Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Rip Van Rivrdog here...

OMFG, I went to sleep, it seems, just woke up and the whole effing world has changed. The Marine Navigation world, that is.

I started, electronically, in about 1986 with a simple GPS, a trusty Garmin Model XL12, and it still works fine, despite the fact that it's software is 15 years out of date, at least. I could fix that if I wanted to, but I still wouldn't have a WAAS-enabled receiver, so what's the point? Lipstick on a pig. If navigating to within 13 feet isn't good enough on the water, I have a problem that can't be fixed by GPS.

The previous State of the Art for boat navigation was a GPS-Chart-Plotter, a GPS with a larger display (4" and up to 12" or so) which overlaid the GPS position on top of a Marine Chart. On that display, the NOAA Marine Charts would be displayed (when you bought them, at first by the each, then by groups). This was expensive tech, and I didn't go for it, because a 9" Chartplotter, with West Coast charts added, was about $1200, plus installation, for a total of probably $1500.

Then came the "glass-cockpit" types of instruments, which incorporated the sonar (fish-finder), your radar (If you had one, I don't) the GPS and the Chart Plotter. Most of this equipment was made with 12" displays, and it cost up to $2,000, and was permanent-mount (you couldn't move it once installed). I admired, I drooled, but I didn't get it, too $pendy.

This is about when I fell asleep, I guess, under a spreading chestnut tree (the Village Smithy used to be there, but was banned because it used coal to fire it's forge, so now it's a City Park). I digress.

I just woke up.

I read an article in BoatUS Magazine (very good outfit, I buy their insurance for my boat) talking about smartphone apps for boaters. I let my fingers do the walking, and I found that:

• Chart plotters are totally outmoded, have been replaced by smartphones and tablets for display of Marine Navigation data.
• Someone broke the back of the "C-Chart" robber barons who used to charge, say, $200 just for charts of the Columbia River. If you had equipment that used their charts-on-chips, you might pay well over $1,000 to have charts from San Francisco to Alaska, and maybe not all of Alaska. A $15 app now has all NOAA Marine charts of the entire USA!
• For less than $50, I have put everything I will ever need on my Motorola Xoom Tablet, a very useful 10.1" display, with 32gb of internal and 32gb of SD card storage. It has Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) upgrade, 1gb of Ram, and a dual-core microprocessor. I run Verizon's 4G on it, and have coverage on the entire Lower Columbia. It has an ecellent GPS receiver in it (it's a Motorola, and they build good, if $pendy, stuff), and a bright HD display, with good sound projection (actually has .75" speakers that will fill a quiet room with sound). I paid $200 for the tablet earlier this year, and $40/month for the data package.
• Guess what else you can do on a tablet, if you want to lay out more shekels? You can outfit your boat with sensors (the kit runs $500 to $750), and remotely control things from afar, and see what the security cameras see (without paying NobelTec's primo $800 price for their software, which won't work on the Droid, anyway). An example of this tech: you set the perimeter guard (GPS box) at your mooring, turn it on and leave. Someone steals your boat, and by the time they back it out of your slip, they have broken the box perimeter, so the system sends a message to your phone. When the message pops up, you hit "disable engines", and the boat is dead in the water. If you know your moorage area, you can wait enough time before killing the engines that the boat will be disabled in open water (you see that on the cameras, which you are viewing over the 'Net). The coordinates of the boat pop up, and you call the authorities. If the thief hasn't been smart enough to get his skanky ass off your boat and swim for it, the boarding party from the Sheriff's Marine Patrol or the US Coast Guard let him have a look at an AR or two, or maybe an MG-240, and off to the pokey he goes, while your boat gets towed to safety. the sensors can be installed to work any boat's system, such as your heating or reverse-cycle air conditioning, so you can have your boat all comfy by the time you get from your drudge-day to your boat to salvage your sanity.

Yep, real glad I woke up. There's some hi-tech out there, and it's ready for YOUR boat.

Letter to Mitt - 09-26-12 - Updated!

