TRUTH ON A STICK

CLEVELAND POLICE PREPARE FOR RNC

As the peaceful demonstrators make plans to attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer, the Cleveland Police Department, notorious for it's execution style of police self defense, is getting ready to make them comfortable during their sojourn in this, our fair MetroParkCentralis.

Police practice with new Active Barricade System

Cleveland Police learning crowd control techniques

IT'S NOT A SMALL TOWN

I did end up getting the hair cut yesterday. As I walked in I commented that it was my first entrance without other patrons present in the little 2 chair shop and the owner smiled and said that not only had she managed to finish her lunch undisturbed, she also managed to sweep up. I admired the room and mentioned it was also the first time I'd ever been there without finding myself ankle deep in hair, and then I bravely sat down for the usual.

As I sat there on the receiving end of a very good haircut, I asked if she was going to be at dinner that evening and she was answering when the phone rang with her husband asking her what time they were leaving. I arrived a little early, to shop, and the MC/owner asked me something that got us discussing that my barber would be there that evening. He shook his head and said, "she isn't on the list." I told him I was pretty sure she was going to be there. She's shows up pretty much every month. He went off to call her but it was too late. He set a place for them anyway.

When she showed up, in good time, it turns out that 70% of the men present know her very well since they also get their haircuts in that little shop. Sheeesh! No wonder it's so crowded. These people drive in from all over MetroParkCentralis to get their hair cut at her chopshop where I got this, slightly modified by me, masterpiece.

I'd tell you more about the dinner,  but it's a secret.

FROM THE CAVE

I can't recall where I saw this but I have enjoyed Achmed since his debut. This was how he used to open the act on tour. I really enjoyed the script scrolling across. It took me awhile to understand it.

A GLIMPSE AT REALITY

I like this cartoon.

Of course, those who believe they have a right to your stuff also insist that life was doomed over a decade ago due to man made global warming.  Not would be doomed. No, their projections showed that we'd all be dead and gone  by now. Now those same frauds are hard at work to make criminals of anybody who objects to the unwholesome made up facts behind their syents.

The Green Party still dominates swathes of Europe. They came out with an ad six years ago that defined their intentions. They were more forthright than Obama was about shutting down the coal industry in America. They very fairly showed what they expected would happen to people who didn't go along with 'saving the planet.'

This link quotes Swedish Green Party secretary Anders Wallner, "What Nicander says is something that we take very seriously. Extremism has no place in the Green Party." He was just talking about his party being overrun by the muslim brotherhood and behaving just like them.

How to Cut Carbon Emissions (1010 No Pressure) Sick! from Truth Mongrel TV on Vimeo.

DIABOLICAL

The people who declared war on a man who won 10% of the votes for President of the Science Fiction Writers Association who then threw him bodily out of the organization, must surely regret being such intolerant, bigoted, hate-filled, idiots. Everything they did to him, he promised, would rebound on them and he hasn't even begun to sue them yet.

This afternoon the Hugo Awards for this year were announced and he swept a number of the awards again; just like last year, which resulted in an enormous black eye for the writer-knights who think of themselves as true fans.  It reminded me of this old movie gem about one man taking on a whole world.

He may not be the smartest guy, but he's smarter then they are. I suspect the ones who manipulated the system against him really regret being such bigots and racists. As he demonstrated again this year, two can play that game.

WHATEVER IT IS, IT AINT TRUE

Bloomberg had this to say about Congressman Ryan:

Puerto Rico’s complex debt crisis is shaping up as the first true test of Paul Ryan’s six-month old speakership. 

I'm pretty sure there is something fiendishly complex about loaning money to a country that requires each and every citizen of that country to pay its creditors $19.5 million. That's every citizen's share of the debt they racked up.

The Wisconsin Republican has pledged publicly that the U.S. House will find a "responsible" solution to the island’s debt crisis.

Why start being responsible now? Wouldn't that time have been back when it was obvious that Puerto Ricans had exceeded any feasible means of repaying their creditors and stop lending them more money? 

The responsible thing is to investigate and jail everybody who loaned Puerto Rico money after that point when it was impossible to repay the money, and hold them personally accountable. Don't just fine the banks and mutual funds and financial companies, find out who failed to carry out their fiduciary duty and jail them all for fraud.

Any institution that made those loans should get absolutely nothing and certainly nothing from the taxpayers in this country.

Unlike many of his previous challenges, this isn’t a mess he can blame on his predecessor. If he can’t forge a solution, it also doesn’t bode well for Ryan’s ability to bring his recalcitrant conservative caucus Party along on other spending and tax plans, which could be a recipe for the continuing gridlock and peril that ousted John Boehner.

