The past has shown that emails are not secure, no matter how secure the experts try to make them. The government is very good at keeping secrets from us, but very poor in keeping secrets from our enemies. Many years ago the great Fats Waller wrote a song that went, I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter. That’s where we are. Were I elected president of the United States I would immediately issue an executive order that no one in the Executive branch was to use email, that all communication was to be by hand delivered letter where possible, and the US Mail for out of DC. I would strongly urge Congress to pass legislation binding all Congressional employees to comply with these regulations. I would also have all elections by paper ballot. Any Federal employee violating these common sense orders would be doing hard labor throwing voting machines into the nearest river.

I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter
And put it in my desk and lock the drawer
And make those Russkie hackers go one better
And show Assange and Wikileaks the door
Before the war, the big one, the Pacific
We had a Sec of State who used to rail
At Intel guys, and just to be specific
He screamed no gentleman reads others’ mail
That’s where we are now that the lids have blown off
And nothing in the ether is secure
From prying eyes and shortly will be shown off
And do we really want to go to war
Because Gmail and Yahoo, even Outlook
Can’t keep a secret and don’t even try
In fact they do not care and I much doubt took
The simplest measure to deter a spy
But they are not to blame for Clinton’s treason
In putting our top secrets up for grabs
For money, and for her no other reason
Let’s see she ends with prison weight hijabs

I first posted this on 7 December 2010, and have re-posted it every December 7^th since then. I was in 7^th grade, and remember lying on the floor the Monday morning, reading the paper, looking at the photographs of the burning and sunken ships. I still see the basket masts of West Virginia, Wee Vee to her crew, still see the crew of a ship’s boat approaching a burning ship, still see the smoke and desolation of ships torn apart, burnt and capsized. Those pictures are seared in my memory.

BATTLESHIP ROW

Guts and valor are words not usually associated with inanimate objects, but ships are not inanimate objects. Ships are live, living things. Ships, as well as men, can be tough and resilient. Such were the ships of Battleship Row.

0755 SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 1941

A quiet, peacetime Sunday morning. Seven battleships swung gently at their moorings; Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and California. Pacific Fleet flagship Pennsylvania was in drydock. When the attack came, half their crews were ashore, and most of the officers. None had steam up, for it was Sunday, and all was at peace. Except Nevada. Nevada had steam. Nevada could move. At the height of the attack, with burning and exploding ships all around her, already severely hurt by a torpedo to her port side, Nevada, under Lt. Commander Francis J. Thomas, senior officer aboard, broke out her big battle ensign and stood down the channel, heading for the open sea. Sailors on the burning ships cheered and threw their caps in the air, but Nevada’s gallant sortie was short lived. Five Japanese dive bombers laid her low, beaching her.

The battleships were ultimately raised and rebuilt, those that were salvageable. They rejoined the fleet, but the war had passed them by. It was a carrier war now, and the World War 1 era battleships were too slow, could not keep up with the fast carriers. They were relegated to fire support, and accompanied the Marines in their march across the Pacific, bombarding the beaches, their 14 and 16 inch guns trained on palm trees instead of dreadnoughts, declared unfit to do the job for which they were built. Until Surigao.

SURIGAO STRAIT, 0351 TO 0409 HOURS, 25 OCTOBER 1944

Vice Admiral Nishimura, with a force of battleships, cruisers and destroyers, was heading for the Leyte beaches and the soft-skinned, vulnerable transports, still loaded with troops. Standing across his path was Admiral Oldendorf, and six old fire support battleships, all but Mississippi on Battleship Row that Sunday morning in December. The other five were California, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Oldendorf put his weary old battleships in line ahead, a Battle Line, as battleships had fought since the 17^th century, and waited for Nishimura. At 0351 the big guns lit the sky. Oldendorf brought his big ships across the Japanese front, crossing the T, the dream of every admiral down the centuries, doing to the Japanese what Togo had done to the Russians at Tsushima nearly forty years earlier. The Japanese fought back, but when Nishimura turned away his battleships were gone, along with most of his heavy cruisers.

