USS INDIANAPOLIS

Sunk in the Philippine Sea 75 years ago with the greatest loss of life in a single ship disaster ever experienced by the USN. Everything done up until the moment the torpedoes hit her was done well but everything after that was a tragedy and it was all made worse by the scapegoating carried out by the Navy high command back in Washington, DC. The survivors would not be rescued from the sea for another 4 days after the ship sank.

NADLER AND THE NEW SOCIALISTS

Watching the awful performance of the democrats on the Judiciary Committee yesterday as they attempted to brutalize the Attorney General brought up a memory from the past. I knew their histrionics reminded me of something. This afternoon it came to me. We have these guys sitting as a court representing the democrats in Congress.



I'd be ashamed if I was a democrat.

NOW AND FOREVER

After a day peering at the idiots that ran their fabulously stupid scam against the Attorney General when he was called to testify in front of them a little interlude of music is called for. All those idiots are nothing but sheep. The ruler called them, laid down the law and told them to denigrate and degrade the AG as much as possible with stupid accusations and then 'reclaim their time' so he cannot answer them. Just how did they imagine that looks when it is compiled into a 30 second ad and people see the petty little demons at play in Congress?

ANOTHER WONDERMENT

Have all the Walkers and whossnames perished who gave the Soviet Union access to Task Group Orestes? I wonder because one of the questions we might now know the answer to is, did the USSR collapse after finally learning what the hell we really are which is what they would finally have learned after reading our daily Top Secret radio traffic and realizing that never in a million years could they be as good as we used to be on a bad day? While I'm not vengeful I hope they linger here yet since they still owe a great deal of suffering. They didn't sell out the country to convince the Soviets that winning was only slightly more impossible then simply keeping up. They sold out for money.

A WORLD OF HURT

My computer flamed out a couple of hours after my last post. It has taken me awhile to kick it back into action. I don't have any idea how computers work so I use a macbook and Time Machine to back it up. It took me a little longer than I thought it would to marry the two back together and get it working again.

That said, we left with the world in flames and we return with the the idiotic parts of the world in flames. What's going on in the Blue strongholds in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York, DC and the other stupid cities must be having the same affect on most people as root canal without anesthesia. I still catch the odd moment of our foe trying to blame it all on Trump but surely people are not that stupid. Are they? People can see that the policies the democrats advocate and put in place in those places seem to have energized a beast of great hatred to go after all authority and the past without remorse.

At any rate, so long as he refrains from raising his hand against the arsonists, rioters, shooters and killers running amok in those crappy hellholes he will almost certainly win because anybody with a brain can see who is behind the violence and anarchy and it sure as hell isn't him or the rethuglicans.

A certain amount of truth is now moving to the forefront and it may prove illuminating:

- The Navy has a couple of problems that it cannot resolve in the current context of things. It totally screwed the pooch when it killed officer training in the surface warfare community and left it to the older guys on each ship to give some instruction and teach leadership. Now they have some really ignorant officers and very very few actual leaders.
   
   They compounded that mistake by deciding and acting as if sailor quality of life was the be all-end all of life in the Navy. I and my peers stood 3 or 4, sometimes 5 section duty inport throughout the Cold War and it wasn't because the powers that be liked us to stay on the ship to save money. Nope. We were there for several purposes outside the normal scope of folks knowledge. First, we were the Duty Section and were trained to fall in on a Repair Locker and grab the gear necessary to fight any kind of fire, stop any kind of leak and keep the ship afloat and unburned. In addition to that, we also kept the ship safe from intentional kinds of harm. Nuclear capable ships had to have a full Security Alert Team and Back Up Alert Force to keep some things safe at any cost. Those guys were in addition to the repair party since you could not do both jobs at the same time with the same people. Finally, it gave younger sailors their best chance to complete their Professional on hands training to learn enough to pass the tests to advance in rate and to satisfy the other requirements that demanded. I think they scrapped all that stuff decades ago. It shows. They decided they could go into 10 duty sections and just man a single hose to fight fires with untrained sailors most of whom are probably not qualified.r

-  At some point people are going to wake up and wonder just where all these trillions and trillions of dollars are coming from that are flying out of the Congress and the Fed and the answer isn't pretty. They're just making it up and all those who are worried about their grandkids having to pay the debts being racked up today and yesterday don't have to worry. It is impossible to ever repay that debt even as it stands now, never mind as it grows again by 2 and 3 trillion $ deficits every year from now on, more if people elect Democrats.

-  People are seriously trying to convince you that we need to prep for War with China. All you have to do in that regard is ask a simple question nobody ever seems to ask: How do we win a war with China? We can't win one in Afghanistan or anyplace else we've fought since 1945 and the last one we did win took nuclear weapons. We really don't want a war with China. There is no conceivable way to win one or break even.

-  The virus has revealed the cracks in the education system from top to bottom. Why are people going into debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands of $ for a meaningless degree in 'studies'? Why do students have to appear in corpus to receive instruction when it is now made clear that they can get it online or simply read it out of books and have tutors assist with the tricky bits? As I understand it the old school was the first 3 years were teaching the kids to read and after that they taught themselves most subjects and I'm pretty sure computer courses could teach every level of math just fine. Do you really have to dissect a frog, yourself? Do they still do that?

- The K-12 are a failing enterprise for about 50% of the inmates. They never learned to read. They're of little use in modern society in America. If we need unskilled labor that works hard all the hours of the day we hire Mexicans. They work their asses off. What do we do with young adults that can't read, don't know anything and won't work?

- Still, that's nothing compared to the colleges and universities. At one time they were the rendezvous for young adults with the shared goal of learning and then moving on. That ended in the 60's and it is now so rare as to be very hard to find. Oh sure you say, the schools are stuffed with inmates students but there's a catch. Some staggeringly huge percentage of them never graduate. They rack up the debts just fine but they fail to make the grade, even today, even if they are colored. The colleges and universities rely on them to pay those Diversity Directors their $500,000/annum salaries and that won't change. Most of the schools are broke.

-  The Savage War of Peace we are engaged in right now with China is having an impact on the schools too. Most of the students actually paying the full tuition come from China and the President and Chinese actions have brought that to an end for now. Trump won't relent because why should he? We don't have any of our students in Chinese universities hoovering up all the red hot Chinese technology so we don't lose by curtailing their ability to send their students here to  hoover up our technology. It's a great pity that we have very few young people interested in the hard sciences to take their place but that will change when,

- We finally have a President who ends the abomination of the suicide visa option that lets Silicon Valley firms hire Indians and other lesser lights to come to America to take the jobs away from the American doing them and pay the new guys half the going rate for the same job. I think there would be more interest in the jobs if people sensed that they would have a job when they graduate after a hard slog getting a BS or MS in the hard sciences.

We've got cities here full of people who have realized that they have no meaningful future in this country as it exists now and think the only thing they can do is use violence to change it into something they think would improve their outcomes.

Did anybody think that some jackass would try to kick off a race war in the 21st century here in America? This place looks more surreal every day.

INTERESTING

I read this article just now and the author asks a question. He hustles around the berry bush but he doesn't actually have a clue about the answer. I know what it is. You should too.

When I was a Commander working at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command I watched something amazing happen and nobody at all saw it or wrote about it. I did but that was back when USENET was a thing.

What happened was that when Obama took power he and his party set out to destroy the military. They didn't do it the old fashioned way with rockets, bombs and infantry. What they did was a lot more soulless. Working with the Clinton machine they simply arranged for the worst possible officers to get promoted to flag rank and to get advanced to 3 and 4 stars. Starting with their war on Bosnia you could watch as the leadership of the military declined to about a 90 IQ.

The larger issue that most people would miss from Bryan McGrath's article is, why does it take 2 and a half years to weld steel and run some wires to fix a ship? It didn't use to and the ships aren't really any more complex than they used to be. That's a myth people like to believe. It's steel and wires. Yeah there are the finicky details but those were thrashed out 30 years ago.

Ship construction funds are like the gold of Congress and they are doled out to truly deserving Congresscritters and Senators and they always have been. We are paying a ridiculous premium for shipyards that don't actually build or repair ships so the tap will remain open and the dollars will flow. Yes, even as I write that I realize that I sound like an old codger but it's true. The Bonhomme Richard will almost certainly be towed 300 yards to NASCO shipyard for repairs and the repairs will take about 3 years. That's the optimist in me. In reality there is little chance it will make fiscal sense to repair a 20 year old ship gutted by a fire that burned for 4 days.

I read everything Dan Gallery DDLM wrote. I may have reached my Pueblo Incident moment. I think he was probably about this old when he wrote it.

The Bonhomme Richard fire raises another question: How tough and survivable can a ship be in combat if it is burning out of control in port during peacetime? While it takes three to five years to build a modern warship, there are very few places to do so. And, as was recently shown by the two-and-a-half years of repairs to the USS Fitzgerald after its 2017 collision, it takes time to repair major damage to a modern warship. Some will look at this fire and conclude that continuing to build and operate large, vulnerable ships makes little sense in an age of proliferating anti-ship missiles and greater visibility of ship movements through a variety of sensors.

There's something nobody talks about. In that crew of 1100 people? It takes just one enemy of civilization to torch it. And there is nothing anybody can do to stop it.

ASKED AND ANSWERED

I really don't care about political spectrum but

do you really want an 87 year old cancer patient deciding the law?

BURNING SHIPS

USN warships are designed from the keel up to catch fire and burn. That's why they have extensive fire fighting equipment literally built in at the outset. One really wants to catch a fire and put it out before it can take hold. Every sailor on my ship was extensively trained to do just that with the fire fighting agents at hand. In my last seagoing job I think we averaged a fire a day. It was back in the early 80s, old wooden fuel/lube oil soaked ship and I remember we were getting our quarterly fire fighting damage control assessment from the Group. That guy was walking down the pier at 0730 when the quarterdeck watch did everything right. They passed word over the 1MC telling all that there was a class c fire in compartment so and so. A half minute later they reported to the whole ship announcing the fire was out and a minute or so later announced the reflash watch was set.

right by the Main Brace so at least they could get a cold one before heading back into the fire

you have to know ship fires to realize just how pointless this is

Back then in my world the switchboard watch could terminate most class charlie (electrical fires) by simply opening the breaker on the switchboard for that piece of gear/part of ship. It was the Chiefs who had trained them to do that instantly without looking around for somebody to tell them what to do. A good engineer would hold fire fighting training every single day in port and at sea so the duty sections which changed every so often knew how to deal with it as a team. You used to be able to drive ships OK without a spec of electricity. Boilers didn't care. Neither did diesels. I can't recall running a gas turbine without electricity. I kind of doubt it could be done but I could also be wrong.

I wrote the watch bills for the whole ship and yet one of the things I never really had to bother with was the repair locker leader assignments to the crew. There was a number one nozzleman, there was a hoseman, there was a backup nozzle man for the applicator and hosemen for him as well. I was supposed to know each of their qualifications and when it reached idiotic levels, their dates of qualification or expected date if not quite qualified in writing. I didn't worry about it too much.

What the navy had was an ethos that required one truly good petty officer in place at the right time to deal with anything. We did that. Maybe we got lucky but there were only a couple of times that I can remember so well when I thought maybe we'd screwed up.  That was back when I was trying to fight a ship with just 23 men on it when it was designed to be fought by a full crew of 100. 18 of them didn't appear to have any qualifications at all but still our Group commander insisted that we keep our schedule and get underway. We did once do it for four days and nights and I had to explain to the CO that this would mean me being fast asleep on watch since I was the only Engineering Officer of the Watch, Top Watch, etc and that we had probably better be at anchor at those times so the qualified guys minding the generators were awake and on watch. Power and light 24 hours a day, oh, and firemain pressure of at least 100 psi.

There was a big difference between my experience and that of the crew in the ship above.  I knew from reading the history of my last ship class that any one of the hundred we had built could burn to the waterline and sink in under 12 minutes. The idea of fighting fires for 4 days and not sinking were not in the cards. We knew exactly how long it took to burn one down to the waterline because we did it a couple of times over the decades. The only survivor I remember was Enhance. It burned quite a bit during OPERATION ENDSWEEP and then it did it again later in SOCAL. Most of the rest that burned hard were simply discarded. There were, after all, a hundred of them.

The thing about the little ships was they had big fire fighting systems. It starts with fire hoses and huge pumps, CO2 smothering, HALON smothering and our favorite, Twin Agent which was a mix of water and foam to smother fires and our least favorite which was huge flasks of PKP; in both engine rooms and oddly enough, on the Damage Control deck above.

I did enjoy reading just a moment ago in the link that Pinnacle got hit by USS Forrestal way back when and

Atlantic 01/20/56: The USS James V. Forrestal (CVA-59) collides with the USS Pinnacle (MSO-462) at Norfolk, Virginia, slightly damaging the Pinnacle.

We kind of did that once when a new CO was trying to moor the ship his first time driving in 3 years and we kind of ran into USS Wainwright in Mina Sulman and left an insignificant tiny dent in her stern. Very embarrassing. At some point one simply accepts that the old skills have atrophied by neglect and the passage of time and every ship handles differently.

Wainwright somewhere

CURIOUSLY

I don't actually watch the news charade here but is anyone else curious about why there has been almost no mention of a Presidential Election coming along in 4 months? As I remember, Trump was one of 20 running for the job and it filled the news all the time for months before the election. Now that he is running for reelection and Biden is the sacred camel of the left I haven't seen a peep about anything like an election other than a few Biden signs on people's yards and frankly, given the neighborhood, a stunning lack of them.

So because of that, we watched Groundhog Day last night. It's a wonderful movie.

THAT DOOMSDAY CLOCK?

I've been shrugging it off for decades. OTGH, this better be nonsense.

Frankly, I don't want to be here when a former naval power clashes with the Asian land power. I was never all that worried about the Russians. For all that they're 100% not like us in any way shape or form, they wouldn't and we wouldn't. I'm not so sanguine about the Chinese leaders. They kill millions without blinking and I don't think they'd hesitate to pull the nukes out of the closet. They won't even think twice.

Yeah yeah I was rereading Thucydides and Clausewitz and the hidden history of the world. Whatever war you want to name, viewed in retrospect, one could easily see as step by step, inch by inch they met on the battlefield neither side saw coming. Every single war.

On second thought, don't study history. Nobody ever learned anything from it.

ON BEING COLORFUL

When people tell you you’re their enemy, believe them and act accordingly.

I AM REALLY GLAD

Today, President Trump signed an Executive Grant of Clemency commuting the unjust sentence of Roger Stone, Jr.
He was a pure victim and road kill of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency.  There was never any collusion between the Trump Campaign, or the Trump Administration, with Russia.  Such collusion was never anything other than a fantasy of partisans unable to accept the result of the 2016 election.  The collusion delusion spawned endless and farcical investigations, conducted at great taxpayer expense, looking for evidence that did not exist.  As it became clear that these witch hunts would never bear fruit, the Special Counsel’s Office resorted to process-based charges leveled at high-profile people in an attempt to manufacture the false impression of criminality lurking below the surface.  These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice.This is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.  Roger Stone is well known for his nearly 50 years of work as a consultant for high-profile Republican politicians, including President Ronald Reagan, Senator Bob Dole, and many others.  He is also well known for his outspoken support for President Donald J. Trump and opposition to Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Stone was charged by the same prosecutors from the Mueller Investigation tasked with finding evidence of collusion with Russia.  Because no such evidence exists, however, they could not charge him for any collusion-related crime.  Instead, they charged him for his conduct during their investigation.  The simple fact is that if the Special Counsel had not been pursuing an absolutely baseless investigation, Mr. Stone would not be facing time in prison.

