I’m checked in after a long drive and three family visits enroute, and will be heading to Fran’s Restaurant tonight for the pre-MilBlogging Conference join up, but more importantly, to shake a few hands and say a few words of thanks to our service personnel, while trying not to interupt their free steak dinner.

LCDR and Mrs Smash will be here, and I think one other tagged with being a navy type in the list of attendees. I’m looking forward to getting to know some of the people I have read much of over the last two years.

I was hoping Capt Lex would make an excuse to make a cross country, but….he’s busy, I guess, becoming an systems engineer….

If you’re not already briefed in on the furor over Fran’s lease not being renewed, go here, read and chase the links. Hilton boned this one up (even the MSM is writing negative things!). Fran is also looking to set up a fund to keep the dinners for the wounded personnel from Walter Reed going. If you have a few spare $$$, that may be a good place to drop them.

More later!

From a comment on a post over at Little Green Footballs:

#257 Blue Chip 2/28/2006 01:35PM PST

Ok, time for a little levity.

I’m working on a parody of the Oscars (apologies to all the parody masters out there-I’m a novice-It’s a work in progress).

Any feedback – much appreciated.

* Backstage at the Oscars Rehearsal *

Producer: “Five minutes everybody! Places please! This is a live rehearsal! Camera one – zoom in on Jon!”

Jon Stewart: “Dick? I’m gonna open with the Bush/Cheney ‘Brokeback Mountain’ joke. Maybe use the “Capote & Cheney Hunting” stuff later? You know, after we have the “Jumpin’ Jihad” musical number. What do you think?”

Producer: “Yeah, that works. Don’t forget Rosie O’Donnell and Nathan Lane are doing the “Gay Love Stories at the Movies” montage right after you. Keep it tight on the monologue. We don’t have a lot of time before the commercial break…”

Jon Stewart: “Right. Alex Baldwin and Marty Sheen are still doing the “Support the Troops – Vote Democrat” mock PSA? That’ll kill! Funny stuff!”

Producer: “Of course. Camera Two? Make sure you get a good shot of Cindy Sheehan sitting next to Michael Moore during Jon’s monologue! Third joke in, wait for the line “Bush loves cartoons at the movies….”

Jon Stewart: “Cindy promised to wear her tee shirt if we showed it. That still a go?”

Producer: “Hell yeah! This isn’t the ‘State of the Union’ speech, you know. We still have free speech in Hollywood! By the way, make sure you pull all the “Mohammad – The Musical” jokes”

Jon Stewart: “I pulled all the Mohammad jokes. No sense offending a respected religion for no reason. We don’t need any grief over being ‘insensitive’ to cultural differences.

Producer: “Absolutely. That’s the same reason we dropped Theo Van Gogh from the “In Memoriam” montage. I mean, the guy basically made a hate film. We can’t celebrate that.

Jon Stewart: “Not enough fire insurance in the world to mention that guy! Can you imagine?!? They’d burn the theater down!

Producer: “Hell! They’d burn half of Hollywood down!”

Jon Stewart: “Is Redgrave going to hand out the award to “Paradise Now” when Palestine wins for best foreign film?”

Producer: “Who else? She’s always supported them. We thought it was a good fit. Should be an interesting acceptance speech, too.”

Jon Stewart “Did the President tape a message for opening credits? Like Clinton did?”

Producer: “The President….? Of the Academy….?”

Jon Stewart: “No – the President of the United States. You know, Bush?”

Producer: “Hell no! Will Farrell is doing a really funny impersonation of him we filmed last week. It has ‘Bush’ trying to figure out what the films are about based on just their titles! It’s a scream! He thinks ‘Crash’ is about NASCAR! Our audience will love it”

🙂

This was published in the local paper on New Year’s Day, but not listed in the Pearls Before Swine cartoon archives.

Maybe it’s an analogy of what happens out here in the blogosphere sometimes…Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Operational Security (OPSEC). Important stuff for the Cold War, and even today. PatriotVoices has a great post on the topic, taking us back to another time (at least for us older ones who had to face the “Evil Empire” while wearing a uniform. I concur with that post and vouch for it’s accuracy. The bad guys had incredible intelligence gathering organizations, and even if today’s enemy doesn’t have those resources, they have the web. It’s a great aggregator of info….

While we make our posts, the world reads them. It’s quite satisfying to get a good comment. Good doesn’t mean as in how wonderful a post was (yep, those are nice), but one that adds to the issue, or corrects an error, or critically debates the info, (debate here meaning what the ancient Greeks would recognize as debate, not just a bunch of personal opinions presented with truth). As the posts propagate out via trackbacks and links sent around by others to friends and associates, more information on the topic can be aggregated. In a dedicated intelligence collecting environment, this becomes powerful. By accident it the same thing can happen. This morning I saw this very example. The topic is the physics and chemistry of state changes of water, but it you read the post and comments, you’ll follow my point.

I found the post via the Open Post for 7/8/2005 on Mudville Gazette. Ma Deuce Gunner posted a science question Friday 7/8/2005 @ 6:31PM (I assume that’s sandbox time). At 8:25 PM, Owen had answered the question, with a correction to the actual naming by John of the phenomena by 4:43 AM 7/9. That is some serious application of knowledge in my view.

Think for a moment how a moment of typed pondering of any one of the Milbloggers, regardless of when we served, might have a similar effect? Consider a situation where the comments were not fed back to the author, but to others who could use the description of a tactical concept to their advantage. It’s like the breaking of atomic bonds…it can light up a city, or decimated it. Same principle, different logic behind the application. We know the military is a plodding beaurarcy, and some things don’t change. We also know the basics of warfare haven’t changed from it’s very beginnings, but then many of us have been present when some new tactical or strategic concept came to be. Some us may have been actively involved in the birthing of something that made the organization more militarily effective. Some times, it’s the assemblage of several old, well known concepts that make a new tactical break through. Just before WWI, some german scientists came up with a process to create fertilizer. It was expensive and the process shelved. When WWI came along, and the sea lines of communications were restricted and bird guano, rich in nitrates and used in the production of explosives, as well as being used on the farms was cut off, the process was pulled of the shelf, so explosives could be made…The 1 year supply of natural nitrates in 1914 should have limited Germany’s ability to fight any longer than that. Application of an old idea killed many of the youth of Europe and the US for four years, thanks to modern living thru chemistry.

A few years ago, a couple of math guys speculated the we are all connected to each other by at most, six people, hence the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation.” The business world knows of this and I have a friend who has leveraged off this concept, and while he is a civilian, with military like efficiency. Using a network, intentionally, or unintentionally, yields a large amount of information quickly. Throw in the ability to search the web, once you have been “tipped off” for other knowledge on the subject.

While I was in the Navy, there seemed to be a constant low level battle waged about what had to go into the “burn bag.” Some said all naval messages, regardless of classification, others said only classified ones. Given the massive stack of paper I routinely dealt with in my operations department tours, and having been the communications officer, I thought it far too easy for a classified message (of which many were Confidential, could accidentally end up in a trash can, mixed with the unclassified ones, so I preferred the burn bag for messages. Those who had to store the many red and white striped bags, and those who had to actually take them to the shore based incinerators, disliked that idea. Both sides of the battle had legitimate reasons for their choices.

There are things I have great sea stories about, and some of the things have come out in open source, but I still refrain.

Summary;

It’s a double edged sword out here with information on the web. Be mindful of what you post

A few days ago, in my post on the revelation that black holes don’t exist, I mentioned “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. I finished listening to it today and here’s my review:

Sort of like the line in “Top Gun:” “That was some of the best flying I’ve seen, right up until the time you got killed.” this was a good book, right up until the last commentary by the author.

After 5 CDs of listening not only to the fantastic things man has discovered, by who and how, and many stories of how things were either not understood, or not even comprehended, and later, once something was discovered (“plate tectonics” was a term first used in 1968), all of a sudden, right at the end of the book, Bill Vryson begins to pontificate about how life was actually a series of highly improbible things happening over and over again, so that’s how it works we’re told. He describes “miraculous” things, then makes it a result of a few chemicals and a spark.

He goes on to tell us how they (scientists) postulate that 90% of the species on Earth still haven’t been discovered, and a few moments later, he starts berating mankind for being the most selfish and inept species ever in the history of the planet, uncaringly either letting species be eliminated, or actually wantonly eliminating them.

It struck me as incredible that the very history of our journey into modernity has been rife with misunderstandings, personality conflict, rejection of actual fact, yet all of a sudden, we are chastised for destroying the planet and what lives here. We have also been responsible for global warming (it couldn’t have been the big yellow ball hanging up there in the sky!), since that began when humans first walked the earth.

Anyhow, listen to it all, but if you’re not in the mood for a lecture on how bad humanity is for dear old mother earth, skip the last track on the last CD and spare your blood pressure.

