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

Author: Ex-PH2

  • A Very Special Feel Good Story

    This was forwarded by Skippy. As a “feel good story”, I thought it deserved its own space.

    Before you go any further, put down whatever beverages you are indulging in, get some kleenex to wipe the tears from your eyes. and if you easily become short of breath, be warned: this is not for the faint of heart to read.

    —————-XX——————–

    A Las Vegas sociology professor is facing felony gun charges after he reportedly shot himself in the arm in protest of President Trump.

    The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on Tuesday that College of Southern Nevada sociology professor emeritus Mark J. Bird, age 63, was charged with the unlawful discharge of a firearm, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit and the possession a deadly weapon on school property for his role in an on-campus shooting last month.

    In the bathroom after Bird had exited, campus police said they found a $100 bill that had been taped to a mirror in addition to a note reading: “For the janitor.” Campus police also reported finding a .22-caliber pistol on the bathroom floor and a spent shell casing.

    There is a preliminary hearing for Bird scheduled in the Las Vegas Justice Court on Sept. 17.

    The college’s lack of transparency seems to be bothering the president of the college’s faculty union. Well, I’d let it go. The professor is apparently distressed about Trump.

    It’s a shame that while he was in the bathroom with a gun, he didn’t neuter himself.

     

  • 38 Simulated Combat Drops?? Yeah, We’re Dead!

    I love the first two movies in this bunch. “Alien” was a spook show, with more McGuffins than Hitchcock ever dreamed of. If you had a date with you, I’m sure that afterwards, you had some kind of reward for your effort.

    The second one, simply titled ‘Aliens’ put poor old Ripley right back into her worst nightmare in the company of Colonial Marines led by a greenhorn 2nd Lieutenant who had a record of 38 simulated combat drops (whoopee!), and a crusty, grumpy, sarcastic, cigar-chomping Sergeant Apone who would start his day with a cigar before breakfast. He was  played by Al Matthews, who had 13 years of Marine Corps AD life, a good portion of it in Vietnam. Now, he’s a musician and composer.

    https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/marine-infantry-life-aliens

    I’m just going to leave this here and let you Marines tell me if you think the assessment of the movie’s Colonial Marines is close to the mark.

    Do the Marines always get the junk the Army doesn’t want or like?

    Is there only one whiny private in a unit?

    Is every 2nd Lieutenant an idiot with a poker up his backside until he’s been shot at a bunch of times?

    Are all boot Hershey Bar Lieutenants so dumb they’d get lost in a shoebox, even with a map, a compass, and a flashlight?

    Are the pranks as harmless as the one in the movie?

    Do the Marines get the MREs that nobody else wants? That mealtime scene, where Drake asks ‘What is this?” referring to the yellow block on his tray, and Hicks, “It’s supposed to be cornbread. It’s good for you. Eat it.” I figure a full carton of MREs with fish that no one will eat would be an Army reject.

    Anything you want to add to that is fine by me.  There’s other stuff, too, but those are a start.

    If you haven’t seen those two movies, I have to ask “What planet are you from?”

     

  • Why Am I Not Surprised?

    Defensive gun use (DGU) happens more regularly in the United States than gun crimes, according to data the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) never publicized.    http://dailycaller.com/2018/04/22/guns-save-lives-cdc-never-publicized/ 

    Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck has been arguing that point for a quarter of a century, saying that his own research led him to believe that DGU was far more prevalent than gun-control advocates claim.

    The CDC’s data, collected a few years after Kleck’s survey, appears to corroborate his findings, Reason.com reported. The question asked in the CDC survey addressed the use or threatened use of a firearm to deter a crime. “During the last 12 months, have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?”

    Kleck, upon reviewing the CDC’s data, noted just how close it came to mirroring his own.

    The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)….CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.

    Many gun control advocates have complained about the fact that the CDC is limited with regard to research on gun violence. A 1996 amendment to a spending bill bars the organization from using congressionally allocated funds to “advocate or promote gun control.”

    What those fighting for stronger gun-control generally leave out is the fact that the CDC is not barred from doing any research on gun violence — and the research it has done in the last two decades has largely corroborated Kleck’s findings.

  • Feel Good Stories

    From Baltimore, MD, where guns aren’t allowed:

    https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Off-Duty-Baltimore-Officer-Shot-at-Man-Who-Stole-His-Guns-in-Shopping-Center-492904951.html

    Baltimore police officer shot at a man at a shopping center in District Heights, Maryland, after he saw the man breaking into his truck and stealing a bag full of guns, police say.

    Prince George’s County police believe the man followed the officer after they both went to a gun range in Upper Marlboro.

    The officer, whose name was not released, went to the gun range on Friday. Police believe the man also was there and followed him.

    From Los Angeles, CA, where guns aren’t allowed:

    https://www.breitbart.com/california/2018/09/11/watch-suspect-shoots-officer-gets-killed/

    Dashcam video from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) cruiser shows a suspect shoot and wound a female officer at point blank range before being shot and killed by her partner.

    The Los Angeles Times reports that the suspect in the video, 32-year-old Richard Mendoza, was a gang member. After being asked to exit his vehicle Mendoza can be seen “[pulling]  a .380-caliber handgun from his side and [shooting] the female officer who is standing just inches away.”

    She falls to the ground as her partner shoots Mendoza from the passenger’s side.

    As the female officer lies on the ground, screaming with a gunshot wound to the leg, her partner comes around the car and shoots Mendoza one more time.

    N.B.: There’s a video at the link.  : -)

    And finally, from Palm Beach, FL:

    https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/09/11/suspect-steal-car-5-year-old-back-seat-gets-shot-dead-childs-father/

    The Palm Beach Post reports that the sheriff announced the father will face no charges for shooting the suspect, identified as 22-year-old Terrence Wilson Jr.

    The father left his daughter in the car while he went into a barbershop to get his 12-year-old son. Upon coming out he spotted Wilson get in the car and try to drive away. The father drew his gun, ordered Wilson to stop, then opened fire.

    There’s a second story at the bottom of that page.

  • Nikki Haley Responds to Anonymous’s Op-ed

    Nikki Haley, whom we all know as an outspoken representative of the United States at the UN, one who neither minces words nor speaks in unclear euphemisms, has written a response to the op-ed piece penned by ‘Anonymous’ earlier this week for the New York Times.

    Nikki Haley is the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

    We have enough issues to deal with in the world, so it’s unfortunate to have to take time to write this, but I feel compelled to address the claims in the anonymous “resistance” op-ed published this week in the New York Times. The author might think he or she is doing a service to the country. I strongly disagree. What this “senior official in the Trump administration” has done, and is apparently intent on continuing to do, is a serious disservice — not just to the president but to the country.

    I, too, am a senior Trump administration official. I proudly serve in this administration, and I enthusiastically support most of its decisions and the direction it is taking the country. But I don’t agree with the president on everything. When there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. I pick up the phone and call him or meet with him in person.

    Like my colleagues in the Cabinet and on the National Security Council, I have very open access to the president. He does not shut out his advisers, and he does not demand that everyone agree with him. I can talk to him most any time, and I frequently do. If I disagree with something and believe it is important enough to raise with the president, I do it. And he listens. Sometimes he changes course, sometimes he doesn’t. That’s the way the system should work. And the American people should be comfortable knowing that’s the way the system does work in this administration.

    [These officials have denied writing the Trump ‘resistance’ op-ed]

    Dissent is as American as apple pie. If you don’t like this president, you are free to say so, and people do that quite frequently and loudly. But in the spirit of civility that the anonymous author claims to support, every American should want to see this administration succeed. If it does, it’s a win for the American people.

    The entire article is here:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-i-challenge-the-president-i-do-it-directly-my-anonymous-colleague-should-have-too/2018/09/07/d453eaf6-b2ae-11e8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html?utm_term=.0220af6593c3

    The final paragraph is as direct as one can get:

    To Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, I say: Step up and help the administration do great things for the country. If you disagree with some policies, make your case directly to the president. If that doesn’t work, and you are truly bothered by the direction of the administration, then resign on principle. There is no shame in that. But do not stay in your position and secretly undermine the president and the rest of our team. It is cowardly, it is anti-democratic, and it is a disservice to our country.

    ——Finis——

    I will add here that I continue to believe the so-called op-ed to be concocted by someone at the New York Times, based on the coincidental timing of its release following the review of Woodward’s non-fiction novel inaptly titled “Fear”.  I believe, and will stand by my belief, that these are simply attempts to cast aspersions on a U.S. President who has succeeded at bringing this country back to its status as an international leader, rather than let it continue to slide into oblivion.

    If, as Ms. Haley indicates may be, it is an Administration official, then s/he should have enough cojones to step up and say “I did that.”  Otherwise, I will continue to believe this is just another of the nonsensical schoolyard tricks by those whose disappointment at losing the 2016 election is painfully obvious.

    I may not agree with what “Anonymous” says but I will certainly defend to his right to say it. (Rev. version of Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s aphorism in her 1960 biography of Voltaire.) It is past time s/he stepped forward.

     

  • Nike and the NFL ‘Just blew it….’

    From the pen of Poetrooper, another fine essay:

    I’ve been a Dallas Cowboys fan for a half-century, even when my career took me long distances from Texas.  All that long time, I’ve stuck with them through good and bad, through the glory years of multiple Super Bowl victories and the long, disappointing drought since.  Living in New Orleans and the Redneck Riviera of the Florida Panhandle for many years, I also became, and still am, a fan of the New Orleans Saints.

    Like most NFL fans, my support for both teams has been mostly through television-viewing, with an occasional live game attendance.   Nevertheless, for more than five decades, I have been that dedicated viewer so counted on by the NFL and its advertisers, sitting there for hours on Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays, whenever, if either the Cowboys or Saints were playing, soaking up their commercials and even, on occasion, buying their advertised products.

    Being now an old man in frail health, I have been reluctant to join the boycott of the NFL over the flag protests because watching football is one of the few pleasures remaining to me.  Not being a baseball or basketball fan, I live for football season, both collegiate and professional.  The problem is that as a Vietnam combat veteran, I can no longer watch NFL games without a sense of guilt.  I am not totally unsympathetic to the complaint of blacks that the justice system is not racially blind.  Having lived in the Deep South for more than a decade, I have witnessed firsthand a dual system of justice that favors those with the means to pay their way out with fines, while those without those means go to jail.  That said, I do not agree in the least with a sports entertainment venue such as the NFL being exploited by wealthy players as a legitimate setting for social protest.

    So my unresolved feelings of guilt were there throughout the season-opening games this week, and they blossomed into a sense of indignation when both the NFL and Nike chose to rub my nose in the issue by running commercials featuring Saint Colin Kaepernick, with his hirsute halo, the instigator of all this heightened racial and social dissension, piously telling me, a veteran of ground combat before he was even born, about moral courage.

    I simply could not believe that the NFL was so clueless.  Here they had been fairly successful in quelling the demonstrations by black players, of tamping down the outrage of patriotic NFL viewers, and now they chose to give a big middle finger to those millions of fans and slap them and me across the face with that scorning glove of social justice, as if challenging us to a mortal duel.  Airing that provocative commercial during these games was stunning in both its arrogance and its total tone-deafness.  Clearly NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is both contemptuous and ignorant of his fan base, a fact underscored by the substantial decline in television viewers for the NFL opening games this year.

    You can take it to the bank, Roger: your viewing numbers are going to decline even more rapidly if you insist on airing that insulting, confrontational commercial during games.  You may think you can project a super-fro’ed, haloed Kaepernick into our homes to lecture us on courage, Roger, but you forget that we hold those tens of millions of all too readily clickable TV controls upon which your advertising revenues depend.  As for being sympathetic to your multi-millionaire athlete who claims to have sacrificed all for the cause of social justice, there are millions of Americans who reserve their compassion and respect for those who have truly sacrificed all.  As Daniel John Sobieski recently and poignantly summed up that attitude in an essay at American Thinker: “[t]hose who would take a knee to protest the American flag likely have never been handed a folded one.”

    I would wager that that includes you, Commissioner, and the tone-deaf execs at Nike who “Just blew it.”

  • No, Trump is Not Going Away

    Any of that talk of impeachment still wandering through the hallowed halls of the Congress?

    The author of the National Review article gives us good, hard, solid reasons for the unlikely possibility that Trump will face impeachment charges, despite the howling in the outer darkness, and why such a move would be distinctly unwise. I think he spares no one, including Trump, for faults that are public knowledge,

    For example, this paragraph makes Trump’s popularity clear:  “Had Trump misled his base and not fulfilled his campaign promises, he would have little popular support. Had he tanked the economy and started a war, he would be polling in the 20s rather than the mid to lower 40s.“

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/donald-trump-impeachment-unlikely-unwise/

    I’ve said this before, as have others, including the author of the article:  “The startling fact is that a so-called buffoonish real-estate developer hit upon a calculus to restore robust economic growth in a way that all the degreed experts of the prior (Obama) administration had not.”

    Yesterday, I referred to the sluggish return of the markets under Obama’s administration as an anemic 1404.84 average per year over a period of eight years. I also said that once the 2016 election results were announced and confirmed, the markets rose rapidly from a DJIA 18,847.63 on 11/7/2016, to an all-time high of 26,616,71 on 1/22/2018, a difference of 7,769.11 points in about 14 months. That is not a fluke. The markets reflect the economy and both continue to stabilize and improve under Trump. The so-called blue collar sector views Trump as a positive response to what had become an economy that was, at best, sluggish and weak under bodaprez.

    The DJIA reached another high 26,124.57 on 8/29/18 and maintains a steady growth rate. There may be a ceiling to the markets, but it has not been speculated on thus far.

    Politifact tried to claim that Obama had the better record by comparing those eight years of his slacker, self-involved governance to Trump’s 22 months. This is a false comparison and does not work. You cannot legitimately compare 22 months in office with 8 years, and expect any reaction other than laughter at this attitude. And furthermore, employment opportunities during Obama’s administration were sluggish at best, nearly nonexistent at their worst. Under Trump, employment has picked up graphically, as the author indicates. Unemployment is at an anemic low now of 3.9% since April and may go lower. During the Obama administration, it was as high as 10% in 2009, a level that stirred mutterings of another Great Depression.  The chart to refer to is at this link: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

    I have to add here that Franklin Roosevelt started the government sponsored work programs CCC, WPA, and PWA, as a response to the demands of the War Bond veterans who were desperate for money. He put them to work at a time when people needed jobs more than anything else. The CCC workers at the people who put the national parks into place. You can thank them for Yellowstone, Yosemite, and various other national parks that might be housing developments now.

    The National Review article is worth your time and full attention. The author includes the Never Trumpers, who were ostensibly conservatives who didn’t like Trump, although I view them not as conservatives but as Mugwumps (look that up) who would approve of Gerrymandering if it suited their needs.

  • Nice idea, Woodrow, but….

    The UN was supposed to be a place where nations could settle their differences in a peaceful way. Unless I misunderstood the idea behind it, the UN was not meant to be a place of appeasement, which is what it has turned out to be.

    Except for the post-9/11/01 resolution mentioned below, nothing has been done to contain or even acknowledge terrorism by that organization. NATO has been a more useful alliance. Perhaps it’s time Woodrow Wilson’s bright idea, which was originally the League of Nations, was given its walking papers and disbanded. There is no real evidence that it has done anything other than cost the more affluent countries like the USA and USSR/Russia and China funding that could have gone into other things.

    It was not the UN that resolved the North/South Korea issue. It was an American president who was bold enough to take the bit in his teeth and move forward with ‘do this or else’ approach.

    The UN’s Security Council passed a resolution condemning the 9-11-2001 attacks on New York City, Washington, DC, and the Shanksville, PA, crash.  https://www.un.org/press/en/2001/SC7143.doc.htm

    Nice words, but has anything stopped terrorism since then?  No. In fact, it has become worse than it was, with the constant ongoing war in the Middle East, which has not ceased since the defeat of Sennacherib.

    Nor has the problem dissipated with Angela Merkel’s idiotic flooding Europe with so-called refugees who have proven themselves to be more of a problem than anything else, and a costly one, at that.. They have cost Europeans enormously in taxes, security and flagrant criminal activities that would get anyone else thrown into jail. The malignant refusal to acknowledge that these people are criminals from the get-go indicates an unwillingness to face the fact that the whole idea of “open borders” and “one world” is a denial of reality.

    There is, in fact, no real evidence that the UN has done anything except become a costly club that seemed like a good idea at the time, but has proven to be a waste of resources and time. NATO has been more effective.

    What has the UN done to help the people of Venezuela living in grinding poverty under Maduro’s regime? When was the UN ever willing to go in to Cambodia to stop Pol Pot’s rampage, or to up-stakes and go into Kuwait to help the Kuwaitis stop Saddam Hussein’s confiscation of their tiny country? What did the UN do about the 32,000,000 people who starved to death under Mao Tse-Tung’s dingdong approach to agriculture?

    What, in fact, has the UN done besides occupy real estate in New York City and let its diplomats get away with offenses for which the rest of us would be facing some hefty fines?