I live after dark. I always have. I have an infinite number of flashlights because I also like to read, after dark. I went looking for someone I had not heard for almost 30 years tonight. I was curious. What happened to her? I did not like her and I did not share her philosophy but she did have, like another nameless woman, who had a good voice, a remarkably good voice. Joan and Sinead had wonderful voices. Oh, drat. I named them.


For no particular reason, I wondered, what ever happened to that horrible person and so I googled. I haven't heard her voice since I left Solana Beach in 2001. She vanished. And I saw in the news just now that a good man had stepped into the clearing at the end of the path while I wasn't paying attention.  I kind of thought Spock was good for a lifetime.

Sinead, kind of like a butterfly. When you hear the music though, .... it was good.

If you tossed in Madonna, it was like walking on the Great Plains, in the rain, in a towering thunderstorm OK, and Nena.  The San Diego rats in my garage ate my Bridge Coat but the echoes linger of walking off the Newport Naval Base in that coat to find dinner at Mama Leones after the base closed on account of snow and listening, on my walkman to Paris is Calling by Debra Harry.


The music is the stamp of our times. All of us have our own. Talk to me later about Aha while walking down the Champs Elysee in the Spring of the year of 1985.

Isn't it weird? One has to literally screw the truth out of Clintons.

I might have written about him before but, you can take it. We had a great meal out with scientists and engineers so I am reminded again of Mike. He was going to work for me. He was going to be late reporting, on account of surgery. He wrote a letter to the Captain and said that due to testicular cancer he would be late and one ball short.

When he finally showed up, he was enormous. Huge. Youngest of 14 in his family. Nice young man.

As it happens, shortly later, we went to the Tanker War for a bit and looked for mines. Mike was my DCA on both ships. As it happens, we were both sipping coffee in the wardroom as the ship prepared to get underway from BASREC, Bahrain when the Captain's voice came over all the speakers on the ship and demanded to know, who peed in his coffee cup. The voice assured us that there would never ever be any liberty again and life would surely dry up and blow away if the man who peed in his coffee cup did not immediately reveal himself.

Srsly, it was a timeless moment. I kind of nodded and said, "you" and he kind of nodded and said, yep.

Just happened to buy a 150 rounds of .45 on the way home. Just saying.

I would kill them all. What use are rethuglicans?

The move comes just 24 hours after McConnell agreed to remove provisions defunding President Obama's executive action on immigration from the DHS bill and vote on them separately. McConnell had said he would schedule a vote on the immigration measure, sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins, on Friday, but if votes on the DHS bill drag on, the Collins measure will be bumped back, with a cloture vote following DHS passage.

Seriously, I could get drunk and puke better republicans. Yes, I know, that doesn't say much for the brand.

I won't vote for her but I did like her observation. Fiorina said that despite Clinton’s extensive travel as secretary of state, “every place in the world is more dangerous today than it was six years ago."

You know? Despite Hillary.

Democrats, making shit scarier than it has to be.

A loser invites a head of government to address Congress and our Head of State and all of his minions moan most passionately about how this hurts relations with whossname's country. As I recall, the light worker had Netanyahu drop by for a brief meeting  several years ago which the light one abrogated by suddenly deciding for the first time in 11 years to take dinner with the Mrs and her two polo ponies. Our light worker didn't ask Netanyahu to dine with him and the ponies, he simply invited him to fuck off for an hour somewhere in the house.

The New York Times meant something once.

As the sailing coach at Navy used to say to the lone stragglers, "That's enough, your position has been established." Pat Healy had a way with words.

We, on the other hand, as the away team, and we were always the away team, used to strategically position empty beer bottles on the pilings leading up the Severn River to the Robert Crown Sailing Center at the Naval Academy....for the merit that was in it. Once or twice we were tempted to leave a bottle with a little beer remaining in it to see if any of the midshipmen would swim out to get it. :)

Why do ordinary, everyday people throw garbage in the sink?

I never do.

The sink is where one cleans stuff.

Garbage and trash have their own separate place. You don't 'clean' garbage.

You throw it the fuck away.

Every single girl I know tosses garbage in the sink. It's maddening. (100%)

WHY? WHY? WHy? WhY? Why?

