Hookin' and Jabbin'

2008-07-05T12:10:00.003-05:00

Well, don't I feel like the jackass. I didn't bother to leave you folks a post here on Independence Day to fill you with love of country and appreciation for our bountiful gifts, but that's not to suggest I wasn't feeling it. Especially when I saw this picture. This was the first thing I saw when I woke up yesterday (courtesy of wwtdd.com), and damned if it didn't fill me with 4th of July spirit right off the bat. Bob and I agree: we're not big on people wearing flags, but Jessica Simpson is sort of our nation's prize hotty, so this time we'll let it slide. Next time, though, she'll have to take it off. I'll even forgive the peace sign, because I know she's probably spent about as much time in Iraq as I have, entertaining the troops in a way only a girl of her looks and charm could.

Rather than spending my Independence Day posting here, I went with Bob down to our coworker Jimmy's house in Vienna. We discharged a multitude of firearms throughout the day, including my first two revolvers and Bob's cherry Browning pump shotgun, we drank beer, ate grilled meat and drank home-brewed wine. Then we went to Harrah's casino in Metropolis (home of Superman!) and I lost $23 while trying to win back $3. This just speaks to my fear of growing much stupider since high school. Anyways, short of watching fireworks and military parades (or sticking it to the terrorists like I was doing a few years ago on the Fourth), this was about the most American behavior I could hope for.

If you couldn't tell, Independence Day is my favorite holiday by leaps and bounds (though scantily-clad women make a strong argument for Halloween as second place). In all seriousness, I hope you all had a meaningful and inspiring Fourth, and I wish I could've been around to spend it with you.

2008-05-26T10:54:00.005-05:00

On April 29, 1866, at Woodlawn Cemetery in Carbondale, Illinois, Gen. John A. Logan spoke in an event that likely originated his idea for a holiday commemorating the fallen soldiers of the Union, which he later proclaimed in his capacity as commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. May 30th, 1866 was the first Decoration Day, which came to be called Memorial Day in 1882.

142 years later, I stood in Woodlawn Cemetery in pouring rain with fifty-some other people who saw this commemoration as more important than their comfort. Across the country, millions of others are doing the same. 4,082 Americans have died while fighting in Iraq, and 29,978 have been wounded. These gallant men and women
are the salt of the earth, brave souls who regardless of politics have advanced the cause of freedom at the highest possible expenses to themselves. An estimated 1.3 million uniformed Americans have given their lives in service to their country since its creation, and today we renew our pledge never to forget. The highest honor we can give them is to remember what they died for and why. God bless America and keep our servicemen safe.

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." - John Stuart Mill

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

2008-04-21T03:37:00.001-05:00

Jeeze, Facebook, you don't have to be so harsh about it.

2008-03-10T14:14:00.005-05:00

Living, breathing Bible

I've heard of the concept of a "living, breathing" Constitution. Now, it seems the Bible lives and breathes just the same.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/10/eavatican110.xml
I wish I had the primary source of this article, so I wasn't at risk of misunderstanding the language used in these new "mortal sins" ("genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy and taking drugs").

So many thoughts bug me about this that I don't know where to start. I guess my first problem with it is that it seems to be encoding modern political fads into the eternal moral standards of the Church. Like I said, this is just like someone reinterpreting the Constitution to mean something that fits their political purposes. It goes without saying that the Church ought to be above this kind of nonsense.

The doctrine of the Church ought to be eternal, absolute, and self-evident. What is absolute about saying that pollution is a mortal sin? Is my soul going to suffer eternal death because the lightbulbs I use aren't energy star compliant? How about using drugs? Am I to stop drinking soda and start refusing penicillin, or is it only illegal drugs that I cannot use? Illegal in what country? How wealthy can I become before it is considered obscene? Shall I cut myself off before reaching the highest tax bracket, or shall I not have any savings at all? To me, the chief virtue of the church is that its moral standards are absolute. It provides a moral foundation, a system of deciding if something is right or wrong, a bedrock of unquestionable morality. With these behaviors now considered to be mortal sins, it should be pretty important to know if I am at risk of eternal damnation, for which there doesn't seem to be any standard.

The "sins of yesteryear" - sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and pride - have a "rather individualistic dimension", he told the Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper.
The new seven deadly, or mortal, sins are designed to make worshippers realise that their vices have an effect on others as well.
"The sins of today have a social resonance as well as an individual one," said Mgr Girotti. "In effect, it is more important than ever to pay attention to your sins."

So far as I'm concerned, this means that the nature of my entire relationship with God must have changed. I had considered it to be a personal one, in which He cherishes me individually and favors my personal relationship with Him, but now the Church seems to be telling me that He kind of just likes us all as a whole. Evidently not only am I to meet a minimum standard of not being bad, but I actually have to be really, really good, or I'm going straight to hell. And, so far as I can tell, all in the pursuit of political correctness. I wonder how many years it will be before the Church stipulates that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, I have to eat organic foods and always defer my moral judgments to the United Nations.

2008-03-09T23:19:00.002-05:00

New title banner today, and I tinkered with the size of the main body, but it was not how I'm used to tinkering with those settings, so let me know if it looks really goofy. The biggest problem I could see with it would be that it would edge out the profile and links and what have you on the right side of the screen.

Marines in Fallujah

2008-01-28T18:38:00.000-06:00

Today I went to Fox News' website to find out when the State of the Union Address would air. While there, I caught this article about the troop levels in Fallujah having decreased from 3,000 at the end of 2006 to around 250 today. It's gone down 90% since I was there. I can't even imagine that massive base having only two or so companies on it. The point is, evidently things are pretty much cleaned up in Fallujah, and the Iraqi Police are nearly ready to take over (or whatever you want to call it...I wouldn't trust those bastards with a butter knife).

I mentioned this to my friend Karnolt, who was my best bud there, in an email after talking to him tonight. His response was "Wow, I'm very proud to say that I served in [Iraq] out of Camp Fallujah and it is practically a success." I hadn't even thought of it like that, I'd just thought it was an interesting news item. But indeed, the impending success of the Fallujah Marines' mission is in part my own success, and my efforts there helped to make this happen. And that feels pretty damn good.

"Taxes are easy to explain"

2008-01-28T18:30:00.000-06:00

[editor's note: I got this from a friend from Fallujah on myspace.]

Ten men go out for beer. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1. The sixth would pay $3. The seventh would pay $7. The eighth would pay $12. The ninth would pay $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. He said, "Since you are all such good customers, I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80."

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes, so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men -- the paying customers?

How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his "fair share"? They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay!

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings). The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings). The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings). The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings). The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings). The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

I only got a dollar out of the $20," declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, "but he got $10!"

"Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!"

"That's true!!"shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!"

"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!" The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up any more. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

[editor's note: Friendlier? I don't know about that. But it's still a useful analogy.]

Al Gore updates climate change

2008-01-24T12:46:00.000-06:00

Drudge has a news article about Al Gore revealing today that the impending doom of climate change will be significantly worse than earlier predictions. Read the article, it's almost humorous. He goes on to state that within five years the North Polar ice caps may melt entirely during the summer months. I like this news for two reasons: first, it allows us to prove much sooner that he's full of shit when the polar caps don't melt within five years (even the most horrific of "scientific" predictions don't have the polar caps melting for something like another hundred years). Second, it shows how much Al Gore knows the global warming scare is in his hands (and, logically, how unscientific -- read: "bologne" -- it is). Without even trying to cite demonstrable evidence, he ups the ante based on his word alone. After all, he's a "Nobel prize winner", even if it is a Peace Prize, so we should believe him. Clearly, he was underwhelmed with the obviously weak language of the IPCC report and feels a need to reestablish his mandate, so he makes a blatantly unsupported claim which ought to scare those idiots back in line. What an asshole.

Political education at University of Delaware

2008-01-18T14:57:00.000-06:00

I don't know if this made the news or not. I don't think so, but I haven't been much a newshound for awhile. I just read an article called "Brave Newark World" from Halloween of last year written by Dr. Mike Adams about a re-education program the University of Delaware had started in its residence halls. It's chilling. Fortunately, there is Supreme Court precedence here and thanks to Dr. Adams' readers and a general community response the university revoked that initiative within five days of the article being published. Essentially, UD required the students in their residence halls to attend meetings (UD called them "treatments") with their RAs who had been trained in "diversity facilitation" and who would then conduct diversity training and ask the students invasive questions pertaining to their sexuality and experiences in "oppression". I urge you to read Dr. Adams' article. It's extremely important to recognize that things like this happen in America, so we have the vigilance to stop such things from happening again.

It's unbelievable to me that enough college administrators with such Orwellian agendas can get together and force these kinds of things down the throats of young and impressionable college people. If you read the quotes that Adams provides, these people weren't trying to just show their students that "underpriveleged" people exist in the world, nor were they simply advocating responsible recognition that racism is a problem. This is a systematic brainwashing of impressionable young people by the authorities they pay to teach them, people who hold economic power over them by virtue of their owning and being in control of the places the students live in, and who control these people's very livelihood as students. This disgusts me. "There, he is taught that '[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.'” They're taught that racism is a uniquely white thing? How racist is that? These people should be put into prison. This is a state school. The people enacting these policies are unelected government officials, imposing strict partisan dogma on every student who is paying to live in their dorms. This terrifies me.

I know I don't have many readers (to my knowledge, Dad and occasionally Ryan). But if you happen upon this blog and you're a college student, please visit the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and have them send you (for free!) their guides, especially if you're in a student group of any kind. I had them sent to me when I was vice president of the College Republicans and president of my fraternity, and though we had no occasion to use them (thank God), they are indispensable for what they tell you about your rights as a student, especially in situations like this. Again, they will send you their guides at no expense to you, and if you find yourself in such a situation you can get in touch with them (their site makes this easy) and there is a good chance they will provide you with legal representation and publicity to make this kind of damn thing stop.

Fifth Column

2007-12-31T12:22:00.001-06:00

I've been slowly reading through The Futurist for all its insight, and have come to an interesting article about fifth columnists. I read through his first example (at Daily Kos, who Forbes listed as third of the top 25 most influential internet personalities) and it was frightening, maddening, and disgusting. Its only value is in its honesty, and the unshakable evidence it provides from a leading leftist who admits to hating America. His reasoning, as I said, is maddening, and when I tried to think of how you could reach a person like this in argument I came up with nothing. I then read The Futurist's advice on how to debate a person like this, and I'm not satisfied at all with his advice either. It's because I do not think there is any way to reason with someone like that. Someone so disconnected from reality, who clearly has so little desire to understand truth, who is completely devoid of honor, cannot be reasoned with. There is no Truth to a person like this, except his belief in nothing, which is to say his loyalty to the destruction of everything. These people are part of Dad's 90% (or higher), the percentage of the population who I will never understand, never agree with, whose values I will never share and who I will never befriend and will never want to. Hopefully, they make up an extremely small amount of that 90%.

Anyways, enjoy your New Year's Eve and have a happy New Year!

Reagan speeches

2007-12-19T16:46:00.001-06:00

I've been watching some of Ronald Reagan's speeches and reading others today. It started with a link to a YouTube video of his call to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Watching that speech at first, I was caught by the way he had with words, his eloquence and slow, simple, profound speech. Then he says, "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate." And the silent crowd erupts in cheers and applause, causing him to pause. Then, the command of righteousness in his voice, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The cheers explode in a roar again, only moreso, like he is a rock star just coming on stage, his message music to the ears of a people tired from years of divisiveness, agitation and crisis. And I thought, "My god, this truly was a great man."