Mitt, we haven't talked in over two weeks, and in that time, you campaign has gone nowhere, except maybe downhill. Your peeps have challenged the MSM on their gundecked "polls", but that's not resonating. If you don't do something soon to remove the MSM from their attack-Mitt mode, you will lose the election.

What to do?

Here's an idea that will take them out of the game, and put YOU in charge of what they say for the next five or so weeks until the election.

Start announcing your Cabinet. Yes, I know you are probably not prepared for this, maybe haven't even named a Transition Manager yet, but I know you have to have had discussions with prospects.

Start with someone important, like Treasury or State. Name the person, then sit back and watch what the media will do. Here's how it should break out:

1. First, they and Obama will howl that it's not traditional. Your reply will be, "so what", then "all we're doing is giving our voters a real choice". Some really brainy people from the (D)onk side will concede that it's a brilliant move.
2. The press will then have to start chasing the prospective Cabinet Secretary. There are only so many minutes in a broadcast day, and that takes away minutes from their incessant attacks on YOU, Mitt.
3. After a few days, do it again. With the second announcement, all the press will be able to do is react, then speculate about who all the rest of them will be, etc. Obama's time before the press will shrink, and YOUR time before the press will shrink, both good things, because, let's face it, Mitt, you have all the appeal now of a mud fence.
4. Quickly, the focus of campaigning will be not on you, not on Obama, but on your choices. You can then restrict your speeches to promoting your choices, which offers less fodder for the Obama War Room to grind you up with.
5. (The Update!) The elephant almost got out of the room un-noticed. This plan uses the tried and true "Assumed Close" method of salesmanship. I've sold intangibles (advertising) in my life, and I'm here to tell you that without the assumed close system, you don't sell water to a man dying of thirst in the desert, but with it, you can sell oil to an Arab Sheik who has it coming out his ears.

Word of advice: for this new tactic to work, the prospective appointees have to be solid people, not re-used hacks leftover from GWB43. There MIGHT be a few GWB43 people who would be decent, Ambassador John Bolton or Condi Rice come to mind, but leave out party hacks like Sununu, who, distressingly, is turning up more and more in front of GOP cameras.

Your election should be about ending the US move towards Socialism, and making that work means having some outstanding administrators to be able to get to the heart of the most damaging parts of Obama's destruction of individual enterprise, and ripping them out by the roots. That has to be reflected not only in the Cabinet Secretaries, but all the way down into the daily work force of the Government. You MUST have people working for you who can manage the Un-Do. GWB43 had his chance after Clinton's leftward moves, but he failed to change anything, and now you MUST.

Get to it, Mitt, this Nation isn't going to be worth a flying fark if we get Four More of Obama. 

It was a fine speech

Full of promises for everyone, full of self back-patting, and signifying ...

....well,  it signifies nothing. Obama simply fails to realize that the United Nations is the leader in world political and fiscal corruption, not the force to battle it, as he said. It is the promoter of world extremist violence, by failing to allow member Nations their chartered rights of self-defense against such extremist violence Finally, the United Nations is the wrong place to be selling our brand of Liberty, because few of the member-nation delegates would know Liberty if it walked up and shook their hand.

Yes, a speech full of fine words, and surprisingly little bombast or apology (I'd have lost that bet). It is the United Nations itself that we must oppose, though, because it's member-nation delegates almost always put themselves first, sometimes their Nations first, but NEVER put first the principles of Freedom and Democracy.

Sic Semper, etc

Having my lunch, and watching the quiz show "Millionaire". The first contestant is a black woman, who, the second she is introduced, alleges as how she is SUCH an Obama fan, then manages to drop Obama's name twice more in the next few seconds.

The game starts. Mizz Dizz don't know for Shizz, but she lucks into the first answer, jumps the next question, and is presented with the third, paraphrasing: Which of these Civil War women disguised herself as a farm wife to directly help the Union in an important aspect of the war". The choices were Harriet Beecher Stowe, two others and Harriet Tubman (Underground Railroad, remember?).

Mizz Dizz had to jump again, didn't know her own Black History. I knew the answer, never took Black History, just American History.

Sic Semper Obama-dummy. She withdrew from the game a couple of questions later.

Monday musings

Just now, in the 0800 segment, Fox News revealed a comment of Obama's from back when he was Senator Obama, that showed his true colors: he said, in this comment, that he wanted to lead the welfare class, as he saw it as a "majority coalition". Newt Gingrich also weighed in on this. Two things: this makes Obama's criticism of Romney's statement identifying the Gimmes as 47% of citizens seem fairly hollow, since he was obviously the first of the two candidates to expound on that subject, and secondly, it seems fairly obvious by the quote that Obama thinks that the wants and needs of the welfare class should rise to the top of the hierarchy of needs of this Nation. The average voter lacks the political nuance to properly digest this information, but if they were to digest it, Obama would suffer the worst election loss of any incumbent President in our history.

....snip....

Ah, for comic relief, we have a.....wait for it.....wardrobe malfunction! Hmmmm....when ya got curves like those, Miz Vergara, you need either stretchier material to make the dress out of, or stronger thread to put it together. Or, the "emergency crew" could have just sewn two bar-tacks at the top and bottom of the posterior split, and the designer would have sold thousands of the dresses this week. If you want to see more of Sofia, go here

.....snip....

Speaking of political greed, in Multnomah County, we have a Library system that has gotten all it's requests for operating levies passed, still gets 25% of it's operating funds from the County General Fund, and now wants to form it's own special Taxing District. In Oregon, like most states, we have a form of property tax limitation, which allows modest yearly rises in the propert tax rate (millage). Of late, the property tax limitation is gotten around by spinning off portions of the local government into these special Taxing Districts. If the dollars were the same, the only argument that could be made against this system is it's complexity, but the dollars aren't the same. For example, the Library has NOT offered to vacate it's operating levy (just passed this May) or turn back it's request for County funding if it's taxing district scheme passes. It will have a huge money windfall as a result. More laws to limit government is not usually a good thing, but our Legislature MUST consider a law mandating that such funding changes cannot result in tax-funded windfalls for local government agencies. I just penned an article for the TEA Party Capo Regime that will take this nonsense on.

.....snip....

How about those Ducks! Oregon finally brought it's defense to a football game, and shut out the 4th best offense in the country, Arizona's, 49-0. The Ducks move up to #2 in the polls as a result.

.....snip....

How about those replacement NFL refs? HA! made you upchuck, didn't I?

.....snip....

With the NHL lockout following the usual pattern of owners vs. players' unions, why haven't the Sportz TeeVee moguls announced that the blocked-out TeeVee time for NHL games will be used to broadcast some minor-league games? For example, the Western Hockey League plays a decent game, with the League being split between Canadian and US teams (the Portland Winterhawks are in this league, and played for, but lost, the Cup last year).

That's enough for today, readers, I've got to work on my next novel some while my back still permits vertical posture. 

 

 

The Price of Socialism

Have you Dear Readers ever heard the old British expression, "Buying a Pig in a Poke"?

We, the People bought that pig in that poke when we let the Democratic party have the keys to leadership in this Nation. Those Democrats decided to go "all-in" and push hugely expensive Socialist measures on our Nation, the worst two being ObamaCare and Guaranteed Income (the sane and humane welfare measures of the past generation have morphed into a guaranteed income scheme in this generation, with just under fifty percent of the population involved). No money for these expenses? No problem to the (D)s and (R)s who went along, just up the taxes to pay for some of it, and write rubber checks for the rest. Oh, toss in some $pendy wars for good measure.

Buying a pig in a poke is no joke, because in this case, it is likely to tip the fragile "economic recovery", a smoke and mirrors construct anyway, over the cliff and start us into another severe recession, or worse.

"Taxmageddon" is the term that Americans for Tax Reform prefers to use, because on one day, New Year's Day 2013, dozens of new taxes and tax increases take effect, and the fact that they all take effect at once means that the entire Nation will be impacted. For myself, I will have to set aside at least $500 per month more out of my monthly pensions for taxes than I do now, that's $6,000 per year increase. The loss of certain deductions and the rise in my tax rate guarantees that, and I'm not a rich guy. Last year, my wife and I, both retired, with my Military, my Police and both our Social Security pensions, made just over $105,000 before taxes. I paid a total of $15K state and local taxes. This is just me, but I run a (so-far) unprofitable business out of my pension income, and now I will have to close the business, which cost me $30K of my savings to set up and operate so far. I will likely have to give up my most expensive hobby, boating, so the $4,000-6,000 that hobby spreads out on the local economy will go away, too. That just gets me back to sort-of even.

I'm but a microcosm of the issues this Taxmageddon is going to cause.

You called the Tune, Democrats and the Gimme Generation, and now you have to pay the piper.

Really, our only hope is that we DO have an economic collapse, because it will likely lead to a complete flushing of the politicians who have either forced Socialism on us, or just sat back and allowed it to happen, despite warnings of the consequences.

The consequences arrive in just over 3 months, people.

Thursday Thuds, TeeVee Edition

There's so much wrong with today's TeeVee, that it needs a special Thuds volume to list it all. Not in the mood to pen a whole volume, though, so I will just write a usual five-thud column.

Background. TeeVee is a major part of my life at the moment, because I have suffered some relapses of my back injury, and must sit quietly in a neutral position frequently. So, the old RD sits on his comfy couch, with the right kind of pillows propping me in the right places, with remote (and usually) adult beverage to hand. Just recently, being an Xfinity (fka Comcast Cable) customer, I find I can control everything nicely on the 42" Samsung Smart-TV with my smartphone or tablet, so I do that.

In my home theater, the sounds are amplified by an older, but still good, Dolby 5.1 system, with wall and ceiling speakers and a huge floor-shaking subwoofer, all driven by the last non-digital receiver made, the Pioneer 702. The Samsung TV does a decent job of streaming off of Xfinity's 20mbps Internet service, too.

The Thuds, because after the honorable equipment, honor stops with TeeVee.

Thud the First: TeeVee, of course, is designed to appeal to those who never finished High School. Sure, there are a few exceptions, and I watch all of them. Fox News is designed for High School graduates. I watch that. Jeopardy is designed for thinkers at all levels above the 8th grade, I watch that. I watch some of the Military Channel, mostly for info on advanced weapons systems. I watch a LOT of Sportz, because it shows little of the inanity of the rest of the medium. I watch the occasional travelogue. You can dump the rest of it into the garbage, as far as I'm concerned. The talent shows are entertaining enough, but it's always about the judging, not the contestants or the material/talent they showcase. Why can't they make one without ANY judges, only an MC? Oh, wait! That's a bygone format of the 1950s and everything old is to be reviled, not promoted or reprised with reverence.

Thud the Second: Has to be the Socialist bias of all the news except Fox, and strangely enough, Russia TV, which can present straight news with NO lefty slant (but there is usually a pro-Putin slant). We bloggers are all over the Lefty-Newsy format and content, but even when caught in direct lies (example: the Romnoid "47%" tape, which we now know was heavily edited before presentation as a SCOOP! by Mother Jones News, a lefty TeeVee blog. What it all boils down to, dear readers, is that you write off the TeeVee and print news, and use the Internet blogs for your information, if you have ANY smartz, that is.

Thud the Third: TeeVee thinks we are all victims who want to be led to lawyers. My (absolutely) last resort in conflict resolution would be a lawyer, primarily because I feel that for the most part, they are leeches on our productive society. One of these days, I am going to see Dave, the Mesothelioma Victim's face one time too many and I will have an apoplectic fit and croak on the spot. More than once, I have shut off the TeeVee in disgust after starting to view an ambulance-chaser commercial. There are WAY too many ambulance-chaser commercials, all financed by the hugely corrupt legal system. I suspect that this issue will dog this Republic to it's dying days, which appear to be NOW. Hopefully, in the Second Republic, which I now believe I will live to see, we will finally decide that Free Speech has become, in several respects, a False Icon that we worship to the detriment of our society. Hopefully, there will be a way to stifle the ambulance-chasers.

