OH GOOD GRIEF

It's true. The screen shot below is from my computer after I googled the search term:

Never mind. For a second I thought the webs were tangled and reality was askew but I see that the slant never left the building:

I'll just put my feet up and ponder the ways the internet defies description.

Maybe look at a tree.

You have to click on it to embiggen it and see it all.

MY BEACH

This looks like the ramp leading to the Pacific Ocean at Fletcher Cove in Solana Beach. When I lived there it was a block away from my house. I went down that ramp just about every day for 3 years.

These days, I tell myself that I like snow and Winter. It is 5 degrees above 0 outside.

OUR LADY DISDAIN

This just in from our DC correspondent: An Everyman Story for our Time.

You saw the first picture but you didn't see the rest of the pictures:

As a "birthday present" it has been reported that the President has abandoned his wife at the dascha in Hawaii so that she can continue to bask in the global warming and pleasant tropical breezes of Hawaii.

Unfortunately:

His mother-in-law accompanied him back to the White House.

How much would that suck? You're the most powerful gigolo in the world and you're always under the thumb of your mother-in-law who lives with you; the Empress of Disdain, or the Valerie persona that conceals the evil alien overlord that secretly rules this world. It's no wonder he golfs a lot.

HELLO LITTLE PEOPLE!

What did we ever do to merit this:

If you can handle the odium of it you can head over to their web site and read a message from the charming and versatile General Wesley Clark who proclaims himself the head of the "grass roots" effort to draft Hillary for President.

Don't you love the idea of a totally out of touch with reality former Army General running the grass roots campaign of a woman who has been the gracious wife of a governor from Arkansas, diplomatic wife of a President, diplomatic failure on a par with Madeline Albright and senator from the same effluent that elected a hard-line socialist as dictator of New York?

Seriously, if this turned out like my past and we were afforded the opportunity to vote for a rat or Hillary, the rat would win. Couldn't we at least once start the race with the presumption that both parties are going to put forth candidates that don't lie through their teeth every time they open their mouths?

WAR AND REMEMBERANCE

Or, how I learned to love the lunatics that brought us the Obama Health Care scam. Let's face it. It could be so much worse then it is and it is about the worst thing that has ever happened to America. Let us contrast it though with a bit of current thinking about a past that is rapidly closing in on us as the Progressives bound into the new century with renewed optimism, no knowledge of history, no clue about international diplomacy, trade, economics, military or naval affairs, business, industry, transportation or information networks/systems and vulnerabilities.

Nope. Set that aside for a moment and ponder this which I have taken from my studies on the Easter Rebellion earlier tonight.

The liberal government of H. H. Asquith, not content with slaughtering all the young men in the trenches in Ypres which claimed the lives of almost half of Britain's professional Regular Army, passed an Act that, as you can read above, declared every man in the Realm, a soldier who's life could be spent in whatever manner the idiots that ran Britain and the British Army thought appropriate. And from the Somme to Gallipoli and a thousand places in between, they spent those lives like they had no value at all.

The Act specified that men from 18 to 41 years old were liable to be called up for service in the army unless they were married, widowed with children, serving in the Royal Navy, a minister of religion, or working in one of a number of reserved occupations. A second Act in May 1916 extended liability for military service to married men, and a third Act in 1918 extended the upper age limit to 51.

The politicians and the generals ate men with wild abandon and some people are a dismayed by a weird scam of a fiasco wrought by odious civil servants and wretched Health Industry Professionals who teamed together to destroy Health Insurance in America and gut the gullible? Please.

The problems with Obamacare are so beyond the Pale that I think they may have overreached far beyond their worst nightmares. Demanding all our financial data and other info covered by the Privacy Act and HIPPA and telling us at the same time that there are no guarantees that the data won't be used by others for any other purposes they choose, is irritating.

What do bureaucrats do when doctors opt out of practicing on the Obama plantation and decide to eschew any new medicare/medicaid patients. They may well not take any of the insurance offered by the new Health Insurance Industry heavyweights. You and I know that the bureaucrats don't care because they have no skin or kin in the game.

Time will tell. Me? All I ever get when I visit the doctor is an invitation to lose weight and some vitamins. Do I ever get the good stuff? I do not.

