http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8575904.stm
Page last updated at 09:41 GMT, Friday, 19 March 2010
Davy Crockett actor Fess Parker dies, aged 85
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Actor Fess Parker, famous for playing American pioneer Davy Crockett in Walt Disney’s classic 1950s TV series, has died in California at the age of 85.
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An American icon.
A celebrity who was squeaky clean.
An example of the American hero.
Where are the replacements?
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INSPIRATIONAL | Tagged: Heroes | 
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Posted by reinkefj
Retired railroad man recalls World War II battles
Howard Benthine will go on Honor Flight April 23
By ANNIE ZAK
The Register-Mail
Posted Feb 14, 2010 @ 08:12 AM
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Howard Benthine was not even 19 years old when he killed another man for the first time.
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Benthine faces cancer with the same attitude with which he faced war.
“We’ve had a hell of a good life. An outstanding life.”
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Life was simpler then. Go to war, come home, get a job, work your way up the corporate ladder, and wed.
“Bon courage a vous tous”
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Leave a Comment » | INSPIRATIONAL | Tagged: Heroes, honesty, Human, INSPIRATIONAL | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
http://peadarroe.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/focus-on-this/#comment-285
Focus On This!
January 31, 2010 · 3 Comments
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Sometimes, you know, my mind takes me to another place. That ever happen to you? Take this, for instance…
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I’m talking about the one where this fellow Tebow says he’s happy his Mom let him get born.
Thirty seconds the ad is supposed to take. Thirty seconds squeezed in between all the beer ads with pretty girls and the car ads with pretty girls and the insurance ads and all the other ads with pretty girls, and the half time lollapalooza with pretty girls and ancient guitar players singing about how great it is to be us. Thirty seconds that cost the group that made the ad, Focus on the Family, about two and a half million bucks.
Now, Focus on the Family is one of those groups that says kids should be allowed to be born. I happen to think this is a good idea. They say some other stuff, too, that I happen to agree is a good idea. They say and do some stuff that I don’t happen to agree is so good an idea at all. But, that’s not what I’m on about, here.
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Well said, good sir, well said. But then, I’m just an injineer who had a low index. Seems obvious that: (1) potential human beings are getting killed; (2) a lot of people, without their tuckus on the line, have a lot of opinions about how others should live; and (3) getting the gooferment involved in a tough moral, ethical, and economic problem is like bringing that proverbial bull to help select china. Nice writing to bring light, not heat, to a tough subject. Glad I’m a man and will never have to make such a tough decision. I pray for all those that do. They’re better folks than I. Who knows what I’d do? Math is easier.
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Leave a Comment » | INSPIRATIONAL | Tagged: Abortion, INSPIRATIONAL, personal, personal liberty, Right to Life | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
OK, maybe I’m a sucker. I went to the movies last night. Yes, it was a (poor quality) movie. Not the live remote performance that I was expecting. I felt suckered. The previous night, I went to the Senior Showcase, EB Vo Tech, where aspiring high school seniors displayed their talent. One of their presentations was a better quality than the “professional” one I watched last night.
Now, I understand that weather in Norfolk prevented the live performance. But I felt cheated. It was supposed to be “live”!
The film was obviously edited. I paid for the full performance and I think some of the good stuff was left on the cutting room floor. And, if it was edited, why is there a twenty minute “intermission”. Sorry, that could have been cut. Maybe it was for the old folks to tap a kidney. But, I suspect it was to allow the theater to push some over-priced “refreshments”.
On to the content, I was again disappointed:
* Beck spent to much time mocking Nancy Pelosi’s physical characteristics. At first it was funny, but after a while it got boring.
* O’Reilly was “abbreviated”. He got in some great points about was NOT in Obama’s SOTU, but it seemed like, in his head, the TV timing bell went off and he’d truncate his thought.
The audience was obnoxious. It addition to being mostly old and lilly white. The guy next to us was a fidgeter; guy behind us dropped a big tub of popcorn; and the old lady behind us kept commenting to her party about what the guys were saying. Argh! A chorus of cellphone conversations would have been less distracting.
(18 seats per row, 50 rows, pretty much sold out, 900, time 25$, 225 * 100, 22500$ per theater, times 200 theaters, !!!4,500,0 00!!!, over a million a piece for two hours of work? Hmmm!)
As far as the content was concerned, I had the following observations:
* Beck is NOT a libertarian. No self-respecting libertarian would have a demonstration planned for 8/8/10 in from of the LINCOLN memorial.
* O’Reilly is an interesting amalgam of professed small government but pro-war guy. Interesting, but dangerous. He did correctly identify that OBH44 ignored the Iran threat in the SOTU and has potentially by ignoring them made the world a more dangerous place. If israel has to take Iran on, we are in a world of hurt.
* O’Reilly pointed out that in the SOTU address OBH44 avoided the whole “War” topic. (And, neither mentioned OBH44’s failure to praise the troops. I can’t imagine any President missing that point.)
* Beck makes a good case that the Progressives are the problem.
* O’Reilly was funny in his description of how the folks will wake up and right the ship. Hope he’s right. I’m not so sure.
* Beck portrayed OBH44 as evil; O’Reilly characterized him as an inexperienced unprepared Chicago corrupt politician. (O’Reilly was especially on point with his: comparison of Chicago’s South Side with Haiti; Reverend Wright’s 2M$ mansion in a all-white suburb, AND the KSM terror trial in NYC. He reminded me of Judge Judy when she says “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s not true”, when O’Reilly says that the “folks” can feel when the politician isn’t telling the truth. (Like when their lips move!)
Sorry, but I can’t recommend this.
I shoulda went to see Avatar; it’d been cheaper.
Yeah I know, violating my own dictum, “Shouldas, wouldas, and couldas” will kill you.
It was: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Desi and Lucy, and probably more physically accurate Abbot and Costello or Laurel and Hardy.
But not as timeless, or not as funny.
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http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/the_beckoreilly_bold_fresh_tou.html
“15 minute intermission” live in Tampa
Why was ours 20 minutes?
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Leave a Comment » | INSPIRATIONAL, RECOMMENDED | Tagged: INSPIRATIONAL, RECOMMENDED | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091218/D9CLCDF80.html
Fla. man exonerated after 35 years behind bars
Dec 17, 7:03 PM (ET)
By MITCH STACY
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BARTOW, Fla. (AP) – James Bain used a cell phone for the first time Thursday, calling his elderly mother to tell her he had been freed after 35 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.
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Wow!
Here’s evidence that the justice system is flawed.
End capital punishment now!
Let each state go through ALL it’s convictions and look for similar incidents.
It’s only fair. And, just.
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Leave a Comment » | INSPIRATIONAL | Tagged: INSPIRATIONAL, Justice | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
Went to a 90th Birthday Party today for my uncle (i.e., my Mom’s sister’s husband). It was a celebration. But it made me sad. He’s great guy. Whom I’ve never seen in a bad mood or being anything less than cheerfully helpful. He has a big family and the joint was mobbed. He’s Irish. Actually born in Ireland and came over as a lad. A Golden Glover. (Maybe that’s the secret for his attitude.) So the joint was hopping.
It made me sad, because he’s obviously aging and showing it. All my “old” relatives are aging. As am I.
I guess it’s “rage at the dying of the light” type sadness.
It was NOT supposed to end like this.
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Leave a Comment » | INSPIRATIONAL | Tagged: INSPIRATIONAL | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/in-1942-it-came-down-to-one-marine-65931412.html
VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: In 1942, it came down to one Marine
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It’s hard to envision — or, for the dwindling few, to remember — what the world looked like on Oct. 26, 1942, when a few thousand U.S. Marines stood essentially stranded on the God-forsaken jungle island of Guadalcanal, placed like a speed bump at the end of the long blue-water slot between New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the most likely route for the Japanese Navy to take if they hoped to reach Australia.
On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield. Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto knew what that meant. No effort would be spared to dislodge these upstart Yanks. Before long, relentless Japanese counterattacks had driven supporting U.S. Navy vessels from inshore waters. The Marines were on their own.
As Platoon Sgt. Mitchell Paige and his 33 riflemen set about carefully placing their four water-cooled .30-caliber Brownings, manning their section of the thin khaki line that was expected to defend Henderson Field against the assault everyone expected on the night of Oct. 25, 1942, it’s unlikely anyone thought they were about to provide the definitive answer to what had previously been a mainly theoretical question: How many able-bodied U.S. Marines does it take to hold a hill against a desperate attacking force of 2,000?
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Is the lesson that we should fund a permanent expensive worldwide empire of military occupation? I don’t think so — doesn’t seem compatible, somehow, with a republican government of limited powers. Overstretched empires have a tendency to collapse from the center, anyway. In fact, our forces were pretty far-flung, as it was, in 1941 — though their apparent strength, in places like the Philippines, proved hollow.
But once, 85 long years ago, the arrogant victorious allies quibbled about whether bankrupt Germany should be made to pay them $4 billion or $10 billion in reparations over the next 60 years, as frustrated German veterans in Bavaria grew fed up and marched down to join the German Workers’ Party, an outfit that promised them a rebirth of Aryan glory, a “New Deal,” if you will.
Once, those who sought “peace, peace at any price” sold scrap steel to the Japanese, attended “peace conferences,” stood by and hoped for the best as Hitler re-militarized the Rhineland and then grabbed Austria and the Sudentenland in what we now know were a series of huge bluffs — the fuhrer started out using “tanks” that would barely have stood up to a cap pistol.
We gave away our advantages, one by one, based on our trust in the good will of man. Till it came down to one Marine.
Shall we have to cut it that close, again?
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One Marine?
Is this like the Texas Ranger slogan, “one riot; one Ranger!”?
We have a lot to learn. And, peace at all costs is a losing strategy. As Heinlein said: “An armed society is a polite society.” That goes for the community of nations as well.
Requiescat In Pacem Marine Corps Col. Mitchell Paige.
Where will we find more of men like him? In the playstation generation?
Not bloody well likely.
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Leave a Comment » | INSPIRATIONAL | Tagged: Human Factors, INSPIRATIONAL | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj
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FJohn Reinke
Consultant at Technology Legacies LLC
Advisor, Computer Governance Committee at Manhattan College
Editor / Publisher at Jasper Jottings
Greater New York City Area
JJ Positraction JJ Endnotes Downsize DC
Philosophy of Liberty
I have NOT received any gagged governmental information requests
