Poison Oak Place

President Obama has recently pledged to change the name of Mount McKinley in Alaska back to its original Native American name: Denali.

I wonder what the folks in Los Angeles will say when Obama changes that city's name back to the original Native American place name:  Iyáangẚ, which means "Poison Oak Place." 

There are days I can't wait to get up in the morning.  You just can't make stuff like this up.

Is Puritanism Dead?

The reaction by many including the family of the victim and the state of New Hampshire in the case of alleged prep school rapist Owen Labrie is beyond sanctimonious.   The parents of the victim take no responsibility for raising a daughter who sneaks off to a secluded room for a tryst.  The victim, who is among the nation's brightest and most precocious,  takes no responsibility for sneaking off to a secluded room for a tryst.   The State of New Hampshire, which does practically nothing about the epidemic of teenage sex going on within its borders,  wants us to believe that its prosecution of Labrie, who is barely old enough under the law to be tried as an adult, isn't arbitrary and capricious.   Elite St. Paul's School, which left the young man and women unsupervised, want us to believe that the school is in no way culpable for the teenagers' behavior, and failing to impress upon their students, including the youngest women, that any contact with someone under 16 is criminal.  The State of New Hampshire takes no responsibility for failing to ensure that schools within its borders supervise their young students and prevent teenage sex.   Misandrist activists want young men to take exclusive blame for teenage sex and pretend,  thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, that sexual encounters are part of the rational human experience where checklists for takeoff can and must be maintained just like those used by those piloting 747 aircraft.   Who said Puritanism was dead.

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Wouldn't it be fun to hook up all the activists, journalists, head masters and parents to a lie detector and ask them if they ever had sex with anyone under 16.  You might be in trouble if you kissed someone under 16.  If your hands wandered at all you committed a misdemeanor, at least in New Hampshire.  If you went all the way, congratulations, you're a rapist.  The law makes no distinction between boy and girl perpetrators, by the way.

New Hampshire's law, for example:

http://doj.nh.gov/criminal/victim-assistance/documents/sexual-assault-protocol.pdf

Felonious Sexual Assault (“FSA”) (RSA 632-A:3 ) includes the offense often referred to as the “statutory rape law,” which involves sexual penetration of a person between the ages of 13 and 16 when the age difference between the actor and the other person is 4 years or more.  The legal age of consent in New Hampshire is 16.  It also applies when a person is in a position of authority over another and coerces that other person to engage in sexual contact with the actor or with him/herself in the actor’s presence.

Felonious Sexual Assault includes, but is not limited to:

When the defendant subjects a person to sexual contact and causes serious personal injury to the victim under any of the circumstances named in RSA 632-A:2 (the aggravated felonious sexual assault statute mentioned above).   [I.E: penetration:  oral, anal, vaginal]

N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 632-A:4(I) (Sexual assault) states, 
I. A person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor under any of the following circumstances:
                                                      
(a) When the actor subjects another person who is 13 years of age or older to sexual contact under any of the circumstances named in RSA 632-A:2 [Aggravated felonious sexual assault].  (b) When the actor subjects another person, other than the actor’s legal spouse, who is 13 years of age or older and under 16 years of age to sexual contact where the age difference between the actor and the other person is 5 years or more.  (c) In the absence of any of the circumstances set forth in RSA 632-A:2, when the actor engages in sexual penetration with a person, other than the actor’s legal spouse, who is 13 years of age or older and under 16 years of age where the age difference between the actor and the other person is 4 years or less. 

N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 632-A:1(IV) defines “sexual contact” as “the intentional touching whether directly, through clothing, or otherwise, of the victim’s or actor’s sexual or intimate parts . . . . Sexual contact includes only that aforementioned conduct which can be reasonably construed as being for the purpose of sexual arousal or gratification.”

Red China's Business Plan

Red China treats its best customer and WWII savior (the US) like the enemy.   It bullies its neighbors and grabs their territory not unlike Imperial Japan in the days of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.  Its client state, North Korea, is constantly threatening the world with nuclear war.  Its stock markets are papered over with profits from companies like Hanergy, which had a capitalization bigger than Sony's, but no market share (?????).   It solves its domestic overproduction problems by dumping products like steel at predatory prices on the markets of its trading partners.  It says it has 7 percent growth while collapsing world commodity prices suggest something very different. 

What possibly could go wrong with this business plan.  

Allegedly Red China can put out the fire by using its immense foreign currency reserves, but are the people allegedly running the show capable and willing to do that.  Do they even really have a plan?   Is anybody really in charge?

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The latest military development:  Red China prepares to deploy the DF-41 road-mobile nuclear-tipped ICBM.   Every major American city is within striking distance of this weapon.  This is bad news not only for the US and Japan, but also India and Russia.  If Red China has fearsome multiple-warhead ICBMs, then India will conclude that it too needs them, and if India has them, then Pakistan will need them, too.   Will Vietnam and the Philippines be far behind.  Exactly what South Asia and, especially Pakistan needs, road-mobile nuclear-tipped ICBMs.  God help us.

Picture, if you will, Coca Cola, Walmart, Wells Fargo or Apple building missiles to nuke their customers.   Doesn't make much sense does it.

NYC's Topless Women

The New York Times, predictably, advocates letting topless, half-naked women parade around Times Square in New York City.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/opinion/shirtless-bodies-in-pointless-times-square-war.html
The Times is very wrong about this.   There really is a need for laws to protect us from naked people parading in our streets.... even if is unfair to the few who are pleasing to look at.

Who Are America's Domestic Terrorists

They're certainly not the police, as anti-American journalists like Charles Blow would have you believe.

Topping the list for August, 2015, is Garland Tyree, a high-ranking Bloods gang member and admirer of terrorist Mutulu Shakur, who just used an assault rifle to shoot a firefighter on Staten Island.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/firefighter-shot-responding-to-long-island-incident-1439554041

Here's Tyree's long list of terror and crime.  This is what the cops have to deal with on a daily basis. Don't expect Mr. Blow to deal honestly with this any time soon.

http://www.silive.com/northshore/index.ssf/2015/08/standoff_suspect_garland_tyree.html

Or just look Tyree up on Facebook.

Rabaul - the Unconquered

The Battle of Rabaul, also known by the Japanese as Operation R, was fought on the island of New Britain in the Australian Territory of New Guinea, in January and February 1942. It was a strategically significant defeat of Allied forces by Japan in the Pacific campaign of World War II. 

When Japan surrendered in August 1945, it was found that there were still around 69,000 Japanese troops in Rabaul.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Rabaul_(1942)


Hudson Falls Central School District:
http://www.hfcsd.org/district.cfm?subpage=439
John A. Leary '36

Judge John A. Leary was born on May 4th, 1919,  the second of four children born to John and Adelia Leary. He graduated from St. Mary’s Grammar School in 1932 and Hudson Falls High School in 1936.  A graduate of Syracuse University with a BS degree, he went on to receive his LLB and JD from the Syracuse University College of Law.  He began practicing law with the firm of Hart, Senior and Nichols of Utica, New York and subsequently returned to Hudson Falls where he practiced law for many years in an office over the present Evergreen Bank on Main Street. 
From 1941 through 1945, Judge Leary was a carrier pilot in the United States Naval Air Force.  During his tenure in the service, he was a two-time recipient of the Navy Cross and has shared his World War II experiences on a number of occasions with the students of Hudson Falls High School.  From 1947 through 1949 he was a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 
Judge Leary has served the community as a Justice of the Peace and as a member of the Kingsbury Town Board and he has been the recipient of the Liberty Bell award.  During his career, he has also served as county attorney, district attorney and the administrator of the Assigned Counsel Plan.  He has served as a judge in Washington County Court, Surrogate Court, Family Court and State Supreme Court as assigned.  Judge Leary retired in December of 1989. Judge Leary expressed tremendous pride in his Hudson Falls roots.  The community was fortunate indeed to have another of its native sons return to the community that fostered his ideals.  His interest in flying, originating during World War II,  remained a constant - occasionally he could be seen taking off from Warren County Airport.  He had three sons, two of whom are members of the area medical community and one who is an accomplished artist.   Judge Leary passed away on October 8, 2003.
John Leary- Torpedo Bomber Pilot Midway was the turning point of the war. We had been at the Coral Sea where we lost the USS Lexington. The USS Yorktown was badly damaged, but in any event the Japanese did not continue to invade New Guinea or Australia. Days later, after Coral Sea, when we arrived at Pearl Harbor we thought we were going home because the Yorktown was so badly damaged. But Admiral Nimitz had other ideas and he outranked most of us. They put on civilian workers (to repair the damage) and when the Yorktown sailed 72 hours later it still had quite a few civilian workers still aboard repairing. They never mentioned their losses in the war. Yorktown was hit again at Midway and they did abandon ship, but she stayed afloat and looked like she could make it, so about 200 men went back on board and unfortunately they were still on it when it was taken down by a submarine. But the battle was won principally, I think from our intelligence, because we outmaneuvered and outsmarted the Japanese...from the island, the Marines were flying dive-bombers, which were outdated-the cockpit was made out of canvas, so they were a bit out of date. They had no diving flaps and they would dive beautifully, but there was no guarantee they would come back up. There were only six Dive Bomb Fighter (DBF) torpedo planes involved, they were based on the island, only one returned and on that one, both crewmen were dead. These were the only DBFs they had; they had only torpedo planes, DBDs . There top speed was ...one hundred mph if they were doing well. They were no match for the Japanese. They launched fifty and had three come back. The carriers all together, that is all they had at the end of the day. George Gay was the only one (to survive) he had a ringside seat to the whole battle. He was in a life raft, so he was hanging on to them. George was the only survivor. He was a pilot and everyone else had been killed, everybody. The Marines also had Brewster fighters, "Brewster Buffalos," they called them, I think they had 27. They lost all of those. They were just no comparison with the Japanese Zero. But with the help of God, the battle was won by the American carrier pilots, and we on Yorktown went over landed on USS Enterprise, some on USS Hornet. So we were holding our own. Later on we ended up at Guadalcanal, not too long after the Marines landed. They got into some open field and with one very short leave we went from Guadalcanal, I'm sure these gentlemen would know (points at Marines in room). The 1st Marines were at Guadalcanal and the 4th were at the north end on Bougainville and we ended up on Bougainville so we covered the Solomon Islands, all of them. And that cut the Japanese off because it destroyed their largest base at Rabaul Harbor, on New Britain. Rabaul had five Japanese airfields, a great harbor and we could hit it from Bougainville, and we did. The correspondent that wrote this article -he was correspondent with the Chicago Tribune- two things about him: number one, he “demoted” me from Lieutenant Commander to Lieutenant Junior Grade, and then he wrote the article in a spirit of a party-he just wanted to have a good time . Ex-athletes team up to sink twelve ships
“Lieutenant Commander John Leary, Hudson Falls, was one of a group of former college athletes whose teamwork helped to knock out twelve Japanese ships in last Thursday's attack at Rabaul Harbor, the Navy disclosed today. The official account issued at a South Pacific airbase said that Leary, a coxswain of the 1941 Syracuse University crew, dropped a 2000 pound bomb with great accuracy on a Japanese cargo ship. He made the run over the ship at mast head height, braving heavy anti-aircraft fire from the vessel. In the same attack Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Robert L. Reagan, 1941 catcher for the Harvard baseball team, demolished a Japanese vessel with a torpedo bomb and Lieutenant Junior Grade Bruce Bishop, star University of Tennessee quarterback, blew up a enemy patrol.”
I took more fellas in with me than I brought home that day, unfortunately. It was 1944 because that’s when they went in, on November 1st... [I was]  about 23 or 24. It was the principal Japanese airbase. They had five Japanese airfields defending it. They had about 200 to 250 Japanese fighters there, which could have been interesting.
Hudson Falls man is aboard plane bombing Japanese cargo ship.
A short time ago, Mr. John Leary flew through a curtain of anti-aircraft machine gun fire to drop a 2,000-pound bomb on a Japanese cargo ship at Rabaul Harbor. Lieutenant Commander. Leary, 24, of Wright Street, this village, a U.S. Navy torpedo bomber pilot and section leader in a hard-hitting squadron, flew in at masthead level to skip bomb the enemy ship.” Those ships were reported by one of our submarines and they couldn’t do anything about it, because they had just finished up a patrol and were out of torpedoes. They followed these people with their naval escort into Rabaul harbor. They passed the word back to Pearl and they in turn got in contact with what they call Com-air South, or Command of the Air South. We were then called because we were the oldest outfit there [Bougainville], we were briefed, then set out somewhere around midnight, we hit them around dawn. We lost quite a few people, but the friends that I particularly had were in the troop transports.
We went up towards the Coral Sea on the U.S.S. Saratoga and two small carriers. One of the admirals came aboard, and he always wore a red cap. Well our carrier had duty that day, anti-sub duty. The Big DBF’s that had four large depth charges and all the sonar buoys and all that. The sea on that day was as smooth as a tabletop, and they made only 17 knots on a good day. So the captain of our ship, the air officer and the air group commander, recommended “catapulting” off the ship. Just that, put on a catapult and shot off the ship. But the admiral said ‘suppose the catapults are damaged?’. Still, he would have liked to see how they would work; well, none of us really wanted to do it. The first three planes went off, and they went down into the water and blew up, they never made it. The charges weren’t set properly. A good friend of mine flew the last one off the ship, a man named Gibble. He was older than most of us and was a professor at the university of Minnesota. Well, Bob (Gibble) made it, he sunk below the bow, but eventually pulled up. He went on his patrol and when he got back, Gibble was called to the deck, the captain’s deck and the admiral was going to question him. Now this was a three star admiral talking to a young lieutenant! Gibble didn’t blink an eye, he (the admiral) asked him "what did you do that the others failed to do"? Gibble looked at the admiral and said, “ I think that when they tried to climb, they pulled back on the stick.” (That’s the only way I ever heard of trying to climb was to pull back on the stick. Gibble said, with a touch of sarcasm, ”I just took the stick and held it off the water.” Normally he would have been shot right there, but the admiral didn’t say a damn word to him because the was in a bad bind. Gibble had the nerve to tell him he “held it off the water”. So our people were thrilled with him.
The Marines and Navy pilots all went to the same flight school, although some had selected the Corps and some the Navy. But they all went through the same training. Joe Foss ( leading ace of WWII, Joe Foss, the Marine pilot) and I, and Marion Carl, were in the same flight class. We’ve been friends over the years and Marion Carl ... was in charge of all investigations for the Marines until he retired, and he was murdered about a year ago. Someone broke into his house trying to rob them and attacked his wife, and he (Joe) tried to defend his wife, and he was killed. [I knew Joe Foss very well]...Joe sent me a story he wrote, an autobiography. He sent me a copy and I could hardly make out his signature. I called him and as it turned out that he had been in a little accident before that and had broken an arm and he was still trying to write with a broken arm. So Joe had let me know he had broken his arm. Joe was part Sioux -he was first president of the AFL, then governor of South Dakota.
When I came back finally, I had a couple of special projects. I was chief gunnery pilot for the Banshee, one of the first jets. One morning I went up for a test fire and a 20 millimeter shell exploded in the nose. The engines were in the back and when I pulled the trigger one of the 20’s jumped the gun, it wasn’t set right and blew the nose up. It was hard to tell who was screaming loudest, myself, or the Banshee! But it got down and landed all right. And they were very kind to me, the next morning they had a ceremony, I still have the medal. It’s bigger than this, but it has more things on it I can’t repeat here, but one of them was “enemy planes destroyed: none, ours: one”. When I got out, I had a year in law school and I finished that up. Then being an Irish Catholic of my generation, you only had three options, to be a priest, a farmer, or a cop. So I went into the FBI. I was banged up a bit but always made it back. I had two young fellas that were with me and I lost them both. My gunner was 18 years old, no 17, because it was his birthday the day he died. So, obviously he lied about his age to get in, and had a couple of bad days. There was a young man from around here, Randy Holmes, he hounded his parents to let him enlist because he was only 17. He went through apprentice seamen training, then he was ordered to the USS Oklahoma and he was in 2 weeks before Pearl Harbor. He was in it a couple days when it was bombed by the Japanese and capsized. [Editor's note Randy Jones was on the USS Oklahoma on December 7, 1941, and had only been in Pearl Harbor 2 weeks prior to that. Randy Holmes was from from Hudson Falls N.Y.] Interviewer (Matthew Rozell): He didn’t have much of a chance, did he? John Leary: No, no- he didn’t. Judge John Leary passed away on October 8, 2003.

