EXODUS

I read it when I was 9. It was a blue paperback book that sat atop the Encylopedia Britannica. It shaped my worldview for good or ill. It imparted a lasting impression of Israelis. My kind of people. I suspect they'd get up my nose if I lived there. The people who I consider my kind of people seldom try to get themselves elected and never end up running things. They leave that to assholes.

I watched Ariel Sharon slip out of life. I considered it a great loss. He gave Gaza away and clearly had a plan but died in that ambulance.

The current head of Isreal has a plan. It will be interesting to see what it brings. I don't put any expectation in the arabs and seeing that Abbas just died. Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They're famous that way.

WE HAVE TO BE GOOD

Victor Davis Hanson on The War.

I wanted to be a historian. I figured I'd make a little history and then slip back into the groves of academe. I didn't. I like VDH. I'm astonished by the people who passionately hate the man to death. Given their druthers he'd join all the republicans gunned down by haters who take gun violence to whole new levels.

ENGLAND STILL A SHITTY COUNTRY

They are like the zombie death squads. They wouldn't recognize justice if it bit them very hard.

Authored by Bruce Bawer via The Gatestone Institute,

The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Tommy Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying.

Without having access to his own lawyer, Robinson was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.

Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced Robinson also ordered British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. All this happened on the same day.

In Britain, rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

The very first time I set foot in London, back in my early twenties, I kicked up into an adrenaline high that lasted for the entire week of my visit. Never, in later years, did any other place ever have such an impact on me -- not Paris, not Rome. Yes, Rome was a cradle of Western civilization, and Paris a hub of Western culture -- but Britain was the place where the values of the Anglosphere, above all a dedication to freedom, had fully taken form. Without Britain, there would have been no U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or Bill of Rights.

In recent years, alas, Britain has deviated from its commitment to liberty. Foreign critics of Islam, such as the American scholar Robert Spencer, and for a time, even the Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders have been barred from the country. Now, at least one prominent native critic of Islam, Tommy Robinson, has been repeatedly harassed by the police, railroaded by the courts, and left unprotected by prison officials who have allowed Muslim inmates to beat him senseless. Clearly, British authorities view Robinson as a troublemaker and would like nothing more than to see him give up his fight, leave the country (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands), or get killed by a jihadist (as happened to the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh).

Europe fell into the mire in my life time and no, I won't miss it.

These are my first, be afraid.... First assault rifle, assault knife, assault shotgun and did I mention assault ukelele! Be afraid you sheep. Something very bad has happened to England. I think they lost most of their real men in wars and the rest to us and Australia.

I didn't buy the rifle or the shotgun or the ukelele or the knife I did buy the carpet in Karachi

FUNNY AT A BASE LEVEL

ON THE GRIPPING HAND

I endorse everything he wrote.

My father, who is my touchstone for unyielding truth, honesty and integrity, told me about knowing one of the FISA judges who lived in our neighborhood. They used to eat sausage together at Monday Morning's. He said the man was the soul of integrity.

I would wonder what happened to that but for the matter of knowing democrats and knowing that there is nothing they don't poison out of spite and will.

Remember when you used to know people of enormous integrity? They would not sully their soul for any reason and without proclaiming it aloud, you knew that was true.

We live in an integrity deficit. I knew the men like Admiral Rogers. They were named Fargo and Costello and Julian and you could take to the bank their word on anything. I worked for them and for a number of others for whom integrity was pretty much their center.

I've been reading the history of the Civil War and it was a war of generals like no other war. In just about every single case, the integrity of the general and staff stood out like an iceberg in the Sahara. If you ever get the chance to visit the house of Old Hickory, marvel for a time at a man of his word who lived and died  as he was.

I suspect one can say the same for the old astronauts, the Mercury Seven and Gemini and Apollo. They had a code and they lived it.

Read the link. You'll be a wiser person.

THE SIXTH ESTATE

Suburbs got a bad rep from the left who dislike the idea that people can opt out of forced busing and integration by simply changing their zip code. Where the suburbs really went wrong was in France. France, like South Korea, thinks that living in an apartment block outside the city limits constitutes living in a suburb. This is their idea of a suburb

Our idea of suburb are a little bit different.

The guy living in the house to the right is Serbian. Retired machinist, 3 sons, Baja 1000 enthusiasts of the first water. Were always happy to entertain my 3 year old daughter. Protective and had great Halloween scares for little kids. His garage was one giant machine shop and his wife lived in his other house in Temecula.

Yeah, we knew all our neighbors up and down the street. You could see the ocean from the deck in the back yard.

BOARDED A BOAT TO NOWHERE

It took me five years to get around to it but i did, finally. A submarine on the north coast.

Badger Vapor Compressors. I only had one. Wouldn't you know submariners get two.

TWENTY YEARS

It wasn't even twenty years after World War II when America decided to delve into space and the moon. Think about it. This country sent men to the moon while we were still in the midst of rural electrification and building the TVA. V1 rockets were still an item when NASA built Apollo. Hell, the guys building Apollo designed the V1 rockets.

We're talking my lifetime. I was born back then in Germany to the Army of Occupation. It's hard to believe that we did that back when I was very young and impossible to conceive that we could no more do it today than we could elect a white republican president.

Those people you don't know, the ones born in the early 30's, they made a wonderment.

Srsly, why go to the moon?

RUSSIAN COLLUSION? TIS TO LAUGH

When those of leftist bent get all worked up about the non-crime of collusion, Mention this.

CAIRO — The Egyptian government’s hostile response to a US initiative to fund pro-democracy groups has strained America's relations with its biggest Arab ally during a critical transitional period for Egypt. 

The tension has been building since March, when the US announced plans to distribute $65 million in grants directly to pro-democracy groups. But the angry and wide-ranging response from the Egyptian government and military, which has gone beyond typical Egyptian criticism of American foreign policy, has raised concern in Washington and underscored the challenge the US faces in navigating its relationship with a newly independent Egypt.

I'm not laughing anymore at the stupidity or venality of democrats. They're evil. They pay to corrupt foreign elections and jump maddened by hate when they think somebody colluded in any of their elections.

Oddly enough, collusion is not a crime.

END OF THE WORLD

If you were ever curious how the end of the world would look, here ya go. It's a Russian ballistic missile submarine's multiple launch of ballistic missiles. Come the day, our ballistic missile submarines will do something like this. So will Israel's.  From gCaptain.

ZOMBIE ALERT IN FLORIDA

It happens almost every day in Florida.

LOVELY FAKE NEWS

The Daily Mail goes all in with fake news as it reports that a liar announced at a journalism drive-by that President Trump told her that he was going to smear journolists every time they lie or make up fake news. In this one article the Daily Mail captures the essence of President Trump's campaign against the liars who make up most of the media today.

• CBS News' Lesley Stahl says Trump told before after a taped '60 Minutes' interview that he would intentionally 'demean' and 'discredit' reporters 
• She says he did it to ensure 'no one will believe' unflattering stories about him
• Stahl recalled the admission on Monday evening at Deadline Club of New York's annual journalism awards ceremony
• The CBS News reporter says her boss was also present for the conversation at Trump Tower during which the president-elect laid bare his strategy for assaulting the press.

What I think the Daily Mail missed and certainly what both Leslie Stahl and Judy Woodruff missed, was that nobody except rabid Trump haters actually believe a word they say about Trump or his administration and we take everything else they say with a very large DOT truckload of salt. They are not just fabulists anymore, they are outright liars and get caught in the act of 'making shite up' practically every time they open their mouths.

Why would President Trump outline his strategy for dealing with liars with one of the liars? If you actually go to the link and read the article you will be struck with how miserable the editing was. It fails any standard of real journalism or professionalism. It's a commentary itself about the parlous state of the news business and I consider the Daily Mail one of two papers worth looking at for news.

U P D A T E:

I clearly influenced Elon Musk with my comments because he went off today on the media liars.

What the journos missed was that the world wide web happened and the sources of news all the way back to the primary source are now available for anybody to peruse or watch and the days of hiding the real news from the proletariat and advancing only the news that benefits their benefactors are over. And no, I'm not talking about 'Infowars' or the wackjob web sites, I'm talking about the real interviews and the real primary sources and facts. These days, the main stream media and PBS/NPR/PRI just embarrass themselves with their flawed non-coverage of the news.

WEIRD

This is weird.

Watch this video and expect to hear the word “brainstorm” and you will.
Expect to hear the phrase “green needle” and you will.
Just pick one of those, say it in your head clearly, and then play the video. You will hear whichever one you heard in your head.

FALL FROM GRACE

It appears that go@gl# has withdrawn from the high stakes game of ethics and morality that it initially set out to win and has deleted the phrase, 'don't be evil' from its structure. It doesn't come as a surprise to anybody but it is interesting that they have decided to simply step away from doing the right thing and consigned their original motto to the dustbin of history.

