The America I grew up in is disappearing.

Our independence is being sold for debt and trade deficits.

Our sternly held self-reliance is negotiated for big government
support for insurance, jobs, banking and a false sense of national security.

We have come to believe that national strength is empire.
And, that our history is damnation, rather that heroic.

Homosexual marriage and late-term abortion are the new civil rights.

Politicians have gone from war-proven patriots to rock stars.

I know that part of it is my age. Seniors for years have moaned the loss
of culture and religious canons. Family and cultural pride is the new
racism…Christianity…bigotry.

Globalization is the new patriotism…and presidential campaigns
are conducted in Germany.

Y’all embrace the new culture…the New World Order.
I’ll just fade away…clinging to my faith and my guns.
So while I’m fading…don’t make the mistake of coming for
what I’ve earned, because I’d rather go out in a blaze of glory,
than a whimper of submission.

I grew up in the woods with my boxer dog, a sharp knife
and a belief that individuals were more important than
governments…and I’ll go out the same way.

Not a collective participant…just a man. Xin Loi.

I guess the Chinese have out lasted us. And, maybe that’s the way
it was supposed to be…in this brave, new, negotiated world.

I have a whole lot to say about this, but I need to go to bed. You guys carry on. I'll pick up the pieces in the morning, if any of them get dropped.

In the meantime, Indianhead, my friend, be well.

Who in the world is talking about late term abortion?
No one has mentioned that in at least a decade.
red herring anyone?

Suicide is a permanent solution to what in fact might just be temporary problems ....

Maya, IH ....

Illusions ....

Part the veils ....

I've got to be somewhere near as old as you are, IH ....

I sit and watch and wait, myself ....

There's more yet to come ...

The show s free ...

I've got a good seat ....

Why leave now is my thought ....

And I live pretty much as I did in the 1950's ....

So I'm not a part of a NEW WORLD ORDER, myself ....

And so ...

Being a rebel is being something that precludes being other things ....

Being simply a human being precludes nothing at all ...

Changes in latitude ...

Changes in attitude ...

No man is an island IH. Even a near hermit like I've become knows that. You with a wife and a community that needs you knows it better than I. No matter how self-reliant you are you need others too, and that is what life is about. It's not about how much power, skill, or money we have, or even how proud we are. You know better than I IH it's about that we love and how well we love and that has never and will never change.

what did dear James Byrd Jr. have?

what did they take away from him?

Just like they took it away from Mathew Shepard and Hardy Jackson and all the others.

So, you're not going to pay taxes?



Healthy attitude I would say.....and yes, at times, there is value in sitting back and watching the show from the sidelines....I shake my head, give a chuckle and get on with things I have immediate control over and that give me some respite from the "nonsense". It's all about how we perceive control and power in our lives.




Right on, TRoU!

just remember (points given to decode this)

God grant me the serenity to ....(said to have been written by someone)...
change...

accept..

know the man who took credit for writing that appears to have been a plagarist
So God grant us the knowledge to know that guy lied it appears.

Sometimes

ACCEPTANCE is what's needed to know change is what was needed after all.

I don't like the smell of the New World Odor either.

I believe that individuals are more important than governments, but I also believe that individuals are part of communities, and it is the individual's duty to be a good member of that community.

Indeed, a self-made man is like a self-hatched chicken.

I too am a near hermit, and I like it quite well, actually ...

You are never less alone than when alone ...

And so ...

The biggest part of the art is living that 24/7, seamlessly ....

I am in total agreement with IH on this one...

I have a huge pile of canned goods stashed in a closet.
I have pallets of water in the garage.
I have ammo and guns.

I can hold out for a while if things get dicey.
But when and if I go down I will be standing and shooting.

I guess you can take the boy outta Manvel but you can't take the Manvel outta the boy!

some resistance force

you do gotta laugh

it's always the liberal peace kooks that save the day

not the macho ones...

