OPSEC RULES: No posts until I get back from Iraq

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New High-res scope for snipers

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Big Dog

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Infantry Morning PT

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Michelle Malkin swarmed by mob of Dirties

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Historic Moment?

Mickey Kaus is in Denver at the Dem convention and he writes about attending a panel discussion in which Democrats began to denounce the teacher's unions. Could this be the beginning of the end for one of our country's biggest problems?

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Tazer Videos Are Up

More here (be sure to choose "Hi-Quality" under the videos at the YouTube site).

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CLS YouTube videos

YouTube videos of CLS training are here

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Comments turned off

Sorry, but the comments have been turned off due to excessive spam.

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CLS Videos and pics uploaded

A Co 1-18 CLS Training

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Finally posted some pics from NTC

More to come...

A Co 1-18 NTC

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Father's Video Sparks Action

The father of a soldier recently back from a 15-month tour in Afghanistan posted a youtube video that has caught the attention of the Pentagon and CNN. See the story here.

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Combat Glove

I probably won't be seeing this in my kit anytime soon, but here is a peek at a possible future.

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Video: Special Forces raid in Sadr City

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Obama's "Strike Force"

Another one of Obama's many faces emerged last week when pressed for his plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq. In his answer, he stated that of course we would leave forces behind to protect our diplomatic assets, but he also referred to a strike force that may be in Iraq or nearby.

In the same answer, he disengenously brings up Sen. McCain's 100-year remarks, without noting the fact that his plan would be essentially the same thing.

The Weekly Standard looks into Obama's strike force and finds it even more at odds with his campaign rhetoric, see the article here.

A key adviser to Senator Obama’s campaign is recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

The paper, obtained by The New York Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for the center-left Center for a New American Security. In “Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement,” Mr. Kahl writes that through negotiations with the Iraqi government “the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000–80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground).”

Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator of the Obama campaign’s working group on Iraq.

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Dems

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Outside the Wire

Finally, a film about the war in Iraq that looks promising.



The site.

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The Alleys

James Glanz writes of his time spent with Sadr's Milita in the alleys of Sadr City. He quotes a leader of the Mahdi Army:

“We can’t face the armored tanks of the Americans face to face, because all we have is light guns,” he said. “So we just wait for a chance to attack something.”

But they have some tactical advantages also:

Either way, before dismissing the ragtag Mahdi fighters, it would be well to remember that — partly because the alleys of the neighborhoods they control are too narrow for the Iraqi Army’s armored vehicles — Mahdi units like Riadh’s have been fighting Iraq’s federal forces to a standstill in Basra, the country’s southern port city, for nearly a week now.

Alleys: they are dangerous only when used by those who grew up in them. That is the basic reason Mr. Sadr and his fighters simply will not go away in this war.

Check out the whole story in the New York Times.

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Closing the Race Gap II

In the attempt to increase the understanding.

John Stossel report on urban myths that persist in the black culture.

Part I



Part II

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Motorcycle Conspicuity Gear

Vanity vs. Safety

I just bought a couple items to wear while riding my motorcycle. I'm going to look like a London messenger, but it'll be hard for the fools on phones driving cars to fail to spot me on the road.

The Hi-Vis Hump is a backpack cover



And the Tuffrhino jacket is plenty visible also.


What I'm trying to avoid (caution, very graphic and nasty):

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Bluetooth Dogtag

Click image for story.

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1-41 Alpha Co.Change of Command Photos

Sorry family, there are none of me.

1-41 A Co Change of Command Ceremony

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Dreadlocks

Wishing to close the racial divide through greater understanding? Here is a post by Robert Pierre explaining why he cut his dreadlocks:

In the end, after all the personal point-making and all the career politics, it was just hair, too much hair.

I know it answers some questions I've had.

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Who is the enemy?

I'm just going to cut and paste the whole thing. From James Taranto's Best of the Web:

"Researchers at Harvard say that publicly voiced doubts about the U.S. occupation of Iraq have a measurable 'emboldenment effect' on insurgents there," United Press International reports:

Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university's Kennedy School of Government.

The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq." . . .

In Iraqi provinces that were broadly comparable in social and economic terms, attacks increased between 7 percent and 10 percent following what the researchers call "high-mention weeks," like the two just before the November 2006 election.

The study is here. One possible objection is the way the study counts "emboldening" statements (see pp. 9-10):

We construct an automated mentions count of potentially "emboldening" statements reported in major U.S. news outlets, which we define as the number of times top Bush administration officials--the President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Press Secretary, and the U.S. commander [in] Iraq--refer to statements or actions by other U.S. political figures that might encourage violent extremist groups in Iraq. This strategy provides an objective mechanism to classify what constitutes an emboldening or resolve-undermining statement or action.

This is probably the best the authors could do. There is no way to count "emboldening" statements directly; the definition invariably would be subjective and the count incomplete. But by relying on characterizations of Bush administration officials (and the commander in Iraq), they leave open the possibility that it is those characterizations, rather than the statements being characterized, that embolden terrorists in Iraq. In addition to "emboldening" statements, the authors also find a correlation between the release of major U.S. opinion polls about Iraq and violence there.

On a related note, the New York Times reports that the media aren't paying as much attention to Iraq as they used to:

Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The drop in coverage parallels--and may be explained by--a decline in public interest. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that more than 50 percent of Americans said they followed events in Iraq "very closely" in the months just before and after the war began, but that slid to an average of 40 percent in 2006, and has been running below 30 percent since last fall.

"May be explained by"? What about "may explain"? The Web notwithstanding, most people are still fairly passive consumers of news and are likely to follow stories less closely if there's less news about them.

But here's another possible explanation: News organizations, by and large, are biased against American success in Iraq, as illustrated by this crass bit of editorializing from the Associated Press:

Fresh off his eighth Iraq visit, Sen. John McCain declared Monday that "we are succeeding" and said he wouldn't change course--even as the U.S. death toll rose to 4,000 and the war entered its sixth year.

That "even as" clause is the reporter's opinion, not McCain's. Yet while this sort of thing still goes on, journalists have paid less attention to Iraq over the past year as the "surge" has succeeded in reducing violence. If the Harvard study is right, we may be looking at a virtuous circle: Less violence means less media coverage, which in turn means less violence.

Perhaps one day we'll wake up to discover that America won the war in Iraq months earlier, but no one noticed because the reporters were all busy with other things.

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Required Reading

Michael Yon.

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Calls for Fragging

They're not anti-war, they're pro-war, just on the side of the enemy.

More here.

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Sticky: Comments Welcome!

Just an FYI, I encourage comments on my posts, in fact I look forward to them, so please feel free to just say "Hi."

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D.C. vs Heller SCOTUS Audio file

Here is the audio file of the arguments in the huge 2nd Amendment gun case the Supreme Court heard yesterday:

http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2007/2007_07_290/argument/

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COM-BAT

Engadget has a post about a project being worked on at the University of Michigan. They just received $10 million to continue work on a new flying recon thing.

Click images for higher resolution.

Here is the link to the project website.

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'This Should Not Be a Church,This Should Be a Mosque'

From the JamieWearingFool blog:

A vicar was in hospital last night after being attacked in his churchyard by two youths in what is being treated as a 'faith hate' crime.Canon Michael Ainsworth, 57, was kicked and punched in the head as one of the attackers screamed "f***ing priest".He was left lying on the ground with deep cuts, bruising and two black eyes.

Read the whole thing here.

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The Obama Scrutiny Begins

Obama walks arrogance line

By RON FOURNIER, Associated Press Writer
Mon Mar 17, 1:57 AM ET

Arrogance is a common vice in presidential politics. A person must be more than a little self-important to wake up one day and say, "I belong in the Oval Office."

But there's a line smart politicians don't cross — somewhere between "I'm qualified to be president" and "I'm born to be president." Wherever it lies, Barack Obama better watch his step.

He's bordering on arrogance.

The dictionary defines the word as an "offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride." Obama may not be offensive or overbearing, but he can be a bit too cocky for his own good.

The freshman senator told reporters in July that he would overcome Hillary Rodham Clinton's lead in the polls because "to know me is to love me."

A few months later, he said, "Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there."

True, there's a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekiness to such remarks — almost as if Obama doesn't want to take his adoring crowds and political ascent too seriously. He was surely kidding when he told supporters in January that by the time he was done speaking "a light will shine down from somewhere."

"It will light upon you," he continued. "You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it."

But both Obama and his wife, Michelle, ooze a sense of entitlement.

"Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics," his wife said a few weeks ago, adding that Americans will get only one chance to elect him.

Obama's cool self-confidence got him into trouble in New Hampshire when he said Clinton was "likable enough," faint praise that grated on female votes who didn't appreciate him condescending to the former first lady.

Privately, aides and associates of Obama tell stories about a boss who can be aloof and ungracious. He holds firmly to views and doesn't like to be challenged, traits that President Bush packaged and sold under the "resolute" brand in the 2004 election. For Bush, those qualities proved to be dangerous in a time of war and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

If arrogance is a display of self-importance and superiority, Obama earns the pejorative every time he calls his pre-invasion opposition to the war in Iraq an act of courage.

While he deserves credit for forecasting the complications of war in 2002, Obama's opposition carried scant political risk because he was a little-known state lawmaker courting liberal voters in Illinois. In 2004, when denouncing the war and war-enabling Democrats would have jeopardized his prized speaking role at the Democratic National Convention, Obama ducked the issue.

It may be that he has just the right mix of confidence and humility to lead the nation (Obama likes to say, "I'm reminded every day that I'm not a perfect man"). But if the young senator wins the nomination, even the smallest trace of arrogance will be an issue with voters who still consider him a blank slate.

That may seem unfair to a candidate who's running against Clinton, the former first lady who is the model of overbearing pride. This is a woman, after all, who claims experience from her eight years as first lady but won't release her White House records; who trails Obama in delegates but deigned to suggest he'd be her running mate; and who has more baggage than Samsonite yet says Obama lacks "vetting."

But voters expect arrogance from Clinton and her husband, Bill. It's part of the package. It's a 90s-thing. The Clintons' utter self-absorption comes with a record of achievement and brass-knuckle passion that Obama cannot match — and that Democratic voters know could come in handy against GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain.

Voters won't cut Obama as much slack on the humility test because he's sold himself as something different. While rejecting the "me"-centric status quo and promising a new era of post-partisan reform, Obama has said the movement he has created is not about him; it's about what Americans can do together if their faith in government is restored.

The power of his message lies in its humility. As he told 7,000 supporters at a rally last month, "I am an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams."

Nobody expects Obama to be perfect. But he better never forget that he isn't.

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It's a what?

Becomes....

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Celebrity Morph by MyHeritage

MyHeritage: Family tree - Genealogy - Celebrity

Don't ask.

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Belly dancer mishap

This is funny and hot. Slipped by the youtube censors.

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First post using my new OLPC

It is likely I'll be giving this to someone with small hands, the keyboard is pretty much unusable for someone with full-size hands.

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Kansas

Nice story from Kansas:

NESS CITY, Kan. - Deputies said a woman in western Kansas sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years, and they're investigating whether she was mistreated.

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said a man called his office last month to report that something was wrong with his girlfriend.

Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

“We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” Whipple said. “The hospital removed it.”

Whipple said investigators planned to present their report Wednesday to the county attorney, who will determine whether any charges should be filed against the woman's 36-year-old boyfriend.

“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” Whipple said. “It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”

He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.

“And her reply would be, ‘Maybe tomorrow,”’ Whipple said. “According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom.”

The boyfriend called police on Feb. 27 to report that “there was something wrong with his girlfriend,” Whipple said, adding that he never explained why it took him two years to call.

Police found the clothed woman sitting on the toilet, her sweat pants down to her mid-thigh. She was “somewhat disoriented,” and her legs looked like they had atrophied, Whipple said.

“She said that she didn’t need any help, that she was OK and did not want to leave,” he said.

She was taken to a hospital in Wichita, about 150 miles southeast of Ness City. Whipple said she has refused to cooperate with medical providers or law enforcement investigators.

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More new pics

Three new albums, including some PT, 2nd Platoon group photo and finally layout and inventory pics.

1-41 Apocalypse Company Layout and 2nd Platoon Group

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1-41 Apocalypse Company Truck Gunnery

More pics

1-41 Apocalypse Company Truck Gunnery

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Stocking the Company Store

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New Iraqi Law Places Waiting Period on Suicide Vests

In The Know: New Iraqi Law Requires Waiting Period For Suicide Vest Purchases

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Putting Pads on Posts

From Yahoo News:

Padded lampposts are being trialled in a London street to protect inattentive pedestrians.

A pilot scheme has been launched in Brick Lane after it was found to have the highest number of 'walking and texting' injuries in the country.

A study carried out by 118 118 found one in ten people has hurt themselves while focused on their mobile phone screen.

The charity Living Streets is so concerned that it has teamed up with the directory enquiries service to test a scheme to wrap up the nation's lampposts.

A poll will be carried out on Brick Lane to gauge the response of locals.

If successful, the concept will be rolled out in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool.

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1-41 Marriage Rededication

Photos from the event.

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US Soldiers Must Tread Lightly In Iraq

It is more important than ever that Coalition Forces not push Iraqis, especially the youth, back into the hands of the Musliim fanatics. A New York Times story clearly illustrates how much Iraq's future depends on the way those who call it their home are treated.

After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

"I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us," said Sara, a high school student in Basra. "Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don't deserve to be rulers."

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: "The religion men are liars. Young people don't believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore."

The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.

While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied. Fingers caught in the act of smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its wearer. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold.

The article is amazing in its departure from the NYTime's typical treatment of the war effort, even calling our work there "the American liberation."

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Hitchens on the Simplistic Sloganeering

Christopher Hitchens, while not singling out Obama, certainly takes to task Barack's main rhetorical advantage: the simplistic slogan.

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible. (How could one state, for example, the famous Burkean principle that many sorts of change ought to be regarded with skepticism?) In a rather poor trade-off for this veto on complexity, many views that are expressible (and "We the People Together Dream of and Hope for New Change in America" would be really quite a long sentence in the latest junk language) will, in turn, be entirely and indeed almost beautifully unintelligible.

I highly recommend reading Hitch's whole column, as usual.

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"Baghdad's New Normal"

From US News & World Report

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Spinning the Story

In other words, the sisters were ganging up on and attacking a lone woman, who wisely drew her concealed handgun and fired in defense of her life. Nice of the Tribune to finally get to the actual facts in the story after painting the group of violent sisters as pitiful victims. All in the name of demonizing firearms.

Story

Sample of first 15 paragraphs "...what had been a good day for the teen turned deadly as Marsh walked from her grandmother's house in the South Austin neighborhood with her two older sisters and a friend..."

The actual story:

Later that evening, Kadeidrah and her sisters, Kamesha Pierce, 17, and Lakeva Morganfield, 25, who live in the 3500 block of West Polk Street, went to their grandmother's home in South Austin. As they were leaving the house, family said they encountered a female who was dating a man that had previously dated one of the sisters.

"We was going to have to cross paths with her, and I guess she figured we was going to jump her," said Pierce.

The female reached into her purse and pulled out a silver revolver, Morganfield, 25, said. The women began to quarrel and Marsh was struck in the chest while trying to push Morganfield out of the way, she said.

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Are You Kidding Me!?

This must be a joke, I mean, this is not for real, is it? How completely ludicrous; how utterly juvenile. These people sound like brainwashed zombie infants. Unreal.



Too bad to see Jessica Alba in there, I thought she was pretty cool until now. Oh well, at least I still have Angelina.

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Weekend video viewing

Apaches "Clear to Engage"


Kiowa "Clear to Engage"


Oops, sorry dude.


The Rundown


Bradleys in combat


React to Contact

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OpFor Video

Here is a video from last week when we played the enemy (OpFor) for another unit. Hopefully they took some lessons away from the training. We certainly weren't easy on them.

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Heading to Topeka

The wife and I are heading to Topeka for a unit-sponsered 3-day "marriage retreat." It'll be nice to have a few days away from the post to stay in a hotel with Aziah; time to just focus on the two of us. There will be a vow-renewal and much positive discussion with fellow soldier couples.

I'm sure it will be totally infused with god-talk, whatever. I know what I'm getting into so I can't complain.

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