This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Rudolph Johnson comes home

    Rudolph Johnson comes home

    We get the news today that Private Rudolph Johnson, a member of Company K, 3rd Battalion, 365th Infantry Regiment, 92nd Infantry Division who was killed in Italy on February 1, 1945, has come home to Arkansas. Hondo told us that his earthly remains had been identified in August.

    The Texarkana Gazette tells us that he will be buried on Friday at Arkansas State Veteran’s Cemetery, Little Rock, Ark after a memorial ceremony on Thursday.

    Hicks Funeral Home tells the story of his life and of his service in the all-African-American 92nd Infantry Division.

    Private Johnson’s unit initially reported him Missing in Action (MIA) on 6 February 1945. With no additional information regarding his whereabouts, the U.S. Army changed his status for MIA to Killed in Action (KIA) on 21 February 1945. Private Rudolph Johnson gave his life for his country at the age of 19.

    He has two brothers and three sisters to welcome him home.

  • Salcido canned

    Salcido canned

    Gregory Salcido, the teacher at El Rancho Unified School District in Pico Rivera, California who expressed some pretty vile opinions about folks in the military has been canned by the local school board, according to Board of Education President Aurora Villon as reported by Fox News;

    “His comments do not reflect what we stand for, who we are,” Villon said, adding that “the classroom should never be a place where students feel that they are picked at, bullied, intimidated.”

    Salcido faced a severe backlash after a student secretly recorded him asking his government class why they would want to serve in the military, calling those who serve “dumbs???s.”

    “Think about the people who you know who are over there. Your freaking stupid Uncle Louie or whatever. They’re dumbs???s,” Salcido can be heard saying in the Jan. 25 tirade.

    “They’re not like high-level thinkers, they’re not academic people, they’re not intellectual people. They’re the lowest of our low.”

    Well, obviously, Salcido isn’t a “high-level thinker” otherwise he would have kept his opinions to himself. He was trying to bully a group of boys to avoid military service.

    Salcido is still a member of the city council, where his apology doubled down on the dumb;

    “I don’t think it’s all a revelation to anybody that those who aren’t stellar students usually find the military a better option. … That’s not a criticism of anybody. Anything I said had nothing to do with their moral character,” he said, the paper reported.

    During a break, he told reporters that he believes the military is the not the “best option” for his students, but added “that does not mean I’m anti-military, because I’m not.”

    Yeah, he’s not anti-military, he’s just anti-soldier. Stank-ass hippie.

  • Austin bomber dead

    Austin bomber dead

    We wake up to lots of good news this morning. First off, the fellow believed to be the Austin, Texas bomber pulled the trigger on himself, according to Fox News;

    The suspect, identified by police early Wednesday as a 24-year old male, was killed near the motel he was traced to by authorities using surveillance footage from a Federal Express drop-off store and cell phone triangulation technology, according to The Austin American-Statesman.

    The man died after fleeing the motel in a car, with police hot on his tail. He drove into a ditch, sparking the fatal confrontation.

    “We wanted this to come to a peaceful resolution tonight,” said Austin Police Chief Brian Manley. “However, we were not afforded that opportunity when he started to drive away.”

    Police said the man detonated two package bombs as police closed in, firing at him. It was not immediately clear whether he died from the bombs or shots fired by police. One officer was knocked back by the blasts, but none were seriously hurt.

    Manley said police had zeroed in on a “person of interest” over the last 24-36 hours, tracing him to the motel in Round Rock, where the spotted his vehicle.

    The bomber had managed to kill two men and injure four others in his ten day rampage in the Austin area. When police told the public that those packages hadn’t been mailed to the victims using normal package delivery carriers, he tried to shift his method of operation and send his bombs through FedEx. One detonated in a FedEx facility yesterday injuring an employee, and another was discovered and dismantled. Police were able to trace the bombs back to the point of origin and identified the bomber in security videos – and that led to the motel in Round Rock.

    Meanwhile, someone else deposited an artillery simulator in a Goodwill Dropbox in Austin which detonated and injured a Goodwill employee. It probably wasn’t related to the bomber. From the Austin Statesman;

    An employee of the Goodwill at 9801 Brodie Lane found an artillery simulator – a device meant to simulate the deafening “bang” noise of an explosion for the purposes of military training – in a box of donated items and it detonated in his hand, Austin police Assistant Chief Ely Reyes said. The victim, a man in his 30s, was treated at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center and released within a couple of hours, according to a hospital spokesperson.

    It’s not clear whether the donation of the simulator was malicious, but Reyes noted that it is common for military-style mementos to find their way to donation sites if family members find them and don’t know what they are.

    “We have no reason to believe this is an attempt at a copycat,” Reyes said.

    Though not a bomb, the incident added another layer of fear to the jitters of a city that has seen four bombs explode this month, killing two people, a fifth that exploded at a FedEx in Schertz early Tuesday, and a sixth discovered and detonated safely at a FedEx ground facility in Southeast Austin Tuesday morning.

    As far as I know, no one has made a statement that they know the motivations of any of the bombers.

  • Wednesday morning feel good stories

    Wednesday morning feel good stories

    From Travelers Rest, South Carolina;

    Deputies responded to a home in the 200 block of Blue Ridge Drive near Shelton Road around 10 p.m. last night for a report of a shooting.

    After an initial investigation, deputies allege that 30-year-old James Michael Smith, Jr. tried to enter the home through a window and was shot at least once after being verbally warned by the homeowner.

    Smith was transported to Greenville Memorial Hospital. His condition is unknown.

    From Scott County, Kentucky;

    One person has died in an officer-involved shooting in Georgetown.

    Police say it began with a home invasion about 12:30 a.m. Tuesday morning on Echo Path.

    We’re told a man broke into the home, armed with two guns.

    Officers responded to the scene and the man raised his arm toward them. That’s when an officer opened fire.

    From Helena, Arkansas;

    Helena-West Helena Police Chief Patrick Smith said three men forced their way into a home in the 1100 block of Walnut Street about 8:30 p.m. A female resident had refused to let them in, Smith said.

    Police said weapons were fired among the intruders, with shots hitting two of them: 22-year-old Darrin Heath and 19-year-old Oshea Henderson. It was not clear who fired the shots hitting the two men.

    Heath suffered fatal injuries. Henderson was transported to Helena Regional Medical Center, then to Regional One Medical Center in Memphis, Smith said. He was said to be serious condition on Monday afternoon.

    The third man involved, 21-year-old Anthony Gilmore, is in custody on an aggravated residential burglary charge, Smith said.

    In Phoenix, Arizona;

    Police said a homeowner confronted and shot an armed man who refused to leave his house in west Phoenix.

    It happened near 59th Avenue and Thomas Road just before 7 p.m. on Monday.

    Police said the homeowner confronted the suspect at his front door and the armed man was shot.

    The man was taken to the hospital where he should survive, police said.

    Officers said the man was armed with a machete and another type of knife.

    From San Angelo, Texas;

    Police have identified the 26-year-old man who allegedly intruded and was shot and killed Monday by a resident of a San Angelo apartment complex.

    Killed was Jaime Mendoza, San Angelo police said in a news release Tuesday.

    The attempted burglary allegedly occurred at a residence in the Village Apartments (200 block of South Fillmore Street).

    Police, upon arrival, found Mendoza dead.

  • Family turns in teen with guns and bombs

    In Paw Paw, Michigan, police arrested a teenager who they suspect had planned an attack on his school, according to WNDU. His parents alerted police to the cache of explosives and weapons that he had amassed;

    A 15-year-old student was arrested Sunday.

    During a search of the suspect’s home, police say they found Molotov cocktails, guns and materials to make pipe bombs.

    “Our investigators are 100% confident it was going to take place [Monday],” Van Buren County Sheriff Daniel Abbott said. “People were going to get shot, homemade bombs were going to be going off, this was going to be seen on the national news that’s how prepared this kid was.”

    “I’ve been here over 25 years, and this is the first very credible, terroristic act that was going to take place,” Abbott said.

    Well, it isn’t “terroristic” because there probably isn’t a political component to the student’s motivations, but I get what he means.

    The sheriff continued;

    “If it wasn’t for the family aiding us with a lot of this stuff, we probably wouldn’t be where we’re at today,” Abbott said. “This is just a prime example of where flags went up, people spoke up, and by doing so, a tragic incident did not take place.”

