SCHOOL

I see from reading that nationwide we have students who don't go to class. I didn't skip all that much as a student but then I wanted to learn and I found enough point in going so I could learn more math, more chemistry, more things that one gets exposed to at school. At the same time, I really didn't think much of school or teachers. For me, when they gave me the text book and told me to read it and I would be tested I read the damned book.

I took the Navy War College by seminar. In Strategy and Policy we had a stack of books to read that was as tall as I am. I regretted handing them back in but I had large pieces copied into a notebook that  I really hoped Chaplain Harvey would find when he went meticulously through two enormous pods I didn't have time to search before burning it all behind me.

What we used to call teachers are now called educators and I wouldn't submit for one minute to their lessons and ministrations.

I knew how to read before I went to school and I had 3 houses full of books a young man could seek his reading teeth into. I'm talking thousands of books.

I used to watch tv and it was mostly just the shows I wanted to watch before NETFLIX got in the business of letting people watch only what they please to watch. I would sometimes catch a few moments of one of the 90's reality cops show. Bad boys bad boys was their music. What I noted in every single one of their home invasions was a complete and total absence of books.

In my parents house we had bookshelves stuffed to overflowing with books. Most of the closets in the house had book shelves.  In my grandparent's houses they had bookshelves that took up whole rooms and stuffed with books. I still remember the delight of finally braving the sure and certain attack by the 30 million bees who lived in the attic and finding where my grandmother had her shelves full of paperbacks. Hundreds of them. Micky Spillane and the Destroyer were captive in her attic.

Where I live, every single room has at least one bookshelf some more than that. I don't buy them anymore but not because I don't want to read them. I just find it much simpler to read electronic books. Probably, in a generation, nobody in north America will even know what a bookshelf is or was since the only books they ever read are electronic.

I live directly across the street from our elementary school and I see little tiny first and third and second graders walking up the path into the door with enormous backpacks which, I suspect, are stuffed full of books. That stack I had doing Strategy and Policy springs to mind every time I see them.

Education and knowledge accrual had little to do with me once I learned that I could just read the damned book and skip every class. They used to tell me that the weekly surprise quiz was only 10% of the factors that went into getting your term or semester grades......but they lied. I could score a 100 on the midterm and the final and still be given a B for failure to "participate" in class. Oddly enough, it still rankles.

In the Newport classes. All of them. Yeah, I went to NSI and SWOS and Department Head school and also to Thompson Junior High and Saint Joseph of Cluny and learned that naps were the best things in life when one found oneself forced to listen to the same material that you read as homework and yet were forced to be in a classroom with a teacher who did nothing but parroting the book.

Since I'm on that topic, one of the very best classes I have ever taken was on stress management. The instructor stood there in front of us and told us that class would not start until every single one of us had the instructional material furnished to us 5 months ago on the tables in front of us. Some people had to drive 10 miles to their houses/apartments to find that stuff. Once we were all present again and seated the instructor simply said, "that's stress and don't ever do it to the people who work for you." That was it, class over. I don't know if they even still have what used to be known as Destroyer School or Department Head School. It may have been flushed along with SWOS many years ago.

IN THE MODE

All things considered by, and as an officer and a man

Speaking as a Navy Captain, I'd be honored to be barred from Senator McCain's funeral.

He ran for president as a total fake republican party candidate and I wouldn't vote for him in California. Quite seriously, that utter shitbag Obama was preferable to McCain.

As a politician he was a nasty piece of work. As a man he was a total scumbag.

ON CONGRESS

I could not do the job Gowdy did. I sometimes get lost in watching Trey Gowdy. He rips the very heart out of the people who come to testify in front of him. They're the agents of evil and vile. He very skillfully evicts all aspects of virtue from the scum that come before him. I would not hesitate to give testimony to him because I honor the truth and would not dream of prevaricating. We as citizens of our Republic would probably all be better off if somebody just pointed a gun at the heads of any person who testified to his committee and shot them. I wonder if Maxine or that other idiot have you tube followers who would say the same. Gowdy is a man of focus. Yes, as I think of it those words come from the movie John Wick which I might well watch again tonight. I used to be a man of focus. I maintained it for 30 years and then I lost it. I have found it again. The movie was well done, enough. This scene though, it still speaks as loud as it ever did.

