CLIMATE REVELATIONS ON THE DOOM FRONT

It looks like a couple of people have decided that the world's missing heat is hiding in the deep Atlantic where it is lurking under a bushel or something slightly scarier. At any rate, it's just a matter of days now before we'll be buried again under a rain of misery and screams of outright terror as the ignorant followers of the Global Warming Permanent Crisis get reminded of the ocean bottom clathrates that will melt and KILL US ALL!!!!!

So we have that too look forward to. I guess were going to be forced to pave the bottom of the oceans. Just to be safe.

UPDATE: WORLD TURNING INTO ICE!!!!  Well, who are you going to believe, Gore, or your lying satellites taking pictures of the polar ice cap from orbit?

I'm waiting for Gore and the Cult of Warm scammers to start mentioning swarms of Piranha bees or Giant mutant star goats. As I recall, they have already leaped aboard the Ebola train by blaming global warming for its increasing spread.

THE WORLD WILL NOT MISS HIM

A truly despicable man died in prison today while serving out his sentence for betraying his country. He had an enormous impact on my life and the lives of countless others. May he and all his family rot in hell. It is still, almost unbelievable, that his wife had to practically tackle an FBI agent, throw him to the ground and tattoo the word SPY on his forehead to get the idiots there and at NIS to take any notice of the traitor who gave away Fleet Broadcast, TGO, HiComm and the secrets of the KW 7, KY 28 and KY 38.

Having learned nothing from this one, the Army went on to give a twit like Manning full unmonitored access to the entire Secret Internet Protocol network and the NSA did the same thing when it hired people who gave Snowden full unmonitored access to the SCI network.

Background investigations used to mean something but I saw the handwriting on the wall, literally, when I went to my first staff job and saw on the bulletin board a little notice tacked up announcing that anybody who had been denied a security clearance from the U.S. Government simply because they were Vietnamese, Chinese, Cuban, East German, Hungarian, etc, could now sue the government. That was back in 1991. Good going guys.

TOURISM

Once again I filled my morning with the dulcet sounds of NPR and listened to a woman describe the Red Army soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces as "tourists." She said that Vladimir claims that his tourists simply got lost and ended up 30 miles into the Ukraine on the wrong side of the border. Given the quality of our people at the Department of State I was kind of looking forward to Ambassador Pouncetrifle coming forward to offer oleaginous descriptions of how such a tragic affair came to pass and urge the Ukrainian authorities to do the dignified and stately thing and hand the tourists back to the Russians.

I think Keith Laumer and William Lederer had it easy back in the days when they wrote Retief of the CDT and The Ugly American. There was no shortage of material and we know now that the Department of State has always been the last refuge of the ignorant polished turds of the elite ruling class. ....not you of course ambassador cousin Tim.

I found a few pictures of Russian tourists that I like.

Russian Panzer Tourists on the Road

Russian Panzer Tourists in First Class

Russian Tourists Third Class

What can one say about NPR? They offer such a rich breakfast for the mind.

ABOUT THOSE NUKES

Wouldn't it be amusing if it turns out Kiev didn't turn over all the Soviet era nuclear weapons in their territory after the anti-anschluss? It's kind of bold the way Vladimir is staking everything on a rather charming belief in the naivety of the people the Soviet Union destroyed with the Holodomor. I think the Ukrainians held onto a couple of dozen atomic weapons because, why not? 

You know, when you think about smuggling an atomic weapon into Moscow, the sky is not the limit. You could send it on a train, or a truck, or a car, or a donkey.

I've failed to see Mr. Jon Carry trying to negotiate any kind of a deal between Putin and Kiev but, it's not too far outside the bounds of reason to see somebody putting a little nuke on his plane should he try Kissinger's famous shuttle diplomacy and seek to bring peace to the Crimean Khanate and the Prince of Moscow. Kerry and this lot of boobs would be just the clueless donkeys to carry nukes to Moscow without ever knowing.

If I was Putin, Air Force 3 would never be allowed to fly over Soviet territory.

THE ABSURD

If he wasn't French I would find it hard to believe but, he is a French socialist of the first water so there can be no denying that he's a complete imbecile. In his own stupid words:

France has had effectively no economic growth this year, unemployment is hovering around 10 percent and Hollande's approval ratings are sunk in the teens. The country is under pressure from the 28-nation EU to get its finances in order, but Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg has criticized austerity as the wrong medicine to foster growth and argues the government should spend more freely to create jobs.

