Not like we learned or drew in grade school. Also, my hand turkeys were just that, turkeys. It’s why I wasn’t an artist.
Enjoy your day and be thankful for being in the country that has been the greatest in history for helping others.
Don’t forget that they were thankful that God spared enough of them so that we can be at the table today.
Here is one that I remember. When I went to Pearl Harbor, I had a similar feeling when I was at Dachau. The souls of the dead seemed to be there looking at you, hoping you will remember.
How quickly we forget. Here is the story of the last survivor. I met some of them when I was there. None will have that chance again
The end of an Era: Ed Hall, The last known Pearl Harbor survivor in Nevada died in his sleep this week at the age of 99.
Hall was in the U.S. Army Air Corps and only 18 years old when Japan launched a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor that left 2,403 Americans dead.
Hall’s longtime friend Mannarino visited him on Tuesday, the night before he passed.
‘He passed away peacefully in his sleep,’ Mannarino confirmed. ‘He joked with the nurses last night. Before I left he said “I love you.” He seemed still full of life.
The doctor told me that “When we went to check on him, he was unresponsive.” I just fell over completely. He was the greatest guy, from the greatest generation. Those men were cut from a different cloth.’
Hall had told the Review-Journal in an August 2020 interview that he was saddened to hear that he was believed to be the last living Pearl Harbor survivor in the state of Nevada.
In the interview, he also said that December 7, 1941 was a day he would never forget.
‘It’ll be forgotten, just like the Civil War, or the Spanish American War,’ Hall said. ‘This country better wake up or it’s going to happen again, that nobody will pay attention to the warning signs, like that day of December 7, 1941.’
On that fateful day, the former Army private was on kitchen duty and cleaning a frying pan, he has said, when he heard what he thought was a malfunctioning air compressor.
But when he walked outside the mess hall at Hickam Field (now Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam), he was met with the sights and sounds of a full-blown attack.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ he remembered yelling as fighter planes roared above him. A fellow serviceman pulled him down and shouted, ‘Do you want to die?’
‘There was shooting going on like you wouldn’t believe,’ Hall told the paper decades later. ‘I’m still amazed I didn’t get hurt.’
While they took cover, Hall said he remembers seeing an explosion that he later learned was the USS Arizona being struck, killing 1,177 sailors and Marines.
Lest we Forget!
The official story came to a close with an accountant shooting up the crowd. Follow this spew for a moment:
Neat and tidy, just like that. 3 year later when 3 hours is a lifetime on the Internet.
This stinks as bad as the Covid-19 story and Jab. Whatever cover story they are putting out about the Vegas shooting is about like the moon landing being faked. It’s just as (un)believable.
One of the biggest mass shootings in history, just swept under the rug. No real investigation revealed
After what the FBI has been doing lately, I naturally went there to them being behind it. I have no proof other than after what they have done since 2016, it seems logical. They even go after their own, like Whitmer and the elections.
I wonder how long and who crafted the story and told the story they wanted released.
What this shooter (these shooters) did took too much planning and coordination. At least throw in drugs, or the wife leaving him for his best friend or something that adds some credibility
The fix is in and whatever they say right now is likely a cover story, just like everything else they’ve been up to since they gave up hiding the deep state.
Do I sound jaded? Do I distrust the media, the FBI and the government? I’d say it was well deserved.
Well? Unemployment was lowest as well as the best standard of living for everyone in ages. It’s not up to me to stick up for him. He can obviously take care of himself.
I’m in it to point out hypocrisy, irony and outright lying.
I think she should look in the mirror before she points the finger so much.
I saw both of these in my feed. How can these people be so dense?
They are just taking our money and giving it to others. They won’t spend 5 billion to close the border fence, but can’t wait to give $100’s of Billions to other countries and not us (to build fences on their borders). In no way are the current leaders thinking of our best interests. They are thinking of their investments (Pelosi anyone?) and getting re-elected on other people’s money.
Do you know that all of the money for foreign aid is wrapped up together? So is we are helping a needy country, it gets bundled together with money going to China, Russian, Iran and other state sponsored terrorists.
It leads to Socialism, which leads to higher taxes. Relatives in the Scandinavian country tell me that they get to pay upwards of 70% taxes. I get the free college and healthcare (it’s not free, they pay taxes), but I also know of the under the table system that goes on to avoid taxes there.
I’ll support the protection of the country and investment into the future, but the just passed Anti-Inflation bill that increases inflation and is a re-badge of the green new deal. It’s just money for politicians to pilfer and waste.
With this Act, there are 87,000 new IRS agents. There are less than 900 billionaires in the US. What is happening is that the CBO Confirms at Least $20 Billion From New Audits Will Come From Those Making Less than $400K
Yes, just like Bush 41, Biden lied. There will be taxes on those who can afford it the least.
History shows the larges tax revenue increases are from tax cuts, not tax increases. Why? because you stimulate the economy and more revenue is generated for everyone, including the government.
It only leads to one thing.
And to bring this to an unhappy ending, this is why history is importat:
Once again, my friend George missed the boat and thinks that more gun laws would actually apply to bad guys. These laws only restrict law abiding citizens. I feel sorry for those who read the alphabet news sources of propaganda. He, like others should be better educated at this point in life on these matters.
Go down to the part about socialism and guns. Learn from history.
We went to the same American History classes growing up before they re-wrote the facts.
Anyway, here goes. Steal and re-post as much as possible.
An estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with—by execution, imprisonment, or forced famine. https://t.co/RBxIPnxXwm— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) June 17, 2022
Because he took away their guns first, like Stalin, Kim, and the rest of socialist dictators who killed 100’s of millions once the people couldn’t defend themselves.
I have out-law relatives in the socialist paradise of Scandanavia, more precisely in the home of Jante’s Law (also one of the stupidest assumptions about people’s nature). I told them that if you take away guns, people will use knives. If you take away knives, they will use rocks. It progresses to sticks and anything else. Just ask Cain and Abel.
All of this happened right after I told them, but did they listen? No. Guns are bad (to liberals) because conservatives and students of history aren’t afraid of them and built the greatest country in history. They only support leftards and liars like Hillary, Obama and Pocahontas and anyone who wants to tear down America. Bashing the USA is Europe’s favorite sport.
They get to enjoy inflation and lack of prosperity now that that the current administration is screwing the world and them because of it. They are getting a good education in trickle down economics, even in their socialist paradise. It’s just that it’s like plumbing with Biden or socialism, shit flows downhill.
They say they are the happiest country only because of the lowest expectations. They need guns because of the Islamic invasion sucking dry their money that they give 70% to the their government.
My favorite is the half breed James Governor who wondered on twitter who is, why do we need a well armed country and who are we fighting. We are fighting to keep our freedom from people who want communism like James. I’m surprises that you hold a US passport but don’t understand this. Russia, China or Cuba are good places for your dream country.
So George, would you do this?
Even though the MSM, the democrats and those against protecting US citizens are claiming that 2 Senators stopped a power grab, it was really 52. Half of the Senate plus Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin saved us by voting not to kill the filibuster.
Harry Reid threw the nuclear switch on voting in Justices. Not long afterwards in 2016, republicans took control of the Senate where they are approved, and the left is still (bitching) licking it’s wounds that the Supreme Court is (supposedly) 6-3 conservative. Recent verdicts show that Roberts has sided with the liberal judges on important issues like Obamacare by calling it a tax. We still suffer with that albatross. I just went through the process of getting insurance and Healthcare.gov is just another unnecessary layer of red tape that doesn’t really help anyone other than politicians.
Most politicians care most about getting power and staying in power. The two “rebel” democrats risked being outcasts in the next election by doing what was right for the people of the USA. They protected citizens from the government so we don’t have to do it. (see my 2nd amendment post a few down from here)
They should be hailed as hero’s for keeping us a Republic (no Pelosi and Shumer, we didn’t hurt the democracy because we are a Republic) rather than a monarchy.
The House and maybe the senate should flip this November and it also protected the democrats from being run over by a Republican majority, even if it is not 60 members.
Most of all, the ability to stop power grabbing legislature, like the voting act keeps the country protected by those who want to rule us instead of govern us. That was the intent of the current voter protection act, which only protects those in power to keep them there.
So, we escaped that one, but the spawn of Satan who are in charge won’t stop. There will be another power grab soon. I hope that the election cycle, which causes all candidates to lie about being moderate will stop the idiocy. If not, more like Manchin and Sinema will have to grow a spine.
I think that by being true to the people, that Manchin gets re-elected. Sinema faces a state of people less educated on history and what is right vs wrong, but I would vote for her for doing her job.
Cut the shit. The passports are just the next level of control of the masses. All through history, there have been those who try to be the ruling class.
Look at Cuba, North Korea and China to know that we don’t want that.
Take the red pill, I always have.
In my travels, I’ve been to both Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. To me, it was the beginning and the effective end of the War for the USA. The European Theater started much earlier, but it was before our country was forced into the action.
I am related to some who fought in both Theaters. They were people who had to grow up at 18. They had the lives of others in their hands, and some didn’t know if they would make it through the day. Some froze in the winter in Belgium, and others were in the primitive jungles of the South Pacific.
I’m sure they didn’t like their situation, but they had a sense of duty and patriotism. To a person, they all said they did their job and rarely bragged and never complained. Times were harsh back then and they did a lot of things that allow us to be here today, speaking English instead of Japanese or German.
There are only 2 survivors from the USS Arizona left, both are 100. There are about 150 left from Pearl Harbor, also centenarians or close. That means they were 20 or so. They were adults making real life decisions.
Now, everything is racist or woke or a problem (recently Thanksgiving). I wonder how the squad will figure out a way to denigrate patriotism on this anniversary to enhance themselves.
Most of those at 18 today are to immature to trust them with life altering decisions. They are too busy being offended to grow up.
It chaffs my butt when I post stuff and I get ungrateful comments about how the enemy was treated or killed. War is about blowing stuff up and killing people to end it as soon as you can to save lives. I have little patience for the woke or those who are more interested in cleansing history rather than embracing what made us who we are (except for the woke).
I had one chap from the UK trying to trash the USA on a post like this saying that the Russians fought two fronts, but we didn’t. He was trashing the USA for helping out the Europeans. I mentioned the Pacific Theater and his commie ass shut up because of facts.
Soon, there will only be memories, something that the socialists are trying to write out of the textbooks. Why? Because it was times like this that made America great. Now, it just seems that the current group of politicians, celebtards, MSM and social media idiots are the enemy of our country. They are trying to tear down our country because history didn’t write itself the way they want it in their unicorn world.
