Another reason to blog on WordPress

Posted by lex, on July 1, 2008

The crazies can’t shut you down:

Did Google use its network of online services to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the last few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google’s Blogger service.

The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.

Code is poetry.

Back To The Index 

If I had a dollar for each one of those…

Posted by lex, on February 18, 2008

Some time in the next 3.93 days, given current rates, these our humble digs will receive their one millionth visit, having crossed over two pernt summat million page views a few days past.

I’d find a way to be happier about that, but Buckethead John passed the three million mark last month, and by now you know all about that whole Army/Navy rivalry thing. Harumph-harumph.

Still, it’s been fun. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Back To The Index 

OPSEC, redux

Posted by lex, on May 8th, 2007

Over at Bill Roggio’s place – The Fourth Rail – contributor and retired US Navy Intelligence Specialist DJ Elliot puts the recent OPSEC kerfuffle into at least a kind of anecdotal perspective. He ranks OPSEC violaters he has personally observed, and no doubt the astute observer will wonder, from 10th (worst) to 1st (best), how did the MilBlogging set perform?

Not so very badly:

· 3. Military Bloggers: Despite the worries by the hierarchy, I have seen only five valid OPSEC violations in two years from Military Bloggers concerning ISF/Coalition forces (only 1 in the last year). MilBloggers tend to lose unit IDs and details in their writings in a way that PAOs should study and learn from.

Just behind the SOF fellas – whose tendency towards taciturnity has been elsewhere noted – and the ROKs, a group that is by long-accustomed proximity to an implacable threat used to the risks of revealing capabilities, tactics, techniques and procedures.

Even one violation is too many of course, but the list – and DJ’s other observations – make for interesting reading.

Back To The Index 

Back-end maintenance

Posted by lex, on April 9, 2007

Things may act squirrely for a while, gomen.

Update: There. All done.

A propos of nothing in particular, the air fare for my trip from the INFORMS Conference in Vancouver to the MilBlog Conference later on this month turned out to be just a shade over $500. It would’ve been cheaper, obviously, if I’d booked a bit earlier, but my time is not my own and it wasn’t until now that I could be sure of attending. Should be fun, educational, informative, etc. But, you know: Ouch.

Maybe the girls will get scholarships too.

Now SNO and I are headed for the local for to sharpen our skills. I’m going to give that Sig Sauer one more chance to disappoint, and we’ve got a scoped .22 LR and .30-06 Remington which haven’t been fired in ages and are beginning to resent it.

Or they would, if rifles could resent things. Which they can’t, but anyway.

Back To The Index 

A small favor

Posted by lex, on April 4, 2007

Many of the regulars will remember the story of young Diego Santiago, the son of a Navy Chief Petty Officer who died of cancer not quite a year ago at age 6, well before he could follow his dream of also joining the service – but not before the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy made him an honorary CPO.

His father, Chief Hospital Corpsman Santiago, is back in Iraq. Yesterday his mom dropped a note in the comments box of an old post:

Persians bearing gifts

Posted by lex on April 4th, 2007

So Ol’ Beady Eyes has decided to forgive the 15 British mariners their supposed sins and repatriate them in time for Easter. I scarcely know what to think.

It didn’t make any kind of rational sense for a country already squirming under the circling pressure of international opinion over a suspected nuclear weapons program to provoke an additional crisis by seizing the 15 in the first place. Having done so, it did nothing for the regime’s international reputation to parade the men and woman on screen while making truculent declarations of their guilt and muttering about show trials. Of course,  we had all long ago given up on the expectation of rationality from this particular Iranian regime, so while their seizure of the British mariners was a rude shock, it was not, in the end, particularly surprising.

In fact, the only truly surprising thing to come out of this whole ordeal is the release itself, with no apparent strings attached – it sets you back a bit when a madman suddenly starts making sense.

Posting paucity?

Posted by lex on April 4th, 2007

Perhaps.

We’re on a purposeful perambulation, progressively pointing towards Palo Alto. In the pursuit of a pedagogic partnership, prolly.

All in the praise of progress!

It’s at least potentially plausible therefore, that the preoccupations of my profession will proscribe – or at least postpone – prospective parley.

Beg pardon.

Back To The Index 

An insufficiently brief conversation between your humble scribe and a thoroughly hypothetical individual/correspondent

Posted by lex, on Feb 28, 2007

Your humble scribe: Just sign here on the white piece of paper.

Thoroughly hypothetical individual/correspondent: It’s black.

YHS: What is?

THIC: The paper.

YHS: I’m not sure I understand, I meant this piece of paper right here. The white one.

THIC: Black. It’s clearly black.

YHS:

THIC: BLACK!

YHS: Ohh-kayyy. Just sign at the top there.

THIC: That’s the bottom.

YHS: I don’t…

THIC: BOTTOM!

YHS:

THIC:

YHS: Is this one of those, “It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is” things?

–

Update: I was deceived! The “InstaCracker” thing should have given it away, combined with the characteristically stubborn resistance to reason and the psychically starved self-approbation but I simply wasn’t paying that close attention.

I’m just not, you know: That in to him.

Update 2: Do you not, when faced with this kind of behavior, at some level wonder, what the f***?

---

09-30-20 I came across this post last night and wondered what it was all about. Well, it referred to an exchange 2 days earlier when a troll came upon the commentariat. As Lex said at that time, it was like trying to wrestle a pig. Follow the links lex provided above – and I included the comments.

Back To The Index 

There’s all kinds of respect

Posted by lex, on February 11, 2007

Other folks *  are all over * the quote attributed to WaPo blogger William Arkin by Deborah Howell ** , the paper’s ombudsman:

Arkin is unrepentant about two things: He works for The Post. Period. And he said he is “probably one of the best-known and respected anti-military military bloggers.”

Apart from the obvious AHA! reaction, this raises a couple of interesting points: Given that the military is routinely cited as one of the country’s most respected institutions, this puts Arkin’s pride of place in a pretty cramped room. Especially when one considers all of those loyal American citizens who “support the troops, but not their mission.”

So who’s left to respect Arkin’s position? Oh. These folks.

Which seems a strange place from whence an employee of the Washington Post might look to get his affirmation. Arkin said earlier that he was done with all this. Now I am done with him.

He’s just not worth much.

**09-27-20 Links gone; no substitute found – Ed.

***09-27-20 Link gone; substitute found – Ed.

Back To The Index 

Flotsam and jetsam, II

Posted by lex, on February 3, 2007

Those of you paying attention to the comment thread  here * got to see Oyster – one of the few men whom I know personally who has landed aboard an aircraft carrier at night, with one engine not just out but shattered (not before having taken most of the other one with it) and with what damned little gas he had left more or less feeding a raging airframe fire – and I engage in a bit of reminiscing about the old days. The “bad night” we were talking about was the subject of one of my earliest posts on the old blog, reproduced here. I wrote it before I had developed the characteristically taut prose for which I have so often been complimented by you, my dedicated readership, who have been awfully generous with your correspondent over the course of the last several and for which I thank you kindly – gratitude being one of the last barricades for comity in a world where civil correspondence is everywhere encroached upon by those who would instead craft their words almost as missiles, like, for the purpose of hurting others, the bassids. *cough*