He lashed out at the government's policies in a final adieu as minister on Monday.

"The entire world is urging us —even begging us — to end these absurd austerity policies that are plunging the eurozone into an economic slowdown," he said in a statement to the press.

"My responsibility as economy minister is to tell the truth, and observe... that not only these austerity policies are not working, but they are also unfair, as well as being ineffective"

Contrast with the Argentinian socialist-optimists now suffering default after default in Argentina where their government persisted in spending money it didn't have for generations. At the turn of the last century, Argentina was the 4th richest nation in the world.

The French and others occasionally remind me of the little person who declared she did not want to learn from the mistakes of others! She wanted to make those mistakes for herself! Admittedly, she was only 7 at the time.

SRSLY?

They're out there stealing passengers now?

What next?

A MODEST PROPOSAL

I'm sure all sane Americans are disgusted with the utter dishonesty and lack of transparency in our Executive branch (IRS, DOJ, DOS) and all of the Agencies under it. I have devised a modest proposal to improve the public's visibility into what should be an open process of democratic government. It's really very simple.

Every single computer, blackberry, unclassified C4I system that is procured with federal dollars must include, in the operating system an utterly iron clad application that automatically copies every single email sent by that computer to any recipient, to a series of master repositories that won't just file them away. There will be NO exceptions. This includes law enforcement because they are far and away the most egregious bunch of evidence destroyers. (Most Executive Branch agencies now have their own SWAT and armed law enforcement agents.)

Those emails, all of them, will be subject to data mining by us. It will be as easy to search the email files as it is for google to search the world wide web or alta vista the higher web. The NSA can dive in too if they want but in the meantime, any person can look at any unclassified email that ever originates on a government procured machine.

BLITHE SPIRITS

I witnessed a man run a stop sign in a school zone this afternoon. The driver that had the right of way stopped his car in front of the offender and shared with him his anger and contempt that not only did the idiot full on run the stop sign while little kids were crossing the street, he also ignored the horn of the oncoming car which had the right of way. If was funny how all the people you think would laugh at the angry man, laughed at the angry man and one progressive hippy, walking his 5 year old daughter towards the cross walk, was moved to shout, "he made a mistake dude! Give him a break!"

The angry man replied that people aren't allowed to make mistakes like that while driving a 3000 pound vehicle that can kill other people when the driver ignores his surroundings. The hippy was not impressed.

The angry man got back in his car and moved to the school crossing 30 feet away which has no actual stop sign, just an old man waving a micro-stop sign on a stick. He stopped to wait for the kids and parents to cross. As he watched the progressive hipster and his little girl walk into the cross walk the angry man couldn't help but ask him, "how about now? What if I just made a mistake and ran over you because I ran this stop sign? You gonna be OK with that and cut me some slack?"

I listened to NPR again today. I know, it's a bad habit. They had a journolist* on who was appalled at the terrible murder of the ISIS photo-journolist that was recently executed by his captors. She was upset that the Italian and Spanish governments will pay millions to recover their journolists out there covering the terrorist's side of the war while countries like the US and Britain won't pay ransoms. As I recall her words, she said that it was like journolists are seen now by the people they cover as walking ATMs.

She has a good point. Journolists are unhappy at reporting just the news; they need to tell it from the perspective of the underdog who has been forced to adopt the tactics of murder, terror, intimidation and suicide bombing. If they weren't such blithe spirits I'd almost feel sorry for them. That said, I do feel genuine regret for all journalists who are captured and killed or die on assignment as they cover the wars and conflicts and write down the facts for their readers.

Journolists? Not so much. When one dines with leopards, one should really examine the menu before committing to the meet. Those spots don't change.

*Journolist

CIVIL WAR LETTER HOME SILVER RIVER, TENNESSEE

                                    Camp near Silver River Tennessee

                                                      November 24^th 1862

                                             Dear Mother

                                                      I received a letter from you this evening dated Nov. 19^th, 1862 in which you state that you received a letter from me of the 1^st of this month and one of the 13^th at the same time. I suppose that the one of the 1^st was laying in the mail some place until communication was opened between here and Louisville, Kentucky. We are camped between two rivers one of the the above name and the other , Stone River, the latter is a fine stream with high banks but the other is a stream about the size of Silver Creek in Union County, Indiana. I wrote a letter to father today with the last stamp I had on it but I can borrow one for this letter. You asked me why the Captain of Company I resigned. It was because the 1^st Lieutenant and him could not live together.

