Bin Laden vows to attack Israel

Osama bin Laden vowed to destroy Israel.

The fugitive Al-Qaida leader issued an audio recording Saturday in which he came out against Palestinian and other Arab leaders who have recognized the Jewish state.

"I would like to assure our people in Palestine that we will expand our jihad there," Bin Laden said. "We intend to liberate Palestine, the whole of Palestine, from the river to the sea."

"We will not recognize even one inch for Jews in the land of Palestine as other Muslim leaders have," he said.

Al-Qaida is believed to have set up cells in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but its influence is limited given doctrinal opposition from ruling local groups like Islamist Hamas.

In his message, Bin Laden also mocked Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, over the fact that the U.N. peacekeeper presence has grown in southern Lebanon since last year's war with Israel. The peacekeepers, Bin Laden said, "protect the Jews."

read the rest! »

Employers & Social Networking Sites: Search, or No?

Had an interesting conversation with an HR professional today on the subject of employers running searches to see if a candidate has a MySpace page et. al. This is apparently something coming up in her HR training classes.

Facebook is less problematic, because you have to accept their friend invitation or they can't see your profile. LinkedIn isn't an issue because it's explicitly a professional site. So I'm taking those off the table, and focusing on 2 things:

• Searching for and viewing a MySpace page or other public access social networking site profile
• Using Google to track someone back to a blog, and using that in a hiring decision

Ethical? Useful? Wise from HR's point of view? Or something that you'd tell your HR people to avoid if you ran the company? It's a live issue, and becoming semi-common practice. We had a discussion that tried to look at it from several points of view, and found points on both sides. What are your thoughts?

The Bhutto Assassination: Pinky & the Brain in Pakistan?

Well, it looks like Pakistan's Taliban insurgency has claimed another target in that country's ongoing civil war. Bhutto was shot by an attacker after a campaign rally; the attacker then blew himself up, killing at least 20 others. The attack was well timed: her own party will find it difficult to replace her before the January 8/08 elections, and of course Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League-N held up their end of the operation by "suddenly" deciding that they'd boycott the election, while calling for Musharraf's ouster. Hmm, wonder who might rise to power in that kind of vacuum...

Ah, the Waziristan Accords - another successful example of diplomacy with terrorists as a gift that keeps on giving.

Still, I've told Dan Darling before that al-Qaeda and its allies have a bit of a "Pinky and the Brain" problem - good at thinking 2 moves ahead and decent at executing that, but not so great at anticipating what happens once they pull off their scheme...

read the rest! »

On priorities.

If we contemplate what is written, spoken and broadcast in the political, media and cultural fields we find that many members of our intelligentsia, as well as those concerned with public affairs share the following features:

read the rest! »

Merry Christmas to All

Hi all. Hope everyone is having a fine holiday. I recently had the good fortune to spend some time at both AMARG/Davis-Monthan, and the Pima Air & Space Museum, and recommend both venues very highly. Also had interesting conversation with a long-time intelligence professional who was in town on business. All I can say is, we value your ongoing readership - and I really hope you've all been good this year....

Survivable Laser-guided Exactitude Integrated Gift Handling system

(Click to view full)

The Seven Pillars of Terrorism.

The word terrorism has been used to describe the activities of various groups over the last half century. For example, the British denounced the operations carried out by the Irish Republican Army as terrorism, while the same description was applied to the activities of such militant groups as ETA, the organization seeking autonomy for the Basque region lying between Spain and France, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof in Germany and similar movements in Japan and Latin America. However, when the word terrorism is mentioned today, what immediately springs to mind [in other than Arab and Muslim societies] is that an Arab or Muslim has committed an act of violence. The linkage between terrorism and Muslims has grown over the last six years, giving rise to the irrational fear of Islam known as Islamophobia. Still, there is no doubt that Muslims or Arabs are usually implicated in acts that are today described by the world as terrorism. There are two main schools of thought when it comes to addressing this phenomenon: one condemns Muslims in absolute terms, the other [Islamic] school justifies it as a reaction to what Muslims were and continue to be exposed to. With apologies to both schools, I would like here to adopt a novel approach by attempting to identify the sources or pillars of a phenomenon that has become one of the main areas of concern for a growing number of scholars and analysts throughout the world.

read the rest! »

US Army Refuses to Give Soldiers Rifles that Won't Jam in Combat

Is it?
(click to view full)

Advance warning: This is a long entry, but necessary reading. If you have a child, a relative, or a friend in the US Army, sit down and take a deep breath before reading this. You're going to need it...

