Monday, December 31, 2018

FOR TO GIVE

An interesting story about a man. I do hope that for once NPR got it right and proper.
Friends remember Washington state social worker Alan Naiman as being frugal. He wore old shoes held together with duct tape, bought his apparel at the grocery store, drove jalopies and ate at cheap restaurants. But when he died of cancer in January 2018, at age 63, the people around him learned that he had quietly saved millions for a higher cause.
Naiman left most of his $11 million estate to organizations serving abandoned, impoverished, sick and disabled children.

FOR THOSE WE LOST IN 2018

Sunday, December 30, 2018

ALMOST A JOKE

The organizers cancel womens march due to overwhelmingly white participants in Eureka. I find that odd because even if all 3 black women who live in Eureka showed up it would still be a mostly pale  sort of parade. Have they considered asking Soros for a couple of busloads of pregnant Mexicans and maybe a double handful of ebola bearing lasses from the Congo?

Friday, December 28, 2018

NOBLE RATS

The Wall Street Journal is asking for some noble rats to out themselves in the Trump White House and bring down the wrath of Trump and most of his supporters, in an effort to get somebody truthy and honest enough appearing to pitch the manure out of the way and show us the unvarnished President as he fulfills his roles as President and Commander-in-Chief. They allowed as how so far the only people we've heard from have been low down dirty dumb rats or anonymous sources trying to have their post-White House cake and stay employed in this White House.

I would ask where was their passion to find out what Obama was up to when he failed to show up anywhere while our ambassador to Libya was being murdered in Benghazi. Where was their concern about the Clinton Foundation and all the wayward donations that supposedly were raised for relief operations in Haiti but which yielded no relief there.

I am trying to imagine the kind of person the WSJ would find credible if he destroyed his future employment operations by blabbing about his boss to the press. I say "he" advisedly since the women who 'come forward' trying to destroy or discredit this man or his nominees seem to have a tiny little problem telling fact from fantasy and it shows.

One of the things I find reassuring about President Trump is that I don't ever see him pulling a 'Wag the Dog' kind of war to deflect attention from nefarious acts like Obama did time and again. It would be nice if he pulled all of our troops out of Africa. Americans simply have no idea how big that place is and just how futile it is to accomplish anything meaningful with even 20,000 soldiers there doing whatever futile thing it is that AFRICOM has them doing.


Monday, December 24, 2018

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!


WILEY DONALD TRUMP COYOTE

One of the most impressive things I find about President Trump is his complete adherence to the words first written by Sir Philip Sidney a very long time ago. I have them over there in the right hand column. "I seek no better warrant than my own conscience."

President Trump unilaterally declared our involvement in the Syrian War to be over. We are done and we are bringing our soldiers home. This was met with universal howls of disapproval from all the usual sources including democrats and some republicans, diplomats, State Department clowns, European foreign ministers and NPR. It was quite a resounding clap of disdain for his decision which is kind of funny because at one stroke he paralyzed a number of future wars in their tracks.

We got involved in Syria because the deep state remnants of Obama and Clinton argued that we had a role to play there in our ongoing war on ISIS. I think Trump bought their arguments then but has since reconsidered and for some very good reasons.

1. As Mattis recently said, Syria is "a forever war." There is no achievable end that can be foreseen.
2. As conditions on the ground change in the north we risk direct conflict with two major middle eastern powers.
3. We already killed hundreds of Russian troops in their last attack in the north and are likely to be involved in direct combat with Russia for the first time since 1919. We can live very well without that particularly since there is nothing to gain by making war with Russia.
4. By being perceived as supporting the PKK and Peshmerga in their continued resistance to ISIS and arming them but not allying with them we open ourselves up to direct combat operations against a fellow NATO country, Turkey and again, for no benefit to ourselves or NATO.

The stakes are extremely high if we continue our involvement in an utterly meaningless war. Nobody on this continent gives a damn if Bashar al Assad remains president of Syria and why should anybody here care? There are no geopolitical or political/military justifications for maintaining any forces in Syria or engaged in Syria.

