Greenland.

Most people wonder why Trump is so interested in Greenland. That's probably because he knows it would be a good strategic asset for the United States.

Here's a pretty good WSJ article as to why Greenland matters to the US defense that makes a lot of sense. It explains it better than I can.

Incidentally this is not the first time we have made a real estate deal with Denmark. We bought the Danish West Indies (Now US Virgin Islands) from Denmark back in 1917.

Greenland in seven maps.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/greenland-national-defense-maps-6f53c339?st=sidtL4&mod=1440&user_id=695da3512f655e62cc0c887f

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I see where ICE has turned the tables on the idiots that follow them around.

They run their plate numbers and get the registered owner's address and drive them to what  is often the followers own home.

Actually they don't take it far enough. They should stop there, get out of their car and knock on the door.

If someone answers simply say to them "We know who you are and where you live." and then turn around and leave. If the door answerer is a spouse hen someone is likely to get a real ear beating when they get home. 

What's likely to happen is the car owner will see it and out himself by charging up to the officers and try to raise hell with them. With any luck the car owner will talk his way to jail.

===========================

I've seen a few videos of police officers breaking the windows of people that refuse to open them.  In just about every one of them it's pretty funny watching the driver go into shock as the entire window shatters into tiny pieces and falls out in under a second.

What they also need is a seatbelt cutter because when someone refuses to get out the seat belt seems to be the big problem. The officer has to unbuckle it.

Just shatter the window, cut the seat belt and then just jerk the person out of the car and onto the pavement where they can easily be cuffed.

Oh yeah, the police should report this to a central website so that when the owner tries to report it as vandalism or something to get it fixed the insurance company can tell them to pay for it themselves.

I don't believe that insurance companies will pay for damage like that that is caused by idiots.

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I guess the kid got his driver's license and actually listened to me.

I think it was last spring when one of the neighborhood kids was tooling around on some sort of pretty fast electric bike. He was speeding and fooling around on it and I know he blew a stop sign completely off.

The next time I saw him I flagged him down and told him the next time he had a few minutes I wanted to talk to him and give him a couple of tips and pointers. He said he had a few minutes then and there.

I told him I had been a professional criminal and had smuggled guns, drugs, stolen goods, untaxed gasoline and God knows what else and had gotten away with it for my entire life and had never even gotten a ticket.

When he asked how I managed never to get caught I explained to him that over 87% of all felony busts were the result of traffic stops. 

I told him that some I'd teach him how to drive drunk and not get busted.

Anyway, he slowed the electric bike down and seemed to act a little more responsible. 

Today he passed by driving at a reasonable speed in a car.

Maybe he's just doing it here but that's fine by me.

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The average fool doesn't understand the rest of the story of our Venezuelan raid.

Most people think it the raid and removal of Madero was all about oil as in cheap gas prices here in the States. That's a small part of it if you look at the bigger picture. we now have cheap gas and domestic drilling appears to be on the rise.

It's also about oil from another respect. We're keeping China and Russia pretty much out of the Venezuela oil patch. This is in line with the Monroe Doctrine and the policy of keeping the rest of the world out of the Americas.

President Carlos Perez nationalized the Venezuelan oil industry in 1976 and started edging the American companies out. They were completely out by 2007 and American oil companies lost a metric $hit ton of money because there was no reimbursement for contractual losses.

This hodgepodge wound up in world court and Venezuela was stuck with a debt to the US. No US presidents stepped up to the plate to make an effort to collect the debt.

Enter businessman President Trump that ordered certain vessels leaving Venezuela containing Venezuelan crude to be seized causing a certain outcry from the usual suspects Stateside. 

The whole thing is a pretty complicated deal but basically booting Madero out puts us in the driver's seat to cut off oil to China and Russia to an extent which slows up their war machines. 

There's a LOT more to it than providing cheap gas to American pumps.

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I am getting sick and tired of health lectures and nagging.

Just about every family has two members, an Uncle Simon that drank a quart of whiskey and smoked three packs of Luckies a day and died in his sleep at 98 years old. The family consnsus is he got nagged to death.

Then there's Cousin Jamie that was a natural born athlete that was the high school champion of football, baseball, track and field and basketball that went onto college and graduated after having sports scholarships and being the best athlete of his entire graduating class that six months after graduation dropped dead of a heart attack.

I didn't put someone's kid brother on the list. He got hit on the head by a meteorite one day when he was eleven.

It is what it is.

I'm sick and tired of people nagging at me to change my ways.

=====================================

In other news 

I am beginning to like RFKjr more and more because he has started to upset a few apple carts about health issues that we have believed for decades.

He recently tipped the long standing food pyramid upside down and it seems to make more sense.

A lot of myths about what's good for you have been created by various marketing groups to sell products. 

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day (breakfast food makers)

An apple a day keeps the doctor away (apple growers)

And so on.

RFKjr seems to be challenging a lot of what we've heard. 

Anymore my old age cynicism simply says follow the money.

As someone else said, I tried to follow the science and got nowhere so I followed the money and found the science.

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Will someone please explain this to me.

Trump did something.

Before the election my tank could hold $100 worth of gas.

Now it can only hold $60 worth of gas.

That bastard!

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One of the things lawmakers never seem to think about is the

likelihood of an enacted law to actually be obeyed by Joe Citizen.

I'm old enough to remember the 70s and the 55 mph national speed limit. It was a joke.

Almost immediately after it started every good citizen that could scare up $39.95 and two specially marked box tops headed straight down to the local Western Auto and bought a CB radio and the show began.

Anyone that couldn't afford a a CB could still play the game. All you had to do was drive 55 in the travel lane until a semi came roaring past you. If you could see a CB antenna on the truck you simply fell in behind him and kept a reasonably safe distance so when he slowed down to pass a speed trap you wouldn't eat his tail and hammered on.