It seemed like a routine request. Order more M4 carbines for US forces in the pending FY 2007 supplemental, FY 2008 budget, and FY 2008 supplemental funding bills. It has turned into anything but a routine exercise, however - with serving soldiers, journalists, and Senators casting a very critical eye on the effort and the rifle, and demanding open competition.

With requests amounting to $375 million for weapons and $150 million in accessories, they say, the Army's proposal amounts to an effort to replace the M16 as the USA's primary battle rifle - using specifications that are around 15 years old, without a competition, and without considering whether better 5.56 mm alternatives might be available off the shelf. Meanwhile, the M4/M16 family is both praised and criticized for its current performance in the field. DID explains the effort, the issues, and the options.

The latest developments? The M4 and 3 competitors, including one M4 variant that can be converted from existing rifles, come out of a sandstorm reliability test - and the M4 finishes dead last, with 1 jam per 68 shots, 3.77x more jams than the 3rd place finisher. Meanwhile, US Special Forces have declared that the M4 carbine "does not meet the requirements of SOF," and currently use 2 of the test's competitors. But the US Army publicly says that it doesn't care, and orders more M4 carbines....

read the rest! »

Offline For A Bit, And Thinking About This Place

TG, Littlest Guy, and I are headed to Paris tomorrow for a couple weeks, where we'll connect with Middle Guy and spend our flimsy Yankee dollars in support of the new Sarkozy regime.

I'm not taking the laptop, and promised to minimize my time in Internet cafes, so you won't see much of me until mid-January.

To be honest, I'm pretty unhappy with the state of the blog these days. For me, this place is most of all about the discussions in the comments, and there's been far too little discussing and far too much gainsaying going on. I welcome disagreement - even heated disagreement - but what I've seen in my last few posts isn't enlightening, isn't welcoming to outside readers, and doesn't feel to me like the kind of party I want to be hosting.

I'm honestly not sure what to do about it. But when I get back, I intend to do something. Feel free to make suggestions here.

Japanese Destroyer Visits Pearl, Destroys Ballistic Missile

JS Kongo into Pearl
(click to view full)

In December 2003, Japan decided to upgrade their 4 existing Kongo Class AEGIS Destroyers and their SPY-1D radars to full AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defense capability. Installations are scheduled for 2007 through 2010, and each installation will be followed by a flight test to demonstrate proper operation. They will fire the naval SM-3 Standard missile, which is under co-development as part of cooperation with the USA on missile defense. These ships will form the outer layer of Japan's anti ballistic missile shield, with the land-based Patriot PAC-3 forming the point defense component.

It would appear that the first-of-class ship JS Kongo [DDG-173] is also the first Japanese ship to have the BMD upgrade installed. Cue the flight test, as JS Kongo visits Pearl Harbor, then becomes the first Japanese ship to destroy a ballistic missile....

read the rest! »

"Confessions of a Car Salesman"

In light of the events related here, I am reading up on buying cars.

If you're in the market, too, then read, "Confessions of a Car Salesman" at Edmunds.com. Enlightening!

I have not bought a new car in many years. One of the advantages of buying a used car (apart from letting the original buyer get soaked by depreciation) is that it's much harder for a salesman to "bump" you - get you to agree to high-cost extras. The car is what it is. Its options are already installed. All they can do is try to sell you high-profit items such as a used-car warranty, but these are easy to turn down.

I saw a new car in a display in the local mall last week that had $2,500 of dealer-added cost, things like "anti-theft engraving" on the windshield, "paint protection" (a plain wax job), fabric protection" (Scotch-Gard sprayed on) and other junk like that. Another article on Edmunds told of a man who was thrilled to get a price via fax for a new, hard-to-find Lexus that was only $500 over invoice. So thrilled that he closed the deal before he even saw the car or closely reviewed the sales documents. He just signed his name away.

read the rest! »

Hey, Can't We Just Leave The Bad Fascism Similes To The Nutroots??

Via lots of leftie blogs, comments on Jonah Goldberg's jaw-dropppingly stupid new book: 'Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning'

I've just looked at what's on Amazon about it, and read the cites on the blogs.

At some point, you dilute the meaning of words until they don't mean anything at all. I don't like lots about what passes for liberalism now; and I'm also not shy about suggesting that the Islamists share characteristics with fascism - but here's a key difference: fascists actually brutalize and kill people.

