Sunday Funnies 2015.10.11

We just 'upgraded' our 15 year old home entertainment system. We're now the proud owners of audio and visual equipment that is smarter than I am. Like I say about cable TV - 250 channels, and nothing good is on...

Cable TV is now evenly divided between shows about preparing food and shows about losing weight.
- Andy Borowitz

I may have made a lot of bad decisions in life, but at least I don't watch daytime television.
- Andy Borowitz

Television is a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything.
- Fred Allen

Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.
- Fred Allen

In California, they don't throw their garbage away - they make it into TV shows.
- Woody Allen

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your home.
- David Frost

I saw this advertisement on Craigslist that said: “Television for sale, $10, volume stuck on full.”
I thought, “I can’t turn that down.”

Unmotivated Post

Over the last few months I've been saving various images that caught my fancy. Because I have neither the time nor the motivation to create a coherent, well thought out post, I have decided now is a good time to share them with the world.

Enjoy...

A Feel-Good Story

I've had enough gloom-and-doom news lately to last me a lifetime. Time for something that will bring a smile to my face (and a tear to my eye).

Top brass at a Colorado Army post are all smiles after a 2-year-old girl interrupted a general's speech to dash across the room and hug her dad, who had just come home from a nine-month deployment.

Fort Carson spokeswoman Dani Johnson says "everyone thought it was awesome" when 1st Lt. Daniel Oglesby's daughter Karas gave him a knee-high embrace during the homecoming ceremony Tuesday.

Oglesby was standing in formation with other members of the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team when his daughter galloped toward him, arms outstretched.

Johnson says everyone in the room laughed, including Maj. Gen. Ryan Gonsalves, the post commander, who was welcoming the soldiers home at the time.

Oglesby hugged and kissed his girl and sent her back across the room to her mom and sister.

"She was excited. She spotted me from a couple rows back, and she couldn't contain herself. I wasn't gonna tell her no," Oglesby told KKTV of Colorado Springs.

Little girl runs to dad
Best video of the day! A little girl couldn't wait for a homecoming ceremony to end at Fort Carson before she ran to her Daddy! KKTV photojournalist Pedro Laumbach captured this awesome moment. We know you'll "like" it as much as we do in our newsroom. http://www.kktv.com/home/headlines/homecoming-331034542.html
Posted by KKTV 11 News on Tuesday, October 6, 2015

I feel much better now...

That Didn't Take Long

Well, ol' Vlad certainly isn't wasting any time in kicking Syrian ass and taking Syrian names.

Russia Fires Cruise Missiles in Syria

Russia and Syria unleashed a coordinated assault by land, air and sea on Wednesday...

Moscow said it had fired 26 cruise missiles on Syrian targets from naval vessels in the Caspian Sea, 900 miles away...

The bombardment appeared to be severe in some places. One video showed white smoke rising above a village’s minarets, while another appeared to show at least a dozen explosions — the person filming described the weapons as rockets — in less than five minutes.

At certain points in Wednesday’s fighting, rebels fired advanced TOW antitank missiles, supplied covertly by the C.I.A., at Syria’s Russian-made tanks, leaving the impression of a proxy war between Russia and the United States...

Gee, I think we all know who's gonna win that one.

In other Putin-related news:

In Honor Of His 63rd, Putin Plays Hockey And Is Painted As The Buddha

Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrated his 63rd birthday Wednesday, amid a controversial bombing campaign in Syria, a weakening economy and tensions with the U.S. and its Western allies. The Russian leader made a point of taking it all in stride — including adulation from his fans.

...he was shown taking part in a hockey game, playing alongside Russian stars of the National Hockey League.

Putin's fans arranged tributes, including a song by a pair of popular Russian rappers... The song calls Putin "a tough superhero."

The theme of Putin as a superhero was also promoted at a small art gallery in Moscow's Arbat district, hosting an exhibition called "Putin's Universe."

It features paintings depicting Putin as various leaders and heroes, from Alexander the Great to Batman...

Portraits are displayed of Putin as the god Thor, as Che Guevara and as the Brazilian soccer star Pele — kicking a ball drawn with the face of President Barack Obama.

Putin is portrayed as a peace hero, too — as Mahatma Gandhi and Buddha.

"Here is Vladimir Putin presented like Martin Luther King," Kojic says. "He was the most famous fighter for human rights. Also, Vladimir Putin is a fighter for human rights and he is protecting his people..."

Just like Muhammad Ali.

I'm not a big Putin fan, but you've got to admit that when push comes to shove we're in trouble.

The last word on Putin vs. obama:

Perspective

Harper has a post up about a friend of hers who recently passed away after a short, brutal battle with brain cancer. It resonated with me because a friend of ours recently lost her battle with the same vicious disease. Regi was a wonderful, valiant woman who will be sorely missed by all who knew her. (As an aside, she escaped from East to West Berlin back in the day when there was a Wall. That should give you some idea of the kind of person she was.)

A poker buddy was recently diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer (wtf is going on with all these brain cancer cases?), and another friend of ours just got the news she has stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Long story short - count your blessings and keep things in perspective. All this political crap going on right now might consume us, but it's nowhere near as important as friends and family.

Now please excuse me. I'm going to honor my friends by sacrificing the best part of a bottle of single malt.

There may be a slight delay in tomorrow's post...

A New Approach To Gun Violence

I'm only going to post a short excerpt here from a somewhat lengthy article that advocates a new way of reducing gun violence. Please don't let that "somewhat lengthy" bit dissuade you from reading it in its entirety. It's "somewhat lengthy" in Internet terms. In real life, that means it takes five minutes or less to read.

It highlights an approach that I've never heard of, but that seems to be producing promising results in limited trial runs. It's also an approach that should be agreeable to people on both sides of the gun-control argument. So pour yourself another cup of coffee, settle back, and click on the link.

This doctor says violence is contagious, and we should treat it like a disease

How can we prevent future tragedies like the shooting that took place in Roseburg, Ore., on Thursday?

Some doctors believe that the key to preventing this kind of violence is to literally treat it like disease. One is Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who spent a decade fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and cholera in Asia and Africa.

After returning to the U.S. in the 1990s, Slutkin had a realization. The patterns of violence he saw in U.S. cities looked eerily similar to how he had seen infectious disease spread in communities around the world. He went on to found a group called Cure Violence, which advocates treating violence with the same public health approaches that are widely used to fight disease.

This model is being used to prevent community violence in 15 U.S. cities and seven countries, the group says. But Slutkin believes that it has a much bigger role to play in helping to the U.S. address the tragedy of mass shootings, like the one that occurred in Roseburg.

. . .

If you go beyond thinking about violence as a moral problem and instead try to understand it as a health issue, many things that were previously unexplainable can be explained...

Arguably the most important thing that we do in public health is change behavior, such as eating, smoking, exercise, sex.

The end game here is really to understand and change the behaviors. And we’ve been able to show that you can drop the amount of shootings and killings very fast by using health-based detection and behavior change methods.

Go to the link and read the rest. My first impression was that this seemed a little touchy-feely, but if the reported results are valid it just might work.

Of course, it won't be easy, but what we're doing now sure as hell isn't working...

FOD 2015.10.05

Too busy for words. Enjoy the pretty pictures...

Sunday Funnies 2015.10.04

Here in Central Texas temperatures last night got down in the 50s, and the high today is in the mid-80s. That may not sound like much to the rest of the nation, but to us it's a gorgeous autumn day.

Q: What did the tree say to autumn?
A: Leaf me alone.

Q: How do you fix a broken pumpkin?
A: With a pumpkin patch

Q: What's the ratio of a pumpkin's circumference to its diameter?
A: Pumpkin Pi

A couple goes to an art gallery. They find a picture of a naked women with her privates covered with leaves. The wife doesn't like it and moves on but the husband keeps looking.

The wife asks: "What are you waiting for?"

The husband replies: "Autumn."

Autumn is a season for big decisions -- like whether or not it's too late to start spring cleaning.

Autumn leaves are a lot like kids.

First they turn on you. Then they fly away. And next thing you know, you look out the window and they're back!

I can hardly wait until all the leaves turn brown to match the grass.

Oregon Shootings

First of all, thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families of Thursday's shootings at Oregon's Umpqua Community College.

Second, I'm having a hard time containing my outrage at the antics of the loser currently wasting oxygen in the White House. I cannot believe that pathetic worm masquerading as the 'leader' of this country would politicize the tragic shootings while the bodies were still warm.

President Obama on Thursday made an impassioned case that gun violence is “something we should politicize” following a mass shooting at a community college in Oregon.

In his disgraceful rush to advance his political agenda while standing atop the dead bodies of the victims, barry performed his usual trick of misdirection, misleading, and outright lying about a problem - much less offering any solutions.

Eager to distract the country from the collapse of his Syria policy and the triumph of Russia in replacing the U.S. as the dominant force in the Middle East, he seized upon the deaths as means to advance his anti-gun agenda, with absolutely no knowledge of the guns used, or the means by which the shooter acquired them.  He referred to himself 28 times in the course of his 12-minute speech.

