tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18054675351560257512024-03-14T07:42:15.555-07:00Jolly Rogers- Random Wisdom from Under the Mainstream!The Badoracle.THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.comBlogger239125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-9683799853985816422011-07-04T11:55:00.000-07:002011-07-04T11:56:33.615-07:00Our better world<div class="MsoNormal">I want to wake in a better place.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Why is it that I can no longer remember what it was like to open morning eyes and not step out from some nightmare landscape? I remember a time when the sun lit the beginnings of my day. I remember moments of perfect timeless peace – everything accomplished behind me, and so much time in front that I felt almost immortal. I remember those times, but I no longer remember what it felt like.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">How did we come to this place, where every piece of news is mean and dark-spirited? So many people seem so lost and the only answers we get from our country’s leaders are distortions, half-truths and often, just lies.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">It would be nice to live again in summer of our youth, where sand and salt wind and the calls of gulls reminded you every moment that you were forever alive and free.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Instead the news reports scream about higher and higher job losses, continual scams and scandals, natural and unnatural disasters and the horrors we would visit upon each other. Alarmists use a debunked global climate change as reasons to keep stealing from the people. Massive corporations seem suspiciously involved in tremendous webs of corruption and monumental amounts of taxpayer money have sifted into hidden places while lawmakers benefit. States are going bankrupt, promises are broken and new taxes and laws threaten to drown the people still barely afloat in a drowning economy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">So where is our better place?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Like some kind of never-never land, it all seems to be just beyond the starlight – always promised and hoped for, but never realized. Like the carefree years of our youth, our better, stronger country seems beyond our reach and looks to only reside in our memories or our imagination.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">But there is always a road back from the hard places. Redemption is just beyond our belief in our selves, and our own powerful creativity and ingenuity. We can find clarity and purpose and beauty if we discard fear and the eventual anger and hate it spawns. We can become the shining city again, but we must stop the push for greater regulation and government control of our lives’ smallest details.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I know the place where the sun still warms our future. We can wake there and we can walk there and we can feel the breeze of liberty on our faces. I imagine we will see each other in that golden light, and we will nod and smile knowingly. We will talk about the times when things were hard and dark, but we won’t be able to remember what it felt like. We’ll laugh when we speak and we’ll know that our children and grandchildren are going to grow up in a better world than we did; that they will be happy and secure and filled with truth and compassion.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We created it once - and walked barefoot there - in a time of pinball and cotton candy. Tall ships once gathered to celebrate our country's centennial. We will never see that again in our lifetime - but someone will. And perhaps their generation will see a country where flags fly proudly in front of almost every home. Their community will once again be whole and not fractured. Their world will be a place where compassion and love always wins - and where belief and honor do not need to be questioned. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">It is the place where war is unnecessary and sadness, horror, sickness and hunger is lessened and maybe eliminated forever. It’s the place where we can meet old friends and know that each passing day promises we may meet new ones. It is a place of heroes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I want so bad, to continue to believe in our noble home of the brave.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I want to wake to a better place. And if I do, I’ll wait for you, and we’ll walk there together.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">-We the People</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-30692369207863142622011-06-30T20:13:00.000-07:002011-06-30T20:13:02.411-07:00Death panel<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Cambria;
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:auto;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0in;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria;
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}
@page Section1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;
mso-header-margin:.5in;
mso-footer-margin:.5in;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">One hundred peaceful protestors were blocked from FDA offices Tuesday in an attempt to protest the removal of a vital breast cancer treatment drug from its’ approval lists – an action which would make treatment with the drug impossible for all but society’s elite. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It is one of the first and most complete examples of a “death panel” in operation.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The scene in front of the FDA complex highlighted the continued slip of America from a republic into something resembling a police state. The protestors clad in pink, carried signs<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- those facing them carried weapons and were clad in combat uniforms.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The leader of the group, who’s wife is battling cancer, continued to repeat through a bullhorn, “we will obey the law.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet, stone-faced, the Homeland Security detachment faced them – finally allowing one of them through to speak to officials after he obeyed requirements to set down his sign and bullhorn.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The process of withdrawing approval for the drug Avastin is called “unlabeling.” By unlabeling the drug, insurance companies are relieved of their obligation to pay for treatment. So, even though people suffering from cancer have paid high premiums for the coverage, with the help of the FDA, the rules can be changed, and the expensive treatments will be witdrawn.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Those who would have been saved by the drug will face terrible deaths in one of the first examples of administrative government-approved killings. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have a couple simple questions for the reader: First, why face the group of 100 regular citizens with an overwhelming, fully armed police force and demand that the leader of the protest put down his sign and communications and come in alone? Second – and more importantly; how far does one go in “obeying the law,” when to do so means nearly certain death at the hands of the “law?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It would seem people have become very good at obeying commands from faceless corporate and government commanders and commandos, but are less able to see how much has been taken from them – and do something real about it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Until, of course, they take everything away – and then, it no longer matters.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Wednesday, the FDA panel convened to consider the unlabeling, ruled In-favor of it – a decision which if given final approval by the FDA Commissioner, will give insurance companies a big fat paycheck – blood-money for the death of untold numbers of Americans.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One last request of the reader: Define evil. </div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-31489067780509630612011-06-26T15:09:00.000-07:002011-06-26T15:14:19.004-07:00Pride and shame<div class="MsoNormal">I once served in the Honor Guard for the 501<sup>st</sup> Tactical Missile Wing. This was a unit based at the famous Greenham Common in Britain. Our duty was to deliver 96 nuclear cruise missiles to Russia in the event the Cold War became hot.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It didn’t. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One day, the base was called to a briefing to discuss the end of the mission – and a new beginning without the threat of the Soviet Union. There were maybe a thousand people filling a massive building. The Honor Guard had been asked to bring the room to attention. That task was probably more appropriate for the Master Sergeant in charge of the Guard – but he passed it to me. I guess I had a loud mouth. I was a little nervous. The sound from the room was deafening – people talking and laughing and at first, no one noticed as I walked down the center of the room, posted, and carried out the order.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In a split second, everything stopped and everyone came to attention. I did an about-face and walked out – and the U.S. and RAF Commanders came in.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I remember a feeling of pride. We had accomplished an amazing mission. In some small way at least, the threat of our mobile system may have forced the hand and hastened the collapse of the Communist government. And there were other “moments” during the final years of the 501<sup>st</sup>: There was Eisenhower Day, when I marched the American Flag in a color guard, down the center of Newbury. I had bought new boots for this specific day – straight out of the box and completely unblemished, they were peeling the back of my heels off my feet and filling with blood. I was aware of the situation, but much more aware of the old British men in black suits, lining the streets as we passed, their chests decorated with medals from a long-ago war, where we, the Americans came to the assistance of Britain. Together, our countries had won a war, which saved a world. My color guard performed perfectly that afternoon.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Pride” is too small a word to cover such a feeling on a day like that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So to hear of Associations in America, taking veterans to court for flying U.S. flags in their front yard – it infuriates me. A good writer should be objective and impartial. I am afraid, today, I cannot be a good writer.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Today I read about a 77-year-old veteran of Vietnam, who has been told by the homeowner association that the U.S. flag flying in his front yard, violates the rules of the property. This is occurring right now in Macedonia, Ohio. Apparently, there are not enough patriots there in that town to stomp mudholes in the idiots that make up the Association’s board.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Yesterday I read about another Homeowner’s Association in Evans, Georgia, which withdrew approval for a house to be built for a seriously wounded veteran to be erected by the national organization “Homes for our Troops." The house, which was to be specially adapted for SFC Sean Gittens was initially blocked because the association wanted a second story, as well as 700 square feet added to the plan. SFC Gittens was left paralyzed and unable to speak as a result of an aneurism linked to traumatic brain injury resulting from multiple concussive traumas during his Iraq service from April 2007 to April 2008.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As of June 24<sup>th</sup>, however, after continued heat, the Association in the way of Gittens’ new home, folded under the pressure, asking for more shutters and other architectural changes, but not the additional floor space. The family hasn’t yet responded back.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In absolute fury over both these situations, I can only say that it is precisely these sorts of things, which diminish all of us. Are some silly neighborhood rules worth more than the history and majesty of the U.S. Flag? Are these effete snobs, which make up these organizations, worth even one man such as SFC Gittens? Where were they – and what were they doing, when Gittens was serving the country? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What a source of pride – America.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What a source of shame.</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-53780647282445615122011-06-16T17:02:00.001-07:002011-06-16T17:02:48.306-07:00What do you see?<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Look at the sky and clouds on a perfect day.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Somewhere else, that same view resonates like a kind of emotion, deep within another soul on the other side of the world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But in our day-to-night lives we can’t see that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Vibration in sound, familiar to so many, is unfamiliar when thought of as existing inside someone else. Sight and sound and even belief seem so obvious to us when we see ourselves in dreams and life, all the time accepting the lie that each of these things is separate. And that makes us alone.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And still we can’t see that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Lay on your back in the cool grass as a child and look up at the sky – let memory take you there even now. Such peace connected to such longing. What shapes do great winds and water make in their wrestling, somewhere so far above you? Your skin tingles against the green and the Earth presses up against you and through you. From the void, solar winds and cosmic stuff so ancient it can remember creation itself,, move so fast, through everything. They don’t even know you are there, but they carry through the vast reaches and the clouds and the droplets so far above – with hopes to someday be rain - and having seen so much of the universe, they still become part of us, and we are connected to everything.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And we don’t see that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The strata of stone and bone and lost civilizations beneath us hide impossible knowledge, and the stars, so far away can be our friends, even though they hide from us during the day. Somewhere else, in a different philosophy, they are friends too. We appear to each other – but we cannot see beyond the surface, and so only ever see color and shape and the lies of skin and clothes and unfamiliar faces. It is easier to believe in the fiction of a world in revolution around us, than to feel the alien texture of connection – and we certainly don’t want to see that; especially reflected within ourselves.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But we kill and cut and bleed and grasp for more – and we name all these things, as if by naming them we can give them order and reason and control. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Half a world away a child can’t sleep because she is too hungry – and down the street someone who was once relied upon to die for you if necessary – lays dying finally, in some forgettable room where so<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>many others have left this world without seeing the sky one last time. They can’t eat even though they are hungry, and they know even that won’t last – there’s a kindness there they can finally understand. No one will come to see them. Across the street someone has been given a final date – and another street over, someone has been given a different kind of date; and dread is their common thread.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And so many certainly don’t want to see any of that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Squeeze your hands in that distant memory. Feel the Earth give way beneath your fingers, understanding the connection, perhaps – or in a moment, allowing a kind of gift. But that gift is connected through the sunlight and air and cloud and back again to other hearts and minds in so many distant places, you would never be able to speak their names. Yet the stuff of ancient peoples and even older things forgotten fills our hands, cool against the skin and we can almost feel a tear willing itself into being. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I talked to a woman once in Africa. She was a doctor, but so many had died, filling her hands with their fading<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>heat, her soul had eroded. So many mysteries were gone for her – so many hopes now replaced by oblivion’s comfort. She couldn’t imagine anything else because for her, the sky was only something she had to walk under on the way to hear more screams, smell more blood and witness more death. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She couldn’t see anything else anymore.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What is the greater despair? Is it more terrible that it seems like nothing can be done for the lost and tired? Or is the greater horror that so many of us could do so much – and refuse – instead focusing our short lives on the purposeless continuance of hate and hurt. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We can cut each other down to make ourselves seem bigger for just a moment – or we can recognize the infinite connections being made even now without us, and reaching out, become more than ourselves. We can leave our mark or we can become more than that. Sound and shape and touch all resonate in a shared world waiting just beyond each of us – and we don’t have to be alone. Tie your destiny to that of someone else and you together, become greater than you could standing alone. Add a third and a fourth and eventually we can all reach a greater destiny beyond the breeze and the clouds and the shores of that distant sea in which our world – a tiny island, is much less than a speck.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We can reach beyond all of it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And today I wondered if anyone could see any of that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-54139101506374967622011-06-10T19:17:00.000-07:002011-06-10T19:18:43.325-07:00The VA health care system - from a veteran's perspective<div class="MsoNormal">Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I considered the work to be sacred in a way.<br />
<br />
Work as a real reporter is not the sensationalized headline hunting, self-promoting disgrace it has devolved into these days. A real reporter reports the truth and attempts to be unbiased – actually goes to great lengths to be unbiased. A real reporter covers the news and provides information others cannot get access to. A real reporter is a prize fighter, often without any prize (and usually without much of a salary).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But that’s about the responsibility involved in the job. I want to talk to you about the glory of the thing.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The glory of reporting is that, while you may sometimes feel like Don Qixote de la Mancha, you are not always simply “tilting at windmills.” On occasion, the windmills get their ass kicked. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I lived for that moment. I didn’t like to hurt people, but where there was an injustice which could not be addressed any other way … in fact, where the long arm of the law wasn’t long enough – I could reach the sucker. And when I got to them – with training and experience in a variety of fields, they felt like they’d been truly touched.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And so, I would like to introduce to you a concept, which is due: This is the unveiling of a new blog. Those veterans out there are going to like this – especially New Mexico veterans.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am about to begin a new blog dedicated to the review of VA services from the perspective of a New Mexico veteran. For those who work at the Veteran’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, get ready. You’re going to love me even more than you do now.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I will make a regular report on initiatives made by the New Mexico VA Health Care System – and the response to these initiatives by veterans in the hallways and waiting rooms of the hospital complex. I will draw on my own experiences for this, but I will try to keep the reporting on those experiences unbiased. Where possible, I will provide you names and offices and phone numbers for sources. Where possible, I will give individuals the opportunity to respond to my articles. But, in the end, you will have a ground-level view of how a veteran’s medical facility treats soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines returning or returned from the battlefields of the world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">You will often be disgusted by what you see and read here. And you will no doubt also experience the entire gamut of other emotions. Because those who knew me as a reporter and news editor of a daily, knew one thing for certain: there was no escape. If you deserved a look by me or the other reporters, it would be hard and uncompromising – and it would be fair. Good things happen in many of these places as well as the bad things.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I know why this kind of thing is not often done. On the one hand, it is often the case that the doctors, nurses and administrators who work there really are doing their best. They are in a high-stress job and aren’t often appreciated or thanked. But they do get their share of difficult patients. On the other hand, people fear reprisals. Veterans are often very sick and their injuries are serious. Private insurance typically will not cover their chronic service-connected conditions – and the VA is the only chance they’ve got, to lead a halfway normal life. They don’t need a massive organization of nameless, faceless administrators and functionaries descending on them like locusts. They are scared. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am not. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am a former USAF sergeant and a graduate of the Defense Information School, trained in Public Affairs. I am a better PA person than the character they have working for them. I am a reporter, editor and author. And I am a traditional martial art teacher of 20 years experience.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I will tell you folks who treat veterans poorly in my backyard, quite simply now, what is coming for you – it is what I promised to insect politicians and their like when I began writing the Jolly Rogers a few years ago…</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My wrath may not seem real from your lofty positions. You may feel yourselves to be untouchable, but make no mistake I am coming for you. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am coming for you all.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">-------- </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The blog about the VA health care system from a veteran’s perspective will be announced here on the Jolly Rogers, when it is set up. Watch for it. As there are further developments, I will report on them here until that new site is up and running.</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-21443546321779739912011-06-06T14:31:00.000-07:002011-06-06T14:31:57.477-07:00Eugenics<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Eugenics.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If ever there was a subject you might wish to keep relegated to the pages of paperback sci-fi, this is it. It should be in a special dictionary, where it can’t run the chance of infecting other words, more wholesome – or just not as horrible to contemplate. One might imagine this word accompanying others, such as genocide, rape, etc., into the pages of a black book with even blacker pages.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Maybe then, with our language purged, the concepts would not be so easy to access. But I know that is wishful, fanciful thinking. In the real world, monsters don’t need a vocabulary. They just do what they do best – and in the best outcomes, we catch them and electrocute them… like bugs in that blue lit zapper on your back porch. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Killers, unrepentant terrorists, homicidal maniacs – skin-walkers of every description – and we know the names of the big ones: Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Bin Laden – so many, we couldn’t list them all if we tried. Still, we put them down like the rabid creatures they are, when we find them – usually.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, if the skin-walkers are discovered nestled happily within our own government, then the hand-wringing begins. But that process of political correct mumbling only starts after the damage has been long done – either by shuffling minions including lawmakers, lawyers, judges, doctors, police officers, city and county administrators … basically everybody you are told to trust and believe, and obey.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">To hell with them – that’s my sentiment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 347.35pt;">They just didn’t all make it there. Consider North Carolina.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a state chock full of lovely museums and attractions, like the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, featuring this month, an art gallery of watercolor paintings, and a soon-to-be-displayed exhibit on expanding oceans. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 347.35pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">Or you may enjoy the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center! Get your tickets to learn about the “power of the telescope!” There’s just hundreds of places to visit and enjoy yourself, including American History Vacation packages and other wonders.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">I wouldn’t recommend a permanent move, however. Their historical lessons will likely not include something from the past 40 years – and I wouldn’t bother checking on this at the NC Children’s Museum, because you won’t find much evidence of it there. Unless you look for that which is not there at all – specifically 7600 children who would now be adults, their children, and their children’s children. And you won’t see anything anywhere about the accomplishments of those kids, because they were never born.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">No they weren’t aborted. That’s not the subject of this article. These children were simply never born. That is because from the 1920s to the 1970s, North Carolina had the legal authority to forcefully sterilize members of its’ population. Sure, it was done by Hitler – but apparently he didn’t do it right, because following WWII, North Carolina really picked up the pace sterilizing white women at first, because they were on welfare – and later, black women as they became part of the welfare system. But males were also targeted, and the reasoning was what you would expect of insects with little regard for human life:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“you wouldn’t expect a moron to run a train or a feeble-minded women to teach school – you wouldn’t want the state to grat drivers’ licenses to mental defectives…” reads a pamphlet published to promote the program. The capper: “Yet each day the feeble-minded and mentally defective are entrusted with the most important and far reaching job of all … parenthood.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">More than 7500 people were forcibly sterilized in North Carolina. They received an apology from former Governor Mike Easley in 2002.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Easley was born in 1950 – during the time period in which the eugenics program was in full swing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who received their apology in 2002, basically received it from one of the babies who escaped the culling.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">None of the victims of the State ever received any compensation for their empty lives. Only 39 percent of them are still alive. Later this month, those remaining victims will be asked to speak to a “governor’s task force” regarding compensation.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">How do you compensate for something like that?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">What do you give those people back that you haven’t already stolen from them? And what apology will be heard, by the dead and the unborn?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">I imagine those who instituted the program and pushed it into high-gear after WWII – they are likely all beyond justice. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">I hope they’re getting forked right alongside Hitler.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">--------------</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;">Proponents of eugenics are currently within the federal government. Obama's science advisor John P. Holdren has called for a "Planetary Regime" of totalitarian population control measures in his book "Ecomeasures," published in 1977 - years after Eugenics ended in North Carolina. Apparently, he doesn't think the program of Hitler and North Carolina, went far enough, either. Holdren's leading notion in the book called for adding "infertility drugs" to water supplies; his runner-up... require women to apply for licenses to have children.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 270.3pt;"><br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-88596657192685256302011-06-04T22:50:00.001-07:002011-06-05T01:35:12.869-07:00The power of dreams<div class="MsoNormal">I understand at the genetic level the need to revolt. My genetic make-up comes from a people who are good at it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Still, it is disheartening to read the word, as written by modern-day Americans and friends, in response to the perceived – and often very real – dismissal and disdain shown by our elected officials for those who elected them. The response is almost universal now amongst regular folks everywhere … “remove these pretenders from office before they can do any more harm.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I cannot disagree with the reasoning, but I do disagree with the common reasoned solution. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The question really is: what you believe? And it really is that simple. Consider history. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">From 1929 to 1933, the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression. Simultaneously, massive errors in farming practices and natural weather patterns produced the Dust Bowl – and brought devastation to the western U.S. This all occurred during a time when just a decade previous, the “Spanish” Influenza killed 50 million people worldwide. Within that same timeframe, the end of the “Great War” saw approximately 38 million dead. By 1929, despite a bull market leading up to the depression, the crash still occurred, as well as everything that went with it, there was little reason to hope. In fact, the median for education amongst adults living during the 30s was 8.1 years of school. Only about five percent of U.S. youth had ever seen the inside of a college. Less than 40 percent had completed High School. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Life was dark, much seemed hopeless and beyond the control of man. In many places, people were resorting to anything, for just a little bit of hope. Organized crime flourished – violence, strikes and corruption increased, as did racially motivated killings.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What was needed was not greater control and more grasping for power, but simply, a strength of belief.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">January 7, 1929, newspapers carried a new comic strip. Comic strips were very popular due to the literacy level of the average citizen. In this case, the strip was something John Flint Dille had been planning for some time, but which finally came to life with the illustrations of Frank Paul. The story had already begun in 1928 in the August edition of Amazing Stories, as written by Phillip Nowlan., including in the title, the word “Armageddon.” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The comic strip Dille had wanted to produce for some time was all about a single purpose: Produce hope … give people something to believe in. The prologue described a man who had just left the air service after a World War, and through an accident in his new civilian job, became accidentally entombed in a mine – only to awake in the year 2429. This simple prologue was of course, the beginning of a name, which would become known around the world … “Buck Rogers.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Consider this: What kind of hope do you have for the future? How do you think the next year will develop? What do you think will happen to the United States if we have to suffer through another year of a chief executive’s vacationing, golfing, and systematic disassembly of the economy? What results can we expect with further regulation, further control of people’s day-to-day lives?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If we call the America we currently live in, “Orwellian,” then what hope do we have of escape and rebirth? Remember, this … our society is nowhere near as troubled as that of the generation of the Great Depression. We just need something to catch a glimpse beyond the horizon. We need something to believe in.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The miracles depicted in Buck Rogers include rockets, flying machines, television, two-way video communication, cell phones, digital displays – and many other current conveniences. The truth of the power of the convictions which birthed these things was not found in the adult population of that time – but rather the children. By 1929, the comic was everywhere, featuring not just the resourceful Buck Rogers, but the brilliant scientist, Dr. Huer and the courageous and beautiful companion, Wilma Deering.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Children loved it. It became the longest running comic strip in American history – and that’s the real answer to our country’s current predicament – and the way to escape the feeling of despair, which is fueling anxiety across the nation. <br />
<br />
We need the children to get all of us there.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Any adult today is fairly irrelevant if they are not doing their part to inspire and encourage the children and teens around them. Because, like the time of the Great Depression, our days of darkness will not be numbered in a year or two or three – and it will not be a civil project or free money, or war, or any other such scheme which will give us new life and new purpose. As adults, we simply do not have the time necessary to create the beautiful thing which is even now, just out of sight and out of reach. But even if we do, the future belongs to someone else.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It will be the children, who having been stoked on the hopes and possibilities and beliefs of our time, will create the next great world of wonder and growth and development. Their capabilities and talents and truth will create even greater inspiration, if we only help them to get there.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It is this simple: as long as we can find the strength to believe in those children and their imagination, we may someday live in a new kind of world. I see that place sometimes in my rare good sleeps, as a crystalline world in which the best, noblest parts of humankind meet a newly imagined frontier of science, religion, art, renewal, rebirth and most of all … </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">…. dreams.<br />
<br />
