THE ECHOES OF A CRAVEN FOOL LINGER

It seems that the nasty and shameful legacy of Obama lingers yet on the US body politic. It took the Commander of Central Command to tell Turkey that unlike the spineless Obama administration, this one and the U.S. military have no intention of abandoning areas in northern Syria liberated by us and our allies to the non-existent mercies of the Turks. They may be NATO allies but they are no ally of ours.

Gen. Joseph Votel said the United States has no intention of withdrawing coalition forces from the northern Syrian town of Manbij, as Turkish leaders had demanded this weekend. As Turkish forces continued the assault on Afrin, the lead of U.S. Central Command on Monday urged Turkey and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, to recognize each other’s legitimate security concerns but focus on the common enemy of ISIS. 

Senior U.S. leaders across the government have been in constant talks with Turkish counterparts during the Afrin assault, saying that the U.S. recognizes Turkey’s problems with the Kurdish terrorist group known as PKK, but refusing to give up any territory liberated by the SDF, which include Kurds. 

“It’s not our intention right now” to pull back from Manbij, Votel said in Jordan on Monday. He spoke with two reporters traveling with him through the region, including into Raqqa and other parts of northern Syria.

I suspect that the Turkish military knows we'll destroy any attack on us with our air power and we won't give the Turks any room to launch the kind of cowardly sneak attack like they used on the Russians when they shot down a Russian Su-27 attacking ISIS. Erdogan might have to learn this at the expense of a number of Turkish military lives.

I think every military man in the West knows that we lost Turkey to islamic fanatics and won't see it reappear as a western democracy in our lifetime. President Trump knows it too and so does everyone who has been following developments in that place.

We'll know the truth when President Trump announces tonight that we are going to disengage from Turkey and shut down our operations in Incirlik air base and elsewhere in Turkey. To be honest, with the fall of Saddam and the destruction of ISIS, there isn't really any reason to continue to operate, such as we do, out of Incirlik and it's not like Turkey was ever an ally of ours. Some of us haven't forgotten that Turkey's response to our call to rally to US after 9/11 was formally met by Turkish refusal to permit us to use their territory in any way, shape, or form to attack or threaten Iraq's western and northern flanks during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

One has to wonder, just where was the Turkish military when ISIS was ruling the north of Syria and wiping out yet more Christians in yet another Turkish sanctioned holocaust of innocent people? All they had to do was cross the border back then and engage the enemy but I suspect we are all coming to understand that this conflict has become flash point for Huntington's Clash of Civilizations in the War of the West Against the Rest. Turkey hurried to line up on the anti-western side.

It's hard to blame them. They had the weak juice of Obama, Hillary, Kerry and the cowards running western Europe to serve as reminders of the danger of aligning one's country and nation with the weak and contemptible side in an existential war of civilization. However, the Turks chose poorly.

FIRST TO FALL

The Deep State's Head of the Armed Wing of Bureaucratic Corruption and Total Ineptitude has been pushed out of the FBI.

Andrew McCabe spent over 20 years subverting and perverting justice at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Cleverly disguised as the apparent number 2 in the Party Organization of the Democratic Party FBI, McCabe distinguished himself in leaking to the press, taking money from Hillary Clinton and generally screwing up every single aspect of the long troubled and increasingly incompetent FBI.

He won't be missed. Literally, won't be missed since he intends to stay on in some undistinguished Party role for a couple of more months until "his" retirement vests.

Some sources consider that he is likely to be the first of the Deep State apparatchiks to be condemned by Congress and subjected to actual law enforcement investigation and imprisonment.

It is interesting to note that he claims to be stepping down and not being fired due to woeful incompetence in every single aspect of running the bureau of investigation, total lack of integrity, dishonesty and corruption on a massive scale and inability to keep track of any evidence of crimes or wrongdoings perpetuated by the militant resistance wing of the Democratic Party and Deep State.

It will be interesting to see what lawyer and law office represents him at his upcoming trial.

UPDATE: Congressman Gowdy hints at what we will see in the memo that probably resulted in McCabe getting pushed out of office. It will be interesting to see if Rosenstein is next or the two FBI lovebirds who conspired to torpedo Trump and whisked away all the evidence of Hillary's espionage.

ONE PLACE FOR GOOD BOOKS

If you are interested in reading top quality science fiction here are some places where you can find it for the taking. The books are free.  The first place to start with is Baen's Free Library. There are a number of fiction and non-fiction books published over the last 20 years by Baen Books.

The second place, with rather more books and stories, is a technology center in Poland which is one of two places online that has full images of all 23 CD-ROMs distributed over the years by Baen as it published hardback books of general interest to readers of the genre.

All told there are well over two hundred books in all types of e-reader formats that work on every device I own. There are books by Larry Correia, S.M. Stirling, David Weber, John Ringo, Eric Flint and many others. In an even more unusual move, the CDs contain the full series of some of the authors' works.

Rest assured, the publisher offers these books for free as a way to entice readers to buy more books. Clicking on the image will bring up the index and you can either copy the entire disc image or download the books you want individually, one at a time.

I'm sure by this point everyone is familiar with calibre ebook management software. It's free, works on Apple and Windows and automatically puts ebooks into the format to match your reader. It's a great way to store and manage all your ebooks on your computer.

There are countless other places to find books, not to mention places like Amazon and Book Bub but I keep seeing all the titles from the Baen CD-ROMs still on the shelves in the local libraries so I know they are of continuing interest to readers. If not you, perhaps you know some young reader recently gifted with a kindle reader who would like them.

FORGIVABLE ASSUMPTION

This is from some weird place on the web.

