History's Garbage Dump - TANSTAAFL

2359 –civil war index: 1 minute until midnight.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a “Doomsday Clock” on their publication (http://www.thebulletin.org/). It indicates the probability of nuclear holocaust. Because their analog clock is registered, I’ve had to go digital.

I believe this country is teetering on the brink of civil war. There are lunatics afoot who would even welcome this. They are ignorant of history. Civil war is a horrible thing- ask any Lebanon Marine, or anyone who’s served in the former Yugoslavia.

There are several kick-ass reasons for war to ignite in this country. The abortion debate and the current political polarization come to mind. States’ rights and “full faith and credit” are a proven flash point. I’m starting this post to encourage reasoned debate. If I’m wrong, convince me of this. If you agree with me, suggest solutions. I strongly advise all to attend whatever governmental meetings they can. Monitor your representatives. Stay with the Constitution. VOTE. Government is what happens to you while you’re asleep.

I will monitor this thread as time allows. Posts I find obnoxious will be deleted. This IS a blog, after all.

Update 26MAR05: the clock gets nudged forward
Terri Schiavo is near death. Too many questions remain regarding this slow-motion murder. Let's add legalized euthanasia of humans to the mix. The Rev's comment below is just one of many I've seen from people who are really wrapped around the axle over this.

Update 3JUN05: the clock gets nudged forward
DU has a civil war thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3775394#3775409

Update 25AUG05: the clock gets nudged forward
The DU thread referenced above was deleted or moved shortly after I linked to it.

The anti-war(anti-George Bush) movement is gathering steam. They may yet succeed in convincing the uninformed that we are fighting Viet Nam again- even though this World War is a different war, with much higher stakes (Why We Fight- a personal view). The moonbat Left is using tactics that are beyond despicable{hat tip: via LGF}. The tolerance level of many who have served our country is waning (ref. footnote in hangin-with-cindys-buds.html).

Rolling Stones
Gimme Shelter

Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter
Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost it’s way

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away...............

Civil war- just a twitch away.......


Update 5MAR07: the clock hits Midnight
The War Within and the War Without.

On any given Monday in South Bend, IN, a group of morons parades in front of the Federal Building, 204 S. Main St. They will tell you that they are opposed to “the war in Iraq”. But they’ve been out there since November of 2000, their real cause an unreasoned hatred of President Bush. In 2000 I attempted to speak with these dolts about their politics. I’ve had more meaningful conversations with my parrot.

In March of 2003, there was a ‘Support the Troops’ rally at South Bend’s Military Honor Park & Museum. I had just returned from 3 months of intermittent duty at an Army MOB center and had the honor of addressing that rally. Another speaker suggested that there should be a counter to the weekly protest- that there should be so many people supporting the military that the protesters would be invisible behind them. Well, that’s never happened. There are some of us, though, who try to appear on Mondays to wave the flag and show that there are some citizens in town who have a grasp on reality.

I go to downtown South Bend on any Monday afternoon when I don’t have work or military obligations. I invite any and all to come along and wave the flag, 1700-1800 EST, West side of the street. You might meet a Marine mom, military vets, or even FASTAC 6. If you find yourself alone, stand proudly. Feel free to taunt the morons. Please refrain from pummeling, no matter the temptation.

Update 2/28/05: A reader asked for photos. Here are a couple shot during the beginning of what we hope will be our last severe storm of the year. By the end of the hour, there were 15 or so of these dolts in front of the building. Many of the signs are insults aimed at President Bush. Sorry about the lack of close-ups. The weather was ugly, I wanted to get the camera out of the snow, AND this is about as close as I care to get to these......people.




Update 18 AUG 05:

This group of moonbats also runs a Saturday protest from 1300-1400:

Every Saturday, 1:00-2:00pm Anti-War Vigil at the Cemetery corner of Cleveland and Grape Road near University Park Mall. We hope to bring home to the shoppers the reality of the war in Iraq. Bring signs and banners or use ours. The signs should oppose policies and avoid personal attacks on people. E.g., "Peace on Earth Means Now" "No More Preemptive War" "Warfare Out, Health Care In" "U.S. Out, U.N. In."http://community.michiana.org/justice/index.html

On 6 AUG, I was able to celebrate by displaying "Nuke the Bastards" signs on my truck. I found the bank driveway diagonally across from the cemetery to be an ideal spot for flag-waving.