Liberals are annoying, and over-regulate things.

When gangs of Green thugs start beating down Hummer drivers, we can start talking about this. Until then, can I implore everyone - right and left - to find a new friggin' metaphor?

People You Should Know: Chris Terrill

Reporting from duty

Documentary maker Chris Terrill originally trained as an anthropologist. The 55 year old is a real documentary maker (unlike certain fat Americans I might name), and his specialty is humans in high-pressure situations. He covers these situations this by stepping right into high-pressure situations that have included war zones, then reporting from within. Somehow, he's lived to reach 55.

So what does he do when he decides to make 'Commando: On the Front Line' and follow a new group of would-be Royal Marines from training right through to service in Afghanistan? He puts himself through their boot camp, which is tougher than the US Marines. He becomes the oldest individual, and the only civilian, ever to complete training that washes out a lot of fit 19 year olds. Then he deploys with them to Afghanistan, going out on combat patrols and even fixing his bayonet at one point during a massive firefight.

That's pretty damn impressive. He says:

read the rest! »

Baseball: Let Your Free Agents Go?

The blog at BattersBox.ca consistently provides better analysis of baseball moves and developments than the largest newspapers in an urban region with over 5 million people. Recently, one of their threads pointed me to an article on USS Mariner called "Letting Ichiro Leave For Nothing."

The author, Dave, has looked at 34 baseball players from 2000-2006 that were all all-star talents who were traded in the midst of a highly productive season, were free agents at the end of the year, were unlikely to re-sign with the club, and would be classified as Type A Free Agents (2 high draft choices as compensation picks if the player left via free agency). Then he looked at 21 more Type A free agents who were allowed to walk in return for those 2 draft picks.

Bottom line?

read the rest! »

The Other Fallujah Reporter

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” — Thomas Jefferson

I just returned home from a trip to Fallujah, where I was the only reporter embedded with the United States military. There was, however, an unembedded reporter in the city at the same time. Normally it would be useful to compare what I saw and heard while traveling and working with the Marines with what a colleague saw and heard while working solo. Unfortunately, the other Fallujah reporter was Ali al-Fadhily from Inter Press Services.

Mr. al-Fadhily is unhappy with the way things are going in the city right now. It means little to him that the only shots fired by the Marines anymore are practice rounds on the range, and that there hasn’t been a single fire fight or combat casualty for months. That’s fair enough, as far as it goes, and perhaps to be expected from a reporter who isn’t embedded with the military and who focuses his attention on Iraqi civilians. The trouble is that Mr. Al-Fadhily’s hysterical exaggerations, refusal to provide crucial context, and outright fabrications amount to a serious case of journalistic malpractice.

Read the rest at Commentary Magazine.

The French Connection: Libya Seeking Arms Deals

Rafale B
(click to view full)

"Africa: The Next Defense Market Opportunity?" discussed Forecast International's look at some very specific opportunities in that continent - one of which was Libya. Libyan ruler Muammar Gadaffi has shifted his country from rogue state status in the 1970s and 1980s, to a policy that completely disclosed the surprising progress of their weapons of mass destruction programs and sought normalized relations with the western world. In 2004 the European Union lifted a 1986 arms embargo against Libya, and in 2006 the USA restored full diplomatic relations. Many credit in part the influence of his son Saif al-Islam [BBC interview | TIME article], whose graduate degrees the University of Vienna and the London School of Economics reportedly included work studying transitions from rentier states and dictatorships to free market societies; he is currently working with Michael Porter to this end.

Libya's military has traditionally been Soviet supplied, alongside some equipment from France. The demise of the Soviet Union, the 1990s drop in oil prices, and Libya's pariah status all combined to choke military modernization - but Libya's new political direction, and the rise in oil prices, are changing that. Unsurprisingly, there have been widespread reports in recent days that France and Libya have signed a Memorandum of Understanding covering arms deals worth up to EUR 4.5 billion, including the first foreign sale of the Rafale fighter. Has France learned the lessons of Morocco and Saudi Arabia? Can the Rafale find an export home at last? Will the deals come to fruition?

DID reports...

UK & USA Defence Trade Treaty Moves Forward

In December 2005, Defense Industry Daily's "UK Warns USA Over ITAR Arms Restrictions" and "ITAR Fallout: Britain to Pull Out of F-35 JSF Program?" seemed to herald a very difficult period in Anglo-American defense relations. Despite the promises of 2 successive American Presidents, the ITAR exemptions that Britain had sought remained blocked in America's legislature - and European initiatives to resume defense exports to China were not improving the situation. Meanwhile, MPs in Britain were becoming very insistent on a fix. DID's articles were cross-posted to Winds, explaining the nature of America's ITAR arms export restrictions, the issues at play, and the stakes.

In time, many of these issues were worked out. In August 2006, the US and UK reached a technology transfer agreement concerning the F-35 fighter - an agreement that would serve as a model for other F-35 industrial partners. By December 2007, Tier 1 partner Britain had signed the F-35's Production, Sustainment & Follow On Development MoU.

A broader fix was still on the agenda, however, and in July 2007 it materialized as a a treaty that would change the way the American and British defense firms cooperate on defense programs. The treaty is progressing toward ratification in Britain, but some key details remain to be worked out. Those details are likely to matter a great deal to the American side in particular. Defense Industry Daily's Spotlight article aims to act as a one-stop briefing that explains the treaty's motivation, key terms, and outstanding issues; keeps track of ongoing developments; and links to the key documents...

Send Mike Hendrix A Little Love Tonight

Because I just don't want to have to visit him in jail...and based on what useless ass Chuck Adkins has done, I'd worry that he'll wind up on a gurney and Mike will end up in a cell.

I won't reward lives-with-his-folks-at-35 slob Adkins with a link; go read about it on Mike's site.

There's a real issue with marginal personalities on the Internet; Deb Frisch, Elliott Stein, and now the third member of the worthless waste of oxygen trinity, Chuck. And the problem is that until the stakes are high - and they appear to be getting there because the links to the offensive posts on Chuck's site are now 404-ing - they just seem to absorb the abuse they deserve as the attention they crave.

So go over and say a soothing word of support to Mike. He doesn't deserve this shit, he deserves our affection and friendship.

Human Genetic Evolution Is Accelerating

It's been somewhat of a commonplace, among those who worry about such things, that the increase in the power and complexity of human civilization and culture has reduced the forces of evolution on the species. After all, so one argument goes, we now enable diabetics and others afflicted with genetically-linked physical or mental illnesses to survive and reproduce, where they would have perished back before we came down from the trees. Darwin might have been right, but had become steadily less relevant to our future.

Turns out Darwin is still very much relevant. A just released paper (PDF, of highly technical nature) details a study suggesting that mutations have been accumulating in the collective human genome at a rate that has increased since the 'cultural phase' of the species began. The senior author, John Hawks, is a blogger and has a more approachable summary here.

read the rest! »

Let's Talk About Women In Combat, Again

Washington Post:

The gunman...was carrying an assault rifle, two handguns and as many as 1,000 rounds of ammunition when he shot his way into the huge New Life Church in Colorado Springs and was confronted and shot by Jeanne Assam, a former police officer who was serving as a volunteer security guard, police said.

"I saw him coming through the doors, and I took cover, and I waited for him to get closer," Assam told reporters. "I came out of cover, I identified myself and engaged him and took him down," she said.

Assam is a former law-enforcement officer; but was a private citizen acting as a volunteer when she acted Sunday.

So we have two mass shootings this week...in one, a civilian is encouraged to be armed and prepared; in the other...well, sadly, no (see this first-hand account).

And reading her account, I certainly question whether I - or any of the trained shooters I know - could have done much better.

About 80 feet down a main hallway, Murray encountered Assam, who fired several rounds at him, Sgt. Jeff Jensen of the Colorado Springs Police Department told a news conference. He said that "she definitely wounded him" but that police have not yet determined whether any of her shots were fatal or "whether there was a self-inflicted gunshot wound during this as well."

"I didn't think for a minute to run away," Assam said. "I was given the assignment to end this before it got too much worse." She said the encounter "was scary" but "my hands were not even shaking" as she prayed for help. "I was very focused," she said. "I just knew I was not going to wait for him to do any further damage. I just knew what I had to do."

I'll wait for Kingsley Browne's reponse...

Here's One Of The Most Disturbing Things I've Read All Year

A BBC article interviewing 'leading thinkers' on the role of freedom of speech...(hint: they don't like it)

Juggernauts Don't Turn Well

Here's an interesting article about the dynamics of the Democratic campaign:

The Clinton organization had a clear plan A: It envisioned the candidate, as the choice of the party establishment and natural heir to the presidency, to so dominate 2007 that she would be able to corner, not have to capture, the nomination. It worked perfectly for most of the year.