All of the above applies equally to Afghanistan. It is a worthless shithole and I'm sorry for the men and women who died there and for their families. It was wrong to invade and then to stay and try to build a nation/state out of mud and slime. The place hasn't changed for a thousand years and won't change for another thousand years. Our number one stated purpose was to get Al Qaida and for 15 years our "ally" Pakistan hid him right next door to their military academy. Why would they do that one asks? Well, likely because we poured billions into Pakistan to let us use their ports and roads to supply our forces in Afghanistan and bribe them for continued access. Their They're evil, not stupid.

I think that we, as a nation, are done with forever wars. It's a great pity it has taken us 17 years of futile effusions of blood and treasure to realize that.

DEMOCRATS AND BUREAUCRATS ARE EVIL AND STUPID

Rand Paul and others were on Face the Nation where he lucidly described the facts of our wars in the Middle East among other things of importance to American citizens. The full transcript is at the link above but below are some of the most salient points for your consideration. Read it all, every single word. It describes reality that most Americans don't have a clue about.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to move, though, to foreign policy where you do seem to be aligned with the President. You've been on a tweet storm this morning saying, President's decision to pull out of Syria and cut our troop presence in Afghanistan in half, you said "the entire foreign policy establishment of Washington, DC, who two years ago were swearing Trump was going to start multiple nuclear wars. Now they're mad because he is stopping two wars. How about you just admit you hate the President, love war and have been wrong for the last twenty years on every part of foreign policy?" Who are you referring to because the defense secretary and the top diplomat handling ISIS both resigned over these decisions? 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: You know, I think that we should look at some of the statements of the people who are advocating that we stay in Afghanistan forever and that we also stay now in Syria with no sort of determined end. General Mattis, even General Mattis said that there's no military solution to Syria, and he's also said there's no military solution to Afghanistan. How do you think our young soldiers feel? I have members of my family that are going over there soon, how do you think they feel being sent to Afghanistan when your generals are saying there's no military solution? So I think the burden is really on Mattis and others who want perpetual war to explain why if there is no military solution we're sending more troops. I think the onus is really on them to explain themselves. 
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, on that issue, though, it's not perpetual war, the argument has been from diplomats that you need the credible threat of military force in order to get people to the negotiating table. What is the incentive now in Afghanistan-- 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: Well, this is-- 
MARGARET BRENNAN: --or Syria to have any kind of negotiation if there's no leverage? 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: We've been there seventeen years. We think now we are going to take one more village and we'll get a better negotiated deal? Does anybody remember Vietnam-- 
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, that's what the Trump administration says-- 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: That was the strategy of Vietnam for years after year after year in Vietnam was to take one more village and we'll get a better negotiated deal. No, they waited us out and the Taliban are going to wait us out. They know we will eventually leave and leave we must. I mean I don't think we have enough money to be paying to build and rebuild and build and rebuild Afghanistan. The President is right and I think the people agree with him. Let's rebuild America. Let's spend that money here at home. 
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, if you accept the premise of what you just laid out here and-- and some people do agree that particularly in Syria, two thousand troops and two dozen diplomats can't make a difference. So if you accept that, though, if you look at what the defense secretary put in his resignation letter, what you're hearing here is-- is concern about how it's being done, about abandoning allies, about not having a process-- 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: Yeah. 
MARGARET BRENNAN: --about not being clear-eyed regarding America's enemies. 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: But here's the problem-- I know-- 
MARGARET BRENNAN: How do you respond to that? 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: I know. But here-- here is the problem with all of these generals. They're like, "Oh, it's precipitous." We've been there seventeen years. We've been in the Middle East most of that time. It's not precipitous. The President promised when we went into Syria, our goal was to wipe out ISIS. We took ninety-nine percent of the land, they're on the run, can the people who live there not do anything? We spent trillions of dollars arming the entire Middle East, arming Afghan army, can they not do anything? Do we have to do everything? We defeated ISIS. But now you have the-- the hawks in the administration and throughout Congress saying, "Oh, now we have to wait until Russia and Iran leave Syria." Well, that was never our goal and it's never going to happen. So those people are advocating for perpetual war. 
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, that was the goal articulated by the national security adviser to the President, John Bolton. That is what he said U.S. policy was. 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: It-- it was never the goal-- well, it was never-- that's a new goal. That's what you call mission creep. The mission has now changed, that we're going to wait till Iran leaves and Russia leaves. Well, the President told them that's not his mission and that was never the mission. The mission was to wipe out ISIS and we did succeed. And the thing is it's incredibly bold to win a war and come home. That's what the people want. If you poll the American people, it's sixty to seventy percent of people ready to get out of Afghanistan. And I'll bet you the same of Syria if you ask the people. It's only the people in Washington, the armchair generals, that want to keep us at war forever and people, Americans, are tired of it. We want that money here at home and we want to create jobs, roads, bridges here at home not in Afghanistan. 
MARGARET BRENNAN: The concern raised by people like Brett McGurk who-- who was the President's diplomat handling the anti-ISIS coalition is that if you move out too quickly, if you agree we're going to draw down, at least have a plan on how to do it. At least, do it in a way that doesn't abandon allies. And, in fact, he warned in his resignation letter that this could create a vacuum that would allow terrorist groups like the Islamic State to re-emerge and in other-- other words, we'll have to go back in a few years.
SENATOR RAND PAUL: That will always be true. What-- what-- that-- that statement will always be true. That statement will be true in fifteen years. The place is a mess. I mean, they've been fighting each other for a thousand years. Sunni and Shia have been fighting each other since Battle of Karbala in 832 AD. 
MARGARET BRENNAN: This is ISIS. 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: They're going to fight each other until the end of time. It's all of them. It's-- it's a inter-complicated mess that has to do with Sunni extremism versus Shia extremism, and also some other various battles in between. But if we wait until there's potent-- no potential for anybody fighting each other when we leave, we will be there forever. But here is what we need to do. And here is the real problem, we have so politicized the relationship with Russia that there isn't a Democrat in the land that is for any kind of negotiation with Russian ally because they know it's an anti-Trump position to be heaping on Russia. Russia is a big player. If we don't talk to Russia about Syria, we will never come to a resolution. Iran is a player. We actually have to talk to Iran about-- 
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah. 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: --Syria, as well. Assad is a player. We have-- we can't just say Assad is going to go. He won the war. These people have their head in the sand and they just want to send two thousand troops there. They become a trip wire to a possibility of a much-expanded war involving Russia and Iran. And that would be a huge mistake-- mistake. I don't think the American people want another big war in the Middle East. 
MARGARET BRENNAN: The Pentagon and State Department say there are tens of thousands of ISIS fighters still in Syria. How can you credibly say mission accomplished? Do you think ISIS has been defeated? 
SENATOR RAND PAUL: Right. I think the numbers are wildly inflated and nobody knows. I think there are maybe ten thousand so-called radicals. And these are radicals. They are in Idlib and they are surrounded by Turks, Syrians, Kurds others. And I don't think they're going anywhere. And right now there's not a lot of heated battles going on. But my question is why do American young men and women always have to lay our lives down? To the people of Iraq, are they incapable of doing anything? And here's the thing. Muslims need to ultimately police Muslim lands. When Americans are there and we kill someone who lives there, they see it as a religious affront and they see it as the Pagans have come to take their land and for everyone we kill, we create ten to a one hundred more. So it isn't working. We have-- have supplied them all with money we've given them uniforms we've given them weapons. They need to step up and they need to eradicate these violent people from their midst. 
MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Paul, thank you.

