Follow-up to appeasment and flog…er golf…

Posted on by March 6, 2013

Well, the democraps continue to spew hate and discontent…

One wonders how this will allow B. Hussein to “demonstrate” his foreign policy credentials as promised by his campaign? Is he going to talk the terrorists to death?

sigh…

And McCain is being accused of a “cheap shot” and “negative” campaigning for agreeing with President Bush… Does anyone else see just a wee tiny credibility gap here, or is it just me?

The more I see or don’t see of the democrap policies, both foreign and domestic, the more worried I become about where we might end up if they are elected! These folks are absolutely scary; they actually believe their own press releases!

Anyhoo, I finally got a chance to play golf with my new clubs yesterday…

First and foremost, I am NOT a good golfer, I’m your average hacker. Having said that, it was pretty stoopid of me to go play a very narrow golf course that had not cut the rough in a week (think 5 inches high, multiple lost balls and wedges to ‘try’ to get back in the fairway) and with wind blowing 20+ miles an hour…

For those that don’t play, golf (or flog) depends on which swing shows up, the one you spent all that money for, or the baseball swing you learned as a six year old…

Golf courses by their nature are an exercise in self-flagellation, even on a good day; much less a bad day. When you throw in new clubs, it gets even more interesting (or funnier if you are watching).

First hole, a little ‘fade’ on the driver (translation- that sucker took off for the right rough like a scalded dog)… Hmm, ankle deep grass, everybody looking, no golf ball. Okay, drop and hit three- Thick, wet rough grabs the club head and off to the other side of the fairway we go. I’m playing military golf- left, right, left, right…

Meanwhile my playing partner is accusing me of screwing up his swing because he’s laughing so hard at me…

sigh…

So it goes… it gets a little better, and I actually hit a couple of fairways, but inevitably, I’m either long or short on the approaches (you are supposed to ‘know’ how far you can hit your irons)…

Finally get to the 9th hole, it’s uphill, with a 20 mph cross wind- Woods on the right, parking lot with a whole bunch of expensive cars on the left. I aim for the woods, and miracle of miracles, hit one straight… Wind brings it back and lands in the middle of the green! Where I promptly three putt %$^^&*….

Oh well, half way done, grab a dog and turn down a beer (not that it can get much worse), and press on.

More military golf, but I’m at least finding the golf ball (for better or worse). I actually tried to hit one shot out of the wet rough where my feet slipped and I just barely caught the bottom of the ball with the top of the iron and it landed six feet behind me, thanks to the wind…

On the 15th hole, another fade to the right, as I get up near where the ball took off, I see a car sitting there. O.M.G. I’ve hit a car and busted something… Instead the guys says he saw my ball rolling back down the road toward the creek! So off we go, 200 yards in the wrong direction, sure nuff, there sits the ball at the bottom of the hill, at least 50 yards BEHIND where I teed off from… Lovely, just $%^* lovely!

Thanks to a well placed tree and a bank shot, I survive that hole only 2 over par…

Finally get to the 18th hole, par 4 uphill, into the wind. As usual, in the rough, but to the left this time. Hit a good iron shot out of the rough, and up the hill we go! Two balls on the green, one in the sand trap, no fourth ball… Of course, it’s mine that is missing…

sigh…

I’m picking up, I tell the rest of the group, having had enough for one day.

My partner goes over to pull the pin for the putts, starts laughing and yells at me to come back to the green; low and behold, sitting in the cup is my Titleist 8 for a Eagle 2 on the final hole!!!

Guess I’ll be back next week!

Oh yeah, the little old lady playing in the foursome with us beat me by six strokes… sigh…

Marine Drill and political crap…

Posted on by March 6, 2013

The Marines can teach ANYTHING to march…

On another note- President Bush made an interesting statement today while speaking to the Knesset, “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before.”

“As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,” he said, referring to Idaho Republican Sen. William Borah’s comments in 1939.

Of course the Democraps were immediately up in arms… B. Hussein thought it was a personal attack on him… Note to B. Hussein- Hey Bud, you ain’t the center of the universe; you need to take a chill pill!

Some other Demo Congresscritter apparently called BS on the statement- My comment to him- Once again the Democraps are ignoring the truth, and will only bring death and destruction into the US with their plans…

Of course they will hide behind their guards, scream for Secret Service protection, etc. while the American public takes the brunt of the death and destruction.

I sometimes wonder if ANY ONE of those Congresscritters has ANY perception of reality that is not governed by how much money they can rake in, what their precious push polls say, and how much MORE power they can get for themselves.

sigh….

