As sergeant of my unit’s S2 shot, I am responsible for developing the physical training program for all the Soldiers that I work with. I develop monthly plans and present them to the O3 Officer In Charge (OIC) for his approval. The OIC told me that he is a PT fanatic and expounded that PT could be done twice a day. He also brought up something that I have come to hate: CrossFit. Crossfitters invariably believe in constant progress. They believe that fitness is a linear, ever-rising thing, and that by merely being tough and grinding through workout after workout, a person can become super-fit.
This mentality goes against the training regimen of almost all world class athletes. Physical training must involve back off days, and slight variations in rep/set protocols as well as type of exercise in order to maximize results. Not only will people not see the best results from “maxing” every day, they will feel awful. Over training can make people miserable. The worst thing about over training is many people will not even realize just how bad they feel until they stop training and rest. Even then, they may not make the connection between their exercise and mood, sleep and appetite.
Fortunately the Army has caught on, though the word hasn’t made it yet to every ear. The new Army program, Physical Readiness Training (PRT), incorporates many aspects of periodization of exercise. Not only are Soldiers discouraged from going all out every day, but cardio and strength workouts are done on alternate days, a method scientifically proven to promote recovery.
I plan on fully incorporating the PRT model into my office’s training. But I expect some push-back from higher. Of course, I have the highest levels of the Army behind me as this as PRT has been mandated as the doctrine for Army physical training.
The group calling itself, Anonymous, recently hacked Stratfor, a corporation specializing in strategic intelligence analysis. The hackers made off with 90,000 credit card numbers and the personal identity information belonging to people who pay for Stratfor’s highly regarded work. George Friedman owns Stratfor.
To make matters worse, hackers claiming affiliation with Anonymous have threatened retaliation against victims of the theft who are speaking to the media or protesting the action of Anonymous on Facebook. Anonymous says it will spray the personal information of these people all over the internet. Furthermore, the hackers say they will steal $1 million and donate the money to various charities.
The age of the Faux Hero is upon us. To many here in America, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Anonymous are heroes. A similar ethos can be detected in the ranks of Occupy Wallstreet; a mere instinct of rebellion, anarchy, arrogance and envy. Many who idolize Assange and Manning believe quite deeply in a world of black helicopters, Twin Towers immolated by Bush administration zealots, and Federal Reserve connections to the Bavarian Illuminati.
Essentially, the above noted micreants and OWS are considered by some to be revolutionaries fighting against the New World Order. As with the Jacobins in the French Revolution, those taking part in the Occupy Wall Street movement emphasize the “right to eat” over the right of merchants to earn money. Also mimicking the French Revolution is the utilization and exploitation of the underclass in order to solidify political power.
In a previous post I compared Assange to Robespierre. The Anonymous group dons the Guy Fawkes mask as its mascot. Interestingly, Fawkes could be considered somewhat of a right-wing religious zealot, something I’m sure most in Anonymous would be averse to.
Bradley Manning, a troubled soldier who hated the Army, violated the oath he took and motivated by spite, launched thousands of classified documents into the greedy hands of Bill Maher’s IT clone, Julian Assange. The argument that everyone has a right to this information is absurd. The information is not legislation, but in many cases communication between individuals that contains the names of people who would be endangered if revealed. Releasing this information also provides our enemies with clues to our military’s intentions. George Washington would not have revealed his plans at Valley Forge in the name of transparency and Operation Overlord was one of the most secretive undertakings in history. Anyone releasing the Plans to Overlord would have spent a very large amount of time in prison.
I recently completed a college class titled Cyber Warfare. For those not familiar with the concept, cyber warfare is defined as the use of computers, digital mediums, and the internet for the purposes of damaging, stealing, or disrupting the critical infrastructure, banking systems or military of a state. While doing research for the class, my computer became infected with malware from sites critical of Vladimir Putin and more recently, my personal information and email address were stolen from Stratfor’s data base by the loose conglomerate calling itself Anonymous. Fortunately, I do not pay for Stratfor’s services, so Anonymous was not able to get any of my banking or credit card information. I have been receiving emails that are clearly from malicious actors who obtained my email address from the public forums on which Anonymous posted tens of thousands such addresses.
Personally, it wouldn’t bother me a bit if one of Anonymous’ hackers got liquefied in a drone strike. At the very least I would like to see many of these hackers’ computers destroyed in a cyber counter strike. It’s only fitting. But the fact that Anonymous and other organizations hide under a veil of false heroism, a myth of modern day Robin Hood pilfering will probably keep such criminals, malcontents and sociopaths in business for a while.
