All posts by Jim

Left HS before report cards came out. Enlisted in the Marines for four years. By the time those years were over, I was hooked - they had me for life. Spent nearly ten years as enlisted. Received a Silver Star, Bronze Star w/V, Purple Heart as a Sgt during first RVN tour. Upon returning to the State's received a combat commission to 2Lt. Retired after 36 total years as a Colonel. Book follows my career, but is more about the heroes with whom I served, the great mentors I had, and the leadership principles they instilled in me.
Recent Posts

Let’s Forgive Everyone

16 Comments

You are probably not going to believe this story. Talk about putting the cart before the horse, or treating the symptom instead of the disease. This is absolutely insane. It’s so insane, it’s hilarious, and I wish the “Emerald City” all the luck in the world. There is an upside here. This action just may eliminate crime in nearby cities and states when the scum says, hell, let’s go to the Emerald City so we can pillage, steal, and rob from  all them rich folks and get away with it. I love it!! I do, however, have one question though. Who is going to pay for all this? And where do these derelicts go after they are released with no charges, back to their tents under the bridges? Does anyone know someone who still lives in that soon-to-be shit hole? Ha Ha!

Elected officials in a major U.S. city plan to pass a law that will allow thieves to sell items they steal if they do it to earn money for basic needs and trespassers to set up camp on private property when it is to obtain adequate shelter. Dozens of other crimes—including assault and harassment—will be excused under the preposterous measure if suspects are poor, mentally ill or addicted to drugs. It is being crafted as a poverty defense and will allow municipal court judges to dismiss a multitude of crimes if poverty, mental illness or a substance-abuse disorder drove the perpetrator to commit them.

Even for a famously liberal left coast city like Seattle it seems like a bit much. The proposal was first introduced during the Seattle City Council’s budget deliberations weeks ago, according to a local news report. It was put on hold over a budget process bureaucracy but has gained incredible steam and appears to have enough support to alter the city code early next year. “The idea could enormously impact the city — and set Seattle apart from the rest of the country in its approach to misdemeanor crimes,” according to the news story, which includes the concerns of frustrated public safety advocates who say the law will essentially legalize most crimes in Seattle. Not surprisingly, the idea came from a “wave of activism and historic protests after the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota,” the Seattle newspaper story says. That motivated public defenders and community organizers to take advantage of the attention to police and court reforms to fix a “long-held frustration.”

The force behind the push for the new law is a leftist organization called Decriminalize Seattle that opposes policing and the criminal legal system. The group has called for defunding the Seattle Police Department by at least 50% and reallocating the funds to “community led health and safety systems.” It also demands the release of protestors arrested during recent violent uprising without charges. An organizer with Decriminalize Seattle, identified as one of the law’s catalysts in the media, says “what we’ve already known is that the misdemeanor system is basically a system of cycling people in poverty through municipal court over and over again without meeting their basic needs.” In late October Seattle City Councilwoman Lisa Herbold, who ironically chairs the public safety committee, introduced the measure to exempt low-level criminals. The lawmaker, who represents West Seattle and South Park, writes in her official city blog that it is important to make meeting an individual’s immediate basic need an affirmative defense to a crime.

The councilwoman includes a staff memo outlining the proposal, which is identified as “duress legislation” that will codify a defense against prosecution of crimes committed due to poverty or behavioral health issues. “The criminal legal system is ill-suited to address the root cause of ‘crimes of poverty’ and any involvement in the criminal legal system and incarceration causes harm,” the memo states. “As such, Central Staff understands that the intent of the proposal is to provide an exit from the system at trial and without further involvement in the system for those crimes committed because a person cannot otherwise afford to meet their immediate basic needs.” The lengthy document proceeds to reveal that the City Attorney already exercises his discretion to move away from prosecuting property crimes that appear to be committed out of “survival necessity.” The concern, however, is that future prosecutors may not continue the practice and a law must be enacted to assure individuals committing crimes to “fulfill their basic needs” have a way to “exit out of the criminal legal system.”

The proposed law comes as Seattle experiences a big spike in crime—including the highest homicide rate in over a decade—and police funding gets drastically cut to appease Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors. This is not a new problem for the Emerald City. In the summer of 2019, a business publication wrote a troubling piece on the negative impact of rising crime in downtown Seattle. “The increasing prevalence of crime, drugs and homelessness in the downtown core threatens the city’s thriving tourism and convention business, and worries retailers concerned that the city isn’t doing nearly enough to combat the crisis,” the story says. “Downtown crime is increasing at an alarming rate: City of Seattle crime data for downtown Seattle indicate a jump in “person crimes” (aggravated assault, robbery, rape and homicide) of 43 percent between 2016 and 2018. In the downtown commercial district, there was a total of 568 person crimes in 2018, up from 397 in 2016, Seattle Police Department records show.” That was more than a year ago.

Originally posted 2020-12-30 10:55:25.

Current Events

Let’s block out the sun!

4 Comments

Received this today from one of the great blogs I belong to: https://bunkerville.wordpress.com. “God, Guns, and Guts Comrades” Might want to check it out, great coverage of what the crazy earthlings (mostly liberals and globalists) are doing. Here is one that absolutely astonishes me to no end. Bill and his crazy wife, Melinda are really dangerous.

They are hailed for all the money they donate to charities, BUT WAIT, when you have nothing else to do, check out where those charities are located. See if you can find one in the US. All these nut cases are concerned about is the earth, the hell with anyone living on it. What about growing food or all the solar energy fields the world has created? Really dangerous and I find it hard to believe that any one is going to allow them to do this. But then Joe and the Ho are globalists as well.

 

Bill Gates who apparently is willing to risk life on earth as we know it, and is apparently all set to spend his gazillion buckaroos in an elaborate scheme to change life or otherwise eliminate it all together for the sake of the earth. Anyway, he has been complaining that there are far far too many humans here anyway so what the heck. Who cares if there is a disaster? Here tis:

The plan sounds like science fiction — but could be fact within a decade; every day more than 800 giant aircraft would lift millions of tons of chalk dust to a height of 12 miles above the Earth’s surface and then sprinkle the lot high around the stratosphere.

In theory, the airborne dust would create a gigantic sunshade, reflecting some of the Sun’s rays and heat back into space, dimming those that get through and so protecting Earth from the worsening ravages of climate warming.

This is not the crackpot plan of a garden-shed inventor. The project is being funded by billionaire and Microsoft founder Bill Gates and pioneered by scientists at Harvard University.

Indeed, the plans are so well advanced that the initial ‘sky-clouding’ experiments were meant to have begun months ago.

SCoPEx is, however, on hold, amid fears that it could trigger a disastrous series of chain reactions, creating climate havoc in the form of serious droughts and hurricanes, and bring death to millions of people around the world.

One of the Harvard team’s directors, Lizzie Burns, admits: ‘Our idea is terrifying… But so is climate change.’ An advisory panel of independent experts is to assess all the possible risks associated with it.

Want to know how he is going to do it?

Read more

Well, fellow earthing’s, what do you think?

Originally posted 2020-12-29 11:48:03.

Current Events

Curtis & Leroy

A Sunday Reprieve from all the BS

 

Curtis & Leroy saw an ad in the Herald-Citizen in Cookeville, TN, and bought a mule for $100.

The farmer agreed to deliver the mule the next day.

The next morning the farmer drove up and said, “Sorry, fellows, I have some bad news, the mule died last night.”

Curtis & Leroy replied, “Well, then just give us our money back.”

The farmer said, “Can’t do that. I went and spent it already.”

They said, “OK then, just bring us the dead mule.”

The farmer asked, “What in the world ya’ll gonna do with a dead mule?”

Curtis said, “We gonna raffle him off.”

The farmer said, “You can’t raffle off a dead mule!”

Leroy said, “We shore can! Heck, we don’t hafta tell nobody he’s dead!”

A couple of weeks later, the farmer ran into Curtis & Leroy at the IGA grocery store and asked,

“What’d you fellers ever do with that dead mule?”

They said, “We raffled him off like we said we wuz gonna do.”

Leroy said, “Shucks, we sold 1000 tickets fer two dollars apiece and made a profit of $1998.00.

The farmer said, “My Lord, didn’t anyone complain?”

Curtis said, “Well, the feller who won got upset, so we gave him his two dollars back.”

Curtis and Leroy will be on Joe and The Ho’s cabinet as Secretaries of Finance and Treasury respectively as soon a they get done counting ballots.

 

Originally posted 2020-12-27 17:30:13.

Current Events

A COVID Christmas

2 Comments

Please allow me to take this moment to say that I sincerely hope  all my blessed followers had a wonderfully merry Christmas regardless what your local dictators may have said. Mine said have a joyous Christmas with your families and friends, but then I consider myself fortunate by choice to have a sensible, for the people, Governor. My bride and I go to church every Sunday and then to a late breakfast at one of our favorite restaurants.  Life is good in Florida.

I will wish you a very happy new year if you can. I will not have a happy one as best as I can see into the near future. Our MSM wants you to believe 2020 was the worst ever. Well, don’t chalk it up to record books just yet for 2021 may prove to be a close competitor.

Here another thought provoking article from one of my favorite authors.

 

By: G. Maresca

 

American religiosity has been in decline for more than a generation and with the added fear of COVID-19, many Christian leaders have deserted their flocks.

Welcome to Christmas 2020, where the biggest crisis is not a virus but a lack of faith.

Church leaders have conceded to government diktats in this era of COVID-19 in a doleful attempt to brand themselves as benevolent.

The Constitutional right to freely worship, virus or not, was underscored with the recent Supreme Court ruling prohibiting arbitrary limits on church attendance.  Despite the court’s 5-4 decision, religious liberty has never been in more need of defense, especially when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo dismissed the ruling as “irrelevant” and “political.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom had imposed a 10 p.m. curfew, which would have made attending Christmas midnight Mass, a criminal offense.  Perhaps Newsom would find Mass more acceptable if it were celebrated in the French Laundry restaurant – site of his crowded birthday party?  This is another example of directives made by the faithless affecting the faithful in the ongoing leftist agenda to secularize America.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen would be appalled how the church hierarchy has acquiesced to the state.  The state prohibits Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, yet liquor stores remain open.  Churches should have had the same rights as beer distributors, pot smokers and abortion clinics – all deemed essential.

Mandatory masking, overflowing hand sanitizer, and social distancing are in vogue in houses of worship, but what is missing are the children.  Churches will not survive without them.  Few in the pews are under age 50.  Sign-up sheets, roped off pews, and parking lot services did little to bring anyone back, let alone evangelize.

Limiting, or worse, cutting off sacramental grace from Christ’s mercy has only deepened the divide.  The science supporting lockdowns has failed to stop the spread, and may prove deadlier than the virus it was meant to heed.

If anything, COVID-19 underscores daily that no human endeavor can prevent our eventual death from any cause.

Any government that has the authority to restrict your livelihood, family gatherings, and houses of worship is worse than any virus.  The alternative is subservience, empty pews, and lost souls.

The COVID-19 generation may never come back.  The unrelenting attack on Christianity will never cease until the faithful stop kowtowing to tyrants.  Science isn’t going to save you and it is no coincidence Democrats are leading the charge.  What do you expect from a political party that has forced religious sisters to provide for contraception?   The left knows all too well that faith can be exorcised by breaking one’s spirit and will.

Too many politicos claiming to be Christian believe Jesus Christ came to put a chicken in every pot rather than to feed souls and offer salvation.  As long as a portion of a bishop’s budget is generated from government service contracts, towing the party line will be its low-hanging fruit.

Where are the bishops’ supernatural faith?

Where are today’s St. Thomas Mores, and St. Joan of Arc’s, or Fulton Sheens?

Prophetic voices must emanate among the bishops to speak truth to this abuse of government power.  As suicides and other mental health issues increase, we need more prayer, not less.  The secularist, dictatorial governors and mayors and designated so-called experts seeking to oppress worship reveal their contradictory priorities, daily.

Christmas is not the time to take counsel of your fears, but recall the hope that only a sincere faith provides.  Has there been a year in living memory when the Christmas promise is in such demand?  The reason for the season is here, and never leaves.  Jesus was born during one of the darkest periods in human history as the Roman Empire begot moral depravity on an unparalleled scale.  Our Lord did so by entering the world in the humblest of ways to show He will go anywhere when invited.

In a remarkable sign, Jupiter and Saturn crossed paths this past week appearing as one body in the night sky.  They were closer than they have been in nearly eight centuries and was labeled the “Christmas Star.”

Many need to heed the message the angels announced that first Christmas: Fear not!

The child whose birth we celebrate is Emmanuel, “God with Us.”

If God is with us, who can be against us?

 

Originally posted 2020-12-26 10:26:05.

Current Events

Soviet Politics, American Style

8 Comments

The above photo is of Young Communists saluting as they pass Lenin’s Tomb in the U.S.S.R., May 1, 1924. Many of you are probably going to consider I have gone off the deep end and finally crashed into insanity. Hell, I don’t know, maybe I have? However, I cannot help but believe my country that I love more than anything. The country that gave a dumb shit Baltimore HS drop out kid of 17 the chance to make something of himself and have a wonderfully, fulfilling, fantastically enjoyable career serving it is doomed due to the likes of the mentally sick, brainwashed, nitwitted young fools  who are convinced our country is sick. Below is a well written, easily interpreted essay of doom. Enjoy if you can. Be sure to read the Postscript.

On Christmas Day 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, gave his farewell speech and more than seven decades of Russian revolutionary socialism came to an end. A generation later, the spirit of the Soviet Union has re-emerged with mass support in the U.S.

When I arrived in Moscow in 1976 to begin a six-year stint as a correspondent, I was struck by the red flags flying from government buildings and the somber streets devoid of advertising except for garish posters showing workers with clenched fists demanding an end to the arms race.

When the Soviet Union fell, it seemed the Soviet attempt to impose a deluded version of reality had died with it. Francis Fukuyama, in his 1989 essay “The End of History,” said that Marxism-Leninism was doomed as an alternative to liberal democracy. I argued at the time that the drive to make a religion out of politics had not disappeared.

For the past four years, potted histories have warned about the rise of fascism in the U.S. But the real danger is the transformation of “tolerance” into an ideology with its own courts, informers and punishments, all of them reminiscent of the Soviet Union.

One of the pillars of the Soviet Union was a controlled press in which all coverage was organized to confirm a mendacious ideology.

A friend of mine in Moscow, Vladimir Fyodorov, went to work for the TASS news service, which offered readers not news but a “correct” depiction of events, especially regarding the U.S. and the “ulcers of capitalism”—racism, crime and unemployment.

On his first day at TASS, Vladimir was handed a United Press International story about a U.S. company that was promoting a high-quality tire and offered to replace older tires free of charge. Vladimir wanted to kill the story but his boss rewrote it. The new version read: “In the crafty capitalist market, firms frequently offer low-quality products. This is why a well-known American firm was forced to replace tires that were of inferior quality.” The headline was “Deception of Buyer.”

A few weeks later, Vladimir was given a report that prisons in Fiji were so comfortable that people preferred to stay there than to be at liberty. He produced a report that life in Fiji was so unbearable that people preferred to live in prison. His colleagues congratulated him. He told himself: “I’m going to go out of my mind here.”

