Tag Archives: America

USAA

Well, it will happen this week as soon as they deposit my senior discount into my checking account at NFCU. What is it that will happen you asked? I will un-ass USAA after having been a customer since February 1974 (50 years for you non-math guys – LOL). It all started about a year or so ago when I had fraud on my USAA credit card. When speaking to a very nice woman (always), who was going to issue me a new card. I  was complaining about having to call all the companies that hit that card for recurring payments e.g., utilities, and she recommended I get another card and use it just for those recurring companies, but don’t carry that card with me. What a GREAT idea. She transferred me to another very nice woman (always). I  gave her all the information, and she sent it to the underwriting dept for approval. She came back on several minutes later and told me it was disapproved. Can you imagine the shock? She said they turned me down due to a credit report. I asked for a copy of it and the ONLY thing on the report was that I had three inquiries in the past two years. I refinanced my house three times to get to a 1.75% 30 yr fixed rate VA Loan. The bottomline statement said “There are no derogatory items on this report.” And by the way, my credit score on that report was 831. I wrote Mr. Peacock (President) who always boasts about loyalty. and told him where his loyalty really lies. A snooty woman (no longer nice) called a week later and tried to explain to me that the underwriters had to follow set policy. I asked who sets those policies and she tried to tell me it was the insurance industry. Bullshit, USAA sets the policy. I am a damn  Economist by education and hobby. I finally hung up on the bitch. Anyway, that was the beginning of the end for me and USAA.

Then they had the audacity to add something to my auto insurance policy this year without asking me. Something about “Car Replacement Assistance,” and Rental Car option. I called and talked to a very nice woman (as always, except for Mr. Peacock’s bitch) who said they added that thinking I might want it and that I may have forgotten to add renal car to my policy. I have a separate RV towing policy with another company that also covers rental car.  She removed them from the policy.

A month or so later  called and heard “Welcome to USAA, Press one for English or stay on the line.” Now, if I were in charge of a company who caters to military only like USAA, It would be “Welcome to USAA,” then in Spanish someone would say “Press one for Spanish.” Moot point you say? No it isn’t. I spent 36 years of my youthful life serving and bleeding for this country, and I refuse to deal with any company who asks me to press one for English. This is America and our damn language is ENGLISH! If you are Spanish and that upsets you, tough shit, learn English or get out.

There were other incidents that have caused me to un-ass USAA. But I decided I was going to look for another auto insurer because USAA has gotten way too expensive for my wallet. My policy is to expire on March 25th, and they raised my premium another 5% this coming year which will require me to pay a whooping $2,619.87 for a six month  policy.  Want to hear something funny?  They have the gull to tell me that they have given me $4,661.65 in discounts because of my bride and me being such safe drivers, etc. OK,  so had they not been so kind to give me that discount, my six month policy would have been $7,271.52 or 14,563.04/year. LOL Can you believe that? I can’t. I know I live in FL where no one knows how to drive, no one but me drives the speed limit, because here everyone believes a speed limit means you have to drive at least that fast. I believed all these years that I have lived here that everyone was paying these sort of premiums. Surprise! I did my due diligence and comparing apples to apples have found two reputable companies i.e., Progressive and Traveller’s  who will give me the exact six month policy I have with USAA for $1,687  (-35.6%) and $1,515 (-42.2%) respectively. And I am not done checking other companies since I have till March 25th to decide. Oh, and my cars are not expensive new cars. Nancy’s is a 2015 Lexus RX350 and Mine is a 2022 Mini Cooper

You may be asking what were my bonuses this year. The standard was $77.27 and my Senior bonus this week will be $262.02 for a total of $339.49. But that doesn’t even come close to reducing the upcoming policy to what I can get elsewhere.

So, my advice to all my military brethren, I suggest you do some due diligence on your own. Having spoken to Marine brothers of my vintage I am amazed at the huge number who said, “Hell. I dumped USAA years ago.”

I can’t wait to make this phone call and ask to speak to a Supervisor because the women who answer are always so nice and I do not want to shoot the messenger. Speaking to supervisor might have more of an impact on Mr. Peacock, but I have doubts, he’s a jerk as well. How much will USAA pay for ads on the Super Bowl tonight?

