This post brought to you by the fine folks at Hooters (delightfully tacky, yet unrefined) and the Guinness Brewing Company (100% of the US Recommended Daily Allowance of everything a growing boy needs.)
There are just some songs that are so gay that even a dude in a Jeep Wrangler* will stop you on the street and say “Dude, act less like a sissy.” Over lunch today, my buddy and I came up with four that were just Liberace gay, but which were subsequently made kinda cool by a different artist. Can someone come up with a fifth?
*Out Magazine’s Gay Mobile of the Year, only thing gayer than a Jeep Wrangler is watching Show Tunes with Richard Simmons (or Superbowl6Romeo) in one behind a bar called “Dick and Peters.”
(This post will end with a music video, can you guess which one from the title?)
Some advice for the anti-war movement, thankfully, they won’t listen.
I seldom praise an actual journalist, but there is an excellently written article in the Minnesota Independent today by Chris Steller. The basic premise of the piece is that the Peace Activists can be largely broken down into 3 distinct philosophies of achieving change, and I want to discuss each in part. In reverse order of the way Chris discussed them, since the last is from our point of view the one that is most detrimental to the cause of victory.
The first is the group like the asshats in Olympia last week, and the guys who tried to shut down an arcade. This is the faction of the “Peace” movement that takes direct action. In Minnesota, as Chris tells it:
The bridge’s stalwarts embrace a predictability you won’t find in the actions of Leigh York and other young adults who locked themselves to the doors of military recruitment offices across the Twin Cities last month. It was yet another effort at steering United States policies in a more peaceful direction, but for this breed of antiwar activist practices a separate form of protest distinct from lobbying inside paneled government rooms or standing with signs on a bridge.
On a day they dubbed “Zero Recruitment Day,” activists affiliated with the Anti-War Committee put their bodies in the way of the work that normally takes place within recruitment offices. Some offices stayed shut for the day while at others police cut locks and arrested protesters, including York.
OK, some backstory first. When I found out that my old unit was deploying, I begged to get on the deployment. The first thing I did was sign a “try one” contract. That is when you’ve completed your service, and you want to just try out the National Guard. I signed it on Feb 22, and was sworn in at Shenanigans Bar in Leesburg, Virginia with a mug of Guinness close at hand. Since deployment was 18 months I knew I would get stop-lossed, but I was totally cool with that.
Now flash forward to today where Uber-TAH fan and truth deficient Army Times reporter Rick Maze files this story:
By week’s end, about 170,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — many of them no longer in service — who were involuntarily kept on active duty by stop-loss orders before Oct. 1, 2008, could be cheering Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee.
At Murtha’s urging, the 2009 emergency war funding bill that will be taken up Thursday by the House Appropriations Committee includes money and authority to retroactively pay $500 for each month someone served under stop-loss orders from Sept. 11, 2001 through Sept. 30, 2008.
The bill would extend benefits to those who were left out last fall when Congress ordered stop-loss payments that applied only to people held on active-duty after the bill became law.
So, February 22 to August 28 (possibly longer) I was on stop-loss. So, that $3500, which I don’t feel I deserve, will nonetheless go to a good cause. If Murtha doesn’t get booted over the 50k allegations (including the new one today) then it will likely go into his opponents campaign coffers. Maybe some to Soldier’s Angels too.
I just don’t see why anyone should get a bonus for doing a job that they were already paid to do. And how was my service worth $500 a month more than Snipers of Superbowl6Romeo’s when we were in the same unit. Just don’t get the logic of this.
Tacoma, WA – Activists staged a series of successful direct actions in several locations on the night of May 2, blocking striker vehicles bound for the Port of Tacoma from Fort Lewis. Blockades halted strikers at several points along Interstate 5, and 11 activists were arrested. Demonstrators have pledged to continue resisting the use of the port for war shipments.
The Stryker vehicles were heading to the Port of Tacoma for eventual shipment to Afghanistan in advance of the deployment of the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, where soldiers’ skills and lives would be exploited in the name of the “War on Terror.”
At times police used excessive force against unarmed nonviolent demonstrators. One woman was choked on the strap of her messenger bag while another demonstrator was dragged across the road by his hair while he was shouting that he was nonviolent.
Wow, that really sounds horrible, imagine how many times this poor cop had to take the pumice stone to his hand to get the stink of hippie off him.
A few quick things.
1) The hippies will not stop the Strykers.
2) This will cost the city a shit load of money.
3) I hope a hippie gets run over, and they have a pancake breakfast for them.
4) The dirty smelly hippies are all the children of rich parents.
5) The DSHs are all selfish little shits, because the only thing this accomplishes is it keeps poor joe from getting to sleep at a normal hour because he has to wait for the cops to beat down the freaks.
6) This is the Police Dept of Olympia. We should look into an “Adopt a Baton” program. Place bets on the internet on which Baton is the first to crack a DSH up-side the head? Something like that?
7) Chief Michel clearly wishes he had Richard A. Gabriel’s FAR MORE MANLY moustache.
8) Guess where the DSHs are meeting up afterwards? If you guessed the IVAW Coffeehouse, you guessed right.
9) The only man I trust to deal with a fullscale DSH invasion is a cartoon.
I admit, beating on the French used to be fun. But let’s be honest, they kick the crap out of more Pirates and sink more Greenpeace vessels than we do, so the South Park episode from 2 weeks ago was kind of a cheap shot. But the French are doing some damn good work, and we can thank the worst pirates in the world.
From a distance the large ship on the horizon looked like the perfect target, ripe for a successful spot of piracy.
But as Somali pirates sped toward the vessel sailing near the Seychelles Islands on Sunday, they were horrified to see two boats and a helicopter set off from their target and launch their own counter-attack.
They had failed to spot iin the dazzling sun, that the “merchant ship” they thought they were intercepting was actually a French naval ship bristling with cannons, radar technology and armed commandos.
In case you live under a rock and don’t know who Ceann is, shame on you.
So, I am TOTALLY addicted to the History Channel. Watch it nearly every day. Besides ESPN, Family Guy and Charmed, it’s about all I ever watch. And, if you ever watch it, you’ve no doubt seen Richard A. Gabriel. Richard A. Gabriel is a distinguished professor in the Department of History and War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada and in the Department of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. He was professor of history and politics at the U.S. Army War College and held the Visiting Chair in Military Ethics at the Marine Corps University. A retired U.S. Army officer living in Manchester, New Hampshire, Gabriel is the author of numerous books and articles on military history and other subjects.
Anyway, I couldn’t find his damn email because my research skills suck. Nonetheless, here are some questions I would ask him if my 4 hour search for his email hadn’t been futile last night.
1) Thermopylae, Camerone, The Alamo, Roarke’s Drift….we seem to have an unhealthy fascination with last stands. Why do you think that is, and are there other examples you would cite to of tactical losses that amounted to strategic victories?
2) The American military has exempted homosexuals from serving openly; do you believe that a model of inclusion based in part on the Sacred Band of Thebes is potentially a viable option?
3) There is always discussion of Maneuver vs. Firepower coming out of the Pentagon. In today’s world of asymmetric warfare, is the distinction important, or is there a better way of phrasing the hardware choices that must be made?
4) Which would you rather have if you were serving in Afghanistan: A battalion with a great commander and average squad leaders, or a battalion with an average commander and great squad leaders? What about in other conflicts through history?
Some not so serious questions:
1) It has been noted on my blog that while Canadians export Hockey players, seal pelts and Medal of Honor recipient Peter Lemon to the United States, we send deserters north. Since you work at the Canadian Military College, what can you tell us about any nascent plan by the Canadians to mount up on their Caribou and invade south to fix this trade deficit?
2) It’s been said that you are to the History Channel as Tom Brady is to the NFL, that you totally make it your bitch. Do you concur with this assessment?
3) If you woke up tomorrow and some evil bastard had stolen your moustache, who would you hunt down and kill with your bare hands before stealing their moustache?
4) Hypothetical cage match of you vs. Dr Steven Pressfield, what sort of fighting style would you use? Do you know any crazy Shaolin type shit?
MR Gabriel is here, at just shy of a minute, and Pressfield at 5:30. If you have not read Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, you honestly should shut down your computer, drive to the nearest bookstore and read it. I can say without a doubt that it is one of the most important books I have ever read, and I have passed around more copies of that book than I care to remember. Hell, I even got Southern Democrat to read it, and he is barely literate. I actually not only have the book in Hard and soft cover, I also have both the abridged and unabridged CD versions.
I begin this book review as I do all book reviews at TAH, with a quote that the publishers are free to use in the next printing of the work:
Vigorously fact-checked by a pride* of glue-sniffing marmosets with a Ouija board, Rules of Disengagement is a useless compendium of all the debunked canards from the last 7 years. I wish that instead of spending the $14.95 on this piece of shit I had simply replicated the experience of reading it by giving myself a scrotal laceration and then dipping it in turpentine and lemon juice. The legal reasoning behind this book it is roughly as logical as eating an omelet made of pigeon droppings.
*I have no idea if Marmosets travel in a pride.
I think I may very well be the only person in America to read these pieces of shit. This is borne out by the sales at Amazon.com. So far I have read Camilo Mejia’s The Road from Ar Ramadi, which was kind of like Ishtar, only with more fantasy. Then I read Joshua Key’s timeless classic The Deserter’s Tale, wherein the laws of Physics cease to operate in conjunction with the rest of the universe when Joshua is in the area. I read Winter Soldiers even though I had gamely sat through the testimony prior to that, and I have read everything Raoul sends to me, which is a Herculean task in and of itself. This book is currently ranked #322,224 at Amazon, and I wish I could send it back and read 322,225 just to see how this book could possibly be better than any other.
One of the biggest shocks for me in law school (with the possible exception of my actually graduating) had to have been in my first semester, in roughly my third class when I realized that Law Students are in no way any brighter than any other group of people I had been around. This is best illustrated by an actual question from one of my classmates, who in response to a hypothetical asked our professor “Would it be any different if the Child was retarded?” True story I am ashamed to say. Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild personifies the “Lawyer as mental midget” image, and goes one step further by showing how some lawyers will even go so far as to repeat obviously untrue stories, provided it illustrates the proof which they aim to demonstrate. She represented Matthis at his recent hearing, and all I can say is that those two absolutely deserve each other, each one striving to be more integrity-challenged than the other. (more…)
Yesterday was a great victory for me, the entire peace movement and for troops and civilians all over the world. I faced the military for my refusal to deploy to Iraq, and I walked away a free man with a general discharge from the Army’s Individual Ready Reserve.
This does not affect my discharge from Active Duty Service, however, which is the term of enlistment from which my G.I. Bill does derive. My benefits are mine, and I will use them to attain education, as all people have the right to do and should not have to fight in any armies to realize.
Oh, I’m sorry, thanks for playing. See, I contacted the VA. Talked to their people. Contacted some lawyers there. Also contected State VA personnel who administer the program. See, your statement is not an accurate one. Turns out, if you have a General after the honorable one, the honorable one won’t work. See, you will turn that one in, and the VA might never know. Only problem is, I’ll know where you are applying, and I have already filed a FOIA for your NEW DD214. And what will be fun will be me walking in and showing the VA that other one. See, what happens then is they will have to research it. Then, a bit down the road, you’ll get a bill for the full amount sent to you.
In the immortal words of that great philosopher Shaq, Tell me how my ass tastes!
All I have wanted since Day 1 of hearing your name is to screw your chickenshit ass to the ground, and guess what bud, I am within a mile of home.
How does it feel to be my Filipino prostitute?
Jonn added: See the chart below – notice how in the third group, the sixth entry, where I put a black mark, that it says that people with a General Discharge are Not Eligible (NE) for education benefits.