Captain Patterson was a man who drank considerable liquor and it was the cause  of it making him unfit for duty so that the Colonel recommended him to resign and done all in his power to get his papers thru. Since he has left Lieutenant McKiney and Lieutenant Davis have been promoted, the first to Captain and the second to 1^st Lieutenant. And Wm ?ering and C.R Burgess have also been promoted. The former to 2^nd Lieutenant and the latter to 1^st Sergeant. You wish to know what I mean by styling myself the reformed son. I can answer that by confessing to you (Dear Mother not wanting it to cause you any pain) that I have indulged in spending my time in idleness and uselessness until  today when I was detailed to come to the place where I am and in doing so I got out of bad company into good and under the control of a religious man who has some care for the good of men’s souls as well as their bodies.
 I have pledged myself never to be caught using profane language to be found idling away my time, gaming or doing anything is unbecoming of an upright young man. I have partly the promise of a better place in a few days. It is now getting late so I will have to close soon. Give my respects to all. Tell me something of my old schoolmates Shriner Nutter and others who I do not just at present think of. Write soon and often.

Your affectionate son

         Luther M Beaver

PS Direct your letters to Nashville Tennessee to which place the mail is taken every day and mail brought back.

The places he names sometimes have vanished or are very hard to find. The history of the 15th Indiana shows that they had just finished marching up to this camp the day before. It always amazes me how the mail kept up with them and found its way to the soldiers with such an apparent lack of difficulty. Writing as the former mail officer for the Middle East Force, we sometimes went weeks without getting or sending any mail and we lost an entire plane loaded with mail when it was destroyed in a crash taking off out of Sigonella.

Silver Creek, Maury County, Tennessee

RUSSIAN ROCKETS

What happened to America's space program? That asked, what happened to the European space program? How did Russia get an exclusive lock on launching all payloads and satellites into space? I know NASA garbaged the manned space program we used to have but now they and the European non-Space Agency are forced to use unreliable Russian rockets.

I think it is long past time to kick Bolden to the curb. He has been a dismal failure as head of NASA.

Seriously, why are we forced to use Russian rockets? What happened to our rockets?

COLORADO ROAMING

I am sorry the posting and commenting has been a little sparse. We went to Colorado and I decided to see if I could survive on just an iPad, iPhone and iPod. It turns out I do very well without a laptop but it does limit me on posting and writing. I once knew how to put pictures into posts using an iPad but I lost the knack.

It was a glorious week for a visit to the mountains. We flew to Denver, drove up to Fort Collins and for the first time in my life, I experienced a dry heat. It was 96˚ but it felt like low 70s. I'm used to enormous heat accompanied by 99% humidity. Fort Collins is a bland little town but we did take a couple of hours to tour the New Belgium Brewery and quaff some of these:

We visited several towns during our stay. I had to stop in Idaho Springs to check on my friend Steve Canyon. He's still there, right where he's been since the first time I saw him some 20 years ago.

Steve Canyon

We stopped at Colorado Springs since I'd never made it to the Air Force Academy and had a look around. It is an impressive place but it's a wilderness. It's not like Annapolis where the mids can hop over the wall and be in town right next to a bar. The Air Force Academy is in the middle of nowhere. We did get to see some impressive planes. We saw both a B52 on a stick and the Stealth Bomber behind it.

B-52 on a Stick

Exotic Stealth composite layered polymer reflecting an alien death ray

Stealth Bomber on a Stick after the alien attack

It was a good trip but we're happy to be home.

WITHOUT REMORSE

Taken from the instapundit.

...a thousand words.

RISK MANAGEMENT IN THE NEW SPACE AGE

I read this News article today and cringed. These people, now at war with Russia, plan to loft irreplaceable satellites costing hundreds of millions of dollars using Russian rocket motors they just now received personally from the hands of Vladimir Putin. There's no risk because they just know they can trust Russians to do the right thing.

