PRICELESS

HISTORY

I had occasion last night to wonder how much of China's real history is left now. I've spent a lot of time in Korea and know that the Japanese were particularly thorough in stealing or destroying as much of the historic material as they could during their decades long occupation. Every museum except the one I visited in Mokpo had a number of empty spaces in the display cases with a card reflecting that the item that once adorned them had been stolen by the Japanese. I figure the same thing must have happened to all of Japanese occupied China.

Then there was the long war between the communists and the Kuomintang which didn't really end until 1949 and still sees the remnant of the Kuomintang occupying Taiwan with whatever they managed to pack up and take with them when they fled the mainland. Who knows what they have and what was buried, hidden or destroyed by them before the left China forever.

And yet even before the ruin and destruction of the Japanese invasion, the Chinese themselves overthrew the Empire and established a Republic and who knows what vanished as the final empire in China disappeared into the welter of civil war, the Boxer Rebellion, confusion and outright theft as treasure hunters made deals that many must have found hard to refuse.

Perhaps the worst of the trashing of Chinese history was done by the communists themselves after they finally drove out the Republic and then instituted the 20th century's years long curses of the Red Brigades and Red Terror and the Cultural Revolution. I suspect a lot of China's history went up in smoke or was hidden away by caretakers who might not have survived and so never returned to salvage what they had tried to shelter from the antifa and the SJWs of their era.

It's probably a good thing that a number of Orientalists got in there early enough to make a record of what the history was before it was swept away. The thousands of years of civilization is on par with the thousands of years of Egyptian history. You'd never know it existed to visit Egypt today. There is precious little of it left that was small enough for the conquerors or the people to pick up and carry away and Nassar and the rest did a fine job of wasting or destroying those things that were too large to carry off.

AND THE WORLD TRUMPLES

I just saw this at Traditional Vibe and had to post it. How very oddly true.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Travel safely and keep in mind that patience is not just a virtue but can be a life saver. And with that, we’re off!

IT REALLY IS TO LAUGH

Take a minute and watch the wheels come off the entire democratic party charade of an impeachment. Congresswoman Stefanik basically eviscerated Schiff and the whole impeachment sham, a most providential treat for Thanksgiving. In fact it sort of puts me in mind of the Three Stooges and their gag, 'slowly I turned....'

A NEW FRENCH NAVAL BASE

From the admirable folks at gcaptain comes news that the French are to stand up a naval headquarters in the United Arab Emirates to serve as the European Headquarters for their newly assumed duties assumed by them and some of the usual countries, as being in charge of ensuring the safety of some shipping in the Persian Gulf. As you can see, they've given it some thought.

If they had been cleverer, the arabs could have suggested that the logical place to set up a headquarters to oversee the safety of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz would be the UAE islands discussed here. Abu Musa and the Tunb islands have been occupied by Iran since 1971. That of course was before the arabs learned the essential lesson of hanging together or getting hanged by Iran. It was also, sadly, about the time they really started making Americans angry with their OPEC strategy to cripple economies worldwide.

On the other hand, I think it is only we and the Russians who believe in the truth of things expressed by the old saying, Go Big, or Go Home. On the gripping hand, we are talking about the Europeans and they spare no expense in building headquarters and why not plop it down in the premier go-to resort city in the Middle East? Have a look at the article below.

 A French naval base in Abu Dhabi will serve as the headquarters for a European-led mission to protect Gulf waters that will be operational soon, France’s defense minister said on Sunday.

France is the main proponent of a plan to build a European-led maritime force to ensure safe shipping in the Strait of Hormuz after tanker attacks earlier this year that Washington blamed on Iran. 

Tehran has denied being behind the attacks on tankers and other vessels in major global shipping lanes off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in May and which increased tensions between the United States, Iran and Gulf Arab states. 

The command center will host around a dozen officials representing the countries involved, she said. In a speech to French military personnel, she said the next time she visited the base she hoped the mission would be operational and thanked the UAE for supporting it. 

The UAE has tempered its reaction to the attacks and has called for de-escalation and dialogue with Iran. 

On Saturday, Parly said the initiative could start early next year and around 10 European and non-European governments would join, pending parliamentary approval.

You probably noticed that it said that perhaps 10 European governments would join but as usual with the Europeans there was not a peep about how many ships, armed aircraft or coastal missile batteries would be sited in the Strait to safeguard whatever it is they consider essential shipping.