The strategy has imploded. In a similar situation, Bill Clinton would have changed plans on a dime -- he could have gone from B to E during a rest stop.

After the Battle of Al-Fajr

FALLUJAH, IRAQ – Fallujah is known as the City of Mosques. It is also a city of walls, and of war.

It was a quieter city than most after the initial invasion in 2003. There was less looting than in Baghdad, and the mayor was pro-American. It was tranquil for the most part. But resentment first simmered, then exploded in an orgy of mob violence on March 31, 2004, when four security contractors from the Blackwater corporation were murdered, mutilated, and strung up from a bridge.

The following month U.S. Army soldiers and Marines were sent in to clear the city, then were pulled back for political reasons before the mission was finished. The insurgents won the first round and gained total control of the city. Taliban-style rule had come to Iraq. In November of the same year the Americans went back in and fought the massive epic battle known as Al-Fajr, or Dawn.

I met two Marines who have returned to Fallujah after the fighting in that battle. They belong to the 3rd Battalion 5th Regiment's India Company and are based now at a train station on the northern edge of the city that has been turned into a Forward Operating Base that keeps its part of the city secure.

None of the 3/5 Marines – in India Company or any other – have been killed or even wounded since their current tour began in the summer this year.

“What was the fighting like then?” I asked Corporal Brandon Koch.

read the rest at michaeltotten.com

Gulf States Requesting ABM-Capable Systems

Patriot PAC-2
(click to view full)

A recent US National Intelligence Assessment [redacted NIE summary] believes Iran's nuclear program has stopped, but others, including the United Nations and Israel are more skeptical. Intelligence is always a very uncertain and ambiguous exercise, and occasionally features assessments like the somewhat infamous CIA NIE whose 1962 judgment was that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba.¹ Uncertainty creates perceptions of risk, and perceptions of risk lead to behaviors aimed at reducing that risk. Iraq is no longer a missile/WMD threat, Iran's regular and Revolutionary Guards air forces remain relatively weak, and Iran's ballistic missiles based on North Korean designs lack accuracy. Still, even a lucky conventional missile could create issues in some Gulf states if it hit important oil-related infrastructure, or hit the larger and more nebulous target of business confidence.

Arms spending is an incomplete but very concrete way of tracking a state's real assessment of threats and priorities. It's becoming clear that Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, have stepped up their defense spending in recent years. Those expenditures cover a range of equipment, but anti-ballistic missile capabilities appear to be rising to the top of the priority list. Now over $10 billion worth of Patriot missile upgrade requests in the UAE and Kuwait are shining a spotlight on the region's new defense priorities.

Read the rest at Defense Industry Daily...

Cost Pressures Force European Aerospace to Look Outside Europe

A330 MRTT with
boom & drogues
(click to view full)

EADS Airbus' politically controversial "Power 8" restructuring plan is already planning to shift future production out of Europe, and a recent EADS announcement intensified that pressure with more downward pressure on earnings. Worse, Airbus' customers insist on pricing their contracts in dollars, while its costs are mostly denominated in Euros. EADS CEO has complained that every time the US dollar falls by 10 cents, Airbus loses $1 billion dollars - even as the Euro has risen from $1.20 to almost $1.50 over the last few years. Some analysts think this is a dodge (financial hedging strategies exist), but CEO Louis Gallois has apparently decided that if you can't beat 'em, you had better join 'em. Deutsche Welle:

"We don't have a choice," Louis Gallois, chief executive of EADS, told Europe 1 radio Monday. Gallois said the only way to "prepare the company for a dollar that no one can control is -- unfortunately -- to set up shop in a dollar zone."

The French government is reportedly less than happy about this, and has fired a shot across EADS' bow in return...

read the rest! »

German Trades in Demand

Germany has long had a trades program that ranks among the best in the world. The domestic market is currently soft, but they're beginning to find that German trades are very much in demand elsewhere due to their rigorous training and certification, wighted toward real-world experience rather than academia.

It strikes me that a state or province wishing to ensure a solid path up from poverty for its citizens could create much the same effect by phasing in a similar program. The mechanics of it aren't exactly a secret, and mobility in a country like the USA should generate many of the same effects Germany is seeing within the larger European sphere.

read the rest! »

Don't Bogart That Joint, Prof. Nagl...

I'm East for a wedding, and while I wait for TG to suit up, I'm catching up on reading. I've bought a stack of books for Biggest Guy, and am slowly reading down them myself while I wait to give them to him.

So I just started the counterinsurgency classic, 'Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife', by Nagl. And found a funny typo - or a suggestion that West Point (where he was a professor) isn't as straight-laced as it's reputation. From the Acknowledgements:

Special thanks to my mother and mother-in law, both of whom found books and provided emotional support and diversions from writing. Like mother, like daughter: Susi has fought insurgents in her pot plants and over the kitchen table as well as on the computer keyboard.

Who knew it was so much like UC Santa Cruz?? So far it does look like a damn interesting book...

Dec. 7

It's the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The survivors, inevitibly aging, are fewer and fewer and one day soon we will read of the passage of the last one. And a page in our history book will turn and close, I guess.

But the history is still with us.

read the rest! »

You Can Get Anything You Want, at ALIS' Maintenance Hub...

Keeping track of...
by John Batchelor
(click to view full)

For the last 50 years, newer fighters have been sold as requiring less maintenance than their predecessors, due to technical advances. As people like Chuck Spinney and the Congressional Research Service have documented, the reverse has been true. Escalating complexity in electronics, engines, wiring, et. al. delivers required capabilities, but creates multiplying points of failure. Each component may be more reliable than its predecessors on an individual level, but the math means they fall short when put together. In addition, the escalating complexity makes fixes in the field more difficult - and sometimes impossible. This shifts more maintenance to large, specialized rear-echelon depots, which in turn requires more transportation of parts, more infrastructure - and either longer turnaround times, a larger parts inventory of expensive equipment, or both.

The result is that each new generation of fighter aircraft not only sports a price tag that rises faster than inflation, it's also less available for flight. This, in turn, magnifies the impact of the numbers cuts that their higher price tags produce, by creating a drop in operational aircraft that's even sharper than the drop in replacement purchases. The military's reaction is to keep numbers up by keeping aircraft in service for much longer periods, hence the aging aircraft issue that plagues the USAF and most other air forces around the globe. New aircraft types are also expected to serve longer, of course, which in turn drives up their initial costs coming out of the design stage. And the flat spin continues...

That decades-long defense death spiral has finally reached a point where it's prompting musings about the collapse of American TacAir, and European countries with their small and dwindling defense budgets are also strongly affected. If the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter was to have any hope of becoming a commercial and operational success, it needed to change that operating cost dynamic. To do that, Lockheed Martin, BAE, and the international JSF team have turned to embedded HUMS diagnostics. Even that probably won't be enough, absent integration with ALIS - which an IEEE paper has described as "perhaps the most advanced and comprehensive set of diagnostic, prognostic, and health management capabilities yet to be applied to an aviation platform."

Read the rest at Defense Industry Daily...

Copchicks and Raven 42

Jeff Cooper used to talk with veiled disdain about 'copchicks'. And over at Volokh, Wayne State law prof Kingsley Browne riffs off his new book 'Co-Ed Combat' - following on his old book 'Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality' to talk at length about why it is bad to have women in the military.

read the rest! »

"Paratrooper of Love", Indeed!!

TG went to get her hair cut and brought home a copy of Penthouse she'd been reading - or claimed to have been reading. There was an article about the military in it, right between the naked Second Life and hentai characters and the "Wow!! He went 30 days without sex!!" article.

"Don't you know this guy?" she asked.

In the Crosshairs - Snipers are vital to battlefield victory. Why did two of them become targets of our own military establishment?

...by Matthew Currier Burden, also known as Matty O'Blackfive.

Sweet!! You go, Matty!!

Books For The Troops

Abu Muquama is one of my favorite new blogs - by two people with serious cred in counterinsurgency (I've groveled and begged them to follow Totten and crosspost some of their stuff here, that's how good I think they are). You ought to be reading them.

Along with the Small Wars Journal, they are helping some folks in Afghanistan out - apparently, there is an ad-hoc counterinsurgency academy being run by some wicked smart mid-level Army officers.

They need books.

Amazon has books.

You have money.

Are you getting my drift? Throw down for a book or two and help make more wicked smart U.S. soldiers.

Verizon Adopts Google's Android Mobile Platform

Linux Insider explains why they did it; it's an interesting set of business reasons.

The "walled garden" approach favored by many cell phone carriers to date appears to be crumbling fast.

