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 Greetings! You are reading an article from The Mudville Gazette. To reach the front page, with all the latest news and views, click the logo above or "main" below. Thanks for stopping by! September 15, 2005
37 TrackBacksThis confirmation hearing, to me, belies more about the general ignorance of the American judiciary than anything about Roberts' past. Read More The heat here has definitely tapered off. I think we've actually had a high this week that was like 99 instead of over a hundred, and at night or in the morning it has actually dipped into the '60s once or twice. Cool breezes, very very nice for a change. Read More Today's winner is Federal District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton. Read More In spite of the ruling by Judge Lawrence Karlton, here at bRight & Early you are encouraged to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. My friend The MaryHunter pointed out this recitation and comentary on the Pledge by Red Skelton. The file may be off... Read More If you have packrat tendencies, or don't realize you're a slob....or perhaps are married to one and can't seem to keep up, here are a few guidelines and indicators that should help. How to know if you are a slob: 1. You lose a sock and start looki... Read More h/t SPC Flowers, CENTCOM http://www.centcom.mil/extremistssay.asp What Extremists Are Saying CENTCOM: We are fighting an enemy in Iraq and a network of terrorist organizations in the Global War On Terror that uses violence against civilians as... Read More Just yesterday a lefty judge ruled the pledge of allegiance unconstitutional. It’s pretty simple, either we are a nation under God, or a nation without God. I’m not sure the far left know how dangerous it is that they are trying to take... Read More The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and The North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) have announced the revival of their monthly dinner-dance mixer. We're really excited about partnering up with our good friends at NAMBLA once again, stated Read More Today's dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny ... It's Stop the ACLU Thursday Read More Can you spot the amaturish doctoring in this CAIR released photo? (Hint: the woman to the left of the podium showed up to the press conference not wearing a hijab.) Did you guess it? Point Five has the original photo: Read More In today's Opinion Journal, Manuel Miranda recounts disturbing but not surprising developments at the Roberts confirmation hearings. Read More In one instance, the respected Gallup polling organization does the kind of spinning people expect to find in the NY Times. What's going on? I ask Gallup's Editor-in-Chief. Read More Federal Judge Lawrence Carlton, in Sacramento California has reinvigorated the crusade of Michael Newdow by ruling that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional and therefore must be banned from the public schools that are within this court's juris... Read More I was lucky to find time to listen to the Hitchens v. Galloway debate via webcast last night. I was also lucky enough to come across an mp3 (17mb) of a portion of the debate. The contest was immensely Read More I'm going away on vacation until next Tuesday Sept. 20. Go ahead an use this for open trackbacks in the meantime. Please only link 2 per day. Keep going all week long. Sure the trackbacks won't bring in the big extra traffic, but it might move you up f... Read More If it weren’t so obvious, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so amusing to see the contorted twisting and conniving that goes on among the liberal anointed elite — so many of whom are United States senators — in order to redefine and ... Read More Here are some excerpts from a website that represents a political party In the United States. Check them out and see if you picked the right answer. Our Party is a consistent fighter for the unity of our multiracial, multinational, male-female, ... Read More America's Poverty Rate- Hurricane Katrina is forcing many Americans to deal with the uncomfortable issue of poverty. But it is also spawning quite a bit of erroneous demagoguing and misinformation on the subject. First, let's take America's official po... Read More Frances Newton was executed Wednesday for the fatal shootings of her husband and two children 18 years ago, becoming the third woman, and first black woman, to be put to death in Texas since executions resumed in 1982. Black leaders, including the Rev.... Read More So the Sunday after I signed my contract I watched with bemusement as an anti-war rally tried to shut down the recruitment center...The fact that most of them looked like they couldn’t pass the drug test, the height/ weight standard, or the physical ... Read More giant catfish taken for examination Read More Some boys I know (including one who saved me from an ass-whuppin by a French Foreign Legion gent) have been leading the offensive in Tal Afar. One of the