CW2 Vose
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Douglas M. Vose, 38, was killed by intense direct small arms fire while conducting combat operations in Kabul Province while serving as the Special Forces Assistant Detachment Commander for Operational Detachment – Alpha 0114 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom as a member of the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) – Afghanistan.
We were in the same Warrant class. He was good guy. My thoughts and condolances go out to his family.
Ok so I’m looking at the Oakland Raiders line up as they head to summer camp and it hits me. I don’t know who these guys are. Time has finally caught up and the team I knew doesn’t exist. It happens to us all after years of watching the game. We move on and seasons come and go then when you look up the whole roster has changed. It been a long time since the days of Ken Stabler, Mark Van Egan or Cliff Branch. Anyway I found basically two names I recognized so this season depending on time I may actually try to see who’s playing now. But they really need win some games for full support again…….
Jacum Sullum has an interesting article at Reason Magazine on big brother and the British experience. It’s short but good.
Again and again, Clark finds, high-tech systems that seem at first to be outrageous invasions of privacy turn out to be outrageous boondoggles that not only don’t succeed at their official goals but actually get in the way of catching genuine bad guys and protecting public safety. “The excessive collection of data tends to act as a fog through which authorities struggle to find what they are looking for,” he writes. “The more Big Brother watches, the less he seems to see.”
This is great. Stuart Swartz lays into Peggy Noonan. It’s perfect.
Excerpt:
You’re Peggy Noonan and you’re jealous. You don’t understand it. Sure, maybe she has accomplished a few things (like the $26 billion dollar natural gas pipeline deal, restructuring Alaskan government, and taking an ice pick to corrupt politicians). But she has no style, no pizzazz — she just does stuff. But so do you — and you can’t understand why you don’t get the same adoration. After all, didn’t you go before the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission and not just protest, but elegantly protest — so said The New York Times — a 16-story tower a developer wanted to build in your ritzy Upper East Side Manhattan neighborhood? Sarah Palin wouldn’t have done that; she’s not brilliant enough to understand preservation. She probably would have looked at the jobs the construction would create and given it a déclassé "Hell yeah!"
This week was just loads of fun. We are fielding the new MC-6 Parachute system. This is the latest SPEC OPS troop parachute. As a jumpmaster I along with others from our group were invited (ordered) to attend the new equipment training (NET) for this piece of equipment. Unfortunately it turned into a Jumpmaster re-certification course. What that meant was re-living the worst part of the Jumpmaster course the JMPI (Jumpmaster Personnel Inspection) This is a pain in the A**. It consist of a timed physical inspection of a fully rigged combat equipped jumper and a Hollywood jumper (for this NET).
One of our favorite aspects of this training was the nomenclature test. With names like “Universal Static line modified” and “Main lift web tuck tab assembly”, you can imagine how much fun calling these items out in a timed inspection can be.
We finished up Saturday evening with all passing as far as I know.
The instructors where good and frankly I felt for them. They had to listen to a week of bit****g and critiques by experienced jumpmasters who went through their initial Jumpmaster training at different times and had different techniques. But it was all without too much pain directed at the trainers. Most of the anger was directed and the powers of Fort Benning.
Now it’s over and I have a new sequence to keep in mind which will screw up my old sequence on the SF-10 parachute but that’s the way it goes.
All in all it wasn’t that bad but did take me out of circulation for a week.
From the Armed Forces international web site:
Its rate of descent, depending on the weight of the jumper and altitude, is 12.1 to 18.6 feet per second and allows for up to 400 pounds in weight, 40 pounds more than the MC-1. At 26 pounds, the MC-6 is 3 pounds lighter than the MC-1.
The MC-6 has a forward speed of 10 knots and can complete a 360-degree turn in five seconds. The main canopy of the MC-6 also will deploy, inflate and stabilize within 150 to 175 feet of altitude loss after activation.
The Army will need 16,000 MC-6 systems, and officials estimate fielding will be completed in 2012. Also in the works is the Advanced Ram Air Parachute System, a freefall parachute system that can be used for static-line jumps, Lemondes said. Work on ARAPS is expected to be complete in up to three years, he said, and developmental testing is scheduled for spring.
I don’t think so and even if he was who cares? There are bigger problems.
We’ve seen the picture a young girls moves up the stairs past President Obama. In the captured shot it appears he’s checking her out. If you watch the whole scene though that’s not what I see. He’s waiting for the other person to walk down beside him.
An event takes place. Within hours or sometimes minutes multitudes of pundits will have postings, columns, or a statement out in the media (or personal blog). Unfortunately in their haste to be like the MSM, they often make the same mistake. The don’t have all the facts. They can’t. Yet, they believe that they must make a comment to stay relevant in the commentator world. This is the problem. Nobody actually takes the time to think anything out anymore. Frankly unless your commenting on a subject that you have been abreast (just wanted to use that word) of for some time you don’t know what the hell you talking about. Yes there are people who’s area of expertise might give them the ability to comment much faster but for most pundits it should take at least a day or so from any event to have a real opinion on the issue.
For example if Congress passes a late night bill you might be able to comment on the complete BS of passing a bill late at night and adding an additional 300 pages say to said bill, but you really couldn’t comment much on the bill since like most Congressmen you wouldn’t have read it. I’m not saying you have to read every line of every bill to comment, but at least get some cliff notes. Comment accurately. That’s why I don’t write much about Bills’. I can’t understand the language anyway.
If you take any recent event from Michael Jacksons death to Sarah Palin every pundit in pundit land* felt the need to come out and give their opinion of what happened. Most with no more information than a twenty second blurb on one of the 24 hour news channels.
Sometimes you just must let the situation develop.
I wonder what media punditry would be like if they were paid based on the number of time they were actually right about something. I would bet it would take longer than ten minutes after an announcement to right their commentary.
That’s why I wait a few days before I say something that still won’t pin me down too much.. 
**
If you actually read the paid pundits you’ll find they need to write something so often that their columns are like Louis Lamour westerns novels, the same thing over and over. Fortunately Louis is still fun to read.
*(a place where you can take back all you’ve said the next week with brand new analysis)
**(Of course I only have about 4 readers to satisfy)
Sarah Palin has announced she will resign from the office of Governor of Alaska. The speculation is going wild. Frankly it’s kind of funny. She is someone that many claim is not relevant and a bit crazy yet is getting a lot of attention.
I don’t know why she resigned and neither do most others. So I don’t know if this is a good idea or not. I do know that the attacks on her are unprecedented. I do believe there are many in the political world the fear her, else the attacks would not be necessary.
Does she owe the state of Alaska her full term? Did Hillary Clinton owe the state of New York? Only those constituents can say.
She has continually answered the critics and the charges leveled against her only to face more and more. How depressing would that be?
Perhaps she’s just looking for a better way to fight. Either way, I hope she continues to be a force on the political scene.
 | JB on Malik Nidal Husan |
 | 11th ACR on Malik Nidal Husan |
 | cl on Malik Nidal Husan |
| JB on Malik Nidal Husan |
| 11th ACR on Malik Nidal Husan |
