As I am now in Kuwait, preparing to move north as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I suppose am now Newsbuckit's forward war correspondent.
It looks like our area of operations (AO) will provide an opportunity to truly change the lives of thousands of people, and that our mission will be at least as much a hearts-and-minds and handover operation as it is a security operation.
A disclaimer:
All accounts, descriptions, anecdotes, interpretations, and analyses posted here are solely my opinion based on my experience. I am not an authorized spokesperson for, nor is anything written here to be construed as an official statement of, the First Cavalry Division, Multinational Division - North, Multinational Corps - Iraq, U.S. Army Central Command,the United States Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government. Nothing will be posted on this page that is classified as secret, sensitive, for official use only (FOUO), or that is otherwise in violation of operational security (OPSEC) policies and procedures.
Sunday, December 14
Friday, December 12
Robert Wright and Megan McArdle discuss the bailout
Via Instapundit. Wright's a favorite of mine over at Blogging Heads, which is increasingly becoming one of my favorite sites on the net.
Saturday, December 6
Part-whatever of "If a Republican did this..."
Or, "If someone who was standing in the way of Hillary's ambitions did this..."
But a Facebook victim? Puh-lease. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg planted the cut-out, placed Favreau's hands on it, and had him pose for the camera(s?). And Favreau, a former Kerry campaign staffer, should have known better.
"Victim." Like Paris Hilton's a YouTube "victim."
But a Facebook victim? Puh-lease. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg planted the cut-out, placed Favreau's hands on it, and had him pose for the camera(s?). And Favreau, a former Kerry campaign staffer, should have known better.
"Victim." Like Paris Hilton's a YouTube "victim."
Update: Self-victimization?
The picture was reportedly up for a scant two hours or so before Favreau removed it, along with every other picture of himself beyond his profile photo — but there’s no getting the Facebook genie back in the bottle.
Thursday, November 27
Thanksgiving: Prayers of a Christian Nation
For all the to-do about Christmas and Easter and their commercialization, it is Thanksgiving whose banner we should be holding high above our heads, to the utter contempt of charlatans for whom belief in anything is suspect, and things like God and Country are vile.
But the holiday celebrated as Thanksgiving contains more venom than just that. First of all, they want to believe that thanks is something one can offer into the air, or to the universe, or perhaps to the Earth Mother. No, we generally do not offer gratitude except to what we believe to be a conscious agent. To whom are we giving thanks? To the God of Abraham, who sent His Son to die that we might share in his inheritence and be adopted as sons. Our inheritence is the one they built in famine and death, that our Founders, some 150 years later, well understood: that men have a right to their conscious, and to the fruits of their industry. The operating principle of the American Republic is this: that free citizens shall not be compelled.
We have lost our way - and make no mistake that this is a battle the enemy intends to win.
The Thanksgiving story contains America's first and most decisive experiment with communism. In the interests of their investments, the Old World backers of the Massachusetts colony required the colonists to store their resources and property communally. It was an utter disaster, punished, it seems, by the natural laws of economics and the human demand for freedom, and also supernaturally by all manner of disaster. Collectivism was the first thing tried in this new world, and it utterly failed. These colonists, through prayer and council with one another, realized that they had done something immoral by compelling men to work for other men, and they repented their sin - their sin of socialism! - and restored a free, interest-driven economy.
On this Thanksgiving, find your most sanctimonious liberal friend, and tell him that you are so thankful to your God for providing you a nation where private industry and individualism are rewarded. If he dares to argue, look at him with faint astonishment and marvel that he could possibly disagree.
But the holiday celebrated as Thanksgiving contains more venom than just that. First of all, they want to believe that thanks is something one can offer into the air, or to the universe, or perhaps to the Earth Mother. No, we generally do not offer gratitude except to what we believe to be a conscious agent. To whom are we giving thanks? To the God of Abraham, who sent His Son to die that we might share in his inheritence and be adopted as sons. Our inheritence is the one they built in famine and death, that our Founders, some 150 years later, well understood: that men have a right to their conscious, and to the fruits of their industry. The operating principle of the American Republic is this: that free citizens shall not be compelled.
