Boom !

If we are to make a lasting impact on how female Marines see themselves and are perceived by others, we must demand more from them right from the start.

High standards for performance should never be gender-normed and, barring physiological differences, concrete evidence shows that women can perform to the same standards as their counterparts if it is demanded of them.
...
The key to success was establishing the firm expectation that change was both possible and necessary to improve the credibility of our female recruits- come-new-Marines. Once the drill instructors, coaches, and primary marksmanship instructors began to see success, the movement became contagious. For the first time in history, female recruits are competitive with their male counterparts on the rifle range, proving it is not an insult to “shoot like a girl”.

However, for lasting improvement across all of the testable categories to be realized, the Institution must be willing to critically examine the environment in which Marines are made and implement radical changes.
...
High standards should be demanded of all recruits and Marines in order to eliminate performance and conduct double standards and drive the Marine Corps towards a true meritocracy. The continued passive acceptance of diminished standards for females simply because we assume they are less capable of achieving high standards is contrary to our very ethos and is corrosive to our character as an elite fighting force.   

If you only read one news article today, read this.
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STORY SOUNDTRACK ADDED:

"I'm just a gurl... in the world.
That's all that you'll let me be!"
~ No Doubt.

Seriously?

“I’d never heard about the Vidal/Buckley debates before seeing the documentary,” Mr. Sorkin said by email.

I though Sorkin was supposed to be an intelligent, well-versed individual. By Hollywood standards, anyway. How could you understand Gore Vidal -- his essays and his career -- without knowing of the legendary showdown w/Wm. F. Buckley Jr. ?

I'd start with Palimpsest .
(if, at this late date, I was just starting to read up on Vidal... fwiw.)

Buckley and Vidal “had 15 minutes a night, uninterrupted. Imagine that today. Imagine having two witty, literate heavy thinkers having a go at each other for 15 minutes without someone in the headset saying, ‘Quick, talk about Monica Lewinsky’s underwear.’ ”
...
Buckley and Vidal “were independent thinkers, and independent thinkers aren’t given a lot of time on television today.”

How Do You Like Me Now?

Now that I'm on my way?
Do you still think I'm crazy
Standin here today?
~Toby Keith

Richard Cohen asks an honest question about Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and again, comes up empty.

To me, Scott Walker is the candidate for white wealth, fearful and protected from competition. He wants to assure the white Wisconsinites that (booga, booga!) no immigrants nor colored people will change their way of life here...

The sons can still inherit the fathers' businesses -- protected from honest regulation or honest competition;
the fathers can still shield their assets, sucking up the government programs but refusing to avoid the loopholds that let them shield their dollars from necessary taxes;
and if you're white, it's a birthright for success, whether or not the subsequent generations can compete today, on the ground.

You see a lot of that white fear up here -- from professors, from non-workers, from the old and the young, who have not been out of state much, nevermind untethered in the world.

I don't fear Scott Walker -- I lived through GWB as president, and we couldn't do much worse than that...

But, God knows, I do fear the ignorance in the American electorate up here. Hopefully, the rest of the nation will understand the need to step up and protect this fearful white-wealth demographic from itself...

Ignorance knows no borders, afterall.

The more Scott Walker campaigns, the more he proves he is not intellectually fit for the office he’s seeking. He asserts innocent ignorance on matters he should by now know something about — a way of masking his apparent bigotry. I have another question for him. Never mind when he decided to become a heterosexual, when did he decide to be such a dolt?

"All the ... Small Things..."

True Care, Truth Brings...

Say it ain't so,
I will not go,
Turn the lights off,
Carry me home.

(On and on and on, on and on and on... )*

Judges of the International Criminal Court presented a new challenge to Israel on Thursday, ordering the court’s chief prosecutor to review her decision not to investigate a deadly Israeli commando raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla of aid ships five years ago. Israel denounced the order.

In a statement posted on the court’s website, the judges said the prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, had committed “material errors” in her assessment of whether a criminal inquiry was warranted into the raid on the flotilla, which left eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent dead on the lead vessel, the Mavi Marmara.

The judges requested that Ms. Bensouda “reconsider her decision not to initiate an investigation,” and do so “as soon as possible.”

Ms. Bensouda announced in November that while Israeli military forces might have committed war crimes by forcefully intercepting the ships in the flotilla, which were carrying construction materials and relief supplies, the consequences were insufficiently grave to warrant a criminal inquiry.

No Justice = No Peace.

The raid incited widespread criticism of Israel, severely damaged its relations with Turkey and focused attention on the naval blockade the Israelis have enforced on the Gaza Strip, the isolated Palestinian territory that has been a frequent flash point for the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

#All Life Matters.
-----------------
* Blink 182.

"Aw, But Don't You Believe Them..." *

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
~ John Maynard Keynes.

----------------------
*

Standing in line marking time--
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old ladies' eyes
Just for fun he says "Get a job"

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
Aw, but don't you believe them...
~ Bruce Hornsby and the Range.

You Can Fool Some People, Sometimes...

But You Can't Fool All the People All the Time...

The shooting of the youth, Muhammad Hani al-Kasba, 17, has received unusual attention because Israeli news media outlets have reported that the officer who shot Mr. Kasba, Col. Yisrael Shomer, leads a brigade that oversees a central district in the West Bank.

“It sends a message to all other soldiers in the region: ‘This is how one should behave,’ ” said Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem.

The Israeli news media reported that Colonel Shomer had been questioned on Sunday.

Video from a security camera provided by Mr. Kasba’s family to B’Tselem shows the teenager hurling a rock at a vehicle’s window and then running away. Three soldiers then leave the vehicle, with two of them pursuing Mr. Kasba and the third soldier standing near the vehicle. Seconds later, they return to the vehicle and drive away.

The video, along with accounts by Palestinian witnesses and photographs of Mr. Kasba’s body that were provided to B’Tselem, indicate that he was not risking the soldiers’ lives when he was shot and killed, Ms. Michaeli said. In a video distributed on social media networks that purports to show Mr. Kasba after he was shot, he is seen lying on the ground with blood pooling around his face, neck and upper shoulders, as people yell for medical help.

Ms. Michaeli said that he had been shot twice in the upper back and once on the side of his face, which she said indicated that he had been running away when he was shot. The witnesses’ statements and the video also suggested, she said, that the soldiers left Mr. Kasba without offering any medical treatment. He was taken to a hospital in the nearby city of Ramallah, where he was pronounced dead.

So now we see the light (What you gonna do?),
We gonna stand up for our rights! (Yeah, yeah, yeah!)

So you better:
Get up, stand up! (In the morning! Git it up!)
Stand up for your rights! (Stand up for our rights!)
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight! (Don't give it up, don't give it up!)
Get up, stand up! (Get up, stand up!)
Stand up for your rights! (Get up, stand up!)
Get up, stand up! ( ... )
Don't give up the fight! (Get up, stand up!)
Get up, stand up! ( ... )
Stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight! [fadeout]

The episode has loomed large since the Palestinians joined the International Criminal Court.

The court will have to decide whether Israel can fairly investigate itself before it opens its own criminal investigation into Israel’s actions during the war in Gaza last summer, as well as investigating suspected violations in the West Bank, as the Palestinians have requested.
...
Ms. Michaeli, the rights group’s spokeswoman, cast doubt on the ability of the military to impartially investigate the shooting of Mr. Kasba. She said it appeared that investigators had not yet interviewed any witnesses, nor had they returned to the scene or requested an autopsy. She said B’Tselem had provided the military with the video footage of the episode.

She said some of the problems with military investigations were the result of incompetence, but that others reflected the reality of life in the West Bank, where Palestinians have been hostile, and sometimes violent, with military investigators, who are perceived as part of an occupying army.

“It raises great concern as to whether the following criminal investigation can actually lead to meaningful justice and accountability,” she said.

B’Tselem and other human rights groups have noted that Israeli military investigations into accusations of crimes committed against Palestinians in the West Bank rarely lead to prosecutions.

“When you look at the broader picture, we find that the system functions — this is terrible to say — the system works as a whitewash mechanism," Ms. Michaeli said.

Straightening the Curves... Flattening the Hills...*

Say what you like about them good ol' boys,
Bo and Luke Duke--
they were drivers.
-----------
* Even with the General Lee going aloft at the end of Waylon's song, I missed it as a kid, a non-driver.

Ditto with reading and riding the lanes efficiently to indeed "straighten the curve"...

Happy trails.

News to Know...

In case you are experiencing severe abdominal pain...

For more than 100 years, the standard treatment for appendicitis has been surgery. Now a large Finnish study provides the best evidence to date that most patients can be treated with antibiotics alone.

The published Tuesday in JAMA, involved 530 patients aged 18 to 60 who agreed to have their treatment — antibiotics or surgery — decided at random.

Three out of four who took antibiotics recovered easily, the researchers found. And none who had surgery after taking antibiotics were worse off for having waited.

“The time has come to consider abandoning routine appendectomy for patients with uncomplicated appendicitis, ” Dr. Edward H. Livingston, a surgeon and editor at the journal, who was not involved with the study, wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.

"It's My Job"

In the middle of late last night I was sittin' on a curb
I didn't know what about but I was feeling quite disturbed
A street sweeper came whistlin' by
He was bouncin' every step
It seemed strange how good he felt
So I asked him while he swept

He said "It's my job to be cleaning up this mess
And that's enough reason to go for me
It's my job to be better than the rest
And that makes the day for me"

Got an uncle who owns a bank he's a self made millionaire
He never had anyone to love never had no one to care
He always to seemed kind of sad to me
So I asked him why that was
And he told me it's because in my contract there's a clause

That says "It's my job to worried half to death
And that's the thing people respect in me
It's a job but without it I'd be less
Than what I expect from me"

I've been lazy most all of my life
Writing songs and sleeping late
Any manual labor I've done purely by mistake
If street sweepers can smile then
I've got no right to feel upset
But sometimes I still forget

Till the lights go on and the stage is set
And the song hits home and you feel that sweat

It's my job to be different than the rest
and that's enough reason to go for me
It's my job to be better than the best
and that's a tough break for me
It's my job to be cleaning up this mess
and that's enough reason to go for me
It's my job to be better than the best
and that makes the day for me...
~ Jimmy Buffett.

God is With Us Always. Open your eyes and see Life.

Wednesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Lectionary: 379

Reading 1 Gn 21:5, 8-20a

Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.
Isaac grew, and on the day of the child’s weaning
Abraham held a great feast.

Sarah noticed the son whom Hagar the Egyptian
had borne to Abraham
playing with her son Isaac;
so she demanded of Abraham:
“Drive out that slave and her son!
No son of that slave is going to share the inheritance
with my son Isaac!”
Abraham was greatly distressed,
especially on account of his son Ishmael.
But God said to Abraham: “Do not be distressed about the boy
or about your slave woman.
Heed the demands of Sarah, no matter what she is asking of you;
for it is through Isaac that descendants shall bear your name.
As for the son of the slave woman,
I will make a great nation of him also,
since he too is your offspring.”

Early the next morning Abraham got some bread and a skin of water
and gave them to Hagar.
Then, placing the child on her back, he sent her away.
As she roamed aimlessly in the wilderness of Beer-sheba,
the water in the skin was used up.
So she put the child down under a shrub,
and then went and sat down opposite him, about a bowshot away;
for she said to herself, “Let me not watch to see the child die.”
As she sat opposite Ishmael, he began to cry.
God heard the boy’s cry,
and God’s messenger called to Hagar from heaven:
“What is the matter, Hagar?
Don’t be afraid; God has heard the boy’s cry in this plight of his.
Arise, lift up the boy and hold him by the hand;
for I will make of him a great nation.”
Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water.
She went and filled the skin with water, and then let the boy drink.

God was with the boy as he grew up.

-----------------------------------

Gospel Mt 8:28-34

When Jesus came to the territory of the Gadarenes,
two demoniacs who were coming from the tombs met him.
They were so savage that no one could travel by that road.
They cried out, “What have you to do with us, Son of God?
Have you come here to torment us before the appointed time?”
Some distance away a herd of many swine was feeding.
The demons pleaded with him,
“If you drive us out, send us into the herd of swine.”
And he said to them, “Go then!”
They came out and entered the swine,
and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea
where they drowned.
The swineherds ran away,
and when they came to the town they reported everything,
including what had happened to the demoniacs.
Thereupon the whole town came out to meet Jesus,
and when they saw him they begged him to leave their district.