Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
Oh, what he says/writes matters. The sad thing is that what he says/writes is somewhat different from the truth. Not just sad, but evil.
OT- Edward, I left you the requested story ID back at http://www.neptunuslex.com/2011/09/03/hitting-the-links/comment-page-1/#comment-751916
Got it NaCly Dog. Thank you.
Stories from the old Golden Age of “that stuff’. Of course, SF has achieved new heights (but you have to look for authors, not titles.)
About the NYT – it’s an old story:
Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.
One question … Why should Keller sleep any better than I do? Compare us, and I’m just a cranky old lady with no influence, whereas he is/was in a position to strike a blow for freedom of thought and action. He should be ashamed at not achieving something he can be proud of.
Marianne
“Compare us, and I’m just a cranky old lady with no influence,” Sorry, Marianne, but that made me laugh. I don’t think there is anyone here who sees you as a cranky old lady. A lady with deep thought, perhaps, but not cranky and old. FWIW…
Since Marianne is a fellow Badger, cranky is a feature, not a flaw!
My, but this little man does think much of himself, doesn’t he? To paraphrase his own line….he is “enamored of his own importance”.
Me…..not so much.
In my Southern circles we would describe him as “a legend in his own mind.”
Being Southern, that is a polite description.
As a fellow North Carolinian you know we try not to be too abrasive. At least, when it serves our purposes. And, I’m sure, he is a Legend in his own mind.
As I recall, that “mad rush to war” involved close to a year of war warnings, posturing, and saber-rattling before we fired a shot. Hardly a “rush.” More like a slow amble.
Don’t forget the speeches at the UN.
Update on my wife, Lisa.
Something is working. Her sugars are down – without insulin or glucophage or anything (stopped the glucophagelast night to ease the load on her kidneys). Her BP is coming down (we were puzzled by the spike in it when she moved from ICU back to med/surg – last night the CNA said “That cuff is kind of small, let me get a different one.” And that put her BP back to what it was in ICU (a bit high, but not horrid).
The whole idea of keeping her in hospital was so that they could closely monitor her and give supporting care.
Well, they did one (1) blood draw after 3:00 p.m. The slow IV saline (50 ml/hr) that she was supposed to be on during the day never got hooked up, even after the doctor asked about it at noon today. When I got there this morning (ca. 8:30) a piece of the dressing over the incision had fallen off and was on the floor, we pointed that out to the nursing assistant. The nurse finally got around to changing out the dressing about 2:30 p.m. The wound care nurse who should have checked it yesterday finally got around to checking it maybe about 4:00 p.m. Oh, and three times they did finger sticks to check her sugars and at the same time check temp and BP.
Yeah…closely monitor and give support.
And the kitchen STILL has trouble figuring out that “1/4 cup diced pear” means that they should put the little container of pear on her meal tray. And that “hot tea” doesn’t mean some decaf cranberry chutney tea. We did walk down to the dining room across from the cafeteria this afternoon (a drop dead gorgeous view from there) and heard the manager or director of the kitchen talking with a supplier and putting together an order (or maybe a quote to get the numbers so they can cook there again). I told him that I have had commercial beef jerky that with less salt than the turkey ham they serve there. Seriously. Think about taking jerky and then soaking it in really salty soy sauce and you will get close.
Can you tell we are kind of frustrated?
Thanks for the update Joe -continued very best wishes for your wife & you. Getting home will be so good for her. My recent sojurn into the hospital was only 24-hours, and I was mentally READY to come home.
The last time I was in a hospital was over 40 years ago (Fitzsimons Army Hospital just outside of Denver) -I did not remember it being mentally taxing. Course back then I was a bit younger and was surrounded by a few thousand of my best service friends back from their personal SEA adventures, so my challenges were miniscule compared to theirs.
w/r
Joe – it is a sad state of affairs when situations like this happen. You have to be vigilant these days; you just can’t trust that the medical needs are appropriately staffed for the demands in place. When I had my hip replacement in 2009 I was ALL OVER the nurses about being timely with meds and responses to requests. I don’t think they liked me too much and I didn’t care. Best wishes and prayers going out for your wife’s speedy return home – where her recovery can really begin.
Good grief, Joe, I am so very sorry. I have spent the summer tending to my late Father in law’s best friend. (He has no wife or children and no extended family in town.) The care we’ve had has ranged from fantastic to near fatal at the various institutions he has been in. I told my husband that we need to save for our retirement AND for private nursing. I have come to the conclusion that with the sorry state of affairs that our healthcare is currently in and with it only getting worse, when we are of retirement age, the only way to survive in a hospital is if we have a private nurse WE pay for out of pocket. Otherwise, we are doomed.
Here is to Lisa’s recovery. May the remainder of the path be smooth and uneventful…
Kris, Bou, and everyone else, thank you very much for your prayers and well wishes, they mean a lot to us.
One reason we didn’t push yesterday about getting everything is we want to be able to say to the doc today “Look, nothing happened! She continues to improve! Joe can do the dressing changes at home, after all he packed the wound from the appendectomy when it abcessed, and that healed well. All the rest can be done out-patient!” And hope the doc listens to us.
Joe, I’m sorry to hear that your wife isn’t well. Best wishes for a speedy recovery. Hand in there.
Joe,
The improvement is good news, but the state of hospital care is not. My wife and I learned long ago that the patient and partner must be vigilant and demanding that proper care is provided. Make waves when care is sloppy or nonexistent. Complain to head nurse or call your MD with your concerns. The squeaky wheel does indeed get the grease. Try to minimize the stay in the hospital, for that location is a dangerous source of infection. Get the saniwipes and wipe down all surfaces with which you and your wife come into contact — do it multiple times per day. Get the instant hand sanitizer and use it often. Ensure that the staff uses it before touching your wife. The staff of many hospitals have become very lax about hygiene—at the cost of patient lives.
Believe me, the billing department will charge as if your wife got the best of care — and will be very insistent about being reimbursed.
Joe I’m sorry to hear that your wife is in the hospital–and even sorrier that they seem to be running a slip shod operation. Best wishes for better care and a quick recovery.
Now as for Bill Keller: I know someone else who is enamored of his own importance. And the way he’s messing up the deck with his performance as POTUSA shows that he vastly overestimates his abilities.
Frankly, Mike, that statement would describe almost any leftist.
Joe – Hope all goes better for the Missus…health issues are difficult and made worse by poor medical care.
I have three words for Mr. Keller, and they apply to the DUNCE keeping the chair warm in the White House too -
” Get over yourself.”
Nothing during the feckless idiot from Chicago’s term in office except the military’s brilliance of taking out OBL will be of note and that was the product of all the things Obama stood against for years.
Iraq is a free country and while the war could have been handled better, it is far better off than it was under Saddam.
We would be better off if we had elected Sen. McCain instead of the hen-pecked idjit we got stuck with…ugh.
I try to stay out of hospitals! My twenty year old reference to them as “Medical Hobby Shops” is increasingly applicable. Frequently to the point of giving hobby shops a bad name-
Bill Keller – it’s all about him. Sad sorry little man.
As to the main thread: What a pompous ass!
To Joe in N Calif – Best wishes to you and your wife, my prayers are with you.
Joe in N.Calif … So sorry to hear about your wife’s hospitalization. In my few bouts with hospitalization I’ve discovered that you need a close relative or relatives to act as ombudsman between you and the staff and doctors. And what Bou suggests is a really good suggestion. Hire a private nurse to watch over your wife when you can’t be there. I know that, after my hysterectomy the private nurse who watched over me for two nights was hugely instrumental in returning me to the real world. In any hospital, no matter how well run in general, there are glitches, and the private nurse will help you avoid the consequences. Other nurses who work in the hospital will put on their most responsible manners and care when there is a private nurse watching them with beady eyes.
Best wishes and prayers for your wife’s complete recovery.
Marianne
Keller is a bed-wetter. Enough said.
Keller may indeed be a “little bed-wetter” or not. I don’t care. He is irrelevant.
But debasing him begs his serious question: “Knowing what we know now, with the glorious advantage of hindsight, was it a mistake to invade and occupy Iraq?”
Few here seem to want to tackle that major question, either pro or con.
I suppose people bashing is more fun, albeit not very important.