A lesser point from his farewell address was what brings me to this post though. I'll quote it liberally here:

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-'60s.

But now, we're about to enter the '90s, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.

So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important: Why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing of her late father, who'd fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, "We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did." Well, let's help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson No. 1 about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

This seems to me like a very important message, more true now than ever before. "Those who create the popular culture" obviously have not heeded President Reagan's call, and our television, our movies, and our national sense of pride did not return to a place where it's "in style" to have that well-grounded sense of patriotism. There's a very small group of about four or five leaders in Hollywood who occasionally make movies that instill a sense of pride in our national heritage, and hope for where we're headed. As he said, too many parents don't seem to bother instilling that "unambivalent appreciation for America," and we suffer as a result. See the complacency I mentioned in my last post. And, while as Dad said there are plenty of us still out there who treasure it and are willing to fight for it, I've noticed a downward trend. "Trend" really is the right word because it's like Reagan said, it's not "in style," and realizing that being trendy is important to so much of our nation is a disheartening thing. Is there nothing worth valuing your whole life, are there no absolutes that are important enough to keep in your heart and free from the opinions of others?

Something that Reagan seemed to have, and correct me if I'm wrong (I was barely five years old by the time he was out of office), was a near invulnerability to the stresses of politics. His agenda didn't seem to be party-based, it seemed to be Reagan-based. He appeared to me, from what I've read and seen of him, to hold himself above politics, basing his decisions on a higher set of ideals. Ultimately, it seems he had a better memory of right and wrong, a more cohesive, consistent understanding of why he believed what he did, and a steadfast determination to stick to his gut. He aspired to a higher purpose, that of liberty and freedom from the evils of the world. Just doesn't seem like he muddied himself with petty partisan politics (and I hate alliteration) like is so much the business these days. They don't make 'em like they used to.

Invasion

2007-12-03T03:36:00.000-06:00

[edit: I changed the font size of the posts so they weren't so hard on the eyes, but I had to fool with the html quite a bit to get it to look right to me. If it's absurdly large or small on your browser, please let me know in the comments so I can go back to how it used to look. Thanks!]

I just read Bill Whittle's "Freedom" (possiby the oldest essay on the site? Second oldest?). It was a marvelous essay as usual. While not terribly revolutionary in its arguments, he once again put things so damn perfectly and clearly that it renewed in me my vigor on the subject of the Second Amendment. Something he said in it, though, triggered a thought that I'd never before allowed myself.

"And by the way, gun rights supporters are frequently mocked when they say it deters foreign invasion -- after all, come on, grow up, be realistic: Who's nuts enough to invade America? Exactly. It's unthinkable. Good. 2nd Amendment Mission 1 accomplished."

The thing that bugged me was the word "unthinkable." I guess it's something I've always believed myself, that an invasion of the United States is something reserved for wildly imaginative fiction, something that I literally had never given serious thought to before. My whole life, even being the paranoid fantasist that I am, I have never allowed the reality into my head that any force or country could try to invade the U.S. I've imagined countless fascist takeover-scenarios where our government's invasiveness reached a boiling point and federalist troops have come to take away our rights and our weapons to ensure the continuation of their oppressive regime, always resulting in my dad and I staging a heroic last stand or forming a kind of underground resistance (hell, I even started writing a short story about it long ago, and my NaNo story is an extrapolation along the same lines). But it wasn't until Bill Whittle said a foreign invasion of our homeland was impossible, unthinkable, that I realized it's not unthinkable at all.

Most any country in the world could not even begin to hope for victory in invading American soil. There is not a country in all the world, nor has there ever been a country, who could even consider an invasion of our mainland without risking complete depletion of all their resources in attempting such a task, especially not while we have even a single ally. The fighting spirit not only of our military but that which is imbued in every American citizen is simply too great and too common. But it's possible. Communist China has the manpower for such an invasion force, if they were to enlist a quarter of their populace into their armed services. Pretty much every able man and woman of military age would be needed, but they've got enough to throw at us that they would stand a chance at crippling our government, if they could reach our shores. They've got the industrial power to arm so many if needed, I think. And they've probably got a political climate unstable enough where a person of sufficient insanity and boldness could come into power. The chances of these things ever happening are infinitesimally small, but there is still a chance that it could happen.

The reason I decided this thought was worth posting about is that I don't think it's something we should consider unthinkable. If it sounds unpatriotic to imagine a foreign army able of taking down our military and then a significant chunk of our civilian populace, I'd say it's just the opposite. In a strange paradox, it seems to me that so much of the American populace is convinced of our invulnerability, they've lost the appreciation for what we have. It's complacency at its worst. Our national identity is crippled by our strength. We've been so lulled into feeling safe that we have forgotten how fragile our national existence is. That's why September 11th was such a shock, and also why flags flew from every home for months afterwards. When we forget that there are millions, perhaps billions, of people in the world who would like to see us destroyed, or when we let that knowledge become so unreal to us that we can't even imagine a full frontal attack on our home soil, we tend to forget why our nation is something worth defending, and indeed something that needs defending.

This, I think, is a thought that is fairly peculiar to the most recent generations of Americans. Up to 1865, the United States was in a frequent state of war fought to truly establish and preserve its existence as a nation, and fought largely on our own turf. We continued to fight conventional wars against powerful, organized enemies through 1945, and indeed our last full-scale war against uniformed enemies was fought in Vietnam, though it was far from a conventional war, with a great deal of guerilla war in the mix, and a vast swath of opposition to the war here at home. According to my limited understanding, that was the beginning of modern anti-war sentiment, or anyways the first time there had been a sizable chunk of Americans back home who were vociferously against the war we were fighting. Everything since then has been smaller conflicts, or in the cases of Desert Shield/Desert Storm and now the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, wildly one-sided in the case of the former and almost entirely a fight against guerilla combatants in the case of the latter.

Anyways, I'd argue that the last serious, cohesive threat to the United States was gone in 1991, when I was eight years old. So my generation was mostly too young to ever understand and appreciate what it's like to feel my nation threatened by a powerful, capable enemy that existed as more than an ideology. My whole politically-conscious life has been while the United States was the sole superpower, so I never had to fear for the life of my nation. And at that, I think the last great, uniting, open battle against a common foe ended in 1945. Even the baby boomers have never seen a traditional full-scale war. And I posit that these last sixty years of "peace" and prosperity for the American people, these years since our last conventional war, have lulled us into a sense of national security so impenetrable that many of us can't understand the imminent, everlasting need for "a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms". We've only fought elective wars for sixty years, and we've learned to dismiss any possibilities that our great nation could ever be challenged, so we've begun to challenge it ourselves. This complacency towards our national existence for lack of examples of its fragility is what then rots into anti-nationalism. All the apathy towards the safeguards on our freedom, and the attitudes of protectionism that spawned those safeguards, is what results from that complacency. To the Founding Fathers, it was easy to understand how essential an armed populace is to ensuring the security of a free state. But there hasn't been a military-industrial power capable of seriously threatening our borders in at least sixteen years, and we haven't fought a full-scale war on our own soil in 143 years. Still, how quickly people forget.

Somebody named Mark William Paules responded to Bill Whittle's most recent post, "FREEDOM versus JUSTICE", saying that "an engaged and educated citizenry is necessary for a healthy democracy, but there comes a point in the history of every civilization where decadence sets in", citing as an example that when "the Vandal horde [sic] approached Rome in AD 455, the able youth of the city refused to man the walls," essentially having forgotten what it was to be Roman out of complacency. I can only hope that this period without the U.S. fighting wars for its right to exist has not made us forget what it is to be American, fighting tooth and nail not for a tribal leader or a king but for ourselves and the nation in which we can choose our own paths and live with more true liberty than any other civilization in the history of the world.

Late night NaNo

2007-11-01T04:57:00.000-05:00

Well, it's officially November 1st, and at midnight I was free to start working on my NaNoWriMo novel. I didn't start til later and kind of putzed around with it til I got going, but I did finally get going. So far I've written 583 words, which is 1084 words short of my daily minimum (1667 words * 30 days = ~50k words) and only about 1.2% of the monthly goal...but it's 5 a.m. on November 1st. I'm going to get some rest and start up again when I wake up so I can write something coherent. I'm pretty damn happy with how well it's going so far...I've got ideas up the wazoo and I'm already seeing interesting plot twists on the horizon and some character development, and I'm only a single-spaced page in. Look forward to more good news...but I think to save time I'll mostly use my Pownce blog (linked on the top right) for NaNoWriMo news on my front.

NaNoWriMo

2007-10-08T15:21:00.001-05:00

November is National Novel Writing Month, and I'm participating in it this year thanks to the encouragement of my good friend and fellow writing enthusiast, Ben Arnold. Essentially, it's a sort of competition (or challenge, really) that was started something like seven years ago where you try to write a novel of about 50,000 words (about 120 pages) in the month of November. It starts at 12:00 a.m. on November 1st and ends at 11:59 p.m. on November 30th. The idea is to just sit down and write and to learn to squelch your inner editor, so you can actually write the whole damn story and not stop yourself out of frustration with the inadequacy of the story. There aren't really prizes per se, just certificates for those who succesfully write a 50,000-word story, but as I said, the whole point is sort of the learning process of writing through to the end, the discipline to make yourself sit down and write every day and not get so flustered that you quit writing. So, Ben and I are trying it this year. I've done some outlining for what I want to write, and can't wait for November 1st to come around so I can start putting words on paper. Also, I've added a sort of mini-blog per Ben's invitation, which I have linked on the top right of the page. Feel free to come around in November for updates on how I'm doing, and offer any encouragement you possibly can. I'm terrible at making myself write through what I believe to be crap writing, so I'm going to need all the encouragement I can get.

George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"

2007-09-20T18:24:00.000-05:00

My neighbor, Beth, and I discussed modern politics today. I mentioned that I've stopped watching the news and following them online entirely since I returned from Iraq, having lost my stomach for lies and inaction. She kindly directed me to an article by George Orwell that insightfully chastises modern political language, saying that today's "chattering class" (as Maj. Gen. Kelly so deftly calls it -- thanks Dad!) is so full of meaningless identity politics and empty commitment to orthodoxy that it's become unbearable. I read it and see what she means.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

P.S. It is as hard as it sounds to write how Orwell describes.

500 scientists refute global warming scare

2007-09-12T17:35:00.001-05:00

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,176495.shtml

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

2007-09-11T11:42:00.001-05:00

Six years have passed, but all that time hasn't dulled my memory of that Tuesday morning a bit. All the emotion I felt that morning hasn't left me, but just been buried under years of other problems mercifully taking my mind away from what that morning's events represented. Last year at this time, I was enjoying 115 degree heat in the cradle of civilization and bringing the fight to the moral brethren of the September 11th attackers, so I don't know what to do with myself this year. More disturbing is that I don't know what to think about today being September the 11th, as though I've allowed myself to numb to the importance of the date. This was a day we must never forget lest we should allow ourselves the complacency that made its tragedy possible in the first place.

Civilization began in the fertile crescent of the Nile, Jordan, Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where ancient cultures developed thanks to the sustenance available to them from proximity to those powerful, thriving rivers. Human civilization further lept forward in the Mesopotamian city of Babylon (in present-day southern Iraq) with the establishment of coded laws, and its prowess as a civilization could be gleaned from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. As long as there has been civilization, there has been civilization in Iraq; indeed, it has been a launching point for civilization and culture all throughout human history. But we are entering a dark age of civilization of which Iraq is already deep in the throes, because civilization does not come inherent with large collections of people but from those people sharing a cumulative moral value. Plenty of trade is being conducted both here and there, culture in and of itself continues to develop, yet there exists an increasingly downward trend of morality, responsibility, and respect for fellow man that condemn us as a civilization.

