Wednesday, January 25, 2017

THE DARK

it's a blog post I'll write about china and the fall of the west that no more cares about SEATO. In the meantime, a placeholder for something that will show up, eventually, when my finger tips heal. It is very painful to type with stab wounds all over the finger tips of even just the left hand.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

THE HARD THINGS

My intent, after stabbing myself 3 times, was to mention and show a deer. We were driving up RiverView Road here in MetroParkDentralis ( oh what the hell, metroparkdenrtralis fit the mood) and I was saying to the driver that one never ever sees your actual deer in the wood.) They're always in the yard and, of course, a deer right in front of us crossed the road to be in the wood and I said, "look! a deer in the wood" and she looked left and said, "look, deer in the yard."

Ohio is like that.

GOWDY

You can lose hours watching our advocate.

Saturday, January 21, 2017

HARBOR VIEW

Harbor View Medical Shaman Pavillion is one of the places I still take an interest in. It is old. It is functionally, obsolete. It's a dump. I've seen better hospitals in villages in south Korea. I went there a few times back when I was young and a pseudo-lawyer of the Navy. It was part of my Judge Advocate General Investigation into a Line-of-Duty-Misconduct investigation. It was one of those things.

You know, you don't know, you just go and hope for the best.

"Hello", said I to the staff frightful harridan who actually burped at me in response. "I am here to acquire the treatment records of Petty Officer 2X of the United States Navy." In her burp I detected a subtle hint to just FOAD. I was young and persistent. I was escorted out of the Harbor View Medical building by security. I had made a fundamental failure. I told them I was entitled to the treatment records because the organization that sent me to get them had PAID for them.

Security didn't march me all the way to my car, just down the steps into the parking lot with no harbor view at all.

I have to say that my JAGMAN Investigation didn't actually suffer much from the discourteous refusal of Harbor View Medical in Seattle to share with me the records of treatment of an idiot who was so lost to reason after a departmental picnic that he climbed on the hood of his friend's car and 'dared' him  to knock him off because, that sort of thing leaves tangential evidence of full on drunken stupidity, which, in this case had resulted in a very very broken ankle and 5 months removal from service in the afloat part of the navy which he could have survived since we were in drydock at the time in the second worst shipyard in the known universe but, we had, in fact, come to the end of our scheduled 9 month long overhaul in Hell Itself and needed to be seen to get underway, if only to prove that their shoddy repairs hadn't damaged too much of the gas turbine propulsion system.

Hey Buck! I know you're watching. Was that the run-on sentence from hell or what?

Harbor View dragged me through half a dozen administrators before they admitted the impossibility of adding the medical treatment records to my "findings of fact." That was OK. It was almost a complete full day without being in the second worst shipyard in the known universe.

Some days are like that. This one ranked up with the few hours I spent with the Engineering Department Master Chief at the Bahrain Self Defense HQ with the commanding general who leaped to his feet, honored to be visited by the "man who wore the stars" and me, Ensign legal officer. Ok, he was actually way more impressed by Master Chief Meisbrugger. (he was an orphan who had been adopted and taken the name of his adoptive parents. One of the genuine best people on earth as I'm sure his parents were). I was a mere adjunct and "legal officer" was the least of my colateral duties.

Life in the Navy. You know, they keep sacking these captains and even admirals for taking bribes from some dirtbag in 7th Fleet's orbit. Nobody ever offered me any kind of good deal.......except, that one time, in the Seychelles when the XO personally kicked me off the ship and I drove to this fantastic beach hotel (topless french babes on the beach!) and I pulled into the Registration Area in my jeep (and yes, it was, in fact, a drive in registration area)  and this smarmy dude popped to attention by the door to my jeep with a tray over his shoulder and asked me if I would like a complimentary beer of which he had several cold ones on the tray and I looked at him and then into hte backseat of my rental jeep at the 14 cases of beer and boxes of bottled booze and said, "srsly?"

And of course I took one.....for the team.....who was going to show up in an hour or two at the Admin arranged by their very own Mess Treasurer, Postal Officer, Legal Officer, Voting Officer, Auxiliaries Officer.....and so forth and so on.

Friday, January 20, 2017

UNIFORMITY

I've had about 40 years of experience with Marines. In my experience they are constantly concerned with image and uniformity. I find it interesting that the last few days have shown a divide between each pair of Marines who are engaged in Presidential service. I didn't expect that from the few. Obviously, one of them has maligned his hat. The question is, which one?

