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

Category: “The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”

  • Pentagon Restricts Use of GPS Trackers to Find Yef

    The Pentagon is restricting troops’ use of electronic fitness trackers and other electronic tracking devices.

    There is a security problem that apparently did not occur to the Eager Beavers who think there are no Bad People in the world who want to find you and kill you. Perhaps they need to be put into a war zone with a GPS microchip embedded in their posteriors, just like in those Bond movies.

    Per this AP article:  https://apnews.com/d29c724e1d72460fbf7c2e999992d258  military personnel and other defense personnel (an undefined term) deployed to sensitive bases or high risk areas will not be allowed to use electronic fitness trackers or cell phone applications (“apps” to you gadgeteers) that can/will/are likely to reveal their whereabouts.

    No…. Really??? That thought didn’t occur to anyone at the 5-sided parking garage on the Potomac? And these people get a paycheck?

    ‘The memo, obtained by The Associated Press, stops short of banning the fitness trackers or other electronic devices, which are often linked to cellphone applications or smart watches and can provide the users’ GPS and exercise details to social media. It says the applications on personal or government-issued devices present a “significant risk” to military personnel, so those capabilities must be turned off in certain operational areas.

    ‘Under the new order, military leaders will be able to determine whether troops under their command can use the GPS function on their devices, based on the security threat in that area or on that base.  (Okay, but what if you don’t want to use one at all? Are you going to get spanked for not being socially electronic? Is your paycheck going to be fined?)

    “These geolocation capabilities can expose personal information, locations, routines, and numbers of DOD personnel, and potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission,” the memo said.” – AP article quote.

    This comes from the revelation in January that an online tracking map titled Global Heat Map, created by Strava, a GPS tracking company, was pinpointing the locations of subscribers through satellite uplinks to Strava’s fitness service.

    This means that we can no longer track whether or not Yef is in the hallway running the floor buffer or trekking across the grinder to get ice cream.

    The other side of this coin is this questionable need to be electronically connected to everything in the world. My phone annoys me enough when it rings and doesn’t tell me who is robocalling me. Is it really, truly necessary to be so digitized that you can be followed by a satellite uplink whether you like it or not?

    Like I said above, what if you just don’t want the damned thing in the first place?

  • A Slight Rise in Price

    LONDON (Reuters) – Oil rose on Monday (Aug. 6) after Saudi crude production unexpectedly fell in July and U.S. drilling appeared to slow, although the price is still almost 10 percent below its 2018 high of more than $80 a barrel.

    Here’s the link to the entire article:  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil/oil-gains-after-monthly-saudi-output-unexpectedly-drops-idUSKBN1KR039

    How this will affect the CPI calculations remains to be seen, but the price of gas at the pump has been slowly rising since April.  While the price of food at the checkout stand appears to be relatively stable, it will be affected by a rise in the CPI, as well. I did notice a slight rise in the price of chocolate ice cream and sweet corn in July, as well as a rise strawberry prices. A rise in the cost of fuel for deliveries can also affect the cost of your ammo at the gun shop counter.

    You can find local gas prices by going to Gas Buddy or one of those other consumer-reported price indexes. The price of oil at the commodities market does have an effect on a lot of consumer items, including gas at the pump, delivery costs for consumer products such as groceries and plastic straws. The article does not go into that, but the effect is there. California is now banning straws, which may also have a small ripple effect on the price of straws everywhere.

    Pres. Trump wants to roll back the fuel economy rules put on automobile manufacturers by the Obama administration. While the engineering to make current vehicles more fuel-savvy and fuel-saving, the price of gas at the pump has risen in concert with those economies of style. Removing those restrictions from vehicles won’t roll the price of gas at the pump back to the level of 2001, when I could get gas for $1.119/gal or 1974, when Nixon’s ineptitude made the price jump from $.259/gal to $.509/gal overnight and the talk was that there might be a rise to (gasp!) $1.009/gal. The horror!

    My guess about this “drop” in production at the well heads is that the Saudis cut production to bump up the price of crude at the markets, and nothing more complicated than that.  As long as it doesn’t go back to that ridiculous $140/barrel price some years ago, which was the original cause of the overthrow of Venezuela’s government, it’s fine with me.

    The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the determining factor in COLA increases (or lack thereof) in government-directed programs such as SSRI and whatever title welfare goes by now, and it is based on the price of commodities such as oil at the markets and gas at the pump. The CPI for July will be announced on Aug. 10. Any COLA increases will be announced in October, as usual.

    Now may be the time to stock the ammo supply, the pantry shelves and the freezer.  They can just try to keep me from getting my hands on chocolate ice cream or radishes.

  • Sea Story Page

    h2 hoist

    As Ex-PH2 alluded to in her “Knock Yourselves Out” post, TAH is akin to a watering hole where Vets meet and greet, and swap fables known in the Navy as “Sea Stories.” I’m certain the nautically challenged services have similar. A fairy tale starts with “Once upon a time” but a Sea Story always begins with, “Now this ain’t no shit.” So post up your favorite Sea Story or their equivalent. Here’s one of mine.

    Now this ain’t no shit…
    So there AWANEd was, onboard Naval Air Station Jacksonville, FLA (NAS JAX, or just JAX) on Day 2 of Rescue Swimmer School. The same morning PT regimen was conducted, including the Hospital Run, and we broke for lunch. (Day one was pretty brutal, and we lost about 30% of the class right off the bat, exactly as the instructors planned).

    Much different choices for chow today among the now wiser remaining SAR candidates, I had soup and a salad, because we were hitting the pool for the first time.

    It was called a Practical Evaluation, where the instructors would see if any of us could actually swim. Which is kind of key to become a Helicopter Rescue Swimmer.

    An aside, passing SAR School was really not an option for me, as we were told if failed, our next stop would be ship’s company as a non-rate, meaning get familiar with deck grinders and paint brushes, or aircraft chocks and tie-down chains, depending. You can pick the ship’s color as long as its haze gray; they’ll pick the number. Neither option charmed me much.

    So, after chow we mustered at the pool in our shorts and tee shirts, now stenciled with a number and name. No fins or dive mask allowed. The swimming pool, OK, training tank, was 50 yards in length and 12 feet down, everywhere. No splishy splashy shallow end. 12 lanes were described by dark tiles. The eval itself was one lap (up and back, 100 yards) of breast stroke, side stroke, and elementary back stroke, where your hands never break the water’s surface, easy.

    I had been on swim teams since I was 8 years old, and raced for our high school’s team. We got to State level, but were crushed by a team of mutants who I swear had webbed toes and gills. Really cute young ladies, though, which had a big input on my swim team participation.

    Anyway, my turn in the tank. This is a timed event, too, so just finishing doesn’t mean you pass. It means you MIGHT get another shot.

    I jumped in, and started, making good time with the breast stroke (I used to race the 100 and 200 meter breast events) the went to the side stroke, which was easy, but nothing I’d spent a lot of time doing in the past, and then the elementary back stroke, sort of a breast stroke, flipped. Boring. I was well ahead of the clock. Then it hit me, I could impress the instructors with my swimming expertise by finishing the last 50 yards doing the butterfly, a fast double overarm stroke with a dolphin kick. So I did.

    What a bad mistake.

    “What the F do we have here? Mark F-ing Spitz??!!”
    “Why are you F-ing up MY Navy practical eval, AWANED? Are you a F-ing commie??!!”
    “I think Mark F-ing Spitz here needs to meet the Blue Baby!”

    Oops.

    I had managed to single myself out for special attention by the instructor cadre, not a good thing. I got the Blue Baby.

    The Blue Baby is a 10 pound dumbbell weight, and cannot get wet. Doesn’t sound like much, until you have to swim with it. I was “awarded” 100 yards with the Blue Baby, and a ridiculously short time to complete the swim. I opted for the now not so boring elementary back stroke, and completed the 100 yards well passed the allotted, impossible time.

    So, up on the deck for some extra PT because I didn’t meet the Blue Baby time, and repeat the Practical Evaluation, because I “contaminated” the first one with an unapproved swim stroke. I didn’t opt for the butterfly finale, this time. And I did pass just fine. Lesson learned.

    The rest of the class were kept busy with push-ups and flutter kicks and what not while I swam. They weren’t especially happy with me, but the instructors would have found another reason to PT them.
    It was going to be a long eight weeks.

    And guess what my nick name was for the duration.

    F’n Mark Spitz.

  • School is almost out….

    Seth Borenstein, a hippie whiner, wrote an article on how everything is going to pieces and it’s All Our Fault. The guilt trip we’re supposed to be on has not yet hit me, but he is quite adamant about it all. https://www.chicoer.com/2018/06/19/looking-for-signs-of-global-warming-its-all-around-you/

    Unfortunately, his article includes a photo of Venice during a high water episode, which is nothing new in Venice. The city sits on a very ancient marsh, which became a bog, which became a settlement, and eventually, turned into Venice, the city built on water. And Venice is very slowly, but surely, sinking, not experiencing “global warming”. That’s a problem for the Venetians. Right now, they’re in a Very Low Water Level status, and worried.

    There’s also a letter of protest from an upset resident of Chico, who says people who don’t understand science can’t vote and can’t hold public office.  That’s her view, but it violates the US Constitution and the 15th Amendment.

    https://www.chicoer.com/2018/06/24/letter-if-you-dont-understand-science-you-cant-vote/

    Here’s the gist of it:  Why are people still voting for a man who is ignorant concerning proven scientific evidence that we are slowly destroying our home planet by human practices? These are the same type of people who refused to believe the Earth is round and not flat. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

    I propose a new voting requirement. If you aren’t smart enough to understand science you can’t vote and you can’t be an elected official. I am holding Republicans responsible for destroying my planet.      — Nancy L. XxxX, Chico

    She wants to take our basic Constitutional right away from us, despite the additional emphasis provided by the 15th Amendment (and others). In view of her low information level about a bunch of things, and her demand that a science test be passed in order to qualify to vote or hold office, I pulled out all the stops from 4th, 5th, and 6th grade and came up with these general science test questions, which any of us born before 2001 should be able to answer.

    1 – Does the Moon orbit the Earth? How long does it take? Why does it change shape?
    2 – Does the Earth orbit the Sun or does the Sun orbit the Earth? (I made that one up, but it belongs here, just for Nancy.)
    3 – Why do some trees change color in the fall and others do not? What is the difference between deciduous trees and non-deciduous trees? What trees produce maple syrup?
    4 – What is the difference between dogs and humans? Give examples for each.
    5 – Why do we have seasons?
    6 – How long is the longest day, and when does it happen? How short is the shortest day, and when does it happen? How many hours are there in a day?
    7 – Why does the ocean have tides?
    8 – What is a tidal bore? Give an example.
    9 – What is a solar system? How far away is the Sun? Is the Sun a star?
    10 – Who invented the electric light bulb. How many experiments did he create and conduct?
    11 – What is the chemical formula for each of the following: A) water; B) salt; C) dry ice; D) household ammonia
    12 – How are fish and land animals different?
    13 – What is a good way to stop erosion in farmland?
    14 – Why are crops rotated?
    15 – What kinds of plants fix nitrogen in the soil?

    That’s a 10-gallon hat in that photo, right?

    Remember, students, the sillier your answers are, the higher your score will be.

    It’s Friday and the 4th of July is coming up. Happy Summer!!!!

  • Post-Combat Drunken Orgies Okay

    6th Victrix Tribune (Ret.) Fabius Flatulus Maximus was kind enough to give me some of his time in retirement for another interview. He’s been fascinated by the game of golf, but can’t imagine anyone chasing a little white ball around a mowed lawn with holes in it. I did explain to him that it was a game invented by the Scots, who used to be known as the Pictish tribes.

    “Oh! Those birdbrains! Why didn’t you say so!” He laughed. “Yeah, we just called all of them Gauls or Galicians and ignored their tribal cacaisms. Pissed them off no end. We helped Pius Antoninus build the Antonine Wall and then ol’ Hadrian built his wall to keep them on their side of the fence. Kept the troops busy, too. How can I help you?”

    I explained the whole business of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the units, and he stopped me right there.

    “Whoa! Misconduct?” He shook his head and snorted. “Sexual misconduct?”

    I nodded.

    “I did not know there was such a thing,” he remarked, with a twinkle in his eyes.

    I gave him a copy of the latest bit of tight-as-a-drumhead lecture on ‘look but don’t touch, and don’t look, either’. He let out a bellow of laughter, which went on until his eyes were watering and he finally caught his breath.

    “Who wrote this nonsense?” he asked. “What is he? Castratus? Oportet mihi cacare!1”

    I answered “No, it seems that it has to do with a lack of understanding of things like the fight or flight response and human nature’s need to breed, once territory is confirmed in friendly hands.”

    His response to that was quite straightforward: there is nothing wrong with having a little post-combat orgy, as long as too much wine isn’t spilled and no one gets into knife fights.

    “It’s okay if they have chest bumping contests for amusement,” he said, “or a javelin throw using leftover skulls as targets. Relieves stress, you know. But you’re putting women in combat?”

    I nodded.

    “Must be wretchedly mulierii ieiunio2. Carnarius sum, sed pinguiarius non sum3. If they’re really worried about it, they could try recruiting women from the Isle of Lesbos over in the Adriatic. So are these Amazons any good at killing the barbarians?” he asked.

    I assured him they were trained properly for the job. But the general concern was that post-combat stress would lead to improper and inappropriate sexual conduct.

    He stared at me for a moment, then burst into more raucous laughter.

    “Inappropriate what??? Whoever comes up with this stuff,” he said, “has to be psychotic! Iignosce mihi4, but we always approved drunken orgies after a battle. Spoils of war and all that. It relieves the troops’ stress as long as no one overdoes it. Takes the cork out of the amphora, so to speak. We let ‘em party until they pass out. Then they get to work hard the next day, doing things like carpentry and building stone walls. In the sun. Under really bad-tempered centurions.”

    “Well, what about the rape of the Sabine women?” I asked.

    “Hey, I had nothing to do with that! It happened six hundred sixty years before I was born. My granny told me it was half and half. Some of the Sabine women were desperate for real men, so when the Romans showed up, off they went. Those flabby Etruscans like to lie their asses off about everything, you know, and they didn’t want to lose their monopoly on trade with local farmers. When we showed up, we brought competition. That, and muscles.”

    “Well, I’m glad we got that straightened out,” I said. “So Livy was wrong?”

    “Mostly. So who cooked up this nonsense? Some pig-eyed male virgin with a squint?”

    I said no, it was purported to have been the fault of some jug-eared guy with a big nose who talks to himself a lot, and doesn’t have a real job any more.

     

    1 A eunuch? You gotta be shittin’ me!

    2 Bony broads

    3 I’m a meat lover, not a fat lover.

    4 Excuse me, but…

  • What Fools These Liberals Be….

    Ed Rogers posted an article in Jewish World Review, which was picked up and posted by the Washington Post and by my morning newspaper.  http://jewishworldreview.com/0518/ed_rogers051018.php3

    In the article, he reports that Hillary Clinton whined that being a capitalist “probably” hurt her when campaigning against democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2016, that maybe she should have used the word socialist.

    As he indicates, Republicans are chasing their tails, trying to avoid that ‘deer in the headlights” appearance and Democrats are wondering if they’ll have to answer questions about whether they support capitalism or socialism when 2020 campaign season comes up. He also takes a look at the current crop of millennials.

    I’ve been wading through a biographical account of Ernest Hemingway’s involvement in spying for the nascent Soviet Union when he was a journalist in the USA and following events in Spain during the Franco Revolution, at the outbreak of World War II. It’s written by Nicholas Reynolds, (Writer, Sailor, Solider, Spy) a curator for the CIA’s museum (yes, they have one, but can you get tickets to it?) which follows Hemingway’s journey from the aftermath of the 1935 hurricane that whacked the Florida Keys and his discovery that War Bond soldiers who had been recruited to go to the Keys to do housing construction had not been evacuated, and almost all of them had died when the hurricane struck. He was outraged. He began to hate Roosevelt (a New Deal socialist if there ever was one) and was easily persuaded by the editor of The Masses, a Communist publication in the USA, to write articles for them – and later, to spy for the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. At some point (I haven’t arrived there yet) he was also recruited by the OSS (pre-CIA) to work for them.

    He spent time with the Castros during their ouster of Batista. He thought they were buddies. He believed Fidel when that goat told him he carried a copy of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ in his backpack. It  was not until Fidel Castro confiscated Hemingway’s beloved home La Finca in Havana and kicked him out of Cuba, that Ernest Hemingway, the brilliant author, WWI ambulance driver, and hard-driving war correspondent, realized that he had been hosed.

    While Hemingway was being led around by the nose, mostly because his contacts knew how to feed his massive, expansive ego, Josef Stalin was executing anyone he perceived as a threat to his position. When he’d gotten rid of Trotsky,  he turned on his senior Army officers, which included Massiliev, the most senior and most experienced of them. This comes from Robert Conquest’s ‘The Terror: a Reassessment”, which I have only glanced through. Twelve senior, experienced, loyal Russian Army officers were executed, while Hitler was just beginning his rampage through Europe. The mass grave was found near St. Petersburg a while back.

    Conquest wrote the first edition of ‘The Terror’ based on eye witness accounts. When the Iron Curtain fell, when the Soviet Union was disestablished, he went to Russia to research those accounts and provided back up for them in the ‘Reassessment” edition.

    I think it’s a good idea to have both of these titles on your bookshelves. They are thoroughly researched works.

    Why am I writing about this? Because the mind-numbingly blasé attitude of the socialist side of the millennial crowd is that it wasn’t done right. It isn’t done that way.

    Wrong, kiddies. Very wrong.

