Vin Suprynowicz

Perhaps you have heard of the Cargo Cults.

If you’re going to pin your hopes of maintaining a military presence in the Pacific on a vast peninsular fortress like Singapore, the “Gibraltar of the East,” you might want to make sure Japanese soldiers can’t ride down the Malay peninsula on bicycles and turn off your water.

Singapore, provisioned for years, gave up on account of thirst in a matter of weeks. The British and Commonwealth troops were then stuck fighting their way north from Australia. The problem with that enterprise was a nasty piece of real estate called New Guinea.

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Lots of media coverage of flooding in the Midwest and South this spring, presumably because there was lots of flooding.

I’m sure this either proves or disproves that the globe is warming, or both.

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In a 1967 episode of “The Lucy Show,” efficiency expert Oliver Kasten (Phil Silvers) takes over Mr. Mooney’s office and commandeers his secretary, Lucy, turning her into his order-barking clone. When a major client wants a million dollar loan, “Kasten and Lucy visit their assembly line and start making changes.”

President Obama announced a new effort Monday to eliminate government waste, The Associated Press reports.

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They don’t look like cops to me. Dressed in helmets and camouflage fatigues and carrying .223 rifles handed down from the U.S. Army, they look like some ragtag Third World militia as they shuffle up to a suburban front door in broad daylight in a shambling, casual cluster that no non-com who’s ever seen the results of a hand grenade would tolerate.

But they’re cops, all right. It’s 9:15 on a Thursday morning in sunny Tucson, Ariz., May 5, and you can see them force open the door of the three-tour Marine combat veteran who they knew would be sound asleep after returning from his midnight shift at the local copper mine.

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Is health care a right?

You can die without heath care, so it must be a right. Right?

You can also die without food. Is food a right?

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When war is thrust upon us — as it was on Dec. 7, 1941, and again on Sept. 11, 2001 — we ask our young men to put their lives on the line. Then the college debate squad in charge at the White House proceeds to spend more time worrying about how to avoid civilian casualties (actually proposing to award medals, now, to soldiers who manage to avoid hurting anyone) — than they do mobilizing to grind our brutal assailants into the dust of history.

As our leaders suck their thumbs and decline to commit “too much force” because the polls might turn against them, one can’t help but wonder if America has anyone left in long pants still willing to either commit the forces needed to win, or else face the music and bring the boys home. (A few years back, it was Mr. Aspin refusing to send tanks to back up the Rangers in Mogadishu, today it’s an Afghan “war” with a pre-designated surrender date and a Libyan “action” of dubious legality and purpose, which we claim we’re not even fighting. For the record, especially with bin Laden dead and no clear war goals in sight, it is time to come home.)

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In response to my recent columns on the Nevada DMV urging (or even requiring) that 83-year-old widows who prefer to retain their late husbands’ surnames “get their names changed” to match those on Social Security cards likely issued when they were 16 years old, I received numerous smug and sanctimonious assertions that “Driving is not a right; it’s a privilege.”

While we rarely waste time rebutting mere memorized windbaggery, this is such a classic example of internees miseducated in our government youth camps, putting on a pompous and patronizing demeanor and chanting a memorized sound bite without even considering the meaning of their words, that we will pause here for a moment of analysis.

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Why are there so many executive and judiciary branch government employees serving in the Nevada state Legislature, despite the fact Article 3, Section 1 of the Nevada Constitution states “The power of the government of the State of Nevada shall be divided into three separate departments; the legislative, the executive and the judicial; and no persons charged with the exercise of powers properly belonging to one of these departments shall exercise any functions appertaining to either of the others except in cases herein expressly directed or permitted”?

The first reason is often overlooked: The nature of their jobs makes it easy.

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Even though the stated intent of the founders of the modern compulsory government schools — men like John Dewey and Horace Mann — was to wrest children away from their parents at the earliest possible age so as to remove them from the “foreign and un-American” influences of the lower-class home, what’s the most loudly repeated excuse, today, for the failure of these schools?

Why, the fact that parents, especially low-income parents, don’t cooperate and support the schools — they don’t force the kids to do their homework; they don’t “take enough interest” in their kids’ education, etc.

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On the night of Dec. 14, 2010, a firefight erupted in the southern Arizona desert.

According to court documents obtained by CBS News, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was part of a squad that spotted a group of illegal immigrants, some armed with assault rifles. When the illegals refused to drop their weapons — in a pathetic symbol of the current administration’s “college kid” approach to the dangers of the real world — agents fired “less than lethal” bean bags. The bandits fired back with real bullets.

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