TWO TO FOUR TIMES A MONTH

 I used to get on a 747 and fly across the Pacific 2 or 4 times a month for 18 years. I don't really miss the journey but seeing I can't believe how much Korea changed over the course of those 18 years. I think it was for the better, this was the music their mileage may differ. They joined us in the 21st century but I suspect they left a lot of what made them behind. On the gripping hand, a lot of that was Japan and I know they were happy to leave that behind. People alive today have no idea what a destructive force Japan was in Asia. The Koreans remember.

IN TRUTH

I really miss San Diego, Encinitas, Carlsbad. A lot. I miss El Camino Real more than you would know. Robertos was there and so was Pick up Stix. Fast wonderful Mexican food and delicious Chinese fast food not at all like anything you could buy in China. I'd say I live in a food desert but I've been there, done that. While this place is arid, it's not a desert. On the other hand, the virus killed off the places of good take-away. We get sushi at Heinens. On the gripping hand, I have most marvelous chef. Life is good.

EVER WONDER?

Why don't Italians speak latin?

GREAT ZIMBABWE

 I was led off tonight in my reading by a reference to Great Zimbabwe and a whole host of wonderful things Africans and their spirit advisors believe about the place. It seems that it was a city that rivaled London in population back around 2000 years ago and was quite the trade emporium. On the other hand I take any stories about prehistoric peoples that never learned to write a written language with the a grain of salt roughly the size of Gibraltar. You have bee hives with more bees in them than many towns or cities but without a written language they remain mute to history. Making up stuff is what fantasists and writers do but it is not history. It is off putting to have some writer lay claim to some sort of civilization that, on the first hand, never discovered any way to record history. Say what we will, true civilizations were writing and recording in the written word over 5000 years ago.

I can watch the occasional show on the history of some nomadic people and listen to the narrator tell the amazing story of their ancestors based on oral tradition. I'm not really a believer of oral tradition. Like many of you I've had way too many garbled messages relayed to me from trusted sources that were, when all is said and done, garbled to a fare thee well. On the gripping hand, I don't have more than a few words from relatives beyond my grandparents. My mother can tell me some things about her great in-laws and great grandparents and there are photos of them on the 600 acre farm they used to own inside the Washington DC beltway but there is nothing of them in writing that has fallen into my hands. I do like the story about how he and his brothers beat the hell out of a lawyer they hated coming out of court one day. My great grandfather was the constable of the county in Maryland where it happened and one of his brothers was killed in a shoot-out somewhere out West where he was a deputy. I have written four volumes of my own history. I'm not sure it will survive but it was there for a brief and shining moment for anyone to read or record.

As you can read, I'm talking about memories within living memory of some people (not really me). I find it impossible to believe tribal myths or anything of pre-historic sub-Saharan Africa before it was investigated by the ones with a written language. I don't think the Egyptians count since they apparently, in 4000 years of written history never went further abroad then Sudan and perhaps Ethiopia. 4000 years hugging the Nile River and basking in total ignorance of the rest of the world. Kind of hard to believe really.

I enjoyed the Dirk Pitt books by Clive Cussler. He had the people of those days sailing treasure and mystery all the way to Texas 2000 years ago. It would be nice to think it happened but the stories that do bear the test of time because they were written down, don't bear out any voyages of exploration outside the Phoenicians and I haven't read any of what they might have written about their voyages thru the Mediterranean and the founding of Carthage. All that I have read of that era was by the Romans or the Greeks. If you have never read Thucydides you missed out on how the world really works. Spoiler, the world works by leveraging the stupidest people in the world into power and then letting them do what the stupidest people in the world like to do. ie, Biden. Oddly enough, it really only takes one single solitary stupid world leader to fuck over the world for all the rest of us. Just one stupid SOB is the equivalent of 2000 megatons of nuclear death delivered wholesale.

On the other hand, my reading tonight did strike a bell and I decided to reread Wilbur Smith's The Angels Weep and the rest of the series. I last/first read them in college during a summer and while I never read any of his other books, those were worth the time.

TACTICAL

 I think we will start with air bursts. I don't think the fireball will touch the ground.

JUSTICE REARS ITS UGLY HEAD

 Some police officers stopped a young woman and put her in a car they left parked on the railroad tracks.  If there was justice , all three of the police involved would have their hands cuffed behind their back and be placed in another police car from that jurisdiction of Hell and have another train hit them at the same speed while they experienced the terror of knowing that they were going to die, torn to pieces and scattered over a couple of acres.

Putting the one cop on Admin leave while "investigating" a  clear and obvious attempted murder under color of authority is rich. What really sucks about what is called law enforcement in this country is that even if these murderers are sacked, they can still walk into another jurisdiction as sworn officers and be hired as cops again, in your town, in my town.

They deserve to spend 10-23 years in jail at a minimum. They all did it. They all left a young woman they locked in a car on the tracks to die and made no effort to save her.

She survived and all her lawyer has to do now is go to court, show the video and lay claim to the entire town and county as reparations for an evil and horrific crime at the hands of the sworn officers of the law.

I KNOW IT LOOKS LIKE EMCON

 I have been both reading and writing here and there since my last post and for many of the posts before that one. Blogger is being a pain which disturbs the muse a little bit but I also find that I'm likely repeating the words of others and that was never the intent of this blog. It was in its original intent to communicate with my little pilot and after a number of years the other channels are finally open. Hallelujah!!!. 

That said, blogger is being a pain these days in every aspect. It's like they're trying to cut back on the number of free thinkers using their resources to communicate our thoughts outside the bounds of accepted and censored speech. I haven't made the jump to Trump's new locale or Gab or even substack as yet. I may in the future as the politics heat up a little more. I find that I can get what I can consider reliable news and information from the usual sources on the right plus the ones I don't list but go to every day: Instapundit and Daily Mail UK and voxday.

By the accounts I read every day it looks like the world is descending into a darkness it may not climb out of intact. Just how did the West's leaders all decide that the thing to do in a no account Balkan pissing contest was to slit their own throats in so far as Energy, Food, Fertilizer, Minerals and gut their industries to the very breaking point and beyond? How did America seemingly elect an idiot who was always an idiot but is now a senile idiot repudiated by his own White House staff every single time he speaks in public and declares that the US will support Taiwan militarily in the event of a Chinese invasion and that the COVID pandemic is OVER and that he can with the swipe of drool and a pen sign away a trillion $ in student loans and lay them on the backs of the working class who never went to college? 

What happened? Well I know. The communists won the long march thru the institutions and they own/control higher education, K-12 education, libraries, most foundations, NPR, PBS, all other broadcast media, the NYT and most newspapers and now they have slowly been replaced in each by the deviants who believe child grooming is the path to the future of America and the World.

Why does the FBI and the DOJ do nothing about the people that actually banged the underage girls at Epstein's island resort? Why do they do nothing about Hunter's laptop? Why do they persist in this stupid vendetta against Trump. Investigated now by everyone who loathes, hates and despises him for 7 years and impeached twice and the STUPID FUCKTARDS have been unable to pin anything on him but they hate him twice as much as they did yesterday and half as much as they will tomorrow.

Things are falling apart in the Blue cities and nobody seems to care or notice. The border isn't there anymore and the libtards react as if somebody dropped a live rattle snake in their lap when a tiny handful of illegals show up in Martha's Vineyard. 

 Go volunteer to be an election worker and supervise the vote. It's important.

SENSE THE IRONY

 The FBI tracked down the CEO of MyPillow in an Arby's drive thru while he was enroute home from a hunting trip and showed a search warrant authorizing them to seize his cellphone. He was permitted to call his  lawyer who told him to comply even though.....well, read the story.

Two lessons and thus the irony.

1. The FBI tracked him by his cell phone

2. You should always carry 2 cellphones in your car or at home. I mean, what else do you do with the old cell phone?

EUROPEANS BEING STUPID BEYOND REASON, AGAIN

 Ignorant stupid dangerous idiots. God! Just leave it to the Germans. They have been destroying civilization for 700 years.

What the hell is it with Germans and Europeans who compound stupidity and mindless insane policy every time we turn our back on them? Continental wide European war starting again in 4, 3, 2, 1

THE LOST

 One of the things I lost in the bonfire of my life was my copy of Kant's book. I could replace it easily enough but for many years I had used the title page, author page, publisher's page as a place to jot down my own philosophy as it came to me. These started to accumulate on the train from DC to URI. I might ask Chaplain Harvey if he kept them and would send them to me as he has done with many old things I cast off when I was in despair.

What are the odds that any religious being would keep my copy of On the Beautiful and the Sublime? 

I sense a very definite NO out of Texas.

ENGLAND HAS A KING AGAIN

 If I was Europe, I'd be afraid now.

ON THINGS

 The feds ran amok at Mar a Lago to haul out the former Presidents stuff. I was having a conversation wtih a retired flag officer and it called to mind the other ones that I knew well. After the 3rd Fleet commander retired he kept on coming back to  the headquarters there on Point Loma and going into the office they kept for him for a number of months, He was my old XO and one of the best officers I ever knew. i learned that like my father, he kept coming in to the office and was simply going through his files. Almost all of them were classified, some were SCI compartmented information and it took the only man allowed to read the file to shred it or return it. My dad spent months after retired from his final job going through the filing cabinets in his basement office and shredding all the ones that were proprietary. VADM Costello was essentially doing the same thing for months after he retired.

That President Trump took documents out of the office that needed to be destroyed, I don't question. At that point each needed to be examined by the holder and either refiled or destroyed. Anybody with even a grain of sense knows how that works and that it takes time.

I know, I can hear the twit saying, "well they weren't his files and he should have left them" and yet the answer is pretty basic. "They were his files."

I just want to say that the same thing does not apply to the Secretary of State. The top secret stuff she had off the nsanet was never hers, didn't belong to her and should not have been in her house. Presidents, for all that they always appear to have  a clean desk have to actually SIGN document for them to take effect.

GERMANY CALLED TODAY

 They said they wanted back their weapons. This was a stupid article and not well written. I am almost forced to dig up a copy now of Red Storm Rising and I owe my girl a copy of Das Boot but how do people just put out nonsense like this?

As we are seeing today, without US you only get one chance to stay free and independent. And we also shipped most of our weapons to Ukraine and aren't building anymore because. All those countries like France who used to rely on the bedrock of the US military fighting for their freedom should start to think about what post-Trump really means for them and invest in all those hateful weapons dealers industries. This hasn't been the 20th century for over 22 years and there is nobody in America that would shed a single red corpuscle to bail any country in Europe out of the deep hole it has dug with such smugness and pronounced hatred for America for the last 80 years.

The last time I looked the 173rd Airborne was in Aviano but that was 13 years ago. They might well have left. But that's OK Europe because there will never be another war in Europe.

INDIA CALLED TODAY AND TOLD ME TO FUCK OFF

 I have actually found it rare to piss off  the India call center so thoroughly that he screams at me to hang up. So, it was by all measures, a good day.

RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA

 Sorry, that was from a movie I watched

What is going on in Europe? When did all Europeans turn totally stupid?

They actually write serious article now slamming Russia for NordvStream slowdowns delivering gas to Europe while at the same exact time hectoring those belligerent Russian bastards for being all bastardy and stuff and then turn right back around to complain about the Russians withholding fuel from poor shivering Europe. I remember when the Btis totally lost their  minds after CORPORATE but now all of Europe has wandered into the land dazed and confused and without a clue how stupid they sound.

Putin totally has them by their dangly bits but Europeans seem not to notice. It might have something to do with all the women in government in Europe. Yes, you know you thought the same thing, You know you did. You wondered what kind of idiotic jackasses could bring about 1914 again with the special level of stupid malevolence and twisted evil hate.

 Now you know.

As you read on you will see the young lady under who's picture lie the words, The German State is prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian. We have done it before and will do it again!!!

European officials blame Russia for Nord Stream troubles

Moscow’s ‘cynicism,’ not EU sanctions, is to blame for the pipeline drying up, they say

© Getty Images / Stefan Sauer

Russia is deliberately sabotaging the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline to spite the EU, European officials have claimed, questioning Moscow’s explanation for an indefinite delay in restoring service.

State-owned energy giant Gazprom informed its European customers on Saturday that it could not safely resume operations until it had fixed “oil leaks” discovered in a major turbine during a maintenance operation.

Nord Stream was set to come back online just after midnight Saturday morning after three days of maintenance. The leaks, reportedly affecting “cables connected to speed meters of a rotor,” were discovered during a technical inspection with the turbine’s German manufacturer Siemens. Moscow had earlier warned that the pipeline’s operation was threatened by sanctions, which had created a shortage of spare parts.

However, Siemens argued the company had alternate turbines at the compressor station where the leak had been discovered and could use one of those in case of a real emergency. “Such leaks do not normally affect the operation of a turbine and can be sealed on site,” they claimed.

Read more

Germany will back Ukraine ‘no matter what voters think’ – FM

European Commission spokesman Charles Michel condemned what he called Russia’s “use of gas as a weapon,” declaring it would not “change the resolve of the EU” as the bloc works toward “energy independence.”

Commission press service chief Eric Mamer slammed the “fallacious pretenses” he claimed Gazprom had used to shut down the pipeline, holding it up as proof of both their “cynicism” and their “unreliability as a supplier” and suggesting Moscow “prefer[red] to flare gas instead of honoring contracts.” 

German parliamentary foreign affairs committee chair Michael Roth denounced the shutdown as “part of Russia’s psychological war against us” and accused President Vladimir Putin of “violat[ing] contracts without scruples….even at the expense of his own economic interests.” 

German gas regulator Bundesnetzagentur’s president Klaus Mueller warned Germans that it was “down to each and everyone” to conserve resources in the absence of Russian gas.

The G7 countries agreed on Friday to a price cap for Russian oil, vowing not to provide insurance or other forms of financing to any ship carrying Russian oil above that price, which has yet to be decided, but which participants hope to have put in place by February. Despite several rounds of harsh sanctions, Moscow has made £600 million more from oil sales in June than it did the previous month thanks to soaring energy prices threatening to plunge all of Europe into a depression.

A second natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, was completed earlier this year and could alleviate much of the suffering caused by the slowdown at Nord Stream 1, but it has never been put into service due to sanctions.

J R R R

 I think Amazon did this, I couldn't possibly comment,

Black elves, black hobbitses, and black dwarfs. Checkmate, racists!

HEY YOU

 Go see Bullet Train. We think you'd like it.

GOT THE SIDE, READ 2010

I miss Lex but there was a wonderful person there too.

The air show is this weekend.  I remember Lex.

Yeah, I'm looking back at the 2010 blog there on the side bar and yeah, I hear the jets turning over the city.