OH CRAP, I WENT TO MEMPHIS

SLEEP

There I was. Sleep does not come as easy as it used to. Hasn't for years. This one snuck up on me.

TAKE A WALK

I like Jerry Pournelle. He asks some excellent questions. He created whole universes of the mind.

The big complaint about repealing Obamacare is that it will leave some millions without health insurance. Of course they don’t have health insurance in the first place, because much of Obamacare is not insurance, it’s “universal” health care paid for by a complex system of subsidies; and of course the nation got along for a number of years without it. 

My question is, why must I – actually my grandchildren – pay for your healthcare to begin with? I say my grandchildren, because most of Obamacare’s subsidies are paid for with borrowed money, but I do pay current taxes – we all do although only half of us pay income taxes – and the United States is living off borrowed money at a higher rate than usual. But Obamacare says that if you get sick, your health care is my responsibility, not yours; and I am wondering how I came by this responsibility? 

Was I born with it? No. I’m pretty sure that when I was growing up my folks paid my doctor bills to Doctor Demarco and St. Joseph’s Hospital, and no one else did. Doctor Demarco lived across the street from St. Peter’s Orphanage, and donated some of his time there, and to impoverished patients at St. Joseph’s, and I suppose that if my Dad had ever got fired from WHBQ and I got appendicitis I’d be taken care of somehow, but my father was never under the illusion that the final responsibility was his – well, ours – and no one else’s. 

But somehow over the years I have acquired the responsibility to pay your health debts, and those of refugees, and even of illegal migrants who have no intention of assimilating, and I would like to know how I got this obligation, and the state got the right to enforce it with armed men? 

Please do not remind me of my moral and religious obligations. The state is still tolerant – sometimes – of religious views, but it has made it clear that it is unconstitutional to impose religious obligations on anyone. That issue is closed. The state doesn’t send armed men to enforce religious edicts. No: religious obligations, and particularly Christian obligations, are right out, not to be enforced. 

Yet I am obliged to give you – you are entitled – not only to emergency health care, but to health insurance, no matter how sick you are, or how strange your needs. I am even required to pay part of the cost of your sex change operation, should you want one and find a qualified someone to say you need it for proper mental health. It is not an obligation I asked for or assented to, but it is an entitlement you have; and I want to know the constitutional basis for this. Surely your sex change operation is not necessarily and proper for the health of the republic? It is not interstate commerce within any sane interpretation of the phrase. It is not promoting the general welfare. 

You want it. I don’t say you can’t have it, but surely I can say that I don’t want to pay for it? And I don’t have to be totally bereft of the milk of human kindness to say I don’t owe you any health care insurance either.

I vacationed with a girl who believed deep in her heart and soul that I must pay for her insurance. I owed it to her for her maternity care, mental care and everything else. She worked for it and her employer paid the lion's share for her 'health' care and I must too. I pointed out that where she and hers went wrong was ordering me at gunpoint to pay for her healthcare. She quite literally didn't get it. She thought I was some sort of slave who owed it to her to be Barkus and thus forthcoming with all the money she and her's believed I owe because.

One doesn't 'argue' with that mindset. As whip smart as the comrades are, they bought into that universe and Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Illinois won't convince them. There's a pony in there somewhere and it's theirs and they mean to have it.

THE UNBIDDEN

Dreams. They come and go so fast.

THE DARK CURRENT

So, there I was, 1500 miles away from home and the phone did it's thing. It's been doing it for quite some time now. Zählt nicht. The battery of the phone is good for about 30 minutes unless one is using it and then the availability drops to zero pretty fast. I have clevered my way around that.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

I was on vacation and it was good. We drove from MetroParkCentralis to Maine and back. It took 3 days to get there and 3 days to get back and the driving was mo debinetely part of the vacation. I'll have to tell you more but I am eager to discuss national and international politics with you because.... well, actually, not. We watch not the TV nor monitor the radio while we vacate on the rock bound coast of Maine and neither do we pay any attention to papers or other news and we have no internet out there where the seals run wild and the kayaks roam. We kind of just fail to pay attention for awhile. That's well worth the doing.

Nevertheless, we caught snippets and glimpses and one of us laughed up his sleeve while another was somewhat torqued by the slippery and elusive news and the best of us really bought the paper just for the crossword and seduko that was in it. We sailed and kayaked and ate and wandered around and had a good and relaxing time and now we are back.

