Hope Mr G. only mean it for laughs! The British military tradition! Churchill said it:"rum, sodomy and the lash!" About that Gurkha knife, check Darkie's handiwork:
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Originally posted by RUR:
Hope Mr G. only mean it for laughs! The British military tradition! Churchill said it:"rum, sodomy and the lash

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Yeah! You're right! Nothing's worth fighting for, and war never accomplished anything good. Except for the occasional democratization, preservation of liberty, forced abolition of slavery, national self-determination, and ending of genocide. Other than that stuff, war never accomplished anything but bloodshed and destruction. Now I remember why I quit teaching; I was tired of students not paying any attention or giving a rat's ass.

Whatever and ever, amen.

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"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code, does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." --Major Napier, Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE

"I was tired of students not paying any attention or giving a rat's ass."
Did you tried respect?

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Originally posted by RUR:
"I was tired of students not paying any attention or giving a rat's ass."
Did you tried respect?

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I tried the switch, the rubber hose, paddles... electric shock... phone book to the head... giving F-minuses... asking them who was wasting their money on their tuition... DAMN! I forgot to try respect!

Actually, I was required to try respect, even though at my college we only got respect if we did well (thereby encouraging people who wanted respect to do well, and encouraging other people not to waste anyone's time). But the trouble is that in most of the U.S., and pay attention here, cause I'm actually going to criticize my own country, most young adults feel ENTITLED to respect. Not just the bare-bones level of respect that all humans are entitled to as members of society (being treated politely, etc.), but they feel entitled to the level of respect due a Nobel laureate. And treating most of those people as Nobel laureates was like LIVING science fiction. But hey, at least I quit when I realized it wasn't for me, rather than get old and bitter and take out my antagonisms on the students.

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"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code, does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." --Major Napier, Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE

It's beautiful, and deserves to be remembered.

I'm an American, and so I am privileged to be part of a warrior citizen tradition. I bear arms every day.

Yes, everything I do is quite legal. I filled out all the paperwork, which in Florida is blessedly brief.

This speech is as beautiful an expression of the warrior ethic as I have ever heard outside of Sun Tzu and Musashi.

I should hope that anyone spending time on a site devoted to Gibson, who helped decide what the future would be before it arrived, won't be obtuse enough to claim that this speech never happened.

It doesn't matter if it happened.

BTW, shouldn't this be in "talking to the blog"?

That was a beautiful speech, good lord! I'm no hawk, but that was the finest example of the best of the military tradition I've ever seen.

Too bad the American president can't speak so eloquently. Or righteously.

While I certainly think the Hussein regime deserves death for what they've done in Iraq, I still don't trust GWB's motives. Or his methods.

May Allah protect the allied troops and the innocent Iraqi civilians.

Here's to the next election and a regime change of our own.

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The British military tradition! Churchill said it:"rum, sodomy and the lash!"

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The actual quote is: "Sir, the traditions of the Royal Navy are sodomy, rum, and the lash!".

Winston Churchill (who along with Oscar Wilde I deeply admire) is quoted to have said this when the Royal Navy initially refused to support the Dieppe Raid in 1942.