Back when the world was young, or me at any rate, there were machines like this all over the place and they had the coldest drinks you could buy for a quarter. When the bottle top was removed, ice would form in the neck of the bottle and the first few sips were like ambrosia on hot southern days.
When I was a little older and in a much hotter clime, the two men from SUPSHIPDETNAPLES who ran my work packages through the paper-mill in Bahrain for MSO Drydocking and Intermediate Availabilities, had one of these machines in their office up on the second floor of my favorite building in Bahrain Ship Repair and Construction (BASREC). Their CocaCola machine was always full of ice cold bottles of beer and if one was in good graces with the powers (the two engineers from Naples), one could always drop in and have a cold beer for nothing. We never told anyone else that this was even a possibility. While young, we were smarter than that.
Yesterday the New York Times wrote down every smidgeon of truth they knew and published it on a single page in their dog trainer. I took a picture of the page because truth is the rarest form of entertainment the New York Times allows in its pages.
The Times Prints All The Truth They Know
As you might expect, there is a dearth of truth, or indeed, much of the real world in the Times.
The insane ruler of North Korea used his agent abroad and VX nerve agent to kill his half brother in Malaysia. It was the first recorded use of a weapon of mass destruction being used to kill a single man. Leave it to a NORK named Kim.
Various people of virtually no credibility have alleged that the crazy mad physician and current dictator of Syria used chemical weapons on his population or people fighting against his rule in the spirited attempt to make all things better in that hell on earth by adopting and using the tactics and strategy of the 7th century warlords who used islam to sweep aside all of the former kingdoms and peoples and religions of the middle east; albeit with one or two exceptions here and there.
Saddam is alleged to have had weapons of mass destruction and used them on his people. The people doing the alleging were later rounded up and branded as liars by the same people that brought us back pictures of thousands of dead marsh arabs and Kurds who were massacred in their towns and villages by chemical agents dropped on them by Iraqi forces.
We seem to be crossing over a bright line now and the world may rediscover just how hard it is to stuff this particular genie back in the bottle. Terrorists first used sarin gas against civilians in a terror attack in Tokyo's subways over 20 years ago.
As we reel along under the weight of an increasing campaign of urban terror that is increasingly poo-pooed by the intelligentsia and cognoscenti it may be time to dust off those gas masks and refamiliarize ourselves with the symptoms of the various forms of chemical warfare agents. Arguably, most of the more infantile training I got from the military involved some dork advising me that the guy standing next to me appeared to be going into seizures and spasms and what was I going to do about it. They never seemed to accept that I'd be doing the same dance with the same fate if I was indeed, standing right next to somebody who had been the victim of an invisible gas attack.
We are heading to San Francsico this morning and more better, Monterey, where we will once again dine in fine fashion at
Happily we'll spend a night at the Q at the Presidio of Monterey and then move our operation out to just west of Pacific Grove for the rest of the week. Plenty of time to get some proper burgers, shakes and fries! Then off to Berkeley/Albany and a few nights there before heading home.
UPDATE: we had a pair of double doubles, fries, and a milkshake. Gooooooood.
"I'm just telling you, you're dishonest people. The public doesn't believe you anymore. If you told it how it is, Trump would be the biggest fan in the world. Example CNN, story after story after story is bad, I won, I won."
I read here that the world of spooks is witholding spy information from the Trump Administration because they fear that the administrators would leak their precious secret information like somebody at NSA leaked the news about Flynn having chats with the Russian ambassador prior to taking on his role as National Security Advisor.
Srsly? If the spooks are that worried about leaks maybe they should kick out all of their Booz Allen Hamilton contractors. They seem to keep letting all the cats out of the bag. Of course they have the official help and sanction of the morons, clowns and idiots at theOffice of Personnel Management who routinely suffer hacks of their investigations into all security cleared personnel working for the government or contracted by the government. All that blackmail material routinely ends up in the hands of hackers from Russia, China, XYugoslavia and other less reputable places.
