Vietnam War Symbolism and Signs

All of these symbols are personal to me in some fashion. They are not inclusive, many got lost. Many are now.....forgotten.

There ain't nothing in the world for symbols like the military at war. You learn real fast like to read the symbols or you get in trouble, deep trouble.

Symbols on the hat, the shoulder, the chest, the sleeve, etc. tell you instantly about how important the wearer is, how long they've been doing what they are doing, what part of the military they belong to, their unit, whether or not their "superiors" think they are brave, their training, their history, their wars, and all sorts of stuff.

Some symbolism tells about historical cowardice. Some says this division stands their ground. Some say don't mess around here. Don't drive down this road. Some are found in the wrong place at the wrong time because those who wore them didn't give a damn.

Some are worn in full bright colors rather than regulation O.D. and Black, another don't give a damn.

Some symbols tell about relationships between units. Some show disdain. Some get you in trouble. Ignore some and you die.

Some are full of pride. Some have secretes.

Some symbols just mean you've been away from home too long.

Addendum for the record:

The MI insignia was quite interesting. On top was the five petal rose with blue petals for truth and honor. Beneath the rose, i.e. sub-rosa, were the secrets hidden behind the light of the ancient Sun symbol of Hermes, Hermes who saw and heard everything. Within Hermes symbol is the compass rose for everywhere, and beneath the Sun was the upturned dagger, a symbol of danger, vigilance, death and protection. The gold color was for Hermes, the Sun, and victory. Who would ever guess it would mean so much?

Why Do they Lie

Remember when CBS faked an explosion in an auto crash and got caught?

There was Hell to pay.

So why can Fox News and the GOP and Republican pundits lie to me and to you and get away with it? No sanctions what so ever. Not only have they lied they are still right now telling the same lie.

What have we become?

Controversial CBO Report On Stimulus Turns Out Not To Exist

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won't be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.
Funny thing is, there is no such report.
"We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study," a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.
Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score -- how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

Read it all:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/23/a-controversial-cbo-repor_n_160495.html

What happens to those who blatantly try to make us out as fools?

Nothing?

Has that part of America lied so much and so long that they can't tell what is true anymore.

The back side of this of course if they tell us something we really need to know, we can't believe that they are telling us the truth.

Remember that old "X File" slogan? 'Trust No One"

The Wisdom of Solomon, Susan That Is

I have said repeatedly that the cow has done been tipped over boys and girls.
The climate warming of the earth hit the tipping point years ago.
Yep emissions are important(for breathing, cancer and such), but not to the climate. It is too late.

First thing is to understand that a warming earth is a prelude to an ice age earth. That is such a counter intuitive result that it escapes everyone. That's the cycle of climates. Our speeding it up over the past three centuries or so doesn't change the cycle.

The past is prologue. Want to know what's coming, look back at what was. Look back 10,000 years and then project that into the next 1000 or so years.

Our public policy on this subject has been a joke. That has to change. What shall we do to save Houston, Los Angeles, or New York from inundation by rising sea levels. Do we just write Florida off as a loss. How shall we organize and shift our agricultural production? These are the levels of things to be done.

Not that we seem to be able to do it. Guess we will have to get rid of some of the really stupid naysayers. Then we wait for the first absolute disaster on the order or level of maybe 10 tsunamis or 20 Katrinas.


Climate change fallout irreversible
Study finds shift 'unstoppable'
ASSOCIATED PRESSTuesday, January 27, 2009

"Many damaging effects of climate change are already basically irreversible, researchers declared Monday, warning that even if carbon emissions can somehow be halted temperatures around the globe will remain high until at least the year 3000.
"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years; that's not true," climate researcher Susan Solomon said.
Miss Solomon, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., is lead author of an international team's paper reporting irreversible damage from climate change. The paper is being published in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
She defines "irreversible" as change that would remain for 1,000 years even if humans stopped adding carbon to the atmosphere immediately.
The findings were announced as President Obama ordered reviews that could lead to greater fuel efficiency and cleaner air, saying the Earth's future depends on cutting air pollution.
Said Miss Solomon, "Climate change is slow, but it is unstoppable," all the more reason to act quickly.
Alan Robock, of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University, agreed with the report's assessment. "It's not like air pollution where if we turn off a smokestack, in a few days the air is clear," said Mr. Robock, who was not part of Miss Solomon's research team. "It means we have to try even harder to reduce emissions."
Miss Solomon's report "is quite important, not alarmist, and very important for the current debates on climate policy," said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Arizona.
In her paper Miss Solomon, a leader of the International Panel on Climate Change and one of the world's best known researchers on the subject, noted that temperatures around the globe have risen and changes in rainfall patterns have been observed in areas around the Mediterranean, southern Africa and southwestern North America.
Warmer climate also is causing expansion of the ocean, and that is expected to increase with the melting of ice on Greenland and Antarctica, the researchers said.
Global warming has been slowed by the ocean, Miss Solomon said, because water absorbs a lot of energy to warm up. But that good effect will not only wane over time, the ocean will help keep the planet warmer by giving off its accumulated heat to the air.
Climate change has been driven by gases in the atmosphere that trap heat from solar radiation and raise the planet's temperature - the "greenhouse effect." Carbon dioxide has been the most important of those gases because it remains in the air for hundreds of years. While other gases are responsible for nearly half of the warming, they degrade more rapidly, Miss Solomon said. "

http://www.washingtontimes.com/themes/people/susan-solomon/

Will Obama in the White House Satisfy the Ghost in the Parking Lot ?

About a half mile from my home there is a small strip mall that holds several small stores and an independent grocery store. I'm not going to mention the grocery store by name, after all it is not their fault that a racist killer made them famous for a while.

Every time I go by that store I think of the crime that happened there. Every single time I go by it, I remember.

I was working at the time on a court ordered plan for the integration of higher education in Oklahoma. I was not a popular fellow to say the least. I am white, but I had an integrated staff so we all felt the effect of what happened. We could put ourselves or our families in this picture without any great effort of imagination.

The recent inaugural of Barack Obama has brought back so many memories like this to so many people. Have we really changed we ask? I don't think deep down we have. But then again maybe we have.

It was on October 21, 1979, ".... The weather had been perfect for the children's Hula Hoop contest that warm October Sunday. As nurse's aide Marian Bresette, her black common-law husband, Jesse Taylor, and her three children piled into the family Ford afterward, their thoughts were on supper.

They stopped at a supermarket on the way home, and as Jesse was returning with a bag of groceries the first shot was fired. Store employees heard him moaning "no, no, no" as he slumped against the door of the car. Then two more shots threw him dead to the pavement. His wife ran screaming to his side and, as she bent over him, she too was hit—by a single, fatally accurate shot to the chest.

Casings from a high-caliber rifle were reportedly found in a grove of evergreens 75 yards away, but the killer escaped without being seen. There was no apparent reason for the killings."

From: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20077938,00.html

That Monday I had a staff meeting and told my staff to cancel their meetings and appearances for the next two weeks until we knew more about these killings. We often went out as mixed race teams to do our job across the State. It seemed prudent to hold back and find out what this was all about. After the two weeks even though we didn't know why it had happened we went back to business, but kept our senses tuned to our environment.

It took a while but eventually we found out it was a racist serial killer named Joseph Paul Franklin that had blow away Jesse and his wife Marian in that grocery store parking lot on that warm Sunday afternoon.

"Franklin was a drifter, roaming up and down the East Coast, always looking for chances to "cleanse the world" of people he considered inferior, especially blacks and Jews. He sustained himself by robbing banks and often sold or traded the guns he used to kill. Despite being partially blind in his left eye and completely blind in his right eye, Franklin was a proficient marksman, and killed most of his victims from over 100 feet (30 m) away. He did not touch or try to contact the majority of victims, instead assassinating them from a distance; thereby falling into the category of a mission oriented serial killer. He was a highly organized killer, who would plan in advance several escape routes and techniques in which to leave no evidence."
---Wikipedia

He may have killed as many as 20 people or even more. We just don't know. He might have been able to really up the score except he got too ambitious and shot Larry Flynt and Vernon Jordon, two highly visible targets. That put him in the lime light.

He was caught in Florida in 1980 while selling his blood plasma. The nurse on duty recognized a tattoo from a TV program about him.

"Franklin has been linked by either indictment or confession to 20 murders, 6 aggravated assaults, 16 bank robberies and two bombings. He has confessed to eight murders, and has received several life sentences or death sentences for others. He made several confessions in the late 1990s on the condition that he confessed to "an attractive white female investigator"."
--Wikipedia

I drive by that grocery store maybe about twice a week. I always think about the killings when I do. I can see the trees from where Franklin fired his rifle when I go by. There are ghost there standing in that parking lot. Ghosts that have yet to be vindicated.
Franklin has never been tried for their murders.

I wonder how many ghost will have to be satisfied before we truly are a different Nation?
Can the Obama effect give them all rest? Maybe some of them. At least I hope so.

Franklin is still being held on death row at the Potosi Correctional Center near Mineral Point, Missouri.

Do You Have Faith In Naked Singularities?

This morning as I lay in bed with my sinuses draining the Amazon River down my throat, I read about naked singularities in my most recent issue of Scientific American Magazine and how if you fell into one you would be flung out somewhere else along the energy stream from the singularity.

Naked singularities are collapsed super stars that have lost the concretions of the vent horizons around them that would normally trap all matter and energy that fell into them and cause them to function as a black hole from which nothing escapes.

In the stream of a naked singularity space/time does not exist.

Now ain't that a theological wonder.

Is there any Faith system or religion that does not require space and time?

In the beginning .....something.

It is a strange world isn't it when people believe in things much stranger than anything in the Bible and yet such a belief is not based in Faith at all, but in mathematics and science. Even stranger, when you consider that all of the black holes, naked singularities, stars, planets and other objects in space or energy impacting what can be seen actually only comprise 4% of existent universe or cosmos.

And God, knows and controls and is it all.

Of course there are a number of Republican pundits and U.S. Senators and well, others, who wouldn't believe what's said in Scientific American any way. So when the "Star Gate" budget comes up for reauthorization they will probably work against it.

Read it for yourself:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=naked-singularities

Security: Our Kabuki Dance With Death

Having been involved in the aftermath of the terrorist bombing in OKC and many of the ice storms or tornadoes in Oklahoma, it is almost like we are trained to function without the power grid and supply system for a couple of weeks. We personally have at least two weeks of non-cook food available. We keep at least two land line phones that work without electricity. Our home heat does not need electricity to work (a heat-coupling on the furnace generates micro-voltage to control the unit).


Our current 'homeland' national security is a kabuki dance with death. It is 90% show and even the substance that is there is outdated. What we need is good criminal police work on an international level. How about some elemental security like burying the com/data systems, scanning all shipping containers, installing the Israeli 'passengers who fly' program. Patrolling the rivers and checking the boats and ships there on.


I spent a week wandering along the entire Oregon Coast last Summer. There is no visable security there. Only saw two cops patrolling the highway and no, none, nada, Coast Guard.


The Feds can't completely shut down the com systems during a terror attack to keep the bad guys from talking to each other as they say they would . Many of those com systems in operation are outside any control by the U.S., satellite com for example. Even so doing so, they would step on their own toes.


The next attack will be biological. That or maybe an atomic device. Shit, just blow up the old abandoned nuclear fuel processing plants spread around the States. Now don't think the bad guys haven't thought about that.


I used to talk to a friend,the husband of a TSA official, about the geographic and transportation weakness of the city they lived in. He asked how I would take down the city. I told him, and I haven't heard from him since. We are scared shit less of our own shadows and our own people, and up till now, our own government. Too much television I guess.



We act as though we are weak and defenseless. It is not hardly the case. We can be stupid however.

Stand On Zanzibar

Looking at that satellite picture of the Mall during Obama's Inaugural the people really do look like some bacteria growth in a petri dish. There are not many opportunities to see humanity in those numbers crowded together like that.







That reminded me of a novel I read once, oh say 40 years ago, it was 'Stand On Zanzibar'. There was a statistic that was the premise of the book's title. It was that by 2010 the world population would be doubled to 7 billion souls. It forecasted a very crowded earth short of resources and big on Governments and control.



Well the population prediction was right on the money. In 2010 we can expect to have about 7,000,000,000 neighbors. It does boggle the "Love thy Neighbor..." concept a bit don't it.



Well the premise was that if all of the people of the world stood in one place shoulder to shoulder that would cover an area equal to the square footage contained on the island of Zanzibar.
Zanzibar is just off of the "arm pit" of Eastern Africa near the border of Kenya and Tanzania.

Yes we looked like ants on Tuesday from space. It was one of our great historical events, but from a far enough perspective we are left resembling bacteria in a petri dish. Sobering is it not.