CBS News reports on an airbase in Arizona where we are training Iraqi pilots to fly their recently purchased new F-16s. The pilots are now fully trained and ready to join the fight at home. The conundrum: As their airbases are not secure from ISIS, it is not safe enough to go home to fight. […]
The English are marking the 100th anniversary of WWI rather spectacularly. Starting in August and running through November 11, Armistice Day, red poppies are being “planted” around the Tower of London. Each poppy marks each the death of a British soldier. What a great way to remember and even to conceptualize 888,246 deaths.
I have the election day blues, just overcome with sadness. Faced with decisions, not about which able candidate should get my vote, but is any one of them able enough to get my vote at all. My dilemmas: Do I vote for “the person” or “the platform”. We have become so intolerant, so “politically correct” […]
Sometimes, my paranoia runs almost out of control. Ever since Three Mile Island’s partial meltdown, Love Canal and the 1979 movie, The China Syndrome, (A great performance by Jack Lemmon with Jane Fonda playing the young reporter with a pet turtle…hum), I have been an opponent of nuclear power. I mean, I am opposed, but […]
Pinus Palustris, otherwise known as long leaf pine trees, were natives to the Big Thicket National Forest. They dominated their forests for centuries until East Texas developed into a timber producing mecca. They are beautiful trees, growing to a height of 125 feet, straight and tall with no branches except at the very top […]
A group of friends and I recently drove from Texas’ Lake Toleto Bend to visit Louisiana Civil War battlefields and plantations along the Cane River. Leaving just a little after sunrise, we visited the Mansfield Historic Battlefield -the last battle in the Civil War. Although the Confederates won this battle, they had already lost the war. Following the […]
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Hey Bird Brain!
Ben was focused on founding the country, but he almost missed the emerging issue of the new century: slavery. However he took an interest in a neighbor’s young slave boy, and became a leading Abolitionist, lending his considerable influence to the movement to free the slaves. What do you think is the most important issue […]