I've just finished watching the first in a series of shows by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and I'm quite disappointed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of these giants of the movie industry. I loved 'Band of Brothers' and no doubt I'll enjoy the rest of the series of 'Pacific' but right now its not doing it for me.
I understand that 'Pacific' is based very loosely on Eugene Sledge's book With the Old Breed At Peleliu and Okinawa. This is a masterpiece of a book which I have read, and reread often. It really brings war on the Japanese front alive in a way that few other books have been able to do.
If you want a few good books about the 2nd World War and are fed up with Stephen Ambrose's regurgitation of the same few stories under different titles then may I suggest the following;
A Writer at War - Vasily Grossman, with the Red Army 1941 - 1945
Sniper on the Eastern Front, Albrecht Wacker (The German side of battle)
The Day the War Ended - Martin Gilbert (A myriad of 2WW first hand accounts)
But I digress. "Pacific" doesn't follow the same format as Band of Brothers which is a bit of a shame as we don't go through training with the 'team'. We don't know their names, we don't know their ranks or place in the hierarchy of the unit. So all we get to see are a few Marines going to war.
So far I can take it or leave it. There is no doubt in my mind that I'll watch the whole series, I just don't really care right now what happens to the characters. Which, I guess, is a shame.
I live in a relatively 'interesting' part of the world. Below is a photo that was recently taken from my car as I drove to work. Not to a border crossing or to a remote location near an army base but on a main freeway between two cities.
I also get to see many cars with CD number plates, Swiss Red Cross vehicles and a multitude of UN buses and people carriers.
On some rare occasions I see 'Doctors Without Borders' vehicles and I just don't get what they do that the UN, The Red Cross and the State itself do. So I wasn't particularly surprised to read what JayG over at MArooned had to share on Thursday in his blog-post 'Idi Amin Was A Humanitarian, Too'
Three years ago, after decades of performing volunteer operations worldwide, George Whitelaw decided he wanted to do something that would have a broader impact.
The orthopedic surgeon from Milton started a small nonprofit organization to provide primary care to children in Central America. He called his organization Children Without Borders, because “our treatment is without borders, and our patients are without borders,’’ he said.
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Except that some didn't see it that way:
The operation was running smoothly - it had grown to have a $60,000 annual budget and three clinics in Costa Rica - until last summer, when Whitelaw received a cease-and-desist letter from a similar but vastly larger organization, Doctors Without Borders. The Geneva-based organization, which employs 27,000 people and has an annual budget of more than $800 million, said the group was infringing on its trademark and threatened legal action if Whitelaw did not change its name.
JayG ends with what I think is a very inciteful line:
I mean, I'll admit to being suspicious man by nature, but when a Google search on "Doctors Without Borders" brings up 4 out of 10 hits for donations...
Recently I have started reading more new authors and I can assure you that as soon as Marko Kloos' novel is out I'll be buying it.
The link to his latest short story 'Lucky Thirteen' is HERE. I found it very interesting, exciting and believable. Definitely worth a read - now.
What are you waiting for? Click here and read the story. You're reading this blog so why not click here and read Lucky Thirteen NOW?? You'll thank me for it I'm sure.
So where is the internet taking us now? Much like int he late 1800s when the leaders of industry announced that everything that could be invented, has been invented, we seem to have come to some kind of impasse with the internet and technology.
Mac have introduced the iPad which many are calling simply a larger iPhone, just without half of the functionality.
Steve Jobs and his latest invention, the iPad. (ahem)
Daniel Sevitt, over at 'Eyeview's blog' discusses viral videos and their suckiness.
When Haiti got hit with the horrid earthquake all the way back in January I spoke about Team Rubicon - here and here.
Chile has been hit by an earthquake which hit 8.8 on the Richter scale. Please note that a 5.0 earthquake is 10 times stronger than a 4.0 earthquake. According to Wikipedia today's earthquake occurs anywhere on the planet only once a year, and has the equivalent of 15.8 gigatons of TNT exploding at the same time. Haiti's earthquake was a 7.0 so therefore Chile's earthquake has many times the amount of energy that Haiti's had. There are numerous factors that effect the final effect that the release of that energy has on a country but nevertheless, Team Rubicon are ready to roll:
Ladies and Gentlemen:
As you hopefully by now know, Chile has been rocked by a magnitude 8.7 earthquake off it's coast. This earthquake is over 1000x more powerful than the one that struck Haiti over one month ago.
Initial reports from the Chilean government are casualties hovering near 200, however, communication is down with outlying villages and towns on the coast, and that toll is expected to rise sharply in the coming days.
Team Rubicon has assembled a 6 man recon element to fly into southern Chile to assess casualties near the coast, where large aid organizations will not concentrate their efforts. We expect bottlenecks to occur in Santiago, where the airport is shut down for 24 hours, and concentrated efforts to be focused on Concepcion. This leaves a critical gap in medical attention on the coastal towns.
Team Rubicon is asking you to help us offset the cost of this mission. If you can donate $10 or $15 to our website, we can ensure that thousands of Chilean citizens on the coast will receive the care they need.
The two words 'Cheap' and 'Cheerful' go together in my little head as 'will break soon' and 'wasn't worth what you paid'. Like the Lego pieces that are cheaper and don't quite fit. Or the dodgy remote controlled cars that break within 5 minutes of opening the box.
I was therefore not so surprised to hear that Ryanair had pooped all over a planeload of paying customers:
Ryanair dumps passengers on wrong island - doesn't care
A planeload of passengers on a Ryanair flight from the UK to Lanzarote (one of the Spanish Canary Islands) learned the hard way that low cost carriers carry a hidden price.
Instead of landing in Lanzarote, the plane landed in Fuerteventura (about 30 miles from their intended destination).
Bad weather had forced the plane to divert, but usually when a plane has to divert, a normal airline takes care of its customers.
Obviously, Ryanair isn't considered to be a normal airline, so the passengers were told to get off the plane, and after refueling, the plane took off, leaving the passengers to fend for themselves.
There were no Ryanair staff at the airport, and with no way to reach anyone from the airline, the passengers had to book hotels for themselves.
The next morning, the passengers were able to grab a ferry to their correct destination, losing a night of their vacation and any hotel nights they had booked.
A Ryanair spokesman confirmed that the flight had indeed been diverted, but was quick to point out that "if flight disruption is outside the control of the airline, no monetary compensation is due."
So there you have it - flying with Ryanair really is a gamble, and you don't even know whether you'll actually arrive at your destination. Perhaps they can make some more money by starting a "will we get to our destination" lottery on their flights.
After my last post 'What's All The Fuss?' went online I reconsidered my words and thought that maybe I'd gone a bit too far with my dismay at the UK's attitude to a Hamas leader's 'deletion'. It turns out that I wasn't the only chappy on the planet to be upset with the UK's attitude.
EXCUSE me for not sending flowers to the funeral of the terrorist the Israelis bumped off in Dubai. Unlike the bleeding hearts in the liberal media I’m not shedding any tears.
And Chris continues:
Unlike Britain, Israel doesn’t tolerate an enemy within. It doesn’t give those who hate them free housing and welfare handouts. It doesn’t let the right of free speech enable them to preach murder on its streets.
As the immutable Lazy Bum that I am, I try to learn from my mistakes, and from others'. Wirecutter at Knuckledragging My Life Away has shared with us a list of what his father imparted to him.
is a retired Army Warrant Officer, came up through the ranks, did 3 tours in Viet Nam, the whole bit. He was raised up poor (the son of a lumberjack) the grandson of a gambler/lawman/outlaw from Arizona. Let's just say Pops is hard. And he raised me the same way.
So what can we learn from him? His language is not the most 'poetic' - you have been warned!!
So some Israeli's took out the murdering fool Mahmoud al-Mabhouh whilst vacationing in sunny Dubai. No doubt between meetings to help the elderly and infirm in gaza he was looking to buy playground equipment and exercise books for needy children. (How does that sarcasm icon look again?)
I have no clue why the Brits and the Irish are so wound up about the use of their passports in this operation. Its a backhanded compliment as to the ability of their citizens to travel the world as they want!!
And why is no-one moaning loudly about the murder of a known terrorist but the use of dodgy passports gets the ambassador called in?
After all, what’s the world coming to, when a murderous terrorist operating outside the arm of justice can get snuffed achieve martyrdom while attempting to make more mayhem?
I used to live on Facebook (or FB as I call it). I find out what people I went to nursery with are doing, I find out how my old schoolmates' divorces are coming along and I see just how limp and pathetic some of my closer chums and pals can be when it comes to presenting themselves to the world on FB.
Here are some clues on how not to look like a complete and utter muppet on Facebook:
Wearing my 'pedantic hat' I guess that there can be no such thing as 'modern evolution'. However, below you can see the evolution of an idea from TV ad to digitized cartoon to, cartoonified* video, to TV ad.
And then to a few new versions that are basically copies (at last count YouTube had over 400 'Boom De Ah Dah' videos posted).
If you are looking for an interesting blog to read, may I suggest Meat in the Seat's latest bloggage? It really made me think twice about EMS and also about the difference between the mundane and the extraordinary.
I lived on different farms at different stages of my life. I've milked cows, picked eggs up from the hen house and done the more unpleasant jobs around the ol' homestead too. I won't go into detail as I have just eaten, and assume that you are not too far from a meal yourself.
I've said it thousand times before and I'll say it again, the 'Organic' food movement is the greatest scam since someone invented a 'pyramid' scheme and if you think I'm full of it, then answer me this simple question: WHO HAS GONE TO PRISON ON LENGTHY SENTENCES FOR FALSE LABELING OF FOOD AS 'ORGANIC' AFTER IT WAS PROVEN IN A COURT OF LAW THAT IT WASN'T?
And in closing just to be clear, I believe People who believe Organic Food are, in fact, 100% 'Organic', 100% of the time, are FOOLS, COMPLETE AND UTTER FOOLS.
I just got this from a friend of a friend who helped out in Haiti, and it wasn't Team Rubicon.
Its doing the rounds of the blogiverse but I've not seen anyone jump up and correct it.
from Haiti – the other side — Let everybody know about this crap………
From A Retired Special Forces Sgt Major:
To All,
I just returned from Haiti with Hebler. We flew in at 3 AM Sunday to the scene of such incredible destruction on one side, and enormous ineptitude and criminal neglect on the other.
Port o Prince is in ruins. The rest of the country is fairly intact. Our team was a rescue team and we carried special equipment that locates people buried under the rubble. There are easily 200,000 dead, the city smells like a charnel house.
The bloody UN was there for 5 years doing apparently nothing but wasting US Taxpayers money. The ones I ran into were either incompetents or outright anti American. Most are French or french speakers, worthless every damn one of them. While 1800 rescuers were ready willing and able to leave the airport and go do our jobs, the UN and USAID ( another organization full of little OBamites and communists that openly speak against Americana) These two organizations exemplified their parochialism by:
- USAID, when in control of all inbound flights, had food and water flights stacked up all the way to Miami, yet allowed Geraldo Rivera, Anderson Cooper and a host of other left wing news puppies to land.
- Pulled all the security off the rescue teams so that Bill Clinton and his wife could have the grand tour, whilst we sat unable to get to people trapped in the rubble.
- Stacked enough food and water for the relief over at the side of the airfield then put a guard on it while we dehydrated and wouldn’t release a drop of it to the rescuers.
- No shower facilities to decontaminate after digging or moving corpses all day, except for the FEMA teams who brought their own shower and decon equipment, as well as air conditioned tents.
- No latrine facilities, less digging a hole if you set up a shitter everyone was trying to use it.
I watched a 25 year old Obamite with the USAID shrieking hysterically, berate a full bird colonel in the air force, because he countermanded her orders, whilst trying to unscrew the air pattern. ” You don’t know what your president wants! The military isn’t in charge here we are!”
If any of you are thinking of giving money to the Haitian relief, or to the UN don’t waste your money. It will only go to further the goals of the French and the Liberal left.
If we are a fair and even society, why is it that only white couples are adopting Haitian orphans. Where the hell is that vocal minority that is always screaming about the injustice of American society.
Bad place, bad situation, but a perfect look at the new world order in action. New Orleans magnified a thousand times. Haiti doesn’t need democracy, what Haiti needs is Papa Doc. That’s not just my opinion , that is what virtually every Haitian we talked with said. “the French run, the UN treat us the same as when we were a colony”, at least Papa Doc ran the country.
Oh, and as a last slap in the face the last four of us had to take US AIRWAY’s home from Phoenix. They slapped me with a 590 dollar baggage charge for the four of us. The girl at the counter was almost in tears because she couldn’t give us a discount or she would lose her job. Pass that on to the flying public.
I have copied, in it's entirety Neptunus Lex's blog post of January 25th. I think you'll appreciate what he has to say. Personally I enjoyed reading the opinions expressed in the comments on his site:
The British medical periodical “Lancet” was once a beacon of science and reason in a world that badly needed both. Sadly, politically-motivated research led to an utterly rubbished 2004 article claiming that 100k Iraqi citizens had died violently in the year since the US invasion and occupation.
That should have been bad enough. But now they’ve doubled down:
It’s official. Britain’s premier medical journal Lancet has been completely Palestinianized. It no longer bears any relationship to the first-rate scientific journal it once was. Perhaps Lancet is no longer a standard-bearer but has become a follower in the global movement in which standards have plunged, biases have soared, and Big Lies now pass for top-of-the-line academic, scientific work…
Their study is titled: “Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study.” And yes, they have found that Palestinian husbands are more violent towards Palestinian wives as a function of the Israeli “occupation”—and that the violence increases significantly when the husbands are “directly” as opposed to “indirectly” exposed to political violence.
Read the rest, ponder the plight of women in Araby and mourn the loss of objectivity.
Oh, for what it’s worth – George Soros provided around half the funding for the Iraqi mortality survey published by the Lancet. The Palestinian domestic violence article?
This study was funded by the Palestinian National Authority as well as by the Core Funding Group at the University of Minnesota. The Palestinian Authority is not a disinterested party. But even worse: The data was collected by the Palestinian Central Bureau. These are the people who told the world that Israeli soldiers shot young Mohammed al-Dura, committed a massacre in Jenin, and purposely attacked Palestinian civilians (who just happened to be jihadists dressed in civilian clothing or hostage-civilians behind whom the jihadists hid).
Once again, the science seems less driven by an objective analysis of the facts so much as the preferences of those holding the purse.
I understand that 'Pacific' is based very loosely on Eugene Sledge's book With the Old Breed At Peleliu and Okinawa. This is a masterpiece of a book which I have read, and reread often. It really brings war on the Japanese front alive in a way that few other books have been able to do.
But I digress. "Pacific" doesn't follow the same format as Band of Brothers which is a bit of a shame as we don't go through training with the 'team'. We don't know their names, we don't know their ranks or place in the hierarchy of the unit. So all we get to see are a few Marines going to war.
