Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Is rock ‘n’ roll here to stay?

Posted: May 9, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has lost its way!

I love the music of Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, but they’re country artists, not rockers.

Is Kool Herc an important representative of rap because he scratched turntables?

Like many teenagers, I played in a rock ‘n’ roll band. Unlike most, we had some success, recording several songs, including one that made it to the Billboard 100. We’ve also been inducted into two rock halls of fame in South Dakota and Iowa!

That’s why rock and its cathedral in Cleveland are vital to me!

Let me name just a few of the noteworthy musicians who haven’t been honored and probably never will.

Joe Cocker has many proponents for the hall. For example,  Billy Joel voiced his support back in 2014, the same year Cocker died: “I’m amazed that he’s not in yet, but I’m throwing in my vote for Joe Cocker,” Joel told fans at Madison Square Garden while covering “With a Little Help From My Friends” as Cocker once did. He’s been eligible since 1995 but never nominated.

The Spencer Davis Group has never been nominated, despite being eligible since 1991. “[Spencer Davis] was a man with a vision and one of the pioneers of the British invasion of America in the ’60s,” former band member Steve Winwood said to Rolling Stone in 2020. “I feel that he was influential in setting me on the road to becoming a professional musician, and I thank him for that.”

Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s bid for respect for progressive rock has long been an uphill battle. That was Greg Lake’s view when considering why the band hadn’t been inducted into the rock hall, despite being eligible since 1996. Years have passed, and they still haven’t been nominated, which the late ELP vocalist took as a big slight. “Groups like ELP were playing stadiums. Not clubs, stadiums,” Lake said a decade ago. “It’s not something you can overlook: ‘Oh, I didn’t notice that.'”

Grand Funk Railroad has never received a nomination, despite five platinum albums and hugely popular hits like “Walk Like a Man” and “We’re an American Band.” The omission doesn’t sit well with Grand Funk co-founder Mark Farner. “It just shows the illegitimacy of that rock hall,” he said, “and the [fans] are definitely smart enough to know this. They need to be reminded, though, that the rock hall is not a representation of the will of the people; it is a representation of the will of the owners of the rock hall.”

Procol Harum has been eligible since 1993 but has been nominated just once for the class of 2013. Five years later, their classic song “A Whiter Shade of Pale” was inducted into the rock hall’s singles category. “We all know the history of music can be changed with just one song, one record,” E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt said when introducing the category. “In three minutes, we suddenly enter a new direction, a movement, a style, an experience. That three-minute song can result in a personal revelation, an epiphany that changes our lives.”

Many others deserve consideration: Meat Loaf, Harry Nilsson, Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, Toto, Edgar and Johnny Winter, and maybe even the Monkees.

Sadly, many influential artists haven’t been considered for the hall, which means something is wrong.

Transableism is the next cause de jour that will be crammed down our throats by Leftists

Posted: May 4, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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For the past few years transgenderism has increasingly become the de facto religion of progressives here in the United States.  Major corporations, the news media, and especially the education industry, are all trumpeting this destructive ideology so incessantly that the number of supposed transgender youth has skyrocketed.

Just this past week a new celebrity cause has exploded on the internet: ‘Transabled’ People Are Now Purposely Blinding, Disfiguring Themselves to Become Disabled – The Political Insider

Transableism is the idea that healthy people “identify” as someone with a disability – with some taking steps to actually disable themselves, like the woman above who purposely blind herself. Because having two working arms, legs, and eyes is so last year. 

How do you treat this condition? By having your perfectly good arms and legs cut off, getting a little snip on your spinal cord, or maybe just destroying your eyesight. 

This transabled ideology is further proof that progressivism is a dangerous mental disorder.

This concept of people believing or desiring to be disabled isn’t new; it was just known under a different name. Formerly called Body Integrity Identity Disorder or BIID, people suffering from this affliction identify as handicapped instead of ‘able-bodied.’ 

These people in the past have either done this by pretending to have an affliction like blindness, would tie back an arm or leg, choosing to move through life in a wheelchair even though they can walk, and in some extreme cases, they resort to self-mutilation.

There are a great many parallels between transgenderism and transableism.

The reality is instances of transabled people, or more accurately put those suffering from BIID, are minuscule, and the cases of surgical mutilations are also rare. But that also used to be the case for transgenderism.

Those who advocate for transabled surgery claim that it is the only relief these people have, that psychiatry won’t work, and that denying them this surgery is cruel. If that has a familiar ring to it, it should.

And that’s the way it was

Posted: May 2, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

When Fox settled its lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems and then ousted Tucker Carlson, my former colleagues in journalism recalled the “glory days” of Walter Cronkite at CBS News.

But were those days so good?

In a recent biography of Cronkite, Douglas Brinkley investigates some of the anchor’s antics on and off the television screen.

Following are some of the revelations in the biography:

–Cronkite cut a deal with Pan Am to fly his family to worldwide vacation spots. Together with a handful of friends, they traveled across the globe with Cronkite snorkeling, swimming, and drinking, thanks to a friend at the airline. CBS News President Richard Salant was upset at what he deemed a blatant conflict of interest but took no action against his star anchor.

–Cronkite secretly bugged a committee room at the 1952 GOP convention.

–Cronkite misled viewers about 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. On the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Cronkite nodded in thinly veiled contempt when handed a note on air that the Arizona senator had said “no comment.” Goldwater was attending his mother-in-law’s funeral that day.

“Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination,” Cronkite told viewers another day, “he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Although Goldwater had merely accepted an invitation to visit a U.S. Army facility there, correspondent Daniel Schorr said he was launching his campaign in “the center of Germany’s right wing.” 

–Although Cronkite and his fans maintained that the anchor kept his liberal views off the air, he met privately with Robert Kennedy in 1968 to urge him to run for president.

–After covering Nixon’s historic visit to China, Cronkite let loose with a night of partying in San Francisco. Cronkite and a colleague went to an infamous topless bar, and he was later spotted dining with a go-go dancer in a miniskirt and plunging neckline.

In reviewing the book, Howard Kurtz wrote: “Brinkley’s book will undoubtedly tarnish the Cronkite legacy. But my admiration for the man is only partly diminished. Perhaps it is too easy to judge him by today’s standards, any more than we should condemn Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves. Perhaps he simply reflected his times, when some journalists and politicians quietly collaborated, when conflicts of interest were routinely tolerated when a powerful media establishment could sweep its embarrassments under the rug.”

And that’s the way it was.

The military OPHOLDs are here!

Posted: April 29, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncategorized
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Truth be told, I thought it would be towards the end of the year. Guess I was wrong. Remember my list of “things the military does to fix numbers?”

  1. Not kicking people out for physical fitness test failures
  2. Waiving darn near everything, from age to non-violent felonies
  3. Asking people to pretty-please stay around a few more years
  4. Opening OCS and other admissions
  5. Raising bonuses
  6. Make life better for officers
  7. Reduce opportunities to leave early
  8. Op-Hold people
-Me!

Pepperidge Farm remembers too. That last bullet says OPHOLD, which means the military says “You know how we said we’d let you go? Yeah, about that…” Or, in meme form:

Now, while today’s story isn’t a true OPHOLD…it’s basically the same. The Army allowed officers that commissioned as aviators to serve two different requirements concurrently (as in, at the same time), then it said “actually, we meant to say consecutively,” and is now telling these officers they owe three more years of service. Up unitl that point, the Army’s HR department was telling officers that it was totally concurrent…until it wasn’t.

Previously, officials with Army Human Resources Command treated the flight school commitment as a contractual obligation, the letter said. That policy allowed officers to simultaneously serve it alongside their three-year branch of choice obligation and thus immediately resign six years after receiving their pilot’s wings, if they wished.

“We went back and we did kind of audit all of those out there,” he said. The general cautioned that the service is still “refining” the number of officers, estimated at “a little over 600.” They now can’t leave immediately after finishing their flight school commitment.

From Army Times

Whoopsie! Our bad! Sorry to majorly screw up your life!

I’m sure plenty of HR officers will be disciplined for this…said no sane person ever.

Here’s the crux though…the Army needs these officers more than the officers need the Army. Aviation is a difficult skillset that can’t be easily acquired. The Army seems to believe it’ll just order these officers to fly and they’ll just fly. That’s a Communist way of thinking about it…we tell people what to do and they just do it.

In America, you have to compete for skills, and if someone doesn’t want to provide their skills, there is little you can do about it. I predict that we’ll see the following behaviors:

  1. A lot of aviators will smoke weed in the hopes of being kicked out. This, ironically, might make the Army legalize the substance.
  2. Plenty of officers will begin having “headaches” or other symptoms that stops them from flying. A few sharp officers will conveniently fly enough to stay off the radar, but do little else. The Army will either have to punish them, which could result in dismissal and them leaving when they wanted, or relax the medical rules and put expensive aircraft at risk.

No one will outright strike…that would be a stupid move. Instead, people will deny the Army the use of their skills, and the Army’s aviation effectiveness will drop. On paper, the Army will look OK, but the force will be hollow, and it’ll simply be a matter of time before the Army fails against one of our adversaries.

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.

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