Winds of wisdom

I read something the other day that I was going to be sure to remember because I wanted to use it in a post. I've forgotten the line and even the source for the moment, though both are buzzing about just above my right ear, a pair of factsquitoes daring me to capture them. It'll come to me.

The gist of the thing was simply this: cleverness is not wisdom.

When I was a lad I was sharp as a tack and clever as hell. My Mom taught me to read before I marched off to Kindergarten. Kindergarten was kind of a trial though because "lesen war streng verboten!" Kindergarten was for learning your letters, numbers and colors. First Grade was for learning to read.

So I rebelled. I don't remember planning to rebel, I just decided I wasn't going to play their firetrucking game. So I was advanced to first grade (you can't fail kiddygarder, right?) with a black mark and an annotation. "This little shit don't know his numbers, colors, or letters."

They put me in the retard reading section. Until one day when the teacher accidentally came to work sober and noticed that I was reading the grownup encyclopedias.

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She thought I was pretending, but being unusually unintoxicated and able to string a few coherent concepts together she determined to make an investigation. Just like Stu and Jeff in 77 Sunset Strip. So she asked me to read a passage, and I did so. Something about the rape of Nanking, as I recall. I read the passage with even more skill and articulation than Mrs. Elkins, the fifth grade teacher and acknowledged brain of the institution, could muster.

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So I was let out of retard reading and given homework. A bad tactical move on my part, but thus are the seeds of wisdom planted (to lay dormant for many, many years in my case).

Where, you are surely wondering, is this moron going with this?

Sarge opined today that most of the world is populated by average, C students. This got me to thinking about an unpublished draft post on the topic (more or less) which has not as yet made like Jeff Bridges in Tron. Yes, I know, bad analogy. Just imagine Bridges escaping the standalone computer to the information superhighway, which algore had yet to invent when Tron came out in 1982. Tron II, perhaps.

Now where the firetruck was I?

First principle of humanity. If the first principle is more than a platitude, if it's a self evident truth and all men are created equal, then how is it possible that some people are smarter than other people?

We know for a fact that some people are smarter than others, right? I mean, everybody knows that. Some people are really smart -- smart enough to be brain scientists and rocket surgeons and drug empire kingpins.

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And some people are really dumb, with only enough brain juice to scrub floors or dig ditches or stack lumber.

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If you believe that all men are created equal, the fact that some people are smart and some are dumb presents a bit of a problem. If you also think that the unexamined life is not worth living, then perhaps you find (or have found) yourself in the same position as I, compelled to revisit a deeply held belief and determine whether it stands up or not.

In light of the smart-dumb divide, my personal belief that all men are created equal looks kind of shaky. Maybe I need to double check my understanding of the basic terms. Perhaps I've made an error here; perhaps there's a difference between what I know and what I think I know.

Equality

It's easy to get confused and think that equal means identical. But it doesn't. There's a difference between equal and identical, and if I'm saying equal but meaning identical, I might be a tad off course.

When I think about the phrase "all men are created equal," the only way it makes sense is if it's defining "men" as human beings, and "all men" as the sum of the mass of humanity. That the people who make up that mass of humanity are, each and every one, equally, fundamentally, human beings.

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This means that there are no men who belong to some other non-human group; no men who are actually frogs or skyscrapers or pomegranates. There are no men who are protohuman, or "almost but not quite" human.  No men who are posthuman, upgraded or advanced beyond human. No men are "better" humans, and none are "worse" humans. All men are the same basic model, Homo sapiens, period dot.

All men are equally human, but all men are not identical humans.

You don't have to look very hard to see that people are not identical. If you look very closely, you will find that each human is an absolutely unique individual. No two humans are, have ever been, or ever will be, identical.

This is a paradox, isn't it? How can humans be equal if each and every human is different than each and every other human?

Well, "equal" and "identical" are very different things. Equal means being the same in quantity or size or degree or value. Identical means similar in every detail, exactly alike.

So all men can be equally fundamentally human (endowed by their creator -- each and every one, with natural rights) while at the same time being unique individuals rather than cookie cutter copies.

Are we good so far?

