OBAMA DECLARES WAR ON CLIMATE

In a move widely expected by both his friends, the President declared war on climate today. Citing the sweeping and dramatically successful War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, Obama announced that he had just signed an Executive Order today declaring unending war on the planet's climate. He shared the sentiment of a climate scientist lobby (laboring on government stipends) who believe that Earth's climate is somehow to blame for warming or cooling the planet in excessive or inadequate ways and announced drastic quotas on CO2.

In an effort to heal the planet's atmosphere the President has announced plans to drastically increase the amount of carbon monoxide stating that, "19 out 10000000 scientist agree that this is an acceptable way to reduce free carbon.

No real scientists were asked to the Executive signing ceremony hosted in the Rose Garden today which was bathed in the shimmering glow of the Nobel Prizes of both the President and Al Gore.

As a Nobel Laureate myself, in the fine tradition of Michael Mann of Penn State*, I would have been at the ceremony but I was out shooting polar bears.

*Mann contributed something to the IPCC which body was awarded the Nobel Prize. He claimed that this made him a Nobel Laureate. I am a member of the Red Cross and contributed an ocean of blood. The Red Cross has been awarded the Nobel Prize 3 times. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

GUN SAFETY INSTRUCTION THEN AND NOW

This delightful link takes you to a 1956 LIFE pictorial on teaching school children how to handle weapons safely.

You can see how the police teach gun safety in schools today in this clip. Listen to what the police officer says just before he shoots himself.

Personally, I prefer the cop in 1956. At least he knows when the gun is loaded and unloaded and when he pulls the trigger he knows a round will come out and hit whatever the gun is pointed at.

CARPE THE DAMN DIEM JOE!

It gladdens my heart and cheers my soul that I never watch TV anymore but I got to wondering just a bit ago how the "DRAFT JOE FOR PRESIDENT" committee is doing on releasing their candidate into the wild to campaign on his own for national office. I checked the deep internets and the surface ductnets and even probed the starless outer darknets for news of his Campaign to Elect Joe President but it was all in vain.

I found this pathetic dribble right off: “In my heart, I’m confident I could make a good president,” said Biden on Wednesday. Biden was cagey when asked about whether he will run in the 2016 election. “I haven’t made a decision to run. I haven’t made a decision not to run.” Biden said he and wife Jill are too dimwitted and slow to make up their own minds. “Jill and I will make that decision later down the road… If I don’t run for president we’ll all be OK.” Pull the trigger Joe! Commit!

You know the funny bit right? The lick-spittle members of the Democratic National Campaign to Elect Hillary President, er, press, then stupidly asked the dimwit for his deeply cogent and insightful thoughts on the middle east, military strategy in Afghanistan, and the importance of leaning into the solar wind in order to shift the earth's orbit a little further out so man-made global warming won't kill us all.

I miss the last Vice President. Even though he knew how to pull a trigger, and shoot responsibly*, we all knew that he was never Presidential timber and would not run as the Republican nominee. His heart wasn't in it.

SALSAL (See a Lawyer Shoot a Lawyer)

THE ARTFUL DODGER

I heard this at Borders in Emeryville a few years after returning from a very small unimportant and forgotten little war. The singer died yesterday after a long life of protest and organization. I wonder though, if the guys in Italy had it so bad since at least people heard goodish things about them from time to time. The poor guys at Singapore and then the CBI had a far lonelier war a lot further from home.

Here below is an abbreviated version of the tune above.

BLOWUPS HAPPEN

A passing tribute to a wonderful writer, Robert Heinlein. I was struck by a silly question while watching the second video here about a Roman Bakery in the long lost Port of Ostia. As he talked about the slaves toiling away in the dust from 10 millstones churning out enough flour to feed thousands of people every day I wondered if the Romans ever suffered from dust initiated explosions in their flour mills. Their ventilation systems were pretty primitive.

