In 1962, Barbara Tuchman published the masterpiece, THE GUNS OF AUGUST; about how, in August, 1914, dumb leadership in Europe plunged Western Civilization into one of the dumbest wars in  History. WORLD WAR I, in which the civilized nations of Western Europe, the nations of Tolstoy and Chekhov, Nijinsky and Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, Schiller and Shakespeare, Goethe and Michelangelo, Moliere and Monet, Pasteur and Newton, Galileo and Lister  gave themselves up and over to a moronic war. What is a moronic war? It is a war fought not for Greed, nor Empire, nor Defense nor Expanse, nor Opium Trade, nor Land, nor Defining a Border, nor Irredentism, nor Revanchism, nor Ideology, nor Meanness, nor Independence, nor Religion, nor Genocide, nor to end Slavery, nor Revolution; a moronic war is a war fought for no reason, no good reason, no logical reason, no bad reason, no evil reason. It is a war fought only because decision making has been suspended, not just good decision making, but all

  " Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am the only one left." HARRY PATCH Harry Patch was the last living veteran of World War I. My astrophysicist friends tell me that the most amazing thing about living in this universe is TIME. According to them, physics state that this Blogger should be able to get up out of this room and travel back to 1731, without taxing himself. But it does not work like that; even if a Time Machine is eventually fabricated, it will only go one way, time travel into the future. Mankind will not be able to go back in time because time  goes only in one direction-it is an arrow. Which means every living witness to this moment in time, regardless of how young or how fit will eventually die; which means there will eventually be no living witness to any event. Harry Patch  was a plumber, an inarticulate plumber, yet by design or chance or fate he outlived them all, and eighty years after the end of the war  he was for