IRS, EPA, STATE, DOJ, HHS, TSA, HLS, DA: ALL POLITICIZED BY THE DEMONS

It's getting kind of old. You know guys, if you're going to try this all the time? You need to coordinate. It looks all kinds of suspicious and damning when every single organ of government controlled by the democrats is dedicated to the sole task of screwing over conservatives.

How do you force the people to disregard and disrespect the law? There's a way. You work very very hard to make sure that no man can trust the law.

How exactly does making the law "optional" work for you?"  Democrats ruined it for everybody.

You can read about it in the latest version of the History of the Peloponnesian War.

WATCHING THE WHEELS COME OFF

I watched Steyn eviscerate the fascists and anti-speech liberal ruling elite in Canada years ago and never doubted he would prevail against them here. How gratifying to see even the liberals notice the stakes in the game.

VITAL STATS

I was just looking at what happens here under the hood and was struck by the collapse of the Fire Fox browser.  I myself shifted to either Safari or Chrome many months ago but I find it interesting that many of my readers have done the same thing in recent months. FF used to dominate followed by IE. As of this moment, FF is down to 11% of traffic here. There are actually more holdouts still using IE. It's almost like finding people still using Netscape or Mosaic...

Gee, I wonder what Mozilla did to burn so many bridges almost overnight....

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Remember when George flew out to one of our carriers returning from DESERT STORM and the liberals suffered a SCRAM and freaked out at the obtusity of the sign stretched across the ship's island?  It was true after a fashion since neither the Navy nor the Nation had sailed into battle with any other goal than toppling Saddam. It looked pathetic only in hindsight as the Armed Forces were forced to remain and try to turn a filthy lawless land into a strong independent nation.  In that regard we did about as well as the Nation did for the last Fifty Years in the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs.  Nonetheless, it was a genuine moment of triumph and one wonders which of Obama's and the Democratic Regime's offerings since then have come close to the sense of victory and achievement of that moment when our forces returned home victorious.

I suspect that the only thing we can point to is Obamacare. Likely it too will prove Pyrrhic in the end. We will get some idea here in a few months following the midterm elections.  I find it telling though that while the Lightworker goes about his fund raising activities with a near religious mania, no democrats running for re-election ever want to appear with him on their campaign stops even when fortune favors them with an appearance by Obama within their district.

Insert mental image of the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED picture here.  I'd do it myself but blogging on an iPod is kicking my ass.

AH IS IT ONLY ME

Given this administration, and that the enemy has gained control of Haditha dam, can't you just see the administration response? It probably looks something like this.

"Let's take away the threat and blow the dam ourselves."  I'm not sure if that was Hillary, Donilon, Jones or Brennan talking. They all have the same point of view. I'm sure it occurred to all of them.

NO END TO THE HUMOR WHEN SCIENCE GOES BAD

From the web over the last couple of days. Global warming excuses for why the world fails to match any of the dread models.

"Scientists" gotta Pay!

Pretty scary.

BASKETBALL EXPLAINED

From our Arlington correspondent a question for the ages and the answer:

Some stores are incredibly dangerous and should be left to experts.

WHY THE MODEL IS NEVER WRONG

A lovely explanation of why the models are never wrong and why deniers are just a bunch of stupid pathetic losers.

Don't even think about touching the model. Just don't.*

*Many years ago I asked Sondrakistan to reconsider ditching her model. I don't regret it and everybody else chimed in pretty rapidly. Years and years later, she remains.

** I used to use Lex's page to jump to his blogroll and never thought to copy them down and then, his page went dark and I forgot so many of the places that I used to go.

GOOSE MURDERING LUNATIC WORSHIPPED AS A HERO

It wasn't all that long ago;

At exactly 9:30 AM on January 15, 2009, a flock of unsuspecting geese was sucked into the engines of United Airways Flight 1549 out of New York's La Guardia airport. Karma, it seems, wasted no time catching up with the sinister aircraft, for it suddenly spiraled out of control and plunged into the icy water of the Hudson River. Save for the passengers and crew, there were no survivors.

Desperate for another "Joe the Plumber" to ruin Obama's historical day in the sun, the Right Wing Media is hailing the pilot of the Death Plane, Chelsey Sullenberger III, as a "hero". Excuse me, but if I moseyed on down to the local park and took a weed-whacker to a flock of endangered waterfowl, they'd lock me up and throw away the key - and rightly so. Indeed, in a sane, rational, progressyve world, Sullenberger would be frog-marched out of the airport in leg irons. Instead, he gets the key to the city and gushing adoration from the so-called "unbiased press". Worse of all, he shows absolutely no remorse for the lives he destroyed.

