No secrets

The Obama administration continues its war on national security, the latest front in which is an effort to declassify documents and open them up to the public.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered a review of how the nation keeps and classifies its secrets and instructed his top administration officials to lean toward disclosure when they can.

Obama said he didn't want to leave documents kept secret without a clear national security-based reason.

Obama cites the need for transparency in government as the driver behind this effort, but near the end of the article appears a paragraph which I believe is at the root:

Obama aides have lamented overly aggressive classification and inconsistent restrictions. For instance, there are 107 unique markings for sensitive information and more than 130 different procedures to protect them.

This is what happens when you elect a far-left community organizer/activist with zero background in national security and foreign policy affairs as president. He brings with him to the White House like-minded people who have responsibilities thrust upon them which are completely alien to them. So rather than learn the ropes and find out why such measures are necessary, they decide to change the rules to better suit their comfort zone, consequences be damned.

Elections have consequences.

$100 million in perspective

My buddy Kris once again providing material I've got no time to dig for myself. Gaze upon Barack Obama's $100 million dollar budget cut and despair.

Paint it white

Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees a black roof, and he wants to paint it white.

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Tuesday the Obama administration wanted to paint roofs an energy-reflecting white, as he took part in a climate change symposium in London.

The Nobel laureate in physics called for a "new revolution" in energy generation to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

But he warned there was no silver bullet for tackling climate change, and said a range of measures should be introduced, including painting flat roofs white.

I don't get it...silver bullets work on werewolves, and the climate change "crisis" is about as real.

Map The Fallen

Sorry for the lack of posting lately, but work's been hell. So even this past three-day weekend I mostly ignored the computer, except to goof off on Twitter.

It would have been nice to have stumbled across this before Memorial Day as it would have made a good post for yesterday, but better late than never.

Google employee Sean Askay embarked on a Google Earth project to map the fallen servicemen and women from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To be honest, when I first saw this my initial thought was that it might be an anti-war propaganda thing. But that definitely does NOT appear to be the case. If Mr. Askay has an agenda besides his stated one of simply honoring the fallen, it's not at all apparent.

The project is a Google Earth map overlay which represents the home of record (not always the same as hometown) of a service member and the location of their death. Clicking on one of the icons brings up information about the fallen soldier and in most cases a link to their obituary.

I haven't lost any friends or acquaintances in Iraq or Afghanistan, but I did find out that an old classmate of mine lost a son. Whether you've lost a friend or relative there or not, it's worth checking out.

A few pointers since some in the comments at the site seemed to have difficulty figuring it out...make sure you have Google Earth 5.0 or later installed, then just click on the download link at the top right of the page. It worked fine for me, but some folks in the comments say they had issues, probably related to having an older version of Google Earth.

Memorial Day

This song was used in the movie We Were Soldiers. It is sung by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie in memory of his great-grandfather, Sargent Charles Stuart MacKenzie. According to the younger MacKenzie:

Charles Stuart MacKenzie was a Sergeant in the Seaforth Highlanders. He went to fight in France during World War One and was shot in the shoulder, the military sent him home to Scotland for treatment, where the surgeon wanted to amputate his arm. He immediately refused, stating that he had to get back to his men. During his time in hospital he was asked what it was like to kill 'the hun' (as the Germans where called then). He replied what a waste of a fine body of men.

On the steps of the hospital, the last picture of him was taken in his uniform. This picture hung in his home above the fireplace. On his return to battle, he and his men were engaged in fixed bayonet combat. To the best of my knowledge, and taken from reports of the returning soldiers - one of his close friends fell, badly wounded. Charles stood his ground and fought until he was overcome and died from bayonet wounds. On that day, my Great Grandmother and my Grandmother where sitting at the fire when the picture fell from the wall. My Great Grandmother looked, and said to my Grandmother "oh, my bonnie Charlie's dead." Sure enough a few days passed, then the local policeman brought the news - that Sgt. Charles Stuart MacKenzie had been killed in action.

This same picture now hangs above my fireplace. A few years back my wife Christine died of cancer, and in my grief I looked at his picture to ask what gave him the strength to go on. It was then, in my mind, that I saw him lying on the field and wondered what his final thoughts were. The words and music just appeared into my head.

A kibbitz from Mark, crossposted from my corner of the trailer park.

Update: Awesome. Thanks for posting that, Mark.

The filthy blog tag pox

Reader Ayrdale has struck me with the Filthy Tag Pox, in which I'm supposed to post eight random things about myself, so here goes...

• I sometimes brew my own beer.
• One of the strangest duties I ever had in the Air Force was to fire rockets at fighter planes in flight...our own planes.
• I've visited 22 countries outside the US.
• I've been to Las Vegas at least six times over the last eight years, yet gambling is one of the few vices I don't have.
• You know that old-fashioned teletype punched paper tape? There was a time I could read the holes in it.
• I've been in IT long enough to have programmed in both COBOL and FORTRAN.
• I saw Aerosmith in concert...in 1974.
• I once traded seats on a plane with Henry Winkler.

Now it's my turn to pass the pox to Mark at Dangling Invective, Chuck at Front Porch Anarchist and Dave C. at At The Point Of A Gun.

