LWRC Piston Disassembly

Random...

Saul Alinsky: Useful for conservatives?

Tools for Radicals by Jesse Walker (via Daniel McCarthy)

I think I recently saw something on Alinsky in connection to community archived at Energy Bulletin. Here is something from earlier this year.

Another George/Lee piece on embryos

Patrick Lee & Robert P. George, Confused on Fertilization
Another failed effort to show that human embryos are not human beings.

See Embryo: A Defense of Human Life.

Larry Vickers's announcement

ANNOUNCING LARRY VICKERS REGIONAL ENDORSED INSTRUCTORS AND THE VICKERS SHOOTING METHOD

Soldier Systems post

EWTN schedule for the Holy Father's visit to the UK

Now with times:

Thu. September 16

Arrival in Scotland at 5:30 AM ET / 2:30 AM PT
Visit with Her Majesty The Queen at 6 AM ET /3 AM PT
Mass at Bellahouston Park at 12 PM ET /9 AM ET

Fri. September 17

St. Mary's University at 5:00 AM ET /2 AM PT
Meeting with Youth at 6:30 AM ET / 3:30 AM PT
Meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury
at 10:30 AM ET / 7:30 AM PT
Westminster Hall at 12:00 PM ET / 9 AM PT
Westminster Abbey at 1PM ET / 10 AM PT

Sat. September 18

Mass in Westminster Cathedral at 5:00 AM ET /2 AM PT
St. Peter's Residence at 12:00 PM ET /9 AM PT
Hyde Park at 1:00 PM ET /10 AM PT


Sun. September 19

Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman
Live at 4:30 AM ET / 1:30 AM PT
( Encore 9:00 PM ET /6 PM PT & 1:00 PM ET /10 AM PT )
Departure at 1:00 PM ET /10 AM PT

I suspect that some of the other events may be rebroadcast as well...

NLM: 13th-Century Dominican Stabat Mater: Text and Music

Buried Treasure

Gene Logsdon, OrganicToBe.org

What could be a simpler, more secure food supply? Even if the electricity goes off, even if the house blows away, even if we are visited with “the rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air,” our buried treasure will be safe.

Operation Dark Heart has a website??

Here (MacMillan).

The book recently caught some attention after it was revealed that the DIA was trying to buy up all of the copies of the first printing:
Pentagon Fighting Release of New War Memoir, 'Operation Dark Heart'
Pentagon tries to buy entire print run of US spy expose Operation Dark Heart

DIA letter

More:
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer interviewed on the Alex Jones Show  (more)
LT. COLONEL Anthony Shaffer (intelligence officer) OPERATION ABLE DANGER -9/11
Some more videos
Able Danger: The Shaffer Interview
Able Danger blog

Interview with Fr. Ian Boyd

Zenit: Setting the World Right, With G.K. Chesterton's Help
An Interview with Father Ian Boyd of the Chesterton Institute

One of the few draws to cable for me

Video: Man vs. Wild: Swept Away


website

Kelley Vlahos on Erik Prince

The founder of Blackwater, now Xe Services--The Picture of Erik Prince.

(The U.S. Training Center???)

A collection of essays by Theodore Dalrymple: Second Opinion. An excerpt: The Poetry of the Welfare State.

O'Connor Violin Method

O'Connor Violin Method

Harmony Project L.A. uses the O'Connor Method

Mark O'Connor Violin Method from Mark O'Connor on Vimeo.

Mark O'Connor Violin Method: Westward Journey from Mark O'Connor on Vimeo.

NPR: Ricky Skaggs: A 'Mosaic' Of Modesty, Openness by Ken Tucker (mp3)

Found out today that today was the last day for VL and TL at the school; last year during Coral, iirc, T. has said her family was thinking of moving to a different part of San Jose so they could go to a better school district. She also made a comment relating the quality of the current district to the ethnic composition of the student body. That's how Asian parents think?

JoBlo: You want some Star Trek sequel talk? Well, here's some tibits from Abrams, Orci, and Kurtzman

Items of Interest, 14 September 2010

Daniel Larison, “Limited But Energetic”
Rob Hopkins, What can communities do? (via EB)
Michael Shedlock, How Student Debt Wrecks Marriages, Inhibits Family Formation, and Delays the Housing Recovery

Catholic Answers Live, September 13, 2010: Cardinal Newman: Then and Now
Guest Fr. C. John McCloskey
(rm, mp3)


Sandro Magister, Why Kneel for Communion
Benedict XVI wants it that way, at the Masses he celebrates. But very few bishops and priests are imitating him. Yet this is one reason why churches were given ornate floors. A guide to the discovery of their significance

Asia Times:
Time running out for Japan
Japan's faltering growth serves as a reminder of how little its governments have done to revitalize the long-struggling economy beyond a stream of stimulus spending. The luxury of ample domestic funding to pay for this will not be available much longer. - Kunal Kumar Kundu

Taliban and US get down to talks
Preliminary peace talks between the Taliban and the United States have begun, with the Pakistan military and Saudi Arabia acting as go-betweens. A US concession could be the release of Pakistanis detained at Guantanamo Bay. Much thornier issues include a continued US presence in northern Afghanistan and what to do with al-Qaeda, which is busy extending its reach. - Syed Saleem Shahzad 

Hang on a second
Google is flouting its ability to give customers what they never knew they wanted by offering "instant" search results, which are predicted even as keywords are being entered. The problem now is what to do with all the resulting 2.5 seconds saved per search. Martin J Young  

"How un-Christian"

Mere Comments: Hilarion Not Nice at Nicean Dinner

We need more bishops calling a spade a spade.

the full text

Christopher Burchfield has a featured post at The Thinking Housewife

Our Feminized Forests

Eskrima/Escrima

The Filipino martial art, known in the US primarily for its use of various weapons included sticks and edged weapons. Twitch has a review of a recent documentary: ESKRIMADORS Review.

Edit. A Trailer For Filipino Martial Arts Documentary ESKRIMADORS

More on Eskrima:


Part 2

Dan Inosanto video
Links:
Latosa Escrima
Escrima Concepts
Tactical Combat Escrima
Stanford Eskrima

Dan Inosanto doing BJJ:

Steve Andrews interviews Robert Hirsch

Interview with Bob Hirsch on his team’s new book—“The Impending World Energy Mess”  (original)

Steve Andrews, ASPO-USA 

 

Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling have coauthored a new publication, this time a book called "The Impending World Energy Mess: What It Is and What It Means to You," a book to be released by publisher Apogee Prime late this month...He has spent his entire career working in the energy realm, from the oil sector to numerous forms of electric power generation. In 2005, this team published "The Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management." Steve Andrews caught up with Bob Hirsch last week for Steve's last interview and final work with the Peak Oil Review.

America and Islam After Iraq with Michael Scheuer

Road No. 1

The MBC drama Road No. 1 (로드 넘버원), starring Kim Ha Neul, is available on hulu with English subtitles.Hulu has been adding Korean dramas in the last few weeks. I suppose they found out Korean dramas are popular with a substantial number of people in the United States and elsewhere, and many of these fans use the internet to watch them.

Kim Ha Neul reminds me of Lee Eun Joo in Taegukgi -- their characters endure a lot, and yet they somehow seem delicate. The first opening battle sequence attempted to be realistic in the fashion of Taegukgi and Saving Private Ryan (though there was less shaky cam), but the combat was too fake. And the CGI for the explosions was very noticeable. A squad against... what was supposed to be a platoon? And the main character decides to call in artillery on his own position? And then orders his men to fix bayonets and rush the enemy? Hmmm...

But if I continue watching it, it will be for the melodrama - the separation of lovers, the mandatory love triangle, misunderstandings, plus the danger and tragedy of the Korean War as the setting of the story.

(I think the khaki dress uniforms are great, too. It's too bad the US Army got rid of its own khakis.)

I'm waiting for the DVD of 71 Into the Fire (포 화 속으로) to be released.

The Psychology of Combat
When I was in high school, the argument was frequently made in class and in "educational films" that soldiers must learn to demonize and dehumanize the enemy in order to kill. Is this really the case? Do soldiers depersonalize as a psychological defense mechanism, to the point of becoming numb to the killing? Or do they have to personalize even more -- making combat "personal" -- in order to kill too? That is, we make out our opponents to be true believers or those who intentionally wish to destroy our homes and so on -- and so they get what they deserve. What of the emotions of hate and anger?


Without the belief that our cause is right and just how can we kill without losing their sanity or their soul?

Is it the case that even with the conditioning techniques employed by the U.S. military to make it easier for soldiers to kill that some intellectual and emotional reinforcement is necessary? I need to finish reading Col. Grossman's books.

The Warrior Science Group

Misc.
A thought on Asians adopting the ghetto look -- this is a "safe" and "accepted" form of rebellion (in East Asia as well as the U.S.?), but is it also a way to be anti-white (or to reject "white" culture)? An identification with the "oppressed" against the perceived "oppressor"?

Peter Hitchens: Bombing cities is just wrong – even when the planes are ours

source

Can we be straight about the Blitz, now that it is 70 years since it began?

Most of us have two absolutely clear reactions to it. The first is that dropping bombs on women and children in their homes is a wicked form of warfare.

The second is that - despite all the horrors of being bombed - the British people were not demoralised or blasted into defeatism, but worked all the harder for victory because it was the only way to get back at the enemy who dropped death on them from the sky.

Yet as soon as anyone suggests that we were wrong to bomb German women and children in their homes - as I firmly believe we were - they are shouted down by cries of ‘They asked for it!’.

Actually, they didn’t ask for it at all. The children, as always, had no say in the matter.

And the people who bravely voted against Hitler to the last lived in the poor urban areas which we deliberately bombed.

And when anyone argues - as I do - that the bombing of German civilians was also an ineffective way of fighting the war, doing surprisingly little damage to the Nazi war effort, they are shouted down by apologists who seem to think that Germans responded to bombing differently from British people.

It’s not true, and those who have studied the facts agree.

Yet I am absolutely in favour of a memorial, large and majestic, in a place where as many people as possible will see it, to the young men who nightly climbed into their bombers and flew over Germany.

They believed they were helping to destroy a great tyranny. They trusted their leaders.

That is why they set off, hearts in mouths, in the full knowledge that they probably wouldn’t come back, and that they were likely to die in a specially horrible fashion.

Not since the Somme in 1916 had so much steadfast valour and youth been squandered by old men who ought to have known better.

On the Bomber Command war memorial, alongside the shattering number of names and the chokingly sad ages at which they died, should be the words ‘Lions, led by Donkeys’.

It reminded me of the later comments to this post by Edward Feser: Happy Consequentialism Day.

"Squirrel Hunter"

Memories of John