Memorial day is set aside to remember those who lost their lives while serving the nation in uniform. I’m known many who served, and did so myself for a term, but not been particularly close to any that died in service. I’ve known a handful of them personally, having met them a few times, but not known any of them closely. On the one hand, that’s good – I don’t feel as though I’ve got the aura of death that falls on those around me. OTOH, it is a somewhat remote thing when I hear that someone I met has died.

I honor their service, and for those that gave all they had, through bad luck away from the action or with great heroism right in the middle of it, you will not be forgotten. The 300 Spartans at Thermopylae died in uniform, it is true, but they are remembered much more intensely than the accountants and merchants that they protected who lived long and ordinary lives.

Salute!

Reading through the comments on this post, which has a reference to a Fred blurb, I came across a very astute summary of the problem.

Reading Fred, I see by the very questions the culture shock.

Cargo culture shock. They want the cargo only produced by high-trust, long time preference, but not change their culture or virtue. DNA might deal them a bad hand, but human beings can bluff. Simply think a moment. So they build totem towers.

Both liberals and libertarians don’t realize the experiments in law will fail. The 55 page iPhone ToS isn’t read, and at some point Tim will be Cooked because law and force are the opposite of trust. The libertarians too design elaborate replacements – DROs, arbitration, etc. not realizing in a trust/posterity/K society they aren’t needed, and in a suspicion/me-now/r society they won’t work.

And that is the crux of the problem when trying to mix heterogeneous cultures. Cargo Cult culture cannot contribute to creation-of-cargo culture anything other than consumers. What is the term in biology for an organism that only consumes of its host and contributes nothing back?

Looks like something that some American rednecks would come up with, but I suppose rednecks around have more in common than many other groups. Ingenuity, utility, and cool are respected by a certain class of person around the world, regardless of language they speak.

Space-X landed a first stage at Cape Canaveral, while the rest of the Falcon-9 rocket went on to deploy 11 satellites into orbit. That is a first for any nation or private corporation. Many people said it couldn’t be done. What they meant was that they couldn’t do it.

Very cool.