Peace is a glorious achievement and should be the end goal of humanity, but that kind of peace must be righteous. Easy peace in the depths of corruption, murder and immorality is no peace at all, and our present decline of morality becomes evident in our civilization's lack of moral courage to fight immorality, murder and extortion at our own doorstep. All of our great progress in science, culture, art, business and technology cannot continue with an impotence of will to consistently reaffirm our right to exist. Our progress, our values are doomed if we think ignoring the murderer will stop him from killing us in our sleep.

I remember that morning well. Second and third period I spent at the vocational center, and Mr. Michel had the television tuned to the news, which was unusual, so I walked in and watched. Two hours later, after the towers had fallen, I still stood where I had first walked in, my backpack was still on my back and my coat had never come off. I hadn't even noticed that there was a full class around me, seemingly oblivious to the importance of what had just happened. I went to my next class, and the teacher had the radio on. She was listening to it, and so was I, unable to tear myself away from it while my fellow students took advantage of our teacher's preoccupation with the radio. They sat in the back of the classroom and joked around, talked about what they had done the last weekend and who was dating whom. I had to concentrate to keep myself from crying in public, but they seemed more concerned with what was happening in baseball. All I can think is that those must be the people able to yell out for peace, screaming that we should never have gone to Iraq, that we've got too many other problems to deal with at home to continue this war. They must not have been paying attention on September 11th, 2001.

Afterthought: In 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor when World War II was already in full swing. At best, Americans heard about that day's events over the radio long after it had happened, versus watching the whole event play out in real time and in living color. Roughly half as many Americans died that day, mostly military, and it brought the United States fully into World War II. The war continued for four years and cost almost 167 times as many American lives as the war in Iraq, throughout brutal victories and defeats, with military servicemen away from home for at least twice as long as today. Yet American support for that war began and continued to be extremely strong, with the might of the American economy working almost single-mindedly towards wartime efforts the entire time. That war took four years and ended decisively and gloriously in favor of the United States. Perhaps in sixty years we have indeed lost that much of our courage, endurance, and surety of righteousness. We must unite, and regain our lost composure and strength of purpose, if we are to prevail now as we did then.

On Canadian Health Care

2007-07-07T16:27:00.000-05:00

Free markets produce an incompassionate lust for money, whereas nationalized health care means everybody can get the health care they need? I think it's the other way around. It's lucky these people had the money and the means to get what they needed. A poorer man would have been left to die.

In remembrance

2007-07-04T13:56:00.000-05:00

Cpl. Paul N. King, 23, of Tyngsboro, Mass., was killed June 25th, 2006 in Fallujah, Iraq. He and his platoon, from 1st Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, were providing perimeter security and cordon for 1st Platoon, Hotel Company, 3/14, after one of our 7-ton trucks was hit by an IED right in the center of Fallujah, just a few blocks away from the Iraqi Police station. The truck had frame damage and two tires blown, so we had to stop and make just enough repairs to make it to the relative security of the police station, where we could fix it enough to make it adequately drivable.

Cpl. King, providing our perimeter, was shot by a sniper known around Fallujah for his marksmanship and elusiveness. The sniper, probably using a high-power rifle leftover from other conflicts and himself probably a mercenary veteran of other radical-Islamic conflicts around the world such as Chechnya or Afghanistan, was able to shoot Cpl. King while moving under the armpit, in an extremely small area unprotected by body armor. Cpl. King was immediately evacuated to Fallujah Surgical, and we heard later that night upon our return to Camp Fallujah that he had died of his wounds.

I never knew Cpl. King, never met him and I knew nobody from his company or 1/25 in general. Yet I will never forget his name, because when we were under attack in the hottest part of Fallujah and in the middle of a cross-compartment danger zone, he and his fellow Marines came out of cover to make sure no hidden insurgents took advantage of our convoy's incapacitation. He came out with no notice to ensure that we were safe, and in doing so, he was killed by a coward unwilling to fight us in the open.

Cpl. King is just one of countless Marines who have had the courage to forgo their own safety to ensure the safety of others, and put everything they had on the line in the service of a higher cause. Cpl. King and others like him are, for me, the number one reason we must see this fight through. The price we have paid is too high for us to submit to the divisive politicking or our own self-doubt. He did not doubt the righteousness of our cause, or our resolve to ensure the security of our Iraqi friends, or much more importantly, ourselves. God bless him and his family.

Bill Whittle's "Victory"

2007-07-02T00:46:00.000-05:00

Back to reading Bill Whittle in my spare time. I read "Responsibility" today and liked it, as it very elegantly and perfectly put my thoughts on the fundamental difference in human beings and what creates conflict. I more or less forgot all about it, though, reading "Victory." He wrote it in 2003, evidently shortly after they tore down the statue of Saddam in Baghdad. You know the one. The one I didn't see in Baghdad, because it wasn't there. Anyways, a lot of people, especially opponents to his way of thinking, and even myself at first, would say in hindsight that the article is written pretty naively optimistically, given that we're still fighting there and don't know when we'll be done or if we can really call it a victory. As the piece went along, though, I saw that even in mid-2003 we really had achieved profound victory in Iraq.

Everything I've read of Bill Whittle's so far has deeply touched my mind, but this one deeply touched my heart, too. I thought I was going to cry reading it at one point; thinking back on it now, I still might cry writing about it. In his typical fashion, he leads you to believe that he's talking about one thing, then reveals that he's talking about something more basic and significant yet. In this case, he talks about the victory we've won for two-thirds of the article, then says that he's not talking about our military victory, but the fact that we were even willing to fight at all, and then how we fought. The part that nearly made me cry was this excerpt:

"...we had the genius – the only word for it -- to place reporters from several nations, and from every point on the political spectrum – among the troops, to not only see for themselves, but to show the entire planet, in real time,
whether or not American servicemen are baby-killing murderers or the most
tightly disciplined, courageous, humble, humane and morally magnificent army that has ever gone into battle in the storied history of this human species.
Just step back for a moment, and think about how monumentally confident that action was. Before it even started, without knowing how well or badly it would go, with dire warnings of street-to-street fighting that would echo the horrors of Stalingrad, and predictions from shrill and desperate cynics that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians would die – on camera – we decided that we could trust our eighteen and nineteen year old grunts to do the right thing with bullets flying and the blood of their best friends on their uniforms.
Ah, but these were American kids, well-educated, highly motivated, decent and determined, and the most professional warriors, ambassadors and statesmen that ever walked this earth. Good God I am proud of every single one of them."

It truly is of unparalleled significance that our leaders had the monumental confidence in us to go about the war as it has, that our people, less the whiners and scapegoaters and demagogues, had not even the courage but the indelible confidence in our young people to go ahead with the war as we have. In addition, he crystallizes the notions that this war is probably preventing many wars future generations would have to fight, by reminding the world that we will fight a long and daunting battle to prove that our rock-solid system is the best system on the planet now and in all of its history. That "everything the enemies of America could throw at us – failed."

I have also been thinking lately, and was reminded strongly reading "Victory", of the comprehensive economics of nations. I think war's goal is to cause the enemy nation to hemmorhage resources, both tangible and political, until it can no longer survive further losses and is at the mercy of its opponent. "Victory" was really more about the Hearts & Minds campaign than about destroying or cause to be lost to the enemy its tangible resources, but I think it helped persuade me of the importance of that Hearts & Minds campaign. My problem with it before probably stemmed from it being such a cushy, bleeding-heart catchphrase, but I think its success would mean total success for the same reasons that make Iraq and us different in the first place. Our end goal really is to reshape Iraq into a free marketplace of ideas, trade, and culture, as I believe is the manifest destiny of the rest of the world. The American experiment has been so comprehensively succesful and caused such rapid growth in every field of human existence, and caused so much of the rest of the world to advance in kind, that only the worst fools can denounce it. The beauty of the American system is that it isn't just American, or rather it's not a quick fix or uniquely fitted to America. Anyone equipped with logic can reason out for themselves that the existence of creatable wealth begets free trade begets freedom and growth, no matter the culture or religion or resources. The only two requirements are the ability to trust each other and the desire to work hard, and everything from there falls into place. It doesn't require sacrificing your rich cultural traditions, just your desire to rule others and get what you don't pay for.

I guess that basically sums up why some other cultures or peoples don't like it: they'd have to start equal to everyone else and work their way up. We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. And once they're done, the whole damn world is better for it.

On Greg

2007-06-21T14:06:00.000-05:00

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Greg recently. This came about from listening to the Bob Seger song "Like a Rock," which whenever I really listen to it I can't help but think of Greg. It's been playing on repeat in my car at full volume, because the song kicks ass. If you're reading and don't know the song it's the one from about half the Chevy truck commercials of the last fifteen years (evidently, Seger, who's from Michigan, offered its use at length to Chevy to aid the then-struggling Detroit auto workers...whatever). To some extent, the commercials have cheapened the song because casual listeners (namely ones too young to remember the song on the radio before it was used for the ads, like myself) might have a really hard time hearing the song and not dismissing it as a lame marketing tool, but if you can put aside that initial kneejerk reaction to it, it's really pretty good.

Anyways, I always wish I had more of Greg's strengths. Here's a guy who really knows what he's about. He doesn't seem like he ever has moral crises, he just sees what's right and does it, quickly and with everything he's got. He knows his priorities and his values without even thinking about them, just sees the right in them and has the unwavering integrity to pursue them without self-doubt. I feel like I have too hard a time deciding what's right for me, what way I want to go with my life and all that to do the big things, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for Greg at all. He's got all the defining qualities that come to mind when I think of a real man. To top it all off, he's tough as nails too, man, he's a real steel horseman. He's wanted: dead or alive. What a badass.

Here's the first half of the song's lyrics, the parts that make me think of Greg, for your consideration:

Stood there boldly, sweatin' in the sun
Felt like a million, felt like number one
The height of summer, I'd never felt that strong
Like a rock

I was eighteen, didn't have a care
Workin' for peanuts, not a dime to spare
But I was lean and solid everywhere
Like a rock

My hands were steady, my eyes were clear and bright
My walk had purpose, my steps were quick and light
And I held firmly to what I felt was right
Like a rock

Like a rock, I was strong as I could be
Like a rock, nothing ever got to me
Like a rock, I was something to see
Like a rock

And I stood arrow-straight, unencumbered by the weight
Of all these hustlers and their schemes
I stood proud, I stood tall
High above it all
I still believed in my dreams

Tribes

2007-06-01T23:29:00.000-05:00

This is actually a comment I was about to make on my last post, but it grew too long and too important to be just a comment. It was in response to Bill Whittle's "Tribes" on the same site as the article from my last post. Here it is:

One last comment from me on this post, as my justification for not just starting a new post will have run out...and this one's for Dad.

I have now read "Tribes" as well, and at the risk of soliciting your disagreement since I'm such a wonderful and courageous young lad and whatnot, having served my country in Iraq with the mighty United States Marines, I'm prone to call myself the pink-leaning sort of grey tribe, and essentially a sheep in sheepdog's clothing. Any given day, I've got a better than average chance of feeling more the sheep than sheepdog, but in my Young, Dumb, and Full of...Whatever moments, I fancy myself a hard-line sheepdog. Frankly, I figure at my very best I'm Bill Whittle's kind of amateur, stand-by sheepdog.

I figure I'm too inclined towards the artistic in my writing, too bad at practical productivity to call myself truly grey. You might say I'm like New York in that I can turn deep grey in a might hurry when it's called for, but civilian complacency has great power over me, and the idealistic college attitude still has a great deal of control over me as well.

The biggest point he made about being a sheepdog that makes me feel like I must be one, though, was this: "...all I can say is that I believe in my heart that I would rather die for something bigger than myself than lead a life where nothing is more important than me." That is one of my most important ideals...if I die peacefully in my sleep as an old, old man, I feel like I will have been robbed. If there's one way that I really want to be "special," it's that I want to die a death that means something profound. There are too many interesting and powerful ways to die for me to die an average, peaceful death. I would be much happier to die on the field of battle, not only defending but proactively asserting the freedoms and ideals not even of my countrymen but by god of my own self. And that's something that this article may have helped redefine for me; I don't want to die for the bland idea of my countrymen, as there are too many in this country who don't deserve it and don't appreciate what I'd be buying for them. I'll be damned if I'm thought to be so generous as to give my very life for somebody else's prosperity. I would be giving my life in assertion that these ideals that I hold so high, this country system that I value above all others, are righteous and true and leaps above all others in virtue and worth. I don't fight to secure the rights of simply others in my country, I fight to secure the rights of my Tribe. I love my Tribe, I love those who mean so much to me not because of a shared geopolitical origin but because they have found the same ideals to be true and worthy of high sacrifice to secure them. I do not care for those in my same system with diametrically opposed priorities to my own, and I would not give my life to see that they are afforded the opportunity to topple my beliefs. I think it's important that as many ideas and as many options as possible are brought to the table, so that we may evaluate them, laugh at the stupid ones, and strengthen ourselves, strengthen our other ideals and our other crops through synergy. Make no mistake that I have any intention other than to topple those who oppose my beliefs through the success of my system over theirs, and through the butterfly effect of conviction and commitment to what we have found to be right. We have found it to be so thoroughly right and righteous that our conviction knows no bounds; the things we know to be true are worth so much to us that their continuation is profoundly more important than our own.

Okay, so maybe I am a sheepdog.

You Are Not Alone

2007-05-29T14:12:00.001-05:00

My father sent me a link to a page called Eject! Eject! Eject! that has an article (or two, I suppose) called "You Are Not Alone". This article is largely about the precarious balance between cooperation as a society and self-advancement, about the need for just action in the face of exploitation, and the role of incontrovertible character and duty in a society rife with criminal personalities and self-destructive short-mindedness. It excited me enough that I had to start this post before I was finished with the second half of the article, so forgive me for failing to mention a strong point. Only an hour til I must go to work, and I thought it possible that I'd talk on it so much just posting the link that I wouldn't get it posted until after work, when I could possibly lose the necessary luster to expand my thoughts on it.

Anyways, there is more concentrated common sense and sound, educated logic in the first segment alone than I've read in anything since Atlas Shrugged. It's written very intuitively, the author addressing next exactly what you probably conclude from reading it. It's therapeutic, both encouraging against the feeling of isolation we all have and reinvigorating the sense of logic in our most dear creeds.

A few things came to mind as I was reading it. One was: How much do you suppose the math of the game theory figures into it? I wonder if it makes much difference that it's six months versus two years imprisonment, if the results and their ethical implications would change if those seemingly arbitrary numbers came to a different ratio. As I was reading it, I thought it could be possible that a lower sentence, say a year, for non-betrayal might change the results drastically, but now, thinking on it more, I doubt it.

I just came to the part in the second segment about how isolating yourself from society is no way to show courage, or to improve anything. This is something I've wrestled with for years. Often as a kid I thought life would be much better if I could go live as a hermit in the mountains somewhere, that in that way I could show the world that my ideals could result in success, because I was so often jaded by the cruelties, the illogic, the cowardice of the perceived masses that I never wanted to participate. As time went on, though, I began to see the benefits to immersing yourself in your enemies; that thinking largely encouraged me to go to Augustana, where I knew plenty of loud-mouthed anti-patriots and liberal elitists would challenge my assumptions and give me something to challenge, to conquer, in return. As a result, I further developed my ideals, expounded upon them and learned what logic specifically guided my character, but at the expense of feeling too often beaten down by what appeared to be the norm. I still waver back and forth between those two viewpoints, mostly because it is very unsettling to try and stand strong in the face of fierce opposition and see your beloved ideals attacked and belittled. But I know now that strength is one of my highest goals, and that my beliefs, my character cannot be strong without tempering both in the fires of ordeal. Ha! I wish to stand high atop the piled bodies of my defeated foes!

ANYWAYS, it's not a perfect article but it's damn close. I encourage you all to read it and consider it. Perhaps I'll expound upon it more when I get back from work...but I always say that, and it seldom happens. Let me know what you think about the article.

Soccer

2007-05-19T10:26:00.001-05:00

Sarah coached a team of 7-year-olds in soccer this year, and today being their last game and banquet, I went to show my support and such. First of all, the kids were really cute and though I'm not nearly as good with kids as, say, Alex is, it's still pretty delightful to be around ones so young and bright and full of energy and excitement.

The game and people at it brought to mind, though, a conversation Sarah and I had a couple months ago. I was extolling the virtues of moral absolutism, and saying that the relativist apologists are the cause for so much self-victimization that's crippling our society and keeping us from being strong. I said that people must be held to their successes and not be allowed to excuse every shortcoming, to coddle themselves into complacency. Her response was that especially with kids, you can't urge them to succeed so much that they become hyper-aware of their failures or they'll become stagnated in their shortcomings. I thought she was suggesting coddling people so they don't get too hurt, so it took us awhile to reach a consensus. That consensus ended up basically being that everybody should be aware of what they're doing well and what they're doing poorly and be able to take advantage of that knowledge to improve themselves, using the knowledge of their failures to work towards improvement and the knowledge of their successes to provide the self confidence they need for that improvement. Or something like that. She said it much more eloquently than I am.

Anyways, there was a girl at the game whose parents, while being rightly supportive of her teammates, were quite literally screaming at her from the sidelines for somewhat minor things all throughout the game. The girl, in turn, was then hyper-aware of every time she did something wrong, and resorted to immediately making excuses every time she couldn't take the ball back or didn't block a goal. I was pretty put off by it, seeing as these kids are 7 years old and it's not like she wasn't trying. This reminded me of that previous conversation and I got concerned that maybe I was some kind of apologist, that next I'd start thinking we should transfer all prisoners to some kind of rehab facility where they can feel comforted that it's okay to commit murder so long as they later learn the error of their ways and feel bad. So, I rehashed the conversation with Sarah (she didn't know what I was talking about, because I'm probably the only person who remembers commonplace conversations for two months) and she put it perfectly (again, and as always) when she said she doesn't think you should apologize for people's shortcomings, that you should be aware of them and work through them rather than just forgetting about it. The key phrase for me was "not letting them indulge in self pity," which comforted me to think of it not as a concession to weakness but as a commitment to strength. It's a great way of putting what I'd been thinking all along and realizing that we were arguing two sides of the same point. So, yeah. I guess that's all I've got on this one.

Quantico

2007-05-05T00:23:00.000-05:00

I believe I mentioned this in the last post...last drill I was asked to be a shooting range coach for our Marines who have volunteered to go to Iraq. So last Saturday (the 28th), I flew out of Moline and into Washington Reagan and rode a bus down to Quantico to teach some Marines how to improve their shooting. Evidently, they're raising a battalion of volunteers from within a number of different Reserve battalions to be sent to Iraq this summer, so they're spending two weeks in Quantico getting some boxes checked off their pre-deployment list, beginning with Table 1 and Table 2 marksmanship.

Table 1 is essentially their BZO (zeroing their rifles) and then prequalification in a standard known distance course, which is very similar to the service rifle target competitions Dad shoots. We started Sunday night with remedial courses on shooting fundamentals and about three hours of snapping in and dry firing. Monday we got them BZOed and ran through the prequal, in which I had five relays of three to five targets (so between 15-25 Marines and sailors) to assist. Many of them were pretty rusty, so it took plenty of catching up, but thanks to a great deal of advice from Dad and my fellow range coaches we ended each relay on a pretty promising note. Tuesday we went through rifle qualification, in which I was on the same targets more as a judge and safety official, and wasn't allowed to give direct advice. Most of my Marines and sailors did pretty well, including several expert quals and few unqs (unqualified).

Table 2 is a shorter version of what I used to call EMP, and it's essentially combat shooting with flaks and kevlars. They BZO at the 300 yard line and then move up to the 100 for moving targets, then up to...25 or something for multiple-target engagements and rapid position changes, standard combat shooting stuff versus the slower, more regimented Table 1 stuff. It's a bit more stressful because it's much faster and they stay locked and cocked the whole time, so there's more jamming, double feeds of rounds and just more safety issues to be concerned about, but it went off without a hitch. I felt it was pretty outstanding training for them all.

Thursday they had the grenade range, and our part as rifle range coaches was essentially over, so we did almost nothing all day, which was a pretty nice change of pace. We'd been standing in the hot sun all day (we were all redder than a Budweiser bottle by Wednesday) for three days, and had 3:30 a.m. reveille every day and worked til roughly 6 p.m. (hitting the rack around 7 p.m. out of pure exhaustion), so it's been a long and tiresome week.

Two of us had only signed on for the first week (those other poor fools haven't got anything to do but sit on a bus waiting for Marines to leave the field for the next week), so we flew back today, but that proved to be much more complicated than it ever needed to be. The sergeant who was supposed to drive us back to Washington Reagan pretty much doomed us by taking much longer than we had time for to get off base and head to the airport, and then we got stuck in the to-be-expected D.C. morning traffic and didn't even get to the airport til 9:45 a.m., five minutes after our flight was leaving and probably an hour or better after we should have arrived. We were originally slated to be back in Moline by noon, but since we missed that flight we couldn't fly back out of there til 6:30 p.m. and didn't get home til after midnight.

Part of me (a very small part) wishes I would have stuck around to participate in the rest of their training, because they've got some fun stuff going on. Today was ostensibly the gas chamber, which I haven't gotten to do since boot camp, Sunday's the crew-served machine gun range including the M240-G, M2 .50 cal., and supposedly the Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher (I'm going to be pretty furious if I missed getting to shoot the Mk-19, since I've never gotten to shoot it and those opportunities come rarely). It sounds like they've also got some urban combat training (MOUT) next week and probably land nav...and the biggest thing I feel like I'm missing out on is next Friday they're going to see the Marine Corps Museum on mainside in Quantico. That's something I've been infatuated with getting to see since I first heard about it, so I'm a little upset that I won't get to see it. I did, however, get to see the Commandant's building, most of mainside, and TBS (in fact, we did all our rifle qual stuff at the TBS ranges).

Downsides of this week: extremely sore feet from standing and walking around all day long, nasty sunburn, and just straight exhaustion from long hours and early mornings.

Upsides of this week: pretty much everything else. As Support Platoon, we were much more on our own program with significant responsibility and authority, as we had a significant billet (I was teaching a Marine captain who hadn't shot in years how to shoot again). Also, we had the great privelege of training a large group of Marines with limited time left in country before their deployment to a warzone, and that group was entirely volunteers, which is extremely motivating in and of itself. Having that billet of authority, I also was afforded the chance to really improve my bearing among seniors and develop a good deal of confidence in my own abilities as a Marine. I was able to essentially send off a great group of Marines feeling good about the training they'd just received with respect to what they might have to do in Iraq. It was a long week, but I'm extremely glad I got the chance to go help out.

P.S. I took the initiative to preemptively thank as many of those Marines as I could, because I knew you'd want me to.