Oddly enough, few people believe that giant ideas and companies ever set out to deliberately be evil. They just slowly slip into the business of doing evil once the corporation passes over the Whaling* threshold. Once they reach that point it's all downhill into the abyss and hell.

*Whaling Threshold-- a company or organization passes the threshold when it has more than 20 paid lawyers on the staff. At that point they become irredeemably evil and write longer and longer Terms and Conditions and Terms of Service which require hyperlinks to reams of other files that fail to explain anything beyond the undeniable supremacy of the company and the utter inability of the customer to seek any meaningful satisfaction.

THEY MOCKED HER YESTERDAY

I see that one of our schools has introduced all of its surviving pupils to a concept originally defined as putting prisoners back in their cages and leaving them there until the guards restored the situation that caused the warden to issue a lockdown. Remember this graduate from yesterday who carried a rifle to her graduation ceremony? She made a perfectly valid and timely point. No one is safe in our schools except Broward County sheriffs.

HARSH REALITY

I found this at It Aint Holy Water.  Considering that I'm one of those who still thinks it means what it used to mean, I laughed.

EMPTY HANDS PEACEFUL LIKE

Found on the web. This picture clearly shows a peaceful hamas demonstrator in Gaza. You can tell he's peaceful because he very clearly doesn't have any weapons in his hands. Nope. Not one single solitary weapon. He's peacefully unarmed.

Peaceful Hamas terrorist

WHERE NAZIS HEIL FROM

One of the world's mysteries that I never figured out is where do all these damned food nazis come from? Every time one turns around there is another damned food nazi who thinks he or she is smarter than you and who declares not just an interest in what you eat but a passion to keep you from eating it.

It seems pretty clear that all the so-called food science behind the ridiculous dietary rules taught in schools at government and foodnazi insistence was bullshit and mostly made up and faked. There was zero truth to any of it and yet it still resonates today and probably will for another 50 years. Of course, by then it will be padded with more "expert" guidance telling you not to eat tasty stuff but stick to lionfish, weeds and rocks. "If it's good enough for mother nature and birds, then it's good enough for you!"

However, although the Guidelines are required and purported to be “based on the preponderance of current scientific and medical knowledge”, they did not include some of the recommendations of the Scientific Advisory Committee and therefore do not describe an optimal dietary pattern. For example, the World Health Organization recently classified processed meat as a carcinogen and red meat as a probable carcinogen, based on evidence that has been in existence for some time. Yet the Dietary Guidelines make no mention of this and state that processed meat can be accommodated in a diet if the diet is within limits for other nutrients.

I think the "expert's" fascination with what other people eat ought to end at the end of their own table. All I can say is, if you don't like what I eat, what gives you the right to tell me no or double-tax it? This strange government food fetish must end. Stop electing nannies.

On the gripping hand, at some point the clowns in government are going to wake up and realize that if they ever did offer excellent and beneficial dietary advice to the populace, people would live longer and consume a much larger share of socialized medicine $ than they currently do. At the moment, I think seniors consume ~80% of medicare spending. If fewer people lived longer....... well. I'll leave that to the food nazis. I'm sure they're rubbing their heads and trying to figure out how to get people to eat rocks coated with sugar.

STILL NOT A DREAM

I am one of the most tolerant people I know (except I hate bad drivers). I have always been one of the live and let live kind of people who so form the bane of those with a perpetual desire to hurt someone else or enforce "rightness" with an iron boot. In spite of that, I was raised an army brat and spent a good long time in the 'old' navy. I remember sitting in the Repair Officer's office on the destroyer tender and watching site TV as ordered by the XO who used the 1MC to demand our attention so we could all watch as NIS led 21 young women off the ship in chains because lesbian. The XO was a real harridan. I'm glad I wasn't assigned to that ship.

In the Persian Gulf the destroyer tenders traded off. Each had something more silly than the other. As I recall the USS Puget Sound (had another moniker) could not fix its own air conditioning system. The repair ship for the Middle East Force literally could not fix their own air conditioning in the Persian Gulf even as it headed from Spring into Summer. The Cape Cod formed roving patrols of khaki with men partnered with women who roamed the decks and crawl spaces on the ship making sure that nobody was having an illicit, illegal, unapproved, unauthorized, contrary to good order and discipline, good time.

Imagine that. You work a full day doing what Chief Petty Officers do and then you get paired up with a running mate and actually go looking for trouble, in the dark, at night, on a ship, at anchor, in the middle of nowhere. I laughed so hard I think I broke something.

