Nix Nork Nukes Now!

As I practice my headline writing I notice the rather flaccid and anemic response to the North Korean underground nuclear nuke test. We've been afraid of Li'l Kim since the Clinton Administration.

I am pretty sure that the reason is all that Nork artillery within range of Seoul. Of course many North Korean cities are within range of South Korean and American artillery but that doesn't seem to bother the clown with poofy hair.

I had a plan way back in '94 that I believe will still work, although no one has the courage to use it. Item one would be to evacuate Seoul. Item Two: pour artillery and air into the Nork artillery positions and air power. Item three: turn the zoomies loose on the rest of North Korea. Leave a small buffer zone on the Chinese and Russian borders.

After there are no Nork weapons more powerful than a Red Ryder Beebee Gun bomb the gaurdhouses and fences of those massive Nork prison camps. Then let everyone back into Seoul. Rebuild what has been destroyed. I strongly believe that damage will be fairly light, our counterbattery fire is nothing short miraculous.

Now one reason we haven't done that is because we are worried about killing civilians. This is an unfounded worry. No matter how many we civilians we killed it would not come close to how many Nork civilians starve to death or die in the prison camps.

The only people in North Korea that get enough to eat are the politicos and (some of) the military. The South Korean military is not the Army of the early 1950s. I saw them work in the midsixties.

The only advantage Li'l Kim has is brutality. The Norks have nothing else. Their air force is a joke. Their artillery is obsolete. Their army is armed with weapons a couple of generations old. I doubt that one Nork troop out of a hundred has night vision gear. I also doubt that they have effective body armor.

The South even has rifles that shoot airburst shells and all have laser sights. Meanwhile the Norks have those old AKs. The only advantage to the AK is that it will usually hold together while operated by a peasant. Imagine being a Nork grunt. It's night. You are crouched behind a rock when a South Korean that you can't see puts an airburst shell about three meters above your head. Now imagine you are that dead Nork's squadmate. You are hungry, your bud was just killed by a soldier that nobody can see, your officers have taken half the rations and you haven't been paid, or laid, in months. How is that morale and fighting spirit?

The Norks have the T62 tank, the South has the KH1, arguably as good as the M1Ain Abrams.

So, do we wait for the Norks to nuke Tokyo or Seoul or do we gird up or loins as Slow Joe said?

Oh, sorry, I forgot. China! Oh noes! China might get mad! You will forgive me if I'd rather see China mad than a smoking, glowing hole where a city of ten million people used to be. But, that's just me.

Scattershooting While Wondering Who Put The Bop In The Bop-Shu-Bopapop.

Am I the only one left that remembers that song from the '50s?

How often do I need to thank Blackie Sherrod for using the "Scattershooting While..." to keep it from becoming a very small scale plagiarism? I wonder about the same thing on the name of my Blog, of course. I do not know if I saw Duke Venturino's column in Handloader Magazine before or after I started my Blog. Or is it just a case of great minds thinking alike? I like the great minds theory.


I had my weekly ration of eggs and bacon this morning. I am kind of curious about this mania among health professionals about fat and cholesterol. During the 19th Century, and before, a big problem men and women had was keeping enough fat in their diets, especially in winter in cold climates. In the old diaries I constantly see references to killing a fall bear so they would get enough fat. Now I wonder, was it because nobody knew about cholesterol or because the men of that time burned off more calories by having to spend more time in the cold and having to work so much harder.

This last paragraph also makes me wonder about modern folks complaining about how they are so overstress. Few of us work twelve hour days anymore, coupled with then we don't have to go home and chop wood for the stove, carry water from the well or the pump. We have hot water heaters and vacuum cleaners. Washing machines. We don't have to clean the horse manure out of the stable. We buy milk instead of milking the cow. We don't have to shop every day, we have refrigerators and freezers. Those who can at home or sew, do it because it's their part time hobby. Sometimes I want to slap someone who complains about sitting at a desk for eight hours and then have to drive home for a half hour.

Oh, speaking of bacon and eggs, I wonder how much bacon grease I'd have to add to my bullet lube to automatically send any stray Jihadi types directly to the hot place with no virgins?

So I'm deciding whether to minimize this and get offline and watch an old movie or to take a nap. Decisions, decisions. Or maybe a movie and then a nap. Or maybe no nap today and go to bed "early" so I can get up at 10 AM or so. I've fallen into the bad habit of sleeping until noon or one PM. Then I miss half, or more, of Rush. Since I don't watch the news and have let my newspapers go, that and the Internet are my only sources of news. Maybe it's just that even with Rush and the intertubes, I'm run down with Obama fatigue. And we thought Clinton was a Presidency all about himself.

I have decided to blow off Facebook. There aren't enough words before they cut me off to tell a story.

I am hoping that it will stay dry enough tomorrow to fly the flag. Also, to get the Coca Cola 600 in. But mainly to fly the flag.

Naptime

So it was naptime and I was being quiet as a little mouse when I looked over on the couch and spied this. What I don't quite understand is how Ming the Merciless manages to trick me with her "carry me down the stairs, Daddy, you know it hurts my poor paws" routine, even though I see her climb up onto the back of the couch. I guess I'm just gullible.

I am not gullible enough for the politician types, though. I am still bemused how the Democrats are trying to criminalize what was done after 9/11 to prevent the next attack. Now they're saying that it was all that dastardly Bush Administration and we're gonna get even with them!

Sorry, I was home the morning of 9/11. I was on a shooting, hunting and handloading Bulletin Board website when someone popped up with turn on the TV! So I did. One of the things I saw was the stampede down the steps of the Capitol Building.

Now I'm pretty old but I remember the fire drills in Kindergarten. Maybe I only remember because I had to walk out into the playground holding hands with a pretty little redhead but I remember how we had to walk, calmly. We were never told if it was a drill or the real thing, came in handy the day there was a real fire. It was just a small thing, electrical if I recall, but smokey. In that whole school, K-5, there was no panic, we all walked out to the playground and then got to watch the big red fire trucks.

Unlike Congresscritters and their staffers. Remember? Remember the panic over Anthrax in the mail? Linda Lou sure does. Oddly, that panic was all in the political/media class. Linda Lou went to work every day at the main post office but the politicians shut down.

With all that panic we are now told to believe that it was just the Bush Administration treating suspected Jihadis mean. Right. I've got some oceanfront property in northeast Texas, too. I will gladly sell my half acre for the bargain price of five million dollars, too.

So the "torture" was all Bush now. I'm supposed to believe that those panicky congresscritters wouldn't have approved grabbing Jihadi's gonads with red hot pincers? Riiight!

This is why the Donks can't get any real traction on this. All but the diehard leftists have memories. As an aside, it must be nice to have no memory. To be able to say it's never worked anywhere it's ever been tried but it will work now because we have smart people like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in charge, all led by the super genius Obama. (What job has Obama had before that proves his competence? Oh, right, because the community he organized is now so wealthy and healthy.) Though the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) try their best to throw all that down the memory hole, as well as those brothers and sisters of ours jumping out of those burning buildings, we remember.

It seems everyone but Washington remembers. The Washington/New York Republicans can't seem to remember what happens when grassroots Republicans don't man phone banks, when we don't walk precincts. When we sit home on a November Tuesday. Two elections in a row and the big deal "leaders" of the Party can't figure it out. No, Steele, you don't need new grassroots. No, Cornyn, you don't endorse the RINO a whole year before the Florida Primary.

The Republican Party lost big business some time back. Oddly, about the time big business started losing money and shipping jobs overseas. This has much to do with how we lost the education establishment a few decades back and started graduating MBA types who can't walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.

What we have left are main street businesses and the religious right, along with very few libertarians. So, naturally the Republican "leaders" are jettisoning the people who actually did the walking the precincts and manned the phone banks. Hint: It wasn't the libertarians. I keep reading folks like Professor Reynolds, I have never read of him doing any actual work during an election. This is not a big indictment, it's just who walks precincts and works those phone banks. But the Republican "leadership" thinks we need new grass roots.

Armed Forces Day

It's raining today so we don't have the flag out in honor of Armed Forces Day. Too bad, we'd fly it otherwise.

I've said it before, I'm not one of those "professional veterans" I see wearing bits of old uniforms or jackets marking where or when they served. I have none of the gewgaws and doodads they gave me for going where I was sent and doing what I was told. I volunteered once when I took the oath. The rest of the time I went along because otherwise I would have broken that oath. Not to mention being put in the jug.

The only thing we shall do to mark the day is watch that movie, "Taking Chance". We don't have HBO so we didn't get to watch it when it came out there. Instead we bought it and it came off the UPS truck this week. So, we will watch it later today and then, as the grandkids get old enough to understand, we'll show it to them.

While it is not important to me that others know, I did once stand with heroes. Many of the career men I met then had served in the big one, men who made that long walk to the beach of Tarawa, when the boats got hung on the reef. Men who saw the flag raised on Iwo Jima or the Kamakazis off the beaches of Okinawa. Other men who took that nice winter's walk back from Chosin a few years later.

Those men are mostly gone now, instead my generation of veterans has weasels as our public face, John Effin Kerry, Jack Murtha and James Webb. The nice thing about today is that the phoney Hee-roes and fake veterans are more easily found out. That clown in Denver, that kid who wrote that crap in the New Republic about how the war in Iraq stole his humanity before he ever got there...

So, today is another day to say thanks. As every day is, of course. Thanks to those who went before me, thanks to those I knew and thanks to those who came along after. And, yes, thanks to those who are yet to come.

I just got the word from Arizona. My grand niece, Cassie is graduating from high school. In the fall she will become Midshipman Cassie as she goes to the University of Arizona on an NROTC scholarship. So, Cassie, fair winds and following seas. You become a link in a very long chain. You will be a long time understanding just how proud of you I feel.

Exactly What World Does David Brooks Inhabit?

So first I saw what Victor Davis Hanson said about what David Brooks thought about Republicans and John Ford Westerns, it got me curious enough to actually click over and read what Brooks had to say.

Apparently he thinks Republicans don't care about a civil society. This must be because Brooks is a an ivy league "educated" cretin. Brooks says people vote Democrat because they crave order. Um, David, have you looked out the windows as you rode through your beloved Democrat run cities?

It's a pretty good bet that the worse the civic order conditions, the more powerful the Democrat influence. Funny, the places where even police won't go except in groups, that is where the vote is about 100 percent Democrat. But Republican don't care about an orderly society.

I am reminded of how the Democrats used the James Byrd murder aftermath. After Bush's Texas has sentenced two of the murderers to death and the one that rolled and turned state's evidence to life without parole, Democrats said that this just proved the need for hate crimes legislation. Right. With hate crimes legislation the peckerwood that rolled over would get TWO life sentences without parole, right? And the others? Maybe the Democrats would not try to get rid of their death sentences. Oh, I know, they'd still try to do away with the death sentence but would blame the Republicans.

Anyhow, all I know is anyone who decides to vote Democrat because they are interested in civic order is as stupid as those rich folks who voted for Obama believing that he'd go after rich Republicans but leave them alone.

Mom

It's too bad we are broke (again) this month, I have some more slides from my boyhood that I would like to get into a format to put up on this blog. For some reason the new scanner hooked up to the new computer puts the pictures we scan in into a format that we can't manage to put on this blog. And the new grandbaby pictures the kids post on Facebook, the same. Oh well, on with my Mother's Day post...

One of my earliest memories is getting beat up by a goose. I don't recall exactly what I did to anger it (do not ask if it was a goose or a gander at this late date. I have no idea, nor do I know how to tell the difference even today. All I remember is that this giant bird (when you're five years old it doesn't take much to be giant) came rushing out of a yard and whopped me with the leading edge of it's wings and pecked the foo out of me.

Anyhow, it hurt and it really made me mad. I had done nothing to that critter. I later discovered that geese are very territorial, all I knew is that it was time for revenge. So I ran home because my folks had been doing some kind of project and there were some one by one boards around, the perfect size for a small person's hand to wield as a club.

One was broken and kind of pointy, making it just what I needed, a club that I could also stab with. My plan for justice was spoiled, though. Somehow my Mom got wind of it. Fifty-five+ years makes me forget why, exactly. She may have heard me crying tears the size of horse apples, that goose HURT!

Anyhow Mom caught me about a block from home as I was going back to wreak vengeance and justice on that feathered fiend. Unfortunately my mother took sides with the goose. Worse, she took my weapon of righteousness. Worse yet, I must have said the wrong thing to her because she used that stick. On me, the injured party. Step, swat, step, swat, all the way home. Sometimes there is no justice in the world.

I haven't like geese since.

Cracking Down On Tax Cheats

So I see where the Bambi Administration is cracking down on tax cheats. So, I thought "Great! Geithner and Rangel are going to the federal pen."

Imagine my chagrin when (I discovered that instead, they are going to stop the deductions on company's overseas taxes.

I mean it's really hard sometimes to believe in God. When this administration can talk about cracking down on tax cheats and not have lightning strike...

Just Wondering

I'm kind of curious about one little detail. Most everybody who is serious about the economy is expecting we'll hit the wall fairly quickly with these trillion dollar deficits. Now Bambi is still talking about how he's going to pay these things off while giving 95% of citizens an income tax cut.

Now I'm no economist but since almost half of the country doesn't pay income tax, how is he going to cut those taxes? Since the top five percent pays 60% of the taxes I'm not real sure that Bush did a very good job of "tax cuts for the rich".

But what I am really curious about is how people like Obama, Reid and Pelosi are going to explain the mess when the Chinese want some of their money back.

I could see, if the unholy trinity had held spending down even to the insane levels of the last year of the Republican Congress they could just screech Boosh! Booosh! and a sufficient portion of the public might let them live. But having run against Bush's spending and then increasing the deficit to well over a trillion dollars seems to be a whole different problem.

It seems to me that when the bill comes due for this there will be a lot of people very unhappy. I have seen that Bambi's energy proposals will cost each family some thirty-one hundred dollars a year. Well, if I had someone to ghostwrite books making me millions like some people, that would be fine. Or if I could jet all over and have a limo idling outside while I made speeches about how the little people use too much energy. As it is, I don't have an extra thirty-one hundred dollars a year. Not many folks I know do. Folks I know either work for wages or run businesses small enough that an extra thirty-one hundred dollars a year might just cause them to lay off some help, or go out of business. Then what?

It looks as if our political class is eating the seed corn. That is the one sure way to lose the farm. I don't mind Bambi, Pelosi and Reid losing their farms. I'd rather, though, that they didn't take us with them. And I'm curious, what are they going to do if the whole thing comes crashing down around their ears? They can scream Boosh! Booosh! all they want, the entire government belongs to them now. Under Bush I paid my house off. If I lose it to government idiocy it won't be Bush. I won't be mad at the Republicans who can't stop this stupidity, either.

Well, I will be mad at Republicans, if only they'd stayed with the Party Platform they'd never have ended up with no power at all. Instead, they blew it. Leading us to this.

Old Stories

Linda Lou gave me the discs full of all the pics we had. I should tell some stories relating to some of them. This pair of pictures is of my and my old man. I do not recall the pictures with the flowers, it was at some arboretum or other, Mom made sure we visited those in our travels. Which one that was is lost to time.

The other picture is the overlook by Nyack Lodge in the high Sierras. Nyack Lodge was a hotel and restaurant built at a scenic overlook on what was then US Highway 40. The overlook is still there although the hotel burnt down in the 1950s. The restaurant lasted somewhat longer. The overlook is still there on Interstate 80 and there is a new eatery and gas station although it's not the same. All I really remember about that place was the counter had stools with real cowhide with the hair on. And the view.

The low wall I was standing on is all that kept people from falling into the canyon of the Bear River, nearly straight down for about a thousand feet. I doubt that one could really have fallen all that far as the slope was fairly heavily timbered back then but look behind me. Standing on that low rock wall with no fence! No fence to keep idiots from rolling down to the river. Today's safety fetishists are breaking out in hives. Note to lawyers and child protection types: the guy keeping me from rolling down the mountain has been dead since '85 so don't try to sue him, I wouldn't testify anyway.

That's the difference between today and the 1950s. They put up a low stone wall so that if someone parked the car and the parking brake failed, the car wouldn't roll hundreds of feet through the trees. People? They were expected to have a few brains. If someone was dumb enough to roll down the hill, well back then it was on them.

I do wonder if the modern Democrat Party would be near as powerful today if not for the all out effort to make the world safe for stupidity.

So Who Isn't A War Criminal?

So now Harry Truman is a war criminal, or maybe he isn't. Is Jon Stewart's clown nose on or off?

I'm really getting tired of this war criminal crap. We are not at war with anyone who has signed or obeys the Hague or Geneva Conventions. Therefore there are no war crimes.

If this Spanish Judge is so concerned about non Spaniards and their alleged war crimes why isn't he bleating about the North Vietnamese? Or the Sudan?Or Rwanda? I can name probably fifty places worse than Gitmo and not a peep from this clown. I wonder why.

Let's face it, everyone who has ever fought in combat could be considered guilty of a war crime if the rules are stretched enough. Pretty much every infantryman I've ever known has put an insurance shot into a downed bad guy when things were sticky. Too many of them have lain on grenades with pulled pins and only the spring loaded spoon preventing a loud noise. The brass and the remfs always wanted prisoners, infantrymen wanted to go home riding in the passenger seats and not in an aluminum box. Guess who won that argument.

So, is the insurance shot a war crime? Sure is. And infantrymen will stop using them just as soon as they sit in comfortable offices while lawyers and politicians carry rifles and rucks. Except, in this particular fight, the insurance shot is no crime. Remember, if the bad guy isn't in uniform, no rights. Read the Conventions.

Here is what I don't understand. Obama is a lawyer. Holder is a lawyer. I'm assuming that even that Spanish Judge is a lawyer. Now I'm not a lawyer. After all, a man has to have some standards. But way back in the mid sixties I had to read the rules. If A poor dumb ex-enlisted man can read the rules, why can't these stinking lawyers read the rules? Why can't the journalists read the rules?

Lawyers, judges and journalists often tend to look down their noses at ordinary folks. Shouldn't they be embarrassed that ordinary people know the rules better than they do? The rules are pretty simple. Hide among civilians, no rights except a last cigarette and a stout wall. No uniform? The right to that stout wall.

Now those are the rules. What about torture? One of the definitions of torture is that the action must be something that causes permanent damage. John McCain can't lift his arms over his head due to the torture from the North Viets. So, how is this bunch in Spain? What is their range of motion?

Obama and Holder have rules they are supposed to obey. One of the most important is that they don't let dangerous graduates of terror training camps loose in America. Yet that's what they are trying to do. Bet that Spanish Judge clown won't try to indict them, either.

Even though the rules for war crimes are written down, to the left being a Republican is all the evidence they need to make the accusation.