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

Category: Politics

  • The best reason yet for boycotting the NFL

    As a fifty-year follower of the NFL with the Dallas Cowboys being my team, and someone who waits eagerly each year for the season to start, I really thought it would be like going cold turkey on a booze addiction to ever give up my favorite sport. This year, adding to the anticipation, there was a brand new 65-inch Sony sitting just a few feet from the recliners and the waiting fireplace. I was set for the season.

    And then those foolish young black players decided imprudently to follow the league’s biggest loser in his flag- and anthem-disrespecting protest against supposed oppression of blacks in America. Like many in the NFL fan base, I was initially angered but unsure what to do about it. My uncertainty didn’t last long – on week three, when my Boys linked arms and knelt prior to the game, with owner, Jerry Jones, right in the middle, this ol’ Cowboy fan changed channels and hasn’t watched anything from the NFL since.

    I confess that there have been times when I was tempted, like the boozer in rehab, to take just one little taste, but I have managed to remain steadfast. Now, as we are treated to weekly images of evermore empty NFL stadiums and declining television ratings, I no longer have to fear falling off the wagon, for just this very morning I read this:

    “Well, I think it’s deeply troubling that the president would be attacking black athletes for expressing their opinions peacefully,” [Hillary] Clinton told Sirius XM host Zerlina Maxwell. “Protest is a part of the American way of life and it’s something that I’m very proud of whether I agree or disagree peaceful protest is part of what has helped us make progress, learn more, be a better country over time.”

    “I just couldn’t help thinking that he has attacked these black athletes for peacefully protesting, but he doesn’t really attack white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klanners, or Vladimir Putin, who interfered in our election and I think it’s all part of his political calculation and I really think it’s bad for the country. He wants to set people against each other, he wants to divide us,” she added.

    Yep, that Clinton, hateful Hillary, the despised doyenne of defeat, the lame, lying lioness of losing, that selfsame, swamp-side elitist who last year looked me square in the eye through my television screen and contemptuously sneered that I, me, a poor kid, combat veteran, college graduate on the G.I. Bill with a successful career and retirement, an American success story, am a deplorable human being, has just given her blessing to this Democrat-induced racial cancer growing within the bowels of the NFL.

    Well, folks, that’s good enough for me. If Cankles is for it, then it goes without saying that I am dead-set against. If liberals wanted to inject progressive politics into football, they just did so with a partisan turkey baster, and in a way that firms up this conservative patriot’s resolve like nothing before. If Hillary supports anything political, I’m viscerally opposed – a response, I suspect, is widespread among the largely conservative white male fan base, her weakest demographic. So if any of you need additional resolve in turning your back on the NFL and its gutless owners, remember that Hillary is in full support of those players kneeling while our national anthem is played.

    Once again, twice in less than a year, Hillary has made decision-making easier for me.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Daniel Lombardi; phony Green Beret

    Daniel Lombardi; phony Green Beret

    Our partners at Guardians of the Green Beret share their work on this Daniel Lombardi fellow. Apparently, they weren’t fast enough getting screenshots of his claims, so they had to engage Mr Lombardi in a social media discussion when he tried to join a social media group of special forces soldiers. Then he accused the group of being fakes, and then he followed up claiming that he had been pulling their collective leg in his responses to their legitimate inquiry;

    I guess he confused “Special Forces” with “Special Services” – he was in the 8th Infantry Division Band as a guitar player, then he took a break and reenlisted as a parachute rigger.

  • Freedom of the Seas- USS Chafee in the South China Sea

    uss chafee
    Reuters is reporting USS Chafee, a US Navy guided missile destroyer, sailed near islands claimed by China in the South China Sea on Tuesday, prompting anger in Beijing. The operation is the latest attempt to counter what Washington sees as Beijing’s efforts to limit freedom of navigation in the strategic waters.

    Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Chafee, conducted normal operations that challenged “excessive maritime claims” near the Paracel Islands, over which China has territorial disputes with its neighbors.

    “China’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that a warship, two fighter jets and a helicopter had scrambled to warn the U.S. ship away, adding it had infringed upon China’s sovereignty and security with its “provocation”. China would further strengthen its naval and air defenses, the ministry said.

