Author: Ex-PH2

I’ve given this a lot of thought. Well, at least a couple of days’ worth of it… or maybe more like an hour or so. Well, okay – about 15 minutes, because that’s all that is really required to address the issue of the Lemmings and their addiction to Lemmingism.

Lemmings, as most of you know, are pack animals that migrate in herds, or so the mythos goes. They’re so dumb that if someone tells them to jump off a cliff, they’d run right up to the edge and take the plunge. We’ve already seen Lemmings gather in large groups to do things that have an air of Da Stoopid to the more rational among us. For instance, running onto a busy highway in the dark while wearing dark clothing and holding up a lit-up cell phone is one memorable episode. Another is building a human dam at a major university at one gate to block the flow of cross-campus traffic.

There are other incidents as well, almost too numerous to mention.

Mind you, these are not the small, furry rodents who became legends for doing dumb things because Disney cameramen chased them off a cliff. (Yes, they did. Bad boys!) These are physically adult humans who act like small, furry, stupid, legendary rodents.

One of the co-characteristics shared by wild lemmings, those cute little Arctic tundra rodents, and urban-dwelling Lemmings, those nasty, loud-mouthed, dumbass types, is that they both suffer population explosions on a recurring basis. With the wild ones, it’s frequently a seasonal thing related to food, females and fighting, as they are well-known for their warning displays and aggressive behavior towards predators, including humans. With urban-dwelling Lemmings, the population growth takes longer to generate, as much as eight years until the demographic per urban area has become densely-packed and visible during the daytime, as well as at night.

Both species tend to be vegetarian by nature, the wild tundra lemmings consisting almost entirely on roots, seeds and grasses, while the urban-dwelling Lemmings tend to graze several hours per day on lettuces, sprouted roots, quinoa and other seeds, and tofu. Not a lot of difference there, if you get my drift.

Indeed, even the thought processes of the wild lemmings and the urban Lemmings seem to be similar. The urban Lemmings do have some seminal concept of the real world, but it is distorted by their population density and herd choices.

For example, you and I will generally agree that 2 + 2 = 4. Urban Lemmings will argue to the death with you that 2+2 = 5, and will go to great lengths to explain how they reach that conclusion, while completely missing one important point: 2+2 can also equal 6. On the other hand, wild lemmings, when confronted with such a simple mathematical concept as “2+2 equals something”, will blink and show you very quickly that 2+2 = 6 to 10, depending on weather and food resources, hence their regular and very real population explosions.

Therein lies the difference between wild lemmings and urban-dwelling Lemmings. The wild lemming as a genus has a very direct, real-world, real-time approach to life. The urban-dwelling Lemmings, as a population group and species, are bound by the Tenets of Lemmingism to ignore the real-world, find safe spaces to hide from the Daylight of Truth, and to swallow without question whatever baloney they are fed, no matter how rancid, infested and stale it is, or how much it clashes with the Reality that they utterly abhor and deny.

The wild tundra-dwelling lemmings, as a genus of up to thirty species, are well able to take care of themselves. They can adapt quickly and easily to changes in their environment, and survive undisturbed by those changes. They can find food, shelter and companionship without trouble.

The urban-dwelling Lemmings are a different problem. Taking into consideration that The Times, they are a-changin’, and are forecast to be changin’ drastically for the next 85 to 90 years, (well beyond the lifetimes of most urban Lemmings), it is not an inhuman or politically incorrect thing to propose that their species be allowed to become extinct. This means do not feed them, do not house them, do not clothe them and have them spayed and neutered at a low-cost vet clinic.

After all, if the wild tundra lemming can be, and is, a self-sufficient little furball that does quite well on its own, we can attempt to instill that quality in the urban-dwelling Lemmings by giving them a push in the right direction. We can acknowledge their herd instinct and their need for a safe space. A reservation of unused land, perhaps some place near a decommissioned nuclear reactor in the Pacific Northwest, would do nicely. I know, I know: there’s that whole thing about radiation and food, but after all, 18 months after Hiroshima was flattened by a 10KT nuke, people were growing radishes and eating them. Something good might come out of this; a reality check, perhaps, after a decade or two, might manifest itself.

Just an idea I thought I’d throw out there.

In the ‘ Telegraphing Mosul’ article, 2/17 Air Cav reports on 11/25/2016 that ISIS is killing thousands of civilians and/or using them as shields against the Heroic Forces (Iraqis/Peshmerga/ whoever).

November 25, 2016 at 10:09 am 2/17 Air Cav says: I agree except there’s the political fallout from killing thousands that one claims to be trying to save. It’s a bit of a sticky wicket. The thing is, there was an inevitable quality to it, so I can only guess that the Heroic Forces banked on ISIS taking off in a convoy of pickup trucks.

Ex-PH2 says: If there is political fallout from the deaths of all those people, it should land on ISIS/Daesh. They are invaders, usurpers and thieves following a death cult. They could have simply asked for space and probably gotten it, but they did not do that.
They are going to go on with this mass slaughter, regardless, and it is not the fault of those outside in the Iraqi/Peshmerga/Other groups. There exists a naive idea, a hallmark of media stupidity, that with a quasi-political group like Daesh, there is anyone at fault other than the group doing the slaughtering.

Like it or not, it is true. The fault lies with Daesh/ISF/ISIS, or whatever they style themselves now. They set up a death cult in 2014, attempting to overthrow local governments, destroy property, swallow up land that did not belong to them, and create havoc by recruiting followers in distant lands through the magic of the internet. They have repeatedly displayed behavior that is not just sociopathic but also psychotic. If it is not psychotic to tell a six-year-old child to hold up the severed head of someone just slaughtered so that his picture can be taken and publicized on the internet, then what is it?

Is there a difference between these people and the Viet Cong? The VC also recruited children to join them. Some of them were boys who were barely 13 years old and had no idea why they were doing what they were told to do. But it was not the death cult built by ISIS/Daesh. Pol Pot’s relationship with the Khmer Rouge was closer to Daesh. ‘Kill anyone who will not join, and anyone over XXX age’.

ISIS/Daesh is nothing more than politics disguised as religion. Where have we seen this before? Lenin, Trotsky and the purges of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 grew into the USSR under Joseph Stalin. Hitler found his way into power with his speeches and controlling the press, among other things, rounding up not just Jews, but anyone deemed defective or who disagreed with him, or was ethnically undesirable. More recently were the Hutus v Tutsis in Rwanda, wholesale slaughter in other parts of Africa, Milosevic’s rampages through Eastern Europe, and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and trampling the Kuwaiti people, which got the US into a local war you may or may not have heard of.

The brutality that these people have perpetrated on the innocent, has shocked and will continue to shock, a population that seems to think it’s not real until they are confronted by it. Sensationalism in the press is, and has been, the order of the day since some newly-minted wet plate photographers like Carol Szathmari, an Austro-Hungarian photographer decided to go onto the battlefield during the Crimean War and record what he saw. He was the first real combat photographer. The mobile darkroom was improved and Matthew Brady and others like him took advantage of its improvements to record the results of battles during the US Civil War. The results were too shocking for publication.

When ideology is used as an excuse to dominate people and slaughter those who refuse to join up or who disagree with the ideology, the fault lies on the shoulders of the Ideologues, not those who try to stop them. Ideologues cannot be bargained with nor can they be trusted to keep their word, or abide by any agreements they sign. Must I bring up Neville Chamberlin’s idiotic agreement with Hitler over the Sudetenland? To people like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and al-Baghdadi, and never mind which ayatollah is now in charge in Tehran, a bargain with them is seen as a sign of weakness and stupidity. They wait until your back is turned and you’re gone, thinking you’ve solved the problem.

Well, you haven’t. They go right back to what they were doing before you bargained with them. How else do you account for the return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and new ransom demands by Tehran? Must I remind anyone here that as soon as the US began to withdraw from Vietnam in 1973, General Giap started planning the takeover of the South, and put Van Tien Dung in charge of invading the South all over again? Would you like to review those films of NVA tanks rolling into Saigon in 1975?

So what are we facing? Is it continued long-term, siege warfare that wears everyone down to nothing, as happened for us with Vietnam and with Afghanistan for the Soviets? As 2/17 Air Cav has said, flattening the city of Mosul would be an effective way to end this dogfight, but there are 1.5 to 2 million people in Mosul who will be killed in the process.

They’re civilians. They are already being slaughtered by ISIS/Daesh, regardless, because that is what those inhuman slugs do. The ISers have no conscience, no sense of what is right or wrong, only that Death is their real God and they will do anything to please Death. No matter what is done by the Heroic Forces, those people are going to die, period.

