Active Shooter - don't just stand there!

An excellent article from Gabe Suarez, a combat firearms trainer known to most shooters. He has had some issues in his life, and there was talk at one time about financial ethics, but it is impossible to argue about the man's skill and the value of his training, even if you disagree with some of his specific techniques - I don't, because I don't have the knowledge or experience to question what works for him and most of those he trains.

When the Loughner shooting in Tucson took place, where a young girl and five other civilians were killed, and fourteen others wounded (oh, yeah, there was a politician involved as well, Giffords, IIRC ;-), a mail group I was a member of discussed the issues involved. One of our members questioned whether or not it would have been wise to become involved if you were armed and present. Not to put too fine a point on it, I questioned how anyone who was armed and present could not become involved. How anyone with the least bit of training (and all of us who carry should have received some training somewhere or we are fools) could stand by and not try to stop the psychopath who was shooting women and children. The induhvidual who thought this was an issue to be discussed became irate when I made that point, as if I was questioning his courage or moral compass. Well, he may have been morally challenged but he was at least bright enough to understand that I was indeed questioning his courage and moral compass.

Women and children. An imperative that has existed since we began to walk upright, I believe. At the very least, it is a biological imperative, to protect your genetic resources, your ability to pass on your genes to the human race. For many thousands of years it has also been a moral imperative, to protect those who are helpless, who need our protection. Finally, it is a function of love, as we should love our wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and our children, and by extension, the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and children of others, and lay down our lives if necessary to keep them from mortal danger. 

Mr. Suarez uses superb logic in detailing how, when it is obvious you are not watching a gun battle between gang-bangers, or an armed dispute between a couple of deranged individuals, a moral man will do what he can to protect the helpless, by stopping the shooter. One hopes "stopping" involves terminating the scum, but if it merely involves distracting him from shooting the innocent, that is fine. Perhaps it will also, as Gabe points out, cause him to shoot himself - as these psychos often do - now, instead of after killing more people first.

One of my favorite Clancy novels is Patriot Games, in which Jack Ryan takes out some Irish (IRA?) terrorists attacking the Royal family, being wounded in the process. Yes, it is a novel, but it took Ryan only a second to get his family down and safe before he ran to do what was right. Ran toward danger, not stopping to dial 911. Now, I am not suggesting we should always run unarmed into a gun fight - although there may be a time when it is a good choice, or the only choice, or the most moral choice - but in a situation where you are armed and able to respond, not doing so is IMNSHO an act of moral cowardice. If you are concerned for your family, I understand making sure they are not in danger, or are moving away from danger, but the best way to make them safe is to stop the shooter (we are talking a single active shooter here - the dynamics change if there are two or more shooters, as in Mumbai, as protecting your family becomes much more difficult).

Gabe Suarez makes the excellent point for those who - as did several in our mail group - claim their only concern was their own family, hang the rest. Would they have wanted someone to take that stance if it was their family being targeted? Or would they have wanted anyone armed to respond and try to save their wife and/or children from being shot and killed? I think we all know the answer to that one. If someone out there wants to say, "No, don't save my family, let them die even if you have no family of your own there to protect", I am afraid I would have to call that person a liar. 

Please read the article. I am over sixty myself, and I know my eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I practice with my carry weapon at one hundred yards when I am at the range, and if I had a clear shot at that distance, I believe I could hit a man if necessary. If he were moving and not shooting, I might well attempt to get closer first, but if he were actively shooting at people, I would take the shot. Those of you who practice - as you should if you are going to carry - should try your hand at a B-27 (or B-21, 29, 30, etc.) silhouette at that range. It is life-sized, and you may be surprised at how manageable a torso shot is even at that distance.

Imagine that you are going to meet your wife and two children at your local IHOP and see a man shooting at the restaurant with an AK while you are still one hundred yards away. Think you'd take the shot? Or would you use your iPhone to contact your buddies on the Internet to ask their opinion as to what you should do? While the people in the IHOP are dialing 911 and dying (Dial 911 and Die).

