Rainy Sunday

It had been cloudy all day but it really started to darken up and get breezy just as I was finishing the hole. About 2.5 feet x1 foot x4 feet it didn't look like much, just a hole in the ground next to the pomegranate tree. I looked up at the sky, sighed, and went to drag a piece of tin over to keep the hole from filling with water should it start to rain while I was gone. Then I got in the truck and headed over to the vet's office. The vet wasn't open on Sunday but one of his assistants would be there. She was sympathetic and said she had been pulling for him but it was to no avail. I had gotten the call earlier that day that sometime between 0615 and 0845 my dog had died. He had been bitten by a snake Weds afternoon/evening. By late weds night his head had swollen to the size of a basketball. It came down the next day but stayed about twice normal size. He just never recovered. Perhaps if I had had an extra $500 to spend on anti-venom things would have been different. But who cares about maybes? The asssitant brought me the towel wrapped and trashbagged bundle. I offered her the towel back but she said I could keep it. She also had his collar. As I carried him to the car the rain finally began to fall. I sat the sad bundle on the front seat and drove home. When I got here I put the other dogs into the house, I didn't need them sniffing around right now. Then I moved the tin and brought the dog from the truck. I took him out of the trashbag and put his collar on him, gently layed him down in the hole and filled it in. I went inside and got a bag of wild flower seeds and spread a handfull or two on the freshly turned earth. The rain was still falling.




RIP BEADLE

Here's a new one......

I found out that today is Pee on the Earth Day everyone is supposed to save fresh water and help fertilize plants by going outside to urinate today. Don't believe me? Here is one Link, more can be found on Google (easily available above) although most references there are either like this one (It's what?) or just links to the site I linked you to.
I learn new things everyday and a horrifyingly lot of what I learn is so uselessly strange. But it does make life interesting.

strange things seen....

Awhile back I posted a picture of a Pink Car with littel white stickers all over it. It seemed a pretty strange sight on the road. Well I have it beat. I was up in Atlanta again for a fencing tournament again a couple of weeks ago. While there, I got together with a friend in the Air National Guard and went out to eat. As we were coming out of the resturant we saw a motorcycle. It sort of stood out because it was furry. Yes, you read that correctly, I said FURRY. The thing was covered in artificial fur. Red with black stripes. You really can't see the stripes in the photo. I was, for the moment, without my digital camera so we had to use my friends cell phone to capture the moment.

Why would someone do this to a perfectly good motorcyccle??????

The problem of a duel mission war......

There is a problem with wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. WE are there for two purposes. One of them being to find the enemy and kill him and the other being to stabilize and rebuild the countries. Unfortunately these two missions often clash in major ways.
Combat troops, the infantry, are the ones out on the ground fighting the enemy, they are getting shot at and thus feel very little impulse to win a heart or a mind. They want to go out of the gate, do their mission and come home with everyone who went with them alive and in one piece. To do this they will drive like maniacs, intimidate the locals, point their weapons at families in cars, and generally be real bad neighbors and not good PR reps. But can you blame them? In Afghanistan while I was there two Canadian soldiers were killed when a man wearing a suicide belt threw himself onto the hood of their vehicle while they were moving through a traffic circle. The first Car Bomb I heard of in Iraq involved a taxi driver who asked some American soldiers to help him push a stalled car out of the road. While they were pushing it it blew up. (This happened a couple of days before my first trip to Baghdad which I will have to tell you about sometime)
So now you get incidents like that of the accident in Kabul that caused the riots because the American convoy was driving fast and hard for "safety" reasons. And you get incidents like this one. Wild Bill Part I There is a part two that should be read also and the subsequent posts where there is great debate over the actions here. That whole blog, Fun With Hand Grenades is a very interesting study. Start at the beginning and see how this young man changes from the time he is activated till now. If you want to read it you should do so soon. His blog in attracting enough attention now that I rather expect him to get shut down by BIG ARMY. They don't like controversial blogs. But I find it very interesting because he so clearly displays the stereotypical "Infantry Mindset" all the way down to the "We'd win this if the pouges would shut up and let us do it our way!" attitude. (Pouge is pretty much the same as REMF, anyone who isn't out on the street fighting) Unfortunately unrestrained infantry attitude will turn all of the locals against the US. There is a comment HERE that explains how the attitude can screw things up.
I admire the infantry, they do a job that I don't want to do. But generally, they see only one small slice of the picture. And while keeping their men safe is their big picture sometimes a few risks need to be taken to achieve an overall goal. If the locals all hate you you CANNOT defeat an insurgency. The only way to beat an insurgency is to deprive the insurgents of their safe haven among the populace and the only way to do that is to turn the populace against them. IF you turn the populace agaisnt you, then you are doomed. (Witness for example the Germans in the Ukraine, they were welcomed as liberators and celebrated by the local population when they rolled in and due to their actions and policies were being hunted and killed by the same populace in fairly short order) NOTE: I am not comparing the US in Iraq to the Nazis in Russia.
The Infantry are very, very good at what they do, unfortunately what they do isn't generally "win hearts and minds" What they do is find the enemy and kill him. There needs to be a balance.