(they have a good scene in the new batman that deals with blowhards/cowards/morality on a ferry

it's like I said in a post months ago

If everyone dropped their gun, nobody would have anyone to pull the trigger
Had 9-11 been announced in advance and warned, nobody would have much cared after the fact
The panic is in being under the table cowering
the relief comes when "it" happens knowing it's coming, the fear is not knowing it's coming

Tune in next for
( why da bushie knew it was coming and didn't do squat about it, if you believe Bushie didn't actually do it in the first place
(or how I knew the bomb was there, but read to kids as an alibi)

I haven't read this yet, but I put it where I can look at the cover frequently as a morale boost. IT WORKS!

I'll tell you what Graham...
If and when they come for you, I'll just look the other way...
Since you would would want me to drop my gun I would have no other choice.

I don't have any guns, myself ...

Don't need them ...

I got me ...

And that is enough ...

And so ...

Are we supposed to own guns in America and be scared of the boogie man coming for us in the night?

Is that now George W. Bush's latest DIRECTIVE to the American people?

Thank GOD that George W. Bush never went to Viet Nam ....

COWARDS like him get people killed ...

Thank GOD he spent that war over here hiding behind the skirts of his mother ....

I wonder how many American lives that decision of his to admit to his cowardice saved?

More than one, I bet ...

And if Bush wasn't a coward, he would be leading our troops into battle as George Washington actually did, instead of hiding in his office in the Washington White House, cowering under his desk with the lame excuse that he is looking around under there for WMD's ....

But then, with an incompetent like George W. Bush actually out in the field giving orders, that would be the recipe for a mass slaughter ...

Of our troops ....

And so ...

30 years ago, on a NY Subway platform, all alone at the far back end waiting the train
back when NYC was fun, not generic

some kid (by the way- white) saunters over looking to mug me
Asked for some money

I said, what? not really hearing him being that it was noisy down there
he said money
I said, cupping my ear, what?

guess he forgot to say please as I didn't hear it
he finally shrugged his shoulders and went elsewhere I guess as the train pulled in

Bernie Goetz need not apply
(meaning guns not needed)

if the end of the world happens, whats a gun doing to do? Give you another day before two people with guns outlast you with one gun?

Or you kill someone you think will kill you, only to find out you killed the last doctor alive who could save you after being wounded

When people here make jokes about not saving someone because their political point of view is not the same, that what my dentist said to me after 9-11, when the anthraxx and smallpoxx talk was around, he told me, he got a pill that he will swallow the day smallpoxx starts...he just don't want to be here and see what will happen should that occur.

If you pick and choose, agian, that person who invades your space looking for a spoonful of spam you had canned away along time ago, and you shoot that guy, might just have been the person to save the world. Betcha Jesus wouldn't do that, neither would Dr. King

Just saying things like that means, the macho people with guns, are actually just as scaredy cat as a 5 year old child wanting mommy to save them. Mommy never was a gun, now was she? And more scared than the peacenik's who go on about peace love and happiness...after all, NYers who were there on 9-11 do not want war...just those elsewhere scared that what happened in NY won't stay in NY but come to them...

Wonder if a NY'er re-wrote that old Hank Jr. song "A country boy can survive" and change the line about a NY'er being mugged and killed,and the country boy saying what he would do to that fiend,
to a Texan being taken, chained, put on the back of a white dude's pickup and driven round time as limb from limb is dismembered off of him

A NYer can survive...and look how many NYers have now infiltrated and occupied foreign land...North Carolina and Florida to name two...guns not needed.



other odd thing indianhead, in your making it regional or whatever- Hillary is a NYer(she says)...life is strange.
Sometimes this board is stranger.

but then Billy Joel played Shea Stadium last night for the last concert there ever, and Paul McCartney closed the show
with Billy just sitting on the piano singing "Let it Be"... sometimes All you need is love

embrace Obama, and the love you get is the love you can share (or something like that)

And outside of some kind of leather-coated REPUBLICAN GESTAPO, or BUSHIAN storm troopers, who exactly is it that is supposed to be coming for us over here?

That's the trouble with living out in the country as I do ...

You are so like out of the loop, it isn't funny ....

Are the RUSSIANS going to invade us again?

Or the British?

The last time those SOB's were over here, they burned down the White House ....

Are they coming back to do it again?

OH, LAMENTATIONS!

THE WORLD IS ENDING!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGH!