Hey Sarge! Nice hat.

MISSING THE POINT

I read this article and I'm convinced that they missed the real points. It is an article about the decline of the volunteer fire fighter and the figures may be surprising to people who didn't know what they didn't know. About half my brothers in the Omega chapter of Theta Chi were volunteer firemen. They were volunteer firemen BEFORE entering Penn State. I suspect the usual suspects have so girded and enpained volunteer firemen that they must prove that they are 45 years of age, attended 8000 hours of fire instruction training, EMS training and have not had so much as a single moving vehicle accident in the last 19,000 years before they "qualify" as potential recruit volunteers and then must undergo a minimum of 25,320 hours of sexuxal harrassment training and show 480 hours of college credit training in fire purposing and taming.

I think an honest look into what happened to the volunteer fire fighter is still waiting an actual factual report on why the decline has taken place. The parts I didn't mention above can also be weighed against the almost certain tide of lawyers with their legal liabilities and extortion rackets.

Nothing kills volunteerism faster than a lawyer with bills to pay.

Long ago, a neighbor's house caught fire and I lived across the street 3 doors down. I entered the flaming house and shouted fire and tried to see if anyone was home. Nobody was. I left the house and went to the next house and shouted "Fire!" and helped myself to her hose and then I stood there in her driveway spraying water on that house as the one next door went up in flames. As soon as the Professional Oakland Fire Department crews and trucks showed up, I stopped keeping the fire from spreading in the expectation that they would. They didn't. The house I kept from burning caught fire while the pros fought the other housefire from upwind where the smoke wouldn't get in their delicate eyes. It was a sad travesty.

I've attended all of the USN's fire fighting schools at every level and graduated from Washington State's Fire Fighting Training Academy out there beyond Snoqualimie. I fought fires on ships and structures and know a thing or two about fighting fires. Oakland's 'professional' fire fighting response amazed me with its utter cluelessness and ineptitude. I'd say they could do better with volunteers but then, the people of Oakland have a nasty habit of shooting at all first responders...including firemen.

I CAN STILL HEAR BUCK LAUGHING

He and I used to share "draft" numbers. I always beat him. He wrote much better than me. I suspect Buck would have had a great time with the race and the results which will go in effect later today.


Thursday, January 19, 2017

MILLION ANGRY WOMAN MARCH UP

They plan to march in DC on the 21st but can't you imagine them in the march up to Baghdad? That would have scared the shiite out of Hussein and Khameini.


I have to admit, I haven't read that book. I read his first one though, way back when I got it out of the library at Fort Riley when I was 11. It told a remarkable and memorable tale. Well worthy reading. This one is also very good. It talks about the talking tank!


On that topic, I just replaced a book I missed for years and couldn't find in bookstores. You can buy wonderful books for no more than a penny plus $3.99 shipping online. I don't usually do that because I tell myself that I need an excuse to haunt used bookstores, of which there are far to few, while searching for Viscount Slim's memoirs, Jackie Fisher's memoirs etc. I can find them online and in this case I bit the $ because it once was mine and I loaned it to a friend......who just happened to be a lawyer...and process server and it was missed.

So anyway. We shall see what the morrow brings in the Triumph and the next day in the desolate wasteland left behind by a zillion angry womyns. I wouldn't want to be there. No indeed.

FOOT MEMORY

It has been 6 years since I shed the ottoman footstool I bought in Karachi Pakistan and took, along with the wicker chair, back to my stateroom on the mighty flagship of the Middle East Force over 30 years ago. I have different foot stools for my comfy chairs above and below and neither of them has a pile of cushions on them that my feet can burrow into when they feel cold. Nonetheless, when I don't think about it, as I read into the night, one foot or the other, sensing it is cold, attempts, futilely to burrow under the cushion it rests upon.

Funny how memory works. I remember using just pure muscle memory to open safes or dial phone numbers that I could not remember. I could let me fingers do the walking on the safes, and to be honest, I was the one that set the safe combinations for almost 30 years. I could tell you stories about setting combos on COMSEC safes and still shudder at the memories.

