"Bohemian Rhapsody" will never sound the same again!

Peter

Clearly a fun guy

A classic example of a feetishist, I'd say!

A man in China who reportedly sniffed his dirty socks each day learned the hard way that his habit is apparently a health danger.

The man, identified only as Peng ... reportedly developed a habit of sniffing his socks each day after work. But this unusual custom allegedly landed him in the hospital after the Zhangzhou resident complained of chest pains, tightness in his chest and a cough.

Initially, doctors at Zhangzhou's 909 Hospital suspected that Peng, 37, had pneumonia. But when his symptoms persisted, doctors re-questioned the man and he eventually admitted he was “addicted to smelling his socks that he had been wearing,” he said.

Physicians would later discover the man had a serious fungal infection in his lungs, more formally known as pulmonary fungal disease. The infection was likely caused when the man inhaled the fungal spores found in the dirty socks.

There's more at the link.

I wonder how one treats athlete's foot when it turns into athlete's lung?  Or is that question too callus?  And, since Peng likes sniffing his smelly socks, should his name be changed to Pong?




Peter

How a nation destroys itself?

The ongoing gilets jaunes protests in France have rocked that country's establishment to the core, and look set fair to continue indefinitely, unless the underlying factors that have produced them are changed.  I suspect that's unlikely to happen.

Christopher Caldwell published an article last year that outlines what's going on in France.  It's long, but very well worth reading, because many of the same pressures are to be seen in these United States.  They may involved different groups here, but the tensions produced by interaction between those groups is pretty similar, IMHO.  Here's a series of excerpts from the article.

Christophe Guilluy calls himself a geographer. But he has spent decades as a housing consultant in various rapidly changing neighborhoods north of Paris, studying gentrification, among other things. And he has crafted a convincing narrative tying together France’s various social problems—immigration tensions, inequality, deindustrialization, economic decline, ethnic conflict, and the rise of populist parties. Such an analysis had previously eluded the Parisian caste of philosophers, political scientists, literary journalists, government-funded researchers, and party ideologues.

. . .

At a practical level, considerations of economics and ethnicity are getting harder to disentangle. Guilluy has spent years in and out of buildings in northern Paris (his sisters live in public housing), and he is sensitive to the way this works in France. A public-housing development is a community, yes, and one can wish that it be more diverse. But it is also an economic resource that, more and more, is getting fought over tribally.

. . .

The nation’s cultural institutions—from its universities to its television studios to its comedy clubs to (this being France) its government—remain where they were. But the sociology of the community that surrounds them has been transformed. The culture industry now sits in territory that is 100 percent occupied by the beneficiaries of globalization. No equivalent exists any more of Madame Vauquer’s boardinghouse in Balzac’s Père Goriot, where the upwardly mobile Rastignac had to rub shoulders with those who had few prospects of advancement. In most parts of Paris, working-class Frenchmen are just gone, priced out of even the soccer stadiums that were a bastion of French proledom until the country’s World Cup victory in 1998. The national culture has changed.

. . .

For those cut off from France’s new-economy citadels, the misfortunes are serious. They’re stuck economically. Three years after finishing their studies, three-quarters of French university graduates are living on their own; by contrast, three-quarters of their contemporaries without university degrees still live with their parents. And they’re dying early. In January 2016, the national statistical institute Insée announced that life expectancy had fallen for both sexes in France for the first time since World War II, and it’s the native French working class that is likely driving the decline.

. . .

In France, political correctness is more than a ridiculous set of opinions; it’s also—and primarily—a tool of government coercion. Not only does it tilt any political discussion in favor of one set of arguments; it also gives the ruling class a doubt-expelling myth that provides a constant boost to morale and esprit de corps, much as class systems did in the days before democracy. People tend to snicker when the question of political correctness is raised: its practitioners because no one wants to be thought politically correct; and its targets because no one wants to admit to being coerced. But it determines the current polarity in French politics. Where you stand depends largely on whether you believe that antiracism is a sincere response to a genuine upsurge of public hatred or an opportunistic posture for elites seeking to justify their rule.

Guilluy is ambivalent on the question. He sees deep historical and economic processes at work behind the evolution of France’s residential spaces. “There has been no plan to ‘expel the poor,’ no conspiracy,” he writes. “Just a strict application of market principles.” But he is moving toward a more politically engaged view that the rhetoric of an “open society” is “a smokescreen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes.”

There's much more at the link.  It's not light or easy reading, but I think it's prescient about what's happening in France, and also in these United States.  Even though the origins of the pressures on our society aren't the same, their effects are too similar for comfort.  In particular, where Guilluy speaks of African and Muslim pressures on French society, US readers should consider the effects of Latin American illegal immigration and cultural issues on our society.

Recommended reading.

Peter

Sissified?

Stephan Pastis takes on the National Football League. Click the image to be taken to a full-size version at the comic's Web page.

I think he has a point.  When I arrived in this country, more than two decades ago, I can still remember getting the distinct impression that American football was a license to fold, spindle and mutilate everyone except the man with the ball!  No longer . . .




Peter

So much for the "peace dividend"

Under the successive US administrations since Reagan, there was a concerted effort to reap a "peace dividend" by cutting military expenditure.  One can't blame either Democrat or Republican administrations exclusively - both were guilty of such behavior.  The inevitable result was that, as defense funds grew harder and harder to get, they were spent on the visibly "sexy" things like new ships and aircraft and vehicles.  The hidden logistics and support requirements to keep all those new toys functional were often underfunded, sometimes to a criminal extent.  We've all read horror stories of parts having to be stripped from museum displays, to be used to repair active service ships or aircraft.

Trouble is, that backlog has gone on for so long that it's grown to astronomical proportions.  The past couple of years have seen a big effort to address the issue, but it's far from complete.  The General Accounting Office has just gone on record about the scale of the problem.

The Navy has taken steps to address training shortfalls in the surface fleet, but faces persistent maintenance and personnel challenges as it seeks to rebuild ship and submarine readiness. While the Navy has corrective actions underway, they will take years to implement. Following ship collisions in 2017, the Navy has taken steps to ensure its crews are trained to standards prior to deployment and made significant progress in those efforts. However, the Navy has struggled to complete ship maintenance—with only 30 percent of maintenance completed on time since fiscal year 2012—leading to thousands of days that ships were unavailable for training and operations (see figure). Additionally, manning shortfalls and experience gaps continue to contribute to high sailor workload and are likely to continue through at least fiscal year 2021. The Navy has developed a plan to improve shipyards and is re-examining its ship manning, among other actions; however, these positive steps have not yet fully addressed GAO's recommendations. Looking to the future, the Navy has indicated that it wants to grow its fleet to meet demands. However, the costs of such growth are not yet known and would likely require resourcing well above currently planned levels.

Navy and Marine Corps aircraft availability has been limited due to numerous challenges (see figure). Specifically, the seven aircraft GAO reviewed have generally experienced decreasing availability since fiscal year 2011 and did not meet availability goals in fiscal years 2017 and 2018. The F-35—the future of naval aviation—also has not met availability goals due to part shortages and poor sustainment planning. In September 2018, the Department of Defense established aggressive targets for aircraft availability. While the Navy and Marine Corps are taking actions to improve aircraft availability, including addressing GAO's recommendations, aviation readiness will take many years to recover.

There's more at the link.

That's a pretty devastating critique.  Effectively, the forward edge of US defenses is hollow right now.  If it came to a major conflict, it's very doubtful that our front-line ships and aircraft could sustain intensive operations for more than a very short period without breaking down, or running out of critical parts and spares.  They'd be sidelined as effectively as if they'd been sunk or damaged in battle - except that the damage would be self-inflicted.

It's all very well to blame the politicians for this state of affairs, but we should also blame the generals and admirals who allowed the situation to get this bad.  If they could see this building - as they surely must have - why didn't they publicly resign, in protest against being asked to fulfil a mission that was manifestly impossible under such conditions?

Heads need to roll over this, and there needs to be a lot more done than is currently being accomplished.  As always, though, the problem is spending priorities.  Too many politicians want to spend taxpayer dollars in ways that will get them more votes, rather than secure the country.




