Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
Who should we be giving NROTC scholarships and USNA appointment to - and who should our recruiters be visiting? Well, young men like Jamar Williams.
As the car spiraled across the road and roughly flung her against her seat, one thought echoed through her mind.
"Angels. Save me!"
Her appeals for help were answered when the upside-down vehicle stopped shaking. Two hands reached into the wreckage and pulled her to safety.
"He was my angel," 83-year-old Blanca Toda said as she gestured toward her teenage savior. "I grabbed on to him, and we walked away together."
Jamar Williams, a 14-year-old Kernan Middle School student, modestly averted his eyes.
"I didn't think about it when I did it," he said. "I just wanted to make sure she was still alive."
The shy teen was honored for Toda's speedy rescue at a Jacksonville Sheriff's Office award ceremony Thursday.
He was with his mother, Michelle, a school-bus driver, heading back from a Christmas party hosted by Mayor John Peyton about 6:30 p.m. Dec. 6. They had chauffeured a group of elderly partygoers and were letting them off in a parking lot when he saw Toda's car rapidly accelerate after hitting the cement stops in front of a few parking spaces. She swerved across the lot and appeared to have a stuck gas pedal, according to a Sheriff's Office crash report. The car struck a pole, flipped multiple times and came to rest with its tires skyward.
"He was out of the bus before I could put it in park," Michelle Williams said. "He pulled the emergency door open and ran to where she was stuck in the car."
Toda, who was wearing a seat belt, was stuck in the driver's seat and couldn't free herself. She said a group of onlookers watched the crash but didn't come to her aid.
"They looked petrified," she said.
Before she knew it, Jamar swooped in and freed her from the crushed-metal prison.
He is not a kid - someone of his age with that kind of character is a young man ... and the type of person we need in our wardrooms in six years.
Personally, I don't need engineers, though they are nice. I don't need 4.0 Rhodes Scholars, though they are nice. I don't need brilliance, the technical parts of being a Navy officer can be taught to any young person with a standard intelligence and a desire to excel.
What I need is something you cannot teach and cannot build. I need men and women of character who instinctively know what the right thing is and have the mind and spirit for action. You can't teach that. Jamar has it in spades. I hope he can make it through the next few years with his future potential intact - but for now Jamar; BZ.
Wow. This explains so well a critical part of why we are where we are right now - and why we simply have not seen the end of it all.
As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.
Think he makes a lot for a NYC to DC corridor guy? Skippy can do the math.
Having separated from my wife of 21 years, who had physical custody of our sons, I was handing over $4,000 a month in alimony and child-support payments. That left me with take-home pay of $2,777 (wife #2 had a job bringing in ~$2,400 a year)...
You need to read it all, but here is a peek at the trainwreck.
Within a few weeks, an appraiser valued our house at $505,000, almost 10 percent above the original purchase price two years earlier. On June 12, Patty and I signed a new mortgage for $472,000 with Fremont Investment and Loan in Santa Monica, Calif.
Fremont gave us a classic subprime loan. Our monthly payment jumped to $3,700 from $2,500. If we kept the mortgage for two years, the interest rate would jump as high as 11.5 percent, and the monthly payments would ratchet up to as high as $4,500. ... We were still loaded with debt, but we weren’t paying 27 percent interest rates on our credit cards.
All I know is praise the attitude towards debt that Mrs. Salamander and I have soaked in for most of the last decade - we are watching this not playing in it. We drive cr@ppy cars and don't care. We like to cook at home and don't care. I like to eat a lunch Mrs. Salamander made and don't care. I don't use hair jell and ... well ... I ain't Italian or nut'n .....
... and as you would expect in our age .... we reward poor behavior.
When I first called Chase in October, a representative named Sarah said I didn’t qualify for a loan modification because I wasn’t yet 90 days past due. The only “loan modification” she could offer me was a “repayment plan” under which I paid $400 more per month for six months until I was current again.
“It sounds as if I would be better off waiting to fall 90 days behind,” I said. “I think I’ll wait for that.”
