Yes, no, maybe? Can you repeat the question?
The Human is scarfing down an exceptionally nice lunch/dinner thing with possibly more wine than should be allowed. The dogs are begging treats supplied by an exceptionally nice (and clever) church matron who makes them by hand in her kitchen. A gentle rain is falling, and now the Human is wrapping up lunch/dinner/thing with a final glass of wine and a rich dessert of…yeah…chocolate chips.
A voice from somewhere behind the lowering clouds pierces the sky:
Celestial Voice: What do you think you’re doing?
Human: (choke cough!) Uhmm…eating?
Celestial Voice: You’ve been “eating” for half the afternoon. When exactly do you propose to get any work done?
Human: Work? I’ve already rebuilt a template for hard-copy book formatting today.
Celestial Voice: Very nice. How about you actually do something constructive, like, say, FORMAT a book? And even maybe go so far as to publish the thing?
Human: Gimme a break, Your Vastness! I spent the whole darned evening last night and half this morning singing to your Holy Magnificence and helping to hustle cash to support your devotees.
Celestial Voice: Do I look fat in this radiant gown? It’s my favorite radiant gown!
Human: Oh, no, Your…uhm, Your Radiance! You look absolutely perfect!
Celestial Voice: Naturally. I embody perfection. To the extent that there’s any body to do any embodying.
Human: Well, Your Radiance, don’t you think that since You knocked off on the seventh day, your underlings should be allowed to knock off on Sunday?
Celestial Voice: That’s a cultural construct. How do you know Sunday was Day Seven? Could’ve been Tuesday or Wednesday or whatEVER.
Human: So, does Your Radiance mean I can knock off on Tuesday or Wednesday, too?
Celestial Voice: Surely. Assuming bankruptcy is a goal coveted by your species…
{Sigh} God as academic…
Oh well.
The Entrepreneurial Human is a) too tired to breathe, and b) too depressed by current events to function.
Today is Seabury Sunday in the Episcopal tradition. Under normal circumstances, it’s entertaining: we have a delightful band of Scottish pipers and drummers march us in and out with bagpipes, quite an impressive performance.
But.
You know, we — that would be you and me, my friends — are engaged in a holy war. Most Americans and possibly even most Norteamericanos have yet to notice this, or to fully appreciate its implications. But a holy war is what we have on our hands. We are at war with an evil on a par with Hitler’s Nazism. I grew up with it: Saudi Arabia was my home throughout my childhood, and in those days I had a front-row seat to the growth of a very scary movement.
We are hated by a faction of Evil unlike anything Americans, Canadians, Latin Americans, and Europeans have seen in centuries: Evil allied with religion. Really, it’s beyond our ken. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s an evil that decapitates nine-year-old children, burns caged young men alive, sentences dissenters to thousands of lashes, and murders harmless civilians going about their business. Yesterday’s events in Paris spoke to that.
You understand, bagpipes and drums are tools of war. Take that bit of history, put it inside a church (holy war + holy war: interesting), and combine it with my personal opinion, which is that our only hope is to fully engage the jihadists, NOW not later, with everything we’ve got. And by everything we’ve got, I don’t mean flinging volunteers into the war machine: I believe we need to reinstate the draft so that everyone has a personal stake in what is in fact a menace to Western civilization, and so that everyone can understand on a gut level that we’re facing exactly such a menace.
Yes. I’m retrograde. But I’ll say it anyway:
We are being swept into another world war. The sooner we and our allies grasp that concept, the better our chances of survival. The longer we dawdle about building that understanding and allying ourselves in war with countries that have a vested interest in holding back the forces of darkness, the less likely we will, over the long run, prevail.
At any rate…given the religious overtones of the ISIS attacks on innocent civilians, the presence of a tool of war inside a Christian version of the House of God was, shall we say, disturbing.
So, my friends, if there is a Radiant One, instead of asking “When are you going to get of your duff and get to work,” She may be asking “When are you going to get off your communal duff and bring a stop to this?”
Funny….what an excellent topic. Though not in the same line of work as you, I have been in business my entire life and actually feel “guilty” if a day goes by and I have not swung a hammer, run a chainsaw, posted a rental ad, or plowed thru paper work. DW thinks this is crazy but the “guilt” persist.. it’s a sickness I tell ya!
As for the events of these past couple of days in Paris. Like you I am deeply saddened by the events and the “blissful ignorance” we and most of Europe had/have. IMHO those who think we can “negotiate” their way out of this are mistaken. These tyrants look upon negotiation as weakness. This is a holy war and one that must be fought. And maybe just maybe “shock jock” Imus was right when after 9/11 he declared….”Kill …. them….all”….
What I find most troubling is people abandoning their country…I’m talking able bodied men who are interviewed by the media who walked “so far”…for a “better life” aka “free social safety net”. I got an idea….how about you fight to take back your Country. When WWII broke out, I don’t seem to remember anybody in the US headed for Mexico or Switzerland. But there were long lines to enlist and fight the tyrants in Japan and Germany.
Had two cousins fight in the Iraq wars and both said the “fighting force” in the Middle East is a joke. The one cousin spent most of his time collecting disgarded weapons that had been thrown down at the first signs of danger by the Iraqi military. And it is my understanding this carries over into all of the Arab nations. Perhaps it’s time to turn Israel and Russia loose….and call ISIS bluff….
