Overheard

God Bless America is now available on Amazon for rent, and the DVD will be available in July.

This was a movie CrazyUnk and I planned to watch together.  We never had that opportunity which is sad because he would have enjoyed it.



The Karl family enjoyed this movie.

Two short conversations:

When main actor Joel Murray pulls out his gun for the first time:

Karl:  See!  The 1911 is making a come back!

When his gun jams during a murder scene:

Zhukov: Yep, that is a 1911 alright.

Where did that boy get this unwelcome sarcastic attitude?

CrazyUnk - RIP

UPDATED and BUMPED 6.9:

A celebration of CrazyUnk's life will be this coming Saturday, June 16 in Seymour Indiana.

Click Here for details.

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[original post: May 21]

CrazyUnk, from blog Your Crazy Uncle, passed away in his sleep Saturday morning.

He was diagnosed with Colon cancer in February and he did everything he could to defeat the disease.  Surgery had saved his colon but chemo was not effective for the cancer that had spread to his liver.

He went down swinging.

We had traded email with CrazyUnk in 2011 after we had found his blog, but did not meet until after his diagnosis.  We contacted him and insisted he let us help him in this battle, and we visited about once a week between diagnosis and his passing.

Some thoughts about CrazyUnk:

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Thank you, God, for our new friend.

CrazyUnk was full of energy.  Our memory from our first visit was a violent slap on the back, a big smile, and “I can’t believe we’re finally meeting!”.

CrazyUnk was a strong and resourceful man.  

He was frustrated with the pain medication and was in pain for the entire three months.  His frustration was the diminished alertness, but all it really did was slow CrazyUnk down to a normal level.  His mind was so energetic, those pills had little effect.

Time spent with CrazyUnk was a great reminder of what a strong family should look like. He and his wife have three wonderful grown children.  All with the core values that we often worry are missing in today’s society.  Those values are not missing, and we should be reminded that great people exist and those great people raise more great people.  We are very optimistic about his family’s continued successes in life.

We felt a connection when we found CrazyUnk’s blog.  Same thoughts that we have, but an advanced level of humor and sarcasm that we can only dream of.  We felt a connection in the areas of politics, guns, general events in today’s society, and a shared concern for the future of liberty.  It was easy to bookmark his blog in our “Daily” folder of bookmarks.  His Gratutitous Pictures of the Day were a crackup!

We had several reasons for offering to help CrazyUnk.  Hopefully our presence would cheer him up.  A close second was to provide his wife and family a short break.  A third was to shield his family from any negatives - to absorb any despair so they could enjoy the most positive moments.  We know we succeeded in the first two goals.  The third never materialized.

CrazyUnk set a standard of dignity and peacefulness in his final days that amazed us.  He was cheated from a longer life, but never expressed this to us.  He died with one regret: he wished he had gone in for a colonoscopy when his doctor suggested.

In contrast, we have many regrets:  Not knowing CrazyUnk before his diagnosis.  Not realizing the speed of the disease until the last few days.  Not saying this.  Or that.  Never getting a chance to go to a ball game with this fellow Cubs fan.  Or joining him for one of the high-end beers that he liked.  Or asking him to pick up a large coffee at Starbucks for us.

But like his sister-in-law told us, and we agree: he knew all this.

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The top photo is CrazyUnk and Karl earlier this month.

The second photo is a church in the tornado-ravaged Holton Indiana.  This church became a milestone on our drives to and from CrazyUnk’s place, and a reminder of how many hits we can take without losing focus of what is important.

Links:

Blog: Your Crazy Uncle

Cancer Blog: Not What I Wanted to Hear, Doc   - Please leave comments there!

Ushanka posts about visits with CrazyUnk:  March 16, April 18, and April 25.

UPDATED 5.24

Tam

Green Mountains Homesteading

San Jacinto County Outlaw

UPDATED 5.31

Keep It Simple Survival

UPDATED 6.4

CrazyUnk's wife has posted the news at his site.

Pondering.......

American Apocalypse

Book Recommendation

We just finished the Blaine Harden book, Escape from Camp 14.  We've added this to our book list at the left.  Click the image to order from Amazon:

Shin Dong-Hyuk is the first North Korean to be born in a Gulag to have escaped the country.  His story is unique as he was in one of the camps where prisoners are there for life.  (Only two camps in North Korea allow term sentences and release.)

The prison-state of North Korea has a population of about 23 million.  Within the prison-state, over 200,000 North Koreans are imprisoned in the country's Gulags where executions, torture and starvation are daily events. Some estimates have this number at 300,000.

This book's value to us is that it offers some new information on the state of the North Korean regime, the support resources dedicated to the North Korean defector in South Korea and the US, and the recent changes in the North Korean society (black market, outside info getting in, corruption, etc.).  Further, it points to other resources for those interested in knowing more about this horror.

Here are four books the author references:

The Aquariums of Pyongyang (already in our book list at the left)
Nothing to Envy (in the mail)
Long Road Home (in the mail)
Hidden Gulag (PDF)

Escape from Camp 14 motivated us to do a bit of housecleaning with our bookmarks on North Korea.  Here are some of our links, with a couple added from the book:

One Free Korea
North Korean Economy Watch
DailyNK
Strategy Page (links to articles)
Blog Jam (links)
Peterson Institute for International Economics (blog)
North Korea Now (satellite photos of Gulags)
Liberty in North Korea (LiNK)

Click here for a list of links posted at The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK).

Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) has a new DVD ($20): The People's Crisis.  Trailer:



Clips from movie:


The People's Crisis Preview from LiNK | Liberty in North Korea on Vimeo.

Labels

BigFurHat is asking for votes for a new label for liberals progressives communists.

Voting is open until 8pm tomorrow, so hurry!  CLICK HERE!

He has ten options.  We voted for one of these four:

Regressives

Bullshevics

Theft-Wingers

Slacktards

Updated 7pm:

Holy Cow!  Rush Limbaugh gave a little talk on his show yesterday about labels.  He explained why the labels of "Socialist" and "Communist" didn't work in the past.  Key word: "didn't".  He knows his vocabulary and is always keen on what words to use and which words to avoid.

Very instructive: 

If liberal has lost its punch, its shock value, then why do liberals want us to now call them progressives, hmm?  Doesn't matter.  "Liberal" works every time it's tried.  "Socialist."  You know why socialist hasn't worked in the past?  It's like communist hasn't worked in the past.  I will tell you exactly why. I realized this many moons ago.  A little Indian lingo there, a little Elizabeth Warren lingo.  The American people simply don't want to believe that they have elected a socialist.

 When you start calling members of the Democrat Party communist, it didn't work.  People didn't want to believe it.  It was too outside the realm of what was reasonable.  The communists were people like Castro and Gorbachev. Well, not Gorbachev, they loved him.  Khrushchev.  Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev, big eyebrows and stuff, mean guy, Mao Tse-tung.  The idea that an American could even be one of those people was just, no.  Calling somebody communist didn't work.  Socialist, much the same cache.  Now I think it's profoundly different.  Socialists are happy to be called that.  There are many socialists in the Democrat Party.  One of them identifies himself as such, Bernie Sanders.  It still is not helpful.  It can still be an albatross around somebody's neck.  That's why they don't want it used because now it does have cache, now it does work, because now we've got one. 

Spot On

Career Decision Crossroad:

Quote Bubble:  "What would my communist Father, or my communist mother, or my communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis do?"

U/T: FB friend Donald

Technology - A Shout Out

Technology: It was the reason the bird flu and SARS didn't wipe out the planet.  We were able to map each new case and squish the new threat before it could reek havoc.

The Google Maps technology is doing the same for Zombie attacks.

GO HERE to see if the bath-salted undead are rising near you!

And remember to stock up on critical supplies!

Obama's New Party

Stanley Kurtz at NRO gives us an update on an old story about Obama's first political party - the New Party.

New, as in 1917 "new".  Same philosophy as Lenin, but with a Chicago flare.

Obama's Third-Party History:

Knowing that Obama disguised his New Party membership helps make sense of his questionable handling of the 2008 controversy over his ties to ACORN.

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The revelation in 2008 that Obama had joined an ACORN-controlled, leftist third party could have been damaging indeed, and coming clean about his broader work with ACORN might easily have exposed these New Party ties. Because the work of ACORN and the New Party often intersected with Obama’s other alliances, honesty about his ties to either could have laid bare the entire network of his leftist political partnerships.

Although Obama is ultimately responsible for deceiving the American people...

Here is our October 2008 post on the subject.

Photo, and more info, from Theodore's World.

We don't condone violence, but...

...if you have an opportunity to toss water on a socialist and bitch-slap an avowed communist, well...

In the left corner:

Radical left Syriza party member Rena Dorou (wearing red at the right), and Communist Party member Liana Kanelli (wearing white at top left of screen).

In the right corner:

Former member of Greek special forces, Ilias Kasidiaris.

Let's get ready to rumble!



Some are saying Kasidiaris is affiliated with Nazi's but we haven't verified that, and don't care.  Commie smack-downs are happy occasions regardless of who is doing the smacking.

Get ready for more of this.

The coming train wreck in Europe has been obvious for a year now to those of us who think spending more than you make is wrong.

They - the Greeks, Spanish, Italians, etc. - are just realizing what will be necessary to fix their problems.

Full story - The Telegraph.

Our May post re: Greece.

Quote Du Jour

Q: What is the Quote Du Jour?

A: It is the quote of the day.

Today's is from WSJ Taranto's Best of the Web yesterday, where he responds to the loser's complaint in Wisconsin that they lost due to the Citizens United supreme court decision:

Citizens United, which overturned federal laws censoring political speech, did not change Wisconsin's laws. The ruling did affirm that the speech Wisconsin would have permitted anyway was protected by the First Amendment, but that applies to unions as well as individuals and corporations. Anyway, it's telling that the left is convinced it can't win elections without censorship.

1:30 AM Tip

Don't take a Clariton-D 24-Hour pill at 5 PM.