This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Ex-PH2

  • About That Age Thing….

    I got this essay in the mail from someone a while back. I don’t know who the author is, but I think it’s very much to the point.

    I am over 60 and the Armed Forces thinks I’m too old to track down terrorists. You can’t be older than 42 to join the military. They’ve got the whole thing ass-backwards.

    Instead of sending 18-year olds off to fight, they ought to take us old guys.. You shouldn’t be able to join a military unit until you’re at least 35.

    For starters, researchers say 18-year-olds think about sex every 10 seconds. Old guys only think about sex a couple of times a month, leaving us more than 280,000 additional seconds per day to concentrate on the enemy.

    Young guys haven’t lived long enough to be cranky, and a cranky soldier is a dangerous soldier. ‘My back hurts! I can’t sleep, I’m tired and hungry.’ We are bad-tempered and impatient, and maybe letting us kill some asshole that desperately deserves it will make us feel better and shut us up for a while..

    An 18-year-old doesn’t even like to get up before 10 am. Old guys always get up early to pee, so what the hell. Besides, like I said, I’m tired and can’t sleep and since I’m already up, I may as well be up killing some fanatical SOB. If captured we couldn’t spill the beans because we’d forget where we put them. In fact, name, rank, and serial number would be a real brainteaser.

    Boot camp would be easier for old guys.. We’re used to getting screamed and yelled at and we’re used to soft food. We’ve also developed an appreciation for guns. We’ve been using them for years as an excuse to get out of the house, away from the screaming and yelling.

    They could lighten up on the obstacle course however… I’ve been in combat and never saw a single 20-foot wall with rope hanging over the side, nor did I ever do any pushups after completing basic training.

    Actually, the running part is kind of a waste of energy, too…. I’ve never seen anyone outrun a bullet.

    An 18-year-old has the whole world ahead of him. He’s still learning to shave, to start a conversation with a pretty girl. He still hasn’t figured out that a baseball cap has a brim to shade his eyes, not the back of his head.

    These are all great reasons to keep our kids at home to learn a little more about life before sending them off into harm’s way.

    Let us old guys track down those terrorists. The last thing an enemy would want to see is a couple million pissed off old farts with bad attitudes and automatic weapons, who know that their best years are already behind them.

    HEY!! How about recruiting Women over 50…in menopause!!! You think MEN have attitudes??

    Ohhhhhhhhhhhh my!!! If nothing else, put them on border patrol. They’ll have it secured the first night!

    Share this with all of your senior friends. Put it in big type so they can read it.

    — Author Unknown

  • NDtBF’s Photos

    NDtBF sends photos of his latest rocket science experiment. The missile reached an altitude of 347 miles and a distance of 310 miles. This comes just days after  Pyongyang fired a missile that landed in the sea near Russia after flying 490 miles, reaching an altitude of more than 2,000km (1,240 miles), nothing to sneeze at, in my view. He is rapidly advancing his goals and letting us know about it.

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/807592/north-korea-latest-news-missile-test-launch-united-states-ww3

    Our dear leader Kim Jong-un has said he is really happy to see real-time earth photos that were sequentially taken by the camera on the ballistic missile from the atmosphere

    – Rodong Sinmun official daily newspaper

    The trajectory of the medium-range missile had it aimed straight across the waters toward the west coast of Japan’s northern island, which has bad enough memories of the 2011 quake that rattled the entire Pacific plate.

    He’s also threatening Pres. Trump with war, but he does that all the time.

    I’m waiting for his next subterranean nuclear explosion announcement, but the seismic network in place to detect those things will probably tell us about it before he does.

     

  • In the ‘Awww…shit!!’ category

    The Norks have now gone and done it: launched a missile yesterday that survived re-entry before splashdown in the Sea of Japan.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/20/northkorea-missile-passes-re-entry-test-breakthrough-nuclear/

    Per the following UK Express update early this morning our time, “Reports are emerging from North Korea that a ballistic missile launched on May 14 successfully re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere”.  http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/806746/North-Korea-USA-live-latest-news-updates-Kim-Jong-un-Donald-Trump-war-missile-test-WW3

    If this is true, this changes things radically.  According to the report, it was a KN-17, which is liquid-fueled instead of solid-fueled. That makes it easier to spot on the launch pad because the solid fuel rockets don’t require lengthy fueling time.

    I appreciate SecDef Mattis’s rather reserved response.

    “We are going to continue to work the issue,” Mattis said, according to Reuters. “If this goes to a military solution, it’s going to be tragic on an unbelievable scale. So our effort is to work with the U.N., work with China, work with Japan, work with South Korea to try to find a way out of this situation.”