    “We demand the U.S. side earnestly take steps to correct its mistakes,” it added.

    China’s bluster is just writing checks they can’t afford to cash, and they know it.

  • Out of the Mouths of Libidiots . . .

    . . . on rare occasion comes God’s honest truth – either by accident or design.

    This past Sunday Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, appeared on multiple national news shows.  She was promoting new Federal legislation banning “bump stocks”.

    During that appearance, subject of the recent Las Vegas mass shooting came up.  Feinstein was asked if there might “have been any law passed that would’ve stopped” that recent massacre.

    Her answer,  rephrased in simple English:  “No”.

    And that wasn’t a slip of the tongue, either.  Feinstein reiterated essentially the same answer on another news program later in the day.

    Gee.  So Feinstein is promoting yet another gun control law that she knows won’t have any significant effect when it comes to preventing gun crimes.  No surprise there.

    No, what shocks me is that Feinstein – who never met a gun control measure she didn’t like – actually admitted something anyone with common sense already knows.  To wit:  gun control laws . . . don’t prevent gun crimes. All they do is limit the rights of law-abiding citizens.

    There’s simply no way to anticipate and prevent the actions of a loon – or a terrorist – if they keep a low profile and act within the law while planning their criminal acts.  The Las Vegas shooter did exactly that.

    Libidiot politicians telling God’s honest truth.  Perhaps the Millennium truly is at hand!  (smile)

  • Manning finds sympathy in NYC

    Manning finds sympathy in NYC

    Fox News reports that the fellow who went to jail as Bradley Manning found a sympathetic crowd in New York City to whom he told lies about the classified information that he released to the public;

    “These aren’t intelligence documents,” she said. “It’s historical data.”

    She went on, “There’s nothing sensitive in there, there’s no troop movements,” she added. “It was a historical record of everything that had happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

    I’m sorry but an Army private first class doesn’t get to make those kinds of distinctions – he wasn’t the arbiter of what is classified and what is not classified. He can’t even decide whether his barracks room is “clean enough”. PFC Manning wasn’t sure if he was a male or female soldier, how can he be expected to decide what is and what isn’t classified correctly.

    Manning was asked by one tearful audience questioner whether her experience had made her “more cynical about fairness.”

    “I do have cynical moments,” she said, tearing up again. “But then I get past them, you know? I turn to my friends, and I turn to my family … and then they cheer me up.”

    Fairness would be if the government would execute traitors instead of letting them out of prison and running around loose in the world, but they don’t, so me, I’m cynical about fairness, but no one asked.

    Thanks to MustangCryppie for the link.

  • Media expects Bergdahl to plead guilty

    Media expects Bergdahl to plead guilty

    The search engines are clogged with media speculation that Bowe Bergdahl will plead guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy so he doesn’t have to face a very public trial. According to Fox News;

    That’s according to two individuals with knowledge of the case.

    They tell The Associated Press that Bergdahl will submit the plea later this month and sentencing will start Oct. 23. The individuals weren’t authorized to discuss the case and demanded anonymity.

    The 31-year-old Bergdahl could face up to five years in prison on the desertion charge and a life sentence for misbehavior.

    That would be the smart thing to do, especially since he’s been able to witness the beating that Bradley Manning has taken in social media. But, we’ll see in a couple of weeks, I suppose.

  • Israeli technology saving American lives and equipment

    One of the huge problems in fighting asymmetric wars such as America has been doing now for decades is that the advantage a major power has in expensive, sophisticated weaponry can be negated in seconds with an inexpensive, primitive weapon, with the rocket-propelled grenade being the classic example. RPGs have taken out everything from helicopters to heavy tanks. Now, according to Global Security.org, the Army is doing something about it by doing a test refitting its main battle tank, the M1A2 Abrams, with a new advanced Israeli defensive system.

    The US military will be installing the Israeli-built Trophy Active Protection System (APS) meant to intercept and destroy incoming missiles or rockets on their M1A2 Abrams tanks. This will make the US military the only other besides the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to use the defensive system.

    The Trophy system consists of a quartet of radar antennae and fire-control radars that detects incoming projectiles, such as anti-tank guided missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and then destroys them with a blast like that from a shotgun.