    A community that works together, not a village that raises a child.

  • Robert Cascella; phony SEAL

    We talked about Robert Cascella a few weeks ago, when he got into a barricaded stand off with local SWAT members in Churchill, Pennsylvania. For some reason, one of his neighbors thought that Cascella was a Navy SEAL and a combat veteran.

    The sound of gunfire was in the air as SWAT officers tried to get Cascella to surrender.

    “He is a Navy SEAL war veteran. They said he had high-powered weapons in his home,” said neighbor Tami Warfield.

    SWAT formed a perimeter around the house, and multiple police agencies were on scene trying to get Cascella to come outside.

    He was eventually shot twice in his torso and hauled off to jail. Other articles say that he was a Navy veteran and not that he’s a SEAL. That is a little more accurate – he spent less than seven months in the Navy in 1988 – 1989 as an Aviation Structural Mechanic, he went home from his “A” School after clawing his way to an E-1.

    Not a SEAL, barely a sailor. No combat except maybe in a Tennessee bar.

  • David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez on CBS

    David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez on CBS

    According to CBS News, David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez are “survivors” of the Parkland shooting. I suppose that’s true, in that they were in school when some clown broke about a hundred laws in order to shoot other people who are not Hogg or Gonzalez. They also survived the Iraq War if you use their measure of the term.

    Both Hogg and Gonzalez, who refer to themselves as members of the “mass shooting generation,” say they’ve received death threats in response to their efforts in launching the movement. But they aren’t letting threats deter them from making progress.

    “There’s always been people who are going to want to harm us,” Gonzalez said. “I’m not going to pretend that this like opened my eyes to a cruel and harmful world … When it comes right down to it, we already knew that this world was going to be tough. So getting death threats like that doesn’t really faze us.”

    Asked about the NRA’s response to their movement, Hogg responded: “I think it just goes to prove what exactly they are. I don’t think NRA members are bad people at all. I think they’re responsible gun owners that want to become politically active and make their voices heard in this democracy, and I think that’s an excellent thing.

    There are laws against making threats to people, so I’ll believe there were death threats when I see some arrests. How many times have we been told that we made death threats to people, but it turns out to be nothing but a ploy for sympathy. There was the time I got a restraining order because I knocked on someone’s door in Oregon and ran away, on a date that I was in the White House. I’ll just figure that Hogg and Gonzalez are lying until they get the courts involved.

    One thing about these two children that I’ve noticed. Gonzalez is always wiping tears from her eyes, but there are never any tears. I think we call them crocodile tears.

    I think Hogg is going to end up being a school shooter, because I can imagine Shannon Watts convincing him that act would benefit the Gun Grabbers. He just has that Charles Whitman/Lee Harvey Oswald look about him, you know, without the Marine Corps training.

    “I think the problem comes in when it’s people at the top of this organization that don’t listen to their constituents and continue to scare people into buying more guns, creating more violence, so they can scare more people and sell more guns,” he continued. “The people at the top of the NRA are no longer working for the people that are in their organization. They’re working on behalf of the gun lobby.”

    The NRA has never influenced me to buy a weapon – it’s always the people who are trying to take my guns from me that influences me to buy more guns. People like Bloomberg, Watts, Hogg and Gonzalez. I wouldn’t own half the guns I own if people would stop clutching at pearls over them.

  • School shooter foiled by resource officer in Maryland

    According to Fox News, there was a school shooting in Saint Mary’s County, Maryland. Three injured people were taken to a nearby hospital. One of the casualties is the shooter – there are no reported deaths in the incident [Editor Update; the shooter has died];

    The Associated Press reported one of the three people injured is the shooter. The shooter’s identity was not immediately available. ABC 7 reported a school resource officer jumped into action to bring the situation to an end.

    The school was placed on lockdown and students were being evacuated to Leonardtown High School to be reunified with their parents.

    From WJLA;

    ABC7’s Brad Bell said sources tell him the shooter was a student and is one of the three injured. Bell says a school resource officer took action to end the threat and authorities confirmed the incident has been contained.

    Who knew that a good guy with a gun could end a school shooting?