Reason 837,693 why I love the Marines…and some living examples of Semper Fi.

Sgt. Morante landed hard, blacking out as debris covered him. When he came to a few minutes later, he was pinned under concrete shards. Struggling, he shoved the wreckage off him - then saw that his right leg had snapped back behind his body.

The leg was amputated by surgeons in Balad. Morante woke up in a military hospital in Germany. Next stop: San Antonio and rehab.

His chief ambition is still to become a drill sergeant. Missing a leg, he arranged for the Marine Corps logo to be painted on his prosthesis. “I was back on my feet in three months,” he says proudly - but he still faces all-day therapy.

It’s been a tough year: His father died, and his mother’s been sick. And some jerk stole the sergeant’s truck, which had been parked back home in Houston.

So what does he worry about? The other Marines wounded in the blast - and, especially, his Navy corpsman. The medic’s still in a coma down in Tampa Bay and may never come out of it. He’s never seen the child his wife delivered a few months ago.

And:

Then there’s Gunnery Sgt. Blaine Scott, 35, and a “lifer.” The gunny served with the 3rd Light Armored Recon Co. of the 1st Marine Division in Anbar Province. He was 6½ months into his second Iraq tour when an IED detonated under his vehicle.

Gunny Scott was burned over 40 percent of his body. He’s been in rehab for 16 months, with “too many operations to count.” Despite reconstructive surgery, his face still tells of wounds. But this Marine’s Marine is 1,000 miles away from self-pity: “Hey, this is what I do for a living, this is what I chose.”
[…]
His priority now? Working with new Marine patients to bolster their spirits.

Read more examples of Once a Marine, Always a Marine…

mmMMmm….slow cooked today at work, over a grille. The weathur’s been rough and wild so this was just what the doctor ordered. YUMS!

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. ~Edith Sitwell

“CONGRESS” <--A body of elected folks in the US Government, who should do the work of the American people in a bipartisan manner; who should work with the President and Judicial Branch; who should speak for the people who elected them. Congress should rise above childhood tactics and games and get the work done. **I can dream right?**

What’s always my favorite song? Just about anything by Pink Floyd. The new music isn’t music, and those tunes we hear on the radio these days are not songs.

I don’t have a wish list. Never have and never will; every year though I do WISH for peace, contentment and happiness for all my family and friends.

I guess I have to say, OLD SPICE- that cheap cologne one can buy anywhere. Whenever I get a whiff of it, I think of my Dad..who wore it often.

Um well that’s easy. Almost ALL the media. News anchors, reporters, journalists- not a one of them should be on TV spreading their own personal agenda vs. reporting the news and only the facts of the news.

Kat alerts me to this:

The Gratitude Campaign. Just do it…simple, honest and effective. And powerful.

I love Global Warming in New England. Earlier today…it began snowing shortly after noon and hasn’t stopped. The snow is piling up and I just LOVE IT…as visions of snowmobiles fill my imagination!

I got ill after reading this.

IT WAS clear what the woman wanted. She was pregnant, and distressed to the point of being suicidal. She had learned that her baby would be born with dwarfism. She pleaded with the doctors at the Royal Women’s Hospital to terminate the pregnancy.

Lachlan de Crespigny and a handful of other doctors wanted to help her. So, on a Thursday afternoon in February 2000, they did as she asked. The role that Associate Professor de Crespigny played — injecting potassium chloride into the foetus’s heart — took only a minute or two. But almost eight years on, a day can’t go by without him reliving the ugly events that followed.

The woman was 32 weeks pregnant; that’s 8 weeks short of full term.

“It was lifesaving,” he says now of the procedure that he insists he had a moral obligation to perform. “If we didn’t do it and the woman died we would have potentially been charged with manslaughter and gone to jail. So in a legal sense, you could argue that we were compelled to offer it.”

Oh puleeze. Gimme some more totally untrue excuses here. You know what? When a person indicates they are suicidal to their doctor, often the doctor will evaluate how serious the ideation really is. If a doctor decides the threat poses a real and imminent danger to the person, the MD can refer the situation to authorities. Who will place the person into some sort of mental heath facility. I am very much against forced incarcerations, but when the life of a pregnant woman is at risk, I do support them. At least until after the baby is born.

I could care less about the Mother, sorry to say. If she wishes to end her life, so be it. Her choice, not mine nor the governments. The life of the unborn child though, isn’t up for grabs in these situations.

The doctors in this case are WAY OFF base; this happened in Australia where things are a little different than the US. I’ve said it before and will say it again: Not all first world nations are equal. No where is this more evident than in articles like this.

I have seen children who live with half to one quarter of a brain; I have held babies who were born without brainstems; I have worked with those whose brains deteriorate rapidly and they age and die before they’re three yrs. old. I’ve worked with kids with the most severe and profound disabilities one can imagine and not imagine.

I have a few friends who are dwarfs. They’re great people, just like you. And me. And every other normal average person.

It sickens me to know a group of doctors performed a late stage abortion on a woman who was too fucking selfish to give birth to a child who didn’t meet HER idea of perfect. To end a pregnancy in it’s 32nd week, based upon the fact the child will be born a dwarf, is criminal. Just criminal.