The president insisted that "modest regulation," consistent with the Second Amendment rights of "law-abiding gun owners," could "prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America." ... (but he) did not mention a single specific policy fitting that description.

So far, President Obama has said nothing about the ongoing carnage in his hometown of Chicago, where every weekend sees a slaughter nearly as bad as the event in Roseburg.

The reaction to these shootings will be predictable - on both sides. Leftists will call for more stringent gun-control laws. Those of us on the other side will counter that the shooter violated numerous existing laws, and more wouldn't have deterred him.

Perhaps the most obvious broken law was the one prohibiting firearms on campus. I don't understand why the anti-gun crowd believes that gun-free zones prevent gun violence. There are nine dead people in Oregon who could testify to the fallacy of that belief.

Thursday's events are going to be hashed and rehashed ad nauseum. I'll leave that to others. I will, however, save several thousand words by posing a few pictures that sum up my opinion.

Friday Follies Happy Hour 2015.10.02

Something to think about as we listen to barack obama and his cronies politicize yesterday's tragic shootings in Oregon.

The VA, Trust, And Kittens

In a previous post I questioned some admittedly unverified VA practices. Then I came across this story which alleges cronyism and corruption in the VA hierarchy.

I'm shocked - shocked, I tell you - to hear about government officials behaving badly.

American Legion National Commander Dale Barnett repeated his organization’s call for Department of Veterans Affairs Undersecretary for Benefits Allison Hickey to resign amid new allegations of more wrongdoing by senior VA executives.

“In 2014, then-National Commander Dan Dellinger called on the VA secretary, the under secretary for Health and under secretary for Benefits to all step down due to widespread scandals that infected the entire department,” Barnett said “While the VA secretary and under secretary for Health did step down, Under Secretary Hickey ignored the wishes of veterans and stayed on. Now, we have VA’s own Inspector General’s office determining that two senior executives under Hickey inappropriately used their positions to benefit from an overly-generous relocation policy. It’s disturbing to read terms like ‘criminal referrals’ and ‘coerced’ in an official report about an agency that was created to serve veterans. It is time for Under Secretary Hickey to finally do the right thing and resign.”

Gee, to think that a federal agency supposedly dedicated to taking care of those who sacrificed so much to take care of us could be riddled with inefficiency, ineptitude, and corruption comes as a huge surprise... [/sarc]

No wonder that so many Americans view their government as corrupt and a threat to their freedom.

The American people’s trust in government is the lowest it has been in the last 10 years, according to three Gallup polls released recently.

The polls measured the population’s opinions on government corruption, government regulation of business, and whether the government poses an immediate threat to personal liberties.

In a poll that was released on Saturday, 75 percent of respondents said they believe corruption is widespread in the government...

Not surprisingly, the American public distrusts the mainstrewam media as well.

Americans' trust in the national news media remains at an all-time low.

A new Gallup poll shows that just 40% of Americans have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.

That figure, which ties Gallup statistics for 2012 and 2014, represents a steep decline from the 55% high in the late 1990s when Gallup began polling.

As has long been the case, trust remains higher among Democrats than Republicans.

Reminds me of the old joke about kittens.

A pretty little girl named Suzy was standing on the sidewalk in front of her home. Next to her was a basket containing a number of tiny creatures; in her hand was a sign announcing FREE KITTENS.

Suddenly a line of big black cars pulled up beside her. Out of the lead car stepped a tall, grinning man.

“Hi there little girl, I’m President Obama. What do you have in the basket?” he asked.

“Kittens,” little Suzy said.

“How old are they?” asked Obama.

Suzy replied, “They’re so young, their eyes aren’t even open yet.”

“And what kind of kittens are they?”

“Democrats,” answered Suzy with a smile.

Obama was delighted. As soon as he returned to his car, he called his PR chief and told him about the little girl and the kittens.

Recognizing the perfect photo op, the two men agreed that the president should return the next day; and in front of the assembled media, have the girl talk about her discerning kittens.

So the next day, Suzy was again standing on the sidewalk with her basket of “FREE KITTENS,” when another motorcade pulled up, this time followed by vans from ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN.

Cameras and audio equipment were quickly set up, then Obama got out of his limo and walked over to little Suzy.

“Hello, again,” he said, “I’d love it if you would tell all my friends out there what kind of kittens you’re giving away.”

“Yes sir,” Suzy said. “They’re Republicans.”

Taken by surprise, the president stammered, “But…but…yesterday, you told me they were DEMOCRATS.”

Little Suzy smiled and said, “I know.

But today, they have their eyes open.”

Wild Kingdom

Busy with a home improvement project, so here's some critter humor to amuse you...