Bread and circuses…

Posted on by July 24, 2019

Again… Alternately, deja vu all over again…

That’s six hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Three hours of BS, bluster, and obfuscation yesterday morning on yet ANOTHER replay of the Mueller report, this time starring Mueller himself in front of the ‘Judicial’ Committee. And I use the term ‘judicial’ loosely… Sigh

The one that got my attention was when Mueller was asked about Fusion GPS, and apparently didn’t know who/what that was! Now I’m wondering if he even read the report he supposedly drafted… Or was he just the public face of the investigation, while the subordinates did all the work and prepared the report without his direction/oversight. There were at least a few points that even I caught where Mueller’s answers contradicted what was in the report.

This video and the answers (or lack of answers) are rather interesting too…

And the 3 hours of ‘Intelligence’ committee hearing wasn’t much better… One thing I picked up on was that Mueller immediately answered all the Dems questions, as if he knew what was going to be asked. He never declined to answer one of their questions, that I remember. At worst, he just fell back on “I’m not going to discuss that, or get into that.”

Best line, “Where in regulations does it say that you or the Attorney General can exonerate someone?”

Mueller stumbled around a bit then said, “He wasn’t sure.”

When pressed, he just refused to answer…  Also never would answer if there was any investigation of anyone other than the Trump campaign. Interesting…

Mueller never answered a single question about the Steele dossier, saying he wouldn’t go there, even though it was in the report.

Once again, he didn’t seem to know or remember what was in his own report. Strange, to put it mildly.

The political theater on both sides was amazing, and the agenda of the Dems was perfectly clear based on the speechifying by the committee chairs. And that was “Orange Man BAD! He obstructed justice but you didn’t prosecute him because ‘he’ tied your hands, he was unethical but you couldn’t prosecute because ‘he’ tied your hands, partnered with the Russians but you didn’t find collusion, but there was ‘conspiracy’ since the word collusion couldn’t be used, and ORANGE MAN BAD!!!”

If there was a plus to yesterday’s pandering, it kept the congresscritters from screwing up anything else… Sigh…

With malice aforethought…

Posted on by July 23, 2019

There is apparently a concerted effort going on to delete certain conservative authors from Wiki. This has all blown up in the past few days, and it is interesting how commenters who made comments on both the wiki Article for Deletion page AND the blogs are being called sock puppets and their comments disallowed…

The ‘discussion’ is HERE, and note this is the SECOND attempt to remove Mike’s page…

Same for Tom Kratman, HERE.

And yesterday, they (yes, it’s the nebulous they) went after Sarah Hoyt.

And the ‘discussion’ on Sarah is HERE.

Oh, and apparently Baen is a ‘vanity’ press! Really???

Edit- And apparently there was an abortive run made to delete Ringo’s page the night of the 22nd that was quickly shut down.

Reading through some of the comments it is ‘interesting’ to see the convoluted logic used in some of the arguments. I can’t help but wonder if this is nothing more than an attempt to depeople certain individuals prior to the awards season/DragonCon?

Kinda glad I’m a Z-lister, so I don’t have to worry about this crap.

Edit- And the Victory Girls have chimed in, HERE! And they are pulling NO punches!!! LOL

If they aren’t on your daily read list, they should be!

Snerk…

Posted on by July 22, 2019

Karma is such an interesting ‘creature’ in Bawl’more…

A new deputy police commissioner in Baltimore got a firsthand lesson in the city’s crime problems — getting robbed at gunpoint while out with his wife. 

Full article, HERE.

And his original quote on being hired…

“I think the challenges are very similar” in Baltimore and New Orleans, Murphy said. “Obviously, every community, every police department is unique, but the success we had in New Orleans is directly transferable to here and we will modify it as necessary.”

Article, HERE.

It’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t have a basic grip on the ‘politics’ of Bawl’more… And the fact that criminals up there KNOW people are unarmed, unlike NOLA. The other problem is the hard drugs are much more prevalent in Bawl’more than in NOLA, and the drug gangs are much more aggressive in the inner city.

One wonders if they gave him his badge back after they stole his wallet? 🙂

Good news???

Posted on by July 21, 2019

I think so!

Pop. Pop. Pop. At the Minnesota high school trap-shooting championship, more than 8,000 students from some 300 schools gathered in June to blast flying orange discs out of the sky. Over nine days, the sound of bullets firing—hour after hour after hour—-becomes ambient noise, like a supermarket soundtrack. Pop. Pop. Pop.

Full article, HERE.

Kids getting back into competition shooting in high school is all good as far as I’m concerned. Being an old fart, I can remember .22 rifle and air rifle teams back in the day.

The NRA has donated over $4M to the high school shooting sports teams every year for the last few years, but acceptance is still an issue in any number of places. I can’t find it now, but there was an article last year about a young man who was suspended from school for having his gun in his trunk because practice was right after school and he didn’t have time to go home first.

When you don’t educate children in proper gun handling, you get accidents/shootings, as the MSM is ever so happy to publicise as they dance in the blood of the victims. The question I always want to ask is what, if anything, did the parents teach the children about gun safety?

Eddie Eagle is an excellent program and the NRA has been more than willing to provide that program to schools either free or for minimal charge, if I remember correctly.

I taught my kids, did you?

And I gotta throw this one up… Came over the transom from a shipmate. How little things change in a year with the MSM…

This was actually from October 2018. Ramirez as always, captured the BS that was so prevalent then, and even more so today.

