Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Wednesday WTFs

A blog in which I communicate my wonderment to the wider world. Contrary to the popular opinion of my other 36 personalities, I do NOT have a total handle on Life, and there ARE a few puzzlements left to me. Here are a few of them.

WTF, category Irony:

 The Secret Service scandal was discovered when a disagreement on how much a prostitute should charge for her services came to light.  

She was asking for $800.00. The Secret Service Agent offered $30.00.

 

How ironic is it that the only person in Washington willing to cut spending gets fired?

(H/T to the Coyote Kid).

WTF, category The Whole Truth:

  "If you are not legally and morally justified in taking someone's life, you have no business whatsoever pointing a lethal weapon at any part of their body."

What Tam said. Enough said. Via Uncle.

WTF, category Whacky Terbaccy:

Advocates of Whacky Terbaccy legalization (and it's already legal, with a few formalities, under Oregon's loose Medical Marijuana laws) just elected the Top Cop in Oregon, Retired Judge Ellen Rosenblum, to be Oregon AG. I served many a time as a Court Deputy in her court when she was a circuit Judge in my county. Good mind, sharp intuition, but it's a little disturbing that she seems to have been funded in the crucial late stages of her campaign almost entirely by money from the potheads. I'm anti-pothead, myself, having seen the problems firsthand that this minor drug causes (same level of problems as alcohol, really). Additionally, the fact that Socialist George Soros has poured tens of millions of dollars into MJ legalization efforts to further his Stalinist ideas of "social justice" tells me that the biggest downside of more MJ smoked by more people won't just be a shortage of Cheetos, it will likely be a "benevolent" Big Government smiling down on the stoned masses, knowing that stoners can't do much mischief, and when they try, they're easily defeated.

WTF, category Zombie Apocalypse:

I'm puzzled by the national fascination with the subject of Zombies, and the only explanation I can offer to end my puzzlement is that the craze is the result of a backlash against Unicorns, and things like Unicorn Dust (like the Big Government, Unicorn Dust falling on things makes them magically free), Unicorn Farts, which like the Green Faeries of AlGore's invention, are a majikal counter to Glow-bull Warmening.

WTF, category Take Down Guns:

Why aren't ALL sporting carbines made in take-down models? Better late than never for this model, though.

 

I might not be an airline pilot, but...

....oh, wait! I WAS a heavy air transport navigator, so I guess I am qualified to suggest that whoever wrote this inane article overlooked the fact that out over the middle of the Atlantic, the USAF transport aircraft would not have had his landing light on at all, unless instructed to do so by Air Traffic Control, but if that was the case, the same controller would have been talking to the Air Canada jet on the same frequency or on Guard, which all planes monitor.

Also, when a pilot has been off the controls (sleeping) for a while, and he comes back on, it is customary for that pilot to request and get a briefing from the other pilot who HAS been flying, and to not touch the controls until that briefing has been given. There is a hand-off routine for change of flight control in the cockpit, with request, followed by agreement, followed by change of controlling pilot, followed by acknowledgement of change of pilot. That system is almost never broken, because breaking it can lead to FUBARS like this one.

What the First Officer did was use full elevator deflection downward, which caused the aircraft to fly a negative-G path, which causes unrestrained passengers and gear to hit the overhead in the cabin, then fall back down (when nearly full deflection upward was applied to reverse the abrupt descent).

There is a CAAS (Collision Avoidance Alerting System), now in it's 3rd generation, IIRC, that would have given the pilot warning that an actual collision was imminent, and probably flown the airplane out of danger. The First Officer did not need to react this way.

That First Officer needs immediate re-training. 

Long time no blog - UPDATED!

So, let's catch up:

In the past week of no blogging, I have:

• Just deleted 6 spam comments, from Canada, New Zealand, France and the US of A. I guess I am definitely read all over the world! WhooPee Farge!
• Went to the MOAA Portland dinner last week, met the Professor of Aerospace Studies at Portland University, a Catholic institution which has been responsible, in the past 60 years or so, for introducing eleven hundred new butter-bar officers to the Air Force and Army. Got a briefing on the ROTC Summer Camp, which appears to be not much changed from when I did the OTS version of it, only for 90 days, in 1967, to get MY butter bars. Your blogger was one of the last, true, "90-day wonders".
• Been coming around to the conclusion that we have, at this point in the War On Terror, farged up said War so badly we probably ought to just abandon it and wait for a new Commander in Chief before even thinking of starting it up again. When we first went into the 'Stan a decade ago, we sent in one division, together with some TAC air support, and blew the Taliban and Al-Qaeda off the map in about 3 months. They were unprepared for us, and it wasn't that hard a job, especially for the Tenth Mountain Division, which is built for that combat. Since then, we have installed and tolerated a complete crook of a President Karzai (similar to the crooks we installed and tolerated in MY war, Vietnam), we have saddled our troops with the most outrageous and inane Rules of Engagement ever heard of in any modern conflict, we have made STUPID mistakes, like failing to have a Muslim Imam help with the destruction of defiled Qurans, and now, tolerating certifiable Loonies (how many other of these ticking time bombs are there over there).
• Just a few minutes ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's aircraft was approaching Bagram MOB for a landing, when a stolen base vehicle took to the runway, apparently in an effort to kill the landing aircraft. The pilot aborted landing, and the vehicle's suicide-driver failed in his mission. How bad has our security gotten when we can't do enough OpSec and CommSec to keep the SecDef's ingress into the war zone a secret?

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UPDATE: 031412 2146 PDT: The Patriot Padre notes that US and Brit troops attending Leon Panetta's speech to the troops at Camp Leatherneck were told to disarm in his presence. Hmmmm.

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Our military is screwed up to the max. This security breach tells ME that the solid leaders have already all been replaced or retired, and now the military is led by fools and incompetents both at home and in the war zone. We need to get the HELL out of  'Stan before we waste any more US lives. Yes WASTE those lives. The probability of our actually accomplishing any WOT objective over there is long gone, and anyway, there is a high likelihood that we have encouraged/permitted Karzai to butter both sides of his toast, and he has reached an accomodation with the Taliban by now, which means that our men and women over there are all in great danger from ANY association with the Afganis.

When those troops come home, it is MY job and YOUR job to welcome them back, but never stop reminding them that it was Obama who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The WOT veterans are a powerful force, and if properly advised and reminded, give us the power to maintain our Constitution, since with their help, we could take the field against the government if that became necessary to save the Constitution. Note that this berserker incident will be used to try to get into the heads of all those returning vets, and the Obama Administration will try to convince them that they are ALL crazy, so they should be denied their 2A rights, be subjected to mandatory whacko treatment, etc.

When the first signs of those plans begin to appear (second signs, actually, the first sign appeared after Virginia Tech 5 years ago and the NRA kowtowed to it), we must all raise one very loud voice, at least as loud as the voice we have raised over Fast and Furious.

Yeah, your Rivrdog is still here, still blogging. Now, back to the WillBoat job.

Word about singing the National Anthem

I don't care who the Hell you are, what your level of fame as a singer is, there are some RULES about singing the National Anthem in public.

The Rules:

• The song has music which goes with it. Learn the music, which means learning the beat and the meter of the stanzas you are going to sing. Sing the music according to it's original beat and meter.
• The song is a hymn of praise to our Nation. Never forget that. The song is never about YOU, it is ALWAYS about the Nation. Respect the Nation by singing it properly and well, and YOU will be respected. This is the consequence of not singing it well. Do not have the production crew broadcast your image from weird angles, such as waist-level, focusing on your mouth as you hit high notes and hold them too long. Remember, the song is not about YOU.
• If you don't know how to sing the song, You Tube is full of fine singers, Madeline Edwards comes to mind, who have sung it properly. You Tube is also full of fine bands/orchestras who have played it properly, the USMC Band comes to mind.

Do it right or don't do it. It's not supposed to be a show-stopper, it's supposed to be a sincere gesture of respect for our Nation and it's values. If you don't feel that respect, on a daily basis, this old Veteran suggests you just keep silent. If you DO feel that respect on a daily basis, and have a decent voice, PRACTICE the National Anthem, many times, before you sing it in public. It is a technically-difficult piece to sing, and if you try to "wing" it, you will mess it up.

Happy Boxing Day

Yes, in nations now or formerly ruled by the British Crown, the day after Christmas is Boxing Day, which officially recognized the old feudal doctrine of "Noblesse Oblige", a French term for "The duty of the Nobility (to take care of their servants)."

Noblesse Oblige was still being practiced in the dying embers of the British Empire when my Dad was stationed in London, England in 1954 to work for the Navy. As a senior U.S. Naval Officer, he was very well-paid by Brit standards of the day, in the top 3% of all salaries in the UK. Consequently, we had some hired help around our rented house, which was an historic "cottage" that King Charles the Second had built for one of his mistresses out in what was the countryside at the time, but by 1954, was near Central London (South Kensington).

Dad threw many parties at Pelham Cottage, as did later occupants. I remember the crew of barmen and waiters that showed up, time after time, in their best dress, to serve the food, much of it catered by Harrod's, a fine department store one subway stop away, or a short drive, or even a long walk.

Then there was the gardener, "Mr. Tilly" we called him, although I think his real name was Tilby. Then our daily maid, Mrs. Purtell, who brought her whole family over for the Boxing Day celebration.

Boxing Day is a reverse-role thing, so we served food and drink to these employees and their families, and gave them presents.

It was all quite nice, but it is part of the dead-and-gone, past-greatness of the UK now.

Classism of the type still practiced in England while I was there, 1954-1956, was a thing now to be reviled, but there WAS order in the society then which is missing now...

Hydrate yourself well

...because your eyes are going to de-hydrate you some while you watch this Christmas Story.

BTW, the event he spoke of in the poem, taking up a young, suddenly-orphaned girl and taking her home, that has actually happened, and I was a part of it.

I don't remember the Winter day now, it's been 25 years and I shredded all those Patrol notebooks long ago, but I was on patrol on Dog Watch (6pm-4am), and there was a terrible car crash out in the East County. Initially, I wasn't assigned, but as I listened to the dispatch calls, two patrol units went Code Three, then a Sergeant, then two Fire/First Aid companies, then the dreaded call for the Medical Examiner (Coroner) came from the crash scene.

I went about my patrol duties in my own District, but noted some interesting radio by-play about the crash call, involving passing of numbers for calls to the District Attorney, the Juvenile Court, the Children's Services Division. Eventually, I finished my shift, having gotten no closer to the call than some highway-blocking duty, for just a few minutes until a Reserve unit could relieve me.

As I turned in my shift paperwork to the Dog Watch Sergeant, I asked him about Deputy Stellato, who had gotten the original call for the crash, but had not been seen on duty, or heard on the radio since.

"He's on Family Leave" was the Sergeant's curt reply. I got curious. "Did one of his kids get sick?" I asked. "No", said the Sergeant, "he just got a new Foster child." The grizzled old Road Sergeant didn't want to talk about it, but he looked up from his stack of paper long enough for me to see HIS eyes were wet, "The couple who just died in that wreck left a little girl at home, and Stellato volunteered to foster the little girl, and it's all been handled properly."

Well, this hardened 'Nam combat vet, 8-year Road Deputy got a sudden lump in his throat. I still can't think about that night without tearing up.

Andy Stellato died this year, some sort of nervous-system disease, ALS maybe, and I went to his funeral, of course (he was a Police Academy classmate of mine). The Pastor related this vignette of his life, and most of the Deputies who were with Andy that ugly night were there to wish him Godspeed.

May God speed you about your Life on Earth, and welcome you Home when you leave it, but fear not in the meanwhile, there are always some stout men and women wearing Deputy's Stars to handle the rough stuff for you.

