A NICE PLACE

I am going out of town for a while and mowed our front yard today as needful prep so the town doesn't gig us for too tall grass and weeds. I rested after shoving the mower around the yard.  I did it to well. Several neighbors out walking their dogs asked me if I needed them to dial 911.  I just want to know, where were they back when I was mowing the front 40 as a kid?

Admittedly, I was resting on my back on my front porch and now that I think about it, it probably did look like I had suddenly just expired.

Still, you'd like it here. I do and I've lived everywhere.

SAY GOODNIGHT

THANK YOU

If you are willing, we will meet again, in heaven's gate. You will be the unlooked for, unasked favor that I will not expect but be delighted to see.

No, I won't expect a throng, just as there are no throngs anymore at the VFW.

We came, we fought, we moved on and so have you. You did it all the rest of your lives, those that survived the war.

Those that did not, today, we remember you. We don't take a gestalt. We try to remember each of you to the best of our ability.  We get some help in this regard. We need help to remember.

1st Lieutenant Donald Bruch

I looked for family but I couldn't find any beyond his parents. He was an Air Force pilot and so he volunteered but so too did many young men that knew that the draft board had them in their sights. He flew as a Wild Weasel that others may live. He was new to the profession of arms and elected to take on anti-air missile defense sites alone and unafraid.

I don't know what the world will be like when we lose the young men who sign up with the idea that they'd like to go there and try that. I suspect we're on the cusp. Young men in droves are refusing college because SJ and the writing is on the wall for the Armed Forces.

I think we shall see what it means when 'Men of the West' decide they've had enough, finally, and elect to sit out the first half of the 21'st century.

If you look at it closely, they have nothing at all to lose. Every single shibboleth of the left will fall when the old men of the West look at the fight and decide that they have nothing to win by fighting the fall of the West and simply let the 'achievements' of the last 80 years of the West, fall into the abyss.

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE

Always there is a clamor for socialized medicine in America. 'Give us the National Health Service', they cry. If you want to see what 'nationalized health service looks like in the Appalachia of Britain, look no further than England.

Look no further in the mouth than the teeth and ask if that's what you want for modern dentistry in the 21st century. Consider, that this is what you get when you get 'free' medical and dental.

Oh, and listen to the guy sing. I never watched the show when it was broadcast (had life), but to see the clips of the talents they dug up out of the peat and presented.....yeah, that was England.

FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

As you watch the moral mind peel the onion, you wonder just where do they find these sharp political operators who bring us, with their own hands, good red meat like this.

This was from the Hillary campaign

Huffington Post editor thought it was a good idea to show its editorial staff

Srsly? There are actual living beings on Hillary's staff who think that men are going to see that ad and sign up in droves to vote Hillary? Hope does spring eternal but the only white men voting for Hillary are already dead and have been for decades even as they reliably vote the straight democratic ticket in places like Chicago and LA.

Can you imagine being who you are and working with/for the editorial board of the HuffPost? I can't and I spent a long time working for a uniformed branch of the armed forces that tended to stress conformity.

Anyway, we went out to dinner tonight and here in metroparkcentralis the conversation always seems to turn to downtown and the coming widespread deployment of mines and artillery. I'm looking forward to it, the rest are not so sanguine*.

*What an amazing word it is, san·guine. It means 3 different things, two of them total opposites!
adjective
optimistic or positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult situation.
HERALDRYliterary
blood-red.
archaic
bloody or bloodthirsty.

PROMINENT AMERICAN MOSQUES II

CAMP DELTA

WATCHOUT!

A GAPE WHITE SHARK!

YET ANOTHER MODEST PROPOSAL

I was just perusing instapundit and the article featuring Winston Smith caught my eye. It had to do with the new mania of removing man from the military in every instance including job titles.

I read the headline provided by Ed Driscoll and had a flashback to the 21st Century's Great Garbler and Dissembler. He came up with the word all by himself using his own native intelligence and fluency and the really sharp crease in his pants. It's gender neutral in every single sense of the word and covers every single sex anybody, even a liberal progressive angst ridden LGBT sandwich, could dream up.