ADVANCING THE BANNERS

I took a short break from reality as it exists in my corners of the interwebs and visited most of my family for a few days. I had a good time and had a chance to reflect on how different we all are in just about all of the ways that one can be and still be a member of the civilized and educated first world. Nothing bad or wrong with any of us, just different. And the same.

I have not liked the news since I returned home. It is filled with things that are deeply amusing because I find that mostly these days I laugh at the human condition that the West has so invested itself, its integrity and its treasure in defining and shaping. Not only did a ship of fools manage to trap themselves against a lee shore and become surrounded by ice in high summer in the Antarctic seas, they raised such a fuss they got all of their rescuers stuck in the ice too. All have now had to call upon the USCG to come and rescue them after the Chinese, Australians, and Russians failed. These were global warmists out to prove the undeniable global warming in response to mankind by demonstrating that there was no ice at all in the Antarctic summer.

The problem is though that there are a million stories every day just as bad and just as ridiculous. I don't make lists and I don't read conspiracy theories but ask yourself what kind of civilization elects a man who can show nothing at all in his past or background to justify electing him mayor of a small town in Alaska? What about Benghazi? What about the IRS actively investigating "enemies of the regime?" What about the NSA spying on literally everybody in the world?

The New Yorkers have elected themselves a wonderful progressive to lead them into the wild years. They will no doubt be shocked to discover that crime skyrocketed in the Big Apple right up until the media actively goes along with the politicians in charge there and suppresses the data on the crime rate and the victimization of the middle and lower class by new thugs. If you ever wanted to experience NYC, you should go soon since it will increasingly come to look and feel like Detroit.

What I like? I drove from Washington DC to the edge of the Laurentide icesheet here in Metro Park Centralis into the teeth of a winter storm that dumped about a foot of snow on the roads and didn't blink an eye because the highway departments in Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio not only know how to do their jobs properly, I expect them to do them properly all the time. And they do. The roads were fantastic.

The respun news is filling with stories about Russian scientists and others discussing global cooling and its potential effects on humanity. Personally, I prefer the hot to the cold but then I spent years basking in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. It does become a constant trifling annoyance though to avoid countering the utter lack of science with another pack of "scientists" who present different conclusions from what MUST be the same facts. I mean, we all agree on the facts right?

I read a story in the Air Force Lifer Times about a B-1B that crashed and left one hell of a smoking hole in the ground back in August. It seems that the plane was on its way after that last flight, to the great Air Force Depot where it would enter a 60 month overhaul. Yes yes, I know. Nobody spends 5 years overhauling an aircraft and it was a misunderstanding of the life cycle maintenance concept for B-1Bs but nevertheless, I thought it funny. Because nobody was seriously injured. I watched a B52 crash not far from my house in Emeryville once. It was one of the saddest things I've ever seen.

I hope any smart crafty Air Force guys who read this blog would assure me that the USAF really doesn't spend 5 years overhauling a single aircraft.

And to all my critics I must point out that, yes, I know they are sentence fragments but I am trying to hone my press credentials so I can attend the Modern Language Association's annual party in Chicago next week with press credentials and since they don't write so good, I should try not to show them up. I draw the line at misspelling words though and any made-up words are obviously spelled correctly. The MLA has been a source of great merriment for over two decades, ever since I met my other brother-in-law who actually attends them from time to time.

I hope that all are healthy and enjoying the new year! I am.

RAIN OF CONFUSION

Those Cuban doctors in Africa are beginning to look a little more responsive and practical now aren't they?

Let us see how a command economy forces health care to provide health care.

NEAT PLACES

We went and returned from them without any of that flying stuff. I did spot this above me while we were getting a quick bite at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum:

Other cool stuff spotted today:

laugh out loud at some college thesis short explanations of their work

-The ancient Romans had a pretty large army, all things considered.

  -Ancient History, Oxford
 

-Being ignored makes Irish writers really bitter.

  -English, University of Texas

 -Autobiographical comics will save women and other oppressed groups from cultural oblivion.

   -English Literature, Glasgow University

Very Cool Maps! 