H/T to the Patriot Padre, who's spent some time behind a badge himself, including pulling MY bacon out of the fire on a dark night in a rough barfight.

Every CEO, every Chief Engineer

...needs this where they have to look at it the entire time they're in their offices. Not a bad idea for permanent placement on the Employee Bulletin Boards, either.

"A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that customers all the way down to the supermarket don’t get hacked off and buy another product instead.
     Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.
     The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everryone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done to re-start the line.
     A while later, the CEO decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!”  he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the report.
It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren't picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.
     Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed.
     A few feet before the scale, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.
 
    "Oh, that," says one of the workers ”one of the guys put it there cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang."

There's some Latin for that, too: "Quod erat demonstratum, est" (That which was to be demonstrated, was)

Veterans' Call

Note: I wrote this about a week ago, because I was inspired to at that time. I'm reposting it in honor of all Veterans for today.

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In six days, on 11-11-11, our Nation celebrates Veteran's Day, formerly known as Armistice Day, which celebrated that, at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Armistice was signed that ended the hostilities of World War One.

Yes, we've allowed some "mission creep" in here. Nowadays, the day doesn't just remember the Armistice which ended the horrors of World War One, the first war fought on a large scale with what we now consider modern weapons; the day now celebrates veterans, period. When I was a young child, a "war baby", it was still Armistice Day, but on October 8th, 1954, President Eisenhower proclaimed that from then on, the day would be celebrated as Veteran's Day. He would have known, having, within that past decade, led troops in yet another World War, and had seen hundreds of thousands of US military killed in action, and many more wounded. We took about a million casualties overall in our successful efforts to defeat the Axis Powers. With the exception of Desert Storm, which had very limited objectives, we haven't had a significant military victory since. This Cold War veteran considers our victory in the Cold War to be an economic one, not a military one.

When our men went overseas to fight the Axis Powers, defeated them utterly, and returned, they were hailed universally as heroes, as all returning warriors should be. Such has not been the case since WW2.

Consider:

Korean Vets weren't really "welcomed" back, after the diplomatic failure which ended that war, which promptly became known as "the Forgotten War". They just came back and assumed their former places with little fanfare.

Vietnam Vets, such as your writer, were mostly viewed in a negative light upon our return from that war, a view tolerated, and some say, encouraged, by the majority political party of the time, the Democrats. This was mostly due to ineffective wartime leadership from President Johnson, a man with the mistaken belief that his version of liberty (the freedom to spit on returning soldiers) had to supersede the orderly re-integration of the military back into civilian life.

Since 'Nam, the National Leadership has ignored the rule that one can't send troops to fight, fail to lead them to victory, and then expect them to lead happy lives afterward. To this veteran, this is a failure of our society as a whole. The society is in dire straits, having forgotten what it was which made it as great as it once was. Victory in war, not disgrace in war, was an important part of that superlative past.

Let's get to the nut of the problem.

First of all, society fails when it has to go to war in the first instance. War should always be a last resort, and it is always a failure when reasonable people fail to reason and settle their conflicts peacefully AND honorably.

Second, society fails again when, after engaging the failure mode of reason and entering upon war, it completely fails to understand that war is un-natural to humans, and having put a lot of their humans into an un-natural state of mind for so long, it is society's responsibility to ease the stressed minds of returning veterans, not present them with further obstacles in their now-peaceful lives.

A returning warrior is entitled to the respect of those he/she protected, and it is a high moral crime when that respect is not freely and willingly given. I don't know about YOU, my veteran friends, but I feel that at least half of today's "support the troops" message is phony. When I see a car plastered with all sorts of sticker-statements indicating surrender as a way of life (i.e. liberal bumper-stickers), then I also see a "support the troops" yellow ribbon decal, I want to puke.

Here's a short motivational video to keep you in the proper mindset, veterans. H/T to my "padre", every inch a warrior himself, he personifies "praise the Lord and pass the ammunition".

We're still on duty. We're still prepared to fight, and only God can save this Nation if we have to fight again. Pray that day never comes, but prepare for it anyway.

New "PETE" bottle use

We've heard of SODIS, the use of plastic bottles of that formulation (PETE) to purify water.

Now PETE bottles are being used to light up the interior of third-world shanties.

Clever, eh? Got a garden shed that has no power to it and needs to light it's interior up?

OK, some CNC entrepreneur (Og the Neanderpundit comes to mind), get busy with a simple set of cutting mills to make the flanges for the bottles (I'd use plastic, not metal as the video shows), and sell the flanges and the adhesive together in a kit.

No charge for the idea, Og.

H/T to the Coyote Kid

"Flea party" - the filth spreads and turns ugly

When you've spent better than a third of your life wearing a badge and protecting public safety as a Patrol Deputy, you learn certain things.

One thing I learned is that "waiving" the rules for certain disadvantaged members of the society means that you will have a very hard time enforcing them against anyone else, and when officialdom "waives" the rules, they are as good as useless, and might as well have not been written in the first place.

So, Hizzoner the Lying Bonehead Mayor of Portland (ok, I'm being nice to him today!) decided to "waive" the No Camping in Parks rules for the "Occupy Portland" (aka, Flea Party) protesters for the first day they protested, week before last. Trouble is, he didn't say, "you may camp tonight, but be gone by tomorrow noon" or some-such. He put no time limit on his "waiver". Legally, his "waiver" is improper, since the law has no such waiver language in it, and it would have taken the entire City Council, with a three-stage Reading agenda, to get an amendment to the law posted granting Hizzoner such Waiver authority. Perhaps Hizzoner is relying on some "the Mayor is God" rule that the rest of us don't know about.

But I digressed, again.

The Waiver happened, and was NOT conditioned in time, so now the protesters have refused to move. It took police action to sweep them off of a busy street they were blocking (the street carried 8 city bus lines), but that's not the worst of it. Now there's a homeless persons' camp downtown in Old Chinatown, and the idiots down there are citing the Flea Party protest as the reason they don't have to leave and can't be made to leave.

The other biggie you learn as a cop about civil disorder is that it naturally escalates. Just ask the Mayor of Rome, Italy about that. Their Flea Party protest turned really ugly, just as I predicted.

Ok, Chief Reese. You and I were in the same Police Academy, back in the day. You know me to have planning skills, so please make use of this tactical plan I'm offering you.

Pick a dark and rainy night late next week (gives you plenty of time to work out the details), call in the Morning shift 4 hours early, and tell the Second Night (graveyard) shift they are Held Over. Call up all your Reserves, and see if the Sheriff will double-staff the Booking Section in the Jail. Maybe the Sheriff will be nice and declare a State of Emergency to back you up.

Issue riot gear, and at about 0330, sweep the camps. Arrest EVERYONE, and blockade the Courthouse Square so that it cannot be re-occupied. Protect City Environmental as they move in and clear out all the detritus from the camps. Have Flying Squads ready to intercept any escapees who try to occupy other Park Blocks further South. Use the Jail Bus Sally-ports in the basement of the Justice Center (across the street from the camps) as holding areas. Use the entire fleet of Sheriff's Transport buses to transport detainees to Inverness Jail, get them right out of downtown. If they are released on Re-cog, release them out there. Have extra patrols on the city transit buses and Max trains. Make your best effort to deter protesters from re-gathering. Easy enough to do, the releasing Magistrate can order "no lawbreaking" and "diminished 4th Amendment Rights" as conditions of release. "Faces" will record it all and make it easy to re-arrest any who get back downtown. Once re-arrested, they can be held without bail, or on high FULL bail, pending trial.

This is going to cost some big bucks, and someone ought to keep a tally of it, and use that figure to recall the sorry-ass Mayor. It really IS all his fault, and he is the Maroon of the Month for it.