**UPDATE**
I love how Drudge captures the essence of the politics of things. In this case we see a battle over a bill that was passed into law by the majority over the howling objections of every single member of the minority and now the tables seem to be turned and it's God damn! the majority for having the temerity to try to force this upon an unwilling Senate and President.
Our peers in the what remains in the home of the first democracy in the world, have decided to adopt the straight-up democratic steamrolling Leviathan practiced by totalitarian states since the beginning of the post-imperial world. They sound positively evil.  Greece decides that it can jail political opposition after accusing them of racism.

$10 says the liberals try the same tactic in this country.

I heard about this today on "Wait Wait." I'm glad to see that people still have a sense of humor. A Blackhawk helicopter pilot got a ticket during the Colorado flood rescue.

Parked in a "No Parking" Zone and "Facing the wrong direction."  It could happen to anyone.

Not everyone has one.

I believe in reading widely so I am linking a couple of articles from Arab News. The articles deal with the 1948 war from a unique perspective and also with the current flux of much of the Arab world as they scramble out of their own countries and seek refugee status elsewhere in the Arab world.

That's worth keeping in mind. The refugees are now fleeing from all of the countries that refused, point blank, to provide aid and comfort to the Palestinians who fled the 1948 War. The same countries that have treated the Palestinians like dogs for 65 years. Admittedly, the Jordanians are staying home but they were the only country in the Middle East to play host to the Palestinians and it was the Palestinian's actions there that taught the rest of the world to be wary of accepting any Palestinians as citizens. Nothing they have done since Black September, has endeared them to anybody in the rest of the Middle East.

I honestly think you will find the links intersting and they are not very long articles.

From not quite one year ago today: arab spring and israeli enemy

From this week, a quick look at the real enemy: The Arabs

The author of these articles and a number of other fine articles is: Abdulateef Al-Mulhim.

Abdulateef Al-Mulhim writes essays and op-eds that appear in regularly in Arab News, the SUSRISblog and elsewhere. He is retired from the Royal Saudi Navy at the rank of Commodore.  Al-Mulhim served extensively in the United States, including attendance at the Maritime College of the State University of New York.  He is based in Alkhobar and can be contacted at: almulhimnavy@hotmail.com

I showed up here tonight to help a friend of a friend move out. Everything about the sign is wonderful. Evidently it has been in place for years and years.

I was reading tonight and ran across an interesting article on the modifier, moderate. I often wondered how the government and its spokespeople could use such a harmless word to describe muslims and then I suddenly realized something. These people are also routinely using the word 'moderate' to describe the PLO.

You remember the PLO right? American and European politicians and media constantly urge Israel to negotiate with the moderate leaders of the moderate Palestinians who are the PLO and fatah.

I guess they are not being at all deceptive now when they tell us with a straight face that 'moderate muslims' don't condone all these attacks on us. I think 'condone' is too mild a word. I think they should use the words, 'openly celebrate.' The State Department reckons they've achieved something glorious by teaching the Palestinians to stop getting caught on film capering and dancing in the streets every time some moderate muslims kills yet another batch of unarmed infidels.

Anti-civilization forces win again

It was an awesome race and Team USA won!

I've been wondering for some time why there don't appear to be any programs seeking to deliver active radar countermeasures designed to defeat radar detection and tracking by using signal processing and electromagnetic wave-cancelling technologies. The science has been around forever. Barring the ability to truly null the wave I don't see why we don't have some awesome systems to generate range-gate and speed-gate pull offs that would result in continuous failure to track. But then, we've got pulse-Doppler, continuous wave, and track while scan systems out there that all need to be blanked or spoofed and my favorite mode with radar guided missiles was 'Home on Jam'.* Who doesn't like jam?

I can still see the old WLR-1 from 40 years ago and next to it was the current generation of Electronic Warfare system, the newer SLQ-32, which automated the detection and bearing resolution of threat emitters. So, that was 40 years in the past. What has replaced that kludge? You'd think it would be something pretty damn devastating after this amount of time and given Moore's Law it would fit in a shoe box. Obviously the antennae would add volume but remember too that 40 years ago a satellite antenna was gigantic. Nowadays almost every new car has XM satellite radio and a conformal, almost invisible, omnidirectional satellite antenna.

If you want to buy a perfectly good airplane and you want it to be invisible or immune to radar, why can't you just bolt on another black box and a couple of antennae?

