SOTU

I made the mistake of noticing.

Wow!!

In all of my life I have never seen so clear and wide open the horseshit of a naked emperor.

What a disgusting body politic, all assembled, both sides of the aisle.

Eff all of them.

Update: It really is a train wreck. Who wrote this embarrassing drivel?

I personally think he is a crap speaker on top of it. Never heard anything but a bullshit huckster when he spoke.

Finally over. What a cringe inducing set of lies and bullshit platitudes. They all make me sick, but that jackass in chief most of all.

I really don't think I like this feller.

And now they trip over themselves for autographs, the celebrity minded douches.

Owl's Head Transportation Museum

I loved it.

If only my timing were felicitous enough to have had me watching the WWI flyers and taking a ride in a biplane...Still! What works of staggering beauty!...Each station a cocktail of time and history and craftsmanship, color and contour, brilliance and movement. Gears and cams, ignition, torque, leverage, warping, fabric, dope and velocity...Beauty all...

A few photos are, I think, in order. Expect, however, no particular order.

The folks were so nice, something I have found in train and truck museums and nothing of a surprise.

I felt very comfortable wandering and snapping. I think others should have come along, they would have enjoyed it.

I will hit "PUBLISH" right now, but more is in the pipeline.

Spencer Ackerman

What a tool.

Just google his name and read, if you want to laugh, get nauseous, get sad, and laugh again.

He really enjoys that whole threatening violence thing, and I understand, believe me, however it would incite liberals to question a person's masculine properties.

Somehow I must have thought that young people would have seen through the media liberalism, that the pendulum may have changed it's direction.

Painfully it is clear that having the youth is having the future, and the liberal MTV globalism brainwashing worked as desired.

An obnoxious self righteous little turd is Spencer Ackerman, and no doubt so many others on that fetid Journolist. I still wish I had media detecting specs for the train commute leading up to that election.

I can't read Wired without thinking of this smug twat now.

Is his twitter name really "Attackerman"?, that is so pathetic.

He's a Rutgers grad...The Black Knights, isn't that a racist throwback construct? Who came up with that mascot and name, Fox News or white people?

Spencer show me how to be cool, please please please...You brilliant JournOlists showed us the way with a black-but don't call him Arab-president who is post racial and wouldn't have signed up for the gig if he weren't black-don't call him Arab-because his resume would have been laughed out of town if he were white...but throw people who question his competence through windows and call them racists even if they only ever questioned ability while you extolled race.

Eat shit and die, Spencer--Oh! forgive me, that's violent and mean sounding, and I know you wouldn't go there, forgive me, I'm white, I must be innately cruel and I'm a white male, so I must have a predilection towards violent notions which cover my masculinity issues.

What a typical self-conscious white liberal little big mouth.

Frank J gets pretty close with the pipsqueak little dog notion.

Anyway, that's our fourth estate for you. As well as our youth.

Liberal: It means hating the folks who struggled to give you all that you have, and struggling to give it all away from the comfort of what you were given. Add snotty and arrogant, toss in a dash of self loathing dramatic brat, don't forget a pinch of start fights you can't win and shake vigorously.

By the looks of Spencer that is our future, God help us.

Our republic is not going to make it unless we wrestle the fourth estate from the "progressives."

Islam the Religion of Peace

Allahu Akbar!


Do you know what "Taliban" means?

What or who is a Talib?

If you don't know keep your liberal reactions to yourself and go do some learnin', because you are a dhimmi.

It's been ten years and if you are unaware of that tidbit you likely still think that the Koran (yes, I chose the Western Imperialist spelling) is the single driving force of the Islamic socio-religious onslaught.

Haddith? Thanks to our suicidally treacherous and decidedly ugly fourth estate this term is likely gibberish to the liberal as well.

It is shown that "tea partiers" have a more complex and deeply understood grip on the complexities which pressure our world today.

How is it shown? I will link to a poll which indicates they have a better grasp of current events...and yet...screw the polls, they are routinely skewed and framed with intent by the vile MSM....What more do you need to know than:

*They want to secure the borders

*They want honest reporting and are angry at the propaganda of the MSM

*They want a less intrusive Government

*They unabashedly love the United States of America

*They are tidy and peaceful in their demonstrations, in complete contrast to liberals who are threatening, filthy and expect the government to clean up after them and their illegal vote frauding cronies

...and on...and on...

Please berate your representatives in favor of liberty, liberty which we will surely lose after the next SCOTUS nomination.

Kagan is a petty despot. Any honest person will see.

Any honest person will have to admit that Obama is a disaster and an unjust narcissist.