    It is a “hard kill” system, meaning it protects the vehicle by destroying the projectile; this is opposed to a “soft kill” system that interferes with the missile’s guidance and redirects it. Soft kill devices are useless against the simple RPGs popular with militant groups such as Daesh.

    Jointly developed by two Israeli-owned state corporations, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the Trophy is the only combat-proven APS in the world.

    The Pentagon made this decision after an “urgent material” request, they said in a press release on Thursday. Each system costs an estimated $350,000, and it will be first deployed to one of the US Army’s 14 Armor Brigade Combat Team’s squadron of 28 M1A2 SEPv2 variants, a nearly $10 million contract. It may then be added to other squadrons later on if it impresses, the Pentagon said.

    Anti-materiel weapons such as RPGs have been a perennial thorn in the side of the US military and its allies. A $2,000 RPG launcher firing a $500 grenade can destroy or disable a $9 million Abrams tank. Over the course of 2014, the Iraqi Army lost 100 of the 140 Abrams the Americans had sold them in the fight against Daesh.

    That last paragraph explains exactly why this is a good economical move by the Army. Even a disabled tank can cost millions to retrieve from the battle area and return to a maintenance depot capable of making the necessary repairs, so just a few such “saves” can more than justify the cost of this program. Other active protection systems, like the Iron Curtain, are being used to protect other military vehicles. Let us hope more and better protection systems are in the works to protect these vehicles and their crews.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Hate Crimes at the Air Force Academy?

    Hate Crimes at the Air Force Academy?

    The New York Times reported this weekend on another incident of racist graffiti at an unlikely venue, the United States Air Force Academy Prep School, which is located on the campus of the Academy itself, not exactly a hotbed of white supremacist activity.

    Over at my favorite military blog, This Ain’t Hell (but you can see it from here), the discussion was decidedly skeptical, as the people commenting are those serving or who have served and who therefore have an informed appreciation of the dire consequences that could befall the writer of such racist messages on a military installation. Many of them noted the several recent situations like this where the perps have turned out to be one and the same as the complainants. A link was provided to a website that monitors such spurious claims of racist activity, Fakehatecrimes.org, where I discovered an interesting occurrence that might shed some light on such ersatz reports. If you click on the graphs page at the website, you will find a pair of simple bar graphs tracking the reported numbers of such faux incidents by month and year. One thing is immediately apparent: there was a tremendous spike in 2016 and that spike was attributable primarily to the very large number reported in November of that year. It would appear that 2017 is headed to an even higher finish.

    That spike, coinciding with the presidential election, immediately set me to wondering if such reports were being used for political purposes, but the greater likelihood is that it was the heightened emotional turmoil following the Democrat’s hugely unexpected loss that triggered more such activity. That it has continued at an increased pace well into 2017 could indicate that it is a racial variant of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Whatever the driving mechanism, I’m with my comrades in arms at This Ain’t Hell in believing that this latest situation on the USAFA campus is highly suspect, perhaps just a social justice form of a Blue Falcon designed to bring the entire organization bad publicity.

    But there is another aspect of this phenomenon of false racist activity reporting that I find even more significant: its necessity. Why, in a nation of privileged racist white supremacists who are determined to oppress blacks, as the Democrats and their media constantly remind us that we are, is there even a need for blacks to create phony incidents? If we are as hugely racist as Black Lives Matter and other social justice organizations say we are, we’re doing a piss-poor job of it if the downtrodden minority folks have to step up their game of false racism incidents just to keep the white racist meme moving along. Are you telling me, all you privileged white supremacists reading this, that we’re incapable of performing our own racist acts on a scale to justify the media harangues about white privilege and white racism? This can’t be good: I’m forming a mental image of some social justice mob leader, standing before a maze of media microphones and fulminating about how the damned white folks have done gone and gotten so lazy they won’t even do their own damned racism no more!

    On the other hand, and this is where I’m inclined to go, this could be a very good indicator of the fact that this is not such a racist nation after all. We are, as so many of us have long believed, much better people than the Democrats and their controlled media claim we are. I have long chosen to disbelieve them and I’ll bet the rent money that this blossoming situation at the Air Force Academy will someday be included on the pages of Fakehatecrimes.org.

    Crossposted at American Thinker