Kind of makes you wonder what radar doodad they have on this plane
Nice infrared signature you got there!**

*In this mode, the missile guides toward the biggest source of electromagnetic activity and kills it. Active radar jamming in too close can be very hazardous.

**Old aviators told me, when I was young, that if they wanted to drown their sorrows in beer and talk about the one that got away, they'd fire a radar guided missile at it. If they wanted to actually shoot down a Mig, they'd fire a heat seeking missile.

In addition to silly things you can't do anything at all about we are made to listen while pundits fill the air with their reasoned soliloquies about:
- global warming
- climate change
- earth-crossing dangerous asteroids
and
solar flares that wipe out the 19th-21st century in the blink of an eye.

So! Something to look forward to come Flare Day!
They were elegant ships.

It was very nearly a blowout but the Americans came back. When I checked to see today how we were doing in the America's Cup it could have been all over. The Kiwis need to win just one more race to win.

The AC45 catamarans, like this one operated by Oracle ­Racing, can move three times as fast as the available wind. Photo: Acea/Gilles Martin-Ragut

These boats can move out at 50 miles per hour and due to a design flaw, there are no brakes.

Sadly, there has been another case of muslims being muslim. This time they have struck in Kenya and they give new meaning to America's favorite wartime pastime. You know the Army's old saying, "we went to war and the rest of America went shopping." This sort of thing isn't really something that you expect when shopping in a place like Nairobi. They are, however, at war with the muslims and they know it. They just didn't think the muslims could reach out and touch them back.
Are the chattering class bleating about how Kenya needs to confiscate all the guns? Are they blaming the massacre on the easy availability of machine guns in Kenya and the Horn of Africa? Are they suggesting that somebody over there ought to do something and pass a law banning assault weapons? Are they being as appallingly stupid about this tragedy as they are about every other tragedy in the United States?

Ripped off from Traditional Vibe
I don't know where in Greece the Laconics were located but it was probably close to Sparta.

I don't see any harm in saying that I think these losers deserve each other.

The man is barking mad and reality never crosses his threshold. The president who will negotiate with Assad of Syria and Putin of Russia and whateveryislam in Iran has announced that he will not negotiate anything with Congress. His latest dismalism finds its venue on Drudge, as always, and shows the manpoodle announcing that we are not a banana republic. Me? I'd like to see some evidence of that statement.
Why does the media all let the chattering class get away with vilifying the Congress, specifically the House Majority, and pronouncing that it is them that will doom us all if they fail to pass legislation exactly and precisely according to the DNC talking points, but never bother to say that the banana-in-charge is the one threatening to shut down the government using a veto he knows cannot be overturned in the Senate?

Don't you sometimes almost wish we had islamic pilots flying Air Force 1?

One hundred and fifty years ago America was locked in its own internecine Civil War. If you've ever wondered what the various armies were up to during the years of the war, this amazing chart lays it all out on one page. It's well worth a look.

I was looking into propinquity tonight after finishing up with making preparations for onward movement and integration. The old myth was that 90% of Americans didn't move more than 50 miles from where they were born. It appears to be as mythical as dragons. Still, I'm pretty sure we don't really want to run into them. I tell my other half, mostly in jest, if we hear banjo music we turn around and run.

There's other bits of interest in the census quick facts. I will skip over all the bits that hew to race, color and class and focus on those like me and mine and most all of you. Veterans amounted to 22 million Americans. All of them have families. Is that a voting block? No, and it never will be. I think that every other Republic had that problem but not US. We're an ornery bunch.

Ripped off from American Digest.

Doug Ross @ Journal: @MikeKMorrison:

...and maybe there's some other good things to see.

Every time you use google to search the internet, a devil gets its pitchfork. True. It's blatant now. Whenever I search some topics on google I spend the rest of the week getting spammed with pop-up and pop-under ads for roughly the topic searched.
I used to wonder how google made money.

Courtesy of the Class of '57 network.
In case you were wondering what happened to all those fuel tanks we jettisoned from our aircraft in Southeast Asia ……

The Detroit Free Press recently published their study of the city of Detroit's fiscal situation as it developed since World War II and how it developed into complete collapse early in this century.

Look at this place. This is a balance statement with all the obfuscation and outright lies removed.

Why doesn't every city and state have a similar in depth study available on-line of their past performance and concept of operation for the future? Well, yeah. I know why no state or city wants anything remotely like this kind of forensic study conducted. Hard to get re-elected when everybody knows how dismal future prospects really are.

I know perfectly well that the earth warms and cools. Everybody knows that. I haven't believed a word written by the climate scam artists because they conveniently lose their data, make declarations based on data sets nobody can ever find again, massage their data with weird numbers only they can comprehend and use bad and corrupt data to start with. They pretend to measure the exact temperature of the earth (all of it evidently) to 1/10th of a degree. Nobody can measure the temperature of every room in their own house to that degree but they can tell you how warm it was to the 10th degree in 1066 when the Normans came ashore. On every point of the globe.

Setting aside the above, the scam artists also purport to find the effects of temperature in fossil records. The wheels came off that one long ago but still they persist. Here is where even the IPCC admits it got it all wrong.

I'm going back out on my limb and saying that global temperature is mostly driven by one of these:
Real science is correlating facts, deriving a hypothesis and then proving it.  Science is not simple correlation, causation and declaration. If you look at the solar scientists you don't see any of them bleating about man made disasters on the sun. Nothing remains unchanged forever.

There are things that are too damned dangerous to move. Even those carefully stored by the United States Army were deemed too damned scary and dangerous to move out for destruction and so were destroyed in place at the arsenals where they had rusted away for decades in ammunition bunkers. I'm not talking about little scary things like rusty nuclear weapons, I'm talking chemical munitions made by the lowest bidder or, in this case, by imbeciles and madmen. Are these weapons the ones made by Saddam and hidden from the New York Times in Syria and now trucked back to Iraq? Or, are they Syrian chemical weapons shipped off to the hated Iraqis for safe keeping? It's so hard to keep up with arabs when they innovate.
In keeping with the title of the post

If you're interested, Reuters is showing it live and from many angles. They are raising it right now.

UPDATE:
That went very well. We had it running in the background until around 2155 local time when they stopped heaving around and called it a night with the wreck sitting flat on the platform. I hope the rest of the salvage is equally uneventful.
If there was any justice, they would have stuffed the captain of this ship into a surface supplied air suit and strapped him to the platform before starting.

In a Frankfort bookstore,

Back from a long jaunt to the other coast and the other one too. There was all kinds of fun, good times and good memories.
Now at home.

What possible reason could we have for a consulate in Herat? According to the the same morons who had a consulate in Benghazi the purpose of U.S. Embassies and consulates are:

Besides the more obvious functions of issuing visas and assisting American citizens abroad, Embassy and consulate staff interact with host governments, local business and nongovernmental organizations, the media and educational institutions, and private citizens to create positive responses to U.S. policy and the U.S. in general. Mission staff report on political and economic issues that affect bilateral relations and possibly impact the U.S. directly, help U.S. businesses to find partners and customers, and sponsor American scientists, scholars, and artists to promote professional, educational and cultural exchanges.

I think at this time it's pretty clear that the only Americans who deserve any particular concern from the fools of Foggy Bottom are the military, their contractors and...hold on. Just give me a few hours to think of why any other American has any business in Afghanistan or Libya for that matter.  There isn't anything there except vicious murdering tribesmen and their guns and animals and chattels.

I doubt any recall that back before 9/11, the Taliban government running most of Afghanistan, arrested a small number of incredibly stupid religious zealots who had deliberately traveled to Kabul in order to spread the gospel and convert the muslims to christianity. Imagine the devastating stupidity and callous disregard for human life that would send people who knew exactly what would happen to them when caught by the government of Afghanistan, off to the Taliban's country to convert muslims. All muslims EVERYWHERE agree that apostasy has but one penalty, Death. Those missionary zealots wanted to make that happen to innocent people.

Those murderous morons fully anticipated that the US Embassy would intercede on their behalf, oh, and God of course. You know who rescued these vicious killer twits? The Northern Alliance. Mysterious ways.

So again, if there are no loose Americans roaming around in the country and nobody needs visas or assistance in the hinterlands and the local business is making bombs for the Taliban and the NGOs are noticeable for their absence after their headquarters was blown to pieces many years ago and there really aren't all that many educational institutions, why do we have these pointless Fort Zinderneufs scattered all over the Badlands of islam? It's pretty clear from the bombings at our consulates in Benghazi and Herat that they aren't serving as secret hideouts for SPECWAR and they can't exist solely as Blackholes where the State Department shoves those who displease the Pontifex Maximus in Foggy Bottom. Nope. There has to be another reason for sticking these things out there in the wasteland.

They're responsible for supervising the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid sent to win the hearts and mines of the Taliban and the salafists and jihadis and moderate muslims. Of course, I repeat myself. For all that our money and aid earn us we could just overfly the places in a C-130 once a month and kick out a few bales of cash.

Our earlier report of his demise has been greatly exaggerated! Our reporter was misled! Our new reporter has found that the General is summering with other distinguished company prior to his triumphal return.
Thank you Anne for the update.  That Bill Jones guy has a great sense of humor.

[blogger note] When I drafted the original report, believe me that I searched hi and lo on the interwebs for any reason for the removal of the General and found nothing at all. I'd like to think that I post dated my entry and thus missed Bill's excellent summation but naaaa. I prefer to think the intertrubes were punctured that day, struck by lightning or it was all a commie plot to deny me the information in a timely manner!

On Thursday NASA formally announced  that Voyager I, launched in 1977 on a 4 year voyage of exploration to study Jupiter and Saturn, left the solar system last year. Voyager I is still working after 36 years in space and reports information scientists study to this day.

I think it is a stellar achievement. Every soul that worked on this spacecraft and mission has great reason to be proud of their singular achievement. Learn more about the Voyager mission here.
Updates as INS gets them from NASA.

So the question was, what are we going to do to all the religious, hysteric, government and authority hating zealots created by Persia? Because another option would be to deport them. Does anyone on earth want them?

We have very much the same thing going on right now in the United States. Some people lament that so many Americans are locked up in jail, many with no hope for release because their crimes were so vicious and unacceptable. Yet every single person in jail in America had the same opportunities to get ahead in America that all the rest of us had to get ahead but the ones in jail chose violence, mayhem and death. There's room for a little of that but I'm now talking about a problem in society that we all know about and CANT find a solution for.

What do you do with people that opt out of civilized society? What happens to society that finds it has run out money to keep such people locked away from society and is forced to turn them loose again after spending years in jail where they learned nothing and forgot nothing?

I have observed that various ministries of truth are trumpeting the rampant nationalism sweeping the world where nationalist parties are "sweeping to victory" in third place. Perhaps they're worried and see the chilling effects the rise of nationalist movements in various places will have in the immediate and near future. They're right to be concerned, even now, because everybody knows what happens when two peoples decide they cannot stand to abide living with each other.

One of the more recent manifestations of this was in Yugoslavia. The thing to remember about watching that latest European version of ethnic cleansing was that nobody lifted a finger to do anything about it until the United States, acting almost unilaterally, put an end to it. In the past there were major powers that looked after the interests of the nationals living abroad and would step in to prevent massacres but the important thing to keep in mind now is that there are now no major powers left. The Russians pretend to be and because they control the ocean of oil and gas that is essential to life in Europe, the world lets them get away with it. They've been messing about in Georgia and other places that nobody cares about, but then, there are no other places on earth with large populations of Russian nationals. The US was a major power but without the will there is no power. As the military declines under the remaining 3 and a half years of the current regime, the US will find it hard to scrape up the power to project anything anywhere.

Another aspect of major powers was that they forged meaningful military and diplomatic alliances. All the Syrian farce did recently was highlight that the US does not have one single friend or ally left in the world. You'd think people would take note of that. Admittedly, back when major powers forged those alliances they did so with each other. The will to forge an alliance with lesser powers pretty much ended with the Triple Entente. We've been waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade with NATO members providing a platoon every now and again and maybe a helicopter.

I don't know if the ministers of truth fear the slow rise of nationalism again because they fear it could lead to war between nations or they are afraid that it will lead to ethnic cleansing within existing national borders. Either way, it's going to be very hard on the new minority populations in Europe. We will see how 'soft power' copes with one or two members of the EU deciding that a little ethnic cleansing is the right thing to do. But, here is where we truly discover how little power is left. What the nations and peoples and rulers of Europe have finally come to understand is that soft power is ultimately a threat to another's economy and they have twisted and plaited theirs together so well that any collapse of one could very well result in the collapse of all which, in the event, would be like pouring gasoline on a fire.

It will be interesting to watch the financiers going up against the chemists and alchemists in a war to the death. I mean we're talking about Europe right? It's not like anybody there has guns. On the other hand, not many had guns in Rwanda either.

Elsewhere I read a bit on where the US Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security are having some problems with their polar ice breaking fleet. This was an interesting article that came out in June. I had forgotten that they laid up the Polar Star and ran the Polar Sea to death until its engines failed.  Polar Star gets back to work. She started work-ups back in June of this year after being layed up 7 years. It's interesting to see how all these brand new bodies will replace the men and women spoken of by the USCG in this article where they speak about a highly trained and experienced crew. If they get into trouble, the Coast Guard doesn't have any ship to send to rescue them.

The size of the icepack has been changing ever since the world cooled down several billion years ago. I initially thought that what we saw in reading about the decline in our icebreaker fleet was due to the cool-aid drinking the government is so known for these days on Global Warming. It may have started that way here but I think what happened was the Coast Guard found that a well crafted plan to lease icebreakers for little money, found out that being at the tender mercies of people that have the only ships in the world to perform your essential missions, turns into an even more hideously expensive proposition than planners ever thought. I'm willing to bet that the cost of leasing a big ice breaker just to resupply McMurdo Station and get tanker loads of fuel into small towns in Alaska cost more each year than the annual operating cost of the old USCG ice breaker fleet with no sign of easing up.

The second link gives someone's anticipated replacement cost for a heavy icebreaker. It runs $925 million for each. I think we all know the price will have at least doubled by the time that ship is delivered. In previous days, the big time budgeteers knew that when they were invariably hauled into court by the shipyards and forced to cough up billions for "unexpected" cost-overruns, they could rob Peter to pay Paul. I don't believe that money is there anymore. It's a newer system in place now of universal skint. There's not the money anymore that it can be moved from one pot to another to make up shortfalls of billions.

I used to have an amusing book by a man named Hadley. He was a tanker, of sorts, in World War II and it was his job to command the Army's only Talking Tank. Yes he got laughed at but then everybody noticed something. When the tank with the giant loudspeaker pulled up to edge of battle and well within it, and announced that surrender was an easy option and everybody would be well-treated, the number of enemy who surrendered promptly was enormous. It seems that the voice of reason needs a little amplification on the battlefield. It saved a lot of lives.

One day the talking tank broke down and the general ordered his men to repair it pronto. The engineers dragged it to the tank repair depot and told the LT there to fix it pronto. When asked what it's priority was the LT was told, "the highest priority. It is the general's command that the talking tank return to battle asap!" The LT called the sergeant and passed on the order and he lead the talking tank to a tree where a young private was working on welding up a jeep. He was the only welder at the depot. He was ordered to fix the tank as his highest priority since it was the general's order. He looked at Hadley and the sergeant and said, "I'm working now on fixing the general's jeep. Which one has priority?

I wish the guy I loaned the book to would return it some day. It's been about 10 years.

The sax is beautiful. To the end. It doesn't hurt that I love the song.

Thomas, Matthew, James, Bartholomew, Rachel, Susan

Gala swears the hair she wears is her's and true she swears for I know where she bought it.

One reads Juvenal at peril. I like though that many of the names remain the same even over the millenia.

I boggle that my high schools both found him worthy and said to us, read that.

Read the Roman poets at your immediate peril.

I joined the White Company when I was young. There are things I regret, but I never wake up at night and wish I had the courage to do the right thing.

I came a long way for memories. I don't regret any of it but it wasn't necessary. For a long time I thought like the young bride in the movie, A QUIET MAN who wanted to be surrounded by her stuff. It was the things that gave memory a place. But that isn't so. Memory is resident in us all. The journals I put up yestereve are distilled memories but I can remember all of that with just closing my eyes and thinking back. I did that tonight as I talked to a lovely South African lady and her husband and then to a marine turned navy officer at Shakespeare's.

No mistake, I'll leave here with the books I wrote and I treasure the letters an ancestor wrote home more than a century ago but all the rest is debris. I didn't miss it for years and won't miss it forever.

I am all the way across the bay and I hear the train whistles blowing very loudly. Miles and miles

Life is beautiful.

In June of this inst, orcs closed the marina at NTC. The pier that hosted mighty warships fell down for the last time and was removed some time ago. One would never know that this was the home port of a pair of ships. [OK, that was actually down the road 1200 feet and in front of the Admiral Kidd Officers Club] One lucky and plucky, and one constantly in a state of misery and despair. One that sort of slipped a donut under the pier one night and awoke to find that a 5 foot range of tide and a donut raise the bejesus out of a solid float trapped under the pier, wrecking and bringing ruination to said pier. The whole entire duty section {9 of us} stood by that Sunday morning with hammers and attitude and a nice bit of plywood waiting for the tide to ebb and let us conceal the evidence.

Here were sailboats any fool could borrow and use to learn to master wind and wave with an appreciation for just how a real sailor can come along-side in a shifting current and indifferent wind. (They also had outboard motors for the aviators).

All that remains of the marina at the NTC and ASW base

I had hoped to take my pirate for a sail.

Before God and Allah this was the known world. Places to the North, East and South had a history too. You can read it.
To the west, in the New World, history was lost. One can read about the Incas and Mayans and Aztecs but their words vanished from the earth. Nothing in writing survived the Spanish conquest.

Their cities achieved population densities that more than rivaled England or Spain. Every bit of that is lost and gone. It was as if they had no Plato or Cicero or Trajan.

They have locked the doors and are safe now.
 This one actually hurt. We had an open door policy when I worked there. We wanted to hear from our fleet.

Nobody is ever again going to just drop by and say hello and you suck.

So.

Spared again I guess.

In 1996 the US military prepared for the Atlanta Olympic Games by polishing our fangs so as to deter Iran from doing anything crazier than usual. It took the form, in Naval Forces Central Command, of daily flights of Air Force cargo planes arriving with 'stuff' that was offloaded. The planes were emptied and then flown home. Concurrently, a brand new radar sonar surveillance system and generators were sent to me via an opportune lift (Air National Guard training flight) C-141. I met the plane when it landed at Bahrain International Airport. As it taxied up to the navy's military cargo area and home of the Desert Duck, I saw that it had some problems. Fuel. Lots of fuel was sleeting off the top of the wings. 10 men got off the plane and all appeared to not notice gallons of jet fuel dripping on them.

My purpose was twofold. I was going to take delivery of the replacement surveillance system and I was going to load up the one we had for return to the states. Simple. There was another problem. The plane had not one but two load-masters and they were in a snit. There was a third man who was also a load-master who was 'observing and rating' the two guys throwing a fit.* It took them 6 hours. SIX HOURS to offload two generators and my surveillance system. They elected to use a 5 ton truck to pull the system off up until they backed it into one of the upraised personnel doors in the aircraft. It left a mark. When they became hysterical, the civilian ramp boss snuck up behind them with a piece of yellow gear and whipped the stuff off the plane.

The plane continued to offload fuel from the top of the wings. Once the cargo was off, my problems began. If it took this crew 6 hours to get a generator off. It was going to take forever to get a 20 foot milvan embarked. I had 10 minutes. The crew were told they could not remain overnight and had to leave for Dhahran; never to return.

I took my brand new surveillance system back to the Banz and phoned home to let them know that I now had two of them and what did they want me to do with the spare. They were quite excited at the news. This was before video conferencing so I can't be sure that they were foaming at the mouth but that was the impression I got.

So, we return to our highly polished fangs now. There were all these completely totally empty Air Force cargo planes returning CONUS. Why not, we wondered, see if we can use them for opportune lift? It must be noted that my community had no money at all. None. We were skint. We looked under the cushions for change and dipped a finger into every payphone coin return. I consulted my brothers at NAVCENT and even deigned to talk to CTF 54 and ASU. Yes yes, I knew better but optimism is my guiding star. I did it. I consigned the old surveillance system to an empty C5 on the promise that it was free.

Months later I was home on leave for a couple of weeks when I got a call from our Logistics Officer. He was a very nice man, ordinarily. Jeff started out the call by asking me if I had my checkbook. He told me that the Air Force had billed us $54,000 for that opportune lift and he thought I should pay. I countered with the system was damaged in transit and he should send a bill for $54,000 to the Air Force and stop bothering me.

It became a game. A game I truly enjoyed playing. My stuff always moved by a DEPORD after that. Deployment Orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff always tell the services to comply and capture the cost for later reimbursement. No money or funding has to change hands. I think it a more sane approach. Imagine. An army platoon sergeant calls for air support in Afghanistan and the Air Force operator asks if he has a funding site for that which can be billed by the Air Force. That was TRANSCOM.

I took notes and now I have them again

*there was another load-master there. We took advantage of the 452nd's offer and got certified simply because it was far easier to self-manifest. Only played us false one time, in Adak. No. I did not even breath a word as I watched that farce. It was not life and death and they did not work for me.

Why don't the ruling and chattering class use the word soldier anymore?

Once there was a mighty empire. Damascus was within that empire.

Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the Earth unharmed, cloaked only in the protection of the words civis Romanus -- I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.

I dare say we all wish we had Mr. Bartlet for president. There is stasis and stability and there is dynamic stability. The world has been a pretty dynamic place for some time. What we did to the Shah of Iran was a mistake. A huge mistake. We did it again with Mubarek in Egypt. We did it in Libya. We are doing it again in Syria. Some of the ruling class are unhappy that dictators maintain the relative stability of their countries using fear, the police and a ruthless fanaticism to suppress the uncivilized barbarians. They pretend to see no barbarians. The house of Saud must tremble at knowing that they are next on our hit parade.

We are going to look away as we do to Syria what we did to Libya and Egypt. Those poor bastards.

Who knew Del Mar, California was the modern Alexandria?

The perfect end to this police boat attack farce will be the owner of the sunken vessel getting a citation and cleanup bill from the government and city agencies involved for hazarding a police boat and spilling oil and possible chemical/bio hazardous waste into the river. I find these things a little amusing but not too amusing. Last week I was sailing and canoeing that same river a half mile away from where this idiot gratuitously lunged out of the water to smash boats.

Think about this though


if you fell overboard and needed someone to come over and help you out of the water, is this the guy you'd want to motor over you and offer assistance? 

Why yes, I did leave out a word.
 * updated. the first film seems to be held by the NSA and won't run. So I added another and another that started with the same search term.  The question remains. Do we really want any help at all from these guys?

Piling on an earlier post. These guys are the modern highwaymen. Why do we pay them?

A couple hundred cruise missiles ought to do the trick.

I don't go out of my way to read about how awful American law enforcement is these days. The news just happens to be filled with stories about the armed thugs we have allowed to take over our Public Safety offices at every level from local to national authorities. This murderous thug is not leading the charge of police who believe they have both a right and a duty to shoot anybody they want to but is rather just part of the main stream of modern police type thinking.

Chief of Police shoots handcuffed suspect

Seriously, it wasn't too many years ago that I mourned police officers killed in the line of duty. Somehow Public Safety morphed totally into Officer Safety and screw the rest of us. I suppose I can live with that. When the cops open fire on unarmed people every day of the week and also manage to shoot innocent bystanders it may be time to rein them in and just issue them a single bullet. On the other hand, it only takes them one bullet sometimes so just are their actions and true their aims.

The picture above? Oh, its just life in a Republic where the police were not accountable to anyone.

For many years I have read of the Watcher's Council and read their articles with enjoyment and appreciation. Smart bunch of writers I'd say to myself. I have been a little farther away than usual from the world for the last couple of weeks while messing about in boats with my daughter and showing my girl the wonderments of the West Coast. I'm a little late noticing things. Just look!

 Thank you The Mellow Jihadi!

I'm back in San Diego briefly wrapping up some affairs that have been left to themselves for long enough. Through great good fortune I was lucky enough to have both company on the way and charming reasons to find myself back on the left coast and in San Diego. We left Portland and drove down to Eureka so that we could see the Redwoods and the little forests that remain.

Grant's Pass to Crescent City

 From Eureka we continued down Highway 1 to San Francisco with a few hours in Muir Wood because only a madman would not stop to admire what God and man hath wrought there. We spend the night with family in Albany across the Bay and set out the next morning southerly until the San Mateo Bridge, made a bit of westing and continued on down Highway 1 with brief stops along the way in Monterey and a few nice spots of beach and Carmel and spent the night at the Ventana Inn and Spa.

Big Sur

Muir Wood

As we left Big Sur we saw the rocket contrail and wondered what that was and then we continued down the coast on Highway 1 past Malibu and Santa Monica before heading into the hell that is the 405 in LA. We got to NAB Coronado at about 2100 because we stopped at my old place in Solana Beach to wolf down the first of daily rations of Robertos at Fletcher's Cove.

When I found out from reading his blog that Sarge was in Lemoore I asked him if he was up for a meet at Shakespeare's Pub since I know he is an admirer of Lex.  I used to hang out in distinguished company,

Three Captains

nowadays I travel with my Blogger-at-Arms and hang out with old guys in bars. It was great to meet Sarge, Tuna and the Naviguesser.  For a long time the only blogger I knew was Lex.

The Author, Old AF Sarge, and Tuna at Shakespeare's Pub

Everybody I asked to dinner at Sbicca's is welcome to a Guinness at Shakespeare's-on me. I'll be in town thru Thursday.