We can get there. But only if you believe.</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-36550410014726499432011-06-02T12:18:00.000-07:002011-06-02T12:18:52.167-07:00Charlatans<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">I used to wonder about charlatans.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As a traditional martial art teacher, you see a lot of them. They pop up like weeds in what once was a pristine lawn of real, trained, professionals. The result is, of course, people learn and promote junk technique, and will get themselves and others hurt, trying to perform this stuff in the real world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">These days, there is a new breed of this phony. They wrap themselves in ambiguity, innuendo – or even go so far as to wrap themselves in a uniform.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then they show up at community events.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s no longer cool enough to be a martial artist – now, these maggots have to be SEALS.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A recent “Thank You Soldiers” tribute in Thousand Oaks, California drew some meatball named Salhem Dreasden, replete in a Naval officer’s uniform complete with a trident. Of course, he was a fake, but he’s not alone. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A friend of mine relentlessly pursued the true history of a guy claiming to be a professional martial art teacher and – you guessed it –a SEAL. He is neither thing, but has managed to convince members of the press, a local law enforcement community – and many others, simply because no one looked closely enough.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My perspective: he was apparently compensating for something.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s everywhere – and it’s going to get worse. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I once visited a martial arts school where they gathered around in a comfortable circle at the end of practice and exchanged lovely stories about how compassionate and forgiving and gentle, etc., their original teachers were. I don’t know if they did this to determine my background – or if they do that kind of stroking regularly there, but when asked, I gave them the truth:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My training was painful, is still ongoing after decades – as I will always view myself as a student – and my teachers were anything but compassionate. They were hard men who scared the crap out of me, and to this day, I am very careful when I am on the mat with them. Practices were a slice of Hell. Earning my 1<sup>st</sup> Dan (first degree black belt) was the culmination of a decade of work, and one of the greatest honors of my life. Bones broke, joints dislocated, and I did all of it in a foreign country while serving in the Air Force with the 501<sup>st</sup> Tactical Missile Wing. Look it up – a nuclear missile system, which helped bring an end to the Cold War.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The practices were hard and uncompromising. I’d pay real money to be that young and do all of it again.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, the greatest single honor of my life was finding my wife and knowing my children. Following that – I was fortunate to serve in the U.S. military. I was a Sergeant. I was no one important. I served with people who were important - they were great men and women back then – and would become greater in time. The military was often hard and uncompromising. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I loved it and would give away a lot just to wear the uniform one more time. And although I often dream of it - that will never happen.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But what is guaranteed to happen is this: Today or tomorrow, I’ll bump into an alleged 10<sup>th</sup> Degree such-and-such at the grocery store, or online. I’ll get to hear bullshit stories from some dweeb who is so insecure, he has to fabricate a background. They are like lint or pillballs, I can’t keep them off of me – away from me. I have been coated in these creatures for decades.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I know how sick it makes me feel. And I know how disgusted it makes others feel, but I have to wonder what that says about us as a people? Are so many people so insignificant – so worthless – that they have to become a lie?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They can – of course – never be reached for comment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">---------</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For the fakes, I have this to say: Grow a pair. </div><!--EndFragment-->THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-71489033265437800612011-06-01T20:15:00.001-07:002011-06-01T20:31:20.812-07:00Why we cry<div class="MsoNormal">Watch the sun go down and you have to hope it will come up again tomorrow.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That’s the reason, it is said, that seagulls cry – because they see the sun sinking and believe the night will be eternal. Coyotes cry for a much different reason, according to many Indian tribes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And no one knows why whales cry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Humans cry for so many reasons, there aren’t names for them all. But sometimes, they cry for the same reasons as seagulls – the end of the world really does happen every day. For someone, somewhere, an accident, illness or just the weight of the years piled upon them, pulls them away from the world we know, into a place no one has ever returned from.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Look out at the night sky and see the stars. Whatever your viewpoint, the vastness of the great ocean of black is only made more real by those tiny points of light. One native American tribe attributes those lights to an accident – a cosmic splash of flowers from a great bag – flowers the creator had intended to place in perfect patterns, so the creatures of the world would always know he was real.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We often suffer through doomsday claims and for some, a countdown and expectation of something perfect and complete, just around the edge of night. Yet we are still here, imperfect with our wishes and hopes and cruelties and crimes. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We remain here to continue in our days, knowing that another sunset is coming. And in all of the moments between the time we open our eyes in the morning and close them at day’s end, we somehow lose sight of the truth that each breath we take, represents a moment in which somewhere else, the world is ending – or at least changing irrevocably for someone else. And of course in that same moment the world is beginning – being born, in every sense that is possible.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">On an antique table in a corner of my house is an ancient tooth – not of a whale, but certainly something as large as a whale, that cut through the black of the sea 186 million years ago. The eyes of that creature looked upon a very different Earth. In the time it lived, there were no people yet, but the Earth was already ancient. It swam through the crush of a universe no mind can comprehend.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Time is the greatest mystery and immensity of all. We are lost, trying to stay afloat in its’ waves and currents. But nothing can tread those waters forever. No matter how fearsome or how beautiful a thing is, the truth remains. We know it when we are young, and one incredible day we feel somehow the miracle that we have slowed or stopped everything. In that youth we can stop time, but when we are old, we are only time travelers, remembering better days and trying to forget the days which haunt us. Backward and forward – lives played like some kind of worn film, flickering and crackling – eventually giving way to silence.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps all the tears shed over the millennia, are simply a reflection of these truths: The sun rises and sets and may indeed do so again tomorrow – but the moment we are experiencing right now; that simple spark amidst an eternal fire – is an opportunity to be greater than we were a moment ago, an hour, a day - a lifetime.<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If everyone did everything they could to make the world a better place, we would see a day in which no one would fear the night. Hope and compassion would be real - not just words, and we would all know the truth the Creator wanted us to see in the stars.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps we would even know the meaning of the songs of whales and wolves and the music of a perfect afternoon in an unforgettable place.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We can get there from here, but politics and intolerance, hate and all the ignorance and stupidity we would visit upon each other – all has to be gathered and left to dry and bleach in the sun, until it all shrivels and dries, and is carried away in softness. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Somewhere the sun is going down – and somewhere else a sliver of golden light cuts across the horizon.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt;">The only true mystery remaining is what you will do with this single moment.</span>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-45346443027878724442010-09-12T01:18:00.001-07:002010-09-12T01:58:23.184-07:00A final hope on this September 11<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;">Never believe the sun has set forever and left us in darkness.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;">Never forget the victims. Their names are only markers for things we cannot ever see in total - their lives and those they touched even briefly - the changes they wrought in the world, without even knowing it... that is the true monument. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;">It wasn't the terrorists' acts which changed the world - it was the lives of the victims and the rallying cry which rose even as the dust settled. Some brave few answered that call and paid the price for all of us. Our warriors still hunt the animals who would continue to prey on the innocent the world over. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;">So many people- so many stories and lives we will never know - given up for the rest of us. I hope those of us whose safety and security have been purchased at such a high price, have the wisdom and dignity and understanding to honor those sacrifices with our own lives. May we please live our days full and completely enough to give meaning and purpose to those lost since that terrible September day. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;">And if meaning and purpose and balance is beyond our ability to attain, may we at least have the strength to face the days ahead without our brothers and sisters - may we be given enough mornings to wake and rise and make a difference in the world, so that someday those who live in the future may look back and say, "Those who were left at home - who remained at home, accomplished something - some measure of honor - some measure of peace and some measure of purpose." </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;">And us who have all followed the victims and the heroes into the next world, perhaps we can grasp a shred of happiness in our final moments, just long enough to fade from this Earth with a sigh of contentment - and they who come for us, we will recognize - even as they take us away.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"><br />
</span></span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;">And the world will be brighter. And the sun will rise again without us. </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc;"></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">And even that final truth will be right and perfect and wonderful.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-27645455693890732402010-08-18T17:07:00.000-07:002010-08-18T20:26:19.399-07:00Remember the AshRemember the smoke pouring out of two of the tallest buildings in the world.<br />
<br />
Remember the first news reports - the first estimates of how many people could be trapped inside.<br />
<br />
Remember the freeze-frame of the massive jet as it crashed into the second tower - eliminating all doubt that this was an intentional action - an act of war on innocent people.<br />
<br />
Remember the firefighters and policemen that responded instantly - despite the impending collapse which would kill so many of them.<br />
<br />
Remember the ash which covered everyone - no one of any color - no one of any creed. Simply one people - Americans - now soon to be at war with extremists.<br />
<br />
Remember how no one targeted the Muslim faith itself. Remember how American flags seemed to spring from every shopfront - every home - every street - even people who had never even been to New York - or even known anyone there.<br />
<br />
Remember it.<br />
<br />
We were all covered with ash that day - everywhere - even in countries far removed. Americans grieved and vowed to take vengeance. And so did much of the world.<br />
<br />
When did we "get over" Pearl Harbor? When did we excuse the Holocaust and those responsible? When did we walk away from Clocktower shooters and Hijacker terrorists? When did we just shake our heads and say, "It's OK - it happened in another time, to other people - it happened, but we've forgotten what the moment felt like. We've forgotten all of it?"<br />
<br />
Do you think we washed the last of that ash off? I can still feel it on my skin. I can still feel it, even though I was not there. I can feel the weight of it - heavier - not lighter over the years. Was it Muslims who perpetrated those acts of terror? Or do all Muslims disavow the thing? Why is the new Mosque planned for construction on the site where the towers fell, named after the first Muslim conquest in the West?<br />
<br />
Please answer me. I would love to have some kind of reasoning - some line which explained the morality of placing a victory monument on the site where those thousands of people died. Because that is what the thing is - it is a claim of victory.<br />
<br />
I find it difficult to believe that Bob Beckle would suggest on national television that New Yorkers should "Get over it." Apparently he forgot to mention the rest of America - many of whom have not, will not and can not ever set it aside.<br />
<br />
Like myself.<br />
<br />
What I would give to be able to have talked to one of those people before they died that day due to Muslim terrorists. What I would have given to have known even one of them, just for a moment? What would I have said? I would have asked them to tell me their life's story - I would ask them what their favorite things were about this world - I would have asked so that their history be passed on.<br />
<br />
And I demand a monument with those stories, written by their relatives in stone - on the very site they plan to build this Mosque - this atrocity of conquest. Because by erecting that building where they are, is naming this "war on terror" something else entirely.<br />
<br />
They are sadly - intentionally or unintentionally - creating a "Crusade."<br />
<br />
In Human history, civilization has collapsed many times, over much smaller things.THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-61152228389020680832010-08-03T00:05:00.001-07:002010-08-03T00:51:11.483-07:00Lights.<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;">Look down at any city at night and the lights you see can be viewed as only sad glitter.<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;">But look with open eyes and heart and any city – even the worst place in the world, is lit by more than electricity, more than fire.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;">That is because from high above we forget the lights are more than just that. Those lights are exultant. They are a shining – a proof of life. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;">In New Mexico, not so long ago, a small town was known for its’ light. Shining in the darkness of a massive desert, the town was more of an outpost – a place where villagers were struggling to survive. A battle was fought there once. But it was an affirmation of life, more than it was a sign of God’s will. Still, with the unknown darkness against them always, the people of the village chose to erect a cross on a lonely hill where the battle was fought and won. It was a monument to victory… but as with most victories, it is mostly lost to time. I know it from half-remembered stories, told to me in passing. The only thing I’m sure of is the real monument – the true monument: It was the village which is still alive after all this time. It is a community of souls. The village name is “The Light.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;">I often think that what we see is not enough. Our understanding seems lost within bodies aging. Our reasoning seems increasingly clouded, when you would think it would sharpen with experience and knowledge - certainly, the breeding ground of wisdom.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;">But so many days we spend railing against the imagined forces of darkness. And of course, that is also because of experience, because we know the darkness can be real. We know that monsters prowl the half-light thrown at the fringe of shadow. We’re sure of it, because it is true. I have flown in military helicopters over terrain most of you couldn’t imagine, until it all seemed like a patchwork quilt below me, blurring one shape into another. Killers and victims were down there somewhere, but my ground-pounder eyesight wasn't as acute at altitude. I have flown in an AT-38 Talon beside an F-117A Stealth Fighter – somewhere in the deep background a landscape of brown becoming white-capped mountain peaks; all of it so familiar – and yet so different. The tiny lights I would see approaching innumerable airfields when I was younger, were jets just like those – representative, perhaps of the soaring souls on board. But you can’t see that from the balcony of a barracks building. And from a fast-flying military aircraft, often you can't see the life and death below you.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;">I recently made a list. I suppose many would see it as an affirmation of their fears: a country in decline or perhaps at the cusp of a new beginning. Once again, it depends how you view things. I would like to list those things here. But please read beyond them, and understand maybe more than you did when you started reading this article.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;">Here is our government’s actions in recent times:</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .1in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They have been unwilling to deal with illegals and Mexican Drug cartels</div><div class="MsoNormal">A string of broken promises have stacked one upon the other – some which fly in the face of principles set forth when our country was founded.</div><div class="MsoNormal">We have a government which forces through bills – but those bills are really edicts forced upon a population in the dead of night.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our country is taking up socialized programs which cannot be supported in the current economy – or perhaps any economy. The same programs have, of course, failed wherever and whenever they have been tried in history.</div><div class="MsoNormal">The same government is also outlaying funds for ridiculous programs, further increasing the national debt in some kind of insane spree – like a teenager burning their way through a wallet filled with dad’s credit cards.</div><div class="MsoNormal">The administration of our country refuses to expand drilling for fuel by companies here in the U.S., citing environmental concerns, but then play golf, vacation and take long breaks during the worst environmental catastrophe seen since Chernobyl - by mismanaging and ignoring the Gulf oil spill.</div><div class="MsoNormal">In the same timeframe all this is happening, they continue to look at cap-and-trade – a concept, which will simply kick an economy, which is already down. And dying.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Meanwhile, their claim to glory, besides a ridiculous health care package rivaling the complexities and mysteries already seen in an overgrown tax code, is a push for “Green” anything - in any way it can be even loosely achieved. And while climate research has been shown to be at worse, a conspiracy – and at best, bad science, the same administration continues to beat the drum as fewer and fewer people listen.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Lastly, there’s a mismanagement of an ongoing war. Generals are not supported, then removed when they question why they are not receiving the personnel and materials they need. Troops are shuffled like a deck of cards, and in a ridiculous contradiction, the government seeks to go soft on terrorists and admitted enemies of the country – yet in the same breath, level charges against our most elite commandos for something they didn’t do in the first place, but something they should be free to do more of – assaulting the monsters in the night.</div><div class="MsoNormal">And of course, when making a list such as this, you can’t leave out the details: like the disrespect shown to our greatest allies, the embracing of rogue groups and states – as if they were our friends, and lastly, the marginalizing, demonizing and disregard for the regular people of the country.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It would seem, at first glance, that America is dying.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But, I would encourage you to take a different point of view for a moment. The inaction of the federal government in matters of state sovereignty has created a huge divide, which cannot be bridged by federal force. The tighter the hand squeezes, the more water escapes the grip. The harder the darkness presses against the light – the brighter those lights become.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And we have shone so very brightly indeed. In an environment of racial tension once again, our countrymen today would do well to remember that the founding of America itself occurred through the efforts of women and men of all nationalities and creeds alike, fighting side-by-side against a common oppressor. We exist because the lights of their lives were extinguished in exchange for our own. Small flames don’t die; they create newer, larger ones. And so our country was born, itself. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And edicts may be nailed to every post on every corner, broadcast through the very air itself – but none will last out the week. Torn, tattered, blown, fading out into space itself – all such unpopular mandates join the great political landfill, always just out of sight; perhaps hidden by great actions of legendary people. The junk-pile of unjust law is occluded, because the shadows cast by the legendary are long; and their accomplishments so great that even the failed and disgraced in the world recede into background noise and clutter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Socialized debtor programs can’t support themselves. Collapse and equalization is inevitable; recovery and rebirth are always around the corner, and they are always glorious. Look at the Great Depression, followed by the most terrible war the world may have ever seen – all of it, suffering and death and horror on a scale seemingly unimaginable. Still, the result was a great expansion of society, technology, education and enlightenment, even. We reached for the lights in the night sky… and we got there.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Trade scams and snake-oil salesmen are nothing new either. They have taken on the form of complex government schemes, but they are still visible for what they are. They fill a void, of course. They provide the uninformed and the ignorant and the somnambulant with something to grasp at. But, they reach for shadows – and the darkness always follows shadows. I think even these folks know that, deep down. Education and hard lessons provide the cure for this. In an age of information, the uninformed grow fewer in number. The lights in this case are the glow of millions of networked computer screens and televisions. And information cannot be controlled. It can be parsed, and it can be twisted and shaped. But those tricks are also part of the information stream. Those who wish to see, will in fact see.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Turning on friends is never a good thing. Children learn this early on. Yet our own government can’t seem to prevent itself from engaging in such activity – perhaps they are aged, or foolish, or careless. After some time, policies and actions like this become another collapse. Actions like these are the truly unsustainable things in life. When loss is constant, eventually either someone takes your place or you take another tack - one with the wind, instead of against it. To stand is sometimes the most difficult thing in the world.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And of course we come full circle in looking at things like this. Like the city lights and the patchwork countryside, and the mountain set against high-flying aircraft; and even like the town, which is named “The Light,” we are all part of a much larger picture. Our combined wills against that of a government grown oppressive, are like the ocean against a grain of sand. Governments come and go. People remain.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Look down at any city at night – and you may see only lights. But if you look with different eyes you see dreams and hopes and futures not yet born or even imagined. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We are made of light.</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-9689522674194805312010-07-21T16:02:00.000-07:002010-07-21T16:28:01.663-07:00Racial Cards<div class="MsoNormal">In casinos, the cards are regularly changed. This prevents all sorts of embarrassing situations from occurring.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I sure wish America would put the whole pack of racial cards away.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I related a story yesterday about asking while teaching a class, with a group of adults – and one 7-year-old, if they could name one Lee Greenwood song. Only the 7-year-old could do it. He said, “God Bless the USA.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s an interesting thing to have been born during a time, which that 7-year-old couldn’t even imagine – and yet, the kid has heard –and likes Lee Greenwood. But to have lived during a time when a dime could get you a phone call, when men were walking on the Moon, and when so much turbulence was occurring in society as I walked barefoot in a small fishing village in the summers – it is a sobering thought. The world was changing around me – and I never even noticed. For that 7-year-old last night – I wonder what he notices? Does he see or feel the change in society or are these his barefoot summers. I kind of hope the latter is the case.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And lately, I have begun to wonder if we’ve changed at all. Things are way out of control. People pointing at each other – and much worse – using the term “Racist?” I know there are groups out there who would gladly jump on that particular crazy train, but it is important to realize that the really virulent creatures out there, are not identified by the way they look or talk – just by the way they hate. That’s why it is possible to find them. Just look at the tenets of their organization – or their personal views as evidenced by their comments. But when you do that, you have to take in the whole picture – not just the things you “want” to see.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It is not the late 60s – not even the 70s, when I grew up. How I wish it was most days. I wish for those sunlit barefoot, ocean bleached and broken streets, the nights I would spend fishing – and the knowledge that if I stayed out late enough, my dad would always make that midnight walk out to the State Pier to tell me it was time to pack it in. Always. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There was a certain perfection to those days which despite my age and experience, now, I cannot put my finger on. Call it innocence, I guess. Maybe we are all there at some point in our life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And then, you get a few more years tucked under the belt, and you realize the world isn’t all sunshine and beaches. There is real anger out there – anger for nothing. Perhaps the anger is there for its’ own sake, and nothing more. Like a parasite, it grows fat on our indifference, until it can exert its’ own brand of influence.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">People die that way. Because they are the wrong religion, the wrong color, because they do not speak the language, because they are in the wrong political party, the wrong family, they die – or are forced to into terrible things. If they have no voice, or no influence, they are ground beneath the wheels of a terrible machine. It can be called a machine because it has no soul and no conscience, but it might as well be called a mob – or a pack of dogs. Because a person can be reasonable – people, on the other hand, are not.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Some will note the name Shirley Sherrod – although a few days ago, not many would have known her. She has had an interesting couple of days. Shirley might have earned herself an earlier column here on my website – but I must say, that as a former newspaper reporter, I like to wait until all the facts are in-hand, before I get out the hammer.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And all the facts were not in a couple days ago.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Yet, oddly, we have had the White House involved with the woman’s dismissal? They couldn’t wait for her to finish driving home. She was asked via mobile phone, by her boss (who allegedly had no real contact with the White House) to pull over to the side of the road – and send her resignation immediately. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But Shirley didn’t do the things they accused her of. And when I use the word “they” – in this instance, I am speaking to all the bickering children out there. All the self-important, all the “I’m right and you’re wrong” – or at least, left. I’m speaking to all those alleged leaders we have – from the Big O, to the crackpots who want to refer to themselves as “leaders” because of their “ethics.” Here’s a quote from a Marine Gunny I know:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Shut the Hell up.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That about covers it. </div><div class="MsoNormal">Shirley used her life experiences to illustrate how a person can change for the better. Look up the entire speech she gave – not the sound-bite offered to fuel anger and cause more divisiveness. Sherrod’s message in the speech was clear – if she can be a better person, and if she can find a way, anyone can. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Try listening to each other for a change. Try waiting – in this near-instantaneous-dataflow world we live in – just a little while longer before answering. Multi-tasking is a lovely concept, but if you slow things down a little bit, there’s time to do everything – and focus all your attention on each thing as it comes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That “waiting” is something I’ve only just recently learned how to do. It has taken a lot to realize I just need to allow a little grass to grow, in-between comments and actions. The 7-year-old in last night’s class could have told me that, I think. He did say "God Bless the USA." And that was worth more to me than any lesson. It gives me hope - and that's such a rare commodity.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But I should have always known these things, and I should have always been able to follow these simple guidelines. But I am no wise man – and sometimes, not even a very good person. So I forget, and lapse into bad habits and old patterns. I am often a needle in a groove – and my life is a 45, not a 33. That statement will confirm when I grew up. And for those who don’t know what it means. Just take a breath. Calm down and turn on your iPod or iPad – or whatever the hell it is that has some music on it. Take out a deck of cards and if you don’t know solitaire, build a little house. It’s good to build steady hands and patience.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But take out the regular cards - not the racial ones.<br />
<br />
---------------<br />
<br />
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/07/20/the-full-shirley-sherrod-speech/</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-4676642576402383132010-07-19T00:27:00.000-07:002010-07-19T00:44:41.275-07:00Room 101 - revisited<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">I offer you these two articles, which I first wrote in August 2009. They have new relevance today, now that the idiots at the Washington Post have decided in their lofty self-image, to reveal the underpinnings of America's Intelligence gathering capabilities. Back when I first wrote these, I was still hoping that our government wouldn't slide as far as it has. It seemed at the time that the push for nationalized health care and National Socialism (the very definition for the NAZIs) would not take root here. But it has. And we're quickly approaching an end-game of Biblical proportions.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Don't believe me?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">That's OK.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Read what I said in 2009.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzf8djYMYxEO4AOjBZu5_FRPCWvxOCrZ2Fs2HMG6oDjS8-tP9brzSqNibOi6n25u_URj_gQQVUPQ7w5nt7_n8aDRZ4HLtXfvNOfGgxgB1EAGCWeIyydS-CO-qGzaL23GLhBkWl392Nqslg/s1600-h/card+taken+from+floor+in+parliament+bldg.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5373710322353215634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzf8djYMYxEO4AOjBZu5_FRPCWvxOCrZ2Fs2HMG6oDjS8-tP9brzSqNibOi6n25u_URj_gQQVUPQ7w5nt7_n8aDRZ4HLtXfvNOfGgxgB1EAGCWeIyydS-CO-qGzaL23GLhBkWl392Nqslg/s400/card+taken+from+floor+in+parliament+bldg.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 305px;" /></a><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 12px;">Above: a post card requesting the release of a political prisoner from</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 12px;">the clutches of the corrupt Somali government which collapsed, leaving</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: 12px;">the country in ruin, and precipitating international</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">intervention in Operation Restore Hope 1992-93. This card was found</span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial;">on the floor of the corridor of the vacant parliament building</span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial;">amongst piles of millions of such requests.</span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Your health care is history. Your lives are being crushed. You just can’t see the ceiling yet, but it is falling, and we are all underneath it.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">I’m going to paraphrase Orwell again – why? Because, we are living in a time where we are sliding faster and faster into the dark “future” of 1984. Orwell wrote that most of the material that you are dealing with has no connection with anything in the real world, “not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Statistics, he wrote, are “just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">So where is the truth? Truth is currently whatever those in power want to call it. We who live outside of Washington and all the groups connected, contracted and in collusion with the country’s alleged leadership, have no voice. No matter how many town meetings we sandbag – or how many Congressional offices we stand outside of, we are the Proles of 1984. We are the ignored. We are derided and dismissed.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Now, we are the re-educated, reformed and failing that, interrogated or tortured.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">No longer will most of the old agencies be part of the political process. We have czars for everything. We have provided unlimited funding to hidden groups – and some not so hidden, like ACORN. Now, no longer will the Central Intelligence Agency have the ability to do a major part of its job. Someone else will be managing all interrogations. Allegedly the new unit will focus specifically on key terror suspects – and yes, it will have its’ own czar.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">In 1984, Winston does not know why Withers and the FFCC are disgraced and disbanded. Heretical tendencies are at question, but “what was likeliest of all -- the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Many are saying that this change in the interrogation scenario will have a chilling effect – that is, new interrogators hired by the fledgling group will be very cautious – overly cautious, so as not to lose their jobs in the future and become the targets of prosecution.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But, the polar opposite is also true. By removing something as dark as detention and interrogation from a system which has oversight to one which only is answerable to the President – and subsequently no real oversight, you end up with the same kind of system which exists in Third-world countries. Don’t believe it? You don’t have to. The disappeared can’t speak for themselves. They have long ago faced the horrors of their torture chambers – the Orwellian “pain-giving dial,” and are now buried with thousands – perhaps millions - of their fellow citizens; and they are all buried in lost landfills around the globe. I know it because I have stood in the corridors of the former parliament building of the ousted President Siad Barre of Somalia. I stood knee-deep in postcards each requesting the release of a different particular political prisoner. The corridor was thousands of feet long, and filled from one end to the other.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">I can still feel them against my legs – like the fingers of the lost dead.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">And dear reader, you think it can’t happen here? What then happens now?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">One thing is for certain, the cattle-like media will now follow this CIA topic and will allow their albeit meager attention to waver from the story of the failing health-care reform legislation. And of course, the administration knows they are currently losing that battle. Or are they?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">With attention split between the hot-button of interrogation and torture and previous policy versus current policy, a possible window will open through which some version of health care reform will be stuffed through. Meanwhile, the CIA, which in recent months has gone head-to-head with skin-walkers like Nancy Pelosi, will be reduced in authority and power.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">And all that power and authority will be delivered into the loving hands of Big Brother Obama, who could stop the impending prosecution of CIA personnel and others – a modern day witch hunt – in its’ tracks. But he won’t, because he only stands to gain from the avalanche his friend, Eric Holder, has put into motion.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Make no mistake, though. We are already in Orwell’s Room 101. We are strapped to the chair and are completely immobilized. We cannot move our head. And the interrogator O’Brien is with us.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">What’s the worst thing in the world to you, dear reader? Is it the loss of everything that once made us America? For poor Winston, it was rats. Rats like we have in Washington right now.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">'Do you remember,' said O'Brien, 'the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.'</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But they’re not on the other side of the wall any more, dear reader. They are here with us all. They are in our government – by the dozens – by the hundreds or thousands. They are preparing us for Room 101. The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual, wrote Orwell. And he was right – it could be burning alive, impalement, drowning or a thousand other things. But our rats are smart. They’ve found the most terrible thing to inflict on all of us – something truly universal, which every American dreads.<br />