As it is in England, and could be here

Billy Bob at Hell On Earth posted this and I simply had to pass it on.

No matter what your view on firearms, every rational person knows

that we possess an innate human right to defend ourselves from harm.

In England, the socialist State has legislated against that right for its subjects.

They consequently suffer extreme punishment for simply trying to protect

themselves. It could happen here.

The Shotgun

Posted by BillyBob at 5:00 PM

A friend sent me this email this morning. I felt obligated to pass it along.

Read it if you have a chance. It will make you stop and think...

You're sound asleep when you hear a thump outside your bedroom door.

Half-awake, and nearly paralyzed with fear, you hear muffled whispers.

At least two people have broken into your house and are moving your way.

With your heart pumping, you reach down beside your bed and pick up your shotgun.

You rack a shell into the chamber, then inch toward the door and open it.

In the darkness, you make out two shadows. One holds something that looks like

a crowbar. When the intruder brandishes it as if to strike, you raise the shotgun and fire.

The blast knocks both thugs to the floor. One writhes and screams while the second

man crawls to the front door and lurches outside.

As you pick up the telephone to call police, you know you're in trouble.

In your country, most guns were outlawed years before, and the few that are

privately owned are so stringently regulated as to make them useless..

Yours was never registered. Police arrive and inform you that the second burglar

has died.

They arrest you for First Degree Murder and Illegal Possession of a Firearm.

When you talk to your attorney, he tells you not to worry: authorities will probably

plea the case down to manslaughter.

"What kind of sentence will I get?" you ask.

"Only ten-to-twelve years," he replies, as if that's nothing.

"Behave yourself, and you'll be out in seven."

The next day, the shooting is the lead story in the local newspaper.

Somehow, you're portrayed as an eccentric vigilante while the two men you shot

are represented as choirboys.

Their friends and relatives can't find an unkind word to say about them..

Buried deep down in the article, authorities acknowledge that both "victims"

have been arrested numerous times.

But the next day's headline says it all:

"Lovable Rogue Son Didn't Deserve to Die."

The thieves have been transformed from career

criminals into Robin Hood-type pranksters..

As the days wear on, the story takes wings. The national media picks it up,

then the international media.

The surviving burglar has become a folk hero.

Your attorney says the thief is preparing to sue you, and he'll probably win.

The media publishes reports that your home has been burglarized several

times in the past and that you've been critical of local police for their lack

of effort in apprehending the suspects.

After the last break-in, you told your neighbor that you would be prepared next time.

The District Attorney uses this to allege that you were lying in wait for the burglars.

A few months later, you go to trial. The charges haven't been reduced,

as your lawyer had so confidently predicted.

When you take the stand, your anger at the injustice of it all works against you..

Prosecutors paint a picture of you as a mean, vengeful man.

It doesn't take long for the jury to convict you of all charges.

The judge sentences you to life in prison...

This case really happened.

On August 22, 1999, Tony Martin of Emneth, Norfolk , England , killed one

burglar and wounded a second.

In April, 2000, he was convicted, and is now serving a life term..

How did it become a crime to defend one's own life in the once great British Empire?

It started with the Pistols Act of 1903.

This seemingly reasonable law forbade selling pistols to minors or felons and

established that handgun sales were to be made only to those who had a license.

The Firearms Act of 1920 expanded licensing to include not only handguns but all

firearms except shotguns..

Later laws passed in 1953 and 1967 outlawed the carrying of any weapon by

private citizens and mandated the registration of all shotguns.

Momentum for total handgun confiscation began in earnest after the Hungerford

mass shooting in 1987.

Michael Ryan, a mentally disturbed man with a Kalashnikov rifle, walked down the

streets shooting everyone he saw.

When the smoke cleared, 17 people were dead.

The British public, already de-sensitized by eighty years of "gun control", demanded

even tougher restrictions.

(The seizure of all privately owned handguns was the objective even though Ryan

used a rifle.)

