It’s Monday, August 28th, 2017…but before we begin, the WSJ records yet another reason Ray Mabus, Mike Mullen, Jim Stavridis and the rest of the seagoing sycophants who willingly, enthusiastically went along with Barack Obama’s evisceration of the U.S. Military in general…and the United States Navy in particular…should be keelhauled: 

Investigators Repeatedly Warned Navy Ahead of Deadly Collisions

Overworked sailors, shortened training schedules and budgets cuts have long been cited as problems

“Congressional investigators and military officials warned repeatedly about overworked sailors, shortened training schedules and budget cuts in the years leading up to two fatal collisions involving U.S. Navy ships, government auditors, lawmakers and Pentagon officials said.

The collisions in June and earlier this week, both Navy guided-missile destroyers operating in the Pacific, left 17 sailors dead or missing.

Three reports in the past two years by the Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog agency, spell out endemic problems. They found through interviews and Navy studies that U.S. sailors overseas often arrive to their assigned ships without adequate skills and experience. They end up on duty for an average of 108 hours a week, instead of the Navy-standard of 80 hours, the reports found…”

There are two aspects of this story the politically-correct Press will never report: first, since at any given time, 20% of the females deployed aboard ship, already as useful in a damage control scenario as the proverbial…

…are pregnant, this has required not only they be transported back to terra firma at great expense, but their shipboard billets be filled by male sailors enjoying well-deserved shore tours, thus increasing their family separation and the associated strain.

Second, perhaps had the watch sections of the Fitzgerald and McCain not been preoccupied with LGBT awareness, they’d have had more time to hone their navigation and other combat-related skills.  Just sayin’!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, also courtesy of the WSJ, Alan Liotta, former deputy director of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office from 1995-2004, offers Team Trump…

Three Lessons for Negotiating With North Korea

I’ve been to the country six times for talks. Sometimes the only words they hear are the strong ones.

When determining how to deal with North Korea, policy makers often debate the best method for predicting how the country’s leaders will act. But Americans who really want to understand North Koreans instead should study how the U.S. has conditioned North Korea to behave.

From 1996-2005, as the senior Defense Department negotiator, I made six trips to North Korea. We conducted numerous rounds of official talks to allow the first U.S. military teams into North Korea to recover service personnel missing since the cessation of hostilities in 1953. Those negotiations repeatedly stalled until we changed how the North Koreans approached the talks. We learned three critical lessons, all of which are relevant in this current state of uncertainty.

• The North Korean leadership rarely empowers negotiators to make a decision…

• Walking away from the table can provide a tactical advantage… 

• The U.S. should share its bottom line immediately—and never waver from that line…

…Although many are quick to criticize President Trump’s strong words to the North Korean leadership, it bears remembering that often the only words they hear are the strong ones. Using such language to define your endgame, and then steadfastly adhering to your bottom line, is a different negotiating style than they are used to. But as the personnel-recovery talks repeatedly showed, you can teach the North Koreans to moderate their behavior, to talk productively, and ultimately to meet you on your terms.“

While we understand and agree with Mr. Liotta’s points (U.S. “negotiations” to date with the NoKo’s being nothing short of appeasement!), we have a feeling working out the details of recovering the remains of MIAs will prove significantly easier than coercing Kim to surrender his nuclear weapons program.

Next up, courtesy of NRO, Jonah Goldberg details the perils of Progressivism’s ongoing effort to both reinterpret and rewrite history:

The Revenge of El Jabato

Progress depends on knowing where you’ve been.

“…My Friday column is about how the new wave of iconoclasm today isn’t really about iconoclasm, and it isn’t really new. Iconoclasm — the toppling or destroying of statues and images — is merely a symptom of our underlying civilizational illness.

…The fight over Confederate statues is an outlier in the larger trend of iconoclasm in part because there are good arguments on the side of taking at least some of these statues down. Many of the monuments — statues as well as street names — to the Confederacy were put up as an asinine rebuke to the Civil Rights Movement. More charitably, some saw them as a consolation prize in this, their final defeat, at the hands of Lincoln’s American Empire of Liberty. Robert E. Lee was a kind of El Jabato of the self-styled beautiful losers.

My own attitude toward those monuments is somewhere between agnostic and pragmatically against them. If this controversy were an isolated event, unconnected from the larger war on the past, I’d say get rid of them for the most part. If all they represent is an irritable mental gesture against the Civil Rights Acts, then who needs them? And if the past-eating langoliers of today could be satiated with a few busts of Nathan Bedford Forrest, I’d be happy to feed them.

But something else is going on. Many liberals love to mock “the War on Christmas” as so much talk-radio filler. And they often have a point. But many of these liberals are the first to argue that we need to replace Christmas with “Winter Break” or bore me to death with pseudo-sophisticated lectures about pagan solstices. As I mentioned in the column, “crusade” is now a triggering-word. So is “assimilation.” People take offense at saying, “America is the land of opportunity” or a “melting pot.” Yale and Silicon Valley think the word “master” is a hate crime, even when applied to liberal administrators and hard drives. I’ve been writing for years that America is suffering from a kind of autoimmune disorder where we’ve become allergic to our own civilization.

The fascinating part is that this disease — one I chronicle at book-length in my forthcoming book — is a product of the West, too, particularly in America. Our congenital distrust of authority and suspicion of history were born in the Enlightenment and it informs us all, progressives and conservatives alike. It is what makes America great and exceptional, but in too big of a dose, it becomes lethal. Letting go of the past is the great American curative for all manner of European social and political pathologies. But letting go is not the same thing as forgetting, and forgetting is not the same thing as hating. The progressive push to erase the past has gone from being a remedy for social resentment to a cause of social resentment. The cure has become iatrogenic (iatrogenic ailments are conditions caused by the effort to cure other maladies).

When I listen to modern-day know-nothings of the Left and the “Right” curse modernity and capitalism, while hearkening back to some pre-Columbian Shangri-La that never was; or when ridiculous alt-righters prattle on about their Teutonic heritage and Viking vigor, you know what I see: a kind of Numantian cult.

They want to order off the Chinese menu of modernity, picking and choosing the dishes they like, while at the same time cursing the cuisine and the culture that created it. It’s like Hollywood lefties who crap on America, the only society in the world that could have ever made them incredibly wealthy for making movies about fart jokes. The universities infested by entitled little Jacobins are Western institutions, but every day the rabble take sledgehammers to the soapboxes they stand on. They take for granted their rights and privileges that derive entirely from the tradition they denounce. They think they are heroes in the real world, never realizing they are playing a game only made possible by the tradition they ignorantly claim to hate. And if they took the goals of the game and successfully applied them to the real world, they’d be the first to whine about how backward, unfair, and hard the world they created was.

They have no real tradition to draw upon save the one they claim is oppressive and cruel. They literally speak its language, use its laws, and benefit from its institutions, while claiming to be part of something more authentic.

We need the past like drivers need rearview mirrors. Get rid of the mirrors and, eventually, something terrible will happen. Similarly, if you concentrate on them too much, you’re sure to crash as well. Progress depends on knowing where you’ve been.“

And since The Left doesn’t know its elbow from its backside, their misnomered moniker notwithstanding, progress for Progressives is as likely as a one-legged man winning an a*s-kicking contest!

Submitted for your perusal, the evolution of free speech standards…according to the standard-bearer of modern Liberal lunacy:

Since we’re on the subject of political correctness run utterly amok, courtesy of Townhall.com, Todd Starnes records Liberalism’s latest low:

First Grader Sent to Office, Investigated, for “Pronoun Mishap”

“A first grader at a California charter school was sent to the principal’s office this week after she accidentally “mis-gendered” a transgender classmate in what’s being called a “pronoun mishap.”

The incident occurred at Rocklin Academy, a school rocked by controversy after a kindergarten teacher led an in-class discussion on transgenderism that included a “gender reveal” for a little boy who was transitioning to a little girl. For kindergartners. Parents were furious because they were not informed in advance and were not given the chance to opt-out their five-year-old’s from the classroom transgender activity. However, school leaders informed moms and dads – they were not allowed to opt-out – and the state did not require them to notify parents.

The latest incident occurred during the first week of school when a first grader came across a classmate on the playground. She called the student by his given name – apparently unaware that the boy now identified as a girl. “This innocent little first grader sees a classmate, calls him by the name she knew him last year and the boy reports it to a teacher,” Capitol Resource Institute’s Karen England told me. “The little girl gets in trouble on the playground and then gets called out of class to the principal’s office.”

…I reached out to Rocklin Academy numerous times, but they did not return my calls.

England said the first grader was investigated by the principal to determine whether or not she had bullied the transgender child by calling him by his original name. After about an hour it was determined the little girl made an honest mistake and she was not punished or reprimanded.

But she was terribly traumatized by the incident, England said. “The daughter came home from school upset and crying – saying, ‘Mommy, I got in trouble at school today,’” England told me.

The little girl’s mother, who asked not to be identified, immediately contacted the school to find out what had happened. “She was told that whenever there is a pronoun mishap with this biological boy who now claims to be a girl – the school must investigate,” England said…”

This would normally render us speechless…if we weren’t already aware of another, even more egregious act of PC appeasement brought to us by Matt Vespa, also writing at Townhall.com:

Too Alienating: Catholic School Removes Statues Of The Virgin Mary And Jesus

“So, statue hysteria is far from over. I mentioned how this has progressed in some areas of the country. Of course, the Confederates are in the crosshairs. Then, the Founding Fathers were said to be at risk of being put on the chopping block. Now, Catholic saints are on the target list. It doesn’t stop there.  A Catholic school in California has removed statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ because it could be alienating and they so they can be more inclusive (via Fox News):

A California Catholic school is facing a backlash from parents after officials took down some religious statues — including one of Mary and baby Jesus — over concerns that they were “alienating” prospective students.

The head of the San Domenico School in San Anselmo said parents of some prospective students who visited the campus – which was founded in 1850 and serves 671 students grades K-12 — expressed concern about the religious figures, according to the Marin Independent Journal.

“If you walk on the campus and the first thing you confront is three or four statues of St. Dominic or St. Francis, it could be alienating for that other religion, and we didn’t want to further that feeling,” Amy Skewes-Cox, who chairs the school’s board of trustees.

Cecily Stock, who is head of the school, said most students are not Catholic…“

Which begs the question why said people would ever think of sending their children to a Catholic school in the first place…not to mention why a “Catholic school” would sacrifice their Christian principles for anyone not willing for their children to experience a Catholic-based education?!?

As Alice observed after entering Wonderland…

If such insanity continues unchecked, here’s a glimpse of…

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…

Then there’s this compendium of pointed satire courtesy of TerrellAfterMath.com:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with News of the Bizarre, and this just in from Pacific Northwest:

305K salmon escape into waters near Washington islands, unusual solar eclipse tides blamed

“As many as 305,000 Atlantic salmon have been accidentally released into the waters near the San Juan Islands in Washington State, and officials are asking anyone with a valid fishing license to help reel the escapees back in. The breakout happened Saturday when a net imploded at the Cooke Aquaculture net pen operated off Cypress Island. Thousands of 10-pound salmon fled from the containment out into open water.

In a report from The Seattle Times, tribal fishers are calling the accident “a devastation,” and are concerned about the negative impact this could have on native salmon populations. Many fishers in the area have concerns about the Atlantic salmon preying on the native Pacific salmon babies.

A member of the Lummi Natural Resources staff and fish commission, G.I. James, told The Seattle Times, “It is potentially a disease issue, and impact on our fish, as dire a shape as they are in, right now any impact to them is difficult to absorb.” James is concerned about the wild Pacific salmon as they face enough trouble already without the addition of Atlantic salmon invading their home waters.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is just as concerned for the fish population and is urging people to catch as many of the Atlantic salmon as they can, with no size or number limit. “Catch as many as you want,” Ron Warren, the fish program assistant director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, has stated…”

First, precisely how “unusual solar eclipse tides” caused a net to “implode” is beyond us.

Second, as our good friend The Boss so eloquently observed, were the Fish and Wildlife folks forced to follow Progressive illegal immigration policies, they wouldn’t be allowed to even try to catch the alien fish.  

Magoo