As for me, I think back on the sacrifices made for me to be able to live the life that I had. A lot of people lost their lives 80 years ago, and a lot more would suffer for the next 80 years of greatness. I loathe those idealogues trying to take that away for personal gain, greed, money or power.
That group could be easily defeated by unplugging the internet and then they wouldn’t know what to do. I could write in cursive or make them use a map and they’d be chasing their tales wondering how to boil water.
Try to appreciate a veteran, or someone who is in public service like the police, the firemen and others who sacrifice yet get denigrated. I thanked a veteran yesterday at the store for his service. I think he was Korean vintage, but it doesn’t matter to me. I always say thanks for your service.
I notice people going in and out of my blog. I kind of know where they stand when I pick a subject they don’t agree with me about as they are gone. I never really cared though as this is one of the outlets for my thoughts.
I don’t take particularly hard political stances, because most of politics is dancing with the devil, a house of cards built on sand.
I do however call out facts that go against someone’s personal beliefs sooner or later. I’ve never met anyone who agrees with me on everything. It’s just that I’m old enough now to call bullshit on things that are just too obvious for me to be hoodwinked into. I shake my head at people who buy into stuff that doesn’t have a chance of being supported by anything other than ideology, power, control or money.
Go to my tag cloud on the right and pick your poison. I even put in the about section that I’ve offended people.
Heck, just look at the post below where I state the obvious not because of my politics, rather a persons obvious track record screams the truth about what is going on.
I don’t know what the scale is, but it’s less than the bowls we have now days.
A rare private toilet, part of an ancient royal estate from the 7th century BCE discovered on the Armon Hanatziv promenade in Jerusalem, is to be presented to the public tomorrow.
The toilet cubicle was uncovered in a dig by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the City of David, about two years ago, in the remains of a magnificent building which overlooked the City of David and the Temple Mount.
The cubicle was hewn as a rectangular-shaped cabin, with a carved toilet, which stood over a deep-hewn septic tank. Made of limestone, the toilet is designed for comfortable sitting, with a hole in the center.
It must be the men’s room. There looks like it had a place to rest your boys without them getting smashed.
Almost everyone watches or has watched Jeopardy. I have for decades. It is the greatest game show ever. It is also one of the few that the Celebtards haven’t ruined yet because it doesn’t have anything to do with SJW and PC crap. I challenges your mind and memory. I love anything intellectually stimulating.
People play against the contestants from their living rooms. It happens without trying. You want to know how smart you are. There are a lot of strategies and when you think you know them, someone comes up with a new one, like James Holzhauer. I regularly beat the players, but I’m also good on the practice range in golf.
Every once in a while, someone goes on a run. Ken Jennings did 74 games in a row in the 2000’s. A couple of years ago, Holzhauer ran off 32 games and the top money scores of all times except for Jennings. He was about to overtake Ken in less than half the games due to his aggressive betting and incredible knowledge. He was a breath of fresh air. He turned the game upside down by going for the big money clues first, hunting for the Double Jeopardy clues and a willingness to risk a lot.
Last night, Matt Amodio, Ph.D student from Connecticut tied Holzhauer at 32 games in a row and is over a million dollars in winnings, the 3rd most (not counting tournaments of champions, Brad Rutter holds that record).
Tonight, October 1st, Matt could go into 2nd all time for games won. Nothing against James, but I want to see him keep winning.
Everyone loves a streak. In the movie Bull Durham, Kevin Costner told meat “a player on a streak has to respect the streak”. It becomes almost superstitious in baseball and I wonder how it will go for Matt.
It makes for great entertainment. It is the main reason we turn to sports or shows. Back to celebtards and sportstards, they ruin things like the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MBA and most movies and shows with PC crap.
The Jeopardy streak is about intellect, strategy and a little luck.
What is great about Matt is that he is a nice guy. He is respectful to the players past and present and keeps winning. He never says stupid things like “let’s make it a true daily double”. Instead, he bets everything in the Jeopardy round by saying his earnings. His knowledge and intellect is impressive.
He also says What’s (the question) instead of who when it is a person. I like that he has his own style. He has a great poker face on Final Jeopardy and you never know if he’s answered it correctly until it’s revealed. He currently is over 92% right on Final Jeopardy.
The reason I never could be on is that I am only about 30% on Final Jeopardy.
His betting has become aggressive like Holzhauer. I love big bets. It makes the game far more exciting. It separates champions from players or one or two day wonders.
The only regret I have is that Alex Trebeck isn’t there to share it. He made the game what it is.
Trebeck noted the different things about players and that champions are far more willing to bet big.
Sooner or later the streak will be over. It has been a great run. It usually happens when the champion misses a big bet and someone else gets lucky. That victor rarely lasts more than a couple of days. That is the luck part of the show. It’s usually bad luck that ends a streak.
Looks like the history books weren’t exactly right. Columbus discovered a land that people were living in for a long time. Sorry Europe and especially Italy.
Evidence was found that people were walking around New Mexico a heckuva long time before 1492.
For quite some time it has been “settled science” that humans migrated into the Americas during deglaciation as ice-free passages opened. While there have been indications that humans may have arrived much earlier, we now have “rock solid” evidence that humans were already in New Mexico about 23,000 years ago.
Earliest evidence of human activity found in the Americas, researchers report
Date: September 23, 2021
Source: University of Arizona
Summary: Footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years, say scientists.Footprints found at White Sands National Park in New Mexico provide the earliest unequivocal evidence of human activity in the Americas and provide insight into life over 23,000 years ago, scientists report.
The findings are described in an article in the journal Science.
Researchers Jeff Pigati and Kathleen Springer, with the U.S. Geological Survey, used radiocarbon dating of seed layers above and below the footprints to determine their age. The dates range in age and confirm human presence over at least two millennia, with the oldest tracks dating back 23,000 years.
Thank You WUWT
While this is sarcasm, there is a lot of truth in it. The Government is supposed to work for us, yet they act like they are ruling over us. Not wanting this was how our Country started…..just sayin’.
This is for the mush-heads who are tearing down statues or Colleges trying to teach a different story than what actually happened.
Teach the warts and the successes so that the next generation can decide for themselves.
Instead, they want to blame and disparage, for what? As always, it comes down to power and control. That’s another history lesson.
You can’t make yourself better by tearing others down.
Do I expect them to learn this in Portland, SF, Seattle, Chicago, NY and other like places? Of course not.
Worst of all, look at Washington DC and Afghanistan right now. How well is that going? They got their power and control, probably a lot of money also.
A lot of good that will do them when they die. The real book that should be there is the Bible. A history lesson is there also.
I wish the next generation luck. If they don’t learn the real lesson, there will be a new book about another country that was the greatest, for a while.
I first learned this when I visited Dachau, the concentration camp outside of Munich. It was a gloomy day and I could feel the pain and suffering that went on 70 years prior. It was a reminder of what men can do when led by the most cruel and deceiving of governments and leaders. They tried to ban a lot of things because they didn’t like them also.
I don’t have any connection to issues like the Civil War Statues, and didn’t think about them until they started tearing them down. I’m not defending either side here. I’m defending the side of history. If you aren’t proud of it, maybe you need to be reminded why not to do it again, rather than pretend it didn’t happen.
I’m sure it makes a snowflake feel better to tear down history, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Our best lessons are those that come from mistakes.
Lou Ottens, the former Philips engineer who gave the world its first compact cassette tape, has passed away. According to Dutch news outlet NRC Handelsblad, Ottens was 94 when he died on March 6th.
Ottens started work on the cassette tape in the early 1960s. The way NPR tells the story, he wanted to develop a way for people to listen to music that was affordable and accessible in the way that large reel-to-reel tapes at the time were not. So he first created a wooden prototype that could fit in his pocket to help guide the project. He also worked to convince Philips to license his invention to other manufacturers for free. Philips went on to introduce the first “compact cassette” in 1963, and the rest, as they say, is history. But that wasn’t the end of Ottens’ career. He went on to help Philips and Sony develop the compact disc.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of cassette tapes to music culture. We wouldn’t have mixtapes and playlists without them. What’s more, they allowed people to listen to their favorite songs and albums on the go. No ads or input from a radio DJ. That’s something that has come to define how people enjoy music ever since. And for all of their flaws, in recent years, cassette tapes have enjoyed something of a resurgence in popularity. In 2016, sales of the format increased by 74 percent. Two years later, they grew another 23 percent with help from the soundtracks of Stranger Thingsand Guardians of the Galaxy.
I remember having tons of cassettes laying around and a ton of broken cases. Sometimes the cases matched the tape inside.
Does anyone remember rewinding one with a pencil eraser because it got caught?
Somehow, the portability of music got us off the sofa and out jogging or skateboarding because we could listen to tunes. I think some people just wanted to show they could play tunes.
On the bright side, this is the beginning of the end to unwanted conversations on the plane.
“‘Wrong’ is one of those concepts that depends on witnesses.” – Scott Adams
It makes me wonder what is going on with the election. There clearly are witnesses, but there is enough uncertainty on both sides that it makes one question who did what and is it real?
Maybe the history books will one day discover what happened.
That having been said, it is a matter of moral importance as to what you do. It is said that how you act when no one is looking that defines who you really are.
Thinking clearly about the future lets you live wisely in the present. – Unknown.
Part of the discussion when I heard this was to not live in the past. Be guided by your past to avoid mistakes or achieve success, but that is different for everyone.
The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. – Edward Gibbon
I’ve heard a version of this that goes, “The harder I work and prepare, the luckier I am”.
Sure every pig finds an acorn once in a while, but nothing beats being prepared for most outcomes, situations and other events. Yes, the more you do something, the more experience you have to call upon to guide you. The only gotcha is human emotion and interaction. That is never predictable in the outcome.
Fortunately, you can at least anticipate that this is going to happen and how you will react.
There you go. It was 3 sayings in one for today, enjoy.
Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start. – Nido Quebein
You can’t change the past, regardless of how it treated you. You have to learn from it and move on. You also have to realize that it happened to make you the person you are. You will never be someone else so stop trying to be like them. Being yourself and accepting who you are is a gift. Many refuse that gift.
Social media is who people want you to think they are and want you to be. It’s becoming mind poisoning for many. Enjoy and be happy for others, but don’t let it define you.
This comes to today’s saying. Whatever happened happened. It’s time to take what you’ve learned and make the most of what’s ahead of you. You don’t know how long you may have to get done what you need to get done. Try to enjoy it along the way. You never know what lesson today brings to help you the rest of your life.
