The Daily Brief

Sgt Hook posted this – it was sent to him by one of his readers. I think it’s worth repeating. And worth re-reading. The good Sgt called it “Parallel Lives.”

Excerpt:

Your alarm goes off, you hit the snooze and sleep for another 10 minutes.

He stays up for days on end.
__________________________

You take a warm shower to help you wake up.

He goes days or weeks without running water.
__________________________

You complain of a “headache”, and call in sick.

He gets shot at, as others are hit, and keeps moving forward.
__________________________

You put on your anti-war/don’t support the troops shirt, and go meet up with your friends.

He still fights for your right to wear that shirt.
__________________________

You make sure your cell phone is in your pocket.

He clutches the cross hanging on his chain next to his dogtags.
__________________________

You talk trash on your “buddies” that aren’t with you.

He knows he may not see some of his buddies again.
__________________________

Go read the whole thing. And share it.

…in the defense of all we hold dear, Thank you.

ArmyWifeToddlerMom shares what it’s like when the spouse returns. (Bring tissues, even if you’ve never been a military spouse)

hat tip: Sgt Hook, who seems to always know where to find the best stories.

Been playing link-tag around the sphere, to such a degree that I forget where I found the link to this article (might have been from beautiful atrocities?). Yep, it was (I just checked back). It’s on his list of outside reading.

At any rate, it’s an interesting article about bot-nets, and those who make them.

Near the end of the article….

His hard-boiled pose has begun to break down, and instead of sneering at the risks of getting caught and brought to justice, he’s begun to talk about quitting the criminal hacking scene to join the Army, which, he reasons, will offer not only discipline and the motivation to earn his GED but also potentially a free ride to college. From there, he can imagine a more respectable future working on information technology projects for the military.

“It’s nice to have up to $10,000 a month coming in, but, if it’s not legit, then I also have all this other stuff to worry about,” 0x80 says. “Like, I gotta hide my laptop every night, and every time I don’t come online for a day I have people blowing up my cell phone asking if I got raided by the feds.”

This couple.

Excerpt:

MANTECA, Calif. — A married couple who got a dog sitter for their puppies but left the man’s young children home alone while they vacationed in Las Vegas were arrested Wednesday, police said.

Jacob Calero, 39, and Michelle De La Vega, 32, were taken into custody as they arrived home on a flight to Oakland. They had left town Friday to celebrate the new year, authorities said.

The couple apparently told 9-year-old Joshua to look after his 5-year-brother, Jason, who is autistic. The children spent one night alone before police found them.

Thank God Grandma called the cops. How do you get to be that old and have no clue of what’s the right thing to do?

Just read this on Yahoo! News….

The National Guard has found a way to help out its soldiers who were affected by Katrina. If the soldiers’ job is gone due to Katrina, they can extend their active duty time (up to one year), and work on rebuilding projects, including an NG headquarters building in New Orleans.

So far, over 200 LA Guardsmen have signed up, and some MS troops are interested, as well.

From Sgt Hook (always one of my fave reads), comes a story he originally posted on Blog Cuba.

If Sgt Hook ever writes a book, I’ll be standing in line to buy one of the first copies.

Pedro Martin (Originally posted at Val’s Blog Cuba, August 2004).

Private First Class Peter Martin lay on his cot made of an aluminum frame and green nylon, dressed only in his desert camouflage trousers and a brown t-shirt and tan suede combat boots. His blouse hung on a hook fashioned out of 550 cord and an expended 7.62 shell casing tied to a section of the tent’s metal frame. He lay on his back, with his hands behind his head, staring at the canvas ceiling, tiny rays of sunlight piercing the many holes in the tent, waiting. He’s been there waiting for three days now while his platoon was on patrol in the village to the east of their forward operating base. The tent flapped violently in the wind and dust settled on everything. Pete Martin tired of waiting and tired of the heartache he felt within.

He had joined the Army just less than two years ago, shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. He signed on to be an infantryman, he loved being an infantryman. The day that he raised his right hand taking an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies was one of the proudest moments in his life, he was twenty-one years old at the time. He had trained hard after enlisting, first at Fort Benning’s school for boys during the Army’s basic training, then with his unit at Fort Campbell, Kentucky before coming to Afghanistan two months ago.

Read the rest.

Sgt Hook does it again. Give yourself a treat, and check out his post Christmas Presence.

Peggy Noonan has a thoughtful column today, posing some questions that she says make up “the big picture” about immigration policy.

I like her big question – “What does it mean that your first act upon entering your new country is breaking its laws?”

Peggy is the grand-daughter of immigrants, and does a nice comparison between her grandparents’ immigration experience and today. And her questions make sense to me.

The questions I bring to the subject are not about the flow of capital, the imminence of globalism, or the implications of uncontrolled immigration on the size and cost of the welfare state. They just have to do with what it is to be human.

What does it mean that your first act on entering a country–your first act on that soil–is the breaking of that country’s laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? What does that tell you? Will that make you a better future citizen, or worse? More respecting of the rule of law in your new home, or less?

Update:

Dan, in the comments, gives another perspective that’s worth hearing:

I don’t have an answer, but I struggle with that question paired against “what does it mean that you’re willing to risk arrest, and in many cases extreme physical danger, to enter this country”. Especially every time I drive off the exit where the American citizen is holding the “will work for food” sign (yeah, riiiight, I’ve offered), and then on through the intersection where the day laborers are trying to flag down any vehicle they can because they actually will work for food. And while I’ll take the fifth on how I know this, they bust ass.

Thanks, Dan. One thing I love about blogs is that there can actually be dialogue. It’s always good to hear someone else’s thoughts on a topic.

One soldier found a way that’s more unique than anything I’ve ever encountered before. Go read it.

And the next time you hear a bird sing, stop and listen – really listen – to its song.

hat tip: Sgt Hook

One of my favorite milbloggers has returned to the keyboard. Click the link and read the return of the inimitable Sgt Hook. I wept when he chose to close down his old blog, so I’m very excited to see him return.

Go give him a nice welcome home, folks. 🙂

h/t: Citizen Smash

For those of us who would like to catalog our book collections, the options have usually been few and tedious, requiring lots of typing. Oh, the Mac lovers can get by with Delicious Library, which lets you use your webcam to scan the barcode of the book and then enters the applicable data for you, but Macs are a small percentage of the population, and there are no plans to port it to a Windows/Linux environment.

So I thought I was trapped, tied into purchasing a cataloging software and typing the data in for each of the almost 1000 books I own (could be over 1000 by now – who knows?).

Then along comes Tim Spalding, who needed a quick way to catalog his own book collection, so he created LibraryThing. It’s an online catalog of your book collection, but the data is printable and exportable (csv format). You can make your catalog public or private, as you prefer. You can add your own “tags” to the books, describing them in ways that make sense to you, instead of to Mr Dewey or the Library of Congress.

If you want to test it out, you can add 200 books for free. If you have a larger library, he requests a one-time payment of USD10. Yeah – Ten bucks. That’s it.

Creating an account there is simple – you simply type in a username/password, and if they’re unique, you’re in. Adding books to your collection is just as simple – the quick add feature lets you type in whatever you want (author’s name, title, isbn, etc), and search one of over 30 online libraries. Within 5 minutes, I had added 40 books to my online catalog, simply by typing in an author’s name, searching the Amazon.com library, and clicking on the titles that matched mine. When I have time to sit down and do more, I’m going to use the Library of Congress for my searches instead of Amazon – often-times Amazon showed incorrect authors, although the title was correct. I’m thinking it was maybe showing secondary authors as primary, although they all show correctly in my actual catalog.