"After the crash, (Chauncy Goose-Slayer III) was sitting there in the ferry terminal, wearing his hat, sipping his coffee and acting like nothing happened," one eyewitness complained.

"That guy is one cool customer," a horrified airlines official wept. "He was...behaving like it was just another day at the office."

No shame. No guilt. No conscience. That's the mark of a true sociopath. Kind of reminds you of certain chimpy someone who is at this moment enjoying the last of his stolen days in the White House, doesn't it?

Sadly, both Charles Winchester III and George W. the Shrub will most likely never be tried for their crimes against either humanity or Anatidae. One can only hope that as investigators sift through the mangled, mutilated remains of the slaughtered geese, new evidence will come to light that will put both these murderous neocon bastards behind bars forever.

Who knew they floated?

THEY ARE NOT GODS

I think we have shoved our civilization to one side. If one bothers to read this stuff, it reads wrong. very wrong.

Out here? Justice is an open book. When the State closes the book, it is not justice.

NAVAL LEADERSHIP FIXED

I finessed the stupid thing so there is only the one link now.

HOW IRRITATING IS THIS

Ripped from American Enterprise.

Sometimes I give in to an impulse and believe that teachers are actually not doing their jobs. The kids I see going to school across the street every day are filled with enthusiasm and joy of life. I can see it in them every single day. I don't see miserable muppets getting off the busses and heading into the school in the morning and I don't see them coming out of the school in the afternoon. What I see are kids who are glad to be there, with their friends.

Hormones and puberty happen in middle school which is further down the road but still on the same block. Is that where the teachers start to file off the desire for knowledge that the little children have? I think by the time they reach high school it is way too late to engage them again with a desire to learn.

What the hell happens to these kids between 6th and 8th grade just down the road? It does not take Aristotle to teach young children the basic essentials of making a huge success in life by educating themselves with the help of able teachers and rafts of books.

Public education in this country is broken.

ELEGANT TURN OF PHRASE OR DEEP TRUTH

From The American Thinker, the last paragraph.

One result of this K-12 conspiracy is that the least appropriate people, obsessed with the least helpful ideas, educationally speaking, migrated to education.  These were people who valued education not for its own sake, but for social schemes they had in mind.  Whether a kid can read, do arithmetic, or knows very much is not a primary concern for these people.

The people who tinker with education always talk about making changes that will take effect and make things better in a mere five or six years. It's hard to take such people seriously. The process they are messing about with is the oldest respectable profession. Every possible kind of instruction has been tried in the past. Teaching is not rocket science, but it leads to rocket science.  Teaching has moved from clay tablets to slates to paper and computers. Along the way it has incorporated extraneous teaching aids such as film, televisions and even computers.

It was kind of interesting to see that teachers understand that up until third grade the effort is on teaching children to read and after that the effort is to get them to learn by reading.

HALP!

The man for all seasons was well known for his diligence and thoughtfulness a decade ago before he ever left the Senate of the United States for his current job as Secretary of State.

Thanks Jon.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY WAY OF WAR

It's unbelievably callous and brutal. After all, how many Vietnamese Iraqis voted for them?

Make no mistake. The people now in charge ALL voted for the War in Iraq. 99% of them voted to support the war and then, they walked away. Maliki deserves most of the blame but the truth is, he merely made it easy for this government to leave them to the death squads.

One thing one might say, if one is a democrat, at least the NVA ran "re-education" camps and didn't just throw them all, bound, into a ditch and machine gun them. That is the fate of all non-Sunni and all the people that ever supported the United States in Iraq. They all know it. I like to think that they all knew it and got out years ago to leave Iraq to the fate it deserves. I live a rich life of fantasy and imagination.

At this point, I think Spengler has it right. This is the beginning of a new 30 Years War....and Richelieu? We don't have one. We had Hillary, Jarret and Kerry.  If you have the time, read the vileness of the comments at the link. They are profoundly illuminating.

