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

Author: Ex-PH2

  • Seems Like the Times That Try Men’s Souls….

    Yesterday, I watched an idiotic video of a millennial trying to open a can of beans with a can opener. His entire class applauded when he completed that task. Since I knew how to do that when I was 5, this seems like a moron learning to do something that most of us take for granted. I really thought the squirrels around here are smarter.

    But I realized, in watching that video, that those kids born between 1998 and 2018 have no clue on how to do anything, including feeding themselves. This is a golden opportunity to take a mind that is a blank sheet of paper and steer it in a more productive direction, isn’t it?

    It’s my considered opinion that they are ripe for the plucking by those who like to corrupt people into doing stupid things. They are directionless, clueless, leaderless and nearly incompetent because they have been coddled their entire lives and will have to be on their own before long, if they aren’t already there.

    Now is the time to grab those empty minds and get them on the track that will keep them from becoming the gullible prey of people like Gore and other corrupt political people. They have enough followers, as we’ve already seen.

    These young people aren’t stupid. They are John Locke’s blank slates, ripe for corruption by the most corrupt people you can imagine. They can easily learn how to do something as simple as opening a can of beans. They are simply lost souls.

    Note: My disclaimer is that the same generation of kids in my area are generally driven, ambitious, smart, bright, and hard working, and have specific goals for themselves.

    But this generational naiveté is the reason that they’re falling for a strange political ideology called ‘climate change’ (used to be ‘global warming’). It’s the reason that Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot and other corrupt creatures were so successful. It’s the reason that Hitler’s Brown Shirts grew and the Jugend movement he wanted was so mindlessly enslaved to him.  It’s the reason that the quack Trofim Lysenko was so quickly accepted by Stalin and made the head of Soviet agriculture, and millions of people starved in the USSR and China because of him.

    The verbal attacks on climate skeptics and on political conservatives have some of the same characteristics as the Brown Shirt attacks on dissenters and other specific groups in Germany when Hitler was building his Reich.  They also display that same kind of fanaticism that is evident in those films of Hitler giving speeches, where his Jugend followers look absolutely hypnotized by him.

    Therein lies the real danger: when anyone is misled by turning a branch of science into a political base for a new belief system, a new ideology or a new religion, it is corruption at its most obvious and insidious level, and it depends on the naiveté and gullibility of the target audience.

    The issue is how to stop it before it gets so bad that it turns into physical attacks. There is no easy answer to that.

    This happened in Europe during the rise of the Roman church, which became the Roman Catholic church and gave authority to the Inquisition to destroy people who disagreed with its demands. You caved or you died.

    Therein lies the mistake made by these power-hungry, money-grubbing con artists: this isn’t Europe in the 9th century. This isn’t the Soviet Union under Stalin and it isn’t Mussolini’s Italy (which didn’t last very long), nor is it Hitler’s Reichstag or Mao’s Red China, and it certainly isn’t the Dork From Nork’s Hermit Country. There is not and never has been a dynastic class in this country, no matter how much money those infamous robber barons of the 19th century made and no matter how much the MSM want it now. They and their families have faded away to a few straggling remainders. The foundations are slowly disappearing. In my view, that is all the losing end of what was once a sweeping grab of power in the European manner, and the world no longer works that way.

    We are not peasants with no minds of our own, and those millennials who seem so laughably inept aren’t quite the mindless drones they seem to be, either.

    If you were around back in 1960, you may recall Jack Kennedy’s simple message in his inauguration speech: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. This is a message they haven’t heard just yet. It needs to be thrown at them now, today.

    Instead of letting them be fruit loops, point them in the direction of being productive, having something to show for the time they spend, and always clean up after themselves. That’s a skill set they seem to have missed.

    In spite of what you may think, while the military can be a harsh mistress, it can also get lost souls to straighten up if it’s done in a rigid enough manner.  I read up on the history of Women Marines. It seems that the USMC women’s boot camp in 1967 was far harsher and more tight-assed than anything I saw at RTC(W) Bainbridge, right up to Carter’s interference in the world, and a lot harsher than it is today.  But it certainly did build those women into cohesive units.

    And if you will recall, during the Depression, the Roosevelt administration started work programs like the WPA, PWA, and CCC to get people back to work. My understanding of the CCC is that it was run like a military program. What a way to prepare people to defend their country!

