The natural history of the “scofflaw”… another one of those interesting essays, found through Samizdata.
Ordinarily I don’t link to stuff that Instapundit links to, as I suspect that is redundant… but in the case of this particular “shrinkish” essay, I make an exception. The good doctor touches on some very salient points… and kind of explains why the level of discourse on certain topics has sunk to the vitriolic level that it has. Read and follow the links, for extra credit.
So, yeah, my heart hasn’t really been in this blogging thing for a while… no, no nonono, I am not working up to pulling the plug, it’s just that I have been diverted by another mission. As I said in a post a couple of months ago, I’m just laying down to bleed a while, then up and fight again… but I know how Timmer feels. There’s a lot of stuff going on, which in days of yore I would have been perfectly at home, piling on with the rest of us. Some of it is just the usual blogger shit-fit: Marcotte who? At where? Ummm. OK… this is the blogger-face you want with your campaign? It’s always a bad sign when you piss off more than you make friends with. Didn’t anyone actually read hers and that other blog before taking them on board officially? Apparently not. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, as we used to say in junior high.
Anna Nicole Smith, news coverage of, 24-7. Umm, OK. Clear demonstration that the major legacy media are not serving us well, although the Princess Di-like coverage fairly well illustrates the adage about first time tragedy, second time farce. We’re kinda over served in the farce department here, although the astronaut Lisa whats-er-fern is probably grateful for it.
Britney Spears, bald. Sorry, I’m not stooping to the obvious here. (Although the remembrance of a cartoon entitled “Her First Masked Ball” keeps popping up in my mind. I think it was in National Lampoon in about 1979. You google for it, you pervert.) Girl, the trailer park is calling. It is your destiny!
Talk about flashbacks to the 1970s, though… watching our major political parties and politicians maneuver over the last couple of days. Tragedy and farce, tragedy and farce, people. Only this time it’s going to be a tragedy and a tragedy again. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. It’s been like watching a blindfolded person walk over a cliff; for the purposes of scoring domestic political points, just go ahead and kiss off and abandon our allies (yes, we do have some, here and there, although you wouldn’t know it from your abject flunkies in the legacy media) and pull our forces out of Iraq in 90 days or whatever other timeline you have pulled out of your ass which will look good in the polls. Yeah. Sure. Whatever.
Sell out our national credibility and commitment to a long and difficult mission for a mess of pottage and polls. Do whatever it takes to keep you in that nice little office you have scored for yourself. Just keep thinking of your short-term interest. Just keep hoping that all that jihadist narsty stuff in the woodshed will all go away, when George Bush exits the White House. Yep, just keep hoping. Get your friends and mouthpieces in the legacy media to help you out with that. Everybody will love us once again, once the Bushhitlertyrant is gone, and our betters are in control. Take a nice long drink of the Koolaid, comrade, you will feel so much better.
Me, I am trying to take the long view. With luck the blogosphere will circumvent the “flee-all-is-lost-in Iraq” meme, as best we can. No more kindly and authoritative Uncle Walty declaring without opposition after the Tet Offensive , that “all is lost in Vietnam! Flee, flee for your lives!” And also there is a means of fighting the “our troops are bloodthirsty baby-killers and war-criminals” meme. Here’s hoping we can scotch that one, right at the starting post, although given that the so-called military expert for the Washington Post is singing that little ditty like his hope of heaven depends on it doesn’t necessary ensure that that particular meme will go down without a fight. It’s going to be a bumpy ride in the next two years: fasten your metaphorical seatbelt, and prepare to weather the shitstorm
Me… I have the feeling that bad stuff is going to happen. And that I can do my best part now by going back to our stories, or recollections of who we are, and what we had to overcome. We have had hard times, bad times, times when we might have given it all up. We have to remember these stories. Our past, those stories that some of us know, and that some of us have yet to be reminded of, we will need them, very soon. Things will start happening, in the next months or years. Events will overtake the best intentions of us all, and so we need to be reminded of our history, our stories and our heroes and heroines.
They are a talisman, our hope, our light in the dark when every other light has gone out.
I am not alone in obsessing what fuels the radical elements of Islam in their apparent desire to hasten the end of days. The various mechanisms that contribute to its propagation (indoctrination in the schools, grinding poverty, corrupt leadership and so forth) are nothing new, but this whole thing seems to be something of a different phenomenon. While I do not by any means consider myself to be a scholar of theology, anthropology or, for that matter, history, all of these topics provide insight into the pickle we find ourselves in. Nor is it my intent to write a scholarly paper on the things that I’ve been reading, but to rather tell a little about them and why they are interesting. More »
What did a well-known naturalist, a daring mail-coach driver on the hazardous route through West Texas, a fiery newspaper editor, a tireless peacemaker and advocate for the Indians, and an amateur tinkerer/inventor all have in common, besides all being present in Texas in the 1840ies? Frederick Lindheimer, William “Big Foot” Wallace, John Salmon “Rip” Ford, Robert Neighbors and Samuel Walker all served at various times under the command of Jack Hays, the legendary Ranger Captain.
The Rangers of that time were nothing like their present-day iteration… an elite State law-enforcement body. And under Hays’ captaincy, they became more than just the local mounted volunteer militia, called up on a moments’ notice to respond to a lightening fast raid on their settlement or town by Indians or cross-border bandits. They took to patrolling the backcountry, looking specifically for a fight and hoping to forestall raids before they happened, or failing that, to track down raiding parties, recover loot and captives, and to administer payback. There was only one abortive attempt to have them wear uniforms. Ranger volunteers provided their own weapons and horses, and usually their own rations, although the State of Texas did supply ammunition. They were famously unscathed by anything resembling proper military discipline and polish, as the regular Army would discover to their horror during the Mexican War. A contemporary newspaper caricature of a typical ‘Texas Ranger” featured a hairy and ragged creature resembling “Cousin It”, slumped on a horse and wearing a belt stuffed all the way around with knives and pistols.
All that Hays asked of his Rangers was that they follow him… and fight. And so they did, for Texas attracted young and restless males with a taste for adventure, a bit of ambition and no small propensity for administering violence when called upon. They came like moths to a flame, before, during and after the Texas War for Independence; many of them gravitating like a trout going upstream into an enlistment as a Ranger or service in the local militia. During the early 1840s Hays commanded a company of fluctuating size, operating out of San Antonio, which turned out to be extraordinarily effective, and made his name a legend in Texas. Many who had only heard of him were utterly flummoxed upon meeting him in person for the first time. He was slight and short, quiet-spoken and almost shy, appearing to be (and a contemporary sketch and various descriptions conform this) about fourteen years old. In between forays and patrols he drilled his company tirelessly in shooting and horsemanship, copying many of the tricks of fighting from horseback used by the Comanche and other Plains warriors. Meeting the Comanche on anything like equal terms in a fight at short distance had to wait on a single technological innovation, and Hays was the first to put it to effective use.
Until 1844, the Rangers fought primarily with the same kind of weapons that Americans had always used: single-shot flintlock or percussion rifles of various type and design, augmented by single-shot pistols. While such rifles in well-trained hands were punishingly accurate, they were awkward and slow to reload, and nearly impossible to use from horseback in a running fight. Even single-shot pistols took time to reload, time during which an opponent with a bow and arrow could get off any number of accurate shots. But in 1839, motivated by some mad, god-only-knows, pie-in-the-sky, by-god-it’s-crazy-but-just-might-work impulse, the State of Texas ordered a quantity of 180 patent .36 caliber 5-shot revolvers from Samuel Colt’s factory in Paterson, New Jersey. A portion of them were actually issued to certain Texas Navy fighting ships, where they served about as well as expected, but they began to be largely used by the Texas Army… and increasingly by Ranger units, to astonishing effect.
The early Paterson Colts were delicate, and needed constant care and maintenance: loading the cylinder and reattaching it to the barrel was a finicky and careful business. To modern eyes they are over-long in the barrel, heavy and clumsy in appearance. In 1843, they were expensive… but worth every penny to the men who carried them into a fight with mounted Comanche warriors. Being able to fire five shots before needing to reload evened the odds considerably; and Hays’s Rangers usually carried two; it was also possible to purchase extra cylinders, have them loaded and change them out quickly. Colt’s reputation in Texas was made, especially after Hays and a party of fourteen Rangers armed with Paterson Colts charged and routed a party of eighty Comanche, in a running fight along the Pedernales River.
A subsequent design improvement for military use in the Mexican War saw Ranger Samuel Walker working with Samuel Colt on improving the original design. This new design, a six-shot .44 revolver which weighed a whopping four and a half pounds made Colt’s reputation and his economic future secure. Subsequent iterations of the Colt revolver proved enduringly popular in Texas to this day. Traveling there in the early 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote “There are probably in Texas about as many revolvers as male adults, and I doubt if there are one hundred in the state of any other make.”
For all it’s various shortcomings, the Paterson Colt, and its descendents filled a very particular need— the need of a horse- mounted fighter for a repeat-fire weapon that was relatively accurate at short range, rugged, easy to use, and capable of evening the chances of survival against a hard-fighting, and similarly mounted enemy. In the hands of Rangers, soldiers, lawmen and citizens, a Colt revolver was all that.
Except on occasions where a shotgun was called for, but that’s another story.
(Next: An unexpected peace treaty with the Comanche)
The lengths to which the far left will go to avenge the election and re-election of George Bush have amazed me since 2000, but their most recent behavior takes vulgarity, indecency and cynism to a new level. This business of the so-called slow bleed strategy has nothing to do with whether we should or should not have gone into Iraq, and everything to do with adding suspenders to the belt in insuring that defeat is certain. I for one believe that the notion of micromanaging military affairs to the extent that they have threatened is unconstitutional under Article II Section 2. While Jack Murtha and his supporters would have us believe that his convictions are especially valid on the basis of his military service, I submit that his pandering to the fanatic left wing base of his party is his sole motivation and completely negates any respect he may have earned in the service of his country. Actually, earning the disrespect of his fellow Americans has been a work in progress since at least 1980, when he was caught up in the Abscam scandal
If you want to hear what a true hero has to say about funding the troops, watch Texas congressman Sam Johnson here as he speaks at House hearings. Not only a true hero, but a gentleman to boot.
