could anyone ever believe anything she says in the future? Is that who you'd want as the National Security Advisor? I'm a little concerned about our foreign policy team. This is what Rice is concerned with according to the same article:

These days, Rice has been keeping a list of issues at risk of being ignored: a trade agreement with Asia-Pacific nations, development projects in Africa, protecting gay rights overseas.

Nothing screams national security like gay rights overseas. On the other hand, I found it in the Washington Post and I don't think you can actually believe anything they print.

I DON'T KNOW HIM

I posted earlier about the President's decision to violate the law when he traded pure terrorists for America's only POW in Afghanistan. I was prompted to post that because I disliked the trade. The information I had back when he went adrift made me suspect that Bergdahl was a deserter who emulated other service men who defected to the enemy in Korea and Vietnam. On the other hand, I don't know that man and we don't negotiate with terrorists.

I've looked and listened over the last 2 days and I think that I can set aside doubt. Bergdahl defected to the enemy. The Army knew it. The Army promoted him in absentia knowing that he was an enemy of the race of reason.

The people who conspired to violate the law and released hardcore terrorists back into the wild should be investigated and punished for violating the law. The president may get away with saying that he only has to obey what he thinks is the law. For everybody else, there isn't any wriggle room. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, Lieutenant Colonel Bud McFarlane and countless others have shown that the military is held to the laws as written. Yes, they were later pardoned or the convictions were overturned but the law moved against them and the law won. It must be that way. Without the rule of law we are no better than Argentina, Venezuela, or the Philippines.

Many people have decided that Reagan was wrong to let Iran-Contra happen on his watch. Perhaps. Still, I don't recall anything at all like this picture below at the time or in the decades since.

For many decades the party used to say that we could survive a bad president without irreparable harm. I think so too. I suspect that many of our friends won't survive this bad president. We never used to speculate about the ruination that a bad president would visit on the rest of the world while we were 'surviving' his misrule.

Hopefully, they armed themselves.

PROP 13

Outside of California, almost nobody ever heard of Proposition 13. It was a referendum vote that Californians voted for in an effort to keep home owners in their homes despite government and liberal/progressives. Progressive/liberal judges have not yet overturned it and dismissed it. They will.  This is what it was about.

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year. 

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.” 

The arrival of this year’s appraisal notices — which in Travis County showed homes’ average market values jumped 12.6 percent and average taxable values rose 8 percent for 2014 — is sparking a push for reform. Similar jumps have occurred in Williamson and Hays counties.

Anybody can disagree with Prop 13. Go ahead. Idiots vote more and more taxes and think, well, I've done my bit for civilization. They never understand why it was that we survived without these extra taxes. They'll soon approve hearth taxes, door taxes, window taxes, closet taxes and they won't even know. They don't read history. They're proud of their ignorance.

Prop 13 passed to keep retired people in their homes as property values in the Golden State skyrocketed beyond the dreams of avarice. It does no one on a fixed income justice to steal their houses of 30 or 50 years because the land values have ballooned astronomically. Look at Sterling who bought the Cripplers at $12 million dollars and sold it just last week for $2 billion dollars. It's not that the property owners don't owe anything, it's simply that they don't owe everything.

You can also look at the fraud of a California Governor who claims that the State's budget is balanced. OK, he balanced the budget and he didn't do what New Jersey or New York does and jack the property tax through the roof, only because he can't. Yet, in spite of his inability to extort money from property owners, this liberal progressive claims that the budget of California is balanced.

I don't believe him but that doesn't keep him from trying to extort home owners by jacking up property taxes. Prop 13 does that. Otherwise? 100% rises over 43 consecutive years. Liberals are like that. They ruin a place and move on. They always do it by jacking the property taxes.

A MINOR TRUTH

When you have someone, you never need

THESE ARE ALWAYS GOOD

Worth a moment of your time. It's the world as it was once.

A British Soldier with his back turned to enemy prisoners on the beach at Normandy. Imagine doing that to our enemies today. OK, you don't have to imagine that. That's policy.

Evil has many henchmen. Go ahead and refer to muslims as hand-maidens of evil, as I do. When you ever think to wonder what caused real lasting hurtful damage to people, consider what we did to these people and the Japanese. Contrast our treatment of muslims in your own way. We didn't nuke or incinerate their women and children out of hand.

CLASSIFIED DAYS

When I was a LT, I transferred from one of our Mobile Units to the Group Staff after a brief one year hiatus aboard a Tank Landing Ship in Long Beach. The Commodore and I knew each other fairly well because he had commanded the Mobile Unit when I joined it and had, after promotion and tours at other commands, newly returned as Commodore of this particular Group after leading it in the Middle East during Desert Storm. He called me the day after I reported aboard and asked me to represent him at a demonstration being held the next day by Naval Research and Development Command who were going to demonstrate our new surveillance systems. Needless to say, I made arrangements to do just that. I faxed my security clearance to NRAD. (Yes, words about that at another time).

Something odd happened shortly after that dog and pony show at Point Loma. I had faxed my Record of Security Clearances to NRAD, as required, in order to get on the installation and thought no more about it for almost 10 years. The next three years at that Staff, I never managed to get access to their unclassified computers. They were all password protected by some little tool their Intelligence Specialists and Intel Officer used to control access to their unclassified (and hopelessly inadequate) network and nobody would give me a password.

This was going on back in the heady days of personal computers (early 90's) and I didn't much care. I was commissioned into a Navy which did not require its officers to be clerks and admin staff and I was prepared to keep it that way. I handed in paperwork and clerks typed it up.

