Gonna be gone for a few days. I’ll be at P-Con down in Dallas through Sunday. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop by!
Doing a few panels and a reading, among other things. https://www.p-con.us/
Go read the folks on the sidebar, they rite gud!!! 🙂
7
Apparently there were some ‘issues’ with Hezbollah’s secure pagers yesterday…
At least nine people were killed and thousands of others were injured when handheld pagers exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday in an apparent targeting of Hezbollah members, according to Hezbollah officials.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency initially reported that “the handheld pagers system was detonated using advanced technology, and dozens of injuries were reported” in Beirut’s southern suburbs and other areas. Lebanon’s health minister later said at least nine people were killed and 2,750 wounded — 200 of them critically.
Among those injured when the pagers exploded included Iran’s ambassador in Lebanon, Iranian state media reported.
Full article, HERE from Fox News.
And there is this reporting from X…
REPORT: Israel apparently intercepted the pagers from Taiwan that detonated in the pockets of thousands of Hezbollah fighters before they reached Lebanon.
According to the New York Times, Israel tampered with the devices that Hezbollah ordered.
They reportedly placed two… pic.twitter.com/hE1DmFhxDL
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 17, 2024
Regardless, that is more than just a little bit of ‘attention getter’. Of course it also pretty well identifies who was Hezbollah and who wasn’t…
However it was done, there are going to be a bunch of nervous people going forward, wondering what is going to blow up next. Their phone? Their computer? Their house?
Terrorists, by their nature what to spread fear among the innocent, but now, that shoe is on the other foot! And good for whomever did it, (yes, I know people are pointing at Israel, but who actually knows)?
It will be interesting to see the response, or lack of one, from not just Hezbollah, but also the other players over there.
Now back to your regularly scheduled BS… 😉
I dunno… but definitely a change…
The Navy is slated to commission its very first Virginia-class submarine designed for a fully gender-integrated crew on Saturday.
A submarine designed and built for both genders has been a long time coming. The New Jersey is entering the fleet roughly 14 years after then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates ended the ban on women serving on subs in 2010.
Full article HERE from Navy Times. And the original article, HERE from last year.
Women are getting the ‘equality’ they wanted, but of course that comes with ‘accommodations’… I just wonder what they are…
There is no question things are changing for all of the services, but at what cost? We’ve seen a reduction to the physical requirements, changes to the training requirements, and female only spaces on some ships and subs.
I cannot help but wonder how much impact that is having on morale, in addition to the loss of promotable billets for males…
Your thoughts?
To start the week…
A few years ago, my wife and I moved into a retirement development on Florida ‘s Gulf coast. We are living in the “Delray/Boca/Boynton Golf, Spa, Bath and Tennis Club on Lake Fake-a-Hachee”. There are 3,000 lakes in Florida ; only three are real.
Our biggest retirement concern was time management. What were we going to do all day? Let me assure you, passing the time is not a problem. Our days are eaten up by simple, daily activities. Just getting out of our car takes 15 minutes. Trying to find where we parked takes 20 minutes. It takes a half-hour in the check-out line in Wal-Mart, and 1 hour to return the item the next day.
Let me take you through a typical day: We get up at 5:00 am, have a quick breakfast and join the early morning Walk-and-Fart Club. There are about 30 of us, and rain or shine, we walk around the streets, all talking at once. Every development has some late risers who stay in bed until 6:00 am. After a nimble walk, avoiding irate drivers out to make us road kill, we go back home, shower and change for the next activity.
My wife goes directly to the pool for her underwater Pirates class, followed by gasping for breath and CPR. I put on my ‘Ask me about my Grandchildren’ T-shirt, my plaid mid-calf shorts, my black socks and sandals and go to the clubhouse lobby for a nice nap.
Before we know it, it’s time for lunch. We go to Costco or Sam’s Club to partake of the many tasty samples dispensed by ladies in white hair nets. All free! After a filling lunch, if we don’t have any doctor appointments, we might go to the Fort Myers flea market to see if any new white belts have come in or to buy a Rolex watch for $10.00.
We’re usually back home by 2:00 pm to get ready for dinner. People start lining up for the early bird about 3:00 pm, but we get there by 3:45 because we’re late eaters. The dinners are very popular because of the large portions they serve. We can take home enough food for the next day’s lunch and dinner, including extra bread, crackers, packets of mustard, relish, ketchup and Splenda, along with mints.
