Our New Sailor

On Monday evening before Thanksgiving we started our 13 hour drive out to Waukegan, IL to attend our youngest son Christopher's graduation from Navy Boot Camp. He's a 'nuke' which apparently is also synonymous with 'geek' in the Navy. He'll be heading off for his A-school as soon as some paperwork gets cleared up.

The graduation ceremony was impressive. There was a band, a parade of the flags of the fifty states, an honor guard complete with tossing rifles around, and a review. A captain from the office of the deputy secretary of Naval Operations gave a stirring and brief congratulations and reminded all the sailors that aptitude and attitude were two of the most important qualities. You can work on both and those who did would be very successful.

We hung around in the are for Thanksgiving and the day after taking our sailor shopping and to a couple of movies. We went to "Bolt" just because it sounded cute and it was much better than we expected. We ate Thanksgiving dinner at a sparsely populated small restaurant named Anastasia's which featured among other things a brandy flaming cheese appetizer called "Saganaki." Good stuff! Then on Saturday morning at 5 a.m. we rose for the long drive home. Both ways we were fortunate to hit Chicago at times when the traffic was light which seems to hardly ever happen around Chicago.

Serious Change did you say?

The election euphoria continues as the economic meltdown theatrics thunder on. Now we have the big three automakers flying into Washington in their private, corporate sponsored jets with their hands out. "Too big to fail" we keep hearing. You might want to tell that to the Roman Empire. There is no such thing as too big to fail. The big question is fail now or fail later after they've sucked the tax payer dry and there are no more options.

It is not written on the book of life that if you are in business you must succeed. It doesn't have an exception for size. The market punishes wastefulness whether it is the plundering of the company by unions or by management. The U.S. automakers have been fumbling around for quite a few years making poorer quality cars than the Japanese, the Germans, and now even the South Koreans. Cozying up to Congress is not going to suddenly make them better automobile manufacturers.

The gubbment needs to get out of business. What is the change we've signed up for? Increasingly it looks like a fast track to national socialism as we fund a free enterprise melt down (probably induced by government in the first place) with exasperatingly irresponsible bailouts without a trace of real accountability. This isn't a recipe for solving the problems. It is a fast track to turning an economic glitch into a long term track back to feudalism. Here you are serfs, pick up your gubbment check and don't make any waves or we'll turn you into a non-person.

The talking heads in the media have been particularly mindless of late. That is what happens when you can no longer tell the difference between truth, spin, and rank propaganda. It's all a crock. Time to tune-out and get back to something productive like actually thinking.

Update

Well the fat lady has sung and we have kicked the can for hope and change. What has interested me so far is the artificial euphoria of the media, even some of the more even handed media. The long and short of it is that the most liberal senator in the U.S. senate, a man with essentially no credentials, a man who ran on a platform empty of substance who has a record of consorting with radicals and people who hate America is now the president with a majority in both houses of congress.

Did you notice that gun sales have skyrocketed. The market tanked for two days after the election. Those are not signs of great confidence in the wisdom of the American electorate. If you search for precedents for this election the ones that come to mind are the election of FDR, the election of Johnson in 1964, and perhaps the election of Jimmy Carter after Gerald Ford went back on his promise not to run. The first two ushered in spectacular growth in government. The last destroyed the retirement savings of millions and left the nation with double digit inflation, huge unemployment and blamed it all on the people. Hold on, we're in for a horrific ride.

One ought to remember that government doesn't produce anything. It doesn't produce jobs. It doesn't produce wealth. What it is supposed to do is defend you from enemies from within and without. Often, as in the three examples above, it proves to be more the problem than the solution.

Watch closely as the new administration tries to figure out what it is all about. It will be interesting to watch how they try to fill in the blanks and right now it is all blanks. I think that vacuity will show up shortly and we will see that the promised change is just more of the same old lame ideas which have failed and failed and failed. We'll get to pay the price all over again. Carter has returned.

Trust and Integrity? Is there any left?

I suppose in view of rule number 1 you might expect that I think highly of Republicans. Rule No. 1 you might remember is: "Democrats are Liars." Rule number 2 is like it: 2) Republicans lie a lot too but often about different things. So we might be able to apply Occam's law of parsimony and combine rule one and rule two as: Politicians are liars.
What ever happened to honor and integrity? You know what I mean don't you? Keeping your word? Telling the truth? Paying your debts? Not taking out loans you know over extend you?
Now in the presence of the financial melt down in which the gubbmint which largely caused the problem is posturing that they are the solution (save me from this medicine) is asking us to trust that they will fix the problem. I find myself waiting for the other foot to fall.
It is sobering to realize that our entire economy and monetary system is built on a foundation of trust. Without trust that people will pay their bills, honor their debts, and keep their promises the whole fabric of our economic society begins to unravel. This is no surprise. It's not news. In fact one has to wonder if encouraging irresponsibility as the Democrats have done for quite a long time doesn't have a component of intentionality focused on destabilization so that gubbment can ride to the rescue. We may be in for an interesting ride. Ignore the man behind the curtain said the great Oz. I think we better start paying more attention than we do now before the whole country goes down the drain.

The Strangest Election In My Life

My life began at conception in Hawaii in 1941 where my dad was stationed on U.S.S. Detroit, a light cruiser in the harbor at Pearl Harbor. After I was conceived but before I was born my life was disrupted by the Japanese attack. My mom was evacuated to the mainland under the guns of my dad's cruiser which was one of the escort vessels that took the passenger ships with the women and children back to the mainland.
But it wasn't until the election of Dwight David Eisenhower in 1952 when I was ten that I was politically aware enough to notice politics. I followed that election with some interest, but the first time I could actually vote was the election of 1960 when Nixon squared off against Kennedy. I voted for Nixon and it has always been my conviction that Nixon won, or at least would have won had there not been so much voter fraud in Texas and Chicago. That was my introduction to the idea that elections were not fair.
In the 1964 Goldwater-Johnson race I was exposed to the politics of fear as the left characterized Goldwater as a madman. The labor unions were spreading around nasty little comic books that portrayed Goldwater as a Nazi carrying nuclear weapons and the Democrats had an ad that portrayed a nuclear explosion. This exposed me to one of the standard Democratic tactics, the demonization of their opponents with lies, distortions, innuendo, fabrications, and dirty tricks of all kinds.
Nixon managed to get elected and there was the Watergate fiasco, but all through the period we had the looney far left working for the Chinese Communists, whether knowingly or not, to defeat American interests in Indochina. They were successful and in a despicable show of cowardice refused to support our ally when after negotiating a peace treaty the North Vietnamese blatantly violated it and invaded the country. We (well mainly the Democrats) cut off even military support to our ally. That was when I realized that Democrats were congenitally despicable, dishonorable, and not to be trusted. Perhaps it was for that reason that the Nixon White House had a seige mentality and some of the staff engaged in the Watergate fiasco which brought down Nixon with a lot of help from a hostile and leftist press.
That was followed by Ford who was a care-taker president who violated his promise not to run after his term was up and ran anyway. We might have avoided Jimmy Carter and had Ronald Reagan four years earlier were it not for Ford. Jimmy Carter won and was simply the worst president in my lifetime and perhaps of all time. He's a hypocrite, claiming to be a Christian but actually being something of a leftist nincompoop. He destabilized the middle East by abandoning the Shah of Iran whose regime had been single handedly moderating extremist Islam — but Carter wasn't very smart and so began the rise of Islamic terrorism. Thanks Jimmy, you idiot!
Reagan's presidency came just in time and it's interesting that the hostages were released the day of his inauguration The Iranians knew that Reagan was not to be fooled with. Of course the Democrats and the leftist press spent the entire eight years running their mouths about how stupid he was and how nothing stuck (of course the ones throwing the mud should know). The "teflon" president as he was called, was effective because he was principled and his policies contributed to the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.
Bush the elder ran and won on Reagan's coat tails but he promised "No new taxes" and welshed, thinking he could make a deal with the Democrats (reaching across the aisle dontchknow) and no sooner was the tax increase sealed and the Democrats were reneaging on all their promises. Remember the principle: They are liars. They are not to be trusted.
So Bush got slammed and we got Bill Clinton whose mind rarely rises above his fly. His wife is a model of control freak and sought to socialize medicine while he mostly neglected his responsibilties while the Republican congress gave him a presidency with a good economic record.
The Bush the younger who has actually done a pretty good job except that he got us into this unpopular war (What war is popular?) and with the help of the usual crew has been demonized just as Johnson was demonized except he was demonized by his own people. Same strategy, same cast mostly, older but with the same ideology — America haters.
That brings us to the current election. We have a smooth talker who's never really done anything promising hope and change and an authentic American patriot who has always fought, perhaps not alway wisely, on principle and who has selected a woman governor who has been a fighter against special interests for his running mate. This should be a no-brainer. But you have to take into account that the media has decided that they are the ones that ought to make the choice for president and they have spun and spun and spun. If bias in the media was something that you ever doubted, doubt no more! This is the strangest election of my life and I've been through quite a few. The one very stable principle that has remained true through them all is: You can't trust Democrats. They are liars. Those that are stupid enough to take them at their word like the elder Bush will have their heads handed to them. The first principle is that they are liars. If you ever have a decision to make, refer again to the first principle.

ACORN Nonsense

Well there is the usual firestorm going on as irregularities are being uncovered. Try to imagine the outrage the Democrats would be expressing if ACORN were a Republican organization. The outrage would be nuclear, the screams of Nazis (well they are rampant no matter what, the N-word is the Democratic Liberal Apparatchiks default word for a Republican) would be deafening. Now the ACORN business is about fraudulent voter registration. Many ACORN operatives have had people register numerous times. The record seems to be about 72 for a 19 year old that's made the TV news several times as the poster boy for this activity.
The Democrats scream exaggeration or worse because the election hasn't happened yet so it can't be voter fraud. Well excuse the vocabulary. That's short for voter registration fraud which is rather obviously something that is step one in a well known Democratic two step or three step which leads to, guess what, voter fraud. Step 1) register a lot of fraudulent voters, Step 2) see how many can get away with voting multiple times on election day, Step 3) if you fail to steal the election scream that the nasty Republicans were trying to deny your voters the opportunity to vote (i.e. they were actually watching the polls and checking voter id and stuff like that).
We've seen this play out in the last two elections and the allegations of voter fraud go back far earlier, at least in my memory to the 1960 Nixon/Kennedy race which was won narrowly by Kennedy on the strength of vote fraud in Illinois and Texas according to some analysts. Nixon was advised to register a protest and call for a recount and decided not to for the good of the nation. That of course was like waving a "give me more" flag to the Democrats and they've been happy little cemetery registerers ever since.

Addiction ...

I've been astounded by this current election cycle. The dimensions of my exasperation began with the fact that Obama even being in the race was astounding. A freshman senator seemed a totally incongruous candidate. Indeed, generally senators are not terribly good candidates if for no other reason than they have no executive experience. But then he actually won the Democratic nomination. That was astounding squared. It meant that the Democrats were completely nuts. But it continued, and astounding cubed was the pass Obama gets from the media. They called Reagan the teflon president, well Obama is clearly the teflon candidate. But why is that? Why does the media give him a pass on everything? No very relevant experience, a litany of acquaintances that reads like a who's who of America haters, not achievements except a few personal ones, Harvard Law and two books on his life from someone too young to be writing two books about his life. This is just wierd! Are we addicted to hope and change but without substance? Where's the beef? was a commercial too many years ago to remember, but the question is still relevant.