Comments sincerely welcome

Cultural Suicide Is Painless

For those of you who do not know who Victor Davis Hanson is, here is what Wikipedia says about him:

“Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets. ”

For someone born, raised, and educated  in California he certainly has his stuff all in one bag — as we used to say in the Corps. He will be 63 in a week

The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.

n February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.

When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.

You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.

You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.

Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”

Old Liberal Ideas Are Being Destroyed

We are living in the most racially polarized climate since the 1960s. America’s past, present, and future are in the process of being recalibrated entirely through the lens of one’s skin color. Columbus is reduced to nothing more than another racist white Italian sailor of a half-millennium past. Grant might as well have fought for slavery in the mind of today’s campus ignoramus. Apparently, the Antifa thug thinks he could just as easily have written the Gettysburg Address or sculpted a statue of Frederick Douglass.

The old liberal ideas of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are being destroyed by the Left under the specious doctrines of cultural appropriation, or “acting white” or “how we look is who we are.”

A new fuzzy Jim Crow returns with racially segregated campus safe spaces and theme houses or the race-based reeducation and training sessions in the workplace—all predicated to stop racism! Somehow selecting strangers on the basis of their race to bully in a restaurant, or targeting old anonymous men and women to beat up in the street by their race, or singling out suburbanites by their race for racial taunts and profanity is redefined as reparatory justice or overdue payback—on the assumption that no one would dare say that the arson, looting, and rhetoric are descending into ever more hate-filled nihilism.

Our collective future of nationalized tribalism will become what always results when citizens identify by superficial appearance or shared religion. Just go to Lebanon, the Balkans, or Iraq to see what is in store first hand.

Tribalism Rising

To survive, all groups will self-identify, at first quietly, but eventually unapologetically. Some will form alliances of self-preservation, others will war with each other. Tribal gangs, as they already do now in our streets of fire and looting, will assume they are exempt from consequences; and so will their antitheses of vigilantes who band together to guard their stores in the absence of a defunded police.

Liberal elite whites themselves are now uneasy, since the abstract doctrines they so nihilistically advocated, from defunding the police to recalibrating looting as “redistribution,” are now becoming reified and closer to home. They see that when BLM protestors jam a restaurant to demand fealty or lecture on “white privilege” or march into a suburb to wake up the commuter to apprise him of his immorality, the racialists will not qualify their agendas with “except for woke whites.”

When tribalism is distilled to its innate and terrifying essence, there are never exemptions for individuals: you are reduced to what you appear superficially as to strangers. The white felon is no different than the white Harvard president, the black shoplifter is the same as the black physicist. We are all condensed to a sort of collective nothingness, or rather a racial “allness.”

The Self-Immolation of Pro Sports

Professional sports, once an integral part of American life, appears to be nearly in ruins. Professional baseball, basketball, and football might have survived the virus, the lockdown, and the recession—and then maybe they might not have. After all, millions of the bored more quickly than expected got acculturated to the idea of soon not listening to a boring rant from LeBron James or the sad confessionals of Drew Brees.

But what the NBA and NFL, and perhaps MLB won’t survive is cultural suicide as players fragment into causes. The NBA existed on the premise that billionaires were willing to pay multimillionaires to lose billions as a prestige lark—as a franchise became a sort of a huge, showy Louis Vuitton bag. But even billionaires have limits. Snobbery and appearing cool do not always trump losing the equivalent of a Ferrari every hour or a Gulfstream each week.

The NBA, we are told, is a woke industry.

But it’s also the strangest, most nondiverse, right-wing, money-obsessed woke institution in America. More than three-quarters of the multimillionaire players are African-American. Over 90 percent of the billionaire team owners are white.

Yet the entire industry—players, coaches, owners, staff—lecture Americans ad nauseam about their supposed sins. The monotonous sermons have become transparent medieval redemptions—given the mortal sin that the NBA sold its very soul to a racist, genocidal, and totalitarian China—to recover billions abroad for the billions lost in viewership and attendance at home.

Nondiverse multimillionaires, working for even less diverse billionaires, finger-pointing at middle-class Americans on the evils of privilege, in the pay of the Chinese Communist Party, is not a way to win back fans.

Institutional Crack-Ups

Universities are in for hard times. The federal government eventually will get out of the $1.5 trillion student loan subsidy business, and force spendthrift colleges to accept their own self-created moral hazards. Charging $30,000-40,000 for tuition over Zoom is a bad business model in a recession. And the alphabet soups after the names of professors and deans will not make a bit of difference.

Thousands of college-educated protesters and rioters are not especially good advertisements for the building of lifelong character on woke university campuses. Once undergraduate institutions decided to make students socially conscious rather than educated, and once their graduates seem to be neither, then who really finds their mentors essential?

Our major cities, emerging from lockdown, and on the edge of nightly violence, remind us of what Procopius, the Byzantine historian, saw of Rome in AD 538, once the cultural and political megalopolis of the world: a mostly deserted shell of weeds, deserted streets, collapsed stone, choked fountains, and fortified villas where lawlessness reigned and feuding tribes were what was left of a government that once had enshrined habeas corpus.

No city gets a pass from history, not Athens, not Rome, not Alexandria—not Detroit, Baltimore, or Chicago.

After all, there is no rule that just because Bill Gates and Amazon headquartered in Seattle that its mayor, city council, and state governor will not abandon its signature downtown. What once made Portland great can be undone in a few weeks.

Wall Street may run the world, but it certainly does not run the New York City government. Electronic capital really does still have human legs and when the proverbial suited investor thinks he will be infected, short of toilet paper, or assaulted on the street, he leaves, taking his laptop with him. Bill de Blasio is left to govern, like a horned and bearded Visigoth, over an increasing shell of former grandeur.

To venture into San Francisco is to return in a time machine to 1855, a boomtown based on silicon chips, not gold dust, but one likewise lawless, fetid, and safe only for those with private security guards. To the casual visitor, it appears a lunatic place now recalibrated for the homeless, the looter, the assaulter—and the very rich. Crimes like public defecation and drug use, or shattering the windows of a parked car window to steal its contents are not crimes unless the targets are the well-connected.

The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities to go on with their ritual self-destruction.

So it has begun to seem this endless summer.

My personal view is we have the gun to our head right now. It only has two cylinders, one has a round it it, the other is empty. In November the trigger will be pulled.

Originally posted 2020-09-01 10:33:27.

PLEASE READ!!!!!!!!

and then pass it on. This article needs to go viral. This writer is one of my FAVS; he’s intelligent, knowledgeable, backs up his opinions with researched facts, and is unafraid to speak the truth. This article is dated about a month, so some of you may have seen it. I was gone and off the net in July. A friend had sent it to me, but I had finally waded through the 100’s of emails I had received while in hibernation and found it yesterday. WOW, it is the blueprint of exactly what the left is planning. Victor has once again given us fair warning, a glimpse into the future should the left win in November. Call me a conspiracy theorist nut if you will, but I can see the very things he is pointing out and personally believe everything he says. Please read and make it go viral by sharing with nonevent in your email folders. PLEASE, for the sake of America.

 

Will 2021 Be 1984?

It’s all about the power, not the equality.

Victor Davis Hanson July 19, 2020

Elections

Cultural revolutions are insidious and not just because they seek to change the way people think, write, speak, and act. They are also dangerous because they are fueled by self-righteous sanctimoniousness, expressed in seemingly innocuous terms such as “social activism,” “equality,” and “fairness.”

The ultimate aim of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist is raw power—force of the sort sought by Hugo Chavez or the Castro dynasty to get rich, inflict payback on their perceived enemies, reward friends, and pose as saviors.

Cubans and Venezuelans got poor and killed; woke Chavezes and Castros got rich and murderous.

Leftist agendas are harder to thwart than those of right-wing dictators such as Spain’s Francisco Franco because they mask their ruthlessness with talk of sacrifice for the “poor” and concern about the “weak.”

Strong-man Baathists, Iranian Khomeinists, and the German National Socialists claimed they hated capitalism. So beware when the Marxist racialists who run Black Lives Matter, the wannabe Maoists of Antifa, the George Soros-paid activists, “the Squad” and hundreds of state and local officials like them in cities such as Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis, and Big Tech billionaires take power. These are “caring” people who couldn’t care less about the working classes or the hundreds of African-Americans murdered in America’s inner cities.

Vice President as President

If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump.

It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline—and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family.

In the past until now, there was zero chance that the hard Left would ever win an American election. No socialist has ever come close. Even Bernie Sanders accepted that the Democratic establishment for six years broke rules, leveraged candidates to drop out, and warped the media to ensure that he would remain a septuagenarian blowhard railing at the wind from one of his three houses. George McGovern was buried by a landslide. Most Democrats, after Kennedy and until Obama, never won the popular vote unless possessed of a Southern-accented hinting at centrism.

Only the Great Depression and World War II ensured four terms of FDR, who still knew enough not to let his house socialists ruin the wartime U.S. economy.

But in perfect storm and black swan fashion, the coronavirus, the lockdown, the riots, anarchy and looting, all combined with Trump Derangement Syndrome to be weaponized by the Left—and the media far more successfully than with their failed pro forma, legalistic efforts with Robert Mueller and impeachment to destroy the Trump presidency—have pushed socialism along.

Yet even that chaos and anarchy by itself would not have been able to bring the radical Left into power. Only a “candidate” like Joe Biden could do that.

“Good ‘ole Joe from Scranton” could offer the trifecta formula for a socialist ascension: a reassuring pseudo-centrism, decades’ old establishment familiarity, and his current cognitive decline. In a rare time of virtual campaigning, virtual conventions, and perhaps even virtual debates, Biden alone could successfully massage the virus/quarantine/rioting and panic to win the election, and then nobly exit.

This is not the analysis of a conspiracy theorist but the operating principle behind the Democrats’ and Biden’s basement strategy. It is for that reason that his vice presidential selection is shaping up like none other in memory. In short, Joe Biden of all people is now the face of a cultural revolution, although even he may not fully realize it.

Fundamentally Transforming Everything

What should we expect then if Biden wins and either steps down or more or less is left as a diminished figurehead controlled by the hard Left?

First, there is one theme that unites “the Squad,” Black Lives Matter, the globalist technocracy, and the international Left: unapologetic anti-Semitism. We will see overt anti-Semitism in a way this country has not seen since the early 20th century, all couched in ideological and politically correct attacks on “Zionists” and “the rich” and “Wall Street”—and why Israel has no business being a “Jewish state.”

It has already begun with an NFL player voicing Hitlerian tropes and praising Louis Farrakhan, and then being seconded by an array of rappers, woke Black Lives Matter activists and “Free Palestine” demonstrations. To smear “the Jews” no longer is grounds for an immediate and expected apology, but more “So what are you going to do about it?” Anti-Semitism is deeply embedded within the DNA of the BLM movement—and professional sports as well, as we saw recently from the warnings of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Charles Barkley.

“Eat the rich” sloganeering and plans for a wealth tax, and jacking up capital gains and income tax rates, all seem like they are aimed at the super-rich. But don’t think weaponizing the tax code, the government bureaucracies, and the culture itself will do much to the immense wealth of Jeff Bezos, the heirs to Steve Jobs, the Google zillionaires, George Soros, the Walmart fortunes, the lesser tech billionaires, the Facebook clan, or Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. None of them will be touched.

Why would any socialist go after the sympathetic mega-funders of the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Google or Apple News, Twitter, or Vox?

Left-wing billionaires are not so strange as we might think. After all, they can afford to be socialists. They like the idea that fewer may follow in their footsteps. They think social activism offers them penance for their hard-driving acquisitiveness. Most of all, they feel their knack for making money is proof that they have the wisdom, the right, and the need to redirect the lives of less successful others—and for the good of all.

Otherwise, the plutocratic class will spend hundreds of millions—a proverbial drop in the bucket in their fortunes—to consult with lawmakers about how to avoid their own progressive legislation and policies. It will hire phalanxes of tax lawyers, trust evaders, and philanthropy scammers that will make the architects of the Clinton Foundation seem a poor joke.

The real enemy in 2021 would be the upper-middle-class as it always is, the kulaks—and not really the professionals such as the lawyers, media grandees, and professors—although many should expect to become collateral damage.

The special targets will be the self-employed successful business class. The enemies of the people will be mostly those striving to be millionaires who run local insurance agencies, the store owners, salespeople, the successful medical practices, car dealerships, large family farms, the millions who keep the country competitive, innovative, and prosperous.

