I saw a blurb about this on the news the other night, but finally got a chance to link to it.

H/T to OpFor for this.

This is what I mean when I say that the British are our closest and oldest allies. This is why I castigate the President for blowing off their Prime Minister and the Queen.

The blood of our soldiers is mingled with the blood of British soldiers. We can never forget that.

In Kentucky, all this would have caused was a debate as to whether a young girl should have been carrying a Coors box instead.

Saw this over at Cracked. CAUTION – Link is probably NSFW

My favorite is # 16. I always thought Betty was hotter than Wilma.

Well, he was supposed to be in California with his mom, but apparently he was in Missoula Montana.

I’ll have to talk to him about bothering the nice people in the Big Sky country. And he needs a haircut.

40 years ago today, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy to make a rendesvous with the the moon.

24 years earlier, near Alamgordo New Mexico, the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated.

Anyone want to tell the class what these two events had in common? Bueller? Anyone?

They were done because free people decided that something was important and threw unbelievable amounts of manpower, talent, and treasure at the problem to achieve it.

The Apollo program showed that we weren’t locked onto this little chunk of dirt for the rest of eternity.

The Manhattan Project provided us with an example of good people having to do bad things to further a good cause.

Both gave us spin-off technologies that we still use today. Miniaturized electronics? A lot of those were perfected for the space program. Clean, safe nuclear power? The first true nuclear reactor was created to make materials for the atom bomb.

It’s been a long time since a great national project caught our imaginations. Maybe that’s what our country lacks. I hope we can find another one.

The other big political story this week has been a push to “reform” the national health care system. By reform, I believe the President and Congress mean “rip out what’s in place and put in something else”. There’s talk about forcing all employers to provide insurance, and giving the unemployed or self-employed money to buy insurance.

And by doing this, they will destroy our health care system.

I’m personally against national, read forced and socialized, health care. I’ve lived in countries with socialized health care. Junior Bear was born in a German hospital, and while we received adequate care, it was nothing special. If he’d had problems like Little Bear did, we would probably have lost him. When Junior Bear got very ill as an infant, we basically had to give up our baby to the nurses and come back later. He was in a ward, not a neonatal ICU, and it was an open ward at that. Like what you see in the old World War I hospital pictures, but with pictures of the Care Bears on the walls.

I was also subject to a form of socialized medicine when I was in the Army. Yes, I could get sick and get cost-free care, to a point. If the Army couldn’t treat me at whatever post I was at, and didn’t want to send me to a place where they could treat me for something chronic, I would have been sent to the civilian market to get treated. For my care, it would have been free. For my family, not so much. When you’re making less than $15,000 a year, those deductibles and co-pays are pretty harsh.

And care was indeed rationed in the Army. It starts with the gatekeeper for a soldier to go on sick call, the First Sergeant. I avoided going to the clinic like the plague, unless of course they were giving me yet another round of plague vaccine. I did this mainly because I valued the First Sergeant’s opinion of me, and First Sergeants are supposed to view anyone who wants to see a doctor without a bone sticking out or blood coming out of at least two orifices as a slacker.

If you were truly ill, you got to wait for at least a few hours while a group of badly overworked and underpaid medics, physicians assistants, and doctors worked their way through the line of sick and injured. This isn’t during wartime, it’s just normal day to day business. Soldiers live in close proximity to each other, and they do a lot of physical labor and things that tend to injure them. So illness goes though units pretty quickly, and there’s almost always a steady stream of minor injuries that need attention.

If you really hurt yourself, then you got some excellent emergency care. If there’s something military medicine has concentrated on, it’s trauma care. As for follow-up care, well, it depended. When I messed up my ankle doing stupid Army stuff, I was thoroughly examined, x-rayed, poked, and prodded. When the doctor decided I did not need surgery, I was given two crutches, an ACE bandage, enough Motrin to kill a horse, and orders to stay off of it. Imagine my surprise when the next week I was told to sack up and do a ruck march to the range. Massive amounts of Motrin got me through it. But every time I get any kidney pain, I worry that the poor things might just jump out and run away. I’ve since been advised that Ibuprofen and I shouldn’t have anything else to do with one another.