Peter

The next front in the war against President Trump?

I was aware that the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives had promised to launch all sorts of investigations against President Trump.  I was not aware that this appears to be part of yet another tactic to attempt to undo the results of 2016's Presidential election.

The attempt to undo the 2016 election has gone through various phases, some overlapping in time period.

The first phase was the attempt to prevent the transfer of power by intimidating Electoral College Electors into not following their respective state votes.

Then came the protest phase, fueling the Inauguration protests and Women’s March, and Antifa.

Then came the Mueller phase, Part I ... the current phase of The Resistance is the public lawfare against all things Trump, led by Democrat state attorney generals. Unlike the prior phases, the public lawfare is not just against Trump, his campaign or inner circle, it’s an attempt to take down Trump World.

And starting in January, House committees will join this public lawfare, and possibly the House as a whole through impeachment proceedings.

Timothy O’Brien at Bloomberg News calls it a Legal Vise:

The breadth of investigations is so sweeping — as many on social media and reporters with the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg News have already noted — that few of the worlds Trump inhabits have escaped prosecutors’ attention. The Trump Organization, the Trump Foundation, the Trump family, the Trump campaign, the Trump transition, the Trump inauguration, and the Trump White House are all being probed for wrongdoing.

Wired counts 17 investigations, as summarized here by Axios ... This is a full frontal attack on Trump World. And it’s just a continuation of the refusal to accept the results of the election with a Lilliputian strategy to tie down the giant. The sheer breadth of investigations is the point.

There's more at the link.

As I've said many times in these pages, I did not support President Trump in the 2016 election.  I continue to have serious reservations about the way in which he conducts himself in office.  Nevertheless, the man was fairly elected in accordance with our Constitution, and he's done a great deal of which I heartily approve during his period in office so far.  Barring a better candidate, he'll have my support in 2020.

Having made my position clear, let me say that if these allegations are correct - if these investigations are part of a giant plan to tie up the President and the Executive Branch of government, preventing them from exercising their office by wasting their time and resources in answering a barrage of politically motivated investigations - then IMHO, this amounts to treason.  It would do so whether launched from the left or the right wing of US politics.  If an offense against Presidential office, authority or powers has been committed, by all means uncover it; but these investigations appear to be focusing on anything but that.  They're trying to trip up the Presidency, and by extension the running of our country, by tossing all sorts of unrelated tripwires in front of it.

I can only hope that the sheer venom, vitriol and bitterness of the forces trying to undo the results of a legitimate election by illegitimate means will make themselves clear to the US electorate . . . and I can only hope that the electorate will respond appropriately in 2020.  That's not an anti-Democrat sentiment, by the way.  It's an anti-fanatic, anti-extremist, anti-revolutionary sentiment.

Peter

This kid's having way too much fun

This just makes me giggle.

Peter

Heh

Courtesy of Paul, Dammit!:

Now that's a cutting rejoinder!

(For the benefit of readers who may not know what an X-ACTO knife is, see here.)




Peter

Doofus Of The Day #1,032

Today's award goes to a hapless New Zealand serial offender whose criminal career went rather . . . er . . . squirrely, so to speak.  This is an older report, but it's only just come to my attention, and it's too good not to recognize with an appropriate award.

John [Casford] admits he was "high as a kite" when he bypassed an unsecured gate, broke through two padlocks and entered the monkey enclosure at Wellington Zoo. He had it in his mind that he was going to catch one of the zoo's squirrel monkeys—a canopy-dwelling species from the Central and South Americas—and take it home to his girlfriend. The squirrel monkeys had other ideas.

"I don't know what happened in the squirrel monkey enclosure," said Wellington District Court judge Bill Hastings during John's sentencing last week. "The squirrel monkeys know. You say you couldn't find them and I don't speak squirrel [monkey].

"What I know is that by daybreak all the monkeys were distressed, two of them were injured, and you had a broken leg, two fractured teeth, a sprained ankle, and bruises on your back."

