The venerable SOFREP would like to dust off a tradition from just a couple of years past — the Weekend News Roundup. The Managing Editor, Stavros, tossed a dart at a group photo of us staff writers/contributing editors, and it stuck square in my (dominant) right eye. Being the first on the chopping block I vow to put my (dominant) right foot forward and protect Big Steve Balestrieri for as long as I can, for he is likely next should I fail to deliver.

This one’s for you, Big Steve — I’m here for you, bro!

China: The Reds Are Givin’ Me the Blues

One thing China does better than most nations on the planet is to lose a whole lot of people… and then go have a snack.

April 18, 1906: A magnitude 7. 8 earthquake hit San Francisco, California at 5:12 am. This has been by far the deadliest earthquake in U.S. history. It is suspected that 3,000 people lost their lives from the earthquake and aftermath that ensued. I remember that!

On January 23, 1556: An earthquake in Shaanxi, China, kills an estimated 830,000 people. I have never even heard of that!

Between 1958 and 1962: Chairman Mao Ze Dung launched his “Great Leap Forward” social and economic campaign that was supposed to jump-start China’s economic slump and bring it closer to the West. 45 million dead Chinese later a triumphant Mao declared victory for his brilliant plan.

“We gotta hand it to ol’ Dung,” declared the Chinese people, “there really does seem to be a lot more food to go around now than before the campaign,” they said, not actually taking into account that there were now 45 million people no longer ordering à la carte.

Here’s a scene captured from the Great Leap Forward, showing the overalls-clad Mao riding on a big ol’ cog through the ocean leading 45 million of his people to the promised land. In the background is a rendition of Mao inexplicably riding ordnance like Slim Pickins riding the bomb to hell in the movie Doctor Strange Love.

But alas, the Chinese had enough of Mao and his hairless brain schemes. They had had it up to “here” with Mao Ze, to the extent that you could say they were all pretty much full of Dung. He had an immense impact on the country; a long-lasting and reaching effect. Why even today the Chinese are still pretty full of Dung.

I, for one, am in awe of the superhuman feats the Chinese are able to accomplish in this modern world when disaster strikes, such as in the case of the Coronavirus in Wu Han China. But superhuman feats are available to a country with superhuman numbers of humans — China doesn’t mess around in a time of crisis! In this video clip, a massive effort takes place to build a hospital with a 1,000-bed capacity in just under 10 days. I’m in awe of the accomplishment and the fact that the female anchor in the report can actually pronounce the name Bei Jing correctly, without injecting the pretentious French-sounding fricative in the letter “J”.

In a really sad case of irony, the very respectable Doctor Li Wen Liang, known as the Whistle Blower doctor, the man who first tried to warn authorities of the gravity of the Coronavirus when it appeared in Wu Han, was cautioned by authorities to desist from trying to create an uproarious situation over nothing. Doctor Li Wen Liang himself succumbed to the scourge of the virus and passed away — respect!

You can see more on the story of Dr. Li Wen Liang here)

All China, all the time!

Remember that good thing that China did for us? Remember that good thing that China did for anybody? Yeah, I don’t remember either. You know, China doesn’t have to be actively shooting missiles at us, with Chairmen riding on them like Slim Pickins, to be fully engaged in tearing down the U.S. There is plenty of undermining going on in this country by China, so much undermining that we could effectively just call them the Land Down Under (Mining). We’ll just call Australia the Land of Ferocious Fauna.

Here we stand in mid-February of 2020, and the FBI has already opened 80 percent of the number of Chinese government-related criminal cases that it did in all of 2019. First, we have the made-in-China fentanyl scourge; don’t even get me started on that. Now we have the far more in-your-face act of China dispatching scumbags to come to America to commit felony crimes against Americans. They do it because they can — Murica, baby! My country t’is of thee sweet land of liberty, I do get so GODDAMNED frustrated with you!!

That Coronavirus wouldn’t (won’t?) bode well for Americans. We have our own Coronavirus here anyway: someone pops open a Corona and pretty soon everyone in the joint pops one open too and it’s Miller Time! But here in the States try to make a bevy of buttholes wear an anti-germ face mask and you get “sued” because people “know their rights” and it wasn’t their “choice” to wear one. In Wu Han, a cop hands you a mask on the street; if you don’t take it he then steps over your (now) dead corps and hands the mask to the next guy. He can do that 45 million times before anyone becomes alarmed that the country is in a world of Dung again.

Saloth Sar, the man of great POLitical POTential moved the entire population of Phnom Phen out into the countryside and suffocated six million countrymen with plastic sacks. All Mao could say is: “Pisha… what a lightweight!” Meanwhile in California people go out of their minds with anguish: “Six million?? OMG SIX MILLION??? That is such a mind-blowing number of plastic bags! What did they do with all those plastic bags — they won’t decay for 1,000 years you know — they’ll be ingested by the manatee! I sure hope they reused some of those bags… you know you could probably snuff out as many as 800 people if you reused the same bag over and over again!”

A case of misdirected remorse? I just don’t know about (just about) half of the people in our great country.

(Sung to the tune of the National Anthem)
My country t’iiis of thee,
that my frustraaation be,
weighing me doooown.

Ok, let’s get off China for now. Let’s all join hands and promise not to mention China anymore in the News Roundup.

Worlds tiniest Camera.

Well, now here’s some really great new technology for China to steal and create a cheap knock-off version — DOH! (Gosh, that didn’t take long…) This amazing technology is quite literally an entry into the Guinness records book, as the world’s tiniest imaging device. Ok, it’s really tiny there in the picture — .65 x .65 x 1.15 MILLIMETERS! But while the size is amazing to me, it is its capabilities that are truly astounding. This is not just a still-shot device: it is a motion picture video camera that shoots at 30 frames per second (FPS)!

