Woah. Norman won't need an autopsy after this. A highlight...
After Gilmore had been executed, Mailers attention was captured by Jack Abbott, a violent convict and self-declared Communist who began writing Mailer long existential letters about life in prison. Mailer loved them. He helped Abbott have them published, first in The New York Review of Books and then as a book, called In the Belly of the Beast (1981). In his introduction, Mailer described Abbott as an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge. It seems clear that Mailers interest helped to expedite Abbotts release from prison: Culture, Mailer declared at one point, is worth a little risk. Abbott had scarcely set foot in New York when he stabbed and killed Richard Adan, a twenty-two-year-old Cuban-American waiter. Mailer testified on Abbotts behalf at the ensuing murder trial. Asked about Adans family at a press conference following his testimony, Mailer said: Im willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this mans talent. A reporter from The New York Post then asked who he was willing to see sacrificed. Waiters? Cubans? Questions to which Mailer had no response but bluster: What are you all feeling so righteous about, may I ask? Clearly, he did not know the answer to his own question.
This week, the United Nations' climate scientists will release a major report synthesising the world's best global warming research. It will be the first time we've heard from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since its scientists won the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore.
The IPCC's Assessment Report will tell policy-makers what to expect from man-made climate change. It is the result of rigorous and painstaking labour: more than can be said for the other Nobel Prize winner. The difference between Gore's claims and IPCC research is instructive.
While Gore was creating alarm with his belief that a 20-foot-high wall of water would inundate low-lying cities, the IPCC showed us we should realistically prepare for a rise of one foot or so by the end of the century. Beyond the dramatic difference, it is also worth putting that one foot in perspective. Over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about one foot - yet, did we notice?
Most tellingly, while Gore was raising fears about the Gulf Stream halting and a new Ice Age starting, the scientists discounted the prospect entirely. The Gulf Stream takes warm water from around Mexico and pushes it toward Europe. Around 8,000 years ago, a melting lake in the region of the present-day Canadian Great Lakes broke through and a massive torrent of cold, fresh water flooded into the North Atlantic, significantly slowing the Gulf Stream for around 400 years. Gore worries that Greenland's ice shelves could melt and do the same thing again.
Ice in Greenland is obviously melting. But over the next century, it'll spill 1,000 times less water into the ocean than occurred 8,000 years ago. It will have a negligible effect on the Gulf Stream.
In his movie An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claimed that scientists were discovering that the current is "surprisingly fragile". However, the IPCC scientists write in their 2007 report: "None of the current models simulates an abrupt reduction or shut-down" of the Gulf Stream.
But what sort of nightmare would ensue if Gore were right? Siberia-like conditions in Europe? Actually, no. Europe would need to plunge by almost 13C to get that cold. Halting the Gulf Stream wouldn't achieve anything near that.
Gore and others have bought into a popular myth: that the Gulf Stream is the reason that western European winters are so much warmer than those of eastern North America. It is true the Gulf Stream provides a few degrees of extra heat to Europe, but it actually warms the west side of the North Atlantic almost as much. It's not the reason Europe is warmer than the US in winter; warm winds are. Let's hear from the IPCC again: "Catastrophic scenarios about the beginning of an ice age are mere speculations, and no climate model has produced such an outcome. In fact, the processes leading to an ice age are sufficiently well understood and completely different from those discussed here, that we can confidently exclude this scenario."
Gore's claims have received a lot of notice. Hopefully, the careful work of the IPCC will also receive the attention that it deserves.
Bjorn Lomborg is the author of Cool It: The Sceptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Cyan-Marshall Cavendish).
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/12/2007 11:54 ||
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So the choice is between "crazy" and "less crazy"?
#3
I have no problem with accepting the earth may be warming...or cooling. It's called weather, and it goes in cycles. I do have a problem with the level assumed of human impact and the efforts to throttle our economy and lifestyles to keep the grant-whores, Gaia worshipping socialists, and holier-than-thou hypocrites
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/12/2007 18:40 Comments ||
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#4
Hysteria aside and recognizing no one has the answer:
No one honestly thinks that our collective use of the earth's resources - whether of fish stocks, fresh water (currently living in atlanta, so this one hits close to home), carbon-based fuels, etc. - is sustainable, do they? Do you feel in your gut that the status quo 'works'? Then let's stop arguing about *how much* the oceans will rise, just *how few* fish there will be and start doing something about it. Seems alot of folks are missing the point just because Al Gore is a retard.
#5
Get a grip Geoffro. It's not the first world killing the environment as much as the impoverished world. How many square miles of 'precious' Amazon rainforest are being burnt for more 'ecological' power alternatives? The water and air is cleaner with 100 million more people around the US today than it was forty years ago. The obstruction from employing French/Swedish style nuke plants wasn't because of raving capitalism, but the very same community you're swimming in. We're tired of the hysteria and irrational spin as fronts for Marxism Part Two - the Collective.
#6
Okay, Geoffro, you're right: Al Gore is a retard and let's do something. You can start by not eating fish more than twice a year, not showering more than once a month, and cutting your fuel consumption by 90%. That includes electricity that is made using carbon-based fuel. Drop back in a year and let us know how things are going.
Seriously, I'll bet that:
You drove more than 10 miles today in a vehicle that gets less than 30 mpg.
You've made no effort to consolidate trips this week.
There are lights on in unoccupied rooms in your house right now.
You have more rooms than people.
You shower daily.
You've put food in the trash can in the last 24 hours.
The U.N.'s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be "criminally irresponsible."
Yvo de Boer's comments came at the opening of a weeklong conference that will complete a concise guide on the state of global warming and what can be done to stop the Earth from overheating. It is the fourth and last report issued this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, co-winner of this year's Nobel Peace prize.
Environmentalists and authors of the report expected tense discussions on what to include and leave out of the document, which is a synthesis of thousands of scientific papers. A summary of about 25 pages will be negotiated line-by-line this week, then adopted by consensus.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning panel, said scientists were determined to "adhere to standards of quality" in the report. It was indirect barb at the government representatives, who have been accused by environmentalists of watering down and excluding vital information from the summaries of earlier reports to fit their domestic agendas.
The document to be issued Saturday sums up the scientific consensus on how rapidly the Earth is warming and the effects already observed; the impact it could have for billions of people; and what steps can be taken to keep the planet's temperature from rising to disastrous levels.
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/12/2007 20:47 Comments ||
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#8
No one honestly thinks that our collective use of the earth's resources - whether of fish stocks, fresh water (currently living in atlanta, so this one hits close to home), carbon-based fuels, etc. - is sustainable, do they? Do you feel in your gut that the status quo 'works'?
Yes, in countries with a free market and democratic elections, and Yes with the same condition.
#9
More: Everyone will feel its effects, but global warming will hit the poorest countries hardest and will "threaten the very survival" of some people, he said.
"Failing to recognize the urgency of this message and act on it would be nothing less that criminally irresponsible" and a direct attack on the world's poorest people, De Boer said.
The report will provide the factual underpinning for a crucial meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia.
you can bet every one of these assholes will be flying in on private jets
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/12/2007 20:50 Comments ||
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In his novel 1984, George Orwell chillingly described a totalitarian regime in which all communication is controlled by a Ministry of Truth and dissidents are persecuted by political police. The United States remains a democracy governed by a constitution and the rule of law, with pluralistic media, yet there are disturbing signs that the propaganda methods Orwell described have taken root here.
Everybody keeps seeing Orwell's world. All y'gotta do is bend over at just the right angle, squint, and there it is, reflected in your mirror that's warped in just the right way. I'm surprised so many people are so talented here in our Brave New World.
Indeed, techniques of deception have undergone enormous improvements since Orwells time. Many of these techniques were developed in connection with the advertising and marketing of commercial products and services, and then adapted to politics. Their distinguishing feature is that they can be bought for money. More recently, cognitive science has helped to make the techniques of deception even more effective, giving rise to political professionals who concentrate only on getting results.
Posted by: john frum ||
11/12/2007 00:00 ||
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I believe that a huge majority in the West is unable to either understand jihad obligations that fall on Muslims or that those cultists respect free exercise of conscience. However, I believe that Soros' party line thinking is partly responsible for the general ignorance of the West's mortal enemy.
#4
Is he referring to MoveOn.Org or the NYTs or Keith Olberman or the New Yorker? I don't understand which propagandist he is writing about. Surely, he cannot be talking about Rantburg - it welcomes all speech especially any that comes with a $10 contribution to the tip jar. Ain't that right, Fred.
Posted by: Jack is Back! ||
11/12/2007 17:04 Comments ||
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Karl Popper will be turning in his grave over Soros' hijacking of his legacy. Yet another example of the Left hijacking and then subverting institutions with laudable objectives, turning them into narrow partisan vehicles.
BY any conceivable measure, Frank Buckles has led an extraordinary life. Born on a farm in Missouri in February 1901, he saw his first automobile in his hometown in 1905, and his first airplane at the Illinois State Fair in 1907. At 15 he moved on his own to Oklahoma and went to work in a bank; in the 1940s, he spent more than three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. When he returned to the United States, he married, had a daughter and bought a farm near Charles Town, W. Va., where he lives to this day. He drove a tractor until he was 104.
But even more significant than the remarkable details of Mr. Buckless life is what he represents: Of the two million soldiers the United States sent to France in World War I, he is the only one left.
This Veterans Day marked the 89th anniversary of the armistice that ended that war. The holiday, first proclaimed as Armistice Day by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and renamed in 1954 to honor veterans of all wars, has become, in the minds of many Americans, little more than a point between Halloween and Thanksgiving when banks are closed and mail isnt delivered. But theres a good chance that this Veterans Day will prove to be the last with a living American World War I veteran. (Mr. Buckles is one of only three left; the other two were still in basic training in the United States when the war ended.) Ten died in the last year. The youngest of them was 105.
At the end of his documentary The War, Ken Burns notes that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day. Their passing is being observed at all levels of American society; no doubt you have heard a lot about them in recent days. Fortunately, World War II veterans will be with us for some years yet. There is still time to honor them. But the passing of the last few veterans of the First World War is all but complete, and has gone largely unnoticed here.
Perhaps we shouldnt be surprised. Almost from the moment the armistice took effect, the United States has worked hard, it seems, to forget World War I; maybe thats because more than 100,000 Americans never returned from it, lost for a cause that few can explain even now. The first few who did come home were given ticker-tape parades, but most returned only to silence and a good bit of indifference.
There was no G.I. Bill of Rights to see that they got a college education or vocational training, a mortgage or small-business loan. There was nothing but what remained of the lives they had left behind a year or two earlier, and the hope that they might eventually be able to return to what President Warren Harding, Wilsons successor, would call normalcy. Prohibition, isolationism, the stock market bubble and the crisis in farming made that hard; the Great Depression, harder still.
A few years ago, I set out to see if I could find any living American World War I veterans. No one not the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or the American Legion knew how many there were or where they might be. As far as I could tell, no one much seemed to care, either.
Eventually, I did find some, including Frank Buckles, who was 102 when we first met. Eighty-six years earlier, hed lied about his age to enlist. The Army sent him to England but, itching to be near the action, he managed to get himself sent on to France, though never to the trenches.
After the armistice, he was assigned to guard German prisoners waiting to be repatriated. Seeing that he was still just a boy, the prisoners adopted him, taught him their language, gave him food from their Red Cross packages, bits of their uniforms to take home as souvenirs.
In the 1930s, while working for a steamship company, Mr. Buckles visited Germany; it was difficult for him to reconcile his fond memories of those old P.O.W.s with what he saw of life under the Third Reich. The steamship company later sent him to run its office in Manila; he was there in January 1942 when the Japanese occupied the city and took him prisoner. At some point during his 39 months in captivity, he contracted beriberi, which affects his sense of balance even now, almost 63 years after he was liberated by the 11th Airborne Division.
Nevertheless, he carries with aplomb the burden of being the last of his kind. For a long time Ive felt that there should be more recognition of the surviving veterans of World War I, he tells me; now that group is, more or less, him. How does he feel about that? Someone has to do it, he says blithely, but adds: It kind of startles you.
Four years ago, I attended a Veterans Day observance in Orleans, Mass. Near the head of the parade, a 106-year-old named J. Laurence Moffitt rode in a Japanese sedan, waving to the small crowd of onlookers and sporting the same helmet he had been wearing in the Argonne Forest at the moment the armistice took effect, 85 years earlier.
I didnt know it then, but that was, in all likelihood, the last small-town American Veterans Day parade to feature a World War I veteran. The years since have seen the passing of one last after another the last combat-wounded veteran, the last Marine, the last African-American, the last Yeomanette until, now, we are down to the last of the last.
Its hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. Its not that World War I will then become history; its been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we cant quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We cant stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.
#5
I hope historians, biographers, and other researchers, etc. are working to get their stories and those of the wartime-epoch generations properly recorded. The present and future geners can't "learn from history" iff they don't know what the probs, issues, or facts were.
#7
Joe, one thing most of those vets had in common was not being willing to tell their stories. Another thing they seem to have in common is the waking up screaming, from nightmares.
#8
I am hoping to transcribe my grandfather's WWI diaries in the next few weeks. My grandfather didn't see the trenches, however; he was in the Navy. For him, visiting foreign ports and witnessing the German surrender at Scapa Flow were the big events.
One of his hometown friends got a facefull of gas. He recovered, came home, got married, and died two years later from pneumonia brought on by a cold. His lungs couldn't cope with it.
Another hometown friend, engaged before he left, came back severely wounded. His family told the fiancee that they would understand if she did not want to marry him. Her family demanded that she follow through and marry him. So she took care of a brain-damaged man for twenty years.
Alright people, lets get with the program! A voice booms out from the darkness, deep and sandpaper-scraggly, firm and fierce, its the sound of Authority not so much the voice of God as of his enforcer. And lo and behold, the screen flickers and the movie begins, exactly as youd expect from a command belted out by actor, troop advocate, and former Marine drill instructor R. Lee Ermey. . . .
Like many actors, Ermey may feel that he lives in his characters shadow, but that hasnt stopped him from making use of the opportunities and influence the role has brought him. But tops on Ermeys list is a cause thats rarely seen within the confines of activist Hollywood: Supporting the troops that made his time in the service and thus his legendary role possible.
Ermey gives 150 days a year to various activities supporting the armed services. He works with Unmet Needs, a veterans charity that offers financial support to veterans and their families. . . . Ermey also makes trips to the front lines where he meets with the troops many of whom are fans and films segments for his History Channel show Mail Call. In the show, Ermey plays a slightly less menacing variation on his Hartman character, answering viewer mail about all sorts of military-related questions. He goes to places more remote and more dangerous than many of the celebrities who participate in USO shows. They cant ask Hollywood actors to go all the way out there. Me they dont give a sh*t about. Then he flashes a knowing grin and says, But nobodys going to let me get hurt on their watch. . . .
Go read it all. Semper Fi, carry on!
Posted by: Mike ||
11/12/2007 06:45 ||
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He is a fine man and a wonderful example of the American soldier. Keep up the good work, son.
#1
"...let me find out that the news media has run, in the same magazine, one story blasting us for going to war for minerals and another story blasting us for not acting on the continuing mineral shortage back home."
"There should also be simultaneous stories about the outrageous expense of the war effort, and another about how the troops are under-funded and under-equipped. Set it so that I somehow lose public-support points with each story."
This is a long read, but worth the time. I explains as it raises additional questions.
Lord Curzon, Britain's viceroy of India and foreign secretary during the initial decades of the 20th century, once declared:
No patchwork schemeand all our present recent schemes are mere patchworkwill settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steam-roller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine.
Nowadays, this region of what is today northwest Pakistan is variously called "Al Qaedastan," "Talibanistan," or more properly, the "Islamic Emirate of Waziristan." Pakistan gave up South Waziristan to the Taliban in Spring 2006, after taking heavy casualties in a failed four-year campaign to consolidate control of this fierce tribal region. By the fall, Pakistan had effectively abandoned North Waziristan. The nominal truceactually closer to a surrenderwas signed in a soccer stadium, beneath al-Qaeda's black flag.
Having recovered the safe haven once denied them by America's invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban have gathered the diaspora of the worldwide Islamist revolution into Waziristan. Slipping to safety from Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden himself almost certainly escaped across its border. Now Muslim punjabis who fight the Indian army in Kashmir, Chechen opponents of Russia, and many more Islamist terror groups congregate, recuperate, train, and confer in Waziristan. This past fall's terror plotters in Germany and Denmark allegedly trained in Waziristan, as did those who hoped to highjack transatlantic planes leaving from Britain's Heathrow Airport in 2006. The crimson currents flowing across what Samuel Huntington once famously dubbed "Islam's bloody borders" now seem to emanate from Waziristan.
Slowly but surely, the Islamic Emirate's writ is pushing beyond Waziristan itself, to encompass other sections of Pakistan's mountainous tribal regionsthereby fueling the ongoing insurgency across the border in Afghanistan. With a third of Pakistanis in a recent poll expressing favorable views of al-Qaeda, and 49% registering favorable opinions of local jihadi terror groups, the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan may yet conquer Pakistan. Fear of a widening Islamist rebellion in this nuclear-armed state was General Musharraf's stated reason for the recent imposition of a state of emergency. And in fact Osama bin Laden publicly called for the overthrow of Musharraf's government this past September. It is for fear of provoking such a disastrous revolt that we have so far dared not loose the American military steamroller in Waziristan. When Lord Curzon hesitated to start up the British military machine, he was revolving in his mind the costs and consequences of the great 1857 Indian "Mutiny" and of an 1894 jihadist revolt in South Waziristan. Surely, Curzon would have appreciated our dilemma today. Finish at link
#1
This is a really good read, and an important one for all students at Rantburg U.
It reinforces my belief that islam has enabled the perpetuation of tribalism throughout the Middle East and Souther Asia. It also makes me highly sceptical that we are ever going to see a reformation within islam unless a very large stick is applied. Me thinks that Waziristan would be an ideal demonstration site for that large stick.
Posted by: john frum ||
11/12/2007 16:58 Comments ||
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#3
If you ever wondered if UFO's have landed here on Earth you only have to go to Weirdostan and see for yourselves. I am starting to believe that Roswell was a diversion and the real ETs are Pashtun tribesmen in Pakistan. All they lack is a ray gun.
Posted by: Jack is Back! ||
11/12/2007 17:01 Comments ||
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I used to think sociologists were useless.
This fellow, Kurtz, shows that if you want to understand terrorism at more than a superficial level, you need a sociological understanding.
Of course, it may be that he's the only person like him
#5
The root of the problem is neither domestic poverty nor American foreign policy, but the tension between Muslim social life and globalizing modernity itself.
F*cking brilliant article. Concise, and correct.
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/12/2007 20:25 Comments ||
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In the middle of Pakistans political crisis, one question coursing through Washington more through the western media, in fact is whether Pakistans nuclear arsenal is safe; or will remain so, the scare being this decades equivalent of the Russians are coming!.
Considering that Pakistan put in place a C2 (command and control) system for its strategic forces in February 2000, more than three years before India did, what should one make of this alarm in the West?
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: john frum ||
11/12/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Here's my proposal:
Distribute them evenly across Pakistan in heavily fortified underground bunkers. When it looks like the country is about to fall to the bad guys, call the US military to come get them. If for some strange reason they can't get there in time, detonate them.
#3
President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you *assured* me there was *no* possibility of such a thing *ever* occurring!
General "Buck" Turgidson: Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
11/12/2007 13:07 Comments ||
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Despite all the hand-wringing, the BBC admits that life is better in Iraq. The Dhimmicrats still want to surrender.
Is Iraq getting better? The statistics say so, across the board.
Over the past three months, there has been a sharp and sustained drop in all forms of violence. The figures for dead and wounded, military and civilian, have also greatly improved. All across Baghdad, which has seen the worst of the violence, streets are springing back to life. Shops and restaurants which closed down are back in business. People walk in crowded streets in the evening, when just a few months ago they would have been huddled behind locked doors in their homes.
Everybody agrees that things are much better.
But is the improvement only skin deep? And will it last once the American troops, whose "surge" has clearly made a difference, begin to scale down? In the past few days, two events have underlined big changes that have happened in recent months on both the Sunni and Shia sides of the Iraqi equation.
On Thursday, in a crowded public hall in the mainly Shia city of Karbala, south of Baghdad, the local police chief, Brig-Gen Ra'id Shaker Jawdat, bitterly denounced the Mehdi Army militia, accusing it of presiding over a four-year reign of terror there. It was an extraordinary occasion. One by one, men and women stood up and screamed abuse at the militia, blaming it for killing and torturing their loved ones.