Does it make sense to flatten the place and poison the soil for the next 2,500 centuries, IF those people are going to be killed, regardless? And will it stop this from happening again?

To put it in more relevant terms, if you know that someone wants to kill you, no matter how nice you are, are you going to just let him slaughter you over nothing? Or will you say, “You want to talk to God? Let’s go see him together. I’ve got nothing better to do.”

by Ex-PH2

When I was fixing supper Sunday night, I used leftover pasta from another meal. It was rustic pasta, comes in a cellophane pack with seasonings, and costs about $2.00 at Aldi. (Love that store. They have the egg noodles back now!) I had already thawed some chicken to cook and mix with the leftover pasta, so I cut the chicken into one-inch strips, heated the big cast iron skillet and added extra virgin olive oil to it plus a half spoonful of leftover bacon grease for flavor, and started cooking the chicken.

Mind you, this is a dish made mostly of leftovers. All I did to season the chicken was add garlic salt and Mrs. Dash Garlic/Herb. It is so loaded with flavor. After the chicken cooked, I added the pasta to it, stirred it, turned the heat down, and put a lid on it and let it simmer for about 15 minutes, then took the lid off and seasoned it again with that Italian herb mix you can buy everywhere. Then I let it sit for a minute. The aroma flooded my little kitchen. I put enough for one serving on a plate, added the cheese I had already shredded along with carrots and radishes, and sat down with a good book, good food and a pot of hot tea and enjoyed my impromptu supper. I had turtle cheesecake for dessert, too, and I did finish the book I was reading.

While I was cleaning up, I wondered just how many of those noisy Disgruntleds protesting oppression and misogyny have ever made an impromptu dish like that out of leftovers and basic materials. How many of them can actually cook a meal instead of sliding onto a counter seat at a restaurant and demanding vegan scrambled eggs, or just nuking everything in the microwave? How many of them have created a new electronic device that will let a doctor miles away monitor your pacemaker, which is 10% the size of the one my father wore? Have any of them written a fantasy novel destined to become a classic of its generation? Has even one worked as a CGI artist for a film studio? Or found a new comet during nightly observations? Or spent even a few hours a week trying to engineer a way to filter potable water from any source, including floodwater?

They groove on modern technology. They are Facebook adept, twitterpated to the Nth degree, loaded to the hilt on their Kindle, Nook or tablet with books (which they don’t read). They use it, yes, but have they come up with a better version of those electronic libraries, one that will produce the hardcover version in the blink of an eye? And if they want this stuff, then why do they despise wealthy people and big corporations, when the very people who invented those things built multinational corporations out of nothing but a bright idea and are now stinking rich because of it? Are they going to stop buying their precious technocrap as a protest? I doubt it.

Has any one of them even figured out the means of creating a mechanism that can take air, water, and some basic elements and produce edible, nourishing food from it? That idea has been on Star Trek since the 1960s. It’s called a replicator, and it will produce food and water, as well as materials for shelter and clothing. The medical tricorder has been under development for some time now and may be available very shortly. Biobeds may show up before long, too.

They holler about misogyny, quite a bit. Locker room talk upsets them. Oh, yeah? Here’s some real misogyny for you, Sweetcheeks.

Try wearing a corset and hoops or a bustle and carrying a child in your bellies, you bimbos. Try working on a steaming hot summer day, boiling laundry like your great-great-great-grandmother did, or making soap that had to be used for personal cleanliness, shampoo, and laundry. Try being the newly immigrated Irish lower housemaid whose job was to carry 5-gallon cans of hot water up the back stairs to the bathtub of the lady of the household, for the princely sum of 10 pence a month plus your keep. Or imagine being one of the women who found work in a spinning factory, running the yarn and thread spinning machines, with no face mask to prevent cotton or silk dust from getting into your lungs and no protection from the machines, but because you’re a woman, you’re not allowed to wear pants to work, and your long sleeves, apron and floor-length skirt could easily get caught in the running machinery and maim or kill you. Try being someone who would lose your job if you didn’t show up to work because the 1878 blizzard blew into Chicago and New York City from the Northwestern Territories in Canada, and you had to plow your way through 6-foot drifts or lose your job… but if you slipped and fell or were overcome by cold, you froze to death on the sidewalks – and all this, so that you wouldn’t lose your job.

