Author: Hoplite0352 (Page 25 of 27)

Yes, polyphasic sleep was a poor idea.  Failures of course never stop me from additional foolish human experiments.

Yesterday I removed my bed from my room and began sleeping on the floor.  Well, technically I’m sleeping on top of a single blanket, but let’s call it the floor.  The first night was a little rough, but not near as bad as I had expected.  Why am I doing this?  Well, I don’t actually know that it will accomplish anything, but I have a few reasons in mind:

I prefer to live a more spartan existence.  Minimalism is good for the soul.  It makes us strong.

By rolling up my bed first thing in the morning I open an incredible amount of extra space in my room.

I believe that the nearer we are to doing everything, from exercise to diet, to sleep in the state of man the animal, the more likely we are to reap the mental and physical benefits of what we were evolved to do. In a manner, this is just a further extension of barefoot running and the paleo diet.

Finally, I read an article on the topic that piqued my interest.  Of special interest was the possibility of sleeping on hard surfaces increasing bone density and realigning the spine to its natural position.  I, like most people, have an anterior pelvic tilt which causes lower back pain.  Hopefully this will be at least a small step toward correcting it.

So who knows how this will work out.  I will stick with it until the end of the month to see how it feels and then either stick with it or revert back to my old bed.

Today however has been one of those days where I take a step back out of my skin and look at my life and habits and conclude that I am a strange person.  I mean, this is the bed I sleep in before waking up to take an ice cold shower:

Happy Birthday to the prophet John Moses Browning!

Yes, the 1911 warms my heart.  But the Ma Deuce tugs at my loins.

For your viewing pleasure, the Guns of JMB on History:

Reporting In tab has been updated for what you kids crave the most: videos!

I ran into the coolest podcast on the sidebar of facebook.  This may have been the first time I clicked something there. It doesn’t really discuss anything novel, but anytime you have a PhD talking about Firefly and liberty for 20 minutes, you ought to listen.

However, she does make reference to Fredrick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis”  which I have modeled much of my political belief around.  So listen to it.

 http://player.wizzard.tv/player/o/i/x/132709651089/config/k-2e28b68ba8318c33/uuid/null/episode/k-319d4e7db1f1c660

Here you can see the Constitution tab.  Expect this tab to always be in a state of flux, especially within the next 6 weeks as I build a workable final draft for it.

I’m just saying this might be worth reading:

This is only the first half, but the newest ink is in!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock I suppose you’ve seen this NSFW video about Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters.  For the person under that rock, here’s the video:

Now, the expected social split has come down from this.  People are either looking at this with disgust and as an example of the evil deeds of our troops, or they’re taking a, “but they cut our heads off!” approach.

The Learned Sergeant is taking a somewhat different approach.  Friends, our enemies are bad.  If you can take a man’s head with a smile, you qualify in my book as evil.  If you can dig the hearts from our Delta snipers, you’re evil.  Killing these people and killing them often is a noble cause and it betters us as a species.  But just because our enemies are evil, it is no justification for desecrating the dead.  Here’s the bottom line:  We’re the good guys.

There’s a price that comes with being one of the good guys.  One of those is that we must operate with the greatest of restraint.  This goes double if you’re a UNITED STATES MARINE.  This is unacceptable behavior for even the lowliest soldier, but the standards expected of a Marine is higher still.  These Marines are not evil.  In some ways they’re simply the product of a society that takes joy in dropping a pair of testicles on a dead enemy during a rousing inning of Call of Duty.  But war isn’t a game.  We fight to advance the species, not to degrade it.  War is hell.  I’ve known what it feels like to want nothing more than the bury a tomahawk in another man’s head.  But we are the good guys.  We must fight with honor, discipline, and dignity at all times.

In With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge mentions watching Marines dig gold teeth from the mouths of Japanese soldiers.  He talks about the disgust he felt before finding himself doing the same, prior to coming to his senses.  What those Marines did was unacceptable then, and that wasn’t a fully volunteer force.  They also on the whole endured much more brutality than today’s Corps.

Not only is it degrading toward our enemies, our species, and ourselves, but this behavior is also the type that ends with PTSD.  The first recorded cases of PTSD came from the Romans upon the razing of Carthage.  Why?  Because what you do in the heat of combat will visit you in your quiet hours.  This is why we must maintain our dignity.  When you dehumanize the enemy you treat him as such.  It makes it easier to kill him, but it makes it harder to deal with the killing later.

We’re the good guys.  Treat the enemy with dignity — especially when he doesn’t deserve it.  Kill them all, but do it with honor.  Those Marines shouldn’t get a dishonorable discharge or brig time, but they should see a general or other than honorable discharge.

Now that you’ve heard it from me, I’ll give it to you from my favorite G.I. Joe : Beachhead (though that’s a strange code name for a Ranger)