This time it will work. It will really really work. It can't go wrong. Nobody could argue that replacing the word 'man' in all those jobs with that ending with the word 'corpse' wouldn't solve the non-problem of finding a new name to cover the confusion and hysteria stalking the corridors of power and the E ring at the Pentagon too.

Yeoman becomes Yeocorpse

Legalman becomes Legalcorpse

Engineman becomes Enginecorpse

How delightfully sinister.

CALLED AWAY

I was disadvantaged for a couple of days and then called away which explains the absence of blogging over the last few days. My 6 year old Macbook Pro keyboard suddenly bit the dust on the 19th and I didn't make it to the Apple Store for another 2 days, where they told me the keyboard was kaput. I was sorry to hear that.

I asked the genius at the bar what could he offer me as a replacement and explained that I had already begun looking at replacing and upgrading the old laptop but Apple didn't have anything better than what I bought six years ago. To explain, I was looking to buy a new macbook and figured after 6 years of development and refinement the new beast would have some of the spiffy kind of features and that Moore's Law would have kicked in at least something on the retail end of Apple, but alas, no.

My macbook had 4gb of RAM and a 250gb hard drive when I bought it at MCRD in mid-2010. What Apple sells today as a macbook pro has 4gb of RAM and 250gb hard drive. It has a spiffy new display in the same dimensions and it costs as much it did 6 years ago. I have a little trouble with that because it makes absolutely no sense at all.

I doubled the RAM in my machine for $16 by buying it from Amazon and installing it myself. That was quite easy and took me about 30 minutes. If I scale up my expectations and think about adding memory from the factory, the price starts to take off. That doesn't make any sense at all. Memory just isn't that expensive and installing a 32gb stick vice a 4gb stick just means nothing to production cost. Obviously, it taxes the operating systems and heat controls provided by Apple.

The salesman wanted to show me the splendid new sharp Retsina displays and I asked him to look directly into my eyes. We had a little stare down until I blinked and asked him if he noticed all the crud on my spectacles and said it was of little import to me how clear the display was as my view of the world was somewhat distorted from the start. It didn't phase the genius. He generously suggested that a macbook air would meet my requirements. I said that I noticed a distinct lack of an optical drive and he said that nobody used optical drives anymore. I accepted that was a valid point about everybody, but me.

Anyway, he restored my thoroughly unusable machine to working in a kind of Sea Sparrow fashion and I went home and rooted around for any old usb keyboards we have lying around the house, found one that suited me and now have a functional machine that will last another few months or years. The genius was probably spot on when he told me that my machine had a good life and a good run since most laptops die after just 3 years and anyway, Apple was discontinuing all support for macbook pros of my generation this June.

I didn't point out that my Dell Inspiron E1505 was still on my desk and worked as well as it did on the day I bought it ten years ago. It runs Windows XPpro and I use it for old games and for the historic stuff that runs on it. The only thing I've done to it is buy it a new battery from Amazon, $15, and a new power cord since the old one had become frayed and started arcing and sparking in the dark.

After I got home, I got a call from the manor telling me that the house had sold and they needed to have all the stuff out by mid-June. I'm going places and doing things every week until mid-June except this last weekend so I rallied around the aged 'rents and we drove about 8 hours to crash in the house without cable or any wifi at all in the neighborhood. You'd think Arlington would have lots of wifi but it was just like visiting Pyongyang and looking for a Ford dealership. I was too tired to go wardriving so we kipped without any outside electrons and then moved stuff out of the old house to the new house and then loaded up the truck with all the stuff deemed essential to my continuing existence and that of my sister and then drove 8 hours back. I went for a comfy chair and hassock and the missing bolt to a rifle and came home with a truckload of stuff.

After that kind of a week I took some time off and did some new things but I'm back.

HUMANS AND ZOMBIES

Spotted at the local U.

