In The News

 

Someone Needs To STFU

America's half-black, articulate, bright, clean and nice-looking President (channeling my inner Biden, sorry!) needs to seriously shut his pie hole even there is pie in it. Hmmmmm, pie.

In historic visit to Hiroshima, Obama calls on the world to morally evolve

I won't bother listing any of the other drivel that leaked out of his loose-lipped sphincter.

Pampers or Depends ... don't care, someone needs to make a bib for this clown.

Hey Sphincter Lips, How About Starting Your Moral Evolution Here?

After 85 years of  Democratic leadership (the last Republican Mayor of Chicago was William H. Thompson, 1927-31, and he was no prize either),black Chicago denizens have reached an evolutionary plateau; a long time ago their moral DNA hit a brick wall and said "Screw it, we're done, let's kill everybody."

As of Friday morning, homicides in Chicago were up 52 percent in 2016, compared with the same period a year ago, and shootings had increased by 50 percent, though the pace of violence has slowed in recent weeks, the police said. Only five months into the year, at least 233 people have been killed.

Officials are struggling with the problem and are employing a range of strategies as the murder rate in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, outpaces that of New York and Los Angeles.

To give my readers an idea of how bad it is in Chicago, only 20% of this years homicides have been cleared by arrest (source). Historically, murder once had a very high clearance rate (80-85%) simply because the victim and the suspect generally knew each other and it was a crime of passion. No more.

Caracas, The Detroit Of South America

Bernie "It's All Free" Sanders needs to emigrate to Venezuela and rent a dark, festering rathole in Caracas.

Dark, because there is no electricity, and festering, because that's what people do under socialism in every country where it has taken root.

CARACAS, Venezuela — The courts? Closed most days. The bureau to start a business? Same thing. The public defender’s office? That’s been converted into a food bank for government employees.

Step by step, Venezuela has been shutting down.

This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory.

In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week.

But that is only the start of the country’s woes. Electricity and water are being rationed, and huge areas of the country have spent months with little of either.

#NeverHillary

Intel is now available that SecState Hillary Clinton's private email server was the source of several failed US counterterrorism operations.

A retired senior State Department military adviser claims that Hillary Clinton’s “sloppy communications with her senior staff” when she was secretary of state may have compromised at least two counterterrorism operations.

Bill Johnson, who was the State Department’s political adviser to the special operations section of the U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM, in 2010 and 2011, says secret plans to eliminate the leader of a Filipino Islamist separatist group and intercept Chinese-made weapons components being smuggled into Iraq were repeatedly foiled.

Johnson says he and his team eliminated the possibility of other security leaks before settling on the unprotected telephone calls of the secretary of state and her aides as the likely source—though he quickly adds they have “no proof.”

“I had several missions that went inexplicably wrong, with the targets one step ahead of us,” Johnson tells Newsweek in an exclusive interview.

Clinton’s spokesman Nick Merrill calls the allegations "patently false."

Story here.

H/T Daily Timewaster

One of those blown operations was against the Muslim militant group Abu Sayyaf. 

Seriously, how much longer before the indictments come out?

RIP USAAF Master Sgt. Melvin Rector

After 70 year absence, a 94 year old WWII vet dies upon his return to England.

U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Melvin Rector long carried Britain in his heart after he helped defend it during World War II, but 70 years passed without him stepping foot in the country.

The 94-year-old finally decided to leave his home in Barefoot Bay, Fla., to visit Britain earlier this month. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans conducts a travel program through which interested parties can visit certain sites of the war. He signed up for one, in hopes of visiting the Royal Air Force station Snetterton Heath, in Norfolk.

He served there with the 96th Bomb Group in 1945 as a radio operator and gunner on B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, flying eight combat missions over Germany during the spring of the war’s final year. On four of these missions, his plane came under heavy fire. One almost proved catastrophic, and the plane returned to base with holes dotting its wings.

Rector was excited for his return to the place that made this great plane famous.

Story here.

Note: In the early 1970's I worked with a dispatcher who was a B-17 tail gunner during WWII.

Airman Bill Hart's B-17 was shot down in early 1944 on only his second combat mission; he spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp.

I asked Bill about his experiences and he said the Germans didn't treat the Americans and Brits too badly; the German prison camp guards didn't have it very easy either due to food and fuel shortages. But what they did to the Russian POW's was terrible.

Bill was an easy going soul, very conscientious worker but his health was poor. He blamed it on the prison camp and died several years after I worked with him.

Trump Makes Time

Don't tell Donald Trump that there is no time to sing our national anthem.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump held a rally Wednesday at the Anaheim Convention Center in California amid a heavy police presence.

Security was heightened because of the violent protests at his New Mexico rally on Tuesday night. There, anti-Trump crowds lit items on fire and hurled them at police, reportedly injuring several law enforcement officers.