    Maybe this is what we need now – something that puts this clueless, directionless, leaderless group to work, gives them a purpose, and gets them to stop throwing temper tantrums at the Sky Gods.

    There is, of course, an alternative, which is that we send them all to Dave Hardin’s house for pre-bootcamp indoctrination before they’re shipped off to Parris Island.

    Just an idea I thought I’d throw at you all.

  • News from the South Pacific

    I have no idea who that fellow in the pink bathrobe is, but I’m sure he’s there to just goof off. Tourists!!

    In the US Marshall Islands, a ceremony at Memorial Park was held on December 4, 2017,. marking the 4th anniversary of the death of  USAF CPT David Lyons in Afghanistan (12/4/2013) when the ship bearing his name docked at Saipan in the Marshall Islands. http://www.mvariety.com/cnmi/cnmi-news/local/101260-saipan-veterans-join-commemoration-of-capt-david-i-lyon-s-death-anniversary

    Local members of the Saipan VFW and CNMI Veterans Affairs personnel participated in the ceremony.

    Also in the MI, NOAA has announced plans for coordinating with US Fish & Wildlife to implement recovery plans for various Pacific sea turtle species.  http://www.mvariety.com/cnmi/cnmi-news/local/101258-noaa-bares-recovery-plans-for-endangered-sea-turtles

    In Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, the Trust Corporation of the Marshal Islands (TCMI) has deregistered Billions Bunker Group, a Taiwan-based company with ties to North Korea. http://www.mvariety.com/regional-news/101266-marshall-islands-de-registers-corporation-with-n-korea-link

    The Red Cross has now given the Marshall Islands official recognition as its 191st member, which gives them a greater global voice. https://www.radionz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/347447/red-cross-recognition-of-marshall-islands-gives-it-greater-global-voice

    There is some concern, voiced back in November 2017, that a cleanup of nuclear waste was not done properly in 2012-2013. The cleanup project included about 400 lumps of plutonium, stored on Runit Island, a US nuclear test site back in the 1960s, and seawater is now leaking into the storage vault.

    http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/marshall-islands-concrete-dome-holding-nuclear-waste-could-leak/news-story/52169e48cdfe041682e9e6c5b103f

    Guess whose administration cut the cleanup budget for that project? No, really?

    Busy week there in the Marshalls.

    The Marianas (not a US territory) are busy working on attracting tourists and tour groups and are offering tour guide certificates.  http://www.mvariety.com/special-features/my-marianas

    A new Gallup poll shows that a majority of Filipinos view DTrump favorably, although he doesn’t quite outrank Vlad Putin just yet.   http://www.mvariety.com/regional-news/101220-poll-majority-of-filipinos-view-trump-favorably

    On Thursday Jan. 4, 2018, US Amb. Nikki Haley warned North Korea against another missile test. She added that Washington (Pres. Trump) would not take seriously any talks between Norkiland and South Korea if Pyongyang (meaning Rocketman) does not give up testing missiles.  http://www.mvariety.com/regional-news/101219-us-warns-north-korea-against-new-missile-test-plays-down-talks

    As for news from Guam: Tourism may be suffering a slight decline because of Fatty Kim da T’ird’s threats to use Guam as a test target for his rocket science experiments. In the beginning, Pres. Trump said Norkiland would meet with hellfire, and so far, nothing has been aimed at Guam and the Gaumanians that we know about, but you never know what that fat bastard is up to, do you? http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-threat-impact-guam-tourism-industry-2018-767849

    So to ease your minds, I’m providing another link to a recipe from Annie’s Chamorro Kitchen, and one of her Chamorro recipes, this time for Chamorro Bistek (Bisteak). It looks good to me. Give it a try. If you’re not sure where to get the ingredients, visit a Hispanic mercado. They can probably be found there. She’s a retired Army vet, so give her a nod. http://guam.stripes.com/news/annies-chamorro-kitchen-chamorro-bistek-or-bisteak

    So far, all is quiet on the Western Front. Let’s hope it stays that way.

