Remember: MilTracker's goal is to become your source for links to uplifting news about our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines . . . so put us on your blogroll and drop us a line whenever you have some good news to share.
If you have good news about our military, MilTracker wants to link to you!
Ten classic comedies were screened at the recent City of the Angels Film Festival. A broad coalition including Fuller Seminary, InterVarsity, and Catholics in Media offer this annual event as a gift to the city, a celebration of theology and film.
“I believe in being free, acquiring knowledge, and telling the truth.”
The above quote from the legendary American journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) sums it up pretty much. The Brussels Journal is a project set up by European journalists and writers to restore three values that are so lacking in the so-called “consensus-culture” of contemporary Europe: Freedom, the quest for Knowledge, and the Truth.
We defend freedom and, though we do not pretend to know the ultimate truth, we strive to acquire as much knowledge as possible by presenting facts and views that are hard to find in the “consensus-media” of Europe.
We are not an organisation; we are a coalition of individuals. Our contributors do not necessarily share every view represented in the articles of this website, but we know they all write with an earnest desire for the truth. What binds us is our defence of liberty and the conviction that the state exists to serve man and never the other way round.
Zell Miller knows a good bit about living in an institution with people who can’t stand him.
Bill Kristol is a Harvard man; unfortunately, his experience in the White House probably doesn’t adequately prepare him for the Machiavellian nastiness of faculty politics.
ABOARD USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT (NNS) -- A chapter in naval aviation history drew to a close Feb. 8 aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) with the last recovery of an F-14 Tomcat from a combat mission.
Piloted by Capt. William G. Sizemore II, commander, Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 8, Fighter Squadron (VF) 213’s aircraft 204 was trapped at 12:35 a.m. and marked one of the final stages of the Navy’s transition from the F-14 to F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet.
“It’s the end of an era and it just kind of worked out that I was the last trap,” said Sizemore. “This is one of the best airplanes ever built, and it’s sad to see it go away. It’s just a beautiful airplane. It’s powerful, it has presence, and it just looks like the ultimate fighter.”
Lt. Bill Frank, a VF-31 pilot, also took part in the last mission, and is credited with being the last pilot to ever drop a bomb from an F-14 Tomcat.
“We were called on to drop, and that’s what we did,” said Frank. “It’s special and it’s something I can say I did, but what’s more important is the work of the Sailors who made it possible. They have worked so hard during this cruise to make every Tomcat operational.”
The decision to incorporate the Super Hornet and decommission the F-14 is mainly due to high amount of maintenance required to keep the Tomcats operational. On average, an F-14 requires nearly 50 maintenance hours for every flight hour, while the Super Hornet requires five to 10 maintenance hours for every flight hour.
[...snip...]
The F-14 entered operational service with Navy fighter squadrons VF-1 Wolfpack and VF-2 Bounty Hunters aboard USS Enterprise (CVN 65) in September 1974. The Tomcat’s purpose was to serve as a fighter interceptor, and it eventually replaced the F-4 Phantom II Fighter, which was phased out in 1986...
...The apartment has a lingering odour of lunchtime curry. It’s a dashed rummy place to be talking about Bertie Wooster. I have come to explore the curious Indian obsession with P. G. Wodehouse.
Nearly 60 years after the nation’s British rulers packed their bags and legged it home, his books are on sale in most bookshops, sometimes nestling nervously between Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf.
Wodehouse never wrote about India, but sells better on the subcontinent than in Britain, with pirated copies in common circulation. He is one of the most heavily requested authors at the British Library in Delhi and there are clubs and internet chatrooms devoted to him.
[...snip...]
...Thomas Abraham, is now president of Penguin Books India, the country’s largest Wodehouse publisher. “We’ve all grown up with Wodehouse,” he says. “It’s a phenomenon here. When one of his books goes out of print, everyone goes ballistic. My publishing counterparts in the UK are very amused.”
In a country where most books in English sell fewer than 1,000 copies and 5,000 constitutes a bestseller, the corduroy-suited Abraham estimates that his company sells up to 70,000 Wodehouses a year: part of a thriving “retro-market” that ranges from Agatha Christie to Modesty Blaise.
Most Wodehouses are bought by middle-class Indians whose public school-like “English-Medium” education arguably equips them to appreciate the author’s verbal virtuosity and literary allusions better than many Brits.
