Interesting idea

Just saw this on Cnet. Basically, a short lived MMORPG is being used to discuss possible solutions to food and energy shortages, massive disease outbreaks, and major social problems such as refugees. At first glance, it looks like http://folding.stanford.edu/, but using actual people to find answers instead of computers.

Basically, a problem is posited, and lots and lots of people put together proposals on how to deal with the problem.

Kind of like my staff meetings, but in this instance, something interesting is coming out of it.

Military Intelligence Twitter Kerfluffle

OK, full disclosure. I used to be an instructor at the MI Schoolhouse, of which the 304th MI BN is a part. I've seen a lot of articles like this over the years. They're normally done by junior officers, usually students, and are more of a "what if" scenario than anything else.

This article follows that pattern. My guess is that some young lieutenant or captain wrote this as part of a class, and it got published in the battalion newsletter. It doesn't mean that the MI as a whole believes that Al Qaeda is using Twitter and camera phones to carry out attacks. It means that some bright young officer was able to do some research and figure out how these tools could be used.

The author raises some good points, specifically that tools that we use in our daily lives can be used by bad guys to do bad things. Camera phones,GPS, microblogging tools, and Internet chat can all be used to find targets, recon them, and then control an attack. Heck, I've used the camera and GPS in my iPhone to scout my deer hunting areas, and I've chatted from the field with my buddies when I have a 3G signal.

As the author notes, Twitter has already been used by protesters at the RNC in Minneapolis to spread information. The article also makes a good point that microblogging by military personnel can be detrimental to OPSEC.

Hopefully, this article will be used to raise awareness and not create hysteria or over-reaction, either in the public, political, or military spheres.

Old Strategies coming back into Fashion

This caught my eye. Looks like the Air Force did a Map Exercise using China as the Red Force. They were trying to forecast what air power they would need in order to fight a conflict in the Pacific Rim with a near equal opponent.

A lot of the strategies that they are proposing seem oddly familiar. Things like dispersion, forward staging of repair and supply units, communications, and mid-air refueling are big on their list of things they want.

I'm not a Pac Rim guy. I was an Eastern Europe/Russia guy. But these things they are saying for are the same things they wanted when I was a kid living next to a SAC base in the Dakota's.

Their suggestion that we get basing and transit rights in Japan and South Korea may be problematic. We are slowly drawing down our environments in those countries, and they are integrating themselves economically and socially with the rest of the Pac Rim, including China. In the event of a crisis, I'm not sure we could rely on these two countries to not do the calculus and see that China could do a lot more damage to them than a loss of our good graces could do. And there's a precedent in the Iraq War. Turkey refused to allow our troops to cross their territory to get to Northern Iraq, and to my knowledge there haven't been any repercussions. We need to have back up plans to project air, naval, and land power into the Pac Rim in the event that one or both of these important allies go cold on us.

We no longer keep B-52's and B-1's doing circuits on a 24x7 basis, but I don't think that's a permanent situation. China is going to be a major competitor to us for the foreseeable future, and I don't see that relationship as friendly in the long term. Even if the communist government was to disappear tomorrow, the issues that force China to look for more land and resources are still there.

I'd suggest that we beef up our basing in Guam, and do something that draws a very bright line in the sand with Taiwan. Something on the order of recognition of that country and basing of Air Force and Navy units there.

Weekend

Well, I got a lot done over the weekend, but not quite all of the work I had planned.

Saturday I got to sleep in until almost 9, and the Irish Woman had a hot breakfast waiting for me. Kinda nice. We spent the rest of the afternoon doing some house cleaning stuff, and then we went to the Halloween Party.

Baby Bear was as cute as expected in his Yoda costume, and we got to see a bunch of friends we hadn't seen in quite a while.

Sunday I did a lot of the outside work. The gutters got cleaned, and I cleaned the chimney. Now I understand why a good chimney sweep is so expensive. What a nasty job!

Junior Bear continued his labors against the leaves from our maple trees. He's kept his head above water this year, and he should be done in the next couple of weeks.

It got COLD last night, so I may be having our first fire of the year tonight.

No hunting this weekend, and I will probably go to Knob Creek this weekend to get practice in with the Mosin before gun season starts next weekend. This fall is just flying by.

One lucky pooch

Two fishermen off the coast of England caught a dog almost a mile from shore. Lucky dog.

That is one pooch who will never willingly get into the bathtub again.

