Citizens
"To compare political stability in China to Washington is like comparing Mount Everest to an ant hill.... Everything is cuckoo and God knows what's next."
HT: Curmudgeonly
It's only human to want to fix blame for the slobbering disasters that have befallen the United States of America since November, 2008. The problem is to know exactly who is to blame.
Fortunately for us, the solution to our problem is simple: Glenn Reynolds.
Not only is Reynolds to blame for this fine mess, he has confessed it in public over and over again. Herewith, although his sins are both numerous and multiple, I have collected a mere 39 of his confessions . As he freely, but as yet without forgiveness, acknowledges Reynolds has caused all these things and more by casting his 2008 vote for John McCain.
These are those confessions -- IN HIS OWN WORDS! -- by which he stands CONDEMNED! As you can see there is almost nothing that has happened in the Obama years that Reynolds is not directly responsible for (Except, perhaps, Michelle Obama's recent nip and tuck. Developing.).
Consequently this summer's full series of the Orwell Network's "Two Minutes Hate" will be focused on Glenn Reynolds exclusively.
Gentlemen, start your loathings!
Continued...
I've often described online discussions and essays as "Brain Jazz." Like a lot of modern jazz one musician (writer) riffing off another can be irritating. But when it works, when it comes together, brain jazz can be transcendent. An example coming off my RSS stream this morning is when Stuart Schneiderman of the wonderfully titled therapist's page "Had Enough Therapy" takes up Victor David Hanson's latest essay Reflections on the Revolution in America and "free associates" on Hanson's theme with Revolution or Coup d'Etat? As readers know I always try to note a new essay by Professor Hanson with a quote or a link in the sidebar. But this morning, Schneiderman takes it, as they say, up a few notches with his own insights. A sample:
As I was reading ["Reflections on the Revolution in America"], a thought popped into mind-- that, after all, is the definition of free association--- and that thought was a book: The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes.
Harvard Professor Pipes wrote a long, difficult, extensively documented tome to demonstrate that the Russian Revolution was not really a revolution. It was not about what Hanson describes as: "the abject poor and starving storming the Bastille." Not at all. According to Pipes the Russian Revolution was a coup d'etat, an overthrow of the government by a small group that arrogated all power to itself in the name of the poor and the starving.
The Russian Revolution was not an uprising of the proletariat against their capitalist masters. It was not a Hegelian rebellion of slaves against their masters. All of that is mythology, well suited for philosophy and literature classes but having little to do with reality.
In the Russian Revolution a small group that thought it knew what was best for everyone took power in the name of the working class and the peasantry.
So, where Hanson calls what is happening in Washington today a revolution, he is more clearly describing a coup d'etat. As long as we understand that a coup d'etat does not have to be violent, but can easily use the mechanisms of government to subvert the system, we have no problem grasping what is going on.That's just the lead in to a longer reflection on what to call the current "Cosa Nostra" moment unfolding in the capitol.
You might want to read Hanson's Reflections on the Revolution in America before reading Revolution or Coup d'Etat? But either way, they'll enhance your day.
Continued...This May Be the Greatest Campaign Web Video of All Time
"In California’s GOP Senate primary, Carly Fiorina released a web attack ad against Tom Campbell that is being called “psychedelic.” I think it’s destined to be remembered as a classic. It combines what sounds like the soundtrack to “The Exorcist,” a narrator who sounds like he's imitating Morgan Freeman with the stratospheric dudgeon of Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments,” and then the grand finale: evil, menacing, vaguely cybernetic sheep with glowing red eyes. Two minutes and thirty seconds into the video, you will be screaming, “What the hell is that?!?” and reaching for any available firearms." -- Jim Geraghty
What can I say? Around here, it's just all videos all the time lately. It's a great thing that folks everywhere are starting to use original videos as the attack dogs of alternative media. Keep it up and it won't be so "alternative" any more.
Come to think of it, it's not. It's "Citizen Media."
The Post-American Bandstand with Pat Boone. Yes, Pat Boone.
In which the Founding Fathers rock the house world! Amazing.
A question that will grow more poignant with every passing disaster.
"A year ago President George W. Bush left the White House. Since that time the unemployment has nearly doubled, the national deficit has tripled, government has grown in leaps and bounds, and the current president has blamed his predecessor for every problem he has encountered. President Obama even blamed George Bush for the Coakley loss yesterday in Massachusetts." -- Gateway Pundit
Abraham Lincoln? "He freed the slaves." Ronald Reagan? "He won the Cold War." George Bush? "He kept America safe." Barack Obama? To date.... "Putz."
Whew! That was not even close. Now I can take a break from politics for a bit and get back to slapping around the idiots of the media and the blogsphere for a bit.
This post by NeoNeoCon sums up the present state of play in the Republic right now:
Continued...For the record: Scott Brown's remarks at his victory rally. Note that he only mentions "Republicans" and "Democrats" once, as those that he will work with. All else is "independents" and "the people."
Thank you very much. I’ll bet they can hear all this cheering down in Washington, D.C.
And I hope they’re paying close attention, because tonight the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken.
From the Berkshires to Boston, from Springfield to Cape Cod, the voters of this Commonwealth defied the odds and the experts. And tonight, the independent majority has delivered a great victory.
If you're in Massachusetts and you've got a vote coming, go get it. Here's some traveling music.
Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street.
Chicago, New York, Detroit and it's all on the same street.
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.
Dallas, got a soft machine; Houston, too close to New Orleans;
Boston's got Scott Brown and beans; vote or it won't let you be, oh no.
You can never go wrong by spending some time each week browsing Jerry Pournelle's The View From Chaos Manor, an effort he describes as, "Think of VIEW as my column on the installment plan, but there are major differences; here you see what happens as it happened."
Pournelle is an eminence gris of computers (They continue after all these years to vex him.), science fiction and history. He's got a keen sense of the novel and the classical. This morning is no exception. View 604 January 4 - 10, 2010
Western intellectuals used to share far more common education -- novels, familiarity with myth and legend, Iliad and Odyssey and Aeschylus and Sophocles and -- ah, well. There is a great deal of more modern stuff that we must know now, and perhaps a neglect of the classics was an inevitable result of all our modern scientific discoveries. Jacques Barzun told a story of the days in the 19th Century when Harvard instituted the Bachelor of Science degree; something new at the time. It did not guarantee that its recipient knew any science, but it certainly guaranteed that he would know neither Greek nor Latin... Today's graduate can add history and philosophy to those guarantees; all of which makes communication more difficult. If I say David and Goliath most readers will understand the reference and the image of the underdog winning; but the days when there were thousands of such colorful images for a writer to draw on in the sure knowledge that the reader would understand are long gone. Alas. I am not sure we are the better for it.A smart man and a fine American. Recommended. (And don't miss his "Daily Mail" feature to see what his fine collection of correspondents is highlighting.)
Pure. Political. Gold. How golden is it? Watch him say it.
“Promise, big promise, is the soul of an advertisement.” -- Samuel Johnson
Ways to start winning. Excerpts from Restoration Weekend's Lunch Keynote with Newt Gingrich. Important messages: "The combination of Obama, Pelosi and Reid is creating the most decisive moment since the 1850s."
Continued...Scott Brown is running for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat against a Democrat party hack. He's getting within striking distance. Neonocon makes the case. And I say "Hey, Massachusetts, isn't time you voted for someone you can stand to look at for a change?"
In the AMERICAN DIGEST comments on "Afghanistan: The Failure to Plan Is "The Plan"" reader BGR asks:
"What can we do to stop him? What can I do to fight the hordes of people who agree with Obama? Whatever are we to do?I cannot take much more jawboning. We all know the score. What good do we do by talking to one another night after night, day after day, lamenting the truth that we see?
The invaders are taking over and we are just chewing the fat?"
And... a few comments later... Askmom answers:
Continued...
Kimberly Munley, the police officer who shot the Fort Hood gunman, with the country singer Dierks Bentley.
"Prayers and thanks flooded the apparent Twitter feed of Sgt. Kimberly Munley, the civilian police officer hailed as a hero for stopping the shooting rampage at Fort Hood.
"One admirer sent a “bear hug.” She “is one outstanding brave cop!” another wrote. And from a third: “thank you for stopping that mad man.”
"The Twitter feed includes what appears to be a photo of Sgt. Munley. Sgt. Munley, 34 years old, was credited by Army officials with firing the bullets that brought down Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who allegedly opened fire in the base’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center on Thursday afternoon.
"Survivors described the scene as chaotic: the lone gunman spraying bullets in all directions, unarmed soldiers falling, screaming, scrambling to respond. Many soldiers ripped off their uniforms to use as tourniquets; others ignored their own injuries to help those more gravely wounded.
"Lt. Gen. Bob Cone, the top commander at Fort Hood, said Friday that Sgt. Munley and her partner responded within three minutes of reported gunfire. Gen. Cone said Sgt. Munley shot the gunman four times despite being shot herself. “It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” he said.
-- Police Sgt. Kimberly Munley Hailed as Hero After Fort Hood Shooting - Dispatch - WSJ
How it went down:
Kimberly Munley, a 35-year-old police officer, happened to be nearby, waiting for her squad car to get a tune-up, when she heard the commotion. She raced to the scene, according to her boss, Chuck Medley, director of emergency services on base.As she rounded a corner, she saw Maj. Hasan chasing a wounded soldier through an open courtyard. He looked as though he was trying to "finish off" the wounded soldier, Mr. Medley said.
"He looked extremely focused," said Francisco De La Serna, a 23-year-old medic who had fled the building and was watching the same scene unfold from a hiding spot across the street.
Ms. Munley's first shot missed Maj. Hasan. He spun to face her and began charging, Mr. Medley said.
The time was 1:27 p.m., just four minutes after the initial 911 call.
Authorities haven't said precisely how many shots were fired during the running gun battle between Maj. Hasan and Ms. Munley. But one of her shots hit Mr. Hasan in the torso, knocking him to the ground. With that, officials say, she quite likely prevented more injuries or deaths on the base.
Ms. Munley took two bullets to her legs. Both entered her left thigh, ripped through the flesh and lodged in her right thigh. She also received a minor wound to the right wrist. -- Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan Kills 13 in Shooting at Fort Hood Army Base; Suspect in Stable Condition - WSJ.com
No wonder the left hates Walmart. The company feeds more people more for less than any socialist system you can imagine today.
"As shoppers evaluate the impact of tight budgets on holiday meal planning, beginning today Walmart will feature select 12-pound turkeys for less than $5, helping families serve a complete Thanksgiving meal for eight this year as low as $20.*
“We’re proving that we’re committed to helping moms afford the holidays in these tough economic times,” said Jack Sinclair, executive vice president, groceries, Walmart. “That’s why we’re offering incredible pricing on the turkey and all the fixings.”
A turkey dinner for eight as low as $20
According to a survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation, last year’s average cost of a turkey was roughly $1.19 per pound. Beginning today, select Grade A turkeys are available for 40 cents per pound at Walmart.* These gobblers are part of Walmart’s $20 Thanksgiving menu guaranteeing family favorites will be on the dinner table this holiday season. Walmart’s $20 Thanksgiving feast includes:
* One 12-pound Grade A turkey*
* Three 11 to 15.5-ounce cans Green Giant vegetables
* Two 14-ounce cans Ocean Spray cranberry sauce
* Three 6-ounce boxes of Stove Top stuffing
* One 5-pound bag of red potatoes
* One 12-count package of Sara Lee dinner rolls
* One 22-ounce pumpkin roll cake
-- Walmartstores.com:
Like a fine wine, Julia's personality and just continues to improve with age. (The science not so much)
"Today I've turned my kitchen into a bio-chemical laboratory." Julia Child cooks up a batch of primordial soup and explains how these simple ingredients produce amino acids - the building blocks of life. (via airandspace)
Yesterday the German news magazine Der Spiegel published in SPIEGEL ONLINE an interview with Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, one of the most influential conservative commentators in the United States. The result is an interview of over 4,000 words giving us in-depth look at Krauthammer's thinking and observations that we'd never see in the American news media. Since a wide-ranging interview of this length is a rarity in any medium, I'd urge you to read the entire piece. It will give you a sense of the Krauthammer's wide-ranging intellect that you can't get from newspaper columns and brief television appearances. That said, here are a few choice excerpts:
On the Nobel "Prize"
SPIEGEL: Mr. Krauthammer, did the Nobel Commitee in Oslo honor or doom the Obama presidency by awarding him the Peace Prize?Charles Krauthammer: It is so comical. Absurd. Any prize that goes to Kellogg and Briand, Le Duc Tho and Arafat, and Rigoberta Menchú, and ends up with Obama, tells you all you need to know. For Obama it's not very good because it reaffirms the stereotypes about him as the empty celebrity.
SPIEGEL: Why does it?
Krauthammer: He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive.
Emerging Powers?
Krauthammer: The Chinese are rising, the Indians have a very long way to go. But I'm old enough to remember the late 1980s, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy and the prevailing view that America was in decline and Japan was the rising power. The fashion now is that the Chinese will overtake the United States. As with the great Japan panic, there are all kinds of reasons why that will not happen.
Wars of Necessity, Wars of Choice
Krauthammer: The phrase "war of necessity and war of choice" is a phrase that came out of a different context. Milan Kundera once wrote, "a small country is a country that can disappear and knows it." He was thinking of prewar Czechoslovakia. Israel is a country that can disappear and knows it. America, Germany, France, Britain, are not countries that can disappear. They can be defeated but they cannot disappear. For the great powers, and especially for the world superpower, very few wars are wars of necessity. In theory, America could adopt a foreign policy of isolationism and survive. We could fight nowhere, withdraw from everywhere -- South Korea, Germany, Japan, NATO, the United Nations -- if we so chose. From that perspective, every war since World War II has been a war of choice.
The Obama "Doctrine"
Krauthammer: I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.The full interview is HERE.
[HT: Wheat & Weeds: But He Could Be Re-Elected Anyway?]
You just have to love John Nese and spend 12 great minutes with a great American businessman. As Chow.comtells it:
John Nese is the proprietor of Galcos Soda Pop Stop in LA. His father ran it as a grocery store, and when the time came for John to take charge, he decided to convert it into the ultimate soda-lovers destination. About 500 pops line the shelves, sourced lovingly by John from around the world. John has made it his mission to keep small soda-makers afloat and help them find their consumers. Galcos also acts as a distributor for restaurants and bars along the West Coast, spreading the gospel of soda made with cane sugar (no high-fructose corn syrup if John can avoid it).No high-fructose corn syrup? Yes, yes, and yes! High-fructose corn syrup is perhaps the single most invidious ingredient in super-market foods. When I scan ingredients and see it on the list that item goes back on the shelf. It's not only calories consumed to no purpose, it's calories that taste crummy.
I've been dining out lately on the incredible difference between Mexican Coke (sane cane sugar) and the swill passed off as American coke (high-fructose corn crapola). It's true and you can taste and feel the difference with one sip. As a result I am very pleased to listen to this high-priest of boutique sodas, a man who knows what he's talking about.
Here's a few choice quotes pulled from the video:
Corn syrup is totally unnecessary. Why would you use corn as the sweetener? Once a year Coca Cola makes a kosher Coke. It's got a yellow cap. Try it side by side with the regular Coke. The one with the cane sugar just goes pop! And it explodes and it's delicious., The one with the corn just goes fzzzzt.....
"Energy drinks? UGH! Energy drinks just taste bad."
"Big business loves big government. It just uses it to take over the market and then jack up prices."
"What I always wanted to do was to do business with other businesses my size."
"People still come in looking for RC Draft which was a soft cola. Very smooth."
"Coke and Pepsi love recycling. It gets them out of ever have to wash a bottle. If we really cared about the environment you'd have 're-use' and not 'recycling.'"
Re-use rather than recycling. I guess he's hip to the ever expanding glass mountains accruing at municipal garbage dumps around the nation since, surprise, it's cheaper to make glass from sand that to recycle it. Men like Nese should be in government rather than the substandard toads, right and left, that currently infest it. But then again, no. If he did we'd be out one really great soda store and that is just not worth it.
[UPDATE: Yes, Nese's Galcos Soda Pop Shop lets you buy on line for shipping to your parched home address. Check out Galco's Soda Pop Stop for details. ]
"Americans voted for 'change' in the last election. They didn't vote for 'surrender. " A bookend to the video of Penn Jillette is this hard jolt of sense from Pat Condell. He lays out how the forces of darkness now are chipping away at the First Amendment.
Continued...
"I sat on TV, while my hero Tommy Smothers yelled in my face how pissed off he was at me for appearing on Glenn Beck. It broke my heart. "
Portrait of a man trying to come to terms with friendship versus the truth.
Continued...Americans at Their Very Best: Why this isn't clocking upwards of a million views on YouTube is beyond me. Stick around for the slo-mo instant replay.
"This pie fight was held the day before my sister's wedding to celebrate the occasion. In all, 78 pies (54 Lemon Meringue and 24 Boston Cream Pies) were disposed of in approximately 78 seconds! "
Today we all love saying "Massive ordinance penetrator" six times swiftly. US giant bunker-buster bomb project rushed since Iran's Qom site discovered 28 September @ All Things News Function?
15-ton super bunker-buster bomb (GBU-57A/B) Massive Ordinance Penetrator, which can reach a depth of 60.09 meters underground before exploding.Here's the team of "Can do" Americans that made it all possible. Applause please.
Now I'm not saying George W. Bush doesn't love America. He clearly does. And I'm not saying he's the kind of man who takes pleasure in watching his successor slowly pinned and wriggling on the wall. He probably doesn't. ("Karl, what say we let that doofus with the Howdy Doody ears win the next one? It'll be good for at least another decade of those Pelosi losers eviscerating themselves. Put up... oh... I don't know... that McCain character. He's so dim he'll actually think it'll be an honor.")
And I'm not saying he likes watching prestige, power, wealth, and lives slowly being drained out of the body politic. He clearly loathes it. And I'm not saying that he's the sort of guy that say's "I told you so..." when he hasn't. He doesn't have to. Everyone except the most besotted core of Obamallationists knows the deep and sucking morass that is enveloping the Wunderkind with every passing day.
I'm just saying that sometimes, late at night on the ranch in Crawford, George W. Bush has to wander out onto the land and wonder....
Continued..."Obama is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is the Obama interest." -- Apologies to Churchill
Spare a moment for Mary Travers, 1936-2009. We shall not see her like again.
She could touch your heart...
and she could turn you on with a signature hair flip. (:32)....
Continued...Citizen and patriot Andrew Brietbart, the man behind Breitbart News, Breitbart.tv Big Hollywood, and now Big Government.
The Always Trenchant Jim Treacher commenting on the four-day-old Big Government: "I don't want to say Andrew Breitbart is a genius, but the last guy with a launch this successful was Neil Armstrong."
Andrew Breitbart: Hear him now and hear him later.
