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

Author: Ex-PH2

  • A Couple of WWII Vets Have Left Us

    Senator Daniel Akaka, a WWII veteran, passed away on Friday at the age of 93.  He was the sponsor for federal legislation in 1996 that resulted in the Medal of Honor being awarded to 22 Asia-American soldiers who fought  for the USA during World War II. One of them included Sen. Daniel Inouye, who served with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy and was severely wounded during that service.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/daniel-k-akaka-hawaii-senator-with-spirit-of-aloha-dies-at-93/2018/04/06/c732d81a-39cc-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html

    In addition, after being missing for 73 years, the remains of Aviation Ordinanceman 2nd Class (AO2) Ora Sharninghouse, Jr. were identified and he was laid to rest next to his parents in Wood County, Ohio. He was a member of  the Navy’s VT-18 (Torpedo Squadron). There’s a nice photo of him in the Stars & Stripes article.

    https://www.stripes.com/news/us/identification-of-wwii-gunner-s-remains-leads-to-funeral-after-73-years-1.520904

    His plane crashed at Palau. A radioman’s remains were also found with him.

    Also in the news: Winnie Mandela passed on April 2. I’m sure there are people looking forward to seeing her again. Just thought you’d like to know.

  • We’re Extremists? What??? Seriously…?

    I knew that if I looked hard enough and far enough, I would find something interesting, and here it is.

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/a-little-rebellion-now-an_b_253161.html

    Read the first paragraph:   “If you take part in protest rallies, voice your discontent through picket signs, or disrupt events with yelling or intermittent shouts, then you are likely a right-wing extremist or a member of an angry mob, and you must be silenced.”

    What have we been seeing since January 20, 2017? What would those obnoxious children do if they were told they are the right-wing extremists? The horror!!

    Almost nine years ago, in the face of the ACA, President Obama took this chilling message one step further, actually encouraging Americans to report on those who were spreading “disinformation about health insurance reform.”  Anything being done publicly that hinted at disagreement with that policy was labeled ‘mob action’. As the author, James Whitehead, says the Obama administration was trying to stop a resistance movement. We all knew the ACA was going to do more harm than good and we were right.

    And who was He, The One, to say we could not resist it? In 2013, because he allowed sequestration to go into effect instead of doing the job he was hired to do, he pissed off people all over the country in many, many ways, one of them being blocking access to national monuments by putting out crowd barriers, and national parks by blocking views from public highways, just because he could. Remember that?

    Well, here we are, not quite nine long years later and we’re facing the same thing, except that this time, the mob action is coming from the left side of the political fence, from that part of the Leftreds loaded with spoiled brat children who think that somehow they are entitled to “stuff” without earning any of it. As with bodaprez, the Leftreds leave no stone untouched (eeeww!) to try to put the blame on the Right, when in fact, we have little if anything to do with any of this. They lie, they cheat, they milk it for everything they can get, they fall all over themselves to grab the spotlight and almost pound the table with a shoe, like Krushchev once did at the UN, to emphasize that we, the peace-loving, patriotic, country bumpkins that we are, carry the entire load of blame for the behavior of crazy people who have nothing to do with us. False crocodile tears aside, it is slowly but surely becoming a sort of Theater of the Absurd.

    We, as a group, cannot afford to be complacent. We cannot expect peace and quiet unless we make it happen, and if we don’t keep a watchful eye on the horizon at 360°, something like this social “phenomenon” will show up again on our doorsteps and try to run over us roughshod, at the same time. Because, you see, in the view of these children who’ve been on this planet for less time than my aging Himmie, we don’t have any rights any more, or at least, we shouldn’t.

    The issue this time is not about resisting the government’s edicts, which we do all the time, anyway. It’s about facing another episode of disruption, this time by sloppy, obnoxious, ill-mannered, virtue-signaling, attention-whoring, nearly illiterate teens whose understanding of reality is tenuous, at best. It does not help that greedy, grasping, self-absorbed politicians egg them on by pandering to them while trying to scare law-abiding citizens like us. Most of them aren’t even old enough to vote, and my money says they won’t vote unless they get paid to do it.