Special Forces Training: Mind over Matter

Biggest Guy is probably hoping this sort of thing doesn't come into vogue over here any time soon. Excerpted from a January 1998 address by Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in the wake of the Asian crony economy meltdowns:

"By the way, General Jones and I had the pleasure of going out to watch their special forces train in Indonesia. I don't know if any of you have had that experience, but it's pretty impressive. They had 400-500 young men and a small cadre of women in their special forces. These folks were in great shape. They were not big, 250 pound bruisers, but pretty lean, mean, 130-140 pounds, and they were breaking cement blocks with their heads, their arms. They had iron bars they were snapping over their knees, etc.

But the most impressive thing I saw were some of them standing, and they were showing the power of the mind in terms of controlling the body, and they're fighting in jungle warfare scenarios....

read the rest! »

Omaha, Nebraska

I caught the news from Omaha late tonight.

The first thoughts always are visceral - imaging (not imagining) the same thing here in the bustle of the Del Amo Mall just up the street from my house. Then I imagine the holes ripped in families and communities, the faces I will see tomorrow in halftone in the morning paper.

My view on this stuff is simple; it's best summarized by the book 'Stand on Zanzibar', where author John Brunner coined the term 'mucker'.

Blogger Cosma Shalizi - who blogs at 'Three Toed Sloth' wrote a good summary some time ago:

"Mucker" is a word coined by the science fiction writer John Brunner in his great novel Stand on Zanzibar. The word derives from "amok," which will require a bit of history. It is a Malay word, and a person who goes violently insane, rushing through the village and murderously attacking everyone in his path, is said to have "run amok." In what was an egregiously idiotic statement, even for him, the eminent French critic Georges Bataille called running amok the purest manifestation of revolt, "the movement by which man rises up against his own condition and the whole of creation." (Bataille never ran through the streets of Montparnasse madly slashing with a kris, so he either lacked the courage of his convictions or was a hypocrite with a small - a very small - modicum of brains.) The Malays, inevitably, were and are more sensible: they kill those who run amok.

A "mucker," then, is someone who runs amok; the times havin' a-changed, now they use guns. As always, they are people driven to murderous madness by intolerable frustration, repression and conformity, whether in an isolated kampong or the Postal Service. So far muckers seem to have been mostly Americans, but just the other day the radio carried news of one in Germany.

It does Mr. Brunner's prescience great credit to have foreseen the need for this word, back in 1964; and it does the rest of us no credit at all, for letting such a word be needed.

There is something dark and bloody in the human heart.

Short Course: Physics of Sustainable Energy

An acquaintance pointed me to this, which looks like it'll be a really dense infodump. Anyone interested in signing up ought to try. The anti-sticker-shocker: it costs $100. For two days. Parking at the venue adds 30% to that ( :) ).

Sponsors: APS Forum on Physics & Society and AAPT

Physics of Sustainable Energy:
Using Energy Efficiently and Producing It Renewably

Saturday/Sunday, March 1-2, 2008, University of California at Berkeley

D. Hafemeister at calpoly.edu is handling registration. In the interest of reducing spam I'm not posting email in the clear. And I have yet to find an online link for this event.

I wish I could make it to this...

Short Course on Energy

Update: Here's the pdf announcing the event . And it would probably help if you are able to pass as an APS or AAPT member.

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Blog News

Not this blog ... the LA Times blogs.

I've said for a while that it will be easier for newspapers to learn to blog than for bloggers to learn to be publishers. Note that that doesn't cover the cost-structure overhang that is threatening media companies today, which is what's going to grind them as institutions for the next few years.

So the LA Times has hired local blog wild man Tony Pierce to run their blog presence. I'm trying to decide on an over/under for his tenure there, but can say with some cofidence it'll be short.

Now that's not because he and I butted heads when he laid out some bullshit about Pajamas Media. It's not because he was just quoted as saying

Huffington Post showed up out of nowhere when no one asked for another political blog and is now getting more hits than Drudge mostly because they are serious about politics and they're echoing what regular Americans actually believe.

...that'll fit him right in with the Times folks.

It's because he's batshit crazy.

But I say that like it's a bad thing. Maybe not, eh? We'll see...

Help A Blogger Out - Gary Farber

One thing I like about blogs - about all of Media 2.0 in fact - is that it opens the doors to creative people doing their things and the audience directly supporting them. Whether you're Ani diFranco or Michael Totten, it's now possible to lead a middle-class (or better!) life by directly engaging your fans.

And for those folks living closer to the edge, to just live by directly engaging your fans.