And so ...

this gets it 100%
You know, driving cross country, I realized how biggggg this country is
There are not enough people in the world that could take over this country
and I for one do not see how Bush could impliment martial law either on the entire country
He could never secure the entire thing...
They could create KAOS, but they could not control what would happen next...they could never contain...how many blackwater mercanaries would they need?

and indianhead, NYers may not be the gun people, however, we got street smarts you haven't even begun to know...
After all, one Son of Sam created more havoc and panic 30 years ago in a limited range for a longer period of time, then 19 bumbling pilots (David B. of course was a NY'er).

And for the record ...

MOST of NY is not city ...

Just a little spot down on the bottom end is, is all ...

Up here where I am is country ...

We have no dirty subways up here ....

No subway muggers ...

Although down in Albany, there are a multitude of drug dealers and a multitude of kids with guns who will kill you for nothing ...

But that is Albany ...

I think there is a lot of crime in Albany because all the politicians are there, and people like to emulate their betters in society ...

We have no Son of Sam up here, either ...

He was a product of too much concrete and not enough sun, is my thought ....

And so ...

no offense meant to the rest of the BIGGGG state of New York, that takes hours to drive north to south, and more hours than that to drive from NYC to say Buffalo...with Mountains and skiing, and Great lakes, Niagra Falls, and everything else wonderful in between

I live in a part of NJ now (northwest) that nobody ever heard of, that is so unlike the stereotype of NJ (no smokestacks, no exit off the turnpike, nowhere near the shore)...
a town that would be your normal average town, like say Columbine was the day before that happened. A town you
would get that reaction "It never happens here"

although the other day in Brooklyn not four blocks from where my wife lived years ago, there was a double murder, also in a place neighbors said acocrding to the newpaper, "This never happens here"

Last thing I want to do is start a location war...my comments were/are just reflecting off of indianheads.
Indianhead, this is 2008, we are one, no matter how much you try to run away from it.

And by the way, I know there are plenty of people with views not those of his in his state too, and the # of votes Obama is going to get from the states down south will surprise alot of people when the final tally is revealed.
And NO they will not just be black people's votes. (though last I heard, black people are just people too.)

Oh, there was no particular offense taken, graham ....

I just wanted to piggy-back a thought onto your post that while NYC is a BIGGGGG PLACE with a lot of people in it ....

There is in fact much more to NYS than just a big city ....

So you are not in any way starting any kind of location war with me ...

No ....

My comment was spontaneous, and was in large part motivated by this thought that is PERVASIVE in America today that we MUST live in continual fear here in the USA ...

I got to wondering who on earth I need to be afraid of up here where I am that I would need any kind of gun ...

If I was in NYC, the situation might be different ....

So I was establishing CONTEXT ...

Not getting any kind of turf war going with you ...

And so ...

"Soldier in famous photo never defeated 'demons'"

By ALLEN G. BREED and KEVIN MAURER, Associated Press Writers

20 JULY 2008

PINEHURST, N.C. - Officers had been to the white ranch house at 560 W. Longleaf many times before over the past year to respond to a "barricade situation."

Each had ended uneventfully, with Joseph Dwyer coming out or telling police in a calm voice through the window that he was OK.

But this time was different.

The Iraq War veteran had called a taxi service to take him to the emergency room.

But when the driver arrived, Dwyer shouted that he was too weak to get up and open the door.

The officers asked Dwyer for permission to kick it in.

"Go ahead!" he yelled.

They found Dwyer lying on his back, his clothes soiled with urine and feces.

Scattered on the floor around him were dozens of spent cans of Dust-Off, a refrigerant-based aerosol normally used to clean electrical equipment.

Dwyer told police Lt. Mike Wilson he'd been "huffing" the aerosol.

"Help me, please!" the former Army medic begged Wilson.

"I'm dying."

"Help me."

"I can't breathe."

Unable to stand or even sit up, Dwyer was hoisted onto a stretcher.

As paramedics prepared to load him into an ambulance, an officer noticed Dwyer's eyes had glassed over and were fixed.

A half hour later, he was dead.

When Dionne Knapp learned of her friend's June 28 death, her first reaction was to be angry at Dwyer.

How could he leave his wife and daughter like this?