The Road to Solar Power Hell

"The road to [ solar power] hell is paved with good intentions"  Grandma Honoragh and Karl Marx used to say. 

The Obama energy plan falls into that category.   We shouldn't put a straitjacket on our energy future.   As Doug MacEachern suggests (AZ Republic 8/10), natural gas needs to remain an important part of that future.  Take away natural gas, for example, and New England will freeze in the dark when winter rolls around.  Just imagine what it will be like shoveling off the solar panels after one of those famous blizzards hits Boston.   Sure new technology may make solar power practical, but new and practical alkylamine technology for CO2 removal is just as likely to make natural gas a completely clean fuel, and not just a "bridge to a renewable future."

Hiroshima: Columbia's Anti-American Canards

Columbia journalism professor and ex-SDS president Todd Gitlin claims (NY Times 8/11/15) that the Soviet Union's entry into World War II made it unnecessary for the US to drop atomic bombs on Japan, also claiming without substantive evidence that an invasion of Japan would have cost "only" 100,000 American lives.  Japan's horrific war that took  20,000,000 Chinese lives has been overshadowed by the Hiroshima debate and is now long forgotten.  When the atomic bombs were dropped, Japan's largest armies were still a menace in China and Korea.   Virtually no one remembers today that when the atom bombs were dropped,  Japan's most brilliant general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, was still undefeated in the Philippines.  He did not surrender until September of 1945.  It would have taken months, if not years, of devastating fighting to subdue the Japanese armies in China, Korea, the Philippines and still scattered across the Pacific.  Moreover, the Soviet Union had no maritime capability to invade the Japanese home islands.  That would have been left to American forces.   The invasion of the small island of Okinawa cost the US nearly 100,000 casualties.  It's egregiously disingenuous to claim that the far bigger task of invading Japan's home islands would have cost "only" 100,000 American lives.   In 1945 it was the responsibility of the US government to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible to save untold Chinese, Korean, American and, indeed, Japanese lives.

Gitlin's thoughts are really just more anti-American propaganda from the New York Times, Columbia University and the longtime fans of the old Soviet Union, which, in fact, as Hitler's original ally in the dismantling of Poland, was responsible for making World War II and the Holocaust a reality.  All of the horror that followed Poland would have been avoided but for Stalin's original sin: his alliances with Hitler and Japan.  Former SDS leader Gitlin should have explained why Stalin waited until August,1945, to declare war on Japan, instead pretending the Soviet Union's WWII perfidy never happened.

On the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII,  no one wants to talk about the Soviet Union's perfidy helping to start it.

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"My generation of the New Left — a generation that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on — relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss. All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked political correctness of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost — we squandered the politics — but won the textbooks."
-- Varieties of Patriotic Experience, Todd Gitlin, Professor & Chair, Ph.D. Program, Columbia Journalism School,

Platitudes: Challenges Gender-Role Convention

"Vikander's UNCLE spy challenges gender-role convention"
-- Bill Goodykoontz.

Bill Goodykootz lost me before he even got to say hello. Gender-role convention: the latest addition to the category of annoying political clichés and platitudes. Vikander is an actor in a spy fantasy movie, for heavens sake. I'm not going to take my daughter to it to show her she can work for the CIA... that date might be saved for Zero Dark Thirty, which I can guarantee you wouldn't interest her now. She's really smart. I bought her a Carnegie-Mellon robot kit to spend the summer with. She put the robot together in an hour, played with it for an afternoon and spent the rest of the summer knitting and reading girls books.

Here's a much better lead and way of dealing with Vikander and the movie, sans cliches:

"It is 8.15am, and Alicia Vikander – possibly the hottest young actress in the world right now – walks into a cafe near her home in north London and orders a coffee and chia porridge. She is 15 minutes early for our meeting..."

"Next month sees the delayed opening of her first blockbuster, Guy Ritchie's reworking of the 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. In this kind of film, we're used to female characters who exist solely to be the love interest, but Vikander's impossibly glamorous East German car mechanic is central to the action, while the bad guys are led by the equally glamorous Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki." Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/the-man-from-uncles-alicia-vikander-the-worlds-hottest-young-actress-20150805-girabt.html