Still, I can hope that the last thing some of these idiots hear is the dull buzz of a Reaper drone.
As much as there is a real “Tebow Mania” in the air concerning the Denver Bronco’s quarterback Tim Tebow, there is also an equally potent dark side to this mania. Call it Tim Tebow Manicheanism. On one side, there are the people who just like football and appreciate the play of a football player who is winning in a very unorthodox way. Also on that side are people of the Christian faith, who also follow football, who identify with Tim Tebow’s beliefs and who appreciate the fact that he is not ashamed to express those beliefs.
On the other side of the Tebow explosion, are the haters and doubters. There are people who had and still have legitimate doubts about Tim Tebow’s ability to play football at the professional level. To those people I must point that Tebow still has under 300 pass attempts in the NFL. The Denver Broncos selected Tebow in the first round and he has won the games that Kyle Orton could not. At some point you have to stop doubting his ability and start realizing that he is driving defenses nuts. Any other QB would have been given at least two full seasons as a starter before such judgments were made. Especially a first round pick, like say, Rex Grossman–who’s still a starter and performing at a lower level than Tebow.
Then there is the other group of people on the dark side of the Tebow Manichean coin. These are the people who hope Tebow will fail and it is primarily because of his unabashed Christian views. These people hate Tim Tebow more than they hate al-Qaeda. To them, Tebow represents a sappy, Christian anti-intellectualism under which assuredly boils a hatred for hippies, homosexuals and single moms. The haters must ascribe luck to Tebow’s success, mock him as a Jesus Freak. Each victory brings a new soliloquy of venom on YouTube video comments and blogs. Yet Tim Tebow keeps winning in the most excruciating manner.
Tim Tebow is a real leader, whatever be his innate ability to throw a football. This morning, ESPN’s NLF Countdown presented a 10 minute tape of Tim Tebow with a mic on during his games. You simply can’t teach the type of leadership that Tebow displays. At least not with “leadership courses”, like the US military and some corporations use. Tebow’s leadership comes from character. It comes from confidence in something greater than himself. In the ESPN tapes, Tebow displays an unshakable demeanor, laughing at his own mistakes, constantly motivating his own team mates even as a victory seems more and more unlikely.
We all know leaders who are pretending. They are overly autocratic, mistaking control for leadership. They are afraid that others will see their faults, lest they lose the control they ascribe to success. Ofttimes, they present themselves as intellectuals, failing to recognize that a real leader can capture emotive power more than the intellect. Leonidas was no intellectual. If he were, math would have told him he couldn’t win.
In November I departed my old unit in Germany with my family and arrived at my in new unit in New York: Fort Drum. Fort Drum is widely regarded as the worst post assignment in the Army. The reasons that Soldiers feel this way are primarily because of the weather (it’s cold and snows a lot in the winter), it’s located in a remote area (near the Great Lakes, very close to the Canadian border) and the 10th Mountain Division is a Light Infantry Division, which means Soldiers do a lot of PT and ruck marching. Oh, did I mention that 10th Mountain is probably the most deployed unit is the US military since the invasion of Afghanistan?
10th Mountain: "Climb to Glory"
For me, all of the reasons other Soldiers don’t like Drum are all the of the reasons I do like Drum. Since I stopped playing softball, I don’t mind the cold. I’m from the great state of Maine. I don’t mind remote locations–I prefer the woods and mountains. I love PT and ruck marching. And being deployed is better than being in garrison, except for the family seperation.
But one thing I find inexcusable at Fort Drum is the severe housing shortage for Soldiers with families. Since our arrival at Drum on November 24th, my family (2 kids, a wife, and myself–the lonely male), have been living in a single room at the Fort Drum Inn, waiting to be assigned military quarters. I don’t like complaining. I prefer to salute smartly and carry on. But my one year old daughter is not in the Army. She likes to salute at the bugle call for ”Retreat” (really, she does) but other than that the only carrying on she does is crying upon waking from a nap.
“All of us here today understand this: We do not fight Islam, we fight against evil.” ~George W. Bush
“We are not at war against Islam. We are at war against terrorist organizations that have distorted Islam or falsely used the banner of Islam,” ~Barack Obama
Surely we are not at war with Islam. If we were, we’d kill everyone who professed the Muslim faith. The problem with Obama’s and Bush’s statements is that they lead many to underestimate the level to which Muslims in the Middle East and Asia support the jihadists. Throwing out statistics that show only a small percentage of Muslims are responsible for the destruction wrought is a bit like saying that because less than 1% of Americans serve in the US Army, only 1% of Americans support the US military. People fail to realize the power of both the “our team” mentality and religion, especially in parts of the world where the people have little hope in this world and nation states have been shamed in war by America and Israel.
