Hooray, I Can Post!

 I have been stuck in Blogger Limbo, able to write posts and then, whenever I'd hit "POST" the thing would just kind of sit there like a Democrat with a Civil Service job. You didn't really miss too much, my grandson Josiah had his fifth birthday party, I had my 26th AA "birthday" and I requested that the eastern coast types send us some of that rain. Naturally they didn't, the ingrates.

 Anyhow, now that I have the use of this blog again I'll have a little something to say. Not in the next couple of days but after I get done with this bunch of doctor visits. Had one in North Dallas for Linda Lou with the guy that did the surgery fixing her ankle and tomorrow I have my heart doctor in the same hospital complex, Medical City, Dallas.  First class place and first class docs, they sure are a long ways off, though.

 Thanks to Pamibe for showing me how to (sort of) get this blog off the sideline. I wonder if anybody much cares as seldom as I've been posting.

 More over the weekend, unless I spend all my time on www.nakedchubbygirls.org or something. Hmm, wonder if'n that's a real url?

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Will We See London. USA?

I strongly suspect we will see a form of London, USA. The flash mob robberies and beatings will continue and sooner or later some intended victim will be armed. Emptying his or her gun into these idiots will cause more unrest.

Then we will see things like we saw in the LA Rodney King riots, Korean shop owners forting up to keep the idiots at bay.

I, of course, don't hardly have to worry about it, it ain't like the denizens of Lake Tawakoni are going to riot, we're all armed. Plus my neighbors don't have any more than I do, what would be the point?

Actually, most folks will not have to worry much about any unrest. If the "youths" in Chicago start getting too out of hand, most folks will stay out of Chicago. Eventually, the responsible folks will have all moved away and those feral "youths" will get mighty hungry. Meanwhile the suburbs will be forted up. This, of course, will be called raaaaacism. No one in government or the media will notice the middle class minority people helping to man the "barricades".

A lot of folks are buying guns. A lot of folks are going to some of those shooting schools. And a lot of folks are wondering which of the twelve gazillion shooting schools to attend. Meanwhile the new people buying shootin' irons are often buying the wrong kind of weapon. Everyone and their mother with machine shop capabilities are making clones of the AR15. Folks, if you want something to defend your home, this is the wrong gun. The geniuses in the Defense Dept. (notice we have not really won a war since we got rid of the War Dept.?) decided that it's far better to wound an enemy than to kill him. Something about the hospitalization taking more resources. Well, wounding a bad guy is fine, as long as the wound completely paralyzes him. Otherwise he can still kill you.

Oddly, most areas where ordinary folks are most vulnerable to unreast, it's hardest to get and keep arms. So, like in California, you cannot buy an AR15 clone anyway, without a ten round maximum capacity, etc, etc. So a lot of folks tout pump shotguns for home defense. Sorry, wrong again. The pump shotgun is too big to handle in the house. I know we tell civilians to fort up the whole family in one room, defend that room and wait for the local police. That is a great idea except we hear a noise? Is it the dog? Is it one of the kids going to pee? Is it your daughter's no good boyfriend sneaking over, again? Sure, call 911 every time you hear a noise. Umm, no. What works is to grab your good bright flashlight, tuck your handgun just behind your back, in your strong hand, and check it out.

You do not want a rifle or shotgun then, how do you handle a two handed gun and light switches, kids and dogs all at once? So, the first thing you need is a good flashlight and then a handgun. If you don't get a good flashlight, don't bother with a gun.

What gun? I will go against common wisdom here. Unless you shoot for sport I say choose a revolver. Autoloaders have advantages for police and military. Revolvers have other advantages. Put a loaded revolver in your bedside table and thirty years later it will still fire those corroded-green shells. An auto? Probably not. Naturally I'd like you to practice a lot but most folks won't. Truth is, skill doesn't matter all that much. If a citizen gets into a gunfight it's going to be really close. What really counts is willingness. Gunfights happen within the width of a car or the length of a car. The width of a room, the length of a room. Once a citizen learns to hit a target at the range of the biggest room in her house, she's good enough.

Now for a house gun I say there are only a few choices left, the S&W Military and Police K frame and other revolvers of that size are the most common. They come in .38 Special and .357 Mag. Either one is fine. Load it with Winchester Plus P lead semiwadcutter hollow points or that new Speer Gold Dot 135 grain load. Don't bother with flashlights or lasers on the gun, your handheld flashlight will do. Don't waste money on stuff like that, instead invest in practice ammo. When you can hit one of those cheap paper plates every shot at the length of your biggest room, well you're good enough.

Forget all that horsecrap about running around, crawling through pipes, kickin' in doors that some of these schools teach. Half of them give drills that would get you killed if you wore Kevlar to work, all of them teach stuff you and I will never do. I'm too old and fat to be takin' down crack houses or busting MS13 clubhouses. My gun is to protect my family, my life and my home.

There are a couple of other choices in house guns. Those with small hands might well decide to choose one of the little five shooters like the S&W Chief's Special, the Ruger SP101 or one of the Brazilian copies of that S&W. These are also the best guns for carrying. There are lots of autoloaders but, really, those are for soldiers and cops. The simple reality is that if a civilian needs more than five shots he's so outnumbered that all he's doing is taking an escort to Hell with him.

There is another cartridge out, that new Federal .327 Magnum. That little pocket rocket loads six rounds in the same Ruger SP101 that I carry, mine only holds five .357s. It's six to one, half dozen of the other for carry. Ain't nobody gonna laugh if either cartridge hits center mass.

Those are the house guns, or store guns, for that matter. Now there is one more kind of gun I'd like to talk about. The long gun, a rifle or shotgunfor the urban dweller who fears what we saw in England, or for that matter, Detroit in '67. During the Rodney King riots we saw a lot of buildings and businesses burned. We also saw rioters turning away from those Korean-owned stores where the men and women were standing by with rifles and shotguns. Any kind of repeating shotgun will keep bad guys out of Molotov Cocktail range, so will just about any repeating rifle.

I would not bother with an AR 15 clone. The 5.56 will kill, and it will wound. Thing is, if the bullet does not hit something immediate like the heart, spine or brain the bad guy can still do a lot of damage before he finally bleeds out. The average mule deer is about the same size and weight as a full grown man and there is almost no one who says "let's hunt mule deer with our .223s!"

The 12 guage shotgun has a lot going for it at close range. Even better is a little pistol caliber carbine. A .357 or .44 Mag, a .45 Colt lever action holds at least nine rounds and they are all deadly. out to ranges where if I shot anyone I'd go to prison. Put some men and women up on the roof with those and the bad guys would never live to throw a Molotov Cocktail at your business or home.

I could be wrong. When the Democrats run out of other people's money the "youths" might just buckle down and get jobs and I could be John Holmes long lost identical twin. Everyone is buying commodities to weather the recession. Some bought gold. I bought lead.

First We Pray

So we lost some thirty-one of our best trained, best equipped warriors at once when their bird went down. Some twenty members of SEAL Team Six, other US troops, the aircrew and some Afghani Special Ops troops. We do not know why the helo went down, we may never know. That's a lot of wives and children, parents, bothers and sisters with a new hole in their lives.

After we mourn our best and grieve with their families, we need to find out how and why they died. Was it merely the golden beebee that the aviators of my war feared, just that lucky shot from the millions that the bad guys were always pegging toward our birds?

The most important question is a simple one, why do we know what unit took down Osama? Why wasn't it simply NATO Forces? I remember we had about ten minutes of secrecy, that that wetbrain Biden opened his piehole. Did that put the bad guys to work building the Taliban equivalent of a Flak Trap?

If we are pulling our troops out, why are we sending special ops guys in? Are we doing that old partial fight again? During the Bush Admin it was our Armed Forces at war, America at the mall. Today it seems as if some of our Armed Forces at war, America can't afford to go to the mall.

Look, I'm just an ex enlisted guy, still I know enough to figure we either fight or don't fight. This business of agonising over a troop buildup, then sending some of the troops our Generals on the spot ask for, then loudly announcing the withdrawal of said troops, all the time leaving the enemy neighboring countries to rest, recruit and resupply is madness. It's exactly what happened during LBJ's war. We finally won that fight when Nixon took over, this angered Democrats so much they cut off all aid to the RVN when the north invaded again. Now it seems we're doing the same thing again.

I'm pretty sure the Democrats will try hard to blame this on the TEA Party.

So, Now I'm A Terrorist? Oookay. What Happens Next?

So, according to the establishment left we are now terrorists, hostage takers and are holding guns to America's head. We gathered, first in tens and hundreds, then in thousands and tens of thousands, finally in that huge rally in Washington, DC. Funny, each time there was something first noticed by the right, at that "Dan's Bake Sale", where Rush Limbaugh and some 65,000 fans showed up in Fort Collins, Colorado. The crowd left the grounds cleaner than they found them.

This is the right. When we go somewhere we drop our trash in the barrels. If we see something loose we pick it up and throw it away. Funny thing, you can tell, with perhaps eighty percent efficiency , conservative people from lefties at a highway rest stop. The conservatives will be the ones emptying a trash container into the barrels. But, I digress.

