November 11, 2023

Sunrise — 6:58, 6:59.

IMG_4232 2

IMG_4236 2

42 comments:

rhhardin said...

The Iceland volcano is even closer than it was before when it was really close a few hours ago. Several live feeds looking for viewers. Through some mechanism I don't understand, they make money on it.

Clyde said...

I had been reminiscing about my days in the Army a while back and realized that every single unit that I was a part of no longer exists.

I did my Basic Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey in May and June of 1981. I was in C-3-5, (Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Training Brigade). Fort Dix was also where I outprocessed in January, 1989, at my Expiration - Term of Service. Currently, it is part of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. Wikipedia says, "Dix ended its active U.S. Army training mission in 1991 due to Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommendations, which ended its command by a two-star general. Presently, it serves as a joint training site for all military components and all services."

I did my advanced training at the U.S. Army Intelligence School, Devens (USAISD) at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, from July to December of 1981. I also went back there for an add-on course on the way to Berlin in 1985. USAISD's mission was moved to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in 1996.

My first duty assignment was with the 328th ASA Company in Augsburg. I was there from January 1982-January 1984. We were located on Flak Kaserne, which had been a German antiaircraft barracks during World War II. Our barracks was in one very long building that had a central corridor running its entire length, with rooms on either side of the hall. My room was on the first floor at the very end of the front of the building. We had a sign on our door that said Last Chance Saloon, since it was the last place you could get a drink before exiting the building. The Army closed down the installation in spring of 1996. I read somewhere (can't find it now) that the former barracks was used to house immigrants a few years back, and that a fire damaged it to the point that it had to be razed.

After two years in Augsburg, I was reassigned to Headquarters & Headquarters Company, 109th MI BN at Fort Lewis, Washington. I was there from January 1984 to March 1985, when I reenlisted for a duty assignment in West Berlin. It was a bit of a culture shock, going from a strategic unit in Augsburg to a tactical one. We had one major field training exercise in eastern Washington at the Yakima Firing Center in the summer of 1984, and we were out there for a couple of weeks. Fort Lewis is now part of Joint Base Lewis-McChord. The 9th ID was deactivated at the end of the Cold War, beginning in September 1990, with the 109th MI BN the last unit deactivated on 15 September 1991.

I was stationed in West Berlin from May 1985 to January 1989, when I got out of the Army. It was a great duty assignment, with a live mission and 360 degrees of Commies around us. The Field Station located on Teufelsberg was a joint site that we shared with the British; Teufelsberg means "Devil's Mountain" in German, is located in what was the British Sector of West Berlin and was made from the rubble from the bombed-out ruins of Berlin after World War II with topsoil on top of it. At the end of the Cold War, the important equipment was removed from the site, but the buildings themselves remained abandoned, falling into disrepair and being covered with graffiti. Wikipedia says, "Under the treaties that enabled the reunification of Germany, all non-German military forces were required to leave Berlin. The Berlin Brigade was officially inactivated by President Bill Clinton on 6 July 1994."

So, as you can see, every single unit that I belonged to no longer exists. The Berlin Wall came down 10 months after I left. The only constant is change. Nothing remains the same.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Complain about "immigration," pay the price.

Joe Biden is a thug. a mobster.

The Crack Emcee said...

The Last White Football Team

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I'm calling it like I see it.

The NBA's Atlanta Hawks engages in cultural appropriation.

#Misdirection

gadfly said...

I stand w Isreal. Leftists, Mullahs, Hamas-Palistinian terrorists can suck it said...
Complain about "immigration," pay the price.

Joe Biden is a thug. a mobster.
>>>>>
What does Joe Biden have to do with Mayor Adams? And if little old Joe is a thug and a mobster, why are there no RICO charges like the indictments that Trump has?

Joe Smith said...

@Clyde at 7:30pm

My father served in Germany in the early '50s.

Thank you for serving and Happy Veterans Day : )

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Has anybody accused Trump of colluding with the Palestinians to attack Israel and take away the media's laser focus on Trump's mounting legal troubles?

Democracy Dies when attacks on Trump let up.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Taylor Swift sings (in memetic fashion?) "karma is a cat" and yesterday I discovered "disinformation" is also a cat... a fictional cat. Although, i guess someone could argue the cat in Taylor Swift's song is also fictional.

Link above via this week Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn podcast transcript.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Headline: "FBI seizes New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ phones as part of federal investigation into fundraising"

In other words... Rading, Indicting and definitely Suing Trump, a former president, is not unusual in a zero tolerance Biden administration.

There's got to be more to this willful blindness than just the media complete surrender to their biased political passions.

I remember as soon as Clinton's testimony became public, where his definition of sex was called into question, I heard George Stephanopoulos on the radio, on my way back home from work, say the I word. Clinton's own former advisor. A man who helped him win the White House.

Now, it seems like they, whoever they are (the House) are waiting for video of Biden somehow handling the foreign money transfers and giving instructions on how to hide it... or whatever.

Shouldn't standards of evidence for one side be the same for the other side?

The Crack Emcee said...

Israel offers to evacuate babies from crippled Gaza hospital

So Zionists bomb a hospital THEN "offers" to evacuate the babies - smart. And soooooooooo compassionate. I'm sure people will be eager to let them care for their little ones. They can obviously be trusted,....

The Crack Emcee said...

Witches, shamans and grims: why the occult is on the rise in the art world

Boy, am I glad this is just me being "obsessed" and not anything real to be concerned about,...

wendybar said...

The little idiots who are protesting in the streets are well funded...
It's REALLY time to defund colleges, and STOP paying off student loans for kids who are taught to hate America....


https://nypost.com/2023/11/11/business/congress-is-planning-to-turn-up-the-heat-on-major-universities-about-their-funding/

Humperdink said...

My lasting memory of retiring senator Joe Manchin (D-Man of the People) will be the time he was surrounded by protestors while driving his Maserati.

Breezy said...

Clyde, thank you very much for your years of service.

wendybar said...

"Is this an agency that has too much money and not enough to do? Not with an open border, zero knowledge of who's gotten in, and FBI Director Christopher Wray warning that he expects a terrorist attack based on the current scenario. There are child-smuggling sex rings and child-smuggling labor rings to probe. There is organized crime infesting the cities with mass shoplifting incidents that are out of control. The Chicoms have yet to have most of their illegal police stations shut down, and Chinese and other foreign spies are being caught left and right, suggesting there's a lot of this stuff going on, what with nobody having to pass a background check anymore before getting into the military and the rest of the government. There is antifa and its violent activities. There is political corruption up the wazoo in Congress and in the federal workforce with inside trading alone. And let's not get into the fentanyl rings that are taking hundreds of thousands of lives, as well as making Twitter censor
It's so disgusting. And here we have Congress, led by Republicans, vote to authorize a $300 million building on grounds bigger than the Pentagon for this agency, fulfilling the Parkinson's Law maxim about the decline of organizations that build huge new headquarters."
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/so_how_much_did_the_doj_spend_to_arrest_j6_protestor_gregory_yetman.html

wendybar said...

One year later, the Washington Post quietly lets it slip that Ukraine blew up Nord Stream…

Nordstreamhttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1723434504008638877.html

tim maguire said...

gadfly said... if little old Joe is a thug and a mobster, why are there no RICO charges like the indictments that Trump has?

Did you really just suggest that Al Capone couldn’t be a mobster because his own street thugs didn’t kill him like they killed his enemies? Yeah, you kinda did.

The Crack Emcee said...

"Energy healing methods are implausible; further research into this area is a pure wast [sic] of money and arguably unethical."

Translation: this NewAge bullshit is wrong and society should be done with it.

How and why the word "implausible" has so little effect on so many is curious. As is the fact there's rarely any demand that the implausible be treated as such. Blurring the line between what's real and what's not - that's all the rage - not defining the parameters of reality.

And that's our slippery slope to,...whatever. A culture encouraging this never knows what it's going to get. Or we do, because we've gotten it so many times before. And always from the same sectors of society, selling the same old wine in new bottles. It needs to stop.

The Crack Emcee said...

Lem the misspeller said...

"Taylor Swift sings (in memetic fashion?) "karma is a cat"

Taylor Swift believes in - and is teaching young girls to believe in - the erroneous concept of karma.

lonejustice said...

The Crack Emcee said... The Last White Football Team

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HotDJ2FhB84
---------------

That was REALLY funny, Crack. Thanks for posting.

William50 said...

The enemy is already here.

Jamie said...

From Crack's linked sticker:

Speaking from inside the biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra told Reuters Israeli fire had not hit it directly overnight but was "terrorising medical officials and civilians alike".

Israel's chief military spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said on Saturday Israel's military would help evacuate babies from the hospital at the request of staff there. Al-Qidra had said there were 45 babies in total and two had already died.

Asked about the evacuations, Al-Qidra said: "We have not been informed about any mechanism to get the babies out to a safer hospital. So far we are praying for their safety and not to lose more of them."


Emphases mine.

So: Israel is a day ahead of us in the US. This article was written "Nov. 12," Sunday, and refers to "overnight" Israeli fire. The Israeli military spokesman offered evacuation assistance Saturday - before the overnight Israeli fire, not after.

The hospital was not hit - staff were "only" terrorized (I truly don't want to downplay their terror, but they were not working amid rubble in the halls). The article does say Gazan hospitals are "barely" able to care for patients, but didn't say why: low supplies, AWOL staff, Hamas interference, or actual rubble in the hallways (which somehow I feel would have been mentioned and pictured if it existed).

And finally, al-Quidra, from the ever-reliable Gaza health ministry, says that he hasn't been provided any explanation of a mechanism for evacuation - except of course for the statement that the people doing the firing would stop doing that and do the evacuation, which would seem to be mechanism enough, unless the threat to evacuees is coming from inside the house, so to speak. Poor Gaza health ministry, all it can do is pray.

jaydub said...

If we agree to take back Vickie from Pasadena and Chuck, can we get rid of Crack? Asking for a friend.

Mike of Snoqualmie said...

Two headlines this morning on the results of wokeness:

"Miss Universe Boss Files for Bankruptcy as Pageant with Transgender Contestants Nears" According to trans-activists, men make the best women and feminists celebrate this result while ignoring the misogyny of this delusion.

"Nolte: Disney’s ‘The Marvels’ Crash-Dives with $6.5M Thursday" Disney is racing to see how quickly it can enter bankruptcy. No one will miss the current Disney. A 90% layoff and a reconstituted Disney along Walt's original vision is the best outcome.

wendybar said...



Steve Friend
@RealStevefriend

Last year, I brought protected whistleblower disclosures about @FBI weaponization to @HouseGOP. They used it to go on TV & get elected. I lost my career and am under FBI investigation. Today the House GOP voted to give the FBI a $300 million HQ.

Soulless demons. Go to hell.
5:57 PM · Nov 9, 2023


https://redstate.com/mccabe/2023/11/11/fbi-whistleblower-calls-house-republicans-voting-for-new-fbi-hq-soulless-demons-n2166206

Mike of Snoqualmie said...

Nikki Halley, the Chamber of Commerce candidate for unlimited immigration to meet the corporations' labor needs.

The RINO candidate. Screw the wages of Americans. They'll work for peanuts, literally, after Nikki get through with them.

wendybar said...

Joe Bidens America, where Veterans who sacrificed for our country are treated worse than illegal aliens invading our country......with help from our very own corrupt government who hates us.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1723124694000288155

wendybar said...

Always hits you with the truth...


https://twitchy.com/samj/2023/11/12/james-woods-timeline-bidens-america-n2389691

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Crack - Stick with your Hamas-Nazi love.

The Crack Emcee said...

AHEM: How lack of common sense is killing civilization

That sure sounds a LOT like me saying the embrace of NewAge is leading society to atrocities.

The Crack Emcee said...

I stand w Isreal. Leftists, Mullahs, Hamas-Palistinian terrorists can suck it said...

Crack - Stick with your Hamas-Nazi love.

Peaceful Co-existence Looks Very Different (After You Bomb)

Mike of Snoqualmie said...

11/12/23, 8:48 AM
Blogger The Crack Emcee said...
AHEM: How lack of common sense is killing civilization

That sure sounds a LOT like me saying the embrace of NewAge is leading society to atrocities.

11/12/23, 9:00 AM

That's what happens when the neobarbarians gain the upper hand. In Washington State:

- It's illegal for the police to chase criminals
- It's illegal to buy gas/diesel engine cars after 2030
- It's illegal to use coal powerplants for power
- It's illegal to arrest criminals for robbery, shoplifting, camping on public property, etc.
- The State restricts the use of fossil fuels
- The State restricts the rights of property owners
- The State outlaws gun sales
- The State releases repeat criminals within hours of their arrests

The neobarbarians are devolving civilization into barbarism.

The Crack Emcee said...

Jamie,

Why are you checking my links? I thought - since none of you have bothered to prove the "decapitated babies" story was true since Oct.7 - we don't care about accuracy anymore? Or do we just care that anti-Zionist stories are accurate? I know I have repeatedly asked for confirmation of that story, that you all have often repeated, but so far nothing. Maybe you should stop checking my other links and try to fix that first problem. It would help with credibility and an image of fairness.

It's practically the King David Hotel of evidence.

The Crack Emcee said...

I stand w Isreal. Leftists, Mullahs, Hamas-Palistinian terrorists can suck it said...

Crack - Stick with your Hamas-Nazi love.

LE MONDE - Ninety years ago a negotiated 'transfer' led more than 50,000 German Jews to Palestine: The August 1933 agreement between the Jewish Agency and the Nazi regime enabled some 53,000 Jews to emigrate from Germany to Palestine over the following six years.

This year, which marks the 75th anniversary of the state of Israel, there is one commemoration that certainly will not take place. Ninety years ago, on August 7, 1933, the Zionist movement finalized a "transfer" agreement, known in Hebrew as haavara, with Adolf Hitler's Germany.

The Nazi regime gained a valuable means of circumventing the international boycott campaign that its antisemitic policies had provoked.

...Jews represented only one in 10 of Palestine's inhabitants [at there time of the Balfour Agreement of 1917].

Dr Weevil said...

wendybar (5:44am):
"One year later, the Washington Post quietly lets it slip that Ukraine blew up Nord Stream…"

Really? Do they have even one named source? I don't think they do. It's all anonymous sources, who are very likely to be Russians or Russian agents pretending to be Ukrainian or American insiders. Here's a Twitter thread on the subject: link.

More questions: Does Roman Chervinsky actually exist, is that his picture, and is he in fact a colonel in the Ukrainian armed forces? If all three are true, I hope he sues for slander. Discovery would be hilarious.

In short "lets it slip" should be "implausibly alleges without any evidence whatsoever".

The Crack Emcee said...

Inside Arizona's new-age MECCA: How Sedona became a haven for LA hippies and influencers - bringing in three MILLION annual visitors who flock to crystal stores, 'healing' red rocks, and birthing cave... sparking ANTI-tourism campaign from furious locals

The 'small town is surrounded by red rocks' and it is home to 'abundant UFO sightings, but the hippies have moved out and in place are passive aggressive new age LA girls on a spiritual journey to the 100th crystal store in the area.'

While strolling down the high street, he even found one store offering aura readings for dogs.


******************************************

It’s lovely here in Sedona, so stay away

In the 1950s, Sedona really found its tourism sweet spot when real estate agent Mary Lou Keller founded the Church of Light in her office and proclaimed the working-class ranching town a global center of spiritual energy. She may have been making this up to attract homebuyers, but the seekers arrived in force, turning Sedona into a cauldron of the New Thought movement.

This influx of what conservative locals called “moon puppies” and “foo-foo woo woos” led to Sedona’s first tourism crisis.

Today, an estimated 200 small businesses in Sedona cater to visitors intrigued with Earth energy: bookstores, crystal emporiums and sweat lodge retreats that come and go like sunbeams. One chamber of commerce survey found that 37% of visitors come for some kind of spiritual experience.

Narr said...

Interesting service, Clyde.

Thank you, and all the other veterans who comment here.

John said...

The last time I posted on this blog, it was to ask if anyone knew the contact point for the New York Times travel section. No one did. I went ahead anyway and just sent my piece, about all the (obviously fictitious) fame I still enjoy from the 1991 stuff I'd got published on their endpaper, to travel-at-nytimes-dot-com. I got a robotic, prompt, pleasant, noncommittal response. Though the Times gets more submissions than it can individually attend to, I was still invited to send along a "confidential tip for a travel story." Is there anything about journalism nowadays that isn't ridiculous?

Although the cash flow is in the other direction - Ricochet doesn't pay me, I pay it, $5 a month - I have been enjoying posting on that site. This morning it was about Guaymas, whose setting I found a rival to Rio de Janeiro's when I arrived by train in 1990, yet which is today one of the very few biggish Mexican cities that doesn't have direct air service to the U.S. Earlier, I wrote about Italo Zappa, who during and after the last Brazilian dictatorship had been his country's ambassador to Mozambique, China, Cuba, and Vietnam; about my never having seen a Koran anywhere in Turkey, but also never seeing a bookstore either, even though Turkish has a word not only for that but also for a secondhand bookstore; about how, decades after graduate school, the function of the enzyme I'd studied had at last been figured out: it does not destroy thiamine, it salvages it! Huh!

Not how I expected to spend my retirement but it's been stimulating. Just doing the research; verifying old memories; traveling; keeping up with biochemistry, aviation, tax law, etc. In contrast to many of the other retirees who are Ricochet subscribers. Though they are more than old enough to know better, they are flat-out shocked by recent Middle Eastern affairs. One was dramatically banned by the editorial staff for (almost everyone said, wrongly) being anti-Semitic. Anyway, reviewing old posts for my new ones on this and that, I have been struck by how, over the years, this site has got het up over now-forgotten foreign affairs. I myself had forgotten that there ever was a war in Yemen, and that Estonia wanted to get into NATO. But back in the day, folks shrilled. Had this website existed in the 1980s, it would've been all about the Nicaraguan revolutionary army driving tanks across the Rio Grande. Until it was all about something else. Gotta watch yourself, when you get older.

The Crack Emcee said...

Caitlin Johnstone's Ten Dumbest Things We're Being Asked To Believe About Gaza - my two favorites:

1. That Israel had no idea what Hamas was up to prior to October 7, but ever since October 7 has known about every hospital, mosque, school, refugee camp and water tower that Hamas is hiding in.

4. That it would be perfectly fine to murder children by the thousands even if they were being used as "human shields" - as though resolving a hostage situation by mowing down thousands of child hostages would be regarded as reasonable and acceptable by the public if it happened in our own country.

Jamie said...

Jamie,

Why are you checking my links?


I frequently check your links. I don't always comment, often because someone else has done so. In this case, I checked specifically because the behavior attributed to Israel was so different from what we expect of them (since no one who isn't playing moral equivalency games expects Israel to behave like Hamas, and even those playing moral equivalency games have to phrase their statements carefully to make it seem that Israel is the equivalent of Hamas in barbarity) - and indeed the article was written in such a way that it seemed the writer was trying to give the same impression that you were presenting here: that Israel actually bombed a hospital and only afterward, as PR cover, offered to evacuate patients. That impression doesn't seem to have been the truth, and I thought it was worthwhile to point out how the writer accomplished the sleight-of-words.

This article from CNN says several things: some babies were found without heads; their decapitations may have happened explosively rather than by someone's deliberately cutting them off; there were "traditional" beheadings found but Israeli forces did not confirm whether those victims were male, female, adults, children, civilian, or military; babies were found who had clearly been deliberately butchered and apparently burned beyond recognition in ovens.

This very interesting piece fact-checks, not the claim itself, but the claim on social media that Haaretz had found no evidence of decapitated babies. The title, via Google, of my linked article is "False claim Israeli media found no babies beheaded" (when you click through, the title becomes "Baseless claim that Israeli media probe found no babies beheaded by Hamas | Fact check"). Note that both headlines, if not read carefully, give the impression that what's being fact-checked is the claim about whether any babies were decapitated, but again, the actual article says this:

Haaretz [an Israeli news outlet] said the claim [that it performed an investigation into whether decapitated bodies of babies were found] is baseless. There is no evidence the news outlet conducted any such investigation. It reported the decapitated bodies of babies had been found following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. An international group of forensic pathologists also have confirmed babies were found decapitated, though it's unclear if that happened before or after death.

So. That appears to be where the decapitated babies story is: some babies were found without heads. It's unclear whether, in every case, decapitation occurred before or after death, or was deliberate or incidental, through explosion. And, pro-Hamas propaganda got to work quickly to try to cast doubt on the original claim (and by extension all Israeli claims) - which does appear to have been a fog-of-war exaggeration with regard to details like the number of babies, but true in essence: Hamas targeted and murdered Israeli babies in deliberate and gruesome ways.

And more than just to cast doubt: the other function of the propaganda is to get everyone arguing about the details so that the essence no longer matters. And they got you, Crack.

Jamie said...

Just FWIW - there's a lot of difference between knowing the details of an operation and knowing where enemy headquarters and operational bases, as well as civilian infrastructure, are.