Neddy's Palaver

The United States is a warrior nation. It has ever been thus. We cannot continue to exist as a nation without our warriors. War seems to be an embedded particle of all human DNA. We instinctively aim to protect what is our own and we seemingly yearn to project our power and beliefs to others. An ancient Chinese militarist, Sunzi (Sun Tzu), first wrote of the art of war six hundred years before the birth of Christ (600 BC). The technology of war has changed considerably since then, but war, which Sunzi described as evil, seems the same as always. “The Art of War” is a Chinese military treatise written twenty six centuries years ago by a Chinese General. It is composed of thirteen parts, each of which covers one aspect of warfare. Sunzi’s explanations have been long considered as the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time. “The Art of War” has had a great historical influence on military planning and has also been successfully applied to business and managerial strategies.”

Once again in our American history, we are at war. Help yourself understand what we are about by listening to “The Art of War” by Sunzi, 600 BC, recorded by Moira Fogarty at LibriVox.org:

• 1 Laying Plans - 2 Waging War
• 3 Attack By Stratagem - 4 Tactical Dispositions
• 5 Energy - 6 Weak Points and Strong
• 7 Maneuvering - 8 Variation in Tactics
• 9 The Army on the March - 10 Terrain
• 11 The Nine Situations
• 12 The Attack By Fire - 13 The Use of Spies

• The e-text book at Gutenberg
• Wikipedia - Sunzi or Sun Tzu
• Wikipedia - Lionel Giles, the English translator
• Wikipedia - The Art of War

To Give Thanks and Ask the Lord’s Blessing

Come Ye Thankful People Come

We Gather Together to ask the Lord’s Blessing.

The popular Thanksgiving hymn “We Gather Together” is our American legacy from Dutch settlers, who brought it to the New World in the early 1600s. The hymn stayed alive in the Dutch-American community until 1937, when the Christian Reformed Church in North America, originally a religious denomination of Dutch immigrants, made the then-controversial decision to permit hymn singing at church services. “We Gather Together” was chosen as the opening hymn in their first hymnal. I remember singing this song at public school, believe it or not. Those were the days before “giving thanks” at a public institution of learning was proclaimed to be “unconstitutional.”

Thanksgiving Day 1620-2005

Congressional Fast Day Proclamation, March 16, 1776

Thanksgiving Proclamation from a Wartime President

We Gather Together

The Podcast:
The Tonight Show Video: Boo Boo the Chicken Does Leno

The Book of “Extraordinary Chickens”
You will crack up as you watch Marian Morris arrive carrying Boo Boo and a towel to wipe Boo Boo’s chicken poop. You will laugh even harder as every time that Marian laughs, she waves around Boo Boo’s poo-poo towel in the face of the guest sitting next to her. As all are laughing so hard, none of them seems to notice, and since the Bird Flu has not yet arrived in Arkansas, I suppose it is of no consequence. However, I do wonder why everyone, including Nurse Marian, refers to Boo Boo as a “him”. Strange indeed!

DISCLAIMER: CDC warns “DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!”

Mouth-to-Beak Resuscitation of The Arkadelphia Chicken — It’s For the Birds! And it’s for you, if you cannot get enough of Boo Boo’s unbelievable adventure. It’s a kind of Lazarus story of resurrection from the dead.

Boo Boo is a $2.37 chicken from the farm store and she fell into a pond and drowned. Marian Morris is a retired nurse who wasted no time using her skills to save Boo Boo. She described the mouth-to-beak resuscitation, “Well, you open up this little beak and it’s got this little tongue and you don’t see an airway. So, I just blew hard. It’s the first time I’ve done CPR on a beak.”

Her sister-in-law, co-owner of Boo Boo, said, “I couldn’t believe it when she put her mouth right over that chicken’s beak and started blowing into it. His eyeballs just opened up and then she would stop and they’d close and she’d do it again and his eyeballs would pop open and when Jackie came home, I says, ‘You will not believe what your sister did.’”

Jackie, the other owner, decided that Boo Boo needed to be rushed to ICU because she was still having some troubles. On Jay Leno’s show, Marian Morris described it as an Arkansas ICU—a cardboard box with a hairdryer inside. As Becky, the wife of Jackie, explained: “So, my husband put it in the box and put it out here in the sunshine and I was out here reading my bible. I just got to the part where Lazarus was raised from dead and that chicken give a squawk and jumped out of that box and sat on the side and I called my husband I said, ‘You won’t believe this chicken has come alive.’” (Thanks Martha)

Boo Boo’s Official Web Site
Linked at “basil’s blog” and “Wizbang’s” Carnival of Trackbacks.

"If you give a pig a party,she’s going to ask for some balloons. When you give her the balloons, she’ll want to decorate the house. When she’s finished, she’ll put on her favorite dress. Then she’ll call all her friends –"

However - the good news is that she won’t blow your house down!

