Dead GI Selfies

Memorial Day is apparently to be on the 29th of May this year, but I already saw the first Dead GI Selfie of Spring.  I hadn't seen one since Veteran's Day last year - and I hadn't missed these.

Here's what I'm talking about:

Because in the most militaristic nation on Earth, only Posey McPoser
remembers the real meaning of these days.  Attention.  For her.

So not a lot to add.  But I'll go ahead and add somethings.  And yeah, I'm a vet, so I get to speak.  As are two out of three of my sons, my Dad, my uncle, both my granddads.  So quiet down.  I can speak my piece, it's what we fought for, right?

Right?

Here's the sadness.  Memorial Day and Veterans Day substantially take note of the same thing.  Which is those who have either served, or more often, served and died in the United States Armed Forces.

Notice I do not say, "those who died for freedom", as universally, except on these days, we all justly complain about the lack of freedom in our nation.

Notice I do not say, "those who died that others might be free", as most of us over 25 know that they liberated absolutely ZERO nations, nor were they even sent there for those reasons.

Notice I do not say, "those who died fighting terrorism", because frankly, those in the military are usually responsible for others wishing to harm us.  I mean, see too many buildings being flown into over in Paraguay?

But there is sadness, and that's when good men and women sign up for one thing, and die for another.  We recruit teen kids - as young as 17 - to fight and die for "freedom", for "liberation", for "ending terrorism", but then we send them over to die for "profits", for "profits" and just for variety, for "profits".

And that is sad.

And if any spouse, or even girlfriend, wanted to go visit Arlington or any other cemetery to mourn the death of their loved one, I have nothing but respect and sympathy.  And if they want to mourn while imagining that he died for freedom, truth, justice and the American Way, then yeah, sure, I've nothing to say against that, at least not to them.

Certainly not then and there.

Their hearts are in the right places, and that's sufficient.

But then along comes Posey McPoser here, and she's hardly alone.  The one who puts some heavy duty planning into her mourning.  And if that's the level she felt it, I'd be the last to criticize.

Yet it is patently obvious that such is not the reasons for her pulling out all the stops.  Contemplate the above picture.  The artful pose, the specially made blanket facing the right way - the right way for what?  The dead soldier?  The baby?

Or, oh yeah, the cameraman she brought along with her in her "moment of grief" to click the picture!  Or pictures.  You want to get several and then sort through which one is cutest.  Er, specialist!

And she's even got her head lifted and leaning forward like she's having a special moment, talking to her dearly departed - except, which are we to believe?  That the cameraman was so unbelievably rude as to interrupt such unfeigned grief for the sake of his pic?

Or that the reason she's not turned towards this stranger to ask him to leave her in peace is that - oh, yeah, that she brought him here and is specifically pretending this pose so that he can snap the right shot of it!  For her to then choose the best one and post it on her feed!

Wow.  Private Died For Nothing would have wanted it that way, huh?  Not only did his death generate a 3 and 3/8ths rise in the 2nd quarter stock price in Halliburton back in '06, but his widow - or just former girlfriend - gets to use his grave as a big old social media net to grab some sweet, sweet "likes" and "shares" and "comments".

Ugh.  I mean, really, ugh.  Just ugh.  Greater love hath no man, that he gave of his life that Posey might have click-bait.

Were I his parents, or any kin of his at all, I'd have some darn sharp words to say to Posey there.  And Merry Christmas would not be among them.

Now listen, and listen carefully, because I wish to be clear.

Any of you want to go put flowers on a loved ones grave, that's great.  You want a picnic lunch there to feel closer to him, that's great.  You want to do anything you darn well please that lets you have a bit of peace in remembering him, who the heck am I to say a word?

It's all good.

But when you drag along another to take some pretty piccies and snappy snap shots, so you can blaze them over facebook, twitter, instagram and such, not for his sake, but for you to show how tight fitting your jeans are and what a superduperexpial-atrocious girlfriend you are, well, oops, you just lost me.

And quite a few others who are too reticent to speak up, but are thinking what I've been thinking.

Grieve.  In.  Private.

Learn some decorum.  Learn some respect.  Learn some dignity.

That is all.

No One Told Trump

Poor Donald Trump.  A victim of our nation's own propaganda.

No, no, come back.  I'm not actually bashing our President this time.  And I mean that honestly.  I saw a headline today about how he wants South Korea to pay a billion or so dollars for their missile defense, and the typically outraged replies from other power players, and it struck me all at once -

- President Trump honestly thinks those nations really are our allies!  He thinks they are our friends!

