Month: July 2005

July 4th: Support Our Troops

by

O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife.
Who more than self the country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

(Fully lyrics here)

Do something to support our “heroes proved In liberating strife”. One way is to go here. If you are a reader of CPT Chuck Ziegenfuss’s blog From My Position … On the Way”, then you know that this brave and inspiring soldier was recently wounded and is now back in the states. One of his friends had this post on his blog. Here’s part of it:

Today I saw my friend in a hospital bed in pain.

Today as we drove around Walter Reed I saw men on crutches, mending wounds.

Today I saw men who were missing an arm or a leg or both.

Today I saw a portion of what it costs others, so that I and people like me, can sit in my comfy chair and bitch about the price of gas.

So that I don’t have to worry about explosions in my back yard or if the car behind me is full of C4.

Today I saw that they are doing their part and more.

WE NEED TO DO OURS!

Read it all. Then, do something specific and real this weekend to support our troops.

Blog Problems

by

Apologies for the comment-spam storm and for any other problems which readers and contributors may be experiencing. There is a problem at the hosting level that is preventing the anti-spam blacklist and other routine functions of this blog from functioning properly. I assume it will be fixed but I have no idea when.

UPDATE: The problems seem to be fixed.

Diversions – A&L, Chicagoboyz

by

Chris Muir update & move to the top of the blogging humor: additional strip available at Powerline, which also helpfully explicates it. (Muir’s allusions depend upon an audience’s knowlede; Muir may think we all read Doonesbury but many of us stopped reading it years ago; lately, I’ve found he quite nicely meets my daily cartoon need).

Harry Hutton claims he smells like a badger; his excuse is that “the fucking country’s broken.”

If Hutton has Caracas, BlameBush has mad cows. Surely, surely, we can see that questions must be asked:

Did a young George Bush infect cattle with Mad Cow disease to drive progressives insane with talking toasters? Or was it a clever plan to line the pockets of his Big Nicaraguan Meat Buddies and get back at Nolan Ryan for trying to kill his Pa? There seem to be more questions than answers. But the questions alone are enough to put Bush behind bars for the rest of his life.

(Kerry’s editorial also is given some attention.)

Read more

An Italian Toynbee

by

“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci’s.” (Tunku Varadarajan)

Arts & Letters links to the WSJ interview of Fallaci:

The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice.

But she sees hope in a place surprising for a journalist if not for (traditionally) an Italian: “I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.” She is especially moved by “If Europe Hates Itself.”

I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. “I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It’s that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.”

Religion & history intertwine in our desire to understand ourselves. She notes: “Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history!” And, reading this, I remember a short while ago a friend scoffed at Texas’ “jingoism” in requiring two semesters of American history survey (with some majors a course in Texas history can be substituted) and one in state & another in federal government. Jingoism is one word for it, perhaps. Respect. A certain humility that we can learn from the past. There is all that. Simply, I argued, how can we know who we are if we don’t know from what we came?

Read more