Pearl Harbor survivor remembers: ‘All hell broke loose’

Edward Waszkiewicz, 95, is a Pearl Harbor survivor who lives inOxnard. He went to the 50th anniversary 25 years ago with his family.(Photo: JUAN CARLO/THE STAR)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt called Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.” The attack on Pearl Harbor led to the U.S. involvement in World War II.

Sitting inside his home today where he lives with a caregiver, Waszkiewicz, now 95 years old, recalled some of the details of his time in the Navy.

Waszkiewicz, born in 1921, wanted to join the military at age 17 but had to wait until 1939 when he turned 18.

Joining the Navy was a chance to see the world, but it was also a way to help his Polish immigrant parents, who owned a farm in Michigan but were having financial difficulties.

His first assignment was aboard the carrier USS Enterprise. He eventually was assigned to Pearl Harbor to work with the firefighting group.

Ed Waszkiewicz, shown in a photo taken around 1939. He survived the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Photo: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

On the morning of Dec. 7, Waszkiewicz was on duty, driving a firetruck to the dock where the oil tanker USS Neosho was pumping gasoline and other fuel into Ford Island fuel tanks.

He looked up to see three planes swooping down on the southern side of the island. From where he was standing, he first thought they were U.S. planes — until they started dropping bombs.

The island shook when the first bomb hit. Another plane started machine-gunning the dock. When the battleship USS Arizona was hit, about 200 yards away, Waszkiewicz had a full view.

“The explosion was so violent," he recalled. "I thought the end of the world was coming. Pieces of the ship fell everywhere.”

Waszkiewicz had jumped into the water to avoid being hit by the second plane’s machine gun. He ended up getting back on the dock, got back into his truck and drove back to the firehouse. He went out again with the fire crew and began fighting the fires ignited by explosives.

Waszkiewicz also witnessed the USS Shaw and USS Oklahoma being bombed, and he saw the USS Oklahoma roll over on its side.

CNN's Jake Tapper Is Frustrated With Pence's Dodgy Ways

Vice President elect Mike Pence repeatedly refused to answer any questions asked by CNN's Jake Tapper involving Gen. Michael Flynn's son in connection to promoting the Pizzagate fake story and the very real consequences that it caused.

How long will it be before America gets tired of listening to the Trump camp refuse to address real issues and instead blame the media for ginning up negative another story about them?

Tapper asked what happened to Gen. Flynn's son, who has been pushing conspiracy theories like the Pizzagate lunacy.

Tapper asked, "Flynn Jr., was on the transition team, but a source familiar with the investigation tells me he was asked to leave and that the direct order came from president-elect Trump. Tell me what happened?"

Pence responded with a lengthy congratulations to Gen. Michael Flynn on his career and how happy they are that he's on their team.

After over a minute, he said, "Mike Flynn Jr., is no longer longer associated with General Flynn's efforts or with the transition team and we're focused eyes forward."

Wall Street Experts Know Nothing except Fleecing the Masses

Clear proof that the so-called experts of Wall Street would make no money were it not for the gullible masses they can milk. Overall hedge funds have been having a very hard time playing this market. They cannot deal with the extreme volatility as they try to outguess the market; they seem to get whacked on both ends of the trade. Look at how many funds jumped into Valeant Pharmaceuticals assuming that it was safe to follow other experts; the blind lead the mute.  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed Jackass reigns supreme

Pershing Square (Bill Ackman): 21,591,122 shares, 6.33% (added 5 million shares on February 5)

ValueAct Holdings (Jeff Ubben): 14,994,261 shares, 4.39%

Paulson and Co. (John Paulson): 13,265,900 million shares, 3.89% (added 4.375 million shares in Q4)

Brahman Capital: 8,117,753, 2.38% (added 4.1 million shares in Q4)

Viking Global (Andreas Halvorsen): 7,793,397, 2.28% (added 2.8 million shares in Q4)

Lone Pine Capital (Steven Mandel): 5,829,079 shares, 1.71% (sold 1.63 million shares in Q4)

Hound Partners (Jonathan Auerbach): 4,881,835, 1.43% (added 983,187 in Q4)

Iridian Asset Management: 4,324,602, 1.27% (added 1.6 million shares in Q4)

Okumus Fund Management (Ahmet Okumus): 1,875,600, 0.55% (bought position in Q4)

Coatue Management (Philippe Laffont): 1,673,007, 0.49% (bought position in Q4)

If they haven’t changed their positions, as a group, then they’ve seen more than $1.25 billion on paper wiped out since Friday’s close. Bill Ackman, the founder of Pershing Square, has lost more than $321 million in his position since Friday’s close. To date, he’s suffered losses estimated at north of $2 billion on his Valeant investment. Others are likely feeling the pain, too. http://www.businessinsider.com/hedge-funds-in-valeant-2016-2/

Man Who Hacked Celebrities' Email Accounts Gets 5 Years in Prison

A Bahamian man who hacked into the email accounts of celebrities and athletes and later wrote in a jailhouse email that after his release he would “shake up hollywood for real!” was sentenced to five years in prison on Tuesday.

The sentence was roughly double the number of years suggested under federal sentencing guidelines.

The man, Alonzo Knowles, 24, had used his illicit access to the celebrity accounts to obtain unreleased movie and television scripts and personal information, which he then tried to sell for thousands of dollars, prosecutors said. Mr. Knowles had also stolen unreleased music, financial documents, and nude and intimate images and videos, the government said.

Kristy J. Greenberg, a prosecutor, said in Federal District Court in Manhattan that Mr. Knowles’s motivation had been greed. “He had a singular focus on becoming rich and famous,” she said, “by disseminating personal information of celebrities and exploiting them.”

Several victims had submitted statements to the judge. Naturi Naughton, an actress in the Starz drama “Power,” said in a video statement that Mr. Knowles had hacked her personal emails and stolen six scripts of the show, and then “tried to extort me, the producer, 50 Cent and my showrunner.”

Overpaid Oil CEOs for Top Diplomat?

Reuters is reporting that Donald Trump is considering ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond for the post of Secretary of State.

As someone who's been analyzing CEO pay for more than 20 years, I feel like I know these guys.  So I couldn't resist pulling out excerpts from two of our annual "Executive Excess" reports in which Raymond and Tillerson played starring roles. First, in 2006, our report zeroed in on the CEOs who were profiting from the war in Iraq. Lee Raymond, as the outgoing CEO of ExxonMobil, was cashing in bigtime on war-related oil price volatility, something he readily admitted he had no control over. While ordinary Americans were feeling "pain at the pump," high oil prices had sent the value of his pay package soaring. Here's the timely excerpt:

Lee Raymond, ExxonMobil CEO, 1999-2005:

In 2005, ExxonMobil collected $36 billion in profit, the grandest annual profit total ever recorded anywhere. Last November, called before Congress to explain the rising gas prices that appear to have fueled these record profits, ExxonMobil's Lee Raymond explained that rising prices reflect global supply and demand, nothing more.

"We are all," Raymond assured Congress, "in this together, everywhere in the world."

We're all in this together, except Raymond. As ExxonMobil CEO in 2005, his basic salary alone ran 63 times the average paycheck in the oil industry. Raymond's $4 million salary last year amounted to a weekly take-home of $83,333.