Those are minor annoyances, and there are a couple other minor tweaks I would like to see, but it’s still in beta, and it’s only about 6 weeks old as a public product, so I can be patient, I think. It was made public on Aug 29, 2005, and according to its “zeitgeist” page, there are already:

total books catalogued 369,481
unique books 209,490
6,805 users since August 29, 2005

Check it out, see what you think, and share your thoughts with Tim. He seems to be very willing to listen to his customers.

hat tip: Shannon at ShannonBlogs

A guest poster over at Blonde Sagacity has provided us with a wonderful, if challenging to read, profile of a pedophile.

The writer is a Marine Reservist, formerly active duty (5 years). He now works as a sherriff’s deputy somewhere in MI. He works within the court system there, as “the enforcement arm of the family court to which [he] is assigned.” In the 3 years or so that he’s been doing this, he’s seen lots of things. And his observations should make you stop and think.

Probably the most important part of his post (which will be continued on Monday in part 2) is this:

We’ve all heard that rape is about power; it’s not about sex. With child molesters, it’s different. It is about sex.

What’s sick is that often we pick up that these people genuinely love kids. It may sound perverted to say this, but they genuinely love kids. A lot of people get upset by that notion. “How can somebody love a kid and do that?” they ask.

You can’t deny that. And that’s why when you see the person who operates the day-care center or the beloved Pop Warner football coach accused of CSC with a minor, there’s almost always an out pouring of sympathy for the defendant. Letters to the editor of the local paper in support, nasty letters to the prosecutor and the police about how unjust we are. People see someone who genuinely appears to love children and they say “Someone like this who really likes kids couldn’t possibly do this.” People get confused by that. But let me tell you, Pedophiles genuinely love kids… and they have a sexual desire for kids. Take the Michael Jackson case in California as a great example of this phenomenon, public support for a molester because of the molester’s love for children. Some people are fooled by that love. Don’t be.

Whenever I hear somebody say, “Wow, did you hear about that schoolteacher, that priest, that camp counselor, who abused the kid?” it doesn’t surprise me. It doesn’t surprise me a bit. I’d expect it.
(snip)
This is something we in Law Enforcement go insane trying to tell parents and kids. When I was a kid all you heard about was the “Dangerous Stranger,” the outrageous, scary-looking guy that would kidnap you from K-Mart. Mr. Dangerous Stranger is out there. There are individuals who pick up children, torture them, and murder them, they do exist. They are also less than one percent of all CSC cases.

Let me tell you, sex offenders are very normal looking. I arrested a [large car company] VIP for child porn once. Most have “normal” families, children, and jobs. It’s usually not the weird looking dude in the trench coat outside the school yard with a hand in his pants. It’s usually is the basketball coach at the Y. I tell my daughter to look out for the one you know.

Pedophilia is probably my number one “kill them all and let God sort them out” issue. I have no sympathy for it, no interest in it, and no compassion for the perpetrators. I don’t watch the Lolita-type films, and I don’t wink and smile at the school-teacher-pregnant-by-her-teenage-student stories. Maybe because it all strikes a little too close to home, for me. We had a baby-sitter living with us when I was a small child – one of my alcoholic parents’ alcoholic friends. He and I were …. very close, shall we say…probably too close, if anyone had been paying attention. But what did I know? I was only 4. I have a friend whose dad first raped her before she was a year old. Another good friend was molested by her grandmother for most of her early childhood years.

So yeah, not a lot of sympathy from me for these poor, previously abused perpetrators. ‘Cause the cycle does NOT have to continue. Help is out there. I should add, for full disclosure, that I have an alcoholic sister who spent a year in jail for molesting a 12yr old boy she was babysitting, when she was in her late 20s.

Anyway… odds are good that someone you know was abused as a child. And according to the post’s author, odds are good that someone you know is a pedophile (scary thought). You owe it to yourself and your kids (and your neighbors’ kids) to be informed.

Go.

Read.

Learn.