<br />
They are stealing freedom.</div><div><br />
<br />
-------------<br />
<br />
<br />
And another article from 2009.<br />
A nightmare.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The first thing they teach you in journalism school is to maintain a narrow focus. If you go after too big a subject, you risk confusing the reader. The second thing they teach you is not to exaggerate – report the facts. Let the facts stand on their own. Maybe, the third thing is to keep yourself out of the story. You can report effectively while keeping the article neutral and objective.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Sorry about this. I’m going to break every one of these rules.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But it’s OK, because the fourth thing I remember them teaching us is that if you know the rules, then you can break them – or you know when your breaking them… or something like that. I was sleepy that day.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Anyway, here goes. Some will read this and call it alarmist crap. Some will read it and label me a whack-job. Some won’t even get through it before they feel compelled to pick up their field glasses and scan the skies for the “black helicopters.” And of course, some, who have likely been considering putting me on a watch-list, will now just wave their hands dismissively and stamp “whack-job” on that file folder in the black helicopter headquarters.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">I’m going to paint you a picture of words – a picture, which normally would be found inside science fiction novels. Here – in this sentence, ends any humor. What follows is your sci-fi scenario:</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Very soon, people will be found dead, who have been standing in line overnight, waiting to get into the emergency room. Some type of universal health care will pass because no one prevented it. The complicated, ridiculous system will simply kill people at street level. Others will be found dead in their homes, knowing that the wait will be too long, and they may as well die in the comfort of their homes, instead of dying in the 21st century “med” lines.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Very soon, the news will be reporting incidents where killings have picked up outside the crammed primary care and emergency clinics because the criminals will have discovered an easy, soft target to acquire free drugs – simply take it from those too weak and sick, to resist.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Terrorists will carry out their publicized threats to use the Mexican border to carry through satchels of chemical and bio weapons, releasing them from the tops of skyscrapers perhaps, in densely populated areas during high traffic times during the day.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Plagues will create “sanctuary” cities of the dying – people who cannot be helped by the already overburdened first-responder and the rest of the top-heavy, socialized health-care system.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Those still moderately productive and not relegated to slow death in these places, will be relied upon to provide for everyone else – especially those insulated at the top of the political and financial ladders. They will be taxed mercilessly and the result will be a blossoming black market.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Police will be used to break up peaceful demonstrations and meetings, using a variety of excuses cloaked in the truth that any protests or claims against them will never make it into court – or if they eventually do, will not have any significance. Dissenting voices on the air will be silenced one way or the other – perhaps simply by using the rest of the “house” media and “new media,” to chip away at the opposition until they can no longer continue. Or perhaps they will be quieted through application of astronomical buy-outs using appropriated funds from untraceable public funding – in which the new owners simply replace the entire organization with more controllable reporters who will “toe the line.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Congress will become irrelevant. Czars and committee dictators will replace the political process – especially for issues, which various groups want shoved-through into law without interference.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The new laws will include legislation to tell us how we can live and what we are allowed to think and say. Thought policing will take place through a “civilian” para-military arm of the government, which reports only to the President, perhaps through a handful of czars.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Presidential term limits will be eliminated. The massive powers newly taken up by the government would become more and more centralized until we arrive at a true dictatorship.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Outside the U.S., countries will become more and more nervous as a world superpower becomes more insulated and less controlled.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Growing internal unrest will lead the new dictatorship to levy heavier and heavier controls on the population. Resistance groups will be labled, “enemies of the state.” Peaceful rallies will be broken up by members of the massive civilian para-military group, which will by then, have massive power. People will be “disappeared.” Further confrontations will lead to further organization by resistance groups, pitting the overweight government apparatus against its own citizens.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">I know. It's science fiction, right?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But make no mistake – if things continue on the path they are currently on, we will become subjects. We will become slaves. We will become the lost. Welcome to my nightmare.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Do something to stop it.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Please.</div></div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-73434113064266469562010-07-18T21:01:00.000-07:002010-07-18T22:38:48.894-07:00Mathematics, life - and horrible patterns<div class="MsoNormal">Mathematics.</div><div class="MsoNormal">It can alter our very existence. Physics in it’s many guises, chemistry and biology – things unknown – all either bend before its’ strength, or bend in spite of it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Words pale in comparison. Unless you consider the poetry of motion, the perfection of good poetry, the quest for perfection. And I once thought these things to be very separate. Perhaps that’s the nature of our lives – to contain and separate. In that way, things make sense and when they make sense, there is order – not chaos.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Some folks see patterns in things, which others refuse to look at. Patterns are built into us – or they’re built into the universe and don’t notice us at all. There’s so many contradictions in a good conspiracy theory that people caught in the intoxicating web of pattern, can’t help but wait for the spider.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I am no conspiracy lover – and mysteries I love because they exist. But there are both good mysteries and bad mysteries – like everything in this world, they are polarized. A good reporter counts only on the facts. An error in fact, after all, is an error, which calls into question other people – and the word of other people. And so I am going to pose a question based on facts. You may answer it… or not.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The question is based on the researcher in the previous article. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This particular doctor is an interesting individual in that his studies seem to cross the threshold of various disciplines. He is also interesting in that the very things he studies, seem to cross at a variety of creepy levels. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But forget about all that for a moment. Let’s concentrate on condoms. Specifically, please turn your attention to condoms as they relate to the following facts: Xaioming Li receives a $2.6 million grant to do a study on the connection between Chinese prostitutes and alcohol – all funded by the United States. The study is allegedly a five-year study, and will focus on more than 100 venues (brothels) in Guangxi. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So – back to mathematics: 100 brothels (let’s say they’re badly managed and only have 20 girls each). That’s 2000 girls. Then let’s say that during a given day, each group of 20 girls visits with ten men – that’s busy, but not crazy town. Even so, that’s 20,000 condoms a day – if you want to keep them well-supplied. That’s 500,000 condoms a month, six million a year and 30 million over five years. How much does a pack of Trojans cost at the market? Please ask yourself with what money they intend to pay the people involved in the research project – even if you’re only handing out 1/10<sup>th</sup> of the money in supplies to the locals.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Not odd enough? Consider then, Li himself. Wayne State University, School of Medicine. Dr. Li will head the program to train prostitutes and pimps in Guangxi, China. So it’s not odd to find him connected to Psychology. Nor is it odd to find him connected to HIV/AIDS studies - and as with all coincidences, patterns form. What those patterns tell us when we are not in full possession of the facts, is a subjective individual choice. Skip back two articles in this blog and you will read about a myopic monkey. The question here, is whether the coincidences in this case, are a real pattern and what does the pattern represent?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because Li appears to have some connections in Bethesda, Maryland (a locale long-associated with biomed research in the U.S. - much funded by the NIH, which is funding Li) – and Li’s studies have involved children, in the past – small children. In some instances, the study of the fetus and its’ mother – and chimeric cells which are exchanged between the two. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If you read further, you will find that Li’s interests involve epidemics and pandemics and how they are associated with culture and behavioral change. Previous slants for this research cross the boundaries from STD research and intervention, into mental health research.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">According to a news release by the university, “The HIV/AIDS pandemic scene in East Asia is largely dominated by China. While AIDS is not considered an epidemic in China, the infection rate has risen sharply in recent years, and the potential impact of a serious outbreak would be disastrous for both China and the world’s economy.”<br />
<br />
Acquired Immuno Deficiency Virus has no clear source. According to various theories and research, its' beginnings coincide with a variety of changes in the world. What is known as fact is that some versions of HIV very closely match SIV, which is found in some primates. The discovery of the disease in the 1980s has led to a great deal of research suggesting transmission of the first case or cases via bush-meat (hunters killing and eating infected monkeys), or inoculation programs using dirty needles in unsanitary, overpopulated environs, thus infecting large numbers of people - and remaining undiscovered until it made its' way out of the country of origin. Regardless, the disease now has spread to all corners of the globe - even China.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">And so, grant money flows from the U.S. Government – and interestingly, China is willing to allow a U.S. medical study to proceed in country. Even more interesting, are some of the other headlines coming out of China. In the incidents, which have made it past government censors, in just the last eight weeks, 17 are dead and 80 wounded. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">They all involve children – being murdered during multiple attacks – school children. Their attackers have in every case, been wielding knives.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">And so far, there’s no explanation for the pattern.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Reasonable advice would be to simply do the math. How many crazies do you recall in recent history – all attacking a singular target group within the population – without clear motive – with no connection with each other – and with exactly the same weapon and exactly the same means and method.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">How many? It does, after all, come down to simple mathematics – but mathematics as it applies to psychology, biology, chemistry, genetics – and human life itself.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Where is the real spider in this particular web? Is it a potential epidemic connected somehow to HIV in one of the most populated places on Earth – in a province known for its’ tourism and potentially a center for STDs - or is all of this just coincidence and bizarre, horrific occurrences? If it is a potential epidemic or pandemic, are the murders a disconnected product of it - or potentially a direct result. Is Li's group really there to talk to prostitutes about drinking and safe-sex or are they there to gather data and investigate a disease or social breakdown due to disease - in situ?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Answer the question or not – the choice is yours.</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-75630827728800090622010-07-17T01:23:00.003-07:002010-07-17T01:46:13.264-07:00Gatekeepers and Keymasters<div class="MsoNormal">I wasn’t going to write about this topic for a myriad of reasons, which will shortly become apparent, but I see no way around it. It must be approached head-on. Sorry – that was a pun, which you do not currently understand, but which will in just a few more paragraphs, cause you to:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">a.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span>blush</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">b.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span>laugh</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">c.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span>both</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">d.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span>do both – then check your schedule to see when you can arrange a trip to China.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I apologize to my one Chinese reader – there’s always one. And I apologize to the entire industry, which I am likely about to insult.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Now, to the meat of the thing – which is another pun.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">First, I should preface this by saying that the Guangxi District is a lovely multinational locale in southern China, which boasts beautiful scenery, and a multitude of cultures. Indeed, tourism is big in Guangxi, so you won’t be alone if you book your flight right now. Face-to-face communication with various cultures is said to bring you unexpected happy surprises.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are sights to see in Guangxi which include Reed Flute Cave, Seven Stars Park and Fu Bo Hill – all real places, but also possible double-entendres. I apologize to the spirits of those places, should they be reading my articles. Please don’t haunt me – I already have so many ghosts flocking about, that the place is starting to look like the new locale to shoot another poltergeist movie.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I should also say, however, that lovely Guangxi also features Yangshuo, which is a peaceful town with plenty of local appeal, but also western restaurants and hotels. It’s called “The Earth Village.” My belief is that Al Gore and friends would subsequently feel at home in sleepy Yangshuo.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Yes, it is a great place. And it’s going to be made even better by 2.6 million in American tax dollars. Why not? After all, China is bankrolling most of our economy. We should lay down some bread for our friendly Chinese brothers and sisters, right? Oops – there’s another pun.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">You see, Guangxi has a lot of great things going for it. And among them is its’ very busy population. Real busy. And I mean that in the best possible way – the Guangxi folks may have a lot of fantastic destinations available for daytime tourism – but it’s the night life which has everyone talking.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Almost three million dollars will be spent on a program to help Guangxi prostitutes with their choices in booze and condoms – and it even offers training to their pimps! Yeah, baby. But pimps and prostitutes are such old fashioned terms. It’s kind of like “climate change” instead of “global warming.” The researcher who secured the crazy grant money for the study, is instead calling the pros, “Female Sex Workers” or FSWs and their managers, “Gatekeepers.” Presumably, that would make their clients “Keymasters,” but they apparently didn’t think of that one.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What they did think of is amazing, though. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Allegedly, using the study on Guangxi FSWs and their Gatekeepers, will benefit the United States because prostitution occurs in conjunction with alcohol in the U.S. – and oddly, the formula is also present in China! It’s like going to a fast-food joint and ordering a combo-meal. Just don’t super-size.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Alcohol has been apparently a part of sex practices for many, many years. No – you didn’t know that, because you don’t live in Guangxi, where apparently they are having a lot of sex. But the HIV virus, which is no laughing matter – affects 1.2 million Americans! And it affects the Chinese of Guangxi too! But probably the 1.2 million Americans with the virus aren’t all having sex, like the folks in Guangxi.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And fortunately, the project exists at the “exploration” stage. What is that exactly? It’s really quite simple. According to the researcher heading the project <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Wingdings;">:)</span>, the study is a venue-based intervention program which is not aimed at eliminating the prostitution. That would get the researchers beat up by the Gatekeepers – a process which is often called “rolling,” here in the sexless, boring West.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In fact, the work will entail teaching FSWs new communication skills, including negotiating and limit-setting (oh, the imagery in those few words), and will throw in a basketful of behavioral skills which include using latex in appropriate ways and a variety of “individual” skills. A second, more mysterious phase is still being planned. My bet is that it teaches FSWs how not to strangle their Keymasters accidentally, resulting in dead Hollywood actors. Of course, this is Guangxi – not Taiwan, where they don’t know how to have proper sex.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And there’s so many different venues that will benefit from your taxes! There’s nearly 100 commercial sex venues which will be so much improved by the personal attention given the researchers. And it’s all backed by the National Institutes of Health.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Got your plane ticket and travel itinerary yet? Remember the whole HIV thing, though. Aside from the reaction of my wife – the whole virus thing is a deal-breaker for me.<br />
<br />
I have now no doubt, been barred from visiting Guangxi - and will probably be rolled by the Gatekeepers and FSWs should I show my face there. It's a tough world out there. If only we had better prostitutes - or better alcohol. </div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-14213065899637977242010-07-13T23:45:00.001-07:002010-07-14T00:53:13.482-07:00Killing and dying.<div class="MsoNormal">A long time ago I had an unusual job. </div><div class="MsoNormal">It dealt with 96 nuclear-armed, ground-launched, cruise missiles.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When you deal with weapons like that, on mobile systems – basically all-terrain tractor-trailer units, you have to deal with some very real threats. So, your training has to encompass those things.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Within this framework I’d like to paint you a picture of a portion of this training. Let me tell you about the end of the world. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If you’re hit by a nuclear weapon – hell, if it’s anywhere nearby, you’re a ghost before you even knew something bad happened. If you’re further away, you get shards of material blasted at near the speed of sound, through the walls of your house. If you’re in front of a window, the glass will shred you, and you’ll die of blood loss before you can even register the burns – and mercifully before the radiation causes you to hemhorage. The weakness and sickness and loss of hair, bodily function and finally bleeding, will kill those less lucky – those not close enough for instant vaporization, but far enough away to seemingly have escaped. They will die within days or a week, staggering through the ruins.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And a terrorist’s dirty bomb is very good at producing the latter effect, on a smaller scale. But those who die, will die badly. Very badly. Consider your own home – think about everyone sick at the same time – no one to care for them. No ability to care for each other. That is what a nuke – dirty or otherwise, produces.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All warriors are cold warriors. The truth of these things is never far from your mind. But worse truths lay in wait. Let me share them with you.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Consider a perfect day, not too much wind, not too much sun not too hot or cold. It’s a good day to be outside, walking the streets of your city. But as night approaches, an aerosol is dispersed. It won’t happen high up. But the chemical will come as a fine mist. It will stick to surfaces. There are about 70 different variations of what you just breathed or got on your skin. It may affect your vision, or your nervous system as a whole, but here’s the highlights: In as little as a few hours you and your family members will be suffering from blindness, hideous blisters which will burst and cause more blisters, lungs which are irreversibly damaged, will likely fill with fluid and you’ll die – if you’re lucky. If not, involuntary urination, defecation, vomiting, twitching, and unstoppable convulsions will precede your demise – and the death of everyone around you.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And that’s just the simple stuff.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Biological Hell is worse. With this end-of-world scenario, aerosol delivery is also very viable. The results are however, much more terrible. Weaponization of these diseases produces resistant strains with methods of delivery designed to have the greatest effect possible on the target. They are also combined and are generally existing as almost a talcum-powder consistency. Anthrax, ebola, Marburg, plague, cholera, tularemia, brucellosis, Shingella, spotted fever, typhus, psittacosis, yellow fever, hemhorragic fever, encephalitis are all known as having been considered for weaponization – or already existing as such. Most are transmissible. Bio-warfare can include variants which act against vegetation, cattle or other animals, collapsing food chains. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">An SUU-24/A dispenser – which is ancient technology – could infect 50-percent or more of a population in a 16-square-mile area with Tularemia. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq officials admitted to UN inspection teams that the country produced botulinum toxin in amounts considered to be three times what is necessary to kill the entire human population of the Earth by inhalation. One gram of the toxin evenly dispersed is enough to kill one-million people, albeit technical factors make this somewhat difficult. But despite this, terrorists have already attempted its’ use in Tokyo, Japan.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Nevertheless, death by botulinum toxin is singularly horrible. Once absorbed, it binds irreversibly in the neuromuscular junctions of the synapses. Difficulty seeing, speaking or swallowing begins the process. Dry mouth and hyperventilation start as it becomes obvious that paralysis is taking place. Loss of head control, weakness. But you are not confused. You know exactly what is happening to you, and you can experience every awful moment. Without treatment, you will die. And a microbe modified, could possibly make the toxin transmissible.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So if you have read this far, understand this: Congress is attempting today to cut $2 billion from bioterrorism prevention, claiming the probability of such an attack is low. Probability figures only matter to those whom a thing does not happen to. And I would suggest, we are already seeing the effects of world-enders: witness Sept. 11, Katrina, or the most recent Gulf Oil Spill.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The end of the world doesn’t have to come with trumpets and the return of the messiah. World-enders happen all the time, to average people everywhere. They happen, because of insane acts, drunk drivers, inattentive pilots, faulty equipment, simple, unavoidable sickness and injury, and long days in a hospital waiting for some kind of hope.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Hope is rare at the end of the world. </div><div class="MsoNormal">A long time ago I had an unusual job. The ramifications surrounding the necessity of such a job are staggering. Then Ronald Reagan stood up and asked the Soviet Union to tear down a wall. The world pivoted on that moment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But the devices and the material and the desire is still out there – a desire to kill others, whatever the cost.Consider this deeply. You are already a target, be it by those claiming “holy war,” or those just claiming it is right to hurt you because of the color of your skin – or because you speak a different language – or because you come from a particular place. Rhetoric has been ratcheted up – even by our country’s leadership, as they take away the money to treat you and your family, should a pandemic occur. The project which would be discontinued if Congress gets its’ way, has already purchased 29 million doses of anthrax vaccine, 20 million doses of smallpox vaccine and 200,000 doses of botulinum toxin treatment. But it will be discontinued because "probabilities" are low. Thousands of people dead on Sept. 11 attacks - but that's not enough. We should stick our heads in the sand and not worry about it. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have heard that in the a certain holy text, a specific line suggests that if a man is coming to kill you, you should wake up earlier and kill him first. This passage doesn't speak about protecting your family - it asks you to get to killing earlier.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In our greatest texts – in the things considered revered and timeless, we speak of killing on profound scales. I suppose we’re good at it – it’s the dying part that’s difficult.</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-16693496556363267442010-07-07T17:01:00.000-07:002010-07-07T19:49:33.871-07:00In the eye of the tigerWhat constitutes a police state?<br />
If you look at history, there's a whole lot of examples. In some cases, this brand of government has gone hand-in-hand with other things which humans do to humans - oh so well.<br />
<br />
Police states in other cases have led to mistreatment, despair, protests, long-simmering hatred and the killing of innocents, numbering into the thousands - and some cases , the millions. I have personally stood knee deep in letters and cards requesting the release of political prisoners, emptied and left to rot in the corridors of a parliament building in a third-world capitol.<br />
<br />
We, as a species, kill and cause pain on an epic scale. More tired examples, but certainly more terrible, come to mind. Do I really need to enumerate them - to list them here? If I do, will you not simply stop reading - not because these things are not fact, but because they are so familiar? Isn't it sad that they should be?<br />
<br />
Sadder still is the ability of humans to lose sight of things when they are indeed right before them. It is like some small monkey from prehistory, out of the trees and standing in the tall grass for the first time. The tiger is close enough that his breath can be felt, yet because the monkey's pattern-recognition is poor, he can't see the predator. And so, he is a small brunch snack, his DNA is not passed forward, and that is probably good, because if it were, millions of myopic monkeys would exist only as tiger food.<br />
<br />
Similarly, we today are having a pattern-recognition problem. Consider the tiger that stands before us. It is a top-heavy, muscle-bound creature built for only one purpose - to eat us. The current administration has all the money it will ever need (it's printing it). It has control of the press. It has all the power it will ever need, and if nothing changes, it will conclude with a situation not unlike what New York currently has - a version of Bloomberg, the perpetual mayor. Those who have read the articles I have written over the past year, understand that the last ingredient for a civilization lost - is the suspension of term limits. At that point, you have a dictatorship.<br />
<br />
But I have begun to wonder if we don't already have that. Consider our own personal tiger once again. How many details of the Gulf BP oil spill, are being allowed to meet the public eye? BP private security is working so closely with Homeland Security in the South, that many reporters have confused the two. Some have been threatened, their persons and belongings searched and seized. While the management of the actual disaster was practically non-existent, the management of the on-scene locale following the alleged end of the disaster is total and comprehensive. The story - the facts, and the very history and data surrounding the event are being sifted and scrubbed and the rights of average citizens simply don't matter. Those rights haven't mattered since a guy named Joe, asked a guy named Barrack a simple question - they probably haven't mattered for years, and because of our bad eyesight, we haven't really seen it.<br />
<br />
Kings love that. They enjoy total power, and they don't have to listen to, or even see the suffering of their subjects. Dictators love that, too. They just exterminate and bury whoever gets in their way.<br />
<br />
Tigers have always loved it.<br />
<br />
All predators enjoy their spot at the top of the food chain. And sometimes, they enjoy it so much, they just live to kill.<br />
<br />
Remember that.THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-86413252727634801872010-05-31T23:07:00.001-07:002010-06-01T00:20:01.272-07:00Oil platform - FUBAR<div class="MsoNormal">If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to see it fall, does that mean that it fell?<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If a bomb explodes in the forest, but no one is there to hear the blast – or at least, no one important, does it mean anything exploded? If you live near a place named Tunguska, the answer to both questions would be “yes.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Similarly, if an oil rig was said to be a safety hazard, but no one was really listening, would that mean the oil rig wouldn’t explode and sink to the bottom of the ocean, killing half the eastern seaboard in an unstoppable wave of black death? Would it mean that a civilian company wouldn’t be left holding the whole bag of sticky poo as the entire gulf coast dies? Would it mean that a U.S. president – an outspoken opponent to drilling and big oil - wouldn’t be sitting on his hands?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">See where I’m going with this?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Cause and effect – yeah baby. It’s all about cause and effect. As impossible as it is to know the circumstances surrounding the catastrophe in the Gulf, it is more impossible to understand the reason for the hand-wringing and inaction going on now within our government. The president listens to a few briefs, picks up even fewer tar balls from off the sandy beaches in the South, and goes home for vacation – yet again.<br />
<br />
