Beautiful beyond imagining, from the dimmest galaxies at the farthest red shift edges to the deepest ocean canyon on planet Earth; from the scream of a hawk to the fragile beating of a butterfly’s wings; from a Beethoven sonata to a sad and wistful Gaelic folksong; to the majestic arc of an upper deck home run to the hysterical laughter of a small child as dad pushes the swing ever higher. We are surrounded by beauty, though some cannot see the stars or hear the subtle music of the passing seasons, crying out, at the end of life, that all was in vain, as yet unaware that an unimaginably greater beauty awaits, should they choose to see it.

A lonely rock strewn shoreline’s end
The smiling face of an old friend
Twin fawns safe by their mama’s side
A laughing child’s first horseback ride
A summer night with stars so low
That woodlands shimmer with their glow
A dusty, winding country road
Past fields so recently been sowed
With seed that burst to life the land
As joyous as a high school band
The gleam of distant Saturn’s rings
The star filled spheres where music sings
Of beauty nested in the folds
Of new mown fields and ancient wolds
We’ve been bequeathed this land we trod
Where God is beauty, beauty God

A quiet movement has arisen among middle and working class White Americans who have for generations voted Democrat, but who have belatedly recognized that the Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, but is now the party of Marx, Engels and Hugo Chavez, and they want nothing to do with it. And so they are walking away, walking because they know now that the current Democratic Party does not love them as they once loved it, recognizing, again belatedly, that the Democrats want to flood the country with illegals from countries having nothing to do with the United States, culturally or historically or linguistically, and are importing these people by the millions who will take their jobs and ultimately take their country that they and their ancestors built. And so they are walking away, in small numbers so far, but the mood and the numbers are growing.

Abandoned, alone, they expect no amends
The party they loved now says let’s just be friends
With sadness and fright they see strangers alight
From the busses near flowered tombs
Of  forebears and parents and all they revered
And watched strangers take all the jobs as they feared
They took much in stride, they had faith they had pride
But they know an election looms
With sadness and anger they’d walk cross the floor
They’d pull the straight lever marked D never more
By party betrayed, the decision was made
Unrequited love leaves dead blooms

In anticipation of a leftist win in 2020, and a return to leftist normality, I have, by a series of clever ruses, come into possession of a top secret Pledge Of Allegiance to be issued by the newly elected Socialist Democrat administration, and which will require, under penalty of law, that every man, woman, child and other shall recite, aloud and with fervor, first thing in the morning, upon awakening, before doing anything else, no matter how bad you have to pee. Out of fear of retribution, I publish it here, in this obscure journal, for your horror and edification.

A PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

I pledge allegiance to the guys
And to the gals and otherwise
Of any gender who now rules
Because they went to better schools
Where sitting at professors’ knees
Were taught in order they may please
The great unwashed to live in ease
To eat free tater-tots and cheese
I pledge allegiance to our swell
New rulers who like dressing well
In royal purple flowing robes
That look so good with tainted probes
Where royal purple is the hue
Replacing the red, white and blue
I pledge support for fascist thugs
And agencies that plant with bugs
My phones and eavesdrop on my words
And tell me I’m as free as birds
I pledge support for feminists
Who want to put me on their lists
Of white men they will order dead
And offer them my lice-filled head
Support I do democracy
Despite the rank hypocrisy
That permeates the very air
That put me in your tender care
My attitude is quite blasé
Now that elections are passé
I will obey like good men should
And for you pray, as good men would
I know that pronouns do great hurt
And here and now I will assert
That should forgetfully I blurt
A pronoun whether mild or curt
I will confess to the police
That such infractions well must cease
And hie me to a penal farm
Where my sharp pronouns do no harm
I place my hand over my heart
And swear that I shall do my part
To celebrate my being free
But just right now I have to pee

s my support’s on solid ground
My pledge is honest and quite sound
I will obey like good men should
And for you pray, as good men would
I know that pronouns do great hurt
And here and now I will assert
That should forgetfully I blurt
A pronoun whether mild or curt
I will confess to the police
That such infractions well must cease
And hie me to a penal farm
Where my sharp pronouns do no harm
I place my hand over my heart
And swear that I shall do my part
To help my lords rule well and wise
And to not cause a rude surprise
To celebrate my being free
But just right now I have to pee

The Republican majority Senate Judiciary Committee has invited both Judge Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Ford, to an open hearing on September 24 to resolve the validity of her accusation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her 36 years ago when they were both teenagers. She has no contemporaneous police report and no contemporaneous record of medical treatment, and apparently never told anyone of the alleged incident until six years ago when she told her therapist without mentioning any names. She has admitted that she does not remember the year or the address of the house she says she was in, and late Tuesday Senator Diane Feinstein, who started this entire character assassination charade, issued a statement saying that Ms. Ford’s account might not be entirely truthful. We know the history of these very late character assassination tactics by the Democrats who know they have no other shot at defeating the Supreme Court nominee of a Republican president. They lie and smear to the delight of the lapdog press, who print and broadcast every lie and smear as if gospel truth. It worked with Robert Bork, tried and failed to smear Clarence Thomas, and they have trotted out the tactic again. Despite knowing it is all politics by the Democrats, the Republicans have invited her to a hearing where she can tell any story she wants to tell without fear of legal consequence and Judge Kavanaugh must attempt to prove a negative. It is not clear she will show up at the hearing, claiming earlier in the day that she would not appear until after an FBI investigation has been completed. What the Republicans have done is to give the Democrats two bites at the apple. Unable to defeat the nominee in the Judiciary Committee and unable to defeat him in a Senate floor vote, they are now to be given the opportunity to defeat the nominee by lies and smears, all designed to give cover to three Republican Senators – Flake, Collins and Murkowski, who may be disposed to vote no. And if it works two out of three times, there will never be another conservative Supreme Court nominee confirmed. The Republicans are not called the Stupid Party for nothing.

Lies and smears, smears and lies
This is how a country dies
All is power, power’s all
Care not if the country fall
Rule or bust, bust the rules
Get them early in the schools
Teachers lie and liars teach
A generation out of reach
Know history, history no
Just vote for us and all is go
It took us many many years
But in the end it’s lies and smears
We always win, and win all ways
They’re here again, those happy days

The astronomers and cosmologists have now assured us that they have solved the puzzle of the nature of the universe. We are told the universe is composed of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4.9% protons, neutrons and electrons, 0.1% neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, and 0.008% photons, a quite reassuring degree of exactitude. We are further informed that the galaxies are moving away from each other at a constantly accelerating pace to the point where galaxies now visible to us at the edge of our observable universe will disappear over a notional horizon in very short order, cosmologically speaking, to be replaced on the edge of our vision by the next grouping in line, which will in time also disappear from view, and so on, leaving us, eventually, all alone in a completely empty observable universe. We have all been raised in the notion of an expanding universe, but this latest seems to differ only in the notion that the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate, with most of the universe moving away from us, and we from them, at speeds greater than the speed of light. The claim is, because of the ever accelerating speed of expansion the universe is disappearing before our eyes, and there is nothing we can do about it. I confess I have some doubts about all of this, despite the learned opinions of my betters, knowing, as do we all, that until Mr. Hubble came upon a Cepheid variable on piece of film in 1925 it was taught in all university astronomy classes that the Milky Way was all there was.

Firstly, space, like time, is not a thing, it is a void, an emptiness, and therefore it is difficult for a layman such as myself, to think how something that is nothing can expand at all, let alone at warp speed. Nonetheless, I accept as an article of faith, that we live in an expanding universe. But still I wonder, redshift or no. We are told that our observable universe is a sphere with a radius of about 46 billion light years, but because of the speed with which the universe is expanding, we can only see out to about 15 billion light years, with everything beyond that distance moving at speeds greater than light, and therefore invisible to us. Our 46 billion light year radius sphere, we are assured, is just 3% of the universe as a whole. Interesting if true, but since the universe is not an island in a vast sea of nothingness, then the universe is all there is, and therefore is, by definition, infinite, and I for one am pleased to have the size of infinity so easily calculated. In short, consider me skeptical but willing to be convinced. How confident am I that the Earth will not be completely alone sometime in the next two or three hundred billion years or so, the moon, sun, planets and all the stars in the sky having been swept over the notional horizon by a fiercely accelerating emptiness, leaving us freezing in the dark? Confident enough that I’m not going to worry about it.

The universe is all we have
To see it disappearing
Beyond our ken and out of sight
Means end of time is nearing
A time of cleansing of our hearts
Repent of our addiction
To dreams of space-borne empire
And all that other fiction
For nothing in our view is real
It’s all imagination
A book of leaves strewn on the ground
With scattered pagination

In anticipation of a leftist win in 2020, and a return to leftist normality, I have, by a series of clever ruses, come into possession of a top secret Pledge Of Allegiance to be issued by the newly elected Socialist Democrat administration, and which will require, under penalty of law, that every man, woman, child and other shall recite, aloud and with fervor, first thing in the morning, upon awakening, before doing anything else, no matter how bad you have to pee. Out of fear of retribution, I publish it here, in this obscure journal, for your horror and edification.

A PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

I pledge allegiance to the guys
And to the gals and otherwise
Of any gender who now rules
Because they went to better schools
Where sitting at professors’ knees
Were taught in order they may please
The great unwashed to live in ease
To eat free tater-tots and cheese
I pledge allegiance to, as well
Our rulers who like dressing well
In royal purple flowing robes
That look so good with tainted probes
Where royal purple is the hue
Replacing the red, white and blue
I pledge support for fascist thugs
And agencies that plant with bugs
My phones and eavesdrop on my words
And tell me I’m as free as birds
I pledge support for feminists
Who want to put me on their lists
Of white men they will order dead
And offer them my lice-filled head
Support I do democracy
Despite the rank hypocrisy
That permeates the very air
That put me in your tender care
My attitude is quite blasé
Now that elections are passé
In anticipation of a leftist win in 2020, and a return to leftist normality, I have, by a series of clever ruses, come into possession of a top secret Pledge Of Allegiance to be issued by the newly elected Socialist Democrat administration, and which will require, under penalty of law, that every man, woman, child and other shall recite, aloud and with fervor, first thing in the morning, upon awakening, before doing anything else, no matter how bad you have to pee. Out of fear of retribution, I publish it here, in this obscure journal, for your horror and edification.

A PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

I pledge allegiance to the guys
And to the gals and otherwise
Of any gender who now rules
Because they went to better schools
Where sitting at professors’ knees
Were taught in order they may please
The great unwashed to live in ease
To eat free tater-tots and cheese
I pledge allegiance to, as well
Our rulers who like dressing well
In royal purple flowing robes
That look so good with tainted probes
Where royal purple is the hue
Replacing the red, white and blue
I pledge support for fascist thugs
And agencies that plant with bugs
My phones and eavesdrop on my words
And tell me I’m as free as birds
I pledge support for feminists
Who want to put me on their lists
Of white men they will order dead
And offer them my lice-filled head
Support I do democracy
Despite the rank hypocrisy
That permeates the very air
That put me in your tender care
My attitude is quite blasé
Now that elections are passé
I will obey like good men should
And for you pray, as good men would
I know that pronouns do great hurt
And here and now I will assert
That should forgetfully I blurt
A pronoun whether mild or curt
I will confess to the police
That such infractions well must cease
And hie me to a penal farm
Where my sharp pronouns do no harm
I place my hand over my heart
And swear that I shall do my part
To celebrate my being free
But just right now I have to pee

s my support’s on solid ground
My pledge is honest and quite sound
I will obey like good men should
And for you pray, as good men would
I know that pronouns do great hurt
And here and now I will assert
That should forgetfully I blurt
A pronoun whether mild or curt
I will confess to the police
That such infractions well must cease
And hie me to a penal farm
Where my sharp pronouns do no harm
I place my hand over my heart
And swear that I shall do my part
To help my lords rule well and wise
And to not cause a rude surprise
To celebrate my being free
But just right now I have to pee

The Republican majority Senate Judiciary Committee has invited both Judge Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Ford, to an open hearing on September 24 to resolve the validity of her accusation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her 36 years ago when they were both teenagers. She has no contemporaneous police report and no contemporaneous record of medical treatment, and apparently never told anyone of the alleged incident until six years ago when she told her therapist without mentioning any names. She has admitted that she does not remember the year or the address of the house she says she was in, and late Tuesday Senator Diane Feinstein, who started this entire character assassination charade, issued a statement saying that Ms. Ford’s account might not be entirely truthful. We know the history of these very late character assassination tactics by the Democrats who know they have no other shot at defeating the Supreme Court nominee of a Republican president. They lie and smear to the delight of the lapdog press, who print and broadcast every lie and smear as if gospel truth. It worked with Robert Bork, tried and failed to smear Clarence Thomas, and they have trotted out the tactic again. Despite knowing it is all politics by the Democrats, the Republicans have invited her to a hearing where she can tell any story she wants to tell without fear of legal consequence and Judge Kavanaugh must attempt to prove a negative. It is not clear she will show up at the hearing, claiming earlier in the day that she would not appear until after an FBI investigation has been completed. What the Republicans have done is to give the Democrats two bites at the apple. Unable to defeat the nominee in the Judiciary Committee and unable to defeat him in a Senate floor vote, they are now to be given the opportunity to defeat the nominee by lies and smears, all designed to give cover to three Republican Senators – Flake, Collins and Murkowski, who may be disposed to vote no. And if it works two out of three times, there will never be another conservative Supreme Court nominee confirmed. The Republicans are not called the Stupid Party for nothing.

Lies and smears, smears and lies
This is how a country dies
All is power, power’s all
Care not if the country fall
Rule or bust, bust the rules
Get them early in the schools
Teachers lie and liars teach
A generation out of reach
Know history, history no
Just vote for us and all is go
It took us many many years
But in the end it’s lies and smears
We always win, and win all ways
They’re here again, those happy days

The astronomers and cosmologists have now assured us that they have solved the puzzle of the nature of the universe. We are told the universe is composed of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4.9% protons, neutrons and electrons, 0.1% neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, and 0.008% photons, a quite reassuring degree of exactitude. We are further informed that the galaxies are moving away from each other at a constantly accelerating pace to the point where galaxies now visible to us at the edge of our observable universe will disappear over a notional horizon in very short order, cosmologically speaking, to be replaced on the edge of our vision by the next grouping in line, which will in time also disappear from view, and so on, leaving us, eventually, all alone in a completely empty observable universe. We have all been raised in the notion of an expanding universe, but this latest seems to differ only in the notion that the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate, with most of the universe moving away from us, and we from them, at speeds greater than the speed of light. The claim is, because of the ever accelerating speed of expansion the universe is disappearing before our eyes, and there is nothing we can do about it. I confess I have some doubts about all of this, despite the learned opinions of my betters, knowing, as do we all, that until Mr. Hubble came upon a Cepheid variable on piece of film in 1925 it was taught in all university astronomy classes that the Milky Way was all there was.

Firstly, space, like time, is not a thing, it is a void, an emptiness, and therefore it is difficult for a layman such as myself, to think how something that is nothing can expand at all, let alone at warp speed. Nonetheless, I accept as an article of faith, that we live in an expanding universe. But still I wonder, redshift or no. We are told that our observable universe is a sphere with a radius of about 46 billion light years, but because of the speed with which the universe is expanding, we can only see out to about 15 billion light years, with everything beyond that distance moving at speeds greater than light, and therefore invisible to us. Our 46 billion light year radius sphere, we are assured, is just 3% of the universe as a whole. Interesting if true, but since the universe is not an island in a vast sea of nothingness, then the universe is all there is, and therefore is, by definition, infinite, and I for one am pleased to have the size of infinity so easily calculated. In short, consider me skeptical but willing to be convinced. How confident am I that the Earth will not be completely alone sometime in the next two or three hundred billion years or so, the moon, sun, planets and all the stars in the sky having been swept over the notional horizon by a fiercely accelerating emptiness, leaving us freezing in the dark? Confident enough that I’m not going to worry about it.

The universe is all we have
To see it disappearing
Beyond our ken and out of sight
Means end of time is nearing
A time of cleansing of our hearts
Repent of our addiction
To dreams of space-borne empire
And all that other fiction
For nothing in our view is real
It’s all imagination
A book of leaves strewn on the ground
With scattered pagination

The astronomers and cosmologists have now assured us that they have solved the puzzle of the nature of the universe. We are told the universe is composed of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4.9% protons, neutrons and electrons, 0.1% neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, and 0.008% photons, a quite reassuring degree of exactitude. We are further informed that the galaxies are moving away from each other at a constantly accelerating pace to the point where galaxies now visible to us at the edge of our observable universe will disappear over a notional horizon in very short order, cosmologically speaking, to be replaced on the edge of our vision by the next grouping in line, which will in time also disappear from view, and so on, leaving us, eventually, all alone in a completely empty observable universe. We have all been raised in the notion of an expanding universe, but this latest seems to differ only in the notion that the universe is expanding at an ever accelerating rate, with most of the universe moving away from us, and we from them, at speeds greater than the speed of light. The claim is, because of the ever accelerating speed of expansion the universe is disappearing before our eyes, and there is nothing we can do about it. I confess I have some doubts about all of this, despite the learned opinions of my betters, knowing, as do we all, that until Mr. Hubble came upon a Cepheid variable on piece of film in 1925 it was taught in all university astronomy classes that the Milky Way was all there was.

Firstly, space, like time, is not a thing, it is a void, an emptiness, and therefore it is difficult for a layman such as myself, to think how something that is nothing can expand at all, let alone at warp speed. Nonetheless, I accept as an article of faith, that we live in an expanding universe. But still I wonder, redshift or no. We are told that our observable universe is a sphere with a radius of about 46 billion light years, but because of the speed with which the universe is expanding, we can only see out to about 15 billion light years, with everything beyond that distance moving at speeds greater than light, and therefore invisible to us. Our 46 billion light year radius sphere, we are assured, is just 3% of the universe as a whole. Interesting if true, but since the universe is not an island in a vast sea of nothingness, then the universe is all there is, and therefore is, by definition, infinite, and I for one am pleased to have the size of infinity so easily calculated. In short, consider me skeptical but willing to be convinced. How confident am I that the Earth will not be completely alone sometime in the next two or three hundred billion years or so, the moon, sun, planets and all the stars in the sky having been swept over the notional horizon by a fiercely accelerating emptiness, leaving us freezing in the dark? Confident enough that I’m not going to worry about it.

The universe is all we have
To see it disappearing
Beyond our ken and out of sight
Means end of time is nearing
A time of cleansing of our hearts
Repent of our addiction
To dreams of space-borne empire
And all that other fiction
For nothing in our view is real
It’s all imagination
A book of leaves strewn on the ground
With scattered pagination

I have been a Navy guy since my mommy bought me a sailor suit when I was five. Now I’m just another old fogey discontented with the present, but I wish the Navy still named its submarines after fish, its cruisers after cities, its carriers after battles or historic ships of fighting sail, and not as now, with carriers named after politicians and attack subs after cities. I’m okay with missile subs named after states, we have no more BBs and the boomers are now the capital ships, but there is something fitting about a sub named USS Silversides.

We’ll never see their kind again
USS Washington
She crept alone in fading light
To meet the IJN
She saw the Kirishima first
Off dark Iron Bottom Sound
And after a most bloody fight
The IJN had drowned
The Washington, but two years old
Gave better than she got
That blessed night off the ‘Canal
Deep in the jet black Slot
Meanwhile USS Silversides
Patrolled the western seas
Attacking tankers and Marus
Without an if you please
And so the Sculpin and the Tang
The Barb and other fish
The Japanese had wanted war
And so they got their wish
The Navy lives on history
Tradition is the glue
That holds a navy in its place
As proud and ready, true
The names of fighting sail, like Wasp
And Essex, Enterprise
Should still adorn our carriers
And not those DC guys