Back to Ruby Ridge; It's Personal

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The excuses are starting to flood the internet from panicked flacks at H.S. Precision, a maker of sniper rifles and gear. HSP figured it  scored a coup in getting an endorsement from one Lon Horiuchi, crack FBI sniper and leader of snipers.  His letter is spread across the back of the new HSP catalog. Bad guess. Bad endorser. 

Balls in a vice, the best the company can do so far is disclaim prior knowledge of  who Lon Horiuchi is, other than a government killer,  honorably retired.   No Google there at HSP? Or just too busy to enter the 12  keystrokes yielding  17,300 Horiuchi hits? Or too swamped to ask virtually any of your customers? 

Lon Horiuchi  was the government marksman present and firing  at Ruby Ridge on August 22, 1992.  He  was after Randy Weaver,  wanted on a couple of low-level felony charges. He wounded Weaver,  shot at the back of a fleeing Weaver friend,  missed the friend but cleanly killed Vicki, one shot to the head as she stood behind a door, her baby in her arms. 

This is not the sort of man designed to win friends in the shooting community -- or the community of citizens who object to trigger-happy government snipers just as a matter of general principle.

Enter my memory of  Janine, RIP, my little sister, in her girlish years a Brownie, a horse buff, a barrel racer, and a friend of Vicki Jordison in the Des Moines River valley where our families were neighbors. In due course Vicki, a very nice kid as I recall, married Randy Weaver.  

Before Horiuchi killed Vicki, Janine died of a different  kind of evil, that of stupidity, a driver who explained, "I didn't notice the yellow line on the highway... errr, no, I didn't see the sign, either."

Was -- is --  Horiuchi stupid? Probably not. He got into West Point and graduated. He's clever enough to turn a retirement buck hustling endorsements.  So probably not stupid.  

What does that make him?  

Horiuchi,   you didn't have to hear again what much of your country still thinks of you. You could have taken the pension, foregone the endorsement  fee, and retired to Tierra del Fuego,  mouth shut all the way.

(A fair representation of  current thought on Horiuchi and HSP is available by just clicking Tam's blog,  View From the Porch, over to your left.)

It's not a hoax - Lon Horiuchi

http://www.awrm.org/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=21;t=003547;p=0


That's a scan of the back of the new H.S. Precision catalog. The Lon Horiuchi who signed the endorsement of their sniper rifles is the FBI slime who killed Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge. More later.

Gag-starting the day

The  morning news:

The administration and the Federal Reserve rolled out two new programs Tuesday that would provide up to $800 billion in an effort to get more loans flowing in such critical areas as mortgage lending, credit cards, auto loans and small business loans.

Translation: subversives who pay for their stuff are to blame for the depression. Patriots max out the Visas and,  every year or so,  go nothing down, six years to pay, for new wheels.  

Lord Polonius:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

Dad phrased it more elegantly once  when I borrowed  for a motorcycle I didn't need. "Dumb s--t."

(I paid off the bike. Had to  because in those primitive days  all us  neanderthals thought it was better to be out of debt than in.)

Party down tomodachi

=friend, tomadachi

Sixty-seven  years ago today, November 25,  in the cold Kuriles,  a bunch flying    s got together on  "Akagi" (Red Castle) for a gay old time. Hot saki by the quart  and a pep talk from the admiral who told them for the first time, "Next stop: Pearl Harbor."  The 30,000-ton carrier, converted from a battle cruiser,  rang with  "Banzais."

At Pearl, Admiral Husband Kimmel was doing what he'd been doing for months, getting the Pacific Fleet ready to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy.  And fighting Washington for information.

In Washington, Cordell Hull tinkered with the  proposal to placate Tokyo, the modus vivendi, finally said  Hell with it,  and ordered his wordsmiths to write something tougher. The questions still remains: Did Roosevelt, acting for Churchill, order him to?

  

Over at the War Department, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was about to learn that 30-50 Japanese men-of-war and troop transports  were southbound in the South China Sea.  So of course any  Japanese attack would assault  the Philippines or British southeast Asia possessions such as Singapore.   As to Hawaii and the United States fleet there? Not to worry. They wouldn't dare.