"Hey, Secret Service guys, let's stop for some yummy shrimp cocktails before we head home."</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Meanwhile, everything dies – or gets ready to die. British Petroleum executives must be hoarse from the screaming. One can almost hear them – “What the Hell? Who the Hell? Wait a minute … what the Hell?” Then a few days later – “What the Hell? Who the Hell? Wait a minute …. What the Hell? SOMEBODY BLOODY HELP US!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So, they send in the Coast Guard. Look, I’m not one to get down on any military service, because I was in one - and I know I'm going to get cursed by CG guys for this - but when you have a Lobster Boat lost at sea, you call the Coast Guard. When you have potentially every lobster turning toxic at the bottom of the ocean, it’s time to call someone else. I don’t know – was Bruce Willis busy? Could somebody give the guy a call, at least? I mean, he dealt with that asteroid thing pretty well, and he’s an oil drillin’ guy too, right?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Yeah, I know, that one was fiction. Bummer. Worse than a bummer, because we’re supposed to be counting on British Petroleum and the Coast Guard – or is it the Coast Guard and British Petroleum? Does anyone know who’s in charge here? One can just hear the BP executives now, “What the Hell? Who the Hell? Wait a minute…”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I apologize, dear reader. I know you are about to push the nuke button on me, because this is serious Shite, here and the Coast Guard is all over this problem - and they're handling it. But, being a former military guy, I can see when something is SNAFU, TARFU – or as in this particular case, FUBAR. When things have reached FUBAR stage, it’s time to grab your ass, pucker up, and develop some flexibility. For those unfamiliar with these acronyms, I offer this pleasant gauge:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">SNAFU – An oil platform is placed in deep water with Gilligan and the Skipper in charge.</div><div class="MsoNormal">TARFU – Gilligan and the Skipper cannot be found after the oil platform explodes.</div><div class="MsoNormal">FUBAR – Gilligan and the Skipper are running the effort to close the valve on the broken pipe at the bottom of the ocean, with a can of compressed air and some silly-putty between them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Got the picture? It’s about that bad now. Even the professor and Mr. Howell can’t come up with a good enough plan – or throw enough money at it. If it weren’t so tragic, you’d have to laugh. In fact, you may as well laugh – or pray. That’s about the best course of action at the moment, and that's my official policy. Why doesn't the President order up some big juju magic and do something? Why would he? If he stays away from it, maybe it won't stick to him, like say, tar would.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">No wait – let’s build a big hat and drop it over the pipe! Wow! That’s a great idea! Holy crap, someone call BP! No wait – they tried that. It was called the “Ass-hat” idea.” Yep. Didn’t work. It didn’t work about as well as everything else hasn’t worked. In fact, the big O, actually picking tar-balls off the coastline was maybe the most effective thing done yet. How bad can it get?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Well, after we try a big hat, then a smaller hat - then a really small hat and some shit no one understands, how about this: It is already the most massive environmental disaster the U.S. has ever seen, but that’s just the warm-up. The threat is simply unknown. No one has any idea. As of now, there is nearly 100 miles of coastline polluted in Louisiana alone. As there’s only 400 miles of Louisiana coast, things have certainly reached the FUBAR stage. There's oil plumes extending out far beyond this already, and no one knows why. Oh, and here's the best part...every fish and invertebrate contacting the oil will be dying, RIGHT NOW. Birds, reptiles and mammals will be dying for a long time to come – and here’s a big wake up call … WE'RE MAMMALS TOO! Some smart guys have actually been saying there will be “both short term and long term impacts.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">No shit, professor? Feel like cracking open Mr. Lobster or sucking down those raw oysters a year from now? Yummy. Just do a quick science experiment … buy a can of 40 –weight oil (your choice) and dump it in your fish tank. Then fry up Mr. Fish, get all Jurrasic on him and see how you feel in the morning.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">No? Well, then, for good measure, call the Coastguard and British Petroleum and ask them to recommend a filter to get all the goo out of the tank. Still nothing?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">OK, who’s to blame? According to Speaker Pelosi, and some other dim lights in Congress, it’s former President George Bush. Wow. Color me surprised. According to environmentalists, it’s just “big oil.” And according to President Obama, it is big corporate greed, then former President Bush - then big oil. But as far as British Petroleum is concerned – well, we know what they are saying still.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“What the Hell? Who the Hell…”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sorry, no answers – and no non-toxic fish yummies. And definitely no more screaming, because those BP executives have lost their voice.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s a FUBAR alert still in progress.</div><div style="border-bottom: solid windowtext 1.0pt; border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext .75pt; mso-element: para-border-div; padding: 0in 0in 1.0pt 0in;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="border: none; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid windowtext .75pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 0in 1.0pt 0in; padding: 0in;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Not sick yet – look at this fun link….</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html">http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html</a></div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-73562393300249971712010-05-28T22:20:00.001-07:002010-05-28T22:22:52.205-07:00Poppies and Memorial Day<i><br />
</i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6WXtJhYhBXkVJ7vI_yk121ifFOduP2p5RHjlcgt5VDnsw4AhXL18D7m7L8xFFj5TOAAkIUoAS48W7JRu_65Kjot3zPwsrvxBnOOZOuYGuBag0qStaSxPA9KyNahgE-xRUuBnDOO7w59n-/s1600/Wicked+Patriot+logo+x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6WXtJhYhBXkVJ7vI_yk121ifFOduP2p5RHjlcgt5VDnsw4AhXL18D7m7L8xFFj5TOAAkIUoAS48W7JRu_65Kjot3zPwsrvxBnOOZOuYGuBag0qStaSxPA9KyNahgE-xRUuBnDOO7w59n-/s320/Wicked+Patriot+logo+x.jpg" /></a></div><i><br />
</i><br />
<i>By Wicked Patriot</i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Sometimes I wonder at the phrase "Happy Memorial Day" I wonder how many people remember that Memorial day has nothing to do with holidays, family vacations, BBQ's or cold beer.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Memorial Day began as Decoration Day to honor the Union soldiers who died during the Civil War. After WW1 is was broadened in scope to encompass all soldiers who have fallen in service of our great country.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The first Memorial Day was observed by freed slaves to honor the Union soldiers who had died to free them in a long forgotten place called the Washington Race Course on May 1st 1865. The Washington Race Course was a former Confederate prisoner of war camp in South Carolina. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">After the war freed slaves exhumed Union soldiers buried in the mass grave on the site and gave them a proper burial.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Memorial Day was not a declared “holiday” until 1968. This is when the "holiday" was combined with Veterans Day and Washington's Birthday to create a convenient three-day weekend for Congress (fitting). The “holidays” were eventually separated again in 1978. Most businesses are no longer closed on Washington's Birthday or Veterans Day, but Memorial Day seems to endure. Not so much to honor the fallen, but to give the government a three-day weekend.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">My father served all his adult life for a country he loved. Now he is gone, like so many others forgotten on distant shores – never again to see the country they fought and died for.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">You see it is not about BBQ's and days off to me, or anyone like me. The little boys and girls that have to grow up without their moms and dads, know this as do the wives and husbands who cannot go on to grow old together. And there are so many sisters and brothers sorely missed by those that love them – they understand this too.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">When I think about Memorial Day, I think of Red Poppies sold by the VFW and the poem that inspired that tradition, “In Flanders Fields,” penned by John McCrea. Do you know it? I do.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">In Flanders fields the poppies blow<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Between the crosses, row on row,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> That mark our place; and in the sky<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> The larks, still bravely singing, fly<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Scarce heard amid the guns below.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">We are the Dead. Short days ago<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> Loved, and were loved, and now we lie<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> In Flanders fields.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Take up our quarrel with the foe:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">To you from failing hands we throw<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> The torch; be yours to hold it high.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> If ye break faith with us who die<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">We shall not sleep, though poppies grow<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> In Flanders fields.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Remember as you drive to your BBQ’s and to the beach, there are those unseen, beyond the veil of the final nightfall, who whisper “remember me.”</span></div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-61803237760489691102010-05-27T22:20:00.001-07:002010-05-27T22:20:31.019-07:00Patriotism.<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">In 1991 I wrote an article about patriotism.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It wasn’t much. I simply explained that the flag waving and bugle playing and all that great stuff really wasn’t what it all was about. It was really about family and duty and caring for your brothers and sisters. Patriotism is the best things about being human.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I know these sorts of ideas may seem trite to some. I imagine there are plenty of folks out there who don’t believe in God or Heaven – or whatever you’d like to call either. Perhaps they believe in other things. Perhaps they believe in nothing at all. And that’s fine – belief or non-belief isn’t mandatory, but making some kind of choice to do something for other people is.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I can’t help but think of all those commercials and paid “news reports” – some with the President himself, extolling the need for volunteering – asking for people to give of themselves. And yet, half a world away, young men and women are doing just that. They are volunteering to protect the rest of us against a very real enemy. You just haven’t seen the faces of those killers, personally. You hear instead, the platitudes of a government led by cowards. You listen to propaganda – or worse – you believe total fabrications intended to ramp up the volume of hate and despair.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I know the face of hopelessness. I know its’ bitter taste, and can tell you personally what it is like to look into the eyes of the kind of creatures who caused the gaping hole and all the misery in New York. These individuals are no longer human. They aren’t fighting for their families – they aren’t serving any duty, holy or otherwise. They are in fact, insane.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Individuals like that, and all those who enable them – even to a large extent, many in our own government – are just husks. They are empty, lost individuals shuffling through a decaying landscape. For them, the suffering of average people is not real, and the sacrifices made on their behalf simply do not even come to mind. They can’t possibly see beyond their own needs, and so, in their mind, how could there be anyone else who does? How could there be any real kindness and any real giving – without a taking? For these people, how could there even be a God in the face of so much thoughtlessness and emptiness in the cold vastness of the universe?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It is within that barren landscape of soul, that hate and terror and oppression are born.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But there is an alternative and it is always within reach. You can simply choose to care. You can simply try your hardest to be a better person than you were the day before. You can be the one to say a kind word, to ask a simple question, to do a selfless thing and to honor those who are giving up themselves in every possible way, so you will be happy and safe. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have had the greatest honor of wearing the uniform of my country. But it is as nothing compared to the greatness of those who have come before me and those who have come after. I have known both. I have had friends who flew gliders into France on D-Day. I have listened to the stories describing a sky on fire as gliders exploded in balls of flame and bodies of comrades fell to earth. I have known men who were officers in the Underwater Demolition Teams. Their stories are told in pieces – the pieces they are allowed to speak about, and the pieces which their voices will allow them to tell. I have known veterans of Korea and Vietnam and there’s a sadness there, too great for words.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And most recently, I have spoken to a number of my active duty brothers and sisters. I dread the future because it holds the chance – the day – when those voices will go silent and I will never know their fate. My time and my efforts were like a blink compared to these people.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And so we come to the meaning of it all. Patriotism is this: a belief and love for your fellow man, and for an idea that became a country and a people. It is about being more than skin and blood and bone. It is simply about transcendence, and hope, and the willingness to give everything up so that the person next to you – or someone you never met - will be free and live a full life. You don’t have to understand it, but you do have to respect it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Michelle Obama once described a particular moment as the first time she was proud of her country. With her and her husband choosing to take yet another vacation as the annual wreath is laid on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I would have to say it is the first time I am truly and deeply ashamed of our President.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But this is still America, and those brave souls being remembered on Monday, died so he and the First Lady could do as they wish. That sacrifice and that gift – all given for nothing in return, is the true measure and meaning of patriotism.</div><!--EndFragment-->THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-77055627142589049742010-05-26T16:05:00.000-07:002010-05-26T21:18:20.868-07:00ZEUS system with MTBS®<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="mailto:Blackstarfish@cableone.net"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfvm_H6rH3SL_fFZy_X328TKDyMWTDp9_rTnmGrBrJsOGAHDMfNymoBWNZm9JC-GjfdLdYDla-fE7N5Kf5H3ssqM1-FXt9pKqTZL2mofS__btv6F14IQ2DO95-cpCf_DevH_7jKk9xRFDi/s320/ZEUS+HEADER.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://dstactical.blogspot.com/"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCk9Rqzb6pkGBZKaAD4M6Ocy-qkffq3FMA90oxD-9o1FWA1glxCGea_hyphenhyphenebx1L8NNvqP_vpia_PCoyncuuFyUyf-9l8yEGjq_tUaKryqr7B5N6NpmeaIY2wqwbVs3xnuKQ7pQWldloDw2b/s320/complete+ZEUS+system+with+MTBS+best+shot+x.jpg" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"><i><br />
</i></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"><i><br />
</i></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px;">The veil of secrecy is lifted. The new project at <a href="http://www.dstactical.blogspot.com/">D&S Tactical</a> is now not only named, but is also pending approval by a major tactical supply company - soon to be identified. To contact D&S about this, send e-mail to the <a href="mailto:Blackstarfish@cableone.net">Barren Earth Blade Smith</a>. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"><i><br />
</i></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px;">Following are some words on the system. At D&S we make gear for legends.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-large;">A</span>ll ideas start with a small spark. That spark sometimes is a perfect moment – and sometimes it is formed from the actions and simple existence of great men and women. Examples are all around us.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">This world has seen titans – and they are measured by their unflinching valor, by heroism which mere mortals cannot understand, and by actions which literally form the very world we live on. Some may say these great people simply disappear like the flicker and pop of a dying candle flame. Others may equate these immortals, as the ancient Samurai did, to cherry blossoms – fine and beautiful things while they are here among us, but gone when the wind comes and the days grow cold.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">But there are those who believe our hero’s live on, strengthening us in our darkest personal hours. They are eternal. If heaven or Valhalla exists, then surely they are there looking down on us, giving us the strength to accomplish just one more thing – or to live a whole lifetime with purpose and compassion and strength.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">We don’t memorialize the dead – we memorialize the legendary.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">That is the spirit in which the ZEUS knife and Modular Tactical Blade System (MTBS®) were created. In the memory of great men he both knew and those brothers and sisters who are still out there in the dark places, fighting for us all. Barren Earth Knife Smith, Dave Rogers, of D&S Tactical brought the ZEUS into being with the finest materials available on the market today – and simple imagination, determination and hand-craftsmanship.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Made from slabs of 8A High Carbon Stainless Super Steel, the ZEUS is .178 thick and extremely tough. Featuring a razor-sharp double-edge down half of its’ wide blade, this weapon is built for a wide variety of challenges in the business of Special Warfare. The spear-point double edge with its’ mild hollow grind, make it easy to sharpen while allowing for excellent penetration of the target and smooth withdrawal. The steel is extremely resistant to corrosion and incredibly durable due to the cryogenic quench in the heat treatment process. A variety of Black-T blade coatings improve the strength and are designed to match the colors of the handles and sheath. The blades are available in black, dark grey, light grey, tan, dark earth and OD green. They fit each of the custom handles, and mounted blades can be field-stripped and reconfigured depending on mission requirements, in a matter of minutes. A cleverly-designed, silenced, kydex container with MOLE system clip is available to carry spare blades. Blades can be ordered with a variety of engraving – or none at all, to facilitate proper equipment in the places and instances where being identified by your equipment simply isn’t an option.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The handle is equally well suited in the water or out, due to the careful hand-shaping and individual treatment given each knife. Holes in the handle suck water away from the surface, allowing a sure grip in any environment and increasing the surface-area in contact with the palm of the hand. The G10 material which makes up the handle is formed from hundreds of tissue thin fiberglass and resin layers under incredible heat and pressure. Every knife is assembled by Rogers with individual attention to every detail. The steel pins are heavy anodized allen bolts and are set firmly into the sides. The handles are available in pitch black, desert / black, urban grey / black and jungle / black. They can be set permanently onto a blade – or can be removable – to allow operators to combine them with different blades and sheaths at will.