It’s not that I don’t care about the current political situation or what’s happening in Iraq, it’s more that I’m so disgusted with the situation that I simply can’t bring myself, on most days, to even think about talking about it. Let me be clear here. The fact that we don’t even have Baghdad secured at this point and that we’re just starting to push back at the Iranians in country completely pisses me off. WTF?!!! On the other side of the aisle, the folks that are talking about cutting funding and that we’ve already lost, and we need to pull out make my blood boil even hotter. You don’t talk shit while your folks are on the ground trying to get things done. Either have the balls to pull us the fuck out or shut the fuck up and give us what we need to get it done.
UPDATE: Congressman Sam Johnson from Texas is much more eloquent.
I know far more about Anna-Nichole Smith than I ever wanted to. Loved the Guess Jeans billboards…otherwise…shrug.
You’ve got to admire Britney Spears dontcha? When that girl melts down, she melts down alllllll the way. You have to forgive me though…I think the bald look is HOT.
It’s only February of 2007. How come I’m hearing about who’s running for President NEXT YEAR? Election years are becoming like Christmas Seasons, they’re backing up earlier and earlier every year. Hell, at this rate, they’ll start running for President as soon as they get elected to the Senate…oh…wait…
I caught the repeat of SNL’s Christmas Show last night. Justin Timberlake is a funny guy. Not my style of music, but he doesn’t suck at that either.
Buying a house is stressful and gives me mild anxiety attacks. We’re so lucky we have a good realtor and a decent credit union. They’ve literally held our hands through the whole process.
I HATE job hunting. I’m willing to take a BIT of a pay cut as I transition to civilian life, but some of these corporations are on DRUGS if they think I’m willing to start at half my current salary. I’m in the freaking Air Force. We’re just above the poverty level for Chrissakes.
How come STATE OF THE BLACK UNION isn’t considered racist?
Why do these people who keep talking about Katrina recovery keep wanting MY money to fix the problems? I didn’t choose to live in a freaking time bomb and I resent the fact that they want MY money to rebuild in an area that’s still below sea level and will flood AGAIN if another hurricane hits. Pardon me, but go fuck yourselves.
I was reminded vividly last night when watching TV, of one of the classic and foolproof methods for picking out the murderer, early in a movie mystery. The method is to spot a relatively big-name or rather-better-than-average actor during the first act in what looks like a very small, walk-on part. Eventually, though, there will be the dramatic unveiling of the actual guilty party, where serious acting chops are required to chew the scenery in a properly dramatic fashion.
Lately, producers of the better sort of mystery move have gotten wise to this; they cleverly cast relative unknowns who are damn good actors, or salt the cast thoroughly with the same sort of relatively somewhat knowns… but in the instance of the movie that Blondie and I were watching… just about every part in the whole movie was played by a big-named star! Practically everyone with a part was a star, except possibly the two little pug dogs. And not only that, the dialogue was clever, the costuming was to die for, and oh, the set! Especially the Lalique frosted glass panels in the dining area; Blondie could not get enough of them, whenever they showed up in the background. For sheer period luxury, it beat the Titanic set all hollow.
We hadn’t watched this movie in a long, long time, so it was nice to see some of the very best of the lot at top form, and well as looking extraordinarily dishy… thirty years younger than we have seen them lately! It was also rather nice to be reminded that not all of the expensive, block-buster, all-star movie extravaganzas from the early 1970s sucked like a Hoover factory.
Murder on the Orient Express… reminding us of what we used to gladly pay the ticket price to watch. Rent or buy, and watch it again, especially if you haven’t seen it in a long time, and want to be reminded of what Hollywood used to be able to do.
And Blondie says that Sean Connery is gorgeous… and even now, if he didn’t remind her so much of her grandfather, she’d do him in a hot second.
Oh, the blogging has been light this last week, since I was trapped in the snares of literary endeavor. That is, pounding out chapter 12 of the new book. Some of the chapters come easily, as if they were already written down in my head, and some of them are hauled out inch by inch and word by word. Last week was one of the �hauled out inch by inch� weeks, but the week before I knocked out three chapters. Eh� go figure. I also had a couple of hours to work on Friday at the part-time secretarial-admin job, that between a weekly shift at the radio station, my retiree pension, and the very-slightly-more than paltry income from blogging allows me to stay at home and slave over a hot computer writing this century�s answer to �Gone With the Wind�.
So I am completely uninterested in the hot-news-item do jour, the pitiful life and sad demise of whats-er-fern (Ok, so her and Princess Di- first time tragedy, second time farce, and all that? Are we sure that the late and extravagantly mourned Ms A.N. Smith was not actually some animatronic creation devised by the tabloid industrial complex in order to generate the maximum quantity of tawdry headlines? I mean, inerrantly choosing the maximum tackiest of life choices at every possible opportunity� that goes beyond a gift: that argues a fiendish degree of forethought and planning. Oh, well, at least there is no breath of a whisper that she got it off with anyone really, really important in politics. Yet, anyway. Where was I� oh, yes� creation of semi-competent pop literature. Back on track, sorry for the diversion.)