addendum to Zarqawi

I was reading another blog and came across an interesting theory as tot the timing and hapenstance of the death of Zarqawi.
Give it a read.
Zarqawis-demise

Why no Zarqawi post.......

I got an email from a friend asking why I hadn't done a post on the death of Zarqawi. Well, I have been out of town. Had a big fencing tournament that I went to (and got by butt handed to me). (but one of the guys I coach kicked ass winning two events and taking second in his third so I was pleased overall)
Zarqawi's death is interesting, not so much in that we killed him, but in the Intel we are gathering from the site he was killed in. He has pretty much already been replaced. Hopefully the info we gathered and the chaos that has been spread through the organization by his death, the subsequent captures of 20 plus operatives, and the paranoia of how we found him will greatly increase our chances of killing his replacements and shutting down the foreign fighter's organization in Iraq. Of course we will still have to deal with the indigenous fighters but that is another story.

I did hear one radio talkshow person expressing great confusion about why we would leak the information that Zarqawi had been located due to inside information. He thought this would cause the informer to get killed. In this case this info was spread because it will cause all of Zarqawi's associates to stare at one another and try to figure out who is the traitor. It will greatly hamper their ability to work together. And it is quite likely that there never was an informer. But they will never know. Odds are, if there was an informer he was one of the men captured in the period after the killing and will quietly be moved out of the country to a safe house where he will be interrogated, opps, sorry, debriefed is the correct technical term here, for the next year or more. And then watched like a hawk for the rest of his life to make sure he doesn't go back to his old friends.

More later, I have to finish cleaning out my email and then go feed the ravening horde.

We dont care just move.....

“We don’t care, just move……”

Georgia passed a new law this past year, pushed by Governor Sonny “to protect the children”.  Now there is a part of me that firmly believes that whenever you hear that particular phrase you know that someone is about to get screwed.  Civil rights, money, something is about to get taken.  
This new law of Georgia’s makes it illegal for a registered sex offender to live within 1000 feet of a school bus stop.  It doesn’t matter if he or she has lived there for years, if they own the house or anything.  New law says they have to move.  And they need to be moved by July 1 or they face 10-30 years in prison.  In Cobb County there are over 17,000 school bus stops which make it pretty near impossible to find a place to live.  Several people have asked Capt. Tommy Eaton of the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Dept where they are supposed to move to and he has told them that it isn’t his problem.  They need to tell him where they want to live and he will tell them if they can.
Some departments are a bit more concerned and at least make sounds about being trying to give people good information before they uproot them.

Now I realize folks are going to say, “So what?  These are sex offenders, they deserve what they get.”  Perhaps they do, I don’t know.    Just remember that when the rights are being taken from people they always start at the bottom.  Then they move up.
  I do find it amusing that Gov. Sonny has a campaign ad where he talks about making laws make sure that the government can’t take a man’s home for private development.  But he also passed a law where the government can throw a person out of his home for a crime he committed long ago, after he has already served the sentence the courts gave him for it.