This…

Posted on by July 20, 2019

Is the kind of crap that is just… stupid…

The presidential helicopter isn’t supposed to leave scorch marks on the White House lawn. 

Government Accountability Office said in an April report that it “has yet to demonstrate performance requirements related to landing zone suitability, which includes a requirement to land on the White House South Lawn without causing damage to the lawn.”

Full article, HERE.

So this^ is now a ‘high risk’ area that must be fixed… I’m waiting for them to say the cabin door must be moved to the other side of the helicopter because media and photographs…

But NAVAIR is close to signing the LRIP contract, and getting the program going. They have 2 prototypes in house, HERE. The bottom line issue was that on ONE of THIRTEEN test landings, in an ‘unusual’ attitude, caused some discoloration on the lawn…

Gee, you think they ‘might’ want to look at other than perfectly cushy landings, just in case they needed to get on the ground in a hurry for… Oh, maybe REASONS???

So… This is starting to sound like the VH-71 program because of add-ons and ‘additional’ requirements that pushed the costs, Zero Fuel Weight, and other actual aircraft flyability issues into a situation where the program was killed.

This is one of the huge problems with procurement trying to buy any new systems for the military. Congresscritters stick their noses into the process, demanding ‘additions’ that will support ‘their’ districts, yada, yada, yada. This on top of a 12 year average lag between original RFP and actual Initial Operational Capability integration of a system into the actual military…

So effectively the system is already obsolete the DAY it IOCs…

50 Years ago…

Posted on by July 14, 2019

Yes, I’m old… I was sitting in a bar in Rome on the Via Veneto when this happened.

We had hijacked a man and his daughter off the street to translate the Italian TV for us, and they sat there for four or five hours translating for us. I think we gave him something like $200-300 for translating.

The other thing I remember is walking back to the pensione we were staying at early that morning was that every store that had a TV had it in the front window, and we probably saw a thousand people crowding around them.

I picked this paper up July 21, 1969, and somehow have held on to it.

Rome Paper Moon Landing

And no, I didn’t draw the KEDS on the sole of the boot… sigh…

The takeaway for the kids out there is that this was done WITHOUT computers. Slipsticks, elegant math, and skull sweat made it all work.

Sadly, now 50 years later, we can’t get back there, have lost our space capability, and NASA has to fight tooth and nail for maintenance funding… Sigh

Interesting article…

Posted on by July 18, 2019

An interesting precis of why the USA is in decline…

Church attendance in the United States is at an all-time low, according to a Gallup poll released in April 2019. This decline has not been a steady one. Indeed, over the last 20 years, church attendance has fallen by 20 percent. This might not sound like cause for concern off the bat. And if you’re not a person of faith, you might rightly wonder why you would care about such a thing.

Church attendance is simply a measure of something deeper: social cohesion.

From ammo.com, HERE.

This is one of the reasons there are many little ‘family groups’ forming in various parts of flyover country, whether or not they are actually related. They have a level of trust across the group that, while not necessarily religious in nature, is critical to the success of the group in the long term.

I’m not talking about preppers, per se, but more about folks with common interests and mutually supportive abilities within the groups. I also see this as a response to the attempts by the left to drive people apart by using race and/or orientation as wedges to destroy cohesion in family structures and any kind of support for the country.

TBT…

Posted on by July 17, 2019

This is what a haboob looks like….

I’m not sure if this is Masirah or Jeddah. Note the blown dust/dirt in the foreground.

You just hoped and prayed all the covers stayed in place, otherwise the airplane was hard down until you’d purged all the sand, which took a LONG time on det…

Posted in TBT

Humor…

Posted on by July 15, 2019
  1. The nicest thing about the future is . . .. That it always starts tomorrow.
  1. Money will buy a fine dog, but only kindness will make him wag his tail.

3.. If you don’t have a sense of humor, you probably don’t have any sense at all.

  1. Seat belts are not as confining as wheelchairs.
  1. A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you’re in deep water.
  1. How come it takes so little time for a child who is afraid of the dark to become a teenager who wants to stay out all night?
  1. Business conventions are important. . .because they demonstrate how many people a company can operate without.
  1. Why is it that at class reunions you feel younger than everyone else looks?
  1. Scratch a cat . . . And you will have a permanent job.
  1. No one has more driving ambition than the teenage boy who wants to buy a car.
  1. There are no new sins; the old ones just get more publicity.
  1. There are worse things than getting a call for a wrong number at 4 a..m. – like, it could be the right number.
  1. No one ever says “It’s only a game” when their team is winning.
  1. I’ve reached the age where ‘happy hour’ is a nap.
  1. Be careful about reading the fine print. . . . there’s no way you’re going to like it.
  1. The trouble with bucket seats is that not everybody has the same size bucket.
  1. Do you realize that, in about 40 years, we’ll have thousands of old ladies running around with tattoos? (And rap music will be the Golden Oldies!)
  1. Money can’t buy happiness — but somehow it’s more comfortable to cry in a Cadillac than in a Yugo.
  1. After 60, if you don’t wake up aching in every joint, you’re probably dead.
  1. Always be yourself because the people that matter don’t mind . . .. . And the ones that mind don’t matter.
  2. Life isn’t tied with a bow . .. . .. . .. . But it’s still a gift

And last but not least-

As I watched the dog chasing his tail, I thought dogs are easily amused…

Then I realized I was watching the dog chase his tail.

Sigh…