"An environmental impact statement (EIS) under United States environmental law, is a document required by the National Environmental Policy Act for federal government for ps3 users agency actions "significantly affecting the quality of the human environment."[1]
It's difficult to think of a "policy" more likely to impact "the quality of the human environment" than the current behemoth of a bill before the congress. We've had press conferences and postings, meetings and punditocracy without number. We've not seen the background documents used to create this legislation except in a few leaked memos. Nor have we seen a summation of those documents except in a few descriptions offered by the President or the boosters of the bill in speeches or declarations. These are inadequate. There's another way; an extant process. One that the government is already set up to produce....
Seattle's Mayor Gregory "Greg" Nickels (D) admits you won't have him to kick around anymore.
After a surprising primary in which the two-term mayor of Seattle ran third, the Mayor has bitten the bullet:
Nickels bows out; spotlight shifts to Mallahan, McGinnWith his re-election prospects dimming by the day, Mayor Greg Nickels conceded Friday morning that he had lost the primary election. It's a stunning defeat for the two-term incumbent....
It's also a stunning opportunity for me to launch, at last, my fiendish plan for Seattle by taking advantage of the opening and having myself elected as Mayor. Here's my platform from 2007. I'm still convinced it's a winner.
Continued...Desire Grover is making sense out of Gates' stupidity.
Or, "Gosh, he has rediscovered the 20's and Hugo Gernsback." -- Chuck
Sixteen provocative minutes with "the man who helped usher in the environmental movement in the 1960s and '70s has been rethinking his positions on cities, nuclear power, genetic modification and geo-engineering. This talk at the US State Department is a foretaste of his major new book, sure to provoke widespread debate." -- Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies' | Video on TED.com Recorded June 2009.
"I will go around the country on behalf of candidates who believe in the right things, regardless of their party label or affiliation," she said over lunch in her downtown office, 40 miles from her now-famous hometown of Wasilla — population 7,000 — where she began her political career. "People are so tired of the partisan stuff — even my own son is not a Republican," said Mrs. Palin. -- Palin to stump for conservative Democrats - Washington Times
Humm, sounds like Governor Palin may be casting an even wider net than I supposed the other day in: How Sarah Palin Will Become the Most Powerful Republican
A little night music from my channel at Blip.
Set List:
♫ Bob Dylan – Forever Young
♫ Van Morrison – Queen Of The Slipstream
♫ Bob Dylan – What Was It You Wanted
♫ Gretchen Peters – American Tune (live)
♫ Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Grandpa Was a Carpenter
♫ Eva Cassidy – People Get Ready
♫ The Band – Ophelia
♫ Bryan Ferry – A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall
♫ Yardbirds – Stroll On
♫ You Got Another Thing Coming
♫ Talking Heads – Life During Wartime
♫ Natalie Merchant – Carnival (LP Version)
♫ Richie Havens – I Was Educated by Myself
♫ Ben E. King – Stand by Me (Single/LP Version)
♫ David Bowie – Heroes (1999 Digital Remaster)
♫ America – A Horse With No Name
♫ Roll Me Away-Bob Seger-(Lyrics and Song)
♫ Linda Ronstadt – Life Is Like a Mountain Railway (2006 Digital Remaster)
♫ Van Morrison – You Don't Pull No Punches, but You Don't Push the River
Pamela at Atlas Shrugs says Happy Birthday Irving! And so say we all.
Berlin originally wrote the song in 1918 while serving in the U.S. Army at Camp Upton in Yaphank, New York.
I窶况e been with the Charleston Daily Mail for 24 years, the last 21 as an editorial writer and columnist. The National Society of Newspaper Columnists named me the best columnist in the land, under 100,000 circulation, in 2000.
Jules Crittenden
Jules Crittenden ｻ About
Jules Crittenden is a Boston Heraldeditor and columnist who has reported on politics, crime, science, foreign affairs, and maritime and military matters in the United States, Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East.
"Imagine if God existed but was sufficiently advanced such that we couldn't identify him for another 1000 years. Where does that leave the scientific atheist?"
Three Kinds of Black: "It turned out that I have no 'own people,' and it's the hardest lesson of all. No black Americans have their own people because we, of all people, have striven the most against being owned. So I keep repeating that question, a basic human question -- when are people going to realize that they don't own people? When are black people going to learn that they don't own black people? When is humanity going to realize that they don't own humanity? I suppose never, which is when we'll all realize at once that we are God's children -- and we don't even really know God. The alternative belief is more comforting and wrong."
Liberal Structuralism: Overwrought laws implemented by overlarge government bureaucracies for overspoiled children who cannot manage their own affairs independently, like individuals of piety and industry. So long as people will be petty and unable to resolve their differences on their own, there will always be lawyers and laws springing up to fill the vacuum of common sense and decency. Listen for the herald cry: 'There oughta be a law'.
On Listening to Rudyard Kipling's Rolling R: The reader of the audiobook reminds us of a time when the English language was closer to something it oftimes seems unable to convey, which is conviction and respect, even authority. He rolls certain Rs in words for emphasis. It used to be a more common practice to do so, even here in America. Did Dorothy Parker roll the occasional R? I can't imagine that she didn't in the course of her discourse. And so I am remembering Kipling, and Poesy and the discipline and song of adventures into the world, thankful I have been reminded of my great fortune to inherit the language of Liberty.And those are just from the last week.
I've been reading (and sometimes responding to) the essays and short notes of Michael Cobb since before there was a World Wide Web. It began in the stone age of 1200 baud dial-up when we were both members of The Well in the early 1990s. He remains a sane writer with that rare ability to startle me into thought just when I think I must know all he has to say. Sooner or later, he'll do the same for you. His mind is a work in progress.
Many writers run dry, not Cobb. He's never out. He can always "make it new." He's the real deal: a citizen.
From SXSW Interactive 2009 - a set on Flickr at Mike Rohde's Photostream
Condell tells it like it is with A word about the soldiers. The incident discussed concerns a group of Islamic Insects currently living in Britain. These vermin turned out to trash a group of British soldiers returning from Iraq this week. While this may seem to be just about Britain, it really isn't. Works for this country as well.
Condell's You Tube Channel is Here. Well worth subscribing to. I have.
[HT: Daphne @ Jaded Haven]
Of cystic fibrosis, age 41
"At the innermost point of the circle are the things that really matter: family, faith, love. These things stay with you until the day you die. At the very end, because the circle has shrunk down to its center, they’re all you have left. But as we approach that end, we finally realize that all along, they were what mattered most. As a consequence, life often remains beautiful and worthwhile right up until the end." Dean Barnett in "The Plucky Smart Kid with the Fatal Disease: A Life with Cystic Fibrosis""Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyager."
Here's 15 minutes of the brilliant Clay Shirky putting the present day in perspective for you. He centers on what to do with all your extra time to make it both valuable and transformative. What free time? How quickly we forget what life was like less than 200 years ago -- or 50 years ago for that matter.
"When all of the rest of the civilized world, as well as the Marxist world, was tossing God into the dustbin of history, Solzhenitsyn realized that only God really matters. He chided the West for embracing materialism and forgetting God, a lesson that is just as true today as thirty years ago." - Bruce Walker, "Death of a Giant"
A Titan. We shall not see his like again. In his incisive summing up, Bruce Walker at American Thinker correctly notes, " Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. It is a testament to the banality of our times that most people probably do not know what that means. Since the end of the Second World War there have been a very few truly great men. Out of those tiny few, fewer still have combined a great mind with a great soul."
Continued...
GILLIGAN TO MILLIONS, he'll always be Maynard G. Krebs to me: Bob Denver, TV's Gilligan, dead at 70.
In general, I don't find myself identifying with television characters. They are, after all, characters on television. But I do recall that, as a teenager stuck in the trackless suburbs of Sacramento waiting to get out of high school and into the University so my life could begin, Maynard G. Krebs was my first and last television-induced role model. I idolized this character. I had the grey sweatship with the sleeves torn off and a couple of holes I put in it myself. I had the bongos (Hey, nobody's perfect.), and I had the attitude.
Continued...BOB PARSONS, THE BIG DADDY OF GODADDY, gives us a fascinating pocket biography of his life and what he's learned in “Robert, they can’t eat you!” My rules for survival. An ex-marine, his is not your standard dotcom success model, but, come to think of it, few are. Especially interesting are his rules to live by. My favorite three are grouped together:
You could do worse than taking this quick course at the Parson's School of Business.8. Be quick to decide. Remember what the Union Civil War general, Tecumseh Sherman said: “A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”
9. Measure everything of significance. I swear this is true. Anything that is measured and watched, improves.
10. Anything that is not managed will deteriorate. If you want to uncover problems you don’t know about, take a few moments and look closely at the areas you haven’t examined for a while. I guarantee you problems will be there.
Texas to New Orleans and Back: The Truck That Could
HE DECIDED TO NOT JUST SIT AROUND: Lone Star MVPA - ('05 Hurricane Katrina Experience). One Man's Account from "The Lone Star Military Vehicle Preservation Association"
Excerpts:
Continued...
Yon on the Job
IT'S BEEN SOME DAYS SINCE MICHAEL YON POSTED, but his blog has undergone a redesign and has an improved look and feel. Added to the page is a forum for general remarks @ Open Forum: Michael Yon in Iraq with Yon's note:
Continued...
And the answer is....
There are about to be several million words written and published about Johnny Carson but Will Collier at Vodkapundit pretty much says it all in 97 words:
I really feel sorry for people who weren't old enough to see and appreciate Carson while he was still on the air. He was just So. Damn. Good. His successors, on every network, are decidedly pale reflections, and I doubt any of them would seriously argue that Carson was head and shoulders above anybody else who's ever hosted a talk show, anywhere. His blend of great good humor, high taste, low comedy, and refusal to condescend to anybody, regardless of who they were or where they came from, almost certainly can't be duplicated in today's mass media.