Rehab for my separated shoulder amounted to a rubber band and a doorknob. I’m not exaggerating. Imagine me, a young NCO, a leader of men, tying the end of a piece of rubber tubing to the bathroom door and tugging on it for an hour. Every night. For 3 months. And they wondered why I didn’t want to go to the doctor.

With the injuries that have been seen in the War, I understand that such care has gotten a lot better, by the way. I’m not saying that my doctors weren’t trying, but they were constrained by the facilities and treatments that were available for them to treat me. There was a limited amount of doctors to go around, and a lot of soldiers who needed treatment. So they went by formulas to treat us. Gastro-intestinal distress? Here’s some Immodium and Pepto. Hurt leg/knee/arm/ribs? Here’s some Motrin. Cancer? Can’t treat you. We’ll put you on a bus for a 4 hour ride to a bigger base to get chemo. Take an emesis basin to throw up in for the ride home.

If you had something chronic, like bad knees or back due to all of the running/jumping/lifting/whatever, you were pretty much SOL. If you could get someone to care beyond the “take 8 Motrin and come back when you need more” treatment, you waited for months to see an actual orthopedist. If the ortho thought you needed surgery, you waited even more for a slot to open up to get it. Which meant that you waited months and months to get what I got in 3 weeks when I hurt my back in the civilian world.

If you were really screwed up, you got put out of the Army with a promise of care in the VA system. My brother got well and truly screwed up by military medicine, and has been fighting with the VA for years to get something resembling good ongoing treatment for his condition. The problems above exist, but are compounded by poor funding and the need to treat not only the young and broken, but the old and broken too.

Where am I going with this? Nationalized health care will bring all of these ills to the masses. I have arthritis. For that arthritis there are several options for treatment. They range from the moderately effective and cheap to the extremely effective but expensive. I started out with the cheap, and when it either didn’t work or caused problems that were even worse than the arthritis, my doctor and I were able to move into the effective but expensive range. The only limitations were the coverage my insurance company provided and my finances for paying my share. If health care was socialized, most of those options and all of the flexibility would be gone. Some bureaucrat would decide which treatments for my condition could be done, and how much of that treatment could be administered.

When I started treatment, I moved like an elderly man. Now, I’m almost human. (then again, I was never fully human. 3rd generation to walk upright and all that) If my health care had been supervised by someone other than my doctor, I truly believe that I would be unable to enjoy my life as I do today, and I would probably be using a cane to get around.

I’m going to work against socialized health care in our country as much as I can, and I urge each and every one of you to do the same.

If you have your own story to tell, please leave it in the comments.

I’ve been paying a moderate amount of attention to the Senate hearings on Judge Sotomayor. I’m not impressed by either side.

She may be a good jurist, but she certainly hasn’t proven it by the cases that are being discussed and her performance at the hearings. Basically, I see her as a “let’s get a minority on the court as quickly as we can” nominee. I’m not going to debate whether or not that’s a valid reason for putting someone on the Supreme Court, but couldn’t the administration have at least found a Latina with a clue?

The Democratic Senators on the committee have been setting them up for her so she can knock them down all week. The Republicans have been a bit more diligent on getting her to actually discuss her qualifications, but have failed to ask the hard questions in what is basically a job interview for one of the most prestigious positions in the country.

I’m not that worried about the outcome of all this, since it’s pretty much preordained that she’ll be confirmed. She’s a liberal replacing a liberal, so I don’t expect that her presence will change much.