John reportedly told zookeepers that he'd broken his leg while jumping the boundary fence—but his attempted monkey heist was ultimately foiled by the fact that monkeys are not, as it turns out, just hairy little children with tails. They are savage acrobats that will beat the living piss out of anyone who wanders into their territory unannounced. And in this case, that someone also happened to be a wanted criminal.

Police had been chasing John for a string of unrelated offences over the previous seven months, including an unprovoked assault on a man waiting at traffic lights, an alcohol-fuelled attack at a convenience store, and assaults on a Wellington City Council community safety officer and a night shelter resident who refused to hand over cigarettes, the New Zealand Herald reports.

Judge Hastings sentenced him to two years and seven months in prison for both the attempted monkey burglary and the crime spree leading up to it.

There's more at the link.

"Not my circus, not my monkeys" - oh, no, wait:  those are my monkeys!

I'd like to see him try that with African baboons.  Those suckers'll flat-out kill you.  They've been known to gang up on and take down leopards on occasion, so a drunk human wouldn't be much of a problem for them.




Peter

Sunday morning music

Today, let's listen to some very old Christmas carols, dating back to medieval times and even earlier in some cases.  I've tried to select some recordings where they're sung as they would have been in olden times.  The Taverner Consort comes in for heavy listening - they're one of the best sources for medieval and Renaissance Christmas music.

Let's start with the classic Coventry Carol, which refers to the Massacre of the Innocents after Christ's birth.

Here's a fun and unusual carol, from Spain:  Ríu Ríu Chíu.  It's about the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus.  The Spanish lyrics and an English translation may be found here.

For a change of pace and voice, here's the Wexford Carol, a fine example of a "teaching carol" designed to impart catechetical instruction as well as get the congregation to sing along. It's performed here by Alison Krauss, with Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello.  This performance continues to amaze me.  It's one of the best modern interpretations I've heard.  I could have found old-style renditions, but this one's too beautiful not to share.

Finally, let's have a carol that wasn't originally a carol at all.  Branle de l'officiel was a popular dance tune in the 16th century, which later morphed into the well-known carol Ding Dong Merrily on High.  Here's an instrumental version that brings out its foot-tapping rhythm.

May we ignore (or at least overcome) the commercialization of the season, and remember what Christmas is really all about.

Peter

OK, supercar fans, this one's for you

Hear and see the new Cosworth 6.5-liter V12 1,130 hp engine intended for the Aston Martin Valkyrie.

That's quite the howl that beast has . . .

Peter

Misadventures with the galloping crud

Most of the North Texas Writers, Shooters and Pilots Association has been laid low by medical issues over the past ten days or so.  Four of us (first aepilotjim, then Old NFO, then yours truly, then Miss D.) have been hammered by the galloping crud that's going around.  It's not influenza, according to nasal swabs, just ye olde common or garden cold, but it's a nasty dose.  I'm getting over mine, but Miss D. is just starting her week of penance.  (You know what they say about colds:  if you don't take medicine, it lasts a week.  If you do take medicine, it lasts seven days!)

Added to that, another member of our crew needed emergency surgery this week.  The problem's dealt with, and healing is ongoing, but it blew up out of nowhere and led to some alarums and excursions.  It's always a scare when something like that happens.

However, we're all more or less on the mend now.  We'll take it easy for a week or two, and hopefully be ready to celebrate Christmas in our own ways.

Peter

Drone collisions: what did I tell you?

Quite apart from terrorists using small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's, or drones) to carry explosives or other weaponized cargo, I've been warning for years that they may be used to try to deliberately collide with airliners while landing or taking off.  The sheer volume of such incidents (most, thanks be to God, near-misses or close encounters so far) convinces me, from a statistical perspective alone, that all of them can't possibly be accidental or unplanned.  Some of my past articles include:

• Small drone aircraft as a terrorist weapon?
• More than ever, I'm worried about small drone aircraft
• Are all these drone near-misses accidental?
• Am I a prophet, or what?
• Terrorists and UAV's: reader feedback and further issues

Well, guess what happened on Thursday?  (Click the screen capture for a larger view.)