This is the only description I know of the amount of life you have ahead of you, but it is not for us to know. If we knew the ending, we might not live our life the way it should be lived.
Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong, it is the difference between right and almost right.
Times are weird right now. What once was considered wrong is now right, just because. The reverse is also true.
Don’t let what is going on tear you from your principles or the ability to know what is right. It is difficult and it is also hard to know if you are correct in your discernment.
History is a good teacher. It is important to have principles and stick to them. It’s just hard to do when the world is upside down.
“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” – Kilgore Trout
I didn’t label this as great. It is however, a break from the anarchy going on right now.
About the only positive I can take from the rioting is that we’re going to see real quickly if social distancing is necessary anymore. It’s surely not happening in a lot of places at once.
It seems like history is repeating itself. There were protests in the 60’s at the same time we sent men to the moon. Space-X just had a successful launch on Saturday.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” – Thomas Jefferson
Remember, I’m an observer of trends and have taken a position of waiting to see where I’ll fall on any subject until enough facts are in.
Milton Friedman said people are greedy and power hungry when answering who would you trust to have power for your government. We’ve had a test run on what would happen with the struggle to re-open the country after the Wuhan/Covid virus. (here is a brief clip, but the entire discussion is there if you want to view it). He refers to Einstein, Henry Ford and others accomplishing what they did and how.
Some governors have shut down their states, while others are trying to re-open. It’s too early to see who is right, but the trend is leaning towards the virus dying down in both.
What does this have to do with the right to bear arms? It gives us the right to protect ourselves from our enemies. At the time it was referring to the oppressive British, but when setting the boundaries of what was to become the greatest nation ever, it was to protect us from an oppressive US government or any other government for that matter.
As always, history will show the outcome.
“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
We have some power grabbing governors vs. some who are trying to re-start their states. Who knows which model will be correct. Forcing people to close businesses and not being able to feed their families seems overbearing though. It happened only a few miles from me to an honest fellow and it seemed unfair.
Who we trust in positions of authority right now and their limits of authority are certainly of interest. Being a student of history doesn’t give me a real sense of hope or belief that many of them have our best interests in mind ahead of their sense of power. My .02.
Update: On April 5th, the Surgeon General compared the Corona Virus to Pearl Harbor.
There are events in history that cause a divided nation to come together.
Some have been pandemics and others have been wars, but there are times defined by history that people put their selfishness aside and gather to do what is best.
As an example, I could pick the Spanish Flu, SARS, MERS, H1N1, Y2K, the Swine Flu, the Space Race to the Moon or any number of events, but I’m going to use Pearl Harbor.
I wasn’t there, but our nation was divided as to whether we should enter another World War or isolate ourselves and hope the problem would go away or others would solve it. This all changed on December 7, 1941 when our country was forced into the events of the world.
We could have cowered to the attack and ask them not to do it again. Neville Chamberlin tried to appease Hitler this way and it didn’t work out so well.
THE MIGHT OF THE USA
Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor knew that a surprise attack to take out our Navy was the only real chance for Japan to stop the USA so they they could expand their reach in the Pacific Rim. After all, he had studied and lived in the USA and knew that our forces were depleted after WWI. He also knew that he couldn’t attack us on our own soil.
What also turned out to be true was that if the attack didn’t work, that he would awaken the might of the greatest industrialized nation in the world and unite our country to defeat evil.
On December 8th 1941, men young and old were lined up to enlist to fight for our survival. They knew that they would be leaving loved ones behind and there was a distinct possibility that they wouldn’t return alive. They put their fears aside and were willing to fight for our survival and the future that we enjoy today.
Not long after, women went to work in the factories. We had to ration rubber and metal for war supplies, but everyone did their part.
Companies changed their direction. Auto makers went from making cars to building bombers. Scientists invented new weapons to win, not to just survive and suffer. Our nation came together as one because we had a cause to fight for.
After the war, the greatest achievements in technology, medicine and space exploration happened at a speed heretofore never accomplished.
WE’VE BEEN COMPLACENT AND DIVIDED
All of that progress created wealth, comfort and abundance and we lost our focus. It’s no secret that we’ve been a divided country. I’m not here to point fingers because there is enough of that going on through the tradional news and social media. All of it has a bias one way or the other and it has been pulling us apart.
We haven’t had a common enemy to rally against since the downfall of the Soviet Union. Instead, we’ve been feeding on ourselves instead of pulling together. There is a strain of hatred for what we have been that defies the achievements that built our country. I have read celebtards and sports figures that say we have never been great. This just proves that they have no appreciation for the sacrifice and achievements that gave them the fame and fortune to preach from their soapboxes. It also denies our ability to do it again.
We as humans need a cause to believe in and to fight for, whether we are handed or invent it ourselves. Conversely, politicians have been poisoning us with their desire for power and control. They have been playing a game of capture the flag on their own islands and haven’t put the good of the country and the people first. They have been building their power base by taking away our freedom through regulation.
Our government was set up with a system of checks and balances to ensure that no one had the power like the monarchy who we defeated to become what we are. We now potentially suffer from what the history of the world has suffered from since the beginning of time. That is the selfishness, greed and desire for power that has aflicted man since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
There also has been a faction for globalization that has tried to deplete our greatness by moving manufacturing offshore to the point that we could be held hostage for medical supplies. Our spirit of nationalization has been tested by the border fight and ideology fueled by hate of the President. It has ratcheted up these last few years in a power struggle because there was no enemy other than from within.
We have been eating ourselves instead of fighting together.
THE CORONA/COVID-19/CHINA/WUHAN/WHATEVER VIRUS
We now have a new Pearl Harbor. We have been attacked by a new enemy who ambushed us again. It is time for us to realize that we have a fight on our hands Opportunity for success or failure knocks at the door of the fate of our country.
To do that, we need to go back to the spirit of 1941. It was the people who came together in both the public and private sector, not the control of the Government that helped us save ourselves.
We can go back to being the humans that have struggle to fight against, rally together and overcome (both the virus and the overbearance of the governement regulations).
THE SILVER LINING
There is a great opportunity if we do the same as our forefathers. Manufacturing in America again can help us right ourselves to help reunite our country and help other countries as we’ve done before.
We are beginning to see the automakers making ventilators, factories starting to make facemasks and other birth pains of our possible re-emergance to self-sustainment. It can be done.
Before you manufacture in the USA instead of cheap labor offshore, there needs to be a construction boom to prepare production facilities. After that, the job creation of made in in America is limitless, profitable and will help us help ourselves and others if they want it.
We already have become energy independent by producing enough oil so as to not be dependent on countries who hate us.
Our pharmacuticals are all made offshore by countries that have threatened to cut us off. We need to do the same in the drug industry to continue our trend of independence and strength. Through this can we help the rest of the world and save our nation from being held hostage for needed medical supplies and energy.
Most of all, we need fix our goverment and make them serve us instead of us serving them. Companies and individuals need to be let loose to invent, design and create to defeat this latest Pearl Harbor instead of being told when and what we can or can’t do. It’s time to limit their power and continue the greatness that history proves is inside of us.
WordPress says this is my 600th post, but I know I lost the year 2007 when I switched from Blogger to WordPress because I avoid Google whenever possible. I likely passed it a while back, but they are gone forever now.
I post a lot about IQ, intelligence, Introverts, tech and a lot of subjects that would provide a platform to post something meaningful, deep in meaning , intelligent, well thought out and well written. As they say, the road to hell….
In that spirit, I give you a to do list that is sarcastic, funny to me and given the mood I’m in as I write this and very appropriate especially since my last name is Simonds (see number 8).
In these days of divisiveness, there are some facts based on economics that are hard to refute, even if you don’t want to admit it. I enjoy discussion by people of high IQ and of great wisdom, something the world of Political Correctness is sadly overlooking.
Revelations of what happened leading up to and following this tragic day inform us of a backstory of the events that took place in Washington.
Let me go on record to state that I am patriotic and an avid admirer of what the men of our nation did to overcome the tyranny of the Japanese and Germans in WWII. If you click on the military category of my posts, you will see that when I get cut, I bleed red, white and blue. I believe in the greatness and considerable achievements of the United States as well as it being the largest contributor for the betterment of others by any country in history.
However, as an amateur historian and an observer of the (in)competency and motives of bureaucrats in Washington, what our government did leading up to and on that day shows the weaknesses of humans. It should be noted that the Americans and more especially the soldiers who fought the war are held as honorable in my opinion. This post is not written to tear down any of the bravery accomplished during the war. They fought valiantly and protected freedom with the Allies.
This event brought together the country so that good overcame evil and I have the utmost respect for what was accomplished in that war.
Much of this was inspired by “History Honors Pearl Harbor” on the History Channel as well as other documented sources.
A historical documentation and the actual speech can be found here.
Incompetency
America was woefully unable to protect itself by December 6, 1941. It is not unlike today, December 7, 2016, as our current military has been decimated, or the decay of the military before the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers by the administration in charge during the decade of the 1990’s .
On the day of the attack, Roosevelt was viewed by his son as frozen at times because of the thought of what it would do to his legacy. Just like the 42nd and 44th president, their legacy was more important than the nation. The worst attack on American soil would be under his watch and he would be unprepared to deal with it. Fortunately, by 8 am on 12/9/41, brave young men around the country were lined up at the draft offices, but it would take the monumental effort of the country to overcome the government’s lack of responsibility to have a force that could protect our borders.
Next was the communications between Pearl Harbor and Washington. Roosevelt couldn’t get information about what was happening. Granted, the communications infrastructure was not what it is today, but there weren’t even secure lines or even direct lines to Washington. The Naval commander in Hawaii who tried to communicate information to the Chief Naval officer Admiral Stark at the War Department couldn’t give specifics as he wasn’t sure if the Japanese were listening in.
Further, the American leadership greatly underestimated the mental acuity of the Japanese thinking that they weren’t technologically capable of such an attack. It was speculated that the Germans had given them assistance. Hitler later admitted he had no idea that the Japanese were planning to, or had attacked Pearl Harbor despite what was taught at Faber College.
Douglas MacArthur couldn’t be reached in the Philippines for most of the day. General Marshal of the Army tried for the better part of the day to warn him of the happenings in Hawaii and to prepare for a similar attack. Washington wasn’t sure of where he even was or if the Japanese had already attacked. MacArthur boasted that he had special insight into the oriental mind. When he finally was reached, his response was that he was on full alert and that “We are ready, we have our tails in the air”. History documents that the Japanese attacked and drove him out of the Philipines shortly thereafter as MacArthur did virtually nothing and lost the islands in an embarrassing defeat. He was woefully unprepared, but his ego wouldn’t let him admit it.