This accounted for his earlier wishes that Japan pay to defend themselves now, or Germany pay more for NATO and all his other gaffs on this issue!

He was taught - as we all were as kids - that these nations are our allies, and he bought that!

In truth, they are of course nations that we conquered and now occupy for our own benefit.  Germany, Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Cuba, the Philippines...etc.

Here we are waterboarding our future Philippine allies!

When you're raised in America, it somehow never crosses your mind to wonder, "How come all our allies are nations that we once were at war with?"

lol

So here's the problem that the power players have with Donald - he gives away the game. Or rather, he forces them to have to duck and weave to avoid the game being exposed.

Conquering a nation is relatively easy compared to holding it.  And the United States holds the vast number of nations it holds as much by diplomacy as military might.

Yes, yes, we make sure to have our bases in their nations - while not letting our "allies" have any of their bases here! - but more to the point, we let them pretend to be independent.  Because if we did not let them keep their pride, they'd have to rise up every ten years or so and we'd have to go to the trouble of putting them back down.

Oh, sure, some weaker nations like Hawaii and Guam and Alaska such we could just out and out overwhelm and absorb.  We sure had plenty of practice at that in the 19th century.  But for most others, best to take the more prudent course.  Holding a world takes more than might, it takes finesse.

So as tributary nations, all our “allies” are expected to agree with us on most all of our foreign policy adventures and to give us first call on their resources and productivity.  In exchange we guard them from other empires that would love to harness their work forces.

The former Soviets, now the Russians.  The Chinese.  Brazil or India, if they thought there was a power vacuum.  Indonesia.

Now along comes Trump and upsets that apple cart, not because he's stupid, but just because - and it really took me awhile to realize this - he honestly does not get that we occupy those nations!  His only error is in believing as he was taught, as we all were taught!  He thinks that we are guarding them out of kindness and that it’s time they paid their fair share!  

Most politicians rise up through the ranks, and so have time to learn this and get this.  But Donald leaped from the bottom to the top all at once and so had no chance to learn this as a governor or a congressman or even the mayor of a big city.

Had he occupied any of those positions, then he'd have dealt with some of these conquered provinces and been let in on what's what.  How to talk to them - and how not to.  How to make sure to give them a lot of lead in their leash.  Particularly the United Kingdom.

Yes, we occupy England, too, the difference being that they don't mind as their business and our business are so closely tied together that it's a coin flip as to who is wagging who!

Goodness.  I could go on.  But honestly he - and any reading this  who doubt me - need only get a map and a history book.  Look at where each U.S. Military base is - and read of which war we fought with that place before it was built.

Heck, this applies right here at home - think about how many of our cities are named after the conquered peoples or the "Forts" that held the troops that exterminated them!  Look at the distribution of bases west of the Mississippi!

We are the Anglo-American Empire, and sadly, our leader is under some false impression that we're just the main contributors to some kind of benevolent mutual aid society!  

Four Star General Clarke

As tragic an indictment of the police and court system as the death of Terrill Thomas of dehydration while locked in solitary in Sheriff Clarke's jail was, I'd like to also point out the continued absurdity of these tin horn Sheriffs not only militarizing their police forces, but then self-awarding themselves four stars.

Not one star - which is Brigadier General and would be absurd enough - but always the leap to the four stars.

"Angry?  At who's death?  No, I'm just frustrated about not
having my fifth star yet!"

Except in some even more insane cases where I've seen some Andy Griffith - in all but integrity - have 5 stars on each shoulder!

You know what used to qualify a man for Colonel in the old days?  Being enough of a producer to outfit and support 500 men.  That's not only providing for your own uniform, gear and transport, but that of 500 other guys.

These "Four Star Generals" can't even support themselves without tax-dollars.  And they dare to presume the garb of pillars of the community giving voluntary military defense of their nation?  And dare further to presume that they are of higher rank than such real men of old?

I would dearly love an opportunity to ask these posers - "Can you name all six types of Generals, or at least the four types you have represented upon your shoulders?"

"Can you tell me what just being a three star represents?  Start with the title, please."

"How about two stars?"

"How about one star?"

"General - er, Sheriff - can you tell me how long you spent in service as just a 'one star' before getting promoted to the second star?"

"General, who promoted you from one star to a second star?"

"Oh, wait, you're telling us that you started at four stars?"

"General, what advice do you have for those one and two star Generals who are waging wars against entire nations and commanding tens of thousands of men and billions of dollars of munitions and supplies and arms? Any advice from you, the guy who sits around while his deputies bust drunks and wife beaters?"

But anyway, back to the death of a man who was having his 8th amendment rights violated even before being found guilty of anything.

Under the General's watch his men - that others pay for, as he sure can't afford to - murdered a mentally ill man.  At least "murder" is how they'd put it if any did that to the Sheriff or his deputies.

As it is, this is yet another "mistakes were made" moment - there are many such moments in our newsfeeds - and after a year the DA is still doing all in his power to do nothing about this while pretending to be getting to the bottom of it.

Meanwhile, no Sheriff, no LEO and no guard has yet been harmed or inconvenienced in the making of this tragedy.  And while in an unusually extreme case a least ranked guard might be punished, one need not fear that General Clarke will lose even so much as a single star.

Waco

On this date 24 years ago, the Branch Davidian church and residences was burned down, and the available evidence suggests either a misuse of government incendiary devices, or at best, a driving of those within to think that immolation was their best option.

I respect that some people are intensely law and order. But honestly, sometimes it is better to just leave some alone. The general consensus is that this started as a suspected weapons violation, and then other crap was made up and thrown on afterwards to retroactively justify such a massive display of force.

Bringing a tank to a church fight is probably over-kill.

What needs to be remembered is that it is better to take the time to be careful. It would not have hurt to have waited for food to run low, even had that took a year.

What needs to be remembered is that the solution should never be worse than the alleged problem. Perhaps it was of concern to have a lot of rifles in one place. Perhaps it was of concern to have a rifle be able to fire more than one bullet at a time. But I think the death of any was worse than just having left them alone.

What needs to be remembered that if one unpopular and odd ball church can be destroyed, then so can the next one. And the next one. The precedent is set.

In my youth, after it was all over, I hitchhiked over and saw it. The few survivors who had not been on site that day were bravely trying to rebuild. Other, non-Davidians, were planting trees, one for each who died, as a memorial.

Others, still non-Davidians, put up a stone monument with an inscription marking the needless deaths of the Davidians. Seeing that, the Davidians put up one mourning the deaths of their own attackers.

Many years after that, I took my sons to see the site. We were visiting relatives in Texas, so it wasn't that far out of the way. The memorial grove was coming along, new buildings, new church. Still very few members, understandably. But such as were there were taking care of the site.

And yeah, with mixed feelings I noticed the "touristing" of it, in that they sell postcards and such and "accept donations". I had donated the whole ten dollars I had the first time I visited. I only donated the same amount the second time as regardless as to motives, I felt the site was worth being preserved.

From what they related to me and my sons back in 2004, they would get half a dozen or so visitors per day from all over the nation. So I wasn't the only one who felt that the site was worth seeing.

If you're ever down there, go see it. It's like America's own concentration camp, an eloquent reminder of the great need to keep a sharp eye upon how "our" government conducts it's affairs.

We are Cattle

I just want to make very clear here that the person principally responsible for that poor guy being drug off the plane was...

....us.

Ask not for whom the Officer tazes...

We either insisted on and praised the police of insanely over-the-top security on planes, in which any disagreement on the part of a passenger was re-branded as a "terroristic threat" or if we did not like it, we at least did nothing of substance to stop it.

This is that coming home to roost. Neither the airline nor the security boys did anything that was anything other than standard procedure.

But Dean, this kind of security saves us! No it doesn't. I used to work security, and I know ways of getting stuff on those planes past the TSA, so if dorky middle aged me does, I'm sure Abu the ISIS Wonder Terrorist does.

I might also mention the obvious - in my business in particular, I know if drugs are available locally or not. And in spite of years of TSA, DEA, NSA, FBI, CIA and ABCDEFG, America has more drugs than ever.

So much for walls and border controls.

No, this is not, and has never been about "security" or "safety" or "stopping terrorism".

It's been about controlling us. The great unwashed. The proletariat.

You will note that private planes - as able to crash into building as passenger ones - don't have the TSA do the private people who board those what they do to you or I.

Because the "security" it's about is keeping those private plane owning privileged few safe and secure from...

....us.

So we get the full treatment, they do not.

Take my neighbor...puh-lease!

I wonder.  If the Germans in the Nineteen Thirties had had the internet, would they have shared funny tweets and memes saying, "I live in constant fear that the Gestapo will round up my half Jewish Mother-in-Law who lives at 2182 Kurferstenstrasse, Potsdam, who gets off work at 5pm."