One of the things junior officers had that nobody else did on warships long ago, oddly enough, was privacy. One could, or not, lock the stateroom door behind one each morning but there was every expectation that nobody would step foot in there after one left because, who would? For some of us the stateroom served as an auxiliary office but most of us had an office. I might lock up property belonging to one of my sailors but he had no expectation of seeing me lock it in my safe in the stateroom and didn't expect to be there if I removed it to return to him. I don't think anybody came into my stateroom (except my room mate) the whole time I was a division officer (2 ships).

The XO's office was right outside his sleeping cabin. I was in there a lot for one reason or another. Same for visits to Ops in his stateroom but no separate cabin for Ops. I don't actually think the Operations Officer had an office on first ship. The only place I used to see him was in his stateroom. The Cheng had a desk in the Logroom, the First LT had a desk inside the Deck office. The Dr and Dentist both had offices in sickbay and the office of extraordinary relief from pain....but I used to chat with the Doc in his stateroom.

You picked up on the difference right? Only the captain and the Admiral had cabins. The rest of us, staterooms. It proved impossible to get that right in my head on the Queen Mary 2. I kept saying stateroom and people would look at me like I was crazy. s'Okay, I can live with it.

In my stateroom, which I shared for awhile, I had Persian carpets on the deck which is one reason that my older sister's Persian carpet has toothpaste stains. I had a wicker chair that was supremely comfortable, so comfortable in fact that my little sister asked if she could borrow it when she was brooding her eldest. As I recall, she talked me out of the hassock which came back without the lamb skin pillow but with several alt pillows about 5 months later.

As a department head, XO and CO, everybody used my quarters as an office. The one I most disliked was the unfortunate soul who tried twice to hold bible study in my stateroom. I might have pointed out to the youngster that this place was where I got the 30 minutes of sleep a day that kept me going and maybe pointed at the .45 hanging on the hook on my side of the door and told him I wasn't afraid to use it.

And so we return to the hassock of foot memory. Feet remember.


Wednesday, January 18, 2017

HIT THE LINK

This is a fascinating link. Go there. Now.  Every single line is a different category. The colored line is just one of many widely different measures of opinion on wildly different topics. Read and enjoy!


CHANGING ASPECT OF LAW

It's always amusing to see a man like Gavin Newscumm threaten and bluster to use the law as a club with which to beat on the Federal government headed by Trump.
The state lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, who is running for governor, said California could use its stringent environmental protection law to block Mr. Trump from building a wall along the Mexican border. In Sacramento, Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers are pressing bills to expand environmental protections, provide legal assistance for immigrants facing deportation and raise gasoline taxes to pay for highway construction.
“An earned-income tax credit,” said Anthony Rendon, the speaker of the Assembly. “Huge infusions for early-childhood education. Those types of things are certainly things that we are interested in doing.”
These are both funny for what they say about the detachment from reality of those who rule in California. I don't expect Trump to do anything drastic except, forbid any executive agency to spend a penny in California and to withold all federal funds from the state and sanctuary cities until the voters turf out the aristocracy that they have somehow found themselves saddled with.

Make no mistake, the voters are deeply tired of the leaders they find themselves with. Do you really think the voters approve of paying the city manager $810,000 a year or paying a jail psychologist more than the President of the United States? No. They just haven't had a choice in far too long. Given the choice, I expect they'd like to see what ails California ended and jailed.
The daughter of Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) was paid nearly $70,000 by her mother’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. Karen Waters has been on the payroll of her mother’s campaign committee, Citizens for Waters, since 2006. She has pulled in more than $600,000 for her services since that time.
Karen is in charge of endorsement mailers, known as “slate mailers,” for her mother’s campaign. The slate mailer operation has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for Waters’ federal campaign committee in recent years.
Maxine Waters, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Brown and Gavin Newscum are just the tip of the ice berg. California's ruling elite really do see themselves as above the law and aristocrats of the first water.

PARDONING THE CRIMINAL TRAITORS

I'm rather surprised Obama hasn't pardoned Snowden. It's bad enough he commuted Manning's sentence to 7 years of the 35 he was awarded by the court. Obama really is a thoroughly despicable thing.
President Obama on Tuesday commuted all but four months of the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst convicted of a 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted Mr. Obama’s administration and brought global prominence to WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures. 
President Obama on Tuesday pardoned James E. Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general and former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his discussions with reporters about Iran’s nuclear program, saving him from a possible prison sentence.
General Cartwright, who was a key member of Mr. Obama’s national security team in his first term and earned a reputation as the president’s favorite general, pleaded guilty late last year to misleading investigators looking into the leaking of classified information about cyberattacks against Iran.
Everything this dangerous twit has done appears to be done to damage America. 3 more days and hopefully we'll see the end of this horrible man.

HISTORY REPEATS ENDLESSLY

Here it is, just a few days before Trump's Inauguration, and the local public endurance station is broadcasting the story of Lincoln's assassination by the most despicable wretches of the age. It's hard to watch this and not see in Wilkes-Booth the same motivations that shape and power those awful scum so filled with hatred at Trump. Makes you wonder how many attempts they will make on the life of the man, his wife, his children...

The scum of the earth don't like Republican Presidents around here. It always amazes me that those completely twisted by hatred and contempt don't think of themselves as in any way abnormal.


Tuesday, January 17, 2017

CAPTAIN EUGENE CERNAN

Another good man, one of the rarest, has stepped into the clearing at the end of the path. He was the last man to step foot on the moon when he followed Jack Schmitt into the lunar lander for liftoff and return to earth. I join most of the Americans of my generation who never thought that the last man on the moon would be Cernan in the year 1972. It took years for me to accept that the lightness of being that had one time gripped America had slipped away, almost unnoticed until the Challenger brought the fact home to us all that America had given up on the space race and was no longer interested in pushing out the phyical frontiers.


EUGENE CERNAN SALUTES THE FLAG ON THE MOON DECEMBER, 1972

Sunday, January 15, 2017

IMAGINE

They fought all the way to Berlin.


Once our Armies went feet dry on Europe it was all over for the 3rd Reich. And yet, as the Reich contracted from Odessa in the east and Normandy in the west and Italy in the south, those poor bastards continued to fight like demons. When they lost, they lost big. They lost everything.

It's hard to believe that Merkel proved worse for them then surrender to the allies. All the real Germans? Yeah, they proved good enough to die at our hands because. We are still learning what the USSR did in the east but they did give NATO and Germany Angela Merkel, the little Red Guard of Destruction.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

A developer is taking over the government of here. He's not an organizer or a politician. I'm rather looking forward to the next four years.


Truth be told, I worked in defense at it's core when Bush took the job and I was deeply impressed with a man most people hate to death. Shortly before 9/11 that man wrote a directive designed to kill DoD5000. 9/11 killed the initiative.

I think Trump and his people will lift that dead weight off us. That would be nice.

LETHAL CLEANUPS

When you read about the EPA reducing another nightmare site like Love Canal do you ever wonder just how they do it? When they "clean" a nuclear waste dump, what exactly did they do to it? When you think about it, what they did was scrape the topsoil into trucks and then drive them to some landfill somewhere where they reburied it.

How did that "clean" the problem? Well, it was moved outside the environment....

Saturday, January 14, 2017

THERE IS A STORY

I used to listen to some of the more junior petty officers at various commands who would sometimes, late at night, bring up the story they heard from a friend who had a friend who served as helmsman on a ship late one night, probably long after midnight while the ship was steaming independently on some nameless ocean in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by nothing at all and the story then took on a departure that is unique to sea stories everywhere for this is, in fact, a genuine, 'no shit'3r'.

He was helmsman and the infant son of Mickety Mouse was the Junior Officer of the Deck and Conning Officer on this destroyer, frigate, minesweeper ship and the helmsman just knew that the pencil necked geek wouldn't notice if he just put on 2 or 3 degrees of constant left or right rudder and made the ship sail in a giant circle all while the ignorant unknowing product of the Severn School for Boys failed to notice because, dark out there and no visible horizon.

Modern sailors probably no longer tell these sorts of stories. Modern US Navy warships are more like women at restaurants powdering their noses at the same time. They don't ever travel alone anymore. Somebody senior has to keep an eye on them or they get up to the damnedest things all unsupervised and left to their own devices. Nope. Never happen today. No way.

Not like this sort of thing which is pretty much a product of all the servcices. The only 'clean' Front Office staff usually has a CWO2/3/4 in charge and they don't usually do crap like this.


Our man JQP doesn't understand the little things that do motivate the hell out of people at this level of war. If I had such a job as this guy did would I have tried to slip in a Captain General of Air Force? You're damned right I would! And if I got a citation this fuc#ed up you can bet it would be the only one I ever framed and hung on the wall of my office. This is a golden treasure. Somebody appears to have gotten a signature stamp for a 3 star general and used it to good purpose.

I worked again and again and again and again for COMUSNAVCENT. This would not be possible there but I always wondered about our paramilitary on the other side of the causeway at JTF-SWA. Those guys were capable of any kind of lunacy at the drop of a hat and it only got worse when Stormin Norman moved in.

T H I S  I S  A N  U N F A C T  C H E C K E D  A R T I C L E. But still  funny.....and crooked.

Friday, January 13, 2017

JUSTICE INVESTIGATES FBI

Justice in this country has departed. It will surely end with show trials and the triumph of New Speak, but the comedy is just beginning as the DOJ finds a towering pillar of probity, honesty and integrity who will investigate the FBI over its handling of Hillary Clinton's wanton and knowing release of Top Secret, SCI and Special Access Program information to any  hacker worth his or her salt who bothered to look at her unsecured and unclassified network and servers. I don't actually think such men exist in the DOJ anymore. The last man of integrity to work there left many years ago and now writes interesting columns about the shameful misdeeds and injustice enacted by those he left behind in the vasty halls of darkness known to us as the Department of Justice.

It looks from the Bloomberg article like all the people that are accountable to the people are planning to recuse themselves from any involvement in the new witch hunt and let the unimportant dogsbodies do the digging, rooting around, and investigating before everything is once again stitched up as beyond mortal ken and best left alone and misremembered much the way that jackass Walter Cronkite screwed up the true meaning of the Tet Offensive and the utter destruction of the Viet Cong.

I almost hate to write this but what we appear to need now is our own Court of the Star Chamber. It seems that our DOJ makes deals with powerful and rich crooks and thieves and fines their banks and investors billions for the misdeeds of men who are NEVER held accountable, fined and sent to prison for a few decades after looting the country because their business/bank is "too big to fail." I'm tired of it.

Shakespeare had the right of it back when the Star Chamber was just getting off to a good start in England when he wrote,  ''The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.'' You really can't go wrong with that kind of start. It was them and those like them that wrote things like civil forfeiture laws and implemented them on a society that wrote these words into their Constitution:
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
 Our police turned into thieves overnight because they are the law and the law allows them/encourages them, to loot the populace in the gentle name of the people. Likewise, the layering of courts and jurisdictions that mean that a man found not guilty of the crime of murder may then face the same penalties if the same case is retried as a violation of civil rights. That was a pernicious evil that should not have been allowed.

People comment on spirit of the law and the written physical meaning of the law and then they go well outside any normal barrier to reason in order to find penumbras or shadows or bright lines and lose sight of the clear and concise meaning of the English language as written into the highest law in the United States of America.

If one simply put the facts and the law, as it stands, before any group of 8th graders I think they would all find that Hillary violated the laws and should be punished. I'd make it a blind test and present the case without reference to any names or parties. I'd simply put it to them that a person knowingly violated national security laws and then tried to destroy all the evidence even after it had been subpoenaed by lawfully empowered investigators.

I think Martha Stewart might have appreciated a hearing in the Star Chamber. I doubt they would have found her guilty of any crime. I don't think Hillary Clinton can say the same. If she went before the Court of the Star Chamber, she'd be escorted to Tower Hill and her head would be lopped off. On the other hand, to use the delightful phrase she seemed to find so potent and powerful as Secretary of State, Senator and First Lady, "at this point, what does it really matter anyway?"

Exactly. This evil barnacle of spite and hate has finally fallen from the body politic and will have to live or semi-live the remainder of her life knowing that she had the presidency in her very grasp and lost it all because she could not, even once, bring herself to behave in an honorable and upright fashion. Future generations will write scholarly articles about the loathsome critter and wonder that any sane person could vote for such a foul creature. To this day, those that voted for her cannot point to a single achievement she ever accomplished whether as Mrs. Governor of Arkansas, Mrs. First Lady, Senator from New York, or as Secretary of State. She was, at the end, a big fat nothingburger.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

BUFFOONS GOTTA BUFFOON

Layers of fact checkers. Keen observers of the political happenings. Bright eyed observers and speakers of truth to power.....

sadly, all we get is buffoons to the left of us, buffoons to the right; an ocean of buffoons.

