Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Robert Spencer - New in PJ Media: By far the most delectable news item to come across the transom
Thursday was the revelation that mushrooms are magical indeed: the
British journal Royal Society Open Science has published, according to the New York Post,
a startling new study that claims that mushrooms can “talk to each
other — and even have a bountiful vocabulary.”
So if you’re looking for
someone to lend a sympathetic ear, try some fungi. Hey, if men can be
women and women men, and Joe Biden can pretend to be president of the
United States, maybe those toadstools that sprung up after last week’s
rain will turn out to be marvelous conversationalists.
The study was conducted by Andrew Adamatzky, a computer science
professor at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Adamatzky
asserted that his team of researchers “found that the ‘fungal language’
exceeds the European languages in morphological complexity.”
Now, I’ve never in my life had a mushroom say a single word to me,
either with morphological complexity or morphological simplicity. If you
haven’t, either, even if you’ve ingested a few, there are nonetheless
plenty of reasons to restrain your skepticism. The Post noted
that Adamatzky based his study on an analysis of the “electrical
impulses of four species of mushrooms: enoki, split gill, ghost and
caterpillar fungus.” He did this by “inserting tiny electrodes into the
dirt colonized by the mushroom’s hyphae — the threads that compose the
organism’s roots, known as mycelium.”
Human communication can be recorded as a trading of electrical
impulses, you see, and for some of us that’s a considerable improvement.
In a similar way, Adamatzky “found that the electrical spikes often
occurred in clusters, mirroring human vocabularies and employing up to
50 words.” He explained in his study, “We demonstrate that distributions
of fungal word lengths match that of human languages.” Split gills are
the most articulate of the chatty fungi: the study found that “split
gills — a species that resides in rotting wood — generated the most
complex ‘sentences’ of the four fungi.”
But what on earth do mushrooms have to talk about? Their favorite
salads to land into? What they’ll say to the mashed potato? Whether they
belong on burgers or not? What’s gotten into their psychedelic
brethren? The examiners of mushroom conversation suggest that they
“‘chat’ in order to make their presence known to other members of their
cluster — much like wolves howling to alert the pack.” They could also
be “trying to tip off fellow fungi, both to potential threats — such as
the weather — as well as sources of sustenance.” There is more.