Here's the deal, folks.  Rounding up people whose crime is what they "are", not what they "did", never ends well.  Does this mean that our current anti-immigration policies will result in six million dead?

No, it does not necessarily mean that.  But remember, when the round up of Jews, Gypsies and various others started in the thirties, the death camps were not a done deal, or even on the table.

Sometimes things get out of hand.  And the best way to avoid getting to the end of a bad road is to not start down that road.

I couldn't find a pic of "Latina Mother-in-Laws" - yet.
Here's a Japanese American one.

America has a sad history of crappy dealing with "others".  Genocide and slavery were "things" until the 20th century, and for that century racism, exploitations, sterilizations, medical experiments, mass round ups and seizures of all properties were all still on the table.

Korematsu vs. U.S. was the Supreme Court case that dealt with rounding up American citizens of Japanese descent, and it was upheld it as Constitutional.  It has never been overturned.

A bit of fatigue is going to set in now.  Where Trump has done so many silly things we're just going to get tired of reading of it for awhile.  But bear in mind, he's pursuing his goals all the same.

We may be entering into an unfortunate period of history.  So far we've been living in the easy kind of history where we all get to tell our kids, "Oh, yeah, I'd have marched with King!" or "Oh, yeah, I'd have had five Jewish families in my attic!" or "I'd have so helped fugitive slaves get to Canada, see if I'd have feared prison!"

Easy things to say when African Americans have rights, Jews aren't hunted and neither is there slavery.

But what of these "illegals"?  How will your kids see you deal with this issue?  Which side will they see you on?  Oh, is this different?

It's always different.  Some who'd have sworn they'd have aided slaves still turned a blind eye to Jews seeking refuge here in the thirties.  Some who'd swear that they'd have hid Jews had no problem with the firehoses and dogs being turned on the protesters at Selma.

And some won't have any problem with a mass round up of immigrants without papers.  While staunchly claiming their enduring love of Africans and Jews - who for their times were as much "lawbreakers" as any Hispanic or Muslim without papers are now.

Do you have a mother in law who is an immigrant?  Then, like those grudge holding neighbors who called in secretly about those they disliked, you'll really be able to call.

And never mind that you’ll “be able to call", you already can call.  What is being passed off as a joke is actually a reality.  And people being perverse, it's already happened at least once or a hundred times.

Be careful.  Do not dismiss with humor something that should be fought.  Do not soothe yourself with the medicine of laughter as our nation bleeds out morally yet again.

Only Liberals Riot?

I've been seeing a lot of memes, comments, tweets and posts about how only liberals riot, that conservatives are all so gosh darn good - and employed - that they never do.

I checked this out, and yes, it is true that conservatives do not protest the same way the Left does.  And to give credit where credit is due, a lot of it is because of upbringing, that is, conservatives tend to have been raised in more faith-based conservative homes.

However, there are four things to note on this.

1.  There were a lot of  conservative individual or small group protests in the wake of President Obama's winning the election.  Both times.  Beatings of minorities, church burnings, hanging Obama in effigy, etc.  So a crucial difference about protests is not in "who" but in "how".

2.  Conservatives tend to be in power positions up and down the police and military hierarchy, so their angry responses are usually in the form of putting down those they dislike with truncheons, gas and dogs.  A liberal man might throw a rock.  A conservative policeman - or a "conservative establishment's policeman" - can smash his face with a water cannon.

3.  Typically a people have to be in poverty in order to take to the streets and risk arrest.  In this nation, the "poor" are typically the young and the minorities.  At least more of them are poor percentage wise.  Better off citizens, with more to lose, are apt to take a quieter route - like the individual violence in point one - or to use the system to vent their rage - like mentioned in point two.

If you doubt this, note that it is NOT really "liberals" rioting.  It is "poor liberals" and "young liberals". Good luck seeing Rosie or Meryl throwing bricks or setting fires.

Probably a liberal.  Probably not Michael Moore.

4.  Conservative protesters get treated substantially more "gently" than liberal protesters.  Be it Montana Freemen or the Oregon protesters, law enforcement will generally "wait them out" and endlessly negotiate.

As opposed to if liberals or minorities had took over federal property.  There is no one reading this that thinks the FBI, ATF or US Marshalls would have waited 40 plus days for a group of armed Black Panthers to give up.

That's all.  Just my thoughts on it.