SCHOOL

I see from reading that nationwide we have students who don't go to class. I didn't skip all that much as a student but then I wanted to learn and I found enough point in going so I could learn more math, more chemistry, more things that one gets exposed to at school. At the same time, I really didn't think much of school or teachers. For me, when they gave me the text book and told me to read it and I would be tested I read the damned book.

I took the Navy War College by seminar. In Strategy and Policy we had a stack of books to read that was as tall as I am. I regretted handing them back in but I had large pieces copied into a notebook that  I really hoped Chaplain Harvey would find when he went meticulously through two enormous pods I didn't have time to search before burning it all behind me.

What we used to call teachers are now called educators and I wouldn't submit for one minute to their lessons and ministrations.

I knew how to read before I went to school and I had 3 houses full of books a young man could seek his reading teeth into. I'm talking thousands of books.

I used to watch tv and it was mostly just the shows I wanted to watch before NETFLIX got in the business of letting people watch only what they please to watch. I would sometimes catch a few moments of one of the 90's reality cops show. Bad boys bad boys was their music. What I noted in every single one of their home invasions was a complete and total absence of books.

In my parents house we had bookshelves stuffed to overflowing with books. Most of the closets in the house had book shelves.  In my grandparent's houses they had bookshelves that took up whole rooms and stuffed with books. I still remember the delight of finally braving the sure and certain attack by the 30 million bees who lived in the attic and finding where my grandmother had her shelves full of paperbacks. Hundreds of them. Micky Spillane and the Destroyer were captive in her attic.

Where I live, every single room has at least one bookshelf some more than that. I don't buy them anymore but not because I don't want to read them. I just find it much simpler to read electronic books. Probably, in a generation, nobody in north America will even know what a bookshelf is or was since the only books they ever read are electronic.

I live directly across the street from our elementary school and I see little tiny first and third and second graders walking up the path into the door with enormous backpacks which, I suspect, are stuffed full of books. That stack I had doing Strategy and Policy springs to mind every time I see them.

Education and knowledge accrual had little to do with me once I learned that I could just read the damned book and skip every class. They used to tell me that the weekly surprise quiz was only 10% of the factors that went into getting your term or semester grades......but they lied. I could score a 100 on the midterm and the final and still be given a B for failure to "participate" in class. Oddly enough, it still rankles.

In the Newport classes. All of them. Yeah, I went to NSI and SWOS and Department Head school and also to Thompson Junior High and Saint Joseph of Cluny and learned that naps were the best things in life when one found oneself forced to listen to the same material that you read as homework and yet were forced to be in a classroom with a teacher who did nothing but parroting the book.

Since I'm on that topic, one of the very best classes I have ever taken was on stress management. The instructor stood there in front of us and told us that class would not start until every single one of us had the instructional material furnished to us 5 months ago on the tables in front of us. Some people had to drive 10 miles to their houses/apartments to find that stuff. Once we were all present again and seated the instructor simply said, "that's stress and don't ever do it to the people who work for you." That was it, class over. I don't know if they even still have what used to be known as Destroyer School or Department Head School. It may have been flushed along with SWOS many years ago.

IN THE MODE

All things considered by, and as an officer and a man

Speaking as a Navy Captain, I'd be honored to be barred from Senator McCain's funeral.

He ran for president as a total fake republican party candidate and I wouldn't vote for him in California. Quite seriously, that utter shitbag Obama was preferable to McCain.

As a politician he was a nasty piece of work. As a man he was a total scumbag.

ON CONGRESS

I could not do the job Gowdy did. I sometimes get lost in watching Trey Gowdy. He rips the very heart out of the people who come to testify in front of him. They're the agents of evil and vile. He very skillfully evicts all aspects of virtue from the scum that come before him. I would not hesitate to give testimony to him because I honor the truth and would not dream of prevaricating. We as citizens of our Republic would probably all be better off if somebody just pointed a gun at the heads of any person who testified to his committee and shot them. I wonder if Maxine or that other idiot have you tube followers who would say the same. Gowdy is a man of focus. Yes, as I think of it those words come from the movie John Wick which I might well watch again tonight. I used to be a man of focus. I maintained it for 30 years and then I lost it. I have found it again. The movie was well done, enough. This scene though, it still speaks as loud as it ever did.

WEASELS TO THE NORTH

Good title for a blog post. I got hoovered back into reality and lost my whole train of thought. Pretty sure it had to do with the north and weasels.

DESPICABLE SHIT

Mike Mullen shows the true nature of the Admiralty. We let the shit float to the top and run the navy.

A DIFFERENT ERA.

LETHAL AND I WILL MISS GOWDY

I WATCHED THE FBI DIRTBAG TESTIFY

Congratulations, now you get to ask which one.

THE WORD

I don't watch TV. Ever.That said, I just now watched the words drip from the lips of a vile Peter Strzok in his testimony to Congress.

I once dealt with men like him.

No I wouldn't give him access to COMSEC

No I wouldn't have given access to firearms under my control

No, I would never have given him the benefit of the doubt.

I find it incredible that the the FBI gave him any clearance at all or promoted him to the top of the FBI. We really need to work on just how civilians get promoted in organizations because it is clearly defective.

TIME

Every time I hear this I am sent back to 1 north of Santa Monica.

HE LOST MY RESPECT

A man who flew A4's in a deadly place died.

NEW DAY IN THE MORNING

I used to drive in California. I had business that took me through Santa Monica and up the coast to Port Heuneme. At the time I had a 328i convertible and yes I drove with the top down. I also had business in San Jose and yes, took the starlit road north well after the sun had set. I loved driving long after other people were in bed. There was a majesty in simply stopping in the grapevine or even down on the flat central valley and gazing up at the milky way.

You could see the same thing from anywhere else but the dark was especially dark in the valley. Nobody lived there.

For about 10 years I used to commute on weekends between San Diego and San Jose/Emeryville/Treasure Island. It killed my RX-7 but the VW bus was the absolute bomb. I put a comfy chair in the bus and I would stop and spend hours at Big Sur and watch the world go by or look up with binoculars at the milky way above.

SHE'S A KEEPER

THE FORTY DAYS OF MUSA DAGH

I read the book in college. It was recommended by a friend. I have never been to Turkey, unlikely to ever visit the place. It's hard to believe that this was Rome in the East and for a thousand years played host to civilization. It fell to islam in the end and now it is giving up the last ghost of civilization under it's modern day caliph.

Morganthau sure got around back in the day. For a while every single bit of stupid had that name attached to it somewhere.

NOW AND THEN

WHY NOT

PLAY

In an ideal world all would,

FOCUS.

THE WAR OF LIBERAL AGGRESSION

I saw those words in the comments of some blog I read today and found them to be useful to describe what is now going on as the not-so-mythical Deep State continues to do everything in its power to carry out a coup and remove President Trump and disenfranchise the rest of us. I don't see how this is going to end since there is no clear path to victory for either side.

Silicon Valley tech companies and home to many of the internets tools and resources is relentlessly totalitarian in their demeanor and behavior. They have all elected to wage war on the 64 million people that voted for President Trump and  they are using all the means at their disposal to deplatform and shut down everything from comment to actual banking services for businesses engaged in 2nd Amendment trade and sales.

The Courts are being handled as expeditiously as Republican Senators ever did anything useful in the last 60 years but there is still an enormous amount of ongoing damage that comes through the courts and impacts negatively the lives and well-being of people who voted for President Trump.

Hollywood is still fully engaged in trying to overturn the election and is doing everything in their power to shut down the right and cover it with slime. Their allies in Antifa are still working to provoke a fight that will ultimately end very badly for them when people who currently engage them simply give up and bring a gun to the pipe and club fests that pass for anti-hate street demonstrations.

Life is going to be interesting for awhile as things sort themselves out but the war is going to be a long one and it won't be pretty.

BEDLAM WAS ONCE A LUNATIC ASYLUM AND CNN TOOK IT OVER

I don't watch TV as such. I was never lapped in any physical endeavor but I lapped some people. Peters toppled into madness at some point.

