Archive for January, 2011

Blackfive unclear on the concept

Posted: January 5, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news, war
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Captain Owen Honors has been relieved and apparently so are liberals everywhere:

Without any regard for the highest moral values that military officers are expected to uphold, he broke barriers of taste and decency. Or, as the Navy put it in a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the Enterprise’s skipper used “poor judgment.”

I don’t know if Luisita Lopez Torregrosa served, I didn’t but Blackfive has. That’s most likely why he has this reaction over the relief of Captain Honors:

Well, and while you can compare an aircraft carrier to a frat house, it isn’t. But the further away from that alpha male and females mentality, the more pussified and Dutch-like our military will become. They have a union for their troops FFS. If we don’t have guys like the XO flapping his gums, buzzing the tower and deriding Surface Officers and other lower life forms, then we won’t have the mentality that flies toward an incoming swarm of 200 enemy planes, that charges a machine gun, or that leaps on to a grenade to save comrades.

For the most part it takes a particular type to be a great soldier. I’m reminded of the Falklands war when the British commented on the bravery of the Argentine Pilots saying that any country that produces world-class formula one drivers are going have brave fighter and bomber pilots.

A Soldier’s perspective provides some:

Let’s be honest, the videos were not politically correct, but they contained messages of importance that every command must convey to their subordinates. I’ve heard from many people directly who were either on those deployments and saw the videos firsthand or viewed them later. Their response was that, for the first time ever, those messages were actually watched by Sailors on the ship.

Typically, military command messages are monotonous, cheesy, dry and boring. Not “or”, but “AND.”

The Navy has to endure a different type of suckiness than land forces do when they deploy. By and large, they are confined to the limits of the ship on which they are assigned. Unlike Soldiers and Marines, Sailors do not get to drive into town, move from camp to camp, etc. They are stuck in confined spaces with perhaps a tenth of the personal space that ground combat forces enjoy during their deployments. The mood gets pretty crabby and I’m sure that Capt Honors understood that and did a great job livening the mood on board the ship.emphasis mine

Of course some people found it offensive. As a Christian, I found it distasteful, but I also saw the humor in it and thought it was a brilliant stroke of genius to get the Sailors to pay attention.

In the military the goal is results, what results did we get:

Capt Honors served a successful tour as the XO of the USS Enterprise and followed that with a successful command of the USS Mount Whitney (LCC/JCC 20), in Gaeta, Italy. The ship conducted humanitarian assistance missions in Lebanon and the Republic of Georgia in support of Operation Assured Delivery. His awards include the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Joint Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medals, Meritorious Service Medal, and various campaign/unit awards.

Yeah, sounds like this incident really reflected poor performance didn’t it? Luisita Lopez Torregrosa again:

Though the videos have caught everyone’s attention, the captain’s anti-gay slurs cut more deeply, especially now, just weeks after the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the beginning of a new era of openness and tolerance in our armed forces.

Because what we are all looking for in combat is openness and tolerance? I’m sure that is just what is needed when fighting in Afghanistan. Funny how our friends on the left don’t have the same openness and tolerance for humor that others are expected to have. Do you hear Sicilians going nuts over every mafia joke out there? However let’s go back to Blackfive again:

I have given my fair share of shite to any number of fighter pilot types, heck quite a few of them bought me and my friends drinks in O-clubs like Osan and Cubi Point as we told stories using our hands to show how we got on the guy’s six. But I sure as hell respect the stones, ability and discipline it takes to ride a rocket into the sky and then land it on a boat in the ocean. So unfortunately a good officer loses his chance to command the Enterprise over something this lame, but worse yet we lose a bit of our warrior spirit.

He doesn’t get it. The left has never cared for the “warrior spirit” The loss of American warrior spirit IS the goal of these folks. This isn’t a bug, this is a feature.

Cardinal Pell on the money

Posted: January 5, 2011 by datechguy in catholic, opinion/news, politics
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In Australia where many of the debates that have taken place here are heading Cardinal Pell lays down the card for “Catholic” pols:

“If a person says, ‘Look, I’m not a Christian, I’ve a different set of perspectives,’ I disagree but I understand,” he said. “If a person says to me, ‘Look, I’m nominally a Christian but it sits lightly with me,’ I understand that.”

“But it’s incongruous for somebody to be a Captain Catholic one minute, saying they’re as good a Catholic as the Pope, then regularly voting against the established Christian traditions.”

