The Dog That Cornered Osama Bin Laden Posted by Ruth Ann /  Trackback /  August 15, 2011 / in Bloggies 0 Comments The Dog That Cornered Osama Bin Laden When U.S. President Barack Obama went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, last week for a highly publicized, but very private meeting with the commando team that killed Osama bin Laden, only one of the 81 members of the super-secret  SEAL DevGru unit was identified by name: Cairo, the war dog. Cairo, like most canine members of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs, is a Belgian Malinois. The Malinois breed is similar to German shepherds but smaller and more compact, with an adult male weighing in the 30-kilo range. (German shepherds are still used as war dogs by the American military but the lighter, stubbier Malinois is considered better for the tandem parachute jumping and rappelling operations often undertaken by SEAL teams. Labrador retrievers are also favoured by various military organizations around the world.) Like their human counterparts, the dog SEALs are highly trained, highly skilled, highly motivated special ops experts, able to perform extraordinary military missions by SEa, Air and Land (thus the acronym). The dogs carry out a wide range of specialized duties for the military teams to which they are attached: With a sense of smell 40 times greater than a human’s, the dogs are trained to detect and identify both explosive material and  hostile or hiding humans. The dogs are twice as fast as a fit human, so anyone trying to escape is not likely to outrun Cairoor his buddies. The dogs, equipped with video cameras, also enter certain danger zones first, allowing their handlers to see what’s ahead before humans follow. As I mentioned before, SEAL dogs are even trained parachutists, jumping either in tandem with their handlers or solo, if the jump is into water. Last year canine parachute instructor Mike Forsythe and his dog Cara  set the world record for highest man-dog parachute deployment, jumping from more than 30,100 feet up — the altitude transoceanic passenger jets fly at. Both Forsythe and Cara were wearing oxygen masks and skin protectors for the jump. Here’s a photo from that jump, taken by Andy Anderson for K9 Storm Inc. (more about those folks shortly). As well, the dogs are faithful, fearless and ferocious — incredibly frightening and efficient attackers. I have seen it reported repeatedly that the teeth of SEAL war dogs are replaced with titanium implants that are stronger, sharper and scare-your-pants-off  intimidating, but a U.S. Military spokesman has denied that charge, so I really don’t know (never having seen a canine SEAL face-to-face). I do know that I’ve never seen a photo of a war dog with anything even vaguely resembling a set of shiny metal chompers. When the SEAL DevGru team (usually known by its old designation, Team 6) hit bin Laden’sPakistan compound on May 2, Cairo’s feet would have been four of the first on the ground. And like the human SEALs, Cairo was wearing super-strong, flexible body Armour and outfitted with high-tech equipment that included “doggles” — specially designed and fitted dog googles with night-vision and infrared capability that would even allow Cairo to see human heat forms through concrete walls. Now where on earth would anyone get that kind of incredibly niche hi-tech doggie gear? From Winnipeg, of all places. Jim and Glori Slater’s Manitoba hi-tech mom-and-pop business, K9 Storm Inc., has a deserved worldwide  reputation for designing and manufacturing probably the best body Armour available for police and military dogs. Working dogs in 15 countries around the world are currently protected by their K9 Storm body Armour. Jim Slater was a canine handler on the Winnipeg Police Force when he crafted a Kevlar protective jacket for his own dog, Olaf, in the mid-1990s. Soon Slater was making body Armour for other cop dogs, then the Canadian military and soon the world. The standard K9 Storm vest also has a load-bearing harness system that makes it ideal for tandem rappelling and parachuting. And then there are the special hi-tech add-ons that made the K9 Storm especially appealing to the U.S. Navy SEALs, who bought four of  K9 Storm Inc.’s top-end Intruder “canine tactical assault suits” last year for $86,000. You can be sure Cairo was wearing one of those four suits when he jumped into bin Laden’s lair. Here’s an explanation of all the K9 Storm Intruder special features: Just as the Navy SEALS and other elite special forces are the sharp point of the American military machine, so too are their dogs at the top of a canine military heirarchy. In all, the U.S. military currently has about 2,800 active-duty dogs deployed around the world, with roughly 600 now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here’s the link to a dandy photo essay about U.S. war dogs that just appeared in the journal Foreign Policy. Several of the photos I have included here are from Foreign Policy, as you will see. Other photos are from K9 Storm Inc. As for the ethics of sending dogs to war, that’s pretty much a moot point, don’t you think? If it’s ethical to send humans into combat, then why not dogs? At least the U.S. now treats its war dogs as full members of the military. At the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. combat dogs there were designated as “surplus military equipment” and left behind when American forces pulled out.

Texas...a failed conservative experiment - Baltimore Nonpartisan | Examiner.com

Texas...a failed conservative experiment - Baltimore Nonpartisan | Examiner.com:

'via Blog this'
Average Teacher Salary as a % of Avg Annual Pay = 49th

Current Expenditures Per Student = 44th

State Aid Per Pupil in Average Daily Attendance = 47th

% of Elementary/Secondary…Funding from State Revenue = 47th

% of Population 25 and Older With a [HS] Diploma = 50th

High School Graduation Rate = 41st

Enrollment Rates in Higher Education = 39th

Per Capita State Spending on State Arts Agencies = 47th

Percentage of Uninsured Children = 1st

Percentage of Children Living in Poverty = 7th

Percentage of Children Fully Immunized = 36th

Percentage of Children Overweight = 5th

Teenage Birth Rate = 1st

Percentage of Non-Elderly Women with Health Insurance = 50th

Rate of Women Aged 40+ Who Receive Mammograms = 42nd

Rate of Women Aged 18+ Who Receive Pap Smears = 46th

Cervical Cancer Rate = 6th

Family Planning = 45th

Women’s Voter Turnout = 49th

Percent of Mortgage Loans that are Sub prime = 8th

Percent of Households with Interest-Bearing Accounts = 41st

Private Loans to Small Businesses = 43rd

Level of Asset Poverty = 43rd

Amount of Money that Banks Located in the State Collect through Deposits in Relation to the Amount of Money the Banks Re-channel Back into Communities Through Loans = 45th