WEASELS TO THE NORTH

Good title for a blog post. I got hoovered back into reality and lost my whole train of thought. Pretty sure it had to do with the north and weasels.

DESPICABLE SHIT

Mike Mullen shows the true nature of the Admiralty. We let the shit float to the top and run the navy.

A DIFFERENT ERA.

LETHAL AND I WILL MISS GOWDY

I WATCHED THE FBI DIRTBAG TESTIFY

Congratulations, now you get to ask which one.

THE WORD

I don't watch TV. Ever.That said, I just now watched the words drip from the lips of a vile Peter Strzok in his testimony to Congress.

I once dealt with men like him.

No I wouldn't give him access to COMSEC

No I wouldn't have given access to firearms under my control

No, I would never have given him the benefit of the doubt.

I find it incredible that the the FBI gave him any clearance at all or promoted him to the top of the FBI. We really need to work on just how civilians get promoted in organizations because it is clearly defective.

TIME

Every time I hear this I am sent back to 1 north of Santa Monica.

HE LOST MY RESPECT

A man who flew A4's in a deadly place died.

NEW DAY IN THE MORNING

I used to drive in California. I had business that took me through Santa Monica and up the coast to Port Heuneme. At the time I had a 328i convertible and yes I drove with the top down. I also had business in San Jose and yes, took the starlit road north well after the sun had set. I loved driving long after other people were in bed. There was a majesty in simply stopping in the grapevine or even down on the flat central valley and gazing up at the milky way.

You could see the same thing from anywhere else but the dark was especially dark in the valley. Nobody lived there.

For about 10 years I used to commute on weekends between San Diego and San Jose/Emeryville/Treasure Island. It killed my RX-7 but the VW bus was the absolute bomb. I put a comfy chair in the bus and I would stop and spend hours at Big Sur and watch the world go by or look up with binoculars at the milky way above.

SHE'S A KEEPER

THE FORTY DAYS OF MUSA DAGH

I read the book in college. It was recommended by a friend. I have never been to Turkey, unlikely to ever visit the place. It's hard to believe that this was Rome in the East and for a thousand years played host to civilization. It fell to islam in the end and now it is giving up the last ghost of civilization under it's modern day caliph.

Morganthau sure got around back in the day. For a while every single bit of stupid had that name attached to it somewhere.

NOW AND THEN

WHY NOT

PLAY

In an ideal world all would,

FOCUS.

THE WAR OF LIBERAL AGGRESSION

I saw those words in the comments of some blog I read today and found them to be useful to describe what is now going on as the not-so-mythical Deep State continues to do everything in its power to carry out a coup and remove President Trump and disenfranchise the rest of us. I don't see how this is going to end since there is no clear path to victory for either side.

Silicon Valley tech companies and home to many of the internets tools and resources is relentlessly totalitarian in their demeanor and behavior. They have all elected to wage war on the 64 million people that voted for President Trump and  they are using all the means at their disposal to deplatform and shut down everything from comment to actual banking services for businesses engaged in 2nd Amendment trade and sales.

The Courts are being handled as expeditiously as Republican Senators ever did anything useful in the last 60 years but there is still an enormous amount of ongoing damage that comes through the courts and impacts negatively the lives and well-being of people who voted for President Trump.

Hollywood is still fully engaged in trying to overturn the election and is doing everything in their power to shut down the right and cover it with slime. Their allies in Antifa are still working to provoke a fight that will ultimately end very badly for them when people who currently engage them simply give up and bring a gun to the pipe and club fests that pass for anti-hate street demonstrations.

Life is going to be interesting for awhile as things sort themselves out but the war is going to be a long one and it won't be pretty.