Sunday, December 23, 2018

NEEDS A PUSH

I was reading tonight and ran across a rare case of the federal government playing fair. This doesn't happen all that often and in this case it deserves a bit of a push. 100% disabled veterans can be totally forgiven their student debt/loans and their children's loans but only about 20% of those eligible have taken advantage of the program.

I'm off to the local VA next week for one thing or another and I'll see if I can find out how it's working with the veterans here in metroparkcentralis.

Sunday, December 16, 2018

AND THE LEGACY

As I wrote earlier. I was out of the country when this was broadcast. Still.



I think that this was,

timeless.

MY FAIR LADY AND GIGI

My post about getting to chat with the cops in the park just reminded me of two movies I have to rewatch. I very much enjoyed them and Much Ado About Nothing, so three movies to rewatch.

As with Higgins, I was an old man who was keeping a close eye out for one girl and as with him, got called on it several times. Colonel Pickering.



and this for the kill

WE REVISIT THE VAMPIRE

Metroparkcentralis is being unusual to a relative newcomer. It keeps producing bats that find me in my Fortress of Solitude. It's getting old.

The first one bit me. There have been uncharming sorts of people who asked why. What can I say? It landed on my bare leg left knee and settled in for a snuggle before I picked it up with the right hand to toss it back out the window. That's when the damned thing bit me.