So this post is sort of roaming. Let me return to the impetus, the Muslims have foisted grave problems (pun intended) upon civilization and humanity, and their dhimmis in the liberal classes need to step out of the way or take up the blame, which they truly deserve.

Oh!---"Progressives" as well. It's always funny when people try to change the vernacular and feel like they've convinced people the elephant doesn't have the same nose, trunk and tusks any longer...

GatewayPundit has that wonderful photo and some information on a project, an alleged project, of the Muslims to train primates to wield weapons in grievous assault upon Americans.

Fishing Skunk

Will explain unless I am asked not to...

Update:

Honeycomb from a catalytic converter...

I do like that train photo, may employ it further...

Two Polaks Meet 13 Year Old Girls

So these two Polaks meet 13 year old girls.

One is Roman Polanski.

One is Karol Wojtyla.

The links from The Anchoress's new location seem a little rickety but the contrast will show through, worth a quick look and thought.

Here is an excerpt on the Wojtyla matter with it's link:

'During the summer of 1942, two women in Krakow, Poland, were denounced as Jews, taken to the city's prison, held there for a few months and then sent to the Belzec death camp, where in October they were killed in primitive Nazi gas chambers by carbon monoxide from diesel engines.

Their names were Frimeta Gelband and Salomea Zierer; they were sisters. As it happens, Frimeta was my wife's grandmother. Salomea - known as Salla - had two daughters, one of whom survived the war and one of whom did not.

The elder of these daughters was Edith Zierer. In January 1945, at age 13, she emerged from a Nazi labor camp in Czestochowa, Poland, a waif on the verge of death. Separated from her family, unaware that her mother had been killed by the Germans, she could scarcely walk.

But walk she did, to a train station, where she climbed onto a coal wagon. The train moved slowly, the wind cut through her. When the cold became too much to bear, she got down at a village called Jedrzejow. In a corner of the station, she sat. Nobody looked at her, a girl in the striped and numbered uniform of a prisoner, late in a terrible war. Unable to move, Edith waited.

Death was approaching, but a young man approached first, "very good looking," as she recalled, and vigorous. He wore a long robe and appeared to be a priest. "Why are you here?" he asked. "What are you doing?" Edith said she was trying to get to Krakow to find her parents.

The man disappeared. He came back with a cup of tea. Edith drank. He said he could help her get to Krakow. Again the mysterious benefactor went away, returning with bread and cheese. They talked about the advancing Soviet Army. Edith said she believed that her parents and younger sister, Judith, were alive.

"Try to stand," the man said. Edith tried and failed. He carried her to another village, where he put her in the cattle car of a train bound for Krakow. Another family was there. The man got in beside Edith, covered her with his cloak and made a small fire.

His name, he told Edith, was Karol Wojtyla. Although she took him for a priest, he was still a seminarian who would not be ordained until the next year. Thirty-three more years would pass before he became Pope John Paul II and embarked on a papacy that would help break the Communist hold on Central Europe and so transform the world.

What moved this young seminarian to save the life of a lost Jewish girl cannot be known. But it is clear that his was an act of humanity made as the two great mass movements of the 20th century, the twin totalitarianisms of Fascism and Communism, bore down on his nation, Poland.

Here were two people in a ravaged land, a 24-year-old Catholic and a 13-year-old Jew. The future pope had already lost his mother, father and brother. Edith, although she did not know it yet, had already lost her mother at Belzec, her father at Maidanek and her little sister at Auschwitz. They could not have been more alone.

Pope John Paul II is widely viewed as having been a man of unshakable convictions that some found old-fashioned or rigid. But perhaps he offered his truth with the same simplicity and directness he showed in proffering tea and bread and shelter from cold to an abandoned Jewish girl in 1945, when nobody was watching.

It was based in the belief that, as he once put it, "a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being" was at the root of the mass movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism.

Stalin once contemptuously asked, "How many divisions has the pope?" Starting with his 1979 visit to Poland, John Paul gave an answer.

Perhaps the strength that enabled him to play a central role in ending Communism and the strength that led him to save Edith Zierer did not differ fundamentally. Like his healing ecumenism, those acts required the courage born of a core certitude.

Edith fled from Karol Wojtyla when they arrived at Krakow in 1945. The family on the train, also Jews, had warned her that he might take her off to "the cloisters." She recalls him calling out, "Edyta, Edyta!" - the Polish form of her name - as she hid behind large containers of milk.

But hiding was not forgetting. She wrote his name in a diary, her savior, and in 1978, when she read in a copy of Paris-Match that he had become pope, she broke into tears. By then Edith Zierer was in Haifa, Israel, where she now lives.