[...] During his opening speech, Trump addressed the roaring crowd and then said, “I got here and they all said we have a great crowd but we don’t have time for the national anthem. I said, ‘Yes we do, we have time for the national anthem.'”

He then introduced Cherri Wilkens, who took the stage while the crowd chanted, “USA! USA!” Wilkens went on to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the audience cheered loudly once she was finished.

Story here.

Do We Treat PTSD By Healing America?

Journalist Sebastian Junger has an extremely interesting view on PTSD and how we might address it.

He posits that the armed forces of many other nations have a very low rate of PTSD among their combat troops as opposed to ours (i.e., US armed forces, 50% claim PTSD, whereas in Israel it is only 1% - the Kurds don't have any).

Junger claims that their societies are more supportive than American culture and that our troops would normally recover completely within a few weeks or months if it were not for the screwed social mores of America that tend to isolate from each other.

Video and supporting article here. It's really worth a read.

Now, Junger, who announced his retirement from war reporting soon after Hetherington was killed in Misrata, Libya, during the civil war, is shifting his attention to the home front. His latest book, “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging,” which hit shelves on May 24, takes a hard look at the difficulties veterans face as they transition back into civilian life. Front and center is the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Junger believes is overdiagnosed, and, in cases where it’s misdiagnosed, damaging to long-term psychological health. The veteran struggle, he theorizes, has more to do with the nature of American society than it does combat itself.

[...]The irony is that 10% of the U.S. military experiences combat. Something like 50% of the military has applied for PTSD disability. So what’s going on with that 40%? Now, I’m not prepared to be as cynical about that 40% as some people might be. I think an awful lot of those people are honestly describing something that is actually a transition disorder. It isn’t PTSD, but the only vocabulary we have right now is PTSD, so they call it PTSD. And a lot of these people are honest people, and I think they’re probably quite insecure about the fact that they know they were never traumatized, and, yeah, PTSD is the only category that they have available to describe what they’re truly feeling. What they’re truly feeling is this tremendous depression that comes from going from a close-knit communal life to the alienated life of modern society.

You can see the same effect in Peace Corps volunteers. There’s an incredibly high rate of depression among Peace Corps volunteers when they come home. They’re in Guinea, they’re in Sierra Leone, they’re in all these fucked up places. You’d think when they’d get home it’d be this big party. It’s not at all. About half of them struggle with depression afterwards. They don’t call it PTSD because they’re not vets. In their mind, they weren’t traumatized. What they’re really experiencing is the trauma of transitioning from a close-knit life in a village or a platoon to everyone’s living in their own apartment in New York City and contemplating hanging themselves in their closet.

That’s the irony of modern society: As wealth and affluence goes up, independence goes up and so does suicide, and so does depression, and so does all this other stuff.

Leave The Pencil, Take The Cannolis

Let our guidance counselor, Luigi Bartolli, offer you a career that you can't refuse.

For nearly 8,000 young Italians hungry for work, the state exam last month for just 400 jobs as prison guards was a fiasco. For the Mafia, it may have been a great opportunity, prosecutors in Rome say.

They are now investigating widespread and organized cheating, with 88 people caught wearing bracelets or mobile phone covers carrying the answers to the test, or with radio transmitters and earpieces thought to have been used to pipe in the answers.

The Camorra Mafia north of Naples, based where a company printed the exams, may have gotten hold of the answers and tried to get its own people inside a prison system that is holding 7,000 gang members, including some 700 bosses, prosecutors say.

The Mafia clan is also thought to have sold the answers to other applicants for as much as 25,000 euros ($28,000), according to posts on social media.

Story here.

Couldn't Happen To A Nicer Guy

The feds are sniffing around Terry McAuliffe's campaign contributions. Someone dropped a dime on this idiot.

Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department's public integrity unit, U.S. officials briefed on the probe say.

The investigation dates to at least last year and has focused, at least in part, on whether donations to his gubernatorial campaign violated the law, the officials said.

McAuliffe wasn't notified by investigators that he is a target of the probe, according to the officials.

"The Governor will certainly cooperate with the government if he is contacted about it," said Marc Elias, attorney for McAuliffe campaign, in a statement to CNN.

As part of the probe, the officials said, investigators have scrutinized McAuliffe's time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a vehicle of the charitable foundation set up by former President Bill Clinton.

More here.

The Clinton Global Initiative is nothing but a political racketeering organization. The feds ought to initiate a RICO prosecution on these thieves. Breitbart has an article on McAuliffe, Hillary's 'Bagman."

Among the McAuliffe donations that drew the interest of the investigators was $120,000 from a Chinese businessman, Wang Wenliang, through his U.S. businesses. Wang was previously delegate to China’s National People’s Congress, the country’s ceremonial legislature.

Birth Control

H/T iOTW