Rachel Dolazel slipped under my radar last week so she didn’t get the award last week. I was gonna rectify that by giving her the award this week, but she was beat out by Obungler. We had some white loser shoot up a black church and our president couldn’t wait to get to a microphone and use this tragedy to call for gun control. There are many things he could have said about how tragic this was and how we needed to come together but no, he had to climb upon these dead bodies and use this as an excuse to try to take away our guns.

Here’s a little question. If a black dude had shot up a church full of white people would Obumbler have gone on television? Of course not. And then he said stuff like this doesn’t happen in other civilized countries. Did he already forget about the massacre in Paris? Is France not an industrialized country? And France has strict gun control laws. Did that stop the Charlie Hebdo shootings? Nope! And it was in Norway where some deranged dude shot up a children’s camp. And this church in Charleston was a gun free facility. Did that stop the shooter? When one of these deranged dudes sees a sign that says “This is a gun free facility” it’s a big welcome sign because he knows no one will shoot back. My doctor’s office used to have one of those signs. Fortunately, someone there came to their senses and it was removed.

So, for politicizing a tragedy (“Never let a crisis go to waste” – Rahm Emmanuel) Oblunder gets yet another AOTW Award to add to his already massive collection.

Update: Lucky Gene in the comments posted a list of some of the worst mass shootings since 1987.

__ July 20, 2012: At least 12 people are killed when a gunman enters an Aurora, Colo., movie theater, releases a canister of gas and then opens fire during opening night of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.”

_ July 22, 2011: Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik kills 77 in Norway in twin attacks: a bombing in downtown Oslo and a shooting massacre at a youth camp outside the capital. The self-styled anti-Muslim militant admitted both attacks.

_ Nov. 5, 2009: Thirteen soldiers and civilians were killed and more than two dozen wounded when a gunman walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, and opened fire. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder.

_ April 30, 2009: Farda Gadyrov, 29, enters the prestigious Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in the capital, Baku, armed with an automatic pistol and clips. He kills 12 people before killing himself as police close in.

_ March 10, 2009: Michael McLendon, 28, killed 10 people – including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff’s deputy – across two rural Alabama counties. He then killed himself.

_ Sept. 23, 2008: Matti Saari, 22, walks into a vocational college in Kauhajoki, Finland, and opens fire, killing 10 people and burning their bodies with firebombs before shooting himself fatally in the head.

_ Nov. 7, 2007: After revealing plans for his attack in YouTube postings, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen fires kills eight people at his high school in Tuusula, Finland.

_ April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, kills 32 people and himself on Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va.

_ April 26, 2002: Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, who had been expelled from school in Erfurt, Germany, kills 13 teachers, two former classmates and policeman, before committing suicide.

_ April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school’s library.

_ April 28, 1996: Martin Bryant, 29, bursts into cafeteria in seaside resort of Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia, shooting 20 people to death. Driving away, he kills 15 others. He was captured and imprisoned.

_ March 13, 1996: Thomas Hamilton, 43, kills 16 kindergarten children and their teacher in elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and then kills himself.

_ Oct. 16, 1991: A deadly shooting rampage took place in Killeen, Texas, as George Hennard opened fire at a Luby’s Cafeteria, killing 23 people before taking his own life. 20 others were wounded in the attack.

_ June 18, 1990: James Edward Pough shoots people at random in a General Motors Acceptance Corp. office in Jacksonville, Fla., killing 10 and wounding four, before killing himself.

_ Dec. 6, 1989: Marc Lepine, 25, bursts into Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique college, shooting at women he encounters, killing nine and then himself.

_ Aug. 19, 1987: Michael Ryan, 27, kills 16 people in small market town of Hungerford, England, and then shoots himself dead after being cornered by police.

Look at all of the shootings in Europe which has much stricter gun laws than we do. Guns are not the problem! Crazy people are. The Fort Hood massacre should have been prevented but because of political correctness it wasn’t. Why are soldiers disarmed on a military base? Why wasn’t something done about Hasan? All of the warning signs were there but that would have been profiling. There is a reason for profiling. It works. As far as blacks ranting and raving about racial profiling? Quit committing the majority of violent crime in this country and there would be no need for racial profiling. Take my hometown of St. Louis. Blacks make up close to half of the population but commit over 80% of the violent crime. The St. Louis PD has the statistics on that. It takes a while to find them there, but they are there. I posted easier to find details in an earlier post but I’m too lazy to look them up. We don’t have a gun problem in this country. We do have a race problem and racial relations are getting worse and a lot of that has to do with Obungler and the other RWPPs like Sharpton fanning the flames of racial tension to score political points. Our president should be ashamed of himself but what else has he got? His economic policies have been disasterous for blacks. Blacks did far better under Reagan and both Bushes than they have under Obongo. You can only blame Bush and white people so many times before people realize it’s you that’s the problem as your numerous AOTW Awards indicate.

As Califonria goes, so goes the nation. – A quote I have heard many times in my life. Victor Davis Hanson writes what could be an obituary for California and for the country. The very end of the article follows:

I turn on the local news and channel surf for 10 minutes. How well we take refuge in the absurd. This litany blares out: Bruce Jenner’s new sexual identity, the latest racial controversy, this time over the crashing of a private pool party and the police reaction, the Obama’s new stretch Air Force One jumbo jet, Marco Rubio’s one ticket every four years, Miley Cyrus’s bisexuality. I suppose if one cannot grasp, much less deal with, $19 trillion in debt, a foreign policy in shambles, the largest state in the union on the cusp of a disastrous drought, a Potemkin health care system, zero interest on passbook savings, and the end of all federal immigration law, then the trivial must become existential.

Goodnight, once great state…

And goodnight once great country. This is what national suicide looks like.

Two hundred years ago today Napoleon lost at Waterloo which elevated England to a major world power and was pretty much it for France. Never again would they rise to the heights that Napoleon took them to. And it figgers that Napoleon wasn’t even French. He was a Corsican. He changed his name from Napoleone di Buonaparte to Napoleon Bonaparte. This once again proves that the only time France is successful is when someone other than a French male leads them. We here in the United States should be thankful to the Brits, even though we fought a war with them starting in 1812. Since Napoleon needed money for his war he sold us the Louisiana Territory which doubled the size of the country. St. Louis went from a French trading outpost to become the “Gateway to the West”. Lewis and Clarke set out from there to travel up the Missouri River to its source and from there to the West Coast down the Columbia River.

St. Louis has a lot of streets with French names like Choteau and Gravois (which St. Louisians pronounce gra-voy or gra-voys). Then the Germans moved in and they started naming streets after Germans like Beethoven (pronounced beet-hoven) and Goethe (pronounced geth-ee). I can top that. About 50 miles southwest of St. Louis there is a creek called Courtois Creek which is pronounced co-da-way. Stands to reason since most residents of Missouri pronounce it Mi-zoo-rah.

Here’s a little bit of trivia that Ron sent me.

The Panama Canal is not the only water line connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. There’s a place in Wyoming—deep in the Teton Wilderness Area of the Bridger-Teton National Forest—in which a creek splits in two. Like the canal, this creek connects the two oceans dividing North America in two parts.

Yes. You read that right: North America is divided in two parts by a single water line that—no matter how hard you try not to—you will have to cross to go from North to South and vice versa.

The creek divides into two similar flows at a place called the Parting of the Waters, pictured above. To the East, the creek flows “3,488 miles (5,613 km) to the Atlantic Ocean via Atlantic Creek and the Yellowstone, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.” To the West, it flows “1,353 miles (2,177 km) to the Pacific Ocean via Pacific Creek and the Snake and Columbia Rivers.”

Technically, a fish could swim from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean.

Yesterday I had to head over to the Augusta VA to collect my new wheelchair. Jeebus was it hot! Thank you for A/C! It was in the 90’s when I left at 10:30 and it was 100 when I got to Augusta. I usually keep the A/C on 72 in the GOCmobile, but halfway to Augusta when my back was still wet from sweat, I turned it down to 70. I dried off by the time I got to the Augusta VA.

This wheelchair was my third attempt. The two previous wheelchairs that Ashley got for my were experimental designs and they were both really cool. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get parts for the first chair when I had a problem with it. I tried in Atlanta. No help. Ashley tried in Augusta. Same lack of success. Then Ashley got me a really lightweight carbon fiber chair. It weighed 8 pounds without the wheels. Awesome chair! Unfortunately, it tended to be a little fragile and it only took me a year to destroy it. We finally decided to go with the tried and true. Hopefully, the third time is the charm. She has been really great working with me.

I gotta make sure I say nice things about her since she occasionally reads my blog, but I would do it anyway. I have nothing but good things to say about the Augusta VA and all of the people I have dealt with there. She’s done a great job working with me. She also suggested I try Duke’s mayonnaise which she claims is the best on the planet. So, when my tomatoes come in within the next few weeks, I’ll give it a try on my BLTs. Had she delayed my pickup a few weeks I could have brought her some fresh tomatoes from my garden.

After I tried out the chair and took a few swings around the gym, I deemed it a success and I was ready to depart. Ashley had a nice intern working with her and she was sweet enough to follow me out to the GOCmobile and help me get both my old and new chair in it.

I love Augusta! It’s still a southern city, unlike Atlanta. I can go days in Atlanta without hearing a southern accent. That’s because so many people have moved her from other places. Back when I still worked at IBM in education, almost all of the people who worked with me had moved from other places. Pretty much the only people from Atlanta were those people in administration.

When I got back to GOC Central the temp had gotten back down to the 90’s. Atlanta is usually cooler than Augusta with less humidity. Hit rush hour traffic but it was still early so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. One of the nicest things about retirement is not having to fight Atlanta traffic twice a day.