Coming Soon

244 Marines.

Chunks hanging from a bridge.

A retired Jewish guy in a wheelchair.

Various diplomats, journalists, people flying to grandma's house, and miscelleneous stockbrokers, DoD civilian and military folks, NYPD/NYFD.

Multiple embassies.

Rangers in Somalia.

A Navy diver on leave.

A Navy ship making a port visit.

Air Force in Saudi Arabia.



You know, I started to put links to all the germaine backstories connected to the subjects of the above fragments but then I though "why bother?". If you read blogs, chances are you know history and know what my random recollections have in common.

The list was easily twice what you see above - but I threw out Sbarro's, Munich, and the like. Or kaytushas. And mentally deficient Palestinian teenagers. Honor killings in Holland, dead movie directors, and burning cars in Paris suburbs, and decapitated Thai Bhuddists, and dead Aussies carpeting dance floors in Bali.

And so on, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. What does it take, when you get right down to it, to ignore (as a culture) a threat as real as a knife against your own throat?

History runs in cycles. I don't have all the answers, but even I can recognise the pattern so clearly unrolling before us. The enemy has not only published his intentions, but has provided communiques and graphic video on practicaly a daily basis for literally generations in case we miss the point.

I'm with Mr. Batchelor:


"There is a strange parallel right now to the first days of December 1941, before the Japanese sneak attack. America was still not in the war in Asia and Europe, but it was busy getting ready for a momentous calamity and was filled with the presentiment of doom."


The U.N. is Sudetenland; we allowed the enemy to occupy that particular (un)real estate because all it seemed to cost us in the short term was money. But the next step in the cycle we see repeating - serving up real estate populated by real people in order to feed the wolf - is where things are breaking down. Israel is no Czechoslovakia. They have teeth and will not go quietly again into the ditches - not for france or stability or good press from the Beeb.

Given any thought as to where you will be on August 22d? The day after?