At 5:30 pm we’re home, ready to watch the 6 o’clock news. By 6:30 pm we’re fast asleep. Then we get up and make five or six trips to the bathroom during the night, and it’s time to get up and start a new day all over again.
Doctor-related activities eat up most of our retirement time. I enjoy reading old magazines in sub-zero temperatures in the waiting room, so I don’t mind. Calling for test results also helps the days fly by. It takes at least a half-hour just getting through the doctor’s phone menu. Then there’s the hold time until we’re connected to the right party. Sometimes they forget we’re holding, and the whole office goes off to lunch.
Should we find we still have time on our hands, volunteering provides a rewarding opportunity to help the less fortunate. Florida has the largest concentration of seniors under five feet and they need our help. I myself am a volunteer for ‘The Vertically Challenged Over 80.’ I coach their basketball team, The Arthritic Avengers. The hoop is only 4-1/2 feet from the floor. You should see the look of confidence on their faces when they make a slam dunk.
Food shopping is a problem for short seniors, or ‘bottom feeders’ as we call them, because they can’t reach the items on the upper shelves. There are many foods they’ve never tasted. After shopping, most seniors can’t remember where they parked their cars and wander the parking lot for hours while their food defrosts.
Lastly, it’s important to choose a development with an impressive name. Italian names are very popular in Florida . They convey world travelers, uppity sophistication and wealth. Where would you rather live: Murray ‘s Condos or the Lakes of Venice? There’s no difference — they’re both owned by Murray, who happens to be a cheap skate.
I hope this material has been of help to you future retirees. If I can be of any further assistance, please look me up when you’re in Florida . I live in the Leaning Condos of Pisa near Naples Beach.
You’re ‘of an age’, you might remember some of these. Maybe fondly, maybe not…LOL
It was amazing how many you could cram in a station wagon back in the day!
Woolworths used to have a great diner in their stores…
They actually did check everything, and you got Green stamps too!
Not necessarily ‘fun’, but it beat hitchhiking!!!
Back in the day, the stewardesses were young, pretty, and actually liked their jobs!
Sigh…
This raises even more questions about Tuesday night…
The Los Angeles Times has published a lavish puff piece hailing Linsey Davis, one of the moderators of ABC’s three-against-one Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate Tuesday evening. And why not? With her yeoman service to Harris’ cause, Davis has become a rising star in the far-left propaganda machine known as the establishment media. Amid growing controversy over a whistleblower’s allegation that Harris received the questions beforehand, however, the Times revealed a good deal more than it intended.
Quick: who were the moderators of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960? Or the moderators of the Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter debate in 1976 when Ford promised the world that there would be no Soviet domination of Poland on his watch? How about the moderators of Ronald Reagan’s debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, the one where the Gipper turned the tables on the age issue and turned around his campaign? Can’t come up with any of them? That’s because they did their jobs, more or less impartially, and they knew they weren’t supposed to be the center of attention.
Full article, HERE.
I know this will fuel the ‘conspiracy theories’ out there, but it does make one wonder…
Especially if the allegations HERE are true…
Your thoughts?
The truth is finally coming out…
The Navy’s manning shortages are curbing the service’s ability to repair its ships while at sea, according to a watchdog report released Monday.
Sixty-three percent of executive officers — a ship’s second-in-command — surveyed reported that insufficient manning made it “moderately to extremely difficult to complete repairs while underway,” according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.
Full article, HERE from Navy Times and HERE for the GAO report.
BLUF-
This goes all the way back to sequestration and the impacts of ‘rightsizing’ crews under that. Reduction in ship manning was done to ‘allow’ more work to be done during maintenance availabilities with shore based sailors… Yeah, right…
And the pièce de résistance that made it even ‘better’ was the reduction in the underway days, forcing crews and commands to cram even MORE qualifications into less and less time, plus tying ships up at the pier where they had to use ‘systems’ online to conduct training pierside rather than underway (hence no maintenance).
