Post Scripts

Posted by Tina

Mediaite reports on a study of 30 years of crime statistics and gun laws. The results were positive for responsible gun ownership:

A study published in the latest issue of the academic journal Applied Economics Letters took on many of the claims made regularly by advocates of stricter gun laws. The study determined that nearly every claim made in support of stronger restrictions on gun ownership is not supported by an exhaustive analysis of crime statistics.

The study, “An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates,” conducted by Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius, examined nearly 30 years of statistics and concluded that stricter gun laws do not result in a reduction in gun violence. In fact, Gius found the opposite – that a proliferation of concealed carry permits can actually reduce incidents of gun crime.

A gun manufacturer in Colorado will be moving his operation to Texas and Wyoming. Texas gets to make them and Wyoming gets to be the distributor. Colorado will lose hundreds of good paying jobs and taxpayers because of their emotion driven gun laws.

Posted by Tina

In case you haven’t heard the east coast has been hit by blizzard conditions. The response by new York City’s new mayor prompted Rush to contrast De Blasio and the mayor in 1943 :

DE BLASIO: Stay indoors to the maximum extent possible. Stay out of your cars to the maximum extent possible. Don’t go out. We want to make sure people are safe. We want ’em to be in a warm location — and, crucially, we want to keep our streets clear so the good men and women of the sanitation department can ensure that our streets are plowed and salted. It’s very important people get home as soon as possible tonight. Get to a safe, warm place. Stay off the streets. …

LAGUARDIA: We must keep the streets of our city open for the delivery of food supplies, war materials, and readily accessible for our fire department. Therefore, I am appealing to the people of this city to volunteer in assisting us to keep open the sewer basins located at every street intersection and also to keep the crosswalks in as good condition as possible for the pedestrians. And we are also appealing to volunteers, volunteers who will be willing to do a little snow shoveling right in their own block.

In case you missed it the village was much more likely to step up and pitch in before the ideals of massive redistribution and dependency took root in the village. Today citizens of the Big Apple are treated like helpless vulnerable infants.

New York City today is not representative of the America I love. That America became the envy of the world because of freedom, opportunity and the creative ingenuity and participation of her citizens! De Blasio and his fellows are certinly not representative of the type of leaders that will restore our nation to prosperity.

Secret box opens locked cars… 

https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=l7OadDz3Ums

Bonus story…two robbers severely beaten by the victims…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/robbers-beat-by-victims_n_3865241.html

If you follow the obituaries you may have noticed in the Enterprise Record that Jack Lee of Oroville has died suddenly of an undisclosed illness.   Our deepest sympathies to his friends and family.  

However, much to consternation and dismay of many, I regret to inform you that Jack Lee of Chico is not dead!   In the words of Samuel Clemens, the  report of my death has been exaggerated.  

As for my health, I’m fairly sure  God is not interested in taking me any time soon because of  my life mission to irritate liberals.    To those who have been offering condolences to my friends and family, thank you for the thought, but I prefer you make a donation to the Jack Lee Fun-Fund,  any amount will do.   I promise to put it to no-good use.    -Jack Lee (and I’m not 89, although there are days when I feel like it)

Posted by Tina

I’ve nearly turned beet red (never blue) lamenting about the enormous federal bureaucracy that acts as a huge weight on the American economy and blunts the creative risk takers who are the sources of innovation, growth, and opportunity in America. I’ve never seen a broad accounting of the amount of wealth that’s taken out of the economy to feed the federal bureaucracy beast until now. Keep in mind that the following numbers do not include the bureaucracies of state and local governments or even the full spectrum of offices and Bureaus in Washington DC.

Worldbank lists the U.S. economy at $16.2 trillion and our debt is about equal to that. As you will see in the excerpt from the article below, salaries in DC represent more than $1.2 trillion. Sylvia Bokor of The American Thinker writes about “The Trillion-Plus Heist”:

These numbers — of agencies, employees and salaries — are hugely underestimated. Many federal agencies subsume dozens of agencies and bureaus that are not listed. The National Institutes of Health, for example, consists of 47 separate bureaucracies, the number of their personnel and salaries unstated.
The number of employees and salaries of some agencies is classified, such as the CIA and the NSA. An example is the NSA, which experts estimate employs between 100,000 and 200,000 employees with a budget of “at least $40 billion.” This sum is included under agencies with an estimated 150,000 employees averaging an annual salary of $100,000.

Recap:

Executive — 6,546,673 employees; salaries ….. $ 549,126,870,330.
Legislative — 12,835 employees; salaries ……. 5,250,599,780.
Judicial — 1,324 employees; salaries ……. 199,418,700.
Agencies — 5,298,867 employees; salaries ……. 569,886,700,000.
Total = 11,859,699 employees; salaries …. $ 1,124,463,588,810.

The consequences of these stupefyingly large numbers are far more devastating than can be seen directly. To grasp the extent of that destruction, consider the level of prosperity that employers and employees achieve today despite regulations, taxes, permits, fines, and wasted time on government paperwork.

Because of government confiscation of producers’ time and money, gone are the businesses that would have been started with that income. Never to be recouped is the time that would have been spent on innovations, inventions, discoveries and products that would have been made. Never to be retrieved is the prosperity that would have inevitably raised the standard of living, elevated the destitute and eventually wiped out poverty.

The money that politicians and bureaucrats have looted has gone and continues to go into the pockets of the nonproductive.

Keep these figures in mind the next time you wonder about the disappearing middle class, wage disparity, or the numbers of people who are no longer in the work force or are unemployed and underemployed. The secret to becoming a nation of opportunity and prosperity is policy that puts money (power) in the hands of individual citizens and leaves it in their control. Ronald Reagan:

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.”

It currently takes too much of what the private sector generates each year just to support the bloated federal bureaucracy…never mind the many programs we must fund that don’t work well and also must have enormous bureaucracies to implement and manage them. Current policies will make things much worse in the years to come. It’s time to think about a well reasoned and methodical dismantling of the big government drain on our economy. It’s time to downsize government so the people can keep more of what we earn.

“The Niʻihau Incident (or Battle of Niʻihau) occurred on December 7, 1941, when Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service pilot Shigenori Nishikaichi crash-landed his Zero on the Hawaiian island of Niʻihau after participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was killed in a struggle with people on the island.

The island’s Native Hawaiian residents were initially unaware of the attack, but apprehended Nishikaichi when the gravity of the situation became apparent. Nishikaichi then sought and received the assistance of three locals of Japanese descent in overcoming his captors, finding weapons, and taking several hostages.   In the end Nishikaichi was killed by the wife of Niʻihauan Ben Kanahele, (who was wounded in the process), and one of Nishikaichi’s confederates, Yoshio Harada, (a Japanese American) committed suicide.

The incident and the actions of Nishikaichi’s abettors contributed to a sense in the American military that every Japanese, even those who were American citizens or otherwise thought loyal to the United States, might aid Japan, and ultimately may have influenced the decision to intern Japanese Americans during World War II. Ben Kanahele was decorated for his part in stopping the incident.”  Click here for the full story.

My parents knew about this incident and they said it made Americans angry and distrustful against Japanese Americans.    Imagine how you might have felt back then, the war was only hours old and suddenly you have Japanese-Americans coming to the aid of the enemy at the very first opportunity!   Our liberals would prefer you not know about this incident and believe that white Americans acted with pure prejudice and no other reason for interring citizens of Japanese ancestry.

My father was good friends with a Japanese-American in Sacramento at this time and that man was later arrested for spying.  My Dad said he was a really nice guy and you would never have suspected he was a spy, but he truly was and this added even more concern that some Japanese-Americans might turn against their new country,  if the opportunity presented itself as it did in Hawaii.   While I don’t think internment was right for Japanese-Americans, it was absolutely not without some reason.  

At that time in our history many in the Japanese community did not interact well with anglos, they were more like a sub-culture, and no doubt this created some suspicions too.   Another reason to be sure the great American melting pot does it job – subcultures don’t make us stronger. And sometimes it can lead to unfortunate events for those who for whatever reasons failed to amalgamate into American society, as it happened during WWII.

German-Americans did not have this problem in part because of the long shared history the USA had with Germany and German immigrants.   There was a time when it was debated if German shouldn’t be our national language, the influence of German speaking Americans was that great.   However, during WWII there were some instances of pro-Nazi sympathizers and even spies in the German-American community, it did not result in internment that was taken against those of Japanese ancestry.

Here we are at the start of a brand new year. The optimism that often accompanies beginnings is screaming to be set free even as the forces of control and conformity work to blunt our desires. The experts around us are divided on what lies ahead; some claim gloom and doom and others are hopeful that things will bump along at least as well as they have since the recovery began. We prepare for the worst while hoping for the best…and vigilantly guard the treasure which is individual freedom. We vow to restore the the republic to patriots hands.

We at Post Scripts wish you and yours all the best in 2014. We are so very happy to have all of you as friends as we embark on this bold, yet humble, journey. Let us seek greater understanding and knowledge and strive to reveal the enemies of freedom. We look forward to this election year with great determination and anticipation.

“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of Constitutional power.” – Thomas Jefferson

Happy New Year from Jack and Tina

by Jack

In the early morning hours around 3 a.m. a late model Cooper sped east on Valombrosa, blowing through stop signs until it’s driver  approached the stop sign at Lilac and Valombrosa.   There the road forms a gentle curve, but it was apparently too much for the high speed Cooper and the vehicle drifted off the right edge of the pavement and struck a tree dead center.

It’s (six hours later) 9 a.m. now and police are finalizing their tedious and detailed investigation.  It’s a grizzly scene of charred metal and scattered debris - the tow truck has finally arrived.

I’m standing across the street on the sidewalk, but I can clearly see the crumpled, burned remains of the Cooper.   Based on my experience investigating accidents much like this one, the extreme damage to the front end, and the pieces of the car bodiy that are scattered east for well over a 150′ feet, it all points to a vehicle travelling at high speed, possibly in the area of 70-80 mph.   I did not see any skid marks, but often times with ABS brakes tire marks may not be readily visible. 

The posted speed limit in this residential area is 35 mph and this “posted” speed is the maximum under ideal conditions, at night or in the rain, drivers are supposed to adjust their speed downward until it’s safe for the conditions. 

This Cooper appeared to be a late model, possibly a 2011 or 2012, based on the type of wheel rims, but other than that there’s not much to identify it.   The car rests on it’s wheels a short 20 feet from the old oak tree it struck.   A large patch of bark is torn off marking the point of impact.  I’m saddened just looking at the wreck,  thinking of the anguish the decedents family must be feeling at this moment.

Barely 3 hours in to 2014 this is Chico first fatal of the year.   The driver was reported as a young white male - there were no other occupants.   Another young man, who happened to live across the street, was the first to the scene to render aid.   He witnessed flames visible around the front of the windshield and the crushed firewall.   He tried desperately to pry open the drivers door but it was  smashed back into the body of the car as was the passenger door.   The driver was pinned behind the wheel and not moving.    Suddenly the flames erupted in a fireball,  forcing the rescuer back.   

There was nothing he could do but watch and wait for the fire department.   They arrived within a few minutes and the flames were quickly extinquished. They too failed to pry open the doors and were forced to cut the top away to lift the remains of the driver out of the wreckage.

As I looked at what was left and considered what witnesses had told me about the driver my thoughts were, he was probably a Chico State student,  alcohol or drugs may have factored into this, and the BMW Cooper, well, perhaps his parents bought for him for college?   Now I could be way off,   but it’s a familiar scenario based on too many other tragic accidents that looked a lot  like this one.    All we know for sure at this moment are physical clues and the history this street has for bad accidents over past years.   Despite the 35 mph speed limit, cars on Valombrosa tended to speed because its semi-rural setting and that it’s most a long straight road.  A number of years back the City Council placed stop signs in three locations on Valombrosa’s tee intersections in hopes of slowing vehicles down.  It seemed to work, as we’ve not had a fatality east of the freeway overpass since, until now.

‘Whatever the facts are determined to be later, clearly this driver was dangerously out of control.   He showed a reckless disregard for his safety or the safety of others on the road and it killed him in a firey high speed crash, in an otherwise quiet residential neighborhood. 

Just thinking out loud, but when parents send their kids off to college they give them a lot, an expensive education, a chance for a great future, and they also give them things they don’t really need for college, like an expensive sports car or  excess spending money.   And they don’t give them what they really need most… to survive on their own for the first time, like character and discipline that promotes sound judgement.  

                                                                                                                              (A new Cooper Mini shown at right)

The driver in this case went way out of his way to insure his own demise.   What a waste and yet it was so easily preventable.  It simply should not have happened.  This is not the way Chicoans wants to start out year.  

(  This accident happened just a stone’s throw from where I live and it really got to me.   And as a retired police officer, I’ve seen too many tragedies like this.  I hope I never see another, but the odds say I will. )