[NOTE: Go ahead and consider any Saturday post an “Open Trackback” post for the weekend.]
A grab bag of thoughts from all around…
Jerry Pournelle shared some thoughts on honoring our service men and women, including this:
“…the GI Bill today is much lower than it was after World War II, or the Korean War. It is easy to show that the GI Bill paying for retraining — in academic colleges, commerce colleges, trade schools, technical colleges, all of those — was one of the best investments this nation ever made, putting some serious adults young and old into the higher education system.
There are bills pending in Congress that would increase the GI Bill for today’s veterans. They have been cut back “to save money”. Let me say that if we can afford a trailer and payments to people whose only justification is that they were in the path of a hurricane, why cannot we afford benefits for those who put themselves in harm’s way at the call of their country?”
“Dedication Is Visible Among new Soldiers” at military.com (from a Christian Science Monitor article) is good news on more than one front.
“Wal-Mart Boycott Ends with Apology” (from WallyWorld) at Stop the ACLU relates how pressure from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights helped put “Merry Christmas” officially back in Wal-Mart greeters’ allowed repertoire of greetings and “Christmas” back in the search terms at Wal-Mart’s website. heh
It was linked below (in Wednesday’s Open Trackback post), but DO NOT MISS Norman Podhoretz’ article, “Who is Lying About Iraq?“
And did you catch “The French Connection” at The American Thinker?
And DO catch TMH’s Bacon Bits’ “Will Paris (and Washington) Go to School on l’Intifada?”
Semi-random quotes:
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.” -G.K. Chesterton
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” -John Stuart Mill
“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward to perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It tends to risk nothing serious for the sake of truth.” -R. L. Dabney
“Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western civilization as it commits suicide.” -James Burnham
Linked at Don Surber, Common Folks, Common Sense, Stop the ACLU, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Random Numbers, Basil’s Blog, Big Dog’s Weblog, The Tar Pit, The Uncooperative Blogger
Technorati : France burns, GI Bill, Iraq, L’Intifada, Plame, Veterans Day, military service