Relax, it's almost over

Only a few more days until this election cycle is over. Personally, I'm sick of the whole thing. I figured out who I was going to vote for a couple of months ago, and I've been trying to avoid thinking, talking, and writing about it since then.

This is the longest political race I can ever remember, and the nastiest I've ever seen.

Of course I hope my candidates will win, but if not, better luck next time. Hopefully the majority of people will have the same attitude. I have hope on that one, but not much.

It should tell you something when police departments start getting ready for civil unrest over an election. Again, I hope people will act like adults, but I don't have much hope for that one either.

Go vote. Celebrate or mourn on election evening and the day after. After that, sober up, get back to work, and try to remember we're all supposed to be working together.

Rainy Day in Kentucky

Got up this morning to a pouring rain. Supposed to stay that way all day, but it's nice to hear it hitting the roof and trees while I sleep.

Got Junior Bear off to school wearing a heavy duty rain coat, and Girlie Bear helped me with Baby Bear. He has started holding his own bottle, which makes things a little easier. We're also only a week or so away from full blown crawling, so my life is about to get complicated.

Work is work. The Windows people are rushing around patching everything that doesn't move. I'm not going to say anything about Linux on this. It's only a matter of time before we have to do the same thing. I've got a couple of things to do this morning, then I'm off to a doctor's appointment.

We're going down to a friend's farm for a Halloween party tomorrow evening, which is always fun. Hayrides, haunted forest, bonfire, and really good barbecue. Irish woman is making her famous yellow cake muffins with homemade caramel icing. Those things are like nails in my coffin, but I'll die happy.

If the weather clears, I'll do the fall weatherizing tomorrow, and I may go bow hunting on Sunday afternoon. I went hunting with the muzzleloader last weekend with one of my buddies, and had a really good time. At about sun up, a big group of turkeys walked through the area and made a heck of a racket. No deer came into the area I was watching, but one busted me when she saw me from the field behind me. She stood there huffing and pawing for a few minutes then ran off. Unfortunately, she was on property where I don't have permission to hunt (I was on the property line facing away from the field she was in), so she got to walk and I got to watch.

It's finally starting to turn cold here. The warm spell we had in September and October is over, and they're predicting highs in the 40's and 50's for the next couple of weeks. The leaves are absolutely gorgeous now, and the weather man says they should reach peak color this weekend.

Irish Woman picked up Baby Bear's first Halloween costume yesterday. He's going to be Yoda. "Yes, a bottle you will bring to me".

Slow news day, so a personal update

Not much to blog about today. It's been really quiet here, and nothing in the national or local news gives me an idea for a thought or a rant. So I thought I'd bring you all up to speed on how things are here at Case de Oso.

I'll be taking the kids out to get their Halloween costumes tonight or tomorrow night. Junior wants to be the Geico caveman for a party he's going to, Girlie Bear wants to be a witch, and we're going to find something cute for Baby Bear.

We're all getting over a case of the funk, but otherwise doing OK.

Work is work. Had a lot of stuff to do over the weekend, but that should be the last big weekend push we have until the end of the year. We'll be gearing up for the Christmas season soon, but that's not too bad.

Heard from my brother in California today. His health isn't as good as mine, but his spirits are up. He's been going through a lot of the same things that my mother did, but he's actually doing as his doctors say, so here's hoping he'll come through it OK.

Hope he bought the insurance

You park at the post office, go in to do a little business, and come out to find your rental car has been crushed by a falling piece of metal.

I'm sure this guy isn't complaining that the line in the post office delayed him a few minutes. Or else this would be a case of man killed by falling anvil. Cue the Bugs Bunny music.

Saying goodbye to a friend

This morning the Irish Woman and I attended the funeral of an old family friend, Bob.

Bob was the father to one of the women who raised the Irish Woman, and we count her as a mother to her, so Bob was an adopted grandfather to us.

Bob was rarely called by his name. We all called him Pawpaw, from the adults to the smallest children. My children and I met him over two decades after the Irish Woman did, and he introduced himself to us as Pawpaw immediately, and stepped right into the role of grandfather to my kids.

Bob never met a stranger, and never hesitated to help someone out. He always had a cheerful greeting for us, and loved to just sit and shoot the bull. He outlived two wives, but never let their passing away make him bitter or melancholy towards us.