OK, I did do the lineout and red word in the quote above. It's just funny to me how the failure to spend money and increase tax policy is always the fault of something that doesn't even exist anymore and never really did. There hasn't been a financially conservative Republican in Congress since Harriet Tubman died. I dare you to find one who didn't instantly roll over and splay his paws in the air and play dead if anybody even breathed the word, "crisis" because everyone leaped into action to spend more on the crisis and pack the spending bills with pork.

The fabulists at Bloomberg seem keen to fix the blame for Puerto Rico's irrevocable insolvency and 70 billion dollar debt on Ryan, as something that just rolled down the pike on Ryan's watch starting 6 months ago.

A "responsible solution" to the islands debt problem is old, time-tested and fair. That's right, we sell the island and all the government owned infrastructure to Cuba for one dollar and let them assume all the debts and do with it what they want. Wages instantly assume socialist approved amount of $20/month and health care costs practically vanish. Imagine! A New Socialist Paradise with poor people and absolutely nothing else but sunny beaches.

If you think that is unjust, just look what France* demanded and got out of Haiti over the years until Haiti finally repaid the debt it 'accrued' when the slaves revolted and threw out the French and nationalized all their property.

I know what all the people in DC and Boston and New York City want to do in a responsible way. They want all of us to bail out the idiots and morons who created this problem and maybe set up a Puerto Rico Debt Recovery Agency staffed by 15,000 of the wealthy morons who created this problem, and get paid $680,000/year for life to "assist in recovering the troubled asset known as Puerto Rico".

Screw Them!

And should you waste your time reading Bloomberg, ask where the problem lies now with our Iranian-President Agreement to end nuclear proliferation and stop firing missiles that was never submitted to the Senate for approval and which still, somehow, has the force of law. That piece of legislation just seems to have vanished now that Iran is seen to be firing missiles once a day and twice on Sundays and is clearly still spinning centrifuges to get fissile material for nuclear weapons. Nobody even talks about the deal Obama made unilaterally all by himself and apparently only with himself.

And, when you figure that out, ask yourself just how deeply unprincipled the people in the House of Representatives are that those in the majority would even breath about getting involved in Puerto Rico's hand built problem crafted over generations by the scum of the earth.

*Speaking of responsible, the only sources I could find in a quick search for the facts on this case were newspapers and various social justice institutes. There were no primary sources and not even any valid appearing secondary sources. Money was owed and extorted, circumstances and amounts vary.

EXTREME RIGHT WING PARTY IN GERMANY

As with most of the things Europeans get up to these days, I don't understand their ongoing failure, in Germany of all places, to arrest a party that rallies around a diabolical flag, chant Heil Hitler and flap their arms about for all to see. This kind of behavior is unlawful in Germany. People get arrested for doing it all the time.

I guess we all have a different inflexible difference of opinion of what it means to be "right wing."

FOOD AND NUTRITION

Interesting developments that I missed. I'm not much of food science guy so it was never a staple of my reading. There's an interesting book review about a book written by a vegan/vegetarian who fell off the wagon recently and wrote an in-depth book about the diets of people.  The quote below was taken from the comments section between Rob and Paleo Huntress and is part of her response to his arguments about Okinawa diet featuring carbohydrates.

“A point worth making is that people die for other reasons than health. For example, people die because of car accidents and violent crime. A few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa asked the obvious question: what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.”

Earlier, The Clinical Nutritionist chimed and set the record straight with this gem:

Ok here is your proof. As a matter of fact there is NO proof from a bio-chemical standpoint that we require carbohydrates at all, but we do, however, REQUIRE essential amino acids from protein and essential fatty acids from fat.

“Essential” means that your body can not make it. You must get it from your food. There is NO SUCH THING as essential carbohydrates.

Yes, yes, I'm sure these things were well known to my astute readers but I haven't seen either of them anywhere else before this. I mean this is truly dangerous knowledge. You wouldn't want your minor children finding out that there is no dietary excuse for strained carrots or any vegetable once it is known to them that there really is no valid reason to eat them.

MAYBE TOMORROW

We are watching the best television series ever made and regretting it only lasted for one season. I meant to get a haircut today, but the situation is not yet dire. There is plenty of time.

PANTALOONS

There I was, reading Maggie's Farm when all of a sudden, there appeared, like a quest, the idiot idea of delving further into the names and histories of the poltroons. And, so I did.

Sir Walter Raleigh

You really cannot imagine a man like that alive in this day and age.  I'm surprised nobody ever wrote a book about him. I'm kind of amazed that they put his face on the 20 dollar note rather than some old geezer nobody ever heard of.

IN THE QUIET HOURS, THE MOON

There have been years since my last reading of this poem but it always roars back like it did the very first time I heard it. I heard it in Chicago one night on their local public radio as I drove into town after midnight and then I asked the most erudite and knowledgeable professor of (back then, English), who authored it and he told me, for he really does know many things beyond the ken of seafarers.

I used to live above a beach or two and just about every single night the second time I lived in Newport, I would walk down to the beach. The other two Ensigns and our senior housemate, LT Mike Lemieux figured I was crazy but, I like the beach, even if it is covered with snow and ice.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold

In the quiet hours, as I head into my 56th year, I like to remember a friend, who still owes me money.

He was a most excellent man and officer of the USN.

CHANGE

We, who are not narcissists and who don't look into mirrors all that much, fail to pay attention. An ordinary seeming lady asked me the other day for my hair color and I said brown. I figured it was close enough for government work.

I don't care. It's always been brown and is still brownish and 40 years later it still won't lie down and I don't care.

Some of us plan to age gracefully and others never thought we would grow old.

The Three Captains and a Major

LATIN QUARTER

I bought some headphones from Amazon and it makes a difference to us bloggers-after-dark who lurk, quietly, listening to very loud music late into the night.

PLAYING H2OPb WITH THE WATER

From the fascinating blog of the newest Special Assistant Attorney General of Michigan, news of a suit recently filed.

They filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in November 2015 and companion complaints in the Michigan Court of Claims and Genesee County Circuit Court. The complaints include both tort and Constitutional claims against the governmental actors as racial minorities are disproportionately affected by the lead poisoning.

He and his pals are going to investigate and prosecute all those stupid people who made the good people of Flint drink radium and plumbum and other icky stuff like that instead of good clean fresh Lake Huron water which, as we think about it, would  still have been a toxic menace to the good people of Flint since all the lead came from the pipes that distribute the water. Oh, and it's Waukesha that is forcing the people for the last 100 years to drink double the good amount of radium with each filthy glass of water consumed.

You know, when SMOD drops in, the media will again tell us that its impact is felt most by racial minorities and women. They just can't get enough of the racism inherent in the speeding meteor of death.

Short of ripping out and replacing ALL the pipes, the peep show being prepared to bag, tag and jail low echelon Aqua people will simply amuse the peasants while doing nothing at all about the underlying pipe problem.

The prosecutions have begun, the trials and hangings will follow and yet, there remains the troubling language of the idiocracy.

...switched its drinking water source from Lake Huron water treated by the Detroit water system to Flint River water treated at the Flint Water Treatment Plant. Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials have acknowledged a disastrous mistake when they failed to require the city to add corrosion-control chemicals as part of the treatment process. 

The corrosive water caused lead to leach from pipes, joints and fixtures. Although Flint reconnected to Detroit water in October, after state officials acknowledged the lead-poisoning problem after months of denials, the risk remains because of damage to the water infrastructure system. 

Officials also still are exploring possible links between the river water and the Legionnaires' outbreak. 

The state and city are now treating the pipes with higher levels of phosphates in an effort to build up a protective coating that will prevent lead from further leaching. Having more water flowing in the system would help that process, and that's one reason Snyder and other state officials want Flint residents to start using their taps again.

So, you see, it wasn't the water that was dangerous. No! It was the failure to add chemicals to the water that brought about the problem which is 100% caused by the lead pipes that nobody is talking about replacing.

You know, some people went hermatile at the notion of adding fluoride to the water supply. Does anybody ever ask/wonder what chemicals they're putting in the water to keep the lead from showing up? Yea, I went hunting for the wonderful clip from Conspiracy Theory but it was not to be found.

Isn't it wonderful that absolutely NOBODY is suggesting that the best course of action is to replace the dangerous lead pipes that furnish the leaded water to the people?

Oh drat, I just realized that, here in the city of higher elevation, they are replacing the main waterline running all the way up to the water plant that is guarded by Homeland Security, the SS and Bolos. drat. What have I been drinkin aaaarrrrgggghhhh.

Yeah, it doesn't quite get to the aargh scene but it's still a killer rabbit, aint it?

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

We here at Defiant are happy appropriators of all that is best and good. We like fine wine, attractive houses, nice people, melodious voices and cats. We also like things that people built here back when beauty was still in fashion in architecture and the world held competitive exhibitions and World Fairs. We only went to the one fair in New York and we were terribly small at the time and have only the dimmest memories that probably aren't real, but we lived in New York back then, so of course we went.

I see that Egypt erupted at some point over Chinese dare devils who created themselves a near exact life size copy of the Sphinx. We can't have that said Egypt and went to some world body or other that controls things like human rights, the price of anchovies and the great cultural appropriation scam. They objected, most vociferously, to the Chink Sphinx. In your drawing books you can color me stunned when I read that China dutifully knocked to pieces the great fake sphinx.

Closer to home we have the things we took from our heritage. Being American, we have the entire world to select from and refine as 'our' heritage. I kind of like it all. I don't believe any American outside the Department of State would even hear the faint little bleating of outraged old world types if they did object to the little things we made and treasure. Some of them were made, at first, out of paper and tinsel, but the civil liked them enough after the World Fair, Pacific-Panama Exhibit or other giant festival to make them real.

Josephine and A Temple to Athena in Nashville that looks like the Parthenon

Dusty old ruin in Greece 

Art is an ideal. It turns up wherever people have ideals and a copy is still the highest compliment.

Palace of Fine Arts (there's not a speck of art in the palace)

I happen to like the Palace of Fine Arts so I threw it in. I don't see how a Sphinx in China hurt Egypt or Copts in the valley of the Nile, much less the Egyptians dwelling on the shores of the Red Sea or the Sinai.

I suppose if 90% of your national income derives from tourism, not counting the billions of $ in aid the United States sends there every year which is matched by petro-emirs in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, I guess you can be expected to throw a hissy fit when somebody fakes your sphinx. I wonder how their suit against the Luxor worked?

POWER

I got a kick out of reading this because I know power. Sadly, if I was the facilities guy at MIZZOU I'd have responded to the request for power at the quad with something the students needed. It's a jet engine powered generator. A jet off a 747.  It's a little loud. I'd have put it right next to their little settlement on the quad.

I'd have billed them for it, naturally.

THE RICH VEINS OF ANTHROPOLOGIC SCIENCE

I just saw this at my sister's place and it's always worth swiping reposting.

If only there had been adults in the room when Al Gore undertook to destroy the scientific method in the 21st century and wage war on science. It's amazing to me that sincere people like Bill Nye want to criminalize failure to believe that man is responsible for global warming.

THE LOST WERE FOUND

Astute readers are aware that my glasses experimented briefly with flight two weeks ago. They're not terribly aerodynamic which doesn't even slow them down when they feel the call of the wild. As I surmised, they didn't get very far and it was just a tedious matter of beating the bushes most carefully for a few hours in order to track them down at the end of what could only be described as a ballistic arc. I just had to wait until all the snow and ice melted. I enlisted a helper today since it was a glorious Spring day and test dropped two other pair of glasses out the same window. The results indicated that roughly a quarter of an acre of land needed to be searched. The third test article was never seen again.

I don't think that's poison ivy but my track record at identifying poisonous and carnivorous plants is about 10 to 1 against.

ADVANCING INTO THE DARK

Did anyone ever do a cover of Eres Tu by Mocedades? The last time I heard it played was over the air from a station in LA while I was playing war on San Clemente during the first BELL THUNDER. I hadn't heard EUROVISION's winning song since 1974 when I was sailing to Block Island. And back then? Who ever heard of Eurovision?

Remember the old days when you had to "know" the name of the artist or the song to find it?

PRECISELY BETWEEN THE EYES

Ripped from the cover of Maggie's Farm.

HYDROGEN FUSION

There was a graphic that I cannot find now. It discussed the use of fusion technology to convert seawater into freshwater. It made the point that this has actually been going on for a long time now. Eons. We call it solar evaporation and it's where the rain comes from.

BIO WAR

The government is not so savvy as all that. They just sheathed our local federal building in armor but you have to wonder if they have upgraded and improved the central air conditioning to eliminate potential bio-hazards. You know the standard Mission Impossible Format where the 'good guys' infiltrate building security and knowingly move to release a chem/bio element into the central air system of the building? Yeah, like that. Zika mosquitos from hell.

Do you think the feds are set up to deal with this kind of attack any better now after the ridiculous flail ex we went through following 9/11 and the anthrax spores? No? Me neither.

You can almost see the heavy hand of the fed though, can't you. They'll lock up and guard the access to the ventilation room and maybe, just maybe, think about the air vent intakes on the roof. Maybe. But they won't even think about the vents and intakes in the parking garage next door to the federal building where all the federal employees park. That's not how federal security thinks.

Remember, these are the ones that institute draconian screening at the main gate and then have their employees lined up single parked for a mile every single morning to get in the gate to go to work which makes them easy prey for any killer with an AK47 (CIA). We used to get this thing in Bahrain where the line to get into ASU was backed up to the main road all through a Shia village.

You get to laugh as you listen to the Base CO at Norfolk talk about what happens whenever he goes to maximum security at his Base. He told us that he had traffic backed up to the North Carolina State border and it's not that much of an exaggeration.  The lines when you do it are huge.

Look at the recent sad events in Belgium. The bombers attacked the people outside security because, they were vulnerable. There was no need for penetration of the security barrier in order to inflict casualties all out of proportion. The people were deliberately piled up outside the palisades and vulnerable to attack. That was what the government mandated. That's what the Red Brigades did at Rome not that long ago.

Rule # 7  Don't tarry at security interfaces. Get there, go through and move on. You don't want to linger on the boundary of life and death. And, it's not like anybody was stupid enough to arm the TSA.

DEAR COMRADE

The STATE has accepted your new provisions on membership in the Great Proletariat of the Future! You along with all your peers have been approved for accelerated entry into the 14th Century diaspora as envisioned by YOU and YOUR PEERS! CONGRATULATIONS!

As a result of your dedicated advocacy of living a frugal and carbon free existence from now until the end of the world, you have been selected by your friends and neighbors as one of the dullumati and as such are entitled to rent and utility free living in a cave in the nearest gorge to your house! You must move yourself and all your belongings sans truck or any vehicle with an internal combustion engine or anything not directly powered by wind or solar power. (No horses need apply, they're hayburners and as such, fossil fueled).

Move as expeditiously as you want. No hurry. You have 24 hours to complete your move to the cave and after that, all your material possessions will be recycled by the people that actually bought them for you.

With this enviable rent/utility free living credit come a few minor inconveniences that you probably didn't really think applied to people like you.

1. No more electricity unless you make it yourself
2. No more travel unless you really like walking
3. No more air travel.
4. No more internet. (fossil fueled servers are the avatars of the new darkness, you say)
5. No more hot baths or showers (hot water is a scarce commodity in the land of no power)
6. It necessarily follows that you'll wear fur or homespun from now until you die.
7. No more TV.

But, the STATE thanks you for advocating the end to civilization. Keep up the good work! We can't end civilization as we know it without YOUR SUPPORT!

BIG BROTHER

I'm pretty sure that Big Brother is smiling in Franklin County. It's OK for everybody else to film crimes in action but not you. Filming a crime, is a crime says Franklin County's District Attorney.

Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien said, "People need to know and understand that the use of a smartphone to video events can constitute serious felony crimes. They should think twice before they use their smartphones to either photograph or video anything.

Where would the people be if they didn't film anything? This prosecutor just declared it a crime to film a crime. What a weird place he lives in.

IT'S LIKE DYNAMITING FISH

I've always enjoyed my fellow comrades at The People's Cube. My kind of radicals.

WHERE ARE THEY?

Are there any overt pro-America American groups out there anymore? Everyday I read about another pseudo or quasi American group that isn't really about America and Americans. They seem to have splintered into competing groups of budding little fascists.

I read too much news which is kind of a travesty since I took to reading the news again after I found watching television news unbearable. Now it turns out that even the written news that crosses my eye is so full of irritating things it is best avoided. I wonder how many of us have found ourselves sliding comfortably into home each day without paying the slightest attention to the news of the world, the nation, or the city around us.

I vacationed a time or two in a place which is no more where I was were totally cut off from the outside world. No TV, no radio, no newspapers, no cable, no internet. Oh sure, you could get in your car and drive to Kona but there wasn't much there and the idea of doing it so you could pick up a copy of the New York Times in order to feed your news Jones was too much even for me. Besides, every morning at breakfast we got a 9 page extract of the news from the NYT. I say 9 pages but it was only 8 because the last page was the crossword puzzle. That was enough.

I've about reached that point again. Fortunately, spring is almost here and I will be able to take in the gentle breezes and walks in the woods that make a day a splendid thing. I have also rejoined the life aquatic since I trailered home the latest addition to my fleet. I have to fix the electrics on the trailer and figure out how to make it work with the car and then I'll be able to hit the nearby river and the lakes and find comfort in the fact that Lake Erie is the shallow Great Lake and therefore warms up to practically blood temperature by late June. Yep, easy days and lazy nights.

I'm still writing four or five posts a day but perhaps that will slow down when I stop reading the news. Buck and I used to swap numbers sometimes. Not the unimportant ones, but the ones that showed how much effort we were putting into this trivial thing called blogging.

I LIKE VERIZON

I was happily reading and analyzing when my train of thought was interrupted by a call from a Yonkers, NY number. I don't know anyone in Yonkers so I let it go to message and then looked up the number because, Yonkers. It turns out to be the number of the March of Dimes and I saw from the interwebs that these guys are a horror that dial up to 3 times per day for weeks on end.

I was online so I went to my phone home and found that it was as I remembered and that I can block up to 5 callers for absolutely nothing. I was happy to paste the number of the March of Dimes into the little block and hit enter. Evidently, they don't take "no" or "go away and stop bothering me" for an answer. The whole thing took 2 minutes.

That's a good website and a noble service.