Kicking soapbox back in the corner for now and looking for the BP medicine…

Gas crisis solution…

Posted on by March 6, 2013

President Bush wants us to cut the amount of gas we use.

The best way to stop using so much gas is to deport 11 million illegal immigrants!

That would be 11 million less people using our gas. The price of gas would come down.

Bring our troops home from Iraq to guard the Border.

When they catch an illegal immigrant crossing the border, hand him a canteen, rifle and some ammo and ship him to Iraq . Tell him if he wants to come to America then he must serve a tour in the military. Give him a soldier’s pay while he’s there and tax him on it.

After his tour, he will be allowed to become a citizen since he defended this country. He will also be registered to be taxed and be a legal patriot. This option will probably deter illegal immigration and provide a solution for the troops in Iraq and the aliens trying to make a better life for themselves.

If they refuse to serve, ship them to Iraq anyway, without the canteen, rifle or ammo.

Problem solved.

In my dreams maybe… sigh…

Generations of Valor…

Posted on by March 6, 2013

If this does not get your attention, I don’t know what will…

This Picture is Worth a Million Words…

We truly take a lot for granted. Forget the football ‘heroes’ and movie ‘stars’. Pass this on so that all may know the price of freedom. One generation of heroes consoling another generation…

Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you,

Jesus Christ and the American Soldier

One died for your soul; the other for your freedom.

Nuff said…

Life Evolutions….

Posted on by March 6, 2013

Sorry for the lack of posts- been a little busy…


Combining road trips are just pure hell… Four days of sitting on my ass listening to briefings (mostly rehashes of last year’s conference), sidebars (where most of the REAL work gets done), rubber chicken for lunch/dinner, too many late nights and not nearly enough sleep.


Then fly off to marry off my youngest daughter… sigh…


Of course as soon as I get in town, I’m told to meet them at the hospital, grandson is going in for an operation for an abscess behind the eye… Just ^&*( lovely way to start the most important weekend in quite a while…


Grandson has one of two scheduled procedures, then gets booted out of OR for a critical neuro patient; so oldest daughter sends everyone home and spends the night (getting awakened every three hours).


Friday am I relieve her so she can get go with youngest daughter to get wedding stuff done. Do you know how expensive manicures and pedicures are these days? I sure as hell didn’t!!!


Grandson has gone from screaming in pain to wanting to play video games. Which is both good and bad- Good in that he is not hurting too badly, bad in that he wants Papa to play too…


I haven’t touched a video game in 20 years, didn’t even know how to hook it up, had to get the nurse to help. Talk about feeling old… sigh…


AND he promptly kicked my butt at every game…


Saturday was a repeat of Friday, with negotiations with the Doc’s on springing the grandson long enough for the wedding, since he was a key player. Doc’s were reluctant to hesitant, so oldest daughter got the nurses on her side… We left the hospital at 0800 Sunday morning !

Off for a quick change of clothes, did I mention I HATE wearing a tux? Especially a winter weight one for a wedding in the hot sun???

Get up to the outdoor location above Placerville, CA where youngest is to be married, and proceed to hurry up and wait… At least THAT I know how to do…

She finally shows up 15 minutes late (I swear both she and her sister will be late for their own funerals). We get everybody corraled and send the little ones off as flower children ( why do I hear Jefferson Airplane playing in my head). Bridesmaids all survive the stairs and now it is youngest daughter’s turn.

I take her arm, and we walk to the top of the steps… She says, “Oh S**T!” and immediately starts shaking like a leaf!

Then it’s like trying to hold back a runaway horse… She was GOING to that alter!

I hand her off to the hubby to be, and I get to go sit. It was a good (short) ceremony, good vows (they wrote their own), and of course all the bridesmaids are crying.

Ceremony gets done, food is out, beer keg (hey, these are 20 somethings…) gets tapped and the pictures start.

I really don’t remember an hours worth of pose here, pose there, go find such and such… what a PITA!!!

Anyhoo- She’s now an old married lady, daddy is broke (yet again), and one more daughter to go.

