We have all heard of the woes of Chipotle and the repeated outbreaks of food borne illnesses from that chain of weight loss clinics masquerading as fast food outlets. Have you ever wondered why they keep getting hit with repeated bouts of e-coli, norovirus, lysteria, etc? Perhaps there is a former nuclear missile command site, long abandoned in North Dakota and one of Chipotle's enemy franchises is waging war on it's competitors.
The suspicious killer outbreaks of e-coli at Jack in the Box, the Chipotle disaster, Whole Foods ready to eat food? All of them were targeted by the FFSF. Fast Food Strike Force operatives got themselves hired at each of the enemy food stores and then dosed themselves with everything from norovirus to typhus and cheerfully went to work everyday and never washed their hands. Ever.
Little surprise then that some food store chains are surprisingly untouched by loathsome food borne diseases and others are hit again and again. It's the armegeddon of food wars and you don't even see it happening except that the casualties keep showing up in hospitals all over America.
I find it kind of fascinating that we are coming up on 100 year anniversaries of some truly awful battles from the Great War. As a boy and later, I always had a horror of this battle 100 years ago. The numbers of men killed are simply staggering and almost unbelievable to Americans today. We still and hopefully will, read aloud the names of our servicemen and women who were killed in the Global War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan and a few other places.
I remember standing in a used bookshop in the Tottenham Court Road about 3 decades ago and looking at the stack of books that came up to my chest. They were all part of a single set of books and all they contained was the name, rank, regiment and place and date of death in the Great War. It was a record of names single spaced in three columns per page in very small print.
There's more about the battle and the human sacrifice at the link. It's well worth reading unless you're already feeling melancholy.
I got this is in my email and thought there was something good for veterans. Ha!
What made it so egregious is that the subject line was: GOOD NEWS FOR VETERANS.
The awful details are spelled out here. In short, the veterans who spent the last 16 years fighting islamic terrorists, the Taliban and Iraq will all get nothing new unless they were awarded a purple heart medal in which case, there is some benefit for "veterans" but for the vast majority of the forces, nothing changed, nothing new. It does make me wonder if the forces are running into recruiting problems which have forced Congress to act.
I don't see how it is "truly great news for all those who wear the uniform." Those guys in uniform today or who hung them up when they left the service or retired, they don't get anything new or improved or better. They get what they signed up for.
I'm a little snarky on account of I joined up when there was no GI Bill.
One never really thinks about how the solar system works. Here's a good shot of what Jupiter does for the inner solar system. Cheerfully stolen from Traditional Vibe.
As we anticipated, given the location and nature of the damage, the preliminary investigation on the collision is in and it appears that FITZGERALD was at fault. I honestly don't know how two deck officers, two officers in CIC and the watch standers in CIC, standing lookout or even on the bridge, failed to notice a ship that held a constant bearing with decreasing range.
When I was standing those watches on the bridge I would use a grease pencil and make marks on the radar scope and after a few marks on a contact, extend a line to see where that ship's relative motion was going to put it in relationship to me. It was easy. It was almost foolproof. I guess we don't do that anymore.
I have to wonder though, I thought this was the 21st century. Don't our ships have Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Collision Avoidance Systems? Was all of CIC playing pub drills and ignoring the real world while they knocked out a few exercises to put into the daily Operations Summary?
When I was standing watches in the dark, I found it handy to stay focused by walking from one bridge wing to the other and having a look around. It had the added benefit of keeping me awake. Of course the way my ships' bridge wings were configured, I could see everything forward of the beam from either bridge wing. This isn't the case on the DDG.
Just a little effort by any of the watch standers on the bridge or in the Combat Information Center would have avoided the collision and spared the lives of the seven men who died. One almost hopes that that fact haunts them for the rest of their lives.
Shortly after 9/11, the Commander I worked for called me into her office where she gave me the 'bad' news and told me that the new policy at SPAWAR was to kick all unessential people off the property after 1800 and that she had determined that I was not essential and thus, had to be out of the office and off 'the campus' not later than 1800 everyday. She went on to tell me that only 'essential employees could get on the property after 1800 or before 0700. Essential people got to wear a little tag on their security badge that indicated that they were essential.
The admiral's Executive Assistant had called me into her office earlier that day and told me that from now until the heat death of the universe, I would be the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Command Duty Officer from midnight until 0800. She didn't tell the idiot I worked for about this new task and neither did I; well, not right away.
You know that the universe, personally, hates you when this sort of thing happens all at once. I decided to go home, go the beach, rest up and then see what happened when I tried to enter the compound at around 2300. Yep, pretty much what I expected; no drama, no demand for 'special' entry privileges and "drive right in, sir."
It was still sad though to see the precious Y2K War Room reactivated for the new War on Terror. I and others had been hoping we had, 9 months after the war ended, put a stake through it and killed it.
As a side note, my counterpart as OPS on the East Coast and I were talking on the phone about a joint distibution problem we had and he told me he had to leave everyday at 1800 because only essential personnel were allowed in the office after that. I asked him how he swung that good deal and he told me he had been out of the office when they handed out the essential tags and thus, didn't get one and was way too smart to ask for one. It caught up with him later though. It's hard to tell your boss, without laughing, that his Operations Officer isn't essential and has to leave now....
Jon Gabriel at Ricochet succinctly captures why I don't and won't watch the news. Read the whole thing. It takes less than 3 minutes. Here's the capture data and mind, these numbers are only from May to June 20th of this year. I expect it has gotten much much worse. The news people are like rabid animals.
The television and cable news networks have completely convinced Trump haters but they still can't let go and have to keep hammering on this little worm casting as if it was a great mountain that needed to revealed to us ignorant rubes. The minority of the population hated and despised Trump from the very first time his name was mentioned as a potential rethuglican candidate but the media think they can influence the rest of us.
What they've done to the sane people in this country is to demonstrate their complete and insane bias. Where were they when that idiot Comey came out and declared on national television that Hillary Clinton had indeed committed felonious acts and violated the Espionage Act and, by establishing her own private email server, had sought to violate the FOIA and had illegally destroyed 30,000 emails? Where was the media when she was caught in lie after lie?
Where was the media when it was revealed that Comey had given ALL of Clinton's aides who were involved in the scheme immunity AND agreed to destroy the various pieces of their IT hardware that Hillary's aides hadn't already taken a hammer to or conveniently 'lost'?
Yes, I know, it's has ever been thus. Still, there's no reason to feed their egos or the networks which is why, around here, we don't.
We have been getting diversified since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of late, we've been urged to celebrate not just diversity, but multiculturism. I can see why some people want us all to do that but I'm a white guy. What do I get out of multiculturism? It now appears that the new lib/prog weapon-of-choice against white guys is to scream "cultural appropriation" at anywhitebody that tries to engage in multicultural appreciation and do silly things like, prepare and sell ethnic food, braid their hair, play ethnic music, make ethnic art, use ethnic designs, etc. It's like we can't win.
There is a story from Canada that indicates that somebody has decided to wage war on thieves. This person left a backpack on a car in front of a Winnipeg 7/11. The police and the victims are lying about what happened but reading between the lines, a truckload of stupid thieves snagged a loose backpack and drove away with it as fast as they could, at which point, it detonated.
In the pickup were two men, 22 and 27, as well as a woman, 20, and a boy, 17. The bag exploded shortly after the truck left the convenience store’s parking lot, roughly 160 feet away.
When a mild mannered and civilized bloke like James May of Top Gear can state: Motorbike Thieves Ought to be Killed, people should listen. People are sick of the crime that goes undeterred, unpunished and never sees justice done to the perpetrators.
"We could attempt to absolve society of its responsibilities and blame the bike makers, for not providing adequate built-in security. These are platitudes. We must deal with the problem of bike thieves at its source, by killing them.
"It makes me shudder to write that. I, like any civilised person, am vehemently opposed to capital punishment and any other form of state-sponsored murder.
