I liked this:

“You know your own weakness and are modest; but you know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat [something?] which makes him capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, able to face anniliation for a blind belief.”

This aspect, coupled with the mirror aspect of the savage brutality inherent in war (often in the same act) is what has fascinated me about war at its roots. The very best of man, and the very ugliest come out in war at the same instant, and I have never understood how to reconcile that.

Also worthy of quote:

“Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism.”

And like he points out, it takes acts of ugliness to force us out of our quest for comfort and safety to accomplish and witness those acts. In a dark and awful way, Al Queda showed us who we are, and who we can be, on that terrible fall day.

Good link AW1 Tim.

=-= The fuck?

http://people.virginia.edu/~mmd5f/holmesfa.htm

I’ll quote one small part. Mind you, he’s speaking in 1895.

“The society for which many philanthropists, labor reformers, and men of fashion unite in longing is one in which they may be comfortable and may shine without much trouble or any danger. The unfortunately growing hatred of the poor for the rich seems to me to rest on the belief that money is the main thing (a belief in which the poor have been encouraged by the rich), more than on any other grievance. Most of my hearers would rather that their daughters or their sisters should marry a son of one of the great rich families than a regular army officer, were he as beautiful, brave, and gifted as Sir William Napier. I have heard the question asked whether our war was worth fighting, after all. There are many, poor and rich, who think that love of country is an old wife’s tale, to be replaced by interest in a labor union, or, under the name of cosmopolitanism, by a rootless self-seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost.

Meantime we have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt aginst pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked. From societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented, and a whole literature of sympathy has sprung into being which points out in story and in verse how hard it is to be wounded in the battle of life, how terrible, how unjust it is that any one should fail.”

http://mises.org/daily/3536

“In fact, there’s really no such thing as “nuclear waste”: a nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste. In other words, almost all “waste” can be recycled. Indeed, ninety-five percent of a spent nuclear fuel rod is natural uranium, and so it can be put right back in the ground, just as it was found.

The radioactive part constitutes only about five percent, but of that, half is uranium and plutonium, and so it can be recycled as fuel — specifically mixed-oxide fuel, which is exactly what the French have been doing for twenty-five years now.

After twenty-five years, the French store all their so-called waste in one room, under La Hague, which is about the size of a basketball gymnasium.

Why haven’t you heard this? A writer for the New Yorker magazine named John McPhee in 1974 published a highly influential book called The Curve of Binding Energy, which convinced President Jimmy Carter (et al.) that people could steal used plutonium from nuclear plants and makes bombs with it. But this is untrue. Nevertheless, solely on the basis of this detrimental misinformation, our country now has fifty thousand tons of nuclear “waste,” because our government won’t allow nuclear plants to reuse it.”

Jihadist rhetoric espoused by Hasan was categorically dismissed out of submissiveness to the concepts of tolerance and diversity.

I am glad an officer in the active army actually has the guts to write this publicly.

There are two good articles this week which address diversity and the crazy ideology behind it. One is written by Ann Coulter.

“Diversity” is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought.

http://www.anncoulter.com/

The other is written by William Lind and is a nice summary of the whole PC movement over the last 80 to 90 years. Yes, it did not start in the 1960s. It goes back to WW1.

“Diversity” is one of the many false gods of “Political Correctness.”

http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,206026,00.html