VIEW FROM BALLAST POINT

WE REMEMBER THEM

In 1963, USS THRESHER took her final dive and never resurfaced. Boats that never come back are said to be on Eternal Patrol.

Starboard bow view, July 24, 1961. (Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of Naval History and Heritage Command)

GRACIOUS DRIVING

The link HERE will take you to Syracuse.com and there is a link that will take you from there to a video that Jack Nicklaus posted to facebook of his arrival at the Masters this week.

I thought it was an interesting contrast in style and grace with the behavior we have become accustomed to from many celebrities and politicians.

I SENSE AGREEMENT

From The Zman and via Maggies Farm,

TURBULENTS

There isn't a shadow of a crime but the infinitely deep pockets of the State's Attorneys General are investigating ExxonMobil and will go to any lengths to force them to go out of business. I mean, that's not what they say but it's pretty clear that'w what they intend.

Top law enforcement officers in several states are joining with the Chicken Littles of green activism to weaponize the scientifically dubious argument that human activity is not only changing the earth's climate but that unprecedented world catastrophe awaits unless draconian, economy-killing carbon emission controls are imposed more or less immediately.

The litigation offensive has nothing to do with justice. It is aimed at forcing those few remaining holdouts in the business community who stubbornly cling to science to confess their thought crimes and submit to the know-nothing Left's climate superstitions. It is part of modern-day environmentalism's ongoing assault on knowledge, human progress, markets, and the rule of law.

Repent and embrace the true green faith or else you'll be investigated and denounced as a climate criminal, is the message of “Inspector Gotcha,” New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.

“It’s too early to say what we’re going to find,” he said of the five-month-old witch hunt aimed at his current target, the gigantic ExxonMobil, at a press conference this week in Lower Manhattan. “We intend to work as aggressively as possible, but also as carefully as possible.”

One can certainly gain an appreciation for Henry II as we watch the legal theater use naked power against witches, orcs and angevins. As usual, I can't help but wonder if ExxonMobile decided to terminate all business in New York to first put out the light, and then put out the light and rid themselves of this turbulent pipsqueak.

It's all pretty theater and I'm sure the Attorney General of Pennsylvania would be in it up to her eyebrows if not for her own long fall from grace.

I wonder if these people understand why more and more people are preparing for turbulent times. It's like they expect some kind of massive breakdown of law and order.

DELTA OF BLINDNESS

Long ago and far away I was in an advanced, for the time and my age, math class, when the teacher demanded to know why I was squinting at her and in other ways making faces rather than attending to the microprint she was using to decorate the blackboard at the front of the room which, to be honest, I never saw the point. I was sent down to the Stalag Commander's office to await his pleasure and, as it happens, that of my mother, who was summoned to take this disrespectful and thoroughly rotten ne'er do well away for 3 days of bread and water. The truth was slowly revealed to all of us as she dove right into the heart of the matter.

"I couldn't see what she was writing." We stopped at the post doctor shop and found some 89 year old physician who saw action with Custer doing the late unpleasantness with the Indians and he determined, via the most careful and precise measurements known to mankind, that I could not see much further than the end of my nose. Much was revealed in this observation.

I was a devastating player of the game of soccer, so-so at football, and pretty much useless at baseball. As the discerning reader will comprehend, much of my ability in sports of this nature had to do with the size of the ball and the speed at which it traveled. This wan't all. No. The enlightened source of all knowledge suddenly realized that my penchant for coming from behind to win in the sailboat races was due to the fact that I was following the leader until I could see the mark at which point I almost inevitably sailed in for the kill.

Not more than one or two dozen people asked me how I could possibly have gone through years of health class where every year each student is called to the front and compelled to read aloud from the eye chart for the edification of the instructor. They failed to understand that this was competition; this was something I was damned good at; this was a test of memorization, and when one's last name starts with a W, it is not all that hard to memorize 20 or 30 letters sight unseen. What's the point of audible calls if they don't mean it's a game?

The good folk of Huntsville had some sort of optical shop where spectacles could be purchased. I was promptly fitted with a pair. I hardly ever wore them. I mean, guess how much bigger the target pins are when bowling if you can only see a vast blur downrange. You can't miss! You aim for center mass and learn to put some english on it because there is no hope in hell of picking up single pins and getting a spare.

I was also outfitted with a pair of contact lenses and was happyish to wear them and slowly adapt to the agonizing pain discomfort until I wore them too long one day while out racing sailboats and ruptured most of the blood vessels in both eyes. Driving home from the lake and then to work that day was an experience on par with Toad's wild ride. I was completely blind at the end of my shift and didn't see anything after that for the next 3 days. The logistics of getting a sister, who thought it was better to put down blind dumb brothers, to enlist in the quest to join my parent in the sole remaining family car to come and fetch me and the car I had taken to work, was probably screamingly funny to the rest of the family. I don't like to talk about it.

I went crazy mad as a lieutenant and bought two pairs of glasses before deploying for the second time. One was a pair of prescription sunglasses and the other was a nice pair of spectacles that looked good as they flew off my nose about a mile off the coast of the Bahrain Yacht Club (no, not the one in Manama) as my Laser tipped over while in a pretty tight race with the locals and my skipper. I was in the lead on the downwind leg when a sudden gust caught me by surprise. A Laser does a peculiar thing known in the sport as a deathroll when sailing by the lee and getting jammed by a jibe. I hit the rising side of the boat like a ton of cement but the glasses were unconstrained and lived to be wild and free.

It was kind of sad that day to realize one's purpose in life is to serve as a humorous example of blind misfortune. For you see, about a mile off the coast of an island that doesn't rise anywhere more than 3 feet out of the sea, it is somewhat hard for a blind man to see it and head his boat in the direction of home. I was left to follow the others around and around and then follow them back to the marina. Sad really. Didn't really hear the end of it from the skipper until about 3 days later in a minefield.

As the blind do, I felt my way carefully through the tragedy that is the Administrative Support Unit, Bahrain in 1988, and found the doctor shop staffed by one of those armadillos that is convinced that you are some sort of drug seeker and a pest and the worst sort of custodian of valuable government property. She took some delight in telling me that my Commanding Officer himself! would have to sign off on the script to get her to give me a chit good to take to a real doctor of eyes in Bahrain to get my prescription checked and a new pair of glasses in 24 hours. Some people don't understand that I was wearing my glasses and not my sunglasses when the whale surfaced right under my damned boat and pitched me into the water. I could see her just fine.

New glasses in hand, I was prepared for the rigors of combat. I see you sniggering over there! Let me tell you about how we did combat. I would spend between 8 and 20 hours a day in the very very very dark Combat Information Center where I would gaze upon men doing the actual work, occasionally reaching out to rap them on the head when their eyes closed and the drool started to make itself conspicuous on their chin. I payed careful attention to both the search and the classify sonar consoles and the meticulously maintained navigation plot behind me and to the ISS/Hyperfix display units and keenly observed, most carefully, the state of the propellor pitch and the steering indicators and sometimes I merged a sonar shape dragged slightly behind and beneath a zodiac, as I steered it into a mine shape I saw on the sonar display. That was Combat (what we called CIC), and one cannot really do all that from behind some cool blue shades.

The glasses have sallied forth once again dear friend. They were right there on the windowsill just the other night when I put a towel upon the same surface, which movement, pitched them from the third floor window into the cold and dark and snowy night. They safely slithered off the tile roof and since they aren't on the metal roof above the portal, they must have been launched into the ground cover where they dwell even now, in the cold and dark because I'm going to wait until it warms up before I go out and run my hands carefully through the ground cover and retrieve them. I will come across them once again.  But at this point in life I have about 9 pair of glasses lying around, at my fingertips, thank God!

And all this puts me in mind of this wonderful bit from Master and Commander.

Over the years I've seen my glasses fly but I remain convinced they are flightless. They'll be in the tall grass under a poisonous weed.

THE ECHOES LINGER

There are worse things than dying. The echoes linger in the heart long after its tones have ceased to vibrate in the air.

It was a tough week and I like to think that the families of those who died in the attacks in Belgium could see the ones they loved, relaxing in the shade of those trees, on the other side of the river, in the clearing at the end of the path.

She has stepped into the clearing at the end of the path

AND SLOWLY FADE AWAY

I remember an F-18 pilot who died in a plane crash in England. There wasn't much of that story that stuck with me because, truth be told, the world of Marine aviation and me is not really a shared one. Almost 30 years of doing the Navy thing and the only Marine F-18s I ever saw were in the pattern over the west end of Miramar after it became a Marine Corps Air Station.

I remember that one day when there was a terrible accident in San Diego involving another Marine F-18 pilot who flew his terribly broken airplane to within 400 feet of the ground before he punched out on approach to the west end of Miramar eight years ago. He had many options to avoid a tragedy before the crash but only 2 after he crossed the beach and headed home in a crippled airplane. At that point, he had slammed the door on the rest of us and could ride it in to the ground and miss the innocent people living there or he could save himself at their expense.

To be honest, he always had options. He could have ditched that crippled plane at sea, landed the crippled plane on the runway at Naval Air Station North Island,  the F18 Navy Air Rework Facility, or he could have elected to fly it into the empty unoccupied canyon 100 feet away from those houses it ultimately destroyed when it crashed without him after he bailed out and let it to fall where it may. What happened was a tragedy.

