Based on the majority of snooze stories, I was chalking up the Louisville bank shooting to workplace violence. Multiple reports had it that he had been, or was about to be, fired. Not so much, apparently.
[Some asshole] made three key points in the manifesto, which is in the hands of the police: he wanted to kill himself, he wanted to prove how easy it was to buy a gun in Kentucky and he wanted to highlight a mental health crisis in America.
Hmm. On the one hand, he seemingly thought that there’s some much “gun violence” that guns must be further restricted. On the other hand, apparently there wasn’t enough gun violence, so he had to stage some himself.
What the SOB really was… was a terrorist. No different than a psycho suicide bomber.
(A)involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
(B)appear to be intended—
(i)to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii)to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
Good riddance.
Victim disarmers will probably — secretly — consider him a martyr. The Daily Mail report seems to; given the way they use his case to illustrate why he was “right” and Kentucky gun laws are dangerously lax. Why if you aren’t a known criminal, and haven’t been ruled mentally ill, or use illegal drugs, or any of the other restrictions on gun possession, and if you’re old enough… why, you can go to a gun store, undergo a background check (to confirm all the above) and by a gun.
* I won’t give him the post mortem fame he wanted by using his name, unless it’s necessary for research. Clearly, the Daily Mail doesn’t agree; they give his name 33 times in just that one report.
But the promises America has made to the women and men who have served in uniform are due for a review. The budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs has grown at a dramatic pace since 9/11 — from roughly $45 billion in 2001 to more than $300 billion this year.
None of these steps would be politically easy. Proposing and voting for new benefits for veterans have long been among the few policy areas that both Democrats and Republicans support. We also know that the array of benefits offered by the VA plays an important role in attracting and retaining the all-volunteer force — especially in an era of low unemployment and rising wages in the civilian sector.
But the moral responsibility Americans have to those who fought for the country is of diminished value if it does not align with the fiscal responsibility Americans have to keep their financial house safe and sound.
I haven’t been enraged reading a news article in a long, long time. Why am I enraged? Because of these Ivy League, snot-nosed fucks at the Washington Post.
These ones.
That’s the publically available editorial staff’s information about the board who wrote one of the most disrespectful articles I have ever seen about veterans. There are so many awful opinions in this opinion piece that it’s difficult to break down each and every one. I’ll lead with some words from the VFW, ya know, the VFW that helps in leading the charge against bullshit like this. The VFW that was a huge driver in getting the PACT act passed.
It is laughable that the employees of one of the richest individuals in the world have the audacity to suggest disabled veterans should be the persons responsible for balancing the federal budget – instead of their wealthy billionaire benefactors who notoriously skirt their tax liabilities.
You would think with all the collective Ivy League degrees held by The Washington Post Editorial Board they would understand basic economics. Instead, they recommend that veterans be subjected to means tests or outright forfeit their earned benefits if they manage to constructively cope with these life-altering disabilities.
If you don’t remember, the PACT Act was established to secure health care and entitlements for thousands of veterans who are being diagnosed with various cancers, lung diseases, and much much more. Health care was also improved for dozens of other causes and ailments.
We have been making great strides in helping or honoring those who served in the longest fucking war in American history. We went to a place where we could have been blown up at any moment. We went to a place where we had to watch someone point a gun at us before we were allowed to return fire. We fought in places where we had to put our battle buddies on choppers in body bags and watch them head back home to their families without breath or a heartbeat.
Vast numbers of us have terrible back problems, difficulty breathing at times, PTSD, Traumatic brain injuries, and on and on and on. These are things that we did for our country and we only ask for what was promised which is payment for the sacrifices to our bodies and minds that no reasonable government or dumb-ass editorial board could ever imagine stripping away with a means test.
Just like the VA’s motto until a few weeks ago, the terminology is what is outdated, not the benefits. Over the years, entitlement has become a bad word that implies laziness or the wanton use of funds by the government. The VA is the opposite of that. The VA provides entitlements based on the injuries you sustained while serving. Those injuries do not go away simply because you got a job. Veterans are entitled to these payments in the purest sense of the word.
Those injuries do not go away simply because the fiscal state of the United States is in dire shape. The injuries remain and will remain for the rest of our natural lives. Injuries like the aforementioned are something those entitled- the bad version now- people who have cushy jobs writing nonsense about some of the hardest working people in this country.
People that while they were typing or doing some kind of financial news stories, we were in sands above 100 degrees for months at time with packs that weighed over 60lbs on the regular. People who while the WP Board was polishing their Pultizers were calling family members on satellite phones from the rooftop where another person was standing watch with a machine gun ready to protect you while you talked to your kids.
People that had no problem walking near and over IEDs so that we could locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver while you were at the latest James Beard award-winning restaurant. While they were in their posh environments, many of us were marching to the sounds of the guns.
The injuries sustained by veterans and active duty members should be one of the last wells that we fill our buckets with simply because the well is closer and easier to draw water from. Walk to the next village over and look in that well of governmental waste. While I type this blog, my hands shake. My hands aren’t shaking because I am mad, which I am, my hands shake because I sustained an injury to my fucking brain when I was blown up by an IED. Does that change because I have a good job? No.