In addition to charging Mr. Stone with alleged crimes arising solely from their own improper investigation, the Mueller prosecutors also took pains to make a public and shameful spectacle of his arrest.  Mr. Stone is a 67-year-old man, with numerous medical conditions, who had never been convicted of another crime.  But rather than allow him to surrender himself, they used dozens of FBI agents with automatic weapons and tactical equipment, armored vehicles, and an amphibious unit to execute a pre-dawn raid of his home, where he was with his wife of many years.  Notably, CNN cameras were present to broadcast these events live to the world, even though they swore they were not notified—it was just a coincidence that they were there together with the FBI early in the morning.

Not only was Mr. Stone charged by overzealous prosecutors making up an elaborate hoax aka case that never should have existed, and arrested in an operation that never should have been approved, but there were also serious questions about the jury in the case.  The forewoman of his jury, for example, concealed the fact that she is a member of the so-called liberal “resistance” to the Trump Presidency.  In now-deleted tweets, this activist-juror vividly and openly attacked President Trump and his supporters.

Mr. Stone would be put at serious medical risk in prison.  He has appealed his conviction and is seeking a new trial.  He maintains his innocence and has stated that he expects to be fully exonerated by the justice system.  Mr. Stone, like every American, deserves a fair trial and every opportunity to vindicate himself before the courts.  The President does not wish to interfere with his efforts to do so.  At this time, however, and particularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence.  Roger Stone has already suffered greatly.  He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case.  Roger Stone is now a free man!

Under the radar I kind of hope he is doing something of like for general Flynn and maybe using a tithe of the money he has to make Flynn's family whole as they have fought off the dogs we now charmingly refer to as liberal progressives.

IT'S A VIRUS

What part of that are stupid people missing? It will always be here. It's never some day going to be pre-virus, EVER. Not even if the justice department decides to overthrow Trump.

SUICIDE WATCH

Has Robert Maxwell's daughter killed herself in jail yet? We're waiting.....

THIS IS AMERICA!

Honestly, did you ever think you'd see Americans lining up in order to shop for food?

A LESSON AND SAD THING

During my military career I found myself as the judge, jury, executioner a little too often for comfort. I was the ship's legal officer on first ship and would sit in the CO's cabin watching him stomp around shouting and working himself up to a semblance of rage and then shouting for me to bring in the accused along with the Master at Arms and other denizens of the deep justice. Once the accused was squared away and confronted with the tiny CO, justice happened. This was long ago and very far away and justice was mostly doled out for drug using. What we had in our justice 'tool bag' was the drug detector dogs flown in from 6th Fleet specially for us and the urinalysis wizz quiz. I was involved in perhaps a dozen such cases. Didn't enjoy them at all and, oddly, none of the defaulters were mine. A couple were the Main Propulsion Assistants and the CHENG allowed as how he couldn't use them anymore for watchstanding purposes because of a complete failure of trust. We were hovering at 50% manning and hadn't gone cold iron in over a year because we always needed at least one boiler online and two SSTG rolling for ship's power.

The trust thing was germane and interesting to me later on as senior watch officer on a far different ship but still sailing the same waters. The CO had busted a man a rank and docked his pay for 3 months because a couple of staff officers accused him of being asleep on a bs watch, which meant that in order to get into the Bahraini shipyard, owned by Bahrainis, managed by a Scottish engineer and employing scores of Pakistanis, Iranian, Beloots, etc, he had to be honked at by staff in order to open the huge antipersonnel barrier which is to say, a bar across the causeway granting access to cars, buses, truck bombs etc. Most people just walked around it.

A day after his Mast appearance the Captain came to me, white faced and shaking and asked me wtf?!!!!! I looked at him like I do and he said, I just bumped into Petty Officer '******stick and he was carrying a shotgun. I figured out then that he'd bumped into pointless meaningless topside security roving patrol that MIDEASTFOR also mandated for its ships pierside although it seemed totally redundant given the two guys manning the 50 calibre machine guns port and starboard. It was a very small ship. You'd think a machine gun guy, much less two, would intimidate the fu#k out of anybody.

So, back to the issue which was a court decision about Oberlin and their idiotic policy. The court found for the man. But the thing I started out writing was about the nature of the thing and that is pretty crucial. As a CO one of the things I hated and I'm sure many others hated was the entire nature of the nature of the "crime." If it boils down to 'he said/she said' you are left with a judgement call for there is no evidence at all. Who do you trust more is basically what it boils down to. Sometimes it's like, who is more important/essential?

It took me a couple of months to move on Chief Patty's request for judgement and execution. She wanted the 3 male petty officers that disrespected her during the change of command a lot. to suffer justice a lot.

I finally had to take my outstanding XO to the side and ask him wft was going on with executive officer's investigation that was throwing up a Hoover Dam sized roadblock in the path of swift justice and he showed me the charge sheet. Disrespect is a violation of the UCMJ but that's not what was written there. The guys were not forthcoming and signing the necessary article 31 paperwork because she'd written in the death penalty violations of the UCMJ, mutiny, assault, etc. They had all told her that as senior petty officers it was beneath their dignity to stow away folding chairs. It didn't warrant death penalty and the whole thing was a farce. They could not, as rational beings, accept no legal rights in the face of such dire claims and penalties. It was an easy fix.

I faced the other justice a few times when it really did amount to he said/she said. It did not end well. I remember sitting as judge a few times in Summary courts martial and as a review board member where all 3 of us on the panel tried mightily to get the accused idiot to reconsider and say......'oh, yea, now I remember, the wife and I did attend a potluck party and maybe there was something odd about the brownies I ate.' All of us wanted to keep him in but there was a zero tolerance craze on at the time and we could not get him to give us any wriggle room. He and his lawyer kept doing the impossible and trying to say that the scientific evidence of his crime was wrong. The thing is? Sometimes the actual science of the thing is irrefutable and we know it.

I hated he said she said cases. Absent evidence, where is the crime?

I really dislike the mockery of justice the schools have played on their students for the last generation. I know where my justice came from. It came from the UCMJ which is an implement of the U.S. Congress and President. How Title 9 turned into the antichrist of justice was eye-opening. As in having your eyes ripped open.

OH YEAH

It's very late at night in NYC. Has Robert Maxwell's daughter managed to kill herself in her jail cell yet? You know the one. The one with no functioning video systems. Or do we still have to wait?

You know what I see 100% of the media skipping over is who she really is. She's not a 'madam', not a hooker, not a high price girl friend of a scumbag. Funny how the media keeps glossing it over and never mentioning it.

Anyway, just asking, for a friend.

SAD BUT TRUE

You know, if there was somewhere, a nice statue standing in a park or outside Tiffany's someplace, of Audrey Hepburn standing there alone, unarmed and unafraid, I'm sure a mob of rich white college kids would be there to slap it around and knock it down before sunrise, in the spirit of blm. Which begs the question, is there a statue somewhere of Audrey kitted out for tiffany's or for her role as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador? There is. But I'll never say where.

NEVER USED MUSIC AS MY RUDDER IN LIFE

That said, I learned very young how to sail by nothing but the set of the sails. Mine were set for music.

I was no purist. I only bothered once with hi-end stereo stuff and left it unimpressed in my wake.

The music that moved me, perforce moved the boat.

We didn't have a cheap boat but one that embraced a world without perfect reproduction in sound,
we found we lived it with it quite nicely.

I never recall a moment bereft in the doldrums of sound.

Wherever I was, the music was there.

Loud and clear.

There is a knack I've lost

It used to be that I could listen all at once to IAD, MAD, BTB, Plot and Sonar at the same time,

more than that, I heard them all as they came in and processed them,

I heard Praying Mantis over IAD, MAD, BTB and from Plot as I was doing another thing.

I was hunting the mine that was right there in front of me plus the 4 beside it.

It was a different kind of day. Not much different. There'd been scores like it yesterday

Before those days all was like a map one could read at a glance

After that, I found I lost the knack.

It was just radio, or tv, or reading and no longer the trinity.

as with tonight, I find that I really miss most the music in my life.

HELMUTH AND BOSKONE

Have we worked out yet who are the speakers for:
Boskone
the Eich
the Ploor

just asking for a friend.

PIG IGNORANT

You can look at the title a couple of different ways. It can be blm attitude towards the police, police attitudes towards the media and blm and it could be a description of the so-called intelligentsia of this country who make up so many of the Fortune 500 CEOs and CEO of high tech silicon valley society disruptors and destroyers. Unfortunately, it also includes almost all public school teachers and over 99% of college faculty everywhere. For all of them, the 60s never ended. Powerline has some of Moynihan's quotes but I recall reading his prescient book out of that era while I was still in college 40 years ago.

In 1970, Moynihan wrote a memo to President Nixon saying, "The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of 'benign neglect'. The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades."

Nothing changed in the next 50 years except that all involved became even more hysterical, paranoid and vicious. As other commenters have noted, we quite literally have a conversation about race in this country with anyone speaking in opposition to the mainstream hysterics getting destroyed, deplatormed, demonetized and losing their jobs. It seems an unreasonable price to pay for simply disagreeing. As we watch the black death rates just from shootings alone soar in the major cities, all democratic party bastions for generations, the one thing we can all take away is that blm losers got every single thing wrong about police behavior and its impact on crime. And so did the damned intelligentsia.

“To a degree that no one could have anticipated even three or four years ago, the educated elite of the American middle class have come to detest their society, and their detestation is rapidly diffusing to youth in general. The effects of this profound movement of opinion will be with us for generations. . .

If all the intelligentsia had studied very hard to be more ignorant, stupid, and misinformed, they couldn't do it. They have reached peak ignorance and it's killing them.

ON THE GROUSE

The secret is, it's a virus. It is never ever going to go away. You have to learn to live with it or not and the enemy treating it as some sort of thing that could simply be overcome by presidential leadership is no longer funny. It never was. 

Please, it's the flu with adenoids and maybe a bad hair day.

Long ago we stopped into the Air Force Officers Club at Air Force Academy. For me it was a lark. It was the covid virus of clubs. I'm not sure why it still exists. All the military  shamebenders  wanted them dead about 40 years ago and they got their wish, over time. Still, I remember a ltcol coming in to stand tall behind the ltcol next to us, all 3 of us being at the bar at the time and bashing him about something. Upstairs in the Grand Concourse of crap was some meeting of wives going on with an attending general.

UPDATE: OK, it was the general badgering him.

I'll tell you a secret. When your junior officers can no longer go to have a beer and let off steam in an unapproved unpolitically correct fashion, you're out of leaders. After NASA, the Air Force lost them, the navy STB when they closed the Main Brace. I'm not even going to look. Knowing them, they shut it down decades ago. So did ship captain crew...last played in Diego Garcia O'club, 1984.

EVERY DAY

I open the computer to this, a picture I took when we went to a nice place. It's the ship of fools. There were so many. Every day I can hear them grousing about what a crap day it is, no water, nothing to w
well, you know. A sailor born almost a thousand years ago griping. I put some of those days behind me about 10 years ago now. I'm thinking of taking them up again. This was at Point Loma.

Perhaps, I'll go sailing.

I'll have to fix the lights though. Damn the lights.

UPDATE: Those were the Caravels, the ships of exploration for a hundred years. The wonder wasn't so much that they made it to the new world or India, it was that they made it back for however well they were outfitted at the outset in Lisbon and elsewhere, they had to resupply to return and they were tiny ships with men of voracious appetites and a terrible thirst. I don't actually think whining was allowed. Me? I merely have to delve into the electronics of my trunk to find out why the lights work so well when they're braced in the trunk and not at all when they're braced on the aft end of my boat trailer.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA

Have a beer, a Moscow Mule, a bit of happy. It's America!

If you never read it, try it now. America Shaftoe and her brothers, well worth a read. Neal Stephensen

EPSTEIN'S MISSTRESS HANGS HERSELF

She was taken into custody for sex crimes by the FBI. You know the death penalty is always imposed on such brothelish crimes that occurred during the Clinton presidency. Srsly, arrested, confined for sex that may have happened 23 years ago. What on earth will the FBI do for an encore to this investigative genius? Yea, I know, they'll find something else from the NYT to investigate.

