Wednesday, November 30, 2016

NEAREST STAR RENAMED

I was reading somewhere today that the International Astronomical Union had taken the trouble to organize themselves a body of concerned people to sit down and rename the stars. They did it for the best of reasons; they tell us. They claim that by simply renaming stars it would eliminate the confusion people have who cannot tell stars apart because the spelling is different and that throws off navigators, astronomers, birds and concerned people.

This doesn't really effect us but they decided to rename one star in particular. The nearest star is to be renamed in order to eliminate all that dashed confusion and concern. Alpha Centauri will now bask in the light of its new name, Rigil Kentaurus. Read it and weep.


It seems easy enough doesn't it? They have named it Rigil Kentaurus. Nothing could be simpler. All one has to do is change all the text books, all the navigation publications and stellar almanacs, nautical almanacs, air almanacs, star charts, etc and match the old star with its new name.

Space.com shared the name change in its report of 28 November 2016. I'm just a slow reader.

I'm never gonna remember its new name, but that's OK. Rigil Kentaurus is not visible anywhere north of North 29° Latitude. The last time I saw it was in 1984. I'll have to go a long way out of the way to see it again. In the meantime, I can tell people that I saw Alpha Centauri before it went away.

THE IRONY IS RICH

I've been reading and agreeing with a number of commenters and pundits who have pointed out that the left views the right as not just wrong, but evil. The left cannot, in good conscience, debate with evil people about their evil thoughts and potentially evil deeds so they don't remonstrate with the right or even let the right have a voice in their councils or their meetings or their spaces. You can see a sample of this with the PBS team. They have what they refer to as a "Tame Conservative" in David Brooks and trot him out to run down and denigrate any and all aspects or characters that issue from the right. 

At Harry's place one of his guest posters picked up on this and expanded on it. He starts off with a tragic tale that shows just how blinkered the media and the left are and how reluctant anybody is to go against the faddism that passes for liberal thought these days and how the only people who challenge the orthodoxy pitched by the press, maintstream liberal media, academic view are quickly labeled kooks, right wing thugs, racists, bigots and misogynists. It's enough to make a modern liberal arts college junior burst into tears.

Mehrdad Amanpour wrote:
What should worry us all today is that the public response to mainstream truth in the West increasingly reflects the stories I hear from my father-in-law. Politically-correct terms used by the left are increasingly co-opted into conversations and social media to mean something else entirely. You can now find examples in mainstream newspapers, the alt-right media and even within the below-the-line comments of the Guardian. 
‘Cultural enrichment’ is now a sardonic and common term for crime by immigrants. ‘Vibrant community’ means a violent area with a high immigrant population. ‘Religion of peace’ means violent Islamism. ‘Youths’ means young Muslim criminals.  ’Refugees’ means illegal immigrants. ‘Children’ means bearded young men. ‘Syrian’ means a migrant not from Syria. ‘Doctors and engineers’ means semi-literate and unskilled migrants.
Isn't it amazing how words can come to mean different things to different people? The people who use those expressions see totally different realities. Those familiar with the concept of the Venn Diagram can picture this shared reality in this way.

O O

Correct. There is no overlapping of world views at all. There is no shared reality. That's readily apparent to those of us who watched in awe as the left imploded under Bush Derangement Syndrome, took a break during the Obama administration and quite failed to notice that the wars and killing went on, Gitmo never closed, the terrorists attacked more and more countries with greater lethality and increasing numbers of innocent casualties and have now gone collectively insane again even before Donald Trump takes the Oath of Office and is sworn in as our next President. 

The article is not long. It looks that way because it includes all the comments. You might think about sharing it with some of your friends who don't look at the world in quite the same way that you do. I don't advocate this as any kind of attack on other views. It merely provides food for thought. Some of those people out there are famished. To paraphrase the great Flip Wilson, They better get gruntled.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

HELICOPTER PILOTS ARE CRAZY

From gCaptain:


THIRD FLEET NEEDS HELP

There is a fascinating article at Janes discussing the recent complete breakdown of USS ZUMWALT as it passed through the Panama Canal. The ship is currently docked at the former Rodman Navy Base in Panama while experts from Naval Sea Systems Command fly out to diagnose and repair the ships propulsion system.
A series of engine problems has hindered USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) on its maiden transit from the US East Coast to the ship's designated West Coast home port of San Diego, requiring the ship to be towed through the Panama Canal, US Navy (USN) officials told IHS Jane's. 
The ship is now being held in Panama as the USN and contractors try to fix the engineering problems, service officials said on 22 November. As of this writing it was unclear what was wrong with the vessel, which is the lead ship in a class of three next-generation multi mission destroyers. 
Vice Admiral Nora Tyson, commander of US Third Fleet, has directed Zumwalt "to remain at ex-Naval Station Rodman in Panama to address engineering issues that occurred while transiting the Panama Canal", Commander Clayton Doss, a USN spokesman, told IHS Jane's .
"The timeline for repairs is being determined now, in direct co-ordination with Naval Sea Systems and Naval Surface Forces," Cdr Doss said. "The schedule for the ship will remain flexible to enable testing and evaluation in order to ensure the ship's safe transit to her new homeport in San Diego." 
In San Diego, the ship is scheduled to conduct combat system testing and certification before being deployed to the Western Pacific. 
Pacific Command (PACOM) officials remain enthusiastic about the ship's entrance to the region, despite the engineering issues. "As with all first-of-class ships, the navy will have some kinks to work out," PACOM commander Admiral Harry Harris told IHS Jane's. 
Assuming ZUMWALT actually makes it to San Diego it will join the other "first-of-class ships" known as Littoral Combat Ship, all of which appear to be broken beyond repair and of little use to either Third Fleet or the United States Navy.
A report in 2010 by the Pentagon's director of Operational Test and Evaluation found that neither design was expected to "be survivable in a hostile combat environment" and that neither ship could withstand the Navy's full ship shock trials.[14] The Navy responded that the LCS is built to a Level 1+ survivability standard and that the ships will rely on warnings from networks and speed to avoid being hit, or if hit be able to limp to safety.[15][16] Jonathan Greenert said that the crew would "conduct an orderly abandon ship" if their ship was struck by enemy fire, an action that might not be necessary on other vessels in the same circumstances. The ships were designed to minimize vulnerability with modern automated damage control systems to perform its mission, then withdraw from the area under its own power.[17] 
The LCS's combat abilities were said to be "very modest" even before the cancellation of the XM501 Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System.[18] The Independence variant reportedly has better helicopter facilities and more internal space while the Freedom variant is said to be better able to launch and recover boats in high seas. Admiral Gary Roughead said that a mix of both types would be "operationally advantageous".[19]
It was rather sad to see the way Admirals just flat out lied about the worthless little ships. I was quite disappointed in both Greenert and Roughead. I don't know why they compromised their integrity by lying about a ship that was clearly worse than useless from the very beginning.

As we move forward we need to have actual surface combatants that can, at a bare minimum, defend themselves from readily obvious and apparent threats but also protect unarmed ships they might be convoying through the Strait of Hormuz or the South China Sea. Warships that can't conduct meaningful anti-surface warfare, any  kind of mine warfare or any type of anti-submarine or anti-air warfare are useless and worse than useless because they require real warships to defend them.

The idea that we deliberately keep building ships that cannot survive in a hostile environment and are expected to run away from threats they hear about and "limp to safety" after getting tagged by the bad guys is not really funny anymore. The ships engines don't work and they don't "limp" home, they have to be towed. All of the broken ships of the Navy appear to be headed to San Diego and Third Fleet. When Obama talked about a pivot to the Pacific I didn't think he meant to weaken the fleet and load it up with crippled and broken ships.

Trump needs somebody who can look into the debacle and fire everyone involved.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

RON GLASS

Another good man has stepped into the clearing at the end of the path. I really enjoyed the old TV show Barney Miller where Ron played a dapper detective who was policing until he sold his book. He returned to my screen as Shepherd Book in Firefly. He was a gifted actor and I enjoyed his appearances over the years.

Saturday, November 26, 2016

FIDEL CASTRO IS FINALLY DEAD

A little evil has passed from the world with the death of Fidel Castro. He will not be missed. There were other revolutionaries that took power during the long Cold War between the US and the USSR and Castro was not the worst.

I took a few minutes to look at YOU TUBE and watched the films that showed Havana and Cuba back before Castro took power and set about destroying the country as only communists can. The sad thing is that I decided not to use any of them here for the simple reason that I live now in MetroParkCentralis and once lived in Detroit. Right about the time that Castrol took power and started driving all of Cuba (minus Guantanamo) into the ground, Detroit and Cleveland were still thriving industrial powerhouses. Sadly, the world changed. Some might see in this the dead hand of globalism steering American industry and jobs overseas to Japan and the Asian Tigers.
Detroit was, in 1950, 1,800,000 people with the highest per capita income in the United States. Fifty-eight years of bad government, bad policies, high taxes, big regulations.  Failure of the police force, failure of the education system: Detroit today has about 950,000 people, and ranks 66th. What’s the answer been in Lansing by the state government under liberal Democrats? It’s been to raise taxes, increase bureaucracy, take care of the unions. So they’re actually accelerating the decay of Michigan. (Newt Gingrich interview to which I've lost the link.)
It's interesting to reflect what did the damage to the economies of both Cuba and the formerly successful cities of America's rust belt. If you read the two links to "Detroit" you will find an answer that I think covers the situation here very well.

The major difference between Castro's approach to dissent and that of the new Rust Belt Urban Elite (RBUE) is Castro jailed his dissenters or killed them and the RBUE just made it so unpleasant that anyone that could leave, did, and left the rotten core of the former industrial heartland to the progressives, socialists, communists, UAW, SEIU and democratic party politicians.

I'll be curious to see what a 'businessman' President's take is on normalizing relations with Castro's brother's Cuba. I envision a few changes and perhaps the introduction of some more sticks. OTOH, he may also sweeten the pot and tell the ruling class there that they can live, if they leave. I mean, it would be a 'coup' (sorry, I couldn't help myself) for Trump to introduce some weapons and trained soldiers into Cuba to roll up the country in a genteel and open-handed sort of way. Kind of like we rolled up Grenada, Haiti, Panama and the rest.*

Let's remember that Noriega, former President of Panama, rotted in a federal prison here in the US because a President of the USA decided to collar him for drug running. He is now rotting in a Panamanian prison in somewhat less salubrious conditions.

In the grand scheme of things Cuba has lost little by its diversion into socialism. 70 years is not long on a timescale that starts back in 1492. The Cuban people have had better and worse government over the last 5 centuries.

*Once ashore they'd start delivering free Ring Dings, satellite TVs, wifi routers and computers and the rest of the things people seem to want these days. This is sort of what I envision happening to the DPRK soldiers if they ever do cross the DMZ and head into the Greater Metropolitan Seoul Area-- they'll stop and loot and eat and loot some more and eat and drink until they pass out. I doubt they'll even make it to the north bank of the Han River.

Still, it's nice to be able to say that Fidel Castro is finally dead. Let the celebration mourning begin


Friday, November 25, 2016

LOST THE SHIPBUILDING KNACK

It seems America's Navy is not alone in losing any knack it had for building warships. Our sad ships of this century include the Littoral Combat Ship, which, as a Class, suck in both variations and include the recently commissioned Zumwalt, first of the 3 ship Zumwalt Class of Land Attack Destroyers which was recently disarmed when the Navy refused to ask for funds to purchase the Land Attack Munitions for the ships and the troubled bleeding edge Air Craft Carrier, Ford which cannot launch or recover planes and has other engineering problems that keep her years away from Sea Trials and a Commissioning Ceremony that brings her into the Navy.  Nope, we now have the Type 45 Destroyer of the Royal Navy being towed back into port two days after getting underway on its first mission.


You wouldn't think real ship building was such a perishable skill.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Wishing all of you a very Happy Thanksgiving with family and friends.


Tuesday, November 22, 2016

MR GORSKY AND MUSTBESO

Perhaps his signal achievement as President was to launch the United States on a mission to land mankind on the moon and he set a deadline. This country used to be able to accomplish the most amazing technical feats in very short periods of time and with limited budgets. I wonder what happened to change all that? Me? I blame computers.

One of the apocryphal stories related to mankind's descent upon the moon was the story of Mr. Gorsky. I will let it unfold from this space.

Did Neil Armstrong really say “Good Luck Mr. Gorsky” on the Moon?
I have heard, that upon standing on the moon, Neil Armstrong at some point said "Good luck Mr. Gorsky". The story being that while a child, playing baseball, through an open window he heard Mrs. Gorsky yell at her husband: "Oral sex, you want oral sex? When the kid next door walks on the Moon!"
Is that just made up, or real?
It's a cute story, an urban legend, but that's all it is. According to NASA HQ Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal that includes full transcript and MP3 audio clip (52 MB) of all the conversations between Apollo 11 astronauts and mission control, as a note near the beginning of the page, there it stands:
Me? I think it's funny. I wonder just how NASA managed to hang onto the transcripts and the audio recordings of all conversations on the moon even though they destroyed all the high resolution video recordings of man landing and walking on the moon.

Still, a day to remember. Well, two of them actually.

ON READING

Stolen from Megan's Place

LAGUARDIA SUCKS

We flew into LaGuardia last month on our way to embark on a ship and found an unusual set up for passengers intent on departing the airport with all their luggage and heading into New York City. For some reason, LaGuardia requires its customers to haul their bags the full length of the terminal; where, just beyond the end, one can find a taxi stand and hail a cab. It appears that one is not permitted to hail empty cabs passing down the length of the terminal after dropping off departing passengers. We went ahead and hailed one anyway who stopped and picked us up. Quickly.

What a stupid way to run an airport.

Monday, November 21, 2016

ANALYZE THIS!

From Daniel Greenfield at FrontPage. This pretty much sums up the Democrcats again and going into the next election cycle.
Some Democrat strategists want to learn how to “talk to white people” again. Meanwhile the left is doubling down on showing them the door. The left is pushing former Nation of Islam racist Keith Ellison for DNC chair. Because if there’s anything that will save the party, it’s putting a racist who represents a district with the largest concentration of Somali Muslims in the state in charge of formulating its future. 
Ellison supports racist cop killers, hates Israel, and has a past with a hate group that believes white people are “devils” who are the spawn of a mad scientist’s experiment and will be wiped out by UFOs.
The little tiny problem that particular Party has is its failure to include everybody. The only Party and people that routinely deny a specific group of people from their affairs is the Democratic Party and its collection of misfit traffic botherers. We haven't seen a "No Blacks Allowed" sign in more than a generation but I see "No Whites Permitted" signs from Democratic organizations every single day.

It's like they can't help themselves and stop being racist long enough to read what they're writing.

BATTLE DAMAGE ASSESSMENTS BY REPORTERS

It's like bombs and bombers are incapable of hitting anything other than children's hospitals, orphanages, milk factories, schools and Chinese embassies.

Targets bombed are in Green

Friday, November 18, 2016

WHO BLOCKS AMERICA'S ROADS

As we know, Illinois voters once again clasped the Party of Slavery to their breasts and raved defiance at the rest of the States for refusing to accept their glorious leader as their savior for all things defined purely by race. 


I particularly like the in-the-river aftermath after one car swept them off the bridge and into the water, since these appear to be the words of the Socialist Party, the media, race hatred groups and the common core of BLM, SPLC, and all the other oxygen thieves who promote hatred and division between people of America.

You can pretty much take it to the bank that only evil and violent losers and scumbags block the nation's highways and expect to be protected by the police from motorists who would otherwise use them for speedbumps.

ON TRACK AND ON COURSE

Party Spokesman, Paul Forktongue (D-CA), told the gentlemen, ladies, women, girls, boys, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, child-predators, transexuals and unknowns of the press today that the Democratic Party was "on track and on course and speeding towards a glorious future come the revolution!"

Democratic Party Headed for its Rendezvous With Destiny
The members of the press gave repeated loud huzzas and with that they attended a Weiner Roast being held at Hillary Clinton's palace in New York.



Thursday, November 17, 2016

TWO AMERICAS

I can't believe that someone at the New York Times saw fit to publish these. They're amazing.



HACKERS AND LEAKERS

Why does it seem more and more obvious everyday that the only transparency Americans have into the workings of their elected leaders and government actions comes from the people who hack the mystifyingly pseudonomous email accounts favored by elected and appointed leaders and agency employees who unlawfully conduct the PEOPLE'S business away from all possible accountability?

What does it say about the perils of accountability when executives at every level in the Veteran's Administration are routinely found to be corrupt, lying, shameless pigs and yet they never suffer so much as a slap on the wrist after a 3 year investigation by the government agency responsible for such investigations finds them guilty of every crime and misdemeanor they were accused of? They don't even lose their jobs. They get a 2 week suspension with pay and then go right back to the job of not treating veterans, not being accountable for treatment, not playing fair and by the rules and, manifestly, not doing the job they are being paid to do.

PERFECTION

NEVER FOUND IN REAL LIFE
It's true. You never find burgers like this in real life because the people who make them insist on using crappy buns, frozen machine-formed patties and then slathering them with pickles, tomatoes, relish or bbq sauce and a thousand other things used to disguise the fact that the buns are pallid stale things, the beef is bad, the bacon is british style and the cheese was added so late that it failed to melt.

These could almost be In&Out burgers but even their's sometimes didn't match the memory of the perfect burgers they sometimes produced.

THINGS I GOT FROM THEO

A roundup of things I particularly enjoyed at Theo's blog.  His subtitle is The Last of the Few. It was either while we sailing to England late last month or while we in Scotland that I heard a news report that there were only two of 'The Few' still alive. They must be very enduring men.

Extra Remarkably Stupid Idiots Taken For A Ride

So Very True


OATH OF OFFICE

President Trump would be off to a flying start if he swore an oath to honor the laws of the United States and especially the Federal Records Act and Freedom of Information Act and made all of his appointees honor those laws in a formal oath each took, on the record. Let us have no more of this venal corrupt democrat process of violating the laws that permit transparency and accountability at every level of the federal government.

It is painfully obvious that this is required by law and by We, the People.
From National Archives:
What are recordkeeping requirements?"Recordkeeping requirements" are defined as all statements in statutes, regulations, and agency directives or authoritative issuances, that provide general and specific requirements for Federal agency personnel on particular records to be created and maintained by the agency (36 CFR 1220.14). Recordkeeping requirements should be outlined in procedural manuals and other issuances that specify which records need to be included in agency files or other recordkeeping systems.
Clearly articulated recordkeeping requirements are essential for creating adequate and proper documentation. For more information, consult Agency Recordkeeping Requirements: A Management Guide.
What is a record?Records are defined in various statutes, including the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act. The definition that follows is from the Federal Records Act that governs agencies' records management responsibilities.
Records include all books, papers, maps, photographs, machine-readable materials, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of the data in them (44 U.S.C. 3301).
Many of the key terms, phrases, and concepts in this statutory definition of records are defined in CFR Part 1222.12.
It might have been interesting to see all of the records of U.S. funds to the various warlords and other parties in Afghanistan and Iraq. I wouldn't bother to look at them now because I've heard that such records were, very specifically, not kept or were such a pack of lies they are worthless. 

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

LEARNING NOTHING AND MOVING ON

I caught some of 'Fresh Air' with Terry Gross this afternoon as I was driving. She had a guest who gushed breathlessly and endlessly that the Trump Transition, now starting its second week, is suffering from low moral, bloodletting slashers, hysteria and confusion. She never tried to make any point about how any transition campaign MUST shake down as it goes along or it will not function.

People who have never worked together and are all powerful and influential people are thrown together for the first time to put together a transition that will name nominees to the most important Executive Offices in the country and sometimes egos clash or it turns out that one person or the other is incompatible with the boss. It happens. It's human.

Those of us who grew up to work in strictly hierarchical organizations don't see much of this at the senior level because those sorts of people usually get weeded out long before they reach flag rank. The one's with overlarge egos are brung low by fate or circumstance and the ones who are simply incompatible leave the service.

There are some places where the system appears to break down and that is said to happen on Joint Staffs. I wouldn't know, I only ever served on JTF-A and to be honest, the 3 star Army general was
happy with the 2 star Admiral who ran the Navy side of the JTF and nobody knows what he thought about the Air Force people since nobody outside the JFACC ever saw one. The JTF was 3 services plus the Marines, brought together purely for meetings at Cairo West. All the rest of the time, each service and the Marines, were doing their own things in their own corners of Egypt or on the beach or just offshore.

But, let's return to NPR for a moment. As with the election of Ronald Reagan, the organs of the main stream media including NPR and PBS, entirely failed to engage the other half of the country in any of its programming. Run by hard left media types it only brought onboard harder left academics and policy wonks to explain things and used the occasional putz like David Brooks as their 'token' voice of the right not ever realizing that the right considers him to be an absolute left-wing jackass and moron.

The main stream media, when it bothers to produce stories about the right, adopts an interesting policy of never actually inviting the right to participate. They persist in viewing people like Ann Coulter as an ignorant, shameless, lightweight flake. Then they act all surprised when they suddenly learn that more than half the country has turned on them and their wonderful socialist and progressive ideas.

They never gave any airtime to competing ideas except to blast them out of the water using some of the most egregious and stupid straw-man arguments ever heard. But their real failure for over 50 years has been to call the right wing shallow-minded, ignorant racists, bigots, and lately, misogynists and they are outraged that these arguments, endlessly repeated by themselves, fail to gain traction with the majority of the people who suspect that not every single republican is a bigot, racist and misogynist.

What NPR needs to do now, is hire a real right wing investigative journalist type to do one story a week about subjects already covered by the 'journolistas' of NPR. I think they'd be fascinated by the difference in coverage, interviews and conclusions. I was interested to read how the 'investigations' of wrongdoing caught on tape by James O'Keefe were brushed aside just exactly the way Clinton brushed accusations aside or stonewalled and how James Comey, director of the FBI, brushed aside all the criminal wrongdoing of Hillary Clinton.