Why does everyone leap to the assumption that Trump is going to be under oath? Don't you think the lying weasel scumbag xdirector of the FBI should answer questions under oath? I certainly do.

BLINDED BY THE GLARE OF THEIR OWN LIES

The senate democrats made a fundamental mistake. Well, to be honest, they've made millions of mistakes. Their latest screw up can be described as monumental and it is based on their own limitations and the limitations they have spent decades meting out to their ideological enemies on the center and the right.

Democrats in Washington DC read the New York Times and the Washington Post. They subscribe to those papers. They only watch PBS and the former big 3; NBC, CBS, ABC and will only willingly open their eyes if CNN or MSNBC is on the telly. They literally don't see anything from the rest of the world. Naturally, they tend to think that all democrats are just like what they see on TV and read in the papers who, influenced by the NYT and the rest of the propagandists, will support and defend their representatives who are eager to show their dedication and strike a blow for gays and trans and illegal aliens.

As with Flounder in Animal House, they fucked up. They trusted that the media was getting it right and reporting reality. Unfortunately, their media hasn't gotten it right since the NYT sent Walter Duranty ¹ to Russia to report on the successful Bolshevik Revolution and got back nothing but lies and damned lies and lapped them up as truth.



The media lies to the people in this country and always has. When the media were a monoculture controlled by the left wing and the communists, it quickly eliminated any vestige of accuracy, honesty or truth from its reporting. You know this is so simply based on how many democrats are absolutely convinced that Cuba is a worker's paradise and the Soviet Union was a just and fair society right up until Yeltsin and Putin overthrew Gorbachev and the enormous number of democrats who think that Venezuelans just haven't fully implemented the socialism that democrats here in America preach as the beginning of Utopia on earth.

What happened though, for the first time, is that the democratic ruling elite actually drank the cool aid and believed the crap that the media broadcasts as news. They lapped it up like it was Kentucky's finest bourbon. They totally believed that all proper thinking well indoctrinated Americans would rather shut down the government in order to support bringing in more illegals than would support that evil devil Trump.

God were they played by their own weapon. The media let them down.

For believing all the lies and drivel they read from their own propaganda organs they were blindsided by the hate they got from their own constituents and, as shown by the hasty nature of the vote, McConnell let them off easy for being stupid and blind. 31 senators changed the 'minds' in just three days and voted to approve a continuing resolution and there is just about zero chance that anybody is going to push a bill saddling President Trump with DACA. That was Obama's personal mistake and it is the Democrats huge burden and only a thunderously stupid jackass like Flake or McCain would let them try to offload any part of that suicide pact on republicans or the rest of us.

It's not the first weapon to turn in the slime coated hands of democrats in Washington. Their weaponization of the executive branch and its agencies has taken a terrible toll on America over the last 8 years and is only now beginning to be revealed. They thought that their ownership of Hillary gave them ownership of the DNC and that ownership of the DNC gave them ownership of all computers on Capital Hill and that their agents in the FBI and Justice Department would wage successful war and pull off a stunning coup ridding America of it's elected President. Sadly for them, all of this is coming out now into the light of day.

There are an awful lot of evil people who worked from within the government to topple the Constitution and they all need to go to jail for a long time. The people really need to keep an eye on their government and make damned sure they don't set up an untouchable secret police state to run things behind the scenes. FISA has to go. The government has no right to spy on us. None at all.

^1.  In response to Stalin's Apologist (1990), the critical biography by Sally J. Taylor, the New York Times assigned a member of its editorial board, Karl Meyer, to write a signed editorial about Duranty's work for the Times. In a scathing piece, Meyer said (24 June 1990) that Duranty's articles were "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." Duranty, Meyer said, had bet his career on Stalin's rise and "strove to preserve it by ignoring or excusing Stalin's crimes."

That last sentence has a familiar ring doesn't it? That's just what CNN did for Saddam Hussein and what the NYT, Washington Post et al have been doing for the Clintons since the beginning.

HOPEFULLY THEY'LL ALL DIE IN JAIL

Listen to how the FBI, DOJ and Democratic Party made an all out effort to overthrow democracy in America. It's sickening that the people named are still working in the same jobs and investigating Donald Trump for collusion. They have perverted justice and waged war on the Constitution. They need to be fired immediately and they all need to go to jail for decades.

THE AWFUL TRUTH

READING MATERIAL FOR AN ENDLESS WINTER

I found this intriguing place while writing the previous post. What can I say? It makes for interesting reading. It's a photo of the books on the Shackleton Expedition that became trapped in the ice and foundered there. I make the assumption that the odd pipe is the Charlie Noble and heated the space, at least a little, when the galley fires were lit.

The library, seen above in a photo by expedition photographer Frank Hurley, has been decoded for the first time-the Royal Geographic Society, working with Dutch digitizer Picturae, rescanned and analyzed the photo and was able to read the titles of the books for the first time.

In addition to Greely’s sad story, Shackleton carried the Encyclopedia Brittanica, plays by George Bernard Shaw, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and a lot more. The books, unfortunately, went to the bottom of the sea when the Endurance broke apart and sank on November 21, 1915. As most of you know, all 28 men survived.

Here’s the full list of books in the library:

Encyclopedia Britannica
Seven short plays by Lady Gregory
Perch of the devil by Getrude Atherton
Pip by Ian Hey
Plays: pleasant and unpleasant, Vol 2 Pleasant by G B Shaw
Almayer’s folly by Joseph Conrad
Dr Brewer’s readers handbook
The Brassbounder by David Bone
The case of Miss Elliott by Emmuska Orczy
Raffles by EW Hornung
The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett
Pros and cons: a newspaper reader’s and debater’s guide to the leading controversies of the day by JB Askew
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Woman’s view by Herbert Flowerdew
Thou Fool by JJ Bell
The Message of Fate by Louis Tracy
The Barrier by Rex Beach
Manual of English Grammar and Composition by Nesfield
A book of light verse
Oddsfish by Robert Hugh Benson
Poetical works of Shelley
Monsieur de Rochefort by H De Vere Stacpoole
Voyage of the Vega by Nordenskjold
The threshold of the unknown region by Clements Markham
Cassell’s book of quotations by W Gurney Benham
The concise Oxford dictionary
Chambers biographical dictionary
Cassell’s new German-English English-German dictionary
Chambers 20th Century dictionary
The northwest passage by Roald Amundsen
The voyage of the Fox in Arctic seas by McClintock
Whitaker’s almanac
World’s end by Amelie Rives
Potash and perlmutter by Montague Glass
Round the horn before the mast by A Basil Lubbock
The witness for the defence by AEW Mason
Five years of my life by Alfred Dreyfuss
The morals of Marcus Ordeyne by William J Locke
The rescue of Greely by Commander Winfield Scott Schley
United States Grinnell Expedition by Dr Kane
Three years of Arctic service by Greely
Voyage to the Polar Sea by Nares
Journal of HMS Enterprise by Collinson

Photo via the Royal Geographical Society

I suppose that all of the crew were glad they weren't playing tag with the Germans on the Somme by the time they got back and read up on the early days of the Great War. It remains interesting to wonder how many of them survived the Great War after wintering over in the Antarctic.

LCS. TANJ

Poor Littoral Combat Snip. It can't even get down the river without something interfering with its mission, whatever that is. It seems the latest of the Snip class is iced in Montreal and won't be able to leave until Spring. I'm sure, come Spring, we'll find it somehow spot welded itself to the pier and won't be able to leave until cited by the Canadian Maritime Mounted Police. These poor ships just can't seem to do anything without drama.

Forced to spend the winter after being trapped by completely unanticipated ice

I'm sure the crew will find plenty of things to occupy their time trapped in the ice.

This may be the first USN warship to earn the award of the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon before it ever enters it's own home port. It will almost certainly be the very first USN ship to get the award for making a Great Lakes cruise enroute to its home port.

LCS, making history every single day. Oddly enough, the ships have yet to deploy to the littoral seas in the Persian Gulf or Red Sea where it appears they're not up to standard for taking on either pirates or well armed Iranian speedboats.

INTERVIEW WITH A LOBSTER

This is an interesting and amusing conversation that I found well worth watching. The lobster memes were the funniest.

Almost every one of his statements or observations was met by her replying, "...what you're saying is..." and then something most unlike what he had, in fact, said.

IMAGES FROM THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS

Just because I found it fascinating.

SONG OF THE SOUTH

Kurt Schlicter has something to say about the government shutdown. I think what he wrote just about covers the facts.

To the extent that a shut-down hurts some of the government’s few useful employees, like the members of our military, I eagerly look forward to Chuck n’ Nancy and the other circus freaks who make up the Democrat Capitol Crew explaining to the American people why they chose to make our men and women in uniform suffer so the Democrats can import some new ballot stuffers. “Support the troops unless we need to screw them over so we can ship in foreigners to vote for future Maryland Senator Chelsea Manning” seems like a flawed message, which is why I heartily encourage the Dems to try it out.

We all saw the elaborate kabuki theater of the last shut-down, where Obama’s minions took a break from using our intelligence services to spy on Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit’s political enemies and made sure that the shut-down effects were as public and inconvenient as possible. The Democrat media soiled itself with delight as it covered sad schoolkids forbidden to gaze upon the Washington Monument because the GOP hates children, the Washington Monument, and gazing.

This may prove to be more of a test than people realize because previous government shutdowns have mostly been a contest in the Senate to reach the necessary 60 votes to send a bill to the President for signature. This President may be looking a little further downstream than most of his predecessors who were just plain terrified of a government shutdown (most of them were politicians and deeply worried that the American public might discover just how little they actually needed the government). All the theater now is about getting the 60 votes and few are talking about whether or not President Trump will sign a bill that flies in the face of his base.

President Trump is not a politician and he can look a little further downstream and see that just letting another 700,000 democrats stay here necessarily means, based on current law, that they can drag in 30,000,000 more people like them and let's not forget what kind of people we're talking about. We're talking about the kind of people that voted Hugo Chavez and Maduro into power and undertook the destruction of Venezuela because they thought price controls set by the government would keep prices down and looting the stores was justified if they were hungry. They're the same kind that love rent control and moan and cry about the lack of affordable housing.

I think there might be just one or two men left in Congress that have even a shred of sense when it comes to the future and long term consequences of constantly caving in to the sort of people that think Stalin was a statesman and Chavez and Castro were popular leaders who made good things happen to their countries and constituents. One of them just got back to work after being blind-sided by a democratic thug a couple of months ago while moving his grass.

The one surprise tonight as I watched the government shut down was the total absence of the human stain known as McCain.

The blog title comes from a movie I saw as a boy in Fort Riley. It had the wonderful tale of Br'er Rabbit and what the Senate did tonight looks a lot like the situation Br'er Rabbit found himself in when he appeared terrified of being thrown into the briar patch. As I see it, the democrats just tossed Br'er Trump into the briar patch.

AWFUL OVERWHELMING COMPULSION

Yep, the democrats in Congress are going to yield to the base impulse that motivates them the most and they are going to shut down the government of the people, by the people, for the people because democrats think illegal aliens are way way way more important than mere subjects of their particular realm.