Nine years later, at Dunblane , Scotland ,

Thomas Hamilton used a semi-automatic weapon to murder 16 children and

a teacher at a public school.

For many years, the media had portrayed all gun owners as mentally unstable,

or worse, criminals.

Now the press had a real kook with which to beat up law-abiding gun owners.

Day after day, week after week, the media gave up all pretense of objectivity

and demanded a total ban on all handguns.

The Dunblane Inquiry, a few months later, sealed the fate of the few sidearms

still owned by private citizens.

During the years in which the British government incrementally took away most

gun rights, the notion that a citizen had the right to armed self-defense came to

be seen as vigilantism.

Authorities refused to grant gun licenses to people who were threatened, claiming

that self-defense was no longer considered a reason to own a gun.

Citizens who shot burglars or robbers or rapists were charged while the real criminals

were released.

Indeed, after the Martin shooting, a police spokesman was quoted as saying,

"We cannot have people take the law into their own hands."

All of Martin's neighbors had been robbed numerous times,

and several elderly people were severely injured

in beatings by young thugs who had no fear of the consequences.

Martin himself, a collector of antiques, had seen most of his collection

trashed or stolen by burglars.

When the Dunblane Inquiry ended, citizens who owned handguns

were given three months to turn them over to local authorities.

Being good British subjects, most people obeyed the law.

The few who didn't were visited by police

and threatened with ten-year prison sentences

if they didn't comply.

Police later bragged that they'd taken nearly 200,000 handguns from

private citizens.

How did the authorities know who had handguns?

The guns had been registered and licensed.

Kind of like cars. Sound familiar?

WAKE UP AMERICA ; THIS IS WHY OUR FOUNDING FATHERS PUT

THE SECOND AMENDMENT IN OUR CONSTITUTION.

"...It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority

keen to set brush fires in people's minds.."

--Samuel Adams

If you think this is important,

please forward to everyone you know.

You had better wake up, because Obama is doing this very same thing,

over here, if he can get it done.

And there are stupid people in congress

and on the street that will go right along with him.

Bob Beckel - poster boy for "Useful Idiots" and another Che lover

Thanks to Silicon Graybeard (http://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/), I just read a Town Hall post on Bob Beckel getting slapped down by Humberto Fontova over Beckel's love for Che Guevera. I guess Jane Fonda isn't the only one who regrets not bedding Che. Here is the article in full (sorry I couldn't figure out how to delete the ad to the right):

SEPTEMBER 14, 2011

A History Lesson for the Racist Bob Beckel

By Humberto Fontova

9/9/2011

“I still have my Che Guevara poster. Che Guevara was a freedom fighter.” (Bob Beckel on FoxNews’ “The Five” Sept. 5th)

If Bob Beckel’s “freedom-fighter” had been allowed his fondest bit of “freedom-fighting” Bob Beckel’s incinerated remains would fit in a gin bottle today. “America is the great enemy of mankind! Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination!...If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City.”

For the record: Ernesto “Che” Guevara was second in command, chief executioner, and chief KGB liaison for a regime that jailed more political prisoners per capita than did Stalin’s during the Great Terror and murdered more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered (out of a population of 70 million) in its first six. Many, perhaps most, of those murdered and jailed by the regime Che Guevara co-founded were Batista opponents.

The Stalinist regime Che Guevara imposed on Cuba also stole the savings and property of 6.4 million citizens, made refugees of 20 percent of the population from a nation formerly deluged with immigrants and whose citizens had achieved a higher standard of living than those residing in half of Europe. Many opponents of the regime Che Guevara co-founded qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Che Guevara’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag. Most of these had been Batista opponents.

“Don't put him in a list of fascists. The fascists (Batista) were the ones he was trying to get rid of.” (Bob Beckel on FoxNews’ “The Five” Sept. 5th)

For the record: According to the Cuba Archive Project, the Castro regime – with firing squads, forced-labor camps, torture and drownings at sea – has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. According to the Harper Collins Atlas of the Second World War, Nazi repression caused 172,260 French civilian deaths during the occupation. France was nation of 42 million in 1940. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1960. My calculator reveals that Beckel’s freedom-fighter caused an enormously higher percentage of deaths among the people he “freed” than the Nazis caused among the French they enslaved and tortured with the SS and Gestapo.

Beckel tells the “Fox Five” that the CIA killed many more people than Che and implies that in the 50’s the agency was Che’s enemy.

In fact during the late 1950’s the Castro brothers and Che Guevara had no better friends--and Fulgencio Batista few worse enemies--than the CIA. “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas,” (Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s “Caribbean Desk’s specialist on the Cuban Revolution” from 1957-1960.)

“Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except (Republican) ambassador Earl Smith.” (CIA operative in Santiago Cuba, Robert Weicha.)

“Don’t worry. We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto “Che” Guevara haveno affiliations with any Communists whatsoever.” (crackerjack Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel 1958.)

“Listen, we (the U.S.) did not have the most stellar reputation in Latin America and South America during the 1950s and '60s….when the CIA was complicit in the assassination of Allende, that was killing a head of state.” (Bob Beckel)

Ground control to Major Bob: Allende died in the 70’s. But whatever. The leftist proverb that he was assassinated by the CIA was spun and spread only by the hardest of hard-left wackos. Not even Allende’s own family believed it. An investigation including an autopsy by Chilean authorities just last month confirmed that Salvador Allende committed suicide. Surely you read the New York Times, Bob?

“(Che) did help Fidel Castro get rid one of the biggest thugs and murdering bastards there ever was, and that was Batista in Cuba.” (Bob Beckel)

Batista was a mulatto grandson of slaves born on the dirt floor of a palm roofed shack in the Cuban countryside. As President (via honest elections 1940-44, bloodless coup 1952-58) he always enjoyed the support of Cuba’s labor unions. And under Batista, according to a study by the International Labor Organization, the Cuban workforce was more highly unionized than the U.S. work force, with Cuba’s Industrial laborers earning the 8th highest wages in the world.

“Cuba’s laborer’s always maintained a stony indifference to Fidel Castro’s movement,” admitted Cuba’s richest man and Fidel and Che bankroller Julio Lobo, who knew because he employed thousands of them.

So here’s Bob Beckel bashing a black politician of lowly origin who enjoyed overwhelming unionized labor support--while hailing the lily-white rich-boys, Fidel and Che, who outlawed labor unions and sent such as Richard Trumka and Jimmy Hoffa to the firing squad or prison. Where’s Trumka, Hoffa and Maxine Waters on this? Using liberals’ own standards Beckel sure sounds like an elitist--and a racist to boot.

No doubt Beckel picked up the leftist proverb about Batista as “one of the biggest murdering bastards there ever was” from a meme hatched in 1957 by a Fidelista Cuban magazine publisher named Miguel Angel Quevedo. The meme asserts that Batista’s police and army “murdered 20,000 Cubans” and is still parroted by the MSM/Academia axis.

For the record: Ten years after he hatched and spread the lie, Quevedo (from exile, he scooted out just ahead of a Fidelista firing squad) confessed to the lie and greatly regretted how the lie helped the propaganda campaign to put Fidel and Che in power. The regret for the calamity he helped bring upon Cuba was such that, that right after signing the letter, Miguel Angel Quevedo put a gun to his head and blew his brains out.

“The idea of picking Che Guevara and calling him a mass-murder is crazy.” (Bob Beckel)

“Certainly we execute!” boasted Che Guevara while addressing the hallowed halls of the U.N. General Assembly Dec. 9, 1964. “And we will continue executing as long as it is necessary! According to the “Black Book of Communism,” those firing-squad executions (murders, actually; execution implies a judicial process) had reached 14,000 by the end of the ’60s, the equivalent, given the relative populations, of almost a million executions in the U.S. “I don’t need proof to execute a man,” snapped Che to a judicial toady in 1959. “I only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”

Humberto Fontova

Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who idolize Him and Fidel; Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant. Visit www.hfontova.com

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Che lovers, and would-be lovers

How many liberals - especially women liberals - have you seen pictures of wearing a Che Guevera t-shirt or sweatshirt? I can't recall off-hand if I have spoken about my hatred for Jane Fonda on this blog before, especially her treatment and betrayal of our servicemen in Vietnam, but I just now finished reading an essay by Humberto Fontova where he quotes Fonda as saying one of her greatest regrets was not having had intercourse with Che.

Fontova goes on to talk about all the feminists and pretend-supporters of women, their rights, and of the need to protect them from abuse. As we have seen with the incredible and total silence on the subject of the abuse of women and female children by those followers of the religion of pedophilia, islam, these women were - and continue to be - silent on the subject of the horrible abuses of women in Cuba, by Che as well as by Castro and his regime. Here is the complete article:

Jane Fonda's Crush on Che Guevara

By Humberto Fontova

9/7/2011

A new biography of Jane Fonda by Patricia Bosworth reveals a lifelong lament by the famous actress: “My biggest regret” Fonda is quoted during a “feminist consciousness-raising session,” according to the book’s account, “is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.”

In case you read Townhall, Ms Fonda, here’s some consolation, honey: “I used to call him El Gallo (the rooster)” recalled Carlos Figueroa who was Ernesto Guevara’s adolescent friend in Alta Gracia, Argentina. “I’d be visiting him and eating in his family’s dining room and whenever the poor servant girls would enter Ernesto would promptly grab her and force her to lay on the dining room table where he’d have rapid intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he’d throw her out and continue eating as if nothing had happened.”

“Es un gallo—un gallo! (He’s a rooster!—rooster”) complained a scowling Berta Gonzalez a few years later upon emerging from her Mexico City bedroom summer of 1955. This was shortly after his Motorcycle Diary trip, when the hobo Ernesto Guevara was scribbling unreadable poetry and mooching off women in Mexico City, where he met Fidel and Raul Castro. Berta Gonzalez was a Cuban exile in Mexico at the time.

Gallo, as you might have guessed, is a common pejorative by Spanish-speaking women against men who terminate carnal encounters prematurely.

Alas, how the feminist sessionists reacted to Ms Fonda’s above-mentioned confession, and thus, the “raising of their consciousness,” is not mentioned in the book. But we can guess. After all, feminist swooning over Cuban Stalinism started early, and by the feminist movement’s very founders.

“Not only is (the Cuban Revolution) a great success but an example for the rest of the world!” gushed Simon De Beauvoir in March 1960. Her bellhop, Jean Paul Sartre, was not to be outdone. He crowned Che Guevara “the era’s most perfect man.” These “intellectual” hyperventilations 1960 set the tone for future ones of everyone from Maxine Waters’ to Jimmy Carter and from Ted Turner’s to George Mc Govern’s, and from Barbara Walters’ to Andrea Mitchell’s.

“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell)

Alas, Cuban feminists view the Cuban Revolution somewhat differently from Hollywood, Georgetown and Manhattan feminists. When feminist icon Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro in 1977 cooing: “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful!” dozens of Cuban feminists suffered in torture chambers within walking distance of the hyperventilating Ms Barbara Walters.

“They started by beating us with twisted coils of wire recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”

“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls, Manuela Calvo from exile today.” But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”

“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalls prisoner Polita Grau.

The gallant regime co-founded by Che Guevara jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba—but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer, Jane Fonda, etc. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.

Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

Upon the death of Raul Castro’s wife Vilma Espin in 2006 the Washington Post gushed that: “she was a champion of women’s rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.” Actually, in 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates as a percentage of population than the U.S.

This Castroite “improvement of status” and “good life “for Cuban women also somehow tripled Cuban women’s pre-revolution suicide rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal on earth. This according to a 1998 study by scholar Maida Donate-Armada that uses some of the Cuban regime’s own figures.

On Christmas Eve of 1961 a Cuban woman named Juana Diaz spat in the face of the executioners who were binding and gagging her. Castro and Che’s Russian-trained secret police had found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits” (Cuban rednecks who took up arms to fight the Stalinist theft of their land to build Soviet –style Kolkhozes.) When the blast from Castroite firing squad demolished her face and torso Juana was six months pregnant.

Thousands upon thousands of Cuban women have drowned, died of thirst or have been eaten alive by sharks attempting to flee the Washington Post’s dutifully transcribed “improvement of status.” This from a nation formerly richer than half the nations of Europe and deluged by immigrants from same.

In 1962, a Cuban Catholic nun named Aida Rosa Perez was overheard in a private conversation saying things about Fidel Castro and Che Guevara similar (but milder) than those Jane Fonda and Joy Behar trumpet about Republicans. Sister Rosa Perez was sentenced to 12 years at hard labor. Two years into her, while toiling in the sun inside Castro's Gulag and surrounded by leering guards, Sister Rosa collapsed from a heart attack.

The Cuban Archive project headed Mrs Maria Werlau has fully documented the firing squad executions of 11 Cuban women in the early days of the regime. Another 219 women died from various brutalities and tortures while in prison. The Taliban has nothing on the regime co-founded by Che Guevara. So I trust you’ll excuse these Cuban ladies if they regard the “struggles” of Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda as a trifle overblown. And for many of them, though it’s utterly ignored by the MSM, the feminist struggle continues.

Humberto Fontova

Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who idolize Him and Fidel; Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant. Visit www.hfontova.com

A reminder of our duty to each other at http://fija.org/

Unfortunately, most people are unaware of this fact. Then, every judge on the bench goes to great lengths to lie to the jury, to tell the jurors they have no right to judge the law, and convince most jurors to convict even when the jurors can feel how wrong it is to do so. Interestingly enough, judges nowadays - in the appeals courts and at SCOTUS - feel the need to judge the law themselves, and do. More and more these days they have become social activists, applying their own amoral beliefs to what was legislated in the Constitutional, correct and accepted manner (even when morally wrong, nonetheless).

People, this is important. The jury box is the last, and perhaps the greatest, protection we have from bad government short of reaching for the cartridge box. If more citizens could be informed - and convinced - of the need to protect all of us from being convicted of bad law, the State would grow tired of the embarrassment of being overruled each time by the citizens it seeks to control. Can you see how liberating this could be?

Yes, the State would then seek to limit or outlaw jury nullification, but again, short of completely doing away with habeas corpus and imprisoning people without benefit of trial, that would fail in a jury trial. Only if they sought to "rendition" every one of us, use the Patriot Act to hold large numbers of us without bail or right to representation would we be forced to take steps we would rather refrain from. Only if they resorted to that would it become necessary to take up arms, a thing we all would fervently wish to avoid. Short of that, the serious and frequent application of jury nullification could actually turn this government around, could return us to a rule of law. Law determined by us citizens, not corrupt and venal government employees.

Please think about this. Visit the Fully Informed Jurors Association web site. Then make sure your family and your friends learn about this as well.

A Wide Departure From The Usual

This blog is meant to be more politically/socially/morally oriented, but I just got a wild hair and decided to do something different. More for family and friends - although some of you folks who read this have become friends through our interactions here and at your own blog sites - than for those who stop by to read my conservative maundering.

I've started taking flight lessons in a Cessna 152. This will hopefully lead to a private pilot, single-engine, land rating added onto my commercial helicopter (rotorcraft) rating. Friday morning my instructor, a great guy about my age named John Parker, had me fly to a nearby airport to demonstrate that the techniques used to land at one airport will work equally well at any airport, as they are not based on particular landmarks, but the measurement of distances and the timing of turns based on airspeeds and your position relative to the runway you intend to land upon. Unfortunately, there was severe turbulence in the area, due to an approaching cold front, and the turbulence at the airport we flew to was significant all the way to the deck, with the addition of a strong crosswind. We discontinued the landing (a "rejected" landing, per the FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook), poured on the power, and climbed out to return to our home field, Ravalli County Airport, in Hamilton, Montana. Upon arriving back home, the turbulence had decreased, but we had an 18 knot crosswind, and I had not yet had any training in crosswind landings (only ten hours logged in fixed-wing aircraft at this point), so I gladly let John do the honors.