Letters to him went unanswered. But at last, in 1997, she received a letter from the Vatican in which the pope recalled their meeting. A year later they met again at the Vatican. Edith thanked the pope for saving her. He put one hand on her head, another hand in hers, and blessed her. As she parted, he said, "Come back, my child."'

Seth Thomas, Richard Russo, CT, and the Great Utopian Zucchini

Well here is a circle of several posts.

I recently mentioned the Great Utopian Zucchini's selfless efforts to raise money for the restoration of the clock ("After nearly a century of chiming the hours, our old Seth Thomas clock tower...has fallen silent.".) down in New Harmony, Indiana.

I noticed that the clock (sharp, eh?) was a Seth Thomas...(In 1813 a man named Seth Thomas came to the hollow to manufacture clocks. By 1856 Thomas was labeling his clocks with "Thomas Town." He helped route the Naugatuck railroad through Plymouth Hollow, linking us with the brass center at Waterbury.)

There is also a clock in Thomaston, Maine:



I now remember that I had previously conjectured on the matter of Richard Russo's choice of Thomaston for a locale in "Bridge of Sighs."

I was ignorant until I recently went to Maine that Thomaston is nearby Mr. Russo's abode Down East.

I must have been wrong in that Thomaston conjecture.

I have some train photos from Thomaston, CT back there, and they round out the mistake nicely. (I do enjoy that Old Naugie and the RMNE working train museum):






Some Grand Trunk and their railroad here (this last with Grand Funk music reference.)

Canoe Search

I recently took a morning to search for a canoe that I had kept my eye on for some time. The poor little vessel had somehow become lost, and with an American flag standing aboard it had held it's position courageously for three seasons.

What a trooper. I could only view it from the train and I had intended to save it right from the get go, but intentions alone are not sufficient.

Thursday I got on the bicycle and figured a route which would take me along the tracks to a spot from which I could recover the poor girl. When I finally had my chance it was brutally hot and a dripping jungle atmosphere was between me, the lost lake lady and every effort.

It was then that I noticed others had made valiant and doomed efforts before me.









I fear the sky may have gone black just before their end as well...



The journey exceeded mere peril, the damsel has yet to be saved, the Knight is recuperating and the steed may yet not...

Lord help us all...

(I have done nothing with that last photograph whatsoever...I don't know why it appears that way. Not joking.)

Update: That must be my hand. It was so bright and hot out, maybe I was having trouble viewing the shot?

That's what I figure, anyway.

Train Proximity

I have spent quite a bit of time close to where the trains run. With this home and this train schedule I would be more than happy. You can find yourself far away and missing the impending, disrupting mass. You more than grow used to it...

Jennifer May for The New York Times

MORNING LOCAL A freight train passes a few feet

from Kathleen Hulser’s 1839 summer house in Connecticut.

Affirmative Action

Diversity makes us all better! Some much more better than others.

We must cheer those who are hired on the basis of their pigment, religion, physical limitations, sexual proclivities or psychology in order to form a more just society. Right the wrongs!

The entrance qualifications regarding your experience, intelligence and skills are not nearly as Righteously Just as those which involve the fluids which entice you or your appearance.

This is progress, and progressives never cease to inspire awe (as in "awwwwwwwwww...kiss a functioning society goodbye"):

The Boston-area transit authority trolley driver who allegedly slammed into another train while text-messaging his girlfriend Friday had three speeding tickets on his driving record in recent years and could face criminal charges.

Aiden Quinn, 24, received the three speeding tickets in his private vehicle, two in New Hampshire in April 2007, and one in Massachusetts in 2002, sources told ABC News.

Quinn, who was hired as a minority because of his transgendered "female-to-male" status, was born Georgia Quinn and boasts on an Internet networking site that he was one of the first transgender hires by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, sources said.

The trolley driver lists his sexual orientation as "FTM" and was hired as a minority using his transgender status, two sources told ABC News...

Boston Carmen's Union president Stephen Macdougall told WCVB the preventable accident does not reflect the behavior of most MBTA workers.

"The individual involved in last night's incident and the issues led up to that tragedy were avoidable," he said. "This was an individual act by an individual who does not represent the attitudes or the professional conduct of all or most MBTA workers."

Don't forget now, it's important to treat individuals on an individual basis and not, say, as part of a group. That would be wrong and deleterious and simplistic. It could lead to making assumptions as to how whole classes of individuals should be treated legally, morally and culturally.

via Alfred who comments "I guess qualified heterosexual white males need not apply."

The term "qualified" is obviously broached by the modifiers heterosexual, white and male.

Heterosexual white males are not fit to judge a beauty pageant any longer.

What could they possibly understand regarding females and beauty?

