Sat - August 30, 2008Vice Presidential PoliticsSo McCain nominated an unknown for vice
president.
Some people wonder, how can he nominate someone so unknown? Well, name one person who is known who is better! Joe Biden? Okay, Biden is a plagiarist, weasel, and down right stupid on foreign policy. He blusters well, but if you examine what he says it's invariably devoid of intelligence. So what do I think of Biden as a vice president? Eh, he's okay. If something terrible were to happen and B. Hussein were elected and then he were to no longer be in office for whatever reason, what would I think of Biden as a president? Eh. He's okay, certainly better than that outright marxist racist Obama. Accepting that I don't agree with Biden, I recognize that he would serve well enough as president. As would McCain. As would most of the democrat party candidates this year. Obama has ties too close to domestic terrorists and marxists for me to feel comfortable with and the Clintons are just power crazy and I don't trust them. I disagree with almost every syllable I've ever heard Biden utter but I can't object to him as being unqualified for the job. But what would anyone mean when they talk about qualifications for the job? Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Wed - August 6, 2008The End of RacismA black man has been nominated by a major
political party for president. He looks to be very popular and might very well
be elected. Racism has ended.
But the race mongerers won't let us be. Sure there will always be kooks and extremists for any opinion, but institutionalized and culturally encouraged racism is dead. So why does B. Hussein Obama insist on insulting his voters by calling us all racists? Why that's because he, and especially his wife, are the real racists. They're also from Harvard so they seem to have the typical Harvard snobbish elitism where any opinion but theirs is not only wrong, but ignorantly wrong and impossible to comprehend. So that's the main proof that racism is dead. Despite the insults to our character by calling us racists, a black man is still on top of a major ticket. But there's an even more significant, if quieter bit of evidence for the end of racism. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Sun - July 13, 2008The Pyramids and How They Were Built.Okay, I've been bugged by a silly question for
some years now and I don't know the answer to
it.
If you read most any book about the Pyramids of Giza and how they were built you'll get any number of theories of how they dragged those blocks of granite to the top of the heap as it was being built. There is any number of theories and there is evidence that there was a ramp or causeway leading from a canal to the pyramids themselves. That's all well and good. I don't have much problem imagining how they could manually drag even the largest of blocks up a ramp. But what they never seem to explain is how the heck did they get these massive stones on and off of a boat? No one has explained it yet that I've seen. To me, this is a much more difficult question to answer than simply dragging the stone along the ground. On a boat you have to lift the stone over the gunwhale, lower it onto a boat large enough to displace more water than the weight of these stones, and have enough structure in the boat to support this concentrated weight. I don't know what kind of boat the Egyptians had four thousand years ago that could hold that much tonnage, but I imagine that they had such a boat, for holding grain or wine jugs, etc. What I don't understand is how they could move this stone onto the boat without crushing it, swamping it, or toppling it over. And even more crazy, once it was on the boat, how did they get it back out again?  Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Mon - July 7, 2008Tamale StadiumJust a few miles from the world's most extreme
type of poverty is the Tamale stadium. Here's a few pictures of
it:
   This last picture appears to have been taken while it was under construction, but it's a pretty accurate depiction of how it appears now. The construction fence has been replaced by a more permanent fence. At least one gate was hanging by only one hinge when I saw it, which affirmed that we were indeed still in Ghana. Otherwise, it's a beautiful building. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Sun - June 29, 2008Trash is a sign of OppulenceIn Ghana, in the remote regions to the north the
ubiquitous trash along the sides of the road and everywhere else disappears. At
first I thought this was because these remote people were more tidy, but I
quickly realized that they were so poor that they didn't even have
trash.
 They may not have trash, but they do have cell phone towers. And malaria. And worms. And witch doctors for dentists. My battalion went to Ghana to train with the Ghanaian army and to provide security for medical, dental, and veterinary assistance to these poor people. Essentially, we gave these people fish, while a few peace corps volunteers there taught them to fish, and their chief controlled those who were allowed to fish. The only other possessions these people had were the clothes on their backs and scrawny chickens and pygmy goats. That's it. They live exactly how people lived 100,000 years ago. Except for the cell phone towers. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Mon - May 26, 2008I RememberAnd I'll never forget. The men of 3d Battalion,
25th Marines whose lives were taken in the War on Terror in 2005.
