Our Coming Rapprochement With Russia

Rap•proche•ment (räˌprôsh-mäɴˈ)
n. A reestablishing of cordial relations, as between two countries.
n. The state of reconciliation or of cordial relations.

It's a French word (rapprocher - to bring together) so there's probably cheese or white flags involved. Maybe white gloves?

It's not like America and Russia are suddenly BFF and we be like wearing each others lipstick and underwear. Not yet anyways. It's more like the same guy screwed both of us royally and we want to get even. By ripping his head off and crapping in it. From Newsweak:

The Kremlin has praised U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s response to Monday’s attacks in Berlin and Ankara, claiming that his words are “in tune” with those of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump accused a “radical Islamic terrorist” of shooting dead the Russian Ambassador to Turkey on Monday before also commenting on an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, Germany’s capital. In response to the latter, he declared “terrorists and their regional and worldwide networks must be eradicated from the face of the Earth,” and called for international support to do so.

And their entrails worn as neckties.
Because, no one wears garters anymore.

Although little has yet been officially confirmed about the perpetrators of either attack, Russia welcomed Trump’s statement, claiming that Putin has been making the same argument for nearly two decades.

These remarks were made while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was speaking about Russia's desire for international cooperation in eliminating terrorism.

Of course we are referring to Presbyterian terrorists, right? Greek Orthodox terrorists? Baptist terrorists? Catholics? No?

He noted that no one country could win this fight alone, but “it can only be done together.”

Okay, lipstick, definitely lipstick. But no panties. At least not the skimpy, yellow bikini ones. They were a gift from Italy.

Independence Day

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

The rest of this amazing document can be read here. 

That last paragraph "... it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it..." should be resonating in the hearts and minds of every patriot.

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.

American Capitalism Smacks Boris In The Face

Bernie Sanders and every college student in America should have this tattooed on their butts.

Back in 1989, card-carrying Communist and Politburo member in the Soviet Union Boris Yeltsin visited Johnson Space Center, and then took a tour of a grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas. According to a Houston Chronicle reporter, Yeltsin was far more affected by the grocery store visit than he was the space center. He apparently was stunned by the aisles and aisles of supermarket products, and told the other Russians in his entourage that if Russians saw what American grocery stores looked like, when in their homeland they had to wait in line for most everything, “there would be a revolution.”

Yeltsin chit-chatted with customers about what their groceries cost, what they were buying, and was in absolute amazement at the whole experience, saying, “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev.”

He was dazzled by the fact that grocery stores were everywhere, and that they even offered free samples. A year or so later, a biographer wrote that on the plane ride from Texas to Florida, Yeltsin couldn’t get the vision of the endless food supply out of his mind, and lamented how different things were for his own countrymen.

According to wikipedia, Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’”

He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” And then, in his own autobiography, Yeltsin wrote about the experience at the grocery store himself, which reshaped his entire view on communism, ultimately leading to leaving the Communist party.

“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."

More here.

Sister Golden Hair

Golden Hair Surprise

Batter Up 'Murica

On deck and batting clean up.

30" bats --- $250.00
19" bats ---  $90.00

Pricing here.

Interesting Times

So much unrest and uncertainty in the world.

Russia's economy is tanking due to sanctions so Putin is ripping off his shirt and channeling his inner Cossack.

Mooslims are slaughtering school children... again.

The NSA is interpreting the skidmarks on our underwear.

There's another beaner tsunami approaching our southern border.

Congress don't give a shit as they have already stolen everything that wasn't nailed down since Teddy Roosevelt was President.

Meanwhile, the idiot in the White House can't break himself away from ESPN.

Unsettled times remind me of when I was an undergrad. We didn't trust the government then and don't trust it now. 

55 Reasons Why America Is In Trouble

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The American Dream blog,

Is America the greatest nation on the planet? Before you answer that question, you might want to check out the statistics that I have shared in this article first. The reality is that the United States is in a deep state of decline, and it is getting harder to deny that fact with each passing day. Mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually and financially we are a train wreck. Many that are “patriotic” attempt to put a happy face on our growing problems, but the truly patriotic thing to do is to admit just how bad things have gotten so that we can start finding solutions.

If you truly love this country, then you should know that this nation needs a huge wake up call. We have abandoned the values and the principles that early Americans held so dear, and as a result our society is a giant mess. The following are 55 things about America that you may not know…

#1 We are supposed to have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, but only 25 percent of all Americans know how long U.S. Senators are elected for (6 years), and only 20 percent of all Americans know how many U.S. senators there are.

#2 Americans spend more on health care per capita than anyone else in the world by far, and yet we only rank 35th in life expectancy.

#3 Only one state in the entire country has an obesity rate of under 20 percent. 11 states have an obesity rate of over 30 percent.

#4 Of all the major industrialized nations, America is the most obese. Mexico is #2.

#5 Back in 1962, only 13 percent of all Americans were obese, but it is being projected that 42 percent of all Americans could be obese by the year 2030.

Go to the American Dream to see the reference links for all 55 statistics.

H/T iOTW