Soviet practices would have once been unthinkable in the U.S. media. But in August 2016, Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for the New York Times, wrote that if journalists believed that Mr. Trump was a “demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies,” it was necessary to “throw out the textbook of American journalism.” The Times started to characterize Mr. Trump’s statements as “lies” in news stories and suppress news that worked to Mr. Trump’s advantage, such as the Hunter Biden story this fall.

The Times also advanced an ideological account of U.S. history, according to which the American Revolution was undertaken to defend slavery, and promoted it over the objections of historians and the paper’s own fact-checkers.

The Soviet system also relied on the complete liquidation of academic freedom. Marxism-Leninism was treated as a perfect science. But the ideology raised obvious questions: In a “classless society,” why were there special stores for officials? If socialism ended war, why did the Soviet Union and China go to war in 1969 over Damansky Island?

If a student tried to raise these questions, he was expelled from the Komsomol, the communist youth league. That ended any hope of a career. I knew a young man in Moscow who refused to be intimidated and continued to ask questions. He was committed to a mental hospital.

The Soviet style has become a reality in the U.S. Speakers are routinely canceled on ideological grounds: In July the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbour, Maine, canceled a virtual talk with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society because of “the moment of reckoning our society is going through.” At my alma mater, the University of Chicago, the English department announced that it would “only accept applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.”

The Soviet Union finally counted on the readiness of people to betray even family and friends. The regime held up Pavel Morozov (1918-32) as a martyr. He lived in a village in the Urals when the regime was collectivizing agriculture. When Pavel learned that his father was helping peasants hide grain, he walked 35 miles to the nearest town to report him to the secret police. His father was arrested and Pavel was stabbed to death by relatives.

I thought of Pavel Morozov when I read a June op-ed in the New York Times by Chad Sanders, a black writer. He told his white friends that he didn’t need their “love texts” and suggested that instead they cut off contact with family members until they sent money to Black Lives Matter or joined their protests.

When Mr. Gorbachev began the reforms that destroyed the Soviet Union, he said, referring to the U.S.: “We’re going to do something terrible to you. We’re going to deprive you of an enemy.” Twenty-nine years later, it’s clear he was right. Without the ideological challenge of the Soviet Union, we have become immersed in internal conflicts and have made an ideology out of them.

It is true that Marxism is a more coherent system of thought than “wokeism.” But even an intellectual hodgepodge can engender totalitarian habits if it fulfills an emotional need and becomes a device of interpretation.

The antidote is fidelity to higher values. But that requires a moral seriousness that a world at peace and in thrall to superficialities does not inspire. “The West does not know and does not want to know what shaped it,” writes Cardinal Robert Sarah, a Guinean prelate. “This self-asphyxiation leads to new barbaric civilizations.”

The Soviet Union is dead, but its ghost wanders an unsettled world. Finding a lodestar for society’s moral development is the most important challenge facing the U.S. today.

Mr. Satter is author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” and a member of the academic advisory board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Postscript from anonymous.

Franklin Graham said it right and so have I, this is the last free election if Donald Trump doesn’t win we will ever SEE in America . We are done here. Unfortunately we are too late to be effective with a vote. There will be only two alternatives left to us if Biden is seated as President. We have heard it once in our history loudly at Concord. The British are coming to take our guns. Then a shot was fired. The rest is history.

We may hear again a shot fired when someone is burning our town, or another family arrested for protecting their home standing on their steps. Or another old man or woman is hit to the ground for no reason other than walking on a public street. I ask you to think about that. If licensed to carry, do it. If not licensed, get licensed now! Be prepared to defend others in need. Lawlessness is coming on scale. We must decide to stand aside or to stand up. Not a pleasant decision. Get your head straight and make some decisions on how you will react. Be ready to defend your family and for some of us, the Constitution we have sworn to protect.

President Clinton started the ball of breakdown to socialism. I am proud that American’s stood up for a disrupter like Trump. I thought I was alone. I was SO proud of America . Today, Trump is all that is left holding the line. Give him what you’ve got. Prepare to defend yourself!!!

 

Originally posted 2020-12-23 10:38:57.