BACK OF THE HAND

National Review just gave the back of its hand to Lena Dunham for excellent reasons. I particularly liked this line because it is infinitely true and irrefutable:

For instance, we have a Bill of Rights, which could with equal accuracy be called the List of Stuff You Idiots Can’t Be Trusted To Vote On. A majority of Americans don’t like free speech? Too bad, Harry Reid.

There are scores of millions of people who will stupidly vote to terminate the Bill of Rights because they know better than you and hate speech should join guns as things intolerable to any right thinking American citizen. They don't get that tyranny is what they are advocating, frequently at the top of their voices. They are truly loathsome people.

A LIFE TOLD BY A LOVED ONE

American Digest gets all the cool stuff.

MARCH 27, 2015

The Big Life of Captain Donald Alexander Malcolm Jr., 60: Not the Years in Your Life but the Life in Your Years

Taking the award for Obituary of the Decade has got to be this one of €“ Donald Alexander Malcolm Jr. from March 25 in the Homer Tribune

---

Captain Donald Alexander Malcolm Jr., 60, died Feb. 28, 2015, nestled in the bosom of his family, while smoking, drinking whiskey and telling lies. He died from complications resulting from being stubborn, refusing to go to the doctor, and raising hell for six decades. Stomach cancer also played a minor role in his demise.
Don cherished family above all else, and was a beloved husband, father and grandfather. He met his future wife, Maureen (Moe) Belisle Malcolm, after months at sea, crab fishing. He found her in his bed and decided to keep her.
Their daughter Melissa was born “early” six months later. They decided to have a boy a couple years later, and ended up with another daughter, Megan.
He taught his girls how to hold their liquor, filet a fish and change a tire. He took pride in his daughters, but his greatest joy in life was the birth of his grandson Marley, a child to whom he could impart all of his wisdom that his daughters ignored.
After spending his formative years in Kirkland, Wash. with a fishing pole in hand, Don decided his life’s calling was to yell at deckhands on commercial fishing boats in Alaska. As a strapping young man of 19, he moved to Dutch Harbor to fulfill this dream.
Over the next 40 years, Don was a boat cook, mechanic, deckhand, captain and boat owner. Although Don worked nearly every fishery in the Pacific Northwest at one time or another, his main hunting ground was the Bering Sea. He cut his teeth crabbing; kept his family fed by longlining halibut and black cod; then retired as a salmon gillnetter in Southeast Alaska.
Don had a life-time love affair with Patsy Cline, Rainier beer, iceberg lettuce salads and the History Channel (which allowed him to call his wife and daughters everyday in order to relay the latest WWII facts he learned).
He excelled at attempting home improvement projects, outsmarting rabbits, annoying the women in his life and reading every book he could get his hands on.
He thought everyone could, and should, live on a strict diet of salmon, canned peas and rice pilaf, and took extreme pride in the fact that he had a freezer stocked full of wild game and seafood.
His life goal was to beat his wife at Scrabble, and although he never succeeded, his dream lives on in the family he left behind.
Don is survived not only by his wife, daughters and grandson, but by his father, Donald Malcolm Sr; brothers Howard and Mike Malcolm; sisters Lisa Shumaker, Nicki White, Melinda Borg and Patsi Solano.
He also has many nieces, nephews, aunts and cousins who love him dearly, and deckhands who knew him.
He will be having an extended family reunion with his mother, Winifred Thorton; foster parents Marvel and Dutch Roth, brothers Larry and Steve Malcolm, sister Doodie Cake, and other assorted family and friends who died too young.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at March 27, 2015 9:35 AM

CLINTON DOCUMENTS

What is it about the Clintons and documents? The White House Travel Office documents, the Rose Law Firm documents, the FBI files, whatever their lawyer was working on in the White House before he went off to a park and shot himself in the head. Now the emails that were ours but not hers except she stole them while nobody was looking are all gone. Now, evidently, the secret server in her house is wiped clean of everything,.....like, yeah, I believe that.

I worked for a part of the navy that has no peer. We were told that we could not use our personal email accounts. Nope, the universal assessment of New Orleans and the Pentagon was that we could only use .mil accounts. Of course, neither party made them accessible to my little part of the navy and so we just blew them off and did business over the internets using earthlink and hotmail and gmail because the price of doing business in the 21st century is using the internet.

I remember when they gave us CAC card readers that we could plug into our computers serial ports....like anybody still has a computer with a serial port. They had USB CAC card readers but like chumps, they only bought enough for 5 people and all the rest needed a serial port. With your device you could slowly, ever so slowly, connect to your .mil account at the office and download your .mil mail. Or, one could set one's government computer to bounce incoming emails to one's earthlink address.

I am kind of wondering if Sandy Burglar is still out there with classified State Department emails that were sent over whossmanes signature somewhere buried deep in his underpants. The Clintons have maxed out my document meter. If there is a sleazy slimy ooze somewhere, the Clintons will appear out of it like mud covered aliens in the mist with no documentation.

GLOBAL WARMING

All day as I was out on the roads in heavy snow flurries. I heard the prognosticators and news voices telling me that the snow was just a passing thing and that there would be no 'accumulation'. I've got at least an inch of accumulation.

I so wanted to be done with winter. Us southern Californians don't take well to accumulation.

THE BBC

The BBC fires Jeremy Clarkson. Talk about the power of stupid.

I hope he takes the show indy and makes another billion $.

ULTIMATE SORROW

It wasn't an accident. It was deliberate.  For 8 minutes every soul onboard knew that the pilot was flying them into the ground. The desperation of the pilot to get into the cockpit must have been overwhelming.

With nuclear weapons we had two person integrity. There would never be one lone person with a nuke. We actually called it a no lone zone. With crypto we had two person integrity. After Walker there would never again be one person alone with bulk encryption material.

I think the airlines have just joined my two worlds. We will never again have a lone pilot in the cockpit. Those days had better be over.