Finally, the government couldn’t spend more than $750 on an automobile so they couldn’t get a bullet proof car for the President to be transported from the White House to the Capitol to give the speech. The Treasury Department had confiscated Al Capone’s car earlier so that one was used instead as they couldn’t be bothered to have proper protection for the leader of the free world. That would haunt Washington as recently as November 22, 1963.
Roughly 6 hours after the attack, FDR approved Executive Order 9066 which imprisoned 92,000 Japanese to internment camps for no reason other than their might be a fifth column attack within. It was supposed to be limited in scope to arrest any spies but morphed into what was one of the lowest points of FDR’s term of leadership. Little to no evidence is ever recorded that there was any treason on their part and no one was convicted of espionage or disloyalty.
They were deemed guilty rather than innocent in one of the greatest acts of prejudice by an administration.
MORE INCOMPETENCE AND DID WASHINGTON KNOW ABOUT THE ATTACK BEFOREHAND?
As I’ve stated, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I am for facts. FDR ordered an investigation headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts of the attack 18 days after the attack. Some interesting things were revealed. You can read further about it in the book A Matter of Honor, Betrayal, Blame and a Family’s Quest for Justice.
Admiral Kimmel, head of the Navy in the Pacific had asked Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark six months before the attack to keep him apprised of latest intelligence regarding what the Japanese were up to. Washington knew that Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to attack as early as November 1940.
Stark held back the information that aerial torpedos capable of being deployed in waters shallower than at Pearl were being used, despite Stark reassuring Kimmel that the water in the harbor was too shallow for a torpedo attack. How this wasn’t an act of treason is curious.
The FBI had intercepted information that the Japanese had made inquiries as to the depth at Pearl and whether anti-torpedo nets had been deployed there, but again Kimmel was never informed. Not sharing this with the command was grossly incompetent or an act of political chess.
Code-breaker Lawrence Safford visited Kimmel after he had resigned. He then told Kimmel about project Magic that broke coded Japanese diplomatic messages. Washington failed to inform Kimmel what they knew prior to the attack. It reveals the Japanese had spies informing the Imperial Forces where the exact location of the ships anchored as recently as 3 months before the attack. The code breakers who discovered this in Magic was only shared by as few as 10 men who couldn’t or wouldn’t tell anyone else. It was a power play by political operatives in Washington instead of military strategists who would have warned the fleet in Oahu and had the capability to defend against a surprise attack.
A message to the Japanese embassy was decoded instructing them to move to negotiations that had to be completed by 11/5/41, or things will happen automatically beyond that.
The Japanese fleet set sail on November 25th. There was no turning back at this point.
FDR was aware that the Japanese were going to break off negotiations and 10 days prior to the attack, Admiral Stark issued a warning that there could be an attack, unfortunately not mentioning or notifying the Hawaiian Islands that they were a possible target.
Three hours prior to the attack, Stark received a message that indicated what was about to happen but failed to notify Kimmel. By the time the message was placed into Kimmel’s hands, it was 8 hours after the attack and was not marked priority.
The intelligence was available, but Washington failed to connect the dots.
I hope that the administration which has meandered it’s way around the safety of our country hasn’t set the table for a repeat by those who have lost their respect for our capability to defend ourselves.
SEX
Missy LaHand, FDR’s assistant for 21 years contacted him on December 7th. She was closer to the president than Eleanor during that time, some speculate in many ways other than a secretary. With everything that was going on, the last thing he needed was to hear from a woman he’d had a relationship with. Eleanor allegedly pushed for a divorce after discovering hat FDR had an affair with her social secretary, so the last thing he wanted to do was push the envelope unnecessarily by contacting her. With the decisions that would change the world in front of him, all he needed was additional drama from his wife and another woman. He decided not to return her call from Warm Springs where she was recovering and it devastated her so greatly that she attempted suicide shortly thereafter. Presidents have had trouble keeping their pants zipped.
As a side note, but belonging in the sex category, Edward R. Murrow interviewed FDR that night. Not that it has anything to affect the situation, Murrow carried on a wartime affair with Churchill’s daughter-in-law Pamela Digby Churchill when he was a reporter in London. He had a close relationship with the Leaders of the Free World and an even closer relationship with some of their relatives.
DRUGS
Roosevelt had a chronic sinus condition from which he suffered most of his life. Shortly after the attack, he had a headache and was congested, so he was wheeled into the office of his physician, Dr. Ross Macintyre where he was treated with cocaine. It can be argued that it may have affected his decision-making that day. Since it was legal, it wasn’t an issue. Drugs used to be a political show stopper until Obama, who admitted he snorted it got elected.
ROCK AND ROLL
Fortunately, the attack woke up the nation and kick-started the industrial might the US. Some of the greatest human, scientific and technological achievements happened during the war.
Most important though was the lesson on how wars should be fought and won, something that has been lost on the leadership today. You fight to win and settle only for unconditional surrender. At that point, you set the terms of how the relationship will proceed. Germany and Japan have become industrial and world leaders, built up by the USA after the war unlike Vietnam and the middle east where our troops were strangled by congress rather than let soldiers fight the war.
It is interesting to think of what he observed in the mid 1800’s vs. the country we have in 2014. Here are his comments based on a visit:
Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that stuck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things.
In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of Freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.
Religion in America…must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom; it facilitates the use of it. Indeed, it is in this same point -of -view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief.
I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion—for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of cities or a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.
The sects that exist in the United States are innumerable. They all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man.
Each sect adores the Deity in its own peculiar manner, but all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.
Moreover, all sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity and Christian morality is everywhere the same.
In the United States the sovereign authority is religions…there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility and its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.
In the United States, if a political character attacks a sect [denomination], this may not prevent even the partisans of that very sect, from supporting him; but if he attacks all the sects together [Christianity], everyone abandons him and remains alone.
I do not question that the great austerity of manners that is observable in the United States arises, in the first instance, from religious faith…its influence over the mind of woman is supreme, and women are the protectors of morals. There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated.
In the United States, the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people…
Christianity, therefore, reigns without obstacle, by universal consent; the consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate…
I sought for the key of greatness and genius of America in her harbors…; in her fertile fields and boundless forests; in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her public school system and the institutions of learning. I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution.
Not until I went into the chutes of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.
America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
The safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law as well as the surest pledge of freedom.
The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.
Christianity is the companion of liberty in all of its conflicts–the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.
They brought with them…a form of Christianity, which I cannot better describe than by styling it in a democratic and republican religion…From the earliest settlement of the emigrants, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved.
The Christian nations of our age seem to me to present a most alarming spectacle; the impulse which is bearing them along is so strong that it cannot be stopped, but is not yet so rapid that it cannot be guided; their fate is in their hands; yet a little while and it may be no longer.
Read the rest of this PolitiChicks.tv article here: http://politichicks.tv/column/2014-alexis-de-tocqueville-esque-year-restoration/#5ulfUJKsDb9hcb3G.99
This is an abstract of a piece that being the son of an air conditioning pioneer in Florida, I can relate to. Before you skip to the link, notice his comments as he contributed a great deal of the original building code for Florida in an area when this technology first was implemented.
ABSTRACT This paper explores whether the spread of air conditioning in the United States from 1960 to 1990 affected quality of life in warmer areas enough to influence decisions about where to live, or to change North-South wage and rent differentials. Using measures designed to identify climates in which air conditioning would have made the biggest difference, I found little evidence that the flow of elderly migrants to MSAs with such climates increased over the period. Following Roback (1982), I analyzed data on MSA wages, rents, and climates from 1960 to 1990, and find that the implicit price of these hot summer climates did not change significantly from 1960 to 1980, then became significantly negative in 1990. This contrary to what one would expect if air conditioning made hot summers more bearable. I presented evidence that hot summers are an inferior good, which would explain part of the negative movement in the implicit price of a hot summer, and evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the marginal person migrating from colder to hotter MSAs dislikes summer heat more than does the average resident of a hot MSA, which would also exert downward pressure on the implicit price of a hot summer.
The link is here, his comments begin now.
He told me that he felt responsible, if not guilty that the d–m yankee’s relocated to the south, especially Florida. This is particularly ironic as his parents migrated from Boston in the 1920’s, but this was decades before air conditioning. That meant he spent his childhood growing up in an unairconditioned house in central Florida, a virtual hot house and the location of near 100% humidity. As a side note, I spent a part of my childhood in an unairconditioned house also, but kids don’t care about what they don’t know. We played outside in those days.
As he was a part of the team that designed the Epcot HVAC also, tourism wouldn’t have invaded and transformed the south either. It’s too bad they didn’t figure out AC for the outdoors given the sweltering heat waiting in long lines at tourist attractions.
One can track the swelling of population to the south, particularly Florida to the invention of AC. One side of the state tends to favor the mid-west (the more polite side) and the east southeast portion is now almost a southern borough of New York City.
He reckoned that what was once a polite southern state had become a haven for the same people that gave the USA a bad name abroad for their brash manners and self centered nature. He also observed the voting dynamics being changed by the northeastern influence.
Conversely, the south would not have grown near as quickly business and tourism wise had it not been for this technological improvement. I did enjoy one of the first air conditioned houses, but the heat combined with the imported people caused me to ultimately leave as the city I departed from (in south Florida) earned it’s reputation as the rudest city in the US the year before I left.
Additionally, it did raise wages in the south, although not enough for the liking of those who moved there. It also turned sleepy little towns into booming tourist traps creating numerous jobs.
Worst of all he said was the level of complaining. While the snowbirds moved there to get out of the cold, they then complained how everything was much better from (name the state or city) and how it was so hot outside. Not the most political fellow, he invited them to move back occasionally.
One final difference was that in the south, people let you in when there is traffic. Up north it is a sport to cut someone off.
On the anniversary of one of the most historic battles and largest amphibious landing, here is a round up of coverage and events taking place.
I’ll be adding links throughout the day. If you have a suggestion, please leave a comment and I’ll add it.
Remembrances of the men who were there
The War that had to be won to make D-Day a success
D-Day photo’s still haunting after the invasion
WSJ – D-Day Veterans Gather to remember
D-Day Memorial Anniversary Events
WWII Vets Travel To Normandy to Remember
BBC – Staged Landing and Remembrances Event
D-Day Historic Battle Re-created
The Darkroom, pictures and video’s of D-Day
Blackfive – The President’s Prayer, Eisenhower
Blackfive – Courage beyond measure
France will never forget what it owes these soldiers
What does D-Day Stand for and other facts?
