A Time Out.

I am very proud of Cruel Wife. She has agreed to watch Band of Brothers from nose-to-tail. She’s not big on war movies but (1) this is more or less real, even with the embellishments, and (2) even though it is disturbing, she’s still watching it.

I have said many times that I will insist that our kids watch BoB and Saving Pvt. Ryan before they leave home, for I want them to be innoculated against those who wish to poison their minds against our country and I want them pay proper respect to our military and our veterans.

I firmly believe that with the right illustration one cannot help but gain a certain amount of respect for those who have sacrificed in either their lives, their health, and in years of service. Reading of it in a history book will not suffice.  One needs the visceral nature of the event.

Now, here you may roll your eyes but hear me out.

Years ago there was a game, Call of Duty.  The game developers (Infinity Ward) made it a huge point to talk to veterans, scrutinize photographs, watch video footage, and I cannot remember if some actually visited the sites of historic battles.

But the thing is, so much of Band of Brothers looked as if I had been there before.  Now, I am not in any way shape or form drawing equivalency between a first-person shooter and the real war, nor can a movie do it, but I am saying that the game captured enough to have your adrenaline racing.  It was damn hard to make it up the beach at Normandy, you died over and over and over again.  The wire, the bunkers and trenches, the fields beyond, and the guns blazing non-stop.  It was pretty intense.  And so help me, there was an added bit of adrenaline watching as Market Garden went sideways.  There were parts of BoB where my inner self has been screaming “Danger!  Danger!  You guys, there’s bad guys up on that roof!  There are guns downstairs in that building over there!  There’s a sniper over yonder!”  In the game you’re getting shot at, guys are dying all around you, and you still have no idea where the krauts are shooting you from.

Believe it or not, a game can make you respect your soldiers more, because dammit, what they endured was hundreds of thousands of times worse.  In the game you aren’t tired, you aren’t cold, you aren’t hurt, you don’t have crappy food, you don’t have some idiot asshole giving orders that make no sense at all.  What you do get in the game is a visual and visceral feel for what it might have looked like, and it did not look pretty, even as inadequate as it was.  That game didn’t feel like they were trying to make WWII like a level from Doom II where you get a BFG-9000 later on.  You had two weapons.  That was it, and lone-wolfing it didn’t work so very well.  And you died if you got hit.

This time around I’m paying more attention to BoB even though the DVD’s don’t have Closed Captions – Cruel Wife is my interpreter at times.

I am therefore not blogging much for the next few nights and haven’t for the last two.  I trust you’ll understand why, even if I can’t exactly explain in words my internalized metaphor that embodies all the reasons why I am compelled to try to understand that section of history a bit more.  I’m sure I’m not at all alone in that, however.

Update:  We just finished up Bastogne.  Beautiful:

We didn’t need to be “rescued” – 101st Airborne

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Ween(ey) Thinking

I’m not as prepped for Halloween as I’d like but that’s the way life goes.  I’ll figure it out.

If you are a gun owner you already know about Hornady Zombie Max Ammunition.  Good, good for you.   You just never know and better safe than sorry, I say.

This brings up an important safety announcement.

1. Get some Zombie Max Ammo
2. Shoot for the head, always for the head.  Unless other targets of opportunity make for hilarity and you’re in a safe location
3. Rent Bubba-hotep
4. Watch it.
5. Rent and watch:  Ahhh! Zombies!, Night of the LIving Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Resident Evil (it’s like the weird Uncle Carl of zombie movies but it has Milla Jovovich so it gets a pass), 28 Days (no, it’s not a movie about menstruation),  Pet Sematery.  Watch a few episodes of The Rosie Show on Hulu.  (Just seeing if you were awake.)

No, my unpreparedness is because I did not purchase in time the requisite five 500W halogen light bulbs with which to light up my pumpkin, so I will have to use seventeen 150W bulbs, all shoved into one pumpkin.  Yes, I am going to install a 120V fan on the back of the pumpkin to pump air out of it.  Or I will fill the pumpkin with mineral oil to help with the temperature issue.

Pumpkin #2… you’re going to have to wait to see how he gets lit up.  It will be EPIC.  I hope.

Show up around here on Nov. 1 and see if I have the pics posted yet.

****

Hey, kids… want to see something even more scary than Evil Baby Clowns?    (see veeshir’s links in the comments section below, please)

Let’s see what has been uttered by German Chancellor Angela Merkel today…

“Nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe. They are not for granted. That’s why I say: If the euro fails, Europe fails,” Merkel said, followed by a long applause from all political groups.