BEDLAM WAS ONCE A LUNATIC ASYLUM AND CNN TOOK IT OVER

I don't watch TV as such. I was never lapped in any physical endeavor but I lapped some people. Peters toppled into madness at some point.

A DISSERVICE

I have a family rich in a tradition of surprising each other with off the wall stuff out of the blue that we know is not in the genre or type that the one we gift expects. We all do it. Darn it. OTOH, my mother was the one that bought John Norman's paperback books up until about 4 in the series and my sisters and I had little trouble turning up the rest. I think we can all agree that Fort Riley, Manhattan and Junction City were literary deserts in the years that the Vietnam War was winding down and that's where we lived and I didn't even start reading Perry Rhodan until we drove to Saint Johns in Newfoundland from Newport, RI and I finally accepted that there are literary deserts of unplumed depth. Oh Canada, you, without Farley Mowat, would be a most bleak desert. Readers need to read The Boat Who Wouldn't Float, The Serpent's Coil and Grey Seas Under.

So, the 2 have given me all the Leckie books, and I have them on a shelf unread, I will give them a chance this week even though I have little expectation of good. Charles de Lint surprised me and so too did Neverwhere by Gaiman; both gifts from a sister-in-law. I would not have bought either of them but they proved sound and I read a lot more of Gaiman's books after reading the words he wrote that I never would have bothered with by my own self. I shant bother with the Hugo award types of recent age. yjru,pdy;u frgomr trsfrtd smf siyjptd pg trvrmy shr snf yjru divl/. Yeah, it's all like one keystroke off to the right, I just listened to whossnames acceptance declaration and screw reading its crap whatever it's about. Leave that to MSNBC and CNN.

CNN: RINGO, WEBER WIN HUGO AWARD!

In a surprising about face, voters rejected the snowflake's agenda and voted for books they liked to win the scarcely significant hugo award. Both authors were embarrassed when confronted with the news they had won science fictions least honored award. The 'awe shuks' were scattered far and wide. They were both reluctant to admit that popular sales were dismissed as having less than nothing to to do with an award that required voters to send a lot of money to snow flakes in order to 'justify' the award.

IMAGINE BEING A SNOWFLAKE THEN

They screwed up somehow by making believe it could not happen again and so did their kids and their kids until we have a generation of snowflakes who take umbrage-to-death if called miss instead of ms or slut or whatever it is they crave to be called. The Last of the Few.

ELECTIONEERING THE SOCIALIST WAY

We know the states without ID requirements for voters are cesspools of vote fraud. This kind of drives it home. Whenever you hear that vote fraud doesn't exist? You're talking to a dyed in the wool socialist who thinks Che Guevara was a gentle man and friend to the people he mercilessly killed or beat to death in the name of social justice.

If only there was some tropical island, 90 miles away from America, where all the social justice warriors could find peace and contentment....

WATCH ON THE POTOMAC

I wonder who is keeping an eye on Obama and Jarrett as they plot their next attack on the Constitution and the destruction of America in their secret Georgetown bunker. History is littered with examples of leaders and wannabe dictators retreating from view before suddenly re-emerging and taking back the power that they feel is rightfully theirs. Hugo Chavez is famous for repeated lunges at power in Venezuela. Of course, the military had a chance to keep Venezuela from going the way of Cuba and Cambodia but they blew it and let Chavez go.

I don't really doubt that Obama and Jarrett are busy plotting his return to power or possibly her election. It's not outside the bounds of reason. After all, the people elected a first term useless Senator from a corrupt state as President just 2 years into his first term in any elected office. I can see the twisty little communists even now rounding up legal teams to challenge the 22nd Amendment and have it declared unconstitutional. This is why they wanted Hillary, as useless as she is, to win the election and pack the Supreme Court with the kind of 'jurists' that would go along with the idea of overturning something like the 22nd Amendment as 'unconstitutional' and pave the way for a 3rd Obama term.

