We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Captain Pete Hegseth, US Army, has served at Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, and was Executive Director of Vets For Freedom to support our troops and missions. No weak sister.
During his current deployment in Afghanistan, Hegseth has sent email letters home to those on his mailing list. His most recent arrived today, "Endgame in Afghanistan." It is near 4-thousand words long, so I have put it below the fold. Hegseth is not optimistic, stripping away what he refers to as "wishful thinking."
This isn’t to say that we couldn’t affect a more advantageous outcome for the United States; of course if we got rid of the 2014 withdrawal deadline completely, were willing to truly remove Taliban and Haqqani safe-havens in Pakistan (we know where they are!), and purged the Afghan government of its most corrupt nodes we could “change the game” of this conflict. But for various reasons—be they domestic politics, a nuclear-armed Pakistan (a lesson for Iran, I would suggest), and a trepidation with undermining corrosive “Afghan sovereignty”—it is highly unlikely we will make the hard choices necessary to level the playing field. A bad outcome in Afghanistan isn’t inevitable, but in light of current realities, it is likely.
He believes this battleground is "central to defending the United States."
In the realm of perception and international opinion it is still very important; how we “finish” in Afghanistan will send strong signals to the rest of the world about whether we finish what we start. Recent events in Iraq make this plainly clear. However, the question is whether the cost in Afghanistan is worth the outcome?As my British colleague says, “is the juice worth the squeeze?”I think seeing this through, while gradually drawing down, is worth doing.
According to defense analyst Anthony Cordesman the US will need to spend about $10-billion a year for the next 14-years to stand a chance of stabilizing Afghanistan.
We do not need more good intentions and vague promises from the Obama administration. We do not need a vacuous set of positions from Republican presidential candidates who either do not understand the issues or fear addressing their cost. If the United States is to make this commitment we need to start making it now in every part of our posture and spending in Afghanistan — and be clear that we will do so through 2025. If not, we need to be honest about the consequences for some 30 million Afghans and their country.
There's so much detail and stark facts in Hegseth's email that you would be remiss to not read on.
There are many things the government can't do, many good purposes it must renounce. It must leave them to the enterprise of others. It cannot feed the people. It cannot enrich the people. It cannot teach the people.
A wonderful synopsis of Roger Williams' life and influences:God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea - Banished from Massachusetts, the Puritan minister originated a principle that remains contentious to this day—separation of church and state.
I had not known that he had been a pretty big deal in English government before coming to Boston.
When you read about the Puritans in the 1600s - or about the C of E at the time, it is reminiscent of today's Middle Eastern Moslems. No "tolerance," and religious beheadings.
A quote on the founding of The Providence Plantations (Rhode Island):
On March 14, 1644, Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Plantations granted Williams his charter.
The committee could have imposed a governor or defined the government. Instead, it authorized a democracy, giving the colonists “full Powre & Authority to Governe & rule themselves...by such a form of Civil Government, as by voluntary consent of all, or the greater Part of them shall find most suteable” so long as its laws “be conformable to the Laws of England, so far as the Nature and Constitution of the place will admit.”
Even more extraordinary, the committee left all decisions about religion to the “greater Part”—the majority—knowing the majority would keep the state out of matters of worship. Soul liberty now had official sanction.
Williams had created the freest society in the Western world. But he had only begun...
Disturb us, Lord, when We are too pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess We have lost our thirst For the waters of life; Having fallen in love with life, We have ceased to dream of eternity And in our efforts to build a new earth, We have allowed our vision Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, To venture on wilder seas Where storms will show Your mastery; Where losing sight of land, We shall find the stars.
We ask you to push back The horizons of our hopes; And to push back the future In strength, courage, hope, and love.
This we ask in the name of our Captain, Who is Jesus Christ.
Francis Drake,an adventurer and essentially a legal pirate (What else is a second son supposed to do to make a living?), wrote this prayer as he departed Portsmouth on the Golden Hind to raid Spanish gold on the west coast of South America. He ventured at least as far north as the non-Spanish parts of California, claiming it as "New Albion" - New England- and returned to his Queen (the long way - via circumnavigation) with loot worth over a half million pounds sterling, and received his Knighthood for it.
A little old lady’s phone rings. She answers, “Hello.” The man on the line says, “You don’t know me, but I know you’d love me to come to your door, take you in my arms, kiss you, undress you, love your body.” The little old lady says, “All this you get from ‘Hello’?!
The usual leftists or armchair warriors eager to gratify leftist memes to get into print are writing all sorts of word-salads about how a few Marines pissing on some dead Taliban provides deep meaning into war, morality, training, geopolitics, history, and so on.
Bullshit on the phone, or a pissing of pixels.
Vietnam vets and, finally, truth won out. So, witness today's attempt to dehumanize and disparage our troops. Maggots keep crawling and trying to devour honor. Next time they need a Marine, instead call a fellow columnist.
Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days interesting. Well, for example, the other day, my wife-Annie and I went into town and visited a shop.
When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. We went up to him and I said, 'Come on, man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?'
He ignored us and continued writing the ticket.
I called him an "asshole". He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn-out tires. So Annie called him a "shit head". He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first.
Then he started writing more tickets. This went on for about 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote.
Just then our bus arrived, and we got on it and went home.
We always look for cars with "OBAMA 2012" stickers. We try to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important at our age.