We have lost our way - and make no mistake that this is a battle the enemy intends to win.
The Thanksgiving story contains America's first and most decisive experiment with communism. In the interests of their investments, the Old World backers of the Massachusetts colony required the colonists to store their resources and property communally. It was an utter disaster, punished, it seems, by the natural laws of economics and the human demand for freedom, and also supernaturally by all manner of disaster. Collectivism was the first thing tried in this new world, and it utterly failed. These colonists, through prayer and council with one another, realized that they had done something immoral by compelling men to work for other men, and they repented their sin - their sin of socialism! - and restored a free, interest-driven economy.
On this Thanksgiving, find your most sanctimonious liberal friend, and tell him that you are so thankful to your God for providing you a nation where private industry and individualism are rewarded. If he dares to argue, look at him with faint astonishment and marvel that he could possibly disagree.
Monday, November 10
Chairman Claire?
The Huffington Post is reporting that Sen. Claire McCaskill could be tabbed as the new chair of the DNC. She'd be the public face of the party apparatchik, while an Obama insider would run the DNC's day-to-day operations.
...The loser...The people of Missouri
Tuesday, November 4
The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky
A magnificent essay from the inestimable Russell Kirk, who had a hand, along with Bill Buckley, in convincing Barry Goldwater to run for President. It will serve us well to remember - as is the conservative wont - that Senator Goldwater lost that electoral count handily. (Memory is half of history though: the wisdom we should take is that there were many things won that year.)
And so, short of the miracles that John McCain has produced in some small measure in the past, the national Bacchanalia rages on throughout the night. The revelry will continue into the morning, and it will be many years hence, should we survive the binge, that our hangover will commit us to that never-kept promise to our Lord: I shall never behave as such again.
It is worth reflecting that our great forefathers had such a sentiment. Never again would they leave to caprice or chance their sacred rights, which were born not of charity, creed, or demand, but of God, woven into their fiber as much as their physical traits, personality, characters, dispositions. No: they set about their great task resolved, resolved that their bulwark stood in the way of usurpers and tyrants; against the dangerous and nauseating tide of collectivism, and against all infringements of freedom of which this is only the greatest. A people united, not by race or a social order, but by an ideal: the ideal that all men are free unto themselves.
Allow me to restate the Foundation: all men are born entitled to rights that cannot be separated from their persons, but a robust constitution (in the grander and ancienter sense), a moral polity, and a determined progeny are required to maintain the practice of those rights. Woe! -lest we be confused for the Positivists!
The tendency in our world is to be cynical, unphased, expectant of all possible contingencies. Our entertainment industry, to include novels, music, and movies, strives to outmaneuver our wits and turn the plot in just such a way as to cut us off at the pass. I enjoy the thrill like the rest. So it is true that there are natural swings in public opinion, that when two major movements play tug of war, the rope - the polity - will naturally be centered over different points on the ideological ground.
It is also true, as our founders acknowledged, that the natural state of organized society is ordered tyranny. Thomas Jefferson knew that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", and his colleagues echoed such sentiments. Ronald Reagan knew centuries later that "No generation in the history of Earth has ever tasted freedom, lost it, and then tasted it again."
So the temptation is to believe that we are on a downward spiral towards a tyranny masked behind collectivism, and that there is nothing we can do except perhaps stem the tide.
Kirk's essay cautions against fatalism. Though the religious maxim from Battlestar Galactica rings true - "All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again." - there remains a story to be written. The wisdom here is that we must all assume our parts and play them with gusto, because the story is not yet written. Mr. Marc Henrie, perhaps the greatest talent I have had the privilege to meet, reiterated this with an anecdote about the fall of the Soviet Union. He, an international relations graduate of Dartmouth University, was as shocked as any bricklayer when the Berlin wall tumbled.
I want to be on the record before the results are in: Barack Obama is an incompetent and wholly unqualified waife of a man who is controlled by forces much greater than he, whose ascent is an indictment on our polity, a product and conduit of thuggish politics of the most Orwellian - Tooheyian - variety. I find no redeeming qualities in the man, and can only hope that his election is tempered by modesty in local and congressional seats under his administration. The more frustrated the efforts of his controllers, the better off we will be as a nation.