    However, the Twigs who gathered here and there on Sunday in protest of GUN (violence) have no staying power. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Rien. They had a good point – that the violence is out of control – but just who is it that is committing the majority of these violent acts?

    Well, frankly, they are. And they know that they are the perps, especially in the Parkland case, but they have to try to hide it by doing that silly virtue signaling so that they’re separate from The Mob.

    The shooter in at a ball park in Alexandria, VA, last year was not a GOPer. He was a leftwing political activist, remember? The Parkland shooter was a mental case with frequent calls and complaints against him, remember? And what happened to Florida’s Baker Act there? And the Pulse nightclub shooter? His wife helped him in his effort to commit mass murder and is now on trial for that. His father admired the Taliban. I don’t see any right-wingers in there, do you?

    These tweenies howling for “safety” wanted our attention. They always want attention. All those street demonstrations last winter were attention-whoring, nothing else.

    I don’t think they can outdo what they did this time, because it is not really about guns. It’s about throwing tantrums and “crying” on camera to get attention. If this is supposed to be some sort of resistance movement, its legs are stumpy and weak. It has no staying power. In fact, I have no idea what they’re resisting. There is no verifiable message there. They just tack themselves onto the most recent “thing” and go with that. And some of them can cry on cue. What actresses they are!

    Well, now they’ve got our attention. All eyes are on them, and it is not in a positive way. Their façade of virtue-signaling is cracking and peeling and falling apart. The facts about their fabrications and excuses keep coming to light in what one can only term a completely embarrassing way. When the lights are out, the microphones are shut off and the TV cameras are gone, no one is paying attention to anything they say or do.

    So what are they going to do next?

    Just keep your eyes peeled and ears open. I would not put anything past them.

  • Read It and Weep, Gungrabbers

    I don’t know if it’s a good title or not, but maybe it will get the attention of the dumber people on the planet.

    The most recent attempts by the Leftred media to distort something into hysterics failed them again. I see the same idiocy being exposed at websites devoted to exposing the fraud in so-called climate science, which has deteriorated and declined into a pseudo-religion aimed at manipulating the minds of the uninformed into following false paths. There is a strange thing going on there, having to do with controlling what people “believe” in the most Medieval sense. The propaganda rhetoric wears thin when you can’t keep the home fires burning.

    In our most recent episode of Strange Violence in February, the quarreling and phony virtue signaling were rampant. The false narratives being pushed by major media networks and newspapers in what appeared to be an effort to create a theater of blood and gore was an over-the-top attempt to stir the fears and angst of the viewing public. But when there is no blood and gore, as in the more recent Maryland event, when the bad guy turned out to be a teen who stole his father’s gun to go after a girl who broke up with him, or when a serial bomber blows himself to bits before he gets caught, then they have nothing to turn into a bloody spectacle that suits their need to push a political agenda, i.e., take away what are rightfully and legally your possessions and civil rights with no due process.

    Would these same fearful people like it if they were muzzled by the same methods they seek to inflict on others? Perhaps we should give that a try. After all, the Reich in Hitler’s Germany controlled what the press was allowed to print, which is why news about the death camps never reached the average German.

    It was the same in the Soviet Union. Izvestia was the daily broadsheet newspaper in Russia. It was the newspaper of record in the Soviet Union from 1917 until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The word “izvestiya“in Russian means “delivered messages”. It also means “disambiguation”. It was the Soviets’ major propaganda rag, along with Pravda, the other official news rag of the Soviets, starting in 1912. Pravda (“Truth”) was a Russian broadsheet newspaper, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most influential papers in the country with a circulation of 11 million. Since these were the only news resources available and were controlled by the Soviet government, only state-approved info was published in them. The counterpoint to all of that was Radio Free Europe, which broadcast news about the world outside the Iron Curtain to all those countries behind it, including East Germany.

    If you see a pattern of deceit in the stories presented by many media outlets, you are correct. Distort the real stories, make stuff up to scare the uninformed and naive, stifle civil rights, violate Constitutional laws, pretentiously parade children and/or victims of some terrible event in front of a camera to promote this obviously falsehood-laden objective, all to suit your own agenda – well, it’s all there, but it isn’t working quite so well these days.

