Merry Christmas
This is the closest thing I’ve taken to a Christmas photo this year. Enjoy and may your holidays be full of love and tolerance.
Peace prize for what?
Please, someone, explain the reason why Barack Obama is being given a Nobel Peace Prize. I just don’t get the thought process behind this.
OSLO – President Barack Obama entered the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize winners with humble words Thursday, acknowledging his own few accomplishments while delivering a robust defense of war and promising to use the prestigious prize to “reach for the world that ought to be.”
A wartime president honored for peace, Obama became the first sitting U.S. president in 90 years and the third ever to win the prize — some say prematurely. In this damp, chilly Nordic capital to pick it up, he and his wife, Michelle, whirled through a day filled with Nobel pomp and ceremony.
And yet Obama was staying here only about 24 hours and skipping the traditional second day of festivities. This miffed some in Norway but reflects a White House that sees little value in extra pictures of the president, his poll numbers dropping at home, taking an overseas victory lap while thousands of U.S. troops prepare to go off to war and millions of Americans remain jobless.
While I have to agree that non-violence doesn’t defeat armies I cannot understand the type of twisted thinking that has to take place to give a guy fighting two different wars a peace prize. Shouldn’t we wait for him to broker peace somewhere in the world before we reward him for it? Perhaps I’m just mentally slow.
Photography update
I’m working on my photography site, trying to get it to integrate with this blog. I’m having limited success with Lightbox, as usual.
Choosing between Kindle and Nook
This is my first post from an iPhone. I didn’t think I’d ever do this type of blogging but what the heck. Malleable is good. Availability maybe not so much.
Do I want a Kindle or do I want a Nook? Barnes and Noble seems to be making a great entry into the field of e-readers. The Kindle has been around longer. The Nook looks like it takes all the best the Kindle has to offer and improves it slightly. The libraries of books available to both devices are huge. Prices of the books are similar. Both devices can download periodicals and other third party content. Neither of these devices really goes too far beyond being a good reader while stuck in an aluminium tube in the sky but they are worth getting to know. Chances are we’ll soon be using them to blog, twit, text and prepare keynote addresses. I wonder how many years it will be before I can dump all my devices in exchange for just one device – a connected everywhere all-in-one portable phone, entertainment, reading and storage device. Probably not that many.
The easy way to kill American soldiers
If you want to kill as many American soldiers as possible just attack them outside a “combat zone.” As a soldier and former marine, I’ve thought about this issue for many years because I am effectively deprived of my right to self-defense about 98% percent of the time I am in uniform. All it takes to slaughter American troops currently is a little willpower, access to weapons and enough intelligence to find troops on maneuvers around their home base anywhere inside the United States or anywhere outside a so-called combat zone. Just ask Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. He managed to kill 13 and wound 42 with two pistols inside the biggest Army base in the United States. And here you were thinking soldiers have guns. You were wrong. Soldiers mostly have paperwork these days.
Imagine what would happen if a professional cadre of determined aggressors armed with sniper rifles and the right training and experience actively started attacking the hundreds of unarmed military convoys that travel on U.S. highways daily. Just this weekend, I was traveling in such a convoy and I thought about exactly this scenario. We had rifles, to be sure. But they were locked up and we had no ammunition. My personal concealed carry pistol, an H&K .45 USP, is prohibited on base or when in the field even though I am a staff sergeant with combat experience. I carry this pistol every single day as a civilian and take my responsibility to defend my own life and the lives of those around me very seriously. The Army doesn’t believe in my right to defend the lives of myself and my fellow citizens. Except when a bureaucrat says it is OK, of course. The circumstances of my ability to engage an enemy with years of training are dictated by the faceless and the nameless. Men and women unknown to me decide whether I might live or die based in irrational criteria and flawed thinking.
A gun free zone is only gun free until someone ignores the rules and brings a gun into the so-called zone. There is no such thing as a safe zone. We live on a tiny little ball of matter spinning wildly through a universe filled with danger. That doesn’t mean we should live paranoid existences filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth. It does mean that we should encourage human beings to think. It means that we should understand our own infinitesimal fragility. It means that those of us who can should carry fire extinguishers, first aid kits, emergency food rations and guns and ammo at all times. These are basic survival tools and may be needed at the drop of a hat. No one locks up firefighters’ axes while they are off duty. That would be silly. Yet soldiers who are not actively engaged in security operations are deprived of weapons and ammunition. That makes our domestic military installations the biggest targets in United States. Sure, there are quick reaction forces. They are small and if there really were sleeper cells in the U.S. as we’ve been told it would be easy to attack and overwhelm these forces.
In the name of political correctness, we have murdered our own protectors by depriving them of their second amendment rights. This should shame us. The very people we train to protect us are disarmed by our own political class because of cowardice and mistrust. Do not give a man a gun if you do not trust him. Maybe you shouldn’t give him a uniform either. God didn’t design snakes with removable fangs for a reason. An Army that uses the motto “train as we fight” but disarms it soldiers the majority of the time might be broken. Is anyone going to step up and ask that we fix this? I am.
If you are a member of the “armed services” you should be armed. At all damn times. That way, when a psychopath is loose in your midst and is also armed, you don’t have to die running away from the danger.
How do we avoid another massacre such as the one perpetrated by Nidal Malik Hasan? We do the following:
- Encourage all officers and NCOs to carry loaded weapons at all times
- Train all uniformed servicemembers to respond to enemy shooters in domestic environments
- Begin training enlisted troops regarding the serious responsibilities they are being entrusted with (carrying a firearm at all times) beginning with basic training/boot camp – by the time they are NCOs 99.9% of them will be completely adjusted to the idea and comfortable with it
- Encourage retired military to be armed at all times wherever they are
- Create widespread awareness of these programs in the media
Ideas are always more powerful than weapons. Ideas kill people every single day on this planet. Bad ideas like gun free zones kill more people than they save. Stupid ideas like disarmed military population clusters are so asinine that I would quit the military if I didn’t need health insurance and supplemental retirement income to offset my huge tax burden, without which I could be paying for all the health care I need while saving for rainy days and my “golden years.” Thanks Congress. Thank you entrenched career busybodies in Washington, D.C. Thanks for nothing.
Sincerely,
An idealistic staff sergeant
P.S. If you think I’m just a nutjob read what other veterans and servicemembers are saying:
