Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Russia’s next move: Svalbard

Posted: February 15, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
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Abandoned Russian mining town on Svalbard
By Bjoertvedt – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

We will continue to watch Russia divide up Ukraine into pieces until it is essentially Russian territory, and as I previously noted, don’t be surprised when Russia moves into Central Asia. But for anyone that thinks Russia will hesitate against a NATO ally, I say, look to Norway. Because it is here that Russia is beginning its information drumbeat to take territory.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide and Justic Minister Monica Maeland wrote an op-ed in VG titled “Svalbard Treaty 100 Years.” The discussion focused on a resource discussion, because while the treaty gave Svalbard to Norway, it allowed treaty signatories rights to fishing, hunting, and mineral resources. At the time, the Soviet Union continued to call the island Spitsbergen and kept repeating the claim they had discovered it first.

Flash forward, and Russia responded to the op-ed on the news site E24. First they claimed that Norway was ignoring their concerns over Spitsbergen. They also point out that Svalbard “is not originally Norwegian territory,” and that only Russia and Norway have commercial interests on the island. Russia operates a defunct coal mine on the island, which loses money every year, simply to maintain this claim.

If this sounds like Ukraine and Georgia, you’re catching on. While we might be a bit far away from a Russia land-grab on Svalbard, we are in the setup phase. I see Russia first making claims that Svalbard is a Russia-Norway issue. They don’t want NATO involved, and since the treaty was made before NATO, they’ll use that as a wedge to keep other countries out. Then we’ll start seeing stories about Norwegian “atrocities” against the approximately 400 Russians that live on the island. As a side bonus, we might see Russia make claims that the tourism is causing negative climate change, so only someone that cares about the environment like Russia should be in charge.

While not on the same level as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Russia has found an opening in Norway, and it will settle in for a long fight to take away territory and chip at the NATO alliance.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The Octave of Romano’s Market: Saturday, The Family 117 Years and Done!

Posted: February 15, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

If Friday’s at Romano’s was a time of fellowship Saturdays was a time of Family.

That because Mike’s sons Josh Romano and Todd Romano would be in the house working alongside their father.

Both have full time jobs. Josh is a School Principal in Winchester and a former Major in the Army who had deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gitmo Todd is in sales, but when Saturday came they became the local butchers along with their father as they had since they were very young. During the busy season you would also see son CJ and before she got married his daughter and occasionally his wife would be down too.

Just about every grandchild in the family who was old enough has worked behind that counter or at the cash register. If Mike had lived a few years longer you never know if one of them might have decided to take the work on themselves, or perhaps open a couple of days a week

And there were folks like Katie who had been there for years, and Michelle who has worked there for the last ten and carried the ball all this week working. Occasionally the thought came that they might keep up the business, but the same two problems came up.

You couldn’t have a part time butcher shop because of spoilage. The meat has to be sold and sold within a specific period of time. Even closing Sundays posed a problem along those lines after the funeral and as for another person taking over, once the Business was sold 100 years of updated laws that Romano’s had been grandfathered in would have to be observed by the new owners. Combined with the cost of buying the business it became prohibitave.

So for the last time today I will buy a steak and some hamburg and enjoy the meats that I’ve eaten for the nearly three decades that I’ve lived in this neighborhood, but that loss will pale before the lost of the people that I whose faces I’ve seen for decades, the boys and girls who have grown into men and women with kids of their own and who have watch my own kids grow from being carried into the shop to coming in to do their own shopping.

They are like a family and I will miss them an awful lot and I suspect that as much as we all will miss Mike, the loss of that entire extended family will be the thing that me, mine and I suspect hundreds of others will miss the most.

I thank the all the Romano’s for letting me & mine be a part of it.

And Josh and the Romano’s would like to thank you too

The Smart Bloomberg Argument: Black Victims Matter

Posted: February 14, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Mike Bloomberg is having a bit of a bother over his statements concerning Stop and Frisk when he was mayor of New York. (He must have anticipated these problems as he asked that there not be video of same).

Ann Coulter had plenty to say on the matter:

To stop crime, he said, you “put a lot of cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.”

Bloomberg further explained that frisking young black and brown men for minor crimes is how you keep guns off the streets generally: “And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them. And then they start, they say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.”

Does anyone with a functioning frontal lobe disagree with this?

This instantly brought to mind something I read Bernie Goldberg’s classic book Bias about covering riots in a predominantly black country where his video had been rejected by the network because the people being arrested were black.

He pointed out that yes the perps were black, and so were the the owners of the shops that were being looted and so were the police who were arresting them.

This brings up a fact that is usually ignored concerning policing in minority neighborhoods when loud complaints are made concerning it.

The vast majority of victims of these perps are black and that when you use aggressive policing in minority neighborhoods where crime is high, the lives you are saving are black lives who would otherwise be the victim of violent crime , robbery, extortion etc etc etc.

Coulter again:

By pursuing the wacky idea of having cops frisk kids in high-crime areas for minor offenses like turnstile jumping, Mayor Rudy Giuliani cut the murder rate from more than 2,000 per year to about 600. No one thought it could possibly go any lower — and then Bloomberg got murders down to an unfathomable 300 or so per year.

Giuliani and Bloomberg did more for young minorities than all living Democrats combined. In New York City alone, at least 20,000 more black men are alive today than would be under the genius crime-fighting ideas of prior administrations 

Or in other words while activists scream “black lives matter” to Rudy and Bloomberg at the time, black lives actually mattered so they acted to preserve the black victims of these crimes.

Now it’s true that you have to look at individuals and you can’t nor should base policing on race it should be based on fact.

So here is the fact, if a particular neighborhood is where the crime is and the victims of said crime are the people of said neighborhood that’s where you deploy your police to stop it and you police that neighborhood aggressively if it’s a high crime neighborhood if you want to protect the potential victims of said crime no matter what the race of the people involved.

That is, you do if you think black victims matter.

Apparently said victims did when Bloomberg was the Mayor of NY, but now that he is running for president black votes in the Democrat primaries matter more than black lives did in NYC

Unexpectedly of course.

Equity – The latest hot concept in progressive indoctrination

Posted: February 13, 2020 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Progressive indoctrination in the United States was once confined primarily to colleges and universities.  It has now infected grade schools and high schools across this nation.  The purpose of this indoctrination is to convert this nation from a liberty based free market nation into a Marxist nation.   This is chronicled in the Townhall article; Marxism Sugarcoated And Forcefed To Schoolchildren As ‘Equity’

American elementary schools have spent the past decade rapidly introducing leftist and socialist curricula into classrooms of little children. This type of leftist propagandization was previously reserved for older children in colleges and high schools. But the Obama era, followed by the shock of Trump’s election, catalyzed a more emboldened approach for leftist pedagogy. 

The progressive indoctrination has been spread through our schools by using many different warm and fuzzy sounding phrases and buzzwords.  This is a subject I’ve studied in great detail online and have covered it on several occasions on this website.  The concept of equity versus equality is a new one to me even though I’ve encountered many examples over the years.   Here is how it is defined by the author of the Townhall article:

Enter the new era of socialist propagandization of children: “equity.” Equity is taught as a type of superior fairness. It replaces the now archaic concept of equality. Equality is explained to our children as “generic” and “equal,” apparently bad things, while equity is pedestaled as “fair. ” You see, equality means that everyone has the same, equal opportunities, but this leads to unequal results. Equity, on the other hand, ensures identical results and thus leads to “fair” outcomes. The idea that America should offer equality of opportunity, not equality of result, is now dead, and has been replaced with the reverse standard – that America should offer equality of result. 

This nation was founded on the concept of each and every individual being created equal, we are all familiar with that most important line from the Declaration of Independence.  Hopefully it is still being taught in schools.  With the sad state of public school education you just don’t know.

The founders of this nation all knew that because every individual is truly unique, everyone with different talents, intellect, skills, and ambitions, every individual will achieve different levels of prosperity in a truly free society, with a free market economy.   They firmly believed that even though some individuals would achieve a higher standard of living than others, there was no better system.  Their belief in the rightness of that system is based on the fact that government force and coercion would be needed to guarantee equal outcomes for every individual.   They knew that money or other property would have to be forcibly taken from individuals with more wealth and redistributed to those who have less.  This is true in the United States thanks to the progressive income tax and redistributive welfare programs. If you don’t think force and coercion are involved here in this country try not paying your taxes. 

Like all indoctrination, clever and subtle messages are the most effective way to implement it such as this:

To teach the concept, children are shown an example of three kids trying to look over a fence: a short, medium, and tall child. In the first slide, each of them is given an equally-sized box to stand on. This results in the shortest kid not boosted up enough to be able to see over the fence, while the tallest kid is shown to be getting a boost that he doesn’t really need. Next, a second slide is shown. The tallest boy’s box is given to the shortest kid, with the shortest kid now standing on two boxes. The middle child keeps one, and the tallest gets none. The result is that everyone can now see over the fence, equally. The conclusion is taught as: “Fair isn’t everybody getting the same thing … fair is everybody getting what they need in order to be successful.” 

The first time I encountered this example on social media I noticed several glaring flaws which I know are most likely not dealt with in the classroom. 

First, where do the boxes come from?  Socialists would believe that everyone has a right to a box and government must provide it which means the boxes were taken by force and redistributed.  If individuals who do not pay to view the game are given boxes by the government to see the game who would pay to enter the stadium and watch?  Is that fair to the owners of the team and the stadium?  Wouldn’t it be best if the kids who wanted to see the game earned the money necessary to buy a ticket?

The author of the article shared this solution to the progressive indoctrination crises, one I very much agree with:

The only way to stop this socialist infestation of our grade schools is to stand up for your children, to vociferously object to every lesson plan that shows socialism dressed in sheep’s clothing. Keep an eye on your children’s homework and talk to them every day. Set aside Family Learning Time to teach your kids the truth about “equity” and what happens in the real world when equal results are forced. Remember, it is impossible to make everyone equally rich; it is only possible to make everyone equally poor.

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