     

  • No Resolutions…Just Vigilance

    131217-N-ZY812-001
    USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112), moored pierside in her home port of Pearl Harbor, HI, participates in the annual Pearl Harbor Festival of Lights. The guided missile destroyer was named after LT (SEAL) Michael Murphy, a Medal of Honor awardee who was killed in action in heavy fighting in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan in June, 2005. U.S. Navy photo by Ensign Joshua Flanagan (Released)

    N.B.: I wrote this before I watched the news report on the evening of 1/1/2018 about the riots and protests in Iran.  I noticed this morning that Instinct had posted a link to an article by John Ringo, which I read, and you should, too: https://www.azuse.cloud/?p=76872#comment-3071111

    Since we now know that the State of the Blog is secure and the Union has not yet been split asunder,  can we relax?

    No. I don’t think so.  We must as a people be ever vigilant. No matter how annoying the Clankers are (and we know who they are), they will only win if we let them.

    You know, when you have something nice, other people don’t like you because of that, and they want to take it away from you. So don’t let them. Just keep a weather eye on the little buggers and make sure that they don’t win. Some day, they’ll be my age and have nothing to show for their wasted lives – IF they live that long.

    We live in the best country on this planet. People come here all the time because of it. Sometimes, yes, some of them want to knock it down and stomp on it, because they’re afraid of real freedom. And yes, it is scary to determine your own destiny, but that’s what this country is all about: no kings, no dictators, no dynasties – none of that crap. That’s why people like my ancestors and the Irish came here, for the chance to do more than just exist.

    There’s a movie opening now: “The Post”, based on the decision by Kathryn Grahame and Ben Bradlee to publish what became the Pentagon Papers. Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks, was aghast that Jack Kennedy, who befriended him, would lie to him the way he did, but Johnson and Cronkite also lied, as did other people. Lyndon Johnson was the worst liar of them all. And Democrats, they were, all of them. Who knew?

    What do we see now? Much worse: plain old bald-faced lying by the media, mostly in a scramble to get attention. It isn’t working very well for them. Reasoning and more thoughtful people know what is real much better than those involved in the childish scramble for attention by “kids” who seem to be barely out of school. The most recent sample was that rambling, babbling article about conservatism and Stolen Valor by Alex Whatshisname. He had no point to make, he was almost intentionally uninformed, and it was drivel.

    You’d think that as a population group, they would not want to go down in history as a pack of inept fools, wouldn’t you?

    This is why I said we must be vigilant at all times. Dig up the truth, verify it with backup, and throw it at them, as hard as you can, but without rancor. Be persistent, thoughtful, accurate and above all else, calm. A calm stance is like wearing full battle rattle and the truth is a bigger, more effective weapon than theirs.

    If they don’t like it, tough bananas. When they get to be my age or yours, they’ll have nothing to show for a lifetime of being worse than the National Enquirer.

    I don’t think I’d want that on my tombstone. I’d rather have pepperoni, extra pepperoni, and extra cheese.

    We must always be on watch.  We owe it to ourselves and to future generations.

  • The Legacy of the Kaiser’s War

    We’re nearing the end of the 100 years since the start of World War I. The London Telegraph recently ran a fine series of twelve articles by historian Saul David on the subject, with particular attention to the Kaiser’s need and strange desire to acquire control of the European continent by engaging in warfare that would give him control of the Balkans and ports on the Black Sea, with entry into the Mediterranean through the Straits of the Bosporus and the Dardenelles, as well as control of the western seaboard and ports of most of Europe.

    Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to do empire-building, but he failed. He used the assassinations of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife as an excuse to start his roll across Europe to acquire control of the European continent and its ports, with assistance from Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary. Most of what I’ve found was glossed over in my high school history classes as if it didn’t matter. But it did matter. If you want to understand what followed slightly more than a decade after the end of World War I, and why things are the way they are now, you need to pursue this history.

    This is a link to the archives of the London Telegraph’s original articles about World War I, published as the war progressed. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ww1-archive/

    Here’s a link to historian Saul David’s series about the causes of World War I. He takes a closer look at how that war progressed.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/inside-first-world-war/part-one/10271886/who-started-world-war-one.html

    I’m just glad  that there is access to some of this now, because otherwise, it might sit moldering in drawers and on bookshelves, ignored by everyone but the curious like me.  It’s my impression that the German troops went into the battlefield with no real understanding of why they were there. They were simply ordered to the front to fight a war that had no valid purpose, such as defense, behind it. The call-up for mobilization was done under orders of the Kaiser, who had fired Otto von Bismarck. There is, in that second Telegraph link, an article with a photograph that shows both military and civilian Germans in a crowd, listening to the mobilization orders, some of them looking rather bewildered. They answered the call, but to what purpose?

