Right, then.

[silveradept]

Happy birthday, loweko. Hopefully you got a nice new shiny Big Red Button and the license to use it.

Another possible tip for those thinking about trying to achieve enlightenment: Stop thinking about it. Otherwise, the feedback loop gets nasty.

We might also note several things of import happening in a relatively short amount of time. The one the government wants you to pay attention to is this: A new tape, with a voice purporting to be Osama bin Laden, has been found. With characteristic bravado, the Administration claimed al-Qaeda's leader was on the run. What this obscures and hides are the following: A grab for search engine data, to see whether or not search engines index porn (which one would suspect does happen by the robots) and how often it shows up. Well, depending on what you put in to the engine, you get different results. Duh. This is another one of those invasions of privacy under the guise of protecting the vulnerable... and Google is one of the few engines that told them to go fuck themselves. (There's University of Michigan graduates for you!) With that, many are still missing from the hurricane, the federal government won't reimburse the states that valiantly stepped in to cover the stupidity of the new Medicare program's errors, and the biggest middle finger of them all, soldiers are being ordered to leave behind their body armor. The stuff that the government basically made the soliders buy because they didn't have enough, they're now telling to leave behind, because it's not the government's standard-issue. Real nice, threatening a solider with not paying his life-insurance benefit if he doesn't have the preferred contractor, even if the private armor might be better technology. It's like they want people to get killed over there.

...that had better not turn out to be a true statement.

Classwork tomorrow and other assorted things like that. Need to either remember to upload to my personal site or create my personal site and drop the URL in a box by Tuesday.

And, my life has just complicated again. I really don't like it when it does these things.

Comments

[uncle-pervy.livejournal.com]

I read the DefenseWatch article on "Dragon Skin" body armor yesterday and from what I've been able to see it could be true. The main idea is that bringing in something that isn't considered standard issue will muck up the supply chains within the Theatre of Operations. One of the forumites at the forum I go into is stationed in Mosul, Iraq and talked about how he had to leave much of his stuff at his base in Alaska because it wasn't standard issue...of course most of the stuff he left behind were various types of assault weapons and whatnot.

The thing that really got me after reading the article was that there were reported to be a few Generals within Central Command that are wearing "Dragon Skin" and there have been numerous reports on the news and on the net about the "Interceptor" armor the military distributes to the soldiers isn't considered good enough to protect against IED's, large-caliber guns, had bad designs which reduced mobility of the user and wasn't able to protect all that it was supposed to protect.

My friend said he hadn't heard anything about it within his company and it might just be a few local commanders, but considering the source of the article and all the anonymity it just isn't able to be confirmed 100% without confirmation from the Pentagon.

[silveradept]

Quite possilbe that it's not as widesperead as the articles appears, but still, threatening someone with not paying their life insurance benefits if they don't use standard-issue stuff, even if the stuff they bought might be better, and they bought it because the government didn't have enough in the first place... there's something screwy there.