“We have a historical obligation: To protect by all means Europe’s unification process begun by our forefathers after centuries of hatred and blood spill. None of us can foresee what the consequences would be if we were to fail.”

Maybe I’m just paranoid but that didn’t sound as peaceful to my ears as it could.  It sounded sinister, but swaddled in the cloths of compassion.

She was asking for the parliament’s “political” green light on a negotiation mandate for the EU summit, beginning later today in Brussels. The summit is seeking to increase the firepower of the €440 billion-strong European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) to stop the sovereign debt crisis spreading to countries like Italy and ultimately, France.

The Bundestag approved the measure by a large majority, with 503 members in favour, 89 opposing and four abstaining.

Got that?  Huge agreement – that Germany must do whatever must be done.  Whatever must be done.  For the good of all, of course.

While stressing that Germany’s contribution to the EFSF loan guarantees would continue to be capped at €211 billion, she said she could not exclude there may be “risks” for Germany linked to the EFSF increase of firepower. Her own party colleagues had demanded that she clearly excludes German state assets, such as the central bank’s gold reserves, to be put as collateral for the EFSF lending power.

“Nobody can clearly estimate if there will be such risks. What I can say is that we cannot exclude it,” she said, insisting that the current situation is pushing European leaders into “uncharted territories”.

“Not to take these risks would be irresponsible. There is no better and more sensible alternative. Europe and the world are looking at Germany,” the chancellor said.

Looking ahead to the summit, the chancellor repeated her long-standing stance that “there is no silver bullet, no simple solutions. We will still deal with these topics for years from now.”

She repeated her insistence that the EU treaty had to be changed, in the medium term, to be more strict on countries breaching the euro deficit rules.

“Where does it say that any treaty change has to take 10 years or that there should be no more changes after the Lisbon Treaty,” she asked.

More strict.  Again for the good of all, of course.

EU leaders last Sunday agreed to have an evaluation presented to them in December by council chief Herman Van Rompuy about the possibility for a “limited” treaty change.

On the three euro-countries currently propped by EU-IMF loans, Merkel said Ireland was on “the right path”, Portugal showed it could implement the promised reforms, while Greece was still “at the beginning of a long road.”

For the first time, as opposition MPs noted later on in the debate, Merkel had words of praise for the ordinary Greek citizens feeling the brunt of the austerity measures demanded by international lenders. “People in Greece have to stomach a lot of sacrifices. They deserve our respect and also a sustainable growth perspective in the eurozone.”

According to the latest report of the so-called troika, consisting of experts sent from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Greece will need even higher debt restructuring and losses for private lenders compared to what EU leaders had agreed upon on 21 July.

“But debt restructuring alone does not solve the problem. Painful structural reforms have to be made, otherwise even after debt restructuring we’re back to where we are today,” Merkel warned.

Ok, you’ve been softened up.  Here’s that final blow you’ve been unconsciously expecting:

That’s why, she said, Greece would have to be “assisted” for quite some time. “It’s not enough that the troika comes and goes every three months. It would be desirable to have a permanent supervision in Greece,” she said, adding that this issue would be brought up at the summit.

Permanent supervision.   That is one of the more arrogant things you’ll ever hear.  That is saying “Greece is so fundamentally screwed up that they will never be capable of self-policing.”  It is tantamount to making the declaration that an autistic or retarded individual will never be self-sufficient, and for the individual autism sufferer or Down’s Syndrome sufferer, this may indeed be true.  But to place that judgment on a culture speaks of a vast gulf in self-superiority.

Yes, it is true that Greece has some serious freakin’ issues and a total lack of even the basic economic common-sense God gave a gopher.  A lot of Europe isn’t far behind and politicians in the US seem convinced of their brilliance, enough so that they believe we can repeat the actions of the European socialism proponents but without the fatal mis-steps.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.  – Margaret Thatcher

I can say “I don’t believe that Haiti will ever get it’s shit together”, and I’ll probably be right.  I could also say of the Middle East that they’ll never be peaceful because their cultures are fundamentally screwed up, and I could very well be right.  But to say “I think we should stay in Haiti forever and override their poor judgment whenever they lapse, because we know they most certainly will” is beyond arrogant.  It is proof that the German superiority issue is still alive and well even today, nearly seven decades after WWII.

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