Explore Posterous

dream #2, Fri 27/11/09

Continuation of dream, but at this point, it's no longer related to previous dream and because I was blogging at an external computer (madly, I might add, so I wouldn't forget my dream), I couldn't type up the whole thing.

(Here's the first part of the dream)

After trying to stand up for Stu, a girl of about eleven called me into her house. I knew that this was going to be sort of dangerous, because her family was rich and they thought of people like me as trash. With trepidation, I followed her in. She told me I could go into parts that no one but family was allowed in. I felt like an intruding babysitter. She had a younger brother and he was playing with his toys. All of a sudden, her mother called. Panic. I hid in their workshop. As if the mother were psychic, she came and sought me out and leant down to see me hiding under a wooden workbench. She wasn't mad at either me or her daughter, and I was glad.

Then all of a sudden, I was on some sort of school camp. I was watching a comedy show - the comedians were famous, and on the stage they played theatre sport type games. I was on a seat, like a trapeze swing, with a wooden plank to sit on and couldn't see the show properly. I swung it to see while my companions sat on theirs with no trouble.

I was part of some special ops team, and there was a beautiful, blond-haired man in my team. There was a growing attraction between us, even though I was aware that I had a partner already. Despite this, our attraction grew.

At one stage, I was adamant to prove how tough I was. As a BSG Starbuck-lookalike watched on, the blond man pressed a knife into my flesh, just above my knee (not far from where I have a scar in real life). He pressed, harder and harder, and pleaded with me to give in so he could stop. I would not let him stop. I began to fade. I said to him "I'm starting to feel faint..." Again, he begged me to make him stop. I wouldn't.

Eventually, he had to take me to our black special ops van and give me first aid. As he bandaged my leg, our faces stooped to kiss. The attraction was electric but I told him I could not: I had someone I loved already.

Bandaged up, I enjoyed the rest of the visit to this location. My high school French teacher Mrs Gorey was there. The blond man was aroused when I spoke to her entirely in French. She went to the door and smoked and we spoke more French. She did not smoke in real life.

Loading mentions Retweet

Popular Science: X-Flex Blast Protection System - Wallpaper that can stop a wrecking ball or an RPG

X-Flex is a new kind of wallpaper: one that’s quite possibly stronger than the wall it’s on. Invented by Berry Plastics in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, this lifesaving adhesive is designed for use anyplace that’s prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like in war or natural-disaster zones, chemical plants or airports. To keep a shelter’s walls from collapsing in an explosion and to contain all the flying debris, you simply peel off the wallpaper’s sticky backing, apply the rollable sheets to the inside of brick or cinder-block walls, and reinforce it with fasteners at the edges. Covering an entire room can take less than an hour.

X-Flex bonds so tightly, it helps walls keep their shape after blast waves. Two layers are strong enough to stop a blunt object, like a flying 2x4, from knocking down drywall. During our tests, just a single layer kept a wrecking ball from smashing through a brick wall. The wallpaper’s strength and ductility is derived from a layer of Kevlar-like material sandwiched by sheets of elastic polymer wrap. The combination works so well that the Army is now considering wallpapering bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilians could soon start remodeling too—Berry Plastics plans to develop a commercial version next year.

xflexsystem.com

Click here to see our test: X-Flex vs. wrecking ball

Loading mentions Retweet

Comment (0) »

Phillip Carter Walks Away From the Obama Administration

Phillip Carter

This is far more devastating than I think people realize. Phillip Carter's resignation from the Obama Administration is a crucial loss on the road to applying the rule of law to the situation at Guantanamo and to the detainees in American custody. This is ten times more devastating than the resignation of Matthew Hoh and it is a troubling sign for the future of this Administration:

The Pentagon's top detainee affairs policy appointee has quit the Defense Department just seven months into the job, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday.

Phillip Carter, a former Army captain and Iraq War veteran, had been an outspoken critic of Bush-era war on terror detention policy as an attorney and blogging commentator.

He got the job of U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in April, months after President Barack Obama pledged to empty the detention center at Guantánamo. He quit without explanation just days after Obama confirmed in aninterview with Fox News in Beijing that his administration would miss its Jan. 22 Guantánamo closure deadline.

The development apparently took the Department of Defense by surprise. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to say precisely when Carter submitted the resignation, or where he last traveled in a job that took him frequently to Afghanistan, Iraq and the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

As of yet, I don't see where Carter has spoken out publicly. He could be entirely on board with the Obama Administration, and may have, indeed, resigned because of another issue.

Carter is a known blogger and writer on the issues at hand, leaving his Intel Dump blog at the Washington Post in 2008 after rising to prominence as one of the early voices opposing the Iraq War, where he served. He was not a contractor or a temporary employee, like Hoh. He was a fairly prominent political appointee with a sterling resume:

Phillip Carter was appointed as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy on April 27, 2009. In this capacity, he is responsible for developing policy recommendations and coordinating global policy guidance relating to detainees. Mr. Carter practiced government contracts and national security law with McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP.  His practice included work with major defense and aerospace firms, focused on government contracts compliance, export controls, security issues, and contractor support to overseas contingency operations. 

Mr. Carter wrote amicus curiae briefs in the landmark national security cases FAIR vs. Rumsfeld and Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, and has participated in various working groups studying the issue of private military contractors on the battlefield.

Mr. Carter served nine years in the Army, in the active, reserve and National Guard components.  During his military career, he served in a number of military police, civil affairs and infantry units, including duty in the Republic of Korea, Iraq, and in the United States. From 2005-2006, he served as operations officer for an adviser team embedded with the police in Iraq’s Diyala province, where he worked closely with the Iraqi police, provincial courts, jails, and government, as well as the State Department-led Provincial Reconstruction Team, to establish and promote the rule of law.  Mr. Carter’s military awards include the Bronze Star Medal, Army Commendation (2 Oak Leaf Clusters), Army Achievement Medal (1 Oak Leaf Cluster), Iraq Campaign Medal, Korean Defense Service Medal, and Combat Action Badge.

The Obama Administration has either lost a talented and dedicated member or it has gained a very eloquent and credible critic of a highly unpopular policy, and we will know soon enough what Mr. Carter thinks of what has been going on. So far, he has resisted appearing everywhere and anywhere with his breathless assessment.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comment (0) »

Perspective on the Challenge in Afghanistan

UN declares Afghanistan world's worst place to be born. That should provide some perspective on what we're up against in Afghanistan in achieving security. It is a fools errand if through military action and contractors alone. And if we don't have the money to build infrastructure at home, we certainly don't have it to build infrastructure abroad. This is a distraction to our important domestic agenda. http://ow.ly/FwEV

Loading mentions Retweet

Comment (0) »

You can't really be ready for real life

I love people who think that just because they have gone camping for a weekend, and lived without walls and electricity for that time, this makes them "survivalists". It's very much like those people who own a gun or take a self-defense class and think they can survive a fight. By "fight" I mean a real fight. What they don't understand is that all these things do is provide you with confidence, they don't actually help when the shit hits the fan and that's not their purpose. The real purpose is so that you can swagger and boast when there is nothing going on and your "skills" haven't been tested. No amount of survival training can get you ready for the moment when you are truly alone and lost and nobody knows where you are, where there is no rescue coming, no hope on the horizon and you will in fact die if you don't keep your wits and do the necessary. Like kill and eat your wife.

Not even basic training in the military can ready you for the moment when you get shot at with live ammunition by somebody who intends to hit you. Nothing in life but the actual thing can prepare you for that. All the familiarity you have with your weapon, all the physical fitness goes out the door in that moment and the world changes. The nature of your life in the world changes the first time your life is truly on the line, you change in that moment and everything in your life is different, looks different feels different, is handled differently after that point.

You cannot train for life, no course of preparation can ready you completely for a particular situation seeing as it has never happened exactly in that way before, the closest thing you can find is the man who has faced something like it and survived. Every young soldier facing his first battle is, in effect, unprepared. The training is merely to get them to the point where they will show up for the fight. The fight itself can only be learned in the school of bitter experience.

Left in the real wilderness with only your weekend camping skills to survive on, maybe a few barely-remembered episodes of Man vs Wild, you will die. You will die a slow, painful death all alone in the dark because you drank the wrong water, or because the only thing you could find to eat was a bad idea, or because you tripped and fell and hit your head. The only prepared man is the man who has faced it before and come out alive, the only soldier is the man who has faced death at the hands of the enemy and adjusted emotionally and mentally to its nearness.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comment (0) »

Hasan had intensified contact with radical cleric - washingtonpost.com

Loading mentions Retweet

Comment (0) »

Maria Hinojosa reports on military families dealing with traumatic brain injury on NOW on PBS

Loading mentions Retweet

Comment (0) »

Officers' Christian Fellowship

Loading mentions Retweet

"YOU MAY BE TALIBAN IF . . ."

"YOU MAY BE TALIBAN IF . . ."

1. You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer.

2. You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can't afford shoes.

3. You have more wives than teeth.

4. You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon "unclean."

5. You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.

6. You can't think of anyone you haven't declared Jihad against..

7. You consider television dangerous, but routinely carry explosives in your clothing.

8. You were amazed to discover that cell phones have uses other than setting off roadside bombs.

9. You have nothing against women and think every man should own at least one.

10. You've always had a crush on your neighbor's goat.

Loading mentions Retweet

Comment (0) »

Best Commercial

Loading mentions Retweet

Comment (0) »