US and international news media are also reporting that the collision was probably with a drone.  There is no blood or other physical debris to indicate that a bird was involved, so that's a likely deduction.  I'm sure investigators are searching for any detached parts of the UAV's fuselage, propellers, etc. to confirm the 'diagnosis'.  The damage is also similar (albeit worse than) that caused to another Boeing 737 during a drone collision while approaching the airport at Tete, Mozambique, in January 2017.  Compare the photographs of the two aircraft and you'll see the similarities for yourself.

Interestingly, ABC10 News in San Diego reports:

The flight was from Guadalajara, but flight tracking website FlightAware showed the plane did not take its usual course. According to the tracker, the Aeromexico flight instead flew into the U.S., over a flight-restricted zone along the U.S.-Mexico border.

That's an area where drones are in constant use by Mexican drug cartels to ferry drugs and supplies over the US border, as we recently discussed in these pages.  One of them might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I continue to believe that deliberate attempts to crash a drone into a jet airliner have occurred, are occurring, and will continue to occur.  If the Aeromexico incident is included, there have already been at least four recorded incidents of drone mid-air collisions of which I'm aware, including one in Canada and one in New York.  I can easily imagine terrorists planning to fly multiple drones into the landing pattern of a major airport, to "swarm" an airliner as it was too low and slow to maneuver easily.  That's not a happy thought - and the damage shown above illustrates the danger.  What if that drone had hit an engine, or multiple engines, rather than the nose cone?  What if it had struck the cockpit windows instead of the radome?

Food for thought.

Peter

An interesting exercise

I'm busy with a writing project that involves using words according to their historical meaning, rather than the way in which they've been reinterpreted in these politically correct times. to avoid stigmatizing or offending people.  There are a great many such words, and by allowing the Social Justice Warrior brigade to redefine their meaning, we're essentially surrendering a very important front in the culture war.

As part of my research, I looked for older dictionaries online, which I could compare to their modern equivalents.  A very valuable resource has been Webster's Dictionary.  You'll find the original 1828 edition online, as well as the current edition.  It's an interesting and informative exercise to look up the same word in both dictionaries, and see how its meaning has changed over 190 years.

Give it a try.  You might have fun.

Peter

I give you the Old NFO School of Running The Navy

Courtesy of Alaskan cartoon The Whiteboard (clickit to biggit):

That sure sounds like Navy coffee to me!  I must check with Old NFO, who's been known to become dangerously threatening at the thought of being forced to drink "civilized" coffee.  We daren't take him within range of Starbucks . . .




Peter

Now that's student assistance squared!

An extraordinary tale has emerged from Sweden of how a Yazidi student from Iraq was saved from ISIS terrorists by his professor and her university colleagues.

A chemistry professor at Lund University [in Sweden] dispatched a team of mercenaries into an Islamic State (also known as IS, Isis or Daesh) war zone to free one of her doctoral students and his family.

Charlotta Turner, professor in Analytical Chemistry, received a text message from her student Firas Jumaah in 2014 telling her to to assume he would not finish his thesis if he had not returned within a week.

He and his family were, he told her, hiding out in a disused bleach factory, with the sounds of gunshots from Isis warriors roaming the town reverberating around them. Jumaah, who is from Iraq, is a member of the ethno-religious group Yazidi hated by Isis.

"I had no hope then at all," Jumaah told Lund's University Magazine LUM. "I was desperate. I just wanted to tell my supervisor what was happening. I had no idea that a professor would be able to do anything for us."

. . .

But Turner was not willing to leave her student to die without trying to do something.

"What was happening was completely unacceptable," she told LUM. "I got so angry that IS was pushing itself into our world, exposing my doctoral student and his family to this, and disrupting the research."

She contacted the university's then security chief Per Gustafson.

"It was almost as if he'd been waiting for this kind of mission," Turner said. "Per Gustafson said that we had a transport and security deal which stretched over the whole world."

Over a few days of intense activity, Gustafson hired a security company which then arranged the rescue operation.

A few days later two Landcruisers carrying four heavily-armed mercenaries roared into the area where Jumaah was hiding, and sped him away to Erbil Airport together with his wife and two small children.

There's more at the link.

That's got to be the most go-the-extra-mile (or few thousand miles) student assistance request in any university I've ever heard of!  Kudos to Lund University for stepping up to the plate.




Peter

Whisky insurance???

I suppose if something's valuable, no matter what it is, someone will want to insure it . . . but insuring whisky sounds to me like a loss waiting to happen.

With prices of rare whisky soaring into the six and seven digits, ensuring that precious spirit is protected is not only recommended but essential, says Ron Fiamma, head of global collections at American International Group Inc.’s private client group. The insurance giant has seen such an uptick in whisky collecting that it has expanded its coverage of specialty collections to include those owners whose tastes run to a 1926 Macallan.

“Whisky collectors now number in the many hundreds, closing in on 1,000 individual collectors of all stripes and values,” says Fiamma of AIG customers highlighting whisky within their insured collection. “When auction houses are holding two or three whisky auctions a year, with some whisky going for a million or half a million dollars, clearly it warranted attention.”

To wit, on Nov. 29 a bottle of The Macallan that spent six decades in an ex-sherry oak cask sold for a record price of 1.2 million pounds ($1.5 million) at Christie’s London. A rare 60-year-old Macallan whisky fetched HK$7.96 million ($1.01 million) at Bonhams Hong Kong in May. A second bottle from the same vintage was sold later the same day at the same auction for $1.1 million. Both sold for more than twice their high estimate.

Rare whisky has appreciated 140 percent in the last five years, according to the Vintage 50 Index compiled by Rare Whisky 101. AIG has seen an almost tenfold increase in new submissions for whiskey insurance year over year.

There's more at the link.

First off, what risks does the insurance cover?  We've all seen photographs from earthquake zones of bottles of wine and spirits, broken on the floors of shops when they fell off the shelves.  It happened in Alaska just a week or two ago.  This image was posted on social media afterwards.  (I don't know where it originated, so I can't credit the source, but I'll gladly do so if someone will point it out.)

Will whisky insurance cover that?  The insurer might insist on the insured wrapping each bottle in an individually tailored sheepskin, fuzzy side in, and then suspending the lot from an earthquake-proof davit or crane in a drop-proof container.

As for the obvious claims . . . "Hello?  I want to claim against my whisky insurance.  Someone broke into my cellar last Saturday night and drank three million-dollar bottles of it.  What's that?  Why, yes, we were having a party at the time, but what's that got to do with it?"

Personally, given the choice between paying a million dollars for a bottle of whisky, or retiring on the proceeds of the money, I know what I'm going to pick . . .

Peter

Doofus Of The Day #1,031

Today's award goes to no less than twenty gang-bangers, rappers and idiots in Houston.

In March, two rappers, Emekwanem Biosah Jr, A.K.A. Maxo Kreme, and Warren Brown, A.K.A. NFL Cartell Bo, had a run-in with police while filming a rap video at Lakewood Park.

The rappers were filming at the park, which is next to Hillard Elementary School, at about the time school was being let out. Some students made it into the video.

Also in the video were about a dozen loaded guns, some of them stolen, according to police. The guns were being used as props and the extras holding the weapons were all documented street gang members and rappers, according to police.

When police arrived at the park, most of the people ran, leaving the weapons behind, according to police.

Some of them had open warrants and were arrested on the spot, police said.

Drugs were also found, police said.

The video was released two months later and has about 2 million views on YouTube.

Police said they used the video to track down and identify everyone in the video who was holding a weapon.

. . .

As of Monday, 11 of the suspects are either in state or federal custody. Nine suspects remain wanted for numerous open warrants.

There's more at the link.

Nothing like providing video evidence of your own crimes to the police, is there?  I won't bother to post their video here, but if you're interested, it's available on YouTube.  It opens with what appears to be footage of the police securing some of the aspiring rap "artists".

Peter

Heh

Also found on Gab today:

I'd better warn Lawdog.  His house pests may shoot back in future.




Peter

A fascinating photograph

Found on Gab:  a ladybug covered in dew droplets.  Clickit to biggit.

I'd love to know whether that shot was deliberately set up, or whether the photographer happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right lens.  Either way, it's fascinating.

Peter