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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 30, 2005
34 TrackBacksFrom the Washington Post: Democratic lawmakers and civil rights leaders denounced conservative commentator William J. Bennett yesterday for suggesting on his syndicated radio show that aborting black children would reduce the U.S. crime rate. The fo... Read More Today's dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny ... Fun Loving Friday Read More When the last Horn & Hardart Automat closed on April 9, 1991 (audio link), it left a strange void in American life. Strange because Americans love gadgets, and yet no equivalent to the Automats moved in to fill this kitchy gap. Read More It has been widely reported that New Orleans Police Spokesman Marlon DeFillo has spoken out against the term looting being applied to NOPD officers who were caught in the act of taking non-food goods in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Read More I got an email today from a guy who was part of one of my Special Forces stories that gets the most love, Spanky & the Shark. Read More I can’t confirm the statement which makes up the title of this post, caught your attention though, right? All day long, one of the top searches on Technorati has been “paris hilton pregnant”. Who the fuck cares? I can’t hone... Read More Today's winner is the management of Halifax Calderdale Royal Hospital. Read More ..According to the latest reports, the intensity of the explosions has lessened, although specialists expect the event to go on another day... Read More From Katherine Kersten we hear from Vold and MacVarish the effect of the anti-war protesters ala Cindy Sheehan on the troops on the ground. Read More Ohio High School Has 64 Pregnant Students Here's the money quote from the article: Experts, parents and students themselves struggle to explain why such pockets of high teen pregancy rates appear. Are teens getting appropriate sex education? Do... Read More Click here to take the poll. Read More The Danish government is under attack for paying for its disabled citizens to have sex with prostitutes. The official 'Sex, irrespective of disability' campaign pays sex workers to provide sex once a month for disabled people. Read More Gallup's poll reporting has always seemed fair and accurate. But its recent report of blacks and whites' perceptions concerning Katrina matters led me to ask Gallup some questions. A senior Gallup editor's replies left me more troubled than before ... Read More A little test for us all... A friend of mine is a radio talk show host for an AM radio station and brought up the topics of blogs on his show this evening. His basic contention was that blogs are not useful, powerful or read. He doesn't have a blog ... Read More Stepping out into the dawn, a strange and pungent smell greeted me, and it took a minute of reflection to realize just what it was. Rain. It had rained the night before, and as I scanned the area out by the road, I noticed the puddles still in evidence... Read More Does anybody else see the irony and/or hypocrisy in this? "Palestinian" rappers using Hippety Hop as a way to broadcast what they see as 'The Evils That the Eeeeevil West Hath Committed Upon Me'? So let me see if I can get this thing right here. The ... Read More It's a long one today folks, let's get right to the Saturday Edition of Round The Reader. Read More Just about every regular reader of this site knows Im part of the Marine Corps, serving 5 years of active duty continuing as a reservist. Some of you know that my day job is at a Deputy Sheriffs Department in an average sized town in an average cou... Read More It’s the weekend! Help us celebrate, pimp your best stuff. A link for a link…link to this post, send a trackback, and a link to your blog will magically appear. It’s a linkfest weekend! Share your best with us! If you have somethin... Read More I drove down to the Flight 93 Memorial Site yesterday, to pay my respects, and to see if what I had heard was true. And although I would put nothing past the liberals, there is no taint there now. The site of the crash is indeed in a bowl-shaped valle... Read More Don’t forget, there were many wars before World War I - beginning with the American Revolution which our “ragtag” citizen soldier forebears won against the world’s mightiest army. ... Read More Rush Limbaugh just read from “The Clinton Legacy,” an astonishing piece published online at The Progressive Review. It nicely summarizes things. Excerpt: RECORDS SET - The only president ever impeached on grounds of personal malfeasa... Read More A black widow, was enjoying the damp dark open space provided by the motor at the bottom of the pump. She was setting up her lair of death in my garage. Read More In the very beginning, I knew exactly why I started this little website. Having worked in the technology field for 15 years, I did not know how to spell blog until I met James from Hell in a Handbasket. I... Read More ... Read More ... Read More Let's take a look at China's friendly overtures to its own people, beginning with the civil war which catapaulted Mao and the communists into power. These types of friendly overtures are most commonly referred to as "genocide" Read More
NOTE TO READERS: From time to time TMV posts a special Guest Voice column from a reader. We run a variety of viewpoints. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TMV or its co-bloggers. I took apart a NYTimes column, about women in Saudi Arabia, this Wednesday past. Do read what Dymphna had to Read More "We need terror. We need horror. We need the streets running awash in rivers of blood of these thugs and criminals and zealots." Read More I just came across this interesting post at Huff Puff, by Donnie Fowler, a Dem strategist, campaigner, and sometime official. It is entitled Democrats Wishful Thinking Won't Beat Republicans. While Fowler gets in his little snarky pokes at Repu... Read More ....we're having a party Read More dbz hentai gay anal sex cartoon sex gay cock hentai galleries nude lesbians nude lesbians Read More Mudville Gazette: Disc... Read More 5 Comments |
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 |
Hey Holly!
Trackbacks are looking flaky...WP says you got pinged but it's not showing up. (In case you didn't know.)
My trackbacks hadn't worked here yet, but it worked today. Not for Beth, tho. Weird.
Trackback not working for me either so here's a link.
Patriotism
Holly,
Totally irrelevant to the post, but, I went to high school with a really neat young lady, Janice Aho. This would be Hayward High School class of '60 in Hayward, CA.
Just really curious, I haven't seen nor spoken to any since 1960, but Janice was so good, and her last name so different, she's just kinda stuck in the back of my mind over these last 45 years, and, just so you don't get the wrong idea with several others.
And no, she'd have no idea who I was, even looking in a yearbook!
Mike Daley
Hi Mike,
Well, it's my husband's name, but I asked him just in case and he doesn't know a Janice Aho. For those of you curious, the name is Finnish and is pronounced 'Ah-hoe' (yes...it must be love for a woman to take marry a guy with a name like that!). I'll never name a daughter Ima.
On an even more humourous note, my maiden name is Moen (like the faucet). Most people screwed up the pronunciation of that name too and said it like 'moan'. Imagine if Jay Leno had gotten hold of the 'Aho-Moen' wedding invites!