Month: September 2008

That Isn’t a Crime

by

My charity self defense course is a few months shy of being 18 years old. It has certainly taught me a great deal about the dark side of human nature.

When I say “the dark side of human nature”, I don’t mean that seeing the scars and hearing the stories of what my students endured opened my eyes to the cruelty and violence of which criminals are capable. My brief career in law enforcement was certainly adequate to do that! Instead it showed me just how people are willing to take advantage of my good nature in order to screw over an innocent human being.

I noticed after the first year or so that a few of the people who sought me out for help, some of whom claimed extreme abuse, weren’t acting the way the rest of my students would when discussing their experiences. They would exhibit some of the classic signs of telling a lie, they wouldn’t show any lingering physical signs even though they would claim serious injury, and their emotional reactions while relating their stories would be inappropriate.

Read more

Is This a Hoax?

by

The major news agencies are doing their best to find something to use to smear Gov. Palin. I think they have finally slid into that dark and moist abyss called madness.

This news article relates how some YouTube video the author came across shows Palin being blessed in her church before she tossed her hat in the ring to become Governor. A bishop visiting from Kenya asked that she be protected from witchcraft.

Okay, so what? I mean, what does this have to do with anything at all?

The reporter who wrote the story seems to think they have a major scoop, though. You see, Gov. Palin was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church when she was an infant!

I can’t make this stuff up if I tried, folks.

J’accuse—**updated**

by

Here is the speech that Governor Sarah Palin was going to give at the anti-Ahmadinejad rally in NYC. It’s a good speech, and deserves your attention. Excerpt:

Ahmadinejad may choose his words carefully, but underneath all of the rhetoric is an agenda that threatens all who seek a safer and freer world. We gather here today to highlight the Iranian dictator’s intentions and to call for action to thwart him.

He must be stopped.

The world must awake to the threat this man poses to all of us. Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust ever took place. He dreams of being an agent in a “Final Solution” — the elimination of the Jewish people.

Note that I referred to a speech that Sarah Palin was going to give. She was not allowed to give it, because she was disinvited from the rally.

Read more

“Are You The Man That Turns Off The Power?”

by


When I first started working after college I was an auditor for a “Big Six” public accounting firm. Through the (bad) luck of the draw, I was assigned to work on utilities and government institutions. Since utilities are distributed across the United States geographically (unlike finance which is concentrated in New York, for example) I had to travel across the midwest in order to serve my clients.

On one of my first trips I sat next to a couple, a mother and a young son. After a while we started talking a bit on my way to Sioux City Iowa (to see Iowa Public Service, which has since been bought up by Berkshire Hathaway as part of MidAmerican Energy). They asked me why I was traveling to Iowa (a good question, actually) and I said that I was an accountant working for the local power company. The child piped up and said:

“Are you the man who turns off the power?”

The mother was embarrassed and we immediately changed the subject but clearly their family had their power cut off for non-payment at some point in the past and that is how the child knew of the power company. We had some stilted conversation from then on but the encounter has stuck with me for years.

Read more

NEW BOOK: The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy and War

by

Re-posted from Zenpundit.com at the request of my co-author Lexington Green:

boydbook2.jpg

The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War

This post has been a long time coming.

A while back, we had a a symposium at Chicago Boyz to discuss and debate the superb book Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Colonel Frans Osinga. It was a great discussion from which I learned far more about the ideas of the iconoclastic military theorist John Boyd than I had ever previously considered. Not everyone involved was an admirer of John Boyd, a few were initially skeptical and we had one certified critic ( though I had tried to recruit several more). Overall, it was the kind of exchange that makes the blogosphere special as a medium when it is at it’s intellectual best.

Shortly thereafter, via Dan of tdaxp I was approached by the publisher of Nimble Books, W.F. Zimmerman, who happened to be a military history buff and who was interested in working our loose online discussion of Dr. Osinga’s prodigious tome into a book. Initially, I was somewhat dubious but I warmed to the project at the urging of tdaxp and Lexington Green, and agreed to serve as the Editor and “herder of cats” in a project that would involve a large number of contributors with very different backgrounds and some fairly dense and esoteric material on strategic theory to digest and make comprehensible to a general reader.

A wonderful experience.

We had an excellent roster of contributors for The John Boyd Roundtable: Debating Science, Strategy, and War – Dr. Chet Richards, Daniel Abbott, Shane Deichman, Frank Hoffman, Adam Elkus, Lexington Green, Thomas Wade and Dr. Frans Osinga, who contributed several essays. Dr. Thomas Barnett sets the intellectual tone in the foreword after which the authors brought a wide range of professional perspectives to bear – cognitive psychology, military history, physics, strategy, journalism and, of course, blogging – in a series of articles that tried to explain the essence and dimensions of John Boyd’s contribution to strategic thought. Hopefully, we succeeded in creating an interesting and useful primer but the readers will be the ultimate judges, free to dispute our conclusions and offer contending arguments of their own.

I’d like to think that Colonel Boyd would have wanted it that way.