I did briefly slip the shackles of duty yesterday: my sister Pippy had sent my daughter and I both gift cards for Borders Books, and so we popped down to spend a semi-blissful afternoon picking out the books that we wanted. Blondie went for an illustrated Terry Pratchett, but I had resolved to spend the gift card on some books that I could use for �the book�� ones that I didn�t have to keep returning to the library! I already possessed a good number of books that I needed for the writing of �Truckee�s Trail�, but in writing �Adelsverein� I am starting from scratch, and discovering that there exists a ton of excellent and thoroughly researched non-fiction about the German settlements. Either I can check it out from the library and keep it for about a month and a half at a stretch with renewals, or buy the stuff that I know I will need for longer.
And this book is going to be longer. I�ve already mapped out thirty chapters, and they have a wicked way of expanding, as interesting happenings and characters beg for more attention. Forty years worth of events in the Texas Hill country has an insidious way of becoming totally fascinating. Not to mention the people, of course. I write sometimes with a book open on my lap, to refresh my memory about places, descriptions, events and people. This is our history, and those who came before us; I need to get it all right. How it looked, tasted, smelled, what people in that time would have thought and felt and seen. Details count. I put myself in that place, with a book in my lap, and it all comes clear.
Oh, yes, the people: both the real ones, and the ones that I have totally just� you know� like made up? They take on life of their own, which is exhilarating and kind of scary at the same time. It�s easy and at the same time hard to write about them. For instance: in the next couple of weeks I will have to write about the deaths of three very appealing characters� one of whom is a fairly major hero. Sorry, it just has to be, for such sad events drive the plot, and it has always been so, from the instant that I conceived the whole story arc. (And it really was in an instant. I read something in one of the books� and just knew instantly that that was something which had to be a part of it story. This has happened, over and over. Really.) But still, it will be hard to write about. I was in tears for one whole afternoon, writing about a character in an early chapter who was fairly dispensable and barely seen anyway.
About the only harder thing to do will be about half a chapter on the heroine�s wedding night; something tender and erotic and a bit funny. Knowing that most women of the era were kept in a total state of ignorance about what the marriage bed involved, and that most men had a fairly detailed idea� and that a lot of married women of the era adored their husbands with desperate and operatic devotion (Queen Victoria herself, exhibit 1)� well, really, that argues that a fair number of Victorian-era bridegrooms must have done some fairly effective sex-education, at speed and on the fly, as it were. Otherwise, I presume their wives would have been (a) traumatized incredibly, and (b) loathed their so-called helpmates to really unparalleled degree. I am fairly sure that good properly married Victorians really had about as much fun in bed as any of the rest of us� they just didn�t go on about all the details as much. This proper reticence just makes it harder for the rest of us. I don�t mind, really.
Blondie says she will loan me some of her bodice-ripping romances, in order that I should get into the proper spirit. Yeough; if they dictate that I should have to write a sentence like �she grasped his throbbing man-root and guided it into her turgid flesh� I am so going to put my head in the oven. (For about 15 minutes)
It is an electric oven anyway, but you get the general idea.
I am glad to know that all of the federal income taxes I pay for an entire year won’t even cover the cost of one hour’s flight time in a C-32 – the plane that Nancy Pelosi feels that she needs. Just think, I can pay taxes for half of my working career knowing that I have covered the expenses for one round trip flight from Washington to San Francisco. Of course, there will be a reimbursement (at coach rate) for friends and family. Undoubtedly coach rate will have been established by reference to a red-eye flight booked several months in advance. Wouldn’t a more fair way be to calculate the ticket cost by amortizing the amount of paying passengers over the total cost of the flight? Hell, they’re all rich anyway.
It makes me sick.
Found at Photon Courier, a long and fascinating story about the redemption of the Irish underclass in 19th Century New York City, and the man known as ‘Dagger John’, who almost single-handedly worked miracles for a desperatly disfunctional community.
A must see for fans of USAF history is the History Channel Modern Marvels episode on Edwards AFB. While the planes are stars, the show also touched on some of the wild personalities who brought the projects to life, Bob Hoover being one of the more notable.
What can I say, I just love planes.
I just returned a few days ago from Munich, having had to respond to a Summons for Oral Proceedings at the European Patent Office. It was quite an experience – much more formal than the equivalent process in the USPTO. The issue related to a patent application that has been wending its way through their system for several years, and has been repeatedly rejected for a lack of inventive step. After about 3 ½ hours of debating the topic they finally conceded that it was indeed patentable. We don’t win them all, but a victory in the EPO is particularly sweet.
I had planned on doing some blogging while there, but could not bring myself to pay an additional $25/day for broadband access. Watching TV was not much of an option either given that the only English language choice is CNN International. I am completely burned out on the left wing bias of US MSM, but it is nothing in comparison to the Hate America tone in Europe. The release of the UN study on global warming had the European media in a frenzy over US refusal to sign the Kyoto accords, particularly ironic given the concurrently running story of China bringing on something like 5,000 coal fired generation facilities over the next few years.