Washington Rules…

Posted on by March 6, 2013

Attributed to a Southern democrat Congresscritter’s office. It’s no wonder they haven’t done a damn thing since they took over the Congress… sigh…

If it is worth fighting for, it is worth fighting dirty for

Don’t lie, cheat, or steal unnecessarily

There is always one more son of a bitch that you counted on

An honest answer can get you into a lot of trouble

The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant

Chicken Little only has to be right once

There is no such thing as a final decision

“No” is only an interim response

You can’t kill a bad idea

If at first you do not succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried

The truth is variable

A porcupine with his quills down is just another fat rodent

Agree with any concept or notional future option, in principal, but fight implementation every step of the way

A promise is not a guarantee

If you can’t counter the argument, leave the meeting

Never underestimate the power of an unsigned memo

A pretty baby has many parents

Another recommended blog

Posted on by March 6, 2013

I don’t know how I’ve missed this one!

Go check out the Cranky Prof, she tells it like it is!

Good reads and you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement and chuckling at the same time.

The old girl takes pretty good pictures…

Posted on by March 6, 2013

The Hubble takes pretty good pictures after they put glasses on her 🙂
NASA and Hubble have just released 59 more shots from the Hubble library. This group is called colliding galaxies. Go here to look at, download and wonder at the beauty of space!
While 99.9% of us will never ‘enjoy’ a trip into space, at least we can gaze upon the stars courtesy of these folks. They have distilled thousands of pictures down to just a few that show the wonder of the universe.
Makes me feel ever smaller and MORE insignificant that normal…sigh…

Book meme

Posted on by March 6, 2013

From Tamara, who got it here:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123.
3. Find the first five sentences.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Here’s my three sentences from Dan Jenkins “You call it sports, but I say it’s a jungle out there”:

Page 123 is actually a set of tables, so I jumped to the next text-

Think about it. There are 14 clubs, all of them diffeent. There are 18 holes, all of them different.

No tags, play along if you want to…

Staff One liners…

Posted on by March 6, 2013

A bit of explanation here- The LAST thing a warfighter wants to drive is a desk, especially when there is a war on… That is one reason most staff tours are 18-24 months, to roll people out before they go off the deep end…

Having said that, there is another breed who want nothing more than staff duty to keep from having to make decisions, have their petty little empires, and stay off the front lines (back in the day, they were called REMFs).

The collection below comes from a warfighter at CENTCOM who has to attend a LOT of meetings in various places as part of his current staff tour. He is at the 19 month point and teetering on the edge of the diving board…

This is pretty long, but funny as hell, and having done a tour as a staff weenie, they are definitely believeable…

ENJOY!

“Please don’t laugh. This is my job.” Maj (EUCOM) from Protocol, explaining in great detail the approved procedures for dropping off VIPs

“If we wait until the last minute to do it, it’ll only take a minute.” MAJ (EUCOM)

“The only reason that anything ever gets done is because there are pockets of competence in every command. The key is to find them…and then exploit the hell out of ’em.” CDR (CENTCOM)

“We are condemned men who are chained and will row in place until we rot.” LtCol (CENTCOM) on life at his Command

“Right now we’re pretty much the ham in a bad ham sandwich…” GO/FO (EUCOM)

“Let’s face it: Africa sucks…” DOS representative (Bureau of African Affairs) at a conference on Africa

“I’ll be right back. I have to go pound my nuts flat…” Lt Col (EUCOM) after being assigned a difficult tasker

“OK, this is too stupid for words.” LTC (JS)

“When you get right up to the line that you’re not supposed to cross, the only person in front of you will be me!” CDR (CENTCOM) on his view of the value of being politically correct in today’s military

“There’s nothing wrong with crossing that line a little bit, it’s jumping over it buck naked that will probably get you in trouble…” Lt Col (EUCOM) responding to the above

“I may be slow, but I do poor work…” MAJ (USAREUR)

“Don’t ever be the first…don’t ever be the last…and don’t ever volunteer to do anything….” CDR (EUCOM) relating an ancient Navy truism

“Hey, somebody should really do that…” CDR (CENTCOM) on the CENTCOM tasking process

“Cynicism is the smoke that rises from the ashes of burned out dreams.” Maj (CENTCOM) on the daily thrashings delivered to AOs at his Command

“WE are the reason that Rumsfeld hates us…” LTC (EUCOM) doing some standard, Army self-flagellation

“South of the Alps and East of the Adriatic, paranoia is considered mental equilibrium…” and “The chance of success in these talks is the same as the number of “R’s” in “fat chance…”” GS-15 (SHAPE)

“His knowledge on that topic is only power point deep…” MAJ (JS)

“We have no position on that issue. In fact, your position IS our position. Could you tell us what our position is?” CDR (TRANSCOM) at a policy SVTC

“Ya know, in this Command, if the world were supposed to end tomorrow, it would still happen behind schedule.” CWO4 (ret) (EUCOM)

“Never pet a burning dog.” LTC (Tennessee National Guard)

“I need intelligence, not information.” Maj (EUCOM)

“We are now past the good idea cutoff point…” MAJ (JS) on the fact that somebody always tries to “fine tune” a COA with more “good ideas”

“Nobody ever said you had to be smart to make 0-6.” Col (EUCOM)

“Accuracy and attention to detail take a certain amount of time.”

“No need to tip our hand as to how responsive we can be.” CDR (EUCOM) in a passdown to his replacement

“I seem to be rapidly approaching the apex of my mediocre career.” MAJ (JS)

“I just realized that this War on Terror might take a little longer than we thought, so I am developing a new system of hanging charts on walls to solve our problem and win the war.” LTC (EUCOM) after a review of long range Counter Terrorism (CT) plans

“Much work remains to be done before we can announce our total failure to make any progress.”
“None of us is as dumb as all of us.” Excerpted from a brief (EUCOM)

“It’s not a lot of work unless you have to do it.” LTC (EUCOM)

“Creating smoking holes gives our lives meaning and enhances our manliness.” LTC (EUCOM) at a CT conference

“Everyone should have an equal chance, but not everyone is equal.”

“I am so far down the food chain that I’ve got plankton bites on my butt.”

“Once you accept that a dog is a dog, you can’t get upset when it barks.” Lt Col (USSOCOM)

“That guy just won’t take ‘yes’ for an answer.” MAJ (EUCOM)

“When all else fails, simply revel in the absurdity of it all.” LCDR (CENTCOM)

“Never attribute to malice that which can be ascribed to sheer stupidity.” LTC (CENTCOM)

“I hear so much about Ft. Bragg. Where is it?” “It’s in the western part of southeastern North Carolina.” LCDR and CPT (EUCOM)

“I’ve become the master of nodding my head and acting like I give a sh!t, and then instantly forgetting what the hell a person was saying the moment they walk away.” Flag-level Executive A$$istant

“Mark my words, this internet thing is gonna catch on someday.” LTC (EUCOM)

“You’re not a loser. You’re just not my kind of winner…” GS-14 (OSD)

“He who strives for the minimum rarely attains it.” GS-12 (DOS)

“I’m tired of waiting on somebody who I know is just going to ignore me once they arrive.” Lt Col (EUCOM), while waiting to start a brief for a visiting Congressman

“If I’d had more time, I’da written a shorter brief…” Derived from the writings of Mark Twain
“You only know as much as you don’t know.” GO (EUCOM)

“Hello gentlemen. Are we in today or are you just ignoring my request?” GS-15 (DSCA) in an email to EUCOM staffers

“After seeing the way this place works, I bet that Mickey Mouse wears a EUCOM watch.” Maj (EUCOM)

“That’s FUBIJAR.” COL (CENTCOM), Fu–ed Up, But I’m Just a Reservist…

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m the only one that matters in here.” COL (CENTCOM)

“This is all happening because we had the sympathetic detonation of a stress grenade.” Maj (EUCOM) after an insignificant issue became a theater focus because somebody used the “Reply all” function

“Nothing is too good for you guys…and that’s exactly what you’re gonna get…” LTC (EUCOM) describing the way Army policy is formulated

“The only thing that sucks worse than being me is being you…” LTC (EUCOM)

“I have to know what I don’t know…” Col (CENTCOM) during a shift changeover briefing
“No. Now I’m simply confused at a higher level…” Foreign GO/FO when asked if he had any questions following a transformation brief at JFCOM

“‘Leaning forward’ is really just the first phase of ‘falling on your face.'” Col (MARFOREUR)

“We’ve got to start collaborating between the collaboration systems.”

“We’re from the nuke shop, sir. We’re the crazy aunt in the closet that nobody likes to talk about …” Lt Col to GO/FO (EUCOM) in briefings

“We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” Anonymous, but classic…

“The ‘L’ in CENTCOM stands for leadership…”

“At this Command, we have written in large, black letters: DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) on the back of our security badges.” Maj (CENTCOM)

“He cloaked himself in an impenetrable veneer of terminology.” Lt Col (JFCOM) describing the Jiffiecom alpha male

“Transformation has long been the buzzword for those that are dispossessed, dispirited and disillusioned…” Chaplain (EUCOM), allegedly talking about the Disciples…