People shocked at the recent Egyptian election results should study some history. I’ve long said that Egypt was the spiritual center of jihadism, not Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia made good fodder for the Left because of oil. Egypt, in the poll cited above, had the highest percentage of people that believed Sharia should be the sole root of law.
The Muslim countries that have in recent years received the most American aid are Pakistan and Egypt. Approximately 25% of the money used to fund the Pakistani army comes from American aid. The top recipients of US foreign aid in 2011 are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Egypt in that order. Egypt has routinely ranked among the top nations in the world in the number of dollars given to it by the American government.
The problems in giving countries like Pakistan and Egypt lots of money are macrocosmic of what I saw happening in local projects in Afghanistan. The money will always find its way into the hands of America’s enemies because they are the most ruthless, devious and aggressive portions of those societies. They also in many cases have a monopoly on violence, something the state usually lays claim to–if it is not a failed state. In Afghanistan the people were not “all in” for the Americans. They really didn’t care that much, at least in areas far from Kabul, if the insurgents blew up a few American Imperialists. They’d take five bucks to plants a bombs and be on their way. In one fell swoop they’d made a month’s wage, killed some infidels, impressed the locals with their “bravery”, and maintained a semblance of national pride.
Egypt’s Mubarak held the forces of Islamic jihad at bay with the only weapon that works against it: Decisive brutality. As with Saudi Arabia, Egypt was a police state, as much because of the extremists as Mubarak. Only with extreme vigilance could the Egyptian government survive. Frankly, Mubarak may have been the West’s only hope in Egypt, but starry-eyed Westerners with a Democracy fetish ran him off, unleashing a hoard of militants, radicals and young men electrified with a rage whose dynamo was built in 1967 and 1973 during the humiliating defeats of the Egyptian Army at the hands of the Israelis. The effect of these defeats upon the Arab psyche cannot be overstated.
The Arab Spring has generated nothing resembling Western democracy and displays brilliantly the weakness of Democracy itself: People can vote for any horrific idea they choose. Hitler was democratically elected. Muslims have voted and acted exactly how we should have expected them to. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists now hold power. The Salafists in Egypt hold the same views as al-Qaeda and Hamas. Christians are trying to leave the country, fearing for their safety.
The revolutions in Egypt and Libya were hardly induced by only few extremists. In fact,it seems the revolutions enjoyed the backing of millions upon millions of extremists. It is the same sort of thing we saw in Nazi Germany. Many Germans were not Nazis or did not take part in the actual fighting. But most of them wanted to see the Nazis win. And so it is with Muslims in Libya, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. The Muslims there overwhelmingly want to thrash Israel and the United States in any manner they can. If the terror proxies can trounced by the hyperpower or the Jewish state, we can of course expect the “innocent” population of “moderate” muslims to melt back into the woodwork.
Islam unifies people against Israel and the West. As Mark Steyn writes in his book, America Alone, the draw of Western “McWorld” to the average Arab male is vastly overstated. Secularism is about as un-motivational as a Rosie O’donnell workout video. It is meaninglessness and provides no promise of power or life after death, no cloak of righteousness; something that means far more to a poor 23 year old man in Cairo than does the promise of flipping burgers.
Now Israel has a monstrous number of problems on its hand, all coming to bear at once. Iran wants the bomb and is not far off from getting it. Egyptians are muttering that they want the Camp David Peace Accord “adjusted.” 20,000 surface-to-air missiles are missing from Qaddafi’s stockpiles. The current American president’s negative comments about Netanyahu were caught on an open mic.
The vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East are not jihadists or terrorists. But most of them support the actions of extremist Islam when those actions are directed against Westerners or Israelis. Our money and McDonald’s cannot possibly fill the same void that is filled by Islam. And Democracy, as with any form of government, is only as good as the people that comprise it.
So what is the answer? Does America have to kill every last Muslim? Not any more than it had to kill every last German or Japanese. America has only to decisively defeat the front-line troops of Jihad. But decisive victory may no longer be something the West is capable of, despite its overwhelming superiority in almost every facet of military and economic might.
The Arab Spring has not created Arab states that are more stable or less violent. It has provided kindling for another 100 years of Jihadist immolation. Our children’s children will see The Long War continue.
America and Europe are now reaping what has been sowed for the last 50 years in Western society. Our psychiatrists, parents, teachers and even religious teachers inundated us with our “specialness”, carried on about the uniqueness of each person, and generally robbed us of any sense of bad and good, success and failure, better and best.