Oh well, the beer was good. Red Haired Girl asked me to get a souvenir to give to her (yikes!!) boyfriend. I had a craving for a decent burger and fries anyway, so I headed to the Hard Rock Café to kill two birds with one stone. While there I struck up a conversation with a group in the midst of travelling to thirty some-odd cities to collect HRC guitar pins. These people are passionate about their hobby. In any case, I persuaded them to help out with some free Daily Brief publicity. Hopefully at least the gentleman holding the sign will be a new reader.
I will likely be travelling to Romania in the next several weeks, so I will try to get some new pictures with a vampire theme.
In the meantime, I am anxiously awaiting the onset of spring weather. There is a fine brisket in my freezer with an appointment with the smoker.
So according to this story which has been linked and commented on here and there across the blogosphere may indicate that our dearly beloved theatrical-release movie industry may be making a tight circle around the drain, at least as far as the domestic audience is concerned. They’ve been circling it slowly for years, but this time dare we hope that the end is nigh?
Meh. Maybe, maybe not and cry me a river in any case. I fall squarely into the demographic of that 30% that dislikes the movie selection. Yes, I am well aware of the axiom that 90% of any variety of popular culture sucks, yes I am at that cranky age where I have probably seen or heard a lot of it before. (And that little of it that I haven’t, I don’t want to. Thanks) I know that the movie-audience demographic segments most prized by Hollywood these days are A: Sub-literate, non-English speaking audiences who want to see lots of car-chases, explosions and machine-gun fire, B: pimply-faced American post-adolescent males given to communicating mostly in grunts, who also favor the above-listed cinematic elements and C: Politically correct and heavy-handed wank-fests mostly aimed at each other and a small circle of the self-consciously superior bi-coastal cognoscenti.
Hollywood gets by these days by throwing out multi-million dollar chunks of bloody chum to a large audience who gobble it up by the bucket, meanwhile salvaging their artistic pretensions by cobbling together some precious bit of art-house fluff which is ooh-ed and ahhh-ed over by the critics and all their friends, while the paying domestic audience avoids as if it were made of plutonium. This has the added benefit of allowing them to say scornfully “Really, the domestic audience just can’t handle difficult and challenging film-making! Smithers, fetch me another megabucket of chum for the masses!” (Epic Movie, anyone?)
Yeah, they turned out a regular smorgasbord of the craptacular back in any year you could name, but they also managed to churn out stuff that wasn’t half bad at all: movies with coherent and clever plots, snappy dialogue, fairly adequate performances, and the occasional happy ending… that also weren’t a remake of an older movie, part 8-whatever in some series that stopped being any fun at around part 3, or ripped from the pages of a comic book. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but for chrissake people, I am a grown-up! I stopped reading comic books at about the time my lips stopped moving when I read to myself! Please don’t start telling me about graphic novels. I have a copy of Maus and no, I don’t want to see a movie made out of it. Seriously.
If it weren’t for the lonely 1-2% of stuff produced which doesn’t suck with the force of a factory full of Hoovers, and a fairly agreeable collection of movies produced for cable and broadcast TV— at a mere fraction of the cost and the pretensions involved in theatrical productions — I swear there’d be nothing worth renting on DVD.
Might someone in the heart of dark heart of the Hollywierd beast be paying attention, and worrying about why people are staying away from the megaplex in droves? Possibly… but gloom and doom about falling movie attendance has been lurking around for about twenty years, ever since Michael Medved first began banging on about it in this book, and I haven’t seen any turn-around yet. Count me as one who is not holding my breath waiting for the whole edifice to collapse like a house of cards; not as long as they can go on unloading the buckets of spectacular and sub-literate chum on the overseas market.
In the meantime, I have a nice little second-hand copy of Cold Comfort Farm, with Eileen Atkins, Kate Beckinsale and Stephen Fry and a whole lot of people who can… you know, like act? And it’s got clever dialogue and an amusing plot… and there are no car chases at all. Oh, but the bull gets out and they have to chase after it, but that’s about it.
(Also cross-posted at Blogger News Network)
To: Wm. Arkin, “Military Expert”*
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Stop Digging
1. I take pen in hand, metaphorically speaking after reading your latest apologetic non-apology, to offer some kindly advice: Put down the shovel, step away from the hole and for the love of mike, stop digging. Possibly your editor or kindly-intentioned friends have already told you this. I encourage you to listen to them, as they presumably have your better interests at heart.
2. It is not clear in my mind why you pull down a substantial paycheck and are bylined as a “military expert” *. A single term of enlistment in the early 1970ies is pretty thin qualification, unless there is something more substantial to account for this miracle, since to put it kindly, nothing you have written ever since would lead anyone to confuse you with Ernie Pyle. Or Austin Bay. Or David Hackworth.
3. Try and wrap your mind around this basic contradiction: ever since the war in Afghanistan and Iraq began, those who have generally thought it a good idea and said so have been slammed with the chicken-hawk argument by those who do not see it as a good idea. That is to say “You have no right to support the war unless you are wearing a uniform and/or stationed in the war zone”. So a couple of young troops who are unmistakably wearing a uniform and verifiably serving in Iraq speak up and support the war effort there and you are (as teenagers say) all about saying “Shut up! We pay your salary so we own you, and you don’t have any rights to speak out about the war!” The contradiction is, to say the least, rather amusing, since it suggests that you don’t wish to hear their opinions unless they happen to agree with yours. This can be somewhat of a handicap for a reporter, actually.
4. I am also amused by the air of hurt astonishment which you display upon being confronted by the anger and outrage of those who have taken offense at your deeply insulting terms used to disparage the serving military. A so-called “military expert”* should expect a certain amount of flack in response to using such words as “mercenary”, and telling members of the service that they are lucky they to not treated like war criminals by the public at large. Do you recollect the phrase “Suck it up, hard charger” from your time of service? Apparently not. How about the one about people who can dish it out, but can’t take it?
5. Finally, I think you should take up another by-line, other than “military expert”. You remind me at this point of a veterinarian who despises animals and can’t quite figure out why they keep chomping great chunks of flesh out of him.
6. As always, the * denotes viciously skeptical quote marks.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
PS – Can I byline myself as a military expert? I’ve been retired for a bit, but at least I can write about the military without pissing them off, and I’ll work for less, also. Think about it. Have your people call my people, or something.
(Cross-posted at Blogger News Network)
So this one time at Camp Pendelton, there was a Marine in my section and he had a bad day.(Found out that his wife had been sleeping with his best friend and she took the kids and split.)
Our wise SNCO called all of us NCOs into his office and said , “We needed to help this Marine out and make sure he does not hurt himself.”
So three of us were volun-told to get over to his house ASAP and take away and hide all of the things that he could hurt himself with (just in case).
I drew the short straw and got the knives, so I took note of all the sharpest and most lethal and packed them up to go to the armory. Then I hid the rest in plain sight.
Long story short he didn’t hurt himself… and he never found the knives I had hidden in plain view. He got out of the military, moved and never found them.
So I guess the moral is*if there is one*you’re not having a really shitty day—
unless I show up and hide your flatware!
…and I still hate Rex Grossman’s guts. I know, that’s his thing, he’s either very good or very bad.
The sucktitude he displayed yesterday though…that was almost astounding.
It’s not like he could have been tired, hell, the offense practically spent NO time on the field.
(Part 1 is here)
It was not as if the Texans were entirely defenseless against a surprise attack like the Great Linnville Raid. Poor in cash, poor in practically everything but land, the conditions of the frontier had attracted large numbers of the restless and adventurous, who were not inclined to accept any sort of insult lying down. With no meaningful standing army, defense of local communities depended on their militia… usually composed of every able-bodied male. The sheer size of Texas and the nature of war waged by the horse-lords of the Southern Plains made it imperative that at least a portion of the militia be mounted. Over the twenty years after the founding of Stephen Austin’s colony the practice evolved for a mounted militia, ready to ride in pursuit of raiders within fifteen minutes after an alarm being sounded. Sometimes they were able to catch up and retrieve captives, or stolen horses. More often, the raiding Indians split up and melted like smoke into the wilderness, leaving their pursuers frustrated and fuming, their horses exhausted. It became quite clear, as more Anglo settlers poured into Texas, that the best defense was in the offense, to field a mounted patrol out ranging the back-country, looking to forestall Indian raids.
Such a Corps of Rangers was formally established on the eve of Texan rebellion against Mexico. Distinct from the militia and the regular army, the mounted ranging companies continued to serve after the war, in various forms and degrees of effectiveness, most of them locally supported. The citizen-rangers of the local companies assembled for short periods of time in response to specific dangers, their numbers ever-flexible. They supplied their own arms, horses and equipment. By the time of the Linnville Raid, most of them were veterans of the War for Independence, and had years of experience in the field otherwise; men like Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell of Gonzalez, and the McCullough brothers, who had handled Sam Houston’s two artillery pieces at the Battle of San Jacinto. Ben McCullough had even been trained in outdoor skills by no less than Davy Crockett himself. Companies from settlements along the Colorado assembled under Edward Burleson, including Chief Placido and twelve Tonkawa Indians, who had their own score with the Comanche to settle, and twenty-one volunteers from Port Lavaca. Other volunteers gathered from Bastrop, Cuero, Victoria and other towns scattered along the river valleys between the coast and the start of the limestone hills.
Barely a week after the burning of Linnville, companies of volunteer Texans were closing in inexorably on the withdrawing Comanche raiding party, at an open plain by Plum Creek, a tributary of the San Marcos River near present-day Lockhart. Burdened by loot, captives and a slow-moving herd of stolen horses and mules, the raiders, a huge party of Penateka Comanche, led by a war chief called Buffalo Hump, had not split up and scattered as was their usual custom. Unknowing, Buffalo Hump’s war party were closely pursued by part of McCullough’s Gonzales company, who began seeing exhausted pack animals shot and left by the wayside. Caldwell and the other leaders had deduced the route by which they were returning, and had arranged their forces accordingly. They let the Comanche column pass, under a great cloud of dust and ash, for the prairie had recently been burned over.
Not until the Texans rode out from cover in two parallel lines converging on them, did the Comanche warriors even know they had been followed. Some of their gaudily adorned chiefs rode out to put on a show, intending to cover the withdrawal, taunting the waiting Texans, riding back and forth. A Texan sharp-shooter brought down the most flamboyant of the chiefs, and when several warriors rode out to carry his body away, the order for a charge was given. The Texans smashed through the line of Comanche fighters from both sides, and into the loot-laden horse and mule herd. As the herd stampeded, the whole raid dissolved into a rout, a hundred bloody running fights, with the Comanche fighters penned in and ridden down. The battle ran for fifteen miles, with some of the survivors chased as far as Austin. It was later estimated that the tribe lost about a quarter of their effective fighters. They never raided so far into the settled regions of Texas again, in such numbers… and after the Plum Creek fight learned to give a wide berth to volunteer Ranger companies.
One such company was based in San Antonio, composed of local volunteers and funded by local businessmen, many of whom also participated in the patrols. The captain of that company was a surveyor by profession, born in Tennessee and raised in Mississippi, who would live to a ripe old age as a politician and lawman in California. Quiet, modest, self-effacing, Jack Hays became the very beau ideal of a captain of Rangers. He had been among the volunteers at Plum Creek, but made his name in the decade afterwards, astounding people who knew only his reputation upon meeting him for the first time. He was slight, short and refined in appearance, and looked about fourteen years old. But he was a also gifted leader of irregular fighters, possessed an iron constitution, and procured for his men an innovation which allowed them to carry the fight against the Comanche Indians on something like equal terms… the Colt Revolver.
(to be continued)
Here’s the proof.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa BEARS.
While practically everyone in the mil-blogosphere, and the blogosphere in general is lining up and taking turns to thwack the “Piniata o’ The Month”, one William Arkin who is represented to be (admittedly on very thin grounds) the “military expert” for a couple of legacy media outlets who should have known better….
Oh, one of them was the L.A. Times. Never mind. Anyway, I thought the Washington Post might have known better. It’s just that it looks like this doofus’s claim to be a military expert is based on a four-year Army enlistment in the 70ies. According to Hugh Hewitt in this article ‘many of his bylines from the past two decades described him as a “military intelligence analyst” ‘
“Military Intelligence” — Wasn’t that one of those things which was always being sarcastically desribed as a contradiction in terms? Honestly, sometimes these things just write themselves.
More piniata-whacking here, if you have the strength.
I think one of the sadder things about the recent death of columnist Molly Ivins was that the cancer that killed her this week seems to have also killed every scrap of humor in her writing long ago – it’s as if chemo killed the funny bone, too and replaced it with an advanced case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Nothing I read after 9/11 had the same panache, the same sort of hilarity and affection for even those she disagreed with politically. It was painful to read, and so I stopped reading her columns, possibly because I dropped a lot of the publications they were printed in. In the shadow of falling towers, magazines like Harpers, or Mother Jones and the local Current (the oh-so preciously politically correct weekly funded by ad revenue from titty bars and kinky personals) just seemed … well, frivolous. They hyperventilated over the same old obsessions and concerns as if nothing had happened at all, and if they so much as acknowledged 9/11 happening at all, well it was just one of those unfortunate things that was really our own fault for one reason or another. An air of antiquation hung over them, as if they were knights in tatty and hand-me-down armor, going through the rote motions of chivalry, holding jousts in the age of cannon. Besides, I got hooked on the internet and began blogging, exchanging one addiction for another.
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I’ll be in Caldwell Idaho next week, for work. I requested this trip, not paying attention to the dates, because I was stationed at Mt Home AFB about 20 years ago. So I scheduled my flights to give me time to rediscover Boise, and maybe hook up with some AF friends that still live in that area.
Found out today that I’m also scheduled for a trip to Helena, MT the week of Feb 20. Haven’t been there since fall of 1997, when I did some OpenView training at the Air Force Base there. I’ve never been there in the winter-time. Should be interesting for this southern gal.
Okay, not only did Boston get shut down by a bunch of lite-brites yesterday, but they’re going to further embarass themselves by prosecuting the advertisers:
BOSTON — Livid about a publicity campaign that disrupted the city by stirring fears of terrorism, Boston officials vowed to prosecute those responsible and seek restitution, while others mocked authorities on Thursday for what they called an overreaction.
Officials found a slew of blinking electronic signs adorning bridges and other high-profile spots across the city Wednesday, prompting the closing of a highway and part of the Charles River and the deployment of bomb squads.
I would be one of those in the “mocking authorities” column.
Seriously folks, get your pantries stocked and start reading survivorist manuals. We’re falling apart fast.
And for the record, I’m thinking that if you’ve got that many people on your staff who can’t recognize a member of “The Aqua Teen Hunger Force” you have no right representing or protecting the public in the first place.
Sgt Hook tells us a story about an Afghan hero, who saved lives.
He got it from an email sent to him by a longtime reader. The email was from an Army Captain currently in Afghanistan.
Anyway, there is this one Afghan that we call Rambo. We have actually given him a couple of sets of the new ACU uniforms (the new Army digital camouflage) with the name tag RAMBO on it. His entire family was killed by the Taliban and his home was where our base currently resides. So this guy really had nowhere else to go. He has reached such a level of trust with US Forces that his job is to stand at the front gate and basically be the first security screening. Since he can’t have a weapon, he found a big red pipe. So he stands there at the front gate in his US Army ACU uniform with his red pipe. If a vehicle approaches the gate too fast or fails to stop he slams his pipe down on their hood. Then once the gate is lifted the vehicle moves on the 2nd gate where the US Army MP’s are. So he’s like the first line of defense.
Last Thursday at 0930 hrs a Toyota Corolla packed with explosives and some Jack Ass that thinks he has 72 Virgins waiting for him approached the gate. When he saw Rambo he must have recognized him and known the gig was up. But he needed to get to that 2nd gate to detonate and take American lives. So he slams his foot on the gas which almost causes the metal gate to go up but mostly catches on the now broken windshield.
Rambo fearlessly ran to the vehicle, reached thru the window and jerked the suicide bomber out of the vehicle before he could detonate and commenced to putting some red pipe to his heathen ass. He detained the guy until the MP got there.
Go read it. It won’t take long, and it’s worth your time.
I’m not sure what’s more annoying, the color choices of the new iPod Shuffle or the annoying way Apple waits until everyone buys one kind of something before they give you any sort of choice. Are there really that many people with that much expendable income going, “Ooooh, new shiny thing!” and buying said shiny the moment it hits the shelves? How many teenagers got a plain shuffle for Christmas and are looking to their birthday for a NEW one in color? It can’t be worth it to tease like this constantly. Can it?
In other tech news…something called Vista(?) became available today. If you’re anything like us, you’ll think about it only when you’re ready to buy a new computer. The last time I ran out and bought a new OS from Microsoft was Windows 3.0 and I can’t tell you what a freaking nightmare THAT was.
I’m not all that excited about Office 07 either. What more can it do? I’ve not seen anything all that exciting in Office since 97.
I didn’t grow up in a military family, at least not active-duty military. But we were replete with veterans. Dad fought in Korea with the Marines, his dad was with the Army in WWI. Dad’s older brother was in the Merchant Marines. Both of Dad’s younger brothers served at least one tour with the Marines, and Mom’s great-grandpa served with the Ohio Infantry in the 1860s. Come to think of it, Mom’s baby sister joined the Air Force after she graduated high school, in the early 1950s. My brother joined the Marines in 1973 to avoid being drafted, but got a medical discharge before ever completing boot camp. The military was seen as a valid career option, a respectable choice, as well as a place to grow up. We saw it as a rung on the ladder of success, a starting point from which one could reach the moon, if one so desired.
I enlisted in the military twice – the Army National Guard while I was in college, and the Air Force after I graduated. Total time in service was just shy of 12 years, I think. Both times I joined for basically the same reasons – I didn’t see any other clear options for my life, and I wanted to serve my country. And both times, I would say the former reason carried more weight than the latter, but that doesn’t negate the desire to serve. And my time in the military, and the experiences I had there, crystallized and solidified my love of country, and strengthened my belief that while the U.S. isn’t perfect, it’s a damn good country.
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Nineteen Cubans sail to Key West in home-made boat
They used fiberglass, aluminum irrigation pipes (flattened) and a 4-cylinder Peugeot motor, spent 25 hours on the ocean, and landed safely on Key West at or around 530am January 25.
Twelve men, five women, and 2 children. Upon arrival, after being given showers and meals, their first real questions were about how soon they could find work.
The link in the first sentence is to a news article about their arrival. Val Prieto blogged about it over at Babalu Blog, complete with photos of the home-made boat, which looks remarkably like an old row-boat that I would be afraid to take onto a smooth pond (full disclosure- I’m not any kind of sailor, nor a strong swimmer).
Val quotes a correspondence from a friend of his, who was present at the time. An excerpt:
We provided them with soap, towels, chairs, and washed their clothes. The local police showed up with Cuban bread and coffee, and toys for the children.
The rafters were overjoyed! They wanted to know how long before they could get a job and were jittery with excitement at the world opened before them. Some of them reported that living under a system where you fear the police and the state 24 hours a day is not living, and to not be able to enjoy the fruit of your own labor is the worst form of slavery.
They were on the water only 25 hours. They gathered their money and resources and built an incredibly well-crafted boat out of flattened irrigation aluminum pipes, Fiberglas and a four-cylinder Peugeot motor. They had tried to depart twice before but experienced mechanical problems. On this occasion the motor worked like a charm.
One of the ladies in the group reported that she had been arrested by the police several days prior under suspicion of participating in the organization of an illegal departure from the country. She kept her composure and denied everything. Since they could not find any evidence, they released her. That night, all 19 of them got back on the boat again and left.
They stated that they are now and forever a single family of 19. They enjoyed taking pictures with the boat and the various officers that were in the area.
Welcome home, freedom-seekers, until your own homeland is safe for you again.
h/t: Val Prieto
p.s. If y’all have never read Val’s blog, you need to. He writes with an eloquence that puts most of us to shame.