Often impromptu convoys would form that could stretch out for quite a distance, sometimes at speeds close to 80. Etiquette to join a convoy was to continue driving in the travel lane until the last car passed you and then fall in at the rear. It was interesting seeing who was passing you in the convoy. It was a typical slice of Americana.

I actually believe I saw a couple of nuns hauling ass in the middle of one convoy I joined. While they were not in the official penguin suits, they were wearing nun headgear which was common then. Needless to say, I found that comical.

Later when I snagged a CB I entered the fray, passing along speed trap information and listening to things in general. Most of it was just people beating their gums but some of it was pretty good entertainment.

Things really got out of hand to the point where movies were being made over speeders. The one that comes to mind is Smokey and the Bandit that was an exceptionally high grossing movie in 1977.

By 1987 I think the feds gave up and let some rural states raise the limit to 65 and in 1995 it was applied to all states. It took a while but I think the feds knew when they were beat. Americans don't have time to dawdle. Even if they're in a hurry go somewhere to do nothing.

Other laws that's likely to be pretty much ignored are gun laws. 

At last count 'assault rifle' bans have been running single digit compliance in states with the bans. In fact New Jersey reported an increase on finding fully automatic weapons being found involved criminal activity. 

I think that bans are likely to make things worse.

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Sometimes you have to bull your life through

I pretty much play by the rules. 

Depending on the airlines and the circumstances, I generally travel with a carry-on, a personal item AND a CPAP. The carry-on and personal item is mandated by the airline and their policy. The CPAP is mandated by federal law. The CPAP doesn't count as an item. It doesn't have to be checked, either which is to keep it from being lost by rampers.

One time I was getting ready to board a plane with my 3 units of baggage and someone and someone said something snotty to me about having 3 bags.

I told him I was in total compliance with all of the airline policies and applicable federal regulations. He snidely said he hoped there would not be room for my luggage.

That's when I told him I had paid extra for early boarding to insure my gear was secured with me so as to insure I didn't have to screw around with recovering my luggage in the jetway and possibly missing my connection. He looked dismayed. "That's what money is for," I said. "If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em."

Truth is I did pay extra for early boarding and have done so since a flight with a connection into MSP in the middle of the winter. They did gate check my carry on and when I went to get off in MSP the side door on the jetway was frozen shut and they had to bust a lot of ice to get it to open. It took forever to get my bag and I damned near missed my connection.

The door was closing and I shouted and they reopened it. I made an Indiana Jones jump, boarded it, the door closed instantly. The aircrew then grabbed my luggage and stuffed it in a nook somewhere. Almost everyone was seated, only a couple of people in the rear of the aircraft were still sitting down so I grabbed the first empty seat and buckled up.

Later I found the seat was some kind of business class and was a little bigger than the seats I was used to. Nobody said anything about it. when we landed the attendant was sharp and had my stuff ready for me to snag on the way out. I didn't have to hold anyone up. It was grab and go.

That MSP connection was what changed me. I was sick and tired of the cheap seats the company bought and shortly after I arrived in SFO I made it a point to sit down with my port captain and talk about flight arrangements. I was surprised to find out he was responsible to choose my flight and run it through the travel people who would OK the chosen flight. He told me to choose my own flight and email it to him. I could upgrade it by going directly to the airline's web site. If my name matched the ticket and my credit card I was free to alter to my flight comforts.

An occasional $25 here, $30 there and things became civilized. I didn't mind it because I realized I could easily afford the creature comforts. 

Gone were the tight connections and long layovers and other of life's little indignities. I could get a better seat if I wanted one and sometimes I upgraded. My days of the last row next to the toilet and smelling that lovely aroma for an entire flight were now over. 

I also made it a point to look out for the company a little more carefully. When I sent my port captain for the last ticket home I chose Southwest out of Oakland. I had been reassigned to another vessel on the East Coast and had to take everything I owned with me. It accumulated to a lot of stuff like bulky cold weather clothing etc. Everything fit into a pair of large plastic footlockers that I had purchased carefully. The L+W+H had to add up to 62 inches. My pair of Contico footlockers came to 61 and 7/8 inches. Each one of them counted as a single suitcase. Southwest at the time allowed 2 checked suitcases to fly for free. You can cram a lot of stuff into a Contico footlocker.

When I sent the information in to my port captain I also wrote, "This flight is costing me an extra hour connection but that's OK. The reason I chose it is because my 2 footlockers fly free. That's a $70 savings. How about you get the travel people to bounce for the crummy $25 to get me an Earlybird check-in? Oh yeah, I'm also saving you on cab fare.

He fixed it and my carry-on was my CPAP and a folding 2 wheeled dolly to move both footlockers. IIRC I was the second or third person on the plane.

Three weeks later I reported to my newly assigned vessel and a few months later I retired. Of course I had a different port captain but when I told him about the deal I had regarding flights and he told me to continue doing it and running it through him.

A few months later I retired and put in for a First Class ticket for my final flight home. I told him I'd trade it for my (nonexistent) gold watch. He laughed and said he doubted they'd allow it.

When my ticket arrived I laughed like hell. It was a first Class ticket along with a note telling me he had to pawn my gold watch to get it for me.

The spend a little extra for comfort has stayed with me into retirement as my expenses are low and I can afford a few bucks here and there. The few bucks spent help me bull my way through make  things a little easier.

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I see where some women are shaving their heads over Renee Good.

Which is a pretty good deal for the young guys that are dating.

You will be able to spot the moonbats from a greater distance now.

This should save you younger guys a few bucks on coffee dates and stuff like that.

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