A DISSERVICE

I have a family rich in a tradition of surprising each other with off the wall stuff out of the blue that we know is not in the genre or type that the one we gift expects. We all do it. Darn it. OTOH, my mother was the one that bought John Norman's paperback books up until about 4 in the series and my sisters and I had little trouble turning up the rest. I think we can all agree that Fort Riley, Manhattan and Junction City were literary deserts in the years that the Vietnam War was winding down and that's where we lived and I didn't even start reading Perry Rhodan until we drove to Saint Johns in Newfoundland from Newport, RI and I finally accepted that there are literary deserts of unplumed depth. Oh Canada, you, without Farley Mowat, would be a most bleak desert. Readers need to read The Boat Who Wouldn't Float, The Serpent's Coil and Grey Seas Under.

So, the 2 have given me all the Leckie books, and I have them on a shelf unread, I will give them a chance this week even though I have little expectation of good. Charles de Lint surprised me and so too did Neverwhere by Gaiman; both gifts from a sister-in-law. I would not have bought either of them but they proved sound and I read a lot more of Gaiman's books after reading the words he wrote that I never would have bothered with by my own self. I shant bother with the Hugo award types of recent age. yjru,pdy;u frgomr trsfrtd smf siyjptd pg trvrmy shr snf yjru divl/. Yeah, it's all like one keystroke off to the right, I just listened to whossnames acceptance declaration and screw reading its crap whatever it's about. Leave that to MSNBC and CNN.

CNN: RINGO, WEBER WIN HUGO AWARD!

In a surprising about face, voters rejected the snowflake's agenda and voted for books they liked to win the scarcely significant hugo award. Both authors were embarrassed when confronted with the news they had won science fictions least honored award. The 'awe shuks' were scattered far and wide. They were both reluctant to admit that popular sales were dismissed as having less than nothing to to do with an award that required voters to send a lot of money to snow flakes in order to 'justify' the award.

IMAGINE BEING A SNOWFLAKE THEN

They screwed up somehow by making believe it could not happen again and so did their kids and their kids until we have a generation of snowflakes who take umbrage-to-death if called miss instead of ms or slut or whatever it is they crave to be called. The Last of the Few.

ELECTIONEERING THE SOCIALIST WAY

We know the states without ID requirements for voters are cesspools of vote fraud. This kind of drives it home. Whenever you hear that vote fraud doesn't exist? You're talking to a dyed in the wool socialist who thinks Che Guevara was a gentle man and friend to the people he mercilessly killed or beat to death in the name of social justice.

If only there was some tropical island, 90 miles away from America, where all the social justice warriors could find peace and contentment....

WATCH ON THE POTOMAC

I wonder who is keeping an eye on Obama and Jarrett as they plot their next attack on the Constitution and the destruction of America in their secret Georgetown bunker. History is littered with examples of leaders and wannabe dictators retreating from view before suddenly re-emerging and taking back the power that they feel is rightfully theirs. Hugo Chavez is famous for repeated lunges at power in Venezuela. Of course, the military had a chance to keep Venezuela from going the way of Cuba and Cambodia but they blew it and let Chavez go.

I don't really doubt that Obama and Jarrett are busy plotting his return to power or possibly her election. It's not outside the bounds of reason. After all, the people elected a first term useless Senator from a corrupt state as President just 2 years into his first term in any elected office. I can see the twisty little communists even now rounding up legal teams to challenge the 22nd Amendment and have it declared unconstitutional. This is why they wanted Hillary, as useless as she is, to win the election and pack the Supreme Court with the kind of 'jurists' that would go along with the idea of overturning something like the 22nd Amendment as 'unconstitutional' and pave the way for a 3rd Obama term.

Don't think it can happen? Look at California. The Courts have a rich history of overturning various propositions that won the majority of votes in the formerly Golden State.

When you think about it, who out there do you trust to keep an eye on somebody as slippery as those two? Not the FBI. Not the NSA. Not the CIA. Not the DNI. Not the media. There's almost an inevitability to it since there is nobody in any position to fight against it.

REMO WILLIAMS

I was out to dinner with friends last night and they never heard of the movie. It was one of the most watched movies on Esteem back in the day. It must have been shown at least once a day for months despite the fact that we had over 900 movies in the movie locker. The navy had some strange ideas about what movies would be suitable for a crew of all men between the ages of 18 and 35.