Of course the other ‘little’ issue of sequestration was the cuts (back in 2010) of over $450 million in shipboard maintenance budgets…
The OPTEMPO/PERSTEMPO requirements (e.g. how often the ships/crews were supposed to be at sea) pretty much went out the window as there was no reduction in the amount of operations the Navy was expected to perform, including operations and exercises with foreign Navies…
Today, things are even worse, with the Teddy Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group having to leave 7th Fleet uncovered to go to 5th Fleet to ‘cover’ the contremps between Israel and Iran. They were already 7 months into a 6 month deployment, and now they have NO idea when they are going to get home!
So much for retention in THAT CSG…
Sigh…It’s sure as hell not my Navy anymore. But I don’t blame it on the kids, I blame it on the CNO/SECDEF et al who have created this ‘cluster’…
Kicking the soapbox back in the corner and going to find my BP meds.
Gotta wonder who’s side the administration is…never mind…
It isn’t a joke whenever I say that the new space race is Elon Musk versus the rest of the world, and I’m not joking now when I tell you that his company’s biggest competitor isn’t China — and it certainly isn’t Russia — but the Biden-Harris FAA.
SpaceX’s Starship promises to revolutionize spaceflight by reducing launch costs by two orders of magnitude — that’s a 99% savings — and vastly expanding current limits on the size and mass of what can be lifted into orbit and deep space.
If SpaceX can get permission to perform the necessary flight tests, that is — and the FAA is dragging its feet.
Full article, HERE and Musk statement HERE.
It’s becoming pretty obvious that the administration is trying to shut Musk/SpaceX down after Musk came out supporting Trump.
The really sad part is that right now SpaceX is the ONLY reliable US option for getting astronauts to/from the ISS. Granted UAL can push log flights, but most of them are also being done by SpaceX.
What happens if Musk says F it, and moves somewhere else, shutting off any support to the US and NASA programs?
Is ANYBODY in DC thinking about that? Musk does what he says he is going to do, unlike most celebrities that just mouth plaudits….
Sigh…
Today’s media pushes the idea it is time to ‘move on’ that 9/11 should become a part of our ‘history’ rather than continue to be kept at the forefront of people’s minds…
I lost two good friends in the Pentagon, Retired Captain Jack Punches and Captain Larry Getzfred. I served with and crossed paths with both these gentlemen from the 1970’s until 2001, along with AW1 Joe Pycior, who was a former P-3 acoustic operator. I went to Arlington, and stood there remembering these guys like it was yesterday- How good they were with the sailors, how they worked throughout their careers to succeed in the Navy culminating in command tours. Jack had VR-24 in Sig and was well respected and remembered by his sailors, Larry had VP-40 and was very successful during the end of the cold war.
THIS was the reality of 9/11/2001
Not sugarcoated, apologized for, sanitized talking points, or spun by whomever. We, the USA were attacked on our home soil by terrorists who are STILL determined to bring America to her knees, since we are the “Great Satan”… Now, 23 years later, the terrorists are still after us, and the Taliban/al Queda are back in charge in Afghanistan…
Today, the politicians will horn in on the various memorials for the obligatory photo ops. They won’t speak, and will keep those who actually DID THE WORK out of the memorials.
On 9/12/2001, the firefighters and military hung this flag on the Pentagon in honor of those who died…
Never Forgive, Never Forget!!!
How ‘little’ attention this is getting…
Last month, economic conditions triggered the Sahm Rule — one of the most historically reliable indicators of a recession. The market responded swiftly with a major sell-off, fueling fears of an approaching downturn. However, instead of raising alarms, experts and the media immediately sought to cast doubt on whether the rule’s activation truly signaled a recession. Even Claudia Sahm, the rule’s creator, came out to downplay the possibility of a recession.
But now, the economy has triggered another notoriously accurate recession indicator.
“The inversion of the yield curve, which occurs when short-term bonds offer a higher yield than long-term bonds, is over for now after a more than two-year-long stretch,” reports Business Insider.
Full article, HERE from PJ Media and HERE from Business Insider.
When you add in what some are saying is a ‘real’ inflation rate of 19%, and the lack of media coverage of ANY negative budgetary issues, along with the constant ‘corrections’ to the monthly job numbers…
You really have to wonder whatthehell is going on! And none of it is good for us peons!
The media bread and circuses are continuing, hard news is ‘hard’ to find, the Trump assassination has disappeared from the media, etc…
And we are less than 60 days from a presidential election…
Sigh…