Don't think it can happen? Look at California. The Courts have a rich history of overturning various propositions that won the majority of votes in the formerly Golden State.

When you think about it, who out there do you trust to keep an eye on somebody as slippery as those two? Not the FBI. Not the NSA. Not the CIA. Not the DNI. Not the media. There's almost an inevitability to it since there is nobody in any position to fight against it.

REMO WILLIAMS

I was out to dinner with friends last night and they never heard of the movie. It was one of the most watched movies on Esteem back in the day. It must have been shown at least once a day for months despite the fact that we had over 900 movies in the movie locker. The navy had some strange ideas about what movies would be suitable for a crew of all men between the ages of 18 and 35.

A PROFOUND TRUTH

I stopped going to see movies based on books I have read after I went to see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. What a bitter disappointment for one not quite 11 years old. Almost by the same token, I rarely read the book any movie I see was based on.

FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA

That term used to be an obsolete security term. In my time it joined NOFORN as a complete waste of ink. I remember one comment by a general officer that "this should be formerly restricted data" because the author just described exactly how to make a nuclear bomb; something he was familiar with since he used to make them. I didn't see any answer by anybody above in the chain of command but when you know a guy who truly does know how build atomic and hydrogen bombs, you don't get lost on the significance of the evidence.

The only thing keeping them rare is the absence of access to fissionable material. Based on evidence from the Air Force about mishandling fusion bombs I really am kind of surprised DC, Detroit and NYC have not blown up yet.

In time perhaps. I wouldn't want to live there. It's just a matter of time.

MORE HONEST THAN A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Found at Traditional Vibe.

PAUL HOGAN DOES THE OSCARS

The man had more class in this speech than anybody since then at the academy awards.

METROPARKCENTRALIS

Spotted in Gallucci's car corral this weekend. I was down a fresh pint at the time and looking for something to bring up the red cell count at the time.

You don't see something like that everyday in Metroparkcentralis.

ACE SHARES KITCHEN WISDOM

Srsly, nailed it.

Yes...you.

All of you.

Starting with the person who stacks, willy-nilly, everything into the sink. So genius, how am I supposed to start doing the dishes if the sink is full of pots and pans and knives and cutting boards and that spoon at the bottom that just slipped into the drain, soon to be smacked around by the dispose-all?   .........

 It was quite the rant and so apropos.  Oh, and who throws trash in the sink?

SEEN ONCE, NEVER HEARD

When the young pilot flew off into the sunset last weekend, one of the exchanges with ATC was seen once and then never again. Odd that. I wonder why it seems to have slipped out of the narrative.

MALEVOLENT IRONY

I'm always surprised when quaint people tell me that there is some difference between these. In my experience, not so much. There is little difference because they're all exactly the same. You play ball or you get whacked. You got your international socialists, your socialists and your national socialists. Not one of them believes a word of the Constitution applies to anybody except them. With them you have no rights at all and they get to push you around until you die. I'm sick of them all.

One of the confusing things is that the fringe on the right is almost universally declared to be nazis by those on the left and in the middle. They get that label primarily because they're sick and tired of immigration and demonstrate and march about it. What they want is to be left alone and yet to say that is to be condemned. In the slick new society of those on the left and in the middle, to demand to be left alone is to be a national socialist and white supremacist. I'm not sure how that follows.

One of the brighter lights remarked that the Republicans in Congress now have a chance to show the people what they're made of and stand firm against the flood of illegal aliens. American workers finally have the upper hand because employers need more workers. First rule of economics: Price is set by demand. If they need workers they have to pay more to get them and keep them. Everywhere I go these days I see help wanted signs in the windows of employers. That's a good thing!

The flood tide of people who will work for peanuts and live 50 to a house keeps American wages down and has suppressed wages for over 40 years and yet Congress fails to see that and keeps letting millions more people into the country. They don't work the jobs Americans won't, they work for less than Americans could demand and drive down wages everywhere.

The wage suppression doesn't just apply to illegals from south and central America. Congress keeps upping the number of tech worker visas for workers from India and other places with degreed workers willing to work for peanuts compared to Americans which is why Silicon Valley has now become an Indian (dot not feather) jobs fair.

There is a kind of person that created wealth and jobs and opportunity for Americans. You only ever hear about them now as they are described by the three groups above. That's too bad.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.”

                                                      -Robert A. Heinlein.

TRUE ART

A piece of art I find remarkable. From Traditional Vibe

“Memorial for Unborn Children/The Child Who Was Never Born” sculpted by Martin Hudáček from Slovakia.

We no longer see this kind of thing here in the West where art seems to have disappeared down the rabbit holes of mediocrity and outrage.

DANGEROUS MOUNTAIN

I understand that mountains can be dangerous. I've skied any number of mountains and they can be pretty scary. What I don't understand is how it got into this lady's house.  I didn't know that police forces had mountain whisperers but then, it did happen in Colorado.

It cannot possibly be a typo because the bottom line clearly shows that they updated it an hour after they published it, twice.

AMAZING ESCAPE ON VENUS

Somebody just paid $660,000 for this painting at auction.

Back in 1975 it cost me $1.99 and they threw in the book for free.

SLOW PACE OF TECHNOLOGY

I caught this article in the Daily Mail about longest duration flight. The article reminded me of a story I read many years ago about a record set in 1935 that still easily beats the Zephyr S. What's more, that flight back in 1935 was manned by two early aviation pioneers, unlike the drone flight the Daily Mail writes so encouragingly about.

I remember reading the story about the brothers, Fred and Algene Key, who decided to keep their Curtiss Robin J-1 Deluxe in the air for as long as possible. They stayed up there above or around Meridian for 27 days. They received supplies in midair 432 times. Their wives would prepare meals and send them up with the refueling pilot. It's a fascinating story.

As one wag put it, that means they spent 27 days relieving themselves on Meridian. Nobody mentions that part in the history books.

VERY FUNNY

WONDERING ABOUT MEDICINE

I wonder what would happen if Congress passed and the President signed a law that mandates that drug prices in the United States will always be equal to or less than the price charged for the same drug sold in other countries by US drug manufacturers.

THE NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY

These days when I think of democrats I no longer think of them as concerned educators, slightly left wing professors, working class members of unions and the sort of American I would be proud to stand alongside. Nope. These days when I think of the Democratic Party all I see now is Hillary Clinton urging this country into an abyss far worse than Venezuela or Cuba and I think of the scumbags who call themselves anti-fa while dressed as commie thugs of the first water. I think of the vicious and stupid black lives matter scam who don't seem to give a damn if blacks kill each other in record numbers in the major cities of this country and I think La Raza is surely one of the most vile and racist organizations to run around loose in this country since the KKK was put down.

The entire democratic party scheme to take over and rule America seems to boil down to calling every single person who disagrees with them a racist, a bigot a misogynist and a troll. I don't think that's a very positive image and doesn't bode well for the country when one half has decided it has the right and the duty to run the other half out, lock them up or kill them. Given the power, they would do to us what South Africa's government just did to the remaining white farmers.

I dislike the long trends (media ownership and collusion, take over of education, government unions etc.) that have prevailed in this country and have begun to actively hate the new trend that sees every single one of America's new tech pioneers in California using every means at their disposal to 'disappear' any and all voices of reason that simply have the belief that they are as entitled to share the benefits of the 1st Amendment as anybody else in this country. All the Silicon Valley tech giants are colluding to lay waste to the 1st Amendment and people act as if there is no harm and no foul in letting a handful of socialists control who is allowed to speak in this country.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HATE SPEECH. In America there is only FREE SPEECH. This has been corrupted by the people pushed by the likes of Soros to overrule the Constitution and punish people for wrongspeak. George Orwell would be shocked that the left has taken his book 1984 as a playbook and are using every tactic they can find to shut down, vilify, crucify and disappear the opposition. Nonetheless, I'm going to remain in the opposition to the so-called resistance losers who refuse to accept even the idea that there are rules to civilized behavior and beyond that, rules for civilization itself.

AND GO READ THE WOODPILE REPORT

It is always stuffed with good and interesting stuff.

THIS MEANS WAR

In an interesting upholding of the new tradition of single low level judges overturning the President's orders issued under his Constitutional authority, a dipshit judge in Washington DC has ordered that the illegal and unconstitutional DACA dreamers BS be recommenced immediately. To use a famous internet misquote, Winston Churchill would have said, This is something up with which I will not put.

To begin: federal judges have no authority -- none -- to countermand an executive order issued by the president of the United States in the lawful pursuit of his executive function under Article Two of the Constitution. And yet, so out of line has the lesser judiciary -- that is to say, every federal judge below the Supreme Court level -- become that we have now arrived at this blatantly unconstitutional pass.

Go to the link to read the piffle and nonsense in this case. It will only take a moment.

Bollocks. As I've frequently noted on this site, the lower federal courts are entirely creations of Congress, and thus subordinate to it. And they certainly have no authority over the executive branch, other than that which they have aggrandized unto themselves via Marbury v. Madison and other rulings of dubious constitutionality. The notion that the three enumerated branches of the federal government are "co-equal" is a polite fiction to disguise the fact that the Supreme Court (Article Three) is the last and least of them, and can be stripped of all jurisdiction except its enumerated powers any time Congress so ordains.

The President is every bit as much the arbiter of the Constitution as is the Congress or the Supreme Court; if Trump's ready to tackle the problem of the runaway federal judiciary, this would be a great test case. Because, sooner or later, it's a battle that needs to be fought and won if the constitutional balance of power is to be protected. To paraphrase Andrew Jackson, "John Bates has made his decision -- now let him enforce it."

Mr. President, I vote for war.

WAIT TIL THEY DISCOVER CAR BOMBS

The headline says it all, 74 People Shot in Chicago this weekend, 12 killed

A TERM OF LOST ART

I read Fire in the Steppe long ago; all of it. It is still amazing to me that the author wrote this as a serial piece and was traveling the world when he was still writing each month's segment and sending it to the magazine publisher. If you've read it you know, he had a cast of thousands and I don't remember ever running across an error of the kind caught these days by the continuity functionary in modern films.

I miss the weapons artificer who would delight in telling me all about my punctuation errors.

FIRE ON THE STEPPE

I remember being at a place in Fort Riley where they had nothing but open prairie. It was the graveyard for the men and women who died of the Spanish flu in 1918 and 1919. A wind-whipped prairie fire swept through shortly after they were buried and burned the hundreds of wooden grave markers and nobody really could tell who was buried there. Or where. That it was a cemetery was marked. It wasn't The cemetery, it was merely a place where they buried them as fast as they could.

It was there that the buffalo roamed. It was Fort Riley that comes up again and again as the genesis for the flu but you should see the hospitals they had then. I'm 58, I am very familiar with the hospitals they had there back then. The army tries to amortize infrastructure on a millennial time frame. Their hospitals are always the lowest priority. Those horrible green structures were still around when I was growing up in Fort Riley. They gave one of the buildings over to Boy Scouts which is where I came to see it but it was the same thing all over the country. Temporary buildings built for a War a century ago and then the buildings spent another 60 to 100 years serving the armed forces. The services do have very posh headquarters but you would have got a kick out of NAVCENT back when I worked there in 1996. It's way more posh now.

I was quite angry when the press began shitting on the Army for putting soldiers into Walter Reed, a very old hospital but, more to the point, one that had been selected by the Base Realignment and Closure commission Congress created that ordered that hospital to be shut down and closed forever a few years before 9/11. Once the BRAC put your base or post on the list of things to be shed or sold off, the armed forces could, by actual law, not spend one penny on keeping up the infrastructure. Except pre-existing contracts which had to be honored to the penny. It was written off. Congress never actually got around to replacing the various hospitals they wrote off.

