Technology.   Someone commented on a blog elsewhere a few weeks back most of mankind’s greatest accomplishments were driven as a function of the need to conduct warfare. I’ll have to go along with that. While going to the moon has had a vast array of technological advancements, it was to help improve our missile/rocket technology and the abilty to function on the “high ground” That being said, there is technology developments, more like a “fusion” of hardware and software to help our wounded warriors. Laptops and Dragon Naturally Speaking. Life changing, capability restoring. Project VALOur-IT running on raw volunteer power and passion. Join up…serve the cause. Change a life. Invest in a future citizen out of uniform.

Just when you’d thought you’d read enough about VALOur-IT, Jeff Bacon a noted naval cartoonist, has done his duty to help promote the fund raising campaign.

Not only has Jeff jumped in, he connected with Steven Pastis, creator of “Pearls Before Swine” (an excellent cartoon strip, I might add) to jointly promote helping our wounded warriors.

Here is the first frame

YOu have to go to Jeff’s post to see the rest of the story.

And…if you still haven’t been convinced to contribute…please reconsider and chip in a few bucks, and send the information to your friends, family and co-workers.

This post will remain at the top of the posts through 11/11/2009, when the drive ends. Look below for new posts.

It begins today, the drive to make a difference for those who have suffered in defense of the nation, and defense of others around the world.

From a practical need for a blogger and a blog reader sprang a project that has now aided over 4000 wounded warriors in getting some normalcy into their lives. The project blog is here.

Even a few bucks adds up. Times are lean, but consider the “leaness” for those who will never recover what they have lost in the service.

Thanks for helping out.

If you have no preference for a service team to donate to, please drop your funds under the Navy, but know they still go into the same pot at the end of the day.

Do you have a website or blog?

If so, you can “join” a team (Team Navy is a great choice!) that fits your own association, or that of a family or friend.

At the end of the day and drive, all the funds go towards the same cause, VALOur-IT from Soldier’s Angels, helping those wounded warriors by prviding laptops with voice activated software, Nintendo Wiis for therapy and GPS units for those suffering short term memory loss issues from TBI.

If you don’t have a blog/site, please consider passing the word around and condisring donating yourself. Every little bit helps!

The drive begins 10/26 (MONDAY!) and runs through Veteran’s Day (11/11) this year.

Hugh Hewitt at BlogExpo interviewed two MilBloggers, GreyHawk and Chuck Z….and Chuck Z tells about the first voice activated laptop in his hands….the genesis of Project VALOur-IT.

Other MilBlogging history in the interviews…worth taking a listen, at least to tabout the 10 minute in point.

Kick off for the 2009 fund raising campaign begins 10/26. It’s a great cause. Please consider donating.

From Error Theory:

The original Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 faced less than 2° from Mecca. That made it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed-arch shaped, but the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.)

The Park Service dismissed concern about the Mecca-oriented crescent on grounds that the construction drawings had not yet been finalized. “Those trees could move fifty feet, or three hundred feet,” said Project Manager Jeff Reinbold in the Spring of 2006, as if this kind of “tweaking” would make any difference (Crescent of Betrayal Ch.8 p.145-6).

The construction drawings have now been released, and yes, they moved the lower tip of the half-mile wide crescent about 300 feet, enough to change the orientation of the crescent by about 4.5°. Instead of pointing less than 2° north of Mecca, the giant Islamic-shaped crescent now points less than 3° south of Mecca.

Here is the original Crescent of Embrace:

“Qibla” is the direction to Mecca, which you can verify using any online Mecca-direction calculator (just type in Somerset PA). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) would be facing 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°.

Here is one of the new construction drawings:

Instead of facing a titch north of Mecca, the giant crescent now faces a titch south of Mecca (2.7° south ± 0.1°).

As with the original Crescent design, the upper crescent tip is the end of the 50’ tall Entry Portal Wall and the lower crescent tip is the last of the 50’ tall Maple trees on the bottom. The landscape overlays make the details hard to see in the thumbnail image above, but at full resolution they are fully legible. (Copy of source PDF, without the superimposed orientations lines here. Large file warning. Graphic is on p. 30 of 233.)

