Mr. Charlie’s Airline

It always amazes me the extent to which many Americans believe the CIA gives a damn about secrecy. Or has any credibility beyond the political. Of course they’re fighting Trump. They are the establishment and he is largely anti-establishment.

Most soldiers and civilians in Vietnam knew the CIA’s white helicopters on sight. Who else flew white helicopters? Exactly no one. Mr. Charlie’s Airline, some of us advisers to the South Vietnamese called the white birds, a reference not to the Victor Charles radio chatter terms for the Viet Cong, but to an old African-American label for an imperious and condescending white man in the age of slavery and segregation. You know, those Democrat Party institutions.

Mr. Charlie’s Airline not only flew its supposedly secrecy-conscious “agents” about the landscape of the war but also ferried their preferred private army, the so-called Provisional Reconnaissance Units (or PRUs) most of them turncoat North Vietnamese who usually struck small hamlets at night, terrorizing the people while rounding up supposed traitors to the South Vietnamese government.

Just a little tidbit on the Clumsy Intelligence Asses of our Deep State government, the real, un-elected government that occasionally raises its head whenever the establishment is threatened. You know, the folks who predicted 9/11?

MEMRI’s greatest hits

MEMRI, an outfit which translates the Arab world to show us their true attitudes behind the platitudes our pols and the dictator’s club hand us, occasionally hits the jackpot. As they did here. Watch these talk show clowns throw coffee and punches. You’ll see why Israel has so little hope of ever making peace with them.

Bye bye HBO Game of Thrones

The books, as I have said before, I like quite a lot. The author is(or his editor, or a combination thereof is) a pro at painting word pictures and making plots compelling. The literal HBO pictures, not so much. They seldom follow the books.

HBO’s costume drama is mainly scenes of gratuitous nudity and extreme violence, the two big sellers in flickers/movies/videos/what-have-you these days. Mere love and hope are also rans. It wasn’t always this way and back in those less-graphic days our society had a good many fewer mass murders. Are the two connected? That seems obvious to me.

I paid roughly $71 to watch Amazon streaming versions of the first thirty episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones. It was interesting. The nudity got old, especially in these days of ubiquitous Internet porn, and the ever-more-graphic violence got depressing. When I finally reached the end of Season 3, I realized that with very few exceptions, all of the characters I was interested in were dead.

Still, like a good addict of modern media I decided to press on. Then I discovered that Amazon’s price for Season 4 was more than twice that of Seasons 1, 2 & 3. Wily marketing that. But I decided not to go on. Not worth more of the same at twice the price. Not to me. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I’m sticking with the books. I’d still recommend them.

Latest mass murder coverup

The authorities, after eight years of our little Barry Hussein, will hide a mass murderer’s Islamic connections as long as they can. Including the searching-for-a-motive game they and the lame-stream news media play so well.

It took a private investigative-reporter blogger to expose the Fort Lauderdale mass killer of five and wounder of eight for the decade-old Islamic jihadi convert he is. Under the official, fake news cloak of a mere Hispanic Iraq war veteran.

We can only hope Trump’s administration halts these political charades so we know the truth of our vulnerability to the Islamic war on the West.

Via Judicial Watch

Rule 5: Gwendoline Christie

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Gwen doesn’t precisely qualify as one of our favored plus-sized models. But she is larger than many women and has been a model. She’s a British actress who is better known these days as Brienne of Tarth, a striking though rather plain knight in the Game of Thrones. And one of the few women in this persistently unclothed epic who doesn’t get naked from the front. She also uses a wooden sword to fight a bear. She grows on you. Or has me.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two…

…Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And Judaism was banned in Spain.

“…but many Jews, including the Rodriguez family, continued to secretly cling to the Jewish faith and rituals, while living publicly as Catholics. The fearsome Spanish Inquisition ruthlessly hunted these secret Jews, torturing and executing anyone suspected of engaging in Jewish rituals.”

A Rodriguez heir eventually fled to Mexico but found the Inquisition was there ahead of him and so he continued to be a Catholic in public and a Jew in private until about 1590 when the family was found out and tortured and executed.

Today a small, handwritten diary survives them. It’s a compelling story worth a read. Especially when you consider one of its meanings: that Jews were in the New World before the Pilgrims arrived.

Via Aish

More Game of Thrones

The first book is much better than the show’s first season. It also has many scenes that the producers of the show either rewrote entirely or truncated almost beyond recognition. The show is fun to watch but confusing at times and a lot of the details of the book are simply glossed over.

No spoilers here. Read the book and you’ll see what I mean. The show is much more of a costume drama with lots of gratuitous nudity and violence. Some major characters seem nicer or nastier in the show than they are in the book, rather they are complex in the book but rather one-sided in the show. I like both, but if I had to choose only one, I’d take the book.