Posts Tagged ‘veterans day’

Easy Co vs UVA, UGH Canada, Censoring Praise, Invisible Video and Seeing it Young Under the Fedora

Posted: November 13, 2019 by datechguy in culture, media
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Rewatched “We Stand Together Alone” about Easy Company of the 101st Airborne, the companion piece to Band of Brothers.

When I watch it and then see things like this:

The University of Virginia has canceled the 21-gun salute for its Veterans Day ceremony over concerns that firing weapons on campus could cause “panic” among students.

The salute previously came at the end of the school’s 24-hour vigil and Veterans Day ceremony, a tradition for a decade, although it’s commonly seen in the U.S. as an honor for visiting dignitaries.

I thank God that my father and his generation fought World War 2 instead of this one.

Apparently in Canada these days you don’t need to guns firing to trigger people.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

As the good folks at HotAir put it.

Poor guy. If only he’d done something more innocuous, like repeatedly wearing blackface as an adult, he’d have qualified to earn the support of millions of Canadian liberals who are happy to see him booted off the air today.

I think that’s really why the 85 year old Don Cherry was fired from is announcers post after decades of being a Hockey Icon. He reminded people of what Canadians once were when they had a beach at Normandy to attack vs where they are now.

The folks of the left today don’t like to be reminded of realities, that’s also why when they can’t cancel someone they edit them:

“It’s super cute when journalists/interviewers for magazines leave out the massive part where I give God the glory for the success/ achievements in my life,” Wright tweeted last month. “Haha I still love you and God will still be praised.”

As a very attractive black African woman on one of the best grossing pictures she pushes to many diversity buttons to cancel her but none of that God stuff is getting into those pieces if they can help it.

I’m reminded of what Saint Faustina said after recording her visit to Hell in her diary. Most of the people there didn’t believe there was a hell.

Sometimes even video that anyone can see

and front page headlines that graced the paper isn’t enough to change the official narrative

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I guess Baghdad Bob must have had plenty of children who came to America and became journalists.

Of course there are some who never fell for this stuff even in their youth:

When I was around nine years old, my parents and three younger siblings moved from a leaky roofed ghetto to a new 11-story government project in Baltimore. Everything was brand new, kitchen appliances and so on. Extremely excited, we were among the first families in the building of all-black residents. Within a short time, that building became a huge ghetto. The elevators were routinely out of service due to vandalism. Our apartment was on the 6th floor. Entering the pitch-black stairwell to walk up to our apartment was like walking into the shadow of death, as the sound of stepping on broken wine bottles echoed off the concrete walls. I suspect my fellow residents were Democrats. They believed every problem was always the fault of white racism.
At nine years old, I sarcastically said, “How can we stop mean white people from sneaking into our building at night, breaking light bulbs in the stairwells, peeing, breaking the elevators and smashing wine bottles?” Even at that young age, commonsense told me whitey was not responsible for problems we could fix ourselves.

I would be really interested in hearing what is being said on Black radio and podcasts about Trump, because I suspect that he is going to take an awful lot of the black vote in areas where even a small swing in said vote will make a huge difference.

Ask a Vet about their story

Posted: November 9, 2019 by ng36b in Uncategorized
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I will be forever amazed how well our country treats veterans. Anytime I’ve traveled in uniform, it becomes hard to pay for a meal. This is especially true if I’m driving in the middle of the country where there aren’t a lot of military bases. This Veterans Day will doubtlessly be no different, and I’ll get reminded again that this is a country full of great people that care.

Over this past week I had a chance to interact with some of the older veterans from WW2 and Korea. Those veterans are disappearing at an alarming rate, and it won’t be long until they are gone. After that, we’ll eventually have nobody that lived through the Cold War. That time is coming faster than we think.

These veterans have stories that bring these conflicts to life. One WW2 veteran told me about the large number of plane accidents near his hometown. It reminded me that while we increased production of everything from ships to planes, it doesn’t mean it was the greatest quality. We cranked out Liberty ships in less than a month, but more than a few brittle fractured in half due to cold weather and poor welding. Planes and other weapon systems had similar issues. There are a lot of training aircraft on the bottom of Lake Michigan due to equipment failures.

The Liberty ship S.S. Schenectady, which, in 1943, failed before leaving the shipyard. (Reprinted with permission of Earl R. Parker, Brittle Behavior of Engineering Structures, National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1957.) From: https://metallurgyandmaterials.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/liberty-ship-failures/

I would encourage every non-veteran reading this to not just thank a veteran this weekend for their service, but ask them if they have 5 minutes to share a story. Our veterans can become increasingly isolated in their own little groups, and after a while your sea stories get old in the same groups of people. Having even a brief chance to hear about something they did will help bring the conflicts alive. You won’t read these stories in a book. History books capture facts and numbers well, but history is made by real people who are far too complex to capture on paper. This Veterans Day gives us a golden opportunity to remember that and carry on these stories in our minds before they are lost.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The unknown debt

Posted: November 11, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news
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As the TV droned the Nurses aide
Came to clear the tray
No note of the ancient
Who seemed a world away

Down at the park the gang hung out
Sampling their weed
With no thought to the wizened guy
Whose bench was near the tree

The teller felt her day crawl on
As the customer line grew long
It was a pain that people waited
As the old man counted wrong

On the subway the teen rocked on
His earbuds rang its din
Noting of his ancient fellow
an unripe smell within

The code came through
and DNR was stamped upon the chart
a waste of dough the panel said
to fix his creaky heart

So many times when they go by
Do we avert our gaze
Forgetting what these men accomplished
In their Halcyon days

Noting not the beaches
Dyed a bloody red
That age before through firestorm
The man before them tread

Through sky and bursts
With steady eye upon the bomber sight
Ignoring their fellows fall
Through the terror of the night

At station stood upon his quad
While cruising through the slot
Upon a wet and oily death
The seaman. he dwelt not.

Those old eyes that we ignore
Avenged the dead at Pearl
But for them South Korea
Would be unknown to the world

In cold peacetime
They did confine
The iron curtain reach
And twas by their M1 Garands
The 1000 year Reich ceased

Yet every day we walk away
We have no time you see
What interest does that gray ole mane
Have for the likes of me?

If but a word
was asked them: “Sir
What happened in those days?”
Then first hand we’d know the path
They trod for all our sakes

So give a thought
To that old lot
Not just on Veterans Day
For in their youth
They gave to you
A gift you can’t repay