The Park Service was SUPPOSED to remove the Islamic symbol shapes

When architect Paul Murdoch’s winning Crescent of Embrace design was announced in September 2005, it appeared to show a bare naked Islamic crescent and star-flag planted atop the crash site:

Burned by the resulting firestorm of protest, the Park Service to agreed to get rid of the Islamic symbol shapes, but they never did. They added an extra arc of trees, and they call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent.

This is explained on the Park Service’s own website, where the extra arc of trees is explicitly described as a broken off part of the circle:

In summary, the memorial is shaped in a circular fashion, and the circle is symbolically “broken” or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site.

Those two breaks are the two ends of the extra arc of trees:

The extra arc of trees extends from blue circle to blue circle, marking the two “breaks” in the circle referred to in the Park Service’s official explanation of the broken-circle design. One is where the flight path breaks the circle (left), the other is near the crash site (center).

What is symbolically left standing (the unbroken part of the circle) is just this:

Remove the symbolically broken off parts, and you get the original Crescent of Embrace design.

The only change is that the crescent has now been rotated clockwise a few degrees. In the construction plans it faces slightly south of Mecca instead of slightly north of Mecca. For a parallel, imagine airline security discovering a terror bomber, then playing with the fit his suicide vest before escorting him to his plane.

They said they were going to remove the giant crescent. They claim they HAVE removed it, but they haven’t. Symbolically, the design remains completely unchanged. The terrorists are still depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

The giant crescent is actually a mihrab

Here is the mihrab at the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just like the crescent memorial to Flight 93:

Confronted with evidence that the Crescent of Embrace is actually designed to be the world’s largest mosque, the Park Service sought advice from a pair of Muslim scholars. Both acknowledged the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent and both offered overtly dishonest excuses for it. One said not to worry about the likeness to an Islamic mihrab because no one has ever seen a mihrab this BIG before:

…most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience.

Right. That’s why everybody scratches their head at Mt. Rushmore. No one has ever seen Abraham Lincoln so BIG before. They just can’t figure it out.

To be fooled by this excuse, you have to really really want to be fooled. The other Muslim scholar said not to worry, the crescent cannot be seen as mihrab unless it points exactly at the Kaaba:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

In fact, a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca, for the simple reason that, throughout most of Islamic history, Muslims in far-flung parts of the world had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. As a result, it was established as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca. This was recently affirmed by Saudi religious authorities, after Meccans realized that even most of their local mosques do not face directly towards the Kaaba. “It does not affect the prayers” assured the Islamic Affairs Ministry.

Faced with evidence of an Islamic plot, why would the Park Service send this evidence exclusively to Muslims for appraisal? Have they forgotten who attacked us on 9/11?

The Service has long since been apprised of the patent dishonesties retailed by its two Muslim advisors but they don’t care. They wanted to be lied to, they knew where to go to be lied to, and they got what they wanted.

Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey

So where are the patriotic stalwarts like Michelle Malkin whose objections were instrumental in getting the Park Service to agree to remove the Islamic symbol shapes in the first place? If they knew in 2005 that the symbolic outcome of 9/11 should not be a giant Islamic shaped crescent why are they silent about this exact same symbolism today, after THEY were promised that this perversion would be removed?

Ed Morrissey urged his readers “to tell the National Parks Service and the Secretary of the Interior to rethink their plans,” promising for his own part that “as long as that crescent remains in the design, I’m not donating a red cent to the memorial.” Well Ed, the crescent does remain in the design, so please rejoin the fight.

The desertion of Malkin et. al. makes a difficult gap to fill, but we had better fill it, or the Flight 93 crash-site will soon be home to the world’s largest mosque.

To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

Have something that will bring hte big bucks?

Then you can help.

For the Soldiers Angels VALOur-IT fund raising campaign this year, auctions will be held on eBay via a single seller.

