Few things bring great amounts of joy in my life. One of these is the annual release of Sam Adams Summer Ale. It is a monumental event for me, on par with Christmas morning when I was a child. Its release, and that magnificent first gulp, unleashes a torrent of great memories – most of them fuzzy. In the words of the great Frank Riccard: Once it hits your lips, it's so good!
Fast Company has fantastic article by Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist J.J. Brazil on the FBI’s abysmal modernization effort, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a devastating expose on how the Bureau’s counterterrorism efforts come at the expense of fighting crime. This all comes as a drama unfolds in a
Bottom-line: The FBI should not have the primary domestic CT mission. The FBI should have been torn down and rebuilt from the ground up before 9/11.
No one ever said it would be simple.
And so, on we go, blindly – as so many people do, always, in their own time – through the age of terror.
Suskind, Ron
The One Percent Doctrine
In
Buckley, Christopher
Boomsday: A Novel
I was frustrated as much by respect and attempts at understanding as by unfeeling ignorance. The worst were blanket accolades and thanks from people “for what you guys did over there.” Thanks for what, I wanted to ask – Shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people’s homes? There wasn’t any pride in simply being there. The pride was in our good decisions, in the things we did right. I hoped that I’d done more right than wrong, hoped that I hadn’t been cavalier with people’s lives. I was learning that sometimes the only way to fight evil is with another evil, however good its aim.
Fick, Nathaniel
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
Staring down at the water, I measured my words, running through a justification I’d given myself a thousand times before. The good was abstract. The good didn’t feel as good as the bad felt bad. It wasn’t the good that kept me up at night.
“You sound so unprincipled,” she said, shaking her head. “Why can’t you find peace in what you and your men sacrificed so much to do? Why can’t you be proud?
I took sixty-five men to war and brought sixty-five home. I gave them everything I had. Together, we passed the test. Fear didn't beat us. I hope life improves for the people of
"... somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow ... you've got to have some faith in what you're trying to do. It's easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know. But you've got to have faith in us all the way..."
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
"... We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened atleast 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't."
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War
War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.
Bobbitt, Philip
The Shield of Achilles
Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.
Byron, Lord George Gordon
Don Juan
