And Now For the News...

[Shapley]

I always thought that 'tag' was created as a safe alternative to games like 'red rover', 'tackle' and 'smear the queer'.

[barfle]

Texas Seminary Bans Promotion of Speaking In Tongues

Ad Deum qui latifiicat, juventutam meam.

[Shapley]

Introibo ad altare Dei.

[GreatCarouser]

How does one teach principles of good sportsmanship and competition if one bans games like tag because someone loses and gets their feelings hurt? Isn't this why we get UofM vs FIU?

[BigJon]

How does one teach principles of good sportsmanship and competition if one bans games like tag because someone loses and gets their feelings hurt?

Why would we ever need to teach children of the great evils found in competition? They will have no need of such knowledge in the shining, socialist utopia we are constructing.

[Shapley]

Anger as new 9/11 remains found.

Why is there anger? Are we so removed from reality that we actually get angry because we find human remains where we should expect to find human remains? I honestly don't understand people sometimes.

[audiogirl]

I read it to mean that the families (ones who never received remains) are angry because it appears the search was less than thorough.

[Shapley]

That was my reading, as well, but I have to question how thorough of a search can be expected. I realize that, for people who lost loved ones, The answer would be a lot different than for the rest of us. We can't shut down life while we search for remnants of bodies.

After the government raid at Waco, TX, conservatives were outraged that the compound was bulldozed into a pile by the government. Conservatives feared a cover-up of the evidence of the government's responsibility for the fire and deaths that happened there, The reality is that human remains begin to decay after a few days, attracting animals and insects that spread disease. That would be as true in September in New York as it was in April in Texas.

In addition, the cost-benefit ratio has to be determined. After a few days or weeks, costing thousands of man-hours, there comes a point where the number of findings per man-hour becomes so low that the reasoning for continuing the search is lost. There were over 1,000 lives lost, most destroyed beyond any possible recognition. There is a practical limit to the man-hours that can be expended in the effort to recover their remains, and I think we met that requirement, if not exceeded it. Sending in new teams now, five years after the fact, would be a pointless exercise, for what possible benefit?

V/R
Shapley

[audiogirl]

I would speculate that those families are seeking some sort of closure, and practicality is at the bottom of their concerns. Just a guess.

Have a good weekend, all.

[Shapley]

You're probably right. I guess I've never understood the concept of 'closure'. Closure is a personal thing, a feeling, a state of mind. You either accept the situation or you don't. I think demanding that the government or anyone else grant you a sense of closure is absurd.

I remember, back when I was in politics, a meeting of the village board, of which I was a member. The issue was whether or not to hire additional police officers using grant monies from the Federal government. We had debated the issue, and a board member proposed forgetting the idea and sending the grant money back. I seconded the motion and it passed. End of issue.

At the next meeting, a large number of citizens showed up, so much so that we had to move the meeting to a larger facility. The mayor was head of the senior citizen coalition and had urged them all to attend, in order to get us to change our mind on the grant issue. One of the attendees told the board that she had a 'right to feel safe in her home'. My response was that it was not within the board's power to control how she felt. We could have a hundred policemen and she may not 'feel safe' in her home or elsewhere. Were we then guilty of violating her 'right'?

I recall a spokesman for the 9/11 families telling us we 'owe them closure' on this issue. How did we incur this obligation? If they are 'owed' anything, it is owed by Osama bin Laden and the others who perpetrated the act, many of whom died along with their families. The government 'owes' them a reasonable attempt to serve justice upon those who share guilt in the crime, and a reasonable effort to provide national security to ensure that it won't happen again. That is all that can be asked, and I think they've done, and are doing, a fairly decent job of both.

V/R
Shapley

[barfle]

I can understand a grieving relative's concern over the discovery of remains, but I feel that there's very little blame to be cast in this case. The people who cleaned up the site did the best they knew how (who had training or practice in such an activity?) and of course errors were made. It's too bad, but people are imperfect, and people did what they could.

I'm not trying to tell anyone that their concerns are trivial, but the anger should be at the hijackers and their leaders, not the people who did their best to help, and did a 99% excellent job of it.

[Shapley]

By the year 2010, who will have the biggest deficit: The US Government or Ford?

[BigJon]

Political correctness run amok.
When you permit the camel's nose to get in the tent door . . .

[Haggis@wk]

The U.S. Department of Defense is now taking its requests for corrections public through a website known as For the Record For the Record.

Here, the Department of Defense is openly calling for corrections from major media outlets, and even noting when they refuse to publish letters to the editor.

The most recent was this past Tuesday, when the DOD published a letter, that the New York Times refused to run, which contained quotes from five generals (former CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, current CENTCOM commander John Abizaid, MNF Commander George Casey, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, as well as his successor, Peter Pace) that rebutted a New York Times editorial.

The Department of Defense is acting in an effort to avoid a repeat of the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive. On the battlefield, American and South Vietnamese forces won a victory – forever damaging the Viet Cong who never again was a viable fighting force, and crippling North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam. However, media misreporting, including Walter Cronkite's famous mischaracterization of the war as a "stalemate", took away the victory that had been won on the battlefield.

This has been picked up by a number of bloggers who have been able to spread the Pentagon's rebuttal – and the efforts of the New York Times to sweep it under the rug – across the country.

[Shapley]

Good for them. As I said before, if this war is lost, it will be lost at home, not over there.

[analog]

Thank you Haggis. I've bookmarked the site.
It's always best to go to the source.

That the military felt it needed to go to this length says something.

I've been dividing up my tv news time to see if i could detect consistent "bias". If you watch in addition to the four air networks Link TV, CNN and Fox it becomes quickly apparent.

I think the networks are trying out psy-ops on us to retain market share. They've already lost much of their political influence to corporate PAC's and that must be distressing. We need to get the Madison Avenue types out of the news business, and out of the campaign business too.

Maybe i make too much of it.
It could just be the boomers going through a stage..

Political nihilism is defined as the realization[ or delusion?-a.] "that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility."

http://www.counterorder.com/nihilism.html
it can be seductive.

a.

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

Thanks, Haggis. I bookmarked that.

I've wondered for a long time what it is about the military, in general, that annoys the major news services so badly. There is a consistent effort to cast every aspect of the DoD in the worst possible light even if they have to distort the truth into fancy little Origami creations in order to do it.

[barfle]

Maybe it's just me, but one of the things that makes me distrust the military is Rumsfeld's ongoing attempts to gloss over his mistakes. While I'm certain he's not 100% wrong all the time, he's certainly shown just how not to run a military force. I cite his "You go to war with the Army you have," when clearly we had other options (which I'm pretty sure I cited at the time).

If the government had a spokesman who admitted the errors, perhaps people would support his efforts and believe him when he says things are going well.

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

No, barfle, it's not just you. Politicians in general cannot seem to resist the temptation to spin everything to their benefit, and deny, denounce, or ignore anything inconvenient. Rumsfield may be a fine example of the problem, but he's not without plenty of company.

The various newspapers and broadcast news services also seem to have fallen victim to the politician's disease. Their spin is just different.

Between the politicians spin, the news outlets spin, and the confused spinning of my head I generally try to get several widely-spaced views of things and strike an average. And hope it's close to the truth.

I truly wish there were some group with no ax to grind, an addiction to telling the unspun objective truth, and a publishing outlet of some sort. Blogs are about as close as we get to that, and again we don't know about the bloggists' personal axes and objectivity.

I need a crystal ball.

[Shapley]

I need a crystal ball.

I have one I'll lone you, but when you look through it, everything tilts to the right. Maybe if you set in front of OT's and look through them both, things'll balance out....