The eyes of the world were upon us on the longest day
One of the finest speeches ever delivered at Pointe-du-hoc
93 year old re-creates parachute jump over Normandy
89 year old veteran sneaks out of nursing home to attend ceremony
WSJ – The debt owed to the hero’s of D-Day
This is not only very inspiring, it is some of the best advice on the Interweb. For those in a good way, it will make you better, for those in a bad way it will show you how to begin to pick yourself up. If you are young, it is a good lesson in how to live your life.
AP Photo/The University of Texas at Austin, Marsha Miller
UT alum Adm. William H. McRaven gives students the “hook ’em horns” at the university’s commencement last week.
U.S. Navy admiral and University of Texas, Austin, alumnus William H. McRaven returned to his alma mater last week to give seniors 10 lessons from basic SEAL training when he spoke at the school’s commencement.
McRaven, the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command who organized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, stressed the importance of making your bed every morning, taking on obstacles headfirst, and realizing that it’s OK to be a “sugar cookie.”
All of his lessons were supported by personal stories from McRaven’s many years as a Navy SEAL.
“While these lessons were learned during my time in the military, I can assure you that it matters not whether you ever served a day in uniform,” McRaven told students. “It matters not your gender, your ethnic or religious background, your orientation, or your social status.”
This plus the decline of morals have been the beginning of the end for Rome and all other great countries/societies/cultures in history.
I have half of my relatives on one side of the Civil War and half on the other. I have equal respect for both.
I searched my name and was surprised to find a ship with my name. It fell on the Confederate side of my family.
John Simonds, a 1024-ton side-wheel river steamer, was built at Freedom, Pennsylvania, in 1852. The Confederate Army used her as a support ship on the Mississippi River, where she was sunk off the fortress at Island Number Ten on 7 April 1862. It was sunk to prevent it from being used by the Union forces.
You should search yourself to see what is in your background.
Anniversary of D-Day b the Army
On D-Day, 6 June 1944, the Allied nations landed around 156,000 troops on the Normandy coastline. The American forces landed numbered 73,000: 23,250 on Utah Beach, 34,250 on Omaha Beach, and 15,500 airborne troops. In the British and Canadian sector, 83,115 troops were landed (61,715 of them British): 24,970 on Gold Beach, 21,400 on Juno Beach, 28,845 on Sword Beach, and 7900 airborne troops.
The War Years has created a range of D-Day commemorative designs and merchandise. Each of our designs incorporates QR barcodes that enables anyone with a smartphone or similar web-enabled mobile device to connect to our digital content, such as this Omaha Beach video. We also use 2D QR codes so that you can connect to our social media pages on Facebook and Twitter. Checkout our website: http://www.thewaryears.co.uk
The Assault on Omaha Beach
On D-Day, the untested 29th Infantry Division, joined by nine companies of U.S. Army Rangers redirected from Pointe du Hoc, were to assault the western half of the beach. The battle-hardened 1st Infantry Division was given the eastern half. The initial assault waves, consisting of tanks, infantry, and combat engineer forces, were carefully planned to reduce the coastal defences and allow the larger ships of the follow-up waves to land.
However, the assault on Omaha Beach did not go to plan. Almost all the specially designed amphibious DD tanks, that were to provide much needed covering fire for the infantry assault waves, sank off shore. Navigation problems caused the majority of landing craft to miss their targets throughout the day. The defences were unexpectedly strong, and the Germans inflicted heavy casualties on landing US troops. Under heavy fire, engineers struggled to clear beach obstacles; later landings bunched up around the few channels that were cleared.
Many troops were drowned or killed the moment they hit the beach. Many landing craft hit under water obstacles or were destroyed by mines. The surviving assault troops could not clear the heavily defended exits off the beach. This caused further problems and consequent delays for later landings.
Eventually small groups of Rangers and infantrymen scaled the heavily defended bluffs commanding the beach. Allied naval gunfire supported these improvised assaults. By day’s end, two small footholds had been won, which were subsequently exploited against weaker defences further inland, thus achieving the original D-Day objectives over the following days.
By The War Years Online http://www.zazzle.com/trumpess
AN EX-FBI AGENT WHO WAS SUPPOSEDLY TIMED IN
LESS THAN 3/100’S OF A SECOND.
THIS GUY COULD SHOOT YOU EVEN IF YOU WERE HOLDING A GUN ON HIM,
YOUR REACTION WOULD NOT BE FAST ENOUGH TO PULL TRIGGER.
NO – I MEAN YOU COULD START PULLING THE TRIGGER AS FAST AS POSSIBLE
WITH HIS GUN STILL IN THE HOLSTER AND YOU WOULD LOSE.
IMPRESSIVE STUFF
Watch the movie here, it’s unbelievable
First to Fight, the Marines are one of the 5 Military Branches that protect and serve our country. They have protected our freedom and the countless lives of many around the world. I am a big supporter of the military and celebrate each branch for what they offer.
BACKGROUND
On November 10, 1775, the Continental Congress passed a resolution stating that “two battalions of Marines be raised” for service as landing forces with the fleet. This established the Continental Marines and marked the birth of the United States Marine Corps. Serving on land and at sea, early Marines distinguished themselves in a number of important operations, including their first amphibious raid on foreign soil in the Bahamas in March 1776, under the command of the Corps’ first commandant, Capt. Samuel Nicholas. The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War and as the last of the Navy’s ships were sold, the Continental Navy and Marines disbanded.
Following the formal re-establishment of the Marine Corps on July 11, 1798, Marines fought in conflicts with France, landed in Santo Domingo and conducted operations against the Barbary pirates along the “Shores of Tripoli.”
Marines participated in numerous operations during the War of 1812, including the defense of Washington at Bladensburg, Md. They also fought alongside Andrew Jackson in the defeat of the British at New Orleans. Following the War of 1812, Marines protected American interests around the world in areas like the Caribbean, the Falkland Islands, Sumatra and off the coast of West Africa, and close to home in operations against the Seminole Indians in Florida.
During the Mexican War, Marines seized enemy seaports on both the Gulf and Pacific coasts. While landing parties of Marines and Sailors were seizing enemy ports, a battalion of Marines joined General Winfield Scott’s army at Pueblo and marched and fought all the way to the “Halls of Montezuma,” Mexico City.
Although most Marine Corps service during the Civil War was with the Navy, a battalion fought at Bull Run, and other units saw action with blockading squadrons at Cape Hatteras, New Orleans, Charleston and Fort Fisher. During the last third of the 19th century, Marines made numerous landings around the world, especially in the orient and the Caribbean.
Following the Spanish-American War in 1898, Marines fought during the Philippine Insurrection, the Boxer Rebellion in China, in Nicaragua, Panama, The Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico and Haiti.
In World War I, Marines distinguished themselves on the battlefields of France, as the 4th Marine Brigade earned the title of “Devil Dogs” for actions at Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Michiel, Blanc Mont and the final Muesse-Argonne offensive. Marine aviation, which began in 1912, was used for the first time in a close-air support role during WWI. More than 309,000 Marines served in France and more than a third were killed or wounded in six months of intense fighting.
During the two decades before World War II, the Marine Corps began to more completely develop its doctrine and organization for amphibious warfare. The success of this effort was proven at Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, New Britain, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. By the war’s end in 1945, the Corps had grown to include six divisions, five air wings and supporting troops, about 485,000 Marines. Nearly 87,000 Marines were killed or wounded during WWII and 82 earned the Medal of Honor.
As the Marine Corps attempted to modify the Fleet Marine Force (FMF) for operations in the nuclear age, the Corps began a decade long struggle to save the FMF and, in affect, its own existence. The Marine Corps had peaked in strength in 1945 at nearly half a million men in six divisions and five aircraft wings. The postwar Corps shrank to fit federal budgets rather than adjust realistically to fit the contingency needs of the Cold War era. Available manpower fell to 83,000 men in 1948 and dropped to just over 74,000 by the spring of 1950. About 50,000 men were assigned to the operating forces, but the FMF had only about 30,000 men in the two skeltal divisions and aircraft wings. Fewer than 12,000 Marines comprised FMFPac which included the 1st Division at Camp Pendleton and the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing (MAW) at El Toro, California. On the East Coast, the 2d Division at Camp Lejeune and the 2d MAW at Cherry Point, making up FMFLant, numbered just under 16,000 Marines. At the outbreak of the Korean War, no Marine unit of any size was based or deployed in the Far East.
The Corps’ supporting establishment was so small and its tasks for maintaining Marine Corps bases so extensive that many FMF troops spent more time housekeeping than training. The Marine Corps share of the federal budget was simply not enough to buy adequate manpower, training, or new equipment. The main threat to the nation was seen in inflation and unbalanced budgets rather than in the Soviet armed forces. On the eve of the Korean War, the FMF seemed doomed to fall to six battalion landing teams and twelve squadrons in 1950.
While Marine units were taking part in the post-war occupation of Japan and North China, studies at Quantico, Va., concentrated on attaining a “vertical envelopment” capability for the Corps through the use of helicopters. Landing at Inchon, Korea, in September 1950, Marines proved that the doctrine of amphibious assault was still viable and necessary. After the recapture of Seoul, the Marines advanced to the Chosin Reservoir only to see the Chinese Communists enter the war. In March, 1955, after five years of hard fighting, the last Marine ground forces were withdrawn. More than 25,000 Marines were killed or wounded during the Korean War.
The realities of the Korean War brought major changes in the basing and deployment of Marine Corps forces. The Corps strength ballooned to 192,000 men in June 1951, to 232,000 a year later and nearly 250,000 by June 1953. More than half the troops actually served in the operating forces, and the 1st Marine Division and 1st MAW, operationally employed in Korea, were kept up to strength. In the meantime, the 2d Marine Division and 2d MAW reached full strength for their European contingencies. In June 1951 Headquarters activated the 3d Marine Brigade, built around the 3d Marines at Camp Pendleton. In 1952 the brigade expanded to become the 3d Marine Division, and the same year the 3d MAW formed and occupied a new base in Miami. In another important reorganization, Headquarters in 1951 formed an organization known as Force Troops in order to provide the heavy artillery and other combat support and combat service support units necessary to sustain a Marine division in a land war.
The three-division/three-wing force structure decreed by the June 1952 passage of the Douglas-Mansfield Act, gave legislative support to the stated roles and missions of the Corps. The defense assumptions and programs of the Eisenhower Administration, however, left the Marine Corps role, and the corresponding basing and deployment strategy, less clearly defined. The emphasis on strategic forces over conventional forces, coupled with domestic economic implications of high defense costs and unbalanced federal budgets, challenged Marine Corps leaders of this period.