The term "progressive" has already jumped the shark.

Ford Fusion

goes 1,445.7 miles on a single tank of gas.



That's very cool.

That hypermiling along with the Ford reminded me of Charles Lindbergh, who was associated with Ford but went on to hypermile the P-38 in the Pacific and train others in his methods:

Lindberg was able to return from combat missions with his tanks half full when others returned empty. He was able to teach how to add 500 miles to the P-38's range. It had been considered to be 400 miles, Lindbergh's techniques let the Lightning appear hundreds of miles from where the Japanese expected to find them. He flew missions to Balikpapan, Mindanao, even led a 4 plane raid on Palau, considered out of range of land based fighters, a base defended by 200 enemy fighters.

(Some more WWII Lindbergh here. And here, via this chat.)

From The American Experience, Lindbergh, Ford, Nazis and Hypermiling:

With his hero status already greatly tarnished by his philosophical and political beliefs, Lindbergh delivered a speech in Des Moines that fully knocked him off his pedestal. Announcing that it was time to "name names," Lindbergh decided to identify what he saw as the pressure groups pushing the U.S. into war against Germany. "The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." Of the Jews, he went on to say, "Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government." The speech was met with outrage from numerous quarters. Lindbergh was denounced as an anti-Semite. His mother-in-law and sister-in-law publicly opposed his views. Civic and corporate organizations cut all ties and affiliations with him. His name was even removed from the water tower in his hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota.

All debate surrounding U.S. war policy came to an end on December 8, 1941, the day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States was now at war on two fronts: in Europe and in the Pacific. Despite having resigned his military commission in 1939, Lindbergh was eager to fight for his country. FDR wouldn't hear of it. "You can't have an officer leading men who thinks we're licked before we start...,"said the President. Rejected by Roosevelt, Lindbergh worked as a private consultant to Henry Ford (a man who'd drawn fire for his own anti-Semitic views. Ford was manufacturing B-24 bombers in a Michigan plant. In 1943, Lindbergh convinced United Aircraft to send him to the Pacific as an observer. His work there involved a good deal more than observation though. Lindbergh flew more than 50 combat missions, including one in which he brought down an enemy fighter. The 42-year-old Lindbergh often bested men half his age in feats demanding intense physical ability. Drawing on his extraordinary piloting skills, Lindbergh instructed others on how to conserve fuel and extend their flying range by up to 500 miles.

Hartford Tea Party

Connecticut has a beautiful capital building. There were fears late in it's construction that the dome was near collapse. I have looked a bit for a link but I have read that the cracks during construction had the architect on the train racing north from New York on a Sunday...Tak that for what it's worth without me searching on the link...

That building has collapsed if you have any sentiment towards liberty or self determination.

And, yet, hope. Breath slowly on this ember...

Please...

A Tea Party, and perhaps real "hope-an-change"

James Wolcott

I'm guessing that silly ninny never traversed the Darien gap...

I mean the real one. I'll grant it's entirely likely he's disembarked the train in Darien.

Wolcott seems to feel that Scipio has been overcome with the vapors while ample men of responsibility and clarity such as himself will have to hold down the fort.

Ugh.

(Scipio has a notably arcane and erudite link mixed in with that post! God Bless him!)

Not Surprised

Instapundit links to a confession of sorts:

"But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist."

It seemed obvious to me. Notice that the individual expresses embarrassment, which is indeed suitable, but not fear. They'll drive the bus over that cliff and then blame ignorant backwards Americans when they do...

God I wish I had some manner of Editor detecting spectacles to wear on the train...Mr. Malone is, however, wrong to suggest that the current landscape is all that new...

The Press and the Anger

This comment by Instapundit sums it up well: "They've done more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they've done on Barack Obama in two years . . . ."

I found myself mentioning today that if I were a "journalist" who took the train into Manhattan for work everyday I might find myself really uncomfortable with the notion of people knowing my occupation. Not just reluctant to get into personal talk on the train, but fearful of everyone knowing "who I am."

They are indeed too stupid and arrogant to know what they have wrought, to the detriment of us all, frankly it scares me.

God's Home Address

Unlisted.

via Dave Barry

He also links to this, who says job opportunities are getting scarce?:








Man paid around 7 US dollars a day
to scare monkeys away from a train in India.

He makes a very convincing scaremonkey, his face resembles a Henohenomoheji.



You know what they say, build a better monkey Klopotec and this gent would be out of a job:

Paul Theroux

Has a new one out and in it he returns to the regions of "The Great Railway Bazaar"

It is called "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star."

Here is an NPR interview with Theroux on the new work.



I loved "Dark Star Safari."