The treaty gave both parties the right to conduct inspections of just about any site where ground launched cruise missiles or intermediate range ballistic missiles were produced. That gave the Soviets and Russians the right to enter my classified workspace and search around for anything that might look like a Transporter Erector Launcher TEL since the Air Force and General Dynamics used to build those at Air Force Plant 19 in Old Town, San Diego at what used to be the Consolidated Vultee production facility and is now home to the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. We were admonished to keep all of our secrets in spaces smaller than the footprint of the old TELs so the Russians could be barred from searching anything or space smaller than an actual TEL.
My old office top floor and where LockMart/ULA used to make the fuel tanks for Atlas Launchers
The National People's Radio discussed Trump's flailing Russian policy with the lickspittle commenter noting for us that Trump had no Russian policy and probably wouldn't until he got around to filling the National Security Advisor position and the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Policy) jobs and got some Deputy Secretary at State that could comprehend Russia.
What I despise about NPR is that they cherry pick 100% of their guests to follow the liberal chains of thought on all policy or topics and never give so much of a hint about what is really going on by asking some actual spokesperson from the non-liberal half of the country to come on and comment. The lickspittle guest did observe that Russia violated the INF treaty in 2014 during Obama's administration but offered no hint as to what measures Obama adopted to challenge or counter this violation and the NPR lickspittle naturally let him off the hook and didn't ask any of the obvious questions that immediately occur to anybody with a functioning brain.
It's pretty sad. I used to be able (many years ago) to listen to NPR for up to an hour at a time. These days it's down to about 1 minute/day. Oh well, MetroParkCentralis has some excellent music stations.
It's pretty sad when an entire network is defined as a place people go to hear what they want to hear and nothing else. One could say the same about any of the cable or broadcast networks these days but CNN was the most blatant of the former 'real' news sites. They shed their cred when confronted by Iraq and there is no doubt that they reached other modus vivendi.
One of the treasures that might fall from this administration and congress, is the passage of a mandatory voter ID law requiring all future voters to produce a recognized government issued voter identification card. The various states that mandate voter IDs have been providing the voters with free state identification forever now. The only reason anyone can advance for permitting continuing ongoing fraud in our elections by refusing to countenance the concept of requiring that voters positively identify themselves to the poll workers are the racist bigots of the democrat party who continue to insist that blacks are too inferior and too stupid to get the required identification.
Why rethuglicans don't make this case every single time it is breached is beyond me, except I think an awful lot of rethuglican lawmakers are dumber than dirt.
In this country elections still matter and voter fraud is swaying election returns and throwing away our hard won democracy. It's not just a personal fraud anymore either. These days the democrat party's apparatchiks go on television and the radio and practically order the illegal aliens to vote and sponsor endless voter registration drives that end up only registering democrats.
I have seen some hapless reporting by morons and idiots but Reuters really takes the biscuit. Here is their chomping at the outer boundaries of accurate news with their headline today:
At this point, everybody except reuters knows that there is NO hole in the dam. There is one hell of a big hole in the spillway from the damn but the spillway is not the dam. We all would have noticed a 9 meter hole in the dam since it would have involved the near instantaneous destruction of the entire dam.
Reuters goes on to note that it's only a 9 meter hole and not 90 as they first reported. I think they gooned that up too. Let's look at the hole from yesterday's Daily Timewaster reporting:
It looks a little bit bigger than 9 meters across doesn't it? Well, that's the wire services for you. What they don't make up, they get wrong.
It's like there are no politicians in Illinois that give a damn about the people who live in Chicago. I wonder what made all those politicians give up?
It looks like the message is starting to filter out and the 'proofs' that the global warming klan offered up to show that their weather models were working out just as predicted are starting to show the cracks and flaws they have been papering over and ignoring for the last 20 years. The bloom is rapidly falling off the climate change rose and they have noone to blame but each other and Dr. Curry and the dirty rotten NOAA turncoat who let the cat out of the bag and proved that they have all massaged the data like its never been massaged before.
International man of mystery, George Tenet had a wonderful medal named after him and this CIA medal was just awarded to the Crown Prince of the country that funneled 15 of the 9/11 attackers into the United States and funded their studies here as they learned how to fly jets, kill people and crash into buildings. Yes, the CIA Director just awarded the George Tenet medal to Saudi subject Mohammed bin Nayef for:"excellent intelligence performance, in the domain of counter-terrorism and his unbound contribution to realize world security and peace."
Don't you think it's odd that the CIA Director has the gall to award a Saudi a medal named after a man who was so abysmally incompetent in the domain of counter-terrorism and wouldn't recognize a terrorist if it bit him on the nose? I do. I wonder if this is the 'cut direct' or just a slap in the face for our Saudi 'friends'. I'd be deeply embarrassed to be found worthy of the award of the George Tenet Medal for counter-terrorism excellence.
I have been enjoying the last three weeks of unending criticism of the administration by the brownshirts and the nazis of the fourth estate. The issue I find most appealing must be the White House correspondents crackfest where the media and administration come together for some lighthearted banter that just shows how much they love each other.
"How can media clink glasses with a White House that makes clear its contempt for press freedom and its admiration for (Russian President Vladimir) Putin methods?" tweeted David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic.
I can see that Trump makes no effort to hide his contempt for what passes as the Press in this country and the near abroad. By the same token though, the media make absolutely no effort to hide their complete contempt for Trump. I see them as the more out-of-control 3 year old who cannot do anything but vent hatred and contempt for the man who parlayed their hatred for him into roughly $5 billion in free advertising throughout the primaries and the presidential campaign. They just can't stop themselves, even when they rail at Trump for doing nothing more than whatever Obama did during his administration.
Some people think it unpresidential to tweet and I can see their point but I kind of disagree with them. The tweets are rapid, appear off-the-cuff and are usually humorous to those not targeted by them. The left and the media despise them because they simply can't help themselves. They have an atavistic compulsion to dance to whatever tune Trump plays and he has them place themselves in front of the camera and say deeply stupid things along the lines of the egregious Frum (see above).
As I read all the reporting on the correspondents dinner it always, appears to show the press as unwilling to join the White House to break bread and share in conviviality and jocularity. It's nothing to do with the White House. It's not a dinner the White House puts on or hosts. It's a manifestation that shows that the fourth estate cannot put aside its contempt and hatred for even one night and feel proud to be numbered among the few, the proud, the people who accept President Trump.
The media ain't feeling the love and they keep digging their hole deeper and deeper with the 50% of Americans who voted for Trump. There's a lot of people that have written off the media in this country and agree that if it wasn't for fake news, there would be no news at all out of Washington DC or New York. Every single story has a spin and the spin is always the same.
It reminds me of the time the pope went fishing with President Bush. They were out on the Potomac fishing when the pope's silly hat blew off. The pope was going to try to fish it out of the river with a paddle but George said, "let me" and stood up, stepped out of the boat, walked on water over to the pope's hat and returned with it, giving it to the pope. Naturally the press saw all this and reported with glee that, "President Bush doesn't know how to swim!"
I think it's time the media and the rest of them grew up and learned to behave like adults. They're all much too old to look cute while pouting full time and glowering at the rest of us with unconcealed fury, hatred and disdain. I'm tired of them.
San Francisco has long had a reputation for gathering to itself all the nation's fruits and nuts. Now it appears that they have decided to include out-and-out fascists in their mix of scum and villainy. How exactly does anyone in the United States boast about our very own kristallnacht without fear of arrest and the law?
American fascists attack American university in California to prevent speech by gay man
There were certainly a large number of students in the crowd and many of them were violating another American's right to freedom of speech, but it was the hardcore fascists that were the ones smashing the windows and setting the university on fire. Sort of the like the Brown Shirts working for that Hitler fella.
Meanwhile, the Berkeley police and UC Berkeley police stood by and did nothing. Nothing at all. Does that sort of remind you of how the German police handled the 'rioters' throughout Kristallnacht and beyond? Just standing around minding their own business. And they dindo nothin.
Now that the sturm and drang of bloody football is over for the season, it can be revealed how and why the Falcons never had a chance of winning the Superbowl. In a word, it was Gabriel. Honestly, how could any team with even a hint of the woeful Cleveland Browns hope to win the Superbowl? Other than that, he's a hell of a good football player.
Consider the crocodile. A lifeform so suited to its environment that it has not evolved in 40 million years. Peering into the underlying venality of some of the stuff that happens right in front of one's face is sometimes pretty vicious, like a crocodile. I don't think politics has changed in that length of time either.
He (Trump) calls for full-bore gas and oil development, a common culture in lieu of identity politics, secure borders, deregulation, tax reform, a Jacksonian foreign policy, nationalist trade deals in places of globalization, and traditionalist values.
If the US takes energy development to the next level, it will see the immediate collapse of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, OPEC, Venezuela, etc., economic warfare not seen since FDR in 1939! That worked out splendidly if you owned defense stocks or war material production facilities.
I'd have some sympathy for the talking heads if any of them raised this issue, but I've seen no sign that they have. On the other hand, I don't spend any time looking at the old organs of politics and political chicanry anymore. Needless to say, I don't have any sympathy for OPEC. OTOH, lower energy prices usually mean good things for the 3rd world.
Ace of Spades has a wonderful and insightful view into what exactly cost the left their promised Hillary. I dare say they will never understand, as the riots in Berkeley proved yet again that they learn nothing from experience or truth.
Where before the voters on the left were mostly passive receivers of Cultural Marxism, they had now become active participants via propaganda, slander, social shaming, and otherizing. This meant that conservatives were now being assaulted on two fronts, both from the institutional left and the soft left.
Every conservative who is active on Facebook knows what I'm talking about. After decades of Americans keeping their politics mostly to themselves, suddenly our feeds were jammed up with political invective.
It wasn't just directed at politicians. It was personal--a relentless litany of insults and abuse, first at the Tea Party and then Trump supporters. Most of it was generalized, but the message was clear. They held our kind in contempt and didn't care who knew it. In fact, they seemed to be in a contest to see who could broadcast it the loudest.
Read the whole thing. It will take all of one minute.
I turned my back on facebook the instant I set up an account. I set up the account solely to be a beacon to just one person and I'm still waiting. It's been 5 years. I never go there except to see if there are any messages from her.
I did take a look at some of the things one of my former colleagues, a man with a PhD and 50 years experience working for the government, posted before I stopped even looking at my page. He was unhinged and was happily reposting the most vile insults you can imagine about Trump, his supporters, republicans, conservatives, in short, anybody who disagreed with his worldview. It was a stunning surprise to me because while I knew his politics I hadn't realized that they are that extreme and so filled with hate.
I've been reading Spengler since I first started visiting Asia. In this column he nails it.
One would have thought that a 90-day suspension of immigration from seven countries with minimal economic ties to the United States would be minor news. It has to be the best thing an American president has done since Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, because all the people I dislike have gone bat-guano crazy.
As he finishes, don't believe what you read in the news.
I am always amazed that the real stormtroopers in America think they're fighting fascism. Their "educators" have a lot to answer for. Srsly, a man is asked to come and deliver a speech and the stormtroopers respond by setting fires and threatening any who atttend to the point:
All campus buildings at UC Berkeley on lockdown? It is past time for all students to post a performance bond that they forfeit if they are identified as rioting anywhere during their tenure at the school. There is no excuse for rioting, burning cars, setting fires to building and attacking people who were simply trying to enjoy their constitutional rights. The funny thing though, is that not one single one of these morons who wear black and conceal their faces, ever appreciates that all they're doing is building support for Trump.
I am reminded that the police do not protect the innocent, they protect the guilty. Otherwise those fascist little bastards would be strung up like their moral leaders Mussolini, Hitler and Ceausescu. Only the left seems to hunt in packs and get away with murder, arson, vandalism and assault and they're always the first to call anyone who opposes their stupid ideas, Hitler.