Oddly enough, our own State Department saw this coming back in 1996. Their low level officers were happy to point to the demotragic blip that was going to doom the Middle East islamic world to senescence and destruction right around 2007. The arab rulers had rafts of money at the top from the oil and they had a bazillion males who would reach military age in 10 years WITH NEVER EVEN A HINT AT A REAL JOB. What else are they going to do? I'll give that one to the Consular Service as it existed back in the mid-90's. They recognized a demographic tragedy in the making when they saw one. It was the entire arab world so it would have been hard to miss.

Saudi Arabia is next....after Jordan. My advice to Mobarek was to fly away! My advice to the Hashemite Jordanian ruling elite....fly away. 60% of your population is Palestinian and all the pillars of Middle East rule have fallen except Saudi Arabia and it won't survive the haj. Take your children and go; while the going is good.

When you think about biological warfare, think of people devoted to the downfall of the House of Saud who control the flow of visas for the haj in places where Boko Haram and ebola run rampant and imagine what happens if the plague makes it to Jeddah and Mecca. Inshallah is not going to cover it.

I worked with the true believers in Kuwait after ODS. They were not by any Western definition, sane. At this point, if they survived, they are running the Kuwait Navy and Coast Guard. Their Army Special Forces were my support for several months and they embodied inshallah. The Sabah's would do well to leave; like they did the last time.

I'm not actually, all that worried about the rampant caliphate. Europe is going to have a cow.

LOSS OF A GOOD MAN IN TIBURON

He just stepped out. He was an amazing presence.

WHAT THEY FEAR

You know, after thinking about it for a couple of minutes, I know what the ruling elite fear.
It is actually pretty graphic. You might want to turn away so you don't yack on your keyboard.
All of the ruling class think of the Taxed Enough Already as the equivalent of terrorists like ISIS.
They all think that if we start to move, they will be the ones lined up face down in the ditch waiting for the gunshots to the back of the head or knife at the throat.

They couldn't be more wrong.

Something to look forward to.

VADM MORAN: GOON FOR OUR TIMES

Why exactly is the Vice Admiral running the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington DC wearing this uniform? Give the uniform board mafia another inch and they'll have us all wearing black capes and plastic fangs because the admirals have no shame at all.

He's "Ready Now" to hide behind a tree or Bush, on an aircraft carrier, at sea in the Persian Gulf, because 3 star flag officers do what they gotta do.

Seriously Bill, this is pathetic.

Have some dignity!

Oops. Now you know how I feel on the subject of senior officers wearing combat uniforms when not exposed to combat. It's very close to my contempt for pilots and aviators who wear their rompers to the office on staff duty.

Vice Admiral William Moran, a typical BUPERS thing. [He's too well camouflaged to be called an officer]

RARE VISITORS AT METROPARKCENTRALIS

We had a pair of CH-47s and a B-17 bomber at Burke Lakefront Airport this weekend. The Memphis Belle was here to offer people rides low and slow over the city. I suspect the helos were Guard or Reserve out of Pennsylvania.

BACK TO AIR RAIDING VILLAGES

American President announces it's time to bomb more muslims from the air. He was against it before he was in favor of it.

Catch him say that the root cause for bombing back in 2007 was insufficient troops. We're down to just 650 troops in Iraq, most of whom guard the embassy and airport in Baghdad.

HOW IT WORKS

I'm as outraged as any right thinking person about the suspiciously wiped hard drives but I do know how it really works in US government service. Your provider gives you the latest hi-end computer with 500 gigabytes of hard drive and applications of enormous power.

Then, the self-same providers decides to ease their job by limiting you to just 2.5 gigabytes of storage on that enormous hard drive and limit your Outlook mail to just 250 megabytes of online storage and FORCES you to delete mails in your inbox and sent mail folders if you want/need to be able to even SEND new mail or open and read new incoming mail.

The terrible thing is though, pretty much all digital data that any government employee gets is retained on the servers and thus, always there, if the IT people perform their legal responsibilities.

When was the first time you ever heard of one of the nerd herd going to jail because he failed to carry out the legal mandates outlined under the government laws that not even the government is going to ever abide by? "Uh?  Your bossiness?  I need umpteen million $ to buy terabytes of storage to keep all the crap you losers send each other....."

Just for instance? Ask any Representative to pull up an email from a constituent sent back in 1999 and  his response to it. Oh sure, the response part would be easy. Crickets. You could try again with a similar email from 2010 or 2014.