Surigao was the last battleship to battleship action of WWII, and very likely the last big gun surface action battleship fight the world is likely to see, and it was fought by ships that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor and returned to life. Ships, like men, can be judged by their deeds, and some, like the ships of Battleship Row, by their sheer stubbornness, their refusal easily to die. Ships, like men, are alive, and though it took the ships of Battleship Row almost three years, they gained their revenge in the only way they knew how. With their guns.

Torn by bombs, wracked by fire
They settled slowly to the harbor floor
Breathing their last, or so some thought
But not they
Rising, they joined their kind
Who scorned them now
As the young scorn the old
The slow
They did their job
Plodding the vastness of the central sea
Island to island
A supporting cast
Gaining no praise
No, that was for the young
The swift
The carriers
Until
Until
That blessed night
When called upon to be themselves
They were
Themselves and more

It was recently reported on local television news that Philadelphia is still counting absentee and military ballots and that the Trump state-wide lead has shrunk from 70,000 votes to below 50,000, or 0.8% of the total votes cast in the State of Pennsylvania. If the Democrats discover more uncounted votes in desk drawers and car trunks to get the Trump lead down to 0.5%, that would trigger an automatic state-wide recount.  The Democrats always had the final Philadelphia vote total in their back pocket with uncounted absentee ballots. As reported some few years ago by the Philadelphia Inguirer, a staunch liberal Democrat paper, on a Sunday before the election Black churches in Philadelphia hand out absentee ballots to the people in the pews, who sign the absentee ballots and give them back to the ushers who turn them over to the Party to be filled out later, with most of the people then voting for real, as they see it, in the election. So the Philly Democrats have as many absentee ballots at their disposal as they need. But even if they upend the Pennsylvania vote and tip the state to Hillary, they still need both Michigan and Wisconsin to get her to 270 electoral votes. That isn’t going to happen, though I would keep an eye out for Detroit to fortuitously find a vanload of uncounted absentee ballots in a warehouse. What appears to be the motive for the Jill Stein/Hillary/Soros maneuver is to buy time to get a triggered state-wide hand recount in Pennsylvania and hope for a hand recount in Wisconsin and Michigan in order to prevent Trump from getting 270 electoral votes on 19 December, and even though he would still get many more than one half plus one of the Electoral votes cast, and be elected president, they could then claim he was illegitimate. I fail to see to what end this is all being done, other than pure hatred and the desire to shove a stick in the eye of everyone who voted for Trump. But I feel it must be more than that. We just don’t know yet what it is. Would they be spending all that money just to vent their spleen? I don’t think so. The Left does not admit defeat. Like vampires, the Left believes your blood is theirs to take.

The vampire, the living dead
They have a blood lust thirst to slake
And like the Left they live in dread
Of daylight and the wooden stake

The European Union was a unifying force that kept the peace among historically fractious elements. But so was the Hapsburg Empire. And, like the Habsburgs, who, like the Bourbons, knew nothing and forgot nothing, the European Union is equally historically ineffective in keeping the scam going forever. The European Union had a decent run, but only at the sufferance of the United States, and once that ended, as it did unofficially in the minds of most Americans some time ago, the jig was up. The EU is on the verge of dissolution as the European people revert to nationalism in the wake of the Muslim immigration fiasco foisted upon them by the EU. The guard is changing, but the ceremony may remain for the tourists to admire.

Well fashioned caps and spit-shined boots
Did at one time impress recruits
Who thought the palace would be played
For centuries, and thus arrayed
The palace guard with shouldered arms
Would keep the peasants on the farms
Where they could sing and play and dance
Enjoying socialist romance
As Brussels wrote incessant rules
For those it suffered being fools
But now the fools have had enough
And caused the ship of state to luff
The flapping sails lose steerageway
Thus raising shouted cries, Belay!
The sheets run home, the ship sails on
Into the light of rising dawn
Her crew lined up on every yard
And cheering as they change the guard