Rare Breed

CSM: [Yesterday] Marine Sgt. Dakota Meyer was awarded the Medal of Honor for his attempts to locate and rescue missing comrades despite hostile fire in Ganjgal, Afghanistan. Rather than stay at a relatively safe distance from the intense firefight as he had been ordered, the then-21-year-old crossed battle lines five times and saved the lives of 36 US and Afghan troops pinned down during a Taliban ambush in September 2009.

Meyer is the third living recipient of the Medal of Honor for actions in the wars of Iraq or Afghanistan.

From The Wrong War by Bing West:

"A few weeks later, Lt. Gen. Joseph Dunford, commander of the Marines in Afghanistan, visited Camp Joyce, ate lunch with a subdued Dakota Meyer, talked with the survivors of Gangigal, and flew off, studying his notes.

"Dunford was no man's fool. His troops called him Fighting Joe because he had led from the front in battles in Iraq. He was thoughtful and literate. He studied war, leadership, and courage. Meyer had him stumped. In 28 months in command as a regimental and assistant division commander, he had never come across anything like this.

"In 1942, Sgt. John Basilone had charged several Japanese machine gun nests on Guadalcanal and received the Medal of Honor. Dunford was looking at a similar feat. To rush forward five times, knowing you were going to die...what kind of man did that? Dunford had talked with Capt. Swenson, the savvy advisor, who could only shake his head. The fury of the battle and the lack of support had infuriated Meyer. That four comrades were trapped was unacceptable to him. He wouldn't stop attacking.

"In The Anatomy of Courage, Lord Moran described his firsthand experiences in observing bravery in World War I. 'When the death of a husband or son or brother has grown distant,' he wrote, 'and the world is free again to think without impiety that courage is not common, men will remember that all the fine things in war as in peace are the work of a few men; that the honor of our race is the keeping of but a fraction of her people.' Meyer was one of those 'few men.'"

Courage Under Fire

Amazing Video: Bystanders Lift Burning Car Off Injured Motorcyclist: Bystanders stopped to help police lift a burning car that hit and dragged a motorcyclist in Logan, Utah. The cyclist was rescued by a group who picked up the car and pulled the man out from under the wreckage.

9/11/11

Thinking Big Time

"We are building a 10,000 Year Clock. It's a special clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking. It's of monumental scale inside a mountain in West Texas. The father of the Clock is Danny Hillis. He's been thinking about and working on the Clock since 1989. He wanted to build a Clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. The vision was, and still is, to build a Clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years."

Jeff Bezos
CEO of Amazon.com
(read more HERE)

London Burning

“My fear was not barbarism, which is civilisation submerged or not yet born, but de-civilisation, which is civilisation gone rotten.”

--John Buchan (1875-1940)
Scottish novelist and politician
author of The 39 Steps and Greenmantle

Having a Wonderful Time

Our mountain of debt and the plunge in the market remind me of a story about the Hungarian playwright, Odon von Horvath (1901-1938). While hiking in the Alps, he came across the corpse of a long-dead climber. After rummaging in the man's rucksack he found a postcard. "Having a wonderful time." Asked by his friends what he did next, Horvath replied, "I posted it."

Horvath's own death displayed a similar note of absurdity. An exile from Hitler's Germany, he had settled in Paris just before the outbreak of the war. All his life he had suffered from an inordinate fear of lightning, and one day, while on his way to watch Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, he took shelter from a thunderstorm on the Champs-Elysees and was killed by a falling tree branch.

So maybe it's true what FDR said: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Just don't tell that to a mountain climber!

(cartoon by Michael Ramirez)

Going Ape

Though memories of the original Planet of the Apes (1968) remain vivid to this day, the sequels and Tim Burton's 2001 remake were largely forgettable. Not so with the fabulous new Rise of the Planet of the Apes. A technically brilliant and highly emotional "prequel," Rise does proper justice to one of Hollywood's greatest cinematic myths. Although it indulges the hackneyed anti-capitalist cliche of the greedy, heartless pharmaceutical company run amok, in the end the movie celebrates the struggle for freedom and the dignity and power of self-reliance. The film contains many of what critic Kenneth Turan called "bravura visual moments," including a denouement that sends your mind reeling back over four decades to the final stunning image from the original.Check out the Rise trailer HERE.