Average Credit Score = 50th

Percentage of Women Living in Poverty = 3rd
Air Pollution Emissions = 1st

Amount of [VOC's] Released into Air = 1st

Amount of Toxic Chemicals Released into Water = 1st

Amount of Recognized Cancer-Causing Carcinogens Released into Air = 1st

Amount of Hazardous Waste Generated = 2nd

Amount of Carbon Dioxide Emissions = 1st

Richest 20% of families have avg incomes 7.9 larger than poorest 20% and 2.8 times larer than middle 20%

From the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, the avg income of the poorest 20% has increased $2,657…the middle 20% has increased $4,528.

…the average income of the richest 20% increased $32,813 [in that 20 year span]
A 2002 report found that 86% of nursing homes in Texas did not meet federal standards governing quality of care, 94% of nursing homes did not meet minimum staffing levels, and 39% of facilities had a violation that caused actual harm to nursing home residents or placed them at risk for death or serious injury.

The average nursing home in Texas provided just 21 minutes of daily care by registered nurses for each resident, or less than half of the minimum required by federal standards.
Percentage of Population Uninsured = 1st

Percentage of Non-Elderly Uninsured = 1st

Percentage of Low Income Covered by Medicaid = 42nd

Percentage…with employer Based Health Insurance = 46th

Total State Government Health Expenditures as Percent of the GSP = 33rd

Per Capita State Spending on Mental Health = 48th

Percentage of Population Physically Active = 41st

Physicians – 43rd

Dentists = 42nd

Registered Nurses = 43rd

2005, the birth rate for ages 15-19 was 61.6 per 1000, compared to 40.5 in the U.S.

2001 statewide survey of Texas high school students, almost half had engaged in sexual intercourse at least once. (37.4% of 9th graders)

Among currently sexually active students, only about half reported that they or their partner had used a condom…Only 10% reported that they or their partner used birth control pills.

22.6% of sexually active students had used drugs or alcohol at the time of their last sexual intercourse.

http://www.examiner.com/nonpartisan-in-baltimore/texas-a-failed-conservative-experiment

A Friend On the Liberal Gun Club Board Inspired me to Find this.

Rick Perry’s newbie mistake on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - The Fact Checker - The Washington Post

Rick Perry’s newbie mistake on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - The Fact Checker - The Washington Post:

"As part of the 1993 Oslo accords, in an exchange of letters between then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Palestine Liberation Organization met all of these conditions nearly 20 years ago. The letters are posted on the Web site of the Israeli Foreign Ministry."

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Andrew Breitbart Incites Violence Against Liberals, Says Military Will Back The Tea Party Up | Addicting Info

Andrew Breitbart Incites Violence Against Liberals, Says Military Will Back The Tea Party Up | Addicting Info

Dullbart doesn't realize that Progressive follow Teddy Roosevelt's advice: "Speak softly and carry a Big Stick."
Tea Party favorite Andrew Breitbartz told a conservative audience in Massachusetts that conservatives outnumber liberals and have most of the guns. He also claimed that the military is ready to take action against liberals if violence ever erupted between liberals and conservatives.

"If this isn’t proof that conservatives want a civil war, I don’t know what is. This is a call for violence, pure and simple, and an investigation should be opened immediately. If Breitbart is telling the truth about military officials backing up the Tea Party, they should be investigated and tried for treason. And Breitbart should be questioned by federal authorities as well. This is a serious threat that Breitbart is making and it should concern all liberals. The right wing wants to kill liberals. They want a civil war. Look for this kind of threat to increase as the 2012 Election nears. The Party that cheers for executions and the deaths of the uninsured are fantasizing, and probably are planning, to kill the opposition to grab absolute power." --Stephen D. Foster Jr.

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear | Wendell Berry | Orion Magazine

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear | Wendell Berry | Orion Magazine

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be “unprecedented”.

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world’s people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

IV. The “developed” nations had given to the “free market” the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility. We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our mistakes.

VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.

VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to “rogue nations”, dissident or fanatical groups and individuals - whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.

IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.

X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy (either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by “national defense”

XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make. We can continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited “free trade” among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable lines of communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or all, and that such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.

XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.

XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as before with the corporate program of global “free trade”, whatever the cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or public debate.

XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually happening in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for all we know, serious and difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.

XV. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of weakness. Any war that we may make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in a history of war in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.

XVI. It is a mistake also - as events since September 11 have shown - to suppose that a government can promote and participate in a global economy and at the same time act exclusively in its own interest by abrogating its international treaties and standing apart from international cooperation on moral issues.

XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can justify any form of political oppression. Since September 11, far too many public voices have presumed to “speak for us” in saying that Americans will gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater “security”. Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction in security (and in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any abridgement of our Constitutional rights.

XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.

XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack of Pearl Harbor - to which the present attack has been often and not usefully compared - we humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which has brought peace or made us more peaceable.

XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual “war to end war?”

XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.

XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.

XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.

XXIV. Starting with the economies of food and farming, we should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest way for the world to live. We should not countenance the loss or destruction of any local capacity to produce necessary goods

XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air. We should protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin restoration of those that have been damaged.

XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a “new economy”, but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

We Must Stop Eating The Seed Corn!

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight." --Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776