    I think that the archived photo collections now online at those links, and those in this paragraph, can give you a better view than a single photo posted here. The famous Christmas Eve truce, a spontaneous pause in warfare by troops on both sides of the front lines, did take place on Dec. 24, 1914. The TIME collection at this link includes that brief pause in fighting.  http://time.com/3643889/christmas-truce-1914/

    World War I was a war of aggression by Germany, the same as was WWII, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary as the excuse to make war. Germany had earlier signed a secret treaty of alliance with the Ottoman government in Turkey. Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary had already declared war on Serbia and the Black Hand over the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Gavrilo Princip, a Serb and member of the Black Hand, and wanted Germany’s aid in that conflict. The Kaiser gave it willingly.

    Britain, France and Russia had formed the Triple Entente before 1914, and Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had formed the Triple Alliance.

    The rulers of Britain (George V), Russia (Tsar Nicholas) and Germany (Kaiser Wilhelm II) were cousins. They knew each other quite well. The Kaiser, however, despised everything British including his cousin George V, did not really like his cousin Nicholas II, and had a love-hate relationship with his own mother, Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky. But now, without the previous interference of his British grandmother, the late Queen Victoria, nothing stood in the way of his starting what amounts to a family quarrel, one that cost many millions of lives in the end by warfare and the post-war spread of the Spanish flu, destroyed the legitimate governments of Russia and Germany, and opened the paths to Hitler’s Reich and Lenin’s establishment of the Communist party as the ruling government in Russia.  See the Telegraph link above for the archived 1917 articles for Lenin’s tactic toward his British ‘allies’.  An enlightening Telegraph headline from 1917 says that Lenin barred British citizens from leaving Russia.

    In Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin made Ludwig Dürr his chief designer at the Zeppelin factory when the Count’s first engineer, Hugo Kübler, who had designed LZ-1, refused to fly in the airship he had created, which was named after Zeppelin.

    The Kaiser saw the airships as more useful than airplanes because of their ability to carry large loads of munitions at low cost, and to go long distances at great heights with no interference. Planes of that time period such as the Sopwith Camel were unable to reach the heights at which the Zeppelins were used for bombing runs – as much as 11,000 feet – which meant that a machine gunner posted on a Zeppelin could easily take out a biplane before it ever got near the airship.

    Franz Shrapnel was the developer of bombs carrying up to 2,000 pounds of shrapnel carried by the Zeppelin fleet. The largest such bomb was a 3,000 pounder. The airships were manned by machine gunners who could shoot down the planes trying to attack them during bombing runs. This worked until the UK’s biplanes were equipped with stronger motors that allowed them to climb high enough to attack the airships. (I thought you all might like to know the source of the term ‘shrapnel’.)

    In Waiting For Daylight, H.M. Tomlinson describes the sight of the nighttime aerial bombardment as almost a distraction from seeing the Pleiades in the London night sky, when everyone had gathered in the streets because shrapnel bombs were falling from the sky, and searchlights were trying to find the airships. He reported that he could see sparks of fire on strings descending to the earth, and knew that they were shrapnel bombs brought across the Channel from Europe. There was a ‘lights out’ policy in effect at that time, to try to hinder the aerial bombing runs from the Germans, but the pilots of the Zeppelins used the ‘glow’ of the Thames as a guide for bombing raids. This was from 1915 to 1916.

    The Battle of Cambria ended 12-4-1917.  It was the successful use of tanks at Cambria by the British Army that brought this to a quick conclusion, much more successfully than the same attempts in the sticky, muddy fields of Flanders in the 1916 Battle of the Somme. They didn’t function at Somme as well as they could have. The tanks, running on treads copied from farm tractors, were far more successful at Cambria.

    This introduction of British-built tanks was the real start of mechanized land warfare. J.R.R. Tolkien’s first sight of them and their destructive firepower partly inspired his descriptions of war losses and battle scenes in Lord Of the Rings.

    While the United States avoided the European War in the beginning, there was a massive pro-war sentiment in the USA, that flared into demands addressed to Woodrow Wilson to enter that War when the Lusitania was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat in the Atlantic. H. M. Tomlinson observes that Walt Whitman’s poems in Leaves of Grass somehow indicated that the USA was involved long before we arrived in Europe, and therefore, he could no long refer to Americans as latecomers to the War. Since the poems in the section titled ‘War Poems’ seem to have been written post-Civil War, I’m not sure how Tomlinson derived that connection, but I’ll accept it.

    Essentially, Wilhelm II, who had fired Otto von Bismarck and let his leading Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff dictate policy, was an incompetent leader at best and a publicity-seeking attention hound, letting those two run the war while he himself lost the support of the military and the public, and was eventually forced to abdicate. His cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, was the same – out of touch with his own people and the military, making it far too easy for a malignant creature like Lenin to imprison him and his family and execute them by a firing squad. Wilhelm’s sloppy ideas of management resulted in his forced abdication from the German government and opened the door for Hitler’s seizure of power and the rise of the Reich.  Nicholas’s incompetence and complete disconnection from the Russian people led to his overthrow and the slaughter of him and his entire family, while Lenin drove his brutal, murderous path into existence. And we know well the legacy left to us which followed these events.

    I think H.M. Tomlinson describes it quite well:

    “When the crafty but ignorant Russian generals got from the Czar the order for mobilizing the armies, and issued it, they did not know it, but that was when they released Lenin. And who on earth can now inveigle that terrific portent safely under lid and lock again?” – H.M. Tomlinson, Waiting For Daylight, 1922

    Who, indeed?

  • WWII Vet Gets Some Justice

    Image result for world war II Navy WAVE Josephine Regnier

    Since this year is the 75th anniversary of the start of the WWII Navy program WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), I thought you might enjoy a little music today. It goes with this story, about a WWII WAVE.

    WAVES of the Navy is the countermelody to ‘Anchors Aweigh’. When the two are sung and played together, it’s good music.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNvBqsNSx_Q

    Now, you may remember a story from December 2016, when a 94 year old WWII WAVES veteran was attacked on her own property on Pearl Harbor Day and beaten up, and her purse was stolen by a man driving a stolen car.  That’s her in the photo at the top of this article.  http://abc7chicago.com/news/94-year-old-wwii-veteran-beaten-during-sw-side-robbery/1645837/

    The story doesn’t stop there. The thief and granny basher was driving a stolen vehicle. He bailed out of the stolen car in sight of a surveillance camera mounted outside a pizza parlor just down the street from Mrs. Regnier’s house. He had left her with some broken ribs, a bump on her head, a possible concussion, and a bunch of bruises, including black eyes. She was transferred from a civilian hospital to Hines VA for her care.  She says she still has a little trouble breathing.

    Mrs. Regnier’s son works at the pizza parlor. Her daughter had arrived to take her mother to the dentist just as the thief was running away with her mom’s purse. The pizza parlor owner gave the video to the cops very quickly. The thief, one Olajuwon Claiborne was arrested a few days later, after he was turned in by a former jailhouse buddy. I guess being a granny basher isn’t as cool as these dopes think it is.

    Well, since Mr. Claiborne was ID’d and was wanted anyway, he was picked up by Chicago’s finest, the pohlease people, and sat in jail awaiting trial. And Mrs. Regnier was there to see him. He was sentenced to 20 years in jail on September 21, 2017. When his sentence was handed down, he tearfully apologized to Mrs. Regnier, who is now 95.

    http://abc7chicago.com/man-gets-20-years-in-attack-on-94-year-old-world-war-ii-veteran/2439686/

    Her response was to ask “Why would he want to spend his life that way?”

    After all of this, the Bridgeview Lions Club threw a party in Mrs. Regnier’s honor, which is too cool. The guys got all the parades at the end of WWII. The gals mostly went home and did other things, although some of them stayed in the services.

    Mrs. Regnier’s job as a WAVE was basically as either a PN or a YN, answering phones and processing soldiers where she was stationed in Brooklyn. Since the WAVES boot camp was at Hunter College in Brooklyn, she was probably stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  http://abc7chicago.com/news/94-year-old-wwii-veteran-honored-after-attack-outside-her-chicago-home/1715721/

    She is one tough gal. I hope to be like her if I ever grow up.

    You go, girl! You left behind some big shoes for the rest of us girls to fill.