Dumb and dumber

We know an awful lot about the human brain, and we're learning more and more all the time. But as much as we know, we're essentially in the same boat as the ancient chemists. They tried very hard to do chemistry but had only four elements to work with -- air, water, earth, and fire. Their big 18th century breakthrough was phlogiston, but they were as misguided on that as Fleischmann and Pons were on cold fusion. The olden chemists hadn't yet made the fundamental discoveries that led to atomic theory and the periodic table. Thus far, we modern humans find ourselves in a similar boat, having yet to unlock the fundamental principles of the brain.

Why do some people become terrorists? Why do some mothers kill their children? Why are some people honest and principled? Why will mobs rush to do good things, and just as quickly rush to do bad things? The questions are endless, and our only answers are, "we don't know, but it's got to have something to do with phlogiston."

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Since we really don't understand the brain at all, how is it that we can so smoothly and confidently assign levels of smart and dumb -- levels of intelligence -- to our fellow humans?

The answer is that we can't. which doesn't mean we don't do it all the time. But doing it and being correct are different kettles of fish.

I suspect that if we knew and understood enough about the brain we could probably place every human at a discrete point on an intelligence line, from less intelligent to more intelligent. But, and this is the important bit, I'm confident that the difference, the distance from least to most, would be so small as to be utterly insignificant.

In other words, all men are, to any practical extent at all, equally intelligent.

Now I'm talking about normal, or undamaged men. Those who haven't suffered or are not suffering some form of brain damage.

I know, I know. There's that one dumb guy who can't do anything right. There's the woman (might as well be an equal opportunity stereotyping slanderer) who can't balance a checkbook. There are people who aren't smart enough to go to college or to pass the ASVAB (do they still have that?) or to graduate high school.

And then there is IQ this and multiphasic that and endless papers and studies that claim to rank individual intelligence on some scale or other.

A couple of problems there. No one has yet come up with a comprehensive and testable definition of intelligence. In general, intelligence is the ability to reason, imagine and predict, problem solve, weigh and evaluate evidence, plan, modify plans based on reasoned assessment of evidence, and so on and so forth. The ability to figure stuff out, figure out what to do, and figure out how to do stuff.

We don't know how to measure that objectively. Every measure of intelligence we use or talk about is based on some subjective proxy measurement, most often a demonstrated ability to comprehend and manipulate information based on certain subjectively chosen language and symbology sets.

And that doesn't tell you anything at all about intelligence. It only tells you whether or not the subject demonstrates subjectively defined behavior.

In other words, it doesn't tell you anything about whether the subject can read the sentence or understand the phrase or solve the math problem. It just tells you whether they've done those things in a particular test. Not doing those things does not prove that the subject cannot do them, nor does it prove that the subject lacks the intelligence to do them.

In my own personal experience I've found myself saying "screw this, I can't do my times tables or world geography or spelling or physics or trig or calculus or sestinas or statistics. There's no way I can learn to see sick call or to snatch an appendix or assess and treat cardiac arrest. No way I can understand how you take suck-squeeze-burn-blow and turn it into rotors go round and round."

Yet I've done all of those impossible things, and more.

"Well," you might say, "of course, you're smart. You're smarter than dumb people, who, through no fault of their own -- poor little beggars -- cannot do those things because they lack the intelligence to do so."

However, and again in my personal experience, I've seen people who've never been anywhere or done anything and appear to be barely capable of dressing themselves or of following the simplest of instructions go on to learn and master subjects which we generally believe exist exclusively in the realm of the really, really smart.

In my mind, it's not about intelligence or lack of intelligence. It's about doing. I see no evidence whatsoever that some humans are smart and some are dumb. What I've seen time and again leads me to believe with a very high level of confidence that we've all got the same basic kit of intelligence. Period.

Consequences

A lot of very "smart" people get confused there. Well, actually they don't get confused, because they choose to believe that the "all men created equal" jazz is a bunch of bullshit. They take the position that they and those with whom they most closely identify are superior forms of human. In their world it's perfectly logical that superhumans should be able to reflexively and instinctively categorize individual levels of humanity and determine what is absolutely and universally best for the untermenschen.

It's nothing new. Humans have been doing that for thousands of years.

And I'd suggest that that's generally the case even here in the shining city on the hill. We are surrounded by a majority of people who would (and probably will) blindly follow Clump or Trillary into the hell of a new dark age. That doesn't frighten me personally, for my place in Valhalla has long been reserved. It breaks my heart though, especially when I consider the hell this nation is visiting upon its children.