Does anyone remember Nancy Pelosi leading that bunch of lefty Congresscritters right through the crowd of thousands pleading that our health care system, the best in the world, to not me smashed into bureaucrat's fiefdoms? Sure, we remember. The left screeching about how we were yelling NI**ER at the congresscritters, some of whom were holding video cameras and then state of the art cell phone cameras up. Think hard, Breitbart has offered a pretty fair sum of money to anyone with video proof, so far no takers.

That, of course, was merely business as usual in Washington. More business as usual is that jug eared, empty headed narrow-assed clown in the White House whining that all the nation's economic problems are because of George W. Bush. Too bad we don't have a news media. I would love someone asking this bunch of fools to tell us the exact unemployment rate in November, 2006. Funny how in the last period of Republican "rule" unemployment was 4.6 percent and wages up 3.9 percent. We're coming up on six years of Democrat rule, now, although we have wrested one half of Congress away from the Pelosi-Reid gang of thieves. So, now we have the Vice President of the United States of America, agreeing with a United States Congressman that we acted like terrorists.

A deal which does not stop the ship of state from taking on water but merely slows the leak a tiny bit is not a tragedy for the government. The tragedy for the government is that you idiot professional politicians simply find yourselves unable to stop spending money you do not have and cannot get. Representative Cleaver, the debt deal IS a "Satan Sandwich". It is such because it , along with other of your programs, keeps your people mired in poverty.

National wealth has plummeted since the Pelosi-Reid Congress and the Obama Presidency. Funny, though, the wealth of minority America has plummeted even more. And yet, you call us racist? Mr. Vice President, Representative Cleaver, Mr. President, I have to ask you all, why is it, if WE the conservatives hate the poor so much and are so racist, why is it that the worst sections of the entire country are all Democrat strongholds? Well, up until you took over, now entire sections of the country are dying. Thanks a lot.

How long, Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, Congressmen Doyle and Cleaver (and a whole host of others) before you figure out that it is your policies that are killing the last, best hope of mankind. Or do you realize that you are killing the country. If so, why? Who gains?

I'm just a small town boy grown old. I know the world has changed and will continue to change. What I cannot understand is why you continue to insult and denigrate the ever decreasing number of people who pay your salaries. There are still hundreds of ways for poor people to become if not rich, at least middle class. Yet your bunch goes out and closes children's lemonade stands when you don't want to put whole states like Texas in the dark. Who gains and who loses, then, Mr. President? The middle class who will tighten their belts a little more to pay the higher power bills or the poor, who you claim to care so much about?

Se, my question remains. Are you wrecking the country, and the futures of those you claim to care so much about, by accident? If so, how long before you notice that everything you do makes things worse? Or are you wrecking the country on purpose> If so, do you really expect us to let you do so? Really? You ain't seen terrorists yet.

The Time Machine:1958

The year was 1958. Few remember how long it took to recover from the Great Depression. Ten years after the war my parents were finally making decent money. They bought the first new car of their lives.

In those days it was the norm to have folks take their pictures with their cars. Somehow, perhaps because cars all look the same, I don't see people posing with their rides. Or, perhaps, it's that there is no more novelty in cars. My mother came out of Dust Bowl Kansas. She never, ever told of the trauma she endured. All I ever heard of prewar California was how they had to back over the steep hills and mountains in the old Model T Fords. The Model T had no fuel pump. The gas tank was actually under the windshield and the gas flowed to the carb simply by gravity. This has much to do with why cars caught on fire after wrecks and why they seldom do anymore.
Anyhow it was only after 1955 that we really started traveling.

Of course much of the travel was thanks to Ike and his Interstate Highway program. Those who grew up in the post 1962 world have no real idea of how long it took to get somewhere. There were just as many small towns as ever. Actually more, over the last fifty years hundreds of small towns have been swallowed up by big cities. Every one of those small towns had traffic, complete with stop signs . I was ten years old and it still took four hours to drive a hundred miles.

The picture on the top is Main Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. Click to embiggen, the next three down are my mother, the one with the big Merc is the same trip to Las Vegas. The next one down was Death Valley. Next, I just don't know where that was..

Down another notch was my old man and a right handsome kid with Donner Lake in the high Sierras. You might remember that area, the Donner Party waited just a little too late to try to go over the hill with their wagon train.

That next pic down is my Mom at the California State Capitol in California. The next two are my stepfather, James, the guy that raised me. The picture with the car was at a motel at Lake Tahoe, the other was at that Arboretum in San Francisco. We were a railroad family, the Southern Pacific. The Southern Pacific Hospital was, perhaps still is, just across the panhandle of Golden Gate Park from the infamous Haight Ashberry where the Summer of Love fizzled in a sea of heroin and speed.

If you take a look at my old man's hair you might notice that the idea that everybody in the '50s wore short hair is a myth. I have to remember to tell you how, ten years after those pictures were taken how the new longhairs thought that they found a kindred spirit in my stepfather. They were wrong.