A few weeks later I found another bat bathing in my bath. Yes, in winter I keep the water as a heat sink and I don't really care if it matters-all the windows were closed and yet there was this bat winging frantically to breathe. I tossed him out of the house.

And just two nights ago, I went to the Central Repository to look up a reference from 2 score years ago and what do I find? Another damned bat snuggling into my diaries. I had to go down 3 flights and out to the garage to find utility gloves that I was pretty sure would stimy even shiny dripping with rabies pointed teeth before I grasped it and tossed it out the window.

You know other communities are bemoaning their loss of bats and the death of their bat flocks. Me? Not so much. Those little bastards are everywhere. They're like flying deer dammit!

THE SIMPLE THINGS

She gets it. She wrote about it. As a species we've been around the block a time or two. We share lives and procreate and while a lot of it is beyond my ken, I rather liked this article. If reading it alone brings a long and relaxing backrub in bed into one's life, that is a start but it also sometimes is all that matters, finding someone you can live forever with.



Back when TV started, couples were always portrayed in separate beds. I was friends in the south up north down south in Cali that had totally separate bedrooms. He snored like a grizzly, knew it, and she needed sleep. They still got it on and then retired to neutral corners. For the sleep that was in it.

I'm checking out other ways. That movie with some famous actor who''s name I never remember...Not Al Pacino, the other guy,...."get off my lawn". He knew it.

For a year or so I worked with a seal who liked bananas, a lot for the potassium that was in them because, seal.
He never ever pealed one and ate it like that. Every time he cut off a little piece and put it in his mouth.  I think he watched firefly when the XO told the recruit why the captain always cut up his apples when he ate them.

A MAN IN SERIOUS NEED OF KILLING

You know, the socialists don't remember or care how many their leaders sent to the headsmen. They just don't give a damn and they don't believe it even after they are spattered with gore and body parts.

This guy needs killing and so do his followers.

Whenever I ask myself, "where in the freaking world do all the AK47s and their ammo come from, this kind of thing is the answer."

STUPIDITY RAISED TO THE 57TH POWER

This was amusing. They were a century old group of almost pure volunteers. People joined because they wanted what  Baden-Powell offered them; a chance to slip out of civilization and behave like men in the wilderness for just a little while.

Then they got converged by the social justice warriors who ordered them to take faggots into their young male society in the wilderness and while that was doable under court order they then decided that the society for boys wanting to be men in a wilderness now had to take girls. I'm sure that the more predatory boys that weren't already turned by their gay scoutleaders had no particular problem with that. I mean, girls like to go camping in the woods, sleep in pup tents and go for long walks carrying backpacks with all the stuff young pioneers take into the wilderness. See it all the time.

Once it fell to the social justice types it was doomed. It was merely a matter of time.

This has lain in abeyance while I searched in vain for the instagram page of a gorgeous HM2. She chose to join the navy and climb mountains in the remote and her gram was one any father could be proud of. I regret to say that I lost it and it needs refinding. She's an HM2 but, she's a scout.

A BIT CHASTISED WAS I ABOUT MY BLOG

Frequent readers, both of you, know that this place pitterpatters on little feet between the beautiful and the sublime. (one free turtle on this blogsite for anybody that gets that reference) In the wider world almost everybody mocks Kant. As a young man riding the trains between DC and URI, I read his book and what I remember was written on the inside front cover of a book thousands of miles away and a decade behind me.

He talked to me about stereotypes and you know all that crap that we were lectured to about how one should not stereotype the truth was pretty simple and any idiot can figure the truth out. Stereotypes are a guide and warning and serve just those two purposes. You wait until you begin to know before you simply tell yourself that those black guys walking behind you late at night on a city street that doesn't really have a lot of foot traffic are friendly. By stereotype, they aren't and that's because they almost never have been. People know that. The race baiting ministers of the left are famous for saying that they would cross the street to avoid their own kind in that kind of situation.

Kant lived in the imperial age and what he wrote about was the French, the Germans, the English from back when those words were racial and could be safely addressed with a pen. They're all pretty meaningless now. You might call them africans or jihadists now.

I mourn the passing of the old world. It had it's moments, but I won't go back again.

