So here is my 2010 New Year’s resolution: to quit dead armadillos and start something along the lines of a spiritually themed blog.
I started dead armadillos over 5 years ago. I was reading the editorial page of the Washington Post every day and pulled a lot of material from there. It was part of my day — go to the gym in the morning, read the Post on the lifecycle, and every few nights blog about whatever I thought was interesting from a (mostly) flaming moderate political perspective.
I stopped reading the Post when I moved out of the DC area this summer, and I discovered that I didn’t really miss it. Didn’t miss the front page opinion pieces parading as objective journalism. Didn’t miss the disgusting partisan food fight that the health care reform debate turned into. Didn’t miss the disgusting partisan food fight that our entire political system has turned into. Lastly, didn’t miss my mostly lame sarcastic comments about the disgusting partisan food fight that our entire political system has turned into.
In an attempt to be moderately more constructive, if only in my own head for an audience of one, I’ll be posting some spiritually themed thoughts at jdwhitlock.net. See you over there if you are so inclined.
Published on
December 7, 2009 in
Military.
Brigidier General (Dr.) Loree Sutton, Director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, has a great Pearl Harbor Day message on her website:
Sixty-eight years ago today, Pearl Harbor was attacked. The following day President Franklin Roosevelt addressed Congress at 12:30 p.m., for six and a half minutes, and within one hour America entered WWII, “a date which will live in infamy.”
Killing in combat, losing beloved buddies, coming home to a strained or even fractured marriage, experiencing “survivors guilt,” witnessing the death of innocent civilians are timeless challenges known to Warriors of all ages—past, present and future.
Psychological health concerns are not new to our Warriors who have seen combat. Looking back through history, twenty-seven centuries ago in The Iliad, Homer describes the mental stress that occurs as a result of continuous combat as the “betrayal of what is right.” During the American Civil War post traumatic stress was referred to as “soldier’s heart”; in WWI it was known as “shell shock”; and in WWII “battle fatigue.”
Our journey has gained considerable traction and momentum in helping our Warriors and Veterans receive care for psychological health concerns across the resiliency, recovery and reintegration continuum of care. However, the stigma associated with seeking help for the invisible wounds of war is still present and all too often blocks our Warriors from seeking care. Today, reaching out is an act of courage and strength. This is progress, however, total success will be achieved when Warriors and their Families will give no more thought to seeking help for brain injuries than they would for a broken leg. We still have a long way to travel but, make no mistake, we will get there—sooner is better.
History and literature point to the human need to find meaning, purpose and value in life’s harshest experiences. Consider Hamlet on his deathbed, making his final request to Horatio: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile and enter my harsh world and draw my breath in pain to tell my story.”
Withdraw yourself from your comforts to see through my eyes, says Hamlet. Tell the world my story….
Indeed, the experience of sharing one’s story remains as powerful today. This power resides at the heart of our Real Warriors Campaign to eliminate stigma. Please check out http://www.realwarriors.net/ and keep in touch—maybe you or someone you know has a story that is ripe for sharing.
Thanks as always for your support—together let’s redouble our efforts to make a positive difference for the greater good!
Yours in service ~
Loree K. Sutton, MD
Brigadier General, MC, USA
This would be one of the many reasons I cannot deal with the New York Times:
The New York Times does not tell us whether Tareq Mehanna, the 27-year-old Massachusetts pharmacist who was just arrested on federal terrorism charges, is or even might be a Muslim. In their pages, telling this particular truth is still verboten, politically incorrect, rude, racist, a cheap shot, even “Islamophobic.”
Look: Mehanna might have traveled to Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen (which he did) because, as a relatively young man, he just wanted to sew his wild oats. No matter that Mehanna and his “associates,” including one Ahmad Abousamra who subsequently fled to Syria, had traveled together “seeking training from terrorist groups to fight against American soldiers.” No matter that Mehanna had tried to buy a gun from one Daniel Maldonado who is “currently serving a 10-year-prison sentence for training with Al Qaeda in Somalia. “
Why should the Times suggest that Mehanna’s motivation might be related to Islamic jihad? That hypothesis would tarnish an entire religion, an entire people. It can’t be true—but even if it is true, it’s too troubling and unpleasant a truth. Why connect the dots when you can continue to confuse people?
The alternate reality that NYT reporters live in rivals that of Madrasah-brainwashed 14 year-olds for sheer fantasy.
Why is this considered the pinnacle of journalism?
I am traveling between Dayton and DC a lot on business these days. United Airlines has the only direct flight between Dayton and Dulles so I have been using them.
A few weeks ago my suitcase didn’t show up in Dayton on the return trip … it was left at Dulles along with the baggage of half of the rest of the folks on that flight. They delivered it to my house later that same day. I haven’t had luggage problems in years, so I didn’t think anything of it.
Yesterday, returning from Dulles, they canceled my 5:00pm flight. OK, shit happens, planes break, no problem. There was room on the next flight at 10:00pm, so I spent some quality time at Dulles getting work done and reading my Wired magazine. United Airlines has an extra five hours to make sure my bag (and everyone else’s bag from the earlier flight) makes it onto the later flight.
Guess what. No bag in Dayton. Again for half the folks on the flight. And not just the Dulles flight. There was a flight from O’Hare that got in at about the same time, and a few of them were missing bags too.
Based on all my statistical training, I have determined that this is now officially a trend. And the “good” arrow on the chart is pointing the other way.
Note to self: Don’t buy any United Airlines stock.
Published on
September 22, 2009 in
Military.
… for taking on entrenched bureaucracy at the Pentagon, killing weapons programs that needed killing, and firing people who needed firing.
This Wired article tells the story very well. Moneyquote:
… Gates cut the satellites, the nuke-proof helicopter, the laser-firing jumbo jet prototype, the Future Combat Systems trucks, and, most symbolic, the F-22. Each one of these strike-throughs meant billions of dollars and thousands of jobs lost in dozens of congressional districts. Taken together, they represented the biggest reorg of the Pentagon in a generation.
After the April budget announcement, Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma said that Gates was “gutting our military.” One congressional committee after another voted to keep building F-22s and other Bizarro projects. Gates and the Pentagon “need to learn who’s in charge, and the Congress is,” said Democratic representative Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii. Not even Obama’s threats to veto any budget with F-22s had an effect. The jet had become a symbol of resistance to the Gates Doctrine. By one tally, the Raptor had 45 supporters in the Senate. Gates had only 23 backers.
In mid-July, the weekend before the crucial vote, the White House and Gates’ team started lobbying. Gates assured senator John Kerry that the Massachusetts Air National Guard wouldn’t be severely impacted, and he reportedly warned the CEO of Raptor-maker Lockheed Martin that if his company lobbied in favor of the F-22, Gates would cut other Lockheed contracts. The new Air Force secretary told Wyoming senator Mike Enzi he didn’t want any more Raptors anyway. The following Tuesday, the Senate voted 58-40 to stop production of the Raptors. Gates had won.
… and if we are lucky, he will win many more
I like David Brooks’ take on what Jimmy Carter (and others) have mis-labled racism. Brooks says it is just the latest chapter of a debate as old as our republic — the populists vs. the progressives:
Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.
Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.
What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.
“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”
It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.
Pop quiz: Your team is winning the football game by 5 points with 3 minutes left in the 4th quarter. You are the kickoff return back, and you catch the ball in your endzone. What do you do?
If you said take a knee you would be correct, but if your name is Leodis McKelvin and you play for the Buffalo Bills, apparently the answer is to run it out to the 20 yard line, fumble the ball, and give that twit Tom Brady an easy chance to beat you, which of course he does.
Schnickin-frickin-bad-news-bear Bills. Maybe I’ll just stick with the Jills and forget about the Bills
I thought the prez had a lot of great things to say in his healthcare speech tonight, and I support the direction we are headed with healthcare reform … but he has GOT to stop saying that no-one will be forced into the public plan (or co-op plan, or whatever the “alternate” plan turns out to be). If/when such an option exists, there will be a lot of smaller employers (and probably some big ones) that eliminate their funding for private insurance, instead pay the (cheaper) penalty tax that helps fund the public plan, and therefore “force” their employees into the public plan.
This is not necessarily a bad thing — it may be that without a public plan, the same folks would have lost insurance altogether when their employer decided they just could not afford the steadily increasing premiums.
Regardless, this will happen, and when it does, Obama will be a … um … prevaricator if he doesn’t change his tune on this.