You can see the same idiocy in California where local governments are deciding to divert millions of taxpayer $ to hire legal defense teams for the illegal aliens trying and fighting to stay in our country. That's right little Suzy and Bobbie, the libraries in your towns will close so smug lawyers can be paid $300.00/hour to defend the indefensible. Those potholes in municipal roads and homeless shelters will have to be put on hold because democrats demand all your $ go to the so-called dreamers.

Let's see how it goes.

Judge to smug illegal alien and smug lawyers, "... entered the country illegally without proper immigration papers and documentation and failed to leave, how do you plead?"

Smug, "Not Guilty!"

Judge, "Documented felon here in the country illegally, no proof of legal residence, no meaningful birth certificate. Guilty and out you go."

That's not how it plays out in court but the meat of the matter is laid bare here on these web pages and there really isn't much more that can be said other than the ritualistic artful dodging performed by any performer who gets the people's representatives to pay $300.00/hour for theater of the absurd. A good liar can draw it out for hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars. California is stuffed with good liars.

I'm not altogether sure the democrats know what dreams are. They are content with the dreams of rape and pillage that seem to motivate so many criminals who entered our country illegally and they sure don't know anything about Martin Luther King's dreams but that probably would be asking too much of them. I see that 55% of people who vote democrat are illiterate and therefor unfamiliar with the truth and blinded by the propaganda put out by the various ministries of truth dominated by the liberal progressives in the media, PBS, NPR and blue state governments.

Too bad about your libraries kids but remember when the dreamers come after you? Dial 911.

I took this picture at the Del Mar library

SMALL DESERTS

It seems that a tiny handful of American blacks are settling down in Africa. I read the story and the money quote was hard to believe.

Contrast with a completely different type of human who once had a simple aim for life and death. People who used to seize fate by the horns and dare it to dash them to pieces; people who built the great countries and empires.

 "He either fears his fate too much, 

Or his desserts are small, 

Who dares not put it to the touch, 

To win or lose it all.

It is hard for me to comprehend settling down in the darkness because I feared the law. Darkness hides many crimes. How do they know that the police are not killing others in the dark? The article was filled with people who dislike the perceived racism in America but are totally and abysmally ignorant of the lethal tribalism in Africa. They never heard of the massacre in Rwanda and election violence in Kenya and Biafra and Uganda and Congo is a closed book to them sitting there in the dark, in Dacca.

I REMEMBER SUMMER

This was Chicago in the summer of 2016. Some people claim that sailing is not exciting. Idiots.

A NICE PLACE

I spent a day here once and enjoyed just walking around.

Drone shot by Garrit Wes Anderson

There are a number of remarkable photos by Anderson at his secret agent site on the web.

A TOUCH OF OUCH

Saw this at instapundit and it's too good to not post here. If you read the story you'll see that the most senior members of the FBI took it on themselves to send Martin Luther King, Jr, a letter telling him that he should kill himself. If that sounds a little more humane than the FBI we've come to know, it's only because the Supreme Court and the rest of the judicial system now allows anyone with a badge to just shoot anyone without a badge. Things were a little different in the 1960s so the FBI resorted to its famous 'soft power' approach to dealing with uppity citizens.

James Comey posted in his usual sanctimonious style and was thoroughly owned:

FORGED BY THE SEA

The U.S. Navy spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours to come up with a slogan to strike fear into heart of any real sailor who knows how the sea works. The Navy settled on this:

Yep, it's a doozy. You might even call it a whopper. Do you know what the sea does to metal?

Here are two ships being forged by the sea. It's not pretty.

GLAD I LIVE IN METROPARKCENTRALIS

I read this with some amusement. It appears that the Russians have developed an autonomous undersea vehicle capable of delivering a 100 megaton warhead anywhere on the littoral within a range of 6200 miles of its launch point. As you can imagine, that doesn't sound so good for places on the coastline like, for instance, California, Pearl Harbor, Washington DC or Norfolk. If you thought the anti-missile hysteria kicked up in Hawaii last week by the fake news of a missile detection was a hoot, imagine how they're going to under react to the news that the Russians have done something as impossibly sneaky as building a submarine to carry nuclear weapons to our coastline. Who ever heard of such a thing?!

On the other hand, the nuclear bomb in a shipping container still seems like the most likely and much less risky scheme for delivering nukes to any port city in the world and if you saw the travails the mighty US Navy has getting its autonomous undersea vehicles to do anything more complex than resurface nearby after mission complete, you can only imagine how a Russian vehicle navigating 6000 miles underwater will fare as it seeks to target an enemy coastline. There are drawbacks to living on an ocean coast.

I wonder if the Russians paint their undersea terror vehicles yellow like we do

HELL OF A JOB OBAMA

People living in Hawaii got a rude wake up and lesson in shameless Obama diplomacy. They learned for the first time that Obama, Kerry and Clinton all lied when they assured them that Obama had reached a binding agreement with North Korea on missile technology and nuclear weapons that would surely lead to nothing but peace in our time. For 38 minutes many of them got to contemplate the awfulness that will happen if/when the Democratic People's Republic of Korea decides to just go ahead and attack and lash them with bugs and gas and nukes on long range missiles.

I dare say 99% of the people living in Hawaii never even suspected that one day they would get a nuclear wake-up call. I dare say they're thinking about it now and wondering what all that endless negotiation with north Korea achieved since it is now quite obvious that the goal that the Kim's have been working toward for the last 50 years is now well within their grasp and that an attack on Hawaii has gone from a distant dream to a near certain reality.

On the other hand, the norKs have demonstrated a certain ability to loft missiles into the upper atmosphere and space itself but there is no evidence that they have any targeting capability beyond a rudimentary ability to hit the Pacific Ocean, somewhere. Even that isn't certain since evidence shows that many of the tests end in failure of the reentry vehicle. On the gripping hand, if one is going to shoot for a electromagnetic pulse above someplace, like Hawaii, an air burst high in the stratosphere will do well enough to knock out much of Hawaii's network infrastructure.

It looks like civilization, such as it is in the DPRK, is collapsing. When I was young we believed that the regime was propped up almost solely by its grip on the Army and security forces. The Party was nothing but the bustle to a Kim and followed wherever they led but was a powerless rump. Reading reports of recent army defectors crossing the DMZ who are lousy with vermin, worms and anthrax anti-bodies is a sign that the bastion of the dynasty is crumbling.

As the USSR collapsed and faded away and China relaxed its hard line stance and restarted down the path to success and prosperity one thing we accepted as absolutely true of Kim Jong-il was that he would not go gently into the peaceful night but would take the South and as much of the world as he could reach into the dark with him. Kim Jong-un is very much of the same mold and likely to do the unthinkable.

I think people living in Hawaii now know what the unthinkable looks like and may well be a bit more interested in our diplomatic and military relations with the Korean peninsula. The real concern is obvious to see for those with eyes to see. Japan, Taiwan and the Republic of Korea are probably all well along in their nuclear weapons development and all of them are probably hard at work on making weapons grade fissile materials to build the bombs their engineers could undoubtedly design in a couple of days.

A new dawn in the Far East and mid-Pacific. Thanks Obama, thanks Hillary, thanks Kerry. Kim couldn't have done it without you and Madeline Albright and Bill Clinton.

HATE SJW EVEN MORE THAN ILLINOIS NAZIS

I saw this at Traditional Vibe and couldn't resist.

LOOK IN VAIN FOR YOU WILL NOT FIND

If you are one of the technorati who labors long into the night to launch killing twits or devastating facebook stuff you will not find me among your viewers. I seek no content from either place and never actually go look at it. And this is largely why I don't play in those gardens of hate and lies.

They have both taken the Stalinist approach to voices they disdain to hear and they do everything in their power to make sure that nobody else will hear the lonely voices crying out from the wilderness.

I make it a point to not see ads. I don't watch TV, per se. I watch Netflix and Amazon. I found the web browser BRAVE works quite well now and they have come out with a mobile app that I use on on my ipads too. It seamlessly shifts to secure https and blocks 100% of ads.

I'm a little dismayed by the seeming willingness of the cultural elites to void all references to the ones Hillary condemned as deplorables. I have, over the years, come to spend nothing at all on Hollywood or music or what passes for print news in this country. It's like, having been sawed off the limb of degenerate culture I am free from paying it any mind except to note, as always, the dangers. Situational awareness is the key to survival in urban areas and it pays to keep aware of the bleaker facts of one's 'hood'.

A WINTER STORM ON A 3 DAY WEEKEND

My it's been an interesting week. I can't think of anything to say that hasn't been said. I'll have to think about it some more and get back to this later. Perhaps I'll check out what's on the news or take a look at what our older and wiser European cousins are doing these day to take such good care of the planet and all the little people who keep electing presidents and prime ministers more dedicated and devoted to the welfare and benefit of Africans and muslim terrorists then they are to the subjects and citizens who elected them. It's hard watching western Europe turn into Detroit right in front of my eyes.

CONSIDER THE BOOKWORM

One of the blogs I read is Bookworm. You might find these posts of interest today: so go there and read them!

Mike Rowe cheerfully and politely smacks down small-minded person

I don’t know how many of you follow Mike Rowe on Facebook. If you don’t, consider adding him to your list. He’s wonderful. And just yesterday, he hit one out of the park. I’m embedding it here so that everyone can read it. It deserves that kind of attention:

 Off the WallRebecca Bright writes…
"I love the show How the Universe Works, but I'm lost on how the producers and the Science Channel can allow anti-education, science doubting, ultra-right wing conservative Mike Rowe to narrate the show. There are countless scientists that should be hired for that, or actors, if you must, that believe in education and science that would sound great narrating the show, example: Morgan Freeman. Cancel this fools contract and get any of your ...See More 

and

Dear Democrats: Stop projecting your racism onto Trump 

.... Moreover, modern America has limited (to no) tolerance for people who can’t use toilets; who murder women for “dishonoring” the family; who murder gays just for being; who espouse murdering Jews as a central tenet of their faith; who murder and dismember albinos for good luck charms; who mutilate little girls by cutting off their external genitalia; who support general slavery or sexual slavery; and who have a disproportionate predilection for rape and pedophilia. 

Does this mean that every person from those cultures holding those values is going to commit acts that are anathema in America?* Of course not! But if you’re calculating the odds that one person will be more simpatico to American culture than another, countries of origin matter. Some share our values or at least are not opposed to our values. East Asian immigrants have very different cultural practices from those in America, but their work ethic is in sync with the American work ethic and their cultural practices enrich, rather than attack, the American way of life. 

It’s worth noting here that it’s not just countries mired in violence and corruption that give birth to values we don’t want in America. If I had a say in the matter, I’d also argue that, as a Constitutional country, we should have less tolerance for people from socialist countries who, having destroyed freedom on their shores, seek to import their socialism to ours. As far as I’m concerned, we should shut the door on Sweden and large chunks of Western Europe. Meanwhile, Poles and Hungarians are proving pretty damn stalwart.

SPIDER UPDATE

I was recently informed that my nonchalance viz Brown Recluse spiders in Ohio was misplaced. I did some research and found that my insouciance was not misplaced or even mislayed. As you can see from the graphic, the rotten spiders barely make it to southern Ohio and therefore, I am safely unafraid of the damned things since they don't get within a hundred miles of metroparkcentralis.

I've been advised that the restless little brown recluse spiders are spreading out. This is their new range. I await the day they move into northeastern Ohio at which point, I move to Maine. I had enough of them in Yuma Proving Ground and San Diego to last a life time.

GOOGLE'S FASCIST FACE

Found at MoonBattery. It strikes me as perfectly on target and an accurate depiction. Where in the world did we get all these damned fascists who insist that only they have the right to speak in America? Yes, I know, they got it from their socialist and communist professors at schools all over the country. Maybe it is time to end all public support for all non-science higher education. OTOH, they think global warming is science so there's still way too much wriggle room for the kind of people that think Che was a really nice guy who followed Stalin's advice on how to make omelettes in Cuba.

GOWDY VS ALLIGATOR

CRAZY MAD NEW YORKERS

When it comes to 50 shades of reality New Yorkers can always be trusted to come up with a couple of hundred new shades. They have topped a long list of arrant and vicious stupidity by declaring war on Big Oil. 

The Chief Blowhard of New York City described NY NY's war plan thusly:

Blasio focused on the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, calling it “a tragedy wrought by the actions of the fossil fuel companies.” He detailed the 44 people who died in New York as a result of Sandy, as well as the estimated $19 billion in damage it caused. “That is the face of climate change,” de Blasio said. “That is what it means in human and real terms.” 

The moron has gone on record declaring that all hurricanes and even tropical depressions are caused by oil companies and have been ever since daybreak on planet earth 3 billion years ago.

De Blasio claimed fossil fuel companies were complicit in worsening climate change, because they knew of the problem decades ago but continued to sell a product to Americans that contributed to only more greenhouse-gas emissions. 

It's always a treat to see any idiot this divorced from reality. I'm sure what he meant to say was that the oil companies should have aggressively pushed the nation into 100% nuclear power back in the 50's so we didn't suffer such devastating global warming. As I recall, they tried that but morons and kleptocrats like Blasio killed atomic energy with every erg of political power they could activate.

“The city of New York is taking on these five giants because they are the central actors, they are the first ones responsible for this crisis and they should not get away with it anymore,” he said, adding: “We’re going after those who have profited. And what a horrible, disgusting way to profit — the way it puts so many people’s lives in danger.”

As usual, it comes as a horrible shock to folks like Blasio that the people who profited from oil sales are the share holders who reaped dividends and sold increasingly valuable stocks year after year since Rockefeller created Standard Oil in 1870.

If there was any justice, the oil companies being defamed by New York should either cut off all sales in New York City and cut all supplies to power stations that provide power to New York City. They should also shut down fuel deliveries to JFK and LaGuardia. If that seems unreasonable they should all tack on a $20/gallon climate defense fund surcharge to every gallon of fuel sold in New York City or to New York City.

Why do idiots always think they're sticking it to the man when they elect boobs who think they can tax corporations into paying "their fair share" and then get all pissed off when the corporations simply turn the costs around and jack up prices to the consumers who have to buy their products? Look at cigarettes. Not 15 years ago they cost a $1/pack. Now they cost $7.50/pack because the states won the law suit blaming Big Tobacco for all the harm that cigarettes do. They didn't ban them and forbid their sale or use, they just tacked truly onerous taxes on each pack sold which the tobacco companies all turned into higher and higher prices charged to the consumer.

What is New York City's plan for dealing with power outages on the scale Puerto Rico is currently enjoying? If the courts find that oil is responsible then the only responsible course of action is to shut off the supply of oil to New York City and possibly the state. Nobody wants to compound a felony.

In other news, I heard on THE PEOPLE'S RADIO that European insurance companies were now refusing to insure coal companies in Europe. They seem to think that with law subject to retroactive and punitive damages every time the political winds in Europe blow green that the potential costs for paying off global warming damages in Europe alone are incalculable and unpayable and they have decided to go all serpentine in an effort to dodge the inevitable government hammer.

COLORED WORLD WAR II IMAGES

An interesting look from the Daily Mail.

USS FRANKLIN

WORLDWIDE RETALIATION

I had a moment of introspection tonight not seen too often around these parts. I was reading the story about a software engineer who is suing his former company for firing him illegally and I thought I might write more about that and what I think about a company that is so blatantly and disgracefully racist and sexist and then I thought about what I would lose if that company behaves in the disgraceful and contemptible manor I have come to expect from social justice wrecked institutions like twitter and face book and SFWA and I decided that I would wait until I have stored my online email offline and perhaps backed up one or two other things that could vanish in a twinkling were some SJW loser to take umbrage at being called a spade just because he is used to dig latrines in which to bury his fellow man after the ritual pummelling and social torture meted out to those who dare to dream that America could be great again.

I shall say more anon.

MISCONDUCT IN THE LAW HAS NO PENALTY

There is too much truth to this graphic depiction of what the police have turned into during the course of their War On Drugs. They took every single one of your rights as an American citizen and chucked them under their Urban Riot Control cast-off ex M60 tank and that includes your right to bear weapons for your own defense and your right to .... well, let's just say all of them.

In return they have given you the citizen what, exactly?

Was it worth giving up your rights as a citizen of a Constitutional Republic?

After the fiasco the judge decided to share with the public what she thought of the utterly corrupt and contemptible District Attorneys involved and all the Federal and local cops involved in the attack on the Bundy's.

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy could have spent the rest of his life in jail, but instead he walked away Monday a free man, the case against him and his sons thrown out over what the judge decried as “outrageous” misconduct by federal prosecutors. 

In a stunning rebuke, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Gloria Navarro scolded the prosecution for violating the due process rights of the four defendants — Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, and Ryan Payne — and dismissed the case “with prejudice,” meaning they cannot be retried on felony conspiracy and firearms charges stemming from the 2014 Nevada standoff. 

“The court finds that the universal sense of justice has been violated,” said Judge Navarro, appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2010, as reported by the Arizona Republic.

CITY OF HATE - - SEATTLE

Why do cities enjoying total democratic party control always opt to grind the poor into the dirt?

I get that big city democrats are the stupidest people in America but why do they always aim their control measures and their taxes at the poorest among us? Every time they try to enact their social justice cause they ignore the effect which other cities endured as a result of passing the same stupid regressive laws and taxes and yet they do it anyway.

In a real world they would be met by voters armed with Cluebat 2018™

Cluebat 2018™

UNE ZONE SANS ARME

This is so true and stolen from Traditional Vibe. It's as if the Beslan school massacre never happened and like there are no islamic terrorists here in America or roaming all of the cities of western Europe.

You remember that massacre right? It was 13 years ago.

The Beslan school massacre began on 1 September 2004, lasted three days, involved the capture of over 1,100 people as hostages including 777 children and ended with the death of at least 385 people. 

The crisis began when a group of armed Islamic terrorists attacked School Number One in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, Russian Federation. The hostage-takers were the Riyadus-Salikhin Battalion, sent by the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who demanded recognition of the independence of Chechnya by the United Nations and Russian withdrawal from Chechnya.

It's not like that can happen in America. Everybody loves US.

ROSENSTEIN HAS TO GO

Read the letter and ask yourself why it took the threat of jail to get the Justice Department to simply do what the law requires and furnish to Congress materials subpoenaed by Congress? There was no hint of any claim of Executive Privilege and there is no shred of credibility for any claim that the materials involve national security since the FBI went out of the way and dodged truth to claim, unambiguously, that there was no hint of any violation of national laws on espionage when Hillary set up her own private email server and ran Top Secret and above email through it and had her Chief of Staff Mills and her bodygirl Huma send Top Secret information over that unclassified network that Hillary created and then had destroyed in the very teeth of Congressional subpoenas and a DOJ/FBI investigation.

Rosenstein at DOJ and every other peer and subordinate of his need to be fired, jailed or reassigned to the Alaska office in Nome. They should be joined by the top echelons of the disgraced FBI who covered themselves and their office with filth and squatted in the ruins of a proud institution apparently for the sole purpose of continuing to provide cover fire for Hillary, Lynch and the rest of the apparatchiks of the Obama administration.

HEADS EXPLODING YEAR IN REVIEW

I got this from Free North Carolina and it's about 26 minutes at old at my post time. It's a priceless look at why President Trump enjoys a 95% negative news slant from all print and broadcast media around the world. It's fun to watch this man live rent free in the heads of haters, racists, misogynists and other democratic morons. I don't have cable so I depend on the charity of others to post the good things in what passes for news entertainment.

METROPARKCENTRALIS TONIGHT

This is a picture of MetroParkCentralis from across the lake. The camera is atop the Pier W. The Cuyahoga River hardly ever catches fire anymore. It's very cold but there is almost no wind at all. I just moved the car and it's actually quite nice outside given that it's 11 below 0. I have some awesomely warm and robust pajamas and slippers.

DROP-INS

I don't know what species they are but given the location I suspect they're mostly harmless. There really isn't a great deal of anything of non-African origin that is dangerous to man here in MetroParkCentralis. On the other hand, having a tiny spider drop down in front of one's eyes while washing up after dinner or while sitting in the office composing another brilliant blog post can be somewhat disconcerting.

We're talking spiders. They descend on a single thread from on high. In the warm seasons I run across them as I walk down the sidewalks in my neighborhood as the wee spiders descend towards the earth. I think they were born in the tree tops. The same wee spiders also tend to drop down from the ceilings in my house.

I don't know what they are and they're pretty small and this isn't Australia or Alabama so they're almost certainly harmless. OTOH, I'm not all that comfortable with spiders dropping into my soup or onto my head.

I never experienced this weird phenomena when I lived anywhere else. Oh sure I had 22,003 tiny baby spiders crawl out of the earpiece of a special phone I hid under my sofa back when I was living in Emeryville but they were fairly easy to get rid of in short order. These guys just appear randomly and drift into my sight from time to time with no apparent cause or origin other than somewhere above me.

Stupid spiders.

A FIRE AT THE CLINTON'S HOUSE IN NEW YORK

I wonder what evidence they were attempting to destroy in their usual and predictable fashion. Some would suspect it's evidence of Bill's dabbling with little girls but God knows Hillary has mountains of old evidence that turn up at the damnedest times.....

Fire at the Clinton's New York house 

On the other hand, it might be nothing more than the most recent manifestation of their dark God paying them a visit.

RESETTING THE FOREIGN AID BUDGET

President Trump has honored the United States by slashing funding for the Pakistani terror state and it is most likely just the start of a major re-evaluation of our foreign aid policy. Our aid policy in the past was largely driven by State Department weasels and their lackeys in the Foreign Service and USAID. What each of those petty bureaucrats wanted/needed/lusted after was a larger and larger budget because it was the amount of money at one's disposal that established one's position in the organization that formerly represented US interests abroad but which was hijacked decades ago to save the PLO and the arabs from themselves and to masque our complete indifference to anything in Africa below the Sahara Desert.

President Trump came out and said that we were taking names on the Jerusalem vote and it now appears to the duller people who are alleged to follow policy, that he meant what he said when he said there would be consequences. I anticipate a number of other countries are going to see our aid $ to them slashed by an administration that can, at best, be described as militantly indifferent to the size of some State Department bureaucrats office based on his control of a Congressional funding stream.

I expect Congress and the lawyers to take the matter to Court. I don't exactly see how they can force the Executive Branch to spend money even if Congress has appropriated it. As far as I know, there is nothing that compels the President to spend money he is unwilling to spend for the purposes for which it was appropriated. He simply has to return it to Congress and urge them to try harder next year.

We started this crazy plan to line dictator's pockets with our money back during the Cold War and the Cold War is over. We really don't need to care at all if anybody in France or Pakistan likes us. By the way, for the stupid out there who don't already know this, almost nobody in France or Pakistan likes us at all. Hate might be the more accurate word.  Everyone knows you cannot buy friendship. It's time we got out of that stupid racket and invested that money in our infrastructure and R&D.

Oh, and if I was that interested in seeing how the world is shaping up in the next few years? I'd take a look at Trump industries and see if I could follow the flow of their investments. If they appear to be making major investments in resort properties and selling off assets in places like DC and New York I'd take it like a sign from the Almighty that our laughable intel services are picking up signs and warnings of a pending WMD attack on the major cities on the east and west coast.

ON IRAN, TAKE NOTES

It appears that we might have a revolution on our hands. Not like the Syrian revolution that was engineered by the Iranians but a true blue revolt of the peasants, in Iran. One of my favorite authors, John Ringo has a few words on the subject here.

I am not the expert on Iran, but I did live there upon a time and have remained interested. At the very least I know many of the cities being mentioned on the news without looking at a map. (Right wing and foreign news, at least. The American MSM is studiously searching for a white truck. One very good source is Alarabiya English version.) 

Herewith some thoughts. 

Mashad is an interesting place for the protests to break out to the point of being Bizarre.
How to describe Mashad? Basically, it's the Pittsburgh (or what Pittsburgh once was) of Iran. Something of a trade nexus, (it was part of the Silk Road but so were most of the cities in the region) it is the bluest of blue collar Iranian cities. Which gets to why it's so bizarre. 

The mullahs came to power on the backs of the 'blue collar' of Iran. This is generally defined as the 'rural poor' and, yes, that's true. But it's more along the lines of 'the deplorables.' Any group which was generally lower economic and educational class as well as generally socially conservative. (The two tend to combine virtually everywhere and in all times.) 

But the revolution did not start out as a blue-collar endeavor. The 1979 revolution was very much a socialist revolt, sponsored and paid for by the Soviet Union in an attempt to flip Iran to communist side on the Risk board. 

The mullahs simply co-opted the revolution then hanged all the socialists who started it. They managed that by out-numbering them with the ‘blue-collar’ and ‘rural poor’. (‘Deplorables’ IOW.)

There's quite a bit more at the link.

It was only a matter of time before the people revolted against the strict and ridiculously stupid religious leaders. One thing you might now reconsider as we watch Iran embark on the revolution against the religious is how this is going to play out in the Kingdom. The Crown Prince has taken some extreme and drastic steps to re-align the Kingdom with modernity and ease the clerics and mutawa out of sight and hopefully out of power entirely. He clearly saw what was laid bare in Syria and Iraq and Iran and Yemen and wants to be ready for the coming revolution of the shia.

To paraphrase an old saying: Oh my King, the people are restless. Why do you spend so much money on your armies and weapons since this causes unrest? And the King replied, "Exactly! Come the revolution and I'll be ready!"

A PLACE WHICH IS NO MORE

This is a little sheep of my acquaintance on the Shipwreck Bar in Kona Village. This was taken in 2003, several years before the place was wrecked and closed by the 2011 Tsunami that hit Japan and caused a reactor core to melt down. It looks like the place may finally reopen in 2019 but this is Hawaii. Still, it was a wonderful place and I hope it does reopen.

AH, NOW THEY BELIEVE IN "STATES" RIGHTS

The states of the Union shown in shades of green believe that the "State" compels the union to go along with any little thing that the "State" holds as lawful and that the "Union" can go screw itself.
As I recall, that was the basis and even the foundation of the entire complete War Between the States. The state government of South Carolina was so disconnected from reality that it ordered its troops to open fire on Fort Sumter because, "states rights.

UPDATE: It looks like the US Attorney General has decided to enforce federal law on drugs after all.

I suspect that it will be California that fires the first shot in the next Civil War because, LGBTQ, dreams of aliens, and general overall Democratic stupidity. You remember the Democrats right? They were the party that ruled the South for generation after generation and opened fire on Union soldiers manning an American fort in the United States of America back in 1861. You might have read about it or seen it on tv.

We're not looking so united anymore are we?

It's interesting, to me, that Dixie is holding out and letting the revolt pass them by. Illinois on the other hand, hasn't yet figured out a way to monetize the legal sale of pot that will put all the proceeds into the hands of the state employee unions or the government's coffers.

I will offer this bit of wisdom, once you go green it's a slippery slope and you can never look back again when the next little bit of monstrous legislation passes the bar. I played that game in California once upon a time when the Cali Southern Air Quality Board was given access to a US Military Base and informed me that it would fine me $1500.00/day for each diesel generator of more than 35bhp. I told them to get lost since the laws that governed us were federal laws and not the BS that Sacramento passed off as law.

My so-called chain of command bailed on me. They promptly took all my 30kw generators and shipped them out of state and replaced them on a one for one basis with utterly worthless 15kw generators. I pointed out that the SCAQB didn't convince the USMC Tank Platoon co-located with us to get rid of their M60 tanks or any of their other diesels. My chain of command worked really really hard to earn the contempt they so justly merited from just about everybody.