I particularly liked the bit about free food.

FAREWELL

Tonight I said farewell to a little girl. I love her dearly but she lives in Mordor.

In all her life, she has never emailed me or written me a letter.

I love her, I always will.

GUTTED, CARVED, SLICED

I am pretty sure that I read the books and stories by the people I suspect can tell a good story. Watch what it means to be an award winning author.

(9) NEBULA DIVERSITY. K. Tempest Bradford reported on the Nebula Awards for NPR. 

…This weekend’s winners reflect many different types of diversity beyond gender. Half are women of color, half are self-identified queer women – which mirrors the overall diversity of the ballot. 24 out of the 34 works nominated for the award were written by women from multiple racial and cultural backgrounds and a spectrum of sexual orientations. Of the 10 works by men, five of them were written by people of color and queer authors.
“The Nebula ballot is everything a ballot should be in this community,” said Brooke Bolander, author of the nominated story “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead.” “It’s diverse, it’s wide-ranging, and it includes amazing stories by amazing authors.”
That’s an important point, given the ongoing conversation about diversity happening now in speculative fiction circles. The Hugos — the other major awards in the genre — are nominated by fans. Last year and again this year, Hugo nominations have been affected by the Sad and Rabid Puppies groups, who campaign against what they see as affirmative action-based nominating and voting in the Hugo and Nebula awards.
But “people want these stories,” says Alyssa Wong. She was the first Filipino author to be nominated for the Nebula award last year and is now the first to win it for her 2015 short story “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers.” Though she says she’s seen some Puppy-style criticism of her success, most of the reaction has been positive. 

Readers “want to read stories from the points of view of people who have been historically been locked out of the genre,” Wong says. “‘Hungry Daughters’ is about a group of women who are all Asian-American and all from very different backgrounds, all of whom feel isolated in some way … But clearly this is not just Asian-American audiences who this is resonating with. I’m appreciative that people are reading more widely now. It means more opportunities — not just to be published, but to be seen.”

It will no doubt come as a shock that while we visit the bookstores week after week, we leave empty handed. I find it more than sad that I leave both the library and the bookstore empty handed.

Strokes his kindles and ebook readers and moves on, slowly. The bookstores were a foundation of my life growing up. I was awed when I left Hawaii and googled B&N to see if that one store at Ala Moana was unique. One bookstore on just one of those islands. There were no others.

I remember biking from second hand book store to second hand book store in Huntsville. There were 11 of them. If I'd been in Hawaii it would have included sailing from one island to the next to get a book.....

and, if I was anything like them, using the paddle I didn't need as a weapon to get a book at a bookshop.

Not anymore.

REVISITING THE PAST

Today I recalled a post from November of 2013 when I used to write a good deal more in this blog than of late. What I was remembering was a story about the destruction of a town in the Americas by a pack of religious zealots. It came back to mind when I recalled that I had meant to repost that blogpost after I attended the Monet Show at the Imperial Cleveland Art Museum and Atrium. That show has moved on, as they do, and that all that remains is, kind of unknown at the moment.  From the banner hanging outside the Art Museum, it's Egyptian.

We attended a wonderful Explorer Series lecture last night on the Poison Frogs....and no, not what you're thinking. These are the adorable little poisonous frogs.....not quite specific enough. This was a wonderful lecture on the little tiny extremely poisonous frogs of....I'll start again.

Anyway, while I was there, I recalled the Monet Exhibit this summer which had featured a painting by Childe Hasam of the Isle of Shoals six miles off the coast of Maine, where the godfearing Pilgrims marooned Thomas Morton, leader of Wallaston, to meet his lonely fate and die back in 1625 AD.

Isle of Shoals by Childe Hasam

Merry Mount was a little place but they screwed up and failed to arm themselves against religious fanatics. It's like they didn't believe such folks were a threat to them.

You can read all the gory details here.

It's kind of interesting to observe the trend of now. Merry Mount was a town of good enough people who had a right to exist and follow their conscience but it was wiped out and replaced with Quincy, MA which, I think, is reason enough to compel our attention to the role that zealots play in history. I'm not talking about the small stuff like what happened in Waco twice now as the zealots went berserk and wiped out the enemies of the forces of law and order. It's more than that.

I'm watching more and more zealots convinced that they have an absolute right to kill or strand unbelievers on a rock off the coast of Maine. They believe it down to their hearts that what they do is good and necessary and cannot comprehend people that refuse to knuckle under and obey the commands from on high. They have never once considered where this nation came from or even glanced at the foundations of this modern Nation/State. The only thing that ties them together is a hatred for things they all hate together. They hate everything with a passion. I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you fail to raise passion for what you believe, rest assured you'll go down because the people who hate you will raise passions against you and everything you believe. I believe in civilization. Not many people understand what that is.

We once lived in a world where educated men were familiar with the classics and the classics included all that was distilled from the essence of governing civilized society learned from thousands of years of governing civilized societies. We didn't accept the governing principles of the Kings of Hawaii anymore than we accepted those of the rulers of Africa or Central Asia or the Steppes of Mongolia. That's due to a really simple reason. They are incompatible with civilization. Nomads are inherently destructive of civilization. We've reached the point where our universities preach destruction and decivilization to an entire unwashed group of people who, attending university, consider themselves the arbiters of what is civilization.

Nomads camp on 14th hole in England because

Government, under civilization, grew to effect civilization over the centuries. It gradually assumed the benefices of civilization to itself and it took to governing more and more of the world. Yeah, it did it by main force but also by the fact that it worked to the benefit of most of the people.* It established rational rules of behavior, rewarded those who followed the rules and it imprinted itself on most of the known world by 1948. You can see that by the order that came out of WWII but you can also see that that order grew out of the Peace of Versailles and the Peace of Westphalia and the Magna Carta. It is a gradual process.

You know what held all that together right up until now? People were actually familiar with the Magna Carta, The Constitution, The Rights of Man, the Treaty of Westphalia, the 100 Years War, the Treaty of Paris, the Geneva Convention, the actual words of Martin Luther.

Nobody in the World teaches that stuff anymore. One can lament that as a passing of the armies of western thought that existed since Thucydides right up to George Kennan, but it's gone. It's as much a faded history as the Battle of Blenheim or Malplaquet or the battle flags hanging in Les Invalides. Nobody under 40 has ever read any of that stuff. Not one of them think it matters.

The saddest part for me, nobody understands where that all came from. They don't have a clue that the world goes through phases, just like the solar cycle. There is peace and tranquility for just an instant and then it is swept away by the nature of conflict and cultural understanding. If you look at the shaping documents that survive history that meant anything at all, every one of them was written in oceans of blood. Yep, right around the time the people of x understand the cultural invasion, they react. Greece was there, eventually when the Persians were resisted, Rome for a thousand years, Europe gradually awoke to it but you'd have to actually read a survey of history such Will and Ariel Durant to find an appreciation for every place that grew into a civilization.

Once upon a time, the Caliphs owned a civilization that flourished across much of the known world. They were quite civilized by any standard until they were destroyed by the growing Mongol Empire. What happened to that civilized society at the hands of the Mongols ranks right up there with the Holodomor that overwhelmed countless societies of that time right up until the 20th century. You know? I'm pretty sure that each time, people all agreed, never again.

I was actually kind of looking forward to the sudden understanding of the interpretations (very different) of the sea-bed mining UN convention and the ownership of space UN convention after a little tiny bit of understanding of what has changed over the last 500 years since the kings of Europe wrote Royal or Imperial Charters to the New World. Look at the current onslaught of Space. It is now entrepreneurs that talk about launching the first manned expedition to Mars. They can't claim it in the name of America, they'll just claim it for Google.

