Gang Problems In The Barrio? Let's Patrol the Amusement Parks!

We are all aware (except for the Chief of Police of El Pueblo de Los Angeles) that there are numerous gangs, who are at each others' throats over both race and turf. They battle, almost exclusively, within the poor neighborhoods--their own or those of their rivals. We rarely hear of much gang activity in Holmby Hills or Palos Verdes.

Imagine my ironic chuckle as I read this story in today's Los Angeles Daily News. The headline, "CityWalk In Cops' Spotlight," in which a large bit of our law enforcement dollar will apparently be spent.

"In an effort to stop a gang problem before it starts, police who patrol Universal CityWalk are getting extra help over the next month to keep the San Fernando Valley hilltop tourist attraction safe as the popular summer season heats up.

"For years, the restaurant, entertainment and shopping strip bordering Universal Studios has been the kind of place Los Angeles-area gang members have brought their girlfriends - but not their guns, police say."

So, in an effort to fight gangs, say police, money is being set aside to patrol CityWalk, to patrol what is essentially a very nice, Disney-like, restaurant and souvenir shop row adjacent to the Universal City Studios theme park.

Never mind that Universal City has private security that rivals that of Disneyland. Never mind that, while gangsters frequent the place, gang crime within the CityWalk environs is quite rare. Rather than put our police out where the crime is, to combat that element of society which is a danger to us all, for which they're paid handsomely. Don't believe the propaganda that police are underpaid--Los Angeles police, if you consider their retirement and a long list of other benefits that are part of their remuneration, are paid quite well.

So, I'm sure that hard core gangsters are relieved that, as long as they avoid Universal CityWalk, they can pretty much do as they please. They can carry arsenals under their baggy clothes while honest individuals can be prosecuted for carrying a handgun to be able, one hopes, to do for themselves that which the police are not available to do.

They've killed Freedom! Those bastards!

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

Teddy's Dilemma

Much as I'm (snif) upset about Senator Kennedy's illness, and wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy (wait! he is one of America's worst enemies), I just have to ask.......

To which of the countries that offer universal health care will Senator Kennedy go for care and therapy in his current health crisis?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

In Search of Clean Air

The first time I visited El Pueblo de Los Angeles was in 1961, which happened to be the same year I graduated High school. I had just finished boot camp in San Diego and came to LA to visit my grandparents, who had moved here several years earlier.

Gramp took me downtown one day, sightseeing. We also cruised through Hollywood and Beverly Hills. One of the most memorable things was the foulness of the air. It was a hot day, and it seemed like it was foggy. It wasn't fog. The smog was a palpable thing. It smelled, made my eyes water and caused occasional coughing jags.

Five years later, my new bride and I drove into LA on a rainy September day, to better our lives. A mere few days later, after the unseasonable rain cleared out and it became hot and sunny, the smog closed in once again.

I eventually got used to it, though from time to time it became too obvious to ignore. The sun was dull in the sky. From a window fourteen or so stories up, the ground couldn't be seen. Buildings looked like they grew out of fog. It wasn't fog. Once, I flew into LAX on a hot, sunny day. LA looked like a sea of fog with several dozen of its taller buildings sticking out.

Over the years since, the state has created many thousands of laws designed to fight smog. Most of them merely served to help impoverish the less well off in California, but some of them actually worked. The state faltered, stumbled and spent billions, most of it wasted, but in the past ten years the smog has been lessened to a degree that it isn't so much noticed anymore.

Oh, I won't say the air's clean. Not exactly. There's still noticeable smog, occasionally, in the east at the San Bernardino foothills, but nothing like it was.

One could say that we ought to stand pat. The free market (if it were allowed to work) would supply us with a cheap, clean replacement for the gasoline-powered engine, eventually.

The point of this little history lesson? Several years ago, in spite of the rational arguments of many, the evil and stupid California Air Resources Board (CARB), decided that raw gasoline, evaporating into the atmosphere, was a major cause of smog--the same smog that was even then a diminishing problem. After much experimentation, testing, bribery of CARB officials and state legislators, the state was divided into zones. One zone was the San Diego, LA, western San Bernardino and Riverside counties and the San Francisco area. The other, the rest of the state.

The urban areas were to use a very expensive fueling nozzle that picked up all the fuel vapors during pumping and stored them in the underground fuel tank. It was called a vapor recovery system. Fuel delivery trucks also had a complex, expensive dual-hose system that returned the vapors to the truck tank as the underground tank was filled.

All was again right with the world.

The rest of the state eventually was required to implement a fuel recovery system as well, but it remains far less ponderous and expensive than its urban counterpart.

CARB officials and state legislators were wearing Ace bandages on their wrists and elbows for months, from slapping each other on the back.

So, the war on smog is over, right? Not, as they say in Boulder City, Nevada, by a damsite.

As long as there is one molecule of a substance that can be called a pollutant, hovering over any part of the state of California, Sacramento will keep giving CARB tens (at least) of millions of dollars a year to chase it.

Meanwhile, they're ignoring the fact that their precious vapor recovery system doesn't work. It's worse than the old way--putting the bare hose nozzle into an open fuel tank and letting the vapors go where they will. Now, instead of a little vapor escaping into the air, the high-priced, overly-complex nozzles spit out the best part of a pint of liquid gasoline all over the rear of your car, and on the pavement underneath, where it's free to evaporate over the following few minutes. This, of course, is a pint of the four-dollar-a gallon gas that you pay for. They do this, just about invariably, when the stream clicks off as your tank fills. At times, the nozzle actually pops out of your car, falling 'pon the pavement and spilling even more liquid gasoline under the rear of your car.

CARB won't do anything about this, because to them, it's a done job. To them, no more gasoline vapor is escaping into the air. And so it goes.

You can't trust any air you can't see.

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

Training People to Act Like Sheep

A number of people are sitting and standing in a large room. It might be a bank, or maybe the waiting room of an airport. It might even be a store. Suddenly, as Snoopy often writes in the Charlie Brown strip, a shot rings out.

A man falls to the floor, motionless. Everyone else runs, screaming, in every direction, looking for the cover of something under which to cower, quivering in fear, awaiting further shooting.

Today on the KCAL evening news, they showed video of the above scene as part of a Homeland Security drill.

What was wrong with the scene? Why, of course! People were hiding under tables and behind partitions, waiting for death. Nobody had a gun.

Has ten to twenty percent of these trainees been carrying mockup handguns in their holsters or purses, they could've had a real drill in which the trainees could simulate shooting or arresting the mock killer before he could cause any further mock damage.

Sadly, it isn't within the psychological makeup of the jackbooted thugs of Homeland Security who formulate such drills, to put together a scenario in which the prospective victims could actually defend themselves. Yet, a populace capable if its own self defense is by far the best way to deal with the "terrorism" with which we're supposedly warring.

It leads me to suspect (as I've written several times) that the entire "war on terror" is nothing more than a plan to more rapidly put an end to the freedom we all own as sentient beings and which the people who regard themselves our leaders wish to see ended.

The actors in the drill were clearly depicted as helpless, and simply waiting to die, or perhaps be rescued by the armored and anonymous police squads upon which we're being taught to depend. I Find the entire notion both disgusting and offensive.

They've killed Freedom! Those bastards!

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

Turning the US Over To the Control of the UN

It's long been the opinion of a large minority of Americans that the United Nations is an anti-American organization. Many actions of the UN in recent years proves this--they are very fond of disproportionately criticizing the US while simultaneously requiring the US to shoulder a huge degree of financial responsibility for its operation.

There's a deliberate effort to subjugate the US federal government to the UN, undoubtedly due to extreme envy of our wealth by governments of other nations. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that these governments wish to sap the economic strength of the US to place the US at (or below) a par with the socialist nations of Europe.

Toward this end, the traitorous B Hussein Obama has authored and submitted to the Senate a bill (SB 2433) which, besides committing a hefty chunk of our tax dollars to the world's most savage dictatorships, filtered though the thieving, grasping hands of the leaders of the UN, but it cancels debts of these so far unidentified dictatorships owed the World Bank--at US expense). Read the text of the bill here.

This, of course, means that it'll leave the dictators of these countries with money to purchase more arms and enlarge their armies to better repress their people and, perhaps, to help train and arm groups that would harm the US.

As noted by Alex Jones, of Infowars.com, the bill requires the President to sign on to the UN's Millennium Declaration, which, according to Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media:

.....[A]after cutting through all of the honorable-sounding goals in the plan, the bottom line is that the legislation would mandate the 0.7 percent of the U.S. GNP as "official development assistance."

"In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that (U.N.) declaration commits nations to banning ’small arms and light weapons’ and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention of Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention of the Rights of the Child," he said.

The bill invests the power for enactment of its provisions in the President, which could be B Hussein Obama by the time the bill becomes law. Now, in my own head, this commitment sounds like handing over the sovereignty of each and every one of the United States to an anti-American organization. I have no doubt that is what the multicultural Senator Obama intends.

They've killed Freedom! Those bastards!

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill!

Ok, so I'm a hot rodder. I like old cars; I like fast cars. I'm also a fan of NHRA drag racing and, to a lesser extent, other kinds of auto racing.

Fast cars need a lot of gas. America has, contrary to what the algorians will have you believe, plenty of oil available within the areas US oil companies can search. More than we'll ever need--because we will, in spite of all the wheel spinning with stupid and costly stuff like highlt subsidized ethanol from corn and those idiotic, unsightly and expensive windmills we see here and there (but not in the Kennedys' back yard).

We've had a number of "oil crises" over the past thirty or so years, each one seemingly more serious than those previous. These past five or six years, we've been in a continual oil crisis, largely because of the disingenuously-named "War on Terror." And our own politicians' propensity toward following suicidal policies.

Leftist environmentalism, or algorianism, is deliberately designed to destroy capitalism and individual freedom--not to mention the free world's industrial and technological capabilities. Algorians don't actually care a whit about the environment except as it serves their agenda.

Ten years ago roughly, the question of drilling for the oil under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) became a political football. It had been a question for a long while before, but oil from OPEC member nations became more problematical and a few sensible voices suggested that the federal government get out of the way of American petroleum production. Screams from the left were both shrill and without any rational arguments at all.

The arguments ranged from unprovable fears of destruction of animal habitat to the arguable notion that it would take ten years until any meaningful production would come from ANWR.

A very few brave advocates even suggested that exploring and drilling be authorized in offshore areas in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. They were again shouted down by emotion-laden voices that claimed unavoidable environmental damage. Baloney.

Planet Earth is self-cleaning. Whatever happened to the millions of gallons of oil spilled from the ships of the world's navies and merchant fleets destroyed during WWII? Microcritters ate it. Same with the oft whined about Exxon Valdez spill. One might be able to find traces of that oil today, but he'd have to search. A few years along, even that won't be possible.

Well, ten years have passed. Had we begun working the ANWR oil pools ten years ago, we'd be able to tell the Mideast countries to pump their oil where the sun don't shine. The crisis would be over for decades to come, giving entrepreneurs time to develop personal nuclear generators for the home, the factory and for personal aircars.

But that's not what the algorians want. They want to see us looking under rocks for bugs to eat. They want us killing each other for food.

And I would happily give up my hot rod for my own aircar, if there were no worries about tree huggers bringing back another Dark Age.

We've seen the enemy and he is Algore.

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

Ghoulish Algore Revels in Burma Destruction

It certainly was predictable. He's been telegraphing his intentions for some time--claiming that global warming will cause more and more hurricanes in the southern and eastern states. I can imagine that he was tearing his hair out, waiting for the high-body-count disasters that would help regenerate flagging interest in his nefarious agenda.