In every public school across the land they are teaching children monstrous lies, equal to and often exceeding the lies taught in Nazi schools. Racists have a particular skin color and their affliction is permanent and untreatable. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. Cause and effect are subjective manifestations of sexism. Facts are inhumane. A boy is a girl is a twitch in the lower spine is a small block Chevy. There is only one true path to enlightenment, and hate of the non-favored "other" is the breath of life. Absolute truth lives at koobecaf, and whackopaedia is the new holy ko-ran. It's the firetrucking Lord of the Flies. The land of feral children.

And now we have 36 year-old babes leaving adult daycare and entering the world for the first time, running pitter-patter-pitter-patter-PING into every fan they see, crushed and despairing of the unfairness of it all and continually swamped by waves of heretofore unimaginable reality. And we have older and younger people who know better but who choose to open their ears to the siren song of self importance and side-superiority. It's a hell of a mess.

What to do, what to do

And now that I've harshed your mellow, let me take a page from Pandora's playbook and remind you that we have a choice in the matter. We can give in to despair and allow ourselves to rot from within, or we can roll up our sleeves, take up the task, and strive. Where there is life there is hope, and hope is not a political slogan.

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The way forward is to live the first principle. To embrace and love the humanity of your fellows, to seek always to treat human beings as an end only, and never as a means to an end.

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You won't be perfect in this. I won't be perfect in this. No one will be perfect. Nonetheless, it is the only path that leads to success, the only way to achieve the promise of our human potential.

And at the end of the day, it's not a job for others to do.

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That is all.

Just stuff

Sarge had a good go at the social media over at his place this morning.

Sometimes the social media surprises people.

Back in the old days -- if you define the old days as pre-internet -- a person used to be able to have a few indiscretions or “uh-oh moments” secure in the knowledge that only a limited few friends and neighbors would ever know.

But those days are long gone.

A Tuesday, January 24 headline in England’s national newspaper, The Daily Mail, reads as follows:

Couple who set off a huge EXPLOSION that was felt three miles away in stunt to reveal their baby's gender now face up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine

Some of you may have seen the story making the rounds on koobecaf. The headline in Great Britain caught the eye of one of my farmer friends in Herefordshire, who texted "loook what's in the national newspapers this morning!" As my friend noticed, the couple in question hail from rural Scottsbluff which is "just 'cross the holler and over the ridge" from my place. It's interesting that England heard about the boom before I did. There’s no need to go into detail here, but if you’re curious about how the British press treats such a story you can type the following into your web browser:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4150342/Couple-set-explosion-gender-reveal-face-jail.html#socialLinks

Old-guy workouts

On Monday it was a pretty morning across the south Panhandle of Nebraska. The temperature dropped to about 28 degrees overnight but the sun rose into a clear blue sky. Having moved more than a third of the way from southerly/wintry nadir to spring equinox, the sun's rays were warm and vibrant and made quick work of melting the skiff of snow that had fallen overnight.

It was a good morning to begin the process of getting back into shape after five months of infection-induced inactivity.

First I did a half-Cindy. What, you ask, is a half-Cindy?

This is a half-Cindy.

And it was pretty easy, except for the pull-ups, which I'm afraid I maxed at five. But I did manage 30 pushups and 45 air squats. Don't get me wrong, it was a good workout considering the shape I'm in. Sweat stung the eyes, the heart raced, and great draughts of air went roaring in and out of the respiratory system.

I finished it off with a brisk two-mile prairie hike. Felt goood.

On Tuesday I was pretty creaky and sore but I persevered. I did another half-workout I had to make the brisk walk on my treadmill for it was snowing heavily and blowing a gale outside.

This morning it was cold and still and I began the day (after quaffing my morning caveman sabretooth) by scooping snow, followed by another half-workout. I let the snow shoveling stand in for the brisk walk, which I believe was a good choice.

Still creaky and sore but less so than yesterday. As Juvat pointed out the other day, I'm not 26 anymore, and I sure miss those days. But I'll just plod along and deal with the world the way it is. As if I have any choice.

Calves and grass

For the first time in living memory there are no gravid cows preparing to deliver new baby calves to the EJE Ranch this spring. There is, however, a large wad of cash choking my bank account, cash that needs to be expended before uncle sugar can get his greedy hands on it. Therefore, I'm looking hard at buying cows -- specifically bred cows.