“Wodehouse’s appeal is a pure sense of linguistic delight,” says Abraham, who has read “about 82” of his 85 books. “In the 1980s there was a debate about whether he was ‘literary’ or not, but the fact is that the books are a great read, laughaloud funny.
“It’s a whole world of clean, wholesome, escapist fun and parents here like to hand it down to their children...
...For a long time there was an attitude that novels of mystery and suspense were unvalued stepchildren in the literary world. Only fifteen years ago, on a national television program, I was asked if I ever hoped to write a "good" book someday, one that wasn't in the suspense genre? I replied that I had no idea about my own work, but a few mystery/suspense stories were hanging in there. For example, Oepidus Rex, Hamlet and MacBeth.
Fortunately, that kind of question isn't asked too often anymore...
The National League of Cities, which supports the use of eminent domain as what it calls a necessary tool of urban development, has identified the issue as the most crucial facing local governments this year. The league has called upon mayors and other local officials to lobby Congress and state legislators to try to stop the avalanche of bills to limit the power of government to take private property for presumed public good.
Seldom has a Supreme Court decision sparked such an immediate legislative reaction, and one that scrambles the usual partisan lines. Condemnation of the ruling came from black lawmakers representing distressed urban districts, from suburbanites and from Western property-rights absolutists who rarely see eye to eye on anything. Lawmakers from Maine to California have introduced dozens of bills in reaction to the ruling, most of them saying that government should never seize private homes or businesses solely to benefit a private developer.
The Supreme Court seemed to invite such a response in its narrowly written ruling in the case, Kelo v. City of New London. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, expressed sympathy for the displaced homeowners and said that the "necessity and wisdom" of the use of eminent domain were issues of legitimate debate. And, he added, "We emphasize that nothing in our opinion precludes any state from placing further restrictions on its exercise of the takings power."
Erickson, Hank the Cowdog series. These are very clever, with lots of fun word play and tangled idioms--sometimes when we read these aloud Jonathan and I are choking with laughter, and the kids have no clue why.
By law, Congress has established 11 permanent Federal holidays. Each Federal holiday emphasizes a particular aspect of the American heritage that molded the United States as a people and a nation. Although these patriotic celebrations are frequently referred to as "national holidays," legally they are only applicable to Federal employees and the District of Columbia. Neither Congress nor the President has asserted the authority to declare a "national holiday" that would be binding on the 50 states. Each state individually decides what its legal holidays will be. This is an example of federalism in action.
And then, two babies later (first our Rose, then bouncing Beanie), I gave birth to a little boy, and he wasn’t healthy. He was, to put it bluntly, rather a mess. Thus began the next chapter of the lesson that started during the long months of Jane’s illness. Being entrusted with the care of a child who is not physically perfect can be yes, painful and scary, but also one of the sweetest, most rewarding experiences a person can have. Do you know how much they teach us, these small, brave, persevering persons? I hadn’t begun to grasp the meaning of that whole "Count it all joy" business in the book of James until I met these children. Now I get it, or at least I get a glimpse of it. There is immeasurable joy not just in the overcoming of trial, but even—I know it sounds implausible, but it’s true—in the trial itself.
Patience, cheerfulness, courage, determination, persistence—these virtues which require such effort in me are a matter of course for this boy of mine. And so it was for his oldest sister, when she was in the thick of her ordeal. If we learn by example, then I have surely learned a great deal from my children.
Nathaniel is out of the operating room. He's heavily sedated right now in order to keep his heart from having to do much work. He's got tubes into his chest cavity, tubes directly into his heart, tubes into his lungs, etc. As much work as possible is being done for him.
All things considered, he looks fantastic. I've never been happier to see a drooling, knocked out baby in my life.
In this society, for a parent without one to see something positive in a child with Down syndrome requires a paradigm shift, I know. But if my counterculture years taught me anything, it was to question prevailing attitudes. I’d really never liked the dread surrounding Down syndrome, clouding the horizon for still-waiting-for-test-results expectant parents.
On the Internet in recent years I’ve “met” a few who’ve received the dreaded news, then logged onto Down syndrome newsgroups, trying to pick up the pieces. Often they describe pressure from geneticists and doctors to terminate the pregnancy and “try again.” These professionals are quick to point out the burdens of having a child with Trisomy 21 – possible medical problems, heavier emotional demands, a child who is “less than.”
But then on the Internet, or face-to-face in their own home towns, they meet the real professionals – parents involved with Down syndrome on a daily basis, in much better position to comment on the so-called “quality of life” issues. Always there is an outpouring of loving response, personal variations on Emily Kingsley’s theme in her famous essay, “Welcome to Holland”: So you planned to go to Italy and landed in unexpected territory. At first you’re disappointed. Then you notice the windmills and the tulips – beauty you never expected to find. You discover it’s not a bad place after all.
IT'S amazing that Macquarie Bank, would-be acquirer of the London Stock Exchange, wants to play out this sad little takeover farce to the very end.
It is like offering someone a buoy when they are actually water-skiing with a smile.
But, even if the amount had remained at roughly half this level, shareholders should reject a bid short on logic, strapped for cash, creating a hostage to fortune because of its highly leveraged nature, and now not even very entertaining.
* add/put in one's twopenn'orth informal to have one's say; to make one's contribution to a discussion, etc. [contraction of twopenny worth]
These posts will look at inaccurate or misleading charts, graphs or pictures.
Alcea rosea Grown by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, but mentioned even earlier by John Parkinson in 1629, who described this single hollyhock as being "of a darke red like blackblood." Appears black on overcast days, but will have a hint of red in the bright sun. Plant next to a white fence for a spectacular contrast. Self-seeding biennial, 5-6' tall.
Alcea rosea This classic variety has graced outbuildings on Iowa farmsteads for over a century. A favorite at Heritage Farm. Single blooms of white, light pink, pinkish-red, magenta and burgundy. Years ago, refined ladies just looked for the hollyhocks and didn't have to ask where the outhouse was. Blooms the second year in the North of first year in more moderate, long-seasoned climates. Self-seeding biennial, 6-9' tall....
...and wishing to get off the phone, because it was suppertime, of course: "You have a man who advocates infanticide occupying an endowed chair of bioethics -- and you invited him to assume that chair precisely because of those opinions."
The reply, not at all defensive, was priceless. With a smug lilt in the voice, and the deep ineducability that comes from being told, for years, that you are better and smarter than silly people who think, for example, that killing your month-old child is a reversion to barbarism, "Princeton likes to encourage the airing of all opinions."
I answered immediately that that simply was not true. If I were a young untenured professor at Princeton, and I spoke as frankly as I do in class at Providence College, they would boot me out the door -- though more probably the Bible-believing Roman Catholic doesn't get in the door in the first place. Back in the days when I attended (when Princeton did not have Touchstone's own redoubtable Robert George), diversity of opinion was merely forty shades of red. With that, the conversation was over.
But when I thought about it later I saw that I hadn't given the best answer. Princetonians do not have open minds about embezzlement, wife-beating, child abuse, or treason (well, not about the first three, anyway), nor should they. If you have an open mind about cruelty, that is a sign of your moral corruption. That Peter Singer has an open mind about killing your "defective" child after a few weeks' trial run -- after you've decided that, alas, the yoke of care is heavier than you had supposed, so that you just have no choice but to let little Tim go, probably with a lot of nice flowers and a word of consolation from a minister of the First United Church of Moloch, may he bless us every one -- says little about infanticide and a lot about Singer, and about Princeton.
Yet even that is not the best answer. The purpose of an open mind, says Chesterton, is to shut it on something true...
[...snip...]
...It is in the quest for knowledge as it is in matters of love: just as no one can wholly love another who keeps an escape hatch open, who considers it possible that not-loving might be a better option, so the relativist or the indifferentist keeps all doors open by neglecting to enter any of them. He prides himself on a radical opennness which is really refusal and timidity...
But they missed the point, and this guy in a collar who you’re reading is the proof of their folly. How’s that? Because regardless of Judge John Jones’ inadequate rationale as expressed in his judicial decision, I actually agree with him that ID should not be taught as modern science.
Before you throw the Good Book at me, let’s agree on what we mean by modern science and what we mean by intelligent design. Unlike thinkers of ages past, who intertwined gracefully some elements of philosophy with the natural sciences, today we prefer — for reasons of method — to separate one from the other. In these categories, the competence of modern science accepts only what we can observe and measure (empirical evidence). Questions like, “What’s the essence of it?” and “What’s it for?” are sent down the hall to the philosophy department. And that’s fair.
Intelligent design theory asks just that type of “down the hall” question. Its proponents claim that a good scientist can’t look at the complexity of the human eye without asking himself, “How did that happen?,” and responding with the answer, “I don’t know, but I do know that it didn’t just happen; there must be intelligence behind that design.” The affirmation is quite logical, but the evidence would be philosophical, not empirical, and for that reason it belongs down the hall.
You would think this reasonable principle would be valid for everyone. Not so. Judge Jones wrote that ID was “a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory.” An alternative to what? Ask your children or grandchildren what they are taught in their public school about the origin of human beings. They may say “evolution,” but it’s more than that. They are being taught a very unscientific theory called Neo-Darwinism, the belief that there is NO purpose or intelligence behind life forms, that it’s all random. Where’s the empirical evidence for that? As a matter of fact, it’s impossible to prove, either scientifically or otherwise. It too should go down the hall.
"Father, are you saying that evolution is not true?" Nope. I’m saying that mainstream, atheistic, Neo-Darwinism is bad science because it isn’t science. No reasonable person denies that life forms can evolve, but it’s quite different to say that through purely random natural selection one species evolves into another to the point of reaching human intelligence.
[...snip...]
I don’t want to end without clarifying that I do believe in intelligent design when it’s taught in the right place and in the right way. In fact, teaching it to our children as a philosophical (not just religious) theory is a sign of common sense and open-mindedness. Isn’t the whole of reality a little bigger than science? The problem is that in most public schools the “philosophy department down the hall” doesn’t really exist.
Given the state of things, maybe that’s all right. After all, who do you want to teach your kids about something as important as their origin and purpose? That’s your job. Thanks for allowing me to help.
Did I help? Let me know.
Today the number of breeding pairs is estimated at 7,066, with the birds thriving in 49 states including Alaska, the one state in which they were never listed as threatened. (Bald eagles are not indigenous to Hawaii.)
...wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends of our service men and women. If you care about our Soldiers, you are qualified to submit an entry to the Carnival of Blue Stars.
To love Vincent meant exchanging her luxurious world for a life which horrified her family and her suitor, Roger Herrington. Could she do it -- and would they let her...?
In 1989, the builders of a tea garden in a San Francisco park inadvertently left a parking barrier behind. Four years of complaints yielded zero efforts to remove the eyesore. Then—and I’m not making this up—a group of New Agers began to venerate the barrier as “a manifestation of the Hindi god, Shiva.”
Quicker than you can say “wall of separation,” park rangers hastened to remove the now-sacred eyesore. While the barrier’s worshippers eventually got to keep the object of their veneration, officials insisted that their worship be in private.
It’s hard to imagine a better example of the tortured relationship between religion and public life. Fortunately, however, there’s a new book that offers a possible way out of the mess we have created...
I hate a history that is merely dates, places, battles, and names. I want to know about the people who made things happen, the people who stand in the shadows...
Then this comes along. Is it not just another attack on Wal-Mart? Ok, these women were inconvenienced because a baby-killer prescription is not offered at their store. It states right there in the article- "CVS, the state's largest pharmacy chain, stocks the pill at all of its drugstores." Could they not have just gone to CVS?
Yes, they could have. Instead, they have to draw attention to another store for not being liberal enough. It's getting a bit ridiculous.
How many children does it take to move an old, decrepit house six miles? The answer, Minneapolitans learned back in 1896, was about 10,000.
Two years earlier, a Minneapolis Journal reporter had tracked down the oldest wood-frame house west of the Mississippi and proposed to have the city’s schoolchildren team up to move the structure from its temporary address, 324 16th Av. S., to Minnehaha Park, where the Stevens House would be preserved for future generations to enjoy.
The newspaper solicited donations, added its own money and bought the house, then organized the move with the support of the Park Board, the school board, the mayor and the streetcar company. On May 28, 1896, about 10,000 first- through 12th-grade students got a day off from school to handle the big job. In seven relay teams, they latched onto ropes and helped 10 horses pull the house down Minnehaha Avenue to a spot outside the park.
You can imagine the mayhem...
Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.
