Semper Fi!

Three cheers to the United States Marine Corps, for their supremacy on the battlefield and their devotion to the Constitution of the United States:

From the Wall Street Journal:

Sgt. Maj. Barrett also tackled questions on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the military’s ban on gays serving openly in uniform. The Department of Defense is preparing to implement repeal, and Sgt. Maj. Barrett addressed that issue directly.

“Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution is pretty simple,” he told a group of Marines at a base in South Korea. “It says, ‘Raise an army.’ It says absolutely nothing about race, color, creed, sexual orientation.

“You all joined for a reason: to serve,” he continued. “To protect our nation, right?”

“Yes, sergeant major,” Marines replied.

“How dare we, then, exclude a group of people who want to do the same thing you do right now, something that is honorable and noble?” Sgt. Maj. Barrett continued, raising his voice just a notch. “Right?”

Sgt. Maj. Barrett then described conversations with U.K. troops, who saw a similar ban lifted a decade ago, with little disruption. And to drive the point home, he produced a pocket copy of the Constitution.

“Get over it,” he said. “We’re magnificent, we’re going to continue to be. … Let’s just move on, treat everybody with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let’s be Marines.”

Yes, Sergeant Major!

While I am so glad DADT is ending, I am sad for the magnificent people who were either forcibly ejected from the ranks or who never served at all because of the ramifications of this misguided policy. One of my friends is in the latter category.

For him, this policy change is about a decade too late.

Judgment at Abbottabad: So why am I not dancing in the streets?

One of the most important ideals to emerge out of the Second World War is the notion that individuals can be called to account by due process of law in the aftermath of conflict for crimes committed in the name of a nation or ideology. These criminals can be captured, held, tried and punished for even something as horrifying as genocide. Even decades after the famous war crimes trials, fugitives from justice such as Aldolf Eichmann were still being brought to account. Many were captured, tried and punished . . . by sentence of court.

Fifty million died to fascist aggression in twelve horrifying years of war and genocide, but the architects of that cataclysm were called to account in a manner consistent with the values we were fighting for. In the face of overwhelming evidence of their crimes, even genocidal Nazis and Japanese militarists were offered the benefit of due process at trial.

In these debased times, apparently we can no longer afford the luxury. Due process of law is a sad casualty of this War on Terror™

Last night, President Obama informed the world that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the attacks of 2001.09.11, was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the US has his dead body. This electrifying news triggered spontaneous celebrations around the country and even some praise for the President from the various Republicans seeking their party's presidential nomination.

So while this monstrous mass murderer is now explaining his crimes against his religion to Allah in person and a nation rejoices . . . why am I not celebrating?

First of all -- it's not because I'm some kind of crypto-Islamofacist terrorist socialist communist who hates America, kicks puppies, eats kittens raw and thinks American Idol sucks. Far from it. Unlike many who are having a Beltane mass public triumphalist war-gasm over this, I've served this country in the US Navy. I think I understand a thing or two about war and the way the world works. The part of me that understands the latter is not in the mood for celebrating.

Reason the first for not wanting to celebrate: I hold with the idea of that all human beings have inherent value -- even Hitler and OBL. Yes, even a villain like Osama bin Laden. Even the dearth of this monster diminishes us.

Reason the second: Apparently OBL was killed in a daring raid by US Special Operations troops. Boots on the ground, not bombs from the sky. Intelligence and light infantry were Obama's choice of weapon, not data nets and remote-control drones. This operation could have gone very very badly for the troops and Obama, as both living Democratic former presidents can attest. Barack Obama risked his chances for a second term as President on the success of this raid. My point here: If the President chose to rely on light infantry / commandos for this task, there was the possibility of capturing OBL for trial.

If OBL were taken and not killed in action, the end result would eventually be the same: OBL would never "get off on a technicality" even before the most bleeding heart judge in the universe. Yes, any trial would be a theatrical event to rival Broadway, a media circus that would make OJ Simpson's trial look like a kiddie ride, and a trial would take time.

Due process has a price. But justice at the cost of our values and our souls is hardly worthy of a great nation like the United States of America.

However disappointed that we aren't going to try OBL for his crimes, I applaud the US military for its valor and courage in carrying out a dangerous mission. The guys in camouflage and the intelligence community scored a brilliant success on this operation. However, there is a bigger picture here . . . one that worries me over the long term.

Edit for clarity and a couple of stupid spelling errors.

Belated Birthday Bloggery 2009-11-09

1. Happy Birthday Michelle! You aren't getting older . . . I am:)

2. Happy Birthday to Meece's son, Sean! Get that nelf drood leveled!

3. And, finally, Happy Birthday to the United States Marine Corps, founded 11-10-1775. In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt:

“The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!”

It's been awhile since I last blogged, this has mostly been due to a need for renewed focus at work, and an attempt to focus on raiding in WoW. Well, the later focus has crashed and burned like the Hindenburg.

Meece and I are out of Eclipsed -- the guild broke up like a gigging rock band -- and are now in a new, far more casual family / social leveling guild called Kilrogg Fighters. I'm taking a breather from raiding to level a brand-spanking-new Draenei Shaman. While I have the option of moving and / or faction changing another toon from, say, Kul Tiras, over here, the total cost of doing that all at once is Too Damn Much Money™ right now. Tyrantos is now Level 35 or so after slightly less than a week of spending every second of WoW-playing since creation playing him. The /played timer shows just over 2 days playtime spread over that period . . . so I'm leveling fast.

My secret? Tyrtrinos the death knight has access to the necessary resources to buy two "bind on account" Heirloom items that give bonii to earned experience for good old Tyrantos. The items scale with level, so they will be useful all the way to Level 80.

How I Spent My Holiday...

I stayed home, ate turkey, mustard and Swiss sandwiches on low-carb bread and leveled my Shammy to 72 and my DK to 65. I also performed the annual ritual Blessings Audit (y'know, "count your blessings and thank the gods you aren't in India right now getting hosed by terrorists"). I'm doing what I want to do, and if this seems "outside the norm" to folks 'cause it isn't something out of a Norm Rockwell painting, it's not my problem. It's that of the beholder. Kind of like beauty.

Working now, dressing (human leg wound kind, as opposed to the carb-laden kind served with the ritual holiday feast) change later, then THREE DAY WEEKEND, baby!

Methinks I'll go see the new movie Australia. Us 'Murican folks often forget that Pearl Harbor is not the only place that Imperial Japanese Navy bombed back in '41. Gurencia -- the Picasso painting -- can represent far too many places: Dresden, Coventry, Nanking, Hanoi, London, Berlin, Tokyo . . . .



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Now playing: U2 - Cold Turkey
via FoxyTunes

Teh mind, it boggles . . .

US Army to use WoW to experiment with "virtual soldiers."

As the title implies, the mind boggles . . .

(Guild Chat) What kind of boss loot does Osama bin Laden drop?
....

OSC-noxious Book

Standard conversation with friends (edited for simplicity). It happened twice this weekend.

SF- reading friends: "You've never read (fill in the blank author, book, series, etc)??"

Me: "That's right, I haven't read it."

SF-rf: "Oh come on! (fill in the blank author, book, series, etc) is so classic! How can you call yourself a sf fan?"

Me: (pause) "So. Think 4th Edition D&D will be worth the switch?"

Over the years, a lot of my friends have thrown books at me to read. I usually make an honest effort to read them. However, with a small number of exceptions, I've hated the book / author / series. The exceptions (Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar, Harry Potter, The Mists of Avalon, Harry Dresden) are vastly outnumbered by such as Xanth, Discworld, The Wheel of Fscking Time, Belgariad, DragonLance, the entire Forgotten Realms cycle, virtually all Vampire: The Masquerade novels, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker novels . . . .

The point is, once again I listened to a friend's recommendation about an author to try. I even selected a book set in contemporary America as opposed to one set in his peculiar worlds. And, once again, I was disappointed.

Orson Scott Card's Empire has an interesting premise: that the US is so divided between "Red" and "Blue" states, regions, etc. that there can be no compromise. It's a 21st century Second Civil War with hovercycles, 'mechs and EMP death rays . . . nice premise for a book I'd like, and at first OSC seemed to live up to all my friends' hype about what a great author he was.

He wrote about military culture and hardware as though he lived it without sounding trite. He created a wonderful protagonist, a truly sympathetic character with a lovely family right down to the nerdy loner kid who wandered off alone to read Discworkd and Xanth novels . . . Tight plotting, great dialog and some very well drawn characters . . . an enjoyable read until the very sympathetic protagonist is scragged like a dog halfway through the book, at about the point you find out it's evil libruls who are the rebels.