I intent to expand this essay soon - but for now, another tyranny befalls me: the tyranny of the urgent. Alas - I must watch the horse race.
***
The horse race now complete, it is time to regroup. Michelle Malkin, one of my internet-writing role models, urges tenacity, grit. I propose the same, and hope that the spirit of my pre-election introduction above lends itself to this end. From one of the greatest men to ever live:
This is an opportunity for us to reclaim the spirit of this land. We are a nation founded on individualism: that all men have a right to the fruits of their industry, and that no man shall ever be compelled to live for another. We have a tradition of charity - a Christian mandate that I take very seriously - but we have a brighter and more unique tradition against compulsion.
I am beginning to think that collectivism, the destruction of the individual, is so coextensive with the destruction of freedom that it is merely an academic exercise to separate the two. At a a minimum, it seems to have been recognized as necessary in all cases that the power of the individual must be obliterated in order for the masses to be controlled. The mob is indeed possessed of a single animus!
For the enemies of freedom, the destruction of the individual is but a means to an end. For us, it is a moral imperative upon which much is staked. Kirk ridicules the notion of human rights - for what other entities would rights attain? - especially as historically juxtaposed to property rights (which, of course, are rights ascribed to humans). "Property rights" sounds outmoded and frankly bizarre to our conditioned minds, but indeed it is an aspect of the simple principle:
A man is entitled to the fruits of his industry. This is the most inalienable right of all. When academic charlatans attempt to paint our Founders as greedy for opposing taxation, they are engaging in the basest sort of revisionism. Branding someone as 'selfish' for the belief that they have the right to keep what they legitimately earn is not simply unfair, it is clearly an attack. The ultimate and inviolable freedom of man as man is cast as an evil - quite a neat turn.
So far, the tactics. But what strategy? Is there some coordinated undercurrent, a sinister force directing the battle?
My answer: I don't know. There are certainly well-monied and evil men with a lust for power that is frustrated by robust individuals who refuse to be controlled. It may be there is a concerted effort, or a subconcious coordination. It may also be the results of what the culture critics call decadence: that for various factors determined by countless variables, civilizations once faithful, strong, and proud, eventually lose their foundation and slip naturally into the rut of tyranny.
Whatever the case: whether our enemy is deliberate and faceless, or a collection of interests and nebulous, or simply an accident of history, I know this:
We must fight.
And so, short of the miracles that John McCain has produced in some small measure in the past, the national Bacchanalia rages on throughout the night. The revelry will continue into the morning, and it will be many years hence, should we survive the binge, that our hangover will commit us to that never-kept promise to our Lord: I shall never behave as such again.
It is worth reflecting that our great forefathers had such a sentiment. Never again would they leave to caprice or chance their sacred rights, which were born not of charity, creed, or demand, but of God, woven into their fiber as much as their physical traits, personality, characters, dispositions. No: they set about their great task resolved, resolved that their bulwark stood in the way of usurpers and tyrants; against the dangerous and nauseating tide of collectivism, and against all infringements of freedom of which this is only the greatest. A people united, not by race or a social order, but by an ideal: the ideal that all men are free unto themselves.
Allow me to restate the Foundation: all men are born entitled to rights that cannot be separated from their persons, but a robust constitution (in the grander and ancienter sense), a moral polity, and a determined progeny are required to maintain the practice of those rights. Woe! -lest we be confused for the Positivists!
The tendency in our world is to be cynical, unphased, expectant of all possible contingencies. Our entertainment industry, to include novels, music, and movies, strives to outmaneuver our wits and turn the plot in just such a way as to cut us off at the pass. I enjoy the thrill like the rest. So it is true that there are natural swings in public opinion, that when two major movements play tug of war, the rope - the polity - will naturally be centered over different points on the ideological ground.
It is also true, as our founders acknowledged, that the natural state of organized society is ordered tyranny. Thomas Jefferson knew that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", and his colleagues echoed such sentiments. Ronald Reagan knew centuries later that "No generation in the history of Earth has ever tasted freedom, lost it, and then tasted it again."
So the temptation is to believe that we are on a downward spiral towards a tyranny masked behind collectivism, and that there is nothing we can do except perhaps stem the tide.
