Live Fire with Chuck Holton

So I’ve been reading Diana West’s new book “The Death of the Grown Up,” which makes some very good points about how men in our culture are basically never pushed to take on the mantle of manhood. Instead we are taught that if it’s not fun and comfortable, we shouldn’t be doing it.

The book reads like a doctoral thesis, and so is a bit of a slog, but the material is spot-on. But some of what she talks about seemed, to me, to come from some other country – she talks about how children in American culture today pretty much rule the roost, dictating matters of fashion, style, and more. But that is so foreign to my personal experience, I found myself wondering what country she was talking about.

Until today…

I was just reading this article from the Washington Post, talking about how children are “taking the lead” in the “fight” to “save the environment.” Awww…how cute. But then it goes on to explain how children are demanding that their parents do such things as install expensive solar panels and buy hybrid vehicles…and apparently the kids aren’t taking no for an answer.

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The tom-toms thumped straight on all night and the darkness shuddered round me like a living, feeling thing. I could not go to sleep, so I lay awake and looked; and I saw, as it seemed, this:That I stood on a grassy sward, and at my feet a precipice broke sheer down into infinite space. I looked, but saw no bottom; only cloud shapes, black and furiously coiled, and great shadow-shrouded hollows, and unfathomable depths. Back I drew, dizzy at the depth.

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Sometimes I get so busy I completely miss one of my pieces when it airs on CBN. This one is a follow-up on a story I did back in February about the Karen people in Burma. I met the Htoo family in a Thai refugee camp, and now they’ve come to the states, and I went to Fort Wayne, IN in August to do a follow-up story. It was really awesome to take this family to a restaurant for the first time in their lives, and to watch the look on their faces when they walked into a super-Wal-Mart. Check it out. (still photos here).

Sigh. Why is it that those who carp the loudest about hypocrites in our midst are often the worst offenders? Lately I’ve seen so much cowardice from our military leaders that it would feel really good to be the Commander in Chief for a week. If I were, I’d sack about half of the Generals at the pentagon and start fresh by giving some crusty master sergeants battlefield promotions. Man, wouldn’t that be nice.

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Today is Patriot’s day. It’s the day we remember the reason we’re at war with Radical Islam, and will be for many years to come. It’s the day we celebrate the men and women who sacrifice to make our country safe from the cowards who would murder our women and children in the name of God. It’s a day we should re-commit ourselves to this task – driving the animals back into their caves where they cannot harm us.

Yet I’m concerned that many Americans are past all that. They’re bored with the war. As some Marines stationed in Ramadi recently joked, “America is not at war. The U.S. Marines are at war, America is at the mall.”
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Okay, well, I’m not actually in my underwear, but I am helping in the search for Missing Adventurer Steve Fossett.

Fossett’s plane went down somewhere in a 17,000-square-mile area of my home state of Nevada a little over a week ago. So far, civil air patrol has been flying hundreds of hours a day looking for him, without success. But if Fossett is still among the living, he has a new, high-tech assett in his corner: Google Earth. The internet Giant has somehow obtained up-to-date, high resolution satellite images of the area and posted them. In collaboration with Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, (a program that recruits humans to do computer-tasks that computers still aren’t smart enough to do by themselves.) Google Earth is allowing people like you and me to take part in the search. Which is really cool.

Imagine if this works. In the future, whenever someone goes missing, the first thing to do will be to call “Google 911″ and get a pack of Search-and-Rescue Googlite nerds on it. As resolutions get better, I would imagine we could search for missing children, pets, whatever. And as computer power increases, somebody could feasibly invent a program that does some sort of spatial recognition that can tell a crashed airplane from a fallen tree. Then we’ll really be getting somewhere.

What about on our borders? When Google Earth progresses to the point that we can get real-time footage, I imagine people could pick up extra money by analyzing sat images of the border area in their spare time and reporting breaches of the frontier – drastically lowering the monitoring costs incurred by the US Border Patrol, and putting perhaps millions of eyes on the border.

Really, the possibilities are endless. I imagine that when my youngest is a teenager, I’ll be able to subscribe her mobile phone to a tracking service that allows me to follow her every move from Google earth. “What’s that honey? It doesn’t look like you’re headed to the library!”

As with most technological breakthroughs, however, there could be a dark side. What will it be like when there’s really no place on earth you can go to get lost? How will that change society? Now there’s a discussion for you.

September 3, 2007 was a historic day for Panama, and it went off with a bang.

a fifteen-tons-of-explosives kind of bang, actually.

The Panama Canal is still an engineering marvel, even 100 years after building began. But the demands of global shipping have outpaced it’s capacity, and many ships today are simply too large to fit through its locks.

So Panama’s people decided by referendum to “amplify” the canal’s existing structure, adding two more sets of locks that will allow the largest container vessels afloat to pass through. It’s a huge undertaking, kicked off at yesterday’s ground-breaking ceremony, in which President Martin Torrijos passed on the golden shovel routine for something a bit more macho – collapsing a mountain with the push of a button. Judging from the reaction of the 100,000 or so who were there to watch, it was a real hit. Back in the States, it was barely mentioned, which shows how quickly we can move on after pulling our troops out of somewhere. Or maybe it’s because the average American has the attention span of a fruit fly. (I’ve spoken with more than five Americans in the last six months who didn’t know Panama was a country.)

Jimmy Carter even showed up, giving a speech in “mas o menos” Spanish. He’s definitely more popular here than in the U.S., which made me wonder if he should consider moving here. I wish I could say the same thing for West Virginia’s own king of pork, Senator Robert Byrd, who was also in attendance. The way prices are going in this country, however, he might be one of the few who can afford it.

Nevertheless, I was there reporting for CBN when the mountain came down. It was something to see.