major units involved, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, spent a lot of time.... Read More To those who thought that the recess appointment of John Bolton as top US diplomat to the UN was going to create chaos, the recent proceedings at the current UN summit proves otherwise. Read More This Knight-Ridder story about Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is making the rounds today. In short, a memo indicates he did not officially transfer authority to the head of FEMA to mobilize the hurricane Katrina response until August 30... Read More I didn’t start this post to ridicule Paltrow specifically, but instead to express my opinion on people in general who get disgusted with a policy or politician to the point they claim they want to leave the country. Read More I don't know about you but this absolutely puts my anger and frustration with the DHS in the "ballistic" category. I find it extremely difficult to believe there is a high demand for foreign Katrina relief workers. Read More Violence against women is a global problem, but civilized societies do not sanction Honour Killings, which are justifiable in many Middle Eastern countries if a family member, most often a woman, shames the family. Women are killed for the slightest of... Read More I certainly had a lot to say about the Flight 93 insult to the dead memorial. However, now that the architect has announced that he is going to humor us reconsider his poorly conceived design, I find that I will Read More “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”, in the modern vernacular, “Well, Duh!” Read More Update: This is not a regulation haircut, it is an artistic statement. Thanks to Mudville for the Open Post.... Read More This is background to the debate Wednesday night. Hitchens and Galloway. One of these men is hated by the Left, and one of these men is cheered by the Left. Do you find it troubling that Galloway is the one cheered by the hateful, anti-war Left? Read More I wrote a few weeks ago about visiting the Iraqi Army. That was quite an experience, and I'm glad I had the opportunity while I was here. We really haven't had any contact wi... Read More TITLE: CYBER SEXISM. URL: http://rightwingsparkle.blogspot.com/2005/09/cyber-sexism.html IP: 70.240.184.155 BLOG NAME: Rightwingsparkle DATE: 09/16/2005 04:53:59 AM Read More Too often these specially billed evening speeches have been big on advertising and little on delivery. That was not the case in the speech he delivered this evening. To begin with, let us make sure that the record shows that for the second time in ... Read More $200 billion to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Holy pig! Read More Republicans have become increasingly dominant in the cultural and political "war of ideas" that they constantly claim to be losing because of the "liberal media" and "liberal academia". Particularly in terms of science. The counter every scientific rep... Read More Once again we have widespread evidence of abuse, of the truth, by those sorry misguided extremists at the ACLU. This time because they have no concept of what life is like in an infantry combat unit, whether in peacetime or in a war-zone. In the pers... Read More |
November 26, 2010America@war [Greyhawk]
I think anyone who's ever pondered the "comment" option - once only available on blogs and bulletin boards, now ubiquitous on almost any web site - will appreciate this:
The so-called faculty of writing is not so much a faculty of writing as it is a faculty of thinking. When a man says, "I have an idea but I can't express it"; that man hasn't an idea but merely a vague feeling. If a man has a feeling of that kind, and will sit down for a half an hour and persistently try to put into writing what he feels, the probabilities are at least 90 percent that he will either be able to record it, or else realize that he has no idea at all. In either case, he will do himself a benefit. That's wisdom from the past, captured for posterity at the US Naval Institute, shared via the web on the institute's 137th anniversary. From their about page:
"The Naval Institute has three core activities," among them, History and Preservation: The Naval Institute also has recently introduced Americans at War, a living history of Americans at war in their own words and from their own experiences. These 90-second vignettes convey powerful stories of inspiration, pride, and patriotism. Take a look at the collection, and you'll see it's not limited to accounts from those who served on ships at sea, members of the other branches are well-represented. I'm fortunate to have met USNI's Mary Ripley, she's responsible for the institute's oral history program (and she's the daughter of the late John Ripley, whose story is told here). She also deserves much credit for their blog. ("We're not the Navy nor any government agency. Blog and comment freely.") We met at a milblog conference - Mary knew (and I would come to realize) that milbloggers are the 21st-century version of exactly what the US Naval Institute is all about. Once that light bulb came on in my head, I mentioned a vague idea for a project to her - milblogs as the 21st century oral history that they are. "Put that in writing," she said (of course - see first paragraph above!) - and here's part of the result. Shortly after the first tent was pitched by the American military in Iraq a wire was connected to a computer therein, and the internet was available to a generation of Americans at war - many of whom had grown up online. From that point on, at any given moment, somewhere in Iraq a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine was at a keyboard sharing the events of his or her day with the folks back home. While most would simply fire off an email, others took advantage of the (then) relatively new online blogging platforms to post their thoughts and experiences for the entire world to see. The milblog was born - and from that moment to this stories detailing everything from the most mundane aspects of camp life to intense combat action (often described within hours of the event) have been available on the web... And et cetera - but since you're reading this on a milblog, you probably knew that. And you know that milblogs aren't just blogs written by troops at war, that many friends, family members, and supporters likewise documented their story of America at war online in near-real time, as those stories developed. The diversity in membership of that group is broad, the one thing we all have in common is the impulse to make sense of the seemingly senseless, and communicate the tale - for each of us that impulse was strong enough to overcome whatever barriers prevent the vast majority of people from doing the same. Everyone at some point has some vague idea they believe should be shared - we were the people who, from some combination of internal and external urging, found and spent those many half hours persistently trying to write it down. But where will all that be in another 137 years? Or five or ten, for that matter. That's something I've asked myself since at least 2004 - when I wrote this:
Membership in the ghost battalion has grown in the years since, and an ever growing majority of those abandoned-but-still-standing sites are vanishing. Have you checked out Lt Smash's site lately? How about Sgt Hook's? If you're a long-time milblog reader you know the first widely-read milblog from Operation Iraq Freedom and the first widely-read milblog from Afghanistan are both gone from the web. If you're a relative newcomer to this world you may never even have heard of them - or the dozens upon dozens of others who carried forth the standard they set down. If you have a vague notion that something should be done about that, (a notion I've heard expressed more than once...) then you and I and the good folks at the US Naval Institute are in agreement. Preserving the history documented by the milbloggers is just one of the goals of the milblog project, the once-vague idea that we're now making real. And it's a big idea, if I say so myself - too big to explain in one simple blog post, so stand by for more. Likewise, it's too big a task to be accomplished by just one person. So if you're a milblogger (and exactly what is a milblogger? is a topic for much further discussion on its own) I'm asking for your help. All I'll really need is just a little bit (maybe just one or two of those half hours...) of your time, and your willingness to tell the tale. We've already made history, it's time to save it. (More to follow...) Posted 4:02 PM | Permalink |
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The Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior and his wife who stands by him. They prefer to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary. Until that day they stand fast with those who struggle for freedom, strike for reason, and pray for a better tomorrow.
 
 
 Furthermore, I will occasionally use satire or parody herein. The bottom line: it's my house. I like having visitors to my house. I hope you are entertained. I fight for your right to free speech, and am thrilled when you exercise said rights here. Comments and e-mails are welcome, but all such communication is to be assumed to be 1)the original work of any who initiate said communication and 2)the property of the Mudville Gazette, with free use granted thereto for publication in electronic or written form. If you do NOT wish to have your message posted, write "CONFIDENTIAL" in the subject line of your email. Original content copyright © 2003 - 2011 by Greyhawk. Fair, not-for-profit use of said material by others is encouraged, as long as acknowledgement and credit is given, to include the url of the original source post. Other arrangements can be made as needed. Contact: greyhawk at mudvillegazette dot com  Tending Distant Far from hearth and home, watching What tales we'll tell When things grim Some distant sunset, vision fading Saluting fallen friends whose names - Greyhawk, Baghdad, December 2004 |