Nevertheless, reading Army Times today was still a jolt to the ole system. I haven't changed but the way the Armed Forces has changed is simply astonishing. Truman and Eisenhower had no idea how rapidly the military could change.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has granted a reprieve to allow a Fort Bragg Army chaplain’s husband, who was facing imminent deportation, to remain in country, their attorney said Tuesday. 

Sergio Avila-Rodriguez, the husband of Chaplain Tim Brown, an Army officer, was taken into custody by ICE on May 10 and Brown was notified he was going to be deported to his native Honduras, North Carolina TV station WRAL reported.

I went from no gays, to don't-ask-don't tell, to the chaplain is gay. What a strange journey it was.

SOD OFF SWAMPY

I keep reading about all these so-called colleges and universities  that out-and-out attack freedom of speech. That's OK for universities outside the United States because, after all, they don't have any First Amendment Rights. It is not OK in this country. It is time for the students to take back their rights and stand up for them and sue the snot out of universities that violate their rights. It's time to tell all these administrators and losers who can't handle sunshine or free speech to sod off swampy.

Srsly, if a student is too delicate to hear another point of view, they probably should stay at home and keep hiding in their closets.

The trespassers were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women,” said a photographer, according to The Times of London. “It was really ugly. … They followed the [Greenpeace] guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.”
“The violence was instant,” reported one aggrieved recipient of a rain of blows to the head. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
“Sod off, Swampy!” shouted one tardy trader, steadying himself against the railings of the balcony of the pub across the street as his colleagues threw the protesters bodily onto the sidewalk. (Swampy was an enviro-protester who gained fame by living unbathed in a tunnel for eight months.)

I'm fed up with one-way tolerance. All these people need to get stuffed.

A LITTLE SUNDAY HUMOR

Ruthlessly ripped off from Ace of Spades.

NOT FOOLING EVERYBODY

I noted with some interest that the press had published a number of articles stating that the Bahraini Foreign Minister had tweeted his support for Israel and the actions taken against an aggressor. The "alleged" FM's tweet is here.

 The problem of course is that I don't believe it's real. I'm pretty sure we'll see something along these lines in the next day or so. "Bahrain foreign minister's Twitter account hacked" again.

It's nice to believe that tiny Bahrain even with the US Fifth Fleet based there is unlikely to instantly announce via a personal twitter account that the Kingdom of Bahrain supports all actions taken in defense against aggression. Unmitigated aggression and attack has been the hallmark of arab foreign policy since 1949 and as far as I know, not a single arab country has apologized for it.

I could see the current, or even the last king joining with Anwar Sadat and King Abdullah, I just don't believe it would be prefaced by a personal tweet from the foreign minister. I checked with the Gulf Daily News and Al Khaleej Times and neither had a peep in them about the tweet. I suspect the minister was in his cups or his account was hacked.

Honestly, could anybody believe a word out of Kerry or Hillary's mouth after lunchtime? One was absurdly stupid and the other was even stupider, thought herself cunning beyond belief and both probably worked no more than 3 hours a day before stepping into a gin and tonic or bottle of brandy.

This may be another case where all those involved: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait simply decide not to dignify it by ever referring to it at all.

ROLLING BLACKOUTS

When the California electricity thieves announced that there could be power blackouts this summer they claimed it was due to reduced water flow and a reduction in hydro-power. There was nothing about shuttering the nuclear power stations or the failure to build sustainment plants. Nope. These guys are like super geniuses and claim........wait for it..........wait for it.

The California Independent System Operator (ISO), the grid operator, said the system's capacity to serve consumers will be tight in high-load periods in the summer months, especially during the evenings of hot days when solar power dissipates.

Nope. Nobody saw that coming. I think every blackout should start with Sacramento and if rolling is required, roll it over to Berkeley and San Francisco. Those people are too stupid to work out that if the sun goes down all the solar panels in the world don't generate anything, but they're the ones mandating that solar panels replace real power generators, like wind farms. snerk.

A PASSING CONCERN ONLY

I read about this story everywhere and had a memory of a story I read many years ago by Jack Du Brul.

The largest of these reached a magnitude of 3.2 on the Richter scale around 22 miles (35km) from Puerto La Luz, Port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Most of the earthquakes, of which 94 were located by earthquake experts, hit a region between Tenerife and Gran Canaria along a known underwater fault line.
A number of the tremors rocked Mount Teide, sparking concerns among locals that the volcano may erupt, but scientists said these secondary quakes were triggered by nearby activity. (I bolded this bit)

From Du Brul's novel, Deep Fire Rising, an apocalyptic look at a volcano in the Canary Islands.

"That year, the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which dominates the southern third of the island, erupted over the course of several days. This in itself isn't unusual. She generally pops every two hundred years or so. What made the 'forty-nine eruption unusual is the four-meter-wide crack that appeared along the center of the island. The western flank of the island, a chunk of rock about a hundred twenty cubic kilometers in size, slipped a few feet toward the sea and stopped."...

 "According to the computer modeling done a few years back, the wave will be one thousand feet tall and would have already traveled outward at least sixty miles in the first ten minutes after the landslide. It would cross the ocean at about five hundred miles per hour, radiating in all directions. North Africa would be hit first. The wave will have abated to three hundred fifty feet by then and fortunately that part of the continent is sparsely populated. Loss of life would be minimal. Next would be Spain, Portugal and then southern England. The wave crest at this time will top out at over a hundred feet, still carrying enough energy to ricochet and radiate through the English Channel and completely drown all of the Netherlands."

Well, you should read the book to find out what that tsunami does when it reaches the Americas. You can see that reasonable people still fear another eruption. As Du Brul finished in his Author's Note:

As for the Canary Island La Palma—well, this is where I started working my imagination. If the island stays true to its history of eruptions, the Cumbre Vieja volcano will become active again in the next two hundred years or so. The eruption will further fracture the island's western flank and it is probable that the trillion-ton slab of rock will crash into the Atlantic. The devastation to the United States, Europe and Africa described by Mercer will occur. The truly fictional element of Deep Fire Rising is that there is something that can be done to stop it. There isn't.

But I'm sure there's nothing to worry about.

SLEEP AND DREAM

I tend to claim to blog while really just falling asleep and dreaming. I read history. I dream of things like ships to the new world not sailing from harbors in Lisbon or Spain but from the Barbary kingdoms and what kind of a world would that have created. It would be very different but nobody knowing the real powers of the world back then could claim that ours is better.

There is a school of thought that claims, probably rightly, that all we know of civilization owes to one place and perhaps not more than a dozen people.

There were epic civilizations throughout history. Scores of them. There's a valid reason the old ones did not prosper or survive. On looking at the current news, I suspect this one won't either. You either are civil in law, thought and deed or you are not. All that was the West is falling away from civilization as I know it.

That's OK. There were a thousand civilizations barely known by me. Perhaps the world will try another path.

For those who follow, there was a whole series of books about it.

BREAKING ALL THINGS

It is the nature, the fundamental nature, of an Army to break things, all things. This article was interesting on that topic. The military in a successful country does one thing very very well. Focus. Taking a team of 19-22 year olds and making them focus isn't hard. It's been done forever. But reading the article made me remember flying a huey from Cairo West to Mubarek Military City and meeting a young captain of the Army who was battered, broken and bruised. I asked him what happened and he told me.

"Sir, I was punched very hard in the back of the head at 3 a.m. this morning by a sergeant who punched me all the way down a flight of stairs because I stepped out of my room to go to the head  without all my 782 gear and helmet." Focus is important. For some people it takes real concentration to keep it and stay focused. I worked with the other kind of people for whom focus was merely a knack used as needed. The Army drilled focus into the heads of their NCOs for a time. It tended to show and not just in the NCOs.

Two of the best officers I ever worked with were in Qatar. One was an Army captain the other an Air Force LtCOL. They had focus you would not believe. I was pleased to carry down silver chickens for the LtCol as a gift from the Admiral on my last flight into Qatar because the Admiral was the kind of guy who had focus and if that meant scanning a week old copy of Air Force Times and maybe seeing the name on a promotion list of the military liaison in Qatar, he did it. ADM Fargo had incredible focus and so did every other Admiral I worked for. The meaning of the gift may not seem real to people not in my former line of work. In Bahrain, we had a little military store and it sold things like military insignia and Air Force or Navy collar rank emblems for an 06 is sort of a chicken. You should see them in the Pentagon, there they are incredibly shy and retiring. There was no such store in Qatar. There were, after all, just the Colonel and his deputy, the Army captain and a staff NCO of great antiquity putting in a complete prepositioned brigade of armor in plastic bags. (minus the soldiers of course)

It stuck with me over the years. I expect young men to do dumb things. I didn't and couldn't tolerate 22 year old NCOs doing dumb things. Not for an instant. Back then we didn't really have all that many 22 year old NCOs but we had some well into their 30s or 40s and stupid couldn't be tolerated in the field or the fleet.

The moment you find yourself with an NCO who thinks nothing of using his fists and beating on anybody not the enemy, you need to get rid of him. The Army of the United States promoted that sergeant time and again and he thought nothing of punching an officer down a staircase. What the hell was he doing to the Privates and PFCs?

I remember the image and story like it was yesterday. I can't remember why the Colonel I was working for at JTF A, let me go. It was no boondoggle.  It was business. None of us wanted to fly in the shitty helicopters belonging to ARCENT.  It was not my first ride in a helicopter. It was my first ride in a helicopter featuring a 59 year old CWO who spent every inch of the way telling the 24 year old pilot, "wire, wire, wire".  The ride back down to Cairo West was memorable. We flew within a few hundred yards of the pyramids in Giza just as the sun was setting and backlighting them below us.

Yeah, this page belongs on the other page of the blog and will find its way there in due time. I might include focus. There is an author who wrote some books on the subject. It was not his best work but I really enjoyed the Programmer-at-Arms.

If you read the article it may shed light on your thinking of the military. I am the son and grandson of career military officers. I remember a watershed moment with my father over a little thing called discipline. He had made a comment about a West Point classmate who attained the rank of general in the reserve. My dad said, well, general in the reserves.... His former classmate didn't talk to him again for years. I explained something to my dad,

In the US reserves, those guys and women are only there because they want to be. There is no force holding them to the sword, no law that forbids them to leave when they wish. They stay involved out of all of the reasons you stayed but they have no obligation anymore to work under shitty crappy officers and when that happens you can watch them pick up and move next door to a better run outfit that doesn't feature absolute total assholery. You want to find someone who actually knows leadership, try it with some people who don't enjoy the binding power of the UCMJ to force the no longer willing subordinates to stay and suck it up.

We didn't, we couldn't, tolerate shitty NCOs or JOs. If we did, our manning would drop instantly. You'd be absolutely amazed by the number of people who didn't ever understand that. In my last job as OPS for our country's expeditionary security forces I was sending reserve security units with people I had known for over a decade on their 7th deployment to the sand. All of our deployable security units...............were in the reserve. Admirals truly hate to hand guns to sailors. They spent every year after the Vietnam War trying to hide it.

MY SHIPS WERE SMALL

It's almost the start of a famous quote.

I've always favored it. But, then, I served on the least powerful ships the USN ever had. The only carriers I've ever been on were Midway and Lexington. I never stepped aboard a modern aircraft carrier or landed on one. Mine were the little ships.

500 YEARS AGO, NAILED IT

"I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse."

I stopped taking Latin classes in 4th grade, stopped talking to women shortly after, know nothing of women, horses or French. Born in Germany, somewhat effluent in French still completely clueless about women but I'm working on that. Give me another 200 years and I'll have them figured out.

The Habsburgs were probably more arrogant than any person now alive.

Still, one has to be complete mental defectives for this, Charles the Vee.

(Charles) decided that extinguishing Luther would leave the Pope without a rival.

At the age of just 19, Charles V was the richest and most powerful person of his time, but all the power in the world did not stop Martin Luther from ripping the heart out of his Catholic empire.

Born in 1500, Charles inherited a vast empire from his parents.

When his father Philip I died in 1516 Charles inherited control over The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Artois and Franche-Comté (or Free County of Burgundy).

In 1516 his maternal grandfather Ferdinand II died and he inherited AragÓn, Navarre, Granada, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, Spanish America, and joint kingship with his mother (who was insane) over Castile.

Then in 1519 when his grandfather Maximilian I died, Charles inherited the Hapsburg lands in Austria and was elected Holy Roman emperor.

One should only tread into the past with a loaded gun and plenty of ammo, I think.

REREADING A COMMENT

I'm beyond fighting in my country's wars. Been there, done that. A comment by Andrew, though, brought an image to mind that I will share with you. It persisted for lifetimes but perhaps no more than 50 years when the perfectly trained young officer would indeed carry both a pistol and a sword. Officers still carry a sword but purely for ceremonial reasons. They are not allowed to use them on Capital Hill or in IRS offices. And, every house needs a cannon.

I THOUGHT THIS WAS A KILLER COP STORY

So anyway, a New York cop strangles another New York thug. Coyote lives matter dammit.!

TV TODAY

It seems to be all porn stars and slaves 24 hours a day. I'm glad I don't watch. I'd hate to see what they think of President Trump.