  • Worse and Worse In Norkiland

    As usual, I was looking for stuff to provide a snarky view of ND:tBF’s malfeasance toward his own people. When this WaPo article came up first on my search block, I read it, blinked, reread it, and asked out loud “What in the hell is wrong with that fat basterd?”

    Before you read it, there are a few things from history’s locker that you should know.

    The Romans had a great plumbing system, didn’t they? Yes, they kind of did. But in the digs at Pompeii and other places, including Nero’s Golden Palace (built on the Roman slums that he burned), the sewage went down a hole and stayed there until some poor soul with cacatorium duty went down into the plumbing system and moved it along. (Shovel the shit or suffer the whip.) There were, in fact, commodes in the kitchen in some houses in Pompeii.

    The Romans were infested with parasites such as whipworm, usually picked up from the public cacatoria where everyone used a common sponge to wipe their butts. They were great engineers, but they had no idea how to make toilet paper (or if you prefer, bath tissue). They also had a love of garum, a fermented fish sauce made from uncooked fish. Any parasites the fish had picked up, such as fish tapeworm, were transmitted to the consumer, because cooking killed the parasites. And despite their culture and love of regular bathing, external parasites such as lice and fleas infested the Romans just as much as they did the Vikings and other European populations, right on up through the Middle Ages. The hemorrhagic fever that nearly wiped out the population of Athens in 430BC was probably brought in from northern Africa (Ethiopia) by people infested with either of those insects.

    You would think that in this modern world, where vermifuges are available for every critter on Earth, including people where and when needed, this would be a thing of the past, wouldn’t you?

    Well, not if you live in a country with a ruler so demented that his only goal is to piss off a perceived enemy that can pound him into the ground head first. He is nothing like his Daddy or his Granddaddy. They were better managers, even if they were Commie crapweasels. They might have stiffed the general population, but they didn’t do that to their military.

    It’s more important now for Fatty Kim da T’ird to try to blow up a mountain and threaten to annihilate some other country than it is to keep his people, including his military, fed properly and healthy. If he really wants to wage war, he will lose, and lose badly. You could probably defeat the Nork military by throwing poptop cans of cat food at them.

    Here’s the link to the WaPo article:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/11/19/what-the-parasites-in-a-defectors-stomach-tell-us-about-north-korea/?utm_term=.f13d2a26487f

    There are stray cats in my neighborhood that are healthier and better fed.

    That Fat Basterd needs to pay for this, right through his fat ass.

  • Please, I’m Begging You….

    I don’t normally put out begging letters. However, since this is the holiday season, I thought it might be appropriate to ask a favor of all of you.

    Please get your politicians and reporters spayed and neutered. Then ear-tip them so that we know it’s been done.   Microchipping might be in order, too.

    We need to do something about the rapidly-growing population of these stray and feral critters. If this isn’t addressed now, or even sooner, we’ll have two entire generations of stray politicians hanging out on your doorstep, looking for food and shelter, and most likely a small clowder of reporters following them, after finding their way out of the demesnes under commuter rail bridges and empty shops next to a Starbuck’s.

    Now, I know I used the word ‘strays’.  It’s my understanding that some of them are also ferals, especially the old-timers in the politician population. They’re incredibly picky about what they eat and where they stay, so you can’t just give them regular food like Arby’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken and corner in the garage with a blanket. Many of them will turn down a Quarterpounder with Cheese, even if they’ve gone without a meal since 10AM. They may be finicky, but it’s because they think they’re entitled to a little more than just regular food. Black Forest ham, for instance, makes them happier than a ham sandwich with no designated ham origin, and if the salad you give them doesn’t have the latest in food fads – Chia pet seeds, for instance – they turn up their noses and walk away. And just plain old coffee is less than satisfactory, especially if you don’t use the real fake lo-fat non-dairy powdered creamer in it. They like to have bragging rights about the source and content of everything. It should be tattooed on their tummies or ears for the entire world to see, along with their invente,d but certified, allergies and carbon-resistant tendencies.

    I’m not suggesting we should be considering taking up a collection for shelters for homeless reporters or politicians. That money should go to homeless veterans, who put their time in serving their country instead of themselves.

    It’s only fair, however, to make sure that in their sunset years these particularly politic feral souls will have a safe haven to go to where they can live out what time they have left before the world explodes into an ice age around them. We must also guarantee that they can’t reproduce.

    The only real difference between the two species is that reporters generally tend to be sort of blondish with a fascination for glowing vid-screens, whereas politicians seem to manifest a rather dark, sometimes odd presence, as if they’re hiding something under the dinner napkins. But as you know, both species engage in flurries of untrammeled copulatory diversions, as well as concerts of loud, inane rambling public rhetoric in front of TV cameras.

    The populations of both species have grown by leaps and bounds lately, so much so that to continue to allow the spread of this disorder may result in having to force them into fenced colonies, accessible only to theologians and psychiatrists.

    So please, I beg you, follow the procedure to get this done. Set up the local traps with a tempting bit of bait, such as dinner wafers with feta cheese and fish eggs or pulsed zucchini in a garlic mayonnaise sauce. Once the politician or the reporter is trapped, you can call the local ferals shelter to pick them up for proper medical care, and neutering or spaying, plus the ear tipping and microchip.

    They can then be released to their own colonies where they won’t be constantly begging for money from us, expecting us to listen to their long-winded rattling speeches, or asking us to pay for their expensive cars and food.

    I’m begging you, with tears in my eyes, get them spayed and neutered. It’s the only way to be sure.

  • This is about Guns. That is all

    In case anyone is wondering, the state of Illinois has what can be politely deemed the strictest gun laws in the country. Illinois has ZERO reciprocity with other states regarding guns of any kind. If you’re coming from out of state to hunt deer or porcupines or whatever, you do need a hunting license, but that supports the state’s parks and recreation programs, including game hunting. However, you can’t have the guns riding shotgun in the rack in the pickup truck cab. And considering the theft rate in some areas, I wouldn’t do that, anyway.

    It doesn’t seem to matter that there is plenty of anti-gun stuff already in place. There is always some whining soul waiting in the shadows and corners to holler ‘more laws!!’ as loudly as possible, because – well, it gets attention for them in the media and lets them strut in front of the cameras a little bit.

    What annoys me more than anything else is that mindless and ignorant repeating meme that guns used in crimes are somehow bought legally. Nor does it matter that anyone, including me, can wave reports from the Tribune and other newspapers in the faces of these timid souls that their perception of guns associated with crime is 180-out wrong, unrealistic, and just plain incorrect.

    They find ignorance and corpse dancing to be a lot more attractive than the truth.

    There has been a bill SB1657 in the state legislature since February 2017 that requires gun dealers to have licenses, undergo background checks, etc. – you know the drill – in order to sell guns in the first place.  http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=1657&GAID=14&DocTypeID=SB&LegId=104404&SessionID=91

    The howling and fearful ignore the fact that the “trace” language only gets an original sale point for a gun used in a crime. They purposely fail to recognize that if a gun is stolen and used in a crime, it is not the fault of the dealer or the person who bought it.

    It would be nice if these tearful, fearful sobsters took a few minutes out of their precious time with online social media and paid attention to these things, but that would mean they’d have to acknowledge their mistakes and be in touch with reality. Giving up the addiction to electronic media would be quite painful for them.

    As this article from the Chicago Tribune, posted back in May this year, indicates, we already have everything in place addressed by SB1657. There is nothing new in it. Zero. Zip. Nada.

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-gun-shops-harmon-senate-illinois-perspec-0511-jm-20170510-story.html

    And yet, in this morning’s paper is a letter to the editor from the pastor of one of the Baptist Churches around here that passing this bill will stop corrupt gun dealers. No, do not send him any “hate” mail. I’m sure he’ll get enough in-your-face backtalk from people who know better.

    Carjacking is rising in Chicago proper and is creeping out to the suburbs. The carjackers all have guns. They may not be trained in how to use them – probably throw the bullets at you – but the probability of any of them buying them legally is so far below ZERO that the Antarctic continent is warmer in the winter.

    As was indicated in an article I posted a few weeks ago, guns are frequently shipped from factories in freight cars that are parked overnight in railyards on Chicago’s south side. Those box cars are broken into all the time. One 2013 break-in resulted in 115 Rugers being stolen. Why so few? It was all the thieves could carry.

    I am sick of this ignorance and bullshit.  I don’t know how to shut it down when the facts fly in the face of the people who insist on jumping up and down in front of TV cameras about it. It is far past time that the facts start to overwhelm the hysterics.