N.Z. Bear types for me in Memo to the Left:Time's Up
Alright kids. It's been over a full week now. I left you alone and let you have your pity-parties. Hopefully you've had a good long sulk and gotten it out of your system.Continued...But now, it's time to get your asses back to work. You might not expect me to be saying this, but here's the bulletin: this country needs you.
BEST OF SHOW AT THE BANTERIST today is the latest in his series Grammar Cop.
Complaint: Abuse of the homophone "flair" - a misdemeanor, but not a hate crime; making error permanent by printing it on 80# card stock; placing error behind acrylic shielding so as to prevent correction; placing error in a high visibility location. Additional charges: Blather in the Second Degree in the form of a nonsensical paragraph; failure to capitalize "Asianesque" as required by law.I find this "Banterist" theme a bracing restorative whenever I despair of our civilization.[See below] It reminds me that even in our darkest hours of linguistic genocide, there are those who still seek to enforce the law.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know
Within the smoke their ash revolves as snow,
To settle on our skin as fading stars
Dissolve into pure dust at break of day.
At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the fold of fire into steel,
The rumbles not of crossings underground
But screams from out of flowers built from flame.
We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in deaths ballet
To land among those dying deep below.
By noon the band of smoke leaned low
Upon the harbors skin like some dark shawl,
A pall of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its fatal fall.
The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Whod screaming run beneath the paws of death,
As dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
They lived in light or only in reprieve.
Theyd writhed and spun within a storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the rivers further shore
That sanctuary is not savored but secured.
The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
And marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver stood.
By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all that could not be clean again.
We breathed the smoke that bent and crept and crawled.
We learned to hate the smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go and not to go.
That last, lost summer faded into ash
Their faces faded as endless autumn flowed
Through chill and heat into the winter sea
Where warships prowled in search of stones.
Within the city, shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where we stood or where they lay.
Upon our bricks and stones their faces loomed
To gaze at us from times beyond repeal.
In time, their ash and smoke became the shapes
Of stories told at dinner, found in books,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the larger issues were of worth.
At first their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But now beneath clear plastic they endure
To remind those passing that weve not escaped.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.
41st Street, Manhattan, June, 2002, 6:30
They seek a dedication
No passion prints on stone,
Their reverie -- of clouds.
Their benedictions -- moans.
Not one can name their masters,
Nor indenture's date reveal,
Doomed to ride the animal
That runs within the wheel.
What do you make of the 9-11 commission?
Victor Davis Hanson: Nothing like it is all bad or all good. Investigations, if done properly and timed right, are, of course, essential for a democracy. But look at this present politicized charade.
Televised grandstanding; hearings sometimes held in places like Greenwich Village; former Clintonites who need to be questioned for their own laxity now questioning others (who will police the police?); a jeering gallery; generals summoned from the front to sit and be hectored; and bad timing since we are in the most critical moment in Iraq as the handover nears.
It all reminds me of the Athenian Assembly during the last phase of the Peloponnesian War when the mob adjudicated critical negotiations and always came to the wrong and ultimately fatal decision.
The most recent hair-splitting over Saddam and al Qaeda was pathetic. We all know Zarqawi was close to bin Laden and was treated in Baghdad; we all know that al Qaedists were encouraged to attack Kurds in Iraq. Add the still strong possibility that Atta was in Prague and that Saddam knew a great deal about the first World Trade Center, and the statement of the New York Times that there were no "ties" is really shameful. Saying al Qaeda and Saddam had no relations is like saying Milosevic knew nothing about the Kosovar and Bosnian holocausts. Mr. Clinton would have none of it -- and neither should we now in Iraq.
Again, the New York Times headlines say it all.
-- Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers
Now, I could have been a doctor
Helping the sick
And I could have been a lawyer
But you know that ain't my stick
'coz I feel so bad
If a patient didn't do well
And I feel just as bad
To leave a client in jail
And that is why
That's why I chose
I chose to sing the blues
Now a man has a lot
That he could present
Just to think I could have been
President
But I can't understand
What politicians say
So I wanna talk to you
In my own little way
And that is why (that is why)
That's why I chose (that's why I chose)
I chose to sing the blues
-- Ray Charles, "I Choose to Sing the Blues
THIS WEEK, THE BODY OF RONALD REAGAN will be flown to Washington for a state funeral. Following the ceremonies, the body will be returned to Caifornia. I imagine it has already been discussed and decided one way or the other, but speaking only for myself, I think it would be a fine gesture if Reagan travelled west on Air Force One.
UPDATE:
" Today and tomorrow, Mr. Reagan will lie in repose in the main lobby of his library in Simi Valley, Calif. He will then be flown to Washington with his family aboard the plane usually used as Air Force One. "
-- Reagan's state funeral
We note that for an airplane to be officially designated as "Air Force One," the current President of the United States must be aboard.
UPDATE: Reagan Makes First, Last Flight in Jet He Ordered
WASHINGTON, June 10, 2004 : The blue-and-white presidential jet that brought the flag-draped coffin of former President Ronald Reagan to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., on June 9 is an aircraft he ordered before he left office - but this was his first ride in it.
Reagan ordered two identical Boeing 747s to replace the aging presidential Boeing 707s he traveled in as president. First lady Nancy Reagan designed the interior decor of the planes in a style reminiscent of the desert Southwest.
One plane was delivered shortly after Reagan left office. President George H.W. Bush, in September 1990, was the first leader to fly in one of the new planes.
"Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears: to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty's lamp guiding your steps and opportunity's arm steadying your way."
-- President Ronald Reagan, 1992
The spirit of Ronald Reagan, released from the prison of his body,
this day, 2004.
"I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith."
-- Timothy 2:4:7
STEPHEN DEN BESTE says clearly what most people of good will already know:
The implication that heroes are unusual, better than the rest of us, is wrong. Most real heroes are not extraordinary men; they are ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.And they know it, which is why they do not brag. They may have been heroes, but they saw many others be heroes. They know they are not extraordinary.
Uncommon valor is a common virtue. That's why hundreds of firemen charged into the WTC towers on September 11, 2001, and died there. And after one tower collapsed, that's why the firemen in the other tower did not flee, and in their turn also died.
Real heroes know that decorations are only given to those who were lucky enough to be heroic while someone important was watching. Real heroes will have seen many other heroic acts which were never acknowledged by anyone, except by the other members of the team. And ultimately that is the only acknowledgement they truly value, for only their teammates really understand what they went through.
A man who brags about his heroism is no hero. And the men who served with him will know it.
From -- The price of heroism
STEPHEN DEN BESTE says clearly what most people of good will already know:
The implication that heroes are unusual, better than the rest of us, is wrong. Most real heroes are not extraordinary men; they are ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.And they know it, which is why they do not brag. They may have been heroes, but they saw many others be heroes. They know they are not extraordinary.
Uncommon valor is a common virtue. That's why hundreds of firemen charged into the WTC towers on September 11, 2001, and died there. And after one tower collapsed, that's why the firemen in the other tower did not flee, and in their turn also died.
Real heroes know that decorations are only given to those who were lucky enough to be heroic while someone important was watching. Real heroes will have seen many other heroic acts which were never acknowledged by anyone, except by the other members of the team. And ultimately that is the only acknowledgement they truly value, for only their teammates really understand what they went through.
A man who brags about his heroism is no hero. And the men who served with him will know it.
From -- The price of heroism
THIS LINK: STRENGTH (part 1) NOW.
THIS LINK: STRENGTH (part 2) NEXT
DAVID ENDERS IS A 23-YEAR OLD American spending his time as a "freelance journalist" in Iraq. His Learning Lessons of War on the Streets of Baghdad includes an interesting list of things his university somehow failed to teach him:
How to clean and fire an assault rifle. My co-workers and I had one in the house for "protection," though I'm not particularly sure what I would have done had we been in trouble. I've been encouraged, by Iraqis and foreigners, to carry a pistol as well, but can't bring myself to do it. I was robbed by the police (three of them, one of me); the neighbors killed a pair of looters on our front lawn; looters threatened to kidnap me. That, and the fact that unknown assailants are shooting at reporters, all drive home the futility of owning an assault rifle and having no intention of using it.Proper etiquette at checkpoints, American or otherwise. Even though I speak American English, I often thought the soldier was waving me through a checkpoint, when what he really meant was, "Stop or I'll put lots of holes in you and your car, [expletive expletive]!"
[snip]What to do when you're at a news conference and Donald Rumsfeld won't call on anyone but the pool reporters. It's frustrating, being the youngest person at a news conference. Rumsfeld seems to call only on the faces he recognizes, and I wasn't one of them. I considered throwing my shoe or trying my professor's tactic of simply interrupting, but I figured all the Special Forces guys in attendance would arrest me. So I never had the chance to ask the question I've been dying to know the answer to: "How can you say things are going well when people are shooting rockets at the airport before your plane lands ... sir?"
How to recognize and identify various unexploded bombs and munitions. For a short time, a land mine sat on the sidewalk outside our office, and we often saw other types of explosives lying about. And let's not forget the ones people keep planting in the roads and in front of buildings.
[snip]Making other people comfortable with my activities. "No, it's OK, Mom. That explosion wasn't anywhere near our house. No, everyone's fine. What am I eating? I'm eating Iraqi food, Mom. It's good. Lots of oil."
Determining who wants to kill me and who doesn't. "Where am I from? France. Good to meet you, too."
FROM ONE SOLDIER'S PHOTOLOG ON YAFRO:
"On the far right is a true American Hero! I want to tell you about my friend. His name is First Lieutenant Dave. Dave was the type of officer who looked after his men all the time. He had all the attributes you wanted in a leader. He was selfless, led from the front, caring, hard, tactically and technically proficient, and above all a friend. He was the man you wanted with on your right when the bullets were flying. I was engaged in a firefight with him in May and he was the bedrock of stability. He led his platoon calmly and with experience. He showed me what an officer should be. On the night of October 18, 2003, he was leading a resupply convoy when his vehicle was directly engaged with rocket propelled grenades and well aimed small arms fire. Immediately his gunner was killed by the initial onslaught. Dave was hit in the femoral artery. The vehicle hit a berm and pinned the driver underneath the front wheel. Dave immediately exited the vehicle and returned well aimed fire in order to destroy the enemy. Despite his wounds, he moved around the vehicle and freed the pinned soldier. He then moved the vehicle away from the area. He then returned fire onto the enemy prior to collapsing from his wounds..By this time, a reaction force was on site in order to kill the enemy. He fought hard and led the way saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. Dave was killed doing his job. He is sorely missed by his comrades. He was a fine man, leader, and friend..You will never be forgetten!! RLTW He is on the far right of this picture with his hand on his hip."
-- italyjumper's Yafro Moblog
WITH THE NATIONS FAUX INTELLIGENTSIA still reeling from shame-shock-horror, and the Hounds of the Blathervilles in full cry for Donald Rumsfeld's head on a pike, the likelihood of the picture above being seen on the front pages of the "leading" newspapers, or at the top of the news on any of the network news shows approaches absolute zero. After all, just what is the story here? Why should it be of interest to the Americans these news organizations supposedly serve?
The story concerns a medal given to a Marine: Marine Receives Navy Cross. The marine in question is Capt. Brian R. Chontosh. Chontosh -- an unusual name, one that should be easy to search. But go to Google News and search for Chontosh. The hits are meager to say the least. As of this writing, there are eleven. To put this in perspective, a search for Kerry Medals returns 1,680 references from Google News while Iraq Prisons is a bonanza of reports and commentary -- 8, 660 to be precise. With such an overwhelming glut of news why should any news organization feature a story about the Navy Cross being given to a Marine? Whats that story got, anyway?
The story is this:
Chontosh, 29, from Rochester, N.Y. , received the naval service's second highest award for extraordinary heroism while serving as Combined Anti-Armor Platoon Commander, Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom March 25, 2003.Try to imagine, for only a moment, what those actions entail. Try to put yourself, if for only a moment, on the ground and in the boots of Capt. Chontosh. Try to envision what it is to walk down a trench filled with people whose only mission is to kill you. They number more than 20. You are one. They are all armed. You have one rifle and one pistol. When you run out of ammunition, you have to take up the arms of the enemy. You dont know if they are loaded or to what extent. But you keep going. In time, after you have killed 20 soldiers and wounded others, the shooting finally stops. Somehow, you are still alive. Somehow, your comrades are still alive. For now.
While leading his platoon north on Highway 1 toward Ad Diwaniyah, Chontosh's platoon moved into a coordinated ambush of mortars, rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons fire. With coalition tanks blocking the road ahead, he realized his platoon was caught in a kill zone.
He had his driver move the vehicle through a breach along his flank, where he was immediately taken under fire from an entrenched machine gun. Without hesitation, Chontosh ordered the driver to advance directly at the enemy position enabling his .50 caliber machine gunner to silence the enemy.
He then directed his driver into the enemy trench, where he exited his vehicle and began to clear the trench with an M16A2 service rifle and 9 millimeter pistol. His ammunition depleted, Chontosh, with complete disregard for his safety, twice picked up discarded enemy rifles and continued his ferocious attack.
When a Marine following him found an enemy rocket propelled grenade launcher, Chontosh used it to destroy yet another group of enemy soldiers.
When his audacious attack ended, he had cleared over 200 meters of the enemy trench, killing more than 20 enemy soldiers and wounding several others.
Could you walk down that trench? I couldnt. I know all the usual answers: training, duty, responsibility to the men under your command. None of them really answer the question, do they? Call it courage and hold your manhood cheap if you cannot begin to match it.
But you heard nothing about it, did you? You heard, instead, about the sadists until you couldnt stand to hear any more and then you heard more. You heard about the man from an ancient war who did or did not toss medals away until you couldnt care about it less and then you heard more.
If you were unfortunate enough to read the words of George Will, professional spinster, this morning, you read his handy guide to S&M:
Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.Thats what the Washington Post brought you this morning. Why? Because you havent had your nose rubbed in this enough yet. How does George Will and the Washington Post know this? Because it would seem that, as of this morning, Donald Rumsfeld still has his job. Thats what is important to the writers and editors of the Post and the other leading news organizations today. The prison story with its tops and bottoms and naked images that can be run in the paper with a little discrete blurring here and there is important to these organizations because it is something they can understand. Its permissible porn and they like it, they really, really like it. Indeed, it would seem that George Will likes it a little too much.
--No Flinching From the Facts (washingtonpost.com)
Courage, though, real physical courage that requires a man to put the lives of his comrades above his own life, is beyond the shrunken moral scope of those whove spent the last week grinding out every last drop of rancid, phony outrage out of the Iraq Prison centerfolds they been displaying. Outrage and shock may have been permissible and even correct at the outset of the incident, but now doesnt it seem as if theres an element of perverse enjoyment creeping into the whole thing?
I began this comment thinking that it was an outrage that a report on the heroism of Capt. Brian R. Chontosh wasnt deemed worthy of comment by the leaders of the leading news organizations of the United States.
Ive changed my mind.
It is they who are not worthy of him.
===
UPDATE: More on this remarkable man at Bob Lonsberry: SOMETHING THAT DIDN'T MAKE THE NEWS
Still more at: BLACKFIVE: Captain Brian Chontosh - Someone You Should Know
Glenn Coggeshell is running for congress at The Lord of the Political Rings
The battle for middle earth has begun
In Washington DC."I fight not for what is gained, I fight for what can be lost."
With the choices we're getting , it is obviously time to send a Tolkien fan in. It might be just the ticket. At the very least, we can say "Now, he's really ready to cut the fat out of government."
Excerpt from the entire letter via The Conservative Cajun
"And oh by the way, we do have some common ground. I'm with you on not sending jobs out of the country. I have been against NAFTA since it's inception and believe it should be repealed."Now having said that I have an idea how you can help bring jobs back into the United States.
"Why don't you have your wife talk to the folks who run Heinz Foods and
get them to move all their factories into the U.S.A. since the lion's share of them are in foreign countries? That ought to help some."
Pat Tillman 1976-2004
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder high-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It whithers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echos fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
-- A.E. Housman
If you want to know what Iraq is like right now on the ground, you owe it to yourself to read the entire entry from ginmar's Live Journal titled: The Alamo is over-rated as a tourist attraction, dammit.
Excerpt:
We faced a force of four to five hundred rebels, with mortars, RPGs and various handheld weapons. There were four US soldiers---myself and the other people in my team----about twenty coalition soldiers, and thirty or so scared British and Aussie expats, including the British governor. The coalition soldiers had a couple tank/hybrid vehicles, but they didn't have much ammo for them. By midnight, everyone was running out. We kept impressing this on Higher, and they just couldn't get that through their heads. What the fuck good are they? We are running out of ammo. We will be over-run if light hits this place in the morning and finds us still here.No air cover? No ammunition? No EVAC?More than that, it was the concrete reality that you were going to die. I felt that a few times yesterday, last night, and this morning. Escape attempt after attempt fell through, and those mortars started hitting the grounds, the gate, the vehicles. The enemy sent word that when darkness fell, they were going to over-run the compound and exterminate everyone there. The whole Iraqi security force just up and quit. One guy claimed that his mother had had a heart attack and he had to go home. I heard that on the radio myself. It's the dog-ate-my-schoolwork excuse as applied to battle.
Fallujah was on everyone's mind, but nobody---thank God----said it.
I can't even grasp that we lived through it. I don't think it's hit me yet.
What makes it worse was that we kept trying to get reinforcements and air cover and evac, and eventually we had to do it ourselves. We called up around 1500 because it became apparent that we weren't going to get out, requesting air cover. We thought it would be over by 1700. By then, though, we realized something else was going on---darkness falls at seven. We heard that the whole province was under control, and that Sadr's representatives had offered a cease fire while they negotiated. No other government building in the province was not under his control. Our little force, outmanned and outgunned, held him off for better than twenty hours, and then slipped out under his nose.
He wanted to keep us there, be his bargaining chips while he tightened his fist around the province. And that fucking governor went along with it. We eventually found out the governor was contacting the command and telling them, no, no Evac behind our backs. He wanted US Marines dropped off and the civilians put in the helicopters while they secured his villa and offices. His own people were running around trying to arrange Evac, and kept counter-manding him. Then he'd go on the air and countermand them. I kept overhearing conversations I wasn't supposed to hear.
I can't describe what it's like. You're wearing twenty pounds of gear in helmet and vest, and the sound the bombs make screeching in seems not so much audible as it sensory. You feel it first. You know what sound a bullet makes going through the air? SWWWWWiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhh. It seems to burrow through the air with an odd slowness, as if it were greasy and that makes it slip through the air. If I were 11 Bravo, I'd have earned my combat infantrymen's badge, except of course the fact that I'm a woman means I don't get stuff like that. The way the Army has it set up, it doesn%u2019t matter if you do the job, if you're a woman----you're not supposed to do it, so you don't get acknowledgement if you do.
Right now, downstairs, the usual passel of pundits are sifting through the catbox of the 9/11 Commission's "very important work." Right now, in Iraq, there's a shortage of ammunition. And our soldiers in harm's way.
Pointer via: LGF .
The sane and persuasive thoughts of Victor Davis Hanson continue today in The Mirror of Fallujah: No more passes and excuses for the Middle East
The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as modernism itself and the humiliation that accrues when millions themselves are nursed by fantasies, hypocrisies, and conspiracies to explain their own failures. Quite simply, any society in which citizens owe their allegiance to the tribe rather than the nation, do not believe in democracy enough to institute it, shun female intellectual contributions, allow polygamy, insist on patriarchy, institutionalize religious persecution, ignore family planning, expect endemic corruption, tolerate honor killings, see no need to vote, and define knowledge as mastery of the Koran is deeply pathological.Required reading.
IN HIS LOW-KEY WAY, Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us issues big news @ [delicious-discuss]
After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and then consume all my waking hours, I've decided to quit my job and work on del.icio.us full time.I wish him all the best investors.I've given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment.
The Insight of Allah Strikes Again.
If you don't have Victor Hanson on your reading list, you should. His essays for the last three years represent one of the longest runs of excellence in writing and thinking we've seen in many decades.
Excerpt from "When I Was Young:"
When I was young, my father used to get me out of bed, in a thick John Kennedy accent, and with perfect Bostonian mimicry order me to start the day with "viga." I think he meant "vigor" in the sense of the new Kennedesque idealism at home and abroad. My isolationist grandfather would sigh and concede that Harry Truman was right after all, in spending all our hard-earned tax dollars in strange places like Greece and Turkey and sending relatives and friends to worse in Korea. There was a sort of guarded idealism of the need to promote democratic values, coupled with the tragic acceptance that such sacrifice would always be misinterpreted and caricatured. But the idea, my grandfather also added, was to make places abroad a little freer so Americans would not have to be attacked here at home by those who hated us.And then I grew old and learned that somehow Iraq was not like Panama, or Serbia, or Afghanistan, where without the UN, Congressional approval, and mostly alone we took out dictators and theocrats and left the foundations of democracy in their place. Instead, something that made no real sense in terms of classical economic exploitation was said to be about "blood for oil," or promotion of the Likud party in Israel, or creating a new empire in the Middle East -- all this about a country that we debated publicly a long time about invading, went to the UN, got congressional sanction, and toppled its dictator in three weeks, and then stayed on for another year to ensure the Iraqis had a chance for the only freedom in the Arab Middle East.
The world has changed. What was once liberal is now illiberal, and the old progressivism has become mean-spirited and opportunistic. What was once idealistic is seen as calculating. When I read about the "Jews" now, it is almost always negative and emanates either from the European left or the so-called liberal university here in the United States. Israel, still democratic and still attacked by autocracies, is now hated rather than respected, not for what it has done, but for what it is. The world snored, for example, this week when suicide bombers were foiled in their attempts at getting at a chemical weapons dump so that they might once more gas Jews. Neither Kofi Annan nor Desmond Tutu, for all their recent media appearances, said a word when Palestinians apologized for murdering a jogger in Jerusalem on the mistaken impression that the poor Arab was a "Jew."
Today, IMFO points to an article by David Deutsch written six weeks after the 911 attacks. She notes:
I've always enjoyed David Deutsch. He's a brilliant, brilliant man. Wry sense of humor too. I'd read his piece shortly after 9/11 happened and was just reminded about it after looking over at The World. It's worthy of a read, at least once. If not several times.She's right about this. Here is an excerpt:
The entire essay, WHAT NOW? is more than worth your time. Indeed, it rings more true today than when it was written. His takedown of moral relativists and appeasement specialists is also worth your close attention.Richard Dawkins, as usual, talked sense, and made several true and timely points. He praised America as "the principal inheritor, and today's leading exponent, of European scientific and rational civilisation", and he broke a taboo by pointing out that this is "the highest civilisation ever". He took sides: "I want to stand up as a friend of America" -- as do I. But in one important respect, his remarks did not seem to me to reach the heart of the issue. He blames religion, and our convention of "respecting" it. Now, I am no advocate of religion, but religious belief is surely not central to the present disaster. There are plenty of terrorists at large who are not pursuing any religious agenda. There are notorious sponsors of terrorism who are driven by nationalist or socialist ideologies, not religious dogma. And there are plenty of religious zealots who are no danger to anybody (except themselves and their unfortunate wives and children).
That is not to deny that mainstream Islamic culture has exhibited a major moral failure. It seems to struggle even to find the language and the conceptual framework genuinely to oppose the crimes that are committed in its name. Large numbers of peaceful Muslims find themselves in effect condoning mass murder, and painfully few can bring themselves to side with the victims now exercising their right of self defence. Nevertheless it is not the tenets of Islam that have caused the present violence. This is a political evil we are facing, not a religious one. And it is a modern evil, not an ancient one.
Moreover, mainstream Western culture has also exhibited a major moral failure: a refusal to distinguish between right and wrong. The unique glories of our civilisation -- self-criticism, tolerance, openness to change and to ideas from other cultures -- have in many people's minds decayed, under this moral failure, into self-hatred, appeasement, and moral relativism.
Captain Renault : What in heaven's name brought you to Lileks?
Rick : Mind-numbing boredom. I came to Lileks for the Fargo.
Captain Renault : Fargo? Fargo? We're in Orange County.
Rick : I was misinformed.
Yes, since my mother's family lives in Fargo, I stumbled across Lileks.com years ago by googling "Fargo." Okay, it was a slow day at work, so what? Towards the end, they were all slow days.
Still, I was impressed that anyone could take Fargo and make it more interesting than I thought it was. I'd long used my childhood summers in Fargo as a kind of touchstone whenever meetings in New York turned to what "those people" "out there" would buy. (Even though almost everybody in New York is from somewhere else, there's something in the water that makes you forget what somewhere else is like -- unless you have a touchstone)
If I came for Fargo, I stayed, as so many others have, for 'The Bleat,' a daily journal which sometimes seems as if you're peering over Mark Twain's shoulder as he keeps a diary. Still, Lileks.com grows and develops behind The Bleat, and it rewards intermittent excursions to the Main Menu to see if Lileks has put something up you haven't seen before. Today what was new (to me, okay?) was this:
I could explain why this particular conjunction of image and caption is arresting and provoking, but you either see it or you don't.
Puts that bad hair day in perspective, doesn't it.
Again, to restate the point: let's imagine how some people -- hell, a lot of people -- would react if the government put posters like this in bus stops and public buildings today. People would shriek as if they were having burned skin peeled off with a straight-edge razor. They would be convinced that the transformation of America into a fascist state was finally complete. But this was FDR's America. Just so we're clear.
--
LILEKS (James) WW2 Civil Defense Materials
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether".
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Wall at Camp Pendleton
Click to Enlarge
Within an hour of writing the item below, the wires bring us: Military Copter Crash Kills 4 in Calif.
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. Jan. 23 -- A military helicopter crashed during a training mission at this base north of San Diego, killing all four Marines aboard, officials said.Brave men and brave women, each and every one. Each one missed and all mourned.
12/19/03:
Stuck on Calypsos Island
I'm sure that the Europeans are light-years ahead of us in the use of public transportation. They probably are wiser in their per-capita energy utilization, and their primary and secondary education may be superior. But there is also something of Calypso's island about them. For all their professed enjoyment of food, shelter, and lovemaking, the Europeans are bored silly with their listless routine and are increasingly timid -- this from a great people who should not, but really do, live in terror of their own past. Like Odysseus in his comfy subservience to Calypso, these mesmerized and complacent sensualists sometimes contemplate leaving the comfort of their fairyland atoll and in boredom weep nightly, gazing out at the seashore. But as yet they lack the hero's courage to finally build a raft and sail rough seas to confront suitors who are trying to crash their civilization.12/30/03
The Western Disease
The so-called Arab street and its phony intellectuals sense that influential progressive Westerners will never censure Middle Eastern felonies if there is a chance to rage about Western misdemeanors. It is precisely this parasitic relationship between the foreign and domestic critics of the West that explains much of the strange confidence of those who planned September 11. It was the genius of bin Laden, after all, that he suspected after he had incinerated 3,000 Westerners an elite would be more likely to blame itself for the calamity -- searching for root causes than marshalling its legions to defeat a tribe that embraced theocracy, autocracy, gender apartheid, polygamy, anti-Semitism, and religious intolerance.
1/09/04
The Same Old Thing
Downsizing in Europe, seeing a wall rise on Israel's border, and trying to create democracy in places like Afghanistan and Iraq are not pleasant, easy solutions. Indeed, such tough efforts to end the familiar status quo will prompt greater outrage. Expect more adolescent "I hate Bush" articles, gloomy, end-of-the-world scenarios in the New York Review of Books, and hysterical appearances from an array of ex-NATO apparatchiks, worried former Saudi ambassadors, out-of-work Clinton State Department "crisis-managers," and frowning Washington insiders. Anticipate also more invective about "neoconservatives," "unilateralism," "ideologically driven policy," "hegemony," "squandered good will" -- and all the other meaningless buzz words and third-hand catch-phrases that now are regurgitated daily in lieu of thoughtful analysis.
