BLOGGER STILL SUCKS

BLOGGER SUCKS NOW

I read this article at I'm looking at blind in one eye these days, I no longer care. I agree in spades with the author of whatever link managed to get posted. I too used to read the Sunday NYT as if it mattered. I no longer bother and haven't for about 14 years. Used to be I would buy one at the book store in Solana Beach, drive to Del Mar and drink coffee at the Stratford for about as long as it took to read the Sunday NYT with endless refills.....then they caught on and more people would come and infest my Sunday reading spot. Darn them. In years of doing it, nobody came out to ask me to move along which is largely why I enjoyed sitting there in the Sunday morning reading a complete paper. Other people liked sitting on a patio in the sun by the Pacific Ocean and breakfasting and drinking coffee. Darn them.

BETTER FOR AMERICA'S INTERESTS?

Off hand I cannot think of any American interests in Iraq so this was funny. https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/09/27/u-s-plans-full-withdrawal-from-iraqi-embassy-n973408 BLOGGER has now managed to fuck up every single thing that was once easy and intuitive. FOAD Blogger.

WELL THAT TOOK NO TIME AT ALL

Idiot.

THE ABSOLUTE WRONGNESS

Don't read it.

otoh, know your enemy.

I READ THE LAST BOOK

 For about 20 years I chronicled my life. I pulled the last book off the shelf tonight and read it. It does what it was designed to do and proved evocative. I thought about things I hadn't thought about in decades. I stopped writing them in 99. There was a tiny hiatus until I took up blogging. I fucked up and got married. It proved to be the death of literature or words I wrote for myself.

KANT IS ALIVE AND WELL LIVING IN DENMARK

America is a country of muts. Has been for years. The countries of Europe were bastions of namism. An Englishman was English or possibly Scottish, by luck, Welsh. A French woman was purely French, Spanish were the all the same. Of course that is all not true anymore. Which made this  more amusing than it had to be. If you have not read On The Beautiful and the Sublime, try it again and laugh out loud as you see what once was: incontrovertible.

LOOKING FORWARD IN AMERICA

I can't wait to see how the left is going to describe President Trumps newest supreme court nominee as a rapist. They will. It's just a matter of time. Haters got to hate.

A NO KNOCK INVASION

 The only difference between a home invasion and the cops with no knock home invasions is that the cops wear bullet proof vests. In either event, go for head shots.

Yeah, I watched that video of a woman in a stadium arrested and cuffed after a long struggle by a cop simply because she wasn't wearing a mask in light density arena.

Some of them do a difficult job well enough. The rest are indistinguishable from the SS.

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A RARA AVIS

 Well, not exactly a bird but I did something tonight I have rarely done before and that was I deleted two blog posts that were extremely cryptic but where the lack of my words was to be explained by the hypertext links I put into the posts. In both cases the links were broken and unrecoverable so rather than simply confound people with nothing at all, I elected to delete them and so they are gone. Thank you to those who pointed out that the links were dead.

I typically like to confound people with my brilliance. I sometimes hear a "meh" from below and know I've overstepped my undeniable brilliance. She is my best critic.

NO KNOCK IS MURDER BY COP

This was murder by cop you don't have to agree but we should end it as a practice where the cops shoot innocent people in an armed invasion and where the ones who shoot back in response are charged with crimes against cops. I'm not alone in thinking this way. Every single person I've known over the last 55 years would treat a home invasion by cops exactly the same way they'd treat a home invasion.  Just how cops don't understand that is beyond me.

Invade a man's castle? He has a right to self defense. WACO. TWICE.

The latest gen, whatever they're called, probably don't see it. Their mother's didn't ever allow them to shoot guns in the boy scouts or the military service they declined and to be honest most of the sailors I knew were in that large group the admiral talked about that should never be allowed to handle firearms. "they'd do an injury to themselves." One might laugh but still it was tragic.

The ones in this country shooting the shit out of others are mostly black youths who just point and shoot as directed or when the whim takes them. Read https://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/. It is a description of an epic man made tragedy that just goes on and on.

ON ME

 I have never met any man like me. There was one who lived next door one year but I never really got to know him. My loss for he died. I still remember coming out the back door one day in the sun and he was sitting next door grading papers and he called out cheerily and asked if I was the Curtis writing to Lex on his blog and I said yes and then we knew each other briefly.

It turns out that he too had a book I read and enjoyed in college long ago but not as long ago as the book was written shortly after the Civil War. I'm reading it again late into the night. What are the chances that 2 men would read a hundred and 30 year old book? My copy died in the fire that consumed everything I had but here it is again in a different binding but of nearly the same vintage.

Copyright 1894. The roaring 90's. I lived/live in the place where that era thrived and made a country great. One place was a summer place for the creators of the era and the other place is one of the engines of that creation. If one counts silicon valley, I've lived in them all.

CAME HOME FROM A ROYALS GAME

I play the music from forgotten lands. I used to live in them, courtesy of the US Army. I lived everywhere in the US......that mattered although my mother found living with Junction City and Manhattan Kansas........a trial. We didn't, we were young. Fort Riley was, back then, a wonderful place to a boy with a bike. Redstone Arsenal not so much but Newport was a wonder. When I moved to the Bay area this resonated and it still does.

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back before blogger gooned itself a link would be the image. Now? It's all screwed up. Thanks for making it suck blogger.

SADLY, TRADITIONAL VIBE HAS GONE

 There is nothing there. It seems that he has left the building of great vastness.

ON STANDARDS

 I was replying to a comment posted below when it occurred to me to write a little about a fireman who reported aboard my ship in the month we spent in Diego Garcia getting a Tender Availability from arguably, the second worst tender in the Navy. USS Puget Sound was famous for several things but the one that endeared it to me during a TAV in the Persian Gulf alongside out at anchor in Sitrah was that it hadn't been able to fix its own air conditioning systems for over 3 years. I think it also got underway once out of San Diego and anchored off the Hotel Del Coronado and lost its anchor and 15 shots of anchor chain because it turns out when they hauled out the chain earlier that year, laid it on the dock, sand blasted it and then painted it they forgot to connect the bitter end to the padeye in the chain locker when they reloaded it onboard which meant the chain and anchor just roared off the wildcat when they took off the brake. Might be apocryphal. But I'd believe anything of them. I was told one of the 2 minesweepers in San Diego went out and found and buoyed the anchor and chain for recovery.

At any rate the Proteus was an AR and dated from the Ulithi Atoll in the second world war. It was old. In the parlance of the era, they had to sign off on the work list we submitted via our Damage Control Assistant, a CWO who flew to meet that ship where it was homeported in Guam. He gave them our list of required repairs and they promptly signed off on 998 of the 1000 jobs we wanted done. They utterly failed to sign off on the only two that mattered most. Both of them were my equipment as Auxiliaries Officer. 

Our 16,000 pound weapons and cargo elevator was destroyed by a chief electrician who used a comb to bypass all the interlocks and safeties on the elevator which then overtravelled the top deck bending 19 inch eye bolts over the sheaves and snapping 2 of the 4 cables. It then fell about 10 feet before the elevator safety system kicked in. Unfortunately those are little diamond knurled rollers that are kicked out by centripetal force as the elevator plunges towards the 6th decks down landing force magazine filled with explosives. It was locked in place and we couldn't shift it and they didn't try. They also refused to try to fix the bastard Bridging and Aircraft Crane that leaked about 3 gallons of 2190 TEP every single damned day. They took all the easy jobs and patted themselves on the back and then reassembled one of my diesel generator engines putting all the bearing surfaces in in reverse order which meant we couldn't start the damned thing until we took it back apart and put 1 through 6 bearing surfaces back in the proper positions. Irritating.

My CHENG was also a little irritated. He meant to rebrick both our boilers but that worthless AR shifted most of their resources to provide services to a nuclear submarine that showed out of the blue and it turned out that WE were the only ones that could provide steam power to the sub which meant we kept a boiler alight despite our plans to take power from the diesel AR and that meant that rebricking the boilers was done on boilers that didn't really have a chance to cool down before men had to climb in and replace the firebrick. Irritating.

My brand new fireman flew into Diego Garcia with a draft of 98 other men for our ship. We were a little undermanned by this point. In fact the snipes had been in port and starboard inport and underway for about 8 months. Hallelujah! We got new guys and things were looking up. 

My new guy overstayed liberty on his first night in Diego Garcia which meant Article 15, captain's mast and the CHENG had just received the National Agency Check (NAC) that every sailor has run on him/her. He made it through boot camp which was about 8 weeks back then but the results of the NAC didn't show up until just that morning when he returned from AWOL. He had  a 7 page rap sheet with multiple armed robberies in Chicago. The CHENG asked, "do you want to keep him?"

If you look at the other pages on this blog at the top right you will see that I give every dog a free bite on my ass before lowering the boom. In this one case my answer was, "no!" He was put ashore before noon to head back to the States to answer to fraudulent enlistment charges. We didn't even bother to hold captain's mast on him we just administratively discharged him with an other than honorable and he was gone.

Now this is the same draft of new guys that included an EN2 fresh from the Alcohol Rehab Facility on his second chance. I met him at the bar in the United Seaman's Club where we were both waiting for the liberty boat ride back to the ship.  He turned out to be special too but in a thoroughly good way even though I watched him drink 6 rum and cokes before the boat showed up. He was pure BM2 material but an EN2. The Chief found a really good niche for him, one that he excelled at.

I still laugh when I remember the Chief telling me that he was on one of the LCM 8s when he heard the EN2 reply to 2 defaulters that were cleaning the engineroom bilges of the Mike 8 boats. "We can't scoop any more water out of these bilge pockets Petty Officer P***** and his response was, "use a straw."

Years later I lived on the top floor of the Mannai Plaza for a year and my rooms overlooked the punishment grounds of the FAST platoon we imported from Diego Garcia after the Khobar Tower bombing up in Saudi Arabia. Every morning before sunrise I would awaken and run to the airport and back and the FAST platoon's defaulters had an NCO who was down there to encourage them to fill sand bags as rapidly as possible while another defaulter emptied them back into the bin and another was doing pushups and another was sprinting around a fairly large block. As the sprinter returned the pushup guy took the shovel, the emptier started pushups and the shovel guy sprinted around the block and it went on for a full hour.  

Every time I called either of the two captains out to chew their ass or the Major out to chew his ass I was grateful I didn't work for them. They were easily of the same type as EN2 P*****. And they came from the same place. We refer to it as EMI. Extra Military Instruction. At the NCO level it could be brutal. We didn't practice that sort of art form in the Navy I was part of. If you got EMI you at least got it from the Commanding Officer, not the Corporal or Gunny.

 

ON THE HATE

We drove over to the neighborhood on the other side of the tracks and it was still an eye opening experience. The houses were no different from the ones on our side of the tracks but they had a generation or two of neglect. Unpainted, sagging porches, boarded up ruins and yet these were the same house types found a few streets over in perfect condition. We were bound for the house in perfect condition and I mean perfect condition.  It had been occupied by a genteel woman and her mother in the unit above. Pristine. We were there to pick up some material that her children didn't want or need. We don't want or need it either but it filled up an SUV and we took it home. We'll figure out what to do with it and send it along to someone who really wants it.

On the way we passed through the blight. We once stopped in the blight and I was instructed about the Hough Bakery, home to the Hough riots long ago and while we were stopped there at the curb a black man came out of the house we stopped in front of and urged us to move on. A man came out of his house to warn us that it was too dangerous for two people like us to pause in his neighborhood where her father used to work long ago. 

Everything is now a sere and bloody hate and the ones on the alleged losing end are promoting it just as fast and nastily as they can. NOTHING done in the last couple of years was done in the name of alleviating racial unrest. It all seems to promote racial unrest. There is nobody decocking the triggers and urging real and shared understanding. No. It is all about race, race, race, race. 

I watched the video of two cops shot in LA by a miserable little shit . What can I say? There are forces and players at work seeking to make a war out of race during this election year. It is likely time to turn their animus against them and end them. There are some really evil people out there fomenting this hatred and we'd all be better off without them.

SIMPLY

 

I love the sound.

THE FIRST TIME

 Honestly,

The first time you see a gun close up and personal should not be at your first mugging.

Just sayin.

JUSTICE GINSBURG HAS DIED

 She was a lioness on the Supreme Court for decades. I disagreed with most of what she stood for but there is no doubting the fierceness of principle she demonstrated in her many years on the Court.

On the gripping hand

FIRE ALARMS AND BOMB THREATS

Anybody who has seen Joe Biden try to articulate a sentence in the last year or two has seen that whatever spark of intelligence he ever had, has fled. He could no more meet Donald Trump, a famous extemporaneous speaker, than he could climb K2. It will not be allowed to happen.

If you look at  how the left typically deals with irrefutable evidence and speakers who know their subject as thoroughly as they know their children's names, you know that they cannot prepare Biden for the onslaught any better than France prepared when facing the blitzkrieg.  They don't really have a choice.

They will pull every fire alarm in the venue here at Case Western and failing that, they will phone in endless bomb threats and hope and wish that the Secret Service will whisk both candidates away. I suspect that Team Trump is prepared for this and several EOD Mobile Units will sweep the venue starting right about now and they will continue to sweep it up until the debate starts and after. The SS will be given their marching orders from the top. NO WE WILL NOT RUN AWAY FROM ANY PHONED IN BOMB THREATS.

The apparatchiks and nomenklatura are desperate. Even if the NY Times has failed to notice that their candidate is brain dead, they have not. They know full well that Biden debating Trump is much like a snowflake in Hell pleading for mercy. As it happens, I doubt President Trump is going to be at all merciful when he and Biden argue the merits of the Presidential vision each holds. They are, after all, diametrically opposed.

CRAZY HOT MATRIX REPRISE

 For some friends who never saw this before. Oddly enough it came up in conversation after dinner.

NOT A MATTER OF QUITTING

I wonder at the resilience of the local police forces in places like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The law enforcement guys have been doing battle night after night for over 3 months and see every rioter back on the street the very next night committing the same violence and attempted murder because the district attorneys and prosecutors refuse to indict and jail them. So what I wonder, is why?

Every single snowflake would have pulled their groin muscle or bruised a tarsal and taken 5 weeks sick leave and worker's comp rather than keep going back into the line to melee with thugs every single night to little or no purpose. I wonder why they do it.

I read about the two deputy sheriffs that were gunned down in cold blood by some thug in Compton while they were simply sitting in their car. Sad is what it is. It's almost as unimaginable as the police bursting into the wrong house and shooting the owner dead because he thought since they burst into his house late at night that they were thugs doing a home invasion and reacted. The police have slipped the bonds that once welded them to the communities they police. I believe that the police in some places now view all non-police as the dangerous enemy they must fear to death. Their point of view is being returned in spades by the people.

That whole made up BS called qualified immunity means that the police have been getting away with murder for decades and there is nobody that can do anything about it. Even if one is fired in one city he can get another police job in a different city and carry on as he did before. It's not all that uncommon. About the only thing that happens when the police shoot innocent people is that the city might lose some of the taxpayer money to the victim's family. The one that owes the payment isn't the one that pays.

It has earned the notice of a large number of people that this is so and the police nowhere appear to be doing anything to change their lethal habits of getting away with shooting people which is unfortunate because where they once had 99% of the population to cover their backs they've lost a large percentage of the people who are tired of it. It's time to put away the machine guns and stop playing soldier. Merge the SWAT back into routine police duties where they get to encounter the people everyday as people rather than targets.

If the police want to take part in the democracy that is our Republic perhaps they could arrest more of the  civil officials who take bribes routinely and say 'they're just campaign donations' and they could arrest and jail city officials who break the law. Gavin Newsom as mayor of San Francisco was a perfect case in point. He openly broke the laws of the state and the country from the day he took office. Why not arrest him?

The LA cops did themselves no favors when they instigated the stupid madness that made zero sense and pursued a paddle boarder for breaking an illegal law confining him to his home along with every other Californian and when they tried to stop and arrest a jogger on the beach who easily outran the donut fueled cops wearing 30 pounds of tactical gear they really shouldn't have to carry around. That was one of the interesting things about metroparkcentralis that I saw after I got here. 

The cops here wear a gun and cuffs on the belt and that's about it. They don't have every inch of their girth covered with crap they might need if they decide to go all nuts and feed the squirrels or play with electricity. They kept it simple. Life and death. There is no debating whether this guy needs to be hit with a stick, tasered, or shot. Life and death.

Part of the estimate of the situation is, as it should be, 'do I wade into this matter or is it the kind of matter that only the police can deal with and shoot?' Those idiots that gunned down a 12 year old in the park didn't allow themselves to think. They didn't give themselves room and time to think. I think they're probably still police on the Cleveland Police force.

What else doesn't seem to be inclined to quit is the mass invasion by BLM and antifa. The blm at this point are mostly just criminals and looters. They never had a cause but it made a dandy excuse to loot stores, burn them down, smash property, destroy other people's cars, etc. Invade the mall with hundreds of your very best friends and loot it and beat up whites as you find them. Antifa simply built on the anger of blm and turned it into a revolution. As they are now being caught setting fires out in the West I don't think it will be long before the people start to shoot them on sight. In the old days one might have had to have a drop gun available to throw down by the body in order to claim self-defense. Now? Now all you need to do is drop a bic butane lighter by the body and declare it was being used to commit arson and set the forest ablaze.

Going back to the police. I'm surprised that they stay. I remember listening in Encino and Long Beach to real stories from the news about people like firefighters that claimed disability at 34 and were 'medically' retired and making $250,000 a year in disability pay from the taxpayers of LA, Long Beach, et al. It turns out PIs hired by outside groups followed some of these guys and found that, lo and behold! They were not at all disabled. 

I guess the police are made of tougher stuff. We'll see if the people of Portland and Seattle wake up before it's too late and their cities descend into violent crime filled blights on the coast like those in Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and Central America.

Personally? I doubt it.

SATURDAY HUMOR

I never heard of this guy. He was laugh out loud funny for me. I don't know how I missed him. In '98 I could have used something to laugh along with although Tim Allen's Men Are Pigs was also, laugh out loud humor.

https://www.facebook.com/JeffAllenComedy/videos/322685449088740/

POWERFUL WORDS, POWERFUL HISTORY

Take a minute or two and read and think about what was just written by Hanson

In February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.
When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.
You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.
You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins – to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.
Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”

What he wrote is not merely a recital about history. He talks about what the cities, the universities and others have done to themselves as they burned down our civilization in the cities. I will miss some of them when they are fully gone and lost to the darkness but he captures how our idiots have managed to destroy some of the most amazing places mankind ever built.

WHY NOT?

 Why don't the police simply carry crowbars when they go to riots?

Just asking for a friend.

HATE THE NEW BLOGGER SYSTEM

 Just saying hate for their new system is a mild expression for how I feel.

THE DEBATES

The best people have managed to pull it off again as they always do with the presidential debate farce and a team of hard-core Trump haters will be the moderators.

I don't have any idea how Trump is going to jack those morons up but I'm sure he does. He does it to them all the time.

NEAR TO HAND

Somewhere within about 20 feet of me is the hard copy of what Lex wrote and that Brig was kind enough to send me. I had thought I kept it on the shelf alongside the book, With the Failaka Field Force. I found the one but not the other. It is late and I don't need to read the latter book. As far as I know there were only 2 copies ever made and I very much doubt the other one is still in existence and having written it, I'm familiar with the story. But I was looking for Lex's writing because there was a nugget of wisdom I was keen to see again as it grows into the darkest of late night because it was recalled to mind by what I was reading.

Try to imagine reading 10,000 books, having 20,000 books and thinking, 'oh, I'll just look at that again.

With the Field Force stands out in its binder with the maps and charts sticking up out of it. The other book conformed to the demands of bookshelves and it's on one.

Every single room in this house has at least one bookshelf. There are more on stair landings.