What The Hell Is Wrong With The State?

Seriously. Who thought this was a good idea?

As if there aren't enough reasons to hate The State.

H/t Hey Jenny Slater

Every Day

If you have a loved one serving in our all-volunteer military, I don't have to tell you that every day should be Memorial Day. But those of us who hold that pure, deep love and respect for our Soldiers, our Squids Sailors, our Airmen, our Marines, and even our Coasties are always happy when the rest of the nation takes a moment to join us in memorial. I'm sharing this with you a day late, but the sentiments expressed here aren't just once a year on the last Monday in May.

Commentary: A day to remember the price of freedom

Joe Galloway

For our remaining World War II veterans, the days dwindle down to a precious few. Some of their veterans associations held their last reunion this past year; too few are left to gather again. Fewer than 5 million are left of the 15 million who wore the uniform between 1941 and 1945, and they're disappearing from among us at the rate of 30,000 each month.

The passing years also take their toll among veterans of the Korean War, the forgotten war, and they've begun to thin the ranks of those who served and sacrificed in Vietnam.

Two who died this past year left holes in the ranks of my own small brotherhood, the veterans of the battles of the Ia Drang Valley, fought in Vietnam at the dawn of our war there in November 1965.

Maj. Ed (Too Tall to Fly) Freeman died last August in his hometown of Boise, Idaho. He belatedly earned a Medal of Honor in 2001 for flying his Huey helicopter through a storm of enemy fire 14 times in one hot afternoon, bringing in ammunition and taking out wounded Americans.

His wing man and boss, Lt. Col. Bruce (Old Snake) Crandall, who received the Medal of Honor in 2005, was beside Ed's hospital bed that last week saying his goodbyes and continuing their half-century argument over which of them was the "second-best pilot in the world."

Early this year, Medic Randy (Doc) Lose, one of the survivors of the "lost" platoon of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion 7th U.S. Cavalry in the Ia Drang, was buried in the National Cemetery in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Doc Lose earned a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions in saving the lives of a dozen wounded men who were trapped behind enemy lines for over 24 hours. He was wounded four times as he crawled from man to man, plugging their wounds with C-Ration toilet paper after he ran out of bandages.

Doc never got over the experience. The Vietnam War killed him just as certainly as it did the 79 other men of his battalion who died during those three days in the valley of death. May God rest his soul and grant him peace.

Yes, for the 20 million living veterans of America's wars, old and new, and for the families and friends of the fallen, Memorial Day has a very special meaning, and it is a time for reflection and silent tears.

Map the Fallen

This Memorial Day I would like to share with you a personal project of mine that uses Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each of their stories—you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit memorial websites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died.

This work first began while I was a graduate student in Environmental Science at U.C. Riverside. While teaching myself how to use Google Earth for a research project visualizing sensor networks, I came across the icasualties.org website. Immediately drawn into the stories of the members of the military that had died up to October 2005, I decided to try mapping each of their hometowns. I posted my U.S. & Coalition Casualties map to the Google Earth Community. Fast-forward to 2007: my thesis work on visualizing sensor networks in Google Earth and my personal mapping projects landed me a job at Google.

Google Earth has come a long way since late 2005 when I first started using it: a few of these improvements include time animation, "regionation" for efficiently displaying thousands of points on the map, and Touring, which enables you to record your flightpath and narration to guide your audience through your content. I'm sure many of you have heard of Google's 20% time program, where engineers can work the equivalent of a day a week on a project of their choosing. I decided last year that it was time to revisit my casualties mapping project, and have since spent some of my 20% time (as well as a healthy dose my own personal time) rebuilding the map to use these new features.

For this project I collected information from a number of sources, including the Department of Defense's Statistical Information Analysis Division, icasualties.org, MilitaryTimes.com's Honor the Fallen, Washington Post's Faces of the Fallen, the Iraq and Afghanistan Pages, and Legacy.com. I used the Google Maps and GeoNames.org geocoding services to get coordinates for each person's home of record and approximate place of death. The map includes data through March 2009. I'd like to point out the incredible time commitment the above organizations invest in maintaining this information; as I've learned, it is not an easy task. All of the data I have assembled and generated for this project will be made freely available for download in the near future.

