Recommended Reading and Viewing

Top Billing!COMMAND POST Clint Van Winkle – The Guilt

Powerful. Poignant.

Van Winkle is the author of Soft Spots: A Marine’s Memoir of Combat and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:

The film focuses on my friend SSgt David Paxson. In 2003, Paxson and I fought at Nasiriyah together-one of the earliest and bloodiest battles of Iraq-and making the film forced us to relive those memories. It was a difficult shoot and took all of us months to recover. Talking about war isn’t easy either.

Paxson and I were 25 when we went to Iraq. One week we were in combat, trying to survive insurgent attacks and the next week we were at home, trying to survive panic attacks. After Iraq, we didn’t see each other much. We spoke, but rarely about our experiences. We didn’t talk about the smell of death, the killing, the loss of friends. Day-to-day life was a struggle, but we pretended like we were okay.

We thought we had experienced the worst life had to offer, but Paxson still had another round of pain coming his way….

The Economist – Our global oligarchs  ( hat tip Jessica Margolin)

The problem is that too many of the people who allegedly claim to understand capitalism best, working in the world of high finance are in reality, too frequently, short-term time horizon, zero-sum oriented, assholes with contempt for the idea that markets, to be free, also need to be free of illicit collusion, regulatory capture and rentier self-dealing.

Pennlive.com – Dick Winters, of ‘Band of Brothers’ fame, dies  ( Hat tip to Starbuck)

Dick Winters, the former World War II commander whose war story was told in the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died.

Dick Winters led a quiet life on his Fredericksburg farm and in his Hershey home until the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers” threw him into the international spotlight. Since then, the former World War II commander of Easy Company had received hundreds of requests for interviews and appearances all over the world.He stood at the podium with President George W. Bush in Hershey during the presidential campaign in 2007. He accepted the “Four Freedoms” award from Tom Brokaw on behalf of the Army. He was on familiar terms with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, producers of the HBO mini-series, the most expensive television series ever produced.

Winters was always gracious about his new-found celebrity, but never really comfortable with it. He never claimed to be a hero and said that he had nothing to do with the national effort to get him the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor. When people asked him if he was a hero, he liked to answer the way his World War II buddy, Mike Ranney, did.

“No,” Ranney said. “But I served in a company of heroes.”

Zero Intelligence Agents –Swallowing the Academic “Red Pill”

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