It could not have happened a few months ago, when the Mehdi Army - the military wing of the movement headed by the militant young Shia cleric, Moqtada Sadr - was the real power in the streets of Karbala. A few days later, Moqtada Sadr ordered his followers to halt all forms of military action nationwide, even in self-defence.
That was a turning-point in Baghdad too. The number of bodies being found daily, dumped randomly in the city after being abducted, tortured and killed in sectarian reprisals, dropped from dozens a day to less than a handful.
One morning, about 20 years ago, I heard someone make a crack about the military mind. It was an amusing remark, and I chuckled at it myself. Then, the same afternoon, I saw an old man sitting in a reception area at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital.
This is the whole story. It happened in 1987, but now it crosses my mind every Remembrance Day.
I never talked to the old fellow. I just watched him as he sat there, waiting patiently for some medical exam. He was obviously a veteran. I couldn't tell of which war -- he looked old and frail enough to be a veteran of the Boer war, but he couldn't have been. He could have been a veteran of the Great War, but even that was unlikely. He had probably fought in the Second World War, maybe in Normandy or at the beaches of Dieppe.
Even today, a Dieppe veteran could be as young as 81, though the average Second World War veteran still alive would be pushing 85 or more. If the old man had fought under Field Marshall Montgomery's command, as he might have, with the First Canadian Army somewhere in the Calvados district of France, he would have been about 25 on D-day.
That would have made him only about 68 when I saw him 20 years ago, though he appeared older. . . .
I was a child at the time of the Allied landings, in hiding from the Nazis in Central Europe. I remember watching my parents search for snippets of news on the muffled, static-filled short-wave radio. I understood then, even if dimly, that the time it took for the old man and his fellow soldiers to make the trip from the beaches of Normandy to Caen could be a matter of life or death for us.
Then the years passed, and other concerns intervened. I became busy drinking Calvados, and cracking jokes with intellectual friends about the military mind. My illusion was that I had come to understand the world better. I had even gone through a period -- briefly -- when I believed that it's all the soldiers' fault; that it all starts with war-toys; that war begins somehow in soldiers' minds. Smart people often believe stupid things like that.
Today I know that soldiers don't cause wars. They only die in them (sometimes in greater numbers than need be, because we neglect our armed forces in peacetime). I know that, as the poet Rudyard Kipling had it, we often make mock of uniforms that guard us while we sleep. I know it, because I've been guilty of it myself.
Now I keep thinking of the old man for whom I waited 63 years ago. Wherever he is now, in 1987 he was still sitting an arm's length away from me at Sunnybrook Hospital. It took him 50 days to make the 10-mile trip from the beaches to Caen, and I can write this column only because he got there in time.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/12/2007 13:32 ||
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Some veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a jagged scar, a certain look in the eye.
Others may carry the evidence inside them: a pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg - or perhaps another sort of inner steel: the soul's ally forged in the refinery of adversity.
Except in parades, however, the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or emblem.
You can't tell a vet just by looking.
He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn't run out of fuel.
He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose overgrown frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours of exquisite bravery near the 38th parallel.
She - or he - is the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every night for two solid years in Da Nang.
He is the POW who went away one person and came back another - or didn't come back AT ALL.
He is the Quantico drill instructor who has never seen combat - but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and gang members into Marines, and teaching them to watch each other's backs.
He is the parade - riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic hand.
He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.
He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at the Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor dies
unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the ocean's sunless deep.
He is the old guy bagging groceries at the supermarket - palsied now and aggravatingly slow - who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and who wishes all day long that his wife were still alive to hold him when the nightmares come.
He is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being - a person who offered some of his life's most vital years in the service of his country, and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs.
He is a soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and he is nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known.
So remember, each time you see someone who has served our country, just lean over and say Thank You. That's all most people need, and in most cases it will mean more than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded.
Two little words that mean a lot, "THANK YOU".
"It is the soldier, not the reporter, Who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, Who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, Who has given us the
freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, Who salutes the flag, Who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protestor to burn the flag."
Father Denis Edward O'Brien/USMC
Posted by: Steve ||
11/12/2007 00:00 ||
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May I add:
He is the one that seethes inside at public events during the performing of the National Anthem at those who cannot shut up and place a hand over their heart to honor those so vividly described in the above, yet restrains himself from throttling those same a55holes for that behavior.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
By Bjorn Lomborg