Does the veteran with PTSD lose it when she works in an accounting job now? No.
Does the Washington Post editorial board deal with any of that? I’d imagine not. While we were going to MOS schools, they were going to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Cornell. There is absolutely nothing wrong with going to one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
There is something wrong, however, when you sit there on your ivory fucking tower and scoff your nose at those with injuries, whether you believe they are true or not because you read a congressional budget office proposal and were bored on a Friday afternoon.
While I dont think this type of idea has or ever will get any legs, it’s beyond insulting when a huge newspaper like the Washington Post writes an opinion piece that can mislead and manipulate readers with a lesser understanding of the inner workings of both the VA and the veteran service organizations.
There are plenty of ways to improve the VA, the costs associated with the care of veterans, and the budget without ripping away the entitlements veterans are owed.
It is not only insulting but it also is completely untenable. Homes would go into foreclosure, cars would be repossessed, and families would struggle even more to put food on the table, a concern I’d imagine those Harvard, Yale, and Cornell graduates have never felt in their entire fucking lives.
The Washington Post editorial staff is an abomination to veterans. The Washington Post editorial staff seemingly are terrible people who target those who have served while not being personally impacted in any way. The Washington Post deserves to be shamed on the corner of every street in America. Still though, the military members who have served, are serving, or will serve are going to continue to serve so organizations like the Washington Post can write utter rubbish.
Freedom of the Press is a right guaranteed by the Consitution and those who you are trying to remove benefits from are the guarantors of that right. While invoking your absolute right to free speech, sometimes it’s better to invoke your Fifth Amendment right of shutting the fuck up.
BREAKING: Audrey E. Hale, the 28-year-old woman who identifies as he/him and uses the name “Aiden,” is identified as the now-deceased suspect who shot up a Christian school in Tennessee, killing 6, including 3 children. The killings follow the state banning the medical transitioning of minors & adult cabaret (drag) performances in front of children. #trans
Nossi College of Art & Design, formerly attended by the #trans mass shooter of a Christian school in Nashville, has locked down its Twitter account.
@MrAndyNgo
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Audrey “Aiden” Hale, the #trans mass shooter in #Nashville who killed children & staff at a Christian school, waited to ambush responding police from inside the church & fired upon the cops in their vehicle.
Quote Tweet
As officers responded to the Covenant campus, Hale fired on arriving police vehicles from a 2nd story window.
has released church/school surveillance footage of #trans mass shooter Audrey “Aiden” Hale (he/him). The female-to-male identifying militant shot his way into the school & roamed around looking for victims. Hale murdered 3 young children & 3 staff.…Show more
NEWARK, N.J. — A man in New Jersey tried to board a plane with guns, multiple rounds of ammunition, and a fake United States Marshals identification card in his baggage, officials say.
In a news release, theUnited States Attorney’s Office, District of New Jersey, said that Seretse Clouden, 42, has been charged with unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition by a convicted felon and fraudulent possession of an identification document and authentication features of the United States.
According to court documents, on Dec. 30, 2022, Clouden went to Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey for a flight to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
During the screening process, Transportation Security Administration agents found ammunition along with a ballistic vest with “Deputy Marshal” in one of the bags, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press.
After agents retrieved more of Clouden’s luggage, they found an AR-15 rifle, another rifle, a handgun, a taser, a knife, a baton, a “United States Marshal” badge, and U.S. Marshal credentials with his name and his photo on it, FBI agent Christopher Granato said, according to the AP.
Granato also told the AP that Clouden was convicted in 2016 of unlawful possession of a weapon in New Jersey.
One of the rifles that were found “meets the definition of a machine gun,” according toofficials.
The U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that Clouden is not and was never employed with them, according to authorities.
If convicted, Clouden could face up to 15 years in prison for unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition by a convicted felon. Fraudulent possession of an identification document and authentication features of the United States has a maximum of five years in prison along with a $250,000 fine, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of New Jersey.
———————————————————————————- Here is what Einstein looks like according to Google. Grumpy
I personally think girls are the greatest of all God’s many manifestly amazing creations. Sadly, Marc Lépine felt otherwise.
Some may take umbrage with my assertion, but I would propose that the human female is the most complex organism in the known universe. Stealth bombers, robot Mars rovers, and quantum computers don’t even come close. After a literal lifetime of study I can honestly say that I have no idea what makes girls tick. I am deeply thankful for the fairer half of the human population, but I will never consider myself an expert in the field of female relations. My wife would likely rate me a solid marginal. I think I should get an “A” for effort.
Marc Lépine, shown here alongside his younger sister, was dealt a fairly sordid hand in life.
Despite whatever challenges I might have interacting with women, Marc Lépine was far worse. Born in 1964 as Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi in Montreal, Quebec, Marc was the son of an Algerian immigrant named Rachid Liass Gharbi and Canadian nurse Monique Lépine. He had one younger sister named Nadia. For a variety of very good reasons, Marc had daddy issues.
This is Monique Lépine. Her son was a monster.
