THE 70'S LIVE! RAINY DAY ROCKFORD FILES

 Hey, it's the 70's! I can smoke a cigarette...on TV...while driving!

After ten days of snow and rain, followed by a couple days of high wind warnings, then going back to snow and rain, I started going stir crazy not being able to do much of anything outside. So I broke down and turned on the TV.          
          Other than in the evenings with my wife, I seldom, if ever, watch TV. We have a dish, not being able to pick up any TV stations out here in the sticks otherwise, but even when I’m really bored I can’t seem to find anything worth watching while flipping through the approximately 9,432 channels available.
          In desperation one day last week, as the sleet came down horizontally against the window, I just happened to surf through the old TV series available on Netflix Instant. It wasn't looking a whole lot better than the dish. Most of the series I saw fell into the category, "Hated it when it was on, why the hell would I want to see it again?"

          Suddenly, there was James Garner's face, looking kind of cocky and bemused, an orange Pacific sunset in the background, and over it all were transposed the words The Rockford Files. Things suddenly seemed a little brighter. I sat down with the remote, picked a random episode, and started watching.

          It was kind of like catching up with an old friend. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore. James Garner as private investigator Jim Rockford was always the epitome of cool; women wanted him and men wanted to be like him. I still love to hear that Mike Post/John Carpenter theme song with the electric guitar and harmonica. Yeah, the loud 1970’s wardrobes are appropriately cheesy, the cars are old road-oiling Detroit dinosaurs, and the haircuts atrocious, but so what? It was just as good as I recalled, perhaps even better now.

          For starters, I didn’t remember the show being so gritty. The world is out to screw you and people can’t be trusted; Jim Rockford knows this well and acts accordingly. He’s not a glamor boy; he wears cheap sports jackets and lives in a piece of shit old trailerhouse on the edge of a parking lot at the beach. Creditors and bookies fill the telephone answering machine, something that was state-of-the-art technology at the time. 
          "This is the message phone company. I see you're using our unit, now how about paying for it?"

Jim is definitely his own man. Jim is a smartass and does not play well with others. When it pays to be tough and sarcastic, Jim is tough and sarcastic. When it pays to be tactful and polite, Jim is tough and sarcastic. Even if he knows the toes he steps on today are attached to the ass he will have to kiss tomorrow, he goes right ahead and stomps on those toes anyway.

          We know Jim served time in prison, San Quentin, something unheard of for a television good guy at the time. I don’t remember the show ever coming right out and saying what he went to prison for, but we get the distinct impression it was a bum rap. Jim is more than happy to put to good use all those little cons’ tricks of the trade he learned in prison in his new profession.

Jim fought in Korea, where we get the idea he was one of those soldiers who got promoted in combat and busted as soon as his unit pulled back far enough to be out of earshot of small arms fire. Field Marshall Sir Earl Wavell once defined the ideal infantryman as “cat-burglar, gunman, and poacher” with“ a seasoning of devilry.” He was talking about guys like Jim Rockford, guys who win the war against the enemy but lose the peace against the system.
          When the beautiful young damsels in distress used to come up to good old Thomas Magnum, P.I. with fluttering eye lashes and a sob story, he used to fall for them instantly, hook, line and sinker. When one comes to Jim he immediately starts grilling her and trying to trip her up on her story to see whether the bitch is actually just trying to run some kind of con on him. Actually not a bad policy when it comes to strange women, or even not-so-strange women for that matter. My wife excepted, of course.

 Jim doesn’t trust anybody, not easily, except for his dad Rocky, a retired trucker who’d rather be fishing. Even old prison or army buddies who come to Jim for help usually don’t get much traction until they show him some cash. If it’s a check, they have to wait till it clears the bank.

 Wisely, he doesn’t even trust cops or government agents whom he doesn’t know, only his long-suffering old buddy LAPD Sgt. Dennis Becker. I’m kinda getting that way myself, when I get out of my own county where I don’t know the sheriff and most of the deputies on a first name basis. Especially in big cities. Big city and federal prosecutors often prefer “easy-to-catch” to “actually guilty” when it comes to resume building or preparing to run for office.

          The Federal agents Jim meets are sometimes crooked and almost always arrogant and overbearing. They are more than happy to overstep their bounds and step all over Jim’s Constitutional rights simply because they've gotten away with such behavior in the past. Jim is always quick and loud in reminding them of his rights, as is his attorney Beth Davenport (whom someone around here used to have a crush on when he was a pup) and I've even heard them say the "C" word right out loud. On television! Jim is also more than happy to trip up the “friendly” feds to get them out of his way and ready to figure out how to set the crooked ones up to get busted, with a little help from honest cop Dennis.

          In today’s television world, cops and government agents are expected to shit all over the Constitution in every episode. They stomp all over everybody’s Civil Rights, deliberately break every rule in the book, and get extra points for every Amendment they ignore and all the while we've been conditioned to cheer them on as they do. All is forgiven as long as you catch the bad guy in the end, even if you destroy the Republic and leave behind entire cities in cratered ruins in the process.(Just don't falsely accuse a Muslim, the one cardinal sin!)

          On the other end of things, Jim knows that the rules which the system tries to enforce upon him are bullshit. He knows damn well he’s breaking the law when he takes that little Colt .38 snubbie revolver out of the cookie jar and slips it into his waistband. And he doesn’t care. Neither does Dennis when nobody else is looking. Permit? We don' need no steenkin' permit.          
          Jim can handle a gun, but he can't shoot it out successfully against a half a dozen Mafia enforcers with sub-machine guns and chopped .30 carbines (AK-47s were restricted to use by Commie guerrillas in distant lands in the 1970's). Although I did see one episode where Producer Stephen Cannell must have been smoking a little weed; Jim takes out a guy clean at about a hundred yards with his 2-inch .38 snubbie. Hey, not even I'm that good. Maybe Chuck Norris.

          Jim’s a tough guy, but he can’t take out a half a dozen bad guys at once with perfect right crosses and roundhouse kicks in a 2-minute brawl.  In fact, Jim gets the shit kicked out of him on a fairly regular basis. When Jim fights, he fights dirty to inflict hurt on the other guy to keep that other guy from doing the same to him, which is what fights really come down to in the real world.

        Car chases were a bit more realistic in those days. Jim’s a wheel man, but doesn’t perform any flaming five hundred foot jumps through streams of tracer fire between exploding parking garages. He drives that famous gold Pontiac Firebird, and supposedly James Garner did his own driving for the show, as well as other stunts. When pursued, he’d power brake to a stop, throw it in reverse, race through the bad guys backwards, then crank the wheel hard right over and spin around. It's a real evasive driving move and we actually used to call the maneuver “whipping a Rockford”. 
          Not that Jim always got away. The pursuers were, after all, driving those big old lumbering 1970’s gas-guzzling American-made tanks, when engines were defined by horsepower rather than voltage, and people actually wanted to purchase them.
          So, the next time there's nothing good on television (which is pretty much anytime Duck Dynasty or Swamp People isn't on) time-travel back to the 70's and give ol' Jim Rockford a call. If he's not there, leave your name and message and he'll get back to you.

HAS AUSSIE JIM BEEN IN RUSSIA LATELY?

Russia’s Pulkovo Observatory: “We could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.”

Scientists at Russia’s famous Pulkovo Observatory are convinced that the world is in for a period of global cooling.

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.

LINKIE

IN DEFENSE OF CHECHENS

Today, we'll include a column from a very Special Guest who'll shed some light on Chechnya, a place most Americans had  never even heard of until last week.

Americans are, in general, ignorant. Especially of anything outside of America, which sometimes to them can include Alaska and Hawaii. Ignorant to to the point of stupidity and blissfully ignorant. We even have numerous large government entities, such as the Department of Education, as well as a dedicated state-run media to keep us blissfully ignorant.

Since they don't know their own history, we can hardly expect the sheeple to have any knowledge of someone else's history. Or even geographical location. Or existence. Today, I kid you not, the Czechs are frustrated as hell because Americans can't figure out the difference between "Czech" and "Chechen". If we start talking about Grozny, expect to hear lots of Americans saying, "Gesundheit" immediately afterwards.

