Thursday

                            Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“Life is not waiting for the storm to pass; it is learning how to dance in the rain.”

                                                    Anonymous

Trivia question of the day:

What famous character from the old west was born in Griffin, Ga.? Answer at the end of the blog.

I saw my favorite episode of “Cops” a few nights ago. A man had stolen a pickup truck and was being chased by the cops. He eventually ran out of gas and pulled into the median. He would not get out of the truck and would not unlock the doors. A cop came up on the passenger side, broke out the window and sprayed something. It didn't work so another cop with a K-9 came up and lifted the dog into the cab with him. There was immediate screaming and yelling. He came out of that truck with the dog clamped onto his right arm spinning around screaming bloody murder. That man's arm and the dog was horizontal until the cops knocked him down but the dog still had a grip until one of the cops gave a command and then the dog released. It was funny.

Message from the Grey Panthers.

Back during the Lyndon Johnson (D-Tex) administration a bill was passed whereby funds could be “borrowed” from the Social Security account by the Federal Government for purposes undetermined. There also was no mention of repayment of these “loans” including any interest. The US Government has borrowed money from Red China and a “surcharge” is included in repayment. This is nothing but interest but it is not included if and when a repayment of a loan is made to the Social Security fund, if it is ever repaid. There is no doubt in this Panther's mind that the “borrowed” money was used to help finance the Vietnam War where over 500,000 American soldiers eventually went and it ended in a surrender.

As we all know, nearly all of us work for 50 years (I went to work at 14) and make payments to FICA (Social Security) the entire time. Congressmen and Senators have their own retirement fund that they become eligible for after a very short time in office. We taxpayers pay for that and this year there is no increase in Social Security and an increase in the Medicare payments, who the hell do they think they are. They work for us, not vice-versa.

I am a believer in the premise of “Do not identify a problem without offering a possible solution.” That is whining. The problem is that our lawmakers have taken us Grey Panthers (retirees) for granted and think we have no recourse. They are wrong. The solution is to determine their position and positive action in resolving this travesty and take us seriously, if this not satisfactory then fire (do not reelect) them and find someone who will.

I encourage all of you retirees on Social Security to contact your Senators, Congressmen and presidential candidates and let them know that they are not invulnerable and we as a group have an enormous voter influence, especially to the “professional politicians” out there that know no other skill and have been sucking on our breast all their lives.

It is time for all of us to stand on our hind legs and do something...or wimp out and complain and offer no solutions.

I am from South Carolina, 4^th district which is Greenville-Spartanburg. Our Congressman is Trey Gowdy and our Senators are Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott. You can find yours and their web sites on Google. Now is the time. Do Something.

            This Date in History August 9

1969 On this night four people named Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Linda Kasabian have dinner at the El Coyote Mexican restaurant near Los Angeles, California. After dinner they drive up into the Hollywood Hills and stop at a house at 10050 Cielo Drive. It was a house that was previously owned by a record producer but now it was being leased by movie producer Roman Polanski and his wife actress Sharon Tate. Polanski was out of the country so Sharon had a few of her friends over that included Voytech Frykowski, Steve Parent, hair stylist Jay Sebring and coffee heiress Abigail Folger. Tex Watson and company break into the house with Tex wielding a long barreled .22 caliber pistol and the three women with long knives. For reasons not truly known, Tex and the girls begin slaughtering everybody in the house. Two of them make it out into the front yard trying to escape but Tex runs them down and dispatches them with a shot to the back of the head whereupon one of the girls jumps on the corpses and begins repeatedly slicing and stabbing them. In the meantime inside the house even more horror is committed by the women when they begin stabbing and strangling the 8 month pregnant Sharon Tate and the other two. All five of the occupants of the house are killed and disfigured. The next morning the house keeper shows up and sees the bodies on the lawn and calls the LAPD. No one can imagine the reason for all of this because two days later supermarket executive Leon LaBianca and his wife Rosemary are found cut to pieces in their Hollywood home. Both the Tate and LaBianca murder scene had words like “Death to pigs” and “Helter Skelter” written in blood on the walls so the cops knew the perpetrators of these murders was the same. The Prosecutor assigned to this case, Vincent Bugliosi, determined that the murderers were members of a cult led by a man named Charles Manson that lived on the Spahn Ranch out on the California desert. The ranch was not a ranch at all; it was just a bunch of buildings that were used in movie sets from time to time. Anyway, eventually the entire cult was arrested except for Tex Watson who had fled to, you guessed it, Texas. Listen to this y'all. Prosecutor Bugliosi struggled to find a motive and here is his theory: Charles Manson wanted to commit random murders hoping the public would believe it was blacks that were the killers and the mother of all race wars would erupt and he and his little group would stay hidden in the desert and would be on top after it was all over. Manson somehow arrived at this conclusion by listening to the song “Helter Skelter” on the Beatles “White Album”. How could this jackass believe this and be sane? The answer to that is he ain’t sane. He is crazy as a shit house mouse. Anyway, the whole thing blew up when Susan Atkins was arrested on a stolen car wrap and chose to brag to her fellow inmates about her participation in the Tate and LaBianca murders. Susan scared the hell of the inmates and they passed on the information to the cops and it was all over. All of the participants are still in prison to this day except for Linda Kasabian who eventually rolled on the others including Charles himself in return for a shortened sentence.

1945 At 1:49a a B-29 named “Boch’s Car” departed the island of Tinian piloted by Major Charles Sweeney. The normal pilot of the aircraft was Paul Boch but Major Sweeney was selected to command this mission. As with the “Enola Gay” a few days before, Boch’s Car met up with a weather recon aircraft and an instrumentation plane over Iwo Jima and they all headed out for Nagasaki which was a few hundred miles north of Hiroshima. The nuclear bomb being used this time was a plutonium bomb named “Fat Man”. The bomb was nearly spherical with tail fins. This bomb did not operate on the same theory as the bomb used on Hiroshima but the nuclear physicists that designed it were sure that it would work. Boch’s Car released “Fat Man” at 11:06a on this date and a few seconds later a light brighter than the sun lit up Nagasaki from and altitude of 1,200 above the ground. Nagasaki is surrounded by hills and mountains and therefore the effects of the explosion were contained in a smaller area and the devastation was more complete. As with Hiroshima, nearly 120,000 civilians were vaporized immediately or died from radiation poisoning later. As I stated before, the Emperor demanded that Japan accept the terms of the Potsdam Resolution which called for the unconditional surrender of Japan. The Emperor also stated that if they did not it could mean the end of the Japanese people because a few days earlier Russia had invaded Manchuria which was just across the Japanese Sea. Japan could not fight a war on two fronts. The war was over.

Answer to the trivia question:

The famous character from the old west that was born in Griffin Ga. was Doc Holliday.

               Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow