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I have never owned a gun, my wife won't allow one in the house and when I served a brief stint in the Marine Corps, I never was able to hit the target with a 45. My Gunny Sergeant told me '...not to worry because I would not live long anyway.'
That said, our Founding Fathers understood we were a people who were suspicious of government and wanted to be able to protect ourselves and our property. After all we were Frontier Folk Thus, The Second Amendment, but I doubt Jefferson and other proponents anticipated the type of technology that permits guns to fire as rapidly as many do.
As I have written before, I doubt most gun owners would object to reasonable background checks and might even agree to limits of the type of weapons individuals could own. The problem with the latter suggestion is once you open the door you never know where the flood takes you..
Finally, we have ample evidence strict gun laws do not work because we have Chicago, Baltimore and D.C. All this talk about gun restrictions is another canard used by progressives and liberals to stir people up and cause divisions.
Gun control advocates have not offered anything practical, Constitutional or even effective. Until they propose rational solutions they should quit 'shooting' their mouths off and accept the fact we are a violent society, we are an increasingly dumb-ed down society and there is nothing they can do about this state of affairs, sad as it may be.
As for Obama , he is the worst offender but then, we know every thing with him is purposed to bear a political and divisive price and he always tends to "jump the gun!"
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So you do not think we are in a mess. Some impressive others do think we are in a mess. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Go see "The Intern." starring diNiro and Hathaway. Poignant melding and merging of generation disparity.
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We have been cleared to drive to Edisto but need to avoid high tide time.
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Dick
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1)
How we got to the Syria mess
AMERICANS AND Europeans are seeing the results of four years of U.S. disengagement in the Middle East. A country destroyed, with half its people displaced from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of refugees besieging an unready Europe. And now, Russian warplanes bombing U.S.-allied forces as American officials alternate between clucking reprovingly and insisting bravely that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be sorry in the end. That is a tempting dream, but it represents the same wishful thinking that got us here in the first place.
How did we get here? It’s worth recalling, briefly, a bit of history. When Secretary of State John F. Kerry took office at the beginning of President Obama’s second term, he argued that Syria could be saved only with a political solution: The United States did not want to repeat its Iraq mistake and chase President Bashar al-Assad and his regime out of office with nothing to take their place. But, he said, the regime would not negotiate seriously until its opposition was strengthened, and so Mr. Kerry and others in the administration favored U.S. assistance, including training for the rebels, protection of safe zones where they could begin to govern without fear of Mr. Assad’s barrel bombs and chlorine gas, some arms and other military aid.
Mr. Obama would never agree; or rather, sometimes he agreed, and failed to follow through, and sometimes he just said no. Mr. Kerry was left with no option but diplomacy, in particular begging Russia and Iran to bail him out. This was always based on a fantasy: An essential plank of the Putin ideology is to protect dictators wherever he can. Anything less could give his own people dangerous ideas. He toyed with the Obama administration for a few years and then took matters into his own hands. Of course he is not in Syria to destroy the Islamic State. He is there to save a dictator, while protecting Russia’s naval base on the Mediterranean coast.
It is tempting, as we say, to believe that this must end badly for the Russians. “They want this quagmire? Welcome to it!” And perhaps they will be bogged down and targeted at home by terrorists; we can’t foresee the future. Certainly U.S. officials are right that Russia’s actions will not be helpful to Syria. More and more Sunnis, seeing they have no protection elsewhere, will gravitate to the Islamic State as their only refuge. Radicalization will increase, and the prospects of a negotiated solution will recede.
But that is not Mr. Putin’s concern. Already he has forced the West to change its tune on Mr. Assad; he has to go, but “it doesn’t have to be done on day one, or month one, or whatever,” Mr. Kerry now says. Europeans, desperate for anything to end their refugee crisis, are wondering whether Russia might not offer a better bet than the United States. Mr. Putin has broken out of the isolation Mr. Obama tried to impose for Russia’s illegal dismemberment of Ukraine. And Russia’s lesson is not lost on people all over the world who might attempt to democratize their authoritarian countries: You cannot count on the United States, but your dictator can count on Russia.
Two things always have been true about Syria. First, there have been no good or easy policy options; and second, with time and inaction, the options become worse and harder. Today there are still things Mr. Obama could do: Carve out safe zones. Destroy the helicopter fleet Mr. Assad uses for his war crimes. Provide aid to the battle-hardened force of 25,000 fighters, mostly Kurdish, that, as Post columnist David Ignatius has reported, is ready to attack the Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa. As Russia deploys more air defenses to bolster the Assad regime, some of these options, too, will narrow and disappear. What will not disappear is the humanitarian catastrophe Syria represents, nor the national security threat emanating from its ruins.