    But the real question remains: what is to be done about Fatty Kim da T’ird and  his experiments in chemistry and rocket science?  He has his neighbors quite worried, although he hasn’t achieved the real ICBM capacity that the Cold War offered.  If he continues down this road without let or hindrance, there is no saying that he cannot have that capability.

    There are, likewise, rumors that he has people working on nerve agents.  Owing to his association with the sarin-related death of his half-brother, nothing surprises me less.

    How much real time warning will anyone have if he lets fly with either a nuke-bearing missile or one with a gas canister payload?

    The problem is that he needs to be put on a choke chain and muzzled, period. If, as has been speculated, Norkiland was behind the WannaCry spyware lockout a week or so ago, and likewise, if the Norks were responsible for filching $81 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in March this year, the only thing he is after is cash to buy chemicals and parts and equipment for his rocket science experiments. It’s not going into food for his people, because he doesn’t give a crap about them.

    Money, and of course, being the center of attention of Russia, China and the USA are what he lives for.  It’s been 64 years since the truce stopped the Korean War and locked the door for anyone unlucky enough to be left behind in that hellhole created by his grandpa. There is no way to tell how many Koreans have been slaughtered by the Nork regime in that interval.

    But if he’s the legitimate ruler of Norkiland, we can’t really compare him to Lord Farquaad, can we?

  • …and This Just In

    It seems that Fatty Kim da T’ird, a/k/a NDtBF, is getting more and more annoyed that we aren’t paying enough attention to him.

    First, he sends a butthurt letter to Congress complaining about it.

    Now he’s got Seattle, WA, upset.  As you know already, Seattle is the home of Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing (which is considering moving everything to Illinois).  But because the Cold War ended before some of you were born, Seattle is also the babysitter for 1,300 nuclear warheads, per this AOL article. I’m trying to remember if there was a SAC base there in the long ago, when I lived 10 miles from a Soviet ICBM target city.

    https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/17/seattle-prepares-nuclear-attack-north-korea/22096104/

    Washington State has a law that prevents planning for a nuclear attack. You can plan for evacuation, but in this day and age, do we really need it? However, despite its inland location, Seattle considers itself to be a prime target for the Cheeseslayer’s nuclear missiles (which haven’t worked so far), and there is legislation on the books to change the ‘no planning’ law to ‘plan for’, because one state legislator says it’s ‘silly’ to not plan for it.

    Note that, according to this Express/UK article, down the page, the Chubster fired off another ballistic missile on Sunday. Per his own announcement, it’s capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/805758/North-Korea-USA-live-latest-news-updates-Kim-Jong-un-missile-test-Donald-Trump-war

    China has also entered into this boiling turmoil by lodging complaints against the US in regard to penalties on Chinese and Iranian figures. The fact that ‘figures’ is not defined could mean anything.

    Since we’re doing business with China on a large scale, this needs to be addressed. It’s more important than two scoops of ice cream, isn’t it? Oh, sorry – I forgot that our media report on nothing and make a mountain out of a dimple in a sandbox.

    My concern is that Kim Nodong-at-all is getting his shorts in a bunch over the lack of attention from the US, specifically. There is some suspicion that Norkiland was behind the WannaCry ransomware attack last week. The NYT has an article discussing the possibility that Norkiland was involved in the cyberhacking through sleeper cells. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/world/asia/north-korea-cyber-sleeper-cells-ransomware.html?_r=0

    Yesterday, Norkiland launched a ferry service to Vladivostok, to try to develop economic cooperation between Russia and the Norks.

    There’s a good timeline of Nork-related activities listed in the Express/UK article, events which are not being reported in most of the US media outlets, to their shame. It appears that how much ice cream one person gets, or what kind of salad dressing, is more important than events underway in the real world.

  • News from Norkiland for May 2017

    If you have time to read all of this, you probably have too much time on your hands. But if you need a good laugh, have at it.

    First of all, Fatty Kim da T’ird, aka NDtBF, wants the US to turn over all would-be assassins who have plans to bump him off.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/11/north-korea-demands-that-the-u-s-hand-over-would-be-assassins-of-kim-jong-un/?utm_term=.98883d21b791

    Fatboy the Cheeseslayer has decided, in his wisdom, that the CIA and South Korea’s NIS want to poison him. Well, okay, but that was supposed to happen in 2014 and he’s still here, so either he’s having another episode of paranoid delusions, or he just isn’t getting enough attention from us lately. Since there were no specifics offered, and the potential assassin was ID’d only by his last name, which happens to be Kim, maybe the BF was frightened by his own image in the mirror. Or maybe it talked back to him.

    Moving on, when Qian Qichen, China’s long-time ambassador to Norkiland, died on Tuesday at the age of 89, it ended a very long chapter in China’s diplomatic relations with the hermit kingdom and other countries. In 1992, Qian gave Norkiland, then under Kim Il-Sung (Daddy Kim) the bad news that China was establishing diplomatic relations with South Korea.

    http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2094007/when-late-diplomat-qian-qichen-had-give-north-koreas

    Considering that subsequent to that, the North fired rockets at that island during a joint war games exercise between the US military and South Korea, it must have been annoying to realize that the non-productive North, with a political system that simply sucks dry the only country that will deal with it at all was being put on the back burner in favor of a country (South Korea) or countries (e.g., the USA)  that could provide relatively lucrative trade agreements and help bump up the Chinese economy. Pyongyang saw the move as a betrayal, despite Qian’s assurances that relations would remain the same.

    And finally, Fatty Kim da T’ird has warned that hundreds of millions of us in the US of A will die if he can’t have his way.

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/803077/north-korea-kim-jong-un-hundreds-of-million-in-us-die-war-erupts-nuclear-donald-trump

    From what the linked article says, the threat is based on routine evacuation drills currently underway in the South.  There is confirmation that NDtBF has plans for a sixth nuke test, and I would like to remind skeptics that his last test, last year, (#5) had an estimated yield of 20 to 30 kilotons, per USGS seismic readings. The Hiroshima bomb (Little Boy) was supposed to be a 10 to 15 kiloton bomb, so the Cheeseslayer is getting up there in his efforts. Yes, I am keeping an eye out for odd seismic readings coming from the underground test area.  Unfortunately, the delivery system Fatty Kim da T’ird is trying to pony up hasn’t worked out quite as well as he’d hoped it would, which was probably behind his gas explosions on the 300-tank beach scene last week. I did not know that kim chi had that effect on people.

    I can only hope that any Nork missile built makes landfall on the shores of LaLa Land, because my radishes finally came up and I’d like to harvest them. But if you have concerns about the possibility of a nuke hitting some place near you, now would be a good time to get the 10-year stored seed packs, the complete water filtration system, the solar-crank powered AM/FM/shortwave camper radio with a flashlight and siren, and that nice set of fishing tackle you were looking at in the catalogs over the winter. And stock up on bolts for the crossbows, too, and get the axes sharpened, in case you need to split firewood.

     

  • And You Thought Don Quixote Was Crazy?

    I thought Hondo’s link to the article about Berkeley was a revelation of people who are completely out of touch with reality. It certainly demonstrates that those who are proposing ‘peace with ruffians’ parties have no idea what they’re dealing with.  But they are, like their predecessors, off on their own clouds.

    This article from WUWT is even further into the realm of disconnection from reality. The proposal itself is ludicrous, and the cost of the proposed program – building windmills to pump Arctic sea water onto Arctic ice to thicken it – is estimated to cost $500 billion. That is half a trillion dollars, people.  Half a trillion big ones, and it’s your tax money we’re talking about.

    The proposal is from a planetary scientist whose comparison of Enceladus, an iceball Saturnian moon with a possible ocean under it’s ice cover, to Earth is so off the wall silly, you just have to shake your head. Enceladus has no atmosphere to protect it from space. Earth does have an atmosphere.  It’s why we exist here.  Enceladus has geysers that have photographed by various satellite explorers, but he has yet to explain those geysers which are probably gushing because of water pressure, just like an oil well gusher.

    Here’s the link. You really do have to read the proposal, in italics, to understand the drivel that is being proposed:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/03/alarmists-gone-wild-saving-the-arctic-sea-ice-from-oblivion-with-windmills/

    The sad part is that there are enough dimwits in Congress on both sides of the fence who may think Guam will tip over some day, and who will see this as another splendid idea, even though common sense tells you it is utter twaddle.  However, since it’s only a proposal so far, don’t write to your Congress critters about it just yet. Keep an eye out for it. And if you talk to anyone about it, make sure you emphasize the cost of this idiotic idea.

    Geezo Pete, even Don Quixote had more sense than this!

  • Pigs To Join Bomb Detection Units

    Pigs, Pen, Portrait, Livestock, Barn

    In an effort to relieve some of the pressure on working dogs in bomb-detection units, the US Army has announced that it will employ a sounder of trained truffle-sniffing hogs to detect roadside and mid-road homemade IEDs.