Washburn A Mill exploding in 1878 because of dust. (Stereo view works oddly enough)

Flour dust was once a real passing concern of mine because height of eye is important to the success of some ventures. While the operators assured me that it was safe, one can never be sure about a thing like that. Wired.com reports that between 1994 and 2003 there were 115 dust explosions in the food and agriculture sector, most of them in grain elevators.

You can see the grain elevators and flour mill that concerned me in the picture below. They are the largest objects to the right of the bent submarine. When people assure me that accidents such as dust explosions or smashed submarines are fantastically rare, I take it with a large grain of salt. It's the only way to be sure. One never hears of salt explosions but better safe than sorry.

A badly damaged submarine heads into port. It was run over. In a very rare accident.

THE LONELY LUNAR RABBIT

It was with a heavy heart that I read of the apparent demise of China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover after it dropped into the Sea of Rains. The article at NewScientist attributes the malfunction to charged dust particles stirred up by the rover's arrival and initial motion.

Charged dust particles, hhhmmmm.

Russia's particle beam weapon could raise the dust and rover to the same electrical potential

If it doesn't work out, Jade Rabbit will join other hardware left behind in Mare Imbrium and one small statuette left behind by the astronauts of Apollo 15 commemorating fallen astronauts known to them at the time they departed the Sea of Rains.

A BRIEF STOP FOR FUEL IN EUREKA

A brief stop for fuel is called a BSF in the U.S. Navy. It is what ships do when they cannot replenish their fuel by going alongside a tanker of some sort while underway. They date back to the first days of the machinery powered navy and explain part of the rush to colonize the rest of the world's seacoasts. The navies and maritime fleets of the day needed a safe place to accumulate and store fuel and then to refuel ships that came into port.

Sometimes a BSF is more dangerous than expected and you get tragedies like USS COLE in Aden. The ship was easily targeted and blown up by muslims who placed a lot of explosives in a boat and then drove the boat into the destroyer's port side causing it to sink at the pier. The explosion killed a number of sailors and the muslims on the attacking boat.

USS COLE after its Brief Stop For Fuel in Aden

There was a little interest in a navy ship that stopped in Humboldt Bay to refuel the other day. The coastline between Los Angeles and Seattle is justly famous as the most dangerous bit of coastline ever to make an impact on the U.S. Navy. In 1923 the Honda Point Disaster claimed 7 nearly new destroyers and the lives of 23 sailors. The waters teem with Great White Sharks and Killer Whales but the real sharks are found ashore all along the west coast.

Destroyer Squadron 11 after running aground north of Santa Barbara in 1923

When I was a young Chief Engineer I once sailed to San Francisco and moored at Fisherman's Wharf. We had an easy time getting there from San Diego and enjoyed a fairly relaxing week ashore, but there was one thing I refused to do while in that place and that was to refuel. In San Francisco at the time, the most lethal critters alive were running the place and woe betide the man who spilled so much as one drop of fuel into the Bay for death would be too good for him. (Mayor Diane Feinstein said so.)

I figured we had enough fuel aboard to make it back to San Diego. You can imagine my dismay when my Chief came up to me on the bridge while we were abeam Honda Point to inform me that he couldn't get any fuel out of the last fuel tank. Nothing came out of the purifier but water. I asked the skipper if he could relieve me of the Deck and he answered that he was free and very interested in anything I learned while absent and took the Deck while I moseyed down to the engine room to have a look at this amazing crisis for myself.

The U.S. Navy's newest class of warship was spotted in Eureka, California taking on fuel.

USS INDEPENDENCE gleaming in the bright sun in Eureka, CA January 2014

The good people of Eureka had another Navy warship in that close once before.

USS MILWAUKEE, flag still flying, washes ashore in Eureka, CA in January 1917.

It didn't end well for USS MILWAUKEE. She broke in half after running aground while attempting to rescue a submarine that had gone ashore earlier.

The people of that area take their pacifism very seriously and will go to any extreme of violence to make the point about how much they are in favor of non-violence. I once had the opportunity to send security forces to that neck of the woods to protect some ships and suggested that instead maybe they should go somewhere peaceful and calm, like Aden. There is something about the air on the northern California coast and the Oregon and Washington coast that brings out the worst in people. People like us in Canada and Alaska though so that's something.

I can only imagine the terror of the men and women on the USS Independence as they refueled in that nest of vipers. They probably figured they were lucky to make it out alive. It's bound to be much worse there than San Francisco. Only the most dire necessity would force me into that place to take on fuel.

SOMETIMES YOU GET LUCKY

Our Washington correspondent sent us this today:

A US Air Force C-141 was scheduled to leave Thule Air Base, Greenland , at midnight during a winter month. During the pilot's pre-flight check, he discovers that the latrine holding tank is still full from the last flight. So a message is sent to the base and an airman who was off duty is called out to take care of it. 

The young man finally gets to the air base and makes his way to the aircraft only to find that the latrine pump-truck has been left outdoors and is frozen solid, so he must find another one in the hangar, which takes even more time.He returns to the aircraft and is less than enthusiastic about what he has to do. Nevertheless, he goes about the pumping job deliberately and carefully (and slowly) so as not to risk criticism later.As he's leaving the plane, the pilot stops him and says, "Son, your attitude and performance has caused this flight to be late and I'm going to personally see to it that you are not just reprimanded, but punished." 

Shivering in the cold, his task finished, he takes a deep breath, stands tall and says, "Sir, with all due respect, I'm not your son; I'm an Airman in the United States Air Force. I've been in Thule, Greenland for 11 months without any leave, and reindeer are beginning to look pretty good to me.  I have one stripe, it's 2:30 in the morning, the temperature is 40 degrees below zero, and my job here is to pump shit out of an aircraft." "Now, just exactly what form of punishment did you have in mind?

The major difference between a well-run organization and a half-assed one, is that in a good one, the guy with the duty answers the phone. Many of the places I went on C-141s, nobody bothered to answer the phone. We figured we'd see more of the world traveling on C-141s even though they don't have any windows in  back. They spent longer on the ground. A lot longer on the ground.

THE MASSACRE AT ISANDHLWANA

Forgotten and unlamented in the northern hemisphere, it was a battle in an age of epic military disasters brought to the world by the British Army. Isandhlwana raged on 22 January 1879

Last of the 24th by Stuart Liptrot.

At the end of the Battle of Isandhlwana, the last few soldiers of the South Wales Borderers, 24th Regiment of Foot, hold out till their last rounds of ammunition in the foothills of the mountain.

It was preceded by another forgotten massacre of even more people as Elphinstone retreated from the disaster he wrought in Kabul, Afghanistan from the 6th through the 13th of January.

An 1898 depiction of the last stand of survivors of Her Majesty's 44th Foot at Gandamak.

One of the treasures we carried out of Iraq and Afghanistan is another generation of officers who will not plan a repeat of the disaster that politicians and weak generals created in Vietnam and Cambodia.

It is easy, and easier to say, that the generals and the men who led the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did indeed fail to learn the hard lessons of history but I think a close study of the facts will bear out one resounding truth, the men that planned those wars planned for the immediate, overwhelming and total destruction of the enemy and they accomplished that.  They did it so well there was nothing left and that unfortunately encouraged the idiots. They forgot that after the war is over nothing is more destructive than a politician who appoints a State Department apparatchik to 'run the asylum' and rebuild it into a modern Bedlam.

BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO FEED THE RAPTORS

Peace and Tranquility never had a chance.

Pope gets kids to feed Peace and Tranquility to waiting raptors

STRANGE CARTOGRAPHY

Some interesting mapography here.

HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY

Due to a mix up at the International Date Line this post may be perceived as late. Nothing could more ridiculous.