Part of me wanted to scream and another part of me wanted to throw the book at the nearest wolf. I stayed up till 0230, losing sleep but having fun reading this, only to be played like a violin by this asshat of an author! Yes, as Katherine Kurtz once semi-famously said, "Sometimes the hero has to die" Kurtz once killed off nearly a generation's worth of beloved characters (Camber The Heretic, anyone?) over four books, usually heroically (Kai Descantor, Elaine Thuryn) and sometimes not (Rhys Thuryn), but she did it with style.

Between watching the protagonist die from a .22 pistol round fired by his secretary through the eye at arm's reach range while his hands were both full and the extant to which liberals were being demonized for opposing the conservative policies of a president who makes Dick Cheney look like Ghandi, I'm ready to puke. I know, Empire is NOT Ender's Game. I know judging OSC's entire body of work based on this book is dangerous.

Perhaps fscking with the reader is a trademark of his. I haven't finished the book; I don't know if I ever will now. Up till the hero died, Empire rocked.



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Listening to: Leslie Fish - Bring it Down
via FoxyTunes

The Last Man Club -- US version

Last living WW1 veteran honored by Vietnam-era deserter at White House.

Random Thoughts on McBush

"Y'know, back in the '70s, Joe Haldeman wrote a brilliant military sf novel The Forever War. The book is supposed to be fiction, not a roadmap for an Iraq policy!"

"Bumper Nuts" reach a new low

Nothing says "Support the Troops" like a Camouflage "Support the Troops" plastic scrotum to hang on your bumper!

edit: evil thought -- A Vietnam era phrase variously abscribed to LBJ, Nixon and SecDef Johnny McNamera was "If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow . . . " In this 'support the troops with a magnetic sticker" era, why not just get them by the bumper? That way you get the scrote, heart and mind too!

The Christian Hell Just Froze Over . . .

I am in complete agreement with a New York Times editorial for once.

Ever look for something for a long time . . .

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Listening to: Emerald Rose - Four Jacks
via FoxyTunes . . . and suddenly realize that you had it all along?

Case in point: the "Listening to . . " in this post.

A bit of background: I am utterly addicted to David Weber's Honor Harrington novel series. The Honorverse has been described as "space opera as if CS Forrester had written it." It's got exploding spaceships, Byzantine politics, Tech That Makes Sense, Sound Tactics (too much sf/f military fiction does not, sadly), historical allusions, action, adventure, telepathic cats with prehensile tails and opposable thumbs and characters to both admire and revile.

Anyway, back in 2000 or so, Baen Books, publisher of the series, put the whole series onto CD-ROM and distributed a copy of the disc with each hardcover of War of Honor. Anyway, I got that book and the disc, and gleefully synced the entire series' pdb files to three PDAs since then.

Also on the disc was the three Echo's Children filksongs set in the Honorverse. And until yesterday, I did not know it. I've been all over the web looking for "No Quarter!" -- I saw the lyrics on some random filk site last year, and as soon as I realize it was a Honorverse song, I had to have it!

Now I do . . . and it was worth the wait! I just hope the upcoming Honorverse books (three next year, pray to Sharon)

Many SF series get worse for wear as time goes on; this one gets better. I also recommend the books that are not part of the main sequence of the series, like Crown of Slaves and (most especially) The Shadow of Saganami. Also, unlike many series, reading them in publication order is best. My favorite of the whole series? The Shadow of Saganami, without a doubt. Followed closely by Honor Among Enemies, In Enemy Hands, and Echoes of Honor (which is something of a trilogy in terms of the ongoing story).

The song concerns what could well have been a scene in Echoes . . . but in Echoes the actual wording was "To all Grayson ships, the order is: Lady Harrington, and No Mercy!"

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Listening to: Echo's Children - No Quarter
via FoxyTunes

"You work for the US Army? Merry Fscking Xmas!"

Just when you think the fscking bastard in the White House can sink no lower, he manage to do so . . .


This is the kind of thing the sole defense contractor I worked for half a lifetime ago did one year: a week before Christmas, they had guards armed with automatic pistols (these guys were normally unarmed . . . and they were contract guards, not the in-house security guys) and clipboards waiting one morning as employees as they walked in. If you checked in and were on the list you were sent to a "morning meeting" where the contents of your desk, your pink slip and even more guards were waiting. Not everyone was laid off; this method was supposed to stop the rumor mill from grinding on. What it did was point out what a bunch of dinks the management was there.

I don't know about you, but "retarded asshats" does not begin to describe this behavior.