Didja ever wonder how one goes about buying cows? Here's one of the places I'm shopping at, and here's the sale listing for Monday.

I'll be watching that sale closely, though I'm unlikely to buy anything. It's just a bit too early. It's a tricky thing, buying bred cows. I want the right breeding and genetics and the right looking cows, not too big and not too small, and bred to reasonably good bulls. And I want them to calve in April and May, which means cows that were bred in July and August.

It won't be much of a problem to find the right cows. Finding the right price might be more difficult, but not overwhelmingly so. The real tricky part just now is trying to get a handle on whether we will have grass this year.

To figure that out, though, how hard could it be?

Most of the rangeland across this region consists of mixed cool and warm season grasses acclimatized to a semi-arid vegetation zone. These grass species and indeed the prairie ecosystems have evolved to do most of their growth/biomass production during those periods where peak annual precipitation and occurs. Cool season grasses do most of their growth in the cool of the spring when daytime air temperatures peak at 65-75 degrees. Warm season grasses come on in the summer when daytime air temperatures climb to 80-95 degrees.

Historically about five-eighths of our annual precipitation occurs from April-July and three-fourths of the annual total comes during the March-August period.

Cool season grasses across the region generally have rapid growth periods in April and May, while warm season grasses do their rapid growth in June and July. These are not hard and fast dates and there is often an overlap in May and June, with some warm season grasses taking off early and some cool season rapid growth persisting into June.

We can be reasonably certain that spring and summer temperatures will meet the requirements of the various grass species populating our pastures and rangelands. The uncertain variables are timing and quantity of precipitation.

As 2017 begins we're in a soil moisture deficit. On January 24 the Panhandle of Nebraska had seen 93 percent of normal precipitation since April 1 of 2016, but only 77 percent of normal since October 1 of last year. On the plus side, our ranch is actually at 112 percent since October 1, but that doesn't say anything useful about the future.

The autumnal fall-off in precipitation last year coincided with an extended growing season as autumn temperatures remained well above normal. This extended growing season used up a considerable quantity of soil moisture as forbs and grasses continued to photosynthesize and transpire late into November and even into early December.

We saw a similar pattern in 2011, with abundant spring and summer precipitation tapering off into a dry, warm, extended autumn. The 2011-2012 winter was mild and open, and as spring arrived the rains were sparse and continued below normal throughout the year. At Kimball we saw only half the normal April-July precipitation while average temperatures ran 3-5 degrees above normal. For the year Kimball saw only 8.3 inches of precipitation compared to the average of 16.8 inches. This is what you call a drought. It was ugly, and we didn't have enough grass production. We had a drought plan in place -- which meant selling about a third of the cows -- so we weathered the storm (or lack thereof) okay.

June 2012

June 2016

Similarly in 2001 normal precipitation ebbed during a warm autumn followed by a mild and open winter. In the spring the rains simply failed to materialize and Kimball saw less than a quarter of normal March-July precipitation. A single large rainstorm in August boosted the annual total but came much too late to contribute to grass production, which was essentially nil for the year. In 2002 Kimball saw only 6.67 inches of precipitation, the lowest annual total since 1893. This was the worst drought year we've ever had, and we struggled. We waited too long to sell cows and ended up overgrazing some areas that are only now beginning to recover fully. We learned a lot but paid a stiff price.

Many of the very dry years of the 1930’s show a similar pattern with a dry and warm autumn preceding a dearth of spring-summer rain. 1928/29, 1930/31, 1933/34, 1935/36, and 1938/39.

There have, of course, been dry years following normal autumn/winter periods, as well as normal-to-wet years following a dry, warm autumn and snowy winter. History simply cannot exactly predict the future.

It’s worth noting the weather patterns of the past, though, and giving that information solid consideration when putting together a grazing plan for the coming year.

If our cool and warm season grasses do not receive enough moisture during their rapid growth periods, they will simply not produce biomass, either above the ground as grazable leaves or below the ground as root systems. Grazing grass stands which are moisture-stressed during rapid growth periods will lead directly to root mining and general degradation of the grass resource.

When putting together a grazing plan for the coming year we have to set target dates as decision points. If the rains come on time and in reasonably average quantity, all well and good. However, if the rains do not arrive on time or in reasonable quantity, it’s best to have a plan in place which allows you to step as lightly on the grass resource as possible. There is always a downside to grazing stressed grasslands, and the more prepared you are to aggressively husband the health of your grass asset the better off you will be over the long term.

So. What to buy, and when to buy? It's tricky.

Say goodbye to my little friend

The osteomyelitis which has laid me low for the last five months is now finally and completely defeated. I received the last of the IV antibiotics last week, and once the final labs came in I no longer needed the picc line. It was a little bit difficult arranging to have it removed (to have it removed on my schedule to be honest) so I went ahead and yanked it myself.



With my background and experience, If I'm not qualified to discontinue a picc line, no one is qualified.

Six weeks post surgery and I'm healing very nicely. I'm very nearly pain free and I can walk completely normally. Now it's time to bear down a bit and get back into shape. Five months of immobility has really done a number on my strength and mobility, but it'll come back quickly enough.

Having gone through this experience, I believe that I want to aim for a better, higher level of fitness than I had before the malady reared its ugly head.

We'll see what happens.

And let me just take this opportunity to thank all you kind readers for the well-wishes and prayers. They really did make a big difference.

Celebrate!

R21, the Majestic Melbourne

I've no idea why, but I've always been keenly interested in Australia's last aircraft carrier, HMAS Melbourne.

I speak of her as Majestic, because she was launched as HMS Majestic in 1945. She was the lead ship in what was to be a class of light carriers. With the war drawing to a close, however, work on Majestic was suspended until, in 1947, she was purchased by Australia for service with the Royal Australian Navy (RAN).

Australia actually bought a pair of carriers in 1947, Majestic and Terrible, which was also of the Majestic class. As Terrible was nearer completion, she joined the RAN first, in 1948, as HMAS Sydney.

With one new carrier in hand, and with an additional loaner (HMS Vengeance) from the RN in the interim, Australia asked that Majestic be given the most modern upgrades, including a steam catapult, angled deck, mirror landing system, upgraded arresting gear and barricade, upgraded aircraft fuel storage and distribution, state of the art radars, etc. This work was completed in 1955 and the RAN took delivery of their new flagship, HMAS Melbourne.

One of the things that is fascinating to me is the way the RAN operated a remarkably diverse and capable airwing from such a tiny ship. I think of small carriers as the 27 Charlie Essex/Ticonderoga class, but those were monsters twice the size of the Majestic class.

Below are some interweb videos that you might enjoy. The final two are of a rather famous on-deck ejection which happened on May 23, 1979. The pilot, Kevin Finan, was a US Navy pilot on an exchange tour with the RAN.

Прогресс!

There's an old saying around these parts (perhaps other parts of the northern hemisphere as well), "As the days lengthen, the cold will strengthen."

That's only true for a while though. January is our coldest month, averaging a mean temperature of 26.9 degrees over the last 123 years. The average January hi is 40.3 and the low 13.4. December's 123 year mean is 28.4. February, despite it's dreary, chill reputation, boasts a mean temp of 29.4.

So yeah, the cold strengthens after the first of the year, but before very many days pass the increasing sun angle and daylight duration begin to work their warming magic. March will deliver an average hi of 49.8 and average low of 22.2, for a mean of a balmy 36 degrees. And April, which is the one that comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb in this part of the country, will have a mean temperature of 45.2. That's skinny-dippin' weather!

But I digress. When I saw the surgeon last I was a bit concerned that I'd be chastised for abandoning the crutches. My foot was still sore but felt solid, and crutches are aluminum death on winter's ice, so I turned them back in to the crutch rental counter at the local pharmacy.

I needn't have worried though. "People know when they can start bearing weight," said the surgeon. He was quite pleased with the miracle he had wrought on my previously badly infected heel. "Looks like the infection is all gone," he said. "I've rarely seen anyone heal up so quickly. Whatever you're doing keep it up."

I do have to continue the IV antibiotics through January 19, which as I write this means 13 5 2 (count 'em two) more trips to the local infusion emporium. As you can probably tell, I have not been a very good blogger of late, with drafts going unposted for weeks at a time.

Anyway it looks as if I'll be able to put this bone infection behind me finally. It's been a very long five months. And now that the infection has been killed I'm beginning to realize how sick I was. Even with the dang cold I recently picked up I'm feeling like Superman. Well, perhaps Superboy. A young Superboy. But that's still a lot better than feeling like Debilitatedman.

As for the cold I'm battling, I can be rather certain that it's a viral illness rather than bacterial. With all that high-powered antibiotic coursing through my veins I doubt that any respiratory pathogens could survive long enough to colonize a single alveoli. Alveolus? One of those.

As colds go it's pretty mild. Stuffed head and a lot of lung junk causing a cough. Sore throat from the sinus drainage. A little fever, but not much of one. The last couple of winter colds were just awful, full-blown bouts of influenza that made me unspeakably miserable for 2-3 weeks. This is nothing.

I jumped on it hard with guaifenesin extended release, naprosyn and acetaminophen, lots of fluids, and Jewish penicillin (chicken soup).

As I may have mentioned here earlier I had to sell all my cows. With my foot the way it was and the recovery timescale rather uncertain, I couldn't be sure that I'd be able to properly care for them. They represented a hell of a lot of money and a train wreck would have been disastrous. So I sold 'em and put the money in the bank, where it will be available to buy newer, younger, better cows in the next few months.

I did keep the bulls back; there was no way to get a reasonable price for them at auction and I was pretty sure I could take care of such a small number of animals regardless of my condition.

This morning it looks like we're having a nice January warm spell, what J.B. Books (John Wayne) and his landlady Bond Rogers (Lauren Bacall) called a "false spring." Sun is shining in a clear blue sky and there's very little wind. The temperature is edging north of the freezing mark and is expected to soar into the mid-50's in the next couple of days.

I'm enjoying the sunshine and relative warmth, even though part of me is quite cross that I can't yet get out and work. My foot is healing from the surgery every day, but it's still healing, and overdoing it at this point could be a not good thing in the long run. So I'll continue to practice patience.

Here are a few things that have helped me while away the endless hours.

Fast Movers is, as the subtitle suggests, the tales of a few select jet aircrew and their experiences in Vietnam. Fourteen of them including Olds, Ritchie, Nichols, Rasimus, etc. F-4 and A-6 guys in the main. It's some superb stuff.

Exocet Falklands is an insider's tale regarding Brit special operations during the Falklands War in 1982. I'll bet you had no idea that Limey snake eaters were operating in Chile.

I haven't started Pelandok yet but it promises to be a good read. It's a fictional account of what might have happened if the RAN (Royal Australian Navy) had been confronted with a nuclear threat from beneath the sea. Written by a former RAN ASW aircrew bubba, the book promises some H-3 Sea King and S-2G Tracker action from the decks of HMAS Melbourne, Australia's Majestic Class carrier.

And as if that's not enough, i just took delivery of this.

Gonna be fun times when spring finally gets sprung. 

A cautionary tale

I've been out of the naviating game for a very long time. I am not, nor was I ever, a navy pilot. I never had a set or orders reading "for duty involving actual control of aircraft." I was an aircrewman; a SAR corpsman and rescue swimmer. Like many of my peers I managed to collect a good chunk of bootleg stick time in H-1's and H-3's, but that was all daytime fun and games. Toward the end of my career I did get some right seat time in the Intruder both ashore and afloat including 27 day traps and 13 night traps. During my 14 years of active naval flying I spent nearly all of my time intimately involved with the day-to-day operations of fixed- and rotary-wing squadrons attached to deploying carrier air wings. I made eight major deployments and served in Nimitz, America, Coral Sea and Theodore Roosevelt. And Eisenhower. Yike, how could I forget Ike?

With that experience under my belt I feel like I'm just a little bit qualified to make an observation. I hope you can understand that I'm not trying to bash anyone, nor m I trying to make the "my generation was better than your generation is" argument.

In viewing the video below I was rather taken aback at the fact that  so many people were freaked out over the pitching deck. This video was made in 2005, btw, so it surely doesn't represent carrier aviation in 2016.

In my day a pitching deck wasn't loved and embraced, but it was par for the course. You didn't like it, but you lived with it. And as the Captain says in this video, the skills of carrier aviation are perishable and have to be practiced and kept current -- including operating when conditions are marginal.

In 2005 these folks were clearly surprised and dismayed to see a pitching deck. They'd spent the last two years operating in the Arabian Sea, dropping smart bombs on discrete targets under mostly ideal conditions and with total air supremacy. Unless I miss my guess this really hasn't changed much in the last 11 years. We now have fewer jets and fewer, smaller air wings. We have an enormous emphasis on preventing mishaps, which is perhaps less about safety and risk management than about avoiding black marks.