THUS SPAKE OBAMA

I heard he gave a speech yesterday about a mountain in Kurdistan or something. It put me in mind of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, but it also recalled this gem from the past.

I particularly like the line: why do bad things happen to good people.

I read the book, long ago, while still in school. I hit a phase after reading Oman, where I read Sienkiewicz and quite a few other ancient books including The Forty Days.

Just think of all the things that have happened throughout recorded history that have been documented and then written about and think how close-minded and obtuse one must be to never ever have considered that history does repeat itself, usually in tragedy. Would everybody who didn't know what was inevitably going to happen in Iraq when we pulled our support out overnight, please raise their hand.

Oh well, it was all written 2500 years ago by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. People alive today would be stunned to learn that every single fetish and phobia of theirs was dutifully recorded 400 years before the birth of Christ.

It was a long story documenting the reasons for the Downfall of Athenian Democracy. Reading it does tend to make one cynical. Just saying.

I SAW RIGHT THROUGH THIS

The whossname, Telegraph, tries to make this whole furor about nudity and prudity when it clearly doesn't HAVE A CLUE!

Miss Bardot on the beach when we were young

That girl has a cigarette in her hand!

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS THE HOLE IN THE OZONE

Remember the hole in the ozone that was going to KILLLLL US ALLLL?

Can you all look under the rugs, sofa cushions and your aunt Edna to see what became of it? It sure sounded scary at the time.

Pseudo science has no "best used by date" because it's a scam and lasts forever

TODAY ONLY READ THIS

I enjoy Coyote Blog.  Today, you should read his blog. Srlsy! Don't make me steal all his posts!

LIVING THE DREAM

Whenever I read these stories I am always struck by the basic underlying humanity and civilization of the landlords. There is the easiest way in the world to rid yourself of troublesome tenants. SWAT teams do it all the time when they smash into an innocent home, shoot the dogs, hogtie the residents, leave the premises open to vandals as they haul the accused off to jail. Innocent people who were shorn by the police because somebody gave them the power.

I'm not joking or fooling this time. I really do admire the civilized forbearance of long suffering landlords who don't just have a friend pick up the phone and dial 911 to report a murder rape, or even worse, a drug growing scheme in the rental property. SWAT would blow them out of there so fast it would hurt, and given our SWAT preferences, the renter would be dead or seriously wounded because, lacking any comprehension that they had committed a crime, they'd be most likely to protest long loud and hard up until a scared cop shot them 233 times, just to be safe.

I suspect that the owners are going to figure this out very soon.

Renters might think about just arming themselves. You're going to die in the 'crossfire' or 'mistaken' shooting so you might as well try to run the table on the bad guys. They'll kill you without hesitation or a moment for grace.

ANOTHER GOOD MAN HAS STEPPED INTO THE CLEARING

General Harold Greene, lost in combat while deployed in Afghanistan on Tuesday, 5 August. I greatly regret and mourn the passing of all our people lost in the struggle against terrorism. This one strikes close to home and to me. His family lives down the road from my family. He held the same job at the Pentagon my father once had.

a good man.

HAS DICTIONARY

I saw this headline at Drudge this morning and thought to myself, they must have found an Oxford English dictionary.

Damn their shifty sneakiness!

WOULD YOU BELIEVE LAYERS OF UNREALITY?

I take a few steers from the Instapundit  but this one is interesting for the philosophy and the scale of unreality. We thought Bell, California was egregious, but it's land-sharks all the way down in California.

HOT CRAZY MATRIX

An oldie but a good one. Anne I still laugh when we talk about it.

PROFOUNDLY STUPID

The last 5 admirals running the navy herd thought that this spiffy nautical uniform was the bomb. One wonders, what happened to

I can't imagine the force that makes a tool wear that uniform. Proof enough, I think, that all admirals are gay.

MUSLIM CONTRIBUTION TO WESTERN SOCIETY

Robert Spencer pretty much nails it, here.

I believe the last time our policy makers were so giddy with anticipatory feelings of schadenfreude, Saddam invaded Iran after the fall of the Shah. There are some people who confuse the oldest ways of war with something wild and new and they coined a term for it; 4th Generation War. The people who originated the term were familiar with the broad sweep of history and war and there is no doubt that they captured one of the finest ways to make war and codified it, gave it a new name and publicized it, but there was nothing new about the idea of conning other peoples into fighting your battles for you on somebody else's real-estate. That's been going on since Biblical Times.