This is maybe somewhat brutal, but then again, maybe not. I think we call the end of the http address the domain, .com, .gov, .net, .us, .biz, edu, .info. I propose a new domain (if that’s the right name for them): .joke. I mean, it would warn people before they went there about the mirth ready to befall them. I we could start with http://www.johnkerry.joke. How does that sound? From there, consider the possibilities. We could have MCM (mainstream comedy media) such as www.billcosby.joke, www.adamsnadler.joke, www.stevemartin.joke, and www.rosannebarr.joke (oops…these are supposed to be funny!). Then again, maybe it’s a bad thing to decide we need more domains. What will come next? Maybe .satire, followed by .news (which may be good, but how will you know if CBS belongs in the .joke or .news domain?). Pretty soon, there might be .bucanneers for the somehow still loyal in Tampa, which would be like .saints for the New Orleans crowd. Anyhow, this is a planted thread, to see where it goes from here. The options are pretty endless, unless we ru n out of English words, at which point, we could do a survey for the next most popular language (Spanish?) and begin lifting those words to populate the net with new domains. The down side is our little heads will explode, trying to keep track of the explosion of addresses we have to keep track of. We’d have to demand wall sized screens, just so we had a hope of scrolling through our lists of favorite addresses. Now, that would drive the display market to feed our need. Oh, but what about if someone opposite your view registers the domain name first> For instance, as a staunch Democrat, you could go to www.johnkerry.com and think he’s some commercially related site, you know, someplace that wants your money! Hey! Wait…that’s it, HE DOES! Not only will he take your donations, he’ll tax you and get what you used to have left over for yourself, and spend it how he sees fit. I digress. But, as a good Democrat, your fingers may slip and you’d end up on www.johnkerry.joke. You may be terribly confused if the jokes there are not household humor of the incredibly wealthy, but those from his opponents. If you went to www.johnkerry.biz, you’d find nothing, as he’s never run a business. At www.johnkerry.mil, there may be a single entry, in large purple heart ribbon color letters that says (no emphasis added): “I SERVED IN VIETNAM!” at www.johnkerry.info, I’m not sure what you’d find, certainly no federal bills bearing his name. How about taking a peek at www.johnkerry.us. Hmmm….just what could be said there? Maybe a list of Heinz plants that have moved out of the country and “outsourced” the work to foreign nationals. So it would carry the connotation of really more like www.johnkerryswifesaysscrewyou.us. That’s our “Momma T!”

I’ve been avidly reading blogs for about 5 months now and decided today was the day to join the fray. I happily join the other pajamamujahadien in the cyber world.

As a way of introducing the reading I have been doing, which from which you can conclude my leanings to some degree, here are some of the many that I make a special effort to read daily, if not more depending on how fast the news is breaking. I will shamelessly promote the blogs with my thoughts on them as well:

Little Green Footballs
I was reading this well before RatherGate. Charles was the one who overlayed a MS Word document on the Texas ANG memos and got the entire ball rolling on the forgery issue. Even before that, his blog has a lot of links to news that is published overseas, or downplayed stateside. Great discussions from many thinking readers makes it even better thatn the basic posts alone!

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller
Misha has a lot of insightful commentary, with “edgy” adjectives. Again, as with LGF, the discussions are lively and well populated.

Black Five
Matt is ex-military, with many connections to the real men, women and family members doing the hard work for the sake of freedom. His perspective is well founded when he adds to the material he links. Great place to find great reading and links to the real warriors, so you can see it through their eyes, not the filtering of the MSM.

International Monkey Assasination Organization
Frank isn’t really an assassin, but he doesn’t like monkeys. The man has a view of life of his very own and manages stick figure cartoons to get his point across. It’s a hoot!

That’s a few to start with. Surf on over and spend a few minutes reading.

This post is will be “the one that started it” for me. I’ve been reading blogs for about 6 months now and have decided to join the ranks of the pajamahadeen. More on the logic behind that to come with time, but it has at it’s core the desire to let the main stream media (herinafter referered to as “MSM”) and their blind supporters know there are plenty of thinking, knowledgeable people out here, who did not choose to wear a press pass for their chosen career. Not all of these people had to go through a higher education institution to get their smarts, either.

“They” employ “experts” all the time, and, while I’m thinking of it, they actually pay them for their commentary. Look at all the talking heads they had who used to wear a uniform for the Gulf War and the War on Terror? In the land of the cyber-expert, it seems plenty of people did some tremendously detailed research. all free of charge for the MSM, and their idea of “thanks” was to tell the world that people who sit at home and type in their pajamas can’t be taken seriously.

If I had the free money, I’d sure pay plenty for some not-photshopped pictures of the major luminaries of the press corps typing at home on their laptops…in their PJs!

Comments?

I feel like I’m running out the back of a Super Casa at 15,000 ft. I’m now falling into the cyber-atmosphere, but I packed a ‘chute, it will be OK….