Gary Farber of Amygdala is holding a pledge week while he waits to hear about his disability claim. You can make a big difference in his holiday season by making sure there is food in the larder.

Click here to help out; I just did and the $25 bucks I was going to spend on lunch tomorrow just became a yogurt and a banana. I'm better off spiritually and physically.

Iran - It's Still Not That Dark, And We Still Have A Really Big Flashlight

I'll assume you're all familiar with the news about the new NIE about Iran and the Bomb.

Reading it ought to give us all an appreciation for how difficult it is to make judgements in areas where the facts seem apparent but are really so unclear (see: AGW).

My position on Iran hasn't changed.

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I'm Not Quite Sure What's Setting Me Off Here...

A confessional from an academic parent that just flat rubs me the wrong way (via Crooked Timber):

I spent a lot of those years exhausted and angry. We continued to have only part-time child care. Some nights I put the children to bed crying because I knew they were better off crying alone in bed than interacting with an angry sleep-deprived mother. I was furious that I had to make constrained choices and could not have the life I wanted. When he was home, my spouse was "superdad," who did a lot of the work and played a lot with the children, so there was a big hole when he was gone. He was aware of how much he did when he was around, but not of what it was like when he was not around. I wanted him to confront the consequences of the work-home choice he was making and feel just as bad as I did. In retrospect, I probably should have used more paid child care and household help, as the children would probably have been better off with a saner mother, but I did not want to concede defeat to the constraints in my life. I preferred feeling angry to adjusting.

I need to think about why I'm reacting so strongly to this.

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TNR's Response (the whole nine yards)

I started to pull things out of Foer's essay on l'affaire Beauchamp, but I realized that you can't understand how mendacious Franklin Foer is really being without reading the whole thing. So I've interspersed some passing comments, some deeper ones, and present you with the entire thing so you can read it for yourself and decide if TNR is in fact:

...provid[ing] its readers with an intelligent, stimulating and rigorous examination of American politics, foreign policy and culture. It has brilliantly maintained its mission for ninety years.

Read this whole thing and decide for yourself.

For months, our magazine has been subject to accusations that stories we published by an American soldier then serving in Iraq were fabricated. When these accusations first arose, we promised our readers a full account of our investigation. We spent the last four-and-a-half months re-reporting his stories. These are our findings.

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Ben's Bells

I've got family in Tucson these days, so a project has come to my attention that's worth sharing. In 2002 Mare-Packard, an adjunct instructor for special education and rehabilitation, lost her 3-year-old son Ben to croup. In the painful aftermath, she found that the small kindnesses of strangers meant a lot to her - and the Ben's Bells project was born.

At first, ceramic bells were created and hung in public places, with an invitation to keep the bell and pass on kindness in return. Folks can still drop in and help make the bells, but in September 2005 the project kicked up a notch with weekly "bellings" for a person who makes the Tucson area a better, kinder place to live. Nominations are online.

To their credit, the Arizona Daily Star covers these events, with back stories that explain who the recipient is, what they do, and how they were nominated - q.v. the Nov 3/07 "Beads of Courage" winner. It's a good kind of hyper-local coverage that goes beyond the usual "negativity sells" approach, and works to help build communities rather than tear them down.

The Skyboxes And The Gentry

Here's an oped in the LA Times from Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel that I agree with 100%. I've talked about 'skybox liberalism'; they call it 'The Gentry Liberals'.

Since the 1960s, the intellectual class epitomized by Schlesinger has grown many times over. Academic liberals have become something of a political power in their own right. College campuses constituted the largest single base of contributors to the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry. Professors are among the highly compensated and pampered professional cadres of the knowledge economy -- which also includes lawyers, engineers, doctors, wealth managers, investors and other educated professionals -- that make up the ranks of gentry liberalism and flatter the politicians who advocate its positions.

TNR

Well, they published the results of their long investigation, and while I ought to be charitable - it's difficult when they go on for 15 pages and don't say much other than that they feel very sorry for themselves, abused by the military public affairs apparatus, and wronged by right-wing bloggers, essentially it is an Emily Litella "Never Mind...".

Personally, a two-sentence "Sorry about that, here's what we're going to do to get it right next time" would have made me far happier.

I can think of more than a few holes in the piece, but I have to go on the roof and install a weather station as a part of my effort to make the case to my city government that they should let me put up a windmill. Maybe later this afternoon.

Meanwhile go read it yourself and see what you think, and watch Bob Owens on the issues.