I was selected and appointed to that Staff as Assistant Operations Officer and immediately after reporting was also assigned duties as Special Projects Officer. After 2 months I was also designated Weapons Officer for the Staff and 14 Mobile Units. I wasn't bothered by the inability to get onto the Staff's unclassified computers and network because we, OPS, did classified work on computers at another command/location and unclassified machines were pretty much useless to me. The one exception was the weapons office where I had my Gunner's Mates handle all the data entry and admin.

Periodically, the earth would move and it would be time to turn in annual reports and evaluations. I would usually prepare them at home on my computer and bring them to work where I would furnish them as hard copy to the command's administration office which was stuffed with clerks. The first time I brought in a package of evaluations, one of the officious junior petty officers grandly informed me that I had to hand in my work on a floppy disk. The next day I gave him a floppy disk with the information on it. His boss tracked me down hours later and complained that my disk didn't work.

I didn't really think it would. In fact, I knew it wouldn't. I said the only machine I had was a Mac and if he had problems reading the data off my disks he could always do his job and type it in off the hard copy (which was the way the Navy worked and which was the way that office was staffed at the time). He said it was a problem. I grieved with him and then told him, "it isn't my problem."

I spent most of my three years while attached to that command, cross-assigned to other commands in Korea, Thailand, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The ridiculous computer nonsense never rose above the level of weak nuisance to me. Imagine being totally unable to whip up a powerpoint presentation...

About 10 years after I transferred to SPECBOATs, I came back. I was working at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command when I was ordered in as Operations Officer for the Group. About a year after I reported aboard, one of my senior Intel Staff brought me a memo from the files they had been going through, and showed it to me.

In a hand written Memorandum For the Record, an Intel Specialist 10 years earlier had written that, "it had come to his attention that I had personally touched my own Record of Clearance Form 5520/10 and was thus, maybe, a security problem." He forwarded it to the Intel Officer of that time and he forwarded it to the acting Chief of Staff who had concurred with their finding that I should not be allowed access to the command's unclassified computers even as I was using SPECWAR's classified networks up the road in Coronado.

I laughed out loud when I read the memo. All the mystery and stupidity explained after 10 years. The funny thing for me was that prior to reporting back then I was the Security Manager at my previous command and the one before that. I was the cryptographic security officer at the previous 3 commands. I was the person that handled sending clearance requests when we visited other commands. Doing so was as natural to me as breathing.

They never even thought about discussing it with me at the time. These were the good old days when no clearance data was valid unless it was transmitted via navy message. Faxing clearances was, on the face of it, a really stupid breach of security since anybody could send a fax. NRAD broke the mold and only required faxed clearances. You remember up at the top where I said I'd mention this later, right? I called NRAD about getting their Plain Language Address to transmit a clearance message to and was told, "just fax it."

Every real command transmitted a message request to the Department of the Navy Central Adjudication Facility (DONCAF) requesting the security clearances of personnel assigned to the command. THAT was the only basis for granting a clearance within the command. In the same file we were laughing at was a copy of the message from DONCAF dated a week or two later saying my clearances matched the files in my service record. I was spared a thousand hours of power-pointing by incompetent fools.

Someday I'll post my rules for successful people management. High on the list is finding ways to incorporate the fools BUPERS has issued you. In this case, it really did work out, all for the best. The fools were gratified to leap into the "security breach", I was really happy to be spared the Admin fools and their games and NOBODY ever asked me to power-point anything.

Oh, and "Sir? Do you want a Blackberry? Just fill out this little form and we'll arrange to issue you one."

So fools can reach me 24/7.

I don't think so.

APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEIVING

Genius is relative. You don't know.

Snowden fooled the NSA totally and completely? They lay back and spread their legs and opened up all the sources and methods they want you to know about....And now the bad guys know that keeping the Drones off them is really not going to happen. Fuck with US and die. That's a worthy goal and it cost us nothing. The sources and methods here can no longer be compromised. They are ubiquitous. There is no way around them.....yet.

Was the private lost in Afghanistan an ultra deep cover operative working for the NSA who tagged all those losers and in a couple of months we'll be reading about how the micro-sweat he left in their dank worlds serves as a homing beacon for Tomahawks?

Can't you see it? American pee as a fire control system for our Drones. The new NSA motto, "We know where Americans have been!"

OBL and his fellow muslim terrorists should be afraid.

NASA'S LETTER OF MARQUE

I heard about the private effort to reestablish control over a NASA spacecraft a couple of weeks ago on NPR and then it faded from my view. Well it looks like the crew were successful in regaining control of a spacecraft that journeyed around the sun on its own and returned.

That's pretty cool. We build good spacecraft.

One of the many things I liked when I visited Space College's site was this picture they have of their Mission Control. It's not just the pirate flag, it's the venue. I had business that took me to Moffet Field a couple of times a month. I usually stopped by the enormous aircraft hangers built for the Navy's airships and then I'd eat at McDonalds and then get a haircut at the Base barber shop which shared the parking lot.

ISEE-3 MISSION CONTROL (formerly McDonalds)

Navy Airship Hangers. I used to see half a dozen C-130s tucked in a corner of one of these structures. That's a C-130 above.

FOLLOW THE LAW

This kind of lawless behavior becomes more and more irritating.

A senior administration official, agreeing to speak on the condition of anonymity to explain the timing of the congressional notification, acknowledged that the law was not followed. When he signed the law last year, Obama issued a signing statement contending that the notification requirement was an unconstitutional infringement on his powers as commander in chief and that he therefore could override it.

If you don't want to sign  the law the Constitution provides for that. The president may veto a bill that he does not want or he may simply head to Hawaii for an extended golfing adventure and the bill becomes law without him. To sign the bill and then say that you will ignore the law isn't one of the powers enumerated in the Constitution.

He damages everything he touches.