Friday, April 06, 2018

Easter Friday

7 comments:

  1. Thursday I was downtown most of the day for jury duty standby, and keeping an eye out going to and from the courthouse, and perambulating during the lunch break, I spotted several promising viewpoints for a beginning sketcher. A small (3-story) old department store with a well-maintained facade (looks like about 1900); an interesting view of the backs and sides of several old skyscrapers from near the top of a parking garage--very few architectural details (the most demanding is a big cornice one one building); and what should be an interesting point of view for the old water tower (which is a duplicate of the famous one in downtown Chicago).

    Alan

    One architectural history note: the first skyscraper built with air conditioning was the Pacific Southwest Building in Fresno. I have seen an arial photo of the Graf Zeppelin passing over Fresno which shows the skyscraper, but can't locate it online at the moment.

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    1. In this photo [Click] I can see the Pacific Southwest Building and the top of the parking garage, but it's pretty hard to describe where they are.

      --Alan

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  2. Koch Network Grows Impatient with Republicans[Click]

    'Concerned' Evangelicals Plan To Meet With Trump As Sex Scandals Swirl[Click] Said the leader of one ministry: “We’re very concerned… That’s not who we are; that’s not a ‘fruit of the Spirit’; that’s not leading with humility.”
    Oh? That’s not who you are? Coulda fooled me.

    Trump and Generals Have Different Ideas on Warfare[Click] “Victory over America’s enemies for the president is often a matter of bombing ‘the shit out of them,’ as he said on the campaign trail.” The fact that even saturation bombing raids have never won a war is a dispensable detail. Or maybe it’s fake news!

    —Alan

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    1. It's a common theme with that idiot. He wants to completely obliterate anyone or anything that disagrees with him or stands in his way: laws, free press,other countries, truth, whatever. He has the true makings of an absolute dictator. No law but his and no dissent allowed. Wish Mueller would HURRY UP!

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  3. The NFL’s plan to protect America from witches[Click] Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

    Darwin's lost fossils – including a sloth the size of a car – to be made public[Click]

    —Alan

    P.S.: Our previous (19 years) satellite TV service (Dish Network) as of Monday past no longer offers the one channel we used it for; so we changed to AT&T [DirectTV]. Slightly more expensive, but significantly less than cable. Quick installation, much sharper picture. Followup [in person!] by a service rep, to whom I explained that we were having troubles changing to AT&T long distance. but that it might be changed by our deletion of our previous long distance provider; he said to give him a call if problems continued, which they has, and which I did. Most irritating.

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  4. https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-planning-a-three-front-long-war-against-china-and-russia/240100/

    "This renewed emphasis on China and Russia in U.S. military planning reflects the way top military officials are now reassessing the global strategic equation, a process that began long before Donald Trump entered the White House. Although after 9/11, senior commanders fully embraced the “long war against terror” approach to the world, their enthusiasm for endless counterterror operations leading essentially nowhere in remote and sometimes strategically unimportant places began to wane in recent years as they watched China and Russia modernizing their military forces and using them to intimidate neighbors.

    While the long war against terror did fuel a vast, ongoing expansion of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Forces (SOF) — now a secretive army of 70,000 nestled inside the larger military establishment — it provided surprisingly little purpose or real work for the military’s “heavy metal” units: the Army’s tank brigades, the Navy’s carrier battle groups, the Air Force’s bomber squadrons, and so forth. Yes, the Air Force in particular has played a major supporting role in recent operations in Iraq and Syria, but the regular military has largely been sidelined there and elsewhere by lightly equipped SOF forces and drones.

    Planning for a “real war” against a “peer competitor” (one with forces and weaponry resembling our own) was until recently given far lower priority than the country’s never-ending conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. This alarmed and even angered those in the regular military whose moment, it seems, has now finally arrived.

    “Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding,” the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy declares. “We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order” — a decline officially attributed for the first time not to al-Qaeda and ISIS, but to the aggressive behavior of China and Russia. Iran and North Korea are also identified as major threats, but of a distinctly secondary nature compared to the menace posed by the two great-power competitors.

    Unsurprisingly enough, this shift will require not only greater spending on costly, high-tech military hardware but also a redrawing of the global strategic map to favor the regular military. During the long war on terror, geography and boundaries appeared less important, given that terrorist cells seemed capable of operating anyplace where order was breaking down. The U.S. military, convinced that it had to be equally agile, readied itself to deploy (often Special Operations forces) to remote battlefields across the planet, borders be damned.

    On the new geopolitical map, however, America faces well-armed adversaries with every intention of protecting their borders, so U.S. forces are now being arrayed along an updated version of an older, more familiar three-front line of confrontation."

    I cannot believe this crap. If women ruled the world we wouldn't see this ridiculous "war is everything" mentality. Women know how long it takes to grow a human, the pain that comes with birthing them, and the years it takes to raise them. I firmly believe women WOULD NOT WASTE LIVES as men do because we have a greater understanding of what was involved in bringing that life into this world.

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  5. “Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy"
    The Commander in Chief doesn't do strategy.

    “We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order” — a decline officially attributed for the first time" to the President of the United States.

    Some women have certainly been warlike; Indira Gahdhi[Click] and Catherine the Great come immediately to mind. But it the exception that proves the rule, no? Among prominent US military leaders for whom war was not everything, Sherman and Eisenhower come immediately to mind.


    Alan

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