logo presents mollenhour
home     bulk purchases     brass-4-cash     about us     free targets     FAQs   contact button
  advanced search

post left image  

Lest We Forget

06/17/2013 @ 3:04pm
No Comments »

Killed in Afghanistan by suicide bombers using vehicle-borne IEDs, these three men from Fort Campbell.

The war is barely in the news.  Regardless, the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division deployed to Afghanistan, again.  The 4th Brigade includes the battalion I once served with during the post-Vietnam era, the 1st Battalion of the 506th Infantry Regiment.

There are many fine soldiers in many units and branches of the armed services; I am proud of them all.  I follow the Currahees of the 1/506th only because I more closely identify with the guys who wear the same battalion crest as I did.

For example, 2LT Sisson pictured here in the Fort Campbell Courier was only 23.  Might have been my son.  Some number of years ago, might have been me.

The military unit we shared in common is proud of its service during World War II, starting its history on D-Day.  The unit held a special ceremony in Afghanistan on the 6th of June, 2013, putting on the Screaming Eagle “combat patch” worn on the uniform’s right sleeve to note former combat service with that unit.  They did this in memory of other young Currahees, like the men who wore the patch when the unit jumped into Normandy.

506th Infantry Regiment Crest

506th Infantry Regiment Crest

 

If you are reading this, and know anyone who served with the 506th, or who is wearing the 101st’s Screaming Eagle patch and the Currahee crest right now, please direct them here or here; the 506th Airborne Infantry Regiment Association is reaching out to them, no matter when and where they served.

Rest in peace, Currahees.

 

post left image  

The Third Choice in The Great Islamic Civil War

06/17/2013 @ 10:20am
No Comments »

The Youtube video of Miss Alabama fielding a question over government intrusion into privacy is circulating.  Alabama quickly takes one of the two positions offered: feeling safe is more important to her than maintaining her personhood distinctly from “the state.”  Security over privacy.

Of course, she was offered only two choices: privacy versus security.  Let me expand on that: presented with what she incorrectly assumed was a forced choice between “privacy” and “security,” she was readily willing to forfeit her blood-bought status of a free citizen, in return for feeling safer from Islamic (Can we say that?) terrorists.

She blew it: she fell prey to the questioner presenting her with only two choices, when there are more.  Who could blame her?  We live in an over-institutionalized, conformist, dullard culture that praises lemming-like obedience to authority, and puts independent-thinkers on black lists to be singled out for harassment by the IRS.  It would be too much for her to refute the false premise of the question (that there are only two choices) and thrill the audience with refreshing, creative thinking that offered a third choice.

The third and better way is to point out that lackadaisical immigration and border security permitted the 19 hijackers to infiltrate our country with our permission: they held visas, issued by our State Department.  Even after 9-11, we continue to invite in people from heavily-Muslim countries, currently paving the way for thousands of Syrian refugees to land in the United States.  That seems nice, and we all want to be hospitable, but neither they nor we are able to tell who from among them arrives hating America already, primed for mass slaughter of the infidel.

I will say it again: the Islamic world is in civil war, seemingly without end.  It is tragic for the millions who just want to raise their families in peace.  But, we cannot end the Talibanization of the Muslim world for them.  If they want to live in some form of ordered liberty, then they must take arms and oppose their Muslim oppressors.  They must kill off the bombers, IED makers, and jihadists looking longingly at their presumed rewards in the next world.  Then, we in the west may normalize relations between our peoples.

In the meantime, until they sort it all out, we westerners do not have to open the gates so that their civil war spills over, into our own streets.  We do not have to do this.  Nothing compels us to do this.  It is insanity to invite the destruction of our own civilization, such as it is.

My Muslim readers who value the liberty that America’s founders carved out understand this, even though it would mean extra scrutiny of their own family members’ visa applications, perhaps even the denial of those applications.  But, if America does not see herself as having anything worth guarding and preserving, well, that is how nations fall.  Nations fall when their people no longer believe that their nation is worth preserving.  

Are we worth preserving?  Answer that question first, and the third option, the option Miss Alabama missed, becomes apparent. The crowd, though, cheered her.  Perhaps we are no longer worth preserving.

In the immediate future, preserving America means that liberty-loving Syrians should take up arms, resist evil, claim their own liberty, and stay in Syria.  Because, if thousands are granted permission to land here, among them will come young men who already hate America, and who then sit before Mullahs who urge them to earn eternal glory by blasting nails into crowds of Americans happily out for a Saturday morning.

post left image  

Another Reason Why the Income Tax Must Be Repealed

06/14/2013 @ 5:39pm
No Comments »

The IRS is watching you.  Not just picking on you to audit you.  Not just empowered to swoop down on you and seize your precious computer.  Watching you.  Thanks to Instapundit for the alert published in MSN Money. Read the rest of this entry »

post left image  

The 106 (Recoilless Rifle) Lives! And Kills.

06/12/2013 @ 7:18pm
No Comments »

I had fun writing about the return of the horrible-to-haul-around-but-devastating 90mm recoilless rifle.  Who would have thought—with the TOW and the Dragon and the AT-4 and the Javelin (super dooper, hyper-dyper, hi-technology anti-tank weapons of the Samsung vs. iPad era)—that the venerable M40 106mm recoilless rifle would be around?  Not only is the “one-oh-six” still around, it has made a comeback.  Check out the Danger Room article.

Note the spotting rifle on top.

Note the spotting rifle on top.

It’s pretty impressive to stalk up on one of these crews with their Jeep backed up into a camouflaged firing position.  It sports a .50 caliber “spotting rifle” atop the tube that fires the main, 106mm round.  The idea is to fire the ballistically-matched spotting round first, and if it pings off the tank, then shoot the anti-tank round.  Oh, boy.

Like the 9o, the backblast is horrific.  Don’t hang around behind the 106.

My favorite quote from the Danger Room article: “As weapons go, the M40 is almost amazingly crude.”

More pictures and details here.

post left image  

Dismantle the IRS?

06/10/2013 @ 8:28pm
No Comments »

I had written earlier that the problem with the IRS is not the IRS.   I am changing my mind, having learned the depth to which the Democrat Party infiltrated the IRS and used its offices, authority, and employees to oppress the political opposition. Read the rest of this entry »

post left image  

The Rail is Getting Crowded

06/10/2013 @ 6:26pm
1 Comment »

Douglas Schulman, Lois Lerner, and now Carter Hull: three IRS top employees our colonists would have tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail.

post left image  

Watching the Collapse of the Temple of Secular Legalism

06/10/2013 @ 11:14am
No Comments »

Secular legalism: the conviction that “the best people” can use agnostic government to solve all perceived problems by compelling public obedience.

Secular legalists use legislation, regulation, taxation, and litigation, ultimately enforcing these rules and court or agency orders by penalties, fines, military and police forces, and jail to compel obedience to secular legalist beliefs.  The principal manifestation of secular legalism is myriad rule-making, carried out by massive bureaucracy.  Secular legalists use persuasion also, but they are unconstrained by truth, since secular legalists believe themselves to be their own sufficient moral authority.  Finding, researching, discussing, and publicizing perceived problems is a major activity of the secular legalist movement.  Jealously guarding their authority over government offices, money, news, and the individual power of weapons-ownership, also characterizes their operations.  Where secular legalists cannot yet outlaw competing powers (for example, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to speak and write ideas freely, the right to pray and practice any non-statist religion, and the right to exercise dominion over personal property), they propagandize, form committees boards and movements, develop secret agendas, and insinuate their ideas to suppress competing movements through any means of compulsion available.

Secular legalism is distinguished from religious legalism in that religious legalists seek relationship with a higher power by obedience to elaborate constructs of religious rules, moral codes, or rites.  ”Earning your way to Heaven” is a description of a religious legalist’s belief and life.  Striving to earn God’s approval by ‘doing better’ or tithing illustrate the point.  Just like secular legalism frustrates its believers in the system’s failure, so does religious legalism frustrate its believers who can never do good enough.

Secular legalism is similar to dictatorship by committee.  It may maintain and present a form of elected representative government.  However, where secular legalism permeates a society, the elected representative government is largely subsumed by massive layers of permanent bureaucracy, fueled by taxes and debt.  The movie quote, “I’d rather be ruled over by one tyrant 3,000 miles away, than 3,000 tyrants one mile away,” elaborates the practical day-to-day reach of a secular legalist government.

