Posts Tagged → shooting
My date with MSNBC
Yesterday I took the Princess of Patience out for her birthday lunch-dinner. She is 49, again, but looks young enough that a waiter asked what my daughter wanted for dinner. No lie. Clean living apparently has its just rewards.
On the other hand, I look like hell.
So while she and I were on our date together, celebrating another notch in her gunstock, in terms I can relate to, our eyes kept getting drawn to the TV playing in the sitting area. For whatever reason, it was stuck on MSNBC, a channel I have obviously heard of, but to which I have had very little exposure. Then again, I watch almost no TV, ever.
So, being of open and easily distracted mind, I ignored my wife on her big day, and instead paid increasing attention to the people on MSNBC. It was in truth a date with the TV channel, as I got sucked in so deeply that I forgot entirely to compliment, thank, and engage with the actual human next to me.
Like I said, she is the Princess of Patience. What she sees in me is a mystery. A normal guy would throw rose petals in front of her every morning. She makes me coffee. I am lucky beyond anything I deserve.
But what of my date with MSNBC?
Well, after a solid hour of really paying attention, let us never again call this a “news channel,” nor its personnel “reporters.”
MSNBC is a wholly dedicated political advocacy program. There is no news being reported. Rather, there is news being edited, commented on, subject to opinions from one perspective, one side, one view. No opposing views or analysis are offered, and the questions designed to sound like alternative perspectives are asked of political advocates with whom the interviewer agrees.
The show was totally dedicated to the Parkland High School shooting and to promoting gun control, gun confiscation, and citizen disarmament. The comments made by the guest people, ranging from high school kids to grey-haired retirees, followed a single line of thought. Most of the comments were just factually wrong, and no one challenged them.
Give credit to the two young high school kids who were interviewed, two young men, they stood in front of the camera and answered questions. But their answers were what you would expect from high school kids: Factually incorrect, emotional, without reason or logic. These kids were being used by MSNBC to promote the channel’s political viewpoints, so no one challenged them on any of their nonsense.
For example, both boys kept stating that AR15s shoot “200 bullets a second.”
That is about 199 bullets more than an AR15 actually shoots in one second.
An AR15 is a semi-automatic firearm, not an automatic firearm. Semi-auto firearms shoot a bullet with each manual pull of the trigger, and most have clips holding 20-30 rounds, not hundreds, as the one boy claimed. And very few automatic firearms of any sort, much less hand-held small arms, shoot at that very high rate of fire.
But MSNBC will not allow actual facts to guide their line of thought.
Consider the fact that the armed deputy assigned to protect the children at Parkland WAS HIDING AS THE SHOOTING OCCURRED.
Yes. When the shooting began the school’s paid deputy sheriff, today a retired deputy sheriff, immediately fled the school and went outside, where he basically curled up in a fetal position.
The man abandoned his post, was derelict in his duty, and let the killer slaughter children and teachers, unopposed.
Consider also that the police had been to the shooter’s home three dozen times for domestic disturbances, and at any time could have intervened between an obviously troubled youth and his gun.
Similarly, the FBI had been repeatedly contacted about the young man’s public threats, and they did nothing. Zero. Nada.
But none of these huge adult failures stop MSNBC from exploiting children, living and dead, from promoting their political agenda of gun confiscation.
And the hour went on like this, a parade of fake data, fake outrage, fake news. At the end of my date with MSNBC I understood why adults I know have a similar disconnect as the adults who failed Parkland’s students. Adults who watch MSNBC and believe they are getting actual news, and actual facts, are failing themselves and those around them. You cannot watch MSNBC seriously, because it is an arm of a radical political movement, at odds with American traditions of news reporting, good government, and legal gun possession.
Watching MSNBC may re-affirm your beliefs, but it will not teach you anything accurate or factual.
MSNBC’s purpose is to persuade watchers of one perspective, not to inform them of facts. MSNBC is fake in every way.
I wondered aloud how much of our other media is like MSNBC, feeding watchers inaccurate information from a political perspective?
That question was answered during the live press briefing at the White House yesterday, which was shown real-time on MSNBC, during our “date.”
During the press event, the national media personnel (they are NOT reporters) were openly hostile toward the president and current administration. They are uniformly and firmly of one political mind, and using their positions as would-be reporters to try and damage an administration they personally oppose. They are advocates, political activists, just pretending to be professional news reporters.
Add this media failure to the long list of other adult failures surrounding the Parkland shooting.
I won’t be going on any more dates with MSNBC again, or with any of her silicon sister media friends, either.
Orlando shooting = immigration policy overhaul
The Muslim shooter of 49 innocent Americans in Orlando made his political and personal positions clear for a long time, in tweets, videos, facebook posts, and then recorded telephone 911 calls from the bloody floor of the bar he shot up.
Omar Mateen stated up front for months that he was a follower of ISIS, and he was following the plain dictates of Islam.
The Koran explicitly lists the cruel punishments for gays and infidels, and Omar Mateen followed through like a good Muslim.
The mainstream media is doing everything they can to digress, ignore, avoid, and pretend that the cause of this horrendous event is anything but what it is: Another Islamic attack on Americans.
Islam is a philosophy incompatible with Western civilization. Oh, Americans have big hearts, and we are always trying to find ways to make everyone under the sun feel welcome. But that should not involve committing national suicide. That is the very definition of political correctness.
Trying to punish law-abiding Americans for the actions of insane immigrants and followers of insane belief systems makes no sense, and we will not abide efforts by liberals like US Senator Bob Casey to strip Americans of their Constitutional rights.
The irony is that the Left wants to strip us of our rights for committing thought crimes, ie “hate crimes,” while the actual haters are allowed to roam freely among us, committing crimes in the name of their inhuman belief system.
The failure of the Left in its response to the Orlando shooting is overwhelming. America is being split into citizens who see plainly what is wrong, ie anti-gay violence by religiously correct Muslims, and those who ignore the obvious outcomes of their defective immigration policies.
Neil Young’s 1970 Protest Song REWRITTEN for 2016!
Following the 1970 fatal violence at Kent State University, Neil Young of Crosby Stills Nash and Young fame performed a song dedicated to his perspective of that sad event. It was written by Patricia Griffin and Robert Plant and published by Universal Music.
Neil Young named his song “Ohio,” a “protest song and counterculture anthem” representative of the Left at that time, and probably today, too. If you remove the lyrics, or replace them as I have here, it’s actually a good song.
Ain’t it funny how what comes around goes around, Mr. Young. Yesterday was the 46th anniversary of Kent State.
“Four Dead in Benghazi”
(Sung to the tune of Ohio)
A Parody by Josh First
Tin soldiers and Clinton coming,
we’re finally at the “T.”
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi.
Gotta get down to it,
Government letting us down,
she should’ve been gone long ago.
What if you knew Chris,
and saw him in the compound,
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Clinton coming,
we’re finally at the “T.”
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi.
ISIS soldiers and Clinton coming,
We’re finally able to see,
this summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi
Four dead in Benghazi,
Four dead in Benghazi
Four dead in Benghazi….
Fifty years of designated wilderness
Two weeks ago marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act.
It applies to federal designation of remote areas, not to states. States can create their own wild areas, and some do. States closest to human populations and land development seem to also be most assertive about setting aside large areas for people and animals to enjoy.
I enjoy wilderness a lot. Hunting, camping, hiking, fishing, and exploring are all activities I do in designated wilderness.
Every year I hunt Upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains, in a large designated wilderness area. Pitching a tent miles in from the trail head, the only person I see is a hunting partner. Serenity like that is tough to find unless you already live in northern Vermont, Maine, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming or Alaska. It’s a valuable thing, that tranquility.
This summer my young son sat in my lap late at night, watching shooting stars against an already unbelievably starry sky. Loons cried out all around us. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves on the birch trees above us and caused the lake to lap against our rocky shore.
Only by driving a long way north, and then canoeing on a designated wilderness lake, and camping on a designated wilderness island in that lake, were we able to find such peace and quiet. No one else was anywhere around us. We were totally alone, with our camp fires, firewood chores, fishing rods, and deep sleeps in the cold tent.
These are memories likely to make my son smile even as he ages and grapples with responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. We couldn’t do it without wilderness.
Wilderness is a touchstone for a frontier nation like America. Wilderness equals freedom of movement, freedom of action. The same sort of freedoms that instigated insurrection against the British monarchy. American frontiersmen became accustomed to individual liberty unlike anything seen in Western Civilization. They enshrined those liberties in our Constitution.
Sure, there are some frustrations associated with managing wilderness.
Out West, wilderness designation has become a politicized fight over access to valuable minerals under the ground. Access usually involves roads, and roads are the antithesis of a wild experience.
Given the large amount of publicly owned land in the West, I cannot help but wonder if there isn’t some bartering that could go on to resolve these fights. Take multiple use public land and designate it as wilderness, so other areas can responsibly yield their valuable minerals. Plenty of present day public land was once heavily logged, farmed, ranched, and mined, but those scars are long gone.
You can hike all day in a Gold Mine Creek basin and find one tiny miner’s shack from 1902. All other signs have washed away, been covered up by new layers of soil, etc. So there is precedent for taking once-used land and letting it heal to the point where we visitors would swear it is pristine.
Out East, where we have large hardwood forests, occasionally, huge valuable timber falls over in wilderness areas, and the financially hard-pressed locals could surely use the income from retrieving, milling, and selling lumber from those trees. But wilderness rules usually require such behemoths to stay where they lay, symbols of an old forest rarely seen anywhere today. They can be seen as profligate waste, I understand that. I also understand that some now-rare salamanders might only make their homes under these rotting giant logs, and nowhere else.
Seeing the yellow-on-black body of the salamander makes me think of the starry night sky filled with shooting stars. A rare thing of beauty in a world full of bustle, noise, voices, and concrete. For me, I’ll take the salamander.
Proof that bigotry is moronic, cowardly
A Jewish Community Center in Kansas City is attacked by a Ku Klux Klan guy. He shoots several innocent, unarmed, unprepared people there while yelling about how great Adolph Hitler was. Three people are dead, two of whom are confirmed to be Methodists, the third Catholic.
Not Jewish.
The murderer’s target group wasn’t there. Their Christian friends and neighbors were.
This attack also demonstrates how integrated America is: Christians celebrating at a Jewish run facility; how religious and skin color differences are easily bridged, much more often than not.
My deepest condolences to the families of the victims. My request to bigots: Wake the hell up, knock it off.
Facts be damned, gun control full speed ahead
Aaron Alexis shot about twenty people at the Navy Ship Yards in Washington, DC, not with an AR-15, but with an off-the-shelf shotgun and handguns he captured from security staff.
He was recently being treated with psychiatric drugs, and may have been on them during the shooting.
He was deeply unhappy with America, according to his friend, and was feeling politicized enough to move away. He was often angry.
He had been arrested for illegally shooting guns in Washington State and in Texas, both times out of anger.
Alexis was heavily into violent video games, playing them non-stop for years. Col. Dave Grossman of West Point Academy says that his studies demonstrate a direct link between violent video games and violent behavior.
Alexis was hearing voices.
All of these facts demonstrate that Alexis was crazy when he went on his shooting spree. His Secret clearance to a supposedly secure facility allowed him to get into the building, where he used his plain vanilla shotgun to capture two handguns, which he then used on his victims.
None of these facts have stopped anti-freedom activists like US Senator Dianne Feinstein, leftist political commentator David Frum, and others from immediately leaping on a band wagon for more gun control (not crime control).
A US media that refuses to report these facts, but instead lets stand erroneous reports and opinion columns promoting gun control based on incorrect reporting has bolstered these efforts to disarm Americans.
And it is this disregard for facts that makes me and so many others like me absolutely unbending in our refusal to submit to illegal gun control schemes. All the red flags were available to get Alexis incarcerated and receiving the help he needed. But so many different filters and systems failed. That has zero to do with the lawful ownership of guns.
Leave our Constitutional rights alone. Solve the actual problems.
Condolences to the victims of the Navy Yard rampage
While it is presently unknown who is behind the deadly rampage at the US Navy Yard, it is a fact that innocent people have been killed and wounded in the attack.
Whether this is another act of domestic terrorism by Islamic crazies, like the Fort Hood Massacre and the Boston Marathon bombing, or if it is some workplace politics vendetta, remains to be determined.
The fact is also that most US military installations are disarmed, surprisingly. The lesson from Fort Hood has not been learned, namely, that properly armed workers are safer. Workers who have concealed carry permits should be able to carry at a federal work site, and especially a military one, so that they are better able to defend themselves in situations like this. Gun control proponents will use this to try to promote their gun confiscation plan, when in fact the opposite policies are needed.
My heart goes out to the innocent and brave people who died or who were injured in this tragic event.
No Empty Words, Please
Talking with a gun-owning Democrat friend and then a gun-owning Republican friend on Friday, the subject in both phone calls centered on just how far this anti-Second Amendment effort is aimed.
My Democrat friend said that the Democrats don’t really want all of our guns and that they are already backing away from many of their toughest positions staked out two to three weeks ago. My Republican friend said not to count on the many non-voting gun owners for political support or actual resistance. Why, he asked, would a guy who has never voted in his life, freeloaded off the NRA and his local gun club to stand up for his interests, and rarely does anything for his community suddenly get politically active now? And just how far will that same guy go to resist unconstitutional gun bans and door-to-door confiscation?
Interesting stuff. A year ago this was the purview of the far right and conspiracy theorists. Now it is as real as the air that greets your lungs when you awaken in bed in the morning. And these two guys are both wrong.
First, I am convinced that most Democrats want every single gun taken away from private citizens. For example, a few years ago a local congressman, Joe Hoeffel (SP?), wrote legislation to aggressively control muzzleloading guns. You know, the kinds of guns your great-great-grandfather used in the Civil War and which pose their greatest threat to toes when these heavy art pieces are dropped from the unsuspecting hands that have foolishly removed them from their ancient mountings above the fireplace. Not exactly a public threat. But lots of people react against that greatest symbol of American freedom, and in fact, Congressman Hoeffel had plenty of support.
Second, I am convinced that my Republican friend is wrong, because I grew up in an extremely rural place, where everyone had guns, few people were politically active, and where a healthy suspicion of the government was endemic (and thus, not much time was invested in anything government). A lot of my neighbors, the closest being about half a mile away in any direction, were descended from those Scots-Irish tribesmen who had fled imperial Britain to find enough room to run a still and live unhampered in the 1700s New World. Their anti-government attitudes have always resulted in the toughest fighters, even if that isn’t evident at first or second glance.
Pushed hard enough, they too will be shooting out of their second story windows at government goon squads coming to confiscate their guns. Yes, yes, I know, I sound like a ‘fringe lunatic’ here.
Which brings me back to my Democrat friend. My response to him and to other Democrats who have perhaps foolishly engaged me in discussion about this topic in the past few weeks, including an avowedly liberal reporter from New York City, is this: You are not taking our guns. You’re just not. Anti gun laws have zero to do with crime control, and everything to do with government control.
Most people know me as a passionate conservationist, a birds-n-bunnies guy, a hunter who cares for the green woods, and that’s all true. I am a peaceful guy who just cannot shake certain aspects of my Quaker upbringing, no matter how hard I try. And if I am pushed hard enough, I will meet gun confiscation with armed resistance. Because to do anything else is an abdication of my Constitutional duties.
See, the Second Amendment guarantees the individual right to belong to an armed militia. Necessary to a free state, those local, grass roots, citizen-led militias were intended from the founding of our nation to be an active counterbalance to a centralized, national, federal army. Because political rights are only as good as the citizens’ ability to force change or resist tyranny, the Second Amendment is the one right that guarantees all the other rights in the Bill of Rights.
So go ahead, call me a radical, a nut, a whacko, an alarmist. I wear such appellations with pride in times like these. Someone once said something cute, like, extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice; by backing up the Second Amendment, we are backing up the entire Constitution, and if that is a vice in the eyes of a particular political party, then so be it.
I am standing my ground, proud, unwavering, no matter what illegal law is passed in America. I will not abide by it. I will dissent and I will resist. This love of liberty is a so-called vice that many otherwise quiet Americans will join. Trust me. I am an American, and I know.
Wisconsin Sikh Temple Murders: What The…?
If you have not had the opportunity to meet a Sikh, you should go out of your way to do so.
I have yet to meet a mean, unpleasant, surly, or disrespectful Sikh.
In my experience, Sikhs are like all other Indians: Universally pleasant, friendly, gracious. They work hard, contribute enormously to American culture, our economy, to family life, and small business. Sikhs are exactly the kind of immigrants Americans want, because they are both religious and tolerant of others. They have great values that are 100% congruent with traditional American values, culture, and lifestyle.
Sikhs are a net gain for America, not a threat.
And please, spare us any debate on Sikh or Hindu theology. Not one of us has a theology that someone cannot poke some holes in. Sikh theology is not mine, but it is very American in terms of its values.
My heart goes out to the poor Sikhs in Wisconsin, those who have experienced the downside of American freedom and liberty. Our Second Amendment requires citizens to be responsible, mature, and free of psychosis. It also requires other citizens to be on the lookout, so that they might defend themselves, if need be.
Sikhs are fine citizens, and I wish we had more of them here in Central Pennsylvania. Hopefully, the damaged temple in Milwaukee will be fixed, enlarged, and visited by people of all other faiths as a demonstration of solidarity with fellow good citizens.
What amazes me is that white supremacists believe they are superior, and yet they always behave in such obviously inferior ways. If you are so superior, start a business, make money, run a solid family, and pass on your values, whatever they may be, to your children. The thing is, racial and religious supremacy of all sorts is so deficient, so broken, that its practitioners almost always blow themselves up or run afoul of the law long before they can act civilized and healthily participate in a free democracy, thereby passing on their values.