100 years ago the entire world was swept by a disease that killed between 50 and 100 million people. The governments and doctors of the time did their very best to lie it into non-existence.

When you think about it, the numbers are staggering.

NRA IN TROUBLE

I don't actually believe anything published by the Rolling Stone but my obvious and instant answer to the NRA running into trouble came the second I saw the headline.

They should have armed themselves.

JOE VS THE DEER AS HEARD ON ART BELL

ART BELL

I used to listen to him broadcast from his secret bunker somewhere in America as I drove up and down I-5 in the wee hours. I used to commute from Encinitas to San Jose and back and I drove late late at night when all the crazy was off the freeway. Art Bell and his collection of screwballs were endlessly entertaining. I remember the 911 show. That had me laughing out loud under the starry sky as I drove with the top down. Remote viewing got a listen just for the fun of it all.

There was the night along the canal that the 5 was under heavy duty construction and for mile after mile there was a car behind me in the single open lane flashing her lights, honking her horn and being precious. The instant we reached the end of contruction and I could pull into the right lane she blazed passed me at 200 mph. I was amused to find her about a mile down the road, pulled over by the CHP.

The only time I listened to late night radio was during those drives that went on for about 9 years. He kept me awake and mostly alert way into the dark. He will be missed.

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

The hair defines her.

It totally defines her.

She is the hair.

NAILED IT

I often think that the Air Force is a parody of a joke. Every time they do something else to prove me right it's like the first time. In this article it appears to state that the Air Force could really make stuff happen if they were just relieved of their duty as the Air Force.

“Operational squadrons in Alaska and Hawaii have F-22 pilots sitting alert in order to address the 24-hour per day alert commitment,” GAO says. “During this time they are not able to train for their high-end air superiority missions. Further, the squadrons must dedicate a number of mission-capable aircraft to this mission, which is more challenging for squadrons with a smaller number of aircraft. Squadron officials from one location estimated that they could generate hundreds of additional training sorties on an annual basis if they could use the aircraft that are currently dedicated to the alert mission.”

I dread to think what they would do if they got off the hook for actually assigning aircraft to a mission. Would they get around the golf course under par? The world wonders.

JOHN KASS NAILED IT

As copied from John C
Kass who nailed it. He got it right.

John KassContact ReporterChicago Tribune

As the tax evasion trial of former presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort began, the Trump-hating Democratic Media Complex renewed its howls, hoping Manafort flips and gives up Trump’s head.

Mollie Hemingway, the conservative senior editor from The Federalist, asked a question on Twitter.

“At this point, I genuinely believe reporters/pundits truly don't understand Donald Trump, his rhetoric, his administration, etc., and aren't just pretending to be idiots,” Hemingway wrote. “But my question is why they continue to be paid to cover a man they clearly don't understand in any way.”

Mollie, they’re not idiots. They’re journalists, highly educated, adept at social media, Washington networking and social gatherings, a class that has deferred to the establishment for generations.

The jokes they tell at the White House correspondent’s dinner and the show tunes they sing in costume at the Gridiron Dinner for the amusement of the ruling class are testament to their deference.

They understand the game, as it was played at Versailles, as it is played in Washington. They also understand that peeling the skin off Donald Trump and trolling the almost 63 million Americans who voted for him, drives viewership and internet clicks.

Trump calls the Washington press corps “the enemy of the people” and “fake news,” and they hate him right back, calling him dangerous and stupid, and by doing so, they call his voters stupid, and worse.

All 63 million of them.

Trump and journalism are now locked in a battle of excess and outrage with neither acquitting themselves particularly well.

Trump, with his constant tweeting and needy ego, has never even tried to be “presidential.”

And many if not most in the media have given up trying to be fair. Like liberal arts faculties at American colleges, much of American media begins on the left and proceeds ever leftward.

Early in the Trump administration, independent studies showed the coverage of the president was overwhelmingly negative. It was as negative as coverage of former President Barack Obama was fawning. Journalism still hasn’t reckoned with its obsequious coverage of Obama. Journalism has ignored it. And that’s understood, too.

So, what is bothersome isn’t that reporters and many pundits don’t understand Trump. I really don’t know who does understand him. He wasn’t my choice for president.

But what concerns me are his voters, our countrymen and women. That’s half of our nation. And what bothers me is that I really don’t think many in journalism want to understand them.

Shame them? Yes. Understand them? No.

But Trump’s voters know what put him in the White House. It wasn’t merely that Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. It was that Trump voters detested the crowd that backed her, loathed them; and those voters in turn were viewed as something to be stepped on, to be ridiculed for heresy.

By not wanting to understand them, I worry that journalism blinds itself to something very real, critical and, in the long term, dangerous in our nation: A simmering resentment against the establishment in much of red state America.

And it’s not going away even if Trump goes away.

What’s clear from the anti-Trump punditry is that Trump supporters are still detested; the working class, the suburbanites in high-tax blue states; the families in rural America, all painted with a broad brush and dismissed regularly by the pundit class as hateful, xenophobic and worse.

Because they think their country needs borders and that illegal immigration should have been stopped years ago? Because they like tax cuts? Because they like working after being without work for years?

Or, is it that for eight years, as they were hurting, they watched a love affair between Obama and the media?

They read the papers. They watch TV. They hear the late-night talk show comedians mocking them. They read pundits who ridicule them. They understand shame all too well. Cultural elites may have given up on old-fashioned concepts like honor. But shame? Shame is a useful lash.

Think back on the ridicule that Hillary Clinton, the establishment Democrat of 2016, heaped on Trump voters when she called them “deplorables.”

It wasn’t what Clinton said, alone, that bothered those 63 million voters. Many were shocked by Trump’s manner, by his bragging, his rude behavior, reference to his hand size, his boorishness, the way he treated women.

And still they voted for him. Why? Because they loathed the other side more. They loathed the establishment. They loathed the media. And their reservations about Trump were washed away by the laughter following Clinton’s “deplorables” line.

Think back on that laughter, on that giggling when she talked of “deplorables.” What followed were the snickers of the clique who get the joke at the expense of those who don’t.

That laughter stuck. And Trump voters took the memory of it to the polls on Election Day. Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump voters overwhelmingly gave him the Electoral College victory.

Now, Democrats are lathered up with the trial of this B-movie villain, this Manafort, whose alleged crimes took place long before he worked a few months for Trump.

Let’s say their Manafort fantasies come true, and he cuts a deal, and he serves Trump to special prosecutor Robert Mueller and the orange presidential head is placed upon a platter.

Then what?

What do you do with the millions who voted for Trump? Mock them into submission? Have them grovel and beg forgiveness before they’re re-educated?

You don’t have to understand Trump. But it’s dangerous not to understand the 63 million who voted for him. They’re not going into exile. They’re here.

Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin at http://wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com I think he got it. Nobody we ex xer hmr exr  know would vote for the scum that is Hillary except one or 5. In my California days I knew no one that would vote for. Now, in the midwest, I am far from certain. Some of them would.

The 63 million, should be taken to the bank. We don't think like you, a lot.

Twitter @John_Kass
Nobody I know would vote for Hillary

TEMPTATION

I've been fooling around with the idea for a couple of years here in middle of the not west. Were I still in California I would have done it years ago. Buy Trump bumper stickers and stick them on the cars of people who loath him to death just so they could be vandalized by their ilk who think nothing of vandalizing other peoples stuff. It's the sort of thing a young man with nothing to lose would do just for the fun that was in it.

That 65 million people don't understand that we voted for the guy and hate us all,

amusing.

STILL FUNNY

INSTITUTIONAL PAINT

I noticed the paint on the walls. It was the standard Army color for hospitals and other buildings of WWII era construction. It was an altogether no good color. Growing up in the old Army it was everywhere. I think finding it in the dentist's office forever cemented sea green in my mind.