For a small-business entrepreneur, the business is like a child: something you have to care for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Of course you feel guilty when you slack off!
The refugees from the Middle East are exactly that: refugees. They’re not traitors or cowards. They’re families with children and old folks who ARE going to be murdered if they stay behind. This isn’t a “maybe” thing. The comparison with Hitler is an accurate one. The enemy will kill everyone who is not “them.” If you are not an extremist Muslim of the correct ethnic group, you are targeted for extermination.
In many cases, this is also true of refugees from Central America. In that case, the enemy is murderous gangs who are in the habit of raping and killing family members of anyone they don’t like. These gangs control some countries, making life there short and miserable.
As for Mexican immigrants: if you were given a choice between watching your children starve (or barely survive in desperate poverty facilitated by a corrupt ruling class) and walking north into an affluent, free country whose minimum wage would support your family and your parents when sent back across the border, what would YOU do? Dare one suggest that it would be lache NOT to do everything in your power to keep your kids and your aged mom and dad alive?
We had a draft in WW II. However, we also were directly attacked, at Pearl Harbor, not by religion-crazed guerrillas but by a military force of a sovereign nation. Americans did enlist, mostly as a direct response to that attack. Before Pearl Harbor, few Americans were fully informed about what was going on in Europe; that’s probably why we didn’t engage the Nazis sooner.
If we reinstated the draft and started sending American troops of every socioeconomic class to the Middle East — and doing it en masse — a far more nuanced and accurate understanding of what we face would spread across our land, In the future, because of that on-the-ground education, our voters would be wiser, better informed, and more wary of craziness and corruption in politics.
This is not a job for volunteers. It’s a job that needs everyone.
Arab civilians are not trained (except by the jihadist factions) to fight in the 21st-century mode. Nor is the culture especially compatible with Western military (or civilian) customs and discipline. Many who do have credible military training that fits their way of life and thinking got it from the jihadists. Even those who might be competent to fight in our mode are not enamored of Westerners, are terrorized by factions within their own culture who threaten to murder them (and will, if they get caught), and also know their families are at risk of murder.
That’s why we need Americans and Europeans (and Asians, if at all possible) to band together, go there physically in large numbers, and level anyplace that stands with the enemy.
Like us, Arab peoples are very diverse, as are their religious strains. Our extremists are no different from theirs. We have crazies here who are trying to take control of the government and the country — and who are succeeding, to a large extent. Capitalist/Christian extremists have much in common with Muslim extremists, particularly in their a desire to force everyone to conform to their way of thinking. Meanwhile, average Americans have exactly zero grasp of how dangerous the threat coming from the Middle East may be. They have no real need to understand that: they have no skin in the game.
That’s why we need conscription.
Hmmm….Funny I will agree to disagree about ISIS….I have watched on PBS and other not so commercial news agencies and was struck by the number of young men fleeing their Country. Just on a broadcast of refugees on a train there were plenty of young men in their twenties…”getting out of Dodge”. But DD’s have many fellow classmates that have enlisted and went to the Middle East to fight for these same folks. Something wrong with this picture. Sorry… someone not willing to make a difference and fight for their Country IS a coward…but that’s my opinion. My cousins, veterans themselves , can remember the “mystique of the Red Guard”….BUT they said they proved to be the “fastest and earliest runners”…it was a joke. To me they are bullies and wonder how they would perform against a disciplined force?
As for business, I never looked upon it as a child. Children grow up and move out….I look upon business as a “shirt…that you can’t take off”… enjoy your blog and wish you nothing but the best in your endeavors….
Hmmm… Yeah, I see what you mean. But consider: if you’re a young man, how would you go about resisting if there is no military structure for you to join up with? Or, apparently, even any resistance in the sense of the organized underground Resistance of World War II? What, really, could you and would you do? Might it not be better to try to accompany your wife and kids and aged parents out of the country, especially since any such trip would be fraught with peril?
When we were living in Arabia, the local military was good at putting up a fierce front. But they were no match for the government, or even for a civilian with a modern pistol. Their arms were out of date, and they were a rag-tag bunch. On the other hand, they were not without resources: they were observant, wily to the point of deviousness, and capable of committing exactly the kind of atrocities we see today without so much as blinking. It’s a cultural difference; indeed, the ISIS types don’t see what they’re doing as atrocity — to the contrary, in many minds this kind of behavior is blessed by God.
And it’s important to bear in mind that historically their fighting style has probably been more akin to guerrilla warfare than to the kind of highly regimented militaries we have. Possibly our particular type of call to arms doesn’t resonate with the people we’re calling to?
Today the Arabs are well armed and infinitely more sophisticated than they were back in the day. Even the man or woman on the street no longer lives in the equivalent of the Middle Ages. And believe me: to survive in an environment like the Rub al Khali, you have to be smart and tough. Once attuned to Western technology and structures, they’re capable of applying them to behavior dictated by their own cultural strategies. I personally think that’s very dangerous.
Hmm… It’s a similar logical construct, isn’t it? A man who won’t fight for his country is a coward. A man who commits an atrocity is a monster. Neither premise accounts for the variety of factors influencing it, but whatever the factors, the outcome is about the same…
LOL!! Business as hair shirt! Now THAT is an apt analogy!!!