Didn't he know he had friends who cared about him, who wanted to help?

But as time passed, Knapp's anger turned toward the Army.

A photograph taken in the first days of the war had made the medic from New York's Long Island a symbol of the United States' good intentions in the Middle East.

When he returned home, he was hailed as a hero.

But for most of the past five years, the 31-year-old soldier had writhed in a private hell, shooting at imaginary enemies and dodging nonexistent roadside bombs, sleeping in a closet bunker and trying desperately to huff away the "demons" in his head.

When his personal problems became public, efforts were made to help him, but nothing seemed to work.

This broken, frightened man had once been the embodiment of American might and compassion.

If the military couldn't save him, Knapp thought, what hope was there for the thousands suffering in anonymity?
___

Like many, Dwyer joined the military in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

His father and three brothers are all cops.

One brother, who worked in Lower Manhattan, happened to miss his train that morning and so hadn't been there when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

Joseph, the second-youngest of six, decided that he wanted to get the people who'd "knocked my towers down."

And he wanted to be a medic.

(Dwyer's first real job was as a transporter for a hospital in the golf resort town of Pinehurst, where his parents had moved after retirement.)

In 2002, Dwyer was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas.

The jokester immediately fell in with three colleagues — Angela Minor, Sgt. Jose Salazar, and Knapp.

They spent so much time together after work that comrades referred to them as "The Four Musketeers."

Knapp had two young children and was going through a messy divorce.

Dwyer stepped in as a surrogate dad, showing up in uniform at her son Justin's kindergarten and coming by the house to assemble toys that Knapp couldn't figure out.

When it became clear that the U.S. would invade Iraq, Knapp became distraught, confiding to Dwyer that she would rather disobey her deployment orders than leave her kids.

Dwyer asked to go in her place.

When she protested, he insisted:

"Trust me, this is what I want to do."

"I want to go."

After a week of nagging, his superiors relented.

Dwyer assured his parents, Maureen and Patrick — and his new wife, Matina, whom he'd married in August 2002 — that he was being sent to Kuwait and would likely stay in the rear, far from the action.

But it wasn't true.

Unbeknownst to his family, Dwyer had been attached to the 3rd Infantry's 7th Cavalry Regiment.

He was at "the tip of the tip of the spear," in one officer's phrase.

During the push into Baghdad, Dwyer's unit came under heavy fire.

An airstrike called in to suppress ambush fire rocked the convoy.

As the sun rose along the Euphrates River on March 25, 2003, Army Times photographer Warren Zinn watched as a man ran toward the soldiers carrying a white flag and his injured 4-year-old son.

Zinn clicked away as Dwyer darted out to meet the man, then returned, cradling the boy in his arms.

The photo — of a half-naked boy, a kaffiyeh scarf tied around his shrapnel-injured leg and his mouth set in a grimace of pain, and of a bespectacled Dwyer dressed in full battle gear, his M-16 rifle dangling by his side — appeared on front pages and magazine covers around the world.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to interview the soldier in "the photo."

Dwyer was given a "Hometown Hero" award by child-safety advocate John Walsh; the Army awarded him the Combat Medical Badge for service under enemy fire.

The attention embarrassed him.

"Really, I was just one of a group of guys," he told a military publication.

"I wasn't standing out more than anyone else."
___

Returning to the U.S. in June 2003, after 91 days in Iraq, Dwyer seemed a shell to friends.

When he deployed, he was pudgy at 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds.

Now he weighed around 165, and the other Musketeers immediately thought of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dwyer attributed his skeletal appearance to long days and a diet of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat).

He showed signs of his jolly old self, so his friends accepted his explanation.

But they soon noticed changes that were more than cosmetic.

At restaurants, Dwyer insisted on sitting with his back to the wall so no one could sneak up on him.

He turned down invitations to the movies, saying the theaters were too crowded.

He said the desert landscape around El Paso, and the dark-skinned Hispanic population, reminded him of Iraq.

Dwyer, raised Roman Catholic but never particularly religious before, now would spend lunchtime by himself, poring over his Bible.

When people would teasingly call him "war hero" and ask him to tell about his experiences, or about the famous photo, he would steer the conversation toward the others he'd served with.