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The sheaths are made specifically for each individual blade system– hand cut and fitted using black concealex, with specialized removable face-plates available in desert digital, jungle digital and urban digital colors and are fitted with specialized tek-lok clips. Everything is done piece by piece. The application of these faceplates in conjunction with our handles and coated and uncoated blades, provide a truly modular blade system and perfect customization according to individual requirements.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The finished product is completed with the trademark style of any D&S Tactical product. It is carefully disassembled and reassembled to ensure it is as close to perfect as it can be.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">Because, we honor the memory of our nation’s greatest warriors.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">We memorialize the legendary.</span></div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-71206570378837715382010-05-19T23:03:00.000-07:002010-05-20T05:51:16.755-07:00PTSD revisited again<div class="MsoNormal">I’ve got some first-hand knowledge with regard to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s always with me. I’ve dealt with the effects of it since 1993.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So, when I read about some dumb comments being made on the subject, I can’t help but call it as I see it. Not to be flippant, but the winner of today’s dumb comment drawing is: the Deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps. To be fair, I don’t know the man – and I wasn’t in San Diego for that three-day conference. I didn’t hear his whole speech. Maybe he’s really with the program. Most Marines I’ve met, are.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But, I felt it necessary to take this story on. These were very dumb comments – and they were were made during a recent, posh get-together consisting of 1,000 Marines, sailors and mental health specialists at the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center in San Diego. I’ll take these and put them in the light and perspective of someone with PTSD.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But first, some history and science: PTSD has been in the spotlight because our troops have been deployed – and deployed – and deployed again, in endless rotations to one desert or another, one crap city, town or village or another, and one mountain range or another since 2001.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Check your calendar, dear reader. While you’ve been visiting Starbucks for the last nine years, men and women in uniform have been out there making sure both you and Starbucks are here to enjoy the smell of coffee. On a more serious note, PTSD hasn’t been with us since 2001 – it’s always been with us. The cause of the disorder is thought to be chemical reactions in the human brain. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The human brain produces some of the most powerful chemical compounds on the face of the planet. We are each a pharmacy of “Dr. Feel-Good” medications. The trouble occurs when the brain notices something really bad is happening. In that momentary flash, brain chemistry kicks into high gear, and the result is a “remapping” of brain structure or operation. There are opinions that suggest major reconfiguration of thought processes due to these very real and very physical changes. The brain does this so that the next time such an event happens to you, you are "hard-wired" to respond. Study in fields such as neuroendocrinology and neuroanatomy and genetics have all been brought to bear on the disorder. But basically, the disorder has been with us, since the first tiger chased the first of our monkey ancestors across a field.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And unfortunately, it has happened to military folks through every conflict in history. It has been recorded since the 6<sup>th</sup> century BC, when an Athenian soldier suffered no external injury but became blind after witnessing the death of a friend. The names people have given it, perhaps reflect the times. In recent history it has been known as exhaustion, neurasthenia, war neurosis, shell shock, battle fatigue and combat fatigue. New names have not changed the thing itself - they only make the doctors and other professionals in society feel smarter. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And so, we come back to San Diego. Because it was there that Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, the Deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps, said, “We are at the point where we need to take action.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Yeah baby. We’re there. We weren’t there nine years ago – and we weren’t there after Kosovo or Somalia or Panama, Vietnam, Korea, WWII or WWI, or all the other military engagements troops have been involved with. But, we’re there now. Oh good. I thought we’d never get “there.” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We are there because the general is sitting with a big smile on his face behind a white-draped table at the Town and Country Resort. We are there because the Marines are seeing a suicide rate which surpasses all the other services – almost doubled since 2006. And of course we’re there, because the words “at the point” and “take action” sound good in a speech - and make you feel all warm, squishy, safe and smart.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But the truth is, we are very far from “there.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And apparently, this point has not been overlooked by the general, because also part of his speech was the following statement: “We are not satisfied with the results we are seeing.” And of course, his capper to that statement "commanders can point to no single factor." The general also explained that the military is such a loving and understanding place, that “there are men and women in their ranks who have sought and received help for post-traumatic stress disorder – and have been able to rejoin their units and win promotion.” Yeah – it’s ok. Don’t worry, be happy. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I know of instances where that statement has been true. I also know that during my time in the service, if you had a problem, the last place you wanted to be was in a military doctor’s office, talking about your woes, because it would make people you work with, not want to work with you. It might cause your flight status or deployment status or other very important things to be revoked. It might end you up in some dead-end job in a forgotten corner of the world. And it might cause you to be given your walking papers - a medical discharge. But again, to be fair to the general, the military is trying very hard to get a handle on this thing. Of course, dear reader, you’re fooling yourself to think they are any closer to solving it. You can stoke yourself on anti-depressants and seratonin re-uptake inhibitors and drugs that affect dopamine. You can pop sleeping pills until your head swims, you can try prayer – and that one might be your best hope – you can sit in a circle, hold hands and sing kumbaya or cry on each other's shoulders, you can sit in an auditorium and listen to the VA give you a two-hour, droning bullshit “orientation.” You can do the Tai Chi dance in the garden, go in for an experimental treatment like the stellate ganglion block or the ecstasy trials, or you can even let them drill holes in your head and give you a boost to end all boosts. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But in the end, wherever you go, that’s where you are. There’s no easy answer – and no amount of late-night programming, drinking, eating or farting; blogging, reading or zoning-out to the endless scroll of twitter, will ever make it easier to turn out the light. No one will be there in your dreams to help you when the ghosts come. Nothing will tamp down that almost itchy feeling you get in crowds. Nothing will stop the memories from crowding out your waking thoughts. Nothing will stop the anxiety and the incessant feeling like you’re forgetting something important – like you have to do something right now, or you have to watch those high windows, those shadowed places or the fidgeting scumbag in the market for suspicious movement. Nothing will stop the surges of adrenaline in response to fireworks, a dropped object or a too-familiar smell.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And of course, nothing will stop them from re-naming this condition. At least they accomplished that one thing at the conference in San Diego.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">They’re calling it “Moral Injury.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">------------<br />
For your reference: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/military/article_3dc03ec3-6a37-5608-8563-aca88f635271.html</div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-867068904706782162010-05-09T23:11:00.000-07:002010-05-13T21:22:45.503-07:00Boots.<div class="MsoNormal">Boots.</div><div class="MsoNormal">You see them in the closet, or maybe strewn across your floor like some kind of trail to hidden places. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve worn a lot of boots. Maybe I wore so many for so long that my feet would no longer accept a tennis shoe or something a little less rugged and maybe more dressy. Since leaving the service in 1994, my feet got worse and worse until I was walking with a cane. But I was still shuffling along in my Desert Storm era boots - lately salvaged from military surplus stores.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s a strange thing when you consider these military icons – I mean really consider them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Back when I was still a young man, I was a member of the honor guard, rifle detail and sword detail. I worked at a base with 96 ground-launched nuclear cruise missiles. It was a serious, deadly mission. And we were playing “Chicken” with the declining Soviet Union. I would usually get to the base headquarters building just as the anthem was played. I enjoyed taking the time there in front of headquarters, rendering a salute as the flag was raised. I remember it clearly. The jump boots I wore back then gleamed. I kept my uniform immaculate. One of the guys taking down the flag did not. The toes of his boots were in need of polish. I noticed things like that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Another day I carried the American flag down the main street of Newbury, UK, as the street was lined with WWII veterans there in recognition of Eisenhower Day. I remember seeing those old men in their dark suits, medals lining their chests – so many medals. Beside me, another troop carried the British flag. We moved slow and respectfully with a long parade line behind us. The old men’s faces were somber, but their boots shined as brightly as ours. I noticed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Flash forward - to a dispersal exercise in which I was detailed as an LPOP. My camouflage was exceptional, and when I was young, I could disappear. One night two guys walked down to my position. They stopped right over me. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Where is this guy?” said the one in front of me. I was looking at his boots. He had missed lacing through one eyelet. I noticed things like that – even in the pitch black of that field.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"> “I don’t know,” said the other, behind me, now poking me in the back with his rifle. “What is this pile of trash? Someone should come out here and clean this up.” They walked on, their footsteps receding into the distance. As an LPOP I was not supposed to engage them – just report their position. It was my job to notice things like that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Flash forward – to a long day in Moscow. I had come back in from a walk – trailed for hours by members of the KGB. The Soviet Union was in its’ death throes, but you couldn’t tell that from our trip. We’d been given the full “dollar” tour of the city, and being young and stupid I found every opportunity to slip out into the streets alone. One night I grabbed a cab and made a long trip across the city. It was blistering cold. I needed a real hat and coat. By the time I got back to the hotel, the government agent stationed outside the door of my room had changed. Now it was “Thick Mustache” and his thin-soled scuffed shoes. The laces were thin too – as were his lips. Lips which never smiled despite my courteous tip of my new hat. He crossed his legs, adjusted the newspaper in his hands, and looked away dismissively. I still remember it clearly. The heel of his right shoe tipped toward me and I noticed it was worn on the outside. Bow-legged maybe. Yeah, I noticed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Flash forward – It looked like I might be staying behind when the main group of our unit left Mogadishu bound for home. I needed new boots, but the Air Force supply group wouldn’t give them to me. You see, I wasn’t on any of their lists – I was with the Joint Task Force and my friends were all U.S. Army, Navy and Marines. It was almost funny when I couldn’t get any of those other groups to slide me a new pair of covers for the old dogs, either. I think I did laugh at that – after all, I did have a tendency to notice things like that. Then my home unit needed me back – and I was on my way back to Holloman and the F-117A.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Flash forward – I picked up a newspaper a week after returning home from deployment in Africa. The black jumps felt foreign on my feet after so long in the deserts. They would forever feel foreign now, although I didn’t know that then. I slouched in the couch at the front of the office and flipped open the paper. The front page caught me immediately. The soles of a pair of boots were visible in the back of a flatbed. Their owner stared up at the sky – those who were loading him into the back, were caught in a moment of strain. Perhaps it was the camera gear still hanging around his neck. Maybe it was just the slackness of his frame. Shot up and dead, the Frenchman had been my friend. He had filmed me all around the country of Somalia. We had joked about that. Back then I could still speak some French - not anymore. My friend’s left shoe was unlaced, ends of the string trailing in a pool of something. A black and white photo doesn’t deliver true color, but I knew those boots were deep brown – and the pool of liquid they were being dragged through was red. I noticed things like that.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There’s no answer for the things we carry with us. There’s no reality where such troublesome thoughts fit neatly or comfortably. There’s no place to put them when they try to crowd out other thoughts. I've seen other photos now too in newspapers - of boots next to an up-ended rifle and a helmet. I've seen a lot of photos like that. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Flash forward – I’m old now, but not old enough to have these memories wiped clean by time. Sometimes I’m grateful for that. Most of the time I am not. Still, the other day I received a phone call that I’d won a contest. Somehow I’d won an entire lifetime of new boots from <a href="http://www.militaryboots.com/">www.militaryboots.com</a>. The irony isn’t lost on me, and oddly the new Converse shoes actually fit. They fit perfect. I can't help but think of all the young guys and gals over there now, in the bad places for us. A lot of them would like a new set of shoes. Some of them there today, won't be coming home tomorrow. I can't do anything about that, except remember them every time I lace up. The militaryboots folks were very kind - they really just held the contest out of the goodness of their hearts. It wasn't a slick marketing thing. They really are the best sorts of people - and they have every boot known to man. When they asked what color I wanted, I didn't hesitate.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My new boots are black. Black like eternal night - like my dreams mostly are. Black because I'm so tired of the desert, and still after all these years, it's where I live. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I notice things like that.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
-------<br />
Here's the full story on the contest: <a href="http://www.militaryboots.com/blog/">http://www.militaryboots.com/blog/</a><br />
And here's where to go if you need new boots: <a href="http://www.militaryboots.com/">http://www.militaryboots.com</a><br />
<br />
And here's a link to a better writer than I,; and it is such a very high compliment: <a href="http://www.twitlonger.com/show/180e2d">http://www.twitlonger.com/show/180e2d</a></div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1805467535156025751.post-42802089689229751132010-05-07T01:51:00.000-07:002010-05-07T19:40:00.736-07:00An old article I did after interviewing Commander MarcinkoJust thought some of the readers of this blog would like to see this - an interview which I did with SEAL Commander Dick Marcinko in 1997. The Commander is known worldwide for his series of books which started with his exceptional biography. Today he's also known for his public speaking, a popular video game, and a new company producing high-tech time pieces for operators. See the black watch at right, which is his top- of-the-line, Red Cell wristwatch.<br />
<br />
I remember sitting on the curb with him at the gate of Holloman AFB collecting quotes for this story. He was a regular guy - but not the kind of regular guy you ever wanted coming after you. To the Vietnamese, he was "Shark Man of the Delta," to others, he was Demo Dick. But his most famous name is certainly the one he coined himself - "Rogue Warrior."<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGSVJsRwsHlUXP9wHN8_15Y6a-2LBJK84UpiZYlTAo05SYaK3WBSFFjC9l0rVHzD6VGEHEdKvE03BLTu2C1z671f3oxMJSnd9CIu2-p7GMPoIuWWYRfqRuFL8aCXDKyf4xTd96NctQNWDF/s1600/The+1997+interview+and+story+with+Commander+Dick+Marcinko.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGSVJsRwsHlUXP9wHN8_15Y6a-2LBJK84UpiZYlTAo05SYaK3WBSFFjC9l0rVHzD6VGEHEdKvE03BLTu2C1z671f3oxMJSnd9CIu2-p7GMPoIuWWYRfqRuFL8aCXDKyf4xTd96NctQNWDF/s320/The+1997+interview+and+story+with+Commander+Dick+Marcinko.jpg" /></a></div>THE JOLLY ROGERShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14022547878337696976noreply@blogger.com0