More:

Photos: The Big Picture Memorial Day 2009

NY Times: Time Ebbs for the Heroes Who Saved the Harbor

The Boston Globe: Two families that served with honor

FOX Nonsense

Former Gov. Jesse Ventura tells FOX News dopes how he really feels. Host Steve Doocy, sitting closest to "The Body", clearly wants no part of this action.

Want to know the biggest difference between Ventura and FOX host Brian Kilmeade? Ventura has an agenda, but he's honest about it and it's based on information and experience.

H/t Brandon at VetVoice

My Favorite Republican

Still fighting the good fight for the Department of Navy and Marine Corps and doing other good work on behalf of our warriors.

For More:
My Favorite Republican Wins, A Nazi Loses (Probably Because Of The Jews)

CCP: Documentary, S.C. veterans target anti-gay Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy

From the Charleston City Paper:

When Jarrod Chlapowski and Alex Nicholson moved from Columbia to Washington in January, the two gay veterans sat down with legislative leaders to get a sense of whether Congress might repeal the military's anti-gay Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Coming away from those talks with a belief that more work needs to be done to encourage congressional action, the two have launched Servicemembers United, a group of gay and straight veterans actively advocating an end to Don't Ask.

Since the earliest days of the Clinton presidency, gays and lesbians have been allowed to serve in the armed forces only if they're silent about their sexuality and celibate. Designed as a practical way to ignore the injustice of the military's anti-gay stance, the Don't Ask policy has instead spurred witch-hunts, with more than 13,000 able soldiers discharged because of their sexuality. To avoid detection, gays have been forced to ignore homophobic slurs in the barracks, and some have resorted to near cloak-and-dagger techniques to deflect suspicion, creating ex-wives, girlfriends, and an apparent interest in Sports Illustrated swimsuit models.

Chlapowski and Nicholson first met in 2006 during a tour of military schools to spotlight the failings of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. A documentary that includes footage from that tour, Ask Not, will receive a community screening at the Charleston County Library on Calhoun Street on May 26 and will air nationally on PBS on June 16.

Documentary, S.C. veterans target anti-gay Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy

-Greg Hambrick

For More:

Independent Lens: DON'T ASK

Indigo Journal: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Should Be Next DoD Program Cut

Con-grads and Happy Happy!

Congrats to all our grads, especially my very own Katie Rose, Master of Social Work. Oh, and except all the recently indoctrinated Cleminals. Good luck with that stain on your resume.

And much love to our mamas. Obviously everyday should be Mother's Day, and for more on that I'd direct you to the late, great Lewis Grizzard, author of "Don't Forget To Call Your Mama: I Wish I Could Call Mine"

Thursday Evening Cinema: SupportYourVet.org

The new PSA from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and the Ad Council, announcing SupportYourVet.org - an online forum for the friends and family of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Snead on Film

Not that you care, but here's our recently viewed from the queue with ratings (1 = Hated It, 5 = Loved It).

• City of God 4 stars
• Pineapple Express 4 stars
• Chop Shop 4 stars
• Eagle vs. Shark 4 stars
• The Bridge 3 stars
• What Just Happened? 3 stars
• There Will Be Blood 5 stars
• Wet Hot American Summer 4 stars
• Bigger, Stronger, Faster 5 stars
• I'm Not There 2 stars
• Let The Right One In 2 stars
• Synecdoche, New York 3 stars
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall 4 stars
• Life Is Beautiful 5 stars
• Election 4 stars
• W. 3 stars
• My Cousin Vinny 5 stars
• The Usual Suspects 5 stars
• The Wrestler 5 stars
• Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral 4 stars

Critics we aren't. And without cable, we aren't neccesarily looking for anything terribly artsy, just entertaining.

USC MIA on YouTube EDU

I was perusing some public administration stuff on YouTube EDU this morning and I noticed the University of South Carolina is conspicuously absent from the site's directory. Well, not completely. USC Aiken has an account with 28 videos and the MUSC channel sports an impressive catalog of 168 videos with several in the five-digit view count range. Two other prominent Palmetto State schools, Clemson (28 videos) and College of Charleston (66 videos), are also listed in the EDU directory.

So where is South Carolina's YouTube channel? I guess this is it. An account with seven videos, the most recent of which was uploaded nearly a year ago, that hasn't been active in a month. I certainly hope the University isn't expecting to make up the lost exposure with their US News & World Report rankings. Good luck finding them in that directory. Maybe Coach Staley could teach the administration a thing or two about social media.