But Dwyer once confided that another image, also involving a child, disturbed him.

He was standing next to a soldier during a firefight when a boy rode up on a bicycle and stopped beside a weapon lying in the dirt.

Under his breath, the soldier beside Dwyer whispered, "Don't pick it up, kid."

"Don't pick it up."

The boy reached for the weapon and was blasted off his bike.

In late 2004, Dwyer sent e-mails to Zinn, wondering if the photographer had "heard anything else about the kid" from the photo, and claiming he was "doing fine out here in Fort Bliss, Texas."

But Dwyer wasn't doing fine.

Earlier that year, he'd been prescribed antidepressants and referred for counseling by a doctor.

Still, his behavior went from merely odd to dangerous.

One day, he swerved to avoid what he thought was a roadside bomb and crashed into a convenience store sign.

He began answering his apartment door with a pistol in his hand and would call friends from his car in the middle of the night, babbling and disoriented from sniffing inhalants.

Matina told friends that he was seeing imaginary Iraqis all around him.

Despite all this, the Army had not taken his weapons.

In the summer of 2005, he was removed to the barracks for 72 hours after trashing the apartment looking for an enemy infiltrator.

He was admitted to Bliss' William Beaumont Army Medical Center for treatment of his inhalant addiction.

But things continued to worsen.

That October, the Musketeers decided it was time for an "intervention."

Minor, who had moved to New York, overdrew her bank account and flew down.

She, Knapp and Salazar went to the apartment and pleaded with Dwyer to give up his guns, or at least his ammunition.

"I'm sorry, guys," he told them.

"But there's no way I'm giving up my weapons."

After talking for about an hour and a half, Dwyer agreed to let Matina lock the weapons up.

The group went for a walk in a nearby park, and Dwyer seemed happier than he'd been in months.

But Dwyer's paranoia soon returned — and worsened.

On Oct. 6, 2005, when superiors went to the couple's off-base apartment to persuade Dwyer to return to the hospital, Dwyer barricaded himself in.

Imagining Iraqis swarming up the sides and across the roof, he fired his pistol through the door, windows and ceiling.

After a three-hour standoff, Dwyer's eldest brother, Brian, also a police officer, managed to talk him down over the phone.

Dwyer was admitted for psychiatric treatment.

In a telephone interview later that month from what he called the "nut hut" at Beaumont, Dwyer told Newsday that he'd lied on a post-deployment questionnaire that asked whether he'd been disturbed by what he'd seen and done in Iraq.

The reason: A PTSD diagnosis could interfere with his plans to seek a police job.

Besides, he'd been conditioned to see it as a sign of weakness.

"I'm a soldier," he said.

"I suck it up."

"That's our job."

Dwyer told the newspaper that he'd blown off counseling before but was committed to embracing his treatment this time.

He said he hoped to become an envoy to others who avoided treatment for fear of damaging their careers.

"There's a lot of soldiers suffering in silence," he said.

In January 2006, Joseph and Matina Dwyer moved back to North Carolina, away from the place that reminded him so much of the battlefield.

But his shadow enemy followed him here.
___

Dwyer was discharged from the Army in March 2006 and living off disability.

That May, Matina Dwyer gave birth to a daughter, Meagan Kaleigh.

He seemed to be getting by, but setbacks would occur without warning.

On the Fourth of July, he and family were fishing off the back deck when the fireworks display began.

Dwyer bolted inside and hid under a bed.

In June 2007, police responded to a call that Dwyer was "having some mental problems related to PTSD."

A captain talked him into going to the emergency room.

Later that month, Matina Dwyer moved in with her parents and obtained a protective order.

In the complaint, she said Dwyer had purchased an AR-15 assault rifle and become angry when she refused to return it.

"He said that he was coming to my residence to get his gun back," she wrote in the June 25, 2007, complaint.

"He was coming packed with guns and someone was going to die tonight."

She declined to be interviewed for this story.

In July 2007, Dwyer checked into an inpatient program at New York's Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

He stayed for six months.

He came home in March with more than a dozen prescriptions.

He was so medicated that his feet flopped when he walked, as if he were wearing oversized clown shoes.