On the way out we saw many things. On the way back we saw the very first Red Roof Inn. It's quite a pile. It's where the elite met to establish the Special Drawing Rights and craft a post-war economy that would not be based on any single national currency and then adopted the dollar for the international currency. Bretton Woods was what they called the deal and the inn at Mount Washington was where they gathered to agree the deal after hammering it out a lot. Our diplomats sufferered greatly during the war.

First Red Roof Inn

Red Roof Inn Veranda (one of them)

We came across the modern State Department idle while driving out of our place north of Bath. It attracted the eye, and why not?

All the tools of modern diplomacy on display at this locale north of Bath

TRUTH, A SAD ONE

You really can get kids to do whatever you want. This is not a worthwhile ritual. It does look like one but I'd buy the ammo if they went after the ones that put them there. I'm cheap. I'd issue swords and tell to use the damn bayonet. My grandparents are buried there.

My wars were the little ones. Nobody noticed. and my computer is overheating to death, thank you Ohio.

I WAS TALKING

like I do. I was telling the woman I love about the Newport I knew and loved. I took her there once and showed it to her, the places I lived, the places I'd gone to school. I talked about the last of the fossil fueled super carriers and how they ended up at the same dock that played host to two LNG tanker ships that were so poorly built they could not be sold and the USCG would not give anybody a licence to tow them away to be broken up, so they mouldered away at the destroyer pier where, once upon a time, my first ship sailed from. When I was just starting out on that journey to be an officer, the 'gunny' had us run over there every morning before breakfast. It left me with an enduring dislike of breakfast.

Newport, Rhode Island and Maine, were never places where I used to toss in that phrase that every single one of us learned from watching Deliverance. If we hear banjo music, we run away.

Right over there, sort of close to piers was the Middleton Housing area where a friend of mine lived with his wive. They were musical. He could play any stringed instrument like a maestro and she could play their piano in that tiny place like a goddess of music. They used to entertain. They threw a dinner party every week and they would play, long into the night and those who could, would play alongside. Magical nights.

This, was decades before the carriers showed up on their route to destruction but, as I recall, the LNG elephants were there.

so, anyway, enjoy

ON POORISTAN

No, no. A million times no.

I never watched it but I heard that 'reality tv' was all about voting losers off the island. I sure as hell don't want every democrat lawmaker with property in Pooristan as my huckleberry. Do I get a vote?

Why would we want more idiots who voted themselves beer and perogis to the tune of $75 BILLION in debt? We used to just bomb them but if they are serious about joining us, can we at least send these losers to Detroit and Chicago or California? Yeah, I know, John McCain will lead a progressive bipartisan sortie to bring them here and bail them out. That's the kind of rethuglican he is. Could I hire one of those demons from the Hellmouth that used to die for Buffy? .....just for a day or two. I'll give it back, no scratches or blemishes.

DIRT REPELLENT

In my youth, I used to be a newsman. I would deliver the news to a grateful (paying) public. I delivered the news on a bike. In Newport it rained a good deal and had weather leaving puddles and bikes would happily cast it up on me as I did my newshawk thing. People like these girls always impressed the hell out of me. It held true everywhere I went outside Europe and the Middle East. They didn't have washing machines and had to wash this sort of thing by hand and yet, it was always spotless. And they rode bikes all the time. When I rode I always ended up covered in mud.

I'm pretty sure they're all aliens.

MEMPHIS

A long time ago I took some time off to explore both Tennessee and Texas with an eye to moving there. There was some charm to both. I liked San Antonio and the River Walk, but I wouldn't want to live there. I actually liked Knoxville but, I wouldn't want to live there. By the point I had reached in my life, they were small towns and there was absolutely nothing at all beyond the city's edge. My daughter came along. She was all of 3 at the time.

What I remember about Memphis was how nice it was. I really enjoyed Mud Island. If you haven't been there, go. You can walk down the full length of the Mississippi River and you won't regret it. .....don't move there, you'd regret that. 

In Memphis, the city father's, at the urging of the Justice Department, decided to break up the crime reservations and spread the criminals across the length and breadth of the city and screw the people that lived there. I didn't like that approach. Deciding to spread out the kind of people that would, without a thought, with malice oozing out their nostrils, simply raise a gun and blow the head of any person that irked them, was kind of like, Oh, I don't know, inviting umpteem million islamic terrorists to move in next door. I decided to stay in San Diego. I prefer life with the head I have.

All this was prelude to playing a song I like and which I inflict on you without mercy. Enjoy. The show was absolutely fantastic and just like Firefly and too many others, I wish I had been around to watch it in realtime and thus keep it alive for a second or 5th season. 

Oh, and some of you would enjoy the book, Marooned in Real Time.

ON QATAR

I spent a lot of time there. It was civilized. More will follow. I liked Qatar. The ruling family is nuts but the rest of the place is okay.

I am also just about convinced that one of the impacted wisdom teeth I ignorned decades ago is resurfacing and I don't have a dentist. I don't even know a dentist. I had a LCDR dentist straddle my chest while chipping away at the last wisdom tooth with a hammer and a pair of pliers. I lost interest in preventive dental care right about then, there in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

IN THE FRAME

I liked this painting when first I saw it. I still do.

There was a place, once, that hung a copy on the wall in front of gentlemen using the facilities.

To this day, I laugh.

Thank you Reidy O'Neal and the Lighthouse in Oakland.

THEY FOLLOW

Supposedly in the former european countries, the forces of law and order just follow around behind the terrorists to sort of clean up and stuff. I think we need a new FBI. The same thing happened in London. There were 'security' cops right there waiting for the terrorists to give in to their urge to kill and then they acted.

Naaa, I made the last sentence up but the first sentence, that's the truth.

Do you ever wonder how different things would be if the jihadists targeted the kids of the elite and governing class, the judges, their wives and kids? Yeah, me neither.

SWEET BABY JESUS!

This from the Time Lord running the DNC's computer war against civilization:

Supporters of the Democratic National Committee were especially incensed by her criticism of the party organization, Politico said. Andrew Therriault, who served as the DNC’s director of data science until last June, called Clinton’s claims “f–king bulls–t” in tweets that were later deleted.
“This is all about the last campaign. And really, what Democrats should be focusing on, and what I think Hillary Clinton should be figuring out, is how do we empower the DNC to have the best data resources to win races this year, in 2018 and 2020,” a former DNC aide told the Web site.

EMPOWER THE DNC!!!!!! Good grief, they have all the computers of the NSA working for them. What do they want, Yoda and some of the Force?

STUPID RUNS RAMPANT IN BALTIMORE

Can you imagine teaching in a school system where exactly no students could pass a test? I wonder how indescribably grim and horrible a school must be where whatever it is they do there, it doesn't include studying English or math. Don't get me wrong, I hated to study English and math but I knew that me being there from daybreak until dusk was the price I was going to pay irregardless of whether or not I actually learned anything and I might as well apply myself to learning.

I still can't write but my math is precious to me because it is such a rare and confined little smattering of arithmetic. All the stuff with x's, imaginary numbers and anything in brackets is lost and gone forever and might never have been if you look at my school transcripts. Still. I can do arithmetic and long division and there was never in my life anytime that I needed to work out the square root of anything or calculate the area under the slope of any given line.

As a Fire Control Officer on a missile firing destroyer I had one occasion to use math. I had to calculate the super elevation of the missile launcher and put that number into the missile firing plan that I wrote for our one and only missile shoot after we left Todd Shipyard and the tender mercies of NSWS. Oddly enough, that is pronounced as 'nemesis' and by God they were mine. Anyhow, a little geometry remained and was just enough to calculate the angle for a plan that nobody else ever read and, from the results, nobody who was briefed on it, paid any attention to.

How do I know that? Well, throughout the plan I plagiarized the crap of the Pacific Missile Range's plans for missile firing ships which included multiple and repeated warning about NOT RECOVERING any drones that suffered their expected fate and GOT SHOT DOWN. We no sooner shot down the BQM-34 and the CO was putting the rudder hard over to head to the scene of the splash and start recovering the debris. It took the Range Safety Officer tugging on his cape to keep the CO from salvaging the slivers that remained afloat and hauling them aboard. It was a very weird ship.

But back to Baltimore. Why? Why would ANYBODY spend their life teaching in a place like that where nobody at all, not one, wants to learn? It must be nothing more than a nursery school for older kids who must hate being there even more than the teachers hate it. It's like Hell with a school bus.

I don't think there could ever be a dawn that breaks where students or teachers get up and actually look forward to the 8 hours they're going to spend in confinement with the drug dealers, pushers, rapists, murderers and whatnot because what do you get out of a school system that fails to instruct in civilization? You get anti-civilization and you get it good and hard.

My God, can you imagine employers in and around Baltimore who need to hire workers, counter help, cashiers, stock boys? Where do they get employees and do they dread hiring the way I dread going to the dentist? You know who else can't use people from these schools? Yeah, the employer of last resort (supposedly). The Armed Forces make you take a test before they let you in and if you fail the test, they don't want you. Thank God!

