Armistice Day

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Nothing drives technological innovation more than war.

Boru

That does not mean humans cant or shouldn't try to avoid war.

All that means is humans can invent to construct and invent to destroy. It is still up to humans what we chose. 

What it means is that - while I don’t like war any more than the next fella - most people fail to recognize the very real humane benefits of war-derived technology.

Boru

[Brian37]

That does not mean humans cant or shouldn't try to avoid war.

All that means is humans can invent to construct and invent to destroy. It is still up to humans what we chose. 

What it means is that - while I don’t like war any more than the next fella - most people fail to recognize the very real humane benefits of war-derived technology.

Boru

In evolutionary terms, competing over resources is what war really is ultimately. There was a time long ago when there was room to expand. But today there is not, and humans hide behind issues of ideology and politics and religions, and those are really excuses to ignore we are the same species.

If more humans learned to hate war and accept we are the same species, and especially now, we live in an age of mutual destruction, the better off we will be.

I think Sagan's view is a far better goal now especially with our nukes now. 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I visited Peleliu a few years back, on USS Peleliu.

[Brian37]

I visited Peleliu a few years back, on USS Peleliu.

War is hell, and even though the painting is not graphic in violence, the expression in his face says it all.

It is bad enough our species is tribal, but if it gets to war, you want leaders who exhaust all diplomacy, and soldiers on the battlefield who aren't bloodthirsty and wish they didn't have to be there.

[Angrboda]

Apparently disrespecting veterans on Veterans Day is "a Republican thing."

Republican U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis on Sunday blamed former Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain for the GOP’s loss of the U.S. House of Representatives — an opinion that drew a swift and angry rebuke from McCain’s family and supporters. McCain’s July 2017 vote against a Republican-led effort to scrap the Affordable Care Act put fellow Republicans in an electoral bind last week, Lewis, who was also defeated, wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “McCain’s last-minute decision prompted a ‘green wave’ of liberal special-interest money, which was used to propagate false claims that the House plan ‘gutted coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. That line was the Democrats’ most potent attack in the midterms,” Lewis wrote in a commentary piece under the headline “Who Lost the House? John McCain.”

(MPR News)

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I visited Peleliu a few years back, on USS Peleliu.

[img ]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Tom_Lea_-_2000_Yard_Stare.jpg[/img]

War is hell, and even though the painting is not graphic in violence, the expression in his face says it all.

It is bad enough our species is tribal, but if it gets to war, you want leaders who exhaust all diplomacy, and soldiers on the battlefield who aren't bloodthirsty and wish they didn't have to be there.

After two days continuous combat on Eniwetok.

[Dundee]

The 11th of November is the start of the Carnival Season in Germany.

[The Grand Nudger]

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy [...] all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or "PPs."

-Kurt Vonnegut