 Major Ricardo Crocker SSgt Joseph Goodrich SSgt Anthony Goodwin SSgt Kendall Ivy Sgt Aaron Cepeda Sgt David Coullard Sgt James Graham III Sgt Bradley Harper Sgt Justin Hoffman Sgt Michael Marzano Sgt Nathaniel Rock Sgt David Wimberg HM2 Jeffrey Wiener Cpl Jeffrey Boskovitch Cpl Dustin Derga Cpl David Kreuter Cpl Michael Lindemuth Cpl Bryan Richardson Cpl Brad Squires Cpl David Stewart Cpl Joseph Tremblay Cpl Andre Williams HM3 Travis Youngblood LCpl Timothy Bell Jr. LCpl Eric Bernholtz LCpl Dustin Birch LCpl Nicholas Bloem LCpl Roger Castleberry Jr. LCpl Daniel Chavez LCpl Michael Cifuentes LCpl Wesley Davids LCpl Daniel Deyarmin Jr. LCpl Christopher Dyer LCpl Nicholas Erdy LCpl Grant Fraser LCpl Lance Graham LCpl Jonathan Grant LCpl Jourdan Grez LCpl Thomas Keeling LCpl Ryan Kovacicek LCpl Christopher Lyons LCpl Brian Montgomery LCpl Aaron Reed LCpl Edward Schroeder II LCpl Devon Seymour LCpl Kevin Waruinge LCpl William Wightman PFC Christopher Dixon  Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Tue - May 13, 2008Bringing India into the WarMuslims have killed
again. This time in India. Looks like it's our common enemy, Al
Qaeda.
Why, you might ask, would Al Qaeda want to expand the war when it's losing badly in Iraq? Well, the answer is because it's losing badly in Iraq. The goal of Al Qaeda has never been to single-handedly defeat all of western civilization. It's goal has been to incite all of the muslim world to unite to defeat all of western civilization. By attacking all of these countries it can enflame the war and try to get all of western civilization to fight them. Only then will the rest of the muslim world join them. It's not too different than Lenin's theories of spreading communism. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Sun - May 11, 2008Meanwhile, there's a War being foughtObama has all but sewed up the nomination. So
why are these two self-destructive loser still in the news when there are
dramatic developments going on in the war? In Iraq, the US military is
finally fighting the Iranian trained Special Groups. The important
part of this news is that the Iraqi government and the head of the Sadrist
murderers have called a cease fire. Everyone is ignoring
it.
If this were Israel and Palestine, the UN would scream, the usual communists supporting the PLO would howl, and the US would threaten, and Israel would have to stop fighting. But now, even though the events are similar, the US is refusing to back down because the enemy is still fighting. Let's hope we can keep fighting until the enemy can no longer continue. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Tue - April 29, 2008Credit Where it's DueSo Obama has come out against his pastor and
spiritual guide for the past 20 years. It's twenty years late, and I don't
think it's all that sincere, and there's a possibility that the whole thing was
staged, but . . .
The good news is that the country is spared. Spared what? Spared with accepting Wright's lunacy as mainstream and acceptable. If Obama didn't denounce him, Hillary wouldn't either because the rank and file republicans would do her dirty work for her. And most of all, McCain wouldn't denounce him either. Hillary didn't want to further alienate her biggest voting block. McCain didn't want to be vilified in the press. So if neither of these denounced Wright we as a nation would have been further saddled with the prospect of accepting his statements as reasonable. The only player who could denounce him without injury was Obama. And he did. Thank goodness for that. Now if he'll just do the same for the spiteful, racist, unpatriotic comments of his wife. And what's he going to do about the fact that a terrorist sponsored his political coming out party in his home? Obama isn't completely off the hook, he's a marxist after all, but we've been spared an embarrassing addition to the already embarrassing body of race related nonsense. And maybe, just maybe, Wright's rantings were staged for just this opportunity. Who knows? Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Obama's Chickens are Roosting at HomeObama is a marxist. This is known.
Obama joined his church purely for cynical political reasons. This is known. (I saw a video clip of him discussing this and explaining this is precisely why he joined that church, to make himself viable politically.) Now, his church that he chose purely for political reasons, not because of any belief, is his downfall. Doesn't that seem like just desserts? Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Sat - April 26, 2008The 2008 Elections, or Which Party is Dumber?You know, just when you think the Republican
party can't get any worse, with its rampant spending, its advocacy of torture,
its blind attacks on immigrants, its drive to increase the size and scope of the
federal government beyond all reason, its headlong pursuit of socialist policies
of centralized medicine, its attempts to destroy free speech . . . . I'm
getting tired and the list is too long . . . and you think the democrats have
everything sewn up for this season's elections, then we start to realize that
the democrats might be worse off as a
party.
The democrats are torn between hard core socialist marxists that seek power at all costs (the Clinton machine) and hard core marxist socialists that seek power at all costs (the Kennedy machine via Obama). Add to that fight the even more lunatic fringe that refuses to cooperate with either the hard core socialist marxists or the hard core marxist socialists and seeks to drive each of those factions to ruin. I'm referring to the Cindy Sheehan/Code Pink Bush Derangement Syndrome hard core lunatics. Sheehan seems to think that Nancy Pelosi, by far the most treasonous, marxist, lunatic intellectual lightweight that has ever been a Speaker of the House is not quite lunatic enough and wants to drive her from office. Sheehan wants to get elected to Pelosi's seat in Congress. With a congressional district as screwy as San Francisco she just might succeed. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Sun - April 20, 2008Does "British" = "Sissy?"Okay, I've complained recently about the Brits
doing a generally poor job in Iraq based on their policy to not anger anyone.
This past year they had some of their sailors and sailwomen captured and were
released only after they wet their pants and cried, quite literally, for their
mommies and their video games. Such a pathetic track record can hardly be
sullied.
But the Brits, drawing on their long tradition of never letting the level of past accomplishments keep them from continually surpassing standards have hit again. In past ages, when Britania ruled the wave, they kept the seas safe by executing pirates, often with little ceremony, but more often very publicly and gruesomely. As described by John S. Burnett in the New York Times, "The British attitude has come a long way since the days when pirates were chained to pilings at Wapping and left there until the tidal water of the Thames ebbed and flowed over the bodies three times. So much for Britannia ruling the waves." So today, surpassing their sissy moma's boys sailors standard, their fear of angering an enemy that tries to kill them, and their desire not to hurt anyone's feelings by appearing strong to insurgents, has done their new standard one better. They will give asylum to pirates. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Wed - April 9, 2008I don't think you should vote for or against my mother because of my fatherChelsea Clinton, the 28 year old who is still
seemingly mostly off limits to reporters, has the following quotes about her
father's dalliances with Monica Lewinski and other affairs:
"I do not think that is any of your
business."
I beg to differ. Beyond being a terribly rude
answer, it is precisely our business to decide why she behaves like she did
instead of leaving. What does that say about a woman that puts up with that
type of continuous disrespect? Will she put up with similar disrespect from
other heads of state?
"But also on a larger point, I don't
think you should vote for or against my mother because of my
father."
Here she is exactly correct. Her father is
completely irrelevent. Except when he is. Depending on what the meaning of
"is" is. You see, you should vote for Hillary for all of the reasons you agree
with her husband. But if you disagree with her husband, then you should not
compare him to her. His experiences and behaviors in the Executive Branch are
all germane, except when they are not.
Oh, how I hate the Clintons.
Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Tue - April 1, 2008The Brits Stay in IraqI heard on the radio today that the Brits have
changed their minds because of the recent violence in Basra and decided to not
withdraw from Iraq. Good for them, I'm glad they're showing some sense. I've
been very concerned about them.
In 2005 when my battalion, 3/25, was training for Iraq we had a couple of British soldiers and officers as instructors. They insisted that they were the masters of counter-insurgency based on their experiences in Ireland. They told us that we should avoid wearing armor or helmets and we should be sure to patrol the cities as though we were not afraid of the people. They were sure that all of our problems were a result of our treating the Iraqis as potential enemies rather than as trusted friends. Nice guys, but completely clueless on that issue. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Tue - March 18, 2008AssimilationSt. Patrick's Day has brought up an issue to me
that I thought I would rant about a bit
today.
A friend of mine participates on a blog that I frequent. Lovely people, I used to know her when she was in my squadron so many years ago. Just yesterday it seems to me. They posted some Irish ditties on their website, she going maudlin about how she sang these ditties to her children. Now, the nature of such childhood songs is that they evoke positive memories, no matter how bad the music really is. Those not raised with these chanties find nothing special about them at all, but we can all appreciate a mother's memories of singing to her child. What makes this an interesting issue to me it that these people, I suppose, are Irish. Now, I don't want to assign any ideas to them that I'm not sure they hold, so I'll leave my discussion of my friends and speak generically instead. The Irish and other past waves of immigrants often make the dubious claim that their ancesters differ from immigrants today because they sought to be "assimilated" into American culture, whereas now they don't. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Wed - March 12, 2008Failure in LeadershipTwo headlines in the news today are indicators of
the extent of the failure of leadership by George Bush. Admiral Fallon has
resigned as head of the Central Command and Al Franken might become a US
Senator.
These two seemingly disparate issues show that Bush has no influence on the public conversation in this country. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Mon - March 10, 2008Affirmative Action for Science, Math, and Engineering.You can't make this stuff
up. You can't parody it. And these people are serious. Note the
prevalence of names from the former Clinton
administration.
Somehow I don't think the laws of physics will be under any obligation to surrender their secrets to second rate minds. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Fri - March 7, 2008"Hamas called the attack heroic"Muslims have continued their ways according to
their religious principles and murdered
seminarians in Jerusalem.
I'm sure the state department and Condi Rice will insist on more talks with Palestinian thugs again. I really don't understand why anyone thinks that talking to murderers will yield peace. The only way to stop religious fanatics is to kill them. They will not be convinced of the evil of their ways, they will not stop their killing of innocents. Their god told them to kill, and they won't believe anyone telling them otherwise. Shame on Israel if they don't take action and if they stop before wiping out these organizations. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Tue - March 4, 2008What if Hillary Loses the Nomination?Hillary and the Clinton machine will do anything
and everything to get her the nomination. I don't doubt that they wouldn't
resort to any sort of crime.
But there is a point where even the Clinton machine might fail. Perhaps we are reaching that point tonight, perhaps not. But let's say she is forced out of the campaign now or in the future. What's she likely to do? I have absolutely no doubt that she will do her best to destroy Obama's chances of winning the general election. I think there are two reasons for this. Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | Sun - March 2, 2008More Politicization of the MilitaryI heard an advertisement on the radio today. It
was an ad for Obama and the speaker was Gen McPeak of Gulf War air force fame.
He identified himself as a military officer and then spoke out against Hillary
Clinton.
Now, I'm not one to complain about anyone speaking out against a Clinton, but to do so as a military officer is dangerous. The greatest thing about our military that few countries can claim is that it is apolitical. McPeak has taken a big step across the line. Yes, he's retired and there's no law against what he did, but it is unethical and bodes poorly for the future of our military. If he were a retired sergeant, sure, I wouldn't complain. If he were a former captain, no complaints after retirement. But a general with four stars and a former Air Force Chief of Staff is a job that is much closer to politicians. It's important for someone with such a position to avoid the appearance of having been selected for such a position on a quid pro quo basis, and it implies that the military aligns with one political party. Here's what wikipedia says about his political activities: Click here to read the rest of this Drivel Send me your two cents | |