Shattering awful accidents are something that one can lay at the feet of one's God. Narcissism so cruel that it takes away everything in the world, that's probably unendurable.  A word of Grace may be in order.

GRAY LADY DOWN

I know, it sounds like a Farley Mowat title. It's worth noting when certain people pass. The New York Times took a little over 500 years to note the passing of Richard III at Bosworth Field. Because they are the New York Times, they gooned it.  If you read the interesting article about the reburial of an ancient King, note the last bit which I have captured here.

That theme was pervasive in the reburial service, perhaps captured best when Archbishop Welby, standing beside the grave as the coffin was lowered, invoked forgiveness for Richard. “We have entrusted our brother Richard to God’s mercy,” he said, “and we now commit his human remains to the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” 

Correction: March 26, 2015 
An earlier version of this article misstated the title of the most senior member of the royal family in attendance at Richard III’s reburial. She is the Countess of Wessex, not the Duchess. 

With this article, John F. Burns concludes a distinguished career spanning 40 years with The New York Times, 39 of them with the international desk. Beginning with South Africa in 1976, Mr. Burns reported from 10 foreign bureaus and was chief of the Baghdad bureau during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Along the way, he wrote more than 3,300 articles and collected two Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting, one in Afghanistan and the other in Bosnia. His portrait of a cellist playing on Sarajevo’s main pedestrian concourse while artillery shells exploded nearby is considered a classic of modern journalism. He will continue to contribute to the international and sports desks, among others.

Yeah, that's how I want to go out as a newsman, with a 'correction' for the sloppy journalism I got away with for almost 40 years.

Of course, you'd want some dignity to accompany your reinterment. Instead, you get:

THE ARMY

I'll admit to being surprised that the US Army actually had the balls to do this. I was sure that Private Bergdahl was going to scoot under the wire and make it home. I sorta kinda have massive contempt for the princes that rule the Army. Nothing ever fails the smell test in the Army. Bergdahl deserted in the face of the enemy. He was the enemy. He's been in Army hands now for over a year but they finally decided that an example had to be made. Pour encourager les autres. The French Army practiced the old Roman rule of decimation. We're a bit better than that.

Everybody knew he went over to the enemy. On the other hand, it wouldn't do to get all giddy about instant justice like colleges and universities do these days. A measured approach is the best approach in a legal case.

Over the years, various people insisted that I stand up and speak to the TEWG and the ESG and I did. I'm terse by nature and by training. If I was the spokesbeing, I'd have tersed the reporters right out of their seats and been done with this story in 15 seconds.

THE RUSSIAN DEATH

This is a picture of the death camps we know about:

Whenever I go there in my mind, I always remember Ana Pauker. She yearned for communism. 85% of the leftist progressives here don't realize that come the revolution, they'll be first against the wall. They really are clueless. Whole populations were shipped west to die in the Gulag. Compared to the Ukrainians, they were lucky.

SHORE DUTY

An old Chief and an old Gunny were sitting at the VFW arguing about who'd had the tougher career. "I did 30 years in the Corps," the Gunny declared proudly, "and fought in three of my country's wars. Fresh out of boot camp I hit the beach at Okinawa, clawed my way up the blood soaked sand, and eventually took out an entire enemy machine gun nest with a single grenade. "As a sergeant, I fought in Korea alongside General MacArthur. We pushed back the enemy inch by bloody inch all the way up to the Chinese border, always under a barrage of artillery and small arms fire. "Finally, as a gunny sergeant, I did three consecutive combat tours in Vietnam. We humped through the mud and razor grass for 14 hours a day, plagued by rain and mosquitoes, ducking under sniper fire all day and mortar fire all night. In a fire fight, we'd fire until our arms ached and our guns were empty, then we'd charge the enemy with bayonets!"

"Ah," said the Chief with a dismissive wave of his hand, "all shore duty, huh?"

CHIEF ENGINEER

Since you asked. Long ago and far and very far away, the author as a young Chief Engineer. The sword was reserved for pirates which, regrettably, left us alone. This was stateside. You should have seen the skinny LT that came back from the Persian Gulf 6 months later.

David took the picture against the neutral wall of my dining room on First ST, San Diego, all the way back in 1987. This is the one I sent to the LCDR Board.

My mother really complained that she didn't have a single picture of me in uniform. Her bureau was covered with pictures of my father in uniform from West Point to Vietnam. Back then I was superstitious and figured that I could not die if the media couldn't trot out a photo of me. Remember, the media always seems to find the photo of the young dead Marine or Soldier wearing their uniform and I figured, WTF,  I could cheat death by refusing to give anyone a picture of me dressed in uniform.

Have you noticed how implacable mothers are?

STANDING INTO DANGER

I copped this from traditional vibe.

A ship like that has an enormous crew to make it work and propel it through the sea. It has an air wing to give it the potency everyone ascribes to aircraft carriers. It also has a cruiser or two and a destroyer or two to give it some defense against submarines and air threats that get past the air wing. It also has, you can see it just over there in the gloom on the right, a submarine in direct support.

These little bits of America are afloat in every ocean and some seas and gulfs. We don't have as many as we used to have but the world is a safe and stable place which has little need of our Navy today. The last time I looked 6th Fleet consisted of an Admiral's Barge and a landing craft or two.

I used to go for runs at someone else's base overseas where they had Styx missiles on sticks. They were all over the base. Right around then, the Navy decided to permanently station aircraft carriers within the Persian Gulf. The thing about Styx and all its follow on cousins is that they could be launched from a truck on the shore. They were subsonic short ranged missiles that might be able to go 299.95 miles. How wide is the Gulf? Styx cost about $999.99. One would shoot one or one would shoot a flock of maybe a hundred at something like the picture above.

See, I remember Chuck telling us all at NAVCENT that there was no evidence of any terrorist in the Kingdom having access to hi-explosives just 3 weeks prior to Khobar. One day we will find out how good our ASCM defenses are and how good our terminal defenses are against wave attacks of scores of cruise missiles. Right around the time Iran figures out the bomb.

Right about then, Iran will declare a blockade and mine the Strait of Hormuz and the Battle Group will be trapped in the Gulf. One of the problems of sanctions is putting a country into a place where it has nothing to lose. Saudi has Yanbu but Kuwait and the Emirates are screwed. So is Qatar but they want that.

Can you see the US clawing our way back into the Gulf?

ANGEL ISLAND

Did you know that you could walk Angel Island in Virtual Reality with google maps?

How cool is that?

CIVIL WAR LETTER HOME X

My cousin didn't know it but he was on the eve of the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War. It didn't turn out well for The Army of Tennessee. They should have known better. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Is not Wm Serreny Lieutenant Davis’s enemy

                                                Camp near Chattanooga, Tennessee, Sept 6^th 1863

                                                Dear Parents and Seister

                                                                        I received your letters of the 30^th of August, last, We have been in this camp a little over two weeks in sight of the enemies strongest works a still nothing of importance has occurred until last night and yesterday when the enemy attempted to put a pontoon bridge over the river in order I suppose to cross the river to drive us back from the river, but our batteries gave them such a reception that they concluded to abandon the enterprise remain quietly in their forts. General Wagoner’s  Brigade with Colonel Wilders Brigade of mounted infantry is the only troops on the north side of the river to keep the enemies from crossing and getting into Kentucky.

I think the General Bragg’s army will all be gobbled  if they do not get out within the next three days for General Rosecrans and General Burnsides are closing in on him very fast and if they should succeed in their plans and trap Bragg the war will be brought to a close very soon for this country has been their greatest xxxx country in the south. They have also a greater number of  powder mills in this country also a number of founderies where they cast some very large guns. Our Brigade is on a mountain a little west of north of the city which is at the foot of a large mountain which is their lookout post. From our lookout we can see them at work day and night. A number of deserters have come over the river within the last few days and they say that there is a large force but that their General can not depend much on them fighting for they say that it is no use to attempt to try to hold the place if Chattanooga for if General Rosecrans undertakes to take the place he will have it in spite of all they can do for he is too good a General for old Brag. They say that Brag can retreat but that will stay and be taken under the command of Rese

You can take the map and where the army is. We are in the bend right opposite the town. One of General Van Cleve’s Brigades is at Harrison which is 8 miles up the river. Then, at Jasper or opposite on the south side fo the river General Woods has his other 2 Brigades then General Thomases Corps is laying in line between that and Rome, Georgia at which place General McCooks corps is. Now we will go to the right of the enemy or our left. General Burnsides was at Kingstown 70 miles up the river 10 days ago but it is said that his advance is only 14 miles from Chattanooga on the other side of the river (or safely on the south side) This was the position of our army three days agobut where the right and left  of our army is today I do not know, but some say that the right is within 8 miles of Chattanooga.

PART I wait for exciting part II!

The Battle of Chickamauga was a Union defeat. Without the 'Rock of Chickamauga' it would have been a Union rout. Oddly enough, Rosecrans' Chief of Staff was James Garfield.

Battle of Chickamauga

TOTAL COMPLETE ABJECT FAILURE

It looks like this.

Yes ladies and gentleman, it is the US NAVY's newest aircraft carrier. That's about all it can do. The builder will deliver it to the navy on 31 March 2015 and the pathetic beast can neither launch nor recover aircraft. Kind of a dismal failure.

Everybody went bleeding edge during its design and construction. Naysayers and doubters were treated like climate skeptics and brushed aside as seminal losers. Who's the loser now?

Two technical issues will receive the bulk of attention. First is the electromagnetic aircraft launch system, or EMALS, which replaced the steam-powered catapult system. It is "ahead of the curve," Moore said. Two of four catapults are built. The ship will launch dead loads (weighted sleds) into the James River in June. 

And then there is the advanced arresting gear, arguably the source of most headaches during the carrier's construction. The system could manage only 20 arrests between failures – a rate 248 times higher than should be expected, according to an April 2014 Congressional Research Service report. This led to a major redesign of the water-twister, which absorbs about 70 percent of the energy during a landing.

Once the thing is signed for by the navy all the problems become Navy problems and the builder is off the hook. This is where they make the big money, fixing problems that should have prevented the Navy from signing for the ship in the first place.

No wonder all of us believe in the Sequester. Let these morons (NAVSEA/NAVAIR) have more money and they'd just waste it on drink, drugs and fast women.

PEERS OF THE REALM

Ralph Peters wrote wrote another fine piece for the New York Post. It was forwarded to me for my comment. It took about 5 minutes to type this in reply.

I think Ralph nailed it. It's not just the presidents and the cabinet, it's every layer in the State Department and Justice and every other branch of government. None of them has fought or seen the results of fighting a real battle. None has ever been mugged on the street. The handful of military men are the Wesley Clark types.

Congress comes from the same old school. I watched the Secret Service Director tell Congress yesterday, in testimony, that the White House security cameras automatically tape over themselves every 72 hours. He said it with a straight face. I worked with and helped design security and surveillance systems 15 years ago until the present and the ONLY cameras we would even think to install were digital cameras that stored their data to terabyte storage devices and there was never ever any 'taping over' the imagery. It was compressed and stored and beyond that, it was automatically routed to Command Centers where their systems also stored the compressed imagery files.

The media comes from the same old ivy covered schools where they don't question, they believe; as long as it dribbles from the lips of an approved peer of their realm. I think they're all 'Brian Williams'. They wouldn't know the truth if it bit them.

I think the courts are of the same old school. Why does it take years to resolve an 'open and shut' case? Motions and appeals can be denied. Justice doesn't suffer when legal case is adjudicated quickly and fairly. I used to have 30 days to conclude an investigation. If it went to trial the case could drag on for literally years. Ken Starr knew at once who leaked Plames name to the press. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, the weasel from the State Department, came to him and told Starr that he did it. Starr nevertheless persevered for years flipping rocks in the White House and finally got the Vice President's Chief of Staff to make an error of memory and used that to indict him on......perjury charges. That wasn't what Starr was appointed to do.

