SWORD FIGHTS AT HOME

We're about the only household I know of that could embrace a swordfight at home. We have the cavalry sabre over the door, just in case and a bastard sword in the dining room just in case and if that's not enough I have a navy sword uptairs in my closet. None of them are all that sharp but they are all very pointy.

Mine's got a sheath, as it should. The rest are bare blades like one finds in a museum. for pointy stuff.

OVER AND OVER HE PROVED TO BE A SCUMBAG

You would have been OK if you identified as a democrat and toed Pelosi's party line but you didn't.

Hating you to death works for me. You had no honor. You had no integrity. You were fundamemtally dishonest. I think that says it all.

CAMERON DAY

68 French fought to the bitter end against Mexican forces. One wonders at just how evil the Mexicans behaved to their prisoners that men would sooner battle to the death rather than go into surrender to the Aztecs. As with the Alamo, men would sooner die than submit to Mexico. I'm guessing it was pretty awful.

THE TRUTH

Lifted in whole from elsewhere. I would credit it but I cannot find it. It is literally gone.

I know a number of graduates of the U.S. Military Academy. Most of them are Vietnam veterans who attended the Academy in the late 50's. I lived there for a time. The news that Army fired its football coach on Sunday because he has failed to beat Navy for 5 straight years, says a little something about the Army, the Wars, and the Army Student Athlete in time of war.

I don't believe that Army's football coach has failed because he didn't try hard enough or because he wasn't good enough. I suspect he ran into a problem that cannot be resolved at the Coach's level. I wonder how much of his failure to win is due to the pool of recruits he can convince to sign up to come play football at the collegiate home of the organization responsible not just for killing star football player turned soldier Pat Tillman, but for spending years lying about it and covering it up. Prospective football players knew just how the Army treated a star athlete and the despicable way they lied about it starting in 2004. The last pre-Tillman cadet player graduated in 2008.

I don't think Army enjoyed much success recruiting star football players to come and play for the Army because they know enough to know that upon graduation from West Point they are going to spend years deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Years away from home, family, civilization, women, a relaxing beer at the end of the day, women, the NFL, football team recruiters, women. The military has been working extra hard to make sure that monastic warriors toe the party line and never drink, fool around, have sex, smoke, party to excess or slip the surly bonds of discipline as cherished and expressed by Top NCOs.

It's not much of a life in the military anymore. If the 10 brainiest people in America sat down with the cruelest petty tyrants in the entire world and thought of ways to make life in the military unattractive and pointless, they could not hope to do better than our military leaders have over the last 13 years. They started out with discouraging behavior they thought was 'inappropriate' such as drinking, going to clubs, drinking, smoking, smooching, sex, drugs, nationalism. Then they outright banned going to clubs, drinking, smoking, smooching, sex, drugs and nationalism. Then they got downright vicious about making life in the military as unpleasant and crappy as they possibly could. It wasn't always so.

There is a whole galaxy of difference between the lifestyle we enjoyed as youngsters and the grim institutional grey prudishness of the military today. Even I can hear it faintly; the tremulous little echos of the nannies who run the military today whispering, "it's bad for you." I wouldn't go to West Point even with the Wars finally winding down. Now the graduates can still enjoy all the institutional shall-nots imposed by, "people who know better than you," and settle down to nothing but garrison duties unrelieved by any chance of getting away to go and kill someone who desperately needs killing.

With General Order Number One the military undertook to turn the military into a disease. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The hypocrisy is overwhelming and pathological. It's not my military anymore and hasn't been for a long time. Oh, and I don't give a rat's ass for football or the NCAA.

A CLASSY OLD WHITE GUY

I enjoyed this and happen to think it reflected the man very well. Evidently the dinner last night was some sort of train wreck.



He had style.

YOU WALK IN AND PICK UP AND WALK OUT

England is a foreign place. It's not a place I'd want to be.

There's another story of a family screwed by England's courts.

What I don't get is why the mom or dad doesn't just go in the room, pick up their infant and leave.

And to be honest, you got the chunnel and passport control is just a joke they use to let terrorists in and give expensive houses to. Only an English court would turn taking your child and walking away into a civil case.

Srsly, these are the people that brought us, "oh! Look! A rabbit!!!"

WALKING TO GONDOR

I've never been there. In the morning I'll go.
Like Cortez, I once burned my boats and I didn't miss them
I once left it all on fire behind me
I don't miss any of it

But now
I mean to go west
For a couple who lost a lifetime of things
In a fire
At their home.