"I've often been asked, 'What do you old folks do now that you're retired?' Well, I'm fortunate to have a chemical engineering background, and one of the things I enjoy most is converting beer, wine and vodka into urine.
I tend to agree with George Leef in that debate, but of course I think anybody ought to go if they want to. Some of my points, as readers know, are these:
- college does not equal education - very few people are natural scholars - for many people, it is just an extended adolescence, with credential-buying, beer, and sleeping til noon - many young people would rather work than study
Lubel is a nut (see his other Youtubes. I know a nerdy guy from Long Island who reminds me of him, who has always gotten lots of girls into bed not from his looks or achievements but from plain cheerful confidence and an optimistic, animal openness about his desires):
..the interest of individuals is above the exclusive interest of the state. The power of the whole is not to be set in the balance for a moment with freedom-that is, the conscience of the subject - and those who act on other principle are the worst of criminals.
Marines urinating on the dead? This is war. - The video of US marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters has shocked many. But the dehumanizing of the enemy was much worse back in the day.
When I was beginning to read I imagined that bridges had something to do with birds and with what seemed to be cages but I knew that they were not cages it must have been autumn with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires and those orange places on fire in the pictures and now indeed it is autumn the clear days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing over dry grass that yesterday was green the empty corn standing trembling and a down of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields and everywhere the colors I cannot take my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams red it is the season of migrants flying at night feeling the turning earth beneath them and I woke in the city hearing the call notes of the plover then again and again before I slept and here far downriver flocking together echoing close to the shore the longest bridges have opened their slender wings
This is something that gets obscured in today's medical reporting--everyone, as they get older, will get sick for some reason and die at some point. The biggest risk factor for heart disease and cancer isn't BMI, cholesterol, blood pressure, etc....it's age. And to a large extent, the incidence of those diseases is random; doing everything right lowers your risk of disease, but not to zero, and usually not to that small a fraction of the risk for the general population.
Too busy this week and week-end to do a good Editor-in-Chief job on Maggie's, but Vanderleun is doing a great job at his place. Image on the right is an example.
In America, the poor do not stay poor, and the rich do not remain rich. Overall, in the US, both great wealth and difficult poverty seem to be transient. I am opposed to the death tax because it discourages people from building a secure and independent future for their kids and grandkids.
Of course, death taxes seem not to affect the very wealthy.
From the latter link:
...if upward mobility is so common, why are there still plenty of poor people in this country? In a recent video about income mobility hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies, economist Steven Horwitz of Saint Lawrence University explains:“Immigrants and young people entering the labor force come into that income distribution at low levels of income. They become the new poor when the old poor slowly move their way up.” Horwitz concludes that “even though a first glance at the data may make it seem as if the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, the reality of the United States in the early 21st century is that everyone is getting richer, poor and rich alike.”
But-but-but, his computer models proved the link between good health and red wine. So whats the problem? So what if he made up a few numbers and tweaked the model to coincide with his theory, nothing new, everyone does it. Hey, the more red wine I drink, the better I feel. That’s all the modeling I need.
The reporting of the court martial of Frank Wuterich’s actions in 2005 at Haditha fails to adequately explain the background of the specific charges and, also, the standards of evidence that must be met. Without that crucial information, the reader of daily news reports is likely justifiably confused. The news reports are being more circumspect than previously in parroting accusations of willful massacre. But, major media reports are mostly cherry-picking comments from prosecution witnesses, briefly passing over defense cross-examination, and most importantly not presenting the crucial context of the testimony and examinations.
The core issues in the court martial are whether beyond a reasonable doubt Frank Wuterich acted (1) with dereliction of duty to not obey rules of engagement, (2) leading to his own actions and command culpability for negligent homicide in the deaths at Haditha that otherwise would have been avoided. These are reductions of charges from the original charges of murder against Frank Wuterich. Several other charges were thrown out in opening motions at the court martial.
These key points were examined in Frank Wuterich’s Article 32 proceeding. An Article 32 hearing is comparable to a preliminary hearing in civilian law, with even broader latitude in searching for whether there is cause to proceed to a court martial trial. In an Article 32 hearing, the standard is reasonable doubt. In a court martial, generally following civilian federal trial guidelines, the higher standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. The Article 32 hearing officer concluded that the throw-the-sink, murder charges brought by the prosecution were excessive to the standard of reasonable doubt, and that a key prosecution witness granted immunity – then Corporal, now Sergeant, Sanick Dela Cruz -- was not credible, his story changing multiple times.
"Bullshit" is the title of a well-known 1986 essay by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, now expanded into a short book.
Two of Frankfurt's main points seem to be that, 1, the bullshitter is more motivated to create an impression of himself rather than to communicate substantial true material and 2. bullshit may be more insidious than lying. From a review of the book here:
...bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Besides being a very bright fellow, his life as an academic gives him unique experience with the world of bullshit. We are all bullshitters, to some extent, but some make a career of it.
Frankfurt's original 6-page essay can be read here. One quote:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
A wonderful synopsis of Roger Williams' life and influences:
Why God sends rain to Mexico but not to the Middle East 
Disturb us, Lord, when
Genius! 
ECHOING LIGHT 
Too busy this week and week-end to do a good Editor-in-Chief job on Maggie's, but Vanderleun is doing a great job at
Don't swim in it: