Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Harrison Ford Navigates Us Through the 21st Century
A state representative in Mississippi, channeling his inner Borgia, wants to kill more people and employ more diversity and inclusion in doing so. In addition to lethal injections, Representative Andy Gipson proposes killing people with firing squads, electrocutions, and gas chambers.
Poisoning, shooting, shocking, and gassing – yeah, that’ll probably do it.
Representative Gipson, that merry rascal, missed his true vocation as the villain in one of those lurid Hammer Studios thrillers of the 1950s.
One wonders if Representative Gipson takes Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter off from imagining different ways of killing people.
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Vice-President Pence visited Dachau last week. My father was in that area in early May of 1945 but I don’t know if he entered any of the Dachau compounds; I do know he was in Ohrdruf / Buchenwald with the 602nd Tank Destroy Battalion a month earlier on 3 April (http://www.89infdivww2.org/memories/tank_7.htm). He did not have his picture taken.
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Recently we have seen disturbing photographs and video images of refugees fleeing from the USA into Canada across frozen fields in areas usually isolated but at present busy with taxis, photographers, and border agencies from two nations.
One might dismiss the reports if they came from Native Texan Dan Rather, but they’re not; they’re from many different sources.
Is this nation suffering an East Germany moment? Or did someone or some group make a point of frightening these poor people into hazarding their lives unnecessarily?
The keyboard commandos with their programmatic slogans and clichés don’t have answers to any of this. But who does?
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According to the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-construction-start-20150105-story.html), the California high-speed train project, which taxpayers have been funding since 2008, is scheduled to begin construction this week. Expected to cost working Californians $65 billion-with-a-B, this tribute to Jerry Brown’s vanity choo-choo has not, after eight years of taxing and spending, carried the first passenger because it doesn’t exist.
In the meantime another California project, the 50-year-old Oroville Dam, is in danger of collapse, possibly due to inadequate funding for maintenance. Essential to the state’s economy because of its service in flood control, agriculture, and power generation, loss of the dam would threaten the lives of approximately 180,000 people and flood several counties. Depending on the circumstances, there might not be adequate warning time (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/02/19/if-oroville-dam-failed-residents-likely-would-not-be-advised-in-time.html).
And those 180,000 people sure can’t escape the flooding by riding away aboard the governor’s imaginary Hooterville Cannonball.
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Numerous government and news agencies, some expressing indignation, report that a Russian spy ship is lurking off our Naval bases on the east coast. The Russians are not lurking very well if we know that they are lurking. But then, our spy ships are lurking in the Black Sea and in the Baltic. Lurk, lurk, lurk. Maybe in all that lurking someone’s spy ship will spy, with its little electronic eye, Tom Brady’s jersey.
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