It’s a question posed by a man far too full of himself for said question to hold any relevance to anyone except Bill Keller.
I’ll give it a shot. I suspect that you won’t like it, though.
No. It was not a mistake.
Not given what we knew at the time. And, not given what we were apparently trying to surreptitiously accomplish from 2001-2005.
And, in hindsight? Well, I would just point out, for starters, that Qaddafi might well have had nukes with which to respond to Europe. Saddam’s corruption of the UN and certain major governments (e.g., France) would have gotten him free and clear by now, continuing to spread terror and war within and beyond his borders. He would also likely be yet another of A Q Khan’s clients by now. The color revolutions would never have happened. The Saudis and Pakistanis would have moved even more slowly against AQ, if at all. And without that government pressure, AQ would have been able to focus entirely on the Afghanistan/Pakistan theater… and the US.
We often seem to forget, in our navel-gazing, that the enemy gets a vote, too. Just because we decide to try to turn the region upside down and coax the governments and cultures into turning against the sponsorship and support of terrorism, doesn’t mean we’ll always succeed, especially if we decide to very publicly stab ourselves in the back for domestic political reasons while the outcome is still in doubt. I often said, back in 2002, that there were no guarantees that we would pull it off–but that I didn’t see any other alternatives to our situation that didn’t seem to end in Wretchard’s Third Conjecture, and I figured (and still do) that some of our treasure and blood was worth one good shot at avoiding having to kill millions or even billions in order to save our own from death.
Yeah, I think this one’s gonna cause some sputtering righteous indignation.
Flit, Marianne gave you one of the two appropriate answers; it’s still too soon to tell, yet.
The other appropriate answer is: hindsight is always 20/20, so posing “given what we know now” hypotheticals is a waste of time. After the fact is always easy; that’s why we have the phrase “Monday-morning quarterback.” A day later all is obvious. During the game, not so much. Anyone can be a brilliant diplomat, fearless leader, and faultless general when the outcome is already known. The hard part is deciding what to do in the middle of the game (or war), when you have to make a choice, right then. No putting it off, no “voting present,” no tabling the question for future review.
Keller’s question is, at best, fatuous. I would go further and call his entire post such, as well, especially considering he never provided any solid reasons for backtracking on the invasion in the first place. Keller makes his own case worse by citing Samantha Power “who literally wrote the book on humanitarian intervention.” (my emphasis) What arrogance.
Power is a progressive academic who is as predictable as she is idealistic. It should come as no surprise that she was one of the prime movers behind the Libyan intervention. Thus is the question begged: how is Iraq some terrible mistake, while Libya is part of some grand strategy distilled from “smart diplomacy?” Especially considering the latter action has become arguably unConstitutional, if not idiotic on the merits of the case.
Laughing at twits like Keller isn’t “bashing,” Flit; it’s human nature. They’re effete idiots who are paid to regularly publish all sorts of outrageous statements because … that’s their job.
It’s a good thing they don’t have to work for a living, no?
fliterman my friend … I think perhaps some of us feel that it is a little soon to be able to assess whether we should have “invaded and occupied Iraq.” And we hesitate to pass judgment without all the evidence being in. Most of all, we don’t want to in any way belittle or sleight the sacrifices of those of our troops who were wounded or killed doing their great effort to protect us.
Marianne
Given what we found after we got there, I don’t think it was a mistake. Staying and engaging in nation building was a mistake.
Once we took care of all the WMD programs and materials we should have handed the keys to a new guy and told him not to make us come back.
This is an arguable position, QM. I don’t doubt you are familiar with Pournelle’s position that our primary goal should have been -first & foremost- repairing/rebuilding the refinery system and pumping as much oil as was humanly possible. Drive the cost of oil down. Good for everyone.
Of course, the idealistic “hope’n'changers” would never get behind such a crassly selfish policy… {/snerk}
The estimates of Kurds slaughtered by Saddam Hussein are over 100,000 people. It was a holocaust of sorts. I cannot in my heart say someone should not have gone in and stopped it. The horrors of what I have read about the Kurds and what they went through under his regime, are enough to make me think, weapons of mass destruction or not, he had to be stopped.
Do I like where we are now? No. I wish it would end. But I’m not going to say we should not have gone.