I don't think they'll do it because they all persist in believing that they are fair and unbiased in all the coverage they offer in every story aired by them. They're just like Dan Rather and CBS and they didn't learn anything at all from Rathergate.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Saturday, November 12, 2016

RIDING ASLAN

It made me laugh.




Wednesday, November 9, 2016

WON

I told one and all this last week or two that he would win in a landslide. Close enough.


Tuesday, November 8, 2016

TAPS FOR THE FOREVER YOUNG

I play this and remember a time long before I was born. I was in England last week and the British remember with the wearing of the poppy. It's a sad poppy and I wouldn't buy one but it shows a remembrance for a Great War that cost everything. I won't buy into it for any amount.


That said, nostalgia is my middle name. The next war will be the end of the aristocrats. They may have inferred weakness when they really overlooked indifference. Aristos are not hard to kill and the new courts of their political allies will gradually begin to overlook the necessity of killing people like Soros and his allies. They are, after all, the enemies of mankind. Imagine that, judicial killings.

You never thought you'd see a court uphold an outright ban on the second amendment. Anything can happen when you toss the law.

A REAL FOURTH ESTATE

In the olden days, the citizens had a fourth estate that could be relied upon, sort of, to get the news out and make the public aware of the doings of the aristocrats and the politicians. It was called the fourth estate. The Estates were the literary invention of the Ancien Regime. In our language, it was put as the Lords Spiritual, Temporal and the Commons. The Fourth Estate was the the press.

In America, the Fourth Estate closely bonded with the Lords Temporal and stopped doing their job. They married into the wealth available to the Servants of the Realm and simply ignored the minor pecadillos of the ruling class and the Lords Spiritual. It was deeply shameful.

The Fifth Estate roared into life not that long ago. It sprang full bore upon the first four Estates when it found the falsity of Dan Rather's idiotic reporting of George Bush the Younger's days in the Air Guard when it showed conclusively that the so-called 'fitness reports' of the GBTY were complete fakes because only the Fifth Estate picked up on the fact that the documents used by Rather to discredit a Presidential nominee could only have been generated using a computer since the typographical effects could not have been produced by a typewriter of the era claimed by Rather. It may need pointing out that GBTY served in an age long before the computer. He served when Pica Elite was King and the IBM Selectric ruled the waves.

The left has repeatedly tried to coopt the 5th Estate and met with no success. The Truth shall win out. The Fourth Estate has joined the first in complete non-relevance.

First        The Clergy
Second    The nobles
Third       The Commons
Fourth     The press
Fifth        The lords and ladies of the internet

DIRTY ROTTEN RETHUGLICANS

Ripped gracelessly from the blog of traditional vibe.


I HAVE RETURNED!

There, that almost sounds presidential.

We took the Queen Mary 2 from New York City to Southampton, England and then spent some time in Scotland before flying home about 2 hours ago. It was a most excellent and relaxing vacation. I highly recommend it.

I never wanted to to go on a cruise. I have heard about cruises. However, taking an ocean liner from this side of the Atlantic to the other side has always appealed to me. It was everything I expected and more. Cunard does it right.

We missed out on the last two weeks of election frenzy. We both voted before we left these shores and returned just in time to ignore the rest of the hoopla. I mean, srsly, who cares? We arrived in London on the train down from Edinburgh, checked into our hotel, went to dinner on the 23rd floor and watched Londoners celebrate Guy Fawke's day with utter abandon. I have never seen so many different fire works shows and no sooner did one stop than 3 more started. It went on for hours and we had the best view in the city atop the Metropole Hotel.

I've been holding firm on the optimist front for Trump (dire news indeed) but I did the same for McCain after the first 4 years of the Obama fiasco and was let down by the poltroons and shills of the other party and the loser idiots who just cannot make up their minds and opt to go with the human touch provided by the Stalinist Party every single time.

I don't much care either way. I figure Hillary will be dead of what ails here before she reaches the White House following her inaugural address and Tim Kaine will plump for Putin (surprise, surprise). Every now and again, that rascally old tree of liberty needs to dip its roots in blood. It is, always, surprising that the urban revolutionary expects food to flow into the city when perhaps most of the rest of the country thinks a diet would do them good. One of the downsides to living in an information vacuum is that it leaves a minority in the majority in a  handful of places with the idea that they are in charge.

We have reached the point where truth will fall like a hammer on the lies and other lies spouted by the party of Obamacare.

Wouldn't want to be them.