NOISE

For the second time in my life I called the police to make a noise complaint. The non-emergency line of course. As with the last time, the objectionable noise ended in about 2 minutes. Encinitas cops are almost as fast as the locals. I don't call the police lightly. Back when I walked every evening I'd call them about once a month after witnessing some idiot breaking into a car.

I did for me, the normal thing and confronted the noisemaker and he invited me to step off the planet. I'm not so inclined yet. I told him the consequences and he sneered.

As a rule, a sneer is not a good thing.

I kind of regret not keeping even one of my cammo uniforms. OTOH, this is precisely why not one single one of them accompanied me over the Ginnungagap. I still have one of each of the dress versions of others but not ones worn out by protesters who never served a minute in this country's armed forces. As a rule uniforms aren't that scary but to the ones who know, the colorful bit tells a story about the man wearing it.

Oh, Cities in Flight by James Blish is the reference to the end of time.

ONE OF THE BEST

I actually got actualized to FIREFLY by Lex on his blog. I missed the broadcasts because I was out of the country. I own all of it now but over the last few years I only watched Serenity which is different from Firefly. I'm watching FIREFLY and it is amusing. Just watched the pilot episode. For strength.

And those of you who never roamed the blog of Lex won't have a clue what that means. Tough.

I started this blog and maintain it just for two people. One of you is kind enough to comment from time to time even if I am remiss on commenting on yours.

I think little girls go into fully self absorbed at about 15 and so I won't hear from her for a bit.

I may stop trying to keep open the channel she knows about.

A NICE DAY OUT

I remember a couple of times when the concerned citizens called the cops about me oggling at the little girls in the park. I didn't hover over her when we went to the parks. I sat on a bench at some of the nearer parks or the grass on the slope of the hill when we went to VG's and the Donut Park. And,
 all things considered, bless them for their vigilance and response.


i didn't marry until i was 42. she came along a year or so later and ....

this picture is from some years later. it always reminds me of a book by David Palmer. Emergence.

Friday, December 14, 2018

THE ELUSIVE HUMOR

He covers the ignorant with nitric acid, explosives and a dead pan delivery. He and Sunny are some of my favorite humorists in the age after Wiley Post and Will Rogers



LONELY OUTSIDE

Thursday, December 13, 2018

I ENJOY MORE ALLURE

Press shocked that President Trump isn't asking them to attend his Christmas party at the White House this year. I think it's funny and the only way it could be funnier is if he invited them to the altpress party in Washington's sewers. Srsly, it's like the vapid airheads running the largest news networks in the world just don't get it that their constant, non-stop, incessant attacks on the man largely leave him with a deeper and deeper abiding hatred of them. Srsly?
The decision is hardly shocking, given Trump’s constant attacks on "fake news" and the overwhelmingly negative coverage of him and his administration. In recent weeks, the White House pulled the credentials of CNN's Jim Acosta after he refused to give up the microphone at a news conference and restored his pass only after the network filed a lawsuit.
I haven't even bothered to look but I think President Trump has held roughly 256,000,000 more press conferences in the last two years then both Hillary and obama combined. Where was the press then?

THE PITCH

All of a sudden we lost sonar. It's not a big deal unless you're mine hunting with sonar. CIC had repeaters for anything the bridge had. They were right there in front of me and showed that our engines were near their limits for driving the ship backwards. That prop wash completely wipes out sonar at any depth we used in the fields.

Even in the blacked out CIC, I had the con. I was the one driving the ship. I didn't order flank reverse and never would (I was CHENG and reverse power blows the hell out of weaker engine head gaskets.) So I didn't do it, while wearing a rig that made my every breathing word audible to every single person on the 1MC which included the helmsman and lee helmsman. 

At which point came the voice of the aft lookout on the 1MC screaming that there was a mine we were now backing into.

We found the rest on my way out of the mine field.

People reach positions of power far beyond their acumen. They are dangerous. They will kill you.

Allow me to tell you just precisely who those people are:

They graduated from Harvard.
They graduated from Yale.
They graduated from Princeton.

If you can kill them before they take office, we all might survive. To be honest, if I still had them, I'd nuke every single one of them. They are nothing less than the utter embodiment of absolute evil. They love and snuggle with Cuba and Venezuela and they're too obtuse and stupid to realize how devastating socialism is.

Yea, the pitch. 3 full feet in reverse. Waukeshas could barely handle that, my home ship would have exploded as every single cylinder blew out on Packard's. Been there, done that, a lot.

What was amazing to me that it was my DCA who gave the order over the Bitch Box to Main Control and he knew better. 

He's probably a Congressman or Senator by now.

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

FOR HAGGIS

This is a science anyone in ice country should know. Unfortunately there is absolutely nobody in charge who teaches it. All those rotten b@stards say, "stay off the ice". As one of them in spades, stay off the ice!


This is a lesson on how to survive being an idiot and falling through the ice

I death rolled a laser about 20 times on the downwind leg of a race under the Throgs Neck Bridge in late November. There was no ice but there sure as hell was a suspicion there would have been if it wasn't thoroughly polluted by New York, New York. I don't even want to think about what kept the surface from forming ice. At least, in Newport, you had a reasonable expectation that the ice you were breathing in Frost Biting was mostly seawater.

Oh sure, looks harmless in summer.

MUTATIS MUTANDIS

I have done all that can be done to keep those little bast@ards out. I am sick to death finding bats up here every time I venture to the Bat Cave.



If I am forced to I will use grenades.

The books on the left were all written by me and sometimes I dive in to a different era. Not lately though, on account of the damned bats living on top of them.

I had a little help with the sign for the window.

TRUTHER

The definition has changed since then but all these die-hard anti-trumpers are left wondering why hasn't two years of special prosecutial hell on earth star chamber investigation into trump led to charges. Every single crime of the clintons is simply glossed and air brushed out of the feature.

Some of us wonder if the special hell is reserved for people with IQs in the 60s, you know, the special hell.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

SEEKING

I'm looking for the source of a dimly remembered quote from a story I read, "oh no, there is most of heaven and all of hell between the current state and war."

It's proving elusive and the maddening thing is I don't know if it's of recent vintage or something from Paradise Lost.

From the not too distant past and Writer-At-Arms, Robert Frezza,
“No, Juffrou Bruwer, it is not. There is most of heaven and all of hell between the unstable situation that exists and war. Until the Afrikaner nation has taken up arms or until I say fiat justitita, ruat caelum, let justice be done though the skies fall, there is no war.” 
Immediately, he softened his voice. “I realize that the heavens appear to be falling around you. You, Burgemeester Beyers, a few others, are straddling a widening abyss. Still, however likely it may be that war will manifest itself within this next week, it is not yet, and I greatly dislike inaccuracy.” 
“I do not understand you. Are you saying there is no war?” she asked, the unexpected way in which he expressed his thoughts dulling her intellect. 
Vereshchagin ran his thumb across the surface of the pipe he was holding in his hands. “May I clarify? The situation is volatile and unstable. Within a very few days, if no cause intervenes, the fanatics who initiated this sterile conflict will begin to suppress moderation. Yet as a nation, at this moment in history the Afrikaners have not yet chosen a course of action. Your work with Shimazu, I take it, has given you an understanding of the narrowness of the support the fanatics presently enjoy.” She made no answer for several minutes. “Are you saying that there does not have to be war?” she asked solemnly.
The above was written as fiction about war on another planet. The author worked for the CIA or State or one of the other shadow governments and yet it is very much a paradigm of our times. We in the West are kind of settled and it is the darker war that we fear now. We know who the dark are but since none of us are butted up against their countries, we pretend not to know or fear. Every single one of them is primed to explode.

At the end of the day, there is a little problem with multi-culti.

It isn't real. It is nothing more than a fiction that people of the West believe in the face of 80% of islamics who are quite willing to set alight those who screwed up and think they can get away with a little thing like Apostasy

ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY

I'm more than tired of these deep states shits. I would ask if there was anyone to rid us of these turbulent scum but the idiot that leaped to answer would shoot all the wrong people.


WORD POWER WITH YOGI

Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don't know and I don't care.

Jimmy Buffett

1. When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

2. You can observe a lot by just watching.

3. It ain’t over till it’s over.

4. It’s like déjà vu all over again.

5. No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.

6. Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.

7. A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.

8. Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.

9. We made too many wrong mistakes.

10. Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.

11. You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.

12. You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.

13. I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four.

14. Never answer an anonymous letter.

15. Slump? I ain’t in no slump… I just ain’t hitting.

16. How can you think and hit at the same time?

17. The future ain’t what it used to be.

18. I tell the kids, somebody’s gotta win, somebody’s gotta lose. Just don’t fight about it. Just try to get better.

19. It gets late early out here.

20. If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.

21. We have deep depth.

22. Pair up in threes.

23. Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.

24. You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.

25. All pitchers are liars or crybabies.

26. Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

27. Bill Dickey is learning me his experience.

28. He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.

29. It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

30. I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won twenty-five games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five.

31. I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.

32. I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.

33. I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.

34. In baseball, you don’t know nothing.

35. I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?

36. I never said most of the things I said.

37. It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.

38. If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.

39. I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I’d never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest-high catch, and he never walked off the field.

40. So I’m ugly. I never saw anyone hit with his face.

41. Take it with a grin of salt.

42. (On the 1973 Mets) We were overwhelming underdogs.

43. The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.

44. Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.

45. Mickey Mantle was a very good golfer, but we weren’t allowed to play golf during the season; only at spring training.

46. You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it’ll go.

47. I’m lucky. Usually you’re dead to get your own museum, but I’m still alive to see mine.

48. If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’. I didn’t like to work.

49. If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.

50. A lot of guys go, ‘Hey, Yog, say a Yogi-ism.’ I tell ’em, ‘I don’t know any.’ They want me to make one up. I don’t make ’em up. I don’t even know when I say it. They’re the truth. And it is the truth. I don’t know.

I ate a late dinner just now and laughed out loud at some of his words. I wish I had that power.

MEANT TO BLOG

Night fell many hours ago. OK, didn't fall, it was tripped and pushed over only to be mugged but I did mean to write something light this evening. It actually featured my favorite mongoose who did, ultimately, make a cameo in the very very very long post you won't see because once we left Nag dead we sort of went crazy writing which is a hazard of the profession.

We had a dinner party tonight which was fun, enjoyable, wonderful, rich in exotic food (corned beef on  rye) and much other good stuff. Unfortunately for the blog, it brought out the pompous in me. You don't want to see me being all pompous.

When it happens, I think back to a couple of aviating gentlemen bloggers who could take the pompous out with total class. I think the exile in Portales would cavil at being called a gentlemen. Tough. I outrank him. I'm pretty sure Lex would have agreed with me.

I would like to think it is a night of reverie.............and it is.......for values of is.

Just waiting for the crew to have all gone to bed.........we had about 6 kinds of yummy dessert that I missed and which is waiting in the kitchen for me softly calling my name. I hear and obey.

Friday, December 7, 2018

A TRIP TO MORDOR

It was supposed to be a simple there and back again. Easy peasy. I worked in customer service jobs, heck, I was Fleet Liaison for all our fleets for almost 5 years. This evening took the biscuit, the french toast, all the chocolate cake and the coconut cake leftovers.

I joined a line of about 20 customers to buy some meat. Yeah, yeah, my bad. I like meat!

I stood in that line for almost 15 minutes while it didn't move because there were customer service types, 8 EIGHT OF THEM right there on the other side of the counter.

Every single one of them studiously ignoring us. No kidding. One or two would glance at all the waiting customers and then go back to ignoring us.

I reached my limit and the two loaves of rye bread I was holding in line, I tossed them over my shoulder as I headed out the door.

Every now and then, the shape of reality is shown to me and I see it. This was downtown Mordor and I had just had a wonderful interaction at all levels at a different food shop deeper into Mordor but where 100% of the staff and the owner were pleasant, nice and helpful. Vienna is running 0 for 2.

THAT THING

As a rule, I don't do posts about the past. On the other hand, the past caught up to me this week in a large way and I liked it.

It's the day America remembers that we let our fleet get slaughtered by Japan because we had absolute idiots in charge.

No thing has changed since 1941. You would have to be a chump to believe different. Me? When I was still in the uniform, I used to wonder why we had every kind of service ship in San Diego at our second largest west coast base but there was not one single solitary cruiser or destroyer allowed to radiate or protect the base because that would interfere with garage doors in Chula Vista. Yeah, the Russians could have Pearl Harbored us again any time they wanted. Let us thank God they were not blood thirsty killers.

Srsly people. You're supposed to learn from history.

Thursday, December 6, 2018

FIREFLY

I ran across this today. I really liked that show. I never saw it in broadcast but I own it now.