All of them lack the romance of the poor and the cultural tastes of the rich, but for the most part, they are just too damn informed and stubborn to be tolerated. They need to be marginalized by taxes, regulations, and a second-wave cultural assault that renders the prior “you didn’t build that,” “spread the wealth,” “no time to profit,” and “at some point you’ve made enough money” mere sandbox chatter.

The Coming Segregation

Race? We already see the new contours of the always changing commandments of the anointed posted on the Animal Farmbarnyard wall. A new segregation and apartheid will be sold as needed justice and enlightenment. Admission quotas and hiring on the basis of race will no longer be subtle but overt and triumphant. Separate facilities predicated on race will be common on campuses. What will happen if someone of the wrong race drinks from a fountain in a racially-segregated safe space?

Equality or superiority of result for the favored will be “justice.” Reparations will follow. The sort of creepy anti-white propaganda we saw at the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture will become orthodoxy. Some of the U.S. GDP won’t be devoted to production but rather toward ferreting out “racism” as they reconstruct society in order endlessly to punish “racists.”

Merit will soon become a dirty, counterrevolutionary word.

Discrimination and the one-drop racial rules of the Old Confederacy will be re-branded as woke, hip, and progressive. Expect more Rachel Dolezals and Ward Churchills. In Seattle, the city conducted whites-only, segregated reeducation sessions, teaching the naive how to undo their “whiteness.” It was overseen by an office of “civil rights” and sought to ensure that white employees give up their “comfort,” and even their supposed “guaranteed physical safety.” They were to curb any “expectations or presumptions of emotional safety,” or “control over other people and over the land,” and probably end “relationships with some other white people.”

All that was missing were the Maoist dunce caps.

In 2020 we call racism and segregation “civil rights.” I doubt very many graduates of Seattle’s reeducation efforts decided to dismantle their home security system, will vote to defund the police, will declare their mortgaged home community property, or plan to shun their suburban neighbors if they appear too white looking. But that’s not the point. Instead, the state is joining the racists by institutionalizing venomous tribalism. An Oregon County tried to demand masks for all its residents except African-Americans—the sort of apartheid policy no one in his right mind four months ago would have imagined could be tried in the United States.

Borders? The wall will stop dead in its tracks, and what has been built likely dismantled. Citizenship and residency will be further blurred, with the rights of citizens insidiously transferred to resident aliens. Perhaps the word “citizen” will disappear as discriminatory. Illegal immigration will be favored over legal immigration, in that the latter is too diverse, too meritocratic, and too politically unpredictable.

Farewell to Institutions, Hello to “Progress”

The military? A progressive’s dream. It will transcend its current race and gender edicts in a way no elected slow-coach legislature could imagine. Virtue signaling and quotas will be the quickest route to flag-officer rank, and with it a nice retirement as a woke lobbyist, a wise-man member on an enlightened defense contractor board, a Wall Street “security analyst,” or a cable TV paid woke pundit. How a colonel handled “diversity,” not whether he understands tanks, planes, choppers, or guns will determine his chances at generalship. The Pentagon budget will be re-branded, as “national security” is no longer defined in anachronistic terms like hardware, missiles, ships, and planes, but by diversity and ending implicit bias—a sort of vast ongoing city of Seattle training session.

Finance? The country is broke. Yet the Left wants to borrow trillions for the New Green Deal, reparations, and massive new and expanded old social projects.

It can do that only through one of three ways. It can institutionalize zero or negative interest for a decade or so until the debt crushes the United States. Or it can inflate the economy, eroding accumulated wealth and paying off debt in funny money.

Or it can follow the Chrysler creditor model of the Obama Administration, and begin selectively renouncing debt obligations or reordering the priorities of various creditors. At first, the effort will appear noble and popular by canceling all student debt. But soon the Left will extend such exemptions to minority mortgages and credit card obligations. Debt cancellation and “starting over,” based on race, will be a cornerstone of the “transformation” as it has been since the age of Catiline.

High tech? Like the media, it will formally fuse into the progressive party, as elites go back and forth between jobs in Washington and those at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Everything from the order of internet searches to censoring ads and videos for their political content will be green-lighted. Silicon Valley will be seen as the most important asset of the Left, both for its political utility in blocking conservative expression, and its enormous wealth that fuels leftist campaigns.

Finally, if the Senate and House go progressive along with the presidency, the filibuster will end. And we will see fundamental constitutional changes never quite envisioned. Expect legislation to make the Electoral College inert without the use of a clumsy constitutional amendment process.

The Supreme Court will be enlarged and packed on a majority congressional vote to neuter existing conservatives until reinforcements of progressive new justices arrive.

Some will wish to make senators popularly elected on the basis of demography or the Senate expanded into the hundreds—anything to do away with the paleo-idea of two senators from Montana or Wyoming standing in the way of the bending arc of history.

Such are the wages of a global pandemic, national quarantine, sudden recession, cultural revolution in the streets—and an impaired Joe Biden.

Add it all up, and 2020 may be the first, best, and last chance for “1984”—and the Left knows it.

 

Amen! Thank you Victor, I pray America is awake and listening to you!

Originally posted 2020-08-20 11:03:05.

Aaron Menche

With all the artificial intelligence BS flying around today, you can’t believe anything anyone is saying or showing you.  We have really gotten ourselves into a pickle. Something has to be done about it, and I don’t have a damn clue. That shit is far above my pay grade. I have trouble with real intelligence, let alone the artificial stuff. That has much to do as to why I have not posted much lately. You can’t believe anything anymore, and I don’t have the time to vet everything. But, having said that, I did some research on this fellow and I believe everything he writes.  Something has to be done about all these Muslim. All I will say is keep your goats locked up, as they will rule the world someday!

More concerning Aaron I found:  Aaron Menche, at The Blogs (timesofisrael.com)

I am sitting in my office here in Israel, 9 days after the barbaric attack on Jewish communities in the south. I am writing to you so that you can share our story. I watch international news and am appalled by what I see. I watch the anti-Israel protests and am sickened. I see the silence of most of corporate America and the grotesque support on college campuses. I see the silence of some of my friends and family.

First, let me tell you what has happened. I am not sure that you understand the full extent of this horror. We do not parade our dead for propaganda purposes as our enemy does. We respect those who have been slaughtered and their families. The next few lines may be hard to read, and I would understand if you were not able to:

Entire families were slaughtered in their homes—men, women, children, infants, and the elderly. Israel has now found copies of the Hamas orders to their men, and this is what was planned.
Children under the age of 10 had their hands tied behind their back and were shot in the head in front of their parents.
Infants were beheaded.
Whole families were dismembered, their bodies strewn in the street.
Women were raped next to the bodies of their dead friends.
A 90-year-old woman who survived the Holocaust was tied up and shot in the head. Her killers then uploaded the murder to her Facebook account so her family could see.
Those who managed to go to their safe rooms were burned alive.
I could go on, but I won’t. It is too hard to think about, let alone write. 1200 innocent people annihilated with a barbarity not seen in modern times.

Yet when I turn on the news, the majority has shifted to the plight of the Palestinians. Not Hamas, but those stuck in Gaza that Hamas is hiding behind. Trust me when I say no one here relishes the idea of the murder of civilians. Unlike the Palestinians’ reaction, none of us will be dancing in the street and giving out candy. In fact, the Israeli army has not started a ground invasion precisely because they are trying to save as many Palestinian civilians as possible. Even if you do not have a military background, you can understand that every hour that goes by gives Hamas more time to dig in and will cause the death of more Israeli soldiers. Israel has not invaded Gaza fully, even though they knew Hamas was getting stronger, to avoid civilian casualties. Yet Hamas is telling people not to leave. They are saying that it is a Zionist trick to get them to leave their land, like in 1948. Their real purpose is to show the world the barbarity of the Jews when civilians die. This was the plan from the beginning. This is always the plan with Hamas.

A few facts: Gaza is not occupied territory. Israel moved every troop and settlement out of there in 2005. In 2007, Hamas was elected to run Gaza by the Gazan people. They did this knowing that the Hamas charter calls for the elimination of Israel and all the Jews (for some reason the latter is never mentioned). Some will say that Gaza was in effect occupied because of the strict blockade that Israel imposed. The fact is the blockade was attempted by Israel and Egypt, never Israel alone, another thing never mentioned. It was clearly not effective. If it was, would Hamas have been able to secure all the weapons they have? Would they have been able to build miles and miles of underground tunnels? They could have used this cement to build schools, hospitals, or bomb shelters. Was this done? Some say that they needed to protect themselves. From who? Israel had no intention to reconquer the Gaza Strip. When Israel left, the Palestinians were given a choice. They could build a free society, schools, hospitals, etc., or they could prepare kill Jews to free Palestine because, for them, Palestine is not what is outlined in a two-state solution, Palestine is Israel.

Israel has been accused many times of dealing a heavy hand to the Palestinians by imposing a cruel and inhumane occupation. We have been called Nazis. We have been accused of genocide, apartheid, and war crimes. In fact, the UN Human Rights Commission has only one standing agenda item for a specific country, and that is Israel. Israel is the most inhumane country in the world.

I was once asked by someone why the Jews need their own country; why can’t it be for everyone? I asked him if he knew his grandparents. He replied that he did. I told him I never met mine; they were thrown in an oven. The Palestinians have done everything they can to take Jewish national trauma and turn it on its head, but I have never heard of Israeli death camps. I have never heard of the murder of millions of Palestinians. On the contrary, the Palestinian population has grown faster than almost any on earth. If this is what Israeli genocide looks like, we obviously are not good at it.

Yes, the Israeli occupation has been harsh, but unlike the rest of the world, we knew what we were dealing with. In 1929, 1936, and 1948, the Palestinians raped, murdered, beheaded, and mutilated Jews. We knew if given the chance, they would do it again. So after Israeli independence, we made sure it couldn’t. We lost part of our humanity to stay alive. The Palestinians have been offered peace on seven occasions, and they have turned it down each time. The last time was in 2008; they were offered more than 95% of the territory taken in 1967 and a capital in East Jerusalem. This was rejected because Israel would not give in on two points. One was the right of return. This calls for all Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their ancestral homeland. Unlike any other refugee group in the world, only Palestinians have generational refugees, sometimes up to the 5th generation. This means that there are currently over 5 million Palestinian refugees when only 700,000 left in 1948. If granted the right of return, Israel would cease to be a Jewish state. Even knowing this, Israel offered, as a symbolic gesture, to have 100,000 Palestinians return.
The second issue is Jerusalem. Sharing Jerusalem was not enough they wanted all of it including west Jerusalem which is entirely Jewish. A few quick facts:

Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran.
Jews have been praying to return to Jerusalem for over 2000 years.
The Koran recognizes that Israel was given to the Jews.
For the Jews, Jerusalem and specifically the Temple Mount are the holiest places on earth. When Israel conquered these areas in 1967, what did they do? Did they bar Muslim prayer? Did they build a third temple? No, They prevented Jews from praying there and gave the authority of the Temple Mount to the Muslim Waqf.

What we in Israel know is that the Palestinians will never accept anything less than our destruction. They have said so, poll after poll confirms this. Not a poll of Hamas members, a poll of Palestinians..

I am asking everyone I know to try to help. If you know people who are cheering our raped and dismembered, I hope you can now explain to them why this is not the same as occupation. The idea that anyone would support these heinous crimes is unfathomable, and yet we see this happening all over the world. Join rallies in support of Israel. In the coming months, we will need all the support we can get. Let your customers, clients, and suppliers know. This is not the time to hold back. When the photos of dead civilians from Gaza and Lebanon (yes, I think that will start soon) start pouring over the media, the pressure on Israel to stop will be relentless. Remind people that Palestinian resistance is only accomplished when every Jew in Israel is dead, and the days of us going like sheep to the slaughter are gone.

This time, Israel will not stop under international pressure. We will continue until Hamas is destroyed because the alternative is that we will be destroyed. We are being given the choice between our children or theirs. A choice that they have thrust upon us. A choice that no one will rejoice in, but we know what we must choose.

If anyone would like to discuss this further (as long as you can civilly) or would like any proof of some of the things I am saying, please let me know. If you think that you know some people who may not truly understand what is going on here, please feel free to share this, and if you feel that you just want to delete this email and move on, I understand. You think it is not your fight. I hope you are smarter and understand that ultimately it will be.

Aaron Menche
Sent from my iPhone

Taxes

Once again, I am remiss in posting anything. My only excuse is age-related – I guess having turned 83, I’m just slowing down. Otherwise, my health is good. I find this latest from my friend and fellow Marine Greg earth-shattering as well. I cannot believe the Supreme Court can find anything in the Moore case to go along with the government. Absolutely crazy and could change everything about a capitalistic economy.

Taxing Tremors                                                              By: Greg Maresca

A 7.6 earthquake and its resulting tsunami on New Year’s Day that shook Japan set the stage as the faultless metaphor that will reverberate throughout 2024 and beyond.  With the impending presidential election aside, the tremors of improbability arrived a month earlier when the Supreme Court decided to hear a case with profound implications for the federal income tax.

Moore v. U.S. will decide if the federal government can tax unrealized capital gains not yet received under the 16th Amendment.  The justices agreed to hear the Moore’s appeal as the couple wanted their $14,729 refund that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against. The Ninth Circuit, known in legal circles as the “Ninth Circus,” has the worst record of any appeals court before the Supreme Court.

Like Roe v. Wade did last year, this case will have a huge and lasting ripple effect regarding future taxation that should concern everyone.

It is no secret that the nation is accruing debt that is unsustainable. The day of reckoning approaches. The irony is the case is named Moore – indeed “more” income through taxation.

Over a century of income tax laws has resulted in thousands of pages of decrees that carve out craters of exemptions in a labyrinth of directives. The tax code is a bloated, crony orchestrated, lobbyist measured disaster for those unable to manipulate it by hiring all those cunning accountants and attorneys who are paid handsomely to circumvent it.

When was the last time a member of Congress did their own taxes?

A fundamental reckoning from the ground up is long overdue to bury the income tax along with the IRS and replace them with a consumption tax or flat tax.

To tax unrealized capital gains not yet received is extreme. The power to regulate and tax is the power to destroy. Congress’s authority to tax does not include reinvested capital and personal property as income.

Income is money received.

Assets may increase in value, but until they are collected as interest, dividends or sold, there is no income. If you cannot spend it, it is not income.

You can’t pay the rent or fill your gas tank with paper gains or the appreciation of your home.  When you gain on any financial instrument but do not sell you earn a “paper profit.”  If unrealized gains are taxed, and the taxpayer has no cash to pay, a forced liquidation would be necessary for payment.

Are you prepared to pay a tax because your assets go up in value?  House, car, pets, trading cards, comic books, Auntie Estelle’s antique coffee table – where does it end?   Provided market values decline would monies be refunded?  Stop laughing, that was no joke.

Uncle Sam wants all the golden eggs without having to buy the hens, the henhouse, and the chicken feed. The power brokers in Washington believe everything is subject to taxation real or imagined.

It is pitiful that this case is even necessary.

A tax in bad faith resulted in a revolution nearly 250 years ago. Such taxation realizes the socialist dream of equal outcomes regardless of effort, ingenuity, innovation, or lack thereof. Ayn Rand’s nightmare is finally realized.

The Supreme Court’s job is not about maximizing taxable income for Uncle Sam but to interpret if this tax is constitutional.

A ruling in favor of Uncle Sam will unleash Congress’ taxing power and devastate our economic system as we know it.  Going forward, all unrealized income will become whatever the government says it is.

The Supreme Court’s decision is expected in June right in the middle of the presidential campaign. Provided the government loses and refusing to allow what they perceive as a crisis; Democrats will condemn the decision as a political red herring.

A Moore victory would also challenge other sections of the tax code that stands at nearly 7,000 pages.  Provided they are unconstitutional; they must fall, too.

The income tax has been around since 1913 and its ability to produce revenue has never been assuaged by politics. The hardcore issue is the United States does not have a taxing problem, but a spending problem. Revenue is up but it can’t compete with current spending levels.

A ruling in favor of the government would only exacerbate such spending.

Postscript: I have given up on all the latest coming out of the military and especially our Corps. Absolutely sad! I am simply too old to even bother with it anymore. My stress level is more important to me.

In case you have not read your copy of the latest “Semper Fidelis, or if not retired and don’t get it, I always look at the “Taps” column looking for friends with whom I served. I saw MajGen Dennis Murphy listed this month. Sad, I considered him another Ernie Cheatham – a warrior. He gave me Huxley’s Whores.

Well, this is election year. Do we really believe the liberals are going to allow a legal, valid election? I don’t!