Words to Heed in a Web-based World

If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer.  You're the product being sold.

Hat tip: Ace

Trick Shots

Hat tip: Houston's Clear Thinkers

"He said he would be off the mic for a few to handle his gunshot wounds."

This is from Business Insider, but I thought I'd just copy the whole article.  Go to this link for the source:

When U.S. Army Special Forces entered a Taliban village in western Afghanistan back in 2009, they had one man with them to coordinate the vital air support that would keep them alive.
His name is Robert Gutierrez and shortly into the fight he was hit with an armor piercing round that tore through his chest and shoulder.

"I've seen those types of injuries before, and time isn't your friend," Gutierrez said later. "I thought, ‘I have three minutes before I'm going to die. I've got to do something big. Based on that time frame, I'm going to change the world in three minutes.’"

With Taliban fighters shooting down on his platoon from rooftops just 10 feet from their position, Gutierrez maintained radio contact with airmen overhead to keep the enemy from killing them all. His efforts earned him the Air Force Cross for extraordinary heroism late last month.

The four-hour firefight included sniper and small-arms fire, as well as rocket propelled grenades attacks. Though Gutierrez lost five pints of blood and walked over a mile, he maintained constant radio contact.

Soldiers on the ground attempting to treat Gutierrez said he refused to remove his body armor because it held his radio, relenting only for a moment so the medic could insert a tube below his collarbone. The move kept his lung from collapsing, allowing him to continue breathing and speaking into the radio.

The A-10 pilot talking to him on the ground said he had no idea Gutierrez was wounded, that his voice was calm the whole time, and only realized the man was injured when his team moved to the medical landing zone.

"He said he would be off of the mic for a few to handle his gunshot wounds," Air Force Capt. Ethan Sabin said. "Until that point he was calm, cool and collected."

When it was all over Gutierrez had taken a bullet to the upper shoulder, triceps, left chest and lateral muscle causing two broken ribs, a broken scapula, and a softball-sized hole in his back.


He suffered a collapsed lung and multiple blood infections, which required three chest tubes, three blood transfusions and seven surgeries.


To top it off the 30 mm strafing runs from the A-10 he was calling in ruptured both of his eardrums.


Gutierrez is only the second living recipient of the Air Force Cross since 9/11 and he is now assigned a training role at the Special Operations Training Center at Pope AFB, N.C.

Character Flaw was Always an Important Theme in Greek Tragedy

"There are many lessons for America in the current agonies of the Greeks. Perhaps the most important is that there is such a thing as “national character”. The Greeks collectively are mercurial, spendthrift, comparatively unproductive, and have an unearned sense of entitlement. They feed on past glories while doing nothing to ensure future prosperity. The dodge taxes as though it were a national sport. They take alms as if they are earned wages, and then complain that the money isn’t enough. They lied their way into the Eurozone and now resent the consequences of that lie.

"The “prosperity” they achieved with the Euro was nothing of the sort: it was simply a mad borrowing binge, and all that borrowed money must now be repaid...in one way or another. Debt, by itself, is morally neutral -- but debt incurred in service to weakness, vanity, and vice is most assuredly not moral. Immorality that goes unpunished or ignored leads to decadence; decadence leads to societal rot. Fiscal improvidence is a symptom. The disease is a deficit of national character.

"I have pity for individual Greeks who, through no fault of their own, are held hostage by the wastrels among them. But so many of these stories you read show the defects of the Greek character: a sense of entitlement, of grievance, of inchoate anger at their creditors, a lack of appreciation for cause and effect. Read the comments from the Greeks -- they have no plan to recover the situation, no actual belief in change. Their only hope seems to be that the world will somehow keep giving them money even though they produce nothing that the world wants.

Hat tip - Ace