Just asking.

I was walking. School had just let out. The snow was knee deep. I was returning from the market and as I passed each of them in the road I asked them, 'wouldn't you rather face traffic and the glare blinded driver who DIDN'T SEE YOU?'

70% changed sides of the road.

There were a pair who thought I was quite amusing and giggled as they walked on presenting their backsides to traffic.

High school kids. They were never taught or never learned. If a car driver fails to see you, it will be messy for him, but fatal to you. The 2 girls that persevered, they giggled and walked on, Inshallah.

I kind of listened to loser David Corn getting played by Hugh Hewitt. It was over the tubes because I no longer have that 52 mile commute from work to home and won't listen to radio unless some one holds a gun to my head. Drive time radio for me ended a long time ago. Christopher Hitchens called the head of the Argentine Junta the evilist man he ever met. He died. Kirchner, they were far worse. When one wonders about Pinochet, compare and contrast.

Venona. They were about the first documents released on the darknet. It was pre-Snowden and long ago. I read them when the NSA released them.

I think Congress should give as much time to studying Homeland Securities' budget as the White House has given to Immigration, Health Care and the pipeline to carry Canadian crude oil. I'm OK with letting HLS take off for six years and maybe conquer some other country and eviscerate their Constitutional and civil rights.

Nameless Ignorance Walks Into the Dark,

NBC news tonight about the SEAL rescue attempt, "by the time it reached the president's desk it was approved with warp speed."

It was a 'lightening attack' to rescue hostages and Obama approved it at warp speed.  You do know there is really no such thing as 'warp speed', don't you? XL pipeline? Gitmo? Surge?

She had the misfortune to be raised in an environment which allowed wedding one's self to a cause. On reflection of her life, she was an irritation to the spirit and a great deal of trouble.

Still, at the school of the most adventurous, what they have to signify is that there is a commitment to evil on a global scale.

All in all, I'm kind of glad to live in a society that raises up the nth to be social justice warriors bereft of common sense, history, diplomacy, international relations, math, physics, chemistry, simple bloody common sense. Leaves more room for the rest of us.

How did they miss the muslim terror attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the hijacking and murder of every passenger on 4 American airliners, the London bus bombing, the Spanish train bombing, the cold blooded daylight murder of a British soldier outside his barracks in London, the ongoing assault on individual liberty and civil rights wherever muslims hold sway? Let's not forget that the attackers who hijacked our planes were Saudi citizens and lived in America for years where they masqueraded as 'tame' muslims while planning the most vicious mass murder in our history.

The single reason I supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was that it gave all the muslims all over the world who hate America and everything we stand for a place to come together and be violent to their hearts content trying to kill our soldiers there instead of plotting more and more vicious horrible murders of innocent civilians in our country. Yes, it cost the lives and grievous terrible harm to the men and women who fought and labored for us in Iraq and Afghanistan but that's what we were trained for; to fight the nation's wars in defense of the nation and people of this country. We all knew when we joined that in joining we accepted the possibility of great personal sacrifice.

There is not a smidgeon of difference between ISIS and Saudi Arabia. Their official and unofficial policies, acts and plans are identical: islam uber alles.

Shortly after it was published in 1982 I read a copy of a book by Frank Herbert. It was about a molecular biologist whose wife and family were wiped out by a terrorist bomb so he created a very selective plague in revenge.

John Ringo wrote a number of books about the Zombie Apocalypse and then followed that with it's ineluctable creation. It's really interesting.

The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse 

The general teaching on writing an essay or doing a speech is that you should open with a joke. Fortunately, the title has that covered for the words 'Inevitable' and 'Zombies' are automatically considered humor. It has to be, right?
Wrong. While there will be humor in this article, there is an inevitability to there being a zombie apocalypse (or at least something resembling it) and it is going to happen in our lifetimes. If worse does not occur first.
"Seriously, dude?" Yes, seriously. "WTF? You kiddin, right?" Nope.
The Zombie Apocalypse. Is. Inevitable. If you don't think so, you don't understand Moore's Law and nerds. 

