Maggie's Farm

"This piece (via a reader) is fascinating but we ran out of time trying to figger out whether it's real."

Well, I'd say it's "real", in the sense that there are certainly "natural born killers" in the army, but the whiff I caught was that it was anti-military, couched in a friendly manner. Basically, "Sure, most, I mean many, I mean SOME American soldiers are natural born killers and it's the wise field commander who uses them to his best advantage!"

Or look at it this way: If it's on the level and he's just providing good advice to field commanders, well, what army brass doesn't know that some soldiers are natural born killers and should be used to best advantage? Isn't that kind of like advising the brass to arm their soldiers with guns, and be sure to provide water canteens?

As far as oddities go, apart from mixspelling 'MacArthur", there were some remarks that seemed off kilter:

- In the first paragraph, he's speaking to a tank commander who's walking around with a 14-hour-old bullet wound?

- Then there was what sounded like a piece of deceptive statistics to bolster a claim: "...only 15 to 25 percent of infantrymen ever fired their weapons in combat."

It should be kept in mind that, in order to fire a rifle during a battle, you need to have someone to fire AT. This isn't the Revolutionary War where the Redcoats are marching at you side by side. In modern wars, people are scurrying all over the place and while a soldier might see brief flurries of movement off in the distance, he might never get a clear shot. Add to that that modern battles are fought from great distances via air power and artillery and it's probably amazing that a modern soldier would EVER get a shot off.

There were other oddities, but, overall, it had the stink of armchair psychology about it, with no real point except obvious conclusions. At that point, the gentle reader finishes the article concluding that some (maybe even many!) American soldiers are natural born killers. Babies, women, children -- it's all the same to the natural born killers who make up our army thanks to President Bush!

Mission accomplished?

"Headlines in 2029"

That was a fun article, but I'd alter one thing:

"Global cooling blamed for citrus crop failure for third consecutive year in Mexifornia and Florexico."

Comparatively, there aren't any Mexicans here in Florida. The Hispanic population is about 2/3rds Cuban and 1/3 "everything else", with South American countries seeming to outweigh Central American countries. Rather than "Florexico", I'd call it "Fluba". :)