1/16/04
Our Primordial World
[T]he stuff of collective ego and insecurity is often a uniform race, religion, or class that only fuels sensitivity to nationalist insults and perceived slights. America in contrast has always been a brew of faiths, colors, and ethnicities, united by shared values and concerned more with money than with accent, birth, or pedigree. So again, while we are patriotic and don't like bullies, most Americans don't much care about a national ego that must be fed and coddled by other countries. On almost any given day we turn on the television, surf the news channel, see here an Arab burning an American flag, there a European anti-globalization protester torching an effigy of George Bush, yawn, perhaps mumble out loud "Can't these losers get a life," and then plug in a DVD or hit HBO.As Mr. Bush has grasped, every time we have humiliated our enemies we have gained respect and won security. By the same token, on each occasion we have shown deference to a Mr. Karzai, the Iraqi interim government, and our Eastern European friends, we have helped to create security and stability. Apart from the model of our forefathers who crushed and then lifted up the Germans and Japanese, we could find no better guide in this war than William Tecumseh Sherman and Abraham Lincoln -- in that order. The former would remind us that our enemies traffic in pride and thus first must be disabused of it through defeat and humiliation. The latter (who turned Sherman and Grant lose) would maintain that we are a forgiving sort, who prefer restored rather than beaten people as our friends.
Don't wait, just click.There's really no deadline for sending a package to Any Soldier in Iraq, but now would be a good time to start. I've got my list and I'm checking it twice. You're going to shop this weekend anyway, why not put some people on your list that matter as much as your friends and family?
The Any Soldier site gives you detailed instructions on what is needed and how to send it. Go there now and get busy.Want to send a care package to Any Soldier in Iraq,but have no idea of what to send, who to send it to, or how to send it?
Sergeant Brian Horn from LaPlata, Maryland, is an Army Infantry Soldier with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Kirkuk area of Iraq who has a reputation for taking care of his soldiers. He has agreed to distribute the contents of any packages that come to him addressed "Attn: Any Soldier" to the soldiers who are not getting mail. This works! Your packages get to real soldiers that need and appreciate your support!Please note that now we have more soldiers helping with this. We ask that if you send packages and letters that you spread them across the addresses we have below. Soon there will be more, but they are all in Brian's unit, the Sky Soldiers of the 173rd.
Well, what are you waiting for? Click here ---> Any Soldier
NOTE: If you are planning to link this item, do not link to here, link directly to Any Soldier
UPDATE: HEATERMEALS -- A much needed and sought after item is offering special prices and packages for the Any Soldier program. Check out the details on their webpage, above. No web orders:"To order HeaterMeals through www.AnySoldier.US, please call us at 1-800-503-4483"
The brilliant Orson Scott Card is worth more than a glance for his essary in War Watch - November - On Lying
[Excerpt][Card] ...I think you confessed something a moment ago when you said, 'You conservatives just can't forget how popular and successful Clinton was.' I think you just confessed your own motive for attacking Bush with such hatred and virulence. The thing you can't forgive him for is that he actually took action after 9/11 -- not just a few token missiles fired at empty training camps, but actual, effective action -- and the army, when it was used for its proper purpose, was extraordinarily successful. You wanted Bush to fail, and you just can't stand it that he hasn't."
[The Anti-Bush] "Hasn't he? Aren't our soldiers still dying over in Iraq?"
[Card ] "Yes, they are. That's because they're still fighting the war in Iraq, and when you fight wars, people die. More people will probably die in the U.S., too, because you can bet that our enemies are doing everything they can to mount another series of terrorist attacks here. But please keep in mind: George W. Bush is not killing our soldiers, our enemies are, and those enemies were killing our soldiers before we invaded Iraq or Afghanistan -- just in case you've forgotten. Bush didn't start this war. He merely carried it to the enemy and started fighting it on their soil, liberating a few oppressed countries along the way."
[The Anti-Bush] "It's another quagmire, like Vietnam."
[Card]"It will only be like Vietnam if a certain party in Congress forbids the President to fight it using the full power of the United States."
[The Anti-Bush] "In other words, you're in George W. Bush's pocket, and he can do no wrong."[Card]"I'm in nobody's pocket, and if he actually does wrong, I'll be the first to say so -- which I've done on various occasions. But what I'll never do is accuse a man of the kind of vile crimes you've accused him of, on the basis of the same complete lack of evidence that you have for your accusations."
[The Anti-Bush] "You're just naive."
[Card] "You're just partisan. You have no allegiance to truth. You simply tell whatever stories will make your opponents look bad, whether they're true or not."
[The Anti-Bush] "Are you calling me a liar?"
[Card] "That's a funny thing to resent, considering how freely you call George W. Bush a liar. But no, I'm not saying you're a liar. I'm saying you don't actually care about the difference between truth and lies. All you care about is usefulness. All you care about is whether the public might believe your slanderous slogans and send Bush's popularity ratings down. I think that's worse than lying. At least a liar has to keep track of the truth in order to adjust his lies to fit the facts. You simply don't care."
[Pointer via Cold Fury
Who says a Vice-President can't be brilliant?
I thought this was a good idea in July:
American Digest: How to Destroy the Democratic Party in One Brief Presidential ElectionGeorge W. Bush will be nominated as the Republican candidate for President in 2004. There's no dispute here. Richard Cheney will also be nominated as Vice-Presidential candidate for 2004. He's done a great job and there's no reason to break up a winning team. Coming out of the convention, the Bush / Cheney ticket will be a done deal.
But it is not, I fear, the ticket that can destroy the Democratic Party. Hence, it simply won't do. After the convention, it will have to change.
It will have to change some time after the convention. Not a short time after, but not a long time either. The beginning of August would be about right. Just about then Mr. Cheney's health will become an issue. He will have to have a complete work-up and during that work-up it will be discovered that his heart simply cannot be depended upon. He will, regretfully but for the good of the country and the Republican party, withdraw his name from the ticket.
At that time, it will be up to the President to find and confirm, with all appropriate consultation and following the rituals and laws in this regard, another person for the Vice-Presidential slot. It is at this time the President must turn to the only person in his administration that can deliver absolute victory for the Republicans, destroy the Democrats for decades, and move the Republic of the United States of America into the 21st Century.
Gentle reader, I give you the next Vice-President of the United States: Condolezza Rice.
It's even better in October:
"Welcome to BushRice04.org, where our mission is to convince President Bush that his best chance at reelection, and the Republican party's best chance for victory in 2008, is to choose Condoleezza Rice as his running mate in the 2004 presidential election." Bush Rice '04: Ensuring America's Future
Babe Ruth
by Nikolas Muray, American
(b. Hungary, 1892-1965)
From:George Eastman House Photography Sells Series
"Indeed, what I find most unsettling about the 'InstaBuck' is,
no matter where you go, or what angle you take on this bill
... the omniscient eyes of the Instapundit follow you everywhere."
-- From blogs4God,
which has a few more very scary proposals for the way-new money.
"Ain't a free country if a man
can't blow what he pleases."
Bret Stephens outlines the late and not so great career of our tragically hip ex-President in On Being a 'Clinton-Hater' -- Why I lost faith in the man I backed in 1992.
And he's got his reasons.
Anyway, Mr. Clinton was there. Already he had brought the crowd to its feet at the Mann auditorium in Tel Aviv, singing John Lennon's "Imagine" with a group of Arab and Israeli schoolchildren ("Imagine there's no countries/ It isn't hard to do"). Now he had something personal to say. He had been in Srebrenica the day before, he said. There he had met a woman who was burying her husband and six children. He told us to be mindful that ours was not the only country visited by horror. He told us that Mr. Peres was a man who knew that vengeance belonged to God, not man.There are a sheaf of other reasons that don't involve involuntary regurgitation, but they're worth reading to remind yourself that term limits and Republicans are not always bad things.He said all this in a hoarse and mournful and significant tone of voice. I wanted to puke.
Come to think of it, I backed him 1992 as well. I plead "Intellectual Insanity."
Click to enlarge
From the new online collection of seldom seen holdings at the Smithsonian: HistoryWired
This ambrotype of of Mea-to-sa-bi-tchi-a, or Smutty Bear, a Yankton Dakota, is among the first photographic images of Native Americans. Smutty Bear was part of a large Native American delegation that came to Washington, DC, during the winter of 1857-58. Under duress, members of the delegation signed a treaty that greatly reduced their lands in return for promises of money and provisions that were never fulfilled. This prompted the Sioux Revolt of 1862, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of settlers and the mass hangings of 38 Native Americans."
"A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Lets have rage. Whats needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American furya ruthless indignation that doesnt leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J. Elin Chandra ) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism (as has happened in the recent past, when, for example, you might hear someone say, Terrible what he did, of course, but, you know, the Unabomber does have a point, doesnt he, about modern technology?).-- Lance Morrow: " The Case for Rage and Retribution" Time Magazine, 9/12/2001Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessnessand to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred."
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know
Within the smoke their ash revolves as snow,
To settle on our skin as fading stars
Dissolve into pure dust at break of day.
At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the fold of fire into steel,
The rumbles not of crossings underground
But screams from out of flowers built from flame.
We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in deaths ballet
To land among those dying deep below.
By noon the band of smoke leaned low
Upon the harbors skin like some dark shawl,
A pall of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its fatal fall.
The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Whod screaming run beneath the paws of death,
As dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
They lived in light or only in reprieve.
Theyd writhed and spun within a storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the rivers further shore
That sanctuary is not savored but secured.
The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
And marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver stood.
By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all that could not be clean again.
We breathed the smoke that bent and crept and crawled.
We learned to hate the smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go and not to go.
That last, lost summer faded into ash
Their faces faded as endless autumn flowed
Through chill and heat into the winter sea
Where warships prowled in search of stones.
Within the city, shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where we stood or where they lay.
Upon our bricks and stones their faces loomed
To gaze at us from times beyond repeal.
In time, their ash and smoke became the shapes
Of stories told at dinner, found in books,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the larger issues were of worth.
At first their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But now beneath clear plastic they endure
To remind those passing that weve not escaped.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.