Bob was always as active as he could be. He loved to fish, and I was lucky enough to go fishing with him. He was as happy sitting on the bank of a quiet lake fishing for bluegill as he was on a chartered boat fishing for striped bass. He became a favorite fishing buddy of his son and son-in-law, and the image I have in my mind of him will always be the smile he got when he hooked a fish.

When I met Bob, he had already started to fade, but was still spry. As the years went on, his memory started to fail him, and talking with him became difficult as his speech suffered. None of this changed his attitude or how he treated everyone. We introduced him to Baby Bear earlier this year, and he smiled and cooed over the baby as if he was in his 40's not his 80's.

As Pawpaw continued to fade, he was cared for by his children. They made sure they followed his wishes to stay at home, and made sure he always had his therapy and the small things that he enjoyed. He went on trips with the family, and was always around for a good conversation and to reminisce.

Pawpaw passed away this past Friday. His grandson had returned home to visit one last time, and had a chance to spend some time with him. After the visit, Bob sat down, fell asleep, and never woke up. He died in the company of his family in the home that they had made together.

Go with God, Pawpaw. The world is smaller now that you are not with us, but we know that you have moved on to a better place. We and our children will remember you always as a cheerful, pleasant man who was always happy to see us. We will miss you until we join you.

Baby shower turns into a brawl

Apparently Captain Success and his buddies decided to do some drinking at a baby shower, and it degenerated into a brawl. Someone got hit in the head with a beer bottle, and then someone got hit with a CAR JACK.

OK, kids, how many times have you been to a baby shower and people were drinking beer? I don't go to many baby showers at all, much less ones with a cooler of beer available. Mama shouldn't be drinking, and I don't imbibe in front of those who can't.

And I've never been to a baby shower that turned into a fist fight. I've been to a couple where there were some sharp words said, but nothing even approaching the use of beer bottles and automotive implements as weapons.

And a car jack? I guess someone reached out and grabbed whatever was available at the time to use as a weapon, but a car jack?

State Department announces that Northern Mexico is dangerous. Also says that ice is cold, and that fire is hot

The State Department has announced that Tijuana, Nogales, and Cuidad Juarez are getting kind of dangerous for Americans to be in at any time, day or night.

No kidding. I expect soon that they'll be telling us to not try to run our cars on sugar water.

When the Army tells its soldiers they can't go to Juarez to raise hell because it's too dangerous, it's pretty obvious that it's become a free fire zone against anyone who happens to be there.

TJ has been getting a bad reputation for years, and now it's come to the point where I wouldn't go there for any reason.

I lived about an hour northeast of Nogales when I was in the Army, and we made frequent shopping trips there for booze, vanilla, and Christmas presents. I never went more than a few hundred yards into the city, and it got rough pretty quick once you got outside of the shopping area close to the border. I only went there at night a couple of times to go drinking with my fellas, and we were smart enough to always have a big guy along who stayed sober enough to get us out of bad situations. When we heard that a group of young soldiers was going down there for an evening of fun, we made sure to give them a nice, calm talk about being safe and getting home in one piece.

Now apparently, there are shootouts in the shopping areas in broad daylight. No way I would be going there for any reason without a lot of friends and a lot of weapons.

Mexico as a country has started coming apart at the seams due to the narcotics trade that flows through the country from one end to the other. The level of violence in the conflicts between the drug gangs and their collective fight with the government is escalating fast, and doesn't appear to be slowing down. When thousands of your citizens for one reason or another are being murdered over smuggling, it's not a fight against drugs, it's a fight for survival of credible government control of the country. Mexico City isn't trying to enforce its laws so much as it is trying to squelch a state of revolt in its northern states.

Unless the Mexican government can get a handle on this thing, I expect Mexico to be considered a failed state within the next decade. And that would be a damned shame. Mexico is a beautiful country, with a history that goes back thousands of years. The people I have met who are from Mexico have tended to be honest, hard working folks who just want to get a good pay for a good days work and use that to raise a good family. When you go shopping in Arizona, the native born American kids look like something out of a bad thug-rap video. The Mexican families are neat, pressed, polite, and well-behaved.

The loss of a good neighbor like Mexico would be a great hit to our nation.

And I don't expect the problem to stay south of the border for long. We're already starting to see problems in border areas like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and all of the cities along the Texas-Mexico border. If the drug gangs can have free reign in Old Mexico, they sure as shooting aren't going to allow the border to stop them from trying to have their way in our country.

