Thoughts On A Sunday

Restaging the two WP computers I mentioned yesterday is coming along, though slowly. This is not a “reload the OS and copy files” operation so much as it is a reload, copy files, and ensure all bookmarks/login name/passwords have made the transition properly. Pulling those files is not as easy as just copying as sometimes those configuration files are hiding. But at least it is coming along.

As an aside, Ice Out was declared on Lake Winnipesaukee at 6:49AM EDT this morning. It is slightly earlier than the average date by 6 days, but no one is complaining. I have already seen a few boats out on the lake, most likely contractor boats and boats of those folk checking on how their island properties fared over the winter. I have already seen a few boats at their slips near where I dock the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout. (I won’t be launching that until around the second full week of May.)

I took the WP Mom for a drive around our little town yesterday to show her parts of town she rarely sees. While our town doesn’t have a large year-round population we do have a lot of land area, with about 50% to 60% more land area than many of the surrounding towns. But much of our town’s population lives closer to the lake than to more mountainous terrain on the other side of town. She says it always surprises her when she sees just how big, but sparsely populated our town is compared to other towns in the Lakes Region.

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I did something else today that was scary.

I filed my federal income taxes.

While it didn’t take long to fill out the ‘paperwork’ (I did it online), it was a little daunting. But I got it done and found I was getting more of a refund than I usually do. This was mostly due to the change in tax laws that meant my overtime pay wasn’t being taxed and the higher Standard Deduction for us old folks.

My refund didn’t increase all that much as I usually ‘tune’ my W4 to keep any refund around $100 to $200. I’d rather have the ‘extra’ money in my bank account over the year than in the feddle gummint’s accounts.

With the extra refund money I might go out and have myself some food from our local Wendy’s someday.

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Yeah, this isn’t a surprise to anyone that has paid attention over the past 20 years or so. The quote below is pretty much dead on:

An entire generation of men was repeatedly told "gender is a social construct" only for them to have the rug pulled out from under them because of their gender which the law has evidently decided is very much not a social construct.

Germany has instituted a military draft…but women are exempt. It has also implemented a restriction on men between the ages of 18 and 45 from leaving Germany without permission.

So much for equality.

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You know the Democrats’ latest rhetoric and push to both impeach and “25th” Donald Trump has gone so far over the top that even CNN is sick and tired of it.

On Saturday, CNN's Michael Smerconish delivered a scathing rebuke of Democrats’ rhetoric and methodically dismantled their favorite talking point that Donald Trump is mentally unfit to serve as president.

Smerconish began by recalling Bill Maher's now-infamous dinner with Trump at the White House last spring, which triggered the predictable meltdown from the left — including Larry David mocking Maher in the New York Times under the headline "My Dinner with Adolf."

"In a choice between two of my favorite comedians, I stood with Maher on [the] theory that it's better to have dialogue and to break bread than to demonize," Smerconish said. Maher had dinner, went right back on television, and kept up his criticism.

As you know, it was Trump's Truth Social posts during the Iran war that really set things off for the Democrats this past week, sparking the talks of impeachment and the 25th Amendment. The problem was, it worked, and 90 minutes before Trump's deadline, Pakistan brokered a two-week ceasefire.

Funny how that works.

Of course they never mention that it was both Obama and Biden who helped strengthen Iran’s theocratic dictatorship during their time in office by ‘returning’ money to the tune of billions of dollars that Iran used to try to develop nuclear weapons and fund terrorist operations around the world, including against Muslim countries. Heaven forbid they should point the finger at one of their own.

And so it goes.

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Why would this surprise anyone…including the people living in LA?

It appears the definition of ‘affordable’ does not apply when it comes to ticket prices for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Event organizers consistently promoted tickets as “affordable,” but that wasn’t the case when LA residents got early access to tickets this past week. Despite the promise of tickets starting at just $28 (including a 24% service fee), presale lottery winners saw ticket prices soar into the thousands.

…“They told us that prices were going to start at $28 and that they were going to stagger the most coveted tickets so everyone had a fair shot,” Kelly Burson told The Times. “Either that was total incompetence or a total lie.”

Burnson bought two tickets for a swimming event at $1,230 apiece, and three tickets for the decathlon finals at $1,600 each.

Some prospective buyers reported a price tag of more than $5,000 per ticket for the Opening Ceremony. A few events on presale were simply listed as “unavailable.”

It appears their definition of affordable is entirely different from everyone else’s definition of the term. While I haven’t followed the Olympics nearly as much as I did in the previous century, it looks like I will be doing as so many others will be doing – watching the Olympics on TV.

It could be because I am broke that I couldn’t afford tickets to any of the Olympic events. I’m not.

It could be that I have no desire to go anywhere near the Pyrite State. I don’t, but that’s not the reason even though just getting there and finding lodgings will be difficult.

It’s just my Yankee frugality saying “Oh, HELL no!” when it comes to spending that kind of money to watch sports in person, particularly when I can use that money for something more useful and productive.

No, if I am going to watch the Summer Olympics in 2028 I’ll be doing it the same way as millions of others. I’ll watch it on TV from the comfort of my own home for free.

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Is this true? Is the Left baffled and repulsed by the White Working Class?

Yes. Yes it is.

After failing to win Congress and the presidency in 2024, the Democrats conducted an internal postmortem of what went wrong. While they predictably did not divulge the full results, everyone knew what they had found.

Their obsessions with the low side of 30/70 issues had especially alienated Democrats from white middle- and working-class voters. Yet middle-class whites still comprise about 40–50 percent of the population and are perhaps overrepresented in voter turnout.

Democrats realize that their fixations on biological males competing in women’s sports, open borders and millions of illegal entries, radical green agendas, DEI-driven racial essentialism, and massive government entitlements rife with fraud have alienated the middle classes in general and white middle- and working-class voters in particular.

The question is will they be able to stop doing this or are they so clueless that they’ll keep angering their constituents, particularly middle-class votes regardless of their race, they they’ll be able to win elections and control of Congress, the White House, and state houses across the US?

Somehow, I don’t think they can. To quote Ronaldus Magnus, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so." If that is indeed so, it explains a lot.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where Ice Out has been declared, thoughts of the upcoming boating season intrude, and where I still have a lot of work to do on the WP computers,

Computer Stuff

As you may have noticed, I haven't put up my usual Saturday post. I have been deep into computer restoration, reviving not one, but two of the Weekend Pundit computers - one desktop and one laptop.

I have taken some time restaging them because thrre was some data I needed to recover before doing the job and I finally was able to do so over the past week or so with help from folks on one of the Linux forums.

I will post the usual Thoughts On A Sunda, though it may not be quite as big as usual. Time will tell.

Wish me luck in getting both of these computers fully restored.

Friday Funny - Marriage Differences

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a cool and rainy Easter Sunday up here at the lake. The WP Mom and I attended the Easter service at our church this morning and then went to one of our favorite local restaurants for Easter dinner. The rest of the day has been low key, not taking care of anything else except some laundry and some light housekeeping. I needed a day off considering just how busy this past week has been between work and helping my ex-wife, Deb, finish moving in to her new house down the street from The Gulch. This included a few trips to the dump, moving some things to BeezleBub’s house, and some things to mine. (I had emptied out our storage unit this past Monday and some of the things there ended up in her garage even though they belonged either here or at BeezleBub’s.)

Despite the cool and rainy weather today I saw that more of the ice on the lake was gone as compared to yesterday. I think Ice Out will be declared sometime this week. That brings us closer to when the first boats will appear on the lake and start filling the boat slips. I’m hoping that mine will be launched sometime during the second week of May, well before we start seeing the summerfolk up here.

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I heard about the rescue of the American Airman shot down over Iran, but not the details. Then I came across this which certainly explained quite a bit and dug into the different viewpoints about men versus materiel.

“Americans place a high value on the lives of our soldiers. Equipment and shells could always be replaced.”

Read The Whole Thing. It explains a lot between our philosophy and those of our enemies…and allies.

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I heard this news the other day – the jobs report – and saw that 178,000 new jobs had been created in March.

Like any jobs report, I know the numbers will be corrected later as more definitive data becomes available. During the Biden Administration is seemed the jobs numbers were always adjusted downwards…and during the 2nd Trump Administration it seems they have been adjusted upwards.

I guess we’ll find out for sure in a couple of weeks.

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Hmm. I have to wonder how the Climate Change Cultists will handle this bit of news:

An inconvenient tree found in the Alps shows climate was warmer 6000 years ago.

In 2014, a massive Swiss stone pine (Zirbe) log weighing 1.7 tons was found in the retreat area of the Pasterze glacier at an altitude of 2,060 meters. The tree from which the log originates is dated to be 6,000 years old.

Dr. Steiner points out that no trees of this size can grow at that altitude today because it is currently just too cold, suggesting that 6,000 years ago, temperatures in the Alps were significantly warmer than now. That’s evidence that climate alarmists would prefer to censor.

How will believers in the Mann Hockey Stick graph explain this one away? Not that actual data was used to generate that graph as a belated random data analysis showed the algorithm used to generate the graph was designed to show that particular result. It didn’t matter which data was used with the algorithm, the hockey stick appeared in the graph. Some claimed it was just a poor Monte Carlo analysis that caused the problem, but I have to wonder as a single proxy – tree ring data - was used to generate the data. If memory serves, the proxy data came from a single geographic area rather than using proxies from around the world.

I expect the rending of clothing and tearing of hair among the Climate Change Cultists to commence in 3…2…1…

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I have wondered about this, too.

Why don’t the left at least want to get rid of the really bad guys who are here illegally?

It seems like one heck of a paradox, doesn’t it? One would think they would have no problem with deporting criminal illegals, those that have been committing crimes both here and back in their home countries, particularly violent crimes. But you’d be wrong.

It seems they are even more vehement in their ‘protection’ of violent felons than they are for “those immigrants, even those here illegally, who have been committing no crimes other than those related to being in our country illegally, those simply trying to live a decent life for their families and themselves, being respectable members of their communities.”

I cannot wrap my mind around how the Left would be pushing so hard to keep the violent criminals here? I figure there is some ulterior motive for keeping them here, and in some cases, releasing them back into the general population. Could it be they want to foment a crime wave and the chaos that goes with it for some kind of political gain? Or are they just that deluded that they cannot see the problem?

Or worse, could it be a bit of both?

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice is receding, some warmer temps are on the way, and Monday is once again returning to ruin our weekend.

Observations While Out And About

I was out and about on the roads today, traveling from Lake Winnipesaukee down to Manchester to visit my dear brother in his new digs. He and his missus moved into a new apartment there, leaving the city of Concord where they had lived for over 20 years. They got a good deal on the new place and were now closer to both my oldest nephew and his family as well as his In-Laws.

It was a nice place, and it suited them well. But that isn’t the subject of this post. It is the observations I made while driving to and from their place I want to post about.

I had mentioned in a post sometime back in November about making a trip to a friend’s home in the southern part of the state to help him raise some new antennas for his amateur radio station. One of the things I noticed was how fast everyone was driving. I stuck to the slow lane on the trip down and back, driving at 75mph or faster and I was being passed by everyone. I thought it might have been just a weekend thing, particularly since it was a holiday weekend. But I was wrong.

Just as I had back then, I stuck to the slow lane and was traveling around 70mph and was getting passed by just about everyone. At least this time traffic wasn’t nearly as heavy as it was the previous time, but traffic was moving well above the posted limit – 65mph. My motivation for staying in the slower lane was to keep my fuel consumption lower than it otherwise would have been, particularly in light that I had just paid $4.20 a gallon to fuel up the trusty RAM and wanted to keep my fuel economy above 20 miles per gallon. I did succeed, averaging about 21 mpg for the entire trip.

Another thing I noticed was just how much of the snow cover was gone, with some small remnants of large snowbanks still visible here and there around Lake Winnipesaukee but all signs gone once I was about 10 miles south of there. Gone. I didn’t see any snow on the larger parking lots or along the roads. I didn’t see any in the shaded area of the woods that line the roads we were on. It was gone.

Another sign that winter was losing its grip was the amount of open water seen on Lake Winnipesaukee. There wasn’t a whole lot of open water on Friday, but there was a lot to be seen this afternoon. It looked like most of the ice was gone from the southern shores of the lake though we could still see quite a bit of ice in the center of the lake and along the northern shore. With the warmer weather and the wind today, I wasn’t surprised to see how much the ice had receded. It’s going to be warm tomorrow, though not as warm as today. But there will be rain on and off throughout the day Sunday. If it keeps up, I expect most of the ice will be gone before the end of this coming week.

And speaking of the ice being gone soon, I have already made arrangements to rent the same slip I have over the past 20 years and to get the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of storage and ready to launch sometime in early May. The ice is already gone from the cove where I dock the boat.

And so it goes…

Friday Funny - It's On TV

Sorry for the delay as yet again I forgot to hit "Publish".

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a 50-50 weekend here at the lake, with chilly temps with some wind on Saturday and warmer temps with little wind today. It is making it a bit more comfortable to work while helping the ex-missus get moved into her new house. So far it is looking like everything will be moved in by Wednesday. Then it will be a matter of getting everything unpacked and put away. I also have some things to put away as well as some of the boxes that were in the storage unit were mine will be making their way into the attic here at The Gulch.

I finished moving things from the storage unit around 5:30pm, making for a long day. Only one more trip to make tomorrow and the unit will be empty.

I feel a little more tired than I thought I would, but this was the third day I’ve been moving stuff from storage unit to one of two places. I have a feeling I won’t have any problem falling to sleep tonight. As such, this week’s TOAS may be shorter than usual.

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Listening to the news reports about the nationwide “No Kings” protest you’d think that half the population of the US was out protesting. A couple of aerial shots of a couple of the protests show a lot of people. If they had shown an aerial shot of the protest in our state capitol you might have had a problem finding them.

What I find Ironic is that none of these folks protested against Biden whose administration did more damage to our nation and our rights than those Trump is accused of having committed. Where were these same protesters when The Won also ignored the Constitution?

Seems hypocritical to me.

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I have mentioned the “Before We Get Too Old Or Die” Tour twice before and have been keeping an eye on our local concert venue’s list of shows scheduled for the coming summer.

Here’s the updated list for that tour:

James Taylor

Paul Simon

Motley Crue

Chicago

Styx

Guess Who

I have heard of four more possible acts that meet this criteria but they have not been announced yet.

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I can’t believe it.

UConn Men’s basketball team beat Duke with 0.4 seconds left in the game, overcoming a 23 point deficit at half-time. The final score was 73-72.

UConn’s Men’s and Women’s basketball teams have moved on to the next round or March Madness!

Go Huskies!

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And with that, I am going to close out this abbreviated version of TOAS. I plan to go to bed early tonight because tomorrow is Monday, of course.

That’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice still covers the lake, the only snow we’re seeing around here is that in the snowbanks, and where we’ll see some warmer temps for the next few days.

Time Is Different?

It has been while I have been helping my ex-wife move into her new house that I came to realize just how time can become ‘distorted’ for lack of a better term.

What am I talking about? Maybe it would be better to explain what happened as a better means of defining this.

A little over 7 years ago we sold our house – The Manse – after our divorce. She moved to a neighboring town and I relocated the The Gulch, a home literally on the other side of the hill where The Manse is located. When we decided to sell The Manse we went through everything we’d accumulated over a 13-year marriage. We threw away a lot of stuff there was a lot of things we’d ‘saved’ that we had no room for in our respective new homes. We split some things, with some of my family’s heirlooms remaining with me or going to my siblings. After we had whittled everything down we had some things left over that neither of us could take with us but that were important to us so we decided to rent a storage unit and placed the stuff we both wanted to keep inside it. From time to time over the past 7 years we’ve both removed old items and added new items to our stash.

Some time ago she informed me she wanted to move back to our town as she spent a good portion of her time in this town between shopping, hair appointments, dental appointments, gym workouts, and so on as it was. She really liked this town and missed it. It turns out I knew of a house that would be becoming available. To make a long story short she and her new husband ended up buying that house and are in the process of moving from her old place, one town over, to her new place just down the road from The Gulch. And here’s where the time distortion I mentioned comes into play.