What does the collapsing secular legalist temple look like?  Picture layer upon layer of cut stones reaching high into the sky, with legions of priests and priestesses in perpetual motion up and down the temple’s steps and throughout its passages.  Armed, uniformed guards stand watch at every doorway, permitting those who brandish the badge and trappings of the secular legalist order; others are turned away except from “designated public areas.”

Each stone is a rule.  Groupings of stones are statutes.  Levels represent the enormous collection of land, equipment, and people necessary to inflict all of the rules on “the public.”  During the age when the temple was much smaller, and its priesthood few in number, “the public” was defined generally as the people of the nation; with the growth in numbers and the seemingly boundless scope of the religious order’s power, the meaning of the word has transformed gradually to mean those of the “non-priesthood,” with connotations of derision and suspicion.

Tithes are extracted by force.

And the temple of this religion is collapsing onto the people who make up its religious order.  The falling stones tumble outward onto its worshipers.  Some get crushed; some watch and marvel.

For, in the end we see, they worship themselves, and “they” are no better than the rest of us.

I will refer to the scandals of this administration simply as “the scandals” because they are now almost too many to keep up with.  Besides, rather than representing individual government parts-corrosion and breakage, President Obama’s scandals represent the very nature of government permitted to go wild.  Believers in secular legalism who think must be in dismay; their people populate the government; their ideas are preached by the press every day; crises—they think—cry out for “solutions” and solutions come from their ranks and priesthood.  Don’t they?

Government at best is a misbehaved child.  At its worst, it is an island ruled by the Lord of the Flies—run by bullies.

From crime control to jobs, it has become manifest even to America’s secular legalists that their gods are false.  Some, of course, will never acknowledge their temple’s deterioration, demanding instead that every crumbled corner be re-constructed and that the temple and priesthood be expanded.  Dissenters in the public must be watched and suppressed.  Other, more sober people in the crowd of secular legalist worshipers look on with wide eyes, finally beginning to comprehend that the old order was no marvel of human achievement after all.  Their religion is shaken: they see their temple as beyond repair, their god perhaps even nakedly grotesque.  They have been taught so long to shun “them” (those non-government people in “the public”) but, some of the ideas from “the public” actually start to make sense.  Some of the old religion’s key tenets now threaten imminent disaster.  And, some of the priesthood’s responses become downright scary.

And so, we witness the collapse of western secular legalism.  You and I are privileged to see it.  Deception, corruption, arrogance, absurdity, bankruptcy and outright seizure of ever more and more power are finally so out in the open that the tide is turning against the intoxicating religion that made little gods of “us.”  Our founders knew this, and handed us our constitutional republic bought in blood.  Though the lessons of history confirmed them, we somehow lost their knowledge.  The collapse of the temple of the religion of secularism should be no surprise.  But it is, both to its worshipers, and to those who are pleasantly surprised by the demise of secular legalist power that seemed so inevitable.

Never gloat: “we” have nothing to gloat about.  It is the nature of man given the power to govern over man, that we must guard against, whether “our men” or “their men.”  The taste of power works ugly changes on whomever drinks the wine too fully.  And, it is an enticing wine, indeed.

Limited self-government: because life without government is anarchy on the short march to tyranny, but we create our own tyrants when we trust our government too much.

post left image  

D-Day, June 6, 1944

06/6/2013 @ 8:03pm
1 Comment »

Omaha Beach, Normandy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This day, 1944, across this beach, into the guns atop the high ground.

post left image  

Need a good job?

06/5/2013 @ 4:26pm
No Comments »

LuckyGunner has an opening.

post left image  

MJM Performs a Miracle

06/5/2013 @ 2:46pm
2 Comments »

Friend bought used M-1 carbine.  He was outdoors shooting and the rear sight fell off of it sometime after shooting, as he was packing up his guns and gear.

I was unaware he had lost it.  But, later, I was outdoors shooting at the same location, when I looked down, and saw it on the ground.

So, today, I performed a miracle.  I restored his sight.

about the author


arcturus

arcturus

download_for_free

Invite a Friend!




Links

Search the Blog

   

Archives