    Since pigs are renowned for their refined sense of smell, particularly in the search for a favorite delicacy of les Crapeauds, a small sounder of young pigs will be chosen for this honorable employment within the next few weeks. As is well-known to any truffle hunter in Provence, pigs are widely-known for their ability to detect that buried treasure, no matter how deep it may be. They are, in fact, considered to be much better at it than dogs, partly because their flat, shovel-like snouts can get to the root of the problem and detect the distinct differences in scent between oak roots and the horse-manurelike scent of the black truffle, a rare, highly-sought after and prized fungus which can fetch up to $1200 per pound.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/10/truffle-2500-australia-ted-smith_n_5571053.html

    There have been trials in Israel, and while successfully completed, the reluctance of most Israelis to accept pork in their midst, per kosher dietary laws, has made it difficult to bring a full-blown pig bomb detection unit into effect.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/1443312/Taboo-or-not-taboo-Pigs-that-sniff-landmines-pose-dilemma-for-Israel.html

    There is some concern that the pigs may set off an IED if they detect it, but the cost of training a pig to find a bomb is reduced by their extreme intelligence, their willingness to please, their very rapid growth rate, and the fact that they will work for Snickers and candy corn as rewards for finding an object.  Replacement cost is also a consideration, with the market rate for live pigs going as low as $65 a head.

    However, should a pig be injured or killed in the line of duty, not only will they be fondly remembered as impressive four-legged heroes named Mayo, Ham or Peanut, but the little porkers will also provide a welcome change of diet for the troops.

  • Shots Fired on Earth Day 2017

    On Earth Day (4-22-2017), late at night after a parade, someone did a drive-by shooting, firing seven (count ‘em – 7 casings found) at the 4th floor of National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building at UAH where John Christy, a specific climate scientist works. It is no coincidence that Dr. Spencer is a skeptic about the popular notion that we puny humans are responsible for, and bear the entire burden of guilt for, a natural occurrence that is showing distinct signs of changing.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/24/on-earth-day-shots-fired-at-building-housing-leading-climate-skeptic-scientists/

    I am quoting Dr. Spencer here: “When some people cannot argue facts, they resort to violence to get their way.”

    The article is a relay of those events at UAH to WUWT, plus a link to Dr. Spencer’s blog.

    This is not science at work. It is mob violence and political terrorism, the lowest form of behavior modern humans can engage in.

    You may also be interested in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s self-aggrandizing efforts in another article on WUWT, labeling elected ‘science deniers’ as a threat to democracy. Now since he makes such a generalized statement, it means that anyone who does not follow the diktats prescribed by the Noisy Few (like Tyson) are people who should be viewed with suspicion.

    I’m really not sure what he means by ‘science deniers’, because he isn’t rattling on about physics or genetics or chemistry. No, he zooms in on the buzzword “climate”, as it is the current bone of contention.  Like Bill Nye, the not-so-scientific Science Guy, he grabs the spotlight whenever he can. Tyson tried to dictate the terms that define a planet, and failed, as his dethronement of Pluto was rescinded by the IAU when that august body declared Pluto (with 4 satellites) and Ceres both as dwarf planets.  It must have hurt.

    In a democracy, all views are allowed to be heard. People like Tyson and Nye and Mann refuse to acknowledge this aspect. It represents a threat to their finances and their public status.

    We can agree to disagree on something without trying to destroy each other in the process, but they don’t want this. In their perfect worlds, only their views are allowed to be heard.

    If our tax money is to go into research to provide answers to the puzzles this planet presents to us, and it does go there, then denying an opposing view, or attempting to use an unrelated law to prosecute those who have the opposing view is Lysenkoism at its worst.  It is not science at work.  It is politics.

    Social media may be a waste of time in many respects, but in this case, without this near-instantaneous relay of this drive-by shooting, which was not reported in the press, we would not have a clue about what is really happening with the surging hordes of the Crazypants protesters. I did look at still shots of the Earth Day marchers and saw several wearing those pink pussy hats. What do those idiotic separatist symbols have to do with Earth Day?

    Nothing.

    Dr. Spencer is correct: the protesters frequently cannot even articulate their angst or viewpoint when confronted or questioned. Their response is, instead, a resort to mob violence.  Are we to submit to mindless executions and destruction if we refuse to knuckle under to the lies of dictatorships?

    That is not what science is about.  Refusing to even allow the notion of a different point of view is as Medieval as you can get.  This is NOT the era of Galileo and Pope Urban VIII.

    We must stay alert.