I don't have a snappy opening today sorry, I am just too brained in my brain,
You know it seemed like when I was a little kid that we had national tragedies that were much differently defined than the kinds we have today. I'm not saying one or the other is better I'm just noting for the record that when I look back at my childhood years it seemed like the big stuff going on was really big stuff. I now know that it was just the events of the day being blanketed over by the ugly undertones of what was to come. We had the four major assassinations in the '60s, with Dr. King, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X all being shot and killed with about 5 years of each other.
We had an ugly war that cost us over 58,000 American soldiers and we really didn't achieve that much once it was all said and done, except maybe the development of a few new weapon systems. We had a civil rights movement that made major strides towards achieving racial equality and took definitive steps towards racial equity. We had a national discussion that thought long and hard about the role of women in our society and moved us toward an era where we are more equal than not. That's not all to be sure, I'm not trying to write a definitive treatise on any subject. It just felt like as a society we were trying to work out our differences.
I thought maybe we were on the right track.
In the world of today, we have anxiety so bad that seventh-graders take huge handguns and rifles to school and shoot up the school and kill their classmates. We have embraced divisiveness so deep that we talk the language of war when speaking of others with who we disagree. For really the first time that I can remember, there is open talk of insurrection and civil disobedience so strong that it smacks of a society that seeks to conquer itself. We have had open talks about movements within states in our union that seek to form separate countries of their own.
Like never before in our society has the lack of a national voice been so strong. In the past 20 years, there have been at least 25 incidents of deaths at the hands of authorities. There have been at least 10 deaths of police officers that I know of (and maybe more) where they were murdered in cold blood in the line of duty, where the criminals that shot them just walked up and pulled the trigger, while they were sitting at a stoplight, while they were pumping gas, while they were eating a meal in a restaurant, or while they were sitting somewhere at the end of their shift completing the paperwork necessary to end their day. It has happened so often that it is sad to say, it is no longer shocking and it damn well should be.
Now another death and another uprising that eventually will be quelled hopefully without the use of military force. Peace will finally be restored in Minnesota and elsewhere but I am not so naive as to think that will be the end of it. We had Rodney King and the LA riots some time ago and did that change anything?
There are lessons to be learned here I am sure, however, I'm also sure that as we speak there are forces gathering that see a conspiracy in every move. That sees an underlying agenda being directed from an unknown force being applied to push the population is a certain direction.
Sadly, that will not end unless and until we have a reason to act as one united people.
- The riots in Minnesota are NOT understandable but are somewhat of a given because of the gravity of the situation at hand there. What is not understandable is the connection being made between the man's death (George Floyd) and the people that are looting the Target at the mall, the young fellas who burned down the Auto Zone, or who were seen on cameras stealing TV's and electronics.
The peaceful and angry protests underway are good people doing what they think is right. Protesting tyranny is a given right enshrined in our deepest principles, much as is the freedom of speech. This part is democracy in action. We must accept the right to protest if we also accept the right of rule of law. You cannot have one without the other, because you really can't please everybody, all the time. Protesting is one of our deepest most closely held philosophies as a country.
I do not see the right to burn down an apartment building or smash windows in a beauty salon the same way. Nowhere in any of our founding documents does it say "When you are pissed off go steal liquor from the corner liquor store and when you have emptied it, burn it down to the ground."
Protesting is legal and protected free speech and should be.
Rioting and looting is felony criminal activity and those caught doing so belong in jail. - Every cop page I have seen on social media ( and there are a few) have decried the actions of the kneeling cop in Minnesota, who murdered George Floyd. And yes I said Murder because even if were deemed to be legal, it was still a murder by definition. When you cause the death of another that person has been murdered. Every Police officer I know (and I know several) has came out very strongly against what happened and has decried the actions taken by that officer as illegal and wrong. Not one Cop I have seen quoted has supported him. They are 100% against his tactics. Every one of them says he should be held accountable. Every single one of them has come out against what happened.
I am happy to see that and fully support their right to express their opinion about the matter. The saddest part for them is that now ALL of them know this and all of them must wear the stain of this death on their badges every time they strap on their weapons. Every time they dress for work, they know that every person who looks at them will wonder if they are like THAT guy.
There are a ton of good cops behind their badges on duty in America every day. I know a few of them. I respect them for the sacrifice they make every day, for the dangers they face, and am saddened by the CRAP they will now have to put up with because of cops like THAT guy.
See? This is the problem with the so-called "thin blue line", in protecting their "brother officers", they sometimes end up protecting a creep like this lousy piece of crap of a human being who could care less about whether someone he is arresting lives or dies. I guarantee there are stories out there (if you could get them to be told) of other excesses committed by this guy. I'm also sure there are stories about where other cops just stood there and felt like they could do nothing, because there is a culture in place almost everywhere that protects that kind of behavior.
Nobody wants to be the cop who calls for help and won't get any because the other cops know he stood up against a "fellow officer".
See? That's the problem, they are protecting the wrong guy. - A Mexican drug lord named Rafael Caro-Quintero has filed a plea argument in Federal District court in Mexico (Not here, we would laugh his ass out of the room) where he is claiming that he is too poor and too old and lacks a pension and he has no income and therefore because of that he should be "excused" from extradition to the US. He is wanted for drug trafficking and his involvement in the death of DEA agent Kiki Carmena.
I have never seen someone claim they were too broke to be prosecuted or too old to go to jail (he is 60 years old). He was "mistakenly" let out of prison in Mexico and remains at large where he is hiding out in the mountains with his large drug cartel involved family. It's funny how these guys in Mexico keep getting "accidentally" released from prison huh? - There are reportedly hundreds of tunnels along the US-Mexican border used by drug traffickers to smuggle all kinds of drugs and other contraband across the border. Everything from weed to sex slaves has been intercepted in these tunnels. There are so many of them that they call it the "Cocaine Alleyway", and dozens of them have been found and closed in recent years.
I have a novel idea. Let us use some of that spy gear stuff we have to locate every one of these tunnels of love and get rid of them all at once. We could put sensors in the ground all along the border and listen for digging and use some of those fancy-ass satellites to see the ground with ground-penetrating radar or some such high tech stuff and identify every one of those tunnels. Once we have identified them we tell Mexico to get every one of their citizens at least a mile away from the places where those tunnels are. We buy or condemn all the surrounding property and keep our folks away too and then guess what?
Carpet bomb that shit with about 10 million dollars of bunker-busting precision munitions from an overhead B-52 and then keep bombing that shit until we are sure we have collapsed every single tunnel. Quit playing cops and robbers with this stuff. If its a war on drugs, then by god, let's have a war.
I'll bet they stop using tunnels. - Since April 1st of this year, the US Navy and the US Coast Guard have been working together to stop narco drug trafficking on the open seas. Just in the last 6 weeks or so, they have reported stopping 3 Narco subs (not actually subs as they can't submerge completely), and have seized over 9,100 lbs of pure cocaine. I say step it up, guys, let's have a real war and go after where they build the subs in South America too. Use the same strategy as in my previous point.
I'm sick of this crap. Quit fooling around and get to it.
BigMike
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