On the other hand, when the last tech company I worked for sent my job to India, they did it *after* New Years' and they gave all of us the bad news. They even held a beer bash on the last day when they collected your badge. I hated being laid off, but the company went the extra mile in treating me like a human being.

Apparently, the gang in Washington will do ANYTHING to keep the mess in Iraq rolling. Just over a year till our long national nightmare ends . . .

It figures...

US Navy runs out of Purple Hearts.

. . . in the middle of a fscking WAR.

The only thing I can say about this has been said better by Green Day.

Mr. Rogers, Destroyer of the Youth of Amurika!

Free parenting advice form our "friends" at Fox and Friends

"Can you say 'fscktards'? I knew you could . . ."

And all this time I thought it was something else.

That's what you get when you put a convicted child molester with over 100 confirmed kills as a Marine sniper in Vietnam in such a position . . .

The "Gay Bomb"

And, no, this is NOT from The Onion.


Too fscking strange for words.

Stabbed in the back...

I am ashamed this day to call myself a Democrat.

I am nothing less than enraged over the downright perfidity, the abject betrayal, perpetuated on the 70% of the American people who said, without equivocation whatsoever: "Get the US OUT of Iraq, bring the troops HOME! NOW!"

Keith O's Special Comment says it all....

Kudos to my own Congresswoman, Rep. Matsui and to Senator Boxer, for representing my views.
Senator Feinstein did vote for this abortion.

Arrrrggggghhh!

Memorial Day is fast approaching in the good ol' USA. In celebration of that holiday, my employer is holding a "Memorial Day Film Festival."

Now, being a vet, I'm all for celebrating Memorial Day. Americans often need to be reminded that blood and valor are the currency that purchases liberty, and to honor those who've paid for it on our behalf and in our name.

So far, so good. However, the "movies" that the events committee has selected make me want to gag: "Hogan's Heroes" . . . "Sgt. Bilko" . . . and "Gomer Pyle, USMC"

This is not a "TV makes RichO twitch" thing. It's the fact that Memorial Day is not about teh laugh track.

There are far, far better choices available . . . like the following:
Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, Flags of Our Fathers, The Killer Angels, Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers Once.

Memo to Shrub: "Religious Freedom" means . . .

ALL religions. Period. No Exceptions.

An example here.

Kudos to the frderal courts and Circle Sanctuary.

Storm Front: Book 1 of the Dresden Files

After dinner last night Iz wanted to hit Border's. In the process she turned me on to Jim Butcher's modern wizard / PI Harry Dresden. OK, I'm not a big fan of horror but I really love books where the author works hard to get magic, military tactics / culture and tech right. David Weber (Honor Harrington series), Richard Cornwall (Sharpe's Rifles, etc, British Napoleonic light infantry ), Patrick O'Brien (Master and Commander), and Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October is the best modern submarine book ever; only the late Edward L. Beach's Run Silent, Run Deep, set in the Pacific during WW2 is even in the same ballpark) get culture/tactics and tech right -- with a level of detail that some find irksome.

As as lifelong student of military science and technology, I appreciate the details these guys put in their works. I have not been studying magic quite as long -- my first exposure to an author who did it right with respect to magic was only thirty years ago; I've devoted time to more intense study the last fifteen or so. Mercedes Lackey (most especially her Diane Tregarde modern witch books) and Katherine Kurtz (not only the medieval Deryni-verse, but also her modern / WW2 Adept series) are on a very short list that just got longer by one name: Jim Butcher.

I took this book home and figured to give it the "100 pages test" -- if it could hold my interest for 100 pages, then good. Robert Jordan failed that test. Even Terry Pratchett (I know, Iz, I know! TPs a GAWD, but I.just.can't.get.my.brain.around.Discworld. Sorry! I've tried!) did not make the cut. My standards for holding my attention for the first one hundred pages are tough; the masters of the first-sentence grab-of-attention are guys named Heinlein (Starshp Troopers: "I always get the shakes before a drop.") and Howard (something about a guy named Conan being chased across a river, cannot quote it) trained me early.

I stopped on page 168 because I was ready to go to sleep . . . and not because the book was boring. Anything but! Plenty of action, tight plotting, very nicely drawn characters, enough wizard-lore to satisfy this Background Freak, and, yes, Jim Butcher Gets It when it comes to magic and explains it.

Thanks, Iz, for turning me on to a whole 'nother Harry.

“You’re leading us off a cliff. Stop!”

Sen. Biden's speech on debating Iraq.

This guy sounds Presidential to me!