Blithering On

It might surprise some of you who know me that I’m taking a position on this issue, but as a guy who isn’t afraid to muster up an opinion once in a while, I must do what I must do. I’m writing today about the insensitivity shown in some of the songs that are played on the radio and in the stores this time of year every single year . We are now fairly well established in the 21st century and we’re supposedly far enough along in our cultural development as a free-thinking inclusive society that we should be able to avoid offending those who are different than we are during this holiday season. It’s high time we recognize the effects of regional distinctions and the fact that aspects of this time of year that one group can celebrate might be evoke feelings of being left out to another. Seasonal tunes like “Deck the Halls,” “Silver Bells,” and “The Chipmunk Song” are fine, but I heard a song on my radio today that really crossed the line. Of course, I’m talking about the regionally-biase

Maybe you saw the news story the other day about the 9-year old 4th grader who was suspended from school for telling a friend that he thought his teacher was cute. The principal decided to impose a suspension on the student for “inappropriate behavior” for making that comment which she said was a form of “sexual harassment.” The principal obviously lost sight of what sexual harassment really is and why it’s a problem when it occurs. Sexual harassment is intimidation or coercion with sex in some manifestation – physical, verbal, body language – used as the lever. It’s not supposed to be a tag you place on innocent remarks made by people who intend no malice and are in no position to exert their will on others. Contorting a young student’s harmless observation that he thinks his teacher is cute and representing it as “a form of sexual harassment” goes way too far. I do think I know where that kind of overly strong reaction comes from though. These days, there is so much required of sch

Many don’t know that in addition to being a premium football player in high school, Tim Tebow was also a very good baseball player, named to the all-state baseball team as an outfielder after his senior year of high school. I remember watching him play for Ponte Vedra Nease High School the year my son and nephew played for the Florida high school baseball championship. Tebow’s team played in the semi-finals and lost to the team that our team ultimately defeated in the championship game. Even as a senior on the baseball team, Tebow was someone most Florida high school sports fans were already familiar with. He had already drawn a legion of ardent supporters, but as his college career took shape, he also found a smattering of detractors. I have to say I had mixed feelings about him when he played in college. I appreciated his competitiveness and his burning desire to win, and I admired his adherence to his values. What didn’t always sit well with me, however, was what I took for a penc

It’s funny what you think of when you’ve been sitting in a tree all day waiting for a deer to come along. Yesterday was one of those days. With a big moon in the sky at night, there weren’t a lot of reasons for deer to wander around during the day time. On top of that, the wind was swirling and gusty. Being a nervously paranoid animal in the first place, deer aren’t exactly comforted by all of the scents and sounds in the woods on those kinds of days, so they tend to sit tight until the sun goes down. But there I sat anyway just in case I was wrong. I have seen deer just about every time I’ve been out this year so far, but in most cases it’s been a doe with a young fawn. The late season fawns have lost their spots, but they’re still wearing kind of a rusty brown coat. In a few weeks, they’ll start picking up some black and darker brown that will darken their coats. I’ve always had this thing about shooting does with young fawns. In passing on the shot, I have just had this sense that

Clayton Lonetree was a Marine sergeant serving as a security guard at the United States Embassy in Moscow in the early 1980s. It was a particularly sensitive post during the Cold War, one the Marine Corps exercised a good amount of care in filling. As one might expect, being an embassy security guard in the Soviet Union in those days was an isolated and difficult position, especially for a young 25-year old. But Sergeant Lonetree was up to the task when he was selected for it, and he remained good for it right up to the point that he met a Russian woman while on liberty. He probably didn’t realize she had noticed him long before he noticed her. Although Sergeant Lonetree had been warned about situations like these, he couldn’t believe the warmth and companionship he found in the Russian woman was a ruse. She seduced him, then she blackmailed him, sending his life and his aspirations into a sudden and dramatic tailspin. Before it was over, Sergeant Lonetree had sold blueprints of the

There’s a piece posted on foxnews.com, originally broadcast on the Fox News Channel the other day, about a military father who’s facing foreclosure on his home (“Hero Faces Foreclosure”). The story begins with the words, “All he wants to do is welcome his son home from a tour of duty in Iraq.” To be clear, there is nothing about his military son’s service, his experiences in Iraq, his financial contribution to his father’s domicile – nothing – that links his service to his father’s financial position. The story was clearly an attempt to leverage for sympathy the military tour of duty of the son of a guy who’s enduring a foreclosure experience he shares with thousands of other Americans. The father has been fighting with his bank over his attempt to take advantage of the government’s home mortgage modification plan. Somehow, his son’s military service – which has no bearing on the issue – has become woven into the story. For the benefit of those who might read this and not know, let

Whether the United States government should release the bin Laden death photos is still a topic of discussion in the news and among commentators. Personally, I don’t think our government ought to release them, but not for the reasons we’ve heard. 1. We don’t want to release the photographs because we don’t want incite terrorist violence against Americans. Boy, we sure don’t want to plant the seeds of violence in any terrorists minds, do we? None of this global war on terror business would exist in the first place were it not for a wave of unprovoked violence against Americans right here in our own country. Yet, we seem to be persistently concerned about offending a group of people who take grave offense, even when none is given or intended. No, I think we’re looking at that all wrong. In my mind, the bin Laden take-down was about as unequivocal a statement about the cost of messing with us as we’ve made in a while. Why don’t we just strum that chord for a while? We seem so eager t

Today, I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with both, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Senator John Kerry in saying that I believe there has been too much discussion of the prelude to and execution of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. I think it’s enough for us to know that it was pulled off by American special forces and, as I wrote the other day, that it was completed in accordance with the law and the rules of engagement for the mission. That’s it. We don’t need to know what unit flew the helicopters, we don’t need to know from where they launched their mission, we don’t need to know how many flying back-up helicopters they had, we don’t need to know what kind of covering air support they had, we don’t need to know about the extent to which electronic interdiction was employed in the area. We don’t need to know any of that. It was a secret military operation and it needs to stay classified that way until the either the tactics or the enemy become obso

My brother and I finished our visit at our Dad’s gravesite in Bullhead City, Arizona and made our way back to Las Vegas for a Sunday morning flight back to Pensacola. On our way to the hotel, we decided to visit the pawn shop that is the scene and setting for the cable television show Pawn Stars . We looked and looked, but didn’t see anything that we couldn’t live without. The prices seemed a bit steep. When it gets right down to it, it’s still a pawn shop. They’re in business to buy things for less than they’re worth and then sell them for more than they’re worth. Actually, I guess if someone is willing to pay the price they’re asking for an item, it must have been worth that price. Let me correct myself to say they were selling things for more than they were worth to me . There were a lot of people in the place and a good number of spectators (like us) outside taking pictures. I doubt the owner ever expected people to be standing outside of his pawn shop taking pictures of it when

There’s an adage that “any landing you walk away from is a good landing.” That sounds cute, but no pilot really sees it that way if it involves leaving a broken aircraft behind. By now, we all know that the American forces who raided bin Laden’s compound experienced a rough landing and left the remains of a helicopter behind. You might have heard that the helicopter likely crashed due to a phenomenon known as “settling with power” while some other explanations have suggested that it might have been a “high, hot” landing scenario. I thought I would try to explain how that kind of thing happens in case anyone is interested. You probably already realize that helicopters fly by producing lift with their rotors. The helicopter is controlled by the pilot’s manipulation of three controls: the cyclic which raises and lowers the nose of the aircraft and rolls it to the left and right, the pedals which move (or yaw) the nose (or tail) of the aircraft to the left or right, and the collective whi

It looks like the worst part of the mission to take down Osama bin Laden will be the politics that follow. In the three short days since we learned of the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, we’ve heard that bin Laden was killed because he fired at our SEALs and we’ve heard that he was killed as he appeared to be going for a weapon. Now, we’re told he wasn’t armed. That bit of insight has lit up the “wait just a minute” crowd. CIA Director Leon Panetta has added to the confusion by telling us the raid was a mission to kill bin Laden, “The authority here was to kill bin Laden, and obviously, under the rules of engagement, if he had in fact thrown up his hands, surrendered and didn’t appear to be representing any kind of threat, then they were to capture him. But they had full authority to kill him.” Now, the White House press secretary is trying to explain it all, and he’s not doing a very good job of it. The problem is there is an important philosophical difference between the

There’s an awful lot of talk about the celebrations in the streets in the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden. There’s even a quote circulating that’s been attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” The implication is that Dr. King preached against the kind of celebrations we saw in America’s streets Monday night. It appears that the person who originally posted the quote on his Facebook page got it right, but a subsequent poster misplaced the quotation marks which had the effect of distorting the original context of his words. The original poster led with his own words, “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not

I remember in the days after 9/11, President Bush told the leaders of the world’s nations that they were either with us or against us. Leaders of unfriendly nations stepped right up to make it clear they wanted none of that wrath, but one guy who didn’t get the memo was Saddam Hussein. I agreed with the invasion of Iraq not because of weapons of mass destruction, but because Saddam Hussein was an evil man who had spent the 12 years after the end of Desert Storm trying to shoot our aircraft down in violation of the agreement that brought an end to that war and permitted him to stay in power. I felt that reason was enough, especially in light of the fact that Saddam was clearly in the “against us” camp. Tactically, I believed there was great potential and considerable value in bringing the terrorist rats out into the relative open in Iraq rather than try to track them down in the prohibitive terrain of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union proved that a powerful military force can get decimate

Muammar Qaddafi is a terrorist and he has been one from the day his regime began 40 years ago. He had his hands all over the Lockerbie Pam Am Flight 103 bombing in 1988, and we should have taken him out as soon as it occurred to us that he had a role in it. When Qaddafi started clamping down on insurrectionists in his country, we attempted to strong-arm him into stepping aside by suggesting we might re-open the Lockerbie investigation and bring charges of crimes against humanity against him. The idea was that we had the goods on Qaddafi and if he didn't back away from defending his regime against the rebels, we would go after him in international court. That not only made us look weak, it showed us to be hypocrites in our outrage over the atrocity on Pan Am 103. How in the world do we withhold our vengeance over the murders of Americans over Lockerbie until - and only  until - Qaddafi compounds the crime by killing his own people? That made us look so obviously unprincipled. I don

In December of 2008, George W. Bush was President, Barack Obama had just been elected President, and I was a high school Honors American Government teacher. I stumbled across the final examination I gave them just before Christmas break that year and thought I'd share it here. It seems relevant today in light of today's volatile international political and economic climate, and a national economic climate that includes a national debt that is 34% higher than it was in 2008. My students did very well on the exam, but I wonder how their elected officials today would do on it. Here it is: Looking back to the collapse of the Roman Empire, Rome's economy had been declining for centuries. Rome had grown wealthy on the proceeds of its territorial expansion, but when expansion ended after Rome succeeded in bringing stability to its frontiers, this source of new wealth and economic growth also ended. Lacking new sources of income from expansion, manufacturing, expanding exports,

Muhammad Leads Early Muslim Warriors in Battle Beginning with the war and turmoil that surrounded the Prophet Muhammad's rise to the leadership of the Muslim faith, Islam has proven itself anything but benign, anything but placid for a significant part of its history.  The final dozen years of the Prophet's life were spent at war, and the caliphates that followed stayed true to that example. With the ascendency of the First Rightly Guided Caliph Abu Bakr, Islam won over conversions by force throughout Arabia. The Second Rightly Guided Caliph Umar, however, took Islamic expansionism to a new level as he spread the young Islamic caliphate to include Jerusalem, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, and Persia. The caliphate retracted somewhat under the Third Rightly Guided Caliph Uthman ibn Affan as he tried to harness the multitude of cultures that fell within the Islamic caliphate. The Fourth Rightly Guided Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib had struggled with the fact he believed he should have be