When I was training in helicopters (nine months back in 1993-94 getting my commercial and CFI ratings), my instructor told me that learning to fly an airplane would be much, much easier than a helicopter. He flew both, so I took him at his word. I have a little over 200 hours in the Robinson-22 two-place piston engined helicopter, the R-22. Learning to hover is one of the more difficult evolutions in helicopter training, but once you have that down, the rest actually comes pretty easily. Autorotations were pretty exciting, especially when you do them all the way to the ground, as you need to in order to qualify for a Certificated Flight Instructor rating. Landings, however, were a piece of cake, once you could hover and safely do an autorotation if you needed to do so.

One of the nicest things about landing a helicopter is that crosswinds are never a problem. To a helicopter, which simply sets down from a hover, there really isn't any such thing as a crosswind. Whatever direction the wind comes from, you face into it. Oh, certainly there are some very limited situations where you may be restricted by obstacles on the ground, coupled with canyon walls or other terrain features which can limit your options somewhat, but basically it is a non-issue. Consequently, I am finding landings on a runway to be more challenging than I expected. The other nice thing about landing in a helicopter is that you only need room for your rotor. If an area is big enough to set down in from a hover without damaging your main rotor or tail rotor, it's big enough to land in. No need for a runway, field, or street (in an emergency).

After just four hours of fixed-wing time, I was able to shoot some landings on my own, without the instructor's assistance, which impressed the hell out of him. What frustrates the hell out of me, however, is that I have not been able to translate that into consistently good landings. Most of the time, when I round out just off the surface, I get too nervous and end up pulling the nose too high too soon, "ballooning" and floating too far down the runway before my main wheels touch down. I've got it down to about six out of ten poor landings, with four out of ten being good. I'm sure not satisfied with that. Landing a helicopter seems so much easier.

The evolutions involved with crosswind landings and take-offs, when one wing must be lowered, ailerons, and elevators controlled, with rudder added for crabbing, and such, seems to be a lot riskier than coming to a controlled hover at five feet off the deck and rolling off just enough power to settle onto your skids in a helicopter. No need to balance all of those control surfaces, just pitch and power. However, not being wealthy, I can't afford to rent even a little R-22 when I want to go flying, so learning to fly this Cessna is a must if I want to spend any time aloft. I'll certainly master this, but I have to admit I think my helo instructor was FOS. (I know he was FOS when it came time to find a job flying helicopters, which he claimed would be easy to do. Lied his ass off, he did, as I couldn't get hired anywhere in the US or Canada. I'm sure he enjoyed the $32,000 I paid him getting my commercial and CFI ratings, though.)

Anyway, from time to time I may come back to this topic, to speak about how much fun it is to fly. How I enjoyed doing the helicopter search and rescue work I did briefly in the Marble Mountain Wilderness of Northern California, and once looking for a downed F-16 pilot outside of Klamath Falls, Oregon. Flying around Mount Shasta and the other mountains up there was a hoot. Much more fun than training in the flatlands. I even got to do a half-dozen landings on a ship that was docked in the harbor at Eureka, California.

I hope to get some mountain flying in here in Western Montana as well. Hamilton is surrounded by mountains, with the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness to the west of us.

Take care. and thanks for stopping by.

Sodom and Gomorrah revisited

On the JWR web site, I came across an essay where a Rabbi (Moshe Averick) wrote "A Plea To Atheists", concerning the fact that, apparently, many atheists hold to no moral standards, believing that moral standards are a religious construct that have no truth value to those who do not believe in G-d or a Supreme Being of some sort, or that moral standards are a social convention at best. Rabbi Averick is especially concerned about the attempt on the part of some people, notably atheists again, to change the way society looks at pedophilia.

In reading about this, I discovered that there is a recent move to try to change the DSM IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, removing pedophilia as a disorder. These people want to have us all treat pedophilia as sex between consenting partners, irrespective of whether a child can actually consent. These disgusting, immoral (characterizing themselves as "amoral", although they do know better) creatures speak of twelve-year-old boys who desire (so they claim) sex with an adult, as if these children simply cannot bear to not have homosexual encounters with aged chickenhawks with rouged cheeks and toupees askew upon their bald heads, simply must be fondled and penetrated by these perverted creatures. Man-Boy Love, indeed.

I have written elsewhere (not on this blog) about a book by Piers Anthony, who has written many science fiction and fantasy novels. He wrote a book called Firefly, in which a five-year-old girl is mad to have sex with a middle-aged adult male. She seduces and practically rapes the man, who struggles mightily to refuse her charms, but simply cannot, and succumbs to the little witch's wiles, penetrating her repeatedly over a period of time, weeks or months, IIRC.

Right. I never finished the book, so perhaps I missed where this adult male admits it was only a fantasy and never happened, or where they got married when she turned eighteen, or whatever. No matter the outcome of the book, it was a paean to pedophilia, an apologia for child sex, demonstrating (in the author's mind alone) so vividly how difficult it is to spurn the sexual needs of the very young. What a load of horse manure.

Obama appointed one of his many Marxist and totally immoral fellow travelers to the post of Education Secretary, who then appointed Kevin Jennings to head the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Per Erick Erickson at Redstate, "Working in a school system, Jennings was approached by a 15 year old boy who told Jennings that a much older man had picked the boy up in a bus station bathroom. Jennings encouraged the boy to pursue a sexual relationship with the man. Kevin Jennings is Barack Obama’s 'Safe Schools Czar.'"

With a society that has made homosexuality - considered a perversion of nature for thousands of years (how would a species not die out if the very fluids of reproduction were routinely deposited in places that made procreation absolutely impossible?) - an acceptable practice for everyone, a society that encourages child sex ("Man-Boy Love"), that looks upon incest as being merely an embarrassment rather than a perversion, that teaches our very school children to look upon homosexuality as simply an alternate yet very reasonable choice, we are destined for the kind of social aberration that was the downfall of the mythical (or real?) Sodom and Gomorrah. When our country has sunk to the low of even considering making pedophilia an accepted practice, it is time to stop our slide into such corruption and complete immorality.

How an otherwise intelligent and rational human being could consider pedophilia acceptable is beyond my ability to conceive. There is no way a child has the experience, the insight, the education, or the freedom to choose his or her own path when it comes to having sexual relations with anyone, even another child, let alone an adult who would take advantage of the child's innocence to gratify their own desires. It is even sicker, more destructive, for an adult to seek to convince a child that such activity is good, or an expression of love for another person, as some incestuous parents and pedophiles have done.

How have we sunk so low? I realize child sex has been a feature of other cultures, accepted as either normal or at least permissible in places like the Middle East (Arabs, muslims), Greece (in the past more so than currently), and in Thailand. That certainly doesn't make it right, any more than the prevalence of cock fighting or dog fighting makes those activities proper. America was meant to be a grand experiment with improving the way people interact with each other as well as with their government, protecting the rights of the individual against the wishes of the mob (that being the definition of true democracy: the wishes of the mob). How has a nation based on the correct moral strictures of Judeo-Christian thought and religion come to this point, that children should be a commodity for the gratification of the sexual pleasure of adults? That is something we may have come to expect from the muslim freaks who are orthodox followers of Islam - the religion not of peace but of pedophilia - but not from American citizens. Yet, here we are.

I explained to Rabbi Averick that, although I am an atheist, I try to be a moral man. That not all of us atheists believe morality is in the eye of the beholder, that some of us do understand there are mala per se, things that are wrong, that are bad, in and of themselves. Pedophilia is one of those things. Let us please not lose sight of that fact, not allow the Left and the repugnant moral relativists to put all of our children at even greater risk in this aberrant society which seems to have replaced the world we knew and loved.