"So when I listen to some semi-literate political candidate go on about how Saddam didn't want any part of these people because he isn't or wasn't religious, (yeah, right, as if we know that Bin Laden really is religious, as if history isn't filled with leaders who have cloaked fascism in the mantle of phony devotion, even to the extent of convincing themselves of their sadistic piety) I have to think he is either stupid or a liar. Or just simply a pol out to get his opponent at any cost, even if that cost is the Enlightement itself."-- Roger L. Simon
It was dark, too dark to see,
you held me in the light you gave
You lay your hand on me
Then walked into the darkness
of your smoky grave
Up the stairs, into the fire
Up the stairs, into the fire
I need your kiss, but love and duty
called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs, into the fire
May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love bring us love...
May your love bring us love
-- Bruce Springsteen - "Into The Fire"
A great American president, invited to speak at the second anniversary of September 11 in New York City, might put it something like this:
Two years ago our enemies brought to us on this continent a new war, conceived in hatred and dedicated to the proposition that all Americans are to be slaughtered because they are Americans.Now we are engaged in a great global war, testing whether this nation or any nation so attacked can long find the courage to endure the duties and sacrifices necessary for victory.
We are met on our first mass grave of that war. We have come to remember it as a final resting-place for those who here were murdered in our airplanes, at their desks, or trying to save others. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.
Our fellow citizens, living and dead, who struggled here and in the war since that day have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The old world and those among us still weak and dedicated to appeasement will little note nor long remember what we say here, but we can never allow ourselves to forget what happened here.
It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the as yet unfinished war which by their deaths these victims and heroes have required of us.
It is rather for us to become more deeply dedicated to finishing the great task remaining before us--that from the ashes of our honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that all nations under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that governments of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
From Michelle's moving and important Voices: Stories from 9/11 and Beyond
My wife and I live in Tucson, Arizona where I am stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. That morning I had decided to sleep in a little later than normal. I don't remember why, but for some reason I didn't have to be to work at 0730.Pointer via Silent RunningI was just starting to wake up when the phone rang. It's on my wife's side of the bed so she answered it. She let out one of those wailing "NOs!" that you know only comes from the most horrific news. I assumed that one of our family members had died so I was instantly wide awake and waiting for her to tell me the bad news. Instead she slammed the phone down and grabbed for the remote with these frantic motions which made her clumsy. She was scrabbling around the bed trying to pick up the remote and point it at the television. All the while she was repeating, "It's gone, it's gone. The World Trade Center is gone." I had no idea what she was talking about, but as soon as she turned on the television there was a plane hitting one of the towers. I had a moment of utter confusion, my wife was saying the trade center was gone, but it looked like I was watching it getting it hit. Then it hit me, this was a replay. I knew in that instant it was no accident.
My mind flipped. You understand if you're in the military, or civilian emergency services. I compartmentalized, my world got cold and everything had a sudden sharp clarity. I got up and without looking at my wife, told her, "There's going to be a war. I better get to work." I took a shower, got dressed and left. Later my wife said I had turned into a machine and in a way I had.
I got to work and we had the benefit of a television in the office so we spent the rest of the day watching the news. All the while I had this cold refrain running through my head, "People are going to die. People are going to die. They are fucking going to die."
California Republican Bill Simon drops out of Davis recall race
LOS ANGELES – Republican Bill Simon dropped out of the gubernatorial recall race Saturday amid calls from party leaders to consolidate support behind fewer candidates, a campaign official said.
POPSCI'S 2ND ANNUAL BRILLIANT 10
POPULAR SCIENCE finds and profiles 10 top young scientists whose work has already and will continue to change the world we live in and our understanding of the universe.
STEPHEN QUAKE
Microfluidics: CalTech
Building a computer from a plumber's nightmare of miniature pipes.
DEBORAH ESTRIN
Embedded Networks: UCLA
Her mini-networks track the forest and the treesplus every leaf, bug, bird & dewdrop.TEJAL DESAI
Tissue Engineering: Boston University
Pancreas, blood vessels or other organ on the fritz? She'll build you a nifty replacement.ERIK DEMAINE
Computational Origami: MIT
Paper folding as extreme mind-sport: pushing theoretical limits for the fun of it.XIAOHUI FAN
Cosmology: University of Arizona, Tucson
By detecting faint galaxies, he peers deep within the universe to the start of time.VICTOR VELCULESCU
Genomics: Johns Hopkins University
His maverick approach ushered in a new way to finger cancer genes.SAE WOO NAM
Quantum Cryptography: National Institute of Standards and Technology
He's harnessed the bizarre quantum world and made it do his bidding.
BETTY PACE
Molecular Medicine: University of Texas, Dallas
Unlocking genetic on/off switches to fool the body into healing itself.MICHAEL MANGA
Geophysics: UC Berkeley
He models billion-year and minutes-long processes to grasp earth's workings.SARAH TISHKOFF
Molecular Anthropology: U. of Maryland, College Park
From the genes of living people, she divines the story of human origins.
What is is about a sudden turn of events in the political realm that brings out the shallow stupidity in the paid pundits of our fair land?
Not 24 hours into Arnold Schwarzenegger's run for the Governorship of California, the media air-waves are full of blathering commentators bemoaning the fact that Arnold has 'no political experience,' and therefore should not hold office, or even have the temerity to run.
Read my lips: "So what?"
Yes, there's a whole clot of rabble already whining about 'upstarts' that never ran for anything. You'd think that democracy requires a person to start running for office in the second year of high school, and to keep at it all the way up the political career ladder.
Last time I looked, the rules of this democracy said that any citizen at any time in any place that met the requirements for office could run for that office.
Arnold does. Ergo he may run.
Professional politicians and pundits are cordially invited to partake of a nice hot cup of STFU.
"Experience" vs. "Inexperience" is something that that awful beast, the people, will decide. With their votes. On election day. Refreshing concept, isn't it?
You do not need "experience" to win. Experience is what you get after you win.
The inevitable comparison to Jesse Ventura is a canard and a base one.
What we have here is an extremely intelligent man who is no stranger to running numerous businesses; a man who literally "built himself up" from nothing; a man who has a deeply engaging personality; a man who has a certified track record of negotiating deals with some of the most difficult people in existence, movie people; a man who, in examining the spreadsheets from numerous films is no babe in the woods when it comes to bogus accounting; a man who has no need to raise a cent from anyone; a man who is, if not sincere, better able to fake sincerity than any one of the thousand clowns that currently compose the government of California.
And, as his secret weapon, what we have here is a man that people genuinely love.
What we have here is, in short, a winner.
Click to Enlarge
Ascerbic Web Cartoonists Bare All for Dean Esmay
If you ever wonder whether or not there's a liberal slant to the newspapers of the country, reflect that the editorial cartoons of John Cox and Allen Forkum appear in none of them. Their work is, as of this writing, unsyndicaed. Easily the equal of any editorial cartoonists found in newpapers, and superior to most, this duo remains, along with Chris Muir, one of the crown jewels of the Web; proof that this medium's ability to deliver high-quality content and a wide rage of views is now unexcelled.
Continued...
The Ironman and the Sea
by Bill Plaschke in today's Los Angeles Times.
Every day for 27 years Dale Webster has gone surfing. It might have been crazy for the first 20 years, but now it has gone on to be a crazy kind of deep wisdom.
Everybody knows where Dale Webster has been, and where he's going, this man who has defined himself by his refusal to be defined."Surfing has been so commercialized, so sold out, surfboards on runway models, surfing as a reality show," Barilotti said. "To many people, Dale has become one of the last real surfers."
As of now, there is no party planned for February. Dale Webster says he doesn't need a party. He says a life of dedication has led to a life of understanding, and that's celebration enough.
"Seeing the wave is the future," he said. "Its curl is the present. Its break is the past."You ride a great wave, you turn around, and all you see is foam, nothing to show for it, a memory."
Always the setting forth was the same,
Same sea, same dangers waiting for him
As though he had got nowhere but older.
Behind him on the receding shore
The identical reproaches, and somewhere
Out before him, the unravelling patience
He was wedded to
-- W.S. Merwin
The Woz is back with a killer app.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to create locator network
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak is turning his creative wheels again.Make that his Wheels of Zeus Inc. - a Los Gatos startup he founded in January 2002 to develop wireless technologies that would be "helpful to people's everyday lives." The company, which has been working in stealth mode, announced its management team Monday and unveiled some, but not much, of its product details.The company hopes to create a wireless network of location-monitoring tags and base stations to help people keep track of pets, children, briefcases, or other wayward things. The network will use a low-power, long-range radio technology - the same 900-megahertz spectrum used on many cordless phones - along with global positioning satellite technologies.
From Woz's: Wheels of Zeus | Company Overview
wOzNet also enables the wOzNet Community network that can transparently mobilize an entire community to help locate a person, pet or thing that's not where it should be. Businesses participating in wOzNet Community can provide an important public service to the community at no additional cost. And wOzNet grows organically so a community can be as large as the nation or even the world.If you had to pick one person from the last half-century of computing who was consistently brilliant, innovative and cared deeply about the welfare of the human race, Steve Wozniak would make just about everyone's short list. If this man isn't awarded the Medal of Freedom in the next five years, something is seriously amiss.
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death
March 23, 1775
By Patrick Henry
"It is in vain, sir, to extentuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the house. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen if, entertaining as I do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve.This is no time for ceremony. The question before the house is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at the truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.
Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the numbers of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it.
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House. Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received?
Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation; the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can gentlement assign any other possible motive for it? Has Great Britain any enemy, in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us: they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the British ministry have been so long forging. And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne! In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation.
There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free--if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending--if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained--we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us! They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength but irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.
It is in vain, sir, to extentuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
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