There's a marvelous HQ up in Bahrain which is host to the US Fifth Fleet, Naval Forces Central Command, some sort of Joint/Combined Maritime command that serves as host to scores if not hundreds of Europeans there to keep an eye on things and improve the quality of coffee served in the break room.

One of the worst commanding officers I ever worked for had this really obnoxious saying that he kept telling me, "if you take care of the small things, the big things will take care of themselves." I was in the process of realigning two main engines and my #1 generator with the Diesel Inspector and was somewhat undermanned. OK, hideously undermanned. With the Europeans on board in the Persian Gulf I'm sure that we and the arabs have in hand the perfect crew to take care of the little things and leave the big things to US.

ON MR

I see the worthless Mr. Vindman prefers to be addressed by his rank. It reminded me of a long ago day in the Pluck realm when the skipper came down to address us all (junior officers that we were) and so was he by Navy tradition, right up until he pulled off his collar devices and handed them to me and told us that he was now a real commander and nothing like a lieutenant commander anymore since lieutenant commanders, lieutenants and lieutenants junior grade were all just lieutenants. I found him one of the most relaxing CO's I ever worked for. What he was, through and through, was a solid professional who had your back and you knew it. He had character.

He finished his time as Technical Director at one of our SEACENS on the east coast. I daresay a lot of people were really unhappy with him there. He had a hasty way with idiots. I think he raked a battleship with CIWS during the gulf war part 91.

I saw the crossed rifles on the worthless scum testifying in Congress and wondered enough to break out my own set of crossed rifles. They are mine in the sense that I own them but they were my grandfathers. When did the Army change from putting the numbers on their crossed rifles? I'm guessing it was sometime before the War back when the Army was small enough it was like the Marines and one could say, I'm with the 1st of the 5th and guys who know, would know.

I was on the fringes of the 1st and 2nd divisions but never served with either. Still, I remember well the Big Red One when they got home to Fort Riley and the Indian Head, the first much more fondly than the latter. If there was a way to screw troops by the numbers what 8th Army didn't think of, you could count on USFK to implement but for all of that, one thing I don't recall seeing at Yongsan was 2nd Division HQ. No doubt it was there over by the helo pads which I never went to since everything needed for life was at Dragon Hill and my meetings were in the theater.

AND SOME PEOPLE WONDER

Public service.

FIND A HANDY REEF

Barring that, Honda Point will do. Don't ask our loyal young to go to sea in crappy ships.

GOOD MORNING

NOW THAT I LOOK BACK

I probably should have taken note when she insisted on going to this concert in San Diego. It was the only time she wanted to go out for music. In hindsight, it's really really obvious.



In retrospect, it's an easy tell. It still came as a thunderbolt out of the blue. My S/A was aimed at terrorists and I didn't expect it in the most domestic of places.

THERE'S A NEW BLOG ON THE BLOGROLL

It's probably not new. Probably been around for a hundred years but new to me. I like it.

Yep, a picture of Black Jack Pershing. I like it for a couple of reasons. It reflects the man as he is/was. And I like that once upon a time, a 4 star general of the armies was able to wear just 3 medals and because he was a soldier of ours, there weren't enough actual medals to make up a ribbon bar of 3 so he had to wear some French doodad and some other doodad from some other country, mabye even Belgium.

I followed the example of my dad and his dad and just wore the 3. That was enough. I still remember EN2 Anderson asking the Commodore if we would get any medals once we went to the Persian Gulf and started sweeping mines. This was back in the last millenium and as Anderson said, he'd been in the Navy for 5 years and still didn't have a single medal to show for it. By the time he got back from the Gulf he had 3 rows. It was a medalish time and there was a war you never heard of there. Praying Mantis. Me? I'd already spent time sweeping mines in the Red Sea and a year in the Iran/Iraq War Zone and I had two whole ribbons but none of your actual medals. 18 years later I learned that we had been awarded the Humanitarian Service Medal for our actions in the Red Sea. And there, I thought it was nothing but a complete waste of time.

CARRIERS

There are people that work hard. The only carriers I stepped foot on were Midway and Lexington.

Still, to watch is to see the power.

A MERE TRIFLE WHEN A RIFLE IS CALLED FOR

Yes, exactly. Found at Had Enough Therapy Yet.