Close Gitmo, and then what?

This Richmond Times-Dispatch article is about Sen. Jim Webb's (D-VA) new-found opposition to closing Guantanamo Bay on Obama's timetable, but this paragraph gave me a chuckle:

Senate Democrats are proposing legislation that would fund closure of the Guantanamo prison, but would also block transfer of any of its prisoners to the U.S.

Er...what? In this piece of crap legislation, Senate Democrats would fund closing Gitmo, but leave the disposition of the prisoners in limbo. Brilliant!

Lufthansa's geography quiz

Spotted over at Mark's place...I guess he beat me, and this was my second effort.

Required reading: Leftism is NOT liberalism

Twitter user @vermontaigne tweeted a link to this article yesterday, in which a self-described "secular humanist Enlightenment liberal" separates "leftism" from "liberalism" like white from yolk.

It's long, but well worth the read. Michael Strong first establishes his liberal cred, then describes how classic liberalism has been co-opted by leftists, particularly on university campuses. Here's a stand-out paragraph:

But despite the healthy, productive, and necessary debate concerning global economic history and contemporary policy measures, often the loudest and most aggressive voices in academia do not represent healthy, positive or informed debate. The anti-globalization movement, anti-Americanism, and lingering communism that are common in some academic departments do not offer a useful, positive, or well-considered means of making the world a better place. Hatred and bitterness are no substitute for intellectual coherence. The social and intellectual atmosphere at most universities (and, significantly, the two cannot be distinguished) continues to support views that are better described as “Leftist” than as Liberal. It is not socially acceptable in the humanities departments of most universities to suggest that Hong Kong and Singapore are economically successful today in large part because they had the good fortune to have inherited classical liberal principles as a legacy of British colonialism, or that free trade is the best means available of alleviating global poverty today, or to debate whether FDR or LBJ was the most destructive U.S. president in the 20th century.

Strong offers a checklist to determine whether classic liberalism has returned to college campuses:

1. Are most students and professors aware that under 19th century free market capitalism in the United States and Britain that it was not true that “the rich got richer and the poor got poorer?” i.e., that the working class standard of living steadily increased under laissez-faire capitalism?
2. Do most students and professors understand that wealth is created almost exclusively by private enterprise (given a framework based on the rule of law)?
3. Are most students and professors aware that Marxist governments murdered over 100 million people in the 20th century, vastly exceeding the loss of human life due to the Nazis?
4. Do most students and professors acknowledge that those humanely-motivated academics who self-identified as Marxists should, indeed, accept responsibility for having advocated a repeatedly murderous ideology? (“We didn't intend those outcomes” is not an adequate excuse after the fourth totalitarian Marxist regime, predictably enough, committed mass murder.)
5. Do most students and professors understand public choice theory?
6. Do most students and professors understand the necessary relationship between economic freedom, on the one hand, and creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, on the other?

You go read now.

Serial rabbit murderer follow-up

Remember this item from last summer about a serial rabbit murdered in the Dortmund, Germany area? This morning while looking for something else I happened upon this article in Germany's edition of The Local. It seems they've caught the fiend:

A suspect in a series of grisly rabbit killings has been arrested from a neglected apartment full of animals – both dead and alive, Dortmund police reported on Friday.

Since early 2008, residents in the area have reported a large number of mysterious and disturbing rabbit killings. But investigators didn’t have any solid evidence until Friday morning at 2 am, when they found what they called their “first concrete lead.”

They arrested a 26-year-old suspect who was standing in front of his home with two animal transport boxes full of 11 guinea pigs.

That should help curb the price of hassenpfeffer a bit.

Gin & Tonic

Tonic opens up the show at Celebrate Virginia

Yeah, I know, I've been slow in posting new stuff lately. Been absolutely buried with work. But I did manage to find time last night to head down to Celebrate Virginia here in Fredericksburg with Mrs. Pool Bar to catch Tonic and the Gin Blossoms. I've always liked both bands, and we caught the Gin Blossoms back around 1994 or so. It's good to see both bands are still around (well, in the case of the Gin Blossoms, reconstituted) and they both sounded great.

The Celebrate Virginia Live concert series, by the way, is a great venue. It's well organized, offers good food (Famous Dave's BBQ among others) and an over-priced but good selection of beer. Parking situation was good, and it's worth spending the extra money for the "Golden Circle" tickets which put you right in front of the stage and in actual seats. The rest is lawn seating.

Coming up are Toad The Wet Sprocket and Little Feat.

Gin Blossoms frontman Robin Wilson closes the set
with an acoustic version of Elton John's "Rocketman"

'His only enemies are fellow Americans'

About three weeks old, but I just turned this up today. Columnist Gerald Warner positively shreds Barack Obama over the release of the "torture" memos and in general "cosying up to all the bad guys":

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

And that's just for openers. Great stuff...read the whole thing.

That sucks

Anyone who's worked in a USAF aircraft maintenance shop knows about "FOD walks" along runways and flightlines, in which personnel fan out and walk along areas traveled by aircraft to search for loose foreign objects which might get sucked into an engine resulting in foreign object damage, or FOD.

I'm thinking this bit of FOD would have been hard to miss.