I’m more worried that one of the conservative justices might keel over and leave Obama with a chance to replace a right leaning justice with a fire breathing liberal and change the almost perfect balance of the court. Let’s face it, most decisions in my memory have been 5-4, with one moderate judge moving between the two camps depending on the subject of the case. If Justice Thomas strokes out one of these mornings, then it could be 5-4 or 6-3 all the time. And that would be the end of any strict constructionalist rulings out of the court for a very long time.

I heard some old Prince song on the radio last night, and it got me to thinking about his music. I always liked his older stuff, mostly pre-freaky-symbol-name, more than I like his new stuff.

I got into one of those “let’s look all of this up” moods, and spent some time surfing Wikipedia. I zeroed in on Wendy and Lisa, who were members of the Revolution.

I was surprised to learn that not only were they still active professionally, but they recently released a new album after several years of doing other work.

I gave it a listen on their website, and it’s really good. Give it a listen and if you like it, support some really good musicians who have been a part of our music collections for years.

I love going barefooted. When I was a kid, I didn’t wear shoes unless I was in school, church, or snow. I still go barefooted as often as I can. Shoes just aren’t very comfortable, especially in the heat of the summers here. I’ve done home repairs, yard work, and everything else I can without wearing shoes.

But my feet look like hooves by the end of the summer. And the Irish Woman is always voicing concern that I’m going to step on a wayward railroad spike or something.

Now, the answer to my problem has finally arrived.

I could go almost barefooted everywhere but work and church. They even have them in sizes that fit my more than normal sized rear paws. These are definitely going on my list.

When I first joined the military, our MRE’s still came with a couple of cigarettes in them. One of my drill sergeants smoked cigarettes, and another chewed Red Man. At language school, smokers were allowed to smoke in the breezeways of the building so they didn’t have to go down to the ground floor to smoke. At my first permanent party station, smoking had to be done outside in a designated area, but that rule was recent enough that our computer terminals still had ash residue in the built-in ashtrays. Tobacco, along with alcohol, was sold at a discount due to the lack of local taxes, in the PX.

Over time, restrictions on tobacco use became stronger. All smoking in the barracks was outlawed, and all smoking had to be done in designated areas several meters from all buildings. The Army promoted smoking cessation through free support groups and nicotine replacements such as gum and patches. If an officer or NCO quit smoking this was noted as self-improvement on their personnel evaluations.

When I went to Bosnia, we had the first round of General Order 1. Basically, we were back in high school when it came to personal recreation. All the work out and Monopoly you could take. No alcohol, no sex, no naughty fun at all. The only thing that we had was tobacco. I didn’t indulge, mainly because tobacco that’s worth smoking is expensive. But it was there, and a lot of people enjoyed a smoke every once in a while. Yeah, it was bad for them, but a lot of their other vices had been denied.

Now some policy makers in the Pentagon are suggesting that the military stop selling tobacco on installations and outlaw the use of tobacco by military personnel. I can see their point. Tobacco is bad for you and those around you. The military has an interest in the health of their soldiers. Everyone has to take a cardio test of some kind every so often, and smoking can’t help in doing well on it. Also, the cost of treating tobacco related illnesses isn’t low.

But let the troops have a smoke. Any time someone in the military leaves for a deployment, they lose a lot of the things that they enjoy. They lose the right to have a beer with their friends to blow off steam. They lose the right to sex, which anyone will tell you is fun and a great way to relieve stress. Their movements, due to military necessity, are restricted to a very small universe. Some camps are only a couple of tents or bunkers, and some troops rarely go outside the wire. Those who do go outside the wire do so in very stressful circumstances, and when they get back to base, if they’re lucky all they will have is a gym and maybe a rec tent with movies and video games. So a lot of them have gotten the habit of having a smoke with their friends. Yes, it’s bad for them, but it’s the only vice they have left.

Come on, Secretary Gates. Don’t take the last guilty pleasure our troops have left. For those of you out there who care, please contact your congresscritters and let them know that our soldiers deserve to make the decision about tobacco themselves.