Good news from Afghanistan, via Partamian. As James put it - Essayons!
Watershed in history today - the AEF's first combat casualties in WWI: Corporal James B. Gresham, Private Thomas F. Enright, and Private Merle D. Hay. A sad, but significant, way to enter the history books. Worthy of mention, I think.
Other events of note:
19811: Birth of a slogan: Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!
1947: The Spruce Goose Flew for the first - and last - time.
1982: Fire in Salang tunnel, Afghanistan. In the Salang tunnel north of Kabul, a Soviet army convoy truck collided with a fuel tanker. The explosion triggered an inferno. Various sources claim 700 to 2,000 people suffocated and were burned. Think about that when you tot up the cost for us having taken down *two* rogue regimes. The tunnel was destroyed in the Afghan Civil War in 1998 - It's been rebuilt in a multi-national effort - though you'd have to read Pravda to find out which nations... Apparently, it's *still* a tough place to go...
Got an email reaction from a long-time reader to Dusty's post:
My words......makes me so mad I could spit!Not sure I ever sent you this, someone else's words.
We do not fight for land. We are loyal to an ideal-an ideal of liberty wherever man lives. We do not guard territory, bleed for a piece of dirt. We don't fight because we love violence. We fight for our freedom as individuals to live our own lives, to peruse our own survival, our own happiness.
Your unconditional rejection of violence makes you smugly think of yourselves as noble, as enlightened, but in reality it is nothing less than abject moral capitulation to evil. unconditional rejection of self defense, because you think it's a supposed surrender to violence, leaves you no resort but begging for mercy or offering appeasement.
Evil grants no mercy, and to attempt to appease it is nothing more than a piecemeal surrender to it. Surrender to evil is slavery at best, death at worst. thus your unconditional rejection of violence is really nothing more than embracing death as preferable to life.
You will achieve what you embrace.
The right, the absolute necessity, of vengeance against anyone who initiates force against you is fundamental to survival. The morality of a people's self-defense is in it's defense of each individual's right to life. It's an intolerance to violence made real by an unwavering willingness to crush any who would launch violence against you. The unconditional determination to destroy any who would initiate force against you is an exaltation of the value of life. Refusing to surrender your life to any thug or tyrant who lays claim to it is in fact embracing life itself.
If you are unwilling to defend your right to your own lives, then you are merely like mice trying to argue with owls. You think their ways are wrong. They think you are dinner.
If, hoping to appease it, you willingly compromise with unrepentant evil, you only allow such evil to sink it's fangs into you; from that day on its venom will course through your veins until it finally kills you.
Compromising with murderers grants them moral equivalence where none can rightly exist. moral equivalence says that you are no better than they; therefore their belief-that they should be able to torture, rape, or murder you-is just as morally valid as your view-that you have the right to live free of their violence. Moral compromise rejects the concept of right and wrong. It says that everyone is equal, all desires are equally valid, all action is equally valid, so everyone should compromise to get along.
Where could you compromise with those who torture, rape and murder people? In the number of days a week you will be tortured? In the number of men to be allowed to rape your loved ones? In how many of your family are to be murdered?
No moral equivalence exists in that situation, nor can it exist, so there can be no compromise, only suicide.
To even suggest compromise can exist with such men is to sanction murder.
Many teach that saying someone is evil is prejudiced thinking. it's a way of belittling someone already in pain for some reason. Such people must be embraced and taught to shed their fears of their fellow man and then they will not strike out in violent ways.They are dangerous to everyone because they embrace evil with their teachings. In so doing, in trying to be kind, to be unselfish, in trying to be nonjudgmental, you allow evil to become far more powerful than it otherwise would. you refuse to see evil, and so you welcome it among you. You allow it to exist. you give it power over you. You are a people who have welcomed death and refused to denounce it.
You are an empire naked to the shadow of evil.
These people think of themselves as enlightened, as above violence. They are not enlightened; they are merely slaves awaiting a master, victims awaiting killers.
Anyone know the source of the words, without Googling?
Update: Visitors from Don Surber's place might find this post to be an even better fit to his post.
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