Today I find myself wondering exactly how degraded our blue water warfighting skills have become. Again, not to bash anyone, but I wonder whether we have the raw capability to execute real world missions around the globe under adverse conditions. We did in my day. Can we do it today?



In contrast, watch and listen to this barricade arrestment from 1987. BTW, Bug (the LSO) and Atlas (A-6 pilot) have been gone for more than 20 years now. They each died while flying naval aircraft. 


Food for thought.

Corpsman Chronicles XV: Seagulls gotta eat too

There's a scene in Crocodile Dundee (or maybe CDII, I forget) where Mick sics a big snake on the bad guys who were gathered around a campfire in the non-steakhouse outback. The bad guys scream like girls, with the exception of their Australian guide, who dispatches the snake and says, "It's just a python yuh big gurrl!"

I tried to find that clip but was unsuccessful. Ah well.

So anyway, I'm healing up nicely from my recent foot infection/surgery. Still a little gimpy but getting better every day. And only nine more days of IV antibiotics!

Unfortunately, I managed to catch the holiday cold that's going around. Cough and congestion, aches and pains, fever and chills, malaise and exhaustion. You get the picture. Five days into this thing and I'm miserable as hell. It's not nearly as bad as the last two winter cold/flu episodes I had, so that is a big plus. But I'm still feeling crappy enough to feel vewy, vewy sowwy fow mysef.

We had some very cold weather last week, with overnight lows falling to minus 20 and a three-day average temp of well below zero. The last few days have been quite balmy and pleasant with daytime temps nudging 50 and a good bit of sunshine. South and west of us the winds are howling but they remain fairly calm here.

Perusing my daily blogs I note that Sarge had a rough go-round with caffeine-fueled insomnia last night. I hate it when that happens. Which reminds me of a story from my youth.

Sometime back in the mid- to late-60's, a new winter beverage wave was sweeping the nation. I mentioned this to several people this morning and they all started edging away from me and preparing to run. But it was real, and really, really a thing. I have proof!





Well, out on the ranch we took note of Dick's recommendation, and on New Year's Eve Mom prepared a steaming cauldron of the stuff for to toast in the New Year.

I probably drank a gallon.

And didn't sleep at all that night. It was quite vexing.

Many years later I was in boot camp at RTC San Diego. Somehow I managed to be the academic honor recruit of the company. Myself and a pair of other company honorees were allowed two hours of on-base liberty the night before graduation. Which seemed like a really big deal at the time but which actually meant we had to hump it two miles to a gedunk stand (our only allowed "liberty" destination) and back within the allotted time frame, and somehow figure out how to have a fun, relaxing and joyous time.

Well, the gedunk stand had pop and candy bars and nothing else. I'm guessing we each consumed a dozen snickers and a dozen cans of pop. I was a Dr Pepper man so that was my poison. As you might imagine, we lingered as long as we possibly could at the gedunk stand, reveling in our pseudo freedom. We waited long past a prudent time to begin our return to the barracks, but we were young and fit and used to running our silly naval asses off.

We hadn't before had the opportunity to run with bellies full of chocolate, caramel, peanuts and frothing carbonated syrup though. We were really very nearly late, and decided to run across the main grinder (parade/marching ground) to save time. This maneuver, iirc, was strictly forbidden, but it was mid-winter and already dark out and the grinders were not well illuminated. We dashed across, despite the possibility of being caught and sent to Leavenworth.

Well, we dashed part-way across. In the middle of the grinder our stomachs finally rebelled at the abuse and we three pretty much simultaneously blew bubbling goo all over the asphalt.

With all that crap out of our systems we could run like deer and we returned to the barracks in the nick of time.

The next morning was graduation, with hundreds of newly-minted sailors marching in review in front of lots of brass and proud family members. For some unexplained reason, though, there were hundreds of seagulls flocking around three oval stains in the middle of the grinder.

Strange.

Corpsman Chronicles XIV: Mo

As Sarge points out over at the Chant, there are a lot of silly bastards blaming the year 2016 for killing all their BFF's. It's a conspiracy that many seem to genuinely believe. It also seems that the true believers are the ones who live in the SJW realm, that mind-rotting cesspool that the gubmint and media would have you believe is the core of reality.

SMH, Facepalm.