For those of us who are not camera pukes like me, 30 FPS is quite good; you would never get a headache watching video of that frame frequency. It gets better: the camera’s field of view (FOV) is a whopping 120 degrees — impressive! The weight of the device is not even stated, as it couldn’t possibly be even a factor at that size unless you were, perhaps, shaving down ounces on your loadout for an Arctic excursion. As a former Green Beret, horrifyingly accustomed to carrying heavy rucks over long distances, I have always stated thusly of every piece of gear:

(very cynical agitated tone) “Yeah, well some poor son-of-a-bitch is going to get stuck carrying that thing, and you know — one equals none — so we’re going to have to schlep two of them!”

Astonishing still is that it transmits an ANALOG (not digital) output to as far out as four meters. The scope of its immediate use is in medicine, where this device can be conveniently injected into some of the tiniest parts of the body to get the inside view of pathological afflictions.

I can imagine what some of the issues might be in the execution phase of the technology, like how do you aim the thing to look at what you want to see? I envision this thing tumbling through the bloodstream and the docs hoping it is facing the right way when it flows past the tumor…

But boy, in the hands of the cotton-pickin’ Chinese (sorry!)… they would have one of these things embedded in every cheap knock-off copycat piece-o-junk product that rolls out of that virus-havin’ nation, stealing your great-grandma’s secret apple brown Betty recipe, copying answers off of your midterm finals, and watching your dog lick its balls! It had to be said; it’s what they do!

Dude kills wife then kills hooker: a surprise that nobody saw coming.

I would be lying if I said that Canada doesn’t sometimes make me forget about China. I mean, me loves some Canucks, but just what in the name of actual shit are they doing up there sometimes? Eustachio Gallese is not a flavor of ice cream, he is a murderer — a murderer who brutally killed his wife in 2004. Why he did it is not at all the matter, whether he caught her cheating or, say maybe she… just… wouldn’t… SHUUUTUUUUUUUP!!!

So Pistachio Gallese was caught and put in jail. But things didn’t go quite as according to “plan” as the Canadian authorities had it worked out. It seems Gallese unexpectedly and inexplicably came down with an episode of blue balls that he likely contracted from one of the jailhouse toilet seats — it’s possible!

The authorities, the people who are in charge because of how much smarter they are than the rest of us, realized they were going to have to provide PIstachio some sex to quell his issue. They thought first of drawing straws… but concluded that they should provide an external solution. Ah, but there was a glitch: the caseworker deemed that Pistachio was not yet ready to share in a meaningful and rewarding relationship with a woman, so they provided him with day parole passes to go to brothels to get hooked up.

Things were going just swimmingly for both Pistachio and the jail until an unforeseen wrench fell into the workings of the plan messing it up for everybody — stinkin’ Pistachio brutally murdered one of the whores with a knife and hammer; it was hammer time for ol’ Pistachio. Ok, that’s why jails can’t have nice things, because of assholes like Pistachio. I hope they put him back in GenPop:

“Hey, boy… aren’t you that guy that got us all of our brothel visiter passes revoked? Well, we’re gonna be needing some… “compensation” from you for that, sweetheart.” Brrrrrrrr!

“We were all just so dumbfounded,” the caseworker was heard saying, “I immediately convened a committee and determined first a root cause and then created an abridged gap analysis. We performed an intense review of his day parole contract and found nothing alluding to the possibility of him murdering the whores.”

“I’m afraid our hands are tied in the matter and were going to have to discontinue Mr. Gallese’s pig-slaying and knocking the back out of the beast until he can atone. Until then we will continue to draw straws in the service of Mr. Pistachio. Frightening though that may seem, we’re all just going to have to keep a positive attitude toward this,” the caseworker concluded.

Oh, Canada! People there can “sue” too because they have “rights” and “choices.” I’ll bet you would pay hell trying to make those haters wear germ masks.

Cases like these… I don’t know, I just go back and forth in my mind over which party is the worst in each event. Is it that the men are eviler than the women are stupid? Who is the responsible party here that could be placed more at blame for not preventing the atrocity?

I’m put in mind of a story about a Swedish woman on vacation who happened on an eccentric millionaire at a bar; he invited her to go on a ride with him in his submarine that he had built. Clearly she awarded him a “C” for creativity. I prefer just taking my chances with this line:

“Excuse me, Miss… I believe you dropped something there — your smile!”

I mean, he could have offered her a ride in his Dodge Charger and she probably would have been okay with that, but he went full submarine on her. So she said yes and they sailed off in this clown’s submarine… aaaaand he raped her and chopped her into little pieces and shot the pieces out of the torpedo tubes.

In contemplating the sense in that whole scenario, trying to identify who might be the AHJ — the Authority Having Jurisdiction — responsible for the prevention of that act before it had a chance to happen, I surmised the following:

“Eccentric millionaire assassins we shall always have among us, as long as we have people stupid enough to go on submarine rides with them.”

The foundation for who one is becoming

I leave you with a final spectacle, one that I still have not finished rereading. The prose holds so much; it is an absolute gift of form and function. It will leave you with a sense of mystery, a mystery in the sense of: “what in the name of actual hell is she talking about?” It will remind our children why it is important to stay in school. It will above all else remind us that we do not have to be smart, kind, polite, creative, resourceful, industrious or reserved… as long as we have sassy blonde hair.

But at least she DID write her own résumé.

I didn’t even want to blackout the identifying features of the person that this LinkedIn account belongs to but Stavros, the Managing Editor for SOFREP, made me. I actually accept that because in the grand scheme of things he’s not the boss of me… or actually he IS the boss of me, but I have seen him and he is just a punk and I could for sure kick his ass. So I am at peace.

By Almighty God and with honor I swear to you that these things are all true.
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