I've heard some people talk about a "reconquista", in which radical Mexican-identity believers want to take over the lands that we took from Mexico in the 19th century and make it a hispanic mini-state. I don't believe that will ever happen, any more than I believe that neonazis will create an aryan state in the northwest or that the South will rise again.

What I do see happening is the problems of Latin America becoming the problems of the southern half of the continental United States. I see the areas along the border becoming more and more crime-prone unless the violence is quelched in Mexico itself.

Here are my ideas:

1. We have to starve the drug gangs out by getting rid of their business in the United States. They won't have the money or incentive to do these horrible things if their business model collapses. Either we cut demand for illicit drugs in our country by getting people to stop using them, or we make them legal for personal use. There's no money in smuggling something that people can purchase legally at the liquor store or local headshed. I'm not going to go down the rathole of drug legalization, at least not today, but we need to discuss whether or not continued prohibition is worth the damage that illegal trade in drugs is causing to our country and our neighbor.
2. Provide as much assistance to the Mexican government as we can so that they can fix their problems as quickly as they possibly can. The Mexican government will have to spill a lot of blood to do this, but it's necessary. You can't negotiate away this problem. Someone will have to tell Amnesty International to figure out the difference between rooting out a revolt by narco-terrorists and the normal operations of a criminal justice system.
3. We have to secure our border with Mexico. A fence, either made of cameras or steel and concrete won't do it all by itself. We need men and women with guns and radios patrolling the border from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. The Border Patrol either needs to be beefed up in manpower and firepower, or we need to re-activate some of the old cavalry regiments and have them patrol the border.

Just my two centavos.

Could someone please put a sock in John Murtha?

How this fool has continued to be employed is beyond me. He's been an embarrassment to humanity for years. He's been on the wrong end of every comment he's ever made, and now he's saying that his own constituents are a bunch of racists that won't support Obama because of his race.

Pennsylvania, please, elect someone else. Please.

Clowns that are ruining civil society

Police in Chicago are looking for some creep in a clown costume that is trying to entice children into his car. Creepy enough if it wasn't being done in the territory of another Killer Clown.

Copycat or just a recurring theme? You be the judge.

Idiots like this are the reason that no smart kid will talk to a person they don't know.

It's also the reason that I, as a normal person, would never try to assist a child that didn't appear to be in danger, or try to assist a woman with children that I don't know.

Today was a case in point:

I was at a government office today to take care of something. There was a young mother there with three children, a boy about 4 or 5, a boy about 2 or 3, and a very small infant who mostly slept.

The boys got bored waiting, and Mom had a hard time keeping them in line because they were tag teaming her. When she was trying to control one, the other would be off getting into something or climbing up onto something.

Not her fault. Not even their fault. Boys are boys, and young kids that aren't absolutely afraid for their lives don't just sit quietly for an hour or so in a strange place. The young lady was obviously getting tired and cross with them, but child abuse is prosecuted in this jurisdiction, and they outnumbered her.

When I was a child, any adult would have felt it was their duty to intervene and try to assist this young mother with her two barbarians. The non-family adult wouldn't have disciplined them, but he might have talked to them sternly or tried to entertain them while Mom got herself together or did whatever business she was there for.

In the world we live in today, if I had offered to help her, she probably would have thought I was some pervert, and at least have very loudly and firmly told me no. Best case would be being embarrassed. Worst case would be me answering some questions to a nice police officer.

Best I could do was offer my place in line so that she could get them out of there sooner. She accepted, but still kept her distance from me.

John Wayne Gacy, you and all of the other pukes who ruined my ability to be a nice guy to a stranger, I hope you burn in hell until the world regains some of the innocence that you destroyed.

I want my money back. Now

Apparently AIG just doesn't get it.

First, we give them $87 Billion dollars to keep the doors open.

Then they spend half a million dollars on a luxury trip for insurance agents.

Then they apologize and ask for another $35 Billion to keep the lights on.

Then they spend $86,000 for a hunting trip to England. Apparently this time actual AIG executives went along for the fun.

I want all of the money we've given them back. We can take it in cash or equipment. Either one will work. I don't care if their business fails and is chopped up and sold to the highest bidder on the courthouse steps. Don't come to us with your Gucci hat in hand and ask for money then use some of it to take clients to a spa or hunting.

They can't have spent much of the money yet, but we'll be nice and give them 24 hours to get it to us.

If we don't get it, this happens: