When people defend the Patriot Act, the warrant-less wiretaps, and the other infringements on American civil liberties, they often point out that we are in a time of crisis and these sorts of things are necessary during a crisis. What…
Category: Politics
Dear Britney!
I think I may be the only person who really feels sorry for Britney Spears. I do not find any kind of entertainment in watching the interviews or the VMAs where she performs very badly. When I look at Britney,…
Counter Insurgency (COIN) as different levels of war
It seems like a lot of people have defined counter-insurgency doctrine at different levels of war. I’ve been trying to construct a VENN diagram showing elements of low intensity conflict for a project and came up with some things that…
The F-Word
As a former Marine I take umbrage at to much political correctness…. The f-word is a capital letter, comma, period, exclamation mark, and hyphen. It fills the role of punctuation in the speech of a Marine. It should be used…
Block Cheese and Wires: Are you afraid?
In the news today is a story about a TSA alert brought on by block cheese and wires (CNN.com). After seeing the story it seemed an interesting coincidence that the alert comes just a week after The Secretary of Homeland…
I’m terrified of the terrorism(ist)
I’ve been thinking about the concepts of terrorist, terrorism, insurgent, and what these terms mean to our resulting interest in international relations. The discussion keeps popping up to delineate the terms and codify the meanings. Coming to a common consensus…
Manifest destiny another take on the subject
Much of our thought about how the frontier began and our American version of our own history is written from the perspective of Fredrick Jackson Turner. Writing in the 1880’s and 1890’s his thesis on the frontier described the effect…
Generational assumptions of warfare
I’ve been looking at generational warfare from a slightly different perspective. As we have agricultural revolutions, industrial revolutions, and the information revolution it appears there is a corresponding relationship to the generations of warfare. We did not give up agriculture…
Military Bloggers
The following post is in response to the Wired news story that members of the Army are specifically banned from posting on Blogs. This is of specific interest as Blogs have served as a “lessons learned” and educational tools form…
Privacy and terrorism
In the restriction of personal freedom for perceived security rarely do you gain that security you crave. You loose freedom in a iterative and piecemeal way leaving a hungry feeling for the freedoms lost. Reactionary political fascism has never resulted…
Let’s be positive
Americans are sick and tired of hearing how much your opponent sucks. Petty name calling of your opponents proves an utter arrogance of the political process that reeks with the fetid and rancid rancor of illegitimate discussion. Providing a forum…
Hacking Democracy
Have you seen the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy? I watched it on Google Video a few hours ago. I have spent the intervening hours trying to collect and articulate my thoughts. To say I am upset is an understatement. I…
Hyper Political Action
The hyper-politicization you’re seeing is part of your increasing maturity as regards media. The fact is that American media has always been a highly tumultuous and terribly biased organ of information dissemination. Unfortunately most people never realize that simple fact.…
Not a normal legislation and hunting rights essay
I’m not a political scientist but I do have a hypothesis. I think that there is a cultural war brewing between the rural populations and the urbanized populations. This is especially important to understand if you hunt or use open…