"Justice should not admit a public’s thirst for pure revenge. But that’s not what’s happening here. I have arrived at this conclusion not through knee-jerk reaction or impotent fury, but by a pure and unadulterated process of logic. They have to be killed." He argued that because police don't or can't do much about gangs of motorbike thieves, the only way to stop them stealing bikes is to have them killed.
It looks like the same kind of fury has found its way to Winnipeg where I have no doubt some really tired guy simply built a bomb in his basement, put it into a backpack and left it on a car in a carpark knowing that some thieves would steal it. He probably triggered it with rf signal loss or by command. He may not build another one, but other people sick of crime without punishment are probably downloading the Anarchist Cookbook from Amazon right now.
What can I say? Thieve Responibly, all that glitters is not gold.
This is a short story about traveling in space as reckoned about 4 years before NASA started putting together a government program to launch mankind into space. I read it long ago and was reminded of it again this evening. It has been a long time.
Remember how pissed off the activists, greens, warmists, cultists, and progrs were when the US government declared our intent to launch Cassini even though it was powered by plutonium? I do. I remember it well. Those people were damned near hysterical in their loathing for that kind of science. They still are.
If you watch the video, you will see that the scheduled End of Mission takes place in 2 months, so you know what's going to happen, right? Yep, the media and democrats will shriek that Trump did it. He killed a perfect little daisy of a spacecraft and it's all his fault!
Wait for it, then watch and enjoy as the media and NASA trip over themselves rushing to blame the end of mission on Trump. JPL will be silent on the issue since they're mostly real scientists and not the kind of person that steals leftover drinks off the bar and slurps the contents and then damns the men who bought them for not specifying Grey Goose instead of the 'well' vodka, which seems to be the professional background of NASA hacks these days.
But will this be the end? A worthy question, grasshopper, and the answer lies in our stars. What if the good beings who inhabit Saturn object to having depleted Plutonium dumped into their somewhat sketchy atmosphere? You should probably buy some extra ammo, just in case.
I entered Paris via the Gare du Nord where a string quartet of 4 quite nice looking young ladies from the local academy of music were sitting under the glass and playing Mozart. I got a room in a hotel on the Ave Wagram just about a block away from the Arc de Triomphe.1 I was talking to one of the Eldar tonight and mentioned my first time in Paris. I had just come off wartime steaming for a year in the Persian Gulf and was on my way to the next assignment. This was before I had a home to call my own. I had a month or two and no particular place to be and so I did Madrid and Paris and London in one go.
The first morning in Paris was, IIRC, a Sunday. I can look it up. I used to take notes. We'll agree it was a Sunday. I stood at the Arc de Triomphe and looked all the way down the Champs Elysees and there was, by dawn's early light, not one car, not one pedestrian in sight all the way down to the Place de la Concorde. I'm not exaggerating. There was absolutely nobody at all on that street for as far as the eye could see. That's kind of why I won't go back. One doesn't gloss over memories like that lightly and Paris has changed a great deal.
I remember getting a breath of fresh air in the Marine Memorial Hotel in San Francisco at 3 in the morning and marveling that from my 9th floor room I could not see a living soul nor a car or bus. The window was floor to ceiling and was wide open and still, no sign of life in the city of a million souls. Obviously, not NYC, which I loathe, where, supposedly, nobody sleeps. Trust me, in San Francisco, everybody sleeps, a lot.
When I stayed in London I always stayed in tiny little hotels within a block or two of Paddingon. I could get up and walk to her majesty's palace, Harrods, Tottenham Court Road, the Tower, or pretty much anywhere I wanted to. Purdington's (they call it Purdey's) was a regular stop. I drove them mad by walking in and discussing shotguns and then left, not buying the $15,000 shotguns they had for the sporting sort.
The last time but one the security officer at Heathrow very quietly asked me to join him and we walked to a very private screening area where he asked if he could open my bags. I was nice and said, "sure." He opened them up and started pulling out holsters and empty magazines and one of those flashlights with the 90 degree bend that clips to one's deuce gear and kept on rummaging. I knew he wasn't looking for the pony. He was convinced I had undeclared pistols or machine guns in my luggage. He was young. He kept turning the flashlight on and off as if maybe, just maybe, it was some sort of top secret American weapon. I explained that I left the guns behind but the holsters were mine.
Sometimes, I used the subway or the tube but mostly I was a man fresh off the boat and I liked to walk. I kind of needed to walk. Our secretary once showed me pictures from her and her daughter's trip to Rome. The pictures recorded a visit to every single thing in Rome. You name it, she got a picture of her and her daughter in front of it over the course of a 9 hour layover. They might have walked a couple of feet. Mostly it was downtown tourist bus and ruins and things that ought to be ruined. I suspect that by perambulation, I could have taken pictures of just 3 of the sights. I'm OK with that. I am related to Rikki Tikki Tavii and I like to run walk and find out.
There's a certain majesty in strolling into one of those sidewalk establishments in France and spending a few maddening minutes trying to convince the waiter that you don't want coffee, you want coke and when one says coke one means one hell of a lot more ice cubes than the solitary and lonely ice cube they fished out of the gutter and stuck in the glass. It was more fun having these french debates with woman waiters who were willing to go all-in to explain that there is a worldwide shortage of ice or that the guy with the recipe quit last week and all you are going to get my American friend is that one tiny iceberg. They were so Earnest.
Russian billionaire Alexi Romanov filed suit in a Moscow court this morning, demanding that Hillary Clinton turn over her daughter to him. Romanov claims he, "paid good money to Hillary for her daughter" and he demands that the court order the Clinton's to fork over the girl.
Romanov is famous for also buying all of America's uranium mines from Hillary Clinton when she was acting as US Secretary of State.
Clinton was contacted by Pravda and reported that, "she really couldn't remember that deal and perhaps she had wiped it."
Stunned investigators are left wondering why anyone would pay good money for Chelsea Clinton.
I can't believe I forgot this place. In addition to the wonderful letter by Robert Heinlein to Theodore Sturgeon was the incomparable
On December 5th of 1921, future-Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Faulkner landed a job as a University of Mississippi postmaster. Despite numerous reports of his writing novels on the job, losing and occasionally throwing away mail, ignoring colleagues and customers, playing bridge during opening hours, and regularly turning up late only to leave early, Faulkner somehow held the position for almost three years — until, in September of 1924, a predictably unflattering inspection resulted in him being forced to resign.
He wrote the following letter to his superiors.
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
The headline is from one of the Pacific War biographies I read decades ago. It was, I think, Nimitz or Burke but it could have been Spruance, who was telling the 'youngster' that when the war in the Pacific ended they were just so tired. They could not fight off the depredations of the 22 year old US Army Air Force generals determined to set up the largest paramilitary force in the world. I'm pretty sure it was in Burke's biography but he was talking about his boss.
Fighting such a war, with 12,000,000 men under arms, and more than a thousand ships, took it out of a man. Many of the Admirals, that survived, put down their phones and went home and died within a few days. It's not like that anymore. Our generals and admirals just hang around forever and ever and write their memoirs.
Of them all, I really enjoyed Jackie Fisher's most of all. It's hard to believe it was published a full 100 years ago. He was such a thoroughly modern fellow.... That was one of the little dragons that got away when I finally left San Diego. Memories.
I'm rather surprised the cops didn't load him up and then tell us he died of lead poisoning. Yeah, he is insane, could it possibly have hurt anyone to play the damned song? Here, I'll do it.
Oh, never mind. I mean, it's OK if you want to get your ears clipped and sandblast your brain. Good on ya! Me? Not going to pollute the tubes with that. I thought it was a tune like I play around here and I'm a connoisseur. I don't just play any random crap. I have to hunt it down and kill it thoroughly and then do some data reduction, post analysis, and see if it is still space-worthy before I play a tune here. Rules are rules,
We got to watch another city trashed by progressives and liberal elite (poor branch) and it suddenly struck me that this is an overpopulation problem and one of the best ways to treat that is with culling. So, there's going to be a riot, massive demonstrations are planned, stores looted, cars burned, people beaten to within an inch of their lives and what do the police do to prepare? Right. You got it.