Liberals accuse conservatives of being slaves to corporate greed. Greed is taking more than one deserves or needs at the expense of others. In the cases where greed has damaged America, such as the housing industry, our country paid the price. But it was not only corporations and banks that were greedy. The people who purchased homes with variable rate mortgages while working low wage jobs were also greedy. It is not only the rich that are greedy. Most people who are doing well are not being greedy. They are receiving the just benefits of hard work, education, frugal and wise spending, and paying their dues.
Growing up, I didn’t have much. I lived with my grandmother until I was 7 years old. My grandfather died when I was 5, and my grandmother had a tough time supporting me, but she never complained. A hard life was just the way the world was, to her. She lived through the Depression and her family and my grandfather were all blue-collar: welders, mechanics. They never asked for a handout, not once. That’s not to say that if friends offered to help out with some work that needed to be done, or offered some extra food for the pantry, that my grandparents would not have accepted it. Only that you never would have seen my grandfather carrying a sign protesting the well-to-do. I do not make a mythical hero of my grandfather. He was human and possessed a withering temper at times. But he was never brutal, only steadfast when pushed. He even held a streak of racism, common in his day. He was from New York and didn’t like Jews, as I remember it. But the man worked like a horse. He was in the machine shop every day, coming in with grease-stained fingers. Our sink held a good supply of Lava soap, but his fingers were never free of darkened creases. He would sit up at night and carve, draw, or sharpen his knives at the kitchen table, or any other form of “tinkering” you can think of. He never complained that he had to support his grandson. I would sit on his lap during the sessions of tinkering, or perhaps be ordeed by my grandfather to stand on a stool behind him and scratch his head. An avid outdoors-man, rifles adorned the walls, suspended on the antlers of trophy game. Later, it was not uncommon at all for me to carry a rifle in the woods alone at the age of 10 or 12 years old. I think this is why my favorite books growing up were Where the Red Fern Grows and Summer of the Monkeys.
I never remember envy directed at the rich. My grandparents had it much tougher than any of the Occupy Wallstreet crowd. They grew vegetables in a garden, washed clothes by hand, and had no microwave. They did not have a designer child at 40. They had four sons. They also had a girl, who passed away to God when she was less than two years old. Life was this: Grandfather goes out to the shop to work all day on machine parts that people brought to him to fix. He also repaired firearms. Grandmother cooked and cleaned and cared for the children. Grandfather endured Maine’s blistering winters, working outdoors, wrapped in a wool jacket and hat. The family car was an Oldsmobile Delta 88.
There was Hee-Haw and Lawrence Welk at night. A TV boxing match maybe. A trip to Pat’s Pizza, or maybe over to Dysart’s truckstop or the 95er. This was life and it was accepted. There was no time to envy. There was certainly no time to march up and down the street carrying declarative and mocking signs. The idea of recruiting once’s children to take part in protests would have repulsed both of my grandparents.
You earned what you worked for. If you did not work for it, you did not earn it. If something was given to you without your labor, it was because of the good graces of the giver, not because the receiver deserved it. I’m trying to imagine my grandfather having the time to protest economic injustice.
No one was special “just because”. You were special because of what you did. You did not search for yourself–you made yourself. Pat Farnsworth, the owner of Pat’s Pizza, and good friend of my grandfather, worked for about 70 straight years at his restaurant. He sold 250,000 pizzas a year. He began his restaurant with $150. He never thought of retiring, right up until he passed away at 93 years old in 2003. He never felt the government owed him a thing but freedom. Let him do his thing, and Pat would put his nose to a grindstone until he succeeded. That was America. Pat had a fighter’s heart. In his 80s, he was mugged by two young men as he closed up shop and stepped outside his business holding a sack full of the day’s earnings. the men pepper-sprayed him and thrashed him about. But he fought back and they ran off empty handed. Pat was a millionaire when he passed away. No one who ate at Pat’s Pizza during my grandfather’s day hated or envied Pat for his success. They wanted to learn his secrets, they wanted to be like Pat.
Now, the Occupy Wall Street types cry about “fascism” and “police state” when they get pepper-sprayed after refusing to comply with lawful police orders. Pat and my grandfather would have fully endorsed the pepper-spraying of people camping outside their businesses and homes for months. They would go on working and the Occupiers would go on whining.
Our horrendous ideas on parenting are partially responsible for the cretinous complainers, with their IPads and Powerbooks, sporting their Ralph Lauren glasses, protest signs (with poor spelling) exclaiming the injustice they face, and a lot of time spent not filling out applications. This is the “A” for effort generation. You tried (sort of). And you’re breathing. So the system owes you, but you owe the system nothing. It’s like expecting a car to run without putting fuel in it. Or maybe we just expect everyone else to buy the fuel for our car.