There was another Marine F-18 pilot who had a crippled aircraft on approach to an airfield in England just last year. I think this man knew something that most of us barely get a glimpse of in the routine of our daily lives. What happened in San Diego was repeatable and could happen again at any time. Or not. He elected for not.

There are worse things than dying. The echoes linger in the heart long after its tones have ceased to vibrate in the air.

A LITTLE PI GOES A LONG WAY

Someone asked the Jet Propulsion Lab how much pi they used in their orbital calculations. Here's the answer provided by the  director and chief engineer for NASA's Dawn mission, Marc Rayman.

Here's what he said: To start, let me answer your question directly. For JPL's highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. Let's look at this a little more closely to understand why we don't use more decimal places. I think we can even see that there are no physically realistic calculations scientists ever perform for which it is necessary to include nearly as many decimal points as you present. Consider these examples: 

The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It is about 12.5 billion miles away. Let's say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size (or 25 billion miles in diameter) and we want to calculate the circumference, which is pi times the radius times 2. Using pi rounded to the 15th decimal, as I gave above, that comes out to a little more than 78 billion miles. We don't need to be concerned here with exactly what the value is (you can multiply it out if you like) but rather what the error in the value is by not using more digits of pi. In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches. Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps less than the length of your little finger. 

We can bring this down to home with our planet Earth. It is 7,926 miles in diameter at the equator. The circumference then is 24,900 miles. That's how far you would travel if you circumnavigated the globe (and didn't worry about hills, valleys, obstacles like buildings, rest stops, waves on the ocean, etc.). How far off would your odometer be if you used the limited version of pi above? It would be off by the size of a molecule. There are many different kinds of molecules, of course, so they span a wide range of sizes, but I hope this gives you an idea. Another way to view this is that your error by not using more digits of pi would be 10,000 times thinner than a hair! 

Let's go to the largest size there is: the visible universe. The radius of the universe is about 46 billion light years. Now let me ask a different question: How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom (the simplest atom)? The answer is that you would need 39 or 40 decimal places. If you think about how fantastically vast the universe is — truly far beyond what we can conceive, and certainly far, far, far beyond what you can see with your eyes even on the darkest, most beautiful, star-filled night — and think about how incredibly tiny a single atom is, you can see that we would not need to use many digits of pi to cover the entire range.

So, there you go, a little pi goes a long way.

BING WEST ON POINT

It is the essential document for understanding where we are with our war against our enemy and the consequences of leaving war to idiots. Read the whole thing. It only takes a couple of minutes.

America the Weak

In summary, our enemies do not fear us and our friends do not trust us.

MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY

I don't really go out of my way to troll up the latest outrages in the PC wars of the 21st century. It's one I'm pretty sure we will, like the Roman Republic, lose to the uninformed racists we invited into the tent. I'm OK with that. It is, after all, a done deal. Every single bastion of the West has fallen to the social justice worriers. There is not one single defender of the west in the Church, in the government, in the law, in the courts or in the press. Not one.

That said, I like this guy. I don't really care what else the orcs come up with to redefine a man who speaks his mind about the freedom of speech. Sure, he can have my spare gladius. I'm not using it and when he falls, as he will, I can always pick it up and fight on.

I liked the little squib at Maggies farm today. It speaks to the people who have rediscovered Mao's little red book and cheerfully wave it in the air at all their little auto de fé as they shuffle off to burn another heretic.  They are remarkable for their ignorance of history, politics and war. In a polite society they win because the police protect them from us. Ask yourself, if a bunch of radicals chained themselves up on your commuting highway to block traffic in order to enforce their directive to kill baby Jesus, would you stop........to piss on them, or just drive over them without stopping first?

You can do both if the police weren't there to protect them.

ODE TO JOY with zombies

Notification at Bayou Renaissanceman of a comic strip we all liked to death.

IT HAS TO BE SAID

For many years Congress flew in the face of military opposition and funded an Alternative Engine for the F-35 fighter plane. They did so because history has shown that the OEM always screws up the engine and delivers an unreliable or underpowered pantywaist of an engine. Well, they knew when they let it die on the Obama barricades they refused to climb that it would come back and bite somebody on the ass.

It takes an interesting departure from controlled flight without, you know, an engine. Fortunately, we are assured by the engine manufacturer that only 10% of the engines fail.

Pratt & Whitney spokesman Matthew Bates said in an e-mail that its quality management “is designed to ensure safe, reliable products” and the company “is investing significant resources in advanced quality inspection techniques and continuous improvement in our supply base, which has lead to year-over-year improvement.”

The reliability of installed engines is exceeding 90 percent “which is well ahead of 2020 requirements,” he said.

Gives one pause doesn't it. I don't imagine F-35s glide all that much more efficiently than space shuttles.