Still think you’re underprivileged and impacted by mystic misogyny somehow? Well, if you got pregnant by mistake and you couldn’t find some old crone with a twig to get rid of it for you, then you’d better pray to whatever God you believe in that when it came time to deliver, the doctor (if you had one) actually washed his hands. And if you were married to anyone in the upper classes or the growing middle class, you were expected to give birth to boys, because #FAMILY NAMES MATTER! and girls were useless things. Yeah, that’s right – you were only good for one thing, and that was bearing children, preferably boys.

You want to vote? Well, sorry, but you’re a woman. You couldn’t possibly understand any of the issues we’re discussing. Go out alone, day or night, with no chaperone? You MUST be a prostitute! You MUST be! Decent women didn’t do such a dreadful thing! You still think you’re oppressed? Baby, you don’t know your butt from a hole in the ground about oppression.

I can’t figure out any purpose of the Disgruntleds beyond making noise and causing disruption and destruction. In my humble opinion, they can’t make something out of a bright idea or raw materials. They can only copy or use what other people do, and/or produce noise and dissent. If they want to bitch about real oppression, we can round them up and drop them off in Venezuela, which is nearing complete implosion, or North Korea, where half the population is still starving to death. If they want to come back home, they will have to agree to become productive citizens and place value on real freedom, and learn some manners.

What point is there to their existence? They’re planning a ‘Million Woman March’ in Washington during Inauguration Day. They want ‘stuff’, but they don’t want to work for it. They want a ‘better’ world, but they’re already living in it. Is it our fault that they’re too dumb to recognize it?

I had a few moments of time to get an interview with Fabius Flatulus Maximus. He was looking forward to being appointed to the Trump Administration’s position for Secretary of Defense. Since he retired from the Army of the Roman Imperium several centuries ago, his opinions do have the benefit of time and distance.

His first observation was that we don’t pay the troops nearly enough. Taking into consideration that the Roman Army did not provide housing or food allowances to the troops, but instead gave them bonuses or annonae and quarterly donatives greater than their base pay, they were expected to pay for everything out of their own pockets. Some items he told me about included a modius (8 litres) of salt. At today’s prices, 100 modii of sala (salt) will cost an average price of $620, and 100 modii would last a Roman household about two years. The reason the price of salt was so high back then was the cost of camel caravan transport, never mind fending off thieves and mining the stuff. While Fabius is impressed with our production and transportation methods, which do lower the cost, he still thinks we don’t put enough thought into it.

“No, we don’t pay the troops in salt,” he said. “Even the munifici* get paid in coins. Sala is a bonus, but we mostly use it for trade with native tribes for sex and local beer. They’re glad to have it..” *A munfex is the lowest rank in the Roman Army.

I asked him to give me the lowdown on how the Roman Army paid its troops, at the basic levels, not including the Praetorian Guard, and here’s what he gave me.

Soldiers’ base pay in denarii:
average Roman soldier,annually 1800
annual grain annona (1 bonus per year) 600
quarterly donative (4 per year) 2500
Additionally, every soldier receives a grain allotment as follows:
30 modii of wheat per year that would be worth 3000
Total Annual Pay for an average Roman Soldier 15,400

Converting the denarius and sestertius (4 sesterces 1 denarius) to US dollars, the denarius is worth $6.20 to $9, depending on inflation, and the figures are as follows.

Soldiers’ base pay in USDollars:
average Roman soldier,annually $11,160 to $16,200
annual grain annona (1 bonus per year) $3,720 to $5,400
quarterly donative (4 per year) $15,500 to $22,500 quarterly
(annual total donative total = $62,000 to $90,000 per year)
Additionally, every soldier receives a grain allotment as follows:
30 modii* of wheat per year that would be worth $18,600 to $27,000
*30 modii = 240 liters of wheat

Total Annual Pay for an average Roman Soldier $95,480 to $138,600
I did ask Fabius what he thought of today’s armored vehicles. His response was clear: “You spend too much on that. A good army pack mule will cost about $1500 to $1800. The Humvee alone costs about $220,000. You could buy a thousand mules and feed them for two full years for what you spend on one of those machines, never mind the fuel they use and the maintenance cost. And besides, mules are smart as hell. They can be trained to sniff out explosives a mile away and warn you. If you don’t pay attention, they’ll kick you in the nuts to remind you. Respect the mule! Pay the troops better. And stop hiring jackasses.”

He had other things to add, so we’re getting together over pizza and beer next week..