Traditional Australian

Recent Australians

VB for all!

A LITTLE HAGGIS AT THE BAR

In honor of Robert Burns Night I thought I'd share a picture of a place which is no more.

The little sheep, a genuine product of Scotland, and named, appropriately, Haggis, traveled extensively with my girl and made a brief appearance at Kona Village Resort where he was sometimes found at the Shipwreck Bar. He preferred these:

but he was happy with anything with alcohol in it and a smoke. Sadly Kona Village was destroyed by a tsunami several years ago and hopes fade that it will ever be reborn. It was a timeless place that exuded happiness.

HOW ORWELLIAN

Spotted on a car in front of me. The young lady no doubt thinks she's a very proper model of a liberal mind set free to roam the cosmos of this enlightened age if only she could stamp out the little cockroaches and deniers and t people.

News is free. It is either true or untrue but mostly its shades of truth. Some like the darker bits on top and some like them on the bottom or maybe arranged vertically. Either way though, who the hell thinks they have a right to tell you to turn off the news? Seriously, you see what you want to see.

NO HAPPY COWS

I just ran across this today. Drat.

I didn't hold on like grim death to XP Pro because I hated everything that came after it, I hung on to it because it worked so damned well.

Where I worked for so many years above rocket scientists, mostly Lockheed, I listened to all the engineers and scientists whine about the dismal lack of performance and stability that came with Vista and 7 and 8. I was delighted to plug along on my crisp clean sailing machines of computers running XP that never collapsed under the strain of innovation. Admittedly, our needs were small and we weren't trying to set speed or load records. What we had worked well enough. Still does.

Plus I also had OSX running on a MacBookPro so there was that.

But the cruelest cut from Microsoft today was:

LOOKING INTO THE INFINITE

The supernova in M82 as imaged by Leonid Elenin

It would appear, anywhere but here
that a new super nova blazes in the heavens
Where all may look agape and wonder
at the violence done 12 million years passed
except we upon the plains of the formerly great
City of MetroParkCentralis
where the skies are always cloudy
when the heavens burn so bright

50 supernova per second in the universe. We haven't had one this close in hundreds of years.

Dennis di Cicco captured M82's supernova on the evening of January 22nd

DEEPLY STUPID PEOPLE

If one were to try to think of 10 things a sovereign government could do that are so impossibly stupid they defy belief, I'm pretty sure Greece would place at least 4 times in the top 10. The latest ridiculous outrage today is that a terrorist sentenced to multiple life terms for attacking and killing British and American businessmen, diplomats, foreigners and a total of 23 people was released from prison on furlough for a week and failed to report back to finish out his multiple life sentences.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the United States is “very closely engaged” with Greek authorities about finding Xiros.

“We’re obviously deeply concerned that this convicted terrorist remains at large and is now allegedly issuing renewed calls for violence. ... We continue to call on the (Greek) government to do everything they can to locate him and return him to prison.”

They are now offering a reward for information leading to his recapture. They're offering 4 million Euros to whoever helps locate him so the idiot Greeks can let him go on furlough again next year. That's 4 million Euros they'll have to borrow from their banks and Europe's banks because the government doesn't have it.

So my question is, does the NSA get to keep the money or do they have to give it back? I mean, they obviously know where he is hiding and he's a foreigner. Win win, right?

IF YOU LIKE VERMEER

These are pretty darn good.

I have always liked his paintings because they are compositions that are about the light that falls within. Solar infall....

There was another artist. One who sold priceless Vermeers to the Nazis during World War II. It is a fascinating story about how he beat the charges against him of collaborating with the enemy which was deadly serious in Holland right after the war.

Speaking as one who knows these things, I cannot imagine the patience of both parties to get these staged and photographed. I'm sure lots of favorite things were involved.

There are a number of other works at the first link.