It took a while, but Patty and I found we could get past blaming each other. We had seen each other’s worst sides, but we were still together, and that helped us to get closer. We started listening to each other. Patty began to find her way in the work world, and I was learning that I didn’t have all the answers. And we saw how our children were thriving. My three sons transferred to schools in our neighborhood and made scores of friends. Emily, Patty’s daughter, was a sparkling 10-year-old who loved her home and her school as well as all her brothers. Even if we lost the house, we had gained in other ways.
I called Chase back in January, when I was 90 days past due. Another representative told me that I would automatically be evaluated for a loan modification.
“You should just wait until you hear from one of our negotiators,” he told me politely.
Another two months passed without anyone calling, so I tried again in late March.
“I’m sorry, but our analysts have been backed up,” yet another Chase rep told me, even more politely than the previous one. She said each analyst had about 500 distressed borrowers to deal with, and it had been taking about five weeks for customers to get a direct response. The delays seemed to be getting longer.
I was actually beginning to feel sorry for Chase. It seemed to be so flooded with defaulting borrowers that it didn’t have time to foreclose on my house. Eight months after my last payment to the bank, I am still waiting for the ax to fall.
No, this isn't over - not by a long shot. Harumph.
Conservatives are like the biblical Jews who wandered through the desert for 40 years until that generation's flawed leaders had passed from the scene. Conservatives are not going to get to the political promised land until we get new leaders. And until those Republican politicians who brought plagues onto Americans are gone, voters will refuse to buy whatever Republicans are trying to sell.
To paraphrase cartoonist Walt Kelly's character, Pogo: We have met the enemy, and it is big-government Republicans.
Conservatives should be under no illusions about the massive challenge ahead of us. We face a very popular President Obama, with a radical left-wing agenda designed to punish and silence all opposition, and at taxpayer expense. Mr. Obama and the Democrats have available massive financial revenues, and Republican opponents are leaderless, dispirited, confused and without an agenda or principles.
Most of the establishment institutions of our country are arrayed against us: the mainstream media, entertainment industry, higher and lower education, the legal community, organized religion and big business, including Wall Street.
Conservatives, though, have been here before. Against these same forces, Republicans won three presidential elections in the 1980s by landslides and swept into control of Congress for 12 years starting in 1994. Republicans did it with conservatives paving the way for boat-rocking political leaders such as Ronald Reagan, who could say about the Soviets: They lose; we win.
Leadership starts with each of us. We should cease looking to Republican politicians for leadership.
We have a party and a country to save, and the Republican establishment is part of the problem, not the solution. Conservatives must not wait for orders from headquarters: Rush to the sound of the guns.
I'll take Rubio instead. If you are interested, there is a short interview with him by National Review's David Freddoso here, or you can buy his book from a few years ago, 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida's Future.
BZ to VADM Harvey for this - and going to SailorBob to do it.
If you are a SWO Department Head - he wants to hear from you on this thread.
If you are a SWO Division Officer - he wants to hear from you on this thread.
An example of some of the feedback he is getting - in this case from a LCDR "SWO STAR",
1. Optimal manning. Going from 330 on the DDG down to 270 hurt and hurt bad. All the N1 wizards in the world can spin whatever web they want about work hours the truth is that it corrodes the ability to self train and preserve the ship on the paradigm we have. I have seen it on numerous ships on the waterfront. Where is the CSTT TIC? Oh...she isnt here because she is off at AIC school for five weeks for that CCR and because we have 17 OSs instead of 28 so we only have 2 TICs. So who is going to observe and train the TIC? Chief will do it. No he wont because he is the AAWC CSTT and covering for the missing OS1 billet that we don't have anymore. Well make it work somehow. BMC the waterline and bow need painting. Well sir we have 8 less deck seaman and BMs than we did when we got here so I am going to have to have BM1 and BM2 bust rust and the duty section do it all the way up to sunset and have them start again at first light. Sounds like a plan chief but make sure the punt is out of the water by 0800 because we have ATG coming over for AT/FP cert tomorrow before we get underway to go to Seal Beach in afternoon. Darn it sir that means we can only do the waterline.
was published in 2006, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Vintage)
2007.
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