WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED This is the true memoir of one US Air Force navigator’s journey from the schoolhouses of Air Training Command to the nuclear alerts of the Cold War to combat in a 35-year-old anachronism called the B-52. It is a first-hand account of life during the last days of Strategic Air Command, the early days of Air Combat Command and the ensuing military drawdown of the 1990s. From peacetime training exercises across the globe to combat operations in Desert Storm, Jim Clonts takes the reader inside the cockpit where life and death are seconds apart. Often comical, sometimes heart-pounding, other times tragic, WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED takes you into the world of military aviation, a crucible where warriors learn the true nature of character, conscience and mortality.

Friends of Liberty VOL 61
by Jim Clonts, 2010

07/11/2010

Every day I turn on the news to find a new policy, spending bill or program being pushed by the Administration that seems to contradict logic and reason. We are living in a deep recession with 8 million jobs lost, a record $13 trillion debt, record federal deficits four times greater than during the Bush Administration while fighting two wars, but the Obama Administration is pushing job killing new tax hikes, a healthcare program guaranteed to bankrupt the insurance industry and eventually the healthcare industry, a Federal takeover of the student loan program, Federal give-aways to subsidize automobile and home purchases, invasive financial reforms guaranteed to destroy the normal business cycle leading to continued stagnation, all the while strangling off oil production and threatening massive carbon and value added taxes, after the Bush tax cuts expire. The latest? His primary mission for NASA is now to reach out to the Muslim world and make them feel good about their contributions to math and science. Oh, he is also suing Arizona for trying to enforce existing immigration laws when the Federal Government won't enforce them. These policies simply defy common sense, logic and reason. Sounds crazy, right? I think I've discovered a way to make it all make sense.

In George Orwell's book 1984, the protagonist, Winston, is being "re-educated" by the Government. His educator holds up four fingers and asks him how many fingers he's holding up. Winston responds correctly and it hit with an electric shock. This happens over and over again. Finally, Winston pleads with his educator saying, "How can I see anything but four? Two plus two equal four." His educator says, "Yes, sometimes two plus two is four. But sometimes it's five or even three. Sometimes it's all of those at the same time." Winston is confused. How can this be? The answer he is given is that reality exists only in the mind and the Party controls the mind. If it is in the Party's best interest for two plus two to equal four. Then it's four. If it's five, then it's five.

Winston is hit with more shocks until he cries out that there are five fingers, but that is not good enough. "You are only telling me what you think I want to hear," his educator says. "You have to really believe there are five."

The current Administration is shocking us daily with the completely illogical, contradictory and untenable. To us the math just doesn't add up, because to us two plus two equals four. To the true believers, it adds up to whatever they need it to add up to. The media, otherwise known as the Ministry of Propaganda, repeats the insanity over and over again. Once you've heard it repeated over and over as fact, you become desensitized to it. You may even start to believe the Administration has some special accounting rules or other mathematical gimmicks that make the numbers add up after all. The goal is to get a significant portion of the population to simply give up and believe two plus two is five. Obama got 54% of the population suspend disbelief in 2008 and today he continues to look the American public in the eye and tell us the stimulus bill is creating jobs, even as we continue to lose jobs. We have $106 trillion in unfunded mandates the Government must pay out over the next ten years, but he tells us the Government is not spending enough. He tells us the Government must raise taxes on employers so the Government can spend more and in the process create more jobs. (If we just Rob Peter to pay Paul---Peter will start hiring more employees.) He continues to tell us in order to reduce the deficit, the Government must become the single payer of healthcare benefits. Our eyes are telling us we are growing further and further into debt, we are crushing the private sector, disabling our engines of wealth and proceeding down an unsustainable path to destruction, but perhaps not---if we just really make ourselves believe two plus two equals five.

Dry Powder:

Abraham Lincoln once asked a political adversary the following:

"If you count the tail as a leg, how many legs does a dog have?"
"If you count the tail as a leg, a dog has five legs," the man replied.
"No. It only has four," said Lincoln. "Just calling it a leg doesn't make it a leg."

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