I saw an ad the other day for one of the Japanese car companies in which they proudly proclaimed that they were creating new jobs for Americans in massive numbers. And you know what came to mind? Wow, the Japanese haven't done that much for the American job market since December, 1941. It's so sad, it's funny.

Proving that I have nothing better to do, here is my evidence for the House of Kennedy suffering the "Curse of Water."
1. President John F. Kennedy - Fell asleep, woke up to find "sailing yacht" split in two, nearly died in 1943.
2. Michael Kennedy - Died amidst a sea of frozen water in 1997 due to Newton's Three Laws and a really big tree.
3. Senator Edward M. Kennedy - nearly died in 1969 when his car plunged off a bridge into a river. He

Exited the Oldsmobile

, left Mary Jo Kopechne to die.
4. John F. Kennedy Jr. - Died when his plane plunged into the water in 1999.
5. Joe Kennedy Jr. - Died on active duty as a Navy Pilot during WWII. Granted this one is reaching, but serving on the water all that time was bound to catch up with him.
I see a trend here. Don't feed the gremlins after midnight, and never get a Kennedy near large bodies of water (including snow). The only result will be tragedy.

First of all ,way to go President Bush. Syria and Iran, ya all hear that? Hands where we can see them right now! And, as a youngster, I say: Bush's Social Security plan rocks.
Bonus: Lt. Prakash has a new post well worth the read:

Armor Geddon

And: SFC Smith got the Medal. Too bad its posthumous, but he deserved it.

From Grunt.com


"I took seven rounds from a 'bad guy' firing a fully-automatic AK 47," he said Wednesday during a phone interview from his bed at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. "Five in my right leg, one in my foot and one to the buttocks area. Then a grenade went off about four feet from me and I got 30 to 40 pieces of shrapnel in my back.

Brad described what happened when he was wounded.

"We were moving down the street, clearing buildings," he began. "A Marine came out wounded from a building and said there were three more wounded Marines trapped in there with a bunch of bad guys (insurgents). As we entered, we noticed several dead Iraqis on the floor and one of our wounded.

"An Iraqi pointed an AK47 at me and I shot and killed him, but there was another one on the stairs behind me that began firing at me with a fully-automatic AK. That's when I went down, along with one of my young Marines. Then I noticed the hand grenade."

Brad said his first instinct was to protect his young Marine. He covered the young man with his body and took the full brunt of shrapnel to his back when the grenade exploded.

Brad's injuries were severe. He was in and out of consciousness and lost 60 percent of his blood. He was first taken to a field hospital in Iraq, then flown to Germany, where he was hospitalized for a week before arriving in Bethesda."

P.S. - Notice where his trigger finger is. No wonder the MSM doesn't report these stories. It would ruin them.

Attention!!! Attention!!!
GI Joe (okay, really a Dragon toy, but whatever) has been taken captive by those waskily wabbits in Iraq. They have threatened to take his head off with a thumb, because "they're really, really mean." All members of the GI Joe SWAT, SEAL, and 3 3/4" line are ordered to report to their duty stations at once.
UPDATE: I hear they also have International Journalist Barbie and Human Shield Skipper. Those monsters.

On Sunday morning, during an interview with Tim Russert, J.G. Kerry used the phrase "there's more than one way to skin a cat". Where is the LLL outrage? Where is PETA? Just how many cats has Kerry skinned, and why? And of more import, would you cross or travel on a river with a Mass. senator?

2/2/05 - Bblatt writes: PETA can't come to the phone right now, they've had a run in with:

Bun-Bun's Switchblade

Unpleasant truths:
1)There have been blogs that DO violate OPSEC.
2)When you put on the pickle suit, your civil rights DO become conditional (finding that out is how I became a 1LT-for-life).
That said, here is a letter from Jason, of Just Another Soldier:


Just Another Soldier - How to Turn a Blog Into a Demotion and a $1000 Fine
Mr. Chenelly-

I realize you probably have already written your piece on bloggers in Iraq for the Army Times, but I'd like to respond to your email anyway.

First a quick background. My unit (2/108 Infantry from New York) returned from Iraq on New Years Day. We spent a week at Fort Drum with the demobilization process and we are now all back to being citizen Joe again. All told, we spent fifteen months on this deployment, about eleven of it in Iraq in the Sunni Triangle.

I started my blog at the beginning of our deployment and had it online for a few months during our training-up period before my commander asked me to take it down. Our Family Readiness group knew about the blog who eventually leaked it to my commander. He flipped out. So I took it down, but continued to write, emailing my stories to those who wanted to continue to read. I successfully flew under the radar like this for most my deployment.

Once there were about two months left on our deployment, I put the blog back online with everything I had written. It took less than two weeks for someone from the New York National Guard stateside to inform my command. That's when things got bad.

My commander decided to court martial me. Then he said he saw how the court martial against the soldiers who refused to go on a fuel convoy mission was thrown out, so he changed the request for a court martial to a field-grade article 15 because he wanted to be certain he "could see me punished". My commander is an assistant district attorney in Manhattan in real life and is an expert when it comes to bullying people. I suspect once he cooled off a little he realized that a court martial was a bit much, so gave me the fuel convoy story as an excuse for changing his mind. I also suspect he just wanted to scare me as much as possible by telling me he wanted me court martialed.

My battalion S2 section made a hard copy of my blog and there was an investigation. It concluded that I had violated OPSEC, violated the Geneva convention (for photos of detainees), and that I was guilty of conduct unbecoming an NCO (primarily for a photograph of me sitting on a shitter, among other things). Then I sat around for a month after being transferred from my job as a rifle squad leader (about to be promoted to E-6) to our headquarters platoon doing absolutely nothing while I waited for the other shoe to drop. I was taken off missions altogether (which is the ultimate punishment for a soldier-- to not let him work). Waiting for my article 15 hearing and not knowing what was going to happen to me was one of the worst experiences of my life. I wanted to demand a court martial because I felt I had done nothing wrong, but the thought of being kept on active duty in legal limbo while the rest of my unit went back to their homes weighed very heavily on me. I was ready to be off active duty like I can't explain. Sitting around for that month while anxiety consumed me was far worse than combat. Call me a wimp, but it really sucked.

Apparently our brigade JAG guy (2 BCT 1 ID) was too busy with his own blog (daggerjag.blogspot.com or something like that) to process my article 15 while we were in Iraq, so it didn't get resolved. Instead it was handed over to the garrison support unit at Ft. Drum upon our return. The article 15 I was given charged me with violating a direct order and violating OPSEC. The JAG lawyer I spoke with at Drum was little help and I was in no shape emotionally at that point to deal with a court martial, so I took the hit. I was given a field-grade article 15 by a colonel I never met in my life who didn't know me from a bucket of paint except for an investigation that made me sound like a traitor. I was demoted to E-4 and fined $1000.

The most interesting aspect of this entire fiasco is how OPSEC is defined, or rather not defined. Since there is no concise legal definition of what constitutes a violation of OPSEC (or at least not one anyone could produce for me when I requested it), it's impossible to determine when something crosses the line from "not a violation" to "a violation". It's like trying to define what pornography is or bad taste in music. To make a convincing argument how OPSEC has been violated is trivial. You pretty much only have to smarter than the person you are trying to convince, or just instill in him enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt that he'll have no choice but to agree. It's like accusing someone of being a communist. If you disagree with the person making the accusation, you'll be considered a communist sympathizer, or maybe even a communist yourself. The fight is over before the gauntlet is even dropped.

To answer the rest of your questions: My advice for soldiers who want to blog is to retain legal counsel before you start blogging. Have every legal detail worked out beforehand in regards to what you can and can't blog about. That way when your commander tells you to take your blog down, you can tell him to take the matter up with your lawyer. I had no idea my blog would become such a big issue, but if I had to do it over again, I would have gotten a lawyer before I started or at least made a call to the ACLU.

There is no way to blog about Iraq without your unit finding out about it. The guys in my unit knew about my blog within a month or two from the time I started it, but it took a few months before my commander found it. The only way for a soldier to not get in trouble is to write nothing but insipidly agreeable and conspicuously patriotic content that is reviewed by his or her leadership before posting. So yes, I do feel as though my First Amendment rights were violated. My article 15 was officially about my supposed violations of a direct order and OPSEC, but the ass-chewings I received focused a lot more on my penchant for explicating on the abundant absurdities of military life and combat. This was the real issue moreso than the supposed OPSEC violations and this is why the First Amendment exists-- to protect speech, even unpopular speech.

Everyone has a vision of how they want to remember their combat experience and particularly how they want others to view their combat service. Most soldiers, and especially infantrymen, want to realize all their Jerry Bruckheimer-fueled fantasies with macho military fervor. All I did was include more details in hopes of providing a more honest and humorous perspective of what soldiering is typically like. I could write "We went on a raid tonight. We smashed the gate down and cleared the house, but the guy we were looking for wasn't home." But instead I'd write "Tonight we went on a raid. It wasn't till 3am and I couldn't sleep so I masturbated before we left. On the way to the raid we got lost, but after driving around for a while we finally found the house. We tried to breech the gate of the outer wall, but in the process accidentally ended up knocking the entire wall over. After clearing the house, we realized it was the wrong one. Once we figured out where the correct house was, we raided it. But the guy we were looking for wasn't home. As I was pulling security on an alley, I realized that the chow we had for dinner wasn't agreeing with me and when I tried to fart ended up shitting my pants a little. Once we finished searching the house, we hopped back in our Humvees and took what we thought was our planned egress route, but instead found ourselves on a dead end canal road. While turning around, one of the Humvees got stuck in the mud. Most raids do not go this badly. We eventually made it back to our base safe and sound. My ass had started to chafe from when I 'sharted', so I took a shower, masturbated, and went to bed." (This, by the way, is a true story.) If I wrote a story like this, my commander would spend thirty minutes condemning me for portraying our unit as incompetent and unprofessional, but charge me with violating OPSEC because I disclosed tactical details on how we perform breeches.

All in all, I think Army leadership can't grasp that it's possible for a soldier to be critical or satirical of the Army but still be pro-Army. I've been in the Army 14 years. I love being an infantryman. But there are so many great stories that don't get told because there are so many people who don't want their illusions molested. Or because telling them apparently constitutes a violation of OPSEC.

If you have any more questions, I'd be happy to write more for you.

-Jason Hartley

p.s. I hope you don't mind but I've bcc'd this email to my mailing list.



Joe Chenelly wrote:
Hello,

My name is Joe Chenelly with the Army Times. I was wondering if you'd answer a few questions for us? I am looking at writing about the service members blogging in Iraq.

I've was wondering if you could expand on why you stopped posting? Did it all blow over after you stopped blogging? Were you ever told how you violated OPSEC?

How did your command find out you were blogging?

What kind of advice do you give other soldiers thinking about starting their own blog?

OK, here is the question you're probably expecting me to ask: Do you feel your free speech rights have been violated by the military? I had to ask.

Are you still in Iraq?

Although I have a lot more I'd like to ask, I fully understand how incredibly busy you must be, so I will toss one last question your way: If you had it all to do over again, what would you do? I hope that last question wasn't too cliché for you.

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance. I certainly would understand if you cannot get back to me for a while or even at all, but I really hope you have some time in the future to shoot me an e-mail. If you don't while you're over there, please let me know when you're back in the ole U.S. of A.

Take care of yourself,
Joe

---------------------------------------------
Joseph R. Chenelly
Deputy News editor, Army Times




_______________________________________________
www.justanothersoldier.com
jason@justanothersoldier.com

"AP - Sudan's government and the Janjaweed militia are not guilty of genocide but did commit mass killings, torture, rape and other atrocities in the Darfur region that merit the trial of suspects in the International Criminal Court, a U.N.-appointed panel said in a new report."

That these brutal acts targeted a specific population is, of course, just a coincidence.
Why do we need the UN again? Oh right, we don't.
In other news, the UN is proud to announce democratic elections in Iraq under its benevolent guidance. Jerks.