Icon A5 Made First Delivery

Imagine this beauty towed behind a Class A Motorhome.  Now that would be a great way to experience our nation's history and magnificence.

Airlines -- Be Cautious of Who You Hire

Like Bell Biv DeVoe says, "Don't trust an ATP and a smile..."  I can hardly point to a peer of mine in the Air Force that I would personally hire as a private employer.  There are a few, but they are a very few.

Most are of the go-along-to-get-along, what's in it for me, variety and sadly lack the most basic morality.  Sure, they meet the standard test when it comes to participation in your fantasy football league.  You know, they like football and they like the ladies, and beer, and they want to fit in and they can tell a joke from time to time.  But that whole Constitution thing they swore to support and defend is just so confusing when they don't read it...

Take for example this guy I used to fly with who was little more than the cute smile from the poison lyrics above.  He's a recent hire by a major airline, but he also thinks it is okay for armored men with guns to use violence against teenager girls.

That's not hyperbole.

He thinks the young girl in the video above deserved what she got from the same cop who arrested a military soldier in uniform for playing music too loud in a parking lot.  Never mind that the cop was fired, this guy thinks the display of power against the youngster was perfectly acceptable.  And if you disagree with that, you're just anti-authority, some kind of crazy anarchist or something.

 

We can all have our opinions.  But this individual defriended me after I shared the opinion above, and since he's still a public servant for the next little bit, I figured this would be something worth sharing.  I hate it when worthwhile conversations come to an abrupt end by those who feel ill equipped to have them.  Perhaps Clint Schulz will change his mind and respond here.

Airlines should be careful about the quality they are hiring.  It probably won't matter, flying for the airlines is certainly not public service.  But if I were a young girl traveling on Southwest, I'd be extra careful this pilot doesn't have an air marshal violently throw me off the plane for not being respectful enough.  You don't want to be deemed unruly if he's at the front of the jet.

"If I were you I'd take precautions..."

Edward Snowden is an Exceptional American Hero

We just need to be reminded.  Regularly.  General Michael Hayden (ret) represents fascism and the destruction of the United States of America, from the immoral inner rot produced by insecurity and cowardice.  It's a rot of the mind and spirit and it's un-American.

Ed Snowden, on the other hand, represents courage and true American values that can cleanse and resurrect our nation.

Snowden should be brought home to a hero's welcome.  Like yesterday.

ETA:  For the same tired fascists who like to fling the term "treason" at Ed Snowden (while demonstrating they don't take their oaths seriously because they are unaware what the word means), take a gander at our Constitution and educate yourself.  We do have traitors among us, that is for certain.  Eddie Snowden ain't one of them.

These fascists will, as they so often do, tell us to trust them because they know "secrets."  Which is strange.  Our government leaks secrets on a regular basis when it thinks it benefits them.  And leveraging a blow against Snowden would certainly be in their interests after he pulled their pants down and publicly spanked them.  So why hasn't the government leaked these secrets to the press along with the daily batch of other secrets?

I'm not so sure the "we have secrets you just don't that prove that we are right" excuse is gonna fly this time.  Nice try though, fellas.

George Takei and the Cast of Allegiance Deliver Powerfully on Broadway

The wife and I were fortunate to attend an "in previews" showing of the new musical, Allegiance, from George Takei.  While nobody would accuse me of being a theater groupie, I had a real desire to see and support this event for several reasons.  A U.S. president sending in the American military to deprive life, liberty, and property of American citizens is a particularly resonating issue for me.  As Takei makes clear in the video above, this dark time where all three branches of the federal government made war on innocent Americans is a very prescient topic.  This is American history that Americans need to understand, and if recent events are any indication, it would appear that Americans have to date failed to learn this important lesson.

I attended the show with no real expectations, other than to experience an important look into our national past.  Allegiance the performance, however, blew me away.  The power of the musical to humanize and impart this real American experience was overwhelming and incredibly emotional, and yet it was still able to brilliantly express hope and even humor at times.  The character development was far richer and deeper than I would have anticipated.  Issues like what it means to be a man in our nation, the relationship between father and son, and the play between duty and dissent were on full and vibrant display.

Allegiance phenomenally demonstrated the tension within the imprisoned community, and perhaps of most value, in my opinion, was its presentation of the irony between assimilation into America's society as compared to the actual American assimilation into America's values.  The two characters, Sammy and Frankie, personified this struggle as it compared the experiences of one young man who joined the military and even accused those who dissented as committing treason, and the experience of Frankie who refused to join the military while Americans were imprisoned without due process, and who took a principled stand for America's founding principles and rule of law.