The VA's solution was a "pharmaceutical lobotomy," his father thought.

But within five days of his discharge, Dwyer's symptoms had returned with such ferocity that the family decided it was time to get Matina and 2-year-old Meagan out.

While Dwyer was off buying inhalants, his parents helped spirit them away.

On April 10, weary and fearful, Matina Dwyer filed for custody and division of property.

Without his wife and daughter to anchor him, Dwyer's grip on reality loosened further.

He reverted to Iraq time, sleeping during the day and "patrolling" all night.

Unable to possess a handgun, he placed knives around the house for protection.

In those last months, Dwyer opened up a little to his parents.

What bothered him most, he said, was the sheer volume of the gunfire.

He talked about the grisly wounds he'd treated and dwelled on the people he was unable to save.

His nasal membranes seemed indelibly stained with the scents of the battlefield — the sickeningly sweet odor of rotting flesh and the metallic smell of blood.

Yet despite all that, Dwyer continued to talk about going back to Iraq.

He told his parents that if he could just get back with his comrades and do his job, things would right themselves.

When Maureen Dwyer first saw Zinn's famous photo, she'd had a premonition that it might be the last picture she'd ever see of Joseph.

"I just didn't think he was going to come home," she said.

"And he never did."
___

An autopsy is pending, but police are treating Dwyer's death as an accidental overdose.

His friends and family see it differently.

The day of the 2005 standoff, Knapp spent hours on the telephone trying to get help for Dwyer.

She was frustrated by a military bureaucracy that would not act unless his petrified wife complained, and with a civilian system that insisted Dwyer was the military's problem.

In a letter to post commander Maj. Gen. Robert Lennox, Knapp expressed anger that Army officials who were "proud to display him as a hero ... now had turned their back on him..."

"Joseph Dwyer who had left to Iraq one of the nicest, kindest, caring, self-sacrificing and patriotic people I have ever known," she wrote, "was forced to witness and commit acts completely contrary to his nature and returned a tormented, confused disillusioned shadow of his former self that was not being given the help he needed."

While Dwyer was in the service, Minor said, the Army controlled every aspect of his life.

"So someone should have taken him by the hand and said, `We're putting you in the hospital, and you're staying there until you get fixed — until you're back to normal."

But Dr. Antonette Zeiss, deputy chief of the VA's Office of Mental Health, said it's not that simple.

"Veterans are civilians, and VA is guided by state law about involuntary commitment," she told the AP.

"There are civil liberties, and VA respects that those civil liberties are important."

The family would not authorize the VA to release Dwyer's medical records.

But it appears that Dwyer was sometimes unwilling — or unable — to make the best use of the programs available.

In an e-mail to The Associated Press, Lennox, the former Bliss post commander, wrote that Dwyer "had a great (in my opinion) care giver."

Zeiss said the best treatment for PTSD is exposure-based psychotherapy, in which the patient is made "to engage in thoughts, feelings and conversations about the trauma."

While caregivers must be 100 percent committed to creating an environment in which the veteran feels comfortable confronting those demons, she said the patient must be equally committed to following through.

"And so it's a dance between the clinicians and the patient."

Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, feels the VA is a lousy dance partner.

Rieckhoff said the VA's is a "passive system" whose arcane rules and regulations make it hard for veterans to find help.

And when they do get help, he said, it is often inadequate.

"I consider (Dwyer) a battlefield casualty," he said, "because he was still fighting the war in his head."
___

The Sunday after the Fourth of July, Knapp attended services at Scotsdale Baptist, the El Paso church where she and Dwyer had been baptized together in 2004.

On the way out of the sanctuary, Knapp checked her phone and noticed an e-mail.

"I didn't know if you had heard or not," a friend wrote, "but I got an email from Matina this morning saying that Joseph had died on Saturday and that the funeral was today."

Knapp maintained her composure long enough to get herself and the children to the car.

Then she lost it.

The children asked what was wrong.

"Joseph is dead," she told them.

"You said he wasn't sick any more," Justin said.

"I know, Justin," his mother replied.

"But I guess maybe the help wasn't working like we thought it was."

The kids were too young to understand acronyms like PTSD or to hear a lecture about how Knapp thought the system had failed Dwyer.