Monique was a former Catholic nun who rejected all religion after leaving the convent. Rachid was a non-pious Muslim. Mom later described Marc as “a confirmed atheist all his life.” Rachid started running around on Monique while on business trips, and things spiraled from there.
Marc Lépine just never seemed to get a break.
Rachid was a vile, violent, overbearing man who physically abused both his wife and his kids. He and Monique divorced, but things didn’t get much better. Rachid defaulted on his mortgage, and the family lost their home and most of their possessions. When he came of age Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi changed his named to Marc Lépine to spite his reprobate father.
Marc Lépine’s upbringing was hard and chaotic.
In his youth, Marc was described as reserved, quiet, and uncommunicative. His sister Nadia mocked him mercilessly in public over both his acne and his inability to secure a girlfriend. This precipitated a deep-seeded hatred. Marc once dug a faux grave for her in the backyard of the house where they were staying. He was thrilled when she was remanded to a group home for drug abuse and chronic delinquency. Nadia died of a cocaine overdose in 1996 at age 28.
Early on Marc Lépine vented his frustrations on the local pigeon population.
To make things worse, there were rumors that Marc might have been molested as part of a Big Brother after-school program. Along the way he acquired an air rifle and slaughtered pigeons wholesale in the neighborhood where he lived. He developed a fascination with World War 2 and openly praised Adolf Hitler. In 1981 at age 17 Marc applied for a position as an officer cadet in the Canadian military but was rejected. A subsequent statement from the Canadian Army explained that he was “interviewed, assessed, and found to be unsuitable.”
Behold the face of evil.
So here we have a kid with some suboptimal raw material raised in some of the most ghastly conditions imaginable. He hated his family and distrusted most everybody else. All the male figures in his life were beastly animals, while the women were abusive and distant. This was the perfect milieu to precipitate Something Truly Horrible.
The Setting
École Polytechnique was the site of an epically horrible mass shooting.
Bless his heart, Marc tried to make something of himself. He attended a variety of technical schools wherein his academic performance ranged from exemplary to absent with everything in between. By the late 1980’s he had set his sights on École Polytechnique, a respected engineering school in Montreal.
For reasons known only to him, images like this just sent Marc Lépine over the edge.
Marc had to complete a couple of classes to qualify for admission, and he pursued these prerequisites in fits and starts. During a 1989 meeting with an admissions officer, Marc complained that women were taking over the job market, displacing men from their more traditional roles. He was particularly bitter about female engineers and police officers. Somewhere along the way, Marc Lépine just snapped.
The Ruger Mini-14 was Lépine’s weapon of choice.
Lépine planned his vengeance over a period of months. In August of 1989 he made formal application for a permit to purchase a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. His application was approved in October of that year. He actually purchased the gun on November 21, 1989, from a local sporting goods store. This should address any lingering doubts you might have had concerning the effectiveness of waiting periods.
The Shootings
Marc Lépine was a self-described anti-feminist. Of all the dark twisted causes around which to wrap one’s dysfunctional life, this one strikes me as stranger than most.
On December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into a second-floor classroom of the École Polytechnique with his Mini-14. He methodically segregated the men from the women and directed the roughly fifty male students to leave. Once he had thusly winnowed the crowd he opened fire, killing six women and wounding the rest. Before leaving the room to continue his rampage he took a moment to scrawl a scatological reference across one of the female student’s project depicting his displeasure with its quality.
Marc Lépine focused his rage on the entire female population. In the sordid aftermath of the attack, several survivors have also taken their own lives. In two cases, their final thoughts attributed their own suicides to survivor’s guilt over this horrible attack.
Lépine then went mobile, wandering the halls, classrooms, and cafeteria shooting mostly women but a few men as well. His 14th and final victim was wounded and cried out for help. In response, Lépine stabbed her to death with his hunting knife before turning the rifle on himself. The entire ghastly attack spanned some twenty minutes. In addition to the fifteen dead, there were another fourteen who were badly injured. Lépine was 25 at the time.
The Suicide Letter
Humans have a weird compulsion to capture their final thoughts on paper prior to self destruction. Those of Marc Lépine were fairly nonsensical.
Lépine left behind a suicide note written in French. Here are a few excerpts drawn from the translation—
Forgive the mistakes, I had 15 minutes to write this. See also Annex.
Please note that if I commit suicide today 89-12-06 it is not for economic reasons (for I have waited until I exhausted all my financial means, even refusing jobs) but for political reasons. Because I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker…I tried in my youth to enter the Forces as an officer cadet, which would have allowed me possibly to get into the arsenal…They refused me because asocial [sic]. I therefore had to wait until this day to execute my plans. In between, I continued my studies in a haphazard way for they never really interested me, knowing in advance my fate…Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts…Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.
Thus it is an obvious truth that if the Olympic Games removed the Men-Women distinction, there would be women only in the graceful events. So the feminists are not fighting to remove that barrier. They are so opportunistic they [do not] neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men through the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can. Thus, the other day, I heard they were honoring the Canadian men and women who fought at the frontline during the world wars. How can you explain [that since] women were not authorized to go to the frontline??? Will we hear of Caesar’s female legions and female galley slaves who of course took up 50% of the ranks of history, though they never existed. A real Casus Belli.