During the years 1953 to 1955, significant changes in the basing and deployment of Marine forces were realized. The 3d Marine Division deployed from Camp Pendleton to the Far East in the summer of 1953. Based in Japan, the Division followed regimental landings in Japan and Okinawa with a full-dress division landing exercise on Iwo Jima in March 1954. Significantly, the division began redeploying from Japan to Okinawa in 1955 and by February 1956 the Headquarters of the 3d Marine Division was moved to Okinawa where its remains today. Teamed with the 3d Division, the bulk of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, in Japan with headquarters at Atsugi, provided the air portion of a ready U.S. expeditionary force in the Far East.
The 1st Marine Division, meanwhile, which had been in Korea since the summer of 1950, was returned to Camp Pendleton in 1955. The 3d MAW during the same period moved from the East to the West Coast to support Pacific deployments.
In 1954, the 1st Provisional Marine Air-Ground Task Force, built around a reinforced infantry regiment and a reinforced air group, was established at Hawaii in response to strategic requirements in the Pacific Theater. One reinforced regiment of the 3d Marine Division, together with elements of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing were shifted from the Far East to Oahu to build the task force, later called the 1st Marine Brigade, to desired strength.
On the other side of the world, the commitment of a Marine battalion landing team to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, which began in 1948, continued except for brief periods in 1950-51 and 1955. During the Korean War, this practice was briefly interrupted due to wartime needs and during 1955 a reduction in amphibious shipping forced the termination of the rotating assignment for nearly a year. The deployment to the Sixth Fleet was designed to give the fleet commander a ready landing force in an area left unstable in the aftermath of World War II.
Events in the Far East from 1955 on likewise pointed out the need for a ready battalion of Marines afloat with the fleet, and from 1960 on, the 3d Marine Division maintained such a floating battalion under Commander Seventh Fleet.
In July 1958, a brigade-size force landed in Lebanon to restore order. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, a large amphibious force was assembled, but not landed. In April 1965, a brigade of Marines landed in the Dominican Republic to protect Americans and evacuate those who wished to leave.
The period from 1956-1960 witnessed the Corps’ continuing development of a permanent base structure to support its force in readiness mission as well as the procurement of supplies and equipment for a wide range of contingencies. Bases were developed stateside for cold-weather training at Pickel Meadows, and for desert warfare and supporting arms training at Twentynine Palms, both in California. Budget cuts and resulting reduced end strengths, however, became formidable obstacles to meeting desired manning levels for FMF units. The reductions resulted in all three divisions being placed on reduced manning levels in 1957 and total Marine Corps strength fell below 200,000. Commandant of the Marine Corps Annual Reports for the years 1957 through 1960 reflect the reduced manning levels throughout the FMF, stating of the Divisions and Wings, “their capability for sustained combat has been seriously diminished.” Reserve training also suffered during this period due to lack of funding.
By 1960, Marine Corps strength had fallen to 170,000 – down 30,000 in just three years. Over the same period the Marine Corps “green dollar” budget dropped from an already austere $942 million in FY1958 to $902 million in FY1961. Certain elements of the FMF had to be placed in cadre status. Perhaps just as damaging to the Corps’ readiness posture was the low priority given in the “blue dollar” budget to the construction of amphibious shipping and particularly helicopter-carrying ships, which threatened the development of the vertical assault mission.
To improve readiness in the Pacific, a system was implemented to rotate infantry battalions between the 3d and 1st Divisions. Beginning in 1959, the “transplacement” program had battalions forming and training in the 1st Division, then deploying to Okinawa for fifteen months’ service as a cohesive unit. The 2d Division began a similar program in 1960 which aided personnel stability and continuity, but as in the Pacific, it meant that several battalions could not be easily deployed in a crisis.
Nevertheless, in 1960 the Marine Corps began a five-year surge in its readiness that brought it to its highest level of peacetime effectiveness by the eve of the Vietnam War. The results of the Presidential election of 1960, coupled with internal redirection in the Corps, combined to form the highly favorable conditions for the Marine Corps to consolidate its amphibious force in readiness mission. The “Flexible Response” strategy of the new administration was ideally suited to the Marine Corps — stressing conventional force improvements in manpower, equipment modernization, and strategic mobility. Marine Corps budgets grew, as did the strength ceilings, and just as significantly, improvements were realized in obtaining amphibious shipping. During this period, as well, Headquarters enhanced the readiness of the Reserve with the formation of the 4th Marine Division and 4th Marine Aircraft Wing in the Marine Corps Organized Reserve.
The combination of increased amphibious exercises and contingency deployments kept the tactical units of the FMF busy during the early 1960s. The size of the possible Marine role in Europe grew as Headquarters aimed at a larger role in NATO. In 1964 II MEF conducted Operation Steel Pike I, an amphibious exercise in Spanish waters that exceeded all earlier exercises in both the size of the Marine force deployed and the distance covered. An amphibious force of 60 ships carried 22,000 Marines and over 5,000 vehicles to the amphibious objective area.
While FMF Atlantic forces were being exercized in Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, FMF Pacific units trained throughout the Far East, Hawaii, and California. In 1964 there were 45 landing exercises worldwide, and by the beginning of the major U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in 1965, the FMF, both regular and Reserve, was as effective a force as the Corps had ever fielded in peacetime.
The landing of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade at Da Nang in 1965 marked the beginning of a large-scale Marine involvement in Vietnam. By the summer of 1968, after the enemy’s Tet Offensive, Marine Corps strength in Vietnam rose to about 85,000. The Marine withdrawal began in 1969 as the South Vietnamese began to assume a larger role in the fighting. The last ground forces left Vietnam by June 1971. The Vietnam War, the longest in the history of the Marine Corps, exacted a high cost, with more than 13,000 Marines killed and 88,000 wounded.
The Vietnam War proved to be the ultimate test of the Corps’ basing and deployment decisions of the 1950s and early 1960s. From the March 1965 landing of Marine ground troops as Da Nang until the departure of the last large Marine units in June 1971, the war impacted drastically on all Marine forces within and outside the III Marine Amphibious Force. Peak Marine strength in Vietnam was reached in 1968 when more than 85,000 Marines were in Vietnam out of a Marine Corps numbering just over 300,000.
By 1972 the Marine Corps was once again down to 200,000 men and post-Vietnam redeployments had returned the Corps to the same basing and deployment patterns that had been in effect from 1960 to 1965. The 3d Marine Division was back on Okinawa and the 1st Marine Brigade had been reconstituted in Hawaii. The 1st Marine Division was back in Camp Pendleton and the 3d MAW remained at El Toro. On the East Coast, the 2d Marine Division and 2d MAW remained in North Carolina.
In July 1974, Marines evacuated U.S. citizens and foreign nationals during the unrest in Cyprus.
During the 1970s, the Marine Corps assumed an increasingly significant role in defending NATO’s northern flank as amphibious units of the 2nd Marine Division participated in exercises throughout northern Europe.
As it moved into the 1970s, the Marine Corps once again faced close scrutiny of its missions, force structure, and personnel policies. The Marine Corps continued to emphasize global strategic flexibility and reemphasized the Corps’ amphibious mission, developing the concept of “sea-basing,” which aimed at greatly increasing sea-borne logistic support. At the same time, FMF Atlantic launched its first time NATO exercise outside the Mediterranean when a Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) conducted maneuvers in Norway and northern Germany in 1975. These exercises, which became annual and expanded to brigade size, and their underlying mission of preparing to assist in the defense of NATO’s Northern flank, represented the Marine Corps single most significant change in deployment patterns until the end of the decade.
The revolution in Iran, the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and hostages there, and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 gave impetus to a Department of Defense plan to improve U.S. non-NATO military capability. The Rapid Deployment Force was created in response to the realization of the range of contingencies short of general war that faced the United States. In particular, the CONUS-based joint task force, with designated forces from all four services, was created with responsibility for operational planning, training, and exercises for designated rapid deployment forces worldwide with the initial focus on Southwest Asia and the Indian Ocean. The new force widened the FMF’s force in readiness role without compromising its amphibious mission.
The Corps played a key role in the development of the Rapid Deployment Force, a multi-service organization created to ensure a flexible, timely military response around the world. The Maritime Pre-Positioning Ships (MPS) Program was instituted in late 1979 with the goal of providing three Marine amphibious brigades ready for airlift to potential crisis areas where they would unite previously positioned ships carrying their equipment and supplies. The MPS concept gave the Marine Corps and the U.S. a significant new dimension in mobility, sustainability, and the global response.
An increasing number of terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies around the world took place in the 1980s. In August 1982, Marines landed at Beirut, Lebanon, as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. For the next 19 months these units faced the hazards of their mission with courage and professionalism. In October 1983, Marines took part in the highly successful, short-notice intervention in Grenada.
In December 1989, Marines responded to instability in Central America during Operation Just Cause in Panama to protect American lives and restore democracy.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 led to the largest movement of Marine forces since World War II. Between August 1990 and January 1991, 24 infantry battalions, 40 squadrons (more than 92,000 Marines) deployed to the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Desert Shield. The air campaign of Operation Desert Storm began Jan. 16, 1991, followed by the main overland attack Feb. 24 when the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions breached the Iraqi defense lines and stormed into occupied Kuwait. Meanwhile, the threat from the sea in the form of Marine Expeditionary Brigades held 50,000 Iraqis in check along the Kuwait coast. By the morning of Feb. 28, 100 hours after the ground war began, the Iraqi army was no longer a threat.
In December 1992, Marines landed in Somalia marking the beginning of a two-year humanitarian relief operation there. In another part of the world, land-and carrier-based Marine Corps fighter-attack squadrons and electronic warfare aircraft supported Operation Deny Flight in the no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina. During April 1994, Marines once again demonstrated their ability to protect American citizens in remote parts of the world when a Marine task force evacuated 142 U.S. citizens from Rwanda in response to civil unrest in that country.
Closer to home, Marines went ashore in September 1994 at Cape Haitian, Haiti, as part of the U.S. force participating in the restoration of democracy in that country. At the same time, Marines were actively engaged in providing assistance to America’s counter-drug effort, battling wildfires in the western United States, and aiding in flood and hurricane relief operations.
WORLD WAR II
Not to diminish any other time in their history, but to call out a particular time of sacrifice before technology and exemplifying hand to hand combat to save the world from oppression, I found this:
Photograph of the USMC War Memorial, which depicts the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. The memorial is modeled on Joe Rosenthal’s famous Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.
In World War II, the Marines played a central role in the Pacific War. The battles of Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, Guam, Tinian, Cape Gloucester, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa saw fierce fighting between Marines and the Imperial Japanese Army.
Philip Johnston proposed the use of Navajo as a code language to the Corps. The idea was accepted, and the Navajo code was formally developed and modeled on the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet.
During the battle of Iwo Jima, photographer Joe Rosenthal took the famous photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima of five Marines and one Navy Corpsman raising the American flag on Mt. Suribachi. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, having come ashore earlier that day, said of the flag-raising, “…the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.” The acts of the Marines during the war added to their already significant popular reputation. By the end of the war, the Corps expanded from two brigades to six divisions, five air wings, and supporting troops, totaling about 485,000 Marines. In addition, 20 defense battalions and a parachute battalion were set raised.[43] Nearly 87,000 Marines were casualties during World War II (including nearly 20,000 killed), and 82 were awarded the Medal of Honor.[44]
Despite Secretary Forrestal’s prediction, the Corps faced an immediate institutional crisis following the war due to the low budget. Army generals pushing for a strengthened and reorganized defense establishment attempted to fold the Marine mission and assets into the Navy and Army. Drawing on hastily assembled Congressional support, and with the assistance of the so-called “Revolt of the Admirals,”the Marine Corps rebuffed such efforts to dismantle the Corps, resulting in statutory protection of the Marine Corps in the National Security Act of 1947.[45] Shortly afterward, in 1952 the Douglas-Mansfield Bill afforded the Commandant an equal voice with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on matters relating to the Marines and established the structure of three active divisions and air wings that remain today.
Finally, what makes the title Marine so valuable? Click to find out!
SEMPER FI
I saw this question by analyst James Governor in an obviously sarcastic tweet a while back during a twitter debate on the 2nd Amendment. I did not want to engage in a useless waste of time in a twitter-fest over a subject because James is educated on tech, but very wrong on certain issues such as this.
I also did not have as eloquent answer as Allen West, Representative from Florida. An African-American tells how even whites would be held in slavery were it not for the 2nd Amendment as well a lesson in history as to who are the militia and why it exists. Lessons that real Americans know. Commies want to take away guns to control the population, right James?
Allen is a true American hero and forgetting the 2nd Amendment issue, is the standard for which politicians should be held to for integrity.
Here, he defines the enemy:
Also, he notes there are never any anti-gun protesters or appeasers at NRA events. At least they are smart enough for that.
I also note that the cities with the highest crime have the most limited concealed carry laws.
It is about preserving order.
An armed man is a citizen, an disarmed man is a subject.
George Washington: “Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.”
For those that have questions about why we have guns or that we should ban them, please answer these questions first.
1. How will you get all the guns?
2. How will you stop the bad guys like the Taliban and Al Qaeda from using other weapons?
3. When in history was man not covetous enough to use force to take his neighbor’s property?
4. Prisoners are able to make weapons in prison without gunsmith ability, how will you stop criminals from making guns?
5. The best protection from terror and attack are the best defense or the greater ability for offense. You have now taken that away. What is your protection?
6. When in the history of man have we not been at war somewhere in the world?
So here is the answer. Send your complaints to Allen, but be prepared for a beat down like you’ve never experienced.
Below, Yamamoto was the Commander of the Japanese Forces and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. He was educated and lived in the US.
It’s not that the Keynesians aren’t smart, nor poorly educated, nor bad economists (at least they studied it to make their economic position), rather it is that they are not students of history. I may have to argue that they are bad economists later though as it has yet to work and is failing again.
Here are 2 articles:
Moving beyond contorted Keynesian Logic.
So what kind of Keynesian world are Bernanke and the other wise ones in Washington shaping for us?
Keynesians see a depression as a lack of aggregate demand — as opposed to Austrians who know a depression is the required cleansing of the malinvestments created by the preceding boom of the government’s making. Policy makers, following the Keynesian playbook, enact policies to stimulate aggregate demand and offset the fall in private investment. On the fiscal-policy side, Keynesians advocate higher government spending. On the monetary side, they insist on lowering interest rates to zero if necessary.
The world has recent experience with attempts at resuscitating a bubble economy. The Bank of Japan cut interest rates six times between 1986 and early 1987 and all that new money caused the Japanese economy to bubble over. As Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin write in Financial Reckoning Day Fallout,
the problem with all money is that it is as fickle and unreliable as a bad girlfriend. One minute she goes along with the flow. The next minute she turns silly and bubbly. And then, she gives you the cold shoulder.
The prolonged period of low interest rates created one of the largest domestic bubbles in the world. For a brief moment in 1990, the Japanese stock market was bigger than the US market. The Nikkei-225 reached a peak of 38,916 in December of 1989 with a price-earnings ratio of around 80 times. At the bubble’s height, the capitalized value of the Tokyo Stock Exchange stood at 42 percent of the entire world’s stock-market value and Japanese real estate accounted for half the value of all land on earth, while only representing less than 3 percent of the total area. In 1989 all of Japan’s real estate was valued at US$24 trillion which was four times the value of all real estate in the United States, despite Japan having just half the population and 60 percent of US GDP.
“The Japanese asset bubbles were identical to other asset bubbles in the sense that they were essentially inflated by credit,” writes Asian bank regulator Andrew Sheng in his book From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.
Banks lent to highly leveraged developers to buy real estate against inflated collateral values, which then fueled the bubble further. Asset prices bore no realistic relationship to their return on capital, particularly since cost of funding was exceptionally low. The minute the credit stopped, the bubble began to deflate, and the main victims were the banks themselves.
After the bubble popped in Japan, that government pursued a relentless Keynesian course of fiscal pump priming and loose fiscal policy with the result being a Japan that went from having the healthiest fiscal position of any OECD country in 1990 to annual deficits of 6 to 7 percent of GDP and a gross public debt that is now 227 percent of GDP. “The Japanese tried to cure an alcoholic with heroin,” writes Bonner. “Now, they’re addicted to it.”
Japan’s monetary policy was to aggressively lower rates to .5 percent between 1991 and 1995 and has operated a zero-interest policy virtually ever since.
Between 1992 and 1995, the Japanese government tried six stimulus plans totaling 65.5 trillion yen and they even cut tax rates in 1994. They tried cutting taxes again in 1998, but government spending was never cut. Also in 1998, another stimulus package of 16.7 trillion yen was rolled out nearly half of which was for public-works projects. Later in the same year, another stimulus package was announced, totaling 23.9 trillion yen. The very next year an ¥18 trillion stimulus was tried, and, in October of 2000, another stimulus for 11 trillion was announced. As economist Ben Powell points out, “Overall during the 1990s, Japan tried 10 fiscal stimulus packages totaling more than 100 trillion yen, and each failed to cure the recession,” with Japan’s nominal GDP growth rate below zero for most of the five years after 1997.
After five years in an economic wilderness, the Bank of Japan switched, during the spring of 2001, to a policy of quantitative easing — targeting the growth of the money supply instead of nominal interest rates — in order to engineer a rebound in demand growth.
The move by the Bank of Japan to quantitative easing and the large increase in liquidity that followed stopped the fall in land prices by 2003. The Bank of Japan held interest rates at zero until early 2007, when it boosted its discount rate back to 0.5 percent in two steps by mid year. But the BoJ quickly reverted back to its zero interest rate policy.
In August of 2008, the Japanese government unveiled an ¥11.5 trillion stimulus. The package, which included ¥1.8 trillion in new spending and nearly ¥10 trillion in government loans and credit guarantees, was in response to news that the Japanese economy in July suffered its biggest contraction in seven years and inflation had topped 2 percent for the first time in a decade.
Newswire reports said the new measures would include assistance to the agriculture sector, support for part-time workers to find better employment, and rebates on toll roads. Additional spending was also to flow to healthcare, housing, education, and environmental technology.
Just this past April, the Japanese government announced another ¥10 trillion stimulus program. This was after Japan’s economy shrank by a record 15.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2009. This drop was on the heels of a 14.4 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Last month, Reuters reported that the Bank of Japan reinforced its commitment to maintaining very low interest rates and may provide even further easing. “The bank said that it would not tolerate zero inflation or falling prices.” The bank left its policy rate at .1 percent and analysts see the rate staying low possibly until 2012.
According to Reuters, the Japanese government “is fretting over the risk of the economy flipping back into recession and is pushing the bank for action.” Economy flipping back into recession? Are they kidding? Japan’s GDP at the end of this year will be no higher than it was in 1992–17 lost years.
“After 17 years of bailouts and stimulus programs, the Japanese should be getting good at them,” write Bonner and Wiggin. “But it’s a little like a guy who’s getting good at suicide — if he’s so good at it, you’d think he’d be dead already.”
But Keynesians are wont to grade on a curve. Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for one, points to Japan’s fiscal stimulus packages as having “probably prevented a weak economy from plunging into an actual depression.”
And finally, here is a video on Keynesian Economics.
If you look dead east to the hurricane, you’d find where I lived 20 some odd years ago. It hit like an atomic bomb that make south Florida look like Hiroshima.
It sounded like a freight train all night long. We had a new born and were mighty scared for hours. Fortunately, it moved fast and was over by the next day.
I had to crawl out of a window with a chain saw to cut a tree off of my front door so that we could get out of the house. We were lucky as it was a relatively compact storm and hit only about 40-50 miles south of where our house was. That was the difference between our house standing vs. being a pile of bricks.
This was from the guy that was the architect of Pearl Harbor. He was educated in the US and understood the 2nd Amendment better than the anti-gun activists do today.
Read the full story here, but making a farce of it seems to be the first objective.
Walid bin Attash used to frequent online dating sites. “Loves to travel — sometimes at a moment’s notice,” bin Attash described himself before his 2003 capture. So writes former CIA veteran Jose Rodriguez in his new book, “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”
On Saturday, bin Attash was one of five defendants charged with 2,976 counts of murder for their role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It would seem that bin Attash has grown very devout at Guantanamo Bay. His civilian attorney, Cheryl Bormann, wore a hijab and an abaya at the military pretrial hearing. She even suggested that female prosecutors dress in more “appropriate” fashion in deference to the defendants’ “fear of committing a sin under their faith.” According to news reports, distaff prosecutors wore military uniforms with knee-length skirts.
“Is the bin Attash in your book the same guy whose attorney feels she must cover her entire body?” I asked Rodriguez. Yes, he answered. “These people are pretty hypocritical. One thing is their religious beliefs; the other thing is what they do.”