FICTIONAL ASSASSIN

I was reading a book recently which had the protagonist working as a hired assassin in Detroit. It was pretty interesting because the book didn't just discuss the killer's motives but his rationale for choosing the city he did for all his 'hits.' He figured that with the inept Metro Detroit Police working for the other team he had a less than one in ten chance of ever being caught if he kept his jobs within city limits.
He was used as a corporate 'hit' man who terminated employees for people that wanted to stifle a whistle blower or rescind a golden parachute to an executive who had come to the end of his time with the company...and life. The corporations would contact him and he would tell them to send the employee in question to Detroit for some conference or meeting and that he'd take it from there.

So, you know. If your company wants you to attend a quick conference in Detroit.... your position has been established.

OUTLANDISH UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIMS

The Fukushima Dai Ichi nuclear meltdown was no accident. It was the cover and deception contingency plan developed to disguise an accidental release of radioactivity from Japan's Top Secret nuclear research and warhead production facility.

Regrettably, the immediate nature of the radiation leaking from the weapon manufacturing site necessitated premature use of Japan's scalar resonance weapon which was used to create the earthquake and tidal wave that "led" to the meltdown at Fukushima.

Japanese workers who bravely worked in the plants in a futile attempt to prevent the meltdown were unaware of the plan and the need for the reactor cores to melt down and contaminate a critical area of Japan and stretches of the Pacific Ocean.

Scientists are only now rationalizing earlier discoveries that showed a sizable increase in the number of neutrons floating in the Pacific. They have been linked by top scientists at the Climate Research Institute in Wallingford, NH, to Neutron Bombs!

DPRK cries foul and demands a recount!

I'll be around, just not around here much. We are taking a trip.

FOR EVERYONE

LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE

A potential solution to Al Gore's tiny little global warming problem with greenhouse gasses and the lack of any warming whatsoever for the last 17 years has been sussed out; a titanic volcanic eruption on Mars Yellowstone.

Magma organizing and voting to expel all hot liquid rocks from collective because guns

2000 times larger than the explosion at Mount St. Helens. A bit of volcanic winter. With any luck we can stay ahead of the totally man-made glaciers.

http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/geeta/Plat_du_Jour/02EvolDomes_Space.html

 

 

SUBTLE DOES IT

One of the things you learn right away in a canoe is that when you're in front paddling you cannot tell what is happening behind you. Why, that person supposedly paddling behind you might be goofing off the whole way!

So, an important tip for those who are leading the way up river, check behind you often to make sure you're not the only one making a positive contribution to net progress.

Unaware of the slacker in the back

FULLY LOADED FUNNY

You must read the link to appreciate the entire story about a man who sells his Maxima.

A LITTLE BRITISH HUMOR

A big earthquake with the strength of 8.1 on the Richter scale hit the Middle East.

Two million Muslims died  And over a million were injured.

 Iraq and Iran are totally ruined and The governments don't know where To start with providing help to rebuild.

The rest of the world is in shock.

 The USA is sending troops to help.

 Saudi Arabia is sending oil.

 Latin American countries are sending Supplies.

 New Zealand is sending sheep, cattle and food crops.

 The Asian continents are sending labour to assist in rebuilding the Infrastructure.

 Canada is sending medical teams and supplies.

 GREAT BRITAIN, not to be outdone,  Is sending two million replacement muslims.

 God Bless GREAT BRITAIN....  

 

Damn those Brits are smart !!

MAKING CHUMPS JUMP THROUGH HOOPS

Wouldn't you feel like a stupid chump if you obeyed the law and bought Obamacare insurance at full price last week or last month? Now, you realize that because it's only a law if the President says it's a law, you didn't have too?

Wouldn't you feel like an ignorant buffoon and sick joke if you were in the Health Insurance Business racket ponzi scheme and you supported Obamacare because you thought you were going to rake in money hand over fist from the unwilling chumps being forced into your pool?

Don't worry loser. There's a minimum of 75 million more of you next year when they toss the employer mandate losers into the same pool to sink or swim. You know, if they actually follow the law.

Elections have consequences.

For those with a socialist historical bent, a little history: The Light That Failed. We just did it to health care in America. Good job, Socialists!

BLOWING IN THE WIND

Click here to see the Earth's winds anywhere on earth. 

TEEMING WITH BUDDHISTS

An interesting bit of mappery.

SERVICE TO THE STATE

A parable for our times:

A man goes into a bar and orders a beer. It happens that the bar owner is serving up the drinks. The man points out that the bar owner's employees are all in the back stealing the booze and pilfering the petty cash.

When the owner rushes to the back of the bar and finds that his employers really are stealing everything, he is justifiably angry and returns to the bar to find that the man who told him about the thieves was gone.

Without paying for his beer.

That vicious low down unprincipled son of a bitch!

At this point, the more I read about the NSA and the Government, the less impressed I am with anything they have to say for themselves. I think the law provides punishment for those aiding and abetting law-breakers and also for those conspiring to commit crimes. It's pretty obvious that the NSA and government have been breaking the law. If the NSA had a single argument with merit, it might be the old one used by the CIA for those who ratted out American spies abroad and thus put their lives in danger. But these are American spies, spying on Americans in America. Who's going to punish them for violating American Law?

Get impeached for covering up breaking into the Democratic Party offices to rummage around for their secrets in Watergate. Break into every office and home in the land to steal secrets: who's doing the covering up now?

It was domestic beer anyway.

WHY ARGUE

I'll admit to being an argumentative person. I only really do it in writing though since for a very long time I worked in an organization well known for its perfectly unreasonable stance on debating. That said, I can see the merits of this writer's case about the ACLU stance, but also wonder why not just take the money and do a perfectly awful job if they feel they can compel you to do it against your will?

If you come up to me and tell me that you want me to photograph your wedding and I tell you I don't want to but then you turn to the courts to force me to, well, OK. It's going to cost you everything you own upfront with no refunds. All sales final on delivery. I am absolutely certain that you won't like it.

I might even go to the expense of getting just exactly the right equipment for the job.

Wedding Photographer

It's like demanding that I sell you a parachute or a life raft or you'll sue me.

Bride's Mother and Family

Bride's maids

TRILLION PSI

UPDATE: Fed decided that the economy is doing so well now it CAN taper off the unprecedented scam and reduce its monthly bond purchases to just $75 Billion/month. Market up 300 points!!!!!
I am glad that my faith in them was not misplaced.

I thought the Fed would announce the tapering off of the Quantitative Easing scam today even though I knew they couldn't because nobody else is going to spend $85 billion/month to buy worthless bonds. Intellectually, I know QE is in the same category now as Social Security, Medicaire, Railroad Pensions, taxes... Even so, I caught myself wondering a couple of times today how to position my portfolio to survive the ugly dawn when people wake up again, just as we did a few years ago when the banks collapsed overnight, and realize that the government has just shafted us again. The two parties who won't debate government spending, because there can be no debate, won't even accept a common basis for negotiating future discussions. They can't.

It's the budget trends that worry me. From the report above:

Look at the 3rd bullet about interest on the debt. That is almost double the Defense Budget. When the time comes to pay lots of money for absolutely no goods or services, there's going to be hell to pay. 50% of those people you expect to be paying, don't have jobs today.

How much pressure do you think it takes to get blood from a turnip?

THE GIFT OF HATE

I was reading at Coyote blog about the ASA decision to boycott Israel. He made an interesting observation I hadn't thought about before, "So these leftish academics have a need to criticize, but feel constrained to only strongly criticizing center-right or right regimes.  The problem is that most of these are gone.  Allende, the Shah, Franco, South Africa -- all gone or changed." I'd throw in Pinochet, Somoza, Papa Doc Duvalier, Noriega, and Thatcher. Life is just getting better and better everywhere!

Those poor leftist academic bast#rds have NOBODY to criticize dammit! They can no longer hate responsibly by hating America and as Coyote notes, all those right wing thugocracies have been swept away by the tide of history. They dare not criticize the muslim regimes for several very good reasons having to do with self-interest. Communists and Socialists are good tyrannies and it's pointless to criticize those losers atop the piles of anarchy that are the remainder of the world.

There really is only one place left on the planet that can be criticized safely. Damn the luck!

THE UNDERTOW OF LIFE PLAYED OUT IN A GAME

I know a number of graduates of the U.S. Military Academy. Most of them are Vietnam veterans who attended the Academy in the late 50's. I lived there for a time. The news that Army fired its football coach on Sunday because he has failed to beat Navy for 5 straight years, says a little something about the Army, the Wars, and the Army Student Athlete in time of war.

I don't believe that Army's football coach has failed because he didn't try hard enough or because he wasn't good enough. I suspect he ran into a problem that cannot be resolved at the Coach's level. I wonder how much of his failure to win is due to the pool of recruits he can convince to sign up to come play football at the collegiate home of the organization responsible not just for killing star football player turned soldier Pat Tillman, but for spending years lying about it and covering it up. Prospective football players knew just how the Army treated a star athlete and the despicable way they lied about it starting in 2004. The last pre-Tillman cadet player graduated in 2008.

I don't think Army enjoyed much success recruiting star football players to come and play for the Army because they know enough to know that upon graduation from West Point they are going to spend years deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Years away from home, family, civilization, women, a relaxing beer at the end of the day, women, the NFL, football team recruiters, women. The military has been working extra hard to make sure that monastic warriors toe the party line and never drink, fool around, have sex, smoke, party to excess or slip the surly bonds of discipline as cherished and expressed by Top NCOs.

It's not much of a life in the military anymore. If the 10 brainiest people in America sat down with the cruelest petty tyrants in the entire world and thought of ways to make life in the military unattractive and pointless, they could not hope to do better than our military leaders have over the last 13 years. They started out with discouraging behavior they thought was 'inappropriate' such as drinking, going to clubs, drinking, smoking, smooching, sex, drugs, nationalism. Then they outright banned going to clubs, drinking, smoking, smooching, sex, drugs and nationalism. Then they got downright vicious about making life in the military as unpleasant and crappy as they possibly could. It wasn't always so.

There is a whole galaxy of difference between the lifestyle we enjoyed as youngsters and the grim institutional grey prudishness of the military today. Even I can hear it faintly; the tremulous little echos of the nannies who run the military today whispering, "it's bad for you." I wouldn't go to West Point even with the Wars finally winding down. Now the graduates can still enjoy all the institutional shall-nots imposed by, "people who know better than you," and settle down to nothing but garrison duties unrelieved by any chance of getting away to go and kill someone who desperately needs killing.

AMNESTY DEAL IN THE WORKS

As it now unfolds, I become more and more convinced that Snowden is probably the first and last American to ever work at the National Security Agency. The tiny amount of information he has revealed to date clearly show a U.S. Government Agency that is spying on literally every man, woman and child in America. Of course the wing-nuts believed that was true even before the Snowden revelations. Now everyone knows that the NSA really is rummaging through every single digital facet of your life.

The Guardian has put up a fascinating document which does a hell of a lot more than merely outline the extent of the NSA's spying. It also shows the bare-faced disregard for the truth we have come to expect from lawyers. Page 40 of the document describes the NSA's policy, as implemented, to collect metadata on your position/location and compile it and retain it forever. Snowden's information revealed for the first time that what the NSA and its lawyers thought was appropriate behavior, was based on a very dated concept that allows the NSA to collect and process information gathered legally from foreign intelligence agencies. The NSA didn't spy on us, the nasty British did. I suspect the NSA gave them all the tools, methods and access to enable them to get the data they wanted. I'd include the actual text but the original classification markings are still on the document and untouched.

The news this day is filled hereabouts with rumors that the Government will offer Mr. Snowden amnesty in return for the rest of the secrets he made off with and squirreled away.

My advice to Mr. Snowden would be to consider this Government's record of honest and fair dealing with citizens of the United States and to keep in mind the fate a similar government accorded S. Kamel, the son-in-law of the nation's ruler. He defected to the US with secrets about WMD and then accepted his President's offer of amnesty.

S. Kamel was killed in a shoot-out with his father-in-laws family.

I'd take it as a kindness though, Mr. Snowden, if you'd be good enough to let me know whenever you plan to board an aircraft we might be sharing. I'd need time to get off, but you can have any checked bags I leave behind.

POLICY CENTRIST TROLLS THE FAR RIGHT

and laughs at it.