The short brief: You send the info to Holly Aho, she posts them, you package and ship the item as dirrected and get paid for your shipping costs.

The longer and “official” rules to play:

Auction Items Submissions

All auction items will run as a 7 day auction with no buy-it-now options. Auctions will be listed either on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening, ensuring a “2 weekend run” during the 7 day period. This is the busiest time at Ebay. With new listings and expiring listings showing at the top of their lists this is the best time to have a new listing, and the next weekend a now expiring listing.

All auction items must be shipped within 5 business days after receiving shipping cost payment. You will be sent shipping cost money either by paypal or check based on your preference.

Things needed to start an auction:

1. Photos.

Images should be no larger than 600px by 600px

Image file names should be short and descriptive. IMG_0001.jpg would be wrong. marinecoins.jpg would be better.

Image file names should contain no spaces. marine coins.jpg would be wrong. marinecoins.jpg or marine_coins.jpg would be better.

There is no limit to number of photos you can include

2. Description of item
Suggestions for a good description:
Include measurements if applicable. Height, width, depth, etc. Is it bigger than a breadbox? lol

Include weight if applicable. Is it paper mache or solid gold? Help the person imagine seeing and holding it in person.

Condition of item. Was it last driven over by a drunken tractor driver or is it new in the box?

Rarity. This is more subjective but give an opinion based on your experience. How many of this item have you ever seen?

Include color(s) in your description. Photos are not good for relying on these details. The buyer may have drastically different monitor color settings than you.

Include method you intend to ship the item with. Say you will ship USPS Priority, UPS Ground or whatever you prefer.

Include flat rate shipping cost in description (see below for more details). This information will be in the auction details but it’s good to include right in the description.

3. Shipping cost
Select a shipping method you prefer, be it UPS, USPS, FedEx or whatever.

Find a zip code for the furthest location in the US from your house as you can think of (in lower 48 states). Go to USPS.com, UPS.com or the website for your prefered shipping provider and perform a shipping costs calculator estimate using your address and the zip code you looked up as the shipping location. This estimate will be the shipping cost for the auction.

4. Price
Include:
Lowest possible value of item. If you don’t know, just say that.

5. Your personal information
(this information will not be shared)
Your name
address
phone
email address

6. Method you prefer to receive shipping cost payment from buyer
Paypal
Check by postal mail

Rules for preparing shipping items

1. All items must be shipped in a box large enough to fit the item as well as shipping materials. This includes any item up for auction, books, small items and even paper items.
2. You must use bubble wrap and/or styrophoam peanuts in packaging your item, even if it is a paper item or a book. No newspaper as shipping material allowed!
3. No boxes with alcohol advertisements or names are allowed for shipping purposes. If this is the only box you have, turn it inside out and tape it back together. Need a box? Large stores like Wal-Mart are happy to give you as many as you want. Visit them late at night while they are stocking and help yourself!
4. Use lots of tape!
5. You will be emailed a “From Soldiers’ Angels” label to print and place on the outside of your box. Please tape it in a visible area, and even tape over the paper so that if the box gets wet the label will be “water-proof”.

Questions? Email Holly Aho at [email protected]!

~Holly Aho

Note: Holly has been one of the backgorund volunteers who has made lots of Soldier’s Angels things go for years, so you can be confident your item will be taken care of well in the auctions.

Put on your thinking caps on what you have that can help the cause…and do it soon. Oct 26th is coming up fast! (Statr dtae of the fund dive!).

Hadn’t noticed until today, but now all five services have their own Together We Served sites up.

Now serving Coasties!

Recap:
Navy
Marines rails ties free

Army
Air Force

Find your old service buddies. really…it works!

In memorium:

William J Dimmling was a Senior Vice President Financial Systems with Marsh McLennon Companies. He was one of the 295 employees of this firm who were lost his day, in their offices between the 93rd and 100th floors of the North Tower. сборник картинок эротика

He went by “Bill” and his colleague Harry Carel says Bill always had a smile on his face, no matter what came his way.

47 years old, at the time of his death in the World Trade Center North Building attack. He was a resident of Garden City, NY [ed: corrected]. He is survived by his wife Leslie and sons, Gregory and Nicholas.

He grew up in Queens, NY, attending PS115 and JHS 172, playing sports with his friends and dating. Back then, he went by “Willie.”

Work came early for Bill. His father, who had immigrated to the US from Germany was a butcher. His father died suddenly when he was 18, leaving him as head of his household, having to take care of his mother and his brother Rudy. The article in the NY Times indicates this was the genesis for Bill’s love of life, and optimism, and drive.

He had just completed a joint financial reporting system for Marsh, Inc the week before the attack, a project which he completed by fostering cooperation between executives around the world.

Bob McDade called him friend for 35 years, beginning with their meeting in school in 1966, and he noted Bill welcomed new people into his life and made them feel special.

One of his former employees, Orla Horn, paid this tribute to Bill:

He was a wonderful man – full of energy, vision, commitment and resourcefulness. He was also an extremely kind and caring man – who loved his family more than anything else in the world. He had a happy disposition and always managed to overcome adversity. I’m sure all of these good traits will continue to be felt by his family and friends in the years to come as they’ll always know that Bill made a difference…Our world is a better place because of him.

High praise, indeed. I think we were deprived of the possible friendship of a wonderful man, as his family and friends have been for the past 7 years, and the rest of their lives.

For others memorialized by the Project 2996, click here.

In memorium:

Cortz Ghee was killed on 9/11/2001 at the Pentagon, one of 184 vitims at that attack site. At the time of his death, he was a resident of Reisterstown, MD. Little is on the web, but I can find he has a sibling and at least two nieces. By a stroke of fate, his niece Kim decided to skip out on a dentist appointment on 9/11, that Cortz was due to take her to. How life may have been different for one family, had she gone that day, escorted by her Uncle?

At the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial, there is a bench named in his honor, that of a 54 year old man, at work, supporting the military by his daily work.

One of our citizens who is no longer with us or his family.

RIP, Cortz, and thank you for your service in the defense of the nation.

For others memorialized by the Project 2996, click here.

Obama’s comments were mushy, yes, but at least he said the most important thing, according to AP:

He said it’s up to Iran to determine its own leaders but that the country must respect voters’ choice.

Why then have reputable people continued to pass harsh judgment? And why would AP paraphrase what would have been Obama’s key statement?

Turns out Obama said no such thing. What he actually said is that the VOICES of the Iranian people should be heard and respected, not their votes:

And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.

This is consistent with the rest of Obama’s remarks. He never said a word about respecting votes. Obama did mention “the democratic process,” but far from saying anything about this process having to meet any standards of integrity, he instead implied strongly that he will accept whatever result the “process” followed by the Mullahs produces:

I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be; that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football…

Democracy means that Iranian sovereignty lies with the Iranian people and that a regime that rigs an election is NOT sovereign. Yet Obama is explicit that he will continue to treat the mullahs as the Iranian sovereign no matter how they judge the election. He even goes so far as to suggest that the only reason he is bothering to comment on the competing claim to sovereignty at all is because it would be unseemly for him not to:

We will continue to pursue a tough, direct dialogue between our two countries, and we’ll see where it takes us. But even as we do so, I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days.

The only operative concerns that he mentions are for: “free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent.” When he talks about the “democratic process” going forward, all he urges is that the process be peaceful and that dissent be allowed. He says nothing about the process being honest:

Domestic Import video

…there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it’s important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.

It is no accident that Obama ended with the statement that AP paraphrased so egregiously (equating his call for bloodless suppression with a demand for legitimate elections). This was his theme throughout. He views the honesty of Iran’s democratic process as something to be judged by the mullahs, who he clearly accepts to be the sovereign power, regardless of the merits of competing claims.

AP covers its tracks, just like they did with the Flight 93 memorial

AP’s fraudulent report about Obama demanding respect for voters’ choice was the primary print report on Obama’s comments. Now that it has already misled millions of people, AP has covered its tracks by filing an update that overwrites the errant statement. This is what AP does when it gets caught putting out misinformation. To avoid issuing a correction, they flush the misleading story down the memory hole by using the same url for a completely different story. (Google only finds AP’s original article still posted at Fox News.)

AP did the same thing last year after it was taken to task for failing to check the most basic facts in a story about the controversy over possible Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial. Ramesh Santanam reported a number of conflicting factual assertions, like the 44 blocks:

download My Blue Heaven Opponents also claim there is a plan to have 44 glass blocks, for the 40 victims and four hijackers, in the design.

“That’s an absolute, unequivocal fabrication that is being portrayed as fact,” said Edward Felt’s brother, Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93. “It’s misleading and helps drive the conspiracy theory.”

When it was pointed out that Santanam could have found the four extra blocks just by opening up the design drawings and counting, AP quickly filed a completely different story (about fundraising for the memorial), under the same url.

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with AP using subject feeds that automatically update with their latest offering. It is that AP is systematically using this system to dodge corrections. This is actually their official policy:

For corrections on live, online stories, we overwrite the previous version. We send separate corrective stories online as warranted.

Except AP virtually never issue corrective stories, for the simple reason that AP has no established correction procedure. They just do the overwrite thing and say “too bad.”

Well this time the overwrite thing is not good enough.

Demand a corrective story about AP’s false paraphrase of Obama’s words

Associated Press obviously understands the importance of Obama saying that Iran must respect voters’ choice or they wouldn’t have bothered to pretend that he said it when he didn’t. They don’t just fail to mention Obama’s glaring omission on this crucial point, but actually tell the public via false paraphrase that he did say what he glaringly omitted. This cannot stand. Faced with our new president’s key statement on a historic crisis, AP reports a photo negative of what Obama actually said.

There may be no established procedure for AP corrections, but anyone can still send a pre-written email to AP CEO Tom Curley, Chairman Burl Osborne, Editor Kathleen Carroll, the reporters who worked on the story (the egregious Jennifer Loven, along with Anne Gearan and Robert Burns), plus a smattering of other AP editors and bureaucrats. Who knows. There may even be a limit to how disingenuous some of these people are willing to be.

Error Theory extra: Obama implies that he will let the mullahs get nuclear weapons

Obama is king of the weasel words. At first blush, his statement about Iranian nukes seems to suggest that he will try to stop Ahmadinijad from getting nukes:

…tough, hard-headed diplomacy — diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries — is critical when it comes to pursuing a core set of our national security interests, specifically, making sure that we are not seeing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon…

But wait a minute. If he meant to say that we need to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon, how come he said this other thing? How come he said we need to make sure that there is not an arms race triggered by Iran getting a nuclear weapon? Is he actually saying that what we need to insure is that when Iran does get nukes, it does not trigger and arms race?

Yes. Absolutely. With 100% certainty. Otherwise he would not have used weasel words. The only reason to use weasel words was to find a way NOT to commit to stopping Iran from getting nukes.

Seeing Obama use weasel words for the simple objective of stopping Iran from acquiring the most powerful weapons is like seeing AP use paraphrase for what would have been Obama’s key remark. There has to be a reason for going the long way around, so you look at the actual words and you see the actual meaning.

Obama evades the simple goal of stopping Iran from acquiring the most powerful weapons because he does not share that goal. He either positively wants Iran to have nukes, or he is determined to accept it. Since these views shared by very few of his countrymen, Obama uses weasel words.

• Cutthroat Island rip

This nixes any possibility that Obama accomodation of Islamofascist election-stealing is because he thinks he can negotiate Ahmadinijad and the mullahs out of their nuclear ambitions. He has no intention of keeping the Islamofascists from acquiring nuclear weapons. If there is any interplay between Obama’s tolerance for election-stealing and his tolerance for Islamofascist nukes it can only be that one reason he wants the mullahs in power is so that his plan to accommodate their nuclear ambitions will not go unfulfilled.

To join our blogbursts, just send your blog’s url.

Salem’s Lot film