What Real Heroes Look Like

Afghanistan: A soldier rushes out into the open to draw fire away from his brothers in arms. From the cameraman:



" I got a hit a total of 4 times. My helmet cam died and i made it down the mountain on my own. I was also hit in the side of my helmet and my eye pro was shot off of my face. We were doing overwatch on the village to recon and gather intel. I was point heading down the face of the hill with the LT. when we got hit. the rest of the squad was pinned down by machine gun fire. I didn't start the video until a few mins into the firefight for obvious reasons. I came out into the open to draw fire so my squad could get to safety."



"A round struck the tube by my hand of the 203 grenade launcher which knocked it out of my hands. When I picked the rifle back up it was still functional but the grenade launcher tube had a nice sized 7.62 cal bullet hole in it and was rendered useless. "

Neil Armstrong In Memoriam

Neil Armstrong, Korean War veteran, test pilot, first man to walk on the Moon, has died from complications due to heart surgery. He was 82.


As the first of only twelve men to step foot on the Moon, Armstrong is a member of the most prestigeous group of humans in history. He lived his post-Apollo years semi-retired from public life, rarely granting interviews.


One of our greatest heroes, Neil Armstrong will dearly be missed.




Video of that one small step




CNN Biography of Armstrong

11.11.11

It comes once every century (twice if you're using a 12 hour clock!): 11:11:11 on 11/11/11. In under 5 minutes I talk about the end of the First World War, the experience and value of the soldier, and what we can learn from them and from history.





P.S. The video was shot on 11 November, and posted here on the 12 @ 1:31 AM, but the time stamp has been changed to reflect the theme of the post.

Marine Sergeant - A True Hero

On 15 September the President awarded Marine Sergeant Dakota Meyer the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of 36 of his brothers in arms. He disobeyed orders and entered an Afghan kill zone five times to save the lives of 13 Americans and 23 Afghanis, as well as recover the bodies of 4 of his friends. This is truly moving. Words cannot do justice to his brave deeds.

Why Democrats HATE Space Travel

Reflecting on the last shuttle launch I sit in dissapointment at the whole shuttle program. This is it? This is the best we can do? I came across the following article today from UD. Physicist Rob Sheldon explains that Republicans have been very good to NASA and the space program but Democrats HATE it because they can't get past partisan politics. They would rather turn America communist than explore space, advance science, increase national pride, and bolster international cooperation. He says:



Republicans have generally put US Space Policy or Foreign policy above politics, and have funded unpopular endeavors even when begun by previous Democratic presidents, recognizing that it takes 10 years to see a NASA program from start-to-finish, which is longer than the usual presidential double-term.



Democrats, however, believe that there is nothing more important than politics. Everything is short term. The future can be mortgaged. So for example George HW Bush started the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to follow on the very successful Fermilab “Tevatron”.



Unfortunately, he built it in Texas, which gave it a partisan air. The very first thing Clinton did, was to cancel the SSC, thereby handing the next 20 years of high-energy physics to the European lab CERN in Geneva.



He continues with a point on the space station. The idea for the space station was started by Reagan as a means to develop technology needed to go to Mars. When Clinton got into office he did his best to axe the program.



But under Clinton, the Space Station was scaled back as far as possible without defaulting on commitments made to the Europeans. This meant that the Russians were brought in to supply the Space Station rather than use US Space Shuttles. So when the commitments to Europe had all been fulfilled, both the Station and the Shuttle were obsolete.



As a boy I wondered why it seemed the greatest days of space exploration were behind us. Why did we have grand visions of going to the Moon by the end of the 60s (which we did) and go on to Mars before 2000 and eventually on to the stars, but now we kept launching those damn shuttles into orbit where the astronauts ate their tubes of mush and powered ice cream and nothing ever got done? And why were our first astronauts the toughest people on the planet like John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, people you could really look up to (Buzz Aldrin still is my hero and I still want to be like him), and the new astronauts include people you've never heard of and the "astro-nut" who tried to kill someone and didn't want to be bothered with having to use the toilet so she wore a diaper while she did it. The answer is clear: Democrats. Democrats took all the fun out of space. They turned space travel into a vacation for adults who like to wear diapers and eat floating candy at tax payers' expense instead of the most challenging exploration of the universe imaginable.



Capital Bush even wanted to go back to the Moon. He tried for Mars but the socialists wouldn't let him so he settled for the Moon. He started late in his tenure and didn't get enough finished and then Zero took office and killed the Moon mission. Instead of exploring space and promoting world peace, Zero is "humanitarianly" bombing the crap out of Libya (it's not a war, it's "kinetic military action" and that means it's totally not unconstitutional like BOTH Republicans and Democrats in Congress are now saying) and spending the country into oblivion.



Fuck you, Democrats. Fuck you Zero. Fuck you very much.

Making A Marine

In 12 weeks 200 ordinary mortals are transformed into members of the elite fighting force, the United States Marine Corps. Runs aprox. 21 minutes.

Two Happy Stories

These two stories have been in the stack for months. What with the world going mad and all I've dug deep into the stack to find two stories that are not depressing (I was originally going to do something on income tax).



The first story comes from The Seattle Times, October 2010. A man from Ballard (which I assume is a neighborhood in Seattle), Kenny Johnson, was pulling out of his driveway when he witnessed a car accident. No one went to help the people trapped inside the burning car, a man and his daughter. Kenny went in the car and pulled the two to safety because he's a real hero (not an anti-hero or a tv hero or someone out for revenge). The girl, three year old Anna Kotowicz, survived with relatively unharmed. Her father, 37 year old Andy Kotowicz, died in the hospital three days later.



Several days later Kenny was sleeping beside his wife when, in the hours known as wee, a man appeared in the room standing over him. It was Andy, and he had a message for Kenny to deliver to his wife and daughter, and another message to give to his co-workers. He would go on to deliver the messages, which were well recieved.



The second story comes from HotAir.com, 19 November 2010. The story recounts events from three years ago, when then four year old Colton Burpo was in surgery for a burst appendix. During the operation he had a perfect example of a Near Death Experience, seeing what his parents were doing while outside his body. These veridical perceptions were accurate and represent knowledge Colton could not have gained had he not really witnessed his parents from outside his body.



Colton later visited Heaven where he met his grandfather, whom he had never known, as a young man. He was later able to identify his grandfather in a photograph that his father had to go searching for. Colton also met with his sister, who had died before she was born. His parents had not told him of the miscariage, and were quite surprised by their son's knowledge.



The author of the second story needs to take a few more lessons in journalism (a lot more), but otherwise, another wonderful and uplifting story for us during these very troubling times.

Unstoppable

I've recently seen the film Unstoppable, about a runaway train and inspired by actual events. Directed by Tony Scott, who has a thing for films about trains, Unstoppable is the story of a jackass mistake that sets a rather long train carrying several tanks of deadly poison speeding down the tracks in rural Pennsylvania with no one at the controls. The train is going so fast that it won't be able to make a sharp turn in a major city. The train will derail and release the toxic chemicals, killing tens of thousands of people. The railroad people throw everything they've got at it and nothing works, so a veteran engineer and a rookie conductor, whose families happen to live in the target city, come up with a dramatic plan to stop the train or die trying, just like REAL heroes (not anti-heroes, vigilantes, or some sort of grey area villains).



This is the best film I've seen in a long time (and the only one I've seen in 2010; the last time I went out to see a film was 1 November 2009, Law Abiding Citizen, which was the only one I saw in 2009). I highly recommend seeing Unstoppable.






Unstoppable Trailer



Unstoppable is based on the real life incident involving the CSX 8888 "Crazy Eights," which was carrying poisonous phenol (though not nearly as much), and did travel under power with no one at the controls in rural Ohio in 2001. Crazy Eights chugged along for three hours before a similar plan was used to bring it to a stop before the train derailed. Like in the film, all the other attempts, such as using a portable derailer and police shooting at the fuel shut release valve, failed. While elements of the story are exaggerated for dramatic effect, Unstoppalble is not a documentary. It does, however, portray the actual events closely enough to merrit the "Inspired by True Events" tag proudly displayed on the poster and at the beginning of the film.





News Footage of The Real Train




-Dee

Wonderful Story from France

From AFP comes a wonderful piece about a toddler who fell out a window in France and survived.



The story begins:
"An 18-month-old boy survived after falling seven floors and bouncing off a Paris cafe awning into the arms of a passer-by, witnesses said Tuesday."



The man, Philippe Bensignor, caught the boy who fell out the window!



After the several negative posts and the seemingly endless parade of bad news this story, that was sitting in my in box for quite some time before I read it, and then read it again, really moved me. There's a lot of crap in the world, and I mean a whole lot, but there are events like this that make it all worth it. Enjoy this story.



-Dee

The End of the War

Yesterday night I heard on the radio news that the last US combat troops in Iraq left and are now in Kuwait. Everyone will be home by 31 August. The war is over.

Hero

I'm reprinting some entries that were on the old Urban Mystic that got taken down. This one is from 21 February 2007.



A few days ago I finished reading a book, The Empty Land by Louis L'Amour. This book is amazing because it presents something that so few books today (or movies or television programs or anything else for that matter) even consider a possibility: a real hero. The main character, Matt Coburn, is a real hero. He's not some grey area, he's not out for revenge, he's not looking for some boon or reward. Matt Coburn fights for what's right because it's the right thing to do. He is an altruistic hero who seeks to help others and get nothing in return; in fact he knows in return he'll be asked to leave town after he helps free it from crime! Now that's a hero. There are people like Matt Coburn on earth. You hear about them in the news when that labourer pushed the man out of the way of a train or on 9/11 when people went back into the burning buildings to save others when they could have gotten themselves to safety. But books these days don't care about the real honest hero. They want "anti-heroes" or vigalantees seeking revenge. I for one enjoy reading about heroes, actual or fictional. Everyone should go out and read this book; it's good spiritual detox from the materialistic culture that bombards us every day.



-Dee