Finally, huzzah, a cyclone! Algore's jelly belly is just quivering with glee! Tens of thousands killed or missing. More to die from disease and unavailability of medical care over the upcoming weeks.

On the very day following the end of the storm, Algore finds a microphone and trumpets his "I told you so" as expected (and probably scheduled. As told in this story in the Business and Media Institute website, Algore leaprd to the NPR microphone to shout his mantra, "the cyclone is a consequence of global warming!" Truth be known, he has probably been sitting in front of that mike for weeks, waiting for something, anything, to happen that he could use.

Myanmar, traditionally known as Burma, having been renamed by an agency of one of its recent dictators-for-life is, and as a socialist republic will remain, a third world dictatorship, awash in squalor whenever it's not awash in flood waters. Philosopher Tibor Machan has recently written a short article on the reasons why, here.

Now, any event like that which happened in Burma is saddening beyond words, for the (mostly needless) loss of life. I say "mostly needless" because the socialist dictatorship in Burma has squelched technological advancement and left the country's millions vulnerable to the elements.

These are the kind of living conditions the algorians idealize for all the peoples of the world. This is the sort of world to which Algore's policies will ultimately lead us. Several algorians, past and present (most recently the evil and stupid Ted Turner), suggest that the ideal human population of planet Earth should be a few million naked savages, surviving as cannibals.

What more do you need?

Let them freeze to death in the dark.

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California

El Pueblo de Los Angeles Promotes Gang Violence With Big Payouts

Antonio Vinaigrette, el Alcalde del Pueblo de Los Angeles, is in the process of taking over all of the city's anti-gang programs. As an ex gangster himself, he obviously knows what he's doing. After all, he's also attempting to take over the entire city children's prison system. An obvious rationale? Put gangsters in front of the classes to teach children how to better conduct the War on Productivity in Los Angeles. Given his background and personal philosophy it, as Science Officer Spock used to say, is logical.

Meanwhile, these efforts are being carried out mostly by the City Council.

There is an expose on LA's local Fox News affiliate KTTV, of the effort of one City Councilwoman, Janice Hahn. Seems she's been paying gangsters big bucks to mitigate gang violence in the city. She's been getting gangsters who are arrested of violent crimes, released from incarceration so they can continue their work. See Chris Blatchford's expose video, as shown on KTTV, here, along with other related stories.

Apparently the money, fairly large sums. is given with no strings attached. One gangster is quoted as saying he didn't know what he was supposed to do, for the money. Another took his homies to the Raging Waters amusement park for the day.

Ms Hahn who, along with her father and brother have inhabited offices in City Hall for decades, gets very defensive when asked for specific answers about her programs. She cuts off interviews she deems hostile, much as does El Alcalde himself.

Arrogant as many of the Los Angeles City Council members are, they still have to stand for election every four years. Angry as LA residents are at the high local taxes and foolish spending, these parasites keep getting reelected.

One must suspect some Chicago-style hanky panky at the polls. And, of course, this is Hollywood, with all the celebrity-driven socialist propaganda being brought to bear at every election.

Like MS Hahn's insane notion that paying gangsters off will make them nice.

Meanwhile, the murder of someone (anyone) is the cost of initiation to many gangs and the murder of a member of another gang is even better. As might be suspected in a part of the country in which victims are disarmed by law, there are many murders in El Pueblo, of both the guilty and the innocent, and these murders apparently occur with the blessing of el alcalde and the rest of the City Council. Only occasionally are they prosecuted and they're almost never prosecuted severely.

A recently, one of Ms Hahn's paid gangsters was murdered by a member of a rival gang. She attended the funeral and hugged the deceased thug's mother. One must wonder if he was killed by a gangster with a gun purchased with Ms Hahn's money.

People should never be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California