So, instead, you, Joe Citizen, could buy a protest tag. It's good for one protester. You can buy as many as you like, there's a no-bag limit and at $5.00 a pop, you could shoot a whole lot of lib/progs out on the town having their riot. You don't even have to take the meat!
Win Win! And it enhances city revenues although maybe the county or state governments would like to get involved. You know how they are about preserving the wolves and things like that.
Srsly,
Germans expressed anger on Sunday over violence that hit a G20 world leaders' summit in Hamburg, raising awkward questions for Chancellor Angela Merkel less than three months before an election.
About 20,000 police struggled to contain several hundred anti-capitalist militants who torched cars, looted shops and hurled Molotov cocktails and stones during the July 7-8 summit. Tens of thousands more people demonstrated peacefully.
Overall, 476 officers suffered injuries ranging from cuts and firework burns to eye damage from laser pointers. Police said on Sunday they had arrested 186 people and took 225 into custody.
I wrote it. It wasn't hard. I knew the spelling and even the punctuation wasn't all that hard. I might try writing some of the other amendments, but I don't believe in some of them so, no.
I thought this was an interesting tidbit. From Letterman and his ilk, who went out every so often and asked average LA denizens such depth defying questions as, "can you tell me who is the President of the United States" and got a lot of blank stares, confusions, idiotic giggles and massive ignorance, it's a bit of a reach. They are really really stupid in LA.
I liked this guy, watch and learn,
Listen to a professor who has reached the status of the "immortals". It's well worth your time.
I'm just about convinced that nobody in our schools bothers to teach history. I don't care about the invincibly ignorant who cannot place a battle into a war but it's concerning when those "highly" educated high school students don't even know about either our Revolution or the Civil War and cannot place either World War in the same century.
I know a lot of people who would place the blame on the teachers. To a hideously large extent, so do I. On the other hand, I blame the students.
Yes, yes, pity the poor students who must learn not just about how to placate and win at Candy Crush but are also being asked to learn about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle and a host of other dead white men.
On the gripping hand, ignorance is still high up there as a culling tool. We no longer have the draft or world wars requiring millions of youngsters to die in the mud and the rain and have pretty much glided by without for over half a century without putting the unwilling 18 year old man in front of the bullet or bayonet and things are looking pretty good, unless you're some kind of curmudgeon who thinks everybody needs to know about Boiling Springs, PA.
I have always had a fascination with history. Not so much the names and dates, as the path of history. Perhaps if kids were encouraged to walk unescorted through the forest along the path, they might learn something about the nature of the path of history.
I don't know if it worked but my sister took one of those historical path books you used to find and she took it apart and taped the entire path of known history to the walls of one of her houses. You know the books. They put the whole of history, (snort), onto a continuous pull out page from a big book for kids. She was the first I've seen to tear the whole damned thing out of the book and nail it to the wall. Contemporaneous history for all!
I was taught human evolution decades ago. I am fascinated by every find in that realm just as I am when historians find new Viking cultures in North America decades after I was taught that Columbus was the first European on these shores.
English is THE language for international aviation. All such pilots and flight controllers and such like must speak English. Not French, not Russian; English. Who knew it included those who engage in the most foolhardy and stupid miracle of flight? A tragically young Dutch national, 'pilot' and a Spanish, 'groundcrew', miscommunicated in English with tragic result.
I once had a Petty Officer in my unit who originated in South Africa. She and her friends went bungee jumping shortly before she emigrated to the United States and joined the Navy. They all jumped and the man behind them then jumped. The rope broke.
In hindsight, I did some rather remarkably stupid things when I was young. I used to fly light aircraft in college with my friends and we'd fly to Cape May every so often and spend the weekend gambling up the beach at Atlantic City to make enough money to pay for the plane and the gas. I used to fly with a fraternity brother who was building multi-engine hours towards his ATR. We'd do spins and stalls all over central Pennsylvania on weekends.
