Rock and Roll

They called it "rock and roll".

When, long ago, I went through basic training.  I am one of the 1% of Americans who actually served in the military, admittedly with great reluctance at the time.  Today, the vast majority of Congress men and women have not come near military training.  Their foolishness and me first attitudes is a result of never serving something greater than themselves.  

Yesterday, a young girl, nine I believe, lost control of an automatic weapon at a for profit gun range, and shot her instructor to death.  The instructor was a retired police officer, well trained in firearm safety.

It didn't matter, when the girl attempted to fire the automatic weapon on "rock and roll", which was slang for full automatic (machine gun like), she whirled from the kick of the weapon, and accidentally shot her instructor to death.

She is a child.  Video is available, not showing the actual shooting, of the pair as she timidedly attempted to fire a weapon intended to kill with multiple shots.

Have you ever wondered about why automatic weapons were invented?  In the "old west" single shot weapons were of small help in shooting enough Indians to stop a charge.  The Civil War saw the invention of the gatlilng gun, and repeater rifles which enabled the wholesale extermination of Native Americans from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean.  

Up until the invention of what amounts to an automatic weapon, that you don't have to cock, load singly; etc., single shot weapons were useful for hunting, but not for killing human beings.  

If you missed for example, it took time to reload, and your opponent could get close enough to you to do you harm.  The Comanche held off Texas Rangers for decades, because they learned, by counting to wait until the Rangers fired their first volley, and they had horses fast enough to charge and kill with bows and arrows before the Rangers could reload.

And the Comanches were very good at it.  

After the Civil War, the strategy no longer worked, because the Rangers had repeating handguns and rifles.  Counting did not work anymore, and the Comanches were basically wiped out.

Which gets us back to what automatic weapons are for:  they kill people with multiple wounds, or can be used to spray a group, inflicinting wounds or death on many from one weapon.

World War I is a good example of how the machine gun, the ultimate in automatic weapons, changed warfare forever.  Trench warfare evolved quickly, when it became obvious that a frontal charge, usually timed when the enemy reloaded, was useless against a machine gun.  What is amazing is troops for years kept the frontal mass attack as a strategy, with horrendouls results.  An entire generation of European young men were exterminated.  They are called the "lost generation".  

So, an automatic weapon is meant to kill lots of people.  It is not meant to hunt with.  The meat is ruined if you shoot multiple bullets into a deer for example.

And then the interview with the gun range owner.  He was contrite, and at one point said he felt very bad for the young girl.  He was defensive  obviously, and rambled on how safe the range was.

Of course, he never mentioned the absolute lunacy in having a small girl attempt to fire an automatic weapon on rock and roll.

When we fired our M-16s, one shot at a time was ok, but multiple shots sprayed all over, unless you kept the bursts to three or four rounds at a time.  Otherwise, no accuracy at all was the result.

And these were all adult males, who had sat through hours of training, and many had gun handling backgrounds.

At one point the gun range owner said perhaps they needed to have a height requirement, 'like Disneyland'!   I almost gagged on that one.

DAMN THE SECOND AMENDMENT.  That's right, damn our interpretation of it.  Modern firearms do not belong in the hands of anybody.  That's right, nobody needs to have an automatic weapon.  They are a military weapons and should be banned as well, because of the damage they do.  

If a hunter wants to shoot a deer with an M-16, they should be imprisoned for animal cruelty!  A machine gun is an atrocity!

Why on earth do we continue this madness?  Why do we tolerate these loon toons, who advocate children shooting machine guns, and then weep when they shoot someone, or themselves, because THEY HAVE NO REASON TO FIRE AN AUTOMATIC WEAPON.  THIS IS NOT DISNEYLAND, IT IS A KILLING MACHINE!

And automatic weapons have no place for personal defense either.  If you go to rock and roll, you kill everything in front of you, with no accuracy whatsoever.

And don't give me that bullshit that training helps.  It doesn't help a nine year old girl. And for  most troopers, it doesn't really help either.  

In combat most troops fire blindly, because if they aim, they expose themselves to enemy fire.  So they put the rifle around a corner and fire, on rock and roll, and kill or wound dogs, cats, kids; etc.

That is the reality of this madness.  America has lost its mind to fools who worship weapons on rock and roll.

God forgive us!!!!!!!!

What is Real?

Today I read incredulously that Americans by a large margin oppose Common Core national learning standards.  The study also found Americans haven't got a clue as to what Common Core Standards are.

And to make things worse, they also support Charter Schools even though subsequent questions in the survey show they don't know what they really are.