MATTIS ON WAR

Secretary of Defense James Mattis explained Thursday why he directed a strike that reportedly killed hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria back in February.

Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the U.S. has a deconfliction line with Russia to ensure that the two countries can communicate in order to avoid direct conflict with one another in Syria. He said that a group of "irregular forces" were in conflict with U.S. forces, and once it was ascertained that those forces were not Russian regulars, Mattis directed a counterattack.

"The Russian high command in Syria assured us it was not their people, and my direction to the chairman was for the force, then, to be annihilated," Mattis said. "And it was."

Consider when you play now with US.

     The Secretary of Defense is a retired 4 Star Marine General
     The President's Chief of Staff is a retired 4 Star Marine General
     The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a Marine 4 Star General

One might almost say that an attitude of "screw them if they're dead prevails" and who disagrees with that?

I admire the harmless sounding titles of the generals. They're secretaries and staff pogues.

I remember the last time we were stupid enough to send troops again to Haiti. The Army got shot a lot. It seems every time they walked a patrol down a street some BLM shot them. The Marines were there too and they 'accidently' loaded up a whole porch of BLM with lead when one of the porch crew raised a weapon at them as they walked by. Oddly enough, nobody ever raised a gun against the Marines again. They walked safely through the maelstrom of what BLM created in their own special country of BLM.

BE MY PIRATE

Just because. Better with headphones.



It's a PIRAZ kind of a day. I can live with that. It too brings back the memory of putting a dent in USS Wainwright. Hey, I was just standing there when that happened.

WAY STATION ON PATH TO HELL

 Just why is nobody facing charges for flouting the law in such a blatant manner?

Remember President Reagan and Ollie North and the Sandanistas? How did Obama find $1.7 billion just lying around that he could throw on a plane and send to the mullahs in Iran?

YOU SEE THE SOURCE AND SAY NAAAH.

ALT.

Girls throw off their clothes and..... 

I try to limit my public appearances. It's how I am.

ANOTHER WONDERMENT

I will simply write some names

Winston Churchill
Roosevelt
Wilson
Bell
Tesla
Steinmetz
Grant
Lincoln
Washington
Wellington
Jefferson
Adams

all of them knew a mean word and also how to turn a phrase. We could do with some more like them.

NUTS AND BOLTS

In my annual saunter through the guts of the blog I noted a few things that are new. Firstly, my readers outside the US come from primarily non-English speaking countries. That's weird. Secondly, I've never even heard of some of the operating systems. That's not as weird since I got left behind when I stopped picking up Computer Edge at the front door of my local Borders Books.

I also noticed that a flock of people seem to be reading the other page. It's probably time for me to rewrite the other page in a coherent manner. I just kept tacking on new stuff at the top without figuring out how to bolt on new paragraphs at the bottom like any orderly person would. Having just looked it over, it is somewhat hard to read.

ON FLAIL

I refused to accept these things are real. I blame it on Vietnam and the real war. I never thought I'd see them fly in a war zone. Still and all, I suspect a different definition of a war zone. In any kind of air defense regime these things are toast. It takes more faith then I have to assume that there are no air defense weapons or missiles on the other side of that dune.

A TRIP TO THE EAST

I visited the National Cathedral in Washington DC for the first time since 1968. It was still being finished back then and it didn't yet have a moon rock in one of the glazed windows because they were still pretty darn scarce hereabouts at the time. They're not all that rare.  There are gigatons of moon rocks and they're free for the taking. You just have to go there and pick them up. 

I've been in any number of cathedrals and while the National Cathedral is an impressive structure it doesn't begin to have the kind of gravitas those cathedrals begun in the 14th century have. Enter one of those in Europe and you can feel and see the age worn into the stones. Plus, they have way more impressive gargoyles.

We do have some interesting plaques that I don't recall at all from the last time I was there. I didn't see the one for a long gone French admiral. My maternal ancestors had an awful lot of Huguenots in the mix.  I think my great-great grandfather was the last of the clergy in my maternal line.

I'm the short fellow

And then there is the porch entrance on the starboard side entrance dedicated to the memory of Winston Churchill. We just watched Darkest Hour this month. We liked it so much we watched it twice. That man had a profound effect on the course of civilization.

And there was another plaque dedicated to an Army Major who died with the Titanic. He was an interesting man. The plaque is difficult to read and I had to move some rubbish out of the way to get a clear picture of it. It is located in the downstairs gift shop, which has a unique sales approach.

TO THE MEMORY OF

ARCHIBALD·W·BUTT, MAJOR, U·S·A

MILITARY·AIDE·TO·THE·PRESIDENT

HE LOST HIS LIFE APRIL 15, 1912, WHEN THE

BRITISH STEAMSHIP TITANIC SANK AND THE

WOMEN AND CHILDREN WERE SAVED. OF HIM

PRESIDENT TAFT SAID "THE CHIEF TRAITS

OF HIS CHARACTER WERE LOYALTY TO HIS IDEAL

HIS CLOTH AND HIS FRIENDS. HIS CHARACTER

WAS A SIMPLE ONE; HE WAS INCAPABLE OF

INTRIGUE OR INSINCERITY; HE WAS GENTLE

AND CONSIDERATE OF EVERYONE AND A

SOLDIER, EVERY INCH OF HIM."

GEO T. BREWSTER

·SC·1913

[ inscription on memorial plaque ]

Water is really that expensive in DC?

One of the other interesting things I found there was the tomb of Norman Prince. He was one of the founders of the Lafayette Escadrille. When I was there it was in by far the darkest part of the cathedral.

On the way home we stopped and spent the night in Pittsburgh to visit with friends and relatives. We stayed at a B&B we particularly like and and found ourselves in a really nice room. (They're all nice but this room was amazing). Oddly enough, it had the complete works of Albert Engström: all of them, in Swedish. Each room in the Inn has guest/visitor books going back decades for all the people who stayed there and recorded their thoughts about their stay. Naturally, a recent entry was from a Swedish family who really enjoyed finding some classic Swedish literature to read available in the room. It really is amazing what one runs across in B&Bs.

We left MetroParkCentralis in a driving snowstorm, enjoyed 70 and 80 degree weather in both Virginia and Maryland and returned to MetroParkCentralis in a rain storm. Coming and going though, we made a point to stop in a little town called Hancock. It's the crossroads of I-68 and I-70 and it has a remarkable store called the Blue Goose with the best apple cider donuts on the planet. It's also a bakery. It is easy to find. In fact, you can't miss it. Just look for the giant flag.

COFFEE AND BILE ON THE HELLMOUTH

I see that some Berkeley denizens are shocked that one of their favorite watering holes abruptly shut down overnight without warning because a complete non-entity remarked on TV that he was thrown out of the establishment 3 years ago because they thought he was harassing a woman and baby. The MIQ declared that he was harassing his wife and child - or words to that effect. However, the owner of the Elmwood Cafe must have the most finely tuned ear-to-the-ground in history and reacted to this revelation by instantly closing his shop, papering the windows and making it clear that he was out of business. He did all this that night because Berkeleyites got there in the morning expecting to find a friendly cup of Joe and a bagel and were met with locked doors and a CLOSED sign.

Imagine that. Here is a businessman perched on the Hell mouth, home to Satan and anti-fa who decides to skip the ritual auto de fé and just get it over with. Who really needs a bunch of jackasses barging in to a quiet coffee shop like this? Once is more than enough and Berkeley doesn't believe in such a thing as excess zeal. Were it to be found open it would have been burned down, such is the zeal with which Berkelyites and anti-fa deal with Enemies-of-the-State.

HE WAS A PRESIDENT FOR OUR TIME

Here is a President. H/t timewaster.



try again.

OODLES OF FUN

I have enjoyed Kurt Schlichter since he started writing. His latest Townhall piece was a rare treat for all the senses. He is retired military and now a lawyer and he takes to his current profession all the gritty steely determination you could imagine in such a combination. You really should read the link.

I don't tweet or look at tweets but I enjoyed reading what Kurt laid before my eyes.

I think President Trump is likely to find a judge disinclined to take any of the usual crap from the feds or from the DNC or from Hillary, and if discovery is granted they are not going to be stalled for year after year by howls of protest. They will be sufficiently woke to the consequences of that happening by the Fed's continuous rearguard defense of the indefensible and by the Steyn vs Mann goat rope going on in the  DC courts for the last 7 years. In short they'll find an adult court and an adult judge or the law is going to find itself coated in slime.

I am very much enjoying the prospect of President Trump launching a counter-attack in the courts against the massively corrupt and dishonest Department of Justice, FBI, DNC and Hillary. It is particularly enjoyable because not one of the so-called 'smart ones' thought about the utterly predictable outcome that comes from suing a man who has been tied up in law suits his entire adult life.

JUSTICE PERVERTED

It has been many years since I saw anything like justice in our Department of Justice or in it's tributary organs of justice such as the FBI, ATF or DEA. They all seem willing to ignore injustice, practice injustice and ridicule those who seek justice. I found the actual words of James Comey to describe the crimes of Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills, and Hillary's body servant Humma Abadeen  to be pretty damning. In Comey's words from his book:

In Secretary Clinton’s case, the answer to the first question—was classified information mishandled?—was obviously “yes.” In all, there were thirty-six email chains that discussed topics that were classified as “Secret” at the time. Eight times in those thousands of email exchanges across four years, Clinton and her team talked about topics designated as “Top Secret,” sometimes cryptically, sometimes obviously. They didn’t send each other classified documents, but that didn’t matter. Even though the people involved in the emails all had appropriate clearances and a need to know, anyone who had ever been granted a security clearance should have known that talking about top-secret information on an unclassified system was a breach of rules governing classified materials. Although just a small slice of Clinton’s emails, those exchanges on top-secret topics were, by all appearances, improper. Put another way, there were thirty-six email chains about topics that could cause “serious” damage to national security and eight that could be expected to cause “exceptionally grave” damage to the security of the United States if released. The heart of the case, then, was the second question: What was she thinking when she did this? Was it sloppy or was there criminal intent? Could we prove that she knew she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing?

As Andrew McCarthy writes, the law on espionage is very clear.

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.

and McCarthy again:

 As I have contended before, this claim is specious on multiple levels. Subsection (f) of the pertinent statute (the Espionage Act, codified at Section 793 of Title 18, U.S. Code) makes it a felony to mishandle classified information “through gross negligence” — i.e., proving Clinton was sloppy or careless (or “extremely careless,” to use Comey’s own description) could have been sufficient. But beyond that, Clinton willfully set up a private network for the systematic handling of her State Department-related communications, in violation of federal record-keeping requirements of which she was well aware, and under circumstances in which she (a former senator who served for years on the intelligence Armed Services committee) was a sophisticated longtime consumer of classified information. She was keenly aware that her responsibilities as secretary of state would heavily involve classified information — whether it was “marked” classified or “born classified” because of the subject matter.

It is irrelevant whether Clinton’s purpose was to transmit or store classified information on the private, non-secure server; prosecutors are not required to prove motive. The question is whether she knew classified information would end up on the server, and her set-up made that inevitable.

It is perhaps unimportant that we now know that Clinton's house maid in New York was ordered to print emails that showed up at the house and all of the emails to Clinton's server showed up at the house in New York and it goes without saying that the maid doesn't have any kind of security clearance and there is no way to know how many hard copies of the emails walked out the servant's door at the house in New York.

It is more than Clinton that should be prosecuted and jailed for crimes she committed. Anybody who sent classified emails to that server are listed on the emails the FBI has in its possession and those people also knowingly violated the espionage law by knowingly sending Top Secret and Secret information to an unclassified domain. They should go to jail too.

Why is there a special prosecutor for the complete non-crime of collusion but nobody is doing anything about actual criminals?

ENDANGERED DINOSAUR SHOT TRYING TO REENLIST

There is just something about the Air Force these last 40 years. I don't know what did it but if there was ever a Service that had been subjected to a humorectemy it has to be the Air Force. They don't see the humor in anything and any attempt at humor is blasted with the anti-humor equivalent of the MOAB. It brings to mind a passage from Anton Myrer's book, Once An Eagle.

Damon said: “I never had the advantages of West Point.”
Krisler glanced at him a moment—then grinned his gleeful, face-cracking grin. “Yeah! Isn’t that the truth. But the worst part of the place was the stony-dungeon humorlessness. Not one West Pointer in fifty has a real sense of humor. Jesus, they all think a joke is a long story that has a dog in it with a man’s name.”
Damon laughed; he decided he liked Krisler a good deal. “You must have had a bumpy time of it there.”
“The upperclassmen considered me unsound. Frivolous, they called it. ‘No plebe can afford to be frivolous here, Krisler. We are taking it upon ourselves to see that you rid yourself of that odious characteristic.’ Why in hell do they always think they have to talk like Dr. Johnson? I made the mistake of telling one of them that, once.”
“You lasted four years up there with that attitude?”
“Three. Our academic careers were cut short so as to fit us into the grand conflict. I was just as happy, to tell you the truth.” His jet black eyes glinted, his jaw flexed; and Damon saw there was a lot of steel under the headlong bravura. “It became a game after a while—a grim, methodical kind of game. They threw it all at me—I eagled and dipped and braced and walked my punishment tours hour by lonely hour … but every evening I looked in the mirror at my ugly phiz and told myself: ‘You have not lost your sense of humor.’ And it worked.” He watched a pretty French girl at a nearby table for a moment with eager interest. “Well—I take that back about all Pointers. Colonel Caldwell’s got a sense of humor, all right. Nothing seemed to be happening that night, and I couldn’t find anybody that knew anything, and when I saw Caldwell I ran up to him and said: ‘Colonel, my orders are to take command of the Third Platoon, C Company, First Battalion.’ He gave me a really marvelous look and said, ‘Thank you, Lieutenant—I shall return to my duties with a lighter heart.’”

In the Navy reenlistments are pretty much per the whim of the Petty Officer who is re-enlisting. I've re-enlisted sailors at the top of the forward mast on a Spruance Class destroyer, on the very bow of the X USS Midway, atop one of the caissons holding up the Coronado Bay bridge after climbing up it out of our zodiac which was tied alongside. I've heard of sailors re-enlisting in just about any way possible and although I'm pretty sure none have tried a dinosaur puppet, I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong.

I put in 2 years as an AFROTC student before seeing the light and joining the Navy. There wasn't a spec of humor to be found in the Air Force back then. Years later, I remember the Air Force forced me to spend the night in McGuire one night enroute to the middle east. I sent a junior officer straight to the phones when we arrived at the terminal to get rooms at the visiting officers quarters. He was halfway across the terminal when he turned and shouted a question at me. "What do I tell them if they aren't familiar with navy ranks?" I replied, "we're the equivalent of a Lieutenant Colonel and Major." A hand tapped me on my shoulder and a clearly irate LtCol said to me, "Lieutenant, I don't think that's very funny."

Humor is a lubricant. There's enough friction in war that a little lubricant goes a long way to make it easier to get over the hurdles one runs into after 17 straight years of war.

The Colonel was shot at dawn the following day and the sergeant was busted to 2nd Lieutenant.

WHY I WON'T GO AGAIN TO PARIS

From Bookwormroom a show and tell of what Paris is today. The last time I was there was the summer of 1989. Go to the link and see what Paris has become and will remain for the rest of time. It's beyond sad and it is happening to all of western Europe.

THIS IS JUST WRONG

Ordinarily when a ship gets a hole in it you can guess what happens next. Well not this time.



Srsly, who ever heard of puncturing a ship's hull and letting the water out? H/t gcaptain.

NEEDS A LITTLE WORK

I found this lurking in somebody’s side yard today in Easton, Maryland.  I’m sure it could be restored to its former glory by the right owner. If only there was someone familiar with the aircraft... The rest is probably in the garage getting painted.

NEW LEADERS OF THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

As I read more about how Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube behave it strikes me more and more that they are the worst combination of Joseph Goebbels and the worlds created by George Orwell. The leaders and followers in the organizations named above all follow the same drumbeat and it is the drumbeat Orwell described in both Animal Farm and in 1984. They are Big Brother and it becomes more and more obvious every day. If they decide that they don't like your message? They make it vanish like it never was. If they don't like you because of your politics or views? They make you vanish like you never were.

These weasel fellows have been practicing what they perceive to be the height of civilized behavior by doing the same thing on campus. If they don't like what you wrote and published they hound the publishers and editors no less thoroughly than the SS hounded those they hated and despised. They don't like the messenger? They refuse to let him/her speak the message aloud in ANY venue.

I think it's passed time to break these things up and/or to put an external board of control in charge to end this charade and long fall into the shards of a glittering sharp night.

ULTRA SPIRITUAL REMINDER

I caught a less serious one of JP'S inspirational videos at somewhere tonight but I like this one better.



They are wonderful sincere send ups of some of the things that irritate the hell out of normal people and I write that after living on and off in SOCAL for 30 years.

A LUCRATIVE NEW FIELD

It appears to be the new policy of the Association of American Medical Colleges to make all future candidates taking the MCAT answer deeply personal questions about their background, upbringing and personal experiences. What a crock.

Given that this is exactly the kind of unethical game the left plays all the time and that they also encourage and justify letting people self-identify as women or black or whatever they feel like, why not have a new company, sort of like Kaplan Test Prep Courses, that will prepare all MCAT candidates for getting through the MCAT successfully even if progressive treasures like Dr. Darrell Kirch politicize the living hell out of the test and the process for selecting future doctors in America.

It's pretty simple, everyone taking the test self-identifies properly for whatever benefits them the most. There's even an example from our past.