You Make the Call....IRAQ

Since I've been crossing the lines into the "enemy's camp" at the lair of the Urban Fox, I thought I'd open this challenge/question to you all...hopefully some of the Fox's readers will come here to post their solutions to the question.

If you could convince President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to accept your mediated solution to the current operations in Iraq, what would your recommendation be?

Take as many or as few words as you need to get your point across.

Hmmmm, birds of a feather certainly do seem to flock to this blog together. I'm the lone wacko, Yank (and I'll remind you that you'd be speaking either German or Russian without our help in the 1940s), conservative blogger brave enough to venture into your midst to support the other side of the issue. If you'd just rather me "piss off" I'll be happy to do just that...but only when the Fox asks me to leave...

What do you call people that fire mortar rounds into the exercise yard of a prison full of suspected "anti-government" prisoners and enemies of the interim Iraqi government?

What do you call people that round up members of the Iraqi National Guard and execute them "gangland" style with a bullet to the back of the head?

What do you call someone that kidnaps a defenseless countrywoman of yours and brutally murders her in the name of returning Iraq back to the hands of brutal dictators recently deposed?

If the word terrorist doesn't fit...I just don't get it.

We can argue all day long whether or not this war is a "just war" or not. Your sources of information are just that...sources. I read each and every one you cited in your initial blog entry. Many, many blogs out there are opinion oriented blogs...not major media outlets with huge research departments (that sometimes go under utilized...ask Dan Rather) checking each and every fact. People are writing about how they feel about the news stories that are coming out of Iraq, Afghanistan or wherever. To cite that American/Coalition forces used chemical weapons during the Fallujah offensive is probably a little bit over the top. While I would imagine that the use of CS gas (tear gas used for crowd control across the planet) would be unpleasant for someone that wasn't wearing a protective garment and mask...but hardly capable of "burning fighters beyond recognition." I've sucked down my fair share of CS during training events and exercises and I'll tell you one thing, you'll never find me in a crowd of protesters after being warned about the potential use of tear gas. Not at all pleasant.

Fox, I don't know what it is about you, but you keep trying to put Bush and Blair into the uniforms of Hitler and Mussolini. Yes, it's your opinion...but you're not backing this up with facts. You're using information collected from a variety of questionable news (Arab TV/Al Jazeerah like) and blog sources and expecting EVERYONE to buy it. Obviously you have quite a loyal, slavish following as I haven't seen anyone call you on the carpet for trying to force your point of view on your readers. I suppose that since I question your viewpoint I must be Hirohito, Goebels, and Himmler rolled into one.

My question to you...and your fans:

If you could convince President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to accept your mediated solution to the current operations in Iraq, what would your recommendation be? Take as many or as few words as you need to get your point across. Respond here...or at my blog: http://majordad1984.blogspot.com

I'll post this "challenge" on my blog for your responses.

Tonight as I sit here enjoying two day old turkey and ham left over from Thanksgiving...I'll ask the Almighty to watch over our troops, our leaders, and both our great nations.

See y'all on the high ground...

MajorDad1984

The British - Research through Classic Films

This one got a little long... As you all come out of your turkey and dressing induced comas...I recommend enjoying some decadent, lavish American entertainment through the magic of the DVD. It doesn't even have to be an American film. You never know, you might learn something. I'm learning something as we speak...from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's a lesson in "liberal-speak" and some insights into one of my worthy blogosphere opponents.....here's some dialogue that got me thinking... (for complete Monty Python scripts.....click here)

ARTHUR: Old woman!

DENNIS: Man!

ARTHUR: Man. Sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there?

DENNIS: I'm thirty-seven.

ARTHUR: I-- what?

DENNIS: I'm thirty-seven. I'm not old.

ARTHUR: Well, I can't just call you 'Man'.

DENNIS: Well, you could say 'Dennis'.

ARTHUR: Well, I didn't know you were called 'Dennis'.

DENNIS: Well, you didn't bother to find out, did you?

ARTHUR: I did say 'sorry' about the 'old woman', but from the behind you looked--

DENNIS: What I object to is that you automatically treat me like an inferior!

ARTHUR: Well, I am King!

DENNIS: Oh, King, eh, very nice. And how d'you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'anging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there's ever going to be any progress with the--

WOMAN: Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here. Oh! How d'you do?

ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady? I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?

WOMAN: King of the who?

ARTHUR: The Britons.

WOMAN: Who are the Britons?

ARTHUR: Well, we all are. We are all Britons, and I am your king.

WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.

DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship: a self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--

WOMAN: Oh, there you go bringing class into it again.

DENNIS: That's what it's all about. If only people would hear of--

ARTHUR: Please! Please, good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?

WOMAN: No one lives there.

ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?

WOMAN: We don't have a lord.

ARTHUR: What?

DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week,...

ARTHUR: Yes.

DENNIS: ...but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting...

ARTHUR: Yes, I see.

DENNIS: ...by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,...

ARTHUR: Be quiet!

DENNIS: ...but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major--

ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!

WOMAN: Order, eh? Who does he think he is? Heh.

ARTHUR: I am your king!

WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.

ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings.

WOMAN: Well, how did you become King, then?

ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake,...

[angels sing]

...her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to

carry Excalibur.

[singing stops]

That is why I am your king!

DENNIS: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

ARTHUR: Be quiet!

DENNIS: Well, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

ARTHUR: Shut up, will you? Shut up!

DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.

ARTHUR: Shut up!

DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!

DENNIS: Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?

Hmmm...now who might this be? There might be more than one correct answer....

Enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend...and by all means, don't buy anything. (Bah hah...I crack myself up.)

See y'all on the high ground....

MajorDad1984

Oh yeah....I Forgot

Happy Thanksgiving Wishes from the Entire Major Family...

May your turkey be moist, your pies be sweet, and the company you have not overstay their welcome! (MajorGranny, you can stay as long as you like....)

From the high ground of the world's greatest nation....

MajorDad, MajorMom, MajorTeen, MajorBaby, MajorTzu (Shih Tzu), MajorTeeth (Pit Bull mix), MajorSnowy and MajorSalem (The cats that allegedly live in MajorTeen's room).

Planes, Trains, and Group Gropes

With this being the busiest travel season of the year, I'm sure you've probably heard something about the recent change implemented by the TSA screeners from the Homeland Security Department...let's just say they're getting a little more "hands on" experience...

Read the following story....and come on back. As always, I've got an opinion on this one...

Airport screeners say getting up close and personal is no fun...

I'm a fairly frequent traveler...and I've been getting fed up for the past several years. We've seen a "knee jerk" reaction to the different tactics that some would be terrorists have tried...sometimes successfully, but others unsuccessfully.

Let's see, the hijackers on 9/11 (all easily identifiable as ARABS) use box cutters to commandeer four planes...and use them as fuel laden missiles to take down the World Trade Center Towers, cause substatial damage to the Pentagon, and thankfully caused the crash of the fourth plane short of their target in Pennsylvania. This caused several reactions...such as no more metal implements with our meals on planes, anything larger than a nail clipper to be confiscated at the security checkpoints, and longer more intrusive security procedures.

Then Mr. Reid tried to blow up a plane by lighting a fuse to ignite explosives hidden in his shoes...now I get to take off my shoes while trying to juggle a briefcase, laptop, coat, cell phone, keys and the like while trying to wind my way through airport security.

A couple of Chechen widows blow up a couple of planes in Russia...and now my wife, daughter, mother, and grandmother are subject to a grope in plain view of the traveling public.

Have we lost our minds? There are people that want to do us harm...a relatively small number of them at that. Why don't we try and round them all up and simply deport them? What's the harm in taking people that do not belong here and just send them packing?

This isn't necessarily a matter of security...first, it's a matter of controlling our borders and our sovereignty. If we would get tough by ensuring we know who is trying to enter our country, we would have a much better idea about who might be a real suspect rather than subjecting the law abiding CITIZENS of this country to the humiliation currently underway at our nation's airports. Immigration and Naturalization have procedures in place to accept a set number of immigrants each year. It's time that they get tough with people that enter this country and seem to disappear into our population of 300 million.

For some reason I seem to recall that El Al, the national airline of Israel has done pretty much a bang up job. Here's a link to a story that gives you some idea of how they've been able to avoid any serious security incidents since 1968, before these types of procedures went into place.

El Al Security

Yes, they rely heavily on racial, ethnic, and geographical profiling...but when you see a thief fleeing the scene of a crime with shoulder length hair, heavily pierced with facial decorations, and towering over you at 6'5"...you're not going to look for a chubby little Irish kid. Profiling is nothing more than using statistics to help you defeat a threat. Our friends in Israel seem to have much more experience than we do in this realm...perhaps we can learn from their past to help us into a safer, less intrusive period of travel.

Let's just hope that someone doesn't try detonating a "booty bomb" anytime soon. The thought of a TSA screener with a rubber glove will all of a sudden take on a whole different meaning.

From the high ground...

MajorDad1984

Stalin Tried this Too....

Has anyone heard about what's going on in what I'll have to assume is Cupertino, California???

Check out this link....and then come back for a spell....I think I just might have an opinion on this. Anyone surprised at that?

School Bars Declaration Of Independence

At the risk of all my Google AdSense advertisements going back to hawking religious paraphenalia (not that there's anything wrong with any of it at all) I guess that we have to go back to the issue of religion just one more time.

There is NOTHING in the Constitution that specifically speaks to the issue of separation of church and state. In our previous discourse about the Muslim instruction/orientation/whatever you may call it...I think that we agreed that in the study of humanity...we need to address religions. But I also seem to think that I predicted this sort of rash, one-sided, heavy handed kind of action.

The teacher in question is a history instructor!!! He teaches about what happened. Not what we would have liked to have happened. Not make up things that are more in line with what today's "modern" educators would like to see taught...he is supposed to teach the kids about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and the other dead white guys that founded this country. Those same heros just happened to be devout Christians that wove quite a bit of reference to the Almighty into the foundation documents that this nation was built on. Just because the word "God" seems to strike fear into liberals like holy water to a vampire...doesn't mean that you can simply take these phrases out of history's curriculum.

