Argghhh!

Open post for those with something to share, updated through the day. New, complete posts come in below this one. Note: If trackbacking, please acknowledge this post in your post. That's only polite. ******************************* In today's From the Front: (Click on link to read stories highlighted below) P.J. Tobia: A Soldier With PTSD: “We Don’t Have To Feel Like Monsters…” Old Blue: Ah… Pessimism Bruce R: Offsetting ANA illiteracy In Iraq Now (at 56):...

That's when you know things are working like they're supposed to. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood on what it's like work for the government in Beijing , er, Washington, the District of Columbia: "The Chinese are more successful [in building infrastructure] because in their country, only three people make the decision. In our country, 3,000 people do, 3 million. In a country where only three people make the decision, they can decide where to put their rail line, get the money...

Early morning patrol in the Korengal valleyPhotos by U.S. Army Sgt. Matthew Moeller 5th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment090813-A-1211M-001: KUNAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan – U.S. Army Sgt. Matthew Roberts, a native of Houston, scans the hills surrounding the Korengal valley in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, during an early morning patrol, Aug. 13. Roberts is a member of Company B, 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, based at Fort Carson, Colo...

And no, we're not talking about caskets for these people. We're talking jargon for the style of ammo cans used by Warsaw Pact and now former Warsaw Pact nations for bulk shipping ammunition. [Warning - if you're allergic to cats, there is a *lot* of cat hair in this post. A *lot.* Really. I mean it. A whole lot.]We speaking of cans which we people who have the habit, as Skip noted in this post, "of turning money into noise" call, "spam cans." Why that moniker? Because...

Item the first - notice how we have the rumblings that President Obama, if he thinks things are not going to go well in November, will simply declare an emergency and call off the election? And we will have had our last election, ever? Item the second - remember how we had the rumblings that President Bush, if he thought things were not going to go well in November 2004, and again in November 2008, would simply declare an emergency and call off the election? And that we would have had our last election...

So, Fort Leavenworth is easily the most over-policed 7 square miles in Kansas, and probably is self-funding from speeding tickets on Grant Avenue alone. That said... having been thoroughly conditioned to slow to 20 on Grant when inbound after passing the stoplight at the athletic fields, I always suffer a spike of righteous indignation when someone motors past me at 30... like yesterday afternoon. Only they didn't see what I saw - the unmarked MP car hiding in plain sight in the alley behind...

To include finding out yesterday that some publishing process on the blog takes forever to update a change to the template - such as when I pulled the Day By Day cartoon. It's gone now. Several of you have hated DbD since forever, but you could just ignore it, and I generally (not always) liked it, as did others, so I left it up. But Chris must be feeling some pressure during his ongoing fundraiser, because he finally slipped to essentially full frontal nudity.

Grim, writing over at Blackfive, is worth your time: "The question is therefore not why the age of genocide has returned, but why it ever stopped. The answer is that there was a brief window of history in which Western Christian states were the chief world powers, and those states had developed a religious and philosophical tradition of restraining war's violence against noncombatants. They wrote the rules of this tradition into the laws that are supposed to govern violence in our world...