It’s clear from Saturday’s antics that the military tribunal, which is not expected to begin until May 2013, will be a circus. Defense attorneys don’t have much of a claim to the clients’ innocence. In 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed issued a statement in which he proclaimed that he was the mastermind of 9/11, “from A to Z.” In 2008, KSM and his co-defendants told a military court that they were guilty and wanted to be martyred.
When President Barack Obama was elected, he halted military legal proceedings in favor of a civilian trial in New York. Fearing a possible terrorist attack, Congress objected. Under new rules, the military tribunal is back.
At 4 pages (typed on a typewriter), here is the original Press Release for the IBM PC from 1981. Judge for yourself the writing style.
At $4500, you could get a fully configured 64k PC with 2 360k floppy disk drives and a small dot matrix printer. Such a deal. I’m pretty sure that there are wristwatch
es with more computing power available now.
First, let’s start with President Reagan’s speech about D-Day on the 40th Anniversary
For the most graphic description of what took place, read BlackFive
Next, let’s look at the view of the beach that was taken
Here is the visual provided by the Army
It was one of the bloodiest days of WWII with the Germans cutting down our soldiers from pill boxes as they hit the beach, many seasick. The sea was red with blood and it took days to clean up the beaches, but this was the beginning of the march to Berlin. It was the “surge” that won the war.
As I’ve commented before, you do not negotiate the end of a war, nor the exit strategy. You win and gain surrender, then negotiate the terms of surrender. Pulling out just lets the enemy know how long they have to wait, then where to re-group. Today’s enemy’s, terrorist Muslims hate the US and the West mostly because of the liberal values that are against their beliefs. I especially blame Hollywood, MTV, College professors and the hippies of the 60’s for this.
D-Day was one of our greatest and most terrible moments in history. I salute those who showed bravery and fought for the freedom we have today.
My fath
er saw Europe tear itself apart in the 40’s, a continent that has been at each others throats for hundreds of years. My uncle saw the atrocities of the Pacific Theater as a B-29 bomber Captain. We now face attack from radical terrorist Muslims from the outside and socialism attacking Capitalism or those who invent faux issues like Anthropogenic Global Warming from the inside. Now, other religions are trying to take our holiday from us.
We must stand on the principles that made this country great, honor the memory of those who gave their lives to make us free and stand up to those who wish to defeat us now, or tear us down because we are not like them or are able, willing and ready to defend ourselves and our freedoms This is unlike the pacifistic and appeasers and even some of our current deleterious leaders who didn’t understand what Patton, MacArthur, Nimitz, Bradley and others knew. You fight to win, then you negotiate the terms of surrender and how business will be conducted. Even on my blog, there are some that just have no clue as to what we are about as demonstrated in the absurd comments of this entry.
Others feel this way also like Ricky Gilleland, quoting from this article:
Quiet, soft-spoken 17- year-old Ricky Gilleland spends most weekends surrounded by tombstones, as he walks through Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington, D.C. looking for the burial sites of those individuals who have died in the line of duty since September 11, 2001. Gilleland has taken on the job that the historic cemetery has not been able to do itself.
Through his website, preserveandhonor.com, Gilleland has cataloged the thousands who are laid to rest in Section 60 of Arlington Cemetery. With a camera in hand, Gilleland shoots a photo of both the front and back of the headstone, “to provide a virtual place for loved ones and friends to both locate the graves of the fallen and reflect on the memory of their sacrifice.”
August 6, 2010 is the 65th anniversary of the introduction to the nuclear age. Since then, over 1000 nuclear bombs of various configurations have been detonated by multiple countries, but only 2 have been in wartime.
Some say it was barbaric, I’m taking the position that it saved millions of lives. At that time “while the infrastructure and industrial capacity of Japan may have been ruined, the army was committed to and capable of suicidal resistance to the end.”
That is difficult to comprehend unless you understand the dedication to the emperor as a god, and the Samurai code of death by suicide before capture. Even when the Allies fought the Germans in the European Theater, both sides wanted to live and many surrendered before death. Not so in the Pacific theater where many Japanese were dropped off on Islands without provisions and told to live (as cannibals), documented in “Flyboys”. In fact, very few Japanese prisoners were taken as they either died fighting, or committed seppaku.
History notes the use of the bomb was first and foremost used to end a war against an enemy who was determined never to surrender.
While the Americans and their fellow countries were preparing for the Japanese invasion, they predicted the loss of life on both sides to be north of 2 million.
Ultimately, there had to be a statement of finality to convince this mentality of the utter futile nature of continuing. The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did this. My uncle, then a B-29 Pilot told me that far more damage and more lives were lost by the fire bombing, but it didn’t break the will of the Japanese people.
Japan still refused to surrender and upped its resistance with thousands of Kamikaze airstrikes. By the time of the atomic bombings, the U.S. Air Force was planning to transfer from Europe much of the idle British and American bombing fleet to join the B-29s in the Pacific.
Perhaps 5,000 Allied bombers would have saturated Japan with napalm. The atomic bombings prevented such a nightmarish incendiary storm.
The bombs also cut short plans for an invasion of Japan — an operation that might well have cost 1 million Allied lives, and at least three to four times that number of well-prepared, well-supplied Japanese defenders.
World War II was the most deadly event in human history. Some 60 million people perished in the six years between Germany’s surprise invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the official Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945. No natural disaster — neither the flu pandemic of 1918 nor even the 14th-century bubonic plague that killed nearly two-thirds of Europe’s population — came close to the death toll of World War II.
Perhaps 80 percent of the dead were civilians, mostly Russians and Chinese who died at the hands of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Both aggressors deliberately executed and starved to death millions of innocents.
World War II was also one of the few wars in history in which the losers, Japan and Germany, lost far fewer lives than did the winners. There were roughly five times as many deaths on the Allied side, both military and civilian, as on the Axis side.
Further, evidence was found that the Japanese had their own nuclear bomb and tested it on the Island of Hungnam days after the “bomb” was dropped on Hiroshima. So this act not only saved millions of lives, it now appears to have stopped a nuclear war. Reporter David Snell has documented this.
American soldiers found and destroyed a cyclotron in Japan shortly after the attack.
So ultimately, the goal of all war and the way it should be fought was achieved, to win. You fully defeat your enemy, then negotiate the terms of surrender. I only wish that today’s political correctness would go away and we would let the soldiers do their job without the meddling of an incompetent congress and inexperienced leader and put in a man like Harry Truman who said “We will unleash a rain of terror from the air”.
We face this again and will continue to face it as everyone will challenge the top dog. It is up to the free world to deliver what the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack knew.
This was both an important event in history and a lesson we should learn so that the next Hiroshima is not named New York.
One of the best speeches in movie history. In fact, one of the better movies. Here is the Indianapolis speech by Quint It described one of the bravest missions in Military history.
Here is the video
Original Article here:
History is reliving itself.
Take a dominant company with a large market share with essentially a proprietary product and have it grow to a large enough size based on a subscription or renewal/upgrade model, and you have either pre-Gerstner IBM or Microsoft today.
Peter Drucker has made very relevant descriptions of how companies reach plateaus and either change, tread water or decline. I’m not an analyst, but I can’t help notice that Microsoft is following a similar path that IBM lead in the late 80’s/early 90’s .
I have questions after hearing Vista is delayed, like how long can you miss your product introductions and keep credibility happy customers before they search for options (Linux, Workplace, name your new desktop platform here)? Um Bill, when Lou Gerstner took the reigns, people who missed deadlines had a career decision made for them as opposed to the pre-Lou years when things just went as they went. Look where that got us.
How long before external issues begat internal strife? Mini-Microsoft describes some management issues here calling for the leadership to be fired now.
How long before it affects your other products like Office? (StarOffice, OpenOffice anyone?)
Peter would be rolling in his grave right now to see this happening all over again. IBM went through this and almost didn’t survive. I’m not predicting a company death here, but if something doesn’t change, the market will change it for them as we vote with our dollars. Doesn’t anyone learn from history?
There are too many competitors out there today Microsoft, I know Steve Ballmer is firing shots across the bow at IBM, but I think that Oracle, Apple, Google and a host of others have more marketshare in mind than gathering crumbs under the Microsoft Thanksgiving table. Next time you shoot at IBM, you should look in the mirror and think if the following words mean anything to you? They do to the customers, the industry and history…..
Proprietary, Monopolistic, Bureaucratic, Schizophrenic about the competition.
Competition is good. It promotes Innovation and lower prices, oh yeah, it delivers your products on time or you get a career decision made for you.
A question that has interested historians and researchers for decades is: why? Why did Japan launch an attack that, in hindsight at least, they clearly had no chance of winning? The obvious answer is that they thought they could, but military and naval strategists know the answer is not so simple.
Precisely because its resources were so depleted by the war with China, it is accepted wisdom that Japan was hoping to expand its territories in the Pacific. If these areas belonged to Japan, they would, almost by default, become customers for Japan’s industrial and resource sectors.
But the Japanese underestimated America’s resolve to defend itself, for however long, and by whatever means necessary. If Japan hoped that America might take a “c’est la vie” attitude to the prospect of losing a battle in the Philippines, it was sorely mistaken. Nor was America still weary from the First World War.
Japan also underestimated the extent of Americans’ outrage at the bombing in 1941. It fueled the nation’s desire to win at almost any cost. No democratic government on earth can move forward without the will of the people, and after Pearl Harbor, the American people’s will was ferocious.
Here is the text and a link to the speech that FDR made after the attack at Pearl Harbor.
I read the Biography of Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the attack. He believed that the only way to defeat the United States of America was a surprise attack that would disable our military in the Pacific. He clearly stated that he feared that if the attack was not completely successful, it would awaken a sleeping giant that the Empire of Japan could not defeat in standard battle. It must haunt his legacy.
Tactically, the mistake was not destroying the aircraft carriers which were out at sea that day or his plan may have succeeded.
As it turned out, he was shot down only a few years later in a surprise attack by a squadron of P-38’s heading to an inspection in the Pacific.
Here is the Youtube speech by FDR
I find ironic the words of the second half of the speech, if applied to 9/11, would be appropriate. Also ironic is that Japan was extending its reach for economic resources.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack.
It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese Government had deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you, very many American lives were lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.
Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Wake Island.
This morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.
As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.
But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces-with the unbounded determination of our people-we will gain the inevitable triumph–so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, 7 December 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
Here is the only color film of the event. Listen to how excited the Japanese are and their commitment to give everything, including lives to this war:
Delusions of Adequacy 