There have been countries that have tried to re-write their histories....the former Soviet Union comes to mind. My college Russian professor served as the deputy Army attache in Moscow under Nixon. He told us stories about going into Russian libraries and pulling the volumes of the encyclopedia off the shelves and looking for the "changed pages." This is where a former citizen of note became a non-person....their entry being replaced with some other person or entry. Just like in the book 1984 they would simply paste a revision right over your entry.

Are we headed down that path again? And is it Mr. Bush...who's been called everything lately except a Christian by the left that's leading the charge?

No, it's the politically correct, over zealous academics (or alleged academics) trying to protect children from even the utterance of the word "God."

Folks...there are many worse words floating around the hallways of our public AND private schools these days. "God, help me pass this exam....or God let me get into UT at Austin" seem to come to mind. As long as the word "God" isn't followed by the word "damn it" I don't seem to have a problem with it.

Okay...now that you've had some time to digest this contribution from "The Smoking Gun" and what I had to say.... what do you think?

Sick People...What Do You Do With Them?

Well, it became a very sad day for me today when I heard this story below:

Cops: Mother Cut Off Baby's Arms

How absolutely off the wall is this??? What do you feel as the child's father??? This monster's husband???

Post-partum depression....my aching ass! This woman needs not only to burn in hell...as I'm sure she will, but also feel the burning of a lethal injection coursing through her body down in Huntsville, Texas.

There is NO EXCUSE, may I be repetitive? NO EXCUSE for this woman's actions...and mercy isn't in my vocabulary at this point.

Do you think we could possibly find someone to come to the defense of these kinds of actions? If you think that there's some explanation for this type of crime...or some compelling reason this woman shouldn't be put to death before the New Year...just step right up and give us all a try.

Join me on the high ground...to pray for this little girl that was denied a puppy, her first kiss, her wedding day, holding her first child, growing old, grey and into a grandmother....

MajorDad1984

American Dream...Fact or Fiction As Read by the Author

AudioBlogger Comes to the "Cursed" Site

Hey!!! More new stuff here at "Cursed by a Classical Education" this week!

As I haven't taken the plunge (not sure why I'd want to) and secured some webspace to host this little corner on the blogosphere on...I stumbled across a companion product to www.blogger.com !

Hopefully you'll soon be able to hear some of rantings, musings or just one-sided discussions about "stuff" over your computer speakers...and not have to worry about reading pages upon pages of text.

Oh yeah, by all means if you want to try and port this technology to your BLOGGER blog...go to:

www.audioblogger.com (tricky huh?)

We'll run out a few pilot messages over the next few days as trial balloons...if you like it let me know. If you don't, I'll probably tell you to move along...I think this is too cool for school!

See ya on the high ground...

MajorDad1984

The American Dream...Fact or Fiction?

I've probably been spending a little too much time on some other blogs, posting comments to their musings than staying here at home putting mine into the blogosphere. Okay, you've got my attention and hopefully I've gotten yours for a little while here...

On the blog of "The Urban Fox" we've been having a very spirited debate about the relative goodness or badness of the way the American and Western socieities have become as "The Fox" puts it, lavish consumers of far too much. We're raping the rest of the world...gaining only for gain's sake. Having posted a number of responses, counter responses I decided to see if my audience has some thoughts on the idea of the American Dream. Specifically, is it still available, attainable, and worth chasing?

First, I would maintain that America has one of the best, most accessible education systems available to both young and old in the world. While I think that it's far from perfect for a large number of reasons, nobody in America can say that they didn't have access to education. We mandate that kids from 5-18 attend school on the order of 200 days every year. Pulling out 104 weekend days, a dozen or so holidays, week long vacations once a semester, and then a summer break where kids and teachers can take a couple of months off to recover to begin anew in the fall...we've got the calendar covered.

Next, can anyone argue that American and "The West" are the economic, industrial, and technological leaders in the world? Name another nation that has the track record of innovation, production capacity, and will to do what it takes to better mankind. While many people will say this is evil, over-consumptive, and flat out lavish...do we not share our advances and gains with the rest of the world? Is anyone willing to say that the world is worse off for some of these advances? (Let's leave SUVs out of the discussion....) Let's think about some of the wonder drugs, the medical advances, the agricultural surpluses we share, and the like.

To wrap this all up, let's take a look at freedom. In the West, we have freedom of speech, freedom to travel, and freedom to create wealth beyond the imagination of many others around the world. The key to doing this, is desire. Desire alone cannot be a driving force it must be coupled with the willingness to actually do something to improve your lot in life and the willingness to take the risks necessary to achieve a goal.

There are some in this country that live in what I'll call depressed areas. The industrial power of the "Rust Belt" is waning, perhaps to be lost forever. However, the residents seem to be locked into a geographic region that keeps them from going to where the new jobs are...a hesitance to re-train themselves for the next job...and generally a lackadaisical view of life.

What seems to be lacking in our society today is the "pioneer spirit." If we were to capture this again, I seem to think that we could get ourselves back on track and move forward with our lives. Government isn't going to be able to do this by itself. Personal responsibility and desire to improve the general condition are the key ingredients. Government simply helps in setting up an environment where this is all possible.