The only people today who fear America are its friends and its citizens. All the bad guys have our number. We destroy our 'friends' such as Mubarak and even a man we negotiated a peace with; Qadafi, and even the allegedly recognized elected president of Egypt, Morsi, and turn around and try our very best to slay the only elected leader in the Middle East.

If I was president or even in a position to advise him, I'd tell him to help out the Kurds now that they've mostly worked out their internal differences, and use them to hold the line against ISIS. I'd also inform Turkey that I support a Kurdish State and perhaps THEY ought to negotiate turning over Kurdish land in Turkey to the new Kurdish State. Let those weasels scramble for our support, because they lost all their meaning to us as allies when the Soviet Union collapsed.

We have a glut of domestic oil now. More than we can actually consume and since Congress won't let us export it I'd issue an Executive order forbidding the import of ANY oil from Venezuela. Let them sell their oil to Cuba and Haiti. We could even go out on the world stage and say that we acted out of humanitarian principles for the good of the people of Haiti and Cuba and since they're such good pals of Venezuela it's a win-win and everybody gets something out of the new arrangement.

I think Ralph nailed it. We have an incestuous bunch running the place and they ought to done away with. Good grief! The chattering class are talking about just 2 possible candidates for President; a Clinton and a Bush. The media did their very best to try to convince Americans that Hillary is a worthy choice and the Bush is a valid "republican' contender. They ignored all the rest. It is pathetic and a little sickening.

NOVEL IDEA BUT PERHAPS NOT THE BEST ONE

Starbucks had announced a policy that would call upon their baristas to discuss race issues with each customer that bought some sort of java or tea at each of the stores and franchises. Time Magazine correspondant Mr. Jabbar pointed out one or two flaws in the policy but I think nobody has weighed in on the potential explosive nature of the vice of discussing race in America. You see, I always hear a voice in my head when people start talking racism needing to be discussed here, asking, what race? White? Black? Asian? Hispanic? People don't have the same view about racism at all. Mr. Jabbar pointed out that:

Schultz is right in understanding that we can’t depend on our leaders to eradicate racism. Schultz sees ending racism as a grass roots campaign that starts with the people and swells until it forces politicians to act like leaders. To achieve this, we need to educate the target audience of those who are open-minded enough to be persuaded by facts. Then we need to keep presenting those facts over and over until awareness is finally achieved. That’s when there will be progress.

Does the barista that doesn't toe the liberal line on race get fired or re-indoctrinated after a long stint in the liberal gulag reeducation camps? What would happen to me? I believe most racism everywhere is founded on stereotypes. What Mr. Jabbar and I agree on is that the facts speak for themselves. A stereotype is given life by the actions of the people one runs into every day. Nobody is going to legislate that out of existence.

The video is probably not suitable for most work environments. It's Chris Rock back in 1996. Things are different now talking about racism. He has a slightly different take on the accepted wisdom of liberal progressives, but watch his audience's reaction throughout. They got it.

Of course if he was still touring with this sketch today, the Department of Justice would have him in jail for pure undistilled racism.

HAPPY VERNAL EQUINOX

Super Moons, Total Eclipses, lions and tigers and bears, oh MY.

As usual now for these astronomical phenomena I expect a total overcast as darkness falls here in MetroParkCentralis. I swear the last good thing we got to see here was the transit of Venus. That however, happened on a beautiful day.

Welcome to Spring!

DISHONEST LIARS ROUTINELY LIE TO CONGRESS

I watched the odious director of the Secret Service testify to Congress just now and he told Congress that the tapes of the crash that occurred at the White House when allegedly drunken Top Secret Service Agents were coming home from a party, had been automatically erased by the cameras themselves because the tapes are, "automatically overwritten every 72 hours." What a fucking liar.

For decades what I did was security, surveillance, counter-surveillance and later, as a civilian I worked for a company that took hundreds of millions of dollars installing state-of-the-art digital surveillance systems all over the world for military bases, weapon facilities, police agencies, port districts, everywhere. We put in cameras of every type (360), FLIR, long-range, short range, you name it. But they all had one common characteristic starting back around 2000. Every single one of them was digital and all the imagery was compressed and stored on drives that soon grew to terabyte size and the imagery files could and were removed periodically for long term storage. Most of them shared their imagery in real time with command centers miles or states away.

Who out there really believes that the Secret Service is using cameras around the White House that even 7-eleven stores no longer use? The Secret Service joins every other branch of government in sharing its contempt for congress with congress and what will Congress do about it? Nothing.

MINDBOGGLINGLY STUPID

You have to get up really early in the morning to be stupider than these stupid cretins:

Europe's power operators are bracing for potential disruption from the solar eclipse expected Friday, which will knock out almost all solar-generated electricity in an "unprecedented" test for the network. 

"The risk of an incident cannot be completely ruled out," the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (Entso-e) said recently, as 100 times more power is generated from the sun now than during the last eclipse in 1999. 

"Solar eclipses have happened before but with the increase of installed photovoltaic energy generation, the risk of an incident could be serious without appropriate countermeasures," the group said. 

"For the first time this is expected to have a relevant impact on the secure operation of the European power system," warned Entso-e.

The dark of night never threatens Europe where it is always sunny 24 hours a day. What kind of idiot at the journal published this stupid bunch of drivel. Are they nothing but Al Gore's over there? Even the comments are ridiculous.

HOW REMARKABLE

In a piece he wrote for Politico, Dan Metcalfe was upfront with what he thought of Hillary's blatant lies about information management and FOIA compliance.

But having spent a quarter-century at the forefront of the government’s administration of the FOIA, including its transition to electronic records and its involvement in so many Clinton administration “scandals du jour,” I know full well that both what Secretary Clinton arranged to do and what she now has said about that are, to put it most charitably, not what either the law or anything close to candor requires. At a minimum, it was a blatant circumvention of the FOIA by someone who unquestionably knows better and an attempted verbal “cover” of the situation (if not “cover-up”) that is truly reminiscent of years past.

And I say that even as someone who, if she decides to run for president and is the Democratic nominee, will nevertheless vote for her next year.

This is a man who spent a career in the Justice Department and fully acknowledges that Hillary is a constant liar with the ethics of a rabid weasel. It's pretty sad when she is the very best the democrats have...or the least worst they have.

MY COIN OBSERVATION

Don't you find it interesting that two different people could look at exactly the same coin and give two utterly different descriptions of the coin they see? I was over reading the blog post tonight written by an extremely bitter man. In some ways he was once a peer of mine.

I can see the villainy of people in government, of institutions that knowingly and without a care break the laws of this country but I don't recall ever describing them using hateful, wrathful language and wishing that the would die. I can look at people like George Bush and find in him a man who seriously tried to do good and accomplish things that the country could be proud of. I never saw him as stupid or venal or as a smug elitist. Other hate that man beyond reason. I contrast that with Obama and I find I don't see him or anybody in his cabinet in the same light.

I've kind of given up on the ruling class. Electing a non-conservative republican is the same thing as electing a slightly less venal democrat. I remember the California recall that got rid of Governor Davis because his spending was wildly out of control and so the state  elected Arnold who ended up totally captured by the legislature and actually ended up spending more than Davis had proposed. It was a sham. Now, California doesn't have any republican legislators and so they fall heir to a new $100 billion dollar high speed chain that won't do either of the three things that were promised when they got the seed money from Obama's shovel ready jobs scam. It won't be high speed, it won't run from LA to San Francisco and it will never be finished. California has to find another $97 billion minimum and that's just the latest estimate.

I understand the freeloaders and the grifters voting for crooks and thieves who buy their votes but I don't understand the supposedly smart, educated, hard-working academics and liberals who keep voting money away that does little but buy votes and line the pockets of people like the Clinton's, the Reids, all those lifelong public servants that retire with tens of millions of dollars in the bank and pensions far larger than any private company employee can ever dream of.

I remember running across an interesting article that laid out the pensions being paid to the California public servants. It's shocking. When you live in a major urban area next to what was once the richest city in America and they cannot fix potholes and take months to grade a collapsing road, only to promptly did it back up to fix a water main, its the schools, the parks, the infrastructure that is taking the beating that will only get worse.

How could anyone, an American, vote to shovel trillions of dollars of debt onto their kids, grandkids and great grandkids. Have they no shame?

HAPPY SAINT PATRICK'S DAY EVERYBODY

A KIRK IN TEXAS

A Kirk is a little church. I would know that because we had family friends who, since the Revolution, have named every male of the next generation, Church. To keep track of who one was shouting at, one used to refer to Church minor as kirk because, it's a little church...in Scotland.

We were talking this evening about Santa Rose de Lima. I thought I had been there. I am pretty sure I've been there but this is what I thought I was talking about. In San Antonio there is a tour one can take that takes one to 5 different missions of the old Spanish frontier in America. I liked this one best but I've included a picture of the most famous of them all.

I took the pictures. You have to get there very early to have no people in the way. OK, so at the Alamo, some people got in the way. They tend to do that...taking pictures, damn them!

WE DIDN'T BEAT TO QUARTERS

Every day that I was there and we were on task, we just slipped quietly into battle. If you didn't see us there, well, that was kind of the goal wasn't it? We were not like Vincennes and we had some weaknesses.  You could have been there on the bridge wing with me watching Iraqi fighter bombers flying past not more than a hundred feet away, below me. Back in those times we gave Iraqi bombers our positions so they could use us as navigational way points on strikes into Iran. They used that on STARK.

We didn't like Iran.

Well, when I say we,

I didn't mean me.

Some of us never had CAS and STIR and I don't recall having any kind of meaningful anti-air system the whole time I swerved in the Arabian Gulf. Trust me. I'd know. I did serve later for a very long time as the Fire Control Officer on a Destroyer.

Seriously, those planes used to go by so fast at 40 feet above sea level and you'd go, Wo!

yeah, I meant to type that.

I know, my Spruance colleagues will all pile in to say that SPG 60 and RIM7 were not much but they weren't there. Either one was light years better than nothing at all.

NORTHROYAL

OK,

Last one, I promise.

You know it's funny. I used to be a very fast reader. A book a day was not at all uncommon. I now share my life with someone who could probably read 8 books a day. I know why I slowed down. Even as a bachelor knight I couldn't pay for that many books. I've fixed that problem but still, I unlearned a skill I once had. Reading and comprehension accelerated up to a certain point and then they perished, gently, like a polar bear on a shrinking ice floe in the Pacific just off Hawaii.

KEITH LAUMER

That man knew villains.

And heroes.

Just reread Night of the Trolls. I have got to stop reading this stuff.

SWAT

What's that?

Look at that alice gear for a police visit.

Just how many grenades and magazines do you Rambos need  to take down a house in America?

The gestapo and stazi didn't bring this much firepower to a house raid.

A STEP AWAY

Another good man has stepped into the clearing at the end of the path.

I liked all of his books.

I'm pretty sure the luggage will be along soon.

You can see it now can't you?

INSPECTOR GENERAL

Honest,

I want this inspector generals job.

I might have to buy a coat. How sleazy are democrats? Is there a Brinell number?

THE MUSIC it is there.

IT TAKES A DEMOCRAT

She's standing in a place that aborts baby girls because they're girls. But she is reliable. Those people are always reliable. When it boils down to abortion and killing, the democrats/socialists are always there.

I might listen long enough to hear her Lois Lerner explanation about how those emails vanished.

not really.

MAGIC

So there I was at dinner in a strange world when I watched magic happen. On the other side of the table were 3 grad students=magicians. The conversation turned to locks and safeguards. All three of them knew how to pick locks, force door locks, and steal cars.

It does make one feel old. Thank you.

 They weren't of the old school of dreams but they're so very close.

All of them would sneer at a pocket protecter. A nice, snuggly under the arm holster, oh yea

WATCHING OCEANIA

I tend to think Orwell would shoot and then bayonet every single democrat alive today in America and Britain. When I read his books I thought he was making mock of them. Now? They rule us.

They have their reliable slaves such as Lanny who they can send out to spin, "well, it wasn't sex if she spit" campaign. Watch the man in the video above try to explain how it was that fact is not real and yet they're the same ones that want you to die because tree rings from a thousand years ago postulate that the global temperature has gone up .0001 degree since last time Jesus walked the earth.

Lanny is so utterly evil I don't think he ever goes home and tosses and turns after doing a "good" day of serving the Clintons. Try to imagine a public disclosure of the Wannsee Conference and who would be out there spinning the disclosure for the socialists democrats....Yep, Lanny.

See who was there and who they represented. Every single moment of my life I can honestly say that if I had been asked to represent a 'boss' at that place or speak for my own self, I would have burned the place down and killed all within. At that point, I might have wanted Lanny on my side but you know where he stood. He's reliable.

Don't you love how the name Colin Powell dribbles off his fangs?

Reliable.

YOUR ROLE IN THE NEW STATE

Well I admit. This hurt me way more than most movies. My own personal universe crashed right about then. Just think how long the thing that was Rome lasted. It was there because the people believed in it for almost a thousand years.

Yeah, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Well maybe. They believed in hot baths,

MR AND MRS BLACKBERRY

This is not amusing.

“The point that the president was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address, he did,” Earnest said. “But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.”
When pressed on whether Obama was aware that Clinton was conducting business over her private email, Earnest responded, “the point is the president did email with Secretary Clinton. I assume that he recognized the email address that he was emailing back to,” before saying that the important issue is where she complied with the Federal Records Act.

The reality set in when scumbag decided to keep up with his pals on his own Blackberry.

She thought she knew why she could get away with going deep on her emails.

Those of us who know that 95% of State Department traffic is on the SIPRNET wonder....who made that happen?

Yes, we know. It was liberal and progressive. Thank you Pulitzer prize winning Duranty and fellow lib/prog scum. Even decades after you've been dead, you are reliable.

HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY A MAN TO TELL THE TRUTH

Don't read it. I certainly didn't. I just get a kick out of the National Socialist News Media blit near the end of the article:

As Williams awaits NBC’s decision, he’s been strategizing with his close circle of advisers, including his wife, Lack, and former Universal Studios chief Ron Meyer. Under the terms of his suspension, Williams is banned from speaking to the press. “He can’t wait until he can speak,” a close friend told me. “He’s just anxious to get back to work. And he can’t wait to respond.”

There’s a chance, of course, that Williams’s stories could check out. One former colleague who spoke to Williams when he was in New Orleans during Katrina recalled him mentioning he saw the dead body. Meyer told me that Williams once showed him the piece of the SEALS’ stealth helicopter. “Forgetting what they say happened or didn’t happen, as an observer, he’s gone to some of the most dangerous places in the world, and that’s unquestionable,” Meyer says.

I don't mind all that much that he proved to be a fabulist. All of them are. They enjoy the same credibility that the Clintons have for truth, honesty and the American Way. They were hired to portray honesty to the best of their ability and they failed at the job, rather like Rather and Cronkite. They don't know the truth.

How much do you pay any man to tell you the truth?

It used to be the measure of a man. Honest.

IF LOSERS LIKE YOU COULD STOP BUILDING

More dreams of his father,

Obama: ‘We’re the Slaves Who Built the White House’

I'm pretty sure his father wasn't there and neither was his mother.

This racist son of a bitch is getting old.

Not one single one of his ancestors or anybody who knew them was there building the White House.

It is at times like this that one sees why weak worthless presidents employ utterly worthless or ruthless Vice Presidents. I think I preferred the tickets we used to have where the loser of the other party enjoyed the office of vice president. A president of those times could feel a certain care sitting down on a cushioned chair lest there be a serpent there.

Can you imagine Biden handling a dangerous serpent? I could look for the You Tube but, seriously, the shrieks of panic and alarm after that ignorant loser dropped the snake in his own lap are utterly predictable.

The socialist nazis laugh but think about it.  Bush had the devil incarnate but the democrats employed idiots of the first water. I think 12% of the reason that idiot McCain ran such an idiotic campaign was when he realized that 90% of his own electorate would shoot him dead in order to have her step up as president.

You can go with ruthless or vapid. Mostly, the dems have gone with vapid. Srlsy, Al Gore, Biden, Hillary, whoever was Carter's?

updare:
speelled shoooot write.  :)

PENN STATE AND ME

they overfilled the dorms but when I was there,

Forrest the walk on kicker was there and that was where we launched 57 hour dungeons and dragons on the weekend.

INTERNATINAL WOMEN'S DAY

I ripped this off from a a place I know. I feel OK about it because I was the one that asked her to keep it when she wanted to go all 21st century and replace it. To be honest, she changed it without notice which was/is her right.  Yet, it remains. Long ago she solicited our input if we liked one kibosh or another. I was first in the field to stand by this image:

Nothing says kibosh like this.

SECRET INTERNET PROTOCOL

95% of the State Department traffic is classified cables from the embassies around the world but it is so gratifying to know that the head of the State Department CANNOT READ IT BECAUSE IT IS CLASSIFIED AND ONLY FLOWS OVER THE SECRET INTERNET PROTOCOL ROUTERS.

I only hate and despise the Clintons more every single day. 

EGYPT DESTROYS ANOTHER ANCIENT SITE

I'm not sure how the two are different in the slightest degree. Barbarians on the ground rule.

Those sites were only five thousand years old. What are the odds any of the residents are going to care that they suffered urban renewal?

A LETTER TO JOSIE

I will bring it here. I always knew that the administration of the Smithsonian sucked but this made it really clear. I was mostly out of the country when the debate raged about displaying the plane that dropped the first atomic weapon. The link is well worth the time to read even if it doesn't conclude with the plane now on display way out by Dulles.

There aren't more than a handful of people that remember that I wore an Air Force uniform for two years. Airpower was the rule of the day back when I wore that uniform. We held those who fought from the air in high regard. Airpower was doctrine, tactics and operations. Later on, after signing up for something I may name later, I used to listen to guys talk about "warheads on foreheads." Every one of them was a staff pogue. Say what you will about Americans and their medals/ribbon culture. A pro can glance at the uniform of any serviceman and know a great deal about him/her. Unless he's a faker and oddly enough, a pro will figure that out very quickly.

At the 'fruit salad' level to a professional, it's not a confusing mass of tatter. It speaks volumes.

The thing I learned about air power back when I was expected to be a proponent of it, was that it included something called Effect By Obliviation of the enemy. Thousand bomber raids to drop incendiaries on cities in Europe and Japan could be matched by the delivery of a single bomb from a single bomber. That was progress! As it happens, there is no way that I could bring myself to wage that kind of warfare. My eyes precluded even navigator on a C-130 and made nuclear missile silo watch stander my only career path in the USAF. I walked away and upstairs to sign on with the Navy.

Growing up in places like Fort Sill and Fort Riley, there were school libraries and they appealed to little boys. To this very day I remember how crewmen were extracted from burnt Shermans and Matildas. A wire was required. War is necessary and required. Naked, unchecked atrocity is not, even if it hides it's guise under MAD.

I had an appointment at the VA the other day. Whenever I've gone there in the past I noted that it was packed with men who appeared to be just sitting there. My business was on the second floor and it's a bureaucracy, I went up and down the stairs from the main lobby 6 times. I really hate elevators.

Hey Bob!, do you need a push?"

Hi Bill, we missed you yesterday!

Hey bro, how's it going?

I started to pick up on the way the VA in my place is a community where old men at arms gather and just sit and talk. No booze, no whining, no complaining. It offers a place and it does offer a place.

Two weeks ago I was looking for a place. It was a place I remember most fondly. Fort Riley is its name. We had directions but we thought maybe the back gate would be open. Ultimately, I stopped and asked directions. This was an exit not quite, but just off I-70. I found the VFW and asked, how do I get to Fort Riley. At 2100 the VFW post at Fort Riley, in Junction City, had 5 men, my age, two bartenders and nobody else.

I'm a veteran of many foreign wars and I would never think of joining the VFW. I'm not sure why. I think maybe I'm not a joiner.

When I left as Operations Officer for a Group Staff I had just deployed all of our units to OEF, OIF for their third and fourth tours there. Active and Reserve units. 1ID had been there continuously in one way or another and at 2100, the VFW at that place mustered 5 men a wee bit older than me. I'm older than I thought I'd be but I thought there would be more guys at the local VFW. I suspect few of our generation are 'joiners.' Been there, done that.

I remember sitting overseas with a LT CEC who, "built shitters in Fullujah" swapping tales over a beer with a female LCDR CEC who ran convoys out of the FOBS to resupply the local fire bases with food, ammo and no beer. Watch some video of convoys blown up by IEDs and watch some video of Fallujah way back. I very much doubt they have any interest in joining the VFW either. In the olden days it only required a campaign medal to join. It was like it was taken over by big Army and they are death on beer and having a good time. Everybody knows that. They've probably arranged with the local law to stake out the place to catch any DUIs just as the Shore Patrol staked out the clubs in Treasure Island back in the days when we had a fleet base there.

It was amusing to visit Yongsan Main Post. I used to fly there 15 times a year from the west coast. I did that thing for about 6 years. It got old. As a navy man I would visit the Navy's club up at the top of the post. The place was always hopping, great food, great staff, free lunch, live bands, good movies and I don't mean just a few times, it was every single time I stopped by. There were 19 other clubs run by the Army at Yongsan where one could, sometimes, find an old sergeant drinking a beer under fluorescent lights in a giant empty, cold, echoing hall.

Maybe some day I'll check out the local VFW posts in MetroParkCentralis. Maybe. I wouldn't bet a donut on it.

RESPONSE TO CONGRESSIONAL SCUMBAG

It gives me pleasure to read this man's response to the attack on him by a congressional scumbag.

In recent weeks I have been the target of attacks in the press by various radical environmental and politically motivated groups. This effort should be seen for what it is: a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming.

I am saddened and appalled by this effort, not only because of the personal hurt it causes me and my family and friends, but also because of the damage it does to the integrity of the scientific process. I am willing to debate the substance of my research and competing views of climate change with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a shame that those who disagree with me resolutely decline all public debate and stoop instead to underhanded and unscientific ad hominem tactics.

Let me be clear. I have never been motivated by financial gain to write any scientific paper, nor have I ever hidden grants or any other alleged conflict of interest. I have been a solar and stellar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a quarter of a century, during which time I have published numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. The fact that my research has been supported in part by donations to the Smithsonian Institution from many sources, including some energy producers, has long been a matter of public record. In submitting my academic writings I have always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally, consistent with the level of disclosure made by many of my Smithsonian colleagues.

If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors-on all sides of the debate-are also required to make similar disclosures. And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers’ accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.

I regret deeply that the attacks on me now appear to have spilled over onto other scientists who have dared to question the degree to which human activities might be causing dangerous global warming, a topic that ought rightly be the subject of rigorous open debate, not personal attack. I similarly regret the terrible message this pillorying sends young researchers about the costs of questioning widely accepted “truths.”

Finally, I thank all my many colleagues and friends who have bravely objected to this smear campaign on my behalf and I challenge all parties involved to focus on real scientific issues for the betterment of humanity.

Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

I have nothing but contempt for ranking member Grijalva (Democrat, Arizona)

NICE QUESTION

I like Ashe but this was amusing:

Hillary Clinton is supposed to be a strong, tough woman, yet for some reason she has to be hidden away and only come out for safe speeches where she won't get questions from the press.

The press. They have made themselves a joke and yet they invoke themselves to the causes they think are really important. Kind of like Kayla Mueller.

ETHICALITY

She is a lawyer and ever since she lost all her files just before White Water investigators went looking for them she hasn't drawn an ethical breath in her life. Good luck witchfinders at the New York Times. We'll be amused by your entirely farcical findings.

Not going to hold my breath. Watching really stupid people who would vote for this idiot is more fun. In her entire 'professional' life she did nothing but stand by her man. Democrats still prefer her to any other candidate.

A LITTLE CANDOR PLEASE

I used to work for the US government. I was, after some effort, tortured into using a .mil email address. With that account working with layers of government just under secretary of state, I would always continue to note the email address of ANYBODY who sent me traffic over the interwebs and I got a lot with.gov.

NOLA Command made it a point to offer no service to people who did not use .mil address emails despite not making any provision to offer .mil addresses to the 180,000 people like me who might not have access to .mil.

How did EVERYBODY fail to notice:

I know, its like the sick jokes at the IRS and Justice Department that somehow lost all their emails or had their hard drives crash altogether in one day.

OTOH, she might not use email any more often then she drives her worthless self. What is it now, 20 years and she has not driven a car? That's an accomplishment, but it's about as dubious a type of accomplishment as any of Obama's.

I'll bet a donut she doesn't even know how to drive and democrats are all going to vote for her.

*it's a screen capture of the instapundit.

ASSOCIATED PRESS BUTT CRAWLERS

I kind of enjoyed reading this little AP exclusive:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (neh-ten-YAH'-hoo) didn't offer any "viable alternatives"

Obama says he read a transcript 

Obama says Netanyahu. Obama says that deal 

Obama says 

Obama spoke  

© 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy andTerms of Use.

Jesus wept. I bolded and colorized the AP bullshit. Does it feel like "1984" to anybody else? I went back to the source to verify and include a cite and then captured the final words to the article above. Mutatis mutandis, all we are left with is Obama and I'll bet a donut he mispronounced whossname's name.

AP to the left, but the un carries his own umbrella

Oddly enough, for many years I subscribed to newspapers and I read them every day when I was home. Over the years I dropped them as they turned into the AP. The Christian Science Monitor went first followed by the New York Times and finally even the Wall Street Journal.

What kind of newsman or newspaper believes it necessary to provide pronunciation guidance for the name of a head of government? I suppose that bit was intended for the news reader Brian Whossname who lost his job over confabulations. The AP doesn't appear to have picked up on that story yet. They're still trying to wrap their minds around Goodluck Jonathan's campaign to whip boko haram before his inevitable re-election next week. I guess they figure that even democrats know how to pronounce the name of the ruling head of state in Nigeria.

Me? I wouldn't bet on it.

AT FORT LEAVENWORTH TODAY

A great number of people are now attending mandatory counseling on the 'proper' treatment of their newest death row inmate.  If I was running the place they'd be getting issued baseball bats with little tiny carpet tacks studding them. "Not more than 10 full power strokes delivered to the prisoner in order to motivate him to shower, shave, eat, die. Stick to the extremities. You don't want him dead before justice has authorized it."

This one is guilty. He needs to beg to have sentence carried out.

PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL ADDRESSES CONGRESS

From David Steinberg comes this little number.

THIS PLACE SUCKS

Positive attitude check. This place positively sucks.

Hooked up a standard hose to the hot water discharge, nothing comes out. I know, it's just minutes until the hose ruptures. It seemed such an easy idea to free the hood up to charge the battery.

A LITTLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I can never hear about Artificial Intelligence without thinking back to Douglas Adams and his incredible radio show about The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and his wonderful elevators that were artificially intelligent and could see into the future. From wiki

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. 

This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators.

Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.

They gave whole new meaning to the, Rise of the Machines predicted in Terminator. I'm leaving the planet if any Sirius Cybernetic Company ever start marketing AI.

THE NEW DEATH

I was reading Mattis today and I was many hours later struck by a fundamental underlying flaw in his argument for a new strategy. He is fixated on applying hi-tech and superior man-agent abilities to dealing with outright savages. Kill enough, fast enough and the new savages will dash home.

On my first ship, the flagship for the Middle East Force, we had a plaque in the Wardroom from an earlier visit to Ethiopia.

Mobilisation Order by Emperor Haile Selassie - Abyssinia 1936
Everyone will now be mobilised and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and to cook. Those without wives will take a woman without a husband. Woman with small babies need not go. The blind, those who cannot walk, or for any reason cannot carry a spear, are exempted. Any one found at home after receipt of this order will be hanged.

Think about Verdun or The Battle of the Somme. 75,000 casualties in just the Allied armies in a single battle, much less two and he thinks he has a grasp on true warfare. There were a million casualties at Verdun and that murderous war killed many millions of men of military age. The Muslims could lose that many in a week and never miss them. Just think back to World War I.

Think about it on a perspective that includes 4 years of trench warfare that cost millions of soldiers their lives. Go on,  just ponder it. Millions and millions of the best of men, shelled, gassed, killed for what? Muslims are putting it all on the line because we lost the urge. We build $200 million dollar fighter planes because we like not to to fight.

The key has always been resilience. What caused the retreat of civilization in the Dark Ages? It was human population die-offs nobody can even imagine today.

I'd submit that the Muslims are willing to try to invoke the thing again. Plagues and worse for the West and we let them into our grad schools to study biochemistry and worse every single semester.

Blogged on iPad which is not good for me.

2 SEALS basking in the ice flow. It will get ugly in a second

 We aren't going to be them.

Update: somewhat fixed.

SUBTLE CARTOON HUMOR