But what really gets me is how it's been almost seven years since Barack Obama left one of his ambassadors to die in a terrorist attack on a U.S. consulate, and the same people who defended the Obama administration endlessly over that, are feigning outrage over Trump's tweet expressing his opinion. Democrats have been crying "impeach!" over everything for years, and now every time Trump expresses an opinion, we're hearing "intimidation." The same party that defended the Obama administration's failure to protect our consulate in Libya from an attack that claimed four American lives, including that of a U.S. ambassador, are now trying to tell us that we should be outraged over a harmless tweet—a tweet that, regardless of what one thinks of the content, was written after Yovanovitch started testifying, and as far as Trump knew, she wouldn't have even had an opportunity to see until well after her testimony concluded? A tweet that she'd have been oblivious to had Schiff not brought it up.

#ME TOO

The article says it all.

...... Now if you look at the Department of State's regulations, conversations between American officials and foreign heads of state are automatically classified CONFIDENTIAL and NOFORN. 

You normally — at least if you're not Hillary or one of her minions — store classified information on classified servers. Even confidential. (This one hasn't been as exciting since it became clear the Obama administration was using the same server for the same stuff.) 

Some people want to argue that this shouldn't be classified, but they miss a couple of points: first of all, classification is another one of those Article II powers of the president (see Executive Order 13526). If he says it's classified, it's classified. The second is that the White House was concerned about stuff being leaked and warned Vindman explicitly about talking about it. 

So why is it surprising that material is being stored on a classified server? Why the hell was it ever stored on anything BUT a classified server? 

The point here is that all of these things would, in the normal course of events, be security violations punishable by everything from actually losing a job to extended terms in Kansas making small rocks. 

Why was this not the normal course of events?
I'd really like someone in Congress to ask those questions.

There are an awful lot of people who need to be in jail for decades for what they've done in the name of social justice and hate. We can't tolerate their ilk in the State Department, Justice Department or CIA/NSA/DIA. They're tolerable in places like the DOE only to the extent that we need to defund them of $59 billion/year. After all, they really only hurt minorities now don't they? I think so. We need to get rid of them too but they are secondary to securing our national security. Plus? the gulag large enough for all of those killers hasn't been seen on earth since, oh, wait, the Chinese depopulated the Uighurs and the Soviets deported the Balts out of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.

Honestly, the only hate crimes I see these days are democrats lashing out at orangeman and the fake hate crimes created by minorities who deeply wish they were hate-crimed against since it would explain so much failure. They are forced to hate-criming themselves which speaks ill of the entire idea of so called hate crimes.

THE INEXPLICABLY STUPID STATE DEPARTMENT WONKS

The headline at the Hill captures it all. It's absolutely true. How stupid does one have to be to fail to understand that ALL foreign policy is the realm of the President of the United States and not that of the people who work for him? The President makes foreign policy and owns it: all of it.

Yet here we are with a show trial in the House carried out by the ignoratti as if they had some sort of beef with the President. There was a fable once about this sort of idiocy.

THE MORTIFICATION

If one thinks about it, some people who are die-hard democrats must surely feel some sense of shame and embarrassment that they support exactly what is happening in places like California. They support every single shingle of the Cali democrat and yet they can see what this has led to for the vast majority of people living in the state with almost one third of its people in poverty, a third nearing it and just 5% of so living robustly on the coast while making the rest of California a third world country. Of course, that 5% is watching the cities turn into the typical third world sewer of a place but they don't care because Californiastan is also home to the gated community and none of the 5% most involved in wrecking California live in the actual cities.

I used to live there in various places. I remember San Diego started to go a little bit crazy shortly after Orange County arranged to bankrupt itself and before they tossed Randy "Duke" Cunningham, my Congressman, in jail for living on a boat in DC. He was 'corrupt' or 'taking a bribe', not like Nancy Pelosi who steered billions of $ to her husband's business, or was that Diane Feinstein. Macht nich.

I also lived in the Bay Area and dated a girl who lived in the city. I can't imagine the awful feeling it must be to have to park one's car 10 blocks from home in Pacific Heights because there is no parking closer at 2200 at night when you get there. I had the good fortune to date a girl living across the street from a hospital, a cheapo hospital, that had a parking garage right across the street. I could pull in and park anytime after 2200 and the barriers were up (no attendant) and leave before 0600 when the bars were still up and no attendant. I had to be in San Jose NLT 0700 so I was up early.

I just wonder sometimes how any democrat who votes that way doesn't see that what they're voting for in the short term is 3rd world conditions, increased immigration from economic migrants which slams the working poor who are citizens who never get a pay raise because there are always migrants willing to work for little money, hired by people who don't have to worry about paying their social security, FICA, etc taxes. These are some of our topnotch legal citizens. How many female supreme court nominees got their nominations pulled because they hired nannies and didn't pay the required taxes? A couple, maybe as many as a bunch.

What the Democratic Party shower of sh#t  candidates reveal is that they are hard over to create here in America, all of it, the same kind of hellhole created by Castro, Chavez, Maduro, Mexico, They know it to be true and they don't appear to care. None of them seem to have any real feeling for their fellow citizens.

These are the kind of people that turned AIDS into an epidemic. They are the ones that gave us all the crazy mad lunatics that now own our streets and beat people and kill with impunity because nobody can lock them up in the name of safety for the rest of society. They're also the kind of people that think that Trump must be guilty of some crime and look under every rock while at the same time dismissing and ignoring the real, no shit crimes of Hillary and Biden and most of the rest of the nomenklatura running the Deep State.

They effortlessly gut institutions in the name of social justice and having trashed it, move on to kill another institution that maintains the old ways and the old morality and they do it because they just know they're better than those guys. It is always profoundly weird that they don't know who led the Civil Right campaign and passed the Civil Rights legislation and who actually maintained the rights of man.

Admittedly, "Je Maintiendrai" is the motto of the House of Orange. I daresay most democrats would geld and strangle themselves before letting such a motto pass their lips given their contempt for the President they call Orangeman. I will maintain.

ONE OF THE LOST

The USS Grayback (SS-208), reported overdue and missing since March 1944, has been found. I didn't realize that there is a project to find all of our submarines still on eternal patrol.

IT WAS OVER

An entire generation of young men came to the end of a stupid war that cost them their lives and well-being. It finally came to an end in the 11th month on the 11th day at the 11th hour and you know there was some rat bastard out there shooting right up until the cease fire took effect in 1918.

Once the slaughter was over the French went to work to guarantee that the Germans would only slake their hatred with the blood of Frenchmen even if it took another generation for them to recover from the wounds inflicted by the 'peace' of Versailles.

Today is the day we remember the ones who fought for this country. When I was a boy it took the form of parades and yeah I even remember seeing some of the surviving doughboys march by when I was a boy in Carlisle. They were wearing the uniforms they had been issued some 45 years before but they were still spry enough to march in the line with the new veterans home from the war in Indo-China and with the veterans from the Korean War, World War II and the Cold War as  it slowly consumed men and wealth stolen from 3 generations in a fight so many idiots are eager to recapitulate and so bring about more human misery and suffering as they convince themselves and the other people too stupid to live, that socialism/communism/fascism is just the thing for fixing America.

It's enough to make a grown man cry. You see, the Cold War ended as it was foredoomed to end with the failure of every single communist state as each fell so far behind the West that there was no hope of competing. They're all nation states now and each seems bent on wiping out the vestiges of what ruined them for over 50 years, even Russia. The stubborn holdout is Cuba which is slowly starving to death because they chose a form of government so fucked up it cannot even feed its people on a tropical island paradise. They have been joined by the likes of Venezuela and that is quickly circling the drain as it is emptied of wealth, people and prosperity and looted by the victors who took power in their last 'free and fair' elections.

It is aggravating to watch the Democrats do everything in their power to make an enemy out of Russia which is barely a tithe of America. Russia still has the means to wage thermonuclear war but lacks both the will and any reason for waging such a war.

Interesting times now but hopefully our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen will finally knock the dust of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Africa from their boots and come home to stay. And with them will probably come most of our armed forces in Europe's old countries of what used to be the NATO alliance. It's been a long time since NATO meant anything at all and it's probably time to push it into the dustbin of history alongside the Washington Naval Treaties, the Kellog-Briand Pact and the League of Nations.

TAKING A LITTLE TRIP

Heading a little north of west.

THE MEDIA IN THE WILD

An excellent point and a part of why I don’t believe the media about much of anything.

CALIFORNIA VALLEY AUTHORITY

I have read a number of articles describing California's descent into the Dark Ages as the fires waste the land and the electricity operates like it does in any other third world country. Those of my bent casually mention the causes for the fires, the idiotic policies behind the causes of the fires and the impact of the fires and the random electricity supply and sometimes mention that the smart people who can see just a little into the future are leaving.

I haven't actually read or seen a single thing that describes how California plans to deal with the impact of moronic legislators passing really stupid laws limiting utility companies ability to maintain their lines safely.  I just read an article in the Sunday NYT by Manjoo and his is the only article I've seen that even gives lip service to the FACT that this is the new normal condition for California from now on every time the wind blows. His solution is as stupid as the NYT usually is.

He proposes that people and business be forced to locate in urban cores that build up, not out and cut back on the people living in the wildlands. He never gives even a peep to limiting the brush and fuel loads in the forests or doing what every other state's utility companies do which is to clear the trees and brush away from the transmission lines. Not a peep. He also neglects to mention that these so-called 'wildlands' are cities and towns with up to 90,000 people living in them.

It's odd that we don't see more states spontaneously bursting into flames every time the wind blows. They must be doing something different.

I read last week that San Jose was looking at buying, at bankruptcy auction, what it wanted/needed out of the PG&E equipment and creating its own electric company to service the city of San Jose and perhaps the airport and the outlying bedroom communities. That strikes me as a wise investment but it does leave me wondering about the poor bastards living back in the hills and hollows well removed from San Jose and other like minded self-generating city utility companies. Will we need to recreate something like Rural Electrification and build a sort of California Valley Authority along the lines of the TVA to send power to the poor benighted losers living in places that time forgot?

In 1996 Californians did something really stupid.

This bill would prohibit any person, corporation, electrical
corporation, or local publicly owned electric utility or other
governmental entity other than a retail customer's existing electric
service provider as of December 20, 1995, from providing electric
service to a retail customer of a publicly owned electric utility
unless the customer pays to the utility currently providing electric
service, a nonbypassable generation-related severance fee or
transition charge, as defined, established by the regulatory body for
that utility. 

The bill would prohibit a local publicly owned electric utility or
other governmental entity from providing electrical service to a
retail customer of an electrical corporation unless that customer
pays a nonbypassable transition charge to the electrical corporation. 

The bill would require the local regulatory body of each local
publicly owned electric utility to determine whether it will
authorize direct transactions between electricity suppliers and end
use customers, subject to implementation of the nonbypassable
severance fee or transition charge, and provide for procedures to
implement the direct transactions.

As you know, we're dealing here with California so the losers told themselves that they did this all in the name of increasing competition in the delivery of electricity. You see how that worked out, right? What was the effect of the California legislation?

Provisions of AB 1890

The Electric Utility Industry Restructuring Act (Assembly Bill 1890) makes the generation of electricity competitive in California. The legislation became law on September 23, 1996.

Before restructuring, a single utility provided each customer with generation, transmission, distribution, and metering and billing of electricity. As of March 31, 1998, the new structure allows customers in most, but not all, existing electric utility service areas to choose their electric generation supplier.

Restructuring also brings changes to the transmission of electricity. Previously restricted transmission facilities will be opened to power generators on a fair and equitable basis, overseen by a new organization, the Independent System Operator (ISO). The ISO has been given the responsibility for assuring reliability of the high voltage transmission system. Local utilities will continue to distribute electricity.

You see that the ISO was given 100% of the responsibility for assuring reliability of the high voltage transmission system and yet who does California blame for their ongoing disasters? Not the ISO. In a way, this captures the very essence of so-called 'net neutrality' and what happens under that regime.

I suppose the question now is, would you get on an elevator in California?

SAVE THE VEGETABLES - SAVE THE PLANET!

A little spiritual enlightenment for Saturday. 

MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING

I'm sure it has occurred to some people that there may be some truth to the proposition that mankind itself is responsible for rising temperatures somewhere or other. On the other hand some of us who have traveled the world wonder just exactly how does one measure the temperature of the whole earth in the same way we wonder about people who claim that sea levels are rising. How does one measure the rising sea level when the earth is subject to tides from the pull of the sun and the moon and they vary depending on where the moon is in the equation which is why we have spring tides and neap tides.

Nonetheless, I have finally come around to  accept that there is some truth to the man made global warming theory. It's caused by a bunch of lying thieves who have slowly been corrupting the climate databases going back centuries so they can lower the observed temperatures in the past and raise the temperatures as they come closer to the present time and by carefully including all the data from sensors in the various heat islands while discarding or massaging the more pristine wilderness sensor observations.

So it is clear to me now that if global warming is man made, it's made entirely with pencils, erasers and computers.