It’s the an awful lot like a “Catholic” college fund-raising as Catholic to the devout while keeping their Catholic identity hidden on campus like an embarrassing scar.

“Hey” you say, people have to follow their conscience don’t they? Well…

The Catholic Church “doesn’t teach the primacy of conscience,” he said, explaining that a person’s conscience doesn’t trump Church teaching. “You know if somebody said apartheid was all right, nobody would say, ‘Yes you can say that because of the primacy of conscience.'”

That’s the kicker, because their conscience is informing them to support liberal causes against the church the media is fine with it.

There are plenty of protestant denominations out there and people can make up their own if they want, but if you are going to be Catholic, BE CATHOLIC.

“Uniformly Positive”

Posted: January 4, 2011 by datechguy in DaTechGuy on DaRadio
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If you have a new radio show that is your primary means of support there are no happier words to hear from your station manager concerning feedback on a show than this. With only 7 shows in the can so far that is a great start and with hard work we will continue to get better and better.

Most importantly thanks to you the listeners who have made the show successful and to the advertisers who have supported it. I encourage the one to become better acquainted with the other.

Normalizing Communism Deb is only slightly off

Posted: January 4, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
Tags: , , , , ,

This article at Nice Deb yesterday caught my eye:

Russian TV covers the growing Marxist movement in America – it’s not often that a media outlet calls “progressives” what they really are, as RT America does, here.

I’m not going to embed the video as it’s Deb’s story, but both the story and Deb’s headline is off.

It hasn’t “begun” it has been going on for years.

It went on in the 60’s when college students found that they would not longer get the exemptions that the less fortunate had, joining with Marxists and Jane Fonda aiding enemies and directly leading to the death of millions in southeast Asia

It went on in the 70’s as Colleges veered left preaching moral equivalence between the Soviets and the US

It went on in the 80’s when pols like VP Biden and the late Ted Kennedy backed by the media opposed Reagan tooth and nail as he called the Soviet Union what it was and contained and rolled back communism in our own hemisphere.

We had a brief break in the 90’s as the soviets finally collapsed freeing hundreds of millions (while pols who had supported them and academics who considered them superior suddenly claimed they had been against them or expecting this all the time) but the green movement took over trying to advance the same Red system with a green veneer while ignoring the lack of “Green” in places like China and appeasing North Korea.

And this decade we had the left again blaming the US for the attacks on our soil, railing against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while ignoring the excesses of regimes like North Korea the violence of Radical Islam, the Judenrein nature of the middle east and the actions of leaders like Chavez.

The reason why it is out in the open is the fear. Times are tough so a nation that has been taught by people who have never had to sign the front of a paycheck or actually understood the sacrifices that allowed them the freedom to goof find themselves confronted by the left once again trying to sell a repackaged bottle of the same “ism” that has slaughtered more people over the last hundred years than anyone or anything else ever. The times have emboldened them and they hope to take advantage of it.

The truth is this: This is the living of the far left and always has been. The left impulses have always been totalitarian, they don’t trust the people but they trust themselves to rule them and hope to be part of that privileged class that like Saddam’s relatives, and party members in the old Soviet Union will still have the privileges that the average person is discouraged from. They aspire to the comfort of the feudal lords of the middle ages while pretending to be the friend of the people that they would make serfs.

This is an old style being sold to a public that has forgotten.

Update: I would have included this Mike Barone article if I saw it before I hit post but here is the little secret that people don’t know:

In addition, as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes in the American Interest, “The inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.” Bill Gates may have a bigger house than you do. But you have about the same access to good food, medical care and even to the Internet as he does.

Or consider something as prosaic as food. The supermarkets of the 1960s and 1970s didn’t come close to matching the amazing selection of produce, meats and exotic foods as you find in supermarkets today — and not just in high-income neighborhoods but in modest-income places all over the country.

Or clothing. Stores like Walmart, Target and Kohl’s sell good quality clothes at astonishingly low prices; you can outfit a kid in school clothes for $100 or so a year.

He also nails the elites who cry wolf:

I suspect that most Americans would be thrilled to get a 13th month of pay. But they’re not seething with envy at those who are better off.

So who does? One example is the cartoonist and author Garry Trudeau, a college classmate of George W. Bush, who has been spewing contempt for the Bushes for 40-some years. The strongest class envy in America, it turns out, may be the resentment of those who were one club above you at Yale.

Bingo!

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