Category Archives: Texana

Our uni-uniform Army

Posted on April 11, 2014 | 1 comment

I have no patience with the fools who pass themselves off as Army generals these days. If they were at all competent there wouldn’t have been two (and counting) Fort Hood massacres.

The massacres likely occurred because some general or other refuses to have gate guards wand everyone who passes through. Ties up traffic you know. But it may also have something to do with the way everyone in the Army now dresses alike—laced desert boots and all.

Used to be you could tell the riflemen (not to mention the Airborne) from the clerks and the bottle washers.

Today there’s no obvious difference and you’d best believe the pogies (the c&bw boys and girls) like it just fine that way. Must give the military police pause, wondering who they’re dealing with.

My cousin-in-law, an Army dentist (he’s moved on to private practice now) really liked the way civilians in the groceries deferred to him as if he were a combat veteran of Iraq and/or Afghanistan. He looked like one. He did, mercifully, reconstruct the jaws of some of the ones who were seriously wounded over there, but he sure as hell didn’t fight with them.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Iraq, Texana, War Without End

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Inspired by the latest Fort Hood massacre

Posted on April 3, 2014 | 2 comments

You go climb every mountain.

Via Phase Line Birnam Wood

UPDATE:  The killer was a 34-year-old Spec 4. That’s a lot of years for such a low rank. He either joined late, never deserved promotion or got busted along the way.

And, no, I don’t think allowing non-police soldiers to carry loaded weapons on post is a good idea. Investing in a few metal-detector wands for every person and car that passes through the gates would be a better one.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Blogosphere, Guns, Iraq, Texana, Troops, War Without End

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Why I root for Texas

Posted on April 1, 2014 | 2 comments

Even though I spent my undergraduate years at the University of Maryland. Some sometimes ask, including one particularly obnoxious OCS classmate.

Not that I have spent a great amount of time thinking about this. But this post by Althouse reminded me and I liked her answer. To paraphrase her: I have lived in Austin for 36 years. In Austin the sports teams are the Longhorns. Period.

Besides, I only spent three years at Maryland and the last one was in 1967. And during them I was never very interested in sports of any kind. Attended a few football games, but none other. So the Terps hold no magic for me and they wouldn’t even if the Longhorns played them, which they don’t often.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Texana, Texas Football, The Culture

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Mystery planes over Amarillo

Posted on March 30, 2014 | 4 comments

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A not-so-subtle howdy-do to President Vladimir Vladimirovich?

Texas military aircraft watchers Steve Douglass and Dean Muskett caught three wedge-shaped mystery birds high over Amarillo’s Rick Husband International Airport earlier this month. They ruled out B-2s for lack of the W-shape of their trailing edges. But if they’re black projects why fly them in daylight? Douglass opines:

“A weapons system isn’t a threat to an enemy unless they know it exists. Ask yourself an important question – what’s going on in the world right now?

“Who (…of late) has decided to roll back the clock to the good old days of the Cold War and MAD?

Question: How do you make your adversary take a moment of pause and rethink his military doctrine based on Cold War technology?

Answer: You give him a glimpse, a hint that we haven’t just been sitting on our hands all these years after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

Adds Aviation Week’s Ares Blog: “It’s not merely logical to expect that numerous classified aircraft programs exist: it’s almost a necessity under the principle of Occam’s Razor, because if they don’t, you have to contrive some sort of explanation for what Area 51 has been up to all these years.”

Via FoxNews.

4 Comments

Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, Texana, War Without End

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Unsettling “science”

Posted on March 27, 2014 | 5 comments

Add the American Association for the Advancement of, ahem, Science to the global warming/climate change cult.

Crank up the NPR propaganda machine, boys.

Anthony Watts, whose Watts Up With That blog consistently wins awards for analysis of the climate hoax’s prevarications and outright falsehoods, has a devastating critique of their latest shuck, which carries the AAAS stamp of approval:

“To ‘inform the public’ about their fearful conclusions, [the AAAS] cited 2 outdated peer-reviewed articles, written by [University of Texas biologist] Camille Parmesan, who not surprisingly was one of the 13 scientists writing the AAAS’ media release…If we peruse those papers, we find that one of those 2 cites 11 other Parmesan papers, creating a consensus where Parmesan agrees with Parmesan. Not only are the AAAS’s argument[s] very inbred, they are outdated and contradicted by more recent peer-reviewed studies.”

