I DON'T THINK THEY UNDERSTAND

 I'm catching up reading about the decisions taken at the top at the Washington Post and LA Times to not endorse any candidate for President this season. The Bulwark and a number of the other more anxious and stupid columnists raving about the why and wherefore read an awful lot like press releases from The Shining Path, or the in-depth Vatican explanation about why all the child raping priests were carefully concealed from you for hundreds of years if not longer and also much like IRA's explanations about why they put that particular car bomb in that particular market on that particular shopping day.

Nobody cares about the explanations.

The old days of the all powerful VOX is over and done now. The worldwideweb killed it and it will stay dead as long as there are men like Elon Musk around to do the right thing. All the gasping for air from the media drones who still think they can gaslight the public by making up the reporting about what actually happened are all done to grisly death by anybody who can actually watch the video of what happened on X. You and me can actually see the lying bastards lying right to our faces and thus we no longer care for their 'news' or their 'explanations.'

It's over.

EITHER WAY, IT IS TIME

 I see in the Commentary articles today that the usual pundits are welcoming the increased arc of America's alliances with mighty powers like Sweden and Finland and bragging about some sort of ARKAUS thing in the Pacific alongside some sort of Quad alliance thing over there as well and describing how America's interests lie in propping up every stinking country on earth forever and ever.....against our adversaries.

I wonder just who our adversaries are. It can't be China. We offshored almost 100% of our heavy and high technology industry to China starting over 30 years ago with no sign that it is ever coming back. They are high up there in the list of our Major Trading Partners. It is kind of inconceivable that we would wage war on China over any thing or cause. It's not just the total lack of laying out any strategic objectives that would lead to winning such a war and cessation of hostilities, it is the lack of any meaningful ability to inflict any kind of crippling injury on China. Pushing Russia and China together to form the largest Economic and Trading bloc on the planet doesn't look terribly smart in hindsight.

When they talk about our "allies" I'm always put in mind of the runty little punk that starts really pissing off the entire football team at high school because he has an "ally". WTF wants to be that ally? NATO is dead as a meaningful alliance of any kind and has been for decades. It will never come back. The BOAR and the giant German Army/Air Forces are gone. The AUKUS initiative where Australia pays our thoroughly awful shipbuilders billions for nuclear submarines it will NEVER find crews for or deploy from their berths in distant Australia will never come to the assistance of anyone.

One way or another it is time for the adults to start criticizing our overall strategy and policy. Lining up more and more dependent vassal states of no meaningful use or ability is pointless. Propping up endless African dictatorships for whatever prestige that gains us is stupid. Trying to pay power games against an enormous land power armed with potent anti-naval assets is stupid and counterproductive.

The neocons and their predecessors tried to tie the world together into an interconnected and increasingly networked and deeply entangled web of economic alliances that were beneficial to all. The problem is that the people implementing the policy all graduated from Yale and Harvard, never worked a day in their life and failed to realize that by giving away 100% of productivity they have pissed away the last dregs of the former Arsenal of Democracy. There is nothing left to counter soft/economic power and that is blazingly obvious to anybody watching Putin putting together an entire world alliance of like-minded people tired of and the useless sanctimony of the West and the West's obvious intention to keep them impoverished forever by claiming Global Warming ties their hands, or that they lack representative democratic governments in lands that are still almost entirely tribal.

I really don't know who the adults would be. That part is a bit of mystery. Outside the Hoover Institute all we get is more of the same dismal failures like Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan and the entire faculty of Yale and Harvard along with all the oh so clever former generals and leaders of the intel communities. What that is is rather dismal prelude to revolution. 

People never ever think that Revolutions can happen again. They say, "oh that's so last century ago...." The fact that they come along every hundred years or so and overturn the Old World escapes them because they never study or read history.

I can almost hope for a hard left commie led revolution. They ALWAYS stand their brothers and sisters in arms up against the wall and shoot them first. Pinochet was the last good Revolutionary and look what it got him in the end. On that note, recall how the Junta in Argentina thought they could extend their grasp on power? That's right, they took a long look at the faded giant that was Great Britain and wagered that they could knock off a nearby piece of the Empire and make the masses in Buenos Aires happy just a little bit longer or at least until Galtieri and the rest could figure out a way to safely retire without all getting shot. The Royal Navy isn't even a shadow of what it was when Corporate went down. And that is the picture of the whole rest of the world. It's ripe for Revolution.

EXCESS PROPHETS

 As always now that I no longer live there, I am eternally amused by Californians.  They legislated themselves an energy desert and are calling it a victory. Yes!!! They exclaim, they are slashing the wicked oil companies excess profits and they are doing it by law. You and I know that always works out well so I'm kind of looking forward to Manmade Energy Disaster Part II. I admit I've been looking forward to it since they shut down perfectly good nuclear power plants and demolished them to make way for penguins.

I know one of my more enlightened readers has pointed out that the power generators external to California are not allowed for some reason to charge whatever the traffic will bear like the old California ISO and ENRON and so nixed my idea that every kilowatt sold into California would have an outgoing excise tax of 80% of the cost of production but!!!!! Open the Door to Manmade Crisis Part II. 

See below what Manmade Energy Crisis did the first time in California.

This is what happened when utterly corrupt government and industry collude to screw you

Is there anything that would force oil companies sending tankers loaded with gasoline and diesel to California ports to sell that energy to California at some CA set price? Could Phillips not send tankers to San Francisco piers (and only San Francisco piers) and tell the buyers State of California that it was $10.00/gallon FOB the pier in San Francisco?

The People seem to believe that the Industry has some sort of legal duty to sell to them whatever they want. There is some truth to that but usually only in a market where demand sets the price. When the government tries to set the price it really doesn't work out all that well.

The well known safest way to transport oil

REMEMBER WHEN

Remember the heady days of yore in 1984 when the earth was going to die in fire? Yeah, those were the days. 

 Heard on the radio coming home this morning from an epic drive in the country.

 

ATTENTION IS INVITED

I'm not familiar with the  Kiel Institute for the World Economy but if these numbers are to be believed there is nothing worth mentioning left of the formerly vaunted NATO ally known now as Germany. The current armed forces and projected armed forces of Germany wouldn't even be a speed bump in any clash with the Red Army.

Germany is little different from the rest of NATO with the exception of Poland. All the other members are shadow of what they were in 1991 and I'd have to agree with the pundits that money they've spent on "defense" since 1991 has largely been wasted on a social welfare project that has no return value. It's not just the lack of warfighting materials bur of trained and tested NCOs and officers and a similar lack of any kind of meaningful ammunition stocks. 

I think if NATO engaged in a shooting war of any kind in the next 10 years it would be out of ammo by the 3rd day. Somebody may finally be waking up to the idea that there is no substitute for ammo, no substitute for cadres of expert trained NCOs and officers and an industry that has kept up with the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs. 

They don't have the industry left to build any of the hardware much less the new drones, jamming systems, air defense systems and modern battlefield Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance needed to fight in the 21st century against something considerably more heavily armed and trained then Afghan tribesmen. 

The complete Kiel Report is found here. It's worth a look.

WASHINGTON POST TO MASSIVELY TRIM COSTS

 In a totally unexpected departure from insanity today it was proclaimed by the usual incoherent and fantastic sources that Bezos' Tissue of Lies was not going to publicly endorse the completely non-democratically selected presidential candidate who wriggled into the race despite not even running in the Primary and thus sets the stage for perhaps dozens of air-headed nitwits, neerdowells and other local losers at the national level to depart en masse while screaming curses and invective at the damned loser billionaire that owns the Tissue.

I really am amazed that Harris has gone 0 for 2 in critical nominations and that this is I think largely because Americans have been exposed to the true news now since Musk bought Twitter and returned it to the people who want to be able to believe what they read and hear about politics. By and large all anyone has to do to restore one's faith in the accuracy of the news is to simply let the bastards talk in public and tape it and and then present those exact recordings, unchanged, unedited to the people so that they can form their own opinions. I really despised PBS when they decided enough of us trying to get the various politicians and Ministers of State on tape saying and declaiming the news, we're just going to assign a fat incompetent moron who will tell us what the politicians and Ministers of government said that day and yeah I'm talking about the idiot on Washington Week in Review and other PBS fantasy tv.

I think both owners told the staff at both papers that they were not going to be allowed to rezero the credibility of the newspaper by publicly endorsing a complete incompetent and moron like Harris and I imagine the screams of outrage could be heard out to the Beltway and the 405.

Ha! At any rate I think a handful of top Washington Post Illuminati will walk out now that their days of running rampant across the owner have been brought to a sudden and humiliating end.

TIMELY

 I simply like it.

TIME WAR

 I'm thinking about sitting out this change off of Daylight Savings Time. What about you? I don't wear a watch, never look at a clock, don't watch regularly scheduled or any kind of TV and find that most restaurants around here close when it gets dark anyway. I do miss the 24 hour lifestyle I found in San Diego but at least some of the ice cream shops here in metroparkcentralis have cottoned on to the idea that people really do like to eat ice cream all year instead of just in the summer. Having instituted ice cream shop calendar reform, I've made a start on mastering Time.

I am the Leader of the Time Army! Join today. Tell those clockist bastards to shove it. 

Yeah I know, Jimmy Buffet got there a long time before I did.

STILL KIND OF AMAZING

 This is so last administration but the difference between one man and the next cannot be overstated. This man was actually more comfortable stepping into North Korea than his successor and the other fabulists were in taking office unless they were surrounded by hundreds of cops and National Guard and had high fences to keep the hoi polloi well back from their betters.

This was President Trump striding into North Korea at Panmunjom. I've been there and it is one of the most dangerous places on earth. Srsly, the North Korean hacked apart American officers as recently as the 1970's right there. Think about it though, he was actually safer in North Korea with zero SS around him or vetting the place then he was surrounded by SS in a little town in western Pennsylvania. Kind of sad isn't it?

There has probably not been an American President more attuned to Diplomacy and Statesmanship since Eisenhower.

I WONDER

 I arrived in the late afternoon on a train from Hendaye after some difficulty getting out of Spain and then into France. I threw my bag on my shoulder, checked that the money belt was secure and then took the metro up to Arc de Triomphe and got off there and popped back up at the top of the Champs Elysee. I found the Avenue Wagram, walked the two blocks to the hotel I had identified in my old copy of Europe on $10/day and got a room on the 3rd floor looking out over the Avenue and with a private bathroom with a very nice ancient tub.

I then walked down to the river and crossed and the very first thing I did was head to the top of the Eiffel Tower. It was 1984 and I had just finished my first year in the Middle East and was taking leave enroute home and a new duty station in San Diego on a Destroyer. I wonder if every American who first arrives in Paris heads to the top of the Eiffel Tower too.

Effortlessly lifted from Timewaster a full minute ago

AS A NAVIGATOR

In retrospect I can only be glad that we used Greenwich Mean Time and nautical miles for our infernal calculations for latitude and longitude. I don't even want to guess what it is like to have used kilometers and a constantly changing time zone. I'm sure the French could tell me all about it though. 

When you think about it, the British took a jump on everybody by stating a principle and then making it universal simply by declaring Time gentlemen, Time.

"Greenwich Mean Time or GMT is the mean (average) solar time at the Greenwich Meridian or Prime Meridian, 0 degrees longitude.

The time displayed by the Shepherd Gate Clock at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, is always GMT. When the sun is at its highest point exactly above the Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory, it is 12:00 noon at Greenwich."

Local Apparent Noon was once a big thing everywhere, now, not so much.

 

IS THIS THE NEW NORMAL?

 I copied this picture from the funeral service for Ethel Kennedy where all the master criminals and their handlers got together in front of the scenery to do some more open conspiring in front of their electorate who really are just too.....well anyway.

GUN!!!!! He's got a GUNNNNN!!!!!!

Well, at any rate I am led to believe by the media of which there is so little of worth that little kids making this kind of finger gun in school are hauled away by the cops and grilled for hours by those concerned legal eagles who demand to know where the kid got the gun. I suspect Obama will manage to talk them down this time and there was clearly no hostile intent.....I mean I understand that Hillary was not present for the festivities.

On the gripping hand, I fully expect to read in the NYT tomorrow all about how Joe bravely survived an assassin's attack while standing around in a church looking dazed and confused.

ODDLY UNCHANGED

This was posted back in 2013 so quite some time ago. Nothing has really changed and I thought about it off and on all day today. 

The words are a little hard to read but I assure you I have a much better camera and take way better pictures these days. That said, of course nothing ever really changes. The basics remain the same from one age to the next.

The current adventurers are colonizing the New World and with luck no more than 20% are here at the behest of their god and ISIS, Al Quaeda, Hezbullah, Hamas, or any of all the other rabid muslims. A large number appear to be adventurers seeking wealth and perhaps even the means to return home just as the adventurers did for hundreds of years after they explored the New World. 

The vast majority come with their slaves and are intent on conquering and subduing the natives they find in the New World and they are about as amoral, vicious and unknown to God as the bulk of the Spanish explorers were. Like the Spanish before them they bring their diseases, customs and hatreds to our shores and mean to set them up as the new contagion. They're the sex-traffickers, pedaphiles, procurers, pimps, druglords and the bottom 20% of their own society. Needless to say, our feckless rulers have invited them in to share our goodies just as Montezuma and the Incans did in their time.

They're not all that keen on dying for God or his Majesty but perhaps for the Chinese Communist Party, Blackrock, ISIS and Allah they'd be willing to risk a brush with death. They're not just our problem, they are our children's problem and theirs' unto the ending of the Age.

Did you know that there are more foreign born residents actually living in London now then native British subjects? It's kind of weird and surreal to see an era ending and it's like nobody even notices it swiftly vanishing away into history.

WOW

 This is the 21st century I was hoping to see. Amazing! The heavy booster just snagged out of the air and hanging from its launch assembly after boosting starship into orbit.

THE SIMPLE TRUTHS

 One for the sidebar,

"Any company that has a commitment to diversity necessarily lacks a commitment to excellence, or even basic competence, and which will eventually have very negative consequences for its products and services." 

— Vox Day

Others have noted that once you fail to select for competence you get incompetents. It is the same with selecting for excellence. Once you no longer make it the focus of your effort it quickly goes away.

MADE ME LAUGH

 I laughed out loud when I saw this in the movie. All the desperate and heroic activity leading up to this scene summed up by a girl who was both there and not there. In truth, I think it sums up the current recruiting pool of talent available in one little 41 second clip. It's still pretty funny and a great movie.

LOUD BUZZZZY NOISE

 Read this bit of tripe and ponder what it truly says about both Slow Joe and Osama or whatever he calls himself these days....

It looks like the right side of the aisle wants to use this as some sort of Lame attack on Osama but if you look behind the curtain you can see the reality. Obama had spent years gutting NATO and the US and when confronted by a Putin who was really in charge and running Russia, he did what any objective ruler would do and bowed to the inevitable. There was no way to keep Russia from taking back a place so strategically vital as Crimea. It was a mistake to allow it to slip into Ukrainian hands and those stupid hacks screwed it up massively by inflaming the Russians by their treatment of ethnic Russians living in what was a premier retirement resort and mecca for wealthy Russian oligarchs.

Biden and other idiots would see this as some sort of blunder by Osama and claim that they would have stood right up and attacked Russia with....................what exactly? Sanctions? That didn't work out well. Economic embargo? That really screwed the Bretton-Woods pooch. War? It's not really on the table anymore as we think of it. If War, then it will be something awful and eye opening; kind of like our defeat in Afghanistan should have been or possibly our inability to deal with a shitty little dump like Yemen.

RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES

 The destruction of America is happening right before your eyes but you cannot see it.

Were the thousands of local news papers around this country destroyed almost overnight so that the destruction of every little town in America would happen in isolation unseen and unnotieced by a press and media that live in just 3 places; New York City, Washington, DC and left coast America?

It never really occurred to me just how destructive dumping thousands of migrants on an unsuspecting little town at 0200 can be. Think about it. Overnight the Feds have doubled the number of kids attending school in your little town. Who pays for that? Who takes account of educating kids that don't speak English and what is more, move into grades based on age alone? You now have public elementary and high schools overwhelmed and destroyed by kids who know literally nothing, cannot read or do math and who outnumber the kids you put in your schools.

When you think about it, what is happening today is profoundly evil and everyone involved in it should be jailed forever and their assets destroyed just as they are destroying this country without anybody really noticing what is happening in the next town over.....

They destroyed all the local and state papers so you wouldn't see it happen or read about it in the news.

THINKING ABOUT THE WIN

 As I contemplate a November soon that sees Republicans winning the election I wonder if they are readying themselves for legislative combat on their terms. It is probably long past time when we let the idiotic American-hating leftists write and set the agenda for each new Congress.

There needs to be a reform of the Judicial Branch of government. It is worth delving into the Constitution to see how we accomplish a few minor but valuable changes in the way our Courts work.  We need to put an end to the longstanding practice of allowing any insane or stupid vicious jerk who wears judicial robes to impose a nationwide injunction on any Law going into effect. That practice has to be brought to an end.

It would be nice if Congress acted and eliminated the violation known as Asset Forfeiture. If flies directly in the face of the express written words in the Constitution. End it.

We need to break up the entire Homeland Security apparatus and bureaucracy. It obviously has nothing at all to do with providing Homeland Security and has proven to be more Gestapo than the Gestapo.

It is probably time to get rid of the ATF and the DEA. Neither serves any real purpose under the Constitution and neither has ever served the interests of the American public.

It is time to smite the FBI and get it back under control. It needs to be reduced in size to match its current effectiveness. In other words, it is now an organ of repression used against ordinary American citizens and has lost all real purpose and justification. Frankly, if I was sitting on a jury and the prosecution told me that they were bringing in an expert FBI witness I would just automatically assume that he/she/it is lying to me.

The Congress needs to rewrite the CIA charter. It needs a top down review as does the NSA. Sadly, in the past we would rely upon the old hands as the experts in advising us in these matters but 100% of them all lied and told us that Covid originated in a meat market and that Biden juniors laptop was a Russian Hoax. Frankly they are all liars.

The Department of Defense needs a thorough cleansing and I don't know how to fix it. The Clintons started the corruption at the top and chose 4 stars that then turned around and selected more generals to be 3 and 4 stars whose only qualification was unquestionable social credentials and a willingness to pervert the military at every level with all the things purpose built to destroy military forces. DEI is just a shadow of all the things they did to destroy the military. Look at the long term destructive effects of Navy shipbuilding over the last 25 years. 100% of the new designs were total shit and so useless not one of them has found their way into our line of battle. There is no replacement cruiser, destroyer, frigate or mine sweepers. I mean there is literally NOTHING in the pipeline or under construction now and nothing since the Clintons left office.

Congress needs to move all of the Bureaucrats out of DC and. into the hinterlands. Note, this is expressly not to move them to New York City, San Francisco or LA or to Las Vegas. Let's get them back where the Founders wanted them, in some miserable fever infested swamp. Tell them they have to earn their way back to Washington DC and the only way they can do that is by establishing an American colony on Mars.

That should do it. Americans will be attending baseball games on Mars in a couple of years or they'll die trying.

THE NEW SHEEP, MUCH LIKE THE OLD SHEEP

 As sure as taxes and as easily as death, each generation, except mine, stepped up to the plate to be led by the nose ring of great stupidity into protesting things in the West that were always nonsensical and beyond farce and they all have no regrets because each and every one of the stupid dimwits thinks they are bringing out a necessary change to the World Order. God knows what it was before the "No More War" crowd of anti-Vietnam protesters who demonstrated in stupid mass against keeping South Vietnam from going under the tyrannical boot of communism. I think they lost the point.

This generation also kicked off the overpopulation bomb and acid rain myths.

The next generation leaped into moronic and feisty stupidity with their bleating about "No More Nukes" and "Nuclear Free Zones" and tried to overrun the various bases in Europe that played host (it is alleged) to certain American armaments that were never confirmed nor denied.... In this case as in the previous example it looks very much like the Soviets were the instigators and funded these movements in the hope of winning some idiotic victories of no meaning in the Cold War. In both cases, the adults didn't pay much attention and the feisty stupids are convinced to this day that both Vietnam and our nuclear posture were the pure unbridled meanness of Rethuglicans. Trying to point out that Vietnam was a purely Democratic War and that the nuclear policies were the necessary outflow of the containment policies practiced by Democratic regimes is kind of a waste of air.

There was a boring time when we just didn't do that sort of thing. Sure there was some talk about this enormous hole somebody just noticed in the Ozone layer but we quickly got on top of that and printed billions of new $ for the oligarchs enacting legislation to damage industrialization of the 3rd World.

Finally we turned to the doom cycle of "No More War for Oil" because of course that is what the whole thing was all about. There was no other reason to kick Iraq out of Kuwait and everybody now knows it, according to the dimwits writing the history of the world as it ended in 1991 and declared, "An End To History." Twits.

That wasn't enough by any means so we had to sit up and be made to notice that the whole world was MELTING!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is still getting the full throated war support of the truly stupid among us who believe that CO2 makes up something like 5-30% of the atmosphere and kills polar bears. This was followed by the insanity of BLM and then the COVID Hysteria whipped up by people in control of the media and,

This was quickly followed by the idiotic pro-Palestinian Death Cult now sweeping the land in the absence of any insignificant low-life black thugs getting themselves reset to room temperature by overacting white cops.

What worries me about this and concerns me is that each example above shows a less and less personal involvement in the WHOLE REASON FOR RIOTING. I can understand the youngsters of draft age being a little tired of the idea and fighting back and I can even see some tiny bit of foolish charm in the idiotic old nuns hacking holes in Navy aircraft temporarily lying around airports in Ireland because they were part of the nuclear war machine but the rest of it is just pure stupidity on a stick.

When people babble about what the Idiocracy and the Left have done to Education of our Youth this is what I think they are working towards. They want a stupid and ignorant and violent and sick and twisted mob ready on command to make war and mayhem on the civil authority on demand and these are just them testing to see if they have refined their techniques enough to overthrow a Western Democracy. 

I used to think there would be some sort of payback for those who led the violence but that isn't the case. The graduates of all these Ivy Colleges are hired in droves to work in the university, the media, in NGOs that claim your money as theirs, in government at all levels and in the Bureaucratic State. They hire each other and they don't want any of you to even think about ending their gravy trains.

Based on the evidence, I'd say they're pretty close to takeoff for the All Powerful Bureaucratic State.

COMPREHENSIVE AND TOTAL FAILURE

 The nice feature of this ridiculous story is that no lives were lost. The wonder of course is that any lives were ever even hazarded in such a pointless and stupid total waste of time, money, effort, and ship. Just what part of getting an up close survey of a reef calls for stranding a ship on it? Surely if you want to muck about on a reef you used divers and small boats. You know, the kind of thing you can buy at KMart in Australia. The captain of the poor ship thought snuggling up to a well charted reef in 4 meter ocean swells was a great idea.....

The part that amuses me more than most of the rest is that the ship ran aground, was stranded, burned to a crisp and then sank. You really cannot do much more than that to a ship unless you want to use it again. I'll say it again though, it is far too late now, but when we pick the people to run our Navy and run our ships we really need to stop making anything other than ability a distant last when it comes to measures of performance necessary to take on the job. That kind of thinking applies all the way down to the deck plates and it's not just about this ridiculous accident, it's about all of them over the last 30 years or so.

Lovely day for a stranding, fire and gentle fall to the bottom of the sea.

A LONG DRIVE

 All told it was about 7 hours to get there and about the same to get home and Fall is well along in turning the foliage into a glorious golden and red blanket for the hills that not quite bar the way from Philadelphia to the Western Pennsylvania border. It was darned nice out there and the company at the other end was the best. In short, it was a fairly typical gathering of the clan minus the outriders who were unable to make it and catch up with everybody else. Still, we had family in from all over the country and Canada which happens to be where a good bit of the clan started out while up working in Newfoundland a very very long time ago.

I thought it was interesting to note how once again one could almost tell at a glance just who one was dealing with. Nice house with splendid slightly out of control-not to say exuberantly crazy garden? Yep. Enough chairs to comfortably seat 50 in a pinch? Yep. Food literally hitting the tables like successive waves from an ocean hitting a beach? Yep.

This was the first family gathering I've been to though where the youngest was just fifteen. There were no little kids or babies for this one. This was more an occasion for people to play the do you remember when game and kids don't play that very well. No babies, no little kids but plenty of people done with work and exploring their own passions and quite a few that have passed those passions along to the next adult generation who are busy raising the next one.

It was a quiet affair but it went on for a few days and, just like life, everyone enjoyed it.

ON THE WINGS OF MORTALITY

 Taking a trip to the east today to see off a relative I knew all my life. She certainly knew me all mine since hers started a good 23 years earlier. That I suppose is the window through which my own mortality can be viewed barring accidents. By and large the men in my extended families make it well beyond their given three score and ten but for many reasons I never really thought I'd get anywhere near that far myself. I doubt I would have without the help I got along the way. It is a constant amazement what the power of love alone can achieve.

It is the first in what will become a sea of sorrow and loss but an occasion that we can all be glad was so long in making it's appearance.

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The Poem, Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

SUDDENLY

 Looking into the news just now it came up with a caution to us and the USN in particular that we should not gloat at China's submarine problems. After all, it could have sunk for any reason. Made me think that did.

So, the USNS Big Horn operating south of Oman suddenly becomes the first ship ever to run aground in the North Arabian Sea and every single thing about it is kept very very quiet.

You don't suppose the USNS Big Horn ran over a submarine do you?

    I hope it wasn't one of ours.

    That far from the subcontinent I doubt that it is an Indian submarine

    I don't think the Houthis have any submarines

    I'd be very surprised if Egypt has let one of its submarines submerge in more than 20 years

    I don't know what to think about Iranian submarines but Jask isn't all that far away.

On the gripping hand, even at full periscope depth colliding with a submerged submarine would damage the bow of the ship hitting it.

HAS ANYONE LOOKED

 Is P Diddy still alive or did die of “suddenly” or just kill himself? I mean it's only a matter of time.