Category: military
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Good insights from Madeleine Albright
I listened to the podcast “The Mighty and the Almighty” by Madeleine Albright today in the car, and I found her reflections and responses to questions from the audience insightful and thought provoking. Her view that the decision for the U.S. to go to war in Iraq was a decision of choice rather than necessity…
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Images of and Reflections on 9-11
SC Eagle (a US soldier stationed in Germany who lived in NYC on 9-11-2001) has posted a home video to his blog of a video he and his wife took looking outside their NYC apartment building that fateful day. Close up footage, with the quiet voices of regular citizens responding to the most horrific terrorist…
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Ethnic cleansing in Iraq
This headline from this evening breaks my heart: Gunmen roaming a Baghdad neighborhood on Sunday killed at least 42 unarmed Iraqis as soon as they identified them as Sunnis, emergency police said. Ala’a Makki, a spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party — Iraq’s main Sunni political movement — said the victims included women and children.…
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Remembering the Holocaust
Milblogger Jason has posted haunting images of the Holocaust and reflected about his role in the US military serving in Iraq. I really don’t think it is possible for people who did not experience the Holocaust to adequately comprehend the magnitude of the suffering and evil which was endured and perpetuated during those years. Tragically,…
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Learning Nonviolent Resistance via Gaming
Just when you were ready to abandon all hope when it comes to gaming and youth culture, thinking that Halo2 and World of Warcraft define the available genres as all violent and aggressive, along comes a game with an altogether different theme: “A Force More Powerful.” The website asks rhetorically: Can a computer game teach…
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Value of life, forgiveness, the Holocaust
We are living in a small world, but the ease of communication that is brought by the blogsophere and videoconferencing technologies does not change the incredible pain and suffering experienced by many in the past and present. While reading the Global Voices Online – Armenia blog posts tonight I read through to find Onnik Krikorian’s…
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Bush on Blogs – NCLB reflections
Yesterday, President Bush talked about “blogs” for the first time ever (according to TV press sources today.) He encouraged U.S. citizens (and others) to read milblogs to get a broader perspective on what is happening in Iraq’s civil war. Here is an excerpt from the President’s speech, and his reference to blogs: One of the…
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Medal of Honor Winners Podcast
I had a chance yesterday to listen to a podcast from the outstanding Medal of Honor Winners Podcast, sponsored by the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago, Illinois. We listened to the podcast interview with Gary Littrell, who is a Vietnam-era medal of honor winner who retired as a US Army Commmand Sergeant Major. Wow. The…
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Stopping Genocide in Darfur
I had read and heard a little bit about genocide occurring in Sudan previously, but today my eyes were opened wide to this reality. This happened in the context of a multi-site videoconference involving the US Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., the University of Oklahoma in Norman, The University of Texas at Dallas, and Texas…
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Including cyberspace in official mission
The U.S. Air Force announced a new mission statement in early December 2005: The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests — to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace. This replaced the previous mission statement:…