So she told them that, just as they sometimes have nightmares, "sometimes people get those nightmares in their head and they just can't get them out, no matter what."

Despite the efforts she made to get help for Dwyer, Knapp is trying to cope with a deep-seated guilt.

She knows that Dwyer shielded her from the images that had haunted him.

"I think about all the torture that he went through when he came back, and I think that all of that stuff could have happened to me," she said, stifling a sob.

"I just owe him so much for that."

Since Dwyer's death, Justin, now 9, has taken to carrying a newspaper clipping of the Zinn photo around with him.

Occasionally, Knapp will catch him huddled with a playmate, showing the photo and telling him about the soldier who used to come to his school and assemble his toys.

Justin wants them to know all about Spc. Joseph Dwyer.

His hero.
___

EDITOR'S NOTE — AP Pentagon reporter Pauline Jelinek also contributed to this report.

Such a sad story and not that unusual. For every thousand persons sent into combat, we know before hand, how many will be killed, how many physically wounded and how many psychologicall
wounded. We accept that as the cost of doing business. After all, somebody has to security guards
for the Oil Companies and other US Interests.

Human life is actually petty cheap here in the USA, rla .....

Totally valueless in some cases, actually ...

And so ...

to the leaders human life is worth ZERO

to the good people, human life can't have a price on it, it is so valuable

unfortunately, the 1 percent of leaders control the rest of the people and that 1 percent are bad, evil people, (shouldn't even call them people, they do not qualify for that term).

That is a value judgment, graham ...

I hesitate to judge myself who should be called "people" and who should not be ....

That would make me too much like the DECIDER, George W. Bush, who decides unilaterally who in the world should be treated as being "people", and who should be denied that protection, and summarily killed ...

And so ...

There are two possibilities IMHO..

One- McCain is elected, we attack Iran and gas goes to 8.00 a gallon, the economy tanks and the cities degenerate into chaos.

Two- Obama wins and tries to control us with his "Civilian" security corps.
He has stated his support for removing my right to bear arms and when they try I will fight that.

$8.00 a gallon?
It could be 15.00 a gallon.

But who needs gas anyhow.

we are already in Iran, who needs Granpappy to do it?

Well, if I lived in a city, then I would likely think differently ....

But I don't ....

I don't live in a city ....

And the city near me, Albany, New York, already is degenerating into CHAOS ....

There are shootings down there on a regular basis ....

A 15-year old with a .45 just killed a 10-year old girl down there a little bit back ....

A couple of New Year's Eves ago in Albany, a federal parolee with a MAC-10 automatic pistol killed an Albany Police Lt. ....

As far as guns go, it's like Dodge City down there in the days of the OLD WEST ....

Kids carry guns in Albany ...

I don't go down to Albany, myself ...

There is nothing that I need in my life that can be found in Albany, New York ...

And I wouldn't live there on a bet ...

It's as if the city had some kind of malignancy ....

But since I don't go down there, it doesn't trouble me, out in the country where I am ....

And for me, that is about as good as it gets .....

So I leave it that way ...

And if some day, the deal goes down ....

Well, hey ....

I'll deal with that then ...

And so ...

You see what I am saying here, bigtom?

CHAOS is the rule up here ...

Not the exception ...

And how would me owning a multitude of guns and a load of ammo and all kinds of canned food in a closet change any of this?

We are regressing up here ....

The glue that held on the thin veneer of civilization was faulty ....

Gunfire up here in Albany is pretty much a daily occurrence ....

If we weren't spending all of our resources on trying to make IRAQINAM a safe place, maybe we could be making Albany, New York into a safe place, instead ....

But there are no major oil desposits up here ....

And so ...

"Man shot in the leg in Albany"

Staff reports, Albany, New York Times Union

Last updated: 7:48 a.m., Tuesday, July 22, 2008

ALBANY - A man was hospitalized Monday night after being shot in the leg.

Police said the incident occurred around 10:30 p.m. near the corner for Second and Quail streets.

The man was treated at the scene before being transported to Albany Medical Center Hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, police said.

The man's name and age were not available Monday night.

No arrests had been made and the incident remains under investigation.