Tin snips, ordinary tin snips. That’s what I don’t have, and if they now cost $14 a pair, I may just go without. My long-standing beef with the CPI (Consumer Price Index) has always been that it includes too many articles I never buy. Well, add another thing to that list: a plastic doorstop. These now weigh in at $5.50 plus tax. I would also like some kind of award to go to the inventor of the plastic food bag with the seam running down the back. There is no way to tear those open straight across. You know the ones I mean.
Another thing about those package seams, have you noticed they always fold over and hide the nutrition information? Like daily sodium 36% and calories from fat 300. And the newest version of Microsoft Word defaults to an 11 point font called Calibri. I’m tellin’ ya, the west has gone for a dump since democracy became government-operated.
Drones are back in the news, it seems the US is now apologizing for using them. Use them or don’t, but quit saying you’re sorry when you are not. The terrorists hate them the way any coward would. The government (which I distinguish as being different from the American people) fired something like 70 of those puppies trying to get Bin Laden. And they cost like a million bucks each.
So the feds are using our newest technology as an assassination dagger. Note that like prohibition, assassination doesn’t work. Churchill resisted all schemes to take out Hitler fearing the tyrant might be replaced by a more competent leader. And in case anyone has forgotten, the mission statement of the bad guys is not to defeat the USA in a war, but to bankrupt us into protecting ourselves. We’ve still got 90,000 troops over there being paid with money printed up special for the occasion. Be reminded that bankruptcy, when it happens, is not a long slow process. The Soviet Union vanished in a matter of hours.
Much like I intend to vanish for the summer as soon as I can afford it. If you have doubts about global warming, spend a summer in Miami. The dead heat of summer, I mean like August. They don’t cook eggs on the sidewalk because nobody can stand to be outside long enough to hold the frying pan. Just so you know, the preparations to head for Colorado for 70 days are still underway even without the financing in place. Things around here never fail through lack of planning.
Here’s one version of a plan. I’ve got both a long ways to go and a long time to get there. I completely enjoyed that scooter trip to St. Augustine and I would welcome the concept of taking the back roads all the way to Denver. The scooter now has 7,500 miles on it and acts up a lot despite tip top maintenance. So, one plan is to take it as far as it will go and abandon it. But one way or the other, I’m spending part of this year in Colorado.
Chapter 8 of “Fifty” should be required reading for anyone who still thinks the Americans lost the war in Viet Nam. They lost the war on television and in the newspapers, that much is true, that is the version pushed in the history books. US participation in the ground war was over by 1970 and all subsequent fighting was by South Vietnamese troops. (The US gave air support but otherwise was long out of the hot war.)
Another misconception is that the South Vietnamese soldiers were chicken. The fact is by 1972 they routed the Viet Cong in the Mekong, where most of the south’s population lived. The Cong got their communist asses kicked out the door and their touted “popular uprising” never happened. When the south fell, it was not to men in black pajamas, but to invasion by twenty divisions of North Vietnamese army regulars.
And those divisions were fully equipped and trained by Moscow and Peking, with 500 tanks and long-range Russian artillery. Except for China, there was no military force in Asia that could have held out. The South Vietnamese army was pounded by ten thousand shells per day, more than the maximum output of Soviet factories. That was the attack the US had been trained to fight—but it wasn’t launched until the US ground troops were all but gone. And it still took 504,000 commies until 1975 to cover the few hundred miles to Saigon.
Yep, required reading.
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