    Stalin did it exactly right: eliminate any and all who may even vaguely oppose you, quickly and thoroughly. All he needed was unquestioning obedience, which he got through fear, mass murder, forced labor at gulags, and starvation. Thanks to his embracing Lysenkoism and outright mass murder, 27,000,000 people died of starvation, execution, hard labor in the gulags, and just plain freezing to death.  Hitler did it right, putting Germany first, and slaughtering 14,o00,000++ German and European citizens, just because he could.  Mao Tse-Tung did it right, letting 30,000,000++ Chinese people starve. Why would he care? They breed like rabbits, don’t they? You always need more laborers. Pol Pot did it right: get rid of the older generations because they knew too much and resisted him and his Khmer Rouge. Ask the survivors of his rampages.

    Ho Chi Minh was a Communist. He blackmailed the French at the end of the French-Indochina War into forking over ransom cash for their 15,000 prisoners of that war. He knew exactly how to do it right. The Viet Cong meant nothing to him, so he used them. That spilled over into the 1960s and became our war when Kennedy sent advisers to the South Vietnamese government, and you know the rest of that story. But it wasn’t really over. When the NVA rolled their tanks into Saigon in April, 1975, the city was rapidly being abandoned because the South Vietnamese knew what they’d face if they stayed. And that is what it is: a Communist country, following China’s economic model. You can run a business and make a profit and they love tourists there. But if you speak out against the government in anyway, you will be sent to a re-education camp, so shut up.

    The point is that they ALL knew how to do it right: get rid of any people with opposing ideas, independent thoughts, etc., and squelch the rest through Pure Terror. That’s how it’s done right  (I can hear someone squawking now!) Ask Vlad Putin about it. He was the head of the KGB for a very long time.

    As you’ll see when you read the article linked above, the millennials who belong to the Bright Idea Club all have these wunnaful-a, wunnaful-a ideas about things like a monthly stipend for everyone and guaranteed jobs – all things you get in a Communist world – but all cooked up with no idea where the money comes from to pay for these things. What they need is a harsh lesson in the reality that it creates. When have any of them gone hungry, frozen or exhausted from hard labor – ever?

    When I watched the demise of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev was quoted on the news as saying “We can’t do this any more. We are broke,” and he dissolved the Politburo, I realized that there would be future generations who never had to face the possibility of missiles launched from Cuba toward their homes in the northern Midwest. And they would take this safety for granted.

    Sometimes, I detest being right.

  • Strange Days….

    I came across this gem on Claymore’s DUers column last week. I try to stick to reading the text, not the comments, because the comments seem to be written by Silurians who lost the fight against Dr. Who. It’s very strange to find something at DU that has the blinking eye effect. You see something with one eye, then something like it – but completely different – with the other eye. And then I realized that this is the work of a split personality.

    This is how it works:  read this once, then reread it and everywhere you see Democrat or liberal or whatever refers to that side of the coin, replace it with Republican, conservative or whatever is on the other side of the coin. If you see GOP or Trump replace with Dem or Hillary.  You get the idea. Then read it again.

    Author unnamed wrote:

    The stench and danger of political corruption is nothing new. America has seen it at the local, state, and federal levels many times in the past.

    But this is the first time we’ve seen the total corruption of an entire political party from top to bottom.

    Fox “news,” for all practical purposes, is an arm of the Republican Party in general, and Trump specifically. Republicans also have the benefit of radio stations and online sites that spew their hate and propaganda every hour of every day.

    And they also have the power to gerrymander entire states, deny the “wrong” people the right to vote, “scrub” voter’s rolls, and even make voting results from “certain districts” disappear.

    Above all, the entire Republican Party is enabling the most dangerous, ignorant, corrupt person who ever sat in the White House. They’re allowing him, by their silence, and in some cases their active assistance, to destroy democracy.

    Our votes mean nothing if the outcome can be rigged. So what else can we do?

    Here’s what we can do. We can publicly denounce anyone, anywhere, who votes for any Republican candidate for any office. Each and every one of us must make our voices heard. Even if we’re speaking to a GOP family member, an acquaintance, or a “friend.”

    We need to shame those who vote for Republicans. They need to be made aware of the damage they are causing with their “party loyalty.” And they need to be exposed as aiding and abetting a political party that is doing its best to turn our country into an authoritarian nightmare.

    It’s up to us to stop it. No one else can. Each and every one of us know people who vote for, and thus enable Republicans. And we must speak up now while we’re still “allowed” to speak up.

    Sorry to be asking so much. It can cause hurt feelings, and in some cases irreparable damage. But, yes. I’m asking a lot of everyone. After all, there’s nothing at stake except our way of life, and all of our freedoms.

     

    Okay, now that you’ve done that at least once, did you see what I saw? Or am I wandering alone in the Universe?

  • 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?