Sorry for this too brief letter.
Marc Lépine
It’s Will again now–Wow. That guy was a piece of work.
The Gun
The similarities between the Mini-14 and its larger .30-caliber brother are obvious.
The Ruger Mini-14 was developed by James Sullivan, one of the original designers of the AR15, and Bill Ruger. Introduced in 1973, the Mini-14 was a scaled-down .223 version of the M14 battle rifle. While the two weapons are intentionally similar externally, their operating systems remain quite different.
The Ruger Mini-14 is one of the most highly customized weapons ever built.
The Mini-14 is offered in a variety of configurations in both stainless and blued finishes. This gas-operated rifle feeds from detachable box magazines and could be had from the factory with both fixed and folding stocks. The Mini-14 is one of the most widely accessorized firearms ever produced, and it remains in production today. In the hands of sensible folk it is a reliable utility tool.
The Aftermath
Poverty does a lot of bad things, but it doesn’t automatically make you a psychopath.
Psychiatrists have pored over the details of Lépine’s case, attributing his psychopathy to a broad spectrum of influences ranging from genetic to political. They affixed a variety of psychiatric diagnoses to the man in retrospect. Some of the labels include personality disorders, “extreme narcissistic vulnerability,” and fantasies of power combined with excessive self-criticism. It has been postulated that he had suffered brain damage at some point. Some delusional commentator even claimed that Lépine’s egregious behavior was simply the result of having been raised in poverty. Were that the case you would expect places like Burundi and Niger to be populated solely by serial killers.
Gun control via legislative fiat is a fool’s errand in Information Age America. With some 440 million weapons already in circulation, that ship has sailed.
There are 440 million firearms in America. Marc Lépine invested four months obtaining his gun through legal channels. In modern-day America it is not humanly possible to prevent monsters like this guy from obtaining the tools they want to commit their heinous crimes.
You really don’t have to look very far to find a good reason to pack a gun these days.
I don’t carry a gun every day because I am paranoid or insecure. I carry a gun because my family and I share the planet with homicidal lunatics like Marc Lépine. If you feel differently then good for you. Do whatever you want, just leave me alone to make my own choices. There was exactly one thing that could have stopped Marc Lépine on that horrible day in 1989, and it wasn’t some ill-conceived piece of feel-good legislation. It was a good guy with a gun.
Who wouldn’t want to be Superman? He’s invincible, he’s handsome, he’s unimaginably strong, and he can fly. There’s some heartache to his backstory, to be sure, but Superman just drips cool. In addition, if the notoriety ever grew cumbersome all he has to do to effectively become incognito is don a pair of glasses.
In 2014 a vintage copy of this first ten-cent Superman comic sold for $3.2 million. “64 Pages of Action! All In Full Color!”
Superman is the human ideal. When writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Schuster first introduced their indestructible superhero creation in June of 1938 they also penned the perfect tagline. They called him the Man of Steel. That certainly resonated, but it turned out that Siegel and Schuster weren’t the first. A few years prior a short-statured meteorologist from Georgia (the nation, not the state) grabbed that name for himself.
Background
Heinrich Himmler was a near-sighted chicken farmer before World War 2. A friendship with one of history’s most depraved dictators transformed him into a proper villain.
I don’t care much for the Nazis. They are history’s alpha villains. While they were undeniably snappy dressers, Hitler and his minions murdered millions in their diabolical quest for planetary ethnic cleansing. However, Hitler was at best third in the modern pantheon of mass murderers.
A lot of folks were murdered in the 20th century. Ours was quite the bloody orb.
It is tough to visualize the scope of institutionalized death in the 20th century. Sundry governments took life on a scale previously unimaginable. Democide is the term used to describe government-sanctioned murder. According to R.J. Rummel, during the 20th century, the world’s governments murdered six times more people than died in combat in all wars foreign and domestic. If you assume an average height of five feet and you laid the resulting corpses head to foot they would circle the globe ten times. Wow.
This grandfatherly-looking guy was a paranoid cold-blooded psychopath.
People are innately bad. We come from the factory broken and in need of redemption. Anyone who disagrees with that has clearly never met a human toddler. While the actions of government are by nature collective, certain remarkable individual personalities do inevitably percolate to the fore. One of the most compellingly dark figures in modern history was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. The world has come to know this bloodthirsty psychopath as Joseph Stalin.
The Birth of the Monster
People just kind of suck.
Stalin was likely personally responsible for the deaths of around six million people. His lunatic policies claimed another three million innocent lives beyond that. How do you create a man capable of such cold-hearted carnage? As is always the case, you begin with a broken home.
This is Joseph Stalin at age 15.
Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili was born in the Georgian town of Gori in December of 1878. He was his family’s only child to survive infancy. His dad, Besarion, was a shoemaker, and his mom, Ekaterine, cleaned houses. When the bottom fell out of the shoemaking business, young Ioseb’s dad began hitting the bottle. Besarion descended into alcoholism and began beating Ekaterine and their son. In 1883 Ekaterine and Ioseb hit the road.
Here is Stalin’s school days picture. He’s on the far right.
Over the next ten years, this mom and child burned through nine addresses. In 1884 the young man contracted smallpox. Though he obviously survived, the disease left him badly scarred. At age 12 he was run over by a phaeton, a modest horse-drawn carriage. This injury left him with diminished use of his left arm.
This is the seminary where Stalin went to school.
Ioseb was a small, somewhat sickly child. He ultimately topped out at around five foot five and supposedly wore lifts in his shoes to make himself appear taller. At five foot seven, it is said that Vladimir Putin does the same thing. Not being tall is not a big deal. Some of my favorite people are vertically challenged. However, in this case, Ioseb’s innate moral defects combined with his habitus and physical limitations to create something truly horrible. Regardless, in 1894 at age sixteen Ioseb enrolled in the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis. This short, scarred, crippled little man aspired to become a priest.
Real monsters aren’t this cute and colorful.
Ioseb was, by all accounts, genuinely smart. While in seminary he began writing poetry, some of which was quite good. Along the way, however, he also started reading. Chernyshevsky, Kazbegi, and Marx all planted ideas in his head that ultimately turned out to be teratogens. Teratogen is a medical term used to describe a foreign substance that causes birth defects. The literal translation is “monster maker”.
Ioseb had a bit of a temper. This came into play in a big way later.
The more he read, the more rebellious he became. Young Ioseb stopped doffing his hat to the monks at the seminary, and he refused to participate in prayers. He lost interest in his studies, and his grades plummeted. He was repeatedly confined to his cell for behavior infractions. Eventually, he declared himself an atheist and in 1899 left the school in a huff.
The Monster Comes of Age
All proper villains master their craft in jail.
Later that year Ioseb began work as a meteorologist at the Tiflis Observatory. Apparently, it didn’t take a great deal of formal training to be a weatherman back then. While there he studied socialist theory and began organizing workers to protest the government. He eventually authored several workers’ strikes and was soon on the run. In April of 1902, he went to jail. Prison is the finishing school for both career criminals and megalomaniac dictators. Stalin and Hitler each got their start there.
This is a bunkhouse in a Siberian gulag. Who wouldn’t want to spend the winter in this place?
The young man was remanded to Siberia but escaped twice. His first attempt was foiled due to frostbite. On his second try, he made it home to resume his political activism. At some point, he adopted the nom de guerre Joseph Stalin, the Man of Steel.
In his prime Joseph Stalin was a pretty handsome guy.
Stalin married and fathered a son but lost his wife to typhus. He subsequently went full bandit, commanding a guerilla band called the Outfit. The Outfit made money via bank robbery, extortion rackets, and counterfeiting currency. They also had a nasty habit of kidnapping children from wealthy families and holding them for ransom. What followed was prison, uprisings, girlfriends, and paramours.
This intense-looking gentleman is Vladimir Lenin. Stalin rode this guy’s coattails to the very apex of power in the Soviet Union.
World War 1 changed everything, but Stalin was supposedly too crippled to fight. During the 1917 revolution, however, Stalin nonetheless served as Lenin’s bodyguard. He smuggling the man out of the office of Pravda amidst a violent armed raid. Alongside Leon Trotsky, Stalin helped facilitate Lenin’s Bolsheviks when they moved to seize power in October 1917.
The Russian Revolution was a heady time indeed for enthusiastic young communists.
Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Yakov Sverdlov, and Stalin ran this fresh new revolutionary government as a foursome of sorts. When the civil war grew heated Stalin was dispatched to command military forces arrayed against the White armies. He subsequently lost an astronomical number of troops. He also developed a taste for political execution that was to follow him throughout the rest of his dark twisted career.
The Real Face of Power
Towards the end, Lenin was but a shell of his fiery former self.
Lenin had a stroke in 1922 and died two years later. Despite some fairly significant acrimony between the two men toward the end, Stalin still served as one of Lenin’s pallbearers and found himself in the position of General Secretary. At least half a dozen other Russian politicians coveted the job, but Stalin deftly moved to bypass, neutralize, or kill them. By the late 1920’s Stalin was the head enchilada.
Behold the American Communist Party. Apparently, that’s still a thing. The common thread to all communists everywhere is that they believe that the only reason communism has failed every single time it has ever been tried is because everybody else did it wrong.
No offense to my left-wing countrymen, but communism just doesn’t work. It’s as wrong as a football bat. No amount of tinkering or tweaking will ever make it functional. Communism presumes people are selfless and good. They aren’t. As a result, really bad things happen under communist regimes…every single time.
This is Stalin’s mugshot produced by the Tzar’s secret police. What an epic ‘stache.
“We have fallen behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must close that gap in ten years. Either we do this or we’ll be crushed.
This is what our obligations before the workers and peasants of the USSR dictate to us.”
— Stalin, February 1931
While this guy was figuring out a better way to do everything he inadvertently killed off a generation of his countrymen.
They called it, among other things, dekulakization and collectivization. Kulaks were affluent peasants who thrived as small farm owners. Stalin’s programs centralized land ownership and turned kulaks into functionaries of the state. Without any motivation to better themselves, production plummeted. The stage was set for something pretty awful.
This epic old church was demolished to make room for a shrine to communism.
Communism worships the human ideal, something that, in my opinion at least, doesn’t actually exist. They have little use for God. In 1931 the communists demolished the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow to make space for the sparkly new Palace of the Soviets. The Great Depression certainly didn’t help, and in 1932 famine struck.
Carnage on a Biblical Scale
During Stalin’s famine, millions of folks literally starved to death because of misguided government policies.
Amidst widespread starvation, a desperate Stalin instigated the Great Purge, itself a smaller subset of the Great Terror. Anyone even remotely suspected of opposing Stalin or his policies was simply killed. Eventually, paranoia ruled the day, and you didn’t have to do anything to be arrested, deported, or murdered. I have a friend whose grandfather fled his Russian home for Germany and escaped Stalin’s purge by a whisker. Along the way, Stalin liquidated most of his competent military leadership as well. Apparently, it can be tough to throttle something like mass murder back once you get tooled up.
Most of WW2’s fighting and dying took place on the Eastern Front. Much of that history is lost to us in the West today.
World War 2 happened, and 15% of the Soviet population became hors de combat. Stalin squandered 800,000 men during his ill-fated attack on Finland alone. Almost 70% of Russian men born in 1923 were dead by the end of WW2.
Stalin, shown here during a confab with Harry Truman and Clement Attlee, was fairly full of himself by the end of World War 2.
Regardless, by 1945 Stalin was at the top of his game. He awarded himself the title of Generalissimus. Throughout it all, however, he grew ever more paranoid. Stalin had half the POWs returning from WW2 imprisoned as traitors. By 1953 fully 3% of the Soviet population had been jailed or deported for political crimes.
Behold the goon platoon. This shot of Stalin standing alongside the clearly constipated Mao Zedong, Nikolai Bulganin, Walter Ulbricht, and Yumjaagiin Tseddenbal was taken three years before he died.
In March of 1953, Stalin suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. He was 74. In the chaos surrounding his funeral, more than 100 people were crushed to death. It seems a fitting tribute to a weatherman who ultimately murdered nine million people.
This is the face of a monster. Martin Bryant was the most prolific mass murderer in modern Australian history. His horrific crimes changed the fabric of the country.
Martin John Bryant was born in May of 1967 in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, the oldest son of Maurice and Carleen Bryant. Martin consistently broke his toys and once yanked the snorkel from another child while he was diving. He tortured animals, was obsessed with fire, and had an IQ of 66, about the equivalent of an 11-year-old.
Martin Bryant finally found a friend in the eccentric heiress Helen Harvey.
Bryant was unsuccessful in school and was too socially awkward to maintain normal friendships. However, in early 1987 at age 19 he met a 54-year-old woman named Helen Mary Elizabeth Harvey. Ms. Harvey had inherited a share of the Tattersall’s lottery fortune and was both eccentric and wealthy. Tattersall’s is a conglomerate that has a functional monopoly on the lottery system in Australia.
Martin Bryant encouraged Helen Harvey to spend large quantities of money. Martin was obsessed with bestiality and gory horror movies and frequently slept with his pet pig.
Harvey maintained 14 dogs and 30 cats in a run-down mansion owned by her ailing mother. She invited Bryant to move in with her, and the two of them bought some thirty new cars over a three-year period. They traveled widely together and spent money with wanton abandon. Throughout it all Martin Bryant was persistently both strange and violent.
Martin was nearly killed in a car wreck that took the life of his benefactor.
In 1992 Martin and Helen were driving on a rural road when Helen swerved the car into oncoming traffic and was killed. Martin Bryant suffered a severe back injury and required seven months in hospital to recover. Previously Bryant had been known to lunge for the steering wheel while a passenger in a car and had already precipitated three automobile accidents. Helen Harvey left the entirety of her estate, some $550,000, to Martin.
Maurice Bryant, shown here alongside his nutjob son Martin, was found drowned in a pond. This event precipitated a significant deterioration in Martin’s demeanor and behavior.
Two months later Martin’s father Maurice went missing. Divers eventually found him at the bottom of a pond with one of Martin’s scuba weight belts wrapped around his neck. The police declared the death a suicide. With the death of his father, Martin acquired another quarter-million dollar.
Martin Bryant planned his rampage weeks in advance.
Martin grew ever more despondent and began to drink heavily and daily. Soon after New Year in 1996, he began planning his bloody masterwork. He confided to a neighbor, “I’ll do something that will make everyone remember me.”
The Crime
Noelene and David Martin were Bryant’s first known victims. They were targeted because Martin Bryant’s father had become angry with them over a business deal.
Martin Bryant’s father had complained incessantly that a local couple, David and Noelene Martin, had somehow cheated the Bryant clan by buying a nearby bed and breakfast called Seascape. On April 28, 1996, Martin drove to David and Noelene’s home and killed them both.
The Port Arthur Historic Site is the best-preserved convict settlement in Australia and a popular tourist draw.
Bryant then proceeded to the Port Arthur Historic Site, a popular nearby tourist destination, interacting with several people along the way. Some of these witnesses later described him as rude, while others said he was friendly. Bryant parked his car near a café on the premises. He then entered the restaurant carrying a large black bag, bought lunch, and ate it in a leisurely fashion at an outdoor table.
Bryant enjoyed a pleasant meal before he produced a rifle like this one and opened fire on his fellow diners.
During his meal, Bryant made small talk with the other people in the cafe. He responsibly returned his tray and retrieved a Colt SP-1 AR-15 Carbine equipped with a 3x Colt scope and 30-round magazine from his bag. In the fifteen seconds that followed Martin Bryant fired seventeen rounds and killed twelve people, wounding another ten.
The attached gift shop was both congested and crowded. Bryant’s victims had no place to run.
Bryant then made his way into the gift shop where he fired a dozen rounds, killing another eight people and wounded two more. His victims were hemmed in and helpless. Many of the dead were shot at extremely close range. Bryant reloaded his rifle in the gift shop and left the empty magazine on the checkout counter.
This parking lot was the scene of a great deal of carnage. Martin Bryant targeted his victims randomly.
Bryant then moved to the car park. He fired at Ashley Law, a site employee, at a range of about 75 meters but missed. After sowing mayhem throughout the car lot he returned to his vehicle and exchanged his AR-15 for an L1A1 SLR rifle. By the time he grew weary of the car park, he had killed another six people and wounded the same number.
Bryant had inexplicably strapped a surfboard to the top of his Volvo the day of the massacre.
Bryant then mounted his car and headed down the drive away from the Historic Site.
Bryant shot this woman and her two young children randomly as he fled the scene of his crimes.
On the way, he encountered a young mother with two children aged 3 and 6. This stupid monster exited his car and shot the three of them at contact range.
When Bryant carjacked a new vehicle he abandoned his USAS-12 shotgun in his Volvo.
Once at the toll booth leading into the facility Bryant stopped a BMW, killing its four occupants. He loaded his weapons, a pair of handcuffs, and an extra fuel can from his own vehicle into the BMW before speeding off. He left behind a Daewoo USAS-12 shotgun. By now he had killed 33 and wounded 19.
This guy’s head is a bucket of snakes. It is impossible to establish any reason or order to his actions that fateful day. He claimed later not to remember any of it clearly.
Bryant stopped at a nearby gas station and confronted a couple there. For reasons unknown, he forced the male half of the pair into the boot of his stolen BMW and killed the man’s girlfriend. The service station attendant had a rifle, but Bryant was gone by the time he could retrieve ammunition and get it loaded.
Seascape was a beautiful place before Martin Bryant murdered the owners and burned it to the ground.
Bryant then returned to Seascape, shooting and injuring several bystanders along the way. Once back at the bed and breakfast he handcuffed his prisoner to a stair railing and incinerated the BMW. The following morning, having murdered his hostage and now surrounded by police, Martin Bryant set fire to the building. He taunted the cops to “come and get him.”
Never one to fully consider the ramifications of his actions, Bryant set fire to the building he was cowering within. He incurred some fairly significant burns as a result.
The police let the building burn around him. Bryant eventually fled the conflagration with his clothes alight. The cops found the remains of his two rifles in the burned out building.
The Weapons
The Colt AR-15 was produced in a semiautomatic civilian version alongside the Army-issue M16.
ArmaLite designed the original 5.56mm AR-15 in the mid-1950s. “AR” stands for “ArmaLite Rifle,” a designation that persists to the present. ArmaLite sold the manufacturing rights to the AR-15 to Colt’s Manufacturing Company in 1959. Colt sold the first semiautomatic AR-15 rifles to the public in 1964.
The Carbine version of the AR-15 rifle was shorter and handier.
Original AR-15 rifles featured a fixed polymer stock and a 20-inch barrel. Colt eventually offered a carbine version of the weapon with a collapsible aluminum buttstock and 16-inch thin-profile barrel. The stubby little 3X Colt scope featured a fixed magnification and built-in mechanical bullet drop compensator.
The SLR is a full-sized .30-caliber battle rifle. Martin Bryant had passed extensive background checks to purchase his weapons. Australian authorities never did quite determine how he pulled that off.
The SLR or “Self-Loading Rifle” was the British version of the Belgian-designed FN-FAL that saw military use from 1954 to the present. The SLR was also known at the C1A1 in Canadian parlance or the “Inch Pattern” FAL in the US. The FAL saw service with seventy different militaries to include the Australian Army.
The FN FAL saw extensive service around the globe during the Cold War. Here we see a US Marine undergoing familiarization training during the first Gulf War.
The SLR is a 7.62x51mm semiautomatic gas-operated autoloader that features a tilting breechblock and feeds from a twenty-round box magazine. The SLR is a large rifle at 45 inches long and 9.56 pounds empty. The SLR served in the British Army until it was replaced by the L85A1 in 1984. In 1989 the Australian military replaced the SLR with the F88 Austeyr, an Australian-produced version of the Steyr AUG.
Fallout
The shockingly brutal nature of Bryant’s crimes shook the Australian psyche on a visceral level.
The Port Arthur Massacre precipitated a nationwide transformation in the Australian public’s perceptions of firearms. Tasmania, where the massacre occurred, had previously been a predominantly rural bastion of gun ownership. Australian State governments passed laws to give effect to the sweeping National Firearms Agreement a mere twelve days after the massacre.
The Australian NFA placed tight restrictions on the ownership of semi and fully automatic weapons. As a result of the act, the Australian government bought back and destroyed 643,000 firearms for a total cost of $350 million. The money for this program came from a temporary increase in the Australian Medicare levy.
The Australian government bought back and destroyed hundreds of thousands of previously legally owned firearms. There are 4,500 guns in this bin awaiting the smelter.
As a result of the NFA, there is currently a nationwide firearms registry as well as a 28-day waiting period on the purchase of firearms. The law stipulates storage requirements and demands a “genuine reason” for ownership. Self-defense is not an acceptable justification. As of 2014, there were at least 260,000 unregistered illegal firearms in circulation in Australia. Scholarly works undertaken since then have been inconclusive regarding the law’s effect on crime.
The Australian NFA was a culture-shifting piece of legislation. The Australian soldiers with whom I served were sickened by it.
I was a soldier in 1997 and undertook a joint operation with the Australian Army soon after the NFA took effect. I recall passing Aussie gun shops that were boarded up and shuttered as a result of the legislation. The Australian soldiers with whom I worked, most of whom were politically conservative, deeply lamented the demise of their liberty. Today, some twenty-three years later, 85% of Australians feel that the NFA is either appropriate or too lenient. After two decades of acclimation, only 6% of citizens believe that the statutes are excessively restrictive.
Observations
Martin Bryant was defective from the outset. His childhood and adolescence demonstrate textbook antisocial personality disorder. The Australian press was castigated for doctoring this photo to make Bryant look crazier than he was. Given the egregious nature of his real-life performance that seems superfluous to me.
Studying the dispassionate slaughter wrought by Martin Bryant was a tough read. His victims ranged in age from 72 down to 3. The most compelling aspect of the carnage to me, however, was the sheer helplessness of the victims. His targets fought back with foul language, profound bravery, and dinner trays, but they were all utterly helpless.
Gun ownership in America is on a whole different scale from that in Australia. If all firearms were outlawed in the US tomorrow criminals would still remain heavily armed a century from now.
There are nearly 400 million firearms in America. The Australian government bought back 643,000 guns after their NFA. At the apogee of the Obama Presidency, there were that many NICS checks in the US in nine days. An Australia-style gun buyback is a physical impossibility in the United States.
Martin Bryant will spend the rest of his natural life in solitary confinement inside this building.
Martin Bryant pled guilty and received 35 life sentences and 1,035 years in prison. He remains in solitary confinement in Hobart’s Risdon Prison today. The profound effects this one psychopath had on Australian culture will never be undone.
Today Martin Bryant is 52 years old and weighs 352 pounds. He has attempted suicide eight times and once broke a nurse’s jaw in prison. With more than a millennium on his sentence, he will never again breathe free air.
A French hospital was partially evacuated Saturday after a senior citizen arrived with a World War I artillery shell lodged in his rectum.
The 88-year-old patient visited Hospital Sainte Musse in Toulon to have the antique explosive removed — but instead sparked a “bomb scare,” French publication Var-Matin reported.
“An emergency occurred from 9 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. on Saturday evening that required the intervention of bomb disposal personnel, the evacuation of adult and pediatric emergencies as well as the diversion of incoming emergencies,” a hospital spokesperson stated.
“We had to manage the risk in a reactive framework,” the rep added. “When in doubt, we took all the precautions.”
Oh, shell no! The WWI relic measured almost 8 inches long and more than 2 inches wide.Twitter / @acommonlawyer
Bomb disposal experts at the scene determined there was little possibility the shell would explode inside the man.
“They reassured us by telling us that it was a collector’s item from the First World War, used by the French military,” the hospital stated.
Stunned doctors subsequently began the process of trying to remove the object — which measured almost 8 inches long and more than 2 inches wide — from the man’s rectum.
“We had to manage the risk in a reactive framework,” a hospital spokesperson declared. “When in doubt, we took all the precautions.”Hôpital Sainte Musse
It’s believed the pervy patient inserted the item up his anus for sexual pleasure.
“An apple, a mango, or even a can of shaving foam, we are used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn’t be,” one doctor declared. “But a shell? Never!”
Medics were forced to take the elderly man into surgery, cutting open his abdomen in order to remove the relic.
According to the hospital, he is now in “good health” and is expected to make a full recovery from the surgery.
That’s the publically available editorial staff’s information about the board who wrote one of the most disrespectful articles I have ever seen about veterans. There are so many awful opinions in this opinion piece that it’s difficult to break down each and every one. I’ll lead with some words from the VFW, ya know, the VFW that helps in leading the charge against bullshit like this. The VFW that was a huge driver in getting the PACT act passed.
