You Wanted Change. You Now Have It! But At What Cost?

This new, anti-union video is a MUST WATCH!  It’s time for them to GO!

http://governmentgonewild.org/stateoftheunions?utm_source=GGW&utm_campaign=5da328e3c2-Union_Video3_26_2012&utm_medium=email

This is a long, but fascinating read of the log book kept by one crew member (Navigator in a B-17).  Basically this is the history of the air war in Europe at it’s peak.  This is what our bomber crews had to cope with day after day until they completed their 25 missions.  Statistically you couldn’t survive 25 missions.

In 1981 I was an escort for three days to General Curtis LeMay (former Air Force Chief of Staff) while he was lecturing and visiting Air War College. General LeMay and two other senior officers that served in WWII told stories of events that occured during these and other bombing raids during the war.  Several of the raids over German occupied Europe were led by then BG LeMay.  I might add that two other Lt Colonels and myself were like kids listening to Santa Claus talk about the North Pole.

Once you read the log book of one B-17 aircraft crew that flew into the European inferno of late 1943 and early 1944,  you can begin to know how difficult it was just to survive one mission over German occupied Europe.

Bob Watson 3671 Monticello Drive Fort Worth, TX 76107 817-737-3352

B17-Logbook

We Didn’t Start The Fire Billy Joel

This song & its title was the answer to a recent Final Jeopardy  — only one person got it right –  question was (paraphrased) “What 1980′s song do history teachers praise for its educational value.”

Never could understand all the references on Billy Joel’s song — fortunately, with this VIDEO, given the picture(s), we now can “see” what our “ears” couldn’t.

Anyway, someone checked to see purpose behind the song.   Apparently, it’s Joel’s homage to the 40-years of historical headlines since his birth (1949).

Wish we could have appreciated the depths of this song when it was released.   Twenty years later, it’s amazing what Joel was able to put into music and lyrics lasting only a few minutes.

Here it is, set to pictures. It’s a neat flashback through the past half century. Turn up volume, sit back and enjoy a review of 50 years of history in less than 3 minutes! Thanks to Billy Joel, someone from the University of Chicago with a lot of spare time, a software program, and Google.

Top left gives you full screen….top right lets you pause.  Bottom left shows the year.  The older you are, the more pictures you will recognize.  Anyone over age 65 should remember over 90% of what they see. But it’s great at any age.

http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html

NEW YORK (AP) — Before the towers crumbled, before the doomed people jumped and the smoke billowed and the planes hit, the collective American memory summoned one fleeting fragment of beauty: a clear blue sky.

So many of those who remember that day invoke that detail. Last week, New York magazine, which has been running a 9/11 “encyclopedia” ahead of the 10th anniversary, added an entry for “Blue: What everyone would remember first.” It chronicled nearly a dozen of the ways that Americans recalling 9/11 anchor their looks back with a reminiscence of blue sky.

No coincidence that the power of such an image endures. Blue sky is a canvas of possibility, and optimistic notions of better tomorrows — futures that deliver endless promise — are fundamental to the American tradition. In the United States, to “blue-sky” something can mean visionary, fanciful thinking unbound by the weedy entanglements of the moment. Off we go into the wild blue yonder.

But the years since 9/11 have dealt a gut punch to four centuries of American optimism. A volley of cataclysmic events — two far-off wars, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and, for the past four years, serious economic downturn — has worn down the national psyche. It’s easy to ask: Is optimism, one of the defining pillars of the American character, on the wane?

“Some of the really big challenges we are facing are really starting to sink in with people,” says Jason Seacat, who teaches about the psychology of optimism and hope at Western New England University. “You talk about that can-do spirit that used to exist, and it still can exist. But what I get a lot of is, ‘This is such a huge problem, and there’s really nothing I can do about it.’”

Welcome to the rest of the human race, some might say. Europeans, who can enjoy their fatalism, have been known to poke fun at American optimism. And why not? You could argue that the virus of optimism was spread to this continent by supplicants beguiled by the vision of a land that promised brighter futures — presuming you left the Old World to pursue them.

Since the 1600s, when one of America’s first Puritan leaders cast the society that would become the United States as a “shining city upon a hill,” the notion that one can will a better future into existence has been a central thread of the American story. The Declaration of Independence enshrined as national mythology not happiness itself, but the pursuit of it — the chasing of a dream alongside life and liberty as the ultimate expression of self-definition.

It took root. This became the nation where getting bigger and better was a right granted by God, where the Optimists Club was founded and “The Power of Positive Thinking” became a bestseller, where you could bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun. “Finish each day and be done with it,” American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson exhorted. “Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

Old nonsense, alas, has a way of loitering around and gumming up the works.

Last year, as we began a new decade, a Gallup poll found that 34 percent of Americans were pessimistic about the country’s future – the highest number at the start of a decade since the 1980s began. Numbers from Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index late last month were the lowest since March 2009. Most tellingly, perhaps, a majority of Americans — 55 percent — said this year they found it unlikely that today’s youth will have better lives than their parents.

More anecdotally, when was the last time that popular culture produced a strong vision of an optimistic American future? We got those all the time in the mid-20th century, era of the World’s Fair “Futurama” and promises of jet-packing your way to the office in the morning. But the Jetsonian view of tomorrow has become quaint, and today forlorn narratives like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” the zombie apocalypse drama “The Walking Dead” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” dominate the American futurescape.

In the weeks directly after 9/11, optimism seemed on the rise for a time. The trumpet had summoned us again, and some people expressed a renewed sense of purpose. A high-stakes seriousness settled in. We spun tales of freshly minted heroes, gave blood, held benefits, told each other that hey, don’t worry, things will get better. A national coming together and the accompanying resoluteness were, it seemed, feeding hope.

“In an odd way, for all its tragedy, 9/11 reinvigorated the sources of American optimism at a very particular time,” says Peter J. Kastor, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis. “The problem now is recapturing that.”

Today, politicians struggle to project the all-important optimistic outlook that will help them win elections and govern a cranky citizenry. Yet optimism is a must-have narrative for any politician looking to lead. And the most effective among them – the Roosevelts, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan – have built their images around optimism. “Morning in America,” Reagan called it.

Political consultant Bob Shrum, who wrote Ted Kennedy’s famous and optimistic speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention (“The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die”), says successful politicians deploy optimism as a tool to “expand America’s vision of itself.” The ones who endure, he says, “are people who help define and enlarge the American spirit.”

The “Audacity of Hope” president used the meme Thursday night in his jobs speech to Congress after cataloguing employment problems and putting forward his solutions. “We are tougher than the times that we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been,” Barack Obama said. “So let’s meet the moment. Let’s get to work, and let’s show the world once again why the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth.”

Not everyone finds salvation in positive thinking. The cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an entire book in 2009 on the country’s excessive optimism. In “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” she assessed it this way: “Positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology — the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it.”

Ehrenreich identified an important point: There is a big difference between unfettered hope and the American brand of optimism. Hope, she asserts, is an emotion; optimism is “a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation.”

And what, after all, is more American than a conscious, supremely confident expectation that things will turn out OK? That if we visualize the future, and are simply American enough as we forge forward, bright tomorrows will happen.

That may be the central challenge for American optimism at the dawn of the second decade after 9/11: figuring out how much of the dream should be about the clear blue sky, and how much should be about wrestling with the problems that percolate beneath it. A balance, in effect, between the promise of our tomorrows and the reality of our todays.

It’s not like the future is going anywhere, though. It’s been our comforting companion for too long, and blue-sky dreams have a way of clawing to the top of any American story. Even after 9/11 and the uneasy decade that followed it tested the optimism of so many, that’s the thing about tomorrow: No matter what, it’s still always a day away.
___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Ted Anthony, assistant managing editor for The Associated Press, writes frequently about American culture. He covered the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-2003. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted

Watch this wonderful video of the Memorial to 9/11, to be dedicated this weekend.  It is such a well done, well thought-out tribute to the courage of all Americans.

http://d.yimg.com/nl/ynews/newsmaker/player.html#shareUrl%3dhttp%3a//news.yahoo.com/video%23video%3D26271274%26vid%3d26271274%26browseCarouselUI%3dhide

Turn on /up the sound and enjoy the PowerPoint presentation.  Some of the info may be “old news” to you, but it is ALL worth watching… again or for the first time!

ScreenHeros

Imagine being able to sit down in a bar, snap a few photos of people and quickly learn who they are, who their friends are, where they live, what kind of music they like … even predict their Social Security number.

Now, imagine you could visit one of those anonymous online dating sites and quickly identify nearly every person there, just from their photos, despite efforts to keep their online romance search a secret.

Such technology is so creepy that it was developed, and withheld, by Google — the one initiative that Google deemed too dangerous to release to the world, according to former CEO Eric Schmidt.

SEE THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT:  http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/04/7254996-your-face-and-the-web-can-tell-everything-about-you

Check out this amazing map, published by the NY Times, which gives a lot of the demographics of the states,… and every county therein if you move the cursor over a particular state.

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

Here is a simple test, eleven questions, which test you on current events.  There are no trick questions or questions which an informed person shouldn’t know.  Care to try?

http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/quiz/index.php

Historical Footage: Japanese Surrender Signing Aboard Battleship Missouri Sunday Sept. 2, 1945.

A film of the actual ceremony of the Japanese signing their surrender ending the second world war.  General Douglas MacArthur was the supreme commander of our armed forces in charge of the signing ceremony. Click:

http://enka2.netorage.com:9711/harddisk/user/lyk36/mumess/376-macarthurjap.htm