As part of general world history, both of the places mentioned above, as well as the Korean Peninsula, India-Pakistan, parts of Africa, most of eastern Europe as well as large portions of the Middle East have seen copious amounts of blood shed over the years for various causes. For the past century or so this has been thanks in no small part to large military super powers (UK, USA, USSR) who, immediately following world wars, arrogantly and almost arbitrarily draw imaginary lines on maps to create instant nation-states which appear to conveniently suit their own foreign policy needs at the moment.

PARIS, 1919: "Hey look! Here are three separate groups of a few million people who have distinctly different cultures, are geographically isolated from one another and all hate each others guts with a passion! Let's draw a line around them all and call it Iraq!"

"Sounds good. Should we consult anyone who lives there?"

"No, that sounds like a great deal of bother and it's almost time for tea."

I caught a bit of Hannity's talk show Voice of the RNC on the truck radio yesterday while on my weekly trip to the town dump (I live an exciting life). Apparently, I'm no longer a "conservative" because, strangely, I don't believe boy bomber Tsarnaev should be tried as an "enemy combatant". He was and is an American citizen at the time of his crime, so he should be afforded all the rights of an American citizen when tried, although realistically I know that some citizens are more equal than others in our increasingly dyslexic federal criminal justice system. I just don't think foreign nationals/non-citizens should be accorded any of the same rights and "protections" of an actual American citizen, whether they are blowing up people, sneaking into the country illegally, or just getting you and I to pay for their healthcare. Hence, were big brother Tsarnaev alive he would be an "enemy combatant" as he had never gotten his citizenship. You either are one or you ain't one, simple as that.

I'm not particularly anti-Chechen either. In general, I sympathize with a smaller country seeking independence from a larger, heavily-armed neighbor.

I am anti-Islamic; I don't believe it to even remotely resemble a "Religion of Peace". By its own holy tenets it calls for conversion, enslavement, or death for all of us infidels, the "vilest of animals", whom God does not even love. Hey, if you want to go back to the Eleventh Century and treat women like meat, be my guest, just don't include me and mine in your little plans. But that's a cat we'll skin some other time.

However, I am also in total agreement with our guest and with David Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla theory, in that Super-powers sending troops to invade and then occupy foreign countries for years or even decades, whether under the guise of "keeping the peace", "fighting terrorism" or "installing democracy" does nothing but create more jihadists by the bushel. It doesn't matter whether you're talking T-80s and Hinds in Grozny or M1 Abrams and Apaches in Baghdad.

Even non-Muslims will get pissed off when you invade their homeland. Consider the barefoot, dirt-poor Confederate private captured after a battle in Georgia during the American Civil War. A Union officer noted that he obviously did not own slaves, and never would, so why was he fighting? "I'm fighting because you're down here." If a battalion of Pakistani troops came and occupied our town tomorrow, you can bet your ass I'd be one of the first in line to go shoot at them.

Since we'll never get national governments, let alone world governments, (and at least one major religion) to stop interfering in other country's and people's affairs, I'll finally put you into the hands of our Special Guest Columnist who can at least explain what can happen as a result of such meddling. Our guest has considerable knowledge of and has traveled extensively in Russia and many parts of the former Soviet Union both before and after the collapse of Communism there. Our guest can not only locate places like Kyrgyzstan, Tbilisi or Azerbaijan on a map, but can also correctly pronounce them. We don't don't let just anybody in here, so listen up.

I used your Christmas present to buy Gulag, by Anne Appelbaum, which I would recommend to you if you don't mind 600 pages of gruelingly depressing reading.  I was reading it at the same time that a Holocaust speaker came to Cedar Rapids, and I was struck by how much we know about the Holocaust, and how little we ever hear about the Gulags and exiles of Soviet times.  Anyhow, this leads me to your blog.

I am  afraid to post to your blog, [Probably because Ben is so mean-Ed] but I feel the Chechens in general (not the Tsarnaev brothers, who seem to be pretty much evil and sociopathic) have gotten a bad rap.  I would argue that the Russian approach to Chechnya helped turn a mostly secular national movement into a holy war with support from throughout the Muslim world.

When the Soviet Union began splitting up in 1991, the Chechens, who had never really wanted to be part of Russia or the Soviet Union used this as a chance to try to declare independence.  While the Chechens were historically Muslim, Islam in the Caucasus was traditionally a fairly tolerant and mild religion, nothing like the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia or Taliban in Afghanistan.  During the years of Soviet rule, much of the population had become pretty secular and the leader of the independence movement was Djokhar Dudaev, a former Soviet general married to a blond Lutheran from Estonia.

During the first Chechen war in the 90s, the Russian troops were underfunded, demoralized, and ill-equipped to fight with the guerrillas. They used carpet bombing and massive aerial strikes, killing civilians and rendering cities and villages uninhabitable. There were many documented instances of Russian troops, sometimes irregulars from neighboring republics, raping women and girls and slaughtering civilians. At one point, something like 40% of the population of the country was displaced, many of them in IDP or refugee camps.   To the best of my knowledge, the first Chechen attack on a civilian target (a horrible hostage-taking at a hospital in Budyonovsk) in greater Russia didn't happen until 1995, as a way of forcing Yeltsin to negotiate more seriously.  The mistreatment of Muslims in Chechnya and Bosnia were endlessly used as propaganda to fan pan-Islamic hatred of the West and lead to calls for jihad.
The first Chechen war helped set the stage for the later terrorist acts, general lawlessness, and kidnappings and hostage-takings that have made Chechnya ungovernable until this day and spread into the rest of the region. The second Chechen war had much more of an Islamic character.  The current president, appointed by the Russian government and not elected by the Chechen people, is supposedly Muslim and is in favor of outward displays of Islam like the hijab, but has also been implicated in corruption and human rights violations.

And why were the Tsarnaevs in Kyrgyzstan?

During the 40s, virtually the entire Chechen and Ingush populations (men, women, children, elderly and invalids) were deported thousands of miles to the Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Siberian steppes, traveling in unheated cattle cars and often without food, water, or toilets. They were dumped in villages with no supplies, and with a local population that was already underfed and lacking resources, didn't share a common language, and didn't want them there. Of course, many died in transport or in exile, before finally being allowed to return to Chechnya after 1956. Many returned to find their homes and farms claimed by someone else. 

Those who stayed in Central Asia often experienced mistrust and discrimination.  Although the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are also Muslim, the cultures don't have much in common.  During Soviet times, ethnic Russians were often favored for jobs or educational opportunities; after independence, ethnic Kyrgyz or Kazakhs had the upper hand.

So, I'm not writing this because this sad history excuses what the Tsarnaevs did, but I hate to see an entire people labeled as terrorists.  I have met only a few Chechens, but they were warm, hospitable, and deeply honorable people. 

The Battle Rifle

I made this with Bawb's devotion to the old order in mind.

 

THE TERRORISTS HAVE ALREADY WON

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

First accelerating after 9/11 with the Bush Administration and the odious, misnamed Patriot Act and creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and then re-doubling again with the beginning of the reign of the untouchable Barack Obama, the federal government has been usurping power, demanding money, and trampling upon American rights at an unprecedented rate. Fed.gov has dozens, nay hundreds of agencies, employing millions, a giant jumbo-sized serving of alphabet soup. Most of these agencies are supposedly tasked with keeping our citizens safe or protecting the rule of law or both, quite often redundantly via multiple agencies.

Recently, every last one of them failed us…disastrously…again.

          One of the few things the Constitution tasks specifically to the federal government is the important mission of securing our borders. They do not, sometimes through incompetence and now increasingly through malfeasance originating within the federal government itself, instigated for political gain by men and women in the highest elected offices in the country. Our borders were wide open to two Muslim “political refugees” coming from a Chechen enclave in Kyrgyzstan. Chechnya remains the hottest hotbed of Islamic terrorism in Europe; at the time the bombers emigrated, the capital city of Grozny still lay in ruins after a months-long war between jihadists and the Russian Army. Just like our borders, the doors of Cambridge University, an elite institute of “learning” barred to the vast majority of American students, swung wide open for one of the two future terrorists.

          Through the years, the terrorists couldn’t help but to leave clues concerning the direction they were taking. In various netherworlds, vast, expensive and redundant government entities look down upon us all in Orwellian fashion, listening to our conversations, monitoring our every activity on-line, seeing what we purchase, following the GPS on our automobiles, keeping track and, perhaps more importantly to them, keeping score. They constantly demand more and more access…for instance, the IRS said just weeks ago that they do not need a warrant to intercept and read your personal email…to the last remnants of personal privacy, a right of the citizen ostensively protected by the government. All of these powers failed to notice as the bombers posted YouTube videos glorifying bombings in the name of Allah or songs like “I Will Dedicate my Life to Jihad!” or links to known radical jihadist clerics. The powers that be were too busy at the time working with the military and “intelligence sources” like the SPLC to develop profiles of real terrorists, such as “Roman Catholics” or “Evangelical Christians”, to put on government watch lists.

          The Russian Army fought another war in Chechnya against jihadists, this one leaving the confines of Grozny and spreading across the entire country. The American government, press and people did not seem to notice. A Russian intelligence agency contacted the American government, voicing concerns over ties between one of the bombers and Chechen Islamic terrorist organizations.  The American FBI found nothing of concern. Afterwards, one bomber flew out of the United States to visit “Russia”, after which he disappeared into Chechnya and Dagestan. A half a year later he came back through American Customs and Immigrations, DHS, FBI, TSA, etc. to find wide open arms and no questions, even though he was still not traveling as an American citizen.

The government agency charged with alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives does not prosecute over 99% of the criminals caught in the act of attempting to illegally purchase firearms and knowingly allowed thousands of firearms into the hands of Mexican drug cartels where they have been used to inflict some 400+ Mexican and American deaths. It should come as no surprise that this same agency also fail to notice or prevent the terrorists from building their bombs with what a recent police report now says were “military grade” explosives.

After the bombs went off, when the première federal government law enforcement agency had identified the bombers, at first they would not release photographs of them for fear of being politically incorrect. Initially, the only description they would cautiously release was to refer to the bombers as “dark-skinned”. Perhaps had their faces and descriptions been known and released earlier, the police officer who approached them while they sought to plant more bombs at the MIT campus might have been more cautious and not been shot to death by the “boys”.

They hijacked an SUV belonging to some citizen the government obviously failed to protect and fled MIT, tossing bombs out the window, severely wounding one of the pursuing police officers. The older bother was fatally wounded by police in the chase. The younger escaped.

A major American city of some three million people is besieged, not by the bombers or by an invading army, but by the government agencies still “protecting” them. Businesses are forced to close, transportation grinds to a standstill, people are imprisoned within their own homes, again not by the bombers but by the government. An army…9,000 law enforcement agents of various types, complete with armored vehicles mounting machine guns and covered by an umbrella of helicopters…march like Gestapo through residential neighborhoods of quiet, law-abiding citizens, entering homes and conducting warrantless searches at will, or pulling entire families from their homes on a whim, with no regard for the 4^th Amendment and any of the other “safeguards” the government says will protect us. The terrorist remains at large despite the massive curfew and manhunt.

 


LiveLeak.com - Family ripped from their home at gunpoint; Police storm the property looking for terrorists

 Ooops. Sorry. Wrong number. Our bad.

When an average citizen is finally allowed by the government to leave his own house, he goes to smoke a cigarette in his own backyard and thus tracks down the lone fugitive that nine thousand heavily armed trained government professionals could not.

In response, the well-conditioned sheeple of Massachusetts cheer the government which failed them every step of the way.

If you believe now that we need still more laws, more government agencies, more government agents, more military weapons in the hands of same, more taxes to support their growth, less privacy and fewer Constitutional rights, then yes, the terrorists have already won.