It seems to me that it took only a couple of days to move stuff from The Manse to the storage unit seven years ago. We used the trusty RAM 1500 to move most of that stuff, making about a dozen trips to do so. However, it’s taken almost three weeks to move stuff from the storage unit to her new home, The Gulch, or BeezleBub’s house. At first, I thought that maybe I had misremembered the amount of time it took us to move our things from The Manse to the storage unit. But after asking both my ex and my son about this, I found their recollections matched mine. We have roughly the same amount of stuff we did when we filled the storage unit but it’s taking almost 7 times longer to empty it than it did to fill it. We’ve even been using the same trusty RAM 1500 to move the stuff.

What gives? Does this have anything to do with Relativity or Time Dilation?

I have no answer. It is a puzzlement.

Friday Funny - Relatable Marriage Jokes

Thoughts On A Sunday

It still being March, we are seeing another round of snow here at the lake. After some warm days and rain, much of the snow cover around here has melted away. It’s mostly the snowbanks that remain. But we’ll be seeing between 1 and 6 inches of snow by the time it’s all done. (There are conflicting forecasts with one saying 1-3 inches and another saying 3-6 inches. Time will tell.)

Not that either range will be causing major problems. Probably the worst we’ll see is some slick roads and a small amount of snow that we’ll need to shovel off the driveway.

One related issue we’ll be dealing with is the end of ice fishing season. New Hampshire Fish & Game is reminding ice fisherman their bobhouses need to be off the lake by April 1st. For some, it may be too late to remove their bobhouses easily as their only way off the ice is blocked by open water. They’ll have to float them across the open water to get them to shore. This is nothing new as there are always a few procrastinators who wait until the last minute only find they can’t reach them without using a boat.

And so it goes at the ‘official’ close of winter here at the lake.

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How often over the past 20+ years have we heard that the US Air Force wants to do away with the A-10 Warthog? It is a formidable Close Air Support aircraft that can carry a considerable amount of ordnance on 11 hard points as well as shred targets with its GAU-8 30mm Gatling gun.

The Air Force says the F-35 is more than capable of filling the role presently held by the A-10, but a lot of the ground troops – Army and Marines – think otherwise. We are certainly see it filling a role in the Iraq war, taking out boats and smaller ships of the Iranian Navy in the Straits of Hormuz to safeguard ships wishing to pass through the Straits.

The close-support aircraft, battle-proven in the Gulf War and Global War on Terror, has been threatened with retirement for decades. Congress has often pushed back; the most recent National Defense Authorization Act caps the number that can be scrapped until the Air Force details its retirement strategy. Experts told Defense One that the aircraft’s latest operations prove the war in Iran shouldn’t be the Warthog’s last rodeo.

The A-10s renewed use in the Middle East should serve as a “wake-up call” for lawmakers and the military calling for its retirement, said Dan Grazier, a Stimson Center senior fellow and the director of the nonprofit’s national-security reform program.

“The longer the A-10 exists, the more impressed I am with that aircraft,” Grazier said. “It’s just proof positive that when you design a weapon system that is stripped down and all the decisions that were made in the course of its design were all made for matters of military effectiveness, you get a really effective aircraft.”

One of the biggest issues with this argument about whether the A-10 should be retired was whether or not the F-35 could fill the role of the A-10. It turns out there was a “fly off” competition between the A-10 and the F-35 some years ago…and the results were buried, at least until recently.

A report on the controversial close air support-focused flyoff between the A-10C Warthog and F-35A Joint Strike Fighter that took place between 2018 and 2019 has finally emerged. The declassified review, which was only completed last year and has been essentially buried until now, is heavily redacted and raises more questions than it provides answers in many areas. However, it does still offer valuable details that have not previously been made public even as the U.S. Air Force looks to retire the last of the Warthogs no later than the end of the decade.

--snip--

One of the things that is immediately unclear from this report is why it took nearly three years to produce this final product in the first place or why its core findings were never announced publicly or even distributed to stakeholder communities in the military. It is The War Zone‘s understanding that very few people had previously seen any portion of this document, or details from it, and that it was not provided to members of the A-10 community or F-35 communities. In essence, it has been effectively ‘buried.’

I do have to wonder why the report has been buried. Could it be the A-10 showed to be the better aircraft when it comes to close air support (CAS), airborne forward air control (FAC[A]), and combat search and rescue (CSAR) than the F-35?

It looks like every time the Air Force tries to kill one of the most effective air support aircraft in the world it proves to the rest of the world that it is anything but old and ineffective.

While it is not a multi-mission type aircraft like the F-35, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One of the truisms that anyone familiar with military aircraft is that multi-mission aircraft don’t perform some aspects of their missions nearly as well as mission-specific aircraft.

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It looks like some folks are finally waking up to the fact that Iran has had the capability to strike targets in Europe with ballistic missiles for some time. This realization was brought about when Iran launched a couple of missiles at the joint UK-US base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, a distance of ~2361 miles. Neither missile reached its target as one failed in flight and the other was shot down by US Navy warship using an SM-3 interceptor missile.

The distance between Tehran and Paris is 2610 miles.

The distance between Tehran and London is 2750 miles.

The distance between Tehran and Berlin is 2200 miles.

Estimates puts the maximum range of the missiles of the type used by Iran to attack Diego Garcia at 2800 miles.

So Iran hasn’t been a threat to anyplace but the Middle East?

Another talking point busted.

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Talk about hypocrisy!

All the hypocrites whining about Trump’s reaction to Mueller’s death stayed silent while Democrats mocked Charlie Kirk.

Trump posted that he was “glad” Mueller was dead.. Not something I would post, but Trump doesn’t hide how he really feels, especially about fraud like Robert Mueller.. Now of course Democrats, the media and some worthless RINO Republicans are whining about Trump’s reaction… These are the same scum who either had nothing to say or participated in the mocking of Charlie Kirk, and his wife after the assassination of Kirk in Utah.

When there are a mass of people mocking the death of Robert Mueller, and it even being applauded on networks like Fox when TMZ went live, then get back to me.. Until then, STFU.. You have no leg to stand on and you are nothing more than hypocrites.

It seems their hypocrisy has no bounds. Therefore we need not listen to anything they have to say.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice on the lake is getting thinner by the day, plans to pull our boats out of storage are being made, and where Monday is returning all too soon.

Iran

I have been watching the news and online content covering the war with Iran. I have seen hundreds of different opinions about it running the gamut from “Let’s finally finish this long war once and for all!” to “Trump has gotten us into another forever war and attacked Iran for no reason!”

I will admit that my own opinion leans more towards the former and not the latter.

I remember when Iran fell to the Islamists with the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the exile of the Shah of Iran. I remember when the new Islamic Republic of Iran committed an act of war against the US by invading the US Embassy in 1979 and taking a number of embassy personnel hostage, holding them for 444 days. (That hostage situation ended the day Ronald Reagon took office because the Iranian regime understood that Reagan was nothing like Jimmy Carter.)

Iran has supported terrorism across the world, has attacked its neighbors, has killed thousands of Americans directly and indirectly, killed thousands in the Middle East directly and indirectly. It has also killed thousands upon thousands of its own citizens, with approximately 40,000 killed by the regime recently because they had the temerity to protest against the theocratic government that has been a thorn in the side of the world for almost 50 years. It is a brutal dictatorship with one thing on its mind – nuke Israel and the US in the name of Allah and to kill anyone who disagrees with the regime, including other Muslims.

This tacit war with Iran has been going on since 1979 and I know I would be just fine with bringing it to and end by ending the power of mullahs and returning it to the people of Iran.

Do I think our present hostilities against Iran is a bad idea or illegal or immoral?

No. It is long overdue.

Is the war causing economic disruptions around the world? Of course. I would expect any such action to do just that. But what be would the economic effects of a nuclear weapon detonating in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or New York or Washington? Mind you, if something like that did happen, I would expect Tehran, Qom, and a number of other Iranian cities and military bases and installations to suffer the same fate.

Is that something I want? Don’t be silly. Almost no one wants that.

I would like to see the war against Iran to succeed, to depose the mullahs, eliminate the IRGC and basij, and return Iran back into a civilized nation.