I am just back from a luncheon featuring the author of a best seller. She came costumed in the period of her book and gave an outstanding presentation. After her speaking, all of the books that she brought where sold in a few moments and it appeared that she was about to bring in more from the trunk of her car. This was the first book she had ever written and everyone was curious as to how she managed, not only to find a publisher, but to get to the top of the best seller list and included in book club offerings. Probably the title of her book had a lot to do with it: Sex with Kings .

Today at Jack Yoest there is a great blog post giving good advice: “10 Action Steps to Sell Your Book”.

This Season’s People: A Book of Spiritual Teachings by Stephen Gaskin.

The words of Jesus from the King James Bible are: “Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.” Matthew 18:21,22.

The image, lesson, was originally uploaded by _william. It is posted here from Neddy’s favorites.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a war on Christmas. It’s the secularization of America’s favorite holiday and the ever-stronger push toward a neutered ‘holiday’ season so that non-Christians won’t be even the slightest bit offended.

“That is certainly not what the founders intended when they wrote, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’

“John Gibson, a popular anchor for the Fox News Channel, … reveals that the situation is worse than you can imagine. For instance:

“• In Illinois, state government workers were forbidden from saying the words “Merry Christmas” while at work
• In Rhode Island, local officials banned Christians from participating in a public project to decorate the lawn of City Hall
• A New Jersey school banned even instrumental versions of traditional Christmas carols
• Arizona school officials ruled it unconstitutional for a student to make any reference to the religious history of Christmas in a class project

“John Gibson is the host of The Big Story on Fox News Channel, which airs daily at 5:00 p.m. and is currently the sixth highest rated show in all of cable news. Before joining Fox News Channel, he was an anchor and reporter for MSNBC, CNBC, and NBC News.”

John Gibson has been unable to get television shows to interview him about his new book. These are the reviews that Amazon has chosen for “Spotlight Reviews”:

Offensive and Unreadable I sat down with this book and was unable to finish it. The notion that anyone interested in enforcing the idea of the separation of church and state is therefore “anti-Christmas” is ludicrous and patently offensive. Gibson is tacitly approving cultural McCarthyism in this book. If you are liberal and hate America so much that you see the wisdom behind not forcing non-Christian children to participate in the Passion Play, then according to this book you are anti-Christmas and therefore part of the problem.

The mysterious ethos of Americans’ work being almost an end unto itself probably comes from the founding of the ancient colony under British rule. The early adventurers and pioneers had to be both builders and warriors or they could not have survived. From the beginning there were wars and threats of attacks from the natives, Spain and France. The first construction of the immigrants to the strange new land were forts of protection. When the colonists mostly vanquished the enemies of New Britain, they began another war, a revolt, against their motherland. As they formed their new nation, they continued the co-mingled tasks of building and war making. Without war, there would be no United States of America.

War is repugnant to the people of the United States; yet it is war that has made their nation and it is through their power to wage war that they dominate the world. Americans are proficient at war in the same way that they are proficient at work. It is a task, sometimes a duty. … Left to themselves, Americans build, cultivate, bridge, dam, canalize, invent, teach, manufacture, think, write, lock themselves in struggle with the eternal challenges that man has chosen to confront, and with an intensity not known elsewhere on the globe. Bidden to make war their work, American shoulder the burden with intimidating purpose. There is, as I have said, an American mystery, the nature of which I only begin to perceive. If I were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos – masculine, pervasive, unrelenting – of work as an end in itself. War is a form of work, and America makes war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way. I do not love war: but I love America. ~~John Keegan, author of “Fields of Battle : The Wars for North America“

Tip of the Bonnet to Lexington Green at Chicago Boyz. Tracked at Mudville Gazette’s Open Post.

It is interesting to compare the current president, George W. Bush, with a president of two hundred years ago. Both came to the same decisions about fighting terror. Here is the book’s editorial from Amazon:

Two centuries ago, the ostensibly pacifist president Thomas Jefferson launched America’s first war on foreign soil—a war against terror. The enemy was Muslim; the war was waged unconventionally, with commandos, native troops, encrypted intelligence, and foreign bases under short-term alliances. For nearly two hundred years, Barbary pirates had haunted the Mediterranean, enslaving infidels and extorting millions of dollars from European countries in a holy war against Christendom. Newly independent, American ships became a target of piracy. Instead of paying tribute, after his inauguration Jefferson chose to fight. … Jefferson ordered the new U.S. Navy to Tripoli in 1801, starting the Barbary War that ended in 1805. … William Eaton’s bold frontal assault on Derna with a fractious army of Arabs, disaffected Tripolitans, European mercenaries, and eight U.S. Marines punctuated the American victory as the marines ran up the Stars and Stripes over the city—the first flag-raising on hostile shores by U.S. troops.