…it’s been 11 years.
Hard to believe
Tag: remember
Social Security is a compulsory Ponzi scheme
Apropos of his fear of calling a spade a spade (see also Obamneycare) Mitt Romney took Rick Perry to task last night because Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. James Taranto mounts a defense of sorts:
Perry was not claiming that Social Security is literally a criminal enterprise but asserting that there are similarities between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme.
It is probably true that Perry did not literally mean Social Security is a criminal enterprise. It should be noted, however, that Social Security is not a criminal enterprise only by definition. The people who define what constitutes a criminal enterprise say so.
Imagine Social Security as an investment fund offered by a private company. The Social Security “prospectus” makes guarantees it manifestly cannot fulfill, and the executives in charge largely continue to lie about that. Its accounting practices are much worse than those of Enron. Payments are funded in a way which put Bernie Madoff in jail. The major difference between Madoff and the United States government is that Madoff could not legally exact “investments” with the threat of violence.
If Madoff could legally have paid US dollar investments back in Zimbabwean dollars, he’d be a free man. In contrast, those ultimately in charge of Social Security deliberately and continuously debase SS payments to their own advantage. Unaccountably, they are free men.
Social Security would be a better system if it were a criminal enterprise.
Outstanding!
There has always been debate around what responsibility, if any, business enterprises have to support causes, the disenfranchised, the environment, or the community-at-large. Good corporate citizenship often gets confused with public relations efforts. Celink challenges corporate leadership to demonstrate their commitment to corporate citizenship by supporting those who have provided them with the freedom and safety to do business, and in doing so, to let them know their sacrifice has not been forgotten.
The whole thing:
Celink Gives Back to Veterans
Remember and be Thankful
It is Veteran’s Day. In Canada, today is Remembrance Day. Please observe a moment of silence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
In Flanders Fields
Canadian Army Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Always remember
Today is a day to honor the people who died on 9-11-2001. This video will help.
Today is a day to remember what you were doing when the planes hit the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. And how you felt on 9-12.
The President wants you to think of today as a “day of service.” Perform some service if you want to, but it isn’t about helping your government or your fellows. Remember that.
Update & bumped 7:34PM:
Here’s an example of the first bit of the slippery slope the President’s National Day of Service has set us on.
NEW YORK – Americans planned beach cleanups, packages for soldiers and save-the-tree fundraisers along with familiar remembrances in three cities to mark eight years since the attacks of Sept. 11, the first time the anniversary was named a national day of service.
“Instead of us simply remembering the horrible events and more importantly the heroes who lost their lives on 9/11, we are all going to turn into local heroes,” said Ted Tenenbaum, a Los Angeles repair shop owner who offered free handyman services Thursday and planned to do so again Friday.
Now, I don’t quite know if it would have been better or worse if Mr. Tenenbaum had not used the word “simply.” Maybe he just meant to say we are honoring the dead and their loved ones by these good acts. Maybe. On the face of it, of course, it would seem worse if he hadn’t said “simply.” Except that the meaning of the day is so very simple. President Bush described it well on November 10, 2001.
“…Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children.
“And the people of my country will remember those who have plotted against us. We are learning their names. We are coming to know their faces. There is no corner of the earth distant or dark enough to protect them. However long it takes, their hour of justice will come.
It is so very, very simple that Mr. Tenenbaum’s words made me sad. Remembering the heroes and victims of 911 is so completely simple that it need not, should not, involve a national commitment to heroic handyman services, much less celebration with save-the-tree fundraisers, or a beach cleanup.
Maybe next year they’ll clean up the beach near the Arizona.
Remember our fallen warriors
The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month – A Pittance of Time reprise
If we do not remember those who gave their lives to preserve our way of life, we are likely to lose that way of life by the worst possible means – the habit of thinking things had to be the way they are and not some other way. This lesson is not buried in some dusty tome; our grandparents know better. How could we forget?
Some of us understand that things are the way they are because some soldiers were – and are – so committed to liberty as to give their own lives in its defense. Sadly, the vast majority of us do not seem committed to remember this debt.
There is encouragement for this amnesia. We have many enemies, and putative friends, who desire that we forget past courage and honor. They desire that the remembrance of the justice of the causes of the past should slip away. They view even their own immediate ancestors – who rose to meet challenges of personal and cultural annihilation – as quaint throwbacks to an unenlightened age.
These enemies and self-declared friends are wrong. We must reject their idea that our enemies are simply people we haven’t yet had the intelligence to recognize as our moral equivalents.
Remember Ypres, Belleau Wood and Dieppe. Do not forget Iwo Jima or The Bulge or the Chosen Reservoir or Khe Sanh.
And Khe Sanh is a good example of how an agenda of defeat twists logic: At Khe Sanh 205 Americans were killed, while the North Vietnamese lost between ten and fifteen thousand. The Western press portrayed Khe San as a defeat. Like Tet. Do not forget Tet, where Walter Cronkite surrendered, on our behalf, following our resounding victory.
Our enemies had these “victories” because, while our soldiers were annihilating them, we lost heart. We should certainly remember that.
What we remember will affect what we think. The ritual denigration of the US military continues to affect Associated Press headlines 40 years after Tet, as observed by TOC.
If Veterans day is not an event that counters this defeatism, where will we find the will to win the war against Islamofascism? Respect for those who gave their lives on our behalf LAST WEEK is as necessary as respect for those who died in the Civil War and WWI and WWII and Korea and Viet Nam.
Without our continuing consciousness of their effort, those who have died and those who die tomorrow on behalf of our present freedom, are literally dust. You must not let that happen. They died for their homes and families and friends, and for a rule of law and traditions they cherished and a future they believed in; they died for you.
This truth was not a question until latter half of the 20th Century.
In 1918 Moina Belle Michael read a Canadian Army doctor’s poem, In Flanders Fields, written about the horrors he saw in the Ypres salient.
In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae, May 1915
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
This inspired Michael to write her own poem,We Shall Keep the Faith
We Shall Keep the Faith
by Moina Michael, November 1918Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
Moina Michael went on to campaign for the poppy as a national symbol of gratitude to those who had died in the war. She started the tradition of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.
I have never had the opportunity to make a donation for a poppy in the United States, but I have kept one I contributed a few dollars for in Canada, where the Royal Canadian Legion offers them near Remembrance Day – November 11th.
The Royal Canadian Legion has some links to music appropriate to remembrance. here’s one worth a listen on Memorial Day or Veterans Day: Terry Kelly comments on some anonymous individual who apparently couldn’t observe 2 minutes of silence on the 11th Hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – A Pittance of Time. LISTEN TO IT.
It seems appropriate on a day of gratitude to fallen warriors and failing memories.