As ISIS destroys the fragile comity of modern 'democratic' Iraq, it's these people who notice that Iran is the sponsor of the terror that is crawling across the Iraqi countryside and how they must be laughing in Qum and Tehran as the dark force eats into all that remains of the only bulwark state left to the Arab world. When Iraq falls, there is nothing that can oppose the Quds and the Supreme Council. It's almost like being able to watch Richelieu and Metternich at work.

It's sad to think that the POLMIL wonks at State and CIA convinced their bosses to set up training camps in Syria and northern Iraq to teach muslim fighters all that we know about overthrowing a State without being forced to send our own armies.  Good job guys.

The one sure and certain thing we know is that all of Iraq is as fragile as an egg. Anybody who strikes  hard enough fast enough will shatter the country. We did it in Desert Storm and then again in Iraqi Freedom. The war was won within the first 96 hours in both cases. The fundamental secret that everybody hides is that the entire muslim world is just as fragile and a sharp blow will destroy any of the Arab or other muslim states within the space of a few hours.

The guys at State must be quivering jelly at this point as they contemplate what happens when the forces that motivate ISIS breach the Saudi frontiers because the House of Saud won't hesitate to stay on top of the heap even if it means they must massacre 50% of the population---kind of like the Assad's in Syria. In the meantime, the oil will stop flowing from both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

In the meantime, the West rushes to scrap its nuclear power plants. Ever, Putin, COUGH, wonder if somedody, putin, cough.  Is waging a war against the West?

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

This is an egregious case of state agents given guns, who are willing to kill teenagers they think might have alcohol. I'm pretty sure the Mutawa in Saudi Arabia don't go that far even if the Taliban, ISIS and al Quida would join the Virginia State Alcohol Control Bureau in executing on the spot those found in unlawful possession of what might have been beer. They all share the same evil philosophy.  I hoped she would go the distance and get the $40 million she initially sued for.

The Richmond Times Dispatch.com discussed the case a couple of months ago.

In a 20-page ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson dismissed all or parts of nine of the 12 counts in Daly’s suit: conspiracy to commit malicious prosecution, the counts against the state, and some of the assault counts against the agents.

At this point, Hudson would not grant the Virginia attorney general’s motion to dismiss charges of false arrest, common law malicious prosecution, and assault charges involving three of the seven agents named as defendants.

Hudson directed Daly’s lawyers to file an amended complaint merging the malicious prosecution and false arrest counts into a claim that her constitutional rights were violated.

The young lady at the heart of this is entirely blameless. The State neither disciplined nor fired the agent who pulled a gun on her or any of the evil crew of 7 agents who had literally nothing better to do than sit outside a supermarket so they could trail citizens to their vehicles and then threaten them with instant death. We can do so much better than this.

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

Ever wonder why they aren't on the border forcing all those arrogant pissant immigrants into long slow lines so they can be detail strip searched, irradiated and patted down?

Yea, me neither. Isn't their job and besides, they'd get dirty, have to work outside without air conditioning and speak a second language. Most of the ones we see can barely mangle English much less Spanish and they'd simply go ballistic when asking the immigrants to produce ID. Probably kill most of them because as a DHS TSA employee, you do what ya gotta do!

AN INTERESTING OLD ITEM

It never gets too old for me. It's a real time comprehensive view of our nation's debt, your part of it, and where it all goes. {It's only your part if you pay taxes to the IRS}

I went looking for it today after reading an article that described how Hamas had placed its headquarters under a Gaza hospital in the hopes that Israel would either show enormous restraint, or massacre hospital patients. The article had more comments than I would have thought and I noticed that one of them asserted quite vigorously that the United States had supported Israel with $132 trillion dollars. I wondered about that.

There is at least one person, maybe two, who believe that we took the equivalent of 14 years of our entire gross domestic national economic output and gave it to Israel so they could keep down the Palestinians.  I enjoy a good conspiracy theory along with the rest but that struck me as ludicrous.

If you enjoy quirky romantic comedies, Conspiracy Theory was a good one.  Spoiler: Jean Luc Picard was the bad guy.