Thud the Fourth: Years ago, I would have put TeeVee Preachers next, but they are way down the list now, and don't get a spot on my list of Thuds. Next comes Infomercials. Yes, there is info to be had in infomercials, but after you've seen how the MagiK Boolit works, and you decide you can do without one, why should you have to see this on one of your channels for the next two months? The answer of course, is because the TeeVee management couldn't sell the time to anyone else, so they sell it to the infomercial people. Commercials are a necessary part of TeeVee, they pay the cost of bringing us our choices, and in return, they get a minute (or four, now), every 8 minutes, to sell us something. Why can't I pay a premium to Xfinity to opt out of infomercials and see, say, old movies on those channels? For that matter, why hasn't someone come up with a network TeeVee commercial detector that not only kills off the commercials, but substitutes bandwidth in a queue that you have set up? If I'm watching Dancing with the Stars, and I did, last year, and the commercials come on, why can't my computer whisk me to the NFL channel during commercial breaks? Or the Weather Channel (except it carries less weather and more Discovery channel crapple on it now, so I don't watch it much anymore). Gin up this technology for me, TeeVee techno-whizzes, and I'll watch more TeeVee, but in the meanwhile, the Thud you hear is my boot connecting with your wooden head.

Thud the Fifth: "Reality TeeVee", generally. Generally speaking, "Reality" TeeVee is the worst thing to happen to Television since it was invented in the 1920s. Anything makes the grade in "reality" TeeVee, no matter how stupid, no matter how devoid of value, if it's "reality", some TeeVee manager will pay for it, and some idiot will film itand some channel will show it. In the name of "reality", we get TMZ, we get the Kardashians, we got Octomom, we get all sorts of "hold my beer and watch THIS" video. We need exactly NONE of these items on TeeVee, because they all have a negative impact on the culture, that is to say, they Dumb Us Down. Aren't we dumb enough already?

Thuds that got by: Sportz blatherers, award shows (oscars, etc), Rush Limbaugh (glad he's gone, he never learned how to say it briefly) and his ilk on the Left with THEIR bombast, PeeCee kiddy toons, womyn's victim channels, televangelists, day-long charity appeals, public TeeVee pledge breaks, too many Spanish channels (why are there over 150 of them on Xfinity and ONE, each and only French channel and ONE Russian channel?), fifty percent of local news being CRIME news...EVERYTHING qualifying for "Breaking News" both locally and nationally. A murder in Pawtucket, RI is NOT news in Portland OR, so why should we have to listen to ten minutes of coverage? Ditto a police chase in Shaky-town.

There must be more, but I'm about thudded out.

The dust clears in Israel

Read this first.

Now, were the armored units headed for the Sinai using a deception-route to get to the Golan? Map reference here.

Or is this "Military exercise" presser just a ruse?

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Here's how I see it now:

• The Israelis want to disperse their armor so that a Hezbollah rocket blitz wouldn't get much of it. The Golan is perfect terrain for that. (BTW, it took a Navy officer to come up with that!)
• If Israel were to go into Syria on the pretext of securing the Syrian (former Iraqi?) Chemical and Biological weapons known to be stored there, Iran would order Hezbollah into the fight, and then Iran could be attacked in the course of battle because they would have to give active support to Hezbollah.

Side notes:

• If Israel sends a force into Syria to get the chemical weapons, and they come out with proof that some/all of those weapons WERE Iraqi, it's a huge embarrassment for the (D)onks, whose buddies in International Marxism maintained that GWB-POTUS43 cooked that one up himself as a pretext to invade Iraq.
• This is really all about which Islamist group will wind up running Syria, which sits next to Israel. Hezbollah REALLY wants Syria, so as to have an actual nation-state status. Nasrallah must cream his muzzie jeans daily at the thought of running Syria. Israel is in a bad spot here, not wanting Hezbollah running Syria, or even the Muslim Brotherhood, which might be quickly taken over by Hezbollah. OTOH, they can't really support Baby Assad, either, because he is the focus of world outrage right now.
• Somehow, Israel needs to spin this so that an incursion into Syria with a "limited objective" (as in the Gulf War) meets with at least grudging US approval, but at the same time, doesn't springboard the Muslim Brotherhood or Hezbollah into power. Somehow, the Israelis have to get word to Assad that he needs to let Israel have the chemical/bio weapons without a fight, in exchange for a promise to not stand in his way as he tries to hold onto power. I believe that the Mossad has the connections in Syria to pass such messages to Assad, which then leaves the ball in Assad's court. Assad doesn't have an easy decision, either. He knows that if he just lets the IDF have the chem/bio weapons, he will have seriously pissed off his Iran buddies, as well as Hezbollah. His arms supply from Iran will dry up, and Hezbollah might put aside their differences with the Muslim Brotherhood and take the field against him, which would mean the end for his regime.
• This is VERY high-stakes poker, with Netanyahu, Assad and Nasrallah all believing they have the winning hand. It's likely that none of them actually do, but any of those three could be a spoiler, by changing the game while the hand plays out.
• The last point to make is less obvious, but here it is: the USA has no role in this at all now, having blown several opportunities to gain Netanyahu's confidence. We get to sit on the sidelines and watch it all fall apart from here. Depending on the political situation and timing, Obama might follow Israel into Iran if Israel's military leaders think they can carry this conflict that far. Obama would do that just to get re-elected, and to follow Israel, he would have to swallow his anti-semitic pride, but he will do anything to get re-elected. 

Quote of the Day

or, "what she said" if you're under 30...

"After the disillusion and bitterness will come a painful lesson: that it is foolish to derive laws for human affairs from gods and prophets."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writing in the Daily Beast

Word.

H/T to the Armorer of Argghhh!

BTW, this article answers my most burning question regarding the rise of the Islamists: Where the HELL are the world's free women? Their voices should be deafening to our ears about the resurgence of Islam into Western Culture, but all we hear is the occasional whisper. Where are the women? My guess is that aside from a very few like this writer, they just don't give a flying fark about how other cultures treat women. Why is it that only men can look beyond their cultural boundaries? Why do not the women in Islam see that so much more is possible for them?

Ladies, it's a global thing. Not since Aristophanes penned the play, Lysistrata over two millenia ago have women been considered a game-changer in affairs normally the province of men. It could happen here, if the petty internecine squabbles for "women's rights" issues were set aside, and women universally challenged Islam to rid itself of it's misogynist wing. If women were to unite and do that, they will have literally saved the cultural progress of the planet. If they continue to ignore their obvious role as saviors here, and men fail to come to sufficient agreement on how to stop Islamism and rid the Earth of it's scourge, well then, women have no one else to blame but themselves when more and more of their sex are enslaved.

If the women of the free world WERE to unite with the objective of freeing their sisters enslaved by Islam, it would force the mullahs to either take a stand against them, in which case those mullahs would become legitimate targets for elimination, or the mullahs would have to back down, and admit that Islam CAN be interpreted to give equality of the sexes. That's a win either way for women.

Aux Armes, Mesdames! C'est la guerre pour votre droit! (To arms, Ladies! This is the war for your right).

Mediocrity wins in the Windy City

Hizzoner Rahm Emanuel blinked (winked?) and the city of broad shoulders got a teacher's contract in which just gettin' by is good enough, or close enough for government work, as the old saying goes. No merit-system supervision for Chi-town school marms and school men.

Oh, and they also got a 4.25%/year pay increase for 4 years, plus COLA. CBO has estimated the ongoing CPI at not over 2.5%, but then again, the Congressional Budget Office doesn't have a merit system for performance evaluation, either...