Good morning,
Quote of the day:
Thanks to Leslie for this one.
“On a foggy winter
day...a poem about being lost...and being found...and listening to
the heartbeat all things. Find the inner warmth this winter that is
only found by turning within, below the stream of thought, deeper
still into your own heart...which is connected to the heart of all
things...one tear and the world opens.”
Anonymous
I
acknowledge that I am guilty of saying things on the spur of the
moment that may be interpreted wrongly or downright
misunderstood....I have decided that my best response is just to keep
on doing what I am doing and declare that I am not trying to disturb
or upset anyone. If I do say something that can be interpreted
wrongly, the offended person should just look back at this paragraph
and keep moving....because I certainly will. Life is too short to
dwell on stuff like “Did he really men that?” or “What did he
really mean?” Just move the hell on. Remember that you cannot
change what happened in the past, you do not know what tomorrow will
bring, so live for the moment.
A
while back Federal Drug agencies arrested 678 gang members of which
449 are illegal aliens. Every one of them had an attachment to
Central American drug cartels. They arrested 67 in the Charlotte, NC
area. That reminds me of a couple of friends of mine that met me in
downtown Charlotte to partake of a few frosty adult beverages. After
a fairly long evening my friends headed for the Corvette they came
in. It was parked on Tryon Street which is the main drag in
Charlotte. After making it to their car by taking two steps forward
and one step back for several minutes they finally got seated in the
car. Suddenly there was a tap on the driver’s side window. It was
a Charlotte city cop tapping the window with a night stick. My
friend lowered his window and the cop said “If you start this car
you are going to jail.” My friends decided that they did not want
that to happen and got back out of the car. They pulled out a cell
phone and began trying to find a hotel. The cop came around and
pointed to a doorway about 10 feet away and told them that was a
hotel. They made their way into the hotel and got a room. The cop
could have waited until the car was started and arrested them both.
I guess he was feeling lenient.
Recently
two robbers walked into a Subway sandwich shop in Charlotte and tried
to rob the place at gunpoint. The clerk produced a weapon of his own
and shot both burglars. One died and the other spent some time in
the hospital and even more time in the joint which is where he is
today. The city attorney ruled to not to press charges
against the clerk because he believed no jury would convict him of
excessive force. Me neither. Even the mother of the dead burglar
blamed her son for his death, not the clerk.
I
went to one of my favorite watering hole a while back. My group was
discussing another watering hole nearby that is open 23 hours a day
which is pretty damned redneck. The bartender came over and told us
that he and his social group meet at this establishment almost every
Sunday morning at the crack of dawn for their “gathering”. He
said that the majority of his social group was either bartenders or
servers making Sunday morning the optimum time for a gathering
because most of them were not working. On one occasion the bartender
came over to him and said that he could not be in there wearing
flip-flops. He reassured the bartender that he and his group would
be drinking high dollar shots and expensive drinks. The bartender
did not back down and told him that he had to change shoes or leave.
About that time an elderly man got up from the bar and headed to the
men’s room leaving a trail of pee along the entire route. My
friend asked why it was OK to leave a trail of urine on the way to
the men’s room but not OK to keep on his flip-flops. The bartender
was adamant, the flip-flops had to go. Apparently a trail of urine
was not as offensive as flip-flops to this bartender. There are a
lot of strange critters out there.
This
Date in History March 4
1861
Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as President on this date.
Immediately after he was elected in November seven southern states
seceded from the Union in protest. A few years before the Republican
Party was formed for the expressed purpose of freeing the slaves.
Old Abe knew that he was stepping into a quagmire of Civil War but he
thought he was ready for the job but after his United States Army
received two or three ass-kickings from the outset and he could not
find a field commander worth a damn. But as I said in a past lesson,
Abe finally found Ulysses S. Grant who knew had more replacements
than the Confederates and was not bashful about sending in his troops
against an almost impregnable Confederate position just so he could
kill just a few of them because they had no replacements and he did.
Four years later Lincoln was inaugurated again after being re-elected
for a second term. Shortly thereafter he and his wife Mary decided
to see the play “My American Cousin” at the Ford Theatre in
Washington. A Confederate sympathizer, an actor named John Wilkes
Booth was waiting near the box seat where President and Mrs. Lincoln
would be seated. We all know what happened next.
1944
Previously the British Bomber Command had been making night
bombing raids on Berlin along with other major German cities that
manufactured the tools of war. The United States Army Air Corps, the
8th
Air Force in particular, flying out of various bases in England had
been making daylight on cities other than Berlin. On this date the
8th
Air Force made its first night raid on Berlin giving the exhausted
British a breather. The 8th
Air Force had a variety of commanders such as General “Hap”
Arnold, General Carl Spaatz and Medal of Honor winner General Jimmy
Doolittle who had led the raid on Tokyo early in the war. The
defenses around Berlin had stiffened since other military targets had
been destroyed and the Air Force was looking for other targets of
opportunity and Berlin was a prime target. The bombing of Berlin was
effective but did not do anything to disrupt the morale of the German
people. What happened was this. Later on in the spring of 1945, the
allies sealed off the western side of Berlin and Germany as a whole
and waited not accepting any surrenders. They were giving the
Russians coming in from the east and southeast a chance at their
“pound of flesh”. The Russians had lost about 26 million of
their countrymen to the Germans during Operation Barbarossa.
Hundreds of Russian towns and villages were razed and the citizenry
were unceremoniously murdered in the German onslaught. Not only
that, when the Russians finally began to gain ground back toward
Germany, it was the Russians that liberated the hell on earth places
like Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps set up by
the Germans. One can imagine the frame of mind those Russians were
in after seeing all of this horror along with the death of so many of
their own. The Russians struck Berlin from the east and southeast
with unparalleled ferocity that will probably never be repeated in
history. They killed and literally ground into the soil anything
they confronted including men, women, children, dogs, cats and any
thing else that was in their path. There was one story of a German
anti-tank gun in Berlin being manned by German boys 12 to 14 years
old. They took a shot at an oncoming Russian tank and missed. The
Russian tank commander destroyed the gun and the boys and repeatedly
rolled over their corpses until there was nothing left that could be
identified as human. War is hell y'all.
Thanks
for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow
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