Summer Camp

Why is it that we have to get our real news from the British press?  I guess that our national media is too concerned with more important things … like the Christie/Obama photo-op on the Jersey shore.  Anyhow, it seems that the hunger strike at our Guantanamo, Cuba prison camp for recalcitrant terrorists is getting worse … see: The Guardian Story.  And, of course, this has gotten the liberal nut-job protesters’ juices flowing.  There are now five prisoners in the hospital and 36 of them being force-fed.  My heart is bleeding a gush.

Unfortunately this article has a distinctly sympathetic bent … describing in detail the “humiliations” that these prisoners are experiencing … again, my heart is breaking.  My attitude toward Gitmo is that I can’t understand why all these prisoners have not been long ago tried in a military court … and a goodly portion of them made to smoke their last cigarette in front of a fusillade of rifles?  And why we would consider releasing any of these animals is beyond me.  The known recidivism rate among those who have already been freed is north of 30%.  I suspect that the real rate is a lot higher.

Perhaps I might have a solution for our pompous Prexy. Why don’t we just quietly depopulate all the guards from this posh summer camp … and then unleash multiple drone strikes on it?  How would this be any different from what we do in Yemen or Pakistan?

Assault Weapons

Bushmaster .223

As a result of the horror that transpired last Friday in Newtown, Connecticut (see: Huffington Post) Congress will very likely re-institute the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 … plus a few other palliative measures.  Will this stop such senseless violence?  Unlikely … certainly not the mayhem in the gangland battlegrounds like the south side of Chicago where dozens of teenagers die each week.  Even Connecticut currently has a state-wide ban on assault weapons.  This clearly did not stop Adam Lanza from his twisted vengeance.

But our short-sighted Washington solons will adjourn sometime in January after having put a plaster on the gaping wound of such insanity.  What they likely won’t address are:

-         the culture of extreme violence that pervades Hollywood, the U.S. computer-gaming industry, and all too much of our television programming

-         our country’s turning its back on our need for more mental-health institutions and a reasonable process for keeping our society’s blatantly-psychotic misfits from walking among us.  The notion that every weirdo needs to be “main-streamed” is a sick societal construct that is supported by … and supports the fringes of the  legal profession.  Nonsense!

-         a serious investigation into the effects of many of our psychiatric drugs on large populations of our male teenagers … particularly when dosages are varied or abandoned.  (I happen to believe this well could be the primary reason for the outbreaks of these teenage killings.  To me, there seems a correlation between the hyperbolic increased in the use of such drugs and these Columbine-type events.)

And lastly ... almost as an aside, I fully support the use of drone air-strikes on the hideouts of Muslim terrorists … who too often insinuate themselves among civilians … often resulting in the incidential killing of innocent young children.  With this, I wonder if President Obama thought of the tots that he has killed by proxy when he shed a tear for the youngsters massacred in Newtown, Connecticut?  Life is full of such enigmatic ironies.