Chapomatic

Shifted to the newest version of WordPress, because the old one was creaky and more importantly had big security leaks that spammers found.

I hate spammers.

Still creaky is the template, which won’t change for a long while (I don’t have the time). So. If you see this and the blog’s squirrely on your end, let me know!

Stay classy, HuffPo.

This is one heck of a cri de coeur on academia. It’s well worth reading.

Medium-sized ones, anyway. Here’s one stomp, and its counterstomp.

Me, I’m not happy about all those flags and generals lining up behind their preferred electoral candidate with their ranks prominently displayed–on both sides. I’m also not too happy with CIA and DoD and State guys getting good money for saying things I didn’t hear when they were going to work every day.

And I’ve risked my own career for something I believed in before; once, it didn’t go so well, and once I got a nice thank you and a fitness report that said something about “forceful advice” that made me laugh. Once, I made the conscious decision to stop my level of dissent at a certain point because lives weren’t at stake, but I knew what the next step was and how to do it and had thought through why and why not to do it. Sometimes you have to dissent in a way that is professionally dangerous, particularly if the things at stake are important.

A necessary precondition to blocking Al Qaeda is killing off their recruitment. The New Republic reports we’re getting some help here from interesting corners. Good read.

Man lives through what he did doing what he does, I’ll pay for some of that lawyer.

Some Memorial Days are more recent than others. Dave in Texas links to this painful letter.

Now this is ugly. Somebody figured out a way to hack the index.php file for this blog, inserting a “u” command into front page of the blog. Said line also had almost a thousand spam links to fake blogs on secondlife.reuters.com.

Well, I guess I need to do a little checking out what else got messed with…

I get emails like this a little too often. Usually they don’t hit quite as close.

DoD Identifies Navy Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a sailor who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Lt. Jeffrey A. Ammon, 37, of Orem, Utah, died May 20, as a result of injuries suffered from an improvised explosive device in the Aband District, Afghanistan. The sailor was attached to Commander Navy Region Northwest, Bangor, Wash., and serving in Afghanistan as a member of Provincial Reconstruction Team Ghazni.

Meaning the guy was on a boat (qualified USS Alabama (Blue) in 2005), got yanked from his shore tour, and served in a province town of about a hundred and forty thousand people. What was he doing? Being a smart nuke. Building hospital emergency rooms and working microloans and doing, quite frankly, all the good work that people who don’t like me when I walk around town in uniform say need doing.

Nereus has a good tribute to this man.

These beliefs I hold strongly:

1. It is not enough to put a picture of this man on some list, or recite the name, disconnected from the achievements. Why this man did what he did, why he took the risk that he took, why others who risk and come back unscathed, is as important. You have to live for something. Sometimes ideas mean things, including your life. This man paid for something he thought important. Respect that thought. The man who thinks that Westerners like Ammon “worship life” do not understand us: we like the gift life is, and we value it enough to spend it when necessary instead of throw it away or needlessly destroy it. I’ll mourn that this man died; I’ll honor and respect that this man lived.
2. Ammon died in tough circumstances doing important work. His family will have tougher circumstances over a longer time doing the important work of absorbing this loss and living. I wish them well and hope their path is eased.

Finally, a note from the family, found on a hometown newspaper site linked above.

Robert Ammon | 10:47 p.m. May 23, 2008
On behalf of my family, I want to that everyone for their sympathy and condolences. He will be sorely missed by all. My baby brother was in Afghanistan because he believed that he could help the people there. To him it was never about the politics, but helping the Afghan people to help themselves. His highest priority was the children, he wanted to do anything that he could to help all of them to have a better life.

Sailor, rest your oar.

Yeah, powerful photos. Too bad it had nothing to do with the argument being advanced.

Le Monde devoted a page to a report on “Hiroshima: What the world never saw” last weekend. It recounted the discovery of “ten pictures hidden for more than 60 years by an American soldier which show for the first time the victims of the bomb dropped on the Japanese city on August 6, 1945”. It emerged however that the pictures, from the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, depicted the aftermath of a 1923 earthquake near Tokyo. They were immediately recognised by experts in Japan and the US…

All are slaves to the Narrative.

DoD Live’s up on Blogspot, meaning someone’s finally getting with the nineties, thank goodness.

Now about that blogroll…

Angry daughter here. Here’s a hint: It’s not a shackling, it’s a duty. Different beast entirely.

If you haven’t been following the Mohammed al-Dura story and France 2 trial you’re missing out on a powerful information warfare push. Here’s the latest on this deal: France 2 TV news lied, they followed the information warfare fires that Pallywood handed them, and we’ll still see fools using the “but they killed this little kid” argument ten years from now because the first lie to the TV tends to stick.

Hot Air has the scoop, from this news article:

Canada is set to deport in June the first of possibly hundreds of American soldiers who sought asylum to avoid military duty in Iraq, a group backing the US deserters said Wednesday.

I was in Halifax once and saw the guys on the other side try to get me to join them. Note I didn’t say “antiwar” there. Their supporters can rot, frankly.

Bring our boys home…so we can put them at the tender mercies of the military justice system.

Hat tip Barry on this one. I kinda smelled something like this, mainly because there’s this nice building in Stuttgart being renovated and every conspiracy in the universe is being floated locally for any potential attack magnet HQ.

For now, officials have ruled out basing the headquarters anywhere in Africa and may in fact locate it on the East Coast, a senior defense official says. They have also backed away from selling the new command as a full “interagency” organization that spans military and nonmilitary entities.

On the other hand this is a long game not a short game so I don’t think this article is the end of the story.

I find it interesting that the most remarked-upon card is the one for the secondhand store.

I don’t know much about this guy–a youtoob from something called “def poetry season 2″ that apparently is titled that way just to make me feel old–but check the interaction between speaker and audience. He’s, uh, pretty articulate and likes teachers.

A page connected to freighter passengers with the thoughts of an American merchant captain. Good sea stories for lubbers.

From the Guardian newspaper, an interesting photo collection from a fellow who took pictures of his classrooms in the seventies.

Heaven help me, they’ve got me pegged.

Sorta. But it is too close for comfort. First car: ’64 Studebaker Cruiser. Twenty-five bucks from some college student…