Lovely story about a true warrior:
"In those bleak moments when the lost souls stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, the sound of the wind and the waves was broken by a soft voice. "Why don't you come and have a cup of tea?" the stranger would ask. And when they turned to him, his smile was often their salvation.
For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia's most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called The Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge...."
The Primal Heroic Response, in action.
saw somewhere the government is looking at cutting 1billion in aid to iraq. i also read somewhere that south vietnam didnt really fall until congress stopped sending them money and materiel. what is the point of all this fighting if no one is willing to give support to the countries we tried so hard to build?In the next week, all of the commentariat will be transfixed by the soap-opera of McCrystal and the Administration and who said and did what to whom. Meanwhile, my son carries a machine gun and his friends get shot and blown up. If we're not going to act like these countries matter - why should he?
WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration reaffirmed Sunday that it will begin pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan next summer, despite reservations among top generals that absolute deadlines are a mistake.OK, eff it. Let's just take our ball and go home.
President Barack Obama's chief of staff said an announced plan to begin bringing forces home in July 2011 still holds.
That's not changing. Everybody agreed on that date," Rahm Emanuel said, adding by name the top three officials overseeing the policy girding the war: Gen. David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen.
Well, Clyde sure did in the movie Every Which Way But Loose. Orangs are quite clever, and we always knew they were by far the best tool users among the great apes. Their feats of intelligence and escape artistry at zoos are near-legendary, and have included hiding improvised lockpicks in their lower lip - then successfully using them. They've also shown the inclination to make one tool using another tool, which is no small water.
Clyde was a trained ape, of course. So was Chantek, who showed the ability to master sign language, invent new words, lie successfully, and absorb human cultural notions at the level of a young child.
All pretty cool - and potentially disruptive to our notions of where the term "reasonable creature" (which defines some states' murder laws) might begin and end.
Another brick in the wall comes from Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne at the University of St. Andrews in the UK. They studied orangutans in zoos, but the study focused on how they interacted with each other, not with humans. The kicker? The orangs were consistently using sign/body language among themselves, for specific things, and using the same signals both consistently, and with more emphasis when a response isn't forthcoming (the sign equivalent of talking slower and louder - guess that reflex goes pretty deep).
The use of zoos introduces some complications to the conclusions, but without some kind of anti-grav pack, that stuff is going to be very hard to observe in the wild. If we ever do establish the existence of a similar behaviour pattern in the wild, without human intervention, I think the case will pretty much slam shut on the notion of orangutans as, effectively, "people."
I'm there now. Right beside Philo Beddoe.
The Strategic Importance of Afghanistan and the Case for Staying in the WarLet me talk about the first one now, and move through the rest as I have time.
Can This Mission Be Successful? Can We Win?
Estimating the Enemy
Deadlines and Expectations
Accepting Afghans as Afghans
The Civil-Military Side of the War
The Reality of Continuing Risk
You want to hasten the end of your industry? Then by all means, keep doing what you're doing: consider yourself unaccountable and scoff at the blogosphere. Yes, I understand bloggers are changing the newspaper industry in fundamental ways. (Ezra Klein, to use one example, does not blog with the same tradition of objectivity in which the Washington Post's print journalists report. How that changes the culture of the newsroom, then, is interesting.) But if you think you don't need to answer to bloggers, some of whom have spent years doing field research or working in Central Asia and now blog as a hobby, the invisible hand of the market is going to find you out. And before you know it, you'll have taken a buy-out from the New York Times and be teaching creative writing in Maryland. And, let's face it, probably blogging on the side.-
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Not every war need be fought until one side collapses. When the motives and tensions of war are slight we can imagine that the faintest prospect of defeat might be enough to cause one side to yield. If from the very start the other side feels that this is probable, it will obviously concentrate on bringing about this probability rather than take the log way round and totally defeat the enemy.
- On War 1:2
Godspeed to Brendan and all our sympathy to his parents.
Nevertheless they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?-
They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.
They say, We were young. We have died. Remember us.
- Archibald McLeash - 'The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak'
You simply couldn't make this up. I give you Helen Thomas, acknowledged Dean of the White House press corps, at a White House Jewish Heritage Celebration:
And the thing is, it's not really surprising. Just someone who chose to say out loud the logical endpoint of Islamo-leftist opinion about Israel, and the way many on the left feel.
Back to Poland and Germany. Just let that sink in for a second.
Of course, Helen Thomas issued a statement later:
The attention to detail at a base like Restropo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences.From "War" by Sebastian Junger. I just finished it and will try and do a review before I travel this weekend. Let's just say it's good enough that I need a day or so to process before writing about it.
...
In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out - can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose importance of the importance of things, the gravity of things. Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don't even make the connection; at Restropo, that connection was impossible to ignore.