    I have seldom been as disgusted with so-called reporters as I have been since mid-February, when the Leftred media’s hastily-concocted Theater of Blood fell apart within a 32-hour period as the verifiable facts came to light, more and more quickly. The result was that the Leftred media looked exactly like what they are: a bunch of amateurs barely out of junior high school pretending to be important.

    The Leftreds in news media have been counting on having control of it all for some time now. Unfortunately for them, it is not working quite as well as they had hoped. They have engaged in continuing efforts to act as master manipulators of the news and of opinions, and yet, for every exaggeration and false statement that they have concocted out of whole cloth, their opposition has filed a full story with all the facts available and shot down their tales of Jack the Fake Giant Killer and his Fake Exploding Beans. Every damned time!!

    Why are they failing? Their own vanity that sends them dashing to the internet and instant media outlets with angst-ridden horror stories of death and destruction has blinded them to the mere fact that the same media outlets are available to anyone who has more facts and better information and takes the time to present it correctly, without the speculation, the hysterics and the hyperbole, without the fabricated stories, and without the desperate need to be in control of the minds of public viewers.

    Yesterday (3/24/2018), a quickly-planned protest took place, addressing everything about gun violence except for the fact that many of the items howled about (e.g., universal background checks) are already in place, and the real problem is caused by people, not by inanimate objects.  800,000++ people, most of them reportedly under the age of 18, went to Washington, DC for this protest.. In Chicago, about 85,000 people (mostly under 18) held their own protest. (It did not look like that many, frankly. I’ve seen the crowds at Lollapalooza.)

    Per the news reports, other protests took place in other cities. There were protests held in Houston, NYC, Boston, etc., but 800++ cities around the world? Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong and London only count as four. Where’s the list? Some of those protest had 10 or 15 people attending. Wow. I’ve had more people at a spontaneous Friday PM dinner after work. And frankly, only one resource noted that a pro-gun protest took place in Salt Lake City.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/24/aerial-images-around-world-shows-scope-march-our-lives/455891002/

    Sorry, but if these protests take place outside the USA borders, I don’t give a crap about them. They are not involved in either our legal processes or our laws, nor should they be. If the media cannot produce an accurate tally of people, even by square yard count, or a true list of those 800++ cities, then it’s just more of their idiot scare tactics, which are repeatedly failing. I can quickly get a list of the 10 largest cities in the world, and a count of cities worldwide (4,416) , so where’s that list of 800 cities with protests?

    I want to be clear on this issue.

    It is absolutely appropriate to protest the violence.

    That is the real issue, not some inanimate object that seems targeted by the brainwashed who believe that guns are somehow responsible for these things, but fail to acknowledge that it is people who abuse them. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a problem with people who misuse these inanimate objects. Need I remind anyone that in that hostage event at a French grocery store yesterday, the French policeman was stabbed, as well as shot? Why is no one blaming the knife used to stab the policeman? Must I add that in the Austin violence last week, homemade explosives were used to kill people, and the bomber was killed by his own instrument?

    The real message – that it is violence, not guns, which is the problem – is not being heard at all. Violence is caused by people who are out of control, with no one stopping them before it starts. They can and do use anything available to cause destruction.

    When does that sink in? WHEN????

    The people who are promoting the wrong attitude want this narrative of fear of an inanimate object to be the issue, first and foremost.

    We who know better and disagree with that narrative must ensure that this disinformation campaign to cloud the truth becomes weaker and weaker and finally, fizzles to nothing by speaking the truth: – that is it people who are the cause of violence.

    Accordingly, I’m providing links to three articles by different authors, in separate publications, including a 1994 article in The Atlantic when the Brady Bill was signed, providing various viewpoints on why gun control laws do not work.

    Brazilians are leaning toward increasing access to guns to combat increasing gun violence.  https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/03/28/472157969/brazil-has-nearly-60-000-murders-and-it-may-relax-gun-laws

    Brazil is the murder capital of the world, with 60,000 people dying per year, per Bloomberg News article 2018-3-20. Brazilians are now supporting access to guns for self-defense. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/in-world-s-murder-capital-brazilians-are-ready-to-buy-some-guns

    The false promise of gun control, from The Atlantic in 1994: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/03/the-false-promise-of-gun-control/306744/

    “Gun-control laws don’t work. What is worse, they act perversely. While legitimate users of firearms encounter intense regulation, scrutiny, and bureaucratic control, illicit markets easily adapt to whatever difficulties a free society throws in their way.” – article.

    It’s not the guns that are the problem, you incredible morons.

    It’s not the means of destruction that bear the blame, you despicable cretins.

    It’s the people using them.

    Now what are YOU going to do about that?

  • The Difference Between a Right and a Choice

    Seems there’s this desperate need to impress everyone, by people in the business of so-called journalism, being inflicted upon us these days with how simpatico they are, how in tune they are to whatever they think the current vox populi consists of.

    It’s baloney. It’s virtue signaling from a bunch of self-involved, attention-grabbing twits and nothing else.

    This involves the most recent column in the Chitown Tribune by someone named Dan Moran, a columnist, who says he inherited a bunch of guns from various members of his family. He says that he used to hunt when much younger, but doesn’t go hunting now. What this was leading up to was his desperate need to let the silly, whining, self-terrorized gungrabbers – people who are just positive that they will be next (and probably have wet dreams about it, too) – that he’s on their side, whatever that means. So he informs us, after a prolonged whine of excuses with examples, that he made a date with the local po-po to turn in his guns for destruction, and was assured they were put in the evidence locker, slated for destruction. He says he got a notice to that effect, too.

    “Hey, LOOK!” says he, “I got rid of all of those nasty, scary inanimate objects that can’t function without a live human handling them! I’m such a good guy!  Pat me on the back! Buy me a pizza! I’m on your side! I’m one of you!”

    He could have simply taken them to the nearest gun shop with his FOID and sold them to a dealer, taken home the cash, and walked away feeling maybe just as virtuous, but did he do that?  No. He had to broadcast to everyone what a wonderful guy he is for being so abundantly stupid that he missed that very obvious other choice. His excuse was that no one could get hurt by them now. He did not say whether or not anyone ever had been hurt by them prior to his Virtue Signaling Episode IIIa/IV(b).

    As stultifyingly dumb as that makes him, I took the time to peruse the language of the U.S. Constitution, trying to find anything that says ownership of weapons of any kind is a requirement for U.S. citizenship.  I found nothing. It is a choice we have. Some of us want them. Some do not.

    Here’s what I found with a little effort on my part: “….provide for the common defence….”

    That’s easy to understand. In Them There Olden Times, the militia ranks were filled by local people, the common people, who came here to escape the grinding tyranny of despotic rulers like Oliver Cromwell and Mary Tudor in the beginning of that exodus, and the Prince Regent later on, who succeeded his crazypants father, and the horrifying bloodbath that Robespierre inflicted on anyone who caught his eye. As time went on, as we know, coming here was to find a way out of famine and poverty when late blight fungus killed off the main source of food for the Irish and Swift wrote his snarky essay ‘A Modest Proposal’.  People came here from all over, set up housekeeping and started farms and shops and businesses, which is what this country was about then and always has been, no matter how much the leftreds want to chop it into splinters. But I digress.

    The phrase ‘for the common defence’ in that opening paragraph is preceded by “We, the People”, meaning all of us, not just certain ones.

    Many of Those in High Places now and in the past seem to think that this is inapplicable now, that they know better than we do what we need and/or want.. On the contrary: it is absolutely applicable now, more than ever. It gives us choices. Frankly, not one of those greedy, self-serving slobs in office has the faintest idea what I need or want.

    We have the right to decide what to do with our lives, what we want to do for a living, eat, wear, read, etc., where we want to live, and whether or not we want to serve in the military, among other things. Yes, we have had drafts in the past but at present we do not. Military service is a choice. I made that choice twice, and then the war was over, so I left the military and did other things.

    And that brings me to this bit of thoughtful prose: the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America: …the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.

    Read that carefully. It says the right…to bear arms. Nowhere in that Amendment does it say must bear arms.  It is a choice. You can choose to have weapons, or choose not to.

    As I have repeatedly indicated, a weapon can be anything from a 9-inch cast iron skillet and some hornet spray or cooking spray with flour, to a multi-round firing rifle that may or may not be useful for hunting in the autumn, winter and/or spring (turkeys!) I usually do my hunting at the grocery stores and farmers’ markets, although I have found a few turkeys in the aisles at the local bank and Walmart. I’m quite sure that I can use my short sword to carve a turkey, if I have to.

    Therefore, when I ran across that virtue-signaling, self-important half page op-ed by this Tribune twit, letting all of us know what a saint he is for being dumber than socks on an elephant, my response was to point and laugh, because Danny boy, you had other choices but you didn’t take them.  http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lake-county-news-sun/opinion/ct-lns-moran-never-again-walkout-st-0314-20180313-story.html

    That does not make you virtuous, Dan. It makes you desperate for attention and praise which, in my view, you don’t deserve. You could have sold those guns to a dealership and donated the cash to a really good cause.

    But you didn’t.

    That, you butthead, makes you so stupid you don’t even know you’re alive.

  • We the People Do Not Follow False Prophets

    This is not about gun control.

    It’s about what drives the control freaks to want to deprive American citizens of the right to own this or that, do this or that, and say this or that.

    I spent some time this week reading a chapter from a book about the madness behind the near-to-religious fanaticism in people who insist that we’re all doomed and the world is going to end tomorrow unless all of us agnostics and antitheorists kowtow to the New Religion of Climate Whoosiewhatsis.  Some of the more flagrant cranks offered to strangle you in your bed.

    Because it’s Lent, and because Easter falls on April Fool’s Day this year, I suggested some place else that people who wish to relieve themselves of the Burden of Unbelief spend some time (and substantial cash) in the company of the Monks of Carbon Apostasy.

    I will happily include in that a visit to the Brethren of Guns ‘n’ Ammo Apostasy.

    While I was poking fun at the hysterics of fanaticism and pseudo-religious fervor we witness in so-called liberals, I wasn’t too far off on the pseudo-religious aspect of it. “Catastrophe”, “worse than ever”, “doomsday” and other hyperbole  connected to climate references is advertising language, used to sell a product which, in this case, is not just climate change, but rather disastrous climate change.

    “Repent, and give us your money and you’ll be saved from this Looming Catastrophe!!!  Algore needs more of your money, so send it!! All of it!!!”

    Does anyone besides me remember Jim and Tammy Faye Baker?

    It is baloney, and we all know it, but the uninformed, naïve twits who fall for that stuff swallow it as if it were chocolate syrup on vanilla ice cream. They are drawn into it because it provides them with some sort of pseudoreligious ecstasy. They become part of what they think is a Higher Order. This is not a joke. When you try talking to them in a reasonable way, to point out that the disaster hasn’t happened yet, and likely won’t, that they are being deceived, they refuse to listen, and either run off or start those lame-ass personal attacks.

    It is the same thing with guns. The fact that no one is forcing the anti-gun crowd to buy, own, rent, touch or even look at a gun is immaterial. They don’t get that part at all, nor do they care. They insist on being terrorized by guns.  It feeds their need for some kind of emotional fulfillment. Frankly, I doubt that the majority of them go to any religious edifice unless there’s a funeral – and even then, they’d probably rather have it in a gym. In a large enough edifice, they can wallow in their Worship of the Dead. Something is missing in their souls. Perhaps a visit to the confessional would help them.

    We know exactly how, why, and when guns are pounced on by the media as horrifying objects at the very moment a shoot-shoot-bang-bang event occurs. The fact that the media as a group act worse than African jackals sniffing for blood and scrounging for scraps when something dies only emphasizes their blood lust. And they have that, in spades. They wallow in it. They are just as addicted to this lust for blood as a crackhead is addicted to crack cocaine, or a junkie who shoots up, or some kid stealing painkiller opioids from a medicine cabinet because he will do anything to get high.

    What’s the source of this need to hammer the public about blood and gore?  I’m not sure, but if you are familiar with real history, not the foppish made-up crap being taught now, you know that we humans as a species have a long, long trail of spilled blood, because we are apex predators, just like lions, bears, wolves and sharks. The Romans had organized theater for it in gladiatorial games. The sight and smell of bloodletting can make you randy, even if you won’t admit it to yourself. But now, we are more civilized.  We have football and pizza instead of brutal sword fights and dormice pickled in grape leaves.

    It isn’t something new. The media have always been like this, but the current crop of media mopes seems to have gone off the deep end into a cenote of blood thirstiness that would put Dracula and Caligula to shame. The ‘jump to a conclusion’ hysterics that followed immediately on the heels of the Parkland school shooting were too disgusting for words. It was like watching a kettle of vultures gathering in the sky, looking for a corpse to tuck into before the animal is even dead – except that vultures don’t do that. (No offense meant to vultures in general.)

    It is not only the media that act this way, as individuals and brainless zombies. They can smell blood on the pavement long before it dries. They count on the same blood lust in their viewers. They know their audience well enough to throw these ghoul parties ‘Live! On TV!”

    However, as we found very shortly after the choreographed hysterics, abusive displays of frightened children on live TV, and a complete lack of simple decency, the media were so completely wrong and so full of utter shit, that they completely lost any credibility they might ever have had.

    How quickly did that story die away, once their falsehoods were exposed? Stepped on their own cranks, they did.

    Further information was released on a daily basis and the massive errors by the Liberaltwits became nothing but an embarrassment to journalism. They made damned fools of themselves in the process, sending real journalism further down into the sewers. One can only hope that they will never recover from their own deceit, and that in fact, it will become worse and worse until they are fully exposed for what they are: the false front faggot-bearers for Totalitarianism.

    The pseudo-religious hysterics also apply to the Guns & Ammo corner, and all things related to them as one liberal, self-involved, greedy politician after another jumps into the spotlight to try to blame inanimate objects for what people do. A gun cannot function without a human using it, any more than my 9 inch cast iron skillet can cook bacon without my putting bacon into it and turning on the stove. Ammo won’t load itself into a magazine, nor will my paring knives jump out of the kitchen drawers without assistance.

    These transparent and lame attempts to promote fanaticism are not doing too well. They are slowly crumbling. I think that the Leftherds were counting on We the People as a group, being dumb enough to not think for ourselves, and they were wrong again.

    We the People aren’t remotely the dumbasses that they think we are.

    Nor are We the People as stupid as they are. We the People can still tell a hawk from a handsaw. They cannot.

    Therefore, We the People must remain vigilant. We the People cannot afford to yield even one inch. Give them no quarter. We the People have a tough fight ahead of us, but we should be able to say ‘You should have seen the other guy.’

    Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose… “Me and Bobby McGee”  Writers: Fred L Foster / Kris Kristofferson

  • Attention on Deck! Listen Up!

    In the wake of last week’s heinous episode of destruction of human lives, and the howling to “DO SOMETHING” that predictably succeeded it, I spent some time digging up some information.

    There are at least eleven (11 federal statues on the books regarding guns and control, including the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. – Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_United_States

    Since there are 50 states, there is gun legislation specific to each state which should certainly be sufficient to prevent crimes, shouldn’t it? There is a chart at the bottom of this Wiki link for each state. I don’t know how up to date it is, but the charts do summarize the state laws. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_United_States_by_state

    In all of this, in the screaming, frantic screaming to DO SOMETHING, the hysterics and fear underlying this squawking are not being addressed.  Don’t misunderstand me. Fear generates anger, which generates this scrambling call to ‘DO SOMETHING!’, when there is already plenty of ‘SOMETHING’ done and in place.

    This is never addressed by the media because they can milk the fear and agony caused by these events into oblivion, and they know it. They count on it. They should be barred from doing surveys and interviews until the people who commit these crimes are arrested and awaiting trial.

    If you will recall the social morons who twittered out Tsarnaev’s mugshot after he was caught, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, thousands of teenaged girls couldn’t believe he was one of the Boston Marathon bombers because he was too cute. This was milked to death, as was the search to find him, and the frantic scramble by media mavens to get in the way of law enforcement so that they could get the story. And what happened? Who got blamed for that? The pressure cookers were blamed for the Boston Marathon bombing. Tsarnaev was just a part of the sideshow. Pressure cooker purchases were monitored. Anyone who bought more than one was suspect.

    McVeigh and Nichols used a rented truck and farming chemicals and kerosene to build devastating bombs that blew away most of the Murragh Building in Oklahoma City, and killed and/or injured hundreds of people. Once they were caught, truck rental was blamed for a while for that tragedy. And farming chemicals – that was monitored, too.

    Not so very long ago, a bunch of disgruntled idiots with a hair up their asses hijacked four passenger planes fully loaded with passengers and fuel, and used them to kill thousands of people in three different locations. Thousands of people. All planes were grounded, because the planes were at fault, weren’t they? (If you can’t detect sarcasm in that, you are dead between the ears.) Yes, and back in the 1990s, a bomb tucked away in a radio buried in a suitcase blew up a Pan Am passenger jet over Scotland, so radios were to blame for that, once that was figured out.

    We’ve got the crazy bastards who took guns to Columbine High School and shot their classmates, so the guns were at fault there, not the teenaged hellions who committed those crimes. The nutball who shot up the movie theater in Aurora, CO, killing 12 and wounding 70 others wasn’t responsible because he was crazy, right? No, it wasn’t his fault. It was the guns’ fault that he planned that for weeks, maybe months ahead. Despite warnings by many people, there was never any attempt to stop him before he carried out his threats. The fact that he’s still a whack job is immaterial.

    All of these criminals gave out warnings and nothing – not ONE DAMNED THING – was done about it.

    In Orlando, FL, the nightclub Pulse became a slaughterhouse because one antisocial shithead coward decided to use it as a place to shoot fish in a barrel. But it was the guns he used that were blamed for that, not the fact that he hated everyone in the world, including himself. And that nutball who shot Congressman Scalise and tried to do the same to others – was he really blamed for it? I don’t think so. The focus was on what kinds of guns he used and where he got them, not so much on his hatred of GOPer politicians. That shooter was a Democrat, you know. He was out to get GOPers, so the guns were to blame for that, too, if the media reports were to be believed. Ditto the whack job at Las Vegas – it was the guns and the bump stocks that were to blame for the injuries and deaths, not the shooter who created panic.

    So this latest episode of one freak taking his anger and self-hatred out on everyone around him turns into another circus of blaming the object, a gun, an inanimate object which can’t act without an enabler, instead of blaming the jackass who committed the crime.

    I’m going to blame politicians on both sides of the political fence for this, especially those with the biggest mouths and the most pressing need to stand at a microphone in front of a TV camera and threaten the rest of us with a dictatorship, because if we let them get away with it, that’s where we are headed.

    Why do they do this? Well, part of it is the attention they get. Part of it is the money that it generates for them – yes, it does – and part of it is because the sooner they can get rid of the one thing they fear most, an American populace that is full of free people who can think for themselves, the happier they will be. They might even say they’re afraid of being assassinated, although I can’t think of even one of those attention-whoring idiots that’s worth the cost of a bullet. It doesn’t matter one whit that we can do quite well without them. They could all just lock their office doors and go home and not one of us would miss them, but they have to have that limelight.

    What does matter is this: the US Constitution gives us certain inalienable rights and one of those is to have the means of defending ourselves against tyrants. And everyone of those stumpsucking jerks in Congress is a potential tyrant. Think about that for a second.

    Not one of them has blamed the shooter in this most recent. If they did that – blame the human – they’d have to admit they are failures and all the legislation passed on gun control has been pure, unadulterated failure because no one enforces it. Those recent reports that NICS missed posting 1100 people in the ‘no guns’ list are evidence of that. So they blame the gun, the inanimate object and the bump stock, also inanimate, which the shooter used, instead of blaming the live human scumbag who did the damage.

    Well, we are not a nation of sheep, no matter what the Congress Critters think. We have a right to demand that they enforce the laws already in place and stop wasting our tax money on legislating more of this nonsense until they ensure that enforcement of existing laws happens.

    If they are not going to do what they were hired to do – and remember, it’s supposed to be a temp job, not permanent – then fire their asses and start over from scratch.

    They work for US. We need to let them know that by firing them if they don’t perform.

    They all need to be reminded that this country belongs to US, not to them. They just work here.

  • February Updates from the South Pacific

    From USPACOM.mil, some current updates:  http://www.pacom.mil/Media/News/Year/2018/

    USS Rushmore recently concluded its participation in Operation Iron Fist, a cooperative exercise between US and Japanese military forces off the coast of southern California.

    http://www.pacom.mil/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/1436114/uss-rushmore-concludes-exercise-iron-fist-2018/

    VP Pence spent some time at Yokota Air Base, Japan, addressing the troops, highlighting the range of US military capabilities in regard to common defense of our allies, as well as the issue of North Korea and its current leader, Kim Jong-un.

    Regarding health care in Pago Pago, Samoa for American Samoan vets, the VA has only an outpatient clinic available, no emergency care, so they’re going to Hawaii for VA care. It’s a 17-hour trip on an island-hopping tourist plane, which can be hard on anyone with a serious health issue. https://www.hawaii.va.gov/locations/pago_pago_american_samoa.asp

    This does need to be fixed. If there is a hospital with emergency services on these islands, these vets should not be required to make an arduous, painful and debilitating trip to get help.

    http://www.hawaiifreepress.com/ArticlesMain/tabid/56/ID/20504/Congress-to-Investigate-Lack-of-VA-Care-in-Pacific-Island-Territories.aspx

    Out in the middle of nowhere:

    You may remember that Wake Island was an important launch point and base for USAAF pilots doing bombing runs in the Pacific. The Japanese attacked the island from a base on Kwajalein on Dec. 8, 1941.

    A garrison of 449 U.S. Marines, several dozen navy personnel, and a handful of army radio operators also were stationed on Wake. That force had nearly 2,100 fewer troops than American strategists had deemed necessary to properly defend the atoll. The island’s defenders were equipped with six 5-inch (127-mm) coastal artillery pieces, 12 3-inch (76-mm) antiaircraft guns, 12 F4F Wildcat fighter planes, and an assortment of machine guns and small arms. Forty-five Guamanian men, employed by Pan American Airways as part of its transpacific Clipper service, rounded out the atoll’s human population. – Source: https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Wake-Island

    Prior to the attack, the Wake Island group had been a stopover for tourists and vacationers going  to and from the Orient.

    Right now, the population consists of about four U.S. military personnel and some contractors. Their big deal is the shanty they use as a bar and the karaoke that goes with it. They also have a Facebook page. Stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, they feel like they’re in their own little country.

    https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1431996/wake-island-embodies-reality-of-america-as-pacific-power/

    So when USMC GEN Dunford paid a visit to Wake Island in January, it was part of his tour to visit US bases in the Pacific. Other people would probably just bypass it, but he stopped there.  I think they’d welcome visitors at any time, and that was a thoughtful thing for him to do. No, I don’t know exactly what construction is going on there, but the old guns that were installed are still there on the beachhead.

    The island was an excellent spot to view the last eclipse.There’s a schedule of future lunar and solar eclipses that can be viewed from the island. It’s also a bird sanctuary for birds that make trans-Pacific migration with the Wake Islands atoll en route as a rest stop.

    And finally, you may also remember Tinian. It was that little spit of an island in the Marianas that was used as the launch point for delivering The Bomb to tell Japan we meant business.

    For Tinian’s affairs today, here’s something from the Marianas Variety about Tinian. They’re looking for how to best present historic material to the public.

    http://www.mvariety.com/cnmi/cnmi-news/local/101299-air-force-seeks-public-input-for-tinian-interpretive-plan

    Any suggestions (no snarkking, please) can be sent to the address in the article.

  • 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive

    For those of you who were there at the time, I’m reposting this from last year.

    The Lunar Festival of Tet in Vietnam begins every year in late January.

    At 02:00 hours local time on the morning of January 30, 1968, the NVA began shelling every ville, town and military base in South Vietnam. It had been planned for months.

    For those who were there and survived it, and those who did not….

    CBS offers the following:

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-1968-the-tet-offensive-photographer-john-olson/

    If you were there, please give us your story.