Wednesday, December 5, 2018

HEARTACHE

Out of the blue last night I heard from the one I love as a daughter. Haven't really heard from her in years. She is still nought but a young teen in high school and will be forever young in my reckoning of ages. Because the universe exults in irony, I had been listening to a rarely heard song from my youth that I remember listening to when picking up my sister at softball practice a long time ago.

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

EARTHRISE

From one of the usual places.

THE PREDICTED FUTURES SNEAK UP ON US

I read this story about a man who has been sailing the seven seas for the last thirteen years on the same ship. He hasn't gone ashore in ages and these days he is just about blind but still he sails. He has settled into a routine. That was where I heard the distant echo of another man at sea in eternity as he fled from his nemesis.. It was a good story and yes, the two men in the story settled into a routine. On the gripping hand, one of them had died over a hundred thousand years earlier.

Fiction is fairly rich in stories of the man who sailed forever. It includes the stories by Larry Niven and The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson and any number of other stories that probably had their start before time was recorded but in my case started with the The Man Without a Country by Everett Hale.

I saw the stories about the giant liner that one can buy passage on to sail on forever about 14 years ago. A few years ago I read the zombie apocalypse by Ringo and it didn't seem like a good deal to me. Then too, I spent quite a bit of my own time at sea.

Mind you, I don't think it is a bad way to spend time. I certainly enjoyed that life.

Monday, December 3, 2018

AND WE ALL WALKED AWAY

This was true to a sad extent. A dozen men out there on the street after midnight, a crying women and all of us armed with guns, knives, baseball bats...... and she said no, she was just crying and don't hit him.


And out of the blue this followed.

We aren't always there. I've brought guns and knives to the "No NO NO! a time or two. One feels
a little silly standing there armed to the teeth for confrontation and hearing, "no no". We persevere and say, "just you stand up and come to my side of the street and say that, that's all and I'll go away." And they do and you go back inside.

Some of us were raised on the story of Kitty Genovese and we are not ever going to let that happen on our watch. But it ultimately isn't our call. In the half dozen calls I've never once had the girl accept our offer of help. On the other hand, each case seemed to resolve without violence then or later.

IT IS TO LAUGH

It is almost hard to believe that the ever obtuse Maureen Dowd of the New York Times slime rag penned this about the Clintons this week.
Nothing they have done lately suggests that they have learned anything, including their obtuse post-#MeToo comments about Monica Lewinsky, who has been far more candid and sympathetic in the 20th anniversary retellings of the impeachment saga. The Clintons are still unable to hold themselves accountable. The formerly golden couple who dominated their party for nearly three decades is traveling North America in a bubble, shockingly un-self-aware.
It was her and those like her that relentlessly, persistently failed to remove the scales from their eyes and see those two as they really are. Not one single aspect or characteristic of either Clinton has changed one iota since Dowd, the New York Times and every democrat in the world swooned over how wonderful the two of them were and how good they were for America.

It is hard to believe that she just outed herself and all the rest like her as hopeless dupes.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

ALRIGHT

LIKE A FLOWING OCEAN

Ripped off from Gunsmoke and Knitting.

I watch the River Dance and the rest of Irish Dance and think of the flow. I like it.



Saturday, December 1, 2018

ANOTHER NAVAL AVIATOR BITES THE DUST

He was, for all his faults, a naval aviator who flew against the Empire of Japan in World War II. He was a far better man than Clinton ever was and even with all the decades after leaving behind his final office, he was better than any who came after him or tried to be his rival. It was under his Presidency that the decades long Cold War finally came to an end we could all cheer for because there really was no loser in that War save those who fought and died and were wounded in the proxy wars that culminated in an enduring peace.

LTJG Bush piloting an Avenger in World War II


Congressman
United States Ambassador to the United Nations
Chairman of the Republican National Committee
Envoy to China
Director of the CIA
As Vice President he stood fast after the assassination attempt on President Reagan.
As President, ended the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the USSR.
Led the nation as it fought the 100 hour war that gutted Iraq in the First Gulf War.

A lifetime of service to the Nation.

I would just like to add for the sake of George jr., I was out of town and living in a tent on Ford Island in Hawaii when President Nixon died. I was midway between San Diego and San Francisco when President Reagan died and I was away in Ann Arbor when President Bush died. George, if you want to pay me to stay home for a few years/decades, you can reach me care of this blog.