Boy, they really taught us a lesson… Happy Labor Day

Driving through McKeesport this afternoon, I was struck with just how desolate a town could become At any moment, I expected tumbleweeds to come flying down Walnut Street. The Daily News building is still there but the People’s Bank building with the gigantic columns has a number of For Sale signs in the once ornate […]

I never knew how rich we were

One of the big circles in my life is in the process of closing After forty years of travelling the world, I find myself back in the place where I grew up. Part of that journey has been physical and part has been spiritual. The physical part includes travelling and visiting over 650 cities, towns […]

Exceptional – Does it matter to you?

Look up the word exceptional in the dictionary and a few of the words stick out right away: Rare Unusual Superior Extraordinary By extension, the word exceptionalism is the condition of being exceptional which includes all of those superlatives. It is the belief that something as large as a country does not have to […]

Lessons from Guadalcanal: “The Goettge Patrol”

There have been many books written through the ages about fighting a war. From the lessons of Sun Tzu to the lengthy books on modern war campaigns, we have learned better ways to achieve our goals if we are wise enough to learn from other’s mistakes. One of the ones from Guadalcanal was the disastrous […]

I just heard… Harry Reid might be a Chinese communist

Well, actually, I just said it out loud as I was talking to my best friend. So technically, I really just did hear it. Was it a trusted source? Yes, yes. I trust my source with my life. Can it be verified? Well, it gets a little tricky here. I can verify that I heard […]

The hardest work you will ever love should not cost you your vote.

In the short time I have spent on this planet, I have had a number of jobs. All of them have had their challenges and rewards and I feel blest for having had the experiences I have had. Beyond any shadow of a doubt though, my time in the service was probably the roughest and […]

“A kiss is still a kiss” – Wait, do chicken kisses count?

Ah, Louis Armstrong singing “As Time Goes By”. There was a great voice for the ages. But the most famous rendition of the song As Time Goes By came from an obscure little movie filmed at the beginning of the Second World War called Casablanca with a couple of big name stars filmed seventy years […]

The Die is Cast; Vandegrift does the impossible

America and her allies were woefully unprepared to fight the kind of war they found themselves with in the Pacific. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent attacks around the Pacific Rim decimated the plans and the resources of the forces that would become allied in their opposition to Japanese aggression. Traditional forces were […]

Two Battles that Determined the Course of a War

By July of 1942, the U.S. Navy had proven itself in two critical battles and a number of smaller but significant actions. The Battle for the Coral Sea and Midway proved that the American sailor was more than an equal for any naval force on the face of the planet. Despite numerical strength, the Japanese […]

But it was on the internet… they couldn’t put it on there if it wasn’t true could they?

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" – Edmund Burke Great quote! Unfortunately Edmund Burke never actually said that… The above is most likely a summary of the following quote in Burke’s "Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents": "When bad men combine, the good must […]