SAURON SMILES

All Mordor rejoices, in the most painful manner possible in their grim and horrible blighted land as the foundation that owns the ship announces plans for the hated High Endurance Cutter (an arm of the Law Enforcement Community still reluctantly celebrated in a once noted town) to be erased from history by the stroke of a war pen. It isn't really open to interpretation. Obliterating the name serves no other purpose than destroying history. Taney delivered the position of 7 of 9 Justices of the Supreme Court in their decision about Scott.

"We are not erasing history," James Piper Bond, CEO of Living Classrooms Foundation, said in a statement. "Nor is it our intention to minimize the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have served with honor aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Taney. Our intention is to learn from history and celebrate the legacy of the ship and those who served aboard." 

He's erasing history. What else do you call it when you blot out the name of a ship because you have a sudden hate on for the people who died 180 years ago?

If you have never actually troubled to read the Dred Scott story. Hit the link. It's fascinating and brief.

A SIMPLE THING

You might think getting a cold beer on a hot day in a river/great lake kind of emporium with a breeze blowing through the patio and maybe a calzone was a thing you could actually do in a day while minding the cat. Not here in metroparkcentralis. I think it fair to say I gave it every chance to find a place that catered to humans interested in lunch, a beer and sunshine. What an idiot.

Strike lake view/river view off the sheet of possibilities. Not happening. For some reason best known to city planners, they all decided that such venues would be a waste of the taxpayers waterfront views of dumps, airports, salt mines, slag heaps etc. You get the drift. Toss in the odd steel mill for breakfast viewing.

Add to that the Corona terror and, "you can't just step onto the patio you prole! You must go through the virus vector shop first!" Um, no. No I don't.

"We'd love to talk to you as we get ready to open in 2 hours but no, there's no hope of actually getting a beer here in our Osan kind of open windows shop at just after 1400. Best bet is to die and go to heaven."

It was a beautiful day to shave the cat...... and get a beer and calzone. OTGH, we take what we can get even if we have to make it ourself.

 yeah yeah, there was a barge tied up on the bank but it was a very quiet barge (nobody there) and I had the river and the kayakers, shade, and birds and it was a cool refreshing day after all despite the merchants of 'bite me' who occupied the upper banks of the river and were the masters of "NO".

ON REPARATIONS

On the subject of paying for slaves. If you make me pay for them, I insist on owning them. When you work out how much that comes to per slave let me know so I can put my bid in early. I'm not going ahead anymore with the Great Society bullshit, just send me my slaves when I pay for them. I have a liking for Circassian slave girls, so be forthcoming when you start to dole them out.

Otherwise, I'm not paying.

Yours for a better future.

SRS PROBLEMS?

I enjoyed the movie. It was probably, for me, Hollywood's last gasp of Americana and even then they somehow managed to make a mockery of their intent. He starts out as a champion of the Bill of Rights and ends up as a gun grabber who denies the 2nd Amendment but I do like the bits about the rest. Politics has always been about making the sheep afraid so they vote tyrants more and more power. You see the end result of that in democrat controlled cities and states throughout all of history. It never ends well for the little people and it really sucks for the others when the State comes after them just exactly the way Putin's State went after the Oligarchs it created at the breakup of the Soviet Union.



Make you afraid. They try with something over which mankind has no real effect. They claim the climate will doom us because progress. The claim is marvelously unprovable and histrionic and yet the 16 year old autism types lap it up like the milk of human kindness. They want to save the planet by making you all live in the dark, cold and foodless world you get out of zero emissions and zero GMO foods. Covid 19, like MERS, SARS, Swine flu will be followed next year by another virus. The weather will change from year to year. Murder hornets will be like those Asian killer carp in the Great Lakes and we'll all mosey along just fine unless we believe that all black people are our friends. You pretty much  quintupled your odds of death if you believe that.

Let's also spend $trillions on meteor defense, for the planet. BLM demands it!