“My father hated war, so he fixed me.”

This incident can never be forgotten by me. My father Adolph blinded me in my right eye — the same eye one needs to look down the length of a rifle, over the sights, to kill an enemy soldier … before the enemy kills you.

No doubt about it, Adolph was positive that Nazi Germany would win the war, and for a time, winning they were! My father feared for his family’s lives. After Great Britain, he believed the Nazi would be at our shores next. Don’t laugh because you too, back then, the way the war was going at that time, would have expected the United States to be invaded by the Nazis and soon.

While I was a baby, my father worked in a steel mill in Bridgeville and one day he brought home some of his welding equipment. That late afternoon he bound up a thick blindfold over my left eye, stood in front of me and he did it; he blinded me in my right eye.

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Someone replied to what I wrote with a question about what security measures I would use instead of torture. So, my reply is pasted below.

Although I thought this was just a debate about the use of torture, I will happily address my beliefs on how to improve the security of our nation. Before I go into it, I would just like to say that we are addressing torture as if it is our only security measure and without it, we are blind to future crises. This is far from the truth, and I am giving you the benefit of the doubt that you understand this.

Fact: Torture is known to produce unreliable information and false confessions. Once the information is gathered, how does one disseminate the difference between the valid and non-valid information? That takes time and resources. Poor and/or unreliable information is what created the initiative with the Iraq war, so we can without a doubt say that unreliable information can be costly, if not down right dangerous. With that being said, using it as the foundation for security measures is a very weak and unreliable method for information gathering.

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Snipped from McClatchyDC.com.

As many may know, I have been a fan of Obama, and quite frankly, I still am. Unfortunately, with all things political, I will not agree with all political ideas or policies of Obama’s. And, his Afghanistan idea is just as bad as Bush’s Iraq idea. More troops will help temporarily, but what we will end up with is an unsustainable model that we have invested to much into. So, what does one do after such investment?

Give up? Walk away? Keep propping up the model? Invest more? The answer is there is no good answer, so why even start down such a road. It can only end up one way. Bad.

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Family of Secrets
by Russ Baker

Russ Baker is an investigative reporter well known for fact-based reporting. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, Esquire and as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. He also is the founder of the nonprofit investigative news organization at WhoWhatWhy.com.

By now, I’m sure you have heard all the glowing, historical “accomplishments” by the Bush Administration listed by the President at his last news conference and given elsewhere in the media by the President and his loyal supporters.

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Some history first:

“St. Nicholas is by far the most easily recognized source of Christmas presents around the world. Parents would leave small gifts of candy or fruits for their children in the honor of St. Nicholas. Eventually the date of this exchange of gifts became associated with the December 25th festivities.

“Christmas presents became even more of a focal point of the holiday experience in the mid-19th century when Americans began to shift from exchanging small, simple gifts and instead began taking a more consume-driven approach to Christmas presents and gift exchanges.”

–Source: Gail Leino at EzineArticles.com

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“I shot the sheriff and…” …and just how does that song from the ‘70’s go? …or was it from the ‘60’s? …and why years later, even today, it makes drug addicts, especially, nervous whenever they hear its lyrics?

There’s a new refrain going around these United States, not a song yet, and I hope it never becomes a song.

“Oh, they was just dissin’, those two skinhead guys.”

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