THE WORKERS PARADISE

Cuba as you find it. It's always fascinating that so many people blame America for the communists failure to take off economically and become well fed productive makers of the world's goods rather than consumers. Michael Totten shows the world what progressive politics earns society and those who are born to a world made better by Statists.
The bit with the cows is fascinating. It looks like progressives have put Cuba's few remaining cows on a diet. They are not happy cows.

The way progressive socialists in America carry on about Cuba you would think it is paradise and the only reason it is a little screwed up is because one country out of 192 other countries in the world has refused to trade with it. One. Country. There's one other place that America doesn't trade with. It's another progressive paradise stuffed with virtuous hard working peasants. It's the one you cannot see at night because it's dark there. Very dark.

MR PRESIDENT

Mr President, will you serve as Secretary General of the UN when you leave office?

JUST AROUND THE CORNER

It's sneaking up on you.

Valentine's Day.

NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT

As long as the reactors stay online we have plenty of energy and can continue to make water forever. If for some reason the reactors drop offline we have plenty of coal and can make electricity to power the desalination plants and distilling plants.

What?

San Onofre nuclear power plant is offline and has been dismantled? The California Air Resources Board wants all the coal fired power plants in California to shut down? Really? Well, so not a problem. We still have all the hydro-electric stations not to mention all that hot air.

Say.... do we actually make any water in California at all? It's not like they use any of that electricity to make so much as a single drop of water even using all the waste heat off their current power stations. You might wonder why they can't even manage that and the answer won't surprise you. When desalinating seawater one keeps the fresh water and discards the brine which is just a tiny bit saltier than the sea, back into the sea. Unfortunately, that is the where the vipers known as the California Coastal Commission live and regulate and they won't let anyone pour salt into the sea.

AN INTERESTING SAIL

 
I might opt for a far warmer clime and one without so many giant ice bergs. It would be fun though.

MLK AND A DAY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Driving from Newport, Rhode Island to Philadelphia on my way to fire fighting school back in 1986, I had the radio tuned to a channel of the People's Radio and chanced to hear an excellent program about a man almost nobody ever speaks of anymore; Malcolm X. The station played excerpts from many of his speeches and writings as he grew and developed over his brief time on Earth.  I came to think that he was my kind of rabble-rouser. I could feel the power of the words in his speeches. He was not communicating thoughts he derived from his contemplation of God's words. He was talking like an angry man with much to be angry about. His words contributed directly to his assassination. I never heard his speeches until I was 25 and a brand new graduate of the Navy's Department Head School.

Today is one set aside by the nation to remember another man who was also cut down in his prime by an assassin. The 1960's were a seemingly endless series of assassinations. Diem, shot by friends of Kennedy. JFK killed by a communist 20 days later. Black Nationalist Malcom X, Nazi party leader George Rockwell, Martin Luther King, Jr., and RFK, all assassinated. All of them men who made the decision to enter the arena of ideas, and all but one, coldly agreeable to assassination and murder if that was the price demanded to change the world.

Oddly enough, I have sympathy for just about all of them. They wanted to make it a better world. Each of them wanted to make it over in his own image. One wanted a black nationalist world. You can find that if you like for there are a lot of places where black nationalism has triumphed. Diem who just wanted to survive there at the end. His ambitions there were as doomed as his country. JFK and RFK were going to make a better world for their kind of people. You can see what they meant to achieve in Massachusetts to this day.

Martin Luther King wanted something a little different. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

I believe in words. Each word means a specific thing. Words without qualification mean what they say and nobody gets to qualify another person's words. That is deceitful and lacks honesty and integrity. When JFK spoke to Congress and said, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth," nobody tried to dissimulate his words and their clear meaning and parse it to say anything else. Nobody that mattered tried to add, "if we can afford it or if it isn't too dangerous or if it is technically feasible." We accepted it as the goal and worked to accomplish it.

I think we can all get along if we work at it but there has to be a firm foundation of agreement on what it is that we are working for. If we want an end to discrimination then we should probably stop discriminating. If we want a meritocracy where people are allowed to rise to whatever level of accomplishment they can by merit and luck then we should probably take our thumbs off the scale when parceling out merit and luck. If we believe that we should give it all over and live in a peaceful and harmonious society than surely that is the one that most requires the positive assent of each member to agree to participate in such a society and also it must include a path out for those that do not desire to live in a Society of Friends.

This country used to have a common foundation that was built on a common understanding of the documents of the founding of the country which were taught by the free education that is provided to every child. The educators taught elementary math, reading, writing and the basics of a literate society to everyone. The elite and the devoutly religious sent their children to private schools that employed the same teachers to teach the same subjects. The subjects were identical. The method and nature of the instruction varied widely. Literacy, fluency and mathematical reasoning was the path to a better life. A firm grasp of those subjects lifted all who sought mastery of them.

To everyone's continual amazement, that fundamental baseline is what has been screwed up. Failure to achieve upward mobility in society today can be laid almost exclusively at the feet of a failure to become literate and the inability to reason mathematically. When I look at the enormous number of people that the U.S. Military simply will not recruit because they cannot read or perform simple arithmetic I become angry at how 12 years of free education was shit on. How did we screw that up?

It was there! It was right there! It was shining and sparkly and just within our grasp and we let it get away!

I know what people say about schools and teachers and I don't say any of that. I went to 9 different schools counting kindergarten through high school. They all had one thing in common. They made an extraordinary effort to teach children who came to school and wanted to learn and for the most part they did that very well. My last school was motivated solely by the money and did its best to keep kids in school. It tried hardest to reach the kids that were done learning and it was also the worst of the schools I attended. The other schools looked at the hard-core refuseniks and allowed them to saunter off to whatever pursuits they thought a more fit use of their learning time.

There had to be someone at home that cared about learning if it was going to happen. If nobody successfully communicated the importance of learning and provided the discipline to force it, it was over.

What Martin Luther King, and what we all wish for our children, can now be achieved in the United States by any child that learns to read and write, and learns mathematics and can graduate from school.

I spent my whole life in environments where nobody cared about your background or skin color. The only thing that mattered was if you could do the job. It would be nice if you bathed regularly, were pleasant and had a reasonable sense of humor, but really it boiled down to nothing more than whether or not you were up to the job.

I think Martin Luther King's dream has become a reality. If you can fit yourself into Society, it will make room for you to flourish. Did you know the military simply won't induct 75% of the age eligible applicants because they don't meet the minimum standards expected of members of that society?

If you want a new dream for the new millennium, discover what to do with the millions of people that turned their back on education and learning and declined to take part in society or join the Race.* We mostly lock them up after we tire of them. There has to be a better way and it isn't going to be found in spending more money on schools, teachers, prisons or youth activities. It's going to take something new under the sun.

*The Race of Reason of course.

PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSIN

What is the SS to do with:

I think the Secret Service must be having a good time. This article from the Daily Mail is great!!

For the moment, they are allegedly sleeping in separate bedrooms after Mr Obama’s attempt to ‘mend fences’ backfired so badly on a recent Christmas getaway to Hawaii that he returned to Washington with their two daughters, leaving his wife behind.

The National Enquirer, it must be said, quoted only anonymous insiders in support of these sensational claims, and is hardly the most reliable source of hard news. [says who?]

Obama advisers are certainly not talking as if there is any scandal in the offing. [what scandals? They've never seen any]

Washington’s media has ignored the story. [they've ignored ALL Obama scandals]

But everyone remembers how the Enquirer famously got it right when it claimed the supposedly squeaky clean Democrat presidential contender John Edwards had fathered a love child by a former campaign worker. [But nobody cares about liars and scoundrels]

Kind of makes one wonder if the separate bedrooms are simply the SS telling the two to sleep in neutral corners.

Do you think they've read this wonderful classic?