Back when I did science writing I was initially impressed with the triple-A S and its members, though I soon recognized that most of them were kneejerk leftist Democrats. They routinely sneered at any colleague who did research with corporate money and insisted that only the feds, who fund most of American science research, were pure and objective. As if.

I also interviewed Parmesan on her initial butterflies-moving-north-to-beat-the-heat studies which Anthony shows have been long since superceded by the work of others finding the opposite. UT nevertheless touts Parmesan as a global warming “expert.” Her principal expertise seems to be impressing the Democrat news media.

Cue the NYTimes and Wapo. Bring up the BBC’s spotlight. We’re all gonna dieeeeee.

UPDATE:  The dictator’s club’s cult agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, apparently didn’t get the AAAS memo. They’re softening their drumbeat of disaster:

“The 2007 [IPCC] report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm….According to leaks, this time the full report is much more cautious and vague about worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees, and the overall cost of global warming.”

MORE: Well, they weren’t all that “cautious and vague” even in the face of declining temperatures. Don’t trouble them with facts.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, Texana, Weather/Climate

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Mandolin shopping

Posted on March 26, 2014 | 2 comments

I’m still playing the fiddle and, according to my teacher, and by my own estimation, getting better all the time. Also still playing backup for the LOCO pickup dance band on Wednesdays. Which has helped. Nothing like ensemble work and performance to push things along.

But my teacher says I need to learn chord progressions concretely for a full transition to understanding chords for improvisation—which he contends fiddlers of the future who hope to make a career of music need to know. I’m a little old for a career of any kind but it would be fun to move up to a solo performance now and then.

The mandolin—which he also plays—could be the key, since, unlike the guitar, its notes (and therefore its chords) are fingered the same way they are on the violin. Playing them vertically instead of horizontally could be easier, or something like that.

I’m looking at this mandolin and this method book, thought I may only get the latter. One of the good melody fiddlers in the band, Stewart Rose, has a mandolin for sale which he will bring to the performance tonight for me to take home and try out before I buy.

UPDATE:  Stewart loaned me his A-model Kentucky KM 200S, similar to this one but a dark brown top. Despite the name, Kentuckys are made in China, though I think the 200S is old enough to have been made in Japan. Sounds good and has no cracks or other visible defects. And the $200 price is right.

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Posted in Fiddle Stuff, Rancho Roly Poly, Texana

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Go get ’em, Ted

Posted on March 21, 2014 | 5 comments

The Left is already after him, even as his supporters prepare a super PAC to fuel his presidential bid.

I’m glad he seems to be running. But as much as I still like Ted “Abolish the IRS” Cruz, I do wish he’d back off on abortion and gay-marriage:

“…we should continue to defend life and…we should continue to defend traditional marriage.”

Oh, well, Ted’s doing what he thinks is best, I’m sure. Even as his closest Republican competitor Rand Paul sees it differently: “I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues…[We have] to find a place for young people and others who don’t want to be festooned by those issues.”

Including some of us oldies who are tired of hearing about the opposition to social changes which can be restricted but aren’t going away and which opposition on can only work to elect more Leftists. Or so we think, anyhow.

Be that as it may, it’s going to fun to watch Ted (and Rand) run against Obamalot. It’s about time some one did.

UPDATE:  From PJMedia’s Roger L. Simon writing about Rand:

“Historically, the Republican Party has been just what the public thinks it is, largely a bunch of risk-averse white men who are totally clueless at public relations, even though they are on the right (correct) side of almost every issue.  Meanwhile, the liberal Democrats haven’t had a decent rational argument about anything for years, if they ever did. They ream young people, blacks and virtually every other ‘interest group’ that supports them with their policies and they still win most national elections.  What a disgraceful group of losers that makes the Republicans.”

Surely Ted (or Rand) can/will do better than another Romney or McCain.

5 Comments

Posted in Obamalot, Texana

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