Moore's Law (if you really don't know what it is, look it up) in some variance applies to all emerging technology. In Untold Histories Field Marshall William Slim noted that he liked to gauge the state of industrial technology's advancement between WWI and WWII by the increase in size and power of London City busses. Milling, steam, internal combustion, while they did not precisely 'double in power every eighteen months" all folllowed a fairly set trend of improvement and thus reduction in cost and difficulty of manufacture. Building an original Apple computer took the genius of the Great and Powerful Woz. Building one, now, is literaly child's play. (For values of children.) 

The same can be said of biotechnology. I recall a friend who worked in the Tropical and Emerging Diseases Lab, a Class Four Facility (highest contagion) located on the UGA campus and associated with the CDC who's team was attempting in the early Millenia to build a virus following the prescription of the first person to do so from scratch. They tried time and time again to replicate it and were unable. 

In 2005, five years later, a Newsweek reporter, buying materials from EBAy, did the same thing, literally, in his kitchen. (With Spanish Flu no less. He was later fired as was the editor who approved the story since they LAID OUT THE ENTIRE RECIPE!) 

That is how fast biotech advances. Moore's Law, to some extent or another, applies to all emerging technologies. One day it takes a genius, the next day anybody with the right IQ and background finds it to be child's play. 

Second point: A few years ago, at a bio conference in London, a researcher proudly stood up and showed that his lab had proven they could create an infection that would infect a vast swath of population (choose species, genus, phylum or family) but only kill ONE INDIVIDUAL based upon that individual's DNA.
When he asked for questions one member of the audience stood up and proclaimed: 

"We've known that in (university research center) for the last five years but we were never STUPID enough to speak about it in PUBLIC!" At which point things became shouty. 

By the same token, one can create a pathogen that will infect a vast population, but only target certain races. And, yes, there are clear markers to target race for values of race. It's a term of art in biology, not a term of politics. Westphailians, for example, have distinct genetic markers. Now, Westphalians are MOSTLY still found in Westphalia but the markers are found in a huge population elsewhere (especially the US.) But Negroid? Easy. Han Chinese. Very easy. Jewish. (Racially.) Blonde. (See Live Free Or Die) Etc. 'Northern European' (white) is just as easy. Choose your target or immune population. But be careful. You may not understand your population a well as you think. (The 'crazy' president of Iran is genetically turk but most of his supporters are fars which is a variant of Northern European.)

The Federal Communications Commission will vote to gut the internet and triple its costs to consumers later this week. The majority of the commissioners are Democrats and their watchword is to be EVIL.

It's too bad really. I quite enjoyed the old internets.

Both ObamaCare and “Obamanet” submit huge industries to complex regulations. Their supporters say the new rules had to be passed before anyone could read them. But at least ObamaCare claimed it would solve long-standing problems. Obamanet promises to fix an Internet that isn’t broken.

You just know those scumbags will vote for to regulate it and that somehow, it will end up costing not just us consumers far more, it will somehow cost our government billions. That's what Democrats do.

The animation after the first article is pretty cool. It's an animation of Earth after all the ice melts in the inevitable global warming apocalypse.

This was the first time I saw Powerline's pictures of the week. They are quite unPC.

Separated at birth

Bill Clinton's stand-in

Government labs I worked in disabled all but the floppy devices on their computers

Cartoonist Rick McKee of the Augusta Chronicle h/t WATTS UP WITH THAT

I dare to say I don't care.

We spotted this sign by the on ramp to I-70 in in a little town where we stopped for lunch.

I side with Rudy Guiliani on an appreciation for our President, Obama doesn't like anything about America.

Does Barack Obama like America? The people around him certainly seem to have their reservations. Michelle Obama said — twice, at separate campaign events — that her husband’s ascending to the presidency meant that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” She was in her mid 40s at the time, her “adult lifetime” having spanned decades during which she could not be “really proud” of her country. Barack Obama spent years in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church as the churchman fulminated: “God Damn America!” The Reverend Wright’s infamous “God Damn America!” sermon charges the country with a litany of abuses: slavery, mistreatment of the Indians, “treating citizens as less than human,” etc. A less raving version of the same indictment can be found in the president’s own speeches and books. His social circle includes such figures as Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, who expressed their love of country by participating in a murderous terrorist campaign against it. 

Nothing that man or his circle of friends, aides and sycophants have done have made America better. All of they have done is make things worse for the citizens of America.

“Boys and girls called up for military service for the first time should be brought into a safe environment.

The news is filled with interesting stories about our failure to win in Iraq and the subsequent destruction of much of Iraq and now Syria. I am not convinced they really understand the problem with building an actual national army out of your basic middle east muslims. They all have some characteristics in common that limit their abilities to unite and execute national military strategies.

First, they are muslim. This creates an almost hysterical unwillingness to act in the face of allah's manifest will. Two ships on a collision course will each decide, if crewed by muslims to simply let allah sort it out. If they hit each other and sink, inshallah. If they avoid each other, inshallah. Most of the rest of us would alter course in accordance with the well and long established international rules of the road.

The first part is a killer for national armies because they require the full trust in the competence, honesty and integrity of their superiors. No arab army has mastered that art since the caliphate and they used Jannissaries for the real fighting. Janissaries were european slaves forced to convert to islam and then used throughout the arab world as the loyal guardians of the realm.

If a junior cannot trust that his leaders will rescue him if they push him into what appears to be an untenable military position, he will simply refuse to go. If he is senior enough, he will order someone more junior to go and spring the trap or launch a spoiling attack. That's never going to happen in islamic national armies because they are also ruled by a third characteristic.

The rule is made crystal clear in the middle east from birth. Family, then tribe, maybe clan, strangers never. A subordinate may accept an order to move into certain danger if issued by a senior in his family, maybe if he was in the same tribe and almost certainly not if it came from any other source. American advisors in the middle east found this intensely frustrating.

One laughs when one reads that our response to ISIS is to send 'trainers' to 'train' the islamics. Didn't we do that for 14 years in Iraq and Afghanistan? Are they really slow learners?

We stopped at Fort Riley to spend the night. I lived there once but never went back until this trip. My father was the Battalion Commander of the 1st of the 7th Field Artillery. He told me a funny story a couple of years ago from when he was at a BBQ at a close friend's home a couple of months earlier. The friend had been the First Infantry Division Artillery Commander.  My father retired 30 years ago from the Army as a Brigadier General. Anyway, he was at this BBQ and he was talking about this house


It was a great house. But it wasn't on Colonel's row or on Artillery Parade. It was a lonely little house that occupied a little triangle of land next to the Hippodrome and the Football Pitch. While my father was talking about living in this fine house, the Chief of Staff of 1ID happened to be in earshot and told my father that he shouldn't worry, there was always a chance for promotion in the Army.

I remember when my father got word of his promotion to Colonel. It came in Newport, Rhode Island and it was accompanied by his orders to his next assignment. The houses in Newport were even cooler than the house in Fort Riley. What came next was Huntsville.

From Instapundit:


I'm starting to feel like the Senator of Rome who watches helplessly as Rome slid from a Republic into an Empire. We are not going to get an Empire, we are going to reap a more bitter harvest of anarchy and soon the world will resemble Spain.

We were better than that.

It will be interesting to see how they react if Homeland Security does not get funded. Will it be like the Government shutdown orchestrated by Obama last time with hordes of armed men taking to the streets and shutting down and guarding national parks and monuments? I think I can take it if the TSA fails to appear for work but knowing them like I do, they will promptly order the airlines to sit idle on the runways and taxiways waiting for TSA types to screen luggage and passengers.

Still, I passed through my old home Fort Riley on the way home from San Diego last week and stopped at the Exchange where they not only sold weapons but had lots and lots of ammo. Since we were driving, I bought 150 rounds of .45 which gets us back to the "time to go to the range" mode. I also made a point of visiting the Walmart in Vandalia since we spent the night right next to it and checked out their ammo supply. It was too cool. They had lots of guns and ammo. MetroParkCentralis does not do guns and ammo at their Walmarts. MCRD's Exchange stopped selling guns and ammo 30 years ago. I know, it's where I bought my first .45. None of the Exchanges in California sell either weapons or ammo.

We had a very nice vacation. We took the train to San Diego and had a Sleeper car from Chicago. We were a couple of hours late leaving Chicago which left us plenty of time to get to LA. We got off at Fullerton and caught our connecting train as it passed through enroute to San Diego. We stayed at Naval Air Station North Island and after a few wonderful days we got in a rented car and headed home via Las Vegas, Denver, Fort Riley and Vandalia.

The last day of driving was over the top. We were driving on I-70 just west of Columbus, Ohio when the traffic on the freeway came to a dead stop. We were in the left lane and I soon found myself in a place where I could see people bailing out across the median and heading back west. Opportunity gave us a chance to get into the middle lane and I took it. Another pure chance gave us plenty of room and time to get into the right lane and I took it. All the while announcing that I was the most patient of men and in no hurry and could simply wait all night for the road to clear. Then I steered into the shoulder and took the offramp for State Route 29 to US-40 and never looked back.

It turns out there was an enormous pile-up on the freeway and those who failed to bail were going to spend the next 5 hours running out of gas and heat in the subzero traffic jam that used to be I-70.

We got home a little after midnight after driving up I-71 in white-out conditions. It was funny. It was 73 in California, the same in Las Vegas, 65 in Denver, cold in Fort Riley, freezing in Vandalia and subzero in MetroParkCentralis. It's going to be like that for the rest of the week.

There was no snow at all until Indianapolis but plenty after that. The west slope of the Rockies had no snow. There was nothing until we got to Vail. There was little to speak of all the way to the Continental Divide. We talked to a musician who was on the train with us, enroute to play a gig at hte House of Blues in San Diego. He was the one that let me know that there was zero snow in the Sierras. California is so screwed. Drought, NO snowpack in the mountains, no water. There was a light dusting at the peak of San Gorgonio but the rest of the mountain chain was bare.

These never get old when they are done just so.

I'm on the top floor of Paris Casino hotel in a wonderful room looking down the Vegas Strip in a room with two bathrooms. One is fitted with a great big whirlpool tub and the other has a walk in glas walled shower that would comfortably fit six adults or one progressive. Remarkably, there isn't a single TV anywhere in the suite.  We like it.

Off  tonight on a slow train to the Coast. We'll be on the road back from San Diego doing a drive by of the West and the mid-West. Not going to miss this place too much. We got another 6 inches of snow today on top of the existing 12". I haven't been able to make my car move in almost a week. It's frozen in place until the Spring thaw.

It took Venezuela to figure out the darkest deepest secret of the 20th Century.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro reacted angrily, saying he would write a letter to Obama over what he called an attempt to violate Venezuela’s national sovereignty. He argued that U.S. policy toward Venezuela has been kidnapped by “irresponsible, imperial forces that are putting the United States on a dead-end” in its relations with Venezuela and the broader region.

At the same time, the U.S. dismissed as “ludicrous” Maduro’s recent claim that that Biden had conspired against him.

How they figured it out is a mystery, but it makes sense on so many levels. Obama is so stupid that NOBODY has revealed ANY of his college transcripts. When he talks without a teleprompter he sounds like some local village idiot after spending 20 years in a lunatic asylum. One could possibly argue that the same sort of dynamic went on between Cheney and Bush. One was evidently an evil master mind and the other was widely regarded by the left as a chimp.

It might be more difficult to draw the line between evil mastermind and out-of-control boy, when not properly supervised by an adult in the Clinton era. I confess that the adult seemed to be Gore but Gore, while responsible for many evils second hand, didn't really offer anything to the nation's domestic or foreign policy failures.

In retrospect, the relation was made crystal clear with the  two previous administrations. Bush the Elder who was the mastermind that ran the CIA before taking office as Reagan's VP for 8 years then decided to step up to the role and serve as President. He sought to avoid any chance of an eminence gris and chose Quayle as his VP and then sent him around the world to disarm our opponents.

You are probably wondering why anybody would go along with this idiotic suggestion but consider: The VP shares ALL of the perks of the President and doesn't suffer any of the drawbacks. He can run his policies through his front puppet and no blame ever attaches to him if the "presidents" policies are abysmal failures either domestically or internationally. Short of a golfing catastrophe or a 'shooting accident,' nobody even knows what they're up to.

It's clearly a win-win!

The movie, "MY FELLOW AMERICANS" may prove instructive. The whole thing is available on the Tube of U.