Space X and the rest will move into the solar system with charters you cannot see and they will colonize and develop new places which will find the legacy of their predecessors quite unendurable. I can see them all doing just exactly what the leaders of the Plymouth Colony did and holding every man hostage, at knifepoint, until he agrees that he and his family will be bound by the communist manifesto until they starve to death.

Which is just how it happened again and again in the New World the last time.

THE TONGA ROOM

We will be in Baghdad by the Bay this summer for a conference. I am thinking of hitting the the Tonga Room. It's kitsch, but it's delightful kitsch. We might head up to the Top of the Mark before heading back to the Berkeley Hills, if I can find them.

OK, I'm sure I can find them. I can see them from the driver's seat in my car parked in Pacific Heights.

The odd thing about Bagdad-by-the-Bay is that it is a city that sleeps. If you find yourself there at 0300, the silence is deafening. With the demise of Borders in Union Square, probably nothing happens at all after dark in downtown.

SHARING IS CARING

If you want to see how socialism works in a kleptocracy, nothing beats Venezuela.

WEDNESDAY, MAR 6, 2013 07:30 AM EST

Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle

The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains

DAVID SIROTA

That's a real headline and yes there is a man so stupid he wrote that article.

He believes to this day that socialism works if you just give it a chance.

CALL FOR FREEDOM RIDERS

I don't think we have any choice. We have to support that .01% of guys who are troubled by their sexuality. Yep, we have to support them and show that we support them by using the ladies room for as long as it takes until people understand the empowerment of cispower.

Now, normally, I wouldn't propose such a course of action, but I think we have no choice in the matter. We must violate their privilege and 'safe spaces' in the name of civil rights!

You know, I was alive when the law was used to smash the barriers that men had built around certain institutions that didn't allow women. At the time, I never thought that women would acquiesce to having their locker rooms and their facilities share the same fate.

A late Justice of the Supreme Court talked about a 'bright line' in the law. It's interesting to note its demise in the eye of the law in this case. Sacrifice another bright line so that liberals and progressives can feel safe using the restroom of their choice.

I've never actually been in the ladies room but I hear they have couches so I'm willing to forge ahead and erase privilege just like any valid global warming kind of dude would. Do they have popcorn?

THEY LIED

In a remarkable article today, he lied.

I really don't think the MSM understand yet the depths of our disconnect. Read the article and then ask yourself, who is lying?

And then, to add insult to insult, Trump lied about Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio. He told NBC's Chuck Todd that he was surprised that Paul Ryan had withheld his endorsement since the speaker of the House had called and congratulated him after the New York primary. Trump told Fox News's Bret Baier that he had several "really nice conversations" with Rubio and that Rubio had been "very supportive, very good." 

According to Ryan's and Rubio's staffs, these conversations never happened and Trump's account is fictional. Not the usual way one builds party unity.

I tend to use Occam's razor. I believe Trump. Should Rubio or Ryan come out and directly contradict the man, I think I'd still believe Trump. Those guys are politicians and lying comes to them as naturally as breathing. Trump, on the other hand, probably recorded those conversations. He knows politicians lie.

One doesn't make billions by underestimating the enemies of capitalism. There's a lot of people who are guarding their tongues because they spoke truth or even platitudes to Trump when they thought they could do so in obscurity. So, he is kind of a politician in that regard. Omerta.

WELCOME TO SELF INSURANCE

I kind of enjoy, in a sad way, these articles where progressives and liberals move into my territory and discover just how unpalatable unpalatable is. They had no idea because they enjoyed employer health insurance and didn't know what the public did when they offed the rest of us and forced us to apply for new healthcare plans after canceling ours. Neither did the clinics or doctors care. They care now.

I was once in that market for a time. I remember going to the doctor and spending about 40 times as long with the mediclerk verifying my insurance than I spent with the actual physician. That's not an exaggeration as anybody will tell you. I was once in the chair with the dentist's digits probing a tooth when the insurance fairy came in and demanded to know if I was vested since she and Anthem couldn't settle on a specific day 8 months earlier.

I would visit a given hospital for a procedure my doctor recommended and spend 2 hours with the insurance/billing technician before being allowed to approach the throne. I would cheerfully give them the full details, they would consult with the company over the phone, with their colleagues on either side and with their boss before allowing me to proceed to the procedure.

Some of them later called me and said that my insurance company refused to pay. I got to tell them how sorry I was about that. They suggested I pay them now. My response was always the same. It never changed or varied. "You did your due diligence to the nth degree. Now you follow up and make sure the insurance company coughs it up."

PRESIDENTIAL QUALIFICATIONS

I heard another blast from the right about the lack of qualifications@Trump. I have to laugh. These are the same guys that blew through the only obvious qualification to finally ooze support for Ted Cruz after saying he wasn't a natural born citizen of the United States. That's about it for qualifications these days and even the left tossed that out for John McCain.

To hear anyone bleat about qualifications in the same sentence as an endorsement for Hillary or Bernie is just weird. They have no more qualifications than Obama ever had, or, in my opinion, still has. None at all. He thought there are 57 states in The United States of America and she surrounded herself with principal deputies who hate America almost as much as she does. I mean seriously, what were Mill's qualifications? The other one, she's what we in the trade referred to as a terrorist sympathizer.

How do you take the vast resources of the State Department and use it to insult the Russian premier and foreign minister the very first time you meet them? Well, I don't know either, ask Hillary. She did it right off the bat with her State Department Dream Team who are still there plugging away at our diplomacy.

I'M GOING TO GO WITH WRATH

I actually prefer this version of the painting. I am an unreconstructed Romantic which I can live with and the art evokes the Moody Blues which I enjoyed enough to drive all the way to the Meadowlands to attend.

I took the time a minute ago to read what the stupid thugs had to say about the piece. I can appreciate the underlying point of the piece of art but that doesn't offset the vitriolic and stupid nature of the criticism. Art has no intrinsic value. It's like a stamp collection or a coin collection. It has no value at all beyond the price people set for it as 'coin of the non-existent realm'.

The Goths, Vandals and countless other barbarians had no value for that stuff. If you think that is a dead issue, gone with the Ostrogoths, think of the value the Taliban set on anything. Nothing has intrinsic value except those things that have intrinsic value.

People who imagine that art is a commodity are some of the simplest people I know.

Srsly, in a digital age?

How can you be alive in the 21st century AD and not know that?

PROMINENT AMERICAN MOSQUES

The first in our new photo series of prominent American mosques.

San Quentin, California

A SPRITZ OF DDT SOLVES THE PROBLEM

There is some concern about visiting Brazil for the Olympics this summer. I am not concerned. I will also not be attending the Games. As I read this article, it called to mind the easiest and most efficient means of getting rid of Zika before the Games. It really is as simple as spraying the province with DDT. Everywhere.

No more mosquitoes = no more Zika virus. It's ironic how this solution, hit upon by a number of brilliant physicians at the turn of the 19th century, resulted in little things like the Panama Canal. General Gorgas didn't concentrate on the virus anymore than people dealing with plague tried to conquer the virus. He, like them, focused on eradicating the disease vector.

Honestly, how hard is that?

Do not suffer a mosquito to live.

Except these. These are absolutely OK mosquitoes.

CAPITALISTS BUY THINGS

Wouldnt we all just laugh and laugh if we learn in Feb 2017 that Trump secretly paid Sanders to run against Hillary as a hedge on his ambition to be president? It seems to be working splendidly. He probably thinks it's the best investment he ever made, strictly in terms of buying politicians, so few of them have the integrity to stay bought.

GARDENING

Our computer has snuffed it so we will be gardening for a while.

It sucks to be us.

NUKES

You know, if you think about it, one of the clearest reasons for Iranian nukes was made manifest when the neocons responded to 9/11 by attacking Afghanistan and not Saudi Arabia, which is where most of the killers came from. All of them were turned into mass murderers by wahabbi islam taught by Saudi Arabians and seriously, where did bin laden come from? Saudi Arabia.