Read more on this topic:
As I see it: Putin and the West’s moral vacuum
By MELANIE PHILLIPS,Any lingering doubt about the lethal weakness of America and the West has been brutally shot down in the skies above Syria.Russia’s President Putin sent in his warplanes ostensibly to bomb ISIS but actually, it seems, to bomb more moderate opponents of Syria’s President Assad, including CIA-trained rebels.Putin thus well and truly rubbed President Obama’s nose in American impotence. The Russian leader is now making the immensely dangerous running in Syria. Blindsided America is reduced to scrabbling frantically in his slipstream.Putin is ruthless and focused. Allying with Assad and the Iranian regime that pulls his strings, the Russian leader can pose – however preposterously – as the potential savior of the world from the Islamist specter that terrifies the West.By contrast, America and Britain are wildly flailing around. Obama and Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron say both ISIS and Assad must be defeated. But although they are taking ineffectual military action against ISIS, they won’t attack Assad.Instead, Obama has been reduced to pleading with Putin to restrain Assad’s worst excesses.But to topple Assad requires defeating the Iranian regime – which the US and UK have just empowered still further by capitulating over its nuclear program and gifting it billions in trade deals.This was all supposed to neutralize Iranian bellicosity. But some of those billions will be used to shore up Assad. No wonder Putin’s contempt for America is palpable.It is a commonplace that power abhors a vacuum. As is painfully obvious, this latter-day Russian czar is merely filling the empty space left by the retreat of Obama’s America from its historic role as freedom’s defender.But this vacuum goes far wider and deeper than Obama. It has resulted from the longterm cowardice, arrogance and moral confusion of the West.For decades, Islamists have been pursuing a twin-track agenda to conquer and Islamize the non-Islamic or not-Islamic-enough world.One track uses cultural invasion and takeover; the other uses violence and terrorism. The West has empowered both of them.Saudi Arabia, the world’s principal agent of Islamic conquest, is run by a brutal and barbaric regime. There is currently outrage at its plan to behead and crucify a political dissident, Ali Mohammed al Nimr.But what is the point of such protest given that British and American hands are deep in Saudi money? For sure, the balance between potential harm and benefit means that deals must sometimes be done with unsavoury regimes. Israel, for example, is reportedly allying with Saudi Arabia against Iran.This, however, is a move born of desperation.Israel is forced to form alliances wherever it can just to survive. It has been hung out to dry by America, and is being blackmailed by its supposed European allies to compromise its security with Palestinians out to destroy it.Those western allies have empowered not only terrorist Iran but also Saudi Arabia. In Britain and America, the Saudis have been allowed unhindered to fund extremist mosques and university departments of Islamic studies peddling a sanitised account of Islam.Grotesquely, Britain’s Ministry of Justice has negotiated a £5.9 million training contract with – of all things – the Saudi prison service, under which British officials presumably propose to help Saudi Arabia jail, flog, stone, amputate, behead and crucify people even more efficiently and effectively.Worse still is the elevation of the Saudi envoy to the UN Human Rights Council to head its committee dealing with global human rights standards. This obscene appointment was actually welcomed by the Obama administration.And reportedly Britain did a vote-trading deal with Saudi Arabia to ensure that both countries gained seats on the UNHRC in the first place for the 2014-2016 term.The UNHRC itself is a sick joke. Dominated by human rights abusers, it rarely acts against tyrannies but instead repeatedly and mendaciously bashes Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East.The UNHRC thus effectively condones violence around the world and abandons or punishes its victims. Yet by being members, the UK and US underwrite its legitimacy.The West never challenges the UNHRC’s patently corrupted authority. That’s because western liberals are blinded by shibboleths such as internationalism, their hatred of Israel and their worship of anti-normative, anti-western “human rights” doctrine.The result is that the West has got almost everything about the Muslim and Arab world totally wrong. Refusing to grasp the nature and global ambition of the Islamist onslaught, the West has unleashed chaos abroad and empowered those who would destroy it at home.But its culpability goes back much further. It has been excusing, condoning and incentivizing Arab terror for the best part of a century.In the 1930s, Britain reneged on its international treaty obligation to settle the Jews throughout what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Worse still, it proposed giving part of the Jews’ entitlement to the Arabs in a fruitless attempt to buy off their attempt to expel the Jewish presence from the land.This original “two-state solution” effectively rewarded and incited aggression and punished its victims. Britain, America and the EU continue those perverse incentives to this very day by their resolute whitewashing of Palestinian incitement to murder Israelis and steal their land – the real reason why the Arab war against Israel is a conflict without end.The reason the BDS movement and EU boycotts of Israel have taken hold is that the so-called allies of Israel refuse to tell the world that Palestinian identity is bogus and was invented solely to get gullible westerners to support the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from their own ancestral homeland.By failing to expose the Big Lies about Israel, the West is complicit in both the rise of anti-Jewish bigotry at home and the paranoid hysteria against Israel and the Jews coursing through the Arab and Muslim world.The paralysis of the West in the face of the chaos in the Middle East and the mass exodus of people from the developing world is causing some to predict the collapse of Europe (and the US isn’t immune from this cultural tsunami either).The real issue, though, is not so much mass migration as moral collapse. And anti-Jewish attitudes are at the very core of that collapse.The West followed its perpetration of and complicity in the Holocaust with an onslaught against the Mosaic laws at the root of western civilization. Those ethical codes were dumped in favor of self-gratification. Belief in western superiority over other cultures was replaced by moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism and defeatism.Both Obama and the British Labour party’s new unashamed Marxist leader, Jeremy Corbyn, are regarded by critics as some kind of aberration. They are not. They are merely extreme exemplars of the liberal mindset which is now bringing the West to its knees.Jews are understandably wary of making themselves the center of anyone else’s story.But they are inescapably at the epicenter of the West’s convulsions. The West will only save itself if it finally grasps that to do so it needs fully to embrace Israel and the Jewish story.
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