I expected merely an important history lesson, but instead the cast of Allegiance provided a powerful experience.

Mr. Takei's Broadway musical is an incredible personal accomplishment and a real service to our nation.  I highly recommend this performance to all, but most especially to those of us in the military who must learn from the experiences of our neighbors of the past, if we are to truly defend freedom in America.

And You Thought Disarming Americans Couldn't Happen?

Well, it did happen.  Now let's explore how and why.  We must prepare our minds to consider this.  We all have a strong psychological desire to deny a frightening reality that we feel powerless to change.  So to prepare our minds, we should simply consider this one fact honestly.

That fact is that we live under a government that assassinates Americans without charge or trial.  And the enlightened American population whatever their political professions, by and large, could not care less.

Drink that in.  Prepare your mental state by fully considering this fact.  Don't worry about the daily NSA violations, or whistle blowers reporting government illegality being forced to hide overseas, and don't concern yourself with unlawful wars and collusion between corrupt politicians and Wall Street and pay no attention to the rise of police killing innocent Americans and their dogs or the fact that America has the largest number of its people imprisoned in the world.  Don't even bother with the fact that the federal government passed a law allowing our military to arrest us here in the United States, without charge or trial, and hold us indefinitely in prison without us seeing a court room or a jury of peers.

Don't even worry, after you answer the question "did they really do what he said they did above?" -- about the fact that our judiciary, all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, said that our military imprisoning Americans in America without charge or trial, forever, is perfectly lawful.  Don't worry yourself now, that all three branches of our federal government did that, with politicians and judges from all political parties. 

Clear all of this from your mind, and simply consider the single fact that the government claims the right to, and actually does, assassinate Americans without charge or trial.  Just think about that one little thing.  You will have to try harder than the average German did in the 1930s to come to terms with the developing reality, and to force yourself out of your comfort zone like they were unable to do.  It is scary, and only the honest and the courageous can do it.  If you can, keep reading.

Once you have come to terms with the fact your government believes it can kill you without charge or trial, then it shouldn't be too difficult to understand that our federal government does in fact want to disarm you and render you completely vulnerable to criminals of any stripe (it has a particular stripe in mind, you can be sure).  It's not just political speeches and it's not just your liberal friends and their silly attempts at arguments and their child-like disdain for history.  Power always has a desire to disarm those it wishes to rule.  Always.

Yesterday, the federal body known as the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (which brings fascism to America with a New York City accent and a latte, rather than the straw hat and BBQ of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals), upheld unconstitutional lower court findings from Connecticut and New York, and itself ruled that:

We hold that the core provisions of the New York and Connecticut laws prohibiting possession of semiautomatic assault weapons and large-capacity magazines do not violate the Second Amendment...

The court attempted to throw the people a public relations bone, however, when it found that Connecticut's banning of the non-semi-automatic Remington 7615 was a violation of the Second Amendment.  Because, apparently, the Second Amendment did not say that "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" but rather, almost exactly like the side of the barn in Animal Farm, it must have actually said that the right of the people to keep and bear non-semi-automatic arms shall not be infringed.  If you are scratching your head because you thought it said something different just the other day, you must remember that the pigs know best.  And they have made it clear that weapons that make people less effective as a militia to defend against a tyrannical federal government (like one that assassinates Americans without charge or trial, for example), are perfectly okay but that's it.  An increasingly militarized police state with automatic weapons and stingrays and drones is fine.  You having a semi-automatic weapon?  Whoah now, Sparky, think of the children!

The court offered up this gem describing its "analysis," stating:

Guided by the teachings of the Supreme Court, our own jurisprudence, and the examples provided by our sister circuits, we adopt a two‐step analytical framework, determining first whether the regulated weapons fall within the protections of the Second Amendment and then deciding and applying the appropriate level of constitutional scrutiny.

Let's put to one side the fact that this court used the phrase "guided by the teachings of the Supreme Court" as if this were less an analytical exercise, and more a mystical one conducted under a Bodhi Tree.  What the court here said is that, based on the view of government, the government court decides what our Constitution means.  No need to reference the Constitution itself, especially when the myth that courts decide what the Constitution means for us to internalize into our own understanding (rather than court findings being limited by it), is a myth so widely accepted today.  It would be no different than me trying to figure out what my wife "meant" by her note that said, "please unload the dishwasher when you get home and fix the garage door" by calling and considering the opinions of my buddies who want me to join them at the bar right after work.  If my goal was to join my buddies at the bar, why would I want to try to decipher the clear text of the note when I could get my pals' expert and lofty opinions?  I could even type up a reply to the wife in a cute font with several footnotes, to make it look official and objective.

The effort of government to disarm Americans is real.  Any person who thinks powerful people are going to make public statements about disarming Americans, and then not take real measures to do so, are ignorant of basic psychology and history.  One might be tempted to think, they can't do that!, because of our Constitution and the amendment process and the fact that a majority of Americans do not support gun confiscation.  But such a viewpoint makes an assumption.  It assumes that government cares about our law.

Let me assure you that it does not.  It is difficult to believe that any person living in the modern world could come to a different conclusion.  Remember this government assassinates Americans without charge or trial and is perfectly fine with it.  It tells us that it's legal and then laughs at how incredibly stupid we are to believe it.  How can an even mildly intelligent person think they have any rights before government, when that government claims the power to snuff out their very existence and the existence of their children and loved ones, without so much as a charge or trial or a verdict from a jury of peers?  It's an impossible conclusion for any rational person who refuses to let fear of a traumatic reality cloud their reasoning.

The most we can hope for from this government is that it will take the time to have an unprincipled government lawyer provide a legal "argument" stating that red is green, and that green is red, to offer to a nation that is willfully color blind and will believe what they are told out of fear, rather than as a result of reason.  Our nation is ruled by fear.

Still, it is quite a feat to be so blind today.  Leaving aside the history of our nation's birth, and even forgetting the oddly unfashionable discussion of 1940s Germany and Italy and modern western democracy "legally" giving way to outright fascism, even recent history should make it clear that government intends and desires to disarm the populace.

The federal government murdered a man's son and his wife in front of their daughter, because he sold a shot gun that the government had infringed the right of Americans to keep.  The federal government also burned more than seventy men, women, and children alive, because it thought a private residence might have automatic weapons which it had forbid Americans to keep and bear.  If neither of those relatively recent events make our reality crystal clear enough, then consider that recently Americans were violently disarmed during a life and death crisis at their most vulnerable, and while that same government was murdering their neighbors several miles away.  Even more recent events in Colorado, which blurred the lines between state and federal jurisdiction, have made it undeniable that it is a top priority of the government to disarm the American people.  This government has no respect for the rights of Americans, and it is intent on leveraging the useful idiots you know, bolstered by its tax funded power, to make you as defenseless and vulnerable as it pleases.

There is no happy ending to this story.  But I wish the Americans of Connecticut and New York godspeed, as they defend themselves from the lawless tyranny cloaked in a robe and executed by a government gun, that they find themselves facing.  My heart goes out to them.  I have no doubt, in clear divide and conquer fashion, that they will not be the last Americans to have their constitutional right to defend themselves from criminals and tyrants violated through government violence.

Ironically, the genius and necessity of the Second Amendment can only now be made more clear, if the Supreme Court refuses to overturn this fascist decision by fascist judges in perhaps the most un-American portion of our nation.  We will see.  I am not hopeful.  This is a test of legitimacy and the stakes are extremely high for our nation.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for our domestic enemies in America to make the same coy argument that their intellectual twin, and our previous foreign enemy, in Germany made back in the 1940s.  "I just took over that country, it's not like I'm trying to take over the whole continent or the whole world!  Just an AR-15, not all weapons, what?  Stop being so paranoid and appease me...."

When you live in a nation where the government follows no law, and the populace lacks concern for its constitutional rights, it doesn't take a genius to see that what is happening is very bad.  Not cute coffee shop conversation bad, not entertaining-discussion-one-view-among-several including your "tin foil" buddy's bad, but something really bad.

I can't believe how many Americans have died to defend the constitutional liberty of this nation, for it to devolve so rapidly into what it is now.  Anti-America, a once free nation.

What a blood-soaked tragedy.

Years Late and Billions of Dollars Short - Yet a Positive Development

Let's hope Congress does its job, and reins in the executive branch.  Hopefully this requested investigation into the policy of drone assassination bears fruit, as regards American citizens.  Our Fifth Amendment has been utterly destroyed by remote control and with it any claim our nation had to being free.

Legitimacy

The Fifth Circuit lost legitimacy in my experience, and there are many who think they've not had it for some time now.  I really hope the Supreme Court corrects them.  It would be so very disheartening to see an entire branch of government fail a very simple test, after so much effort and personal sacrifice to right a clear wrong.

Embarassing When Europe Values Our Constitution More Than We Do

At least regarding our Fourth Amendment and digital privacy.  While the top European court protects our digital houses, papers, and effects from unreasonable search and seizure, this is what is happening in America...

Edward Snowden is an American hero and should be invited back to the U.S. for a hero's welcome.