After attacking the Talban alone we added Iraq for no particularly good reason and ruined the country for a generation. Then we did the same thing to Egypt and Libya and destroyed any hope of representational government in either place for another generation. Then we did it to Syria

You know the only reason we haven't layed waste to Pakistan must be because they have nukes. How can we be sure I am right about this? Well, Pakistan sheltered bin laden for 10 years after we destroyed Afghanistan hunting for him and not even a neocon thought that gave us any right to invade Pakistan when we knew for certain they were hiding him.

If there was ever a more clearly shown requirement for a nation to arm itself, the neocons made it.

Kind of makes one wonder how many nukes the Germans, Japanese and Koreans have salted away. Kind of like the good old days when most of us figured the South Africans had them lying around. Now of course it's the Saudis beggaring themselves to buy working nukes from impoverished people willing to sell them.

MEMORY

Discrete memory I have. I can remember with blinding clarity certain moments in my past. But, ask me to tell you when I bought a matchbook in Calcutta and I'll draw a blank. Oddly enough, most of the women in my life can recite a day in the life, chapter and verse. It's not that my memory has been gutted by drugs and alcohol, I never could produce an answer to Perry Mason. "Where were you on June 17th!!!!!!! I honestly don't have a clue. I never did. Date and memory took a journal and a calendar.

Life has shown this to be a singular flaw. It's not a place to hide, it really truly is a place where people will ask me, don't you remember and the answer isn't good. If I can put a place to an image in my mind's eye I can remember it just fine. 3D and in color. Now ask me the year and date of that memory. My only saving grace is that I can put memories in a box defined by where I was at that time. God help me if I was always in the same place trying to recall. That would be hopeless.

I have crystal clear memories of things that happened but the date is never part of the memory. I can only estimate based on the images.

I listen to things spoken, such as this, "your grandmother bought this in Denmark in 1936," and I'll be honest, how in the world do you remember buying a matchbook in Denmark before WWII? How can you tell me that 70 years later?

So drat. I enjoyed Memories by Jackie Fisher. I bought the original in Newport long ago and gave it away. I think it needs buying again....oh, and Dave, also the wonderful book by the Polar Admiral, it has a green cover. If you've still got it, I will pay for shipping and also the autobiography of Jackie Fisher.

IT'S A TWITCHY THING

Ruthlessly stolen from a museum in Ruritania.

Change.

A different look and feel to government by elites and aristocrats.

And you thought they were all guillotined.

MAD

So, just Hillary after her show trial under Mad Emperor Emir Bernie.

Srsly, who fights for Mongolia?

nicked from timewaster.

THE DARK FUTURE OF CALIFORNIA

I can see clapping their hands madly in appreciation for Tinkerbelle and other tiny myths but if the cities of San Diego and San Francisco really do go to 100% renewable power by X date, it will be a future of hot dark nights and no hot water, or even, water. Some things only move in the dark when they're propelled by something other than ignorance.

Ignorance is bliss. We sure got a lot of bliss coming at us in the future though.

HAPPY VE DAY

I read these words on the subject of evil the other day at this place. I think the man who wrote the words had probably seen all there is to see of stupid and evil. He and Admiral Canaris were both executed by evil and stupid on the same day just weeks before VE Day. It was interesting to read that Thorbeck got off with this because the German State later determined that the State has the right to execute traitors. It was, yes, compounding stupid and evil.

At first glance the admission that the administration lied to the public seems a slam-dunk case for malevolence. But there's more to it than that. There is a perception that political imbecility is a lesser offense than malice. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi activist, while in prison waiting to be executed, reflected that "stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice" because evil left behind in its conscious perpetrators "a sense of unease."

Against true imbecility even reasoning was useless since you couldn't even appeal to your enemy's self interest because they were too dumb to see it. "Against stupidity we are defenseless," he wrote, because imbeciles never feel a qualm. Against the stupid "neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything ... reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict ... simply do not need to be believed ... and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack."

Sadly, stupid is always there. It lurks in the strangest places and its effects can be measured far more accurately than the motion of planets orbiting distant stars.

ALL TWISTED

It has been a day of twisted. Dana Milbank has to eat a column of his and he decided if he's going to eat newsprint, everyone should eat newsprint. It's kind of revolting that he thinks if he is going to honor his word, other's should join him in dining on crow. It takes a narcissist.

London, England, is electing a muslim as lord mayor. It's not really anything new about the kingdom we fought off. As you will recall, it was us alone fighting the Barbary pirates and emirates and freeing the crews and passengers they took as slaves from commercial ships sailing the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. England and Europe preferred to lie prostrate at the feet of the islamic pirates. Only the United States, a tiny country on the far side of the world elected to fight back. Londonistan.

I see the mayor of Cupertino is in full throat crying about the depredations of Apple on his fair city. They paid in $9.2 million dollars, 18% of the city's tax revenue, but the mayor insists that since they have really deep pockets they must pay way more. I'm rather surprised that the council is a roadblock to this spendthrift's demands that Apple pay for everything good as a condition of doing business in his little shitty.

No, I'm not an Apple apologist or supporter. I simply think that smacking your lips and sidling up to a successful company in one's geography and ORDERING them to pay their FAIR SHARE while brandishing a knife is unAmerican and unwise. Chang doesn't get it. He figures if they have money, they should give it to him. Of course, the feds agree with him which is why Apple keeps its billions of dollars offshore rather than bringing them home. If they brought it home, the feds would take 35%. Why? What did the feds do that gives us a right to steal income from a successful company? The, "you got the money, give it to us now!" approach happens to be one that I find most disagreeable.

Speaking of barbarous pirates, the Spanish Guardia used one of its boats to seriously harass a US nuclear submarine docking in Gibraltar. They interfered with its safe transit on a massive scale. I remember the Canadian pilot advising me as I docked a warship in Vancouver very late at night as the Green Peace naval commando was zipping into the way in their zodiacs, "Just run them over son, nobody cares about them. They're scum and they'll float to the surface. Don't worry."

TRUMP NAMES VICE PRESIDENT

Yep, it's ugly.

 Are you scared now?

A MODERN LUCIFER

The Country

by Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

I posted this before, but I like it. Collins has written a number of poems I like. This came up last week in the barbershop when the new guy mentioned that one of our neighbors just sold a new book. A book of poems, if you can believe that. She wondered, "who buys poetry?" and it was a valid wonderment because, nobody buys poetry. Still, it's nice to see it is still practiced, in the dark, behind a tree, away from anybody who could see it in effect and criticize it to death.

I brought this to mind after reading the poem that featured the use of Home. I wanted something else to steer by as I go to bed. This will do in a pinch.

WHO WILL DRINK TO VENEZUELA?

Venezuela has run out of beer.

MORE ETHNIC CLEANSING

It never stops. It never ends. People just can't seem to get along.
The Taliban have taken over in Kentucky and they are blowing up ancient statues that they find terribly offensive and unGodly. It's kind of funny how they all find some wonderful justification for sweeping away the history they don't like.

A Monument to the Men Who Fought For Kentucky

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

They'll be digging up Arlington National Cemetery next. 

UPDATE: A judge has barred the Ministry of Truth from carrying out its planned vandalism, for now.

HMS ENDEAVOUR

According to the Daily Mail, the former HMS Endeavour was found. This was the ship sailed by Captain Cook when he discovered and explored the east coast of Australia in 1769-71, and it has turned up in Newport, Rhode Island.

She completed a three year voyage of discovery, returned to England and vanished from history, only to be rediscovered herself. The ship and crew made a fascinating journey. I kind of miss those days.
Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, fixed it now.

I KNOW THE SIGN, NOT THE MAN

I see somebody else on TV is flashing the President's gang sign. I don't recognize him. He must be some foreign warlord trying to suck up to the President. His technique is subpar but then nobody plays as much golf as the President.