As I look back, one can only agree, that ignorance is bliss.
It has been a busy time for me these past few weeks. We made our annual pilgrimage to Maine which takes us about two weeks and we no sooner got home then we hit the road to drive 340 miles for my uncles' birthday. He lives near the old family homestead and we were invited and it was the first larger family reunion since the funeral of my grandmother several years ago.
All five of the greatest generation were there to help celebrate their brothers' birthday and betweem they had mustered 11 of the second generation (a number couldn't make it). They brought their third generation along in some number and it was a great party for two days and a nice trip. Nary a firework of any kind was seen which may have something to do with how many of those present were MD's and mothers. Still, it was a wonderful celebration for one uncle born on the 3rd and the other on the 4th of July.
The cousins traveled in from Newfoundland, Vancouver, Honduras, Argentina and various states. I'm very glad we had the time to go. It's rather difficult to get them together and just about impossible to bump into them, not that we ever did. There was a 100th birthday we celebrated with a women who knew at a glance the name of every single one of the more than 100 people there who were descended from her or married to one of her descendants. It was a wonderful chance to get all together at last but over the years prior to that we would bump into each other on visits to her house at Christmas or Thanksgiving or summer vacations.
The trip there was marked by the heaviest traffic enforcement I have ever seen and it was going on in both states we drove through. There were literally scores of police cars with motorists pulled over for speeding and 3 or 4 lurking about waiting like sharks for the prey to come within range. As a side note, I couldn't believe drivers would fail to note the enormous number of police vehicles enforcing the 70mph speed limit or 55 in work zones and try to keep it reasonable. I'm pretty sure the cops were only pulling over the stupid ones running more than 5mph over the limit. As a second side note, on our return journey today we saw a grand total of 4 police vehicles and only one was making somebody pay. The rest were in cover looking for idiots. It renewed my faith in the Penna Turnpike.
I stopped taking my computer along on road trips, the previous one being a visit to see my daughter on the west coast when we traveled by train and drove back. That was in May and one of the unexpected side effects was that I pretty much maxed out my iphone, ipad and ipod memories and didn't realize it. It's hard to compose a post (for me) on anything without a keyboard. I bought a blue tooth one years ago but keep forgetting to pack it.
Tonight we had no sooner gotten home than my wife's brother called and told us he was in town and asked us to dinner and so off we went.
I plan to resume my responsible thoughtful posts any minute now.... after I mow the yard, weedwack, find out what's going on in my name at the library and mail my daughter's birthday presents.
The Daily Male has an article they didn't really think about. It was her sister's wedding but all I remember was the girl who trailed her into the church. You would think a reporter's article about butt would include this. You'd be wrong.
I swam as a child and garnered many a 3rd place ribbon. I sailed when I was older. Sailing offered trophies and medals and not ribbons. I don't know what afflicts this boy but I find it interesting that our president offered to help even after the European Court said no.
There was an argument about Iraq and Afghanistn that we broke it by fighting in it. I think they were pretty broken to begin with. We kind of did that in Europe the second time because the first World War was just a training war. We thought we kind of fixed Europe with NATO. I'm not so sure. The whole, "you broke it and now must pay" is kind of over. I accept that some things are simply not fixable and we are not liable for damages.
What kind of court system denies a family the right to take their child home? I'd sign up to fight it with lethal intent and weapons of mass destruction.
Europe is becoming Africa and I for one will miss western Europe. It was a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. Eastern Europe is holding on and refusing all Germany's pleas to take ignorant, unschooled and unemployable economic migrants from the various hell holes they created for themselves before the more clever ones ran away.
We have a refugee problem too but ours is a little better.
That girl stands an excellent chance of growing up American. Those other people? They will never be European.
I don't think this will survive. We're pretty much fed up with the court telling democracy to take a hike. And, it goes without saying, they should arm themselves.