An old shipmate of mine died on December 11. Moise Willis was only 57.

I first met Mo at Oceana in about 1985. We were both squadron corpsmen, both E-5's. We worked a lot together and stood a lot of watches together. When you do that, you get to know one another in a way that's perhaps unique to the military. Mo was a hell of a good guy. A hell of a solid shipmate.

He went on to be commissioned in the Navy Nurse corps and retired as a Captain. I had no idea, but I'm not surprised. I'm proud of his accomplishments.

When we mourn the passing of our friends, and even of our idols, our first flush of emotion is selfish. It's about our loss. That's okay, it's the way we're wired. At some point, though, we must find a way to remember a sense of gratitude for the time we shared with our departed friend.

And here's the Mo I remember best, wearing a bright-eyed happy smile with just a touch of lurking sailor-mischievousness. I'll miss you, Mo, and I was blessed to know you as a shipmate. Thanks. Fair winds and following seas.

The physics of not hitting the ground on Christmas (or any other day)

Merry Christmas to all!

My 5:30 a.m. Christmas Day wakeup call was a thunderstorm.

That's right, lightning, thunder and heavy rain. The temperature wasn't very far north of freezing and the ground was still frozen so the rain turned instantly to slush, then ice. As I write this the temperature is 33 and falling, it's very foggy, and a brisk north wind is driving a fresh batch of stinging sleet from the heavens. The weather guesses say it's supposed to start snowing and blowing in an hour or so. On the upside, we're looking only at an inch of snow in the prediction. On the downside, that's enough to make a blizzard. So not a great travelling day.

And now, on with the show.

The other day Sarge had a post about the phynal phlights of the Phantom in U.S. service. Posted a couple of interesting videos he did. Extremely cool to see those lovely QF-4E's motoring around the Wisconsin sky.

One video was taken from the ground and the other was a helmet cam video from inside the cockpit. As I said, they were fun to watch, but parts of each video made me cringe. I did not feel good about the low speed dirty pass.

That pass was made at about 500' AGL with gear, flaps and hook down, very slow, and with a pretty hefty angle of attack. I think they were demonstrating both the carrier landing configuration and slow speed flight.

Now I'm not a pilot, and I've never played one on tee-vee. Nor have I stayed at a holiday inn express. I did in my younger days spend a bit of time around naval air patches, ashore and afloat, and I've seen more than one low and slow come out on the wrong side of the ledger.

In the comments of sarge's post Juvat explained what being behind the power curve means in aviation. Basically, you can get into a part of the flight envelope where you no longer have enough power available to 1) avoid the stall and/or 2) overcome the inertia of your descent vector. With enough altitude you can recover before hitting the ground, but without enough altitude you will hit the ground most crunchingly.

One of the first mishaps I investigated was the one that took the life of the first female Naval Aviator, Barbara Allen Rainey and her student Naval Aviator. They got low and slow and hit the ground.

One of the last mishaps I worked was for an F/A-18, the pilot of which entered a loop at too low altitude at an airshow in California.

In between those two I saw a number of slow, dirty, nose-high aircraft come to grief. And that's why the passes in those videos made me nervous.

Here are a couple of interesting videos. One is old-old school, one merely old school. A video can be worth a zillion words.

By popular demand

The post-surgical checkup went well. Surgeon was very pleased with the way the wound is healing and the way the infection is clearing up. Since the surgeon is pleased, I also is pleased.

The sutures came out today, so one of my pre-visit wishes came true. The other wish, to have my picc line removed and switch to oral antibiotics, well... That one did not come true. The guidelines for this kind of infection call for six weeks of post-surgical IV antibiotics, and that's just the way it is. So another month of that. I can't and won't complain because it's such a very small price to pay. Especially when you consider that it wasn't so very long ago when this kind of infection guaranteed amputation and was more often than not a death sentence.

Before today's visit I'd been pretty sure that I'd be allowed to start bearing weight and rehabbing -- at least a little bit. I was wrong on that though. No weight bearing until at least four weeks post-surgery, so January 5. That's the date of my next follow up appointment.

So, all in all, a good visit and a good report. Seems there's a light at the end of the tunnel!

Now for the gore, although I'm afraid it's getting to be pretty tame gore. In fact it's nearly fake gore at this point. :)

Moments before the sutures came out.

Sutures gone, steri-strips in place.