You see the problem with the article of course. Mattis isn't being considered for Secretary of State. Oh, and there is no limit on appointing anybody to the position of Secretary of State. Any imbecile or stupid traitorous jackass can get that job without needing any kind of waiver.

CHANGING THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

Astute readers may have picked up that I based much of my 30 years in the navy out of San Diego with some time off in the Bay Area before moving back to Solana Beach. I was never a Chargers fan. My team has been the Redskins since very long ago but I don't really pay all that much attention to the sport.

When I returned from the Bay Area a couple of years before the new millennium, the Chargers had signed a sweet deal with teh citie whereby the citizen/taxpayers of San Diego agreed to spend umpteen million on improvements to Jack Murphy stadium and guarantee 100% ticket sales even if that meant that the citizen/slave/taxpayers paid for the unsold tickets and let politicians of the citie hand them out to their cronies and ward healers. And so it was done. For year after year as the Chargers got worse and worse and ticket sales plummetted.

The threat by Spanos was always, 'do this and do it my way or I'm taking my team and hitting the highway.' We always knew the day would come. That family has as much of the milk of human kindness and respect for decency as a rattlesnake. Today, the rattlesnake bit and told the world that the Bolts were moving to LA.

I would just like to say, good riddance! San Diego doesn't need a team so awful and so worthless that it alone lost to the Cleveland Browns this year. The only team the Browns beat was the San Diego Chargers. Can you say, 'hit the road Dean?'

I knew you could.

Now we get to see some real grovelling as the citie leaders haul out their daughters of marriageable age and promise them to any NFL owner who will move to the city for anything up to $400 million in cash and a brand new, built at 100% taxpayer expense, downtown football stadium they'll build on spec.

I blame global warming.....................and Bush.

APOSTASY OF THE CHURCH

If the mainline churches ever wonder why their numbers are diminishing it might have to do with what they preach and how they preach it. It's interesting that they increased for centuries right up until the collapse of western civilization in the 1960s. I would say this Scottish church takes the biscuit if it wasn't for that little protestant church in Canada who support their athiest pastor in her attempt to remain their minister of the faith. 4 of 19 voted to let her stay as an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada. I love the quibble:

In challenging Vosper’s suitability for ministry, the church took the unprecedented step of asking itself whether there is a line. The majority of the 23-member review decided she has crossed it.
That's funny. When I was a boy there were these ever so bright lines and one knew the boundaries and the path to hell was paved with good intentions. Nowadays, ministers and priests appear to approve and support child rape and molestation and couldn't find a boundary if it was a 10 mile high wall in their path. I'm rather surprised at the Toronto Review Committee. I would not have thought they had it in them. Of course, 4 of them don't.

I see that somebody has deleted the video that came with the first link. Too bad. It was all good intentions all around.

DEMOCRATS AND RULE OF LAW

This is why I thoroughly despise all democrats. They are quiet in the face of democratic tyranny and afraid of the mob. They believe in tyranny and domination of the party out of power at any price, at all costs.

HOW TO TREAT FAKE NEWS

Trump looks like he will preside they way he won and won't take prisoners along the way. I'm kind of happy to see it happen because there is no bigger source of fake news than CNN. We'll have to be wary if Trump treats all of the representatives from the 4th estate like the enemy but I think we can safely assume that 3/4's of them truly are enemies of the Republic and can safely be ignored.

I hope that he goes on as he has because those cretins need to learn that their lies and actions have direct consequences. How long will they survive if the president simply ignores them?

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

SCUM OF THE EARTH

I am a little disgusted with law enforcement types all over the world. I have also come to loath and despise everyone who works, in any capacity, in the mainstream news media. It's not enough that law enforcement totally tanked during the investigation into the appearance on Hillary Clinton's unclassified mail server of Top Secret, SCI and SAP information, it has to include the media who brushed it all under the carpet in the twinkling of a jaundiced eye.

Tonight I see that the shooter in Fort Lauderdale who was in the hands of the FBI, who took away his gun and then gave it back to him, must have known that he was a muslim convert who went the full jihadi route and nobody is telling the people that another muslim terrorist has killed Americans in this country again. Nobody. Not law enforcement, not homeland security, not the mainstream media.

I wonder if these people will make a full reversal of their vile and despicable behavior after 20 January and start laying all of the blame for these attacks at the feet of the President and his cabinet appointees. I don't really. I know they will.

Friday, January 6, 2017

THERMO-NUCLEAR OPTION

One of the problems with Trump's pending reforms to the government revolved around the dedicated bureaucrats who are firmly entrenched, armed to the teeth with millions of regulations, hedged around with administrative rules governing misconduct that take the teeth out of any attempt to punish them for intransigence or failure to support the goals of the administration and prepared to fight to the death to preserve all the foulest aspects of the EPA, Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, etc. Well, sucks to be them.

If they prove to be as obdurate and malodorous after the 20th of January, Congress is preparing to use napalm and other scorched earth tactics to take them down.

House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service. 
The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to propose amending an appropriations bill to single out a government employee or cut a specific program.
I can live with that. There are a lot of bureaucrats who are willing to go to the wall in order to defend the indefensible and it is time to rein them in because we don't work for them, they work for us. They've mostly lost sight of that over the last 60 years.

HISTORY OF THE CAR RADIO

I thought this was interesting:

Seems like cars have always had radios, but they didn't. Here's the story:

One evening, in 1929, two young men named William Lear and Elmer Wavering
drove their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset.  It was a romantic night to be sure, but one of the women observed that  it would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.  Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios (Lear served as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy during World War I) and it wasn't long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car.

But it wasn't easy: automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment that generate noisy static interference, making it nearly impossible to listen to the radio when the engine was running.  One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference.

When they finally got their radio to work, they took it to a radio convention in Chicago .  There they met Paul Galvin , owner of  Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. He made a product called a "battery eliminator", a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC current.  But as more homes were wired for electricity, more radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios.  Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business.

Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin's factory, and when they perfected their first radio, they installed it in his Studebaker. Then Galvin went to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal, he had his men install a radio in the banker's Packard. Good idea, but it didn't work –
Half an hour after the installation, the banker's Packard caught on fire. (They didn't get the loan.) Galvin didn't give up.

He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles to Atlantic City to show off the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention.  Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall and cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear it. That idea worked -- He got enough orders to put the radio into production.

WHAT'S IN A NAME
That first production model was called the 5T71.

Galvin decided he needed to come up with something a little catchier.  In those days many companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the suffix "ola" for their names - Radiola, Columbiola, and Victrola were three of the biggest.

Galvin decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.  But even with the name change, the radio still had problems:

When Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at a time when you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was sliding into the Great Depression.  (By that measure, a radio for a new car would cost about $3,000 today.)

In 1930, it took two men several days to put in a car radio -- The dashboard had to be taken apart so that the receiver and a single speaker could be installed, and the ceiling had to be cut open to install the antenna. These early radios ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so holes had to be cut into the floorboard to accommodate them.  The installation manual had eight complete diagrams and 28 pages of instructions. Selling complicated car  radios that cost 20 percent of the price of a brand-new car wouldn't have been easy in the best of  times, let alone during the Great Depression –

Galvin lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple of years after that. But things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola's pre-installed at the factory.

In 1934 they got another boost when Galvin struck a deal with B.F. Goodrich tire company to sell and install them in its chain of tire stores.  By then the price of the radio, with installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off and running. (The name of the company would be officially changed from Galvin Manufacturing to "Motorola" in 1947.)

In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios. In 1936, the same year that it introduced push-button tuning, it also introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was factory preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts.

In 1940 he developed the first handheld two-way radio -- The Handy-Talkie –for the U. S. Army.

A lot of the communications technologies that we take for granted today were born in Motorola labs in the years that followed World War II. In 1947 they came out with the first television for under $200. In 1956 the company introduced the world's first pager; in 1969 came the radio and television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon.
In 1973 it invented the world's first handheld cellular phone.

Today Motorola is one of the largest cell phone manufacturers in the world.
And it all started with the car radio.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO the two men who installed the first radio in Paul Galvin's car? Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different
paths in life. Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950's he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the first automotive
alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows, power seats, and, eventually, air-conditioning.

Lear also continued inventing. He holds more than 150 patents. Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented that.  But what he's really famous for are his contributions to the field of aviation. He invented radio direction finders for planes, aided in the invention of the autopilot, designed the first fully automatic aircraft landing system, and in 1963 introduced his  most famous invention of all, the Lear Jet, the world's first mass-produced, affordable business jet. (Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.)