Kirk's essay cautions against fatalism. Though the religious maxim from Battlestar Galactica rings true - "All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again." - there remains a story to be written. The wisdom here is that we must all assume our parts and play them with gusto, because the story is not yet written. Mr. Marc Henrie, perhaps the greatest talent I have had the privilege to meet, reiterated this with an anecdote about the fall of the Soviet Union. He, an international relations graduate of Dartmouth University, was as shocked as any bricklayer when the Berlin wall tumbled.
I want to be on the record before the results are in: Barack Obama is an incompetent and wholly unqualified waife of a man who is controlled by forces much greater than he, whose ascent is an indictment on our polity, a product and conduit of thuggish politics of the most Orwellian - Tooheyian - variety. I find no redeeming qualities in the man, and can only hope that his election is tempered by modesty in local and congressional seats under his administration. The more frustrated the efforts of his controllers, the better off we will be as a nation.
I intent to expand this essay soon - but for now, another tyranny befalls me: the tyranny of the urgent. Alas - I must watch the horse race.
***
The horse race now complete, it is time to regroup. Michelle Malkin, one of my internet-writing role models, urges tenacity, grit. I propose the same, and hope that the spirit of my pre-election introduction above lends itself to this end. From one of the greatest men to ever live:
"We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times." --George Washington
This is an opportunity for us to reclaim the spirit of this land. We are a nation founded on individualism: that all men have a right to the fruits of their industry, and that no man shall ever be compelled to live for another. We have a tradition of charity - a Christian mandate that I take very seriously - but we have a brighter and more unique tradition against compulsion.
I am beginning to think that collectivism, the destruction of the individual, is so coextensive with the destruction of freedom that it is merely an academic exercise to separate the two. At a a minimum, it seems to have been recognized as necessary in all cases that the power of the individual must be obliterated in order for the masses to be controlled. The mob is indeed possessed of a single animus!
For the enemies of freedom, the destruction of the individual is but a means to an end. For us, it is a moral imperative upon which much is staked. Kirk ridicules the notion of human rights - for what other entities would rights attain? - especially as historically juxtaposed to property rights (which, of course, are rights ascribed to humans). "Property rights" sounds outmoded and frankly bizarre to our conditioned minds, but indeed it is an aspect of the simple principle:
A man is entitled to the fruits of his industry. This is the most inalienable right of all. When academic charlatans attempt to paint our Founders as greedy for opposing taxation, they are engaging in the basest sort of revisionism. Branding someone as 'selfish' for the belief that they have the right to keep what they legitimately earn is not simply unfair, it is clearly an attack. The ultimate and inviolable freedom of man as man is cast as an evil - quite a neat turn.
So far, the tactics. But what strategy? Is there some coordinated undercurrent, a sinister force directing the battle?
My answer: I don't know. There are certainly well-monied and evil men with a lust for power that is frustrated by robust individuals who refuse to be controlled. It may be there is a concerted effort, or a subconcious coordination. It may also be the results of what the culture critics call decadence: that for various factors determined by countless variables, civilizations once faithful, strong, and proud, eventually lose their foundation and slip naturally into the rut of tyranny.
Whatever the case: whether our enemy is deliberate and faceless, or a collection of interests and nebulous, or simply an accident of history, I know this:
We must fight.
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Dem Voter Fraud Reports
Pre-Election:
- Nationwide: ACORN false registrations
- Virginia: Mailing military ballots late.
- West Palm Beach: Illegal electioneering, improper voting procedures, voter intimidation. Machines breaking down as well.
- Maryland: Voters not on rolls (FNC).
- KC, MO: Possible Black Panther at polling location.
- St. Louis, MO: Republican voters not on rolls.
- Dayton, OH: Elderly being asked by pollworkers if they are sure they want to vote, if they want to change their vote (FNC).
- Philadelphia: Republican pollworkers thrown out of polling locations. Dems claim the locations are too crowded and pollworkers need to rotate through.
- Philadelphia: Black Panthers blocking and intimidating voters.
- Lugoff, S.C.: Voters removed from rolls (FOX NEWS).
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