America was made, as Max Weber stated, on the Protestant Work Ethic. That, more so even than Democracy was America’s secret. Now, our secret is how much we can get from the system, not how much we can accomplish before we die. We must game the system until the system cracks, and then blame the system.
To all you Occupying cry babies: Until your calluses have calluses, until you’ve earned your Master’s degree in something other than Art History, until you’ve gone into the military as a well-paid officer, don’t complain. Walk into the local recruiter’s office with your Bachelor’s degree, sign up as a 2nd Lieutenant, have the US government pay for your college loans and find out what real responsibility looks like. Until then–shut up.
In today’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, an AP article written by Heidi Vogt reports that a recently produced documentary, entitled “In-Justice: The Story of Afghan Women in Jail”. Vogt says that the European Union, which funded the documentary, has decided not to release the film. Representatives state that there is worry about the safety of two women currently imprisoned in Afghanistan for “moral crimes”. These moral crimes include being raped and refusing to marry the rapist, for which one woman was sentenced to 12 years in jail. The other subject of the documentary reportedly ran away from a physically abusive spouse, accompanied by a boyfriend she says she loves but has never slept with. She is sentenced to 6 years. Her boyfriend is also in prison.
Now, it would be one thing to argue that a culture is allowed to enforce its own set of rules without the West forcing it to do otherwise. However to argue that the West cannot make a movie documenting the facts is craven beyond words. The argument that the movie will not show because the safety of the women could be compromised is bunk. The women are serving 12 years in an Afghan prison; that in and of itself poses a safety risk. The argument is silly because it assumes the movie will in some way reveal information to Afghans that is not already known. The facts presented by the movie are, from what I know, no different than the facts that sent these two women to prison. Will the re-release of these facts enrage the prison guards to such a degree that they’ll harm these women?
No, the real reason for the EU’s decision is that its timidity in such cases makes the Cowardly Lion look like Prince Eugene of Savoy. It’s afraid not only for the two women, but for itself. For EU members know they cannot stop all acts of terrorism that may result from such a movie. Just ask Theo van Gogh’s ghost. Show a movie the extremists don’t like, and Brussels may be sporting a crater where a subway had once been. But now, as opposed to banning Danish caricatures of Muhammad and having no other excuse than open admission of being scaredy-cats, the EU can proclaim: “We’re doing it for the women!” Better to sweep these two women–and hundreds more–behind the swinging gate of Sharia law. But members of the EU would have no problem throwing Geert Wilders in prison for speaking out against extreme Islam. Why? Who’s afraid Geert Wilders will blow up a train station? As with the choice to bomb Libya but not Iran, it’s easy to wag the dog when the dog won’t bite you. Meanwhile Europe and America keep giving billions to the Afghan government when all the Americans and Europeans should have been giving the government was bullets to kill terrorists. America helped build several multi-million dollar “Justice Centers” in Afghanistan which have either been turned in to over priced warehouses or whose inhabitants practice a kind of justice that would make Adolph Eichmann proud.
What penalty does the “new” Afghanistan pay for its gross violations of human rights? What penalty does it pay when its government pockets half of the money given by America for public good? A single act of lawlessness by an American Soldier is a tragedy; a million acts of avarice, greed, deceit and slothfulness by Afghans is a statistic. The failure of the EU in many, many cases to stand up and demand the destructive habits practiced in Afghanistan be changed has led us to the very spot Europe and America stand in: A swamp of moral and cultural relativity.
Greece, now Italy. Next may be Spain. Russia, too is dying. Much of their problems are demographic and there’s almost no hope in fixing it. Huge cultural and economic shifts are taking place and the next 20 years are likely to be very, very ugly. I expect more wars, more poverty, and more political upheaval. I’m serious.
I recently wrote about Parkinson’s Law, which essentially states that the time it takes to accomplish any job expands to fill the time allotted to do so. In other words, short deadlines increase the density of the work/time relationship. Yesterday and today I’ve experience Parkinson’s Law in full. My family and I are soon moving to my new Army assignment post in New York State. We received a call yesterday that the moving company would be here today, even though I had requested they show up on the 17th. We essentially had nothing packed. Though the transport company does most of the work, there are still standards that need to be met before they’ll move stuff out.
And yet in about one day we managed to weed out everything we wanted to throw away and neatly stacked everything we owed for the movers.
Pressure makes diamonds. Low expectations give us the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
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