Public schools are mandated by the law. They used to have fairly robust organizations devoted to seeing that everyone attended school, everyone had their shots up to date, everybody could pass a physical exam and read an eye chart and everyone got exposed to math, history and English. Civil society thought they were the basic grounding for leading an exemplary American life. For some time now everyone has been content with the old fake it till you make it school of thought and that is what we are turning out; little toxic blooms of anti-civilization to dwell in the deep city and keep alive a world out of time. They prey on civilization and as long as they last, they insist that they are smarter than you.

In the war we never fought we used to describe incoming soviet missiles hitting 'important' targets because they, like us, were targeting cities. As one looks back to that non-war, one wonders.....How many cities could we trade in the calculus of thermo-nuclear war? We could easily start with Baltimore. If you read the words to the side of this post, you can see how I feel about the old cities.

These schools are literally across the street from me. There's 3 of them. They're all 100 years old. As you can see, the fabric of civilization quickly decays.

Elementary School

Still the elementary school

Middle School

Middle School again.

School across the street cornerstone

I remember driving by a Nashville school with a similar cornerstone. I thought it remarkable that children could still learn in such an old building. In retrospect, nothing remarkable about it. Kids haven't changed, instruction should not have changed and the surroundings are a mere bagatelle.

It's not the fabric of the school or school system that need to change. They have worked for generations. I think perhaps some people have lost the bubble on how to teach and perhaps, have failed to learn that you cannot teach all of the people. For the good of all, some need to go because they ruin it for all. Baltimore leads the pack of diminishing returns.

A VERY DIFFERENT PLACE

The last late night talk show I enjoyed vanished a long time ago. This is a window into that vanished era. Follow the ashes.

CITIES IN FLIGHT

A very good read. A dystopian book that I enjoyed. Those are rare. Something I was reading tonight triggered a flashback to the story of New York City in flight under Mayor Amalfi. I think it was the Mad Dogs of Thor V. It was definitely Russian. They drive like my sister.

You might enjoy this no pasaran piece. It talks about the media. As a former, respected member of the media (I used to have a paper route for the astute Newport Daily News), he makes some excellent points about how things are going in my second profession.

On the gripping hand, read and enjoy.

IS BRITAIN A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY

I wonder because I read the poorly written UK Daily Mail which stopped proofreading its headlines or articles ages ago but still carries the news of the kingdom. On Saturday night, while reading about the enormous crowds stranded at Heathrow this weekend, I reflected on how low the British have sunk.

The shadow PM and his shadow Defense Minister both love the IRA and won't hear a word against the atrocities carried out by the IRA as they bombed and murdered their way through much of Britain and some of Ireland. The Labor Party don't care. They don't give a damn because they're really hardline communists and you cannot make an omelette without gassing or murdering 200,000 kulaks.

British Air went into a complete software meltdown as the weekend started and the staff all promptly went home at the end of working hours. Probably because BA is owned by a Spanish company and they could lose their jobs for working unsanctioned overtime.

Incredibly dangerous, scary, easily identifiable anti-British, anti-western scumbags known to the police, can blow up and murder just as many people as they want and the ruling class don't care. They don't give a shit.

Incredibly dangerous, scary, easily identifiable anti-British, anti-western scumbags known to the police, can groom, rape and murder little girls all over England and the ruling class don't care. They don't give a shit.

An insane, murderous bunch of thugs, known to the police, can murder a British Army soldier in the high street and the ruling class don't care. They don't give a shit.

One can say all the same exact things about the vicious circle of scum ruling classes in Scandanavia, Germany and the rest of the world that have all decided that the rights of murderers and vicious scumbags are greater than yours.

Remember when it was "We the People" and the blessings to ourselves meant us and those like us?

The very first thing the left did was weaponize the law against the citizen. The police and the law really and truly are there to protect the criminals from me and you. Fake news, Fake political parties and Fake justice.

Fakery seems to be on the rise all around the world. Too bad for the world. As I believe I said, a time or two, you better arm yourself. The 'ruling class' in Britain have forbidden the subjects to arm themselves. "Leave it to the police!" Britain heads down the same sewer as the rest of occupied Europe.

I always liked Britain and Scotland and Wales. C'est la guerre. We shall not see their like again. That was the interesting proposition put forth by an author who wondered one day if the Industrial Revolution could have come from any other people or place and his answer was pretty much, no. When you think about it, all that was needful was there for the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Romans.....Only one place and people (plus Dutch) pulled it off.