Dwarfs are not developmentally disabled; they don’t have mental health issues; they’re just like me and you forcrisesakes. They just happen to be little. WTF. They may be little, but their minds and hearts and souls are as big as anyone else’s. They grow up to learn and love and give and take just like the rest of us. They have dreams and aspirations and goals; they laugh and cry and dance…they fall in love and get married and they have their own kids who often are not afflicted with this genetic issue.

Perfection comes in all shapes and sizes. Human life is perfect. Until people except this, we will see stories like this repeat itself.
My heart bleeds and is broken over the life of this child so selfishly taken away, at the direction of it’s own mother.

Hmm.

Suggestive pink Santa panties targeting young girls are being removed from Wal-Mart stores after parents objected to the offensive undergarments.

The panties, which were sold in the juniors department, seemed to suggest that girls don’t need money, they just need a sugar daddy — in this case Santa Claus.

The hipster briefs — carrying the slogan “Who needs credit cards …” on the front and “When you have Santa” on the derriere — caused an uproar among parents, who called for the $2.96 drawers to be pulled off the racks.

It warms my heart to know at least SOME parents were pissed off about this.

I hate to tell people this, but the message here is exactly what many want young girls to learn, to know of and to expect. That they should wear suggestive sexy underwear and bras; that having these items is good and fun and what life is all about. That, sex is a commodity they can trade for monetary wants and needs.

For all the whining of liberal blogs who went apeshit over this, not too many of them spoke up to place blame squarely where it needs to go:
1) Feminists-many of whom are total hypocrites
Complain about the Santa Panties ladies, but don’t dare call yourself to task for dragging your daughters to the mall with you as you shop at Victoria’s Secret now. I see it all the time! Women shopping for their lacy bras and undies with little daughters in tow. What do tweens do best? Copy the grown ups.

2) Men who get a hard on kick out of older teenage girls who wear suggestive clothing.
I see this all the time too. Older men who quietly drool at the sight of jail bait teenage girls who prance around like little sluts, simply because they are expected to do this for attention. Again, young girls will do almost anything to please the adults in their lives. Adults set the example. Dad’s are especially important to young girls- they have much influence over their daughters and the manner in which they behave cannot be underrated.

I purchase my underclothes from Victoria’s Secret and not from Wal Mart. I have for many years. I was discreet with it however…I never brought my daughters with me into the shop; I never read the mailed catalogs when the girls were around. They didn’t need to watch their mother pick and choose her thongs and lacy bras. They didn’t need to know I owned them. It simply wasn’t something we discussed or shared. Little kids want to be like the grown ups, and when the grown ups do things only they should do, we have to take some responsibility for our actions.

Kids should be kids for as long as possible. We should let them explore their own world at their own pace. I see it almost all the time now: SOME grown ups want to push kids into things they are not ready for.

The selling of items like the Santa Underwear is a perfect example. Let’s take away the innocence and prepare girls to be used and abused for sex and nothing else. Let’s lay the groundwork. And let’s create yet another generation of women who don’t understand the value of sex and what it can really mean, and how it can be such an awesome experience for them. When we allow girls to become sexualized at young ages, we take away most of their chances for ever knowing what that experience is all about. All this for the benefit of what, and for whom? Please tell me.

I’ve been using Ask.com for several months now, for my searches and other Internet things. They’re offering a new service to help keep your online surfing private and I think it’s a step in the right direction. Is Google listening?

…The fourth-largest search engine company will begin a service today called AskEraser, which allows users to make their searches more private.

Ask.com and other major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft typically keep track of search terms typed by users and link them to a computer’s Internet address, and sometimes to the user. However, when AskEraser is turned on, Ask.com discards all that information, the company said.
[…]
“It works like a light switch,” said Doug Leeds, senior vice president for product management at Ask.com. Mr. Leeds said the service would be a selling point with consumers who were particularly alert about protecting their privacy.

Some people don’t think it’s a big deal. But it IS when you care about your privacy, especially in light of this:

“Privacy only becomes important to the average consumer when something blows up,” Mr. Ponemon said.

Of course, something has already blown up. Last year, AOL released the queries conducted by more than 650,000 Americans over three months to foster academic research. While the queries where associated only with a number, rather than a computer’s address, reporters for The New York Times and others were quickly able to identify some of the people who had done the queries. The queries released by AOL included searches for deeply private things like “depression and medical leave” and “fear that spouse contemplating cheating.”

I have friends who go to the trouble to use those anonymous proxies and all that dumb shit. That’s all time consuming and a total PITA…we shouldn’t have to resort to such things.

I advise folks to stop using Google and Yahoo…simply because EVERYTHING you do through these search engines is recorded, somewhere. I am still looking for an alternative to GMail as well- I cannot stand the ads that come with the email. I find that to be way to intrusive. One never knows how it all might come back to them. I have nothing to hide; but some people do. Be careful out there.

BWAHAHAHAH!!

Totally hilarious. Will certainly offend many. And absolutely NSFW. Make sure you check out the product for Artic Cat Snowmobiles. I got me some.

Hehe!!