In short they are forming opinions that shape public policy, we are a democracy remember, that are based on erroneous information and ignorance.

Who is to blame?  FOX NEWS.

Many right leaning people, if not all of them, get ALL of their information from Fox.  They listen to that blather for 24/7.

And they are getting lied to all the time.

Recently we had a person from the Probation Department speak to the SIR club I belong to (Sons in Retirement).  She was trying to explain AB 109 and associated legislation that seeks  to reform California's unconstitutional penal system.  The law is complex and seems to be working, but the crowd was having none of the detailed explanation the presenter gave.

No, the "common perception" was that felons were being dumped into the country and running amuck in the community.  The county sheriff is an avowed conservative and hasn't helped, using the "issue" (which is the law) to explain away his department's deficiencies and failures.

And, conservatives in the crowd never asked questions about how California got  into such a fix:  overcrowding its prisons with "get tough on crime" and the war on drugs.

Both of these "programs" are reactionary public policies that were passed after the sixties and seventies, most racist in background, that were aimed at incarcerating every African American in the state!

And to some extent, it succeeded.  It also succeeded in bankrupting the state.

But not a word about that from the right wingers in the elderly crowd

No, conservatives never say they are sorry.

Their "think tanks" never analyze their policies and implementation.  They never fine tune their ideological mistakes.

Fox News says that getting tough, not allowing any rehabilitation, throwing people in jail forever, solitary confinement, and arresting people for drug addiction works.

It doesn't.

California is a perfect example.  Redding today is less safe than every before BECAUSE of  the conservative infatuation with determinate sentences, harsh treatment of mentally ill prisoners, incarceration of people of color at unprecedented rates.

Of course, progressive policies, like the Affordable Care Act, have been subjected to a microscope of criticism and reaction finding every minute detail that can be attacked.  Recently a conservative court found a problem in one sentence of the Act that implied a state could not offer subsidized insurance plans if it had refused to establish a state exchange.  That legal nit picking goes against the entire essence of the thousands of words the act includes.

In short, conservatives don't play by the same rules they subject progressive public policy to....they cherry pick, and NEVER subject their policy to scientific scrutiny.

Tax cuts and tax increases are another good example.  Cons will vote for tax cuts, but all have taken a pledge to NEVER vote to increase taxes.  For California this meant years of tax cuts, and starving the "beast", which meant wholesale cuts to education, that led to more incarcerations which led to prison overcrowding which led to AB 109.

See, the cons now say, AB 109 is flooding our community with felons.  The lady patiently explained ALL of the felons were homegrown, the law expressly calls for release under parole (after the sentence if served by the way) in the home county of the felon!  That's right, they are not dumping them here, they lived here!

Of course, the released felons have no education, no rehabilitation, because the cons cut that out long ago; so they wind up homeless, desperate and often commit crimes of opportunity to stay alive.

See, the cons say (who caused this mess) we "need to get tough on them", build more prisons, cut education and other social programs...and the United States begins to look like a Gulag.

What is real?  It sure isn't the crap that Fox dishes out.  It sure isn't in a political movement that refuses to be accountable for their political policies that backfire.

What is real?

My Hands are In the Air

There is outrage.  

I, and my fellow Democrats rage every day about the unfairness of our society.  We rage about the social and economic injustice that has created a "New Jim Crowe" in our nation.  We rage about the fear of homeless people in our community; a fear that looks away from the poor, that is so smug in its civic irresponsibility it makes me sick.  In my home town, the white Police Chief has succeeded in convincing people that the homeless are panhandlers who make $200 to $500 a day; are criminals who will steal from you.  Meanwhile, of course, the Mission, who houses some of the homeless, screams that this is not true.  But he has succeeded in scaring the shit out of the white middle class, who predictably do all the wrong things about the homeless.  

There is a movement to "round them up" and send them out.  Out to where?  

We rage about the double standards we see everywhere, the middle class that has been gutted by tax cut politics that allow uncompromising positions of no taxes by Republican politicians at every level; government revenues for everything from schools to prison reform are gutted in favor of arming our police like Seal Team Six.  

The poor get it, they are the targets of "starving the Government". Starving the "government beast" is really get the "darkies".  Unfortunately the poor don't vote.

People of color do vote.  They vote highly Democratic.  This scares the racist plutocrats. 

And they are who is really behind this... 

The racist minority in this country that moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican and with corporate money has dominated the political landscape for years. Red states are every bit as segregated as in 1960.  SEC teams have African American players all right, but they are simply hired to win, the colleges themselves are still mostly white.  Alabama wins, Alabama graduates hardly no African Americans.

Stanford however is a different animal.  Stanford is a very exclusive college that housed Mitt Romney in the mid-Sixties for a time.  Stanford was the typical Ivy League school, token people of color and the rest the jet set.  

Today, not so.  Stanford reflects a meritocracy and by coincidence the racial make up of the United States almost exactly.   And the giving of a mostly white alumni is at the highest level in years.  Oh, and Stanford wins; winning the Director's Cup for twenty years in a row for the best athletic program.  

Hmmm, racial diversity and inclusiveness works for better outcomes.   And Mitt Romney was a student there.  

Call it white guilt if you must; I am one of those white (actually part Cherokee) graduates, who is proud of the diversity, who knows Stanford has got it right, in spite of housing the independent Hoover Institute right in the middle of an example of diversity in one the richest areas on earth.

We need to get rid of the Hoover Institute because it supports the economic unfairness in the guise of "conservative principles".  Those who would say this would be unfair, practice unfairness everyday, in fact base their businesses on it.  

There is simply NO COMPROMISE with racism.  None.  Mandela had it right when confronted with a "compromise" that would have left the apartheid government in power in exchange for his freedom, he did not compromise.  

He did compromise once the government changed and he was President,  for the peace of the nation.  

For that, he is remembered next to Ghandi and MLK today; he practiced the principles of Christ as well.    

Conservative principles are not economic, they are racist.  They are exclusive, kill motivation by cloaking people of color with layers of poverty and hopelessness, making a plutocracy  who takes needed jobs overseas, or cynically competes state against state, always cutting corporate taxes and directly hammering the poor. Ironically the vast majority of the poor are WHITE! 

The rich get richer, the colored poor get poorer even in Silican Valley.  Recently the San Jose Mercury News bragged that average home prices in the peninsula were a million dollars.  How on earth does the middle class work in such an environment?  They commute of course, sending more tons of CO2 into the environment, choking California to death with an endless drought. 

Of course, the racist Republican Party thinks Global Warming is non existent.  They also think cutting taxes helps the environment.  They are not only wrong, they are wrong for a racist reason:  repress people of color at every turn.  

The United States has no higher moral ground in the world.  We cannot question the motives of Mr. Putin in the Ukraine, when we allow a segregated economic and social society at home.  The world is watching and again, just like when Bull Connor unleashed the dogs, and shaking its collective head.  

We are failing as a society.

Hitler was famously quoted as demeaning the United States as hypocrites about race, while he was killing Jews by the millions.  Meanwhile, the United States refused to house Jewish refugees during most of the war, dooming them to travel the globe looking for refuge.  

The election of an African American President scared the shit out of the racists , hence the never ending obstruction to reform, which again slams the poor minorities that are actually majorities in their communities.

So from what we hear from my conservative racist friends we have divided this nation between a racist Republican Party and an inclusive Democratic Party, that we need "law n Order" as a solution.      It worked once to give them power by a frightened white middle class.  So arm the police to the teeth, elect fascists to office, and then wonder why the whole thing blows up????

Fear is the the code that works.  Fear is a cover to racism.  Fear leads to power, but  a power that is superficial and doomed to failure.  Jim Crowe failed because it could NOT last.  MLK and his heroism finally stopped it....for a brief moment.  The Apartheid of South Africa succeeded for a few decades, but was doomed to what turned out to be a fairly non-violent end.  It could have been much worse.   

The war on terror as you  know, is code for racism, code for throw the "darkies" all into jail, code for attacking child immigrants who are fleeing violence in their own lands, code for sending a tank into a neighborhood to hammer a peaceful demonstration.  

We know we are in trouble when we consider sending in the National Guard to protect the community FROM the police that is hired to protect it.  

And we stood by for Five Days until a Democratic Governor finally spoke up, AFTER the African American President said enough.  And remember, the federal government has armed these ghouls to the death as an anti terrorism "force".    

Conservatives, under George W., succeeded in identifying American Citizens as terrorists.  So Police "stop and frisk", Police beat citizens, shoot them for no reasons, and almost always the targets are people of color.

We watched in horror as police shot at a van full of children, driven by a African American mother, who feared for her children's safety.  All of the police where white and she of course was not.  Few questioned this act of racist stupidity.  Few asked what she had done so wrong that they used deadly force against a van full of children who simply got angry and was fearful being a lone African American woman in the New Mexico desert surrounded by white guys with guns.    

That would never happen to a van full of white children.  

The United States is all concerned about what is going on in the Ukraine and Iraq.  

St. Louis stands as stark evidence that we have succumbed to racist fascism.

When will enough be enough????

Don't shoot, my hands are in the air.