Rules of Engagement - Part XI

Tales from the battlefield: There will be times on the battlefield when you will hear the roars of frustration from the opponents' camps. There will be bellows of impotent rage because a tried and tested strategy fails again and again and again and yet again. The enemy publicly claims they have an army of impressive strength and number, but laments in private the loss of many foot soldiers. One of the stories is that the leader of the Crumbling Cantonment, which was part of the 88th Battalion of the Red Brigade, had composed a verse to accompany the drum beats of a battle song. 

This song, and variations of this song, were to be sung by his drummers who took up flank and echelon positions on the battleground. The enemy picked the best tenors from his regiment to give the proper pitch and resonance to the words of the song. The verse was indeed heavily verbose and the entire regiment sang the words heartily and with gusto. 

I believe the refrain was: "Is there anyone in Stalwart Trooper's Brave Titans that is so loony, so deranged, so mentally incompetent or intellectually crippled, that they take that idiocy seriously? Oh, wait yes, there's Diana". The words were so infectious, so catchy, that even the Titan Diana took to singing the song and when the two sides clashed in the middle of the battlefield, her voice was louder and better than the opponents' voices could ever hope to be. 

The Crumbling Cantonment were seething with rage that a song that was the brainchild of their dear leader could be sung louder and better than the tenors they thought nobody could surpass. Moral of the story: Don't sing aloud without a copyright on the number, lest someone else likes the song, hijacks it, and sings it louder and better than you.

 Quotes from Dr. Thomas Sowell's book "Conflict of Visions". Emphasis mine
 1)....as noted at the outset, these are by no means the only possible kinds of visions. There are not only degrees in each vision but also inconsistent and hybrid visions. Moreover, beliefs in visions are not static. Both individuals and whole societies can change their visions over time. These changes may be sudden "road to Damascus" conversions, where a particular event reorients one's whole thinking, or the change may be more like water wearing away rock, so that one vision imperceptibly disappears, to be replaced by a changing set of implicit assumptions about man and the world. This second kind of change may leave no clear record of when or how it happened, nor perhaps even an awareness on the part of those concerned, except for knowing that things are no longer seen the same way they once were.
2) Although visions can and do change, the persistence and vitality of both constrained and unconstrained visions over a period of centuries suggest that such changes are not easy. The anguish of the apostate comes from within, as well as from the condemnation of his former comrades. Those who lose their faith but continue the outward observances, or who quietly withdraw if they can, are likewise testimony to the power of visions and the pain of change. The terms in which such changes of social vision are discussed—conversion, apostasy, heresy—are borrowed from religious history, though they apply equally to secular creeds which evoke similar emotional commitments.

 And the following are from his articles at Townhall.com
 1) How did we get to this point? It was no single thing. The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of "non-judgmental" affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on. The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair. The only saving grace is that even the trajectory of a bullet can be changed by the wind.
 2) While the recent Supreme Court decision in the New Haven firefighters' case will be welcome news to those who don't think that a gross injustice is O.K. when those on the receiving end are white, the reasoning behind the 5 to 4 decision is a painful reminder that the law is still